Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘It’s Theo,’ he said.

Theo? I looked at him. Theo? Did I know a Theo?

I was ready to throw open my arms and say, ‘Theo, how the hell are you?’ to save us both the embarrassment. Eventually he’d let slip something which would give me a clue to the particular Theo he was.

But then he changed his name to make it easier for me. ‘Twink,’ he said. And it was all I could do not to fall at his feet.

I was right about his being on his own. You can always tell. It’s the air of time hanging heavy.

He’d been married. Perfectly nice girl. Three children. All boys. All doing well? Listen, these days you’re doing well if you’ve got a job. So touch wood, yes, doing well. The only one who didn’t have a job was him.

I don’t know why but this made the black leather jacket somehow more affecting. How old was he now? Fifty-seven, fifty-eight? Pushing sixty and no job, but still in a leather jacket. Didn’t that have to mean that he was not prepared to go quietly? That he was still showing a bit of the old rebel?

Or was it only because I would soon be a little old man myself that he heroically didn’t look like a little old man to me? Did we both look like little old men to other people?

I didn’t want to ask what the job was he no longer had, just in case he’d gone back to working his button machine after national service; I didn’t want to embarrass him. But it came out in the saga. He’d lingered in the South-West once they’d demobbed him from the army — for sweetheart reasons, I gathered — managing a record shop in Bournemouth. He came back to Manchester for his father’s funeral and met his wife. Then he went into business with her brothers. Wallpaper. A wallpaper warehouse on Great Clowes Street. Then her brothers had done the dirty on him. You wouldn’t think it, would you, your own brothers-in-law? Yiddisher boys! But they had. They’d taken his money, removed him slowly from his savings, then nothing like so slowly removed him from the firm. How? Don’t ask him how. His wife took their side. Blood’s thicker than water. So that was the marriage kaput too. Listen, there was no point going over it. He’d seen with his own eyes what harbouring a grudge had done to his father. He wasn’t going to go that way. They could rot in hell, he wasn’t going to think about them. You wouldn’t imagine your own brothers-in-law would do that to you, but that was then and now is now. You have to be philosophical. The ganovim!

‘I always thought you were much taller than me,’ I said.

‘Well, I was then. You were a kid.’

‘No, I mean I always thought of you as really tall — over six foot.’

He shook his head sadly, as though that was something else that hadn’t worked out — his height.

‘But your health’s good?’ I said. ‘You look well.’

‘Listen — I’ve got a lazy bowel and a hiatus hernia and I’m on Prozac for worry. But think of all the people we used to know who are dead already.’

I didn’t ask him to name names. I didn’t want to know.

We hadn’t moved from where he’d found me. Match after match of high-quality geriatric ping-pong had been won and lost before our very noses while we talked, but ping-pong was the hardest subject for us to broach. It was as if we were old lovers meeting in a bedroom for the first time in nearly forty years, not daring to look at the sheets.

In the end we broke the truce at the same time, applauding a fusillade of exquisitely timed whipped forehand smashes from Marty Reisman, the great American exponent of pimples who would undoubtedly have become World Champion forty years ago had sponge not happened. He’d been robbed by history, everyone agreed about that. ‘Beautiful to see,’ we said together.

Beautiful to hear, too — the old plock plock, plock plock.

Reisman touched his familiar black beret in acknowledgement of our acknowledgement of his genius.

Setting aside the small matter of that genius, he was me with staying power. He was nearly seventy but he could still hear a hand clapping on another continent; his eyes were going but he could still find a fan in a haystack.

‘Did you ever make the change?’ Twink asked me.

‘Yes, but I was never really comfortable. I think that’s why I gave it away in the end. I was essentially an old-fashioned player.’

‘You’re telling me? I remember saying to you, “Oliver, you’re going to have to adapt.” Do you remember when you won the Manchester Closed for the first time? I said then that you’d made too much of a megilleh of beating that Finn. “You’re going to have to learn to mix your game up, Oliver,” I said. Do you remember that?’

I didn’t, actually, no. But I said yes, of course I did. And I was touched that he’d remembered my first final, even if he hadn’t remembered it as I’d remembered it.

‘The thing about your game,’ he went on, ‘is that you were never really a natural ball-player like me. I played football, cricket, squash, snooker, golf. I was good at all of them. You were a one-game player. I sometimes thought that that made you concentrate too hard. You remember me saying that to you, don’t you?’

I didn’t, actually, no. But I said, yes, and what about you, Twink, did you change your surface?

It cannot be of interest to anyone else what we discussed for the next hour or more. We had both only ever been so-so players. Every time Reisman wound up his 1949 forehand we fell quiet and thought about our limitations. But the game had been everything to us for a while, and we went through the textures and the thicknesses of our bats, the strengths of our team, the weaknesses of our opponents, the drives to the venues, the scores, the scandals, the nobbels and the moodies, with the passion with which old pals remember the names of their first girlfriends and the tunes they kissed to.

It was a worry to me that I couldn’t recognize him. I knew him all right, knew his slightly put-upon way of looking at things, knew his exasperated Laps’ drawl, as though every word had an extra half-syllable appended to it (necessary because no one was ever listening), and I recalled what he recalled (except when he was recalling it about me), but I couldn’t place him. If he walked past me tomorrow I would once again not know that it was him.

Could it be that too much time had gone by? That the stuff on the shelves in my old room was lying and that I was no longer living the life I’d started out on half a century before?

If I closed my eyes and opened them again would he still be there? Would he ever have been?

‘So what about the opera?’ I asked. ‘How are the tenors going?’

‘You remember that?’

‘What do you mean, remember that ? Jesus, Twink, we talked more tenors than we talked ping-pong.’

‘I thought that was Aishky.’

Aishky.

There, we’d named him.

I went very cold. Had Twink been looking he’d have seen the chill creeping up my arms, like the mist rolling in over the Grand Canal. So far he had said nothing of Aishky, had been careful to say nothing, it seemed to me, and I’d not dared to ask, fearing what the silence meant.

But now the name was out, I had to know.

‘Me and Aishky,’ I said. ‘The three of us. He was Lanza, I was Björling. And when he wasn’t around I was Lanza and Björling. Are you in contact with him?’

I had to wait for my answer. One of the great Chinese players of the past, now living in Germany, was about to begin his match. Lesser players on neighbouring tables stopped their games so that they could get a look at him again.

‘I saw him at the Free Trade Hall years ago,’ Twink said.

‘Aishky?’

‘No, Liang.’

‘What about Aishky, Twink?’