Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Shanda!’

‘What else you expect of a damn Yankee?’

I watched Rhea think about hurling her bat. Had there been an official referee umpiring the match she may well have lodged a complaint. But this was only round one, when any old person does the scoring. She nodded, instead, to signal she was ready.

Shanda crouched to serve. Threw up the ball.

Rhea put up her hand.

Shanda won in the end. On a net cord at 20–19 in the third.

They did not shake hands.

Wherever I went for the next hour, there was Rhea biting her ostrich lip, her long neck white with rage, describing her match to whoever was prepared to listen. You could hear her too, from the opposite end of the hall, pawing the ground and rattling her quills. Eventually a loud series of bangs brought a cry of let! from all one hundred acting umpires. Had there been an explosion? No, it was just Rhea throwing everything she owned into a rubbish bin — her coffee cup, her tournament programme, her towel, her plimsolls, even her bat.

No, I mustn’t idealize. But I mustn’t sell the occasion short either. It was an old persons’ love fest. They had seen a way of entwining ping-pong with their affections, these globe-trotting veterans, of making it a thing of beneficence to themselves and others. They had set sail on a circuit of the emotions, meeting up every other year in a new corner of the ping-pong playing world; shaking hands, embracing, kissing, laughing, sharing news, exchanging photographs. ‘I’m a grandfather now,’ I heard an ex-Romanian international telling a diminutive Taiwanese lady pusher who had butterflies on her skirt. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, oh, oh’ — like little bells going off. Then she put up her hand, just as Rhea had, rummaged in her sports bag, and brought him out a gift, already wrapped and ribboned, just in case. For grandpa.

There would be a lot of new grandpas and grandmas you had to remember to bring presents for on the veterans’ circuit.

Sometimes players exchanged gifts after a game — a wine glass from Bavaria, a set of ornamental chopsticks from Japan — even though they’d never met before today. Next time they’d be friends. They posed with their arms around one another for a picture. You finish? Now I take.

I felt like a ghost at a banquet. Some advantage — being invisible! Some advantage, when the tables creaked with good things and you weren’t able to taste a morsel!

I was becoming tearful. The elation/melancholy mix was losing its elation. How much more upset could I take? Everything I saw was as though a lesson or a reproach to me.

Why, there were men here, playing in the over-eighties’ competition, wearing knee-supports and elastic hose and bandages round every joint, so arthritic that they required the assistance of a third party to retrieve any ball for them that didn’t finish up in the net. They had to hold on to the table between strokes, some of them, so that their own momentum wouldn’t knock them over. Could their imaginations still be rioting in futurity, looking forward to the day when they’d be world beaters?

In Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.

It was afternoon teatime on the first day of the Ninth World Veterans’ Championships, and there was still another week to go.

I could, of course, have called it quits and flown back to Venice. I had come to Manchester for a wedding, not to have my neshome ripped out. But I never once considered it. I would take my punishment like a man.

I stayed with my mother, in my old room, returning late in the evening and going out again early the next morning, so that she wouldn’t have the chance to make another apology for having given me life.

Two nights in my old room were usually the most I could take. It’s probably not a good idea for a grown man to return to the room he slept in as a boy. Especially when half his old things are still there — the jigsaws and the crossword books my aunties bought me; the dice for the snakes and ladders; a photograph of my grandmother holding my hand outside the butchers on Waterloo Road; my framed letter of acceptance from Golem College; three certificates from the ice-cream company citing me as salesman of the month; those Collins Classics that weren’t suitable to take to Cambridge; my Manchester and District Table Tennis League Yearbooks; albums of press-cuttings; my cups and medals — all on the very shelves my father had put up for me, hyper-heavy-duty planks of eight by two hard-as-it-comes-hardwood — railway sleepers they had probably been — secured to the walls with ten-inch industrial screws and brackets strong enough to hold up the Titanic, just to be on the safe side. Even the old hoop-la board, with the rubber rings rusted to the hook marked 20, was still hanging where it had last been played with in 1950-something, on the same six-inch galvanized nail which my father had hammered into my bedroom door, just to be on the safe side.

Best never to see all that stuff again. It doesn’t do to have material evidence of the little that goes into making a life.

Or to be reminded of the impossibility of ever putting any of it behind you. Of ever putting you behind you.

That was my usual position. Two nights and gone. But this time I was in no hurry. If that’s what makes a life, that’s what makes a life. Look at it, Walzer. Be grateful. Say Got tsedank.

I was in a softened state. The veterans had got to me. Instead of immediately turning off the light and falling into troubled sleep the way I usually did when I was back in my old room, I sat up late going through the contents of my shelves, blowing away the dust, easing apart pages that had stuck together, wiping the thumb prints off ancient photographs, and where they were torn, putting them back together.

‘I’m glad you’re sorting through your old things,’ my mother said.

I didn’t know about ‘sorting’. All I was doing was looking. Re-acquainting myself. And doing a little repair work.

I didn’t know about ‘things’ either. Things? Mother, these are the tsatskes of the heart.

Then it was back every morning to G-MEX for more upset.

Was it only the third day, was it only midway through the afternoon of the third day while I was climbing to the top of the tiered section of seats to get a commanding overview of one hundred games of ping-pong, that I heard someone trying out my name — ‘Oliver? Oliver Walzer?’

I swung around. I’d expected to see people I knew from the past here, but so far the ones I recognized hadn’t recognized me. No one important. No one I could realistically have expected to remember who I was; though their failure to do so underlined the bitter discovery I had already made. That as a ping-pong player, to take it no further than that, I had been unmemorable. So-So Walzer. But now it was my turn not to recognize. If the person who was following me up the steps reminded me of anyone it was Placido Domingo, and I wasn’t expecting to see him at the Ninth World Veterans’ Table Tennis Championships.

I looked harder. He was a person about my own height and possibly five or six years older. Like me he was in civvies, not here to play — unless he’d played already and crashed out of everything. There was something just the smallest bit old-fashioned about his appearance, for the reason that he was kitted out to look cool and that always dates you if you don’t get it spot on. Black leather jacket, black trousers, open-necked striped shirt, circa 1966. He looked tired. Life-tired. Not bitter — that’s too active. But ingrained with disappointment; not on the look-out any more for anything else. And somewhat uprooted. A bachelor, like me. Maybe another bachelor whose children had been brought up by someone else. But I was damned if I knew who he was.