Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

It’s a wonderful provision of nature that we should go on loving people positioned at the same point between life and death as we ourselves are. It’s good genetic economics. It means we look after one another. It means we don’t hanker unseasonably after the young. And when we do, we know it’s an aberration. The same would hold for hankering after the old, but of course no one does hanker after the old. Which is why we need one another.

Myself I’m picky about the age of the people I mix with these days to within a latitude of about eighteen months. It’s very nearly all I look for. You’re how old? Excellent. Me too. Let’s be friends, lovers, whatever. Let’s go on holiday together, let’s buy a house, let’s start a business, let’s never part.

My emotional preferences aside, that it actually suited the game to be played by people the age I now was I would never have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. It was as if I had come full circle. Here were my heroes again, the war-torn and the lugubrious, the pallid and the famished, the hollow-eyed indoor nihilists from Prague and Budapest whom I’d got to know from their clumsy black and white portraits in Barna’s and Bergmann’s instruction manuals, come alive half a century later in G-MEX. I am not speaking fancifully. I am not talking resemblances. Some of those very men were actually here. Don’t allow the venue to take away from the eminence of the event. This was a World Championships. You could go away from here in a week’s time and be World Over-Forties’ Champion, World Over-Fifties’ Champion, Over-Sixties’, Over-Seventies’, Over-Eighties’ even. The honours justified the strain on the pension. So it stood to reason that many of the players I’d admired as a boy would be in Manchester, on the glory road again. But what was wonderful was that they had not adjusted to the times; they were not a modern version of themselves; except for the tracksuits which they wore instead of cardigans, and the surgical bandages in which they were ceremented, they were themselves as they had always been — just as morose, just as highly-strung, just as heart-broken.

The game looked like a pursuit of the jaded intellect once more, that’s what I’m saying. Yes, the fat-nippled spam-thin bats had gone and would never return; yes, the technology had advanced to the point where even the glue with which you attached your rubbers to your blade had become decisive, a matter of subtle preferences and choices, so much so that you could be deemed to have gone too far, to have overdosed your bat, to have submitted it to substance abuse, the merest suspicion of which would have the tournament referee removing it from the hall and feeding it into a glue-sniffing machine positioned in the officials’ area; and yes, one smash with a Yasaka Mark V rubber, which you buy packaged like a CD — ‘Every shot aimed at glory’ it promises on the sleeve — and that was that, point over. But despite all this, the deportment of the veterans themselves restored the game’s Old World raffish European dignity. Every player looked like an academic philosopher again. And played like an academic philosopher too. There was Althusser hitting shots behind his back, and Derrida putting wiggle on the ball. There was Steiner needlessly belting shit out of the softest of opponents. And look — bouncing in a little pleated skirt and Reeboks, Susan Sontag, playing safe.

Seventh heaven for me. I couldn’t remember when, on behalf of humanity so to speak, I had ever experienced a sweeter mix of melancholy and elation.

On behalf of myself I was more circumspect. High up on that secret shaming midnight list of all the things I could have been had life only treated me differently was ping-pong player to end ping-pong players. The best the world had ever seen. The Mighty Walzer. Now, in the presence of a thousand and one adroit and plucky competitors from every corner of the globe, I had to swallow a bitter pill. I would never have come close. My talent was not extraordinary. It was not even exceptional. I had only ever been so-so.

Do I mean it? Even if I’d practised harder? Even if my temperament had been sounder? Even if I hadn’t fallen in love with losing at a susceptible age?

I mean it. I would only ever have been so-so. It is important to me to open that wound and rub salt in it. So-So Walzer. So-so and no more.

There was one consolation, should I have been small-minded enough to take it: the game attracted just as little interest among the lay public as it always had. The only spectators, apart from me, were other players not currently engaged in a match or already knocked out. We played for one another. Whatever applause there was came from our own number. No one else gave a damn. So even if I had been in possession of an exceptional or extraordinary talent, it would have blushed unseen, its sweetness wasted on a sour world.

I was sad for myself all the same. So-So Walzer. Fancy having to face up to that so long after the event. Something else would now have to fill the space on that secret shaming midnight list.

Because you cannot live without the idea that you are exceptional at something, can you?

Or can you?

I retired to the back of the hall where the seating was tiered and empty, dropped my head between my knees and fell into a contemplative mood, lulled by the oof plock, oof plock times one hundred.

Why had it mattered so much that I be out of the ordinary?

Why did it always have to be win big or lose big?

Why had the game been everything and then nothing to me?

Why had I turned against it?

Why, in a word, wasn’t I still playing as the vets all were — for the fun and companionship of it, all in it together, content, most of them, not to be out of the ordinary?

I mustn’t idealize. There was plenty of the old spermed-up tantrum throwing, even among the altie kackers. The bat-slapping, the complaining about injustice, the screams of ‘No!’, the irritation with yourself, the irritation with your equipment, the anger with the ball, the anger with opponents whose games were too leisurely or too rushed, the gracelessness. ‘I know, I lost it,’ I listened to a woman with overlapping thighs saying to her friends, in the hearing of the person who had just beaten her. ‘She didn’t win it, I lost it. I know. It’s my own bloody fault. I’m too fat. I was knackered by the middle of the second game. I’m probably better off in the consolations anyway.’

Especially bad, the women. One match was becoming so ill tempered I could hear it from the top of the tiered seating, even though it was in progress at the opposite end of the hall. I hurried down to see what was the matter. A rather attractively out of focus furry Iranian woman now playing for a club in Middlesex was locked in a bitter point by point dispute with an ostrich of a New Yorker called Rhea. Rhea would put her hand up to say she wasn’t ready every time Shanda crouched to serve. Shanda would then turn her back on the table and make an appeal with her big dark blasted eyes to a personage whom I took to be her husband on the grounds that he looked worn out and kept shouting at her to calm down. Then she would go on a short raging walk, swing around suddenly, and crouch to serve again.

‘Are you ready now?’

Rhea nodded.

Shanda threw up the ball.

Rhea put up her hand.

‘Stay calm,’ Shanda’s husband said.

Shanda towelled herself down, threw the towel at her husband and went on another walk.

‘Keep calm,’ he said again. ‘You’ll lose it if you don’t stay calm.’

‘How you expect me to stay calm? She keep saying she not ready.’

‘Take no notice. Just do the business.’

‘Every time I serve.’