Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘It’s funny you should mention him. How often do I see Aishky? You know what he’s like. He says he’ll be in touch and then you don’t hear a word for twenty years. Once in a blue moon he rings me to see if I feel like a game of kalooki. Then suddenly — listen to this — I see him twice in one day! First when I’m visiting my uncle in Marilyn Kaprowitz House —’

‘What’s Marilyn Kaprowitz House?’

‘It’s the old people’s home on Crescent Road. It used to be Hillel House. Don’t you remember? We played against them a few times.’

‘No, I don’t remember. But look, are you telling me Aishk is in an old people’s home?’

‘He works there as a porter two mornings a week. The rest of the time — are you listening? — he’s a security man for an insurance company in Spring Gardens. That was where I ran into him later the same day. I nearly collapsed. I’m coming out of Lewis’s and there he is, standing like a shmulke in the rain. Hat, silver buttons, big black boots, the lot. I say to him, “Aishky, you’re getting wet.” He says, “I’m paid to get wet.” I say, “Can’t you stand in the doorway at least?” He says, “I’m guarding the doorway.” How do you like that?’

‘Aishky is a security man?’

‘Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I’m worried. You know Aishky. I went past there again last week and someone else was standing outside the door. A shvartzer. Wearing the same uniform …’

It was all moving too fast for me. ‘A shvartzer wearing Aishky’s uniform?’

‘I’m telling you… I asked him if he knew where Aishky was and he said he’d left. But I didn’t like the way he said it. You know how you get that feeling that something’s wrong?’

‘What do you think might be wrong?’

‘The usual. Nerves.’

‘So have you rung to see if he’s all right?’

A queer expression passed over his face. ‘It’s not easy for me to ring,’ he said.

I decided not to look into that one. ‘Have you tried Marilyn Kaprowitz House?’

‘If I go there I have to see my uncle.’

‘So is Aishky married or what? Is there someone to look after him? Has he got kids? Is he on his own?’

‘He had a lady. But I think something happened. He doesn’t talk about it. I get the impression he’s on his own. Ask him yourself’

‘Do you think he’d welcome a call from me?’

‘What are you talking about? ‘Course he’d welcome a call from you. I’d like to be there with him when he picks the phone up. I’d like to see the look on his face. He won’t be able to believe it. Like me — I nearly collapsed when I saw you.’

‘Why don’t the three of us go out one night? Like old times.’

The same queer expression passed over Twink’s face. ‘It’s a bit awkward for me,’ he said.

And then I realized what it meant. He couldn’t afford a night out. He couldn’t even afford to make a phone call. He was stony broke. I again took in the still creaking 1960s leather jacket and the carefully pressed striped shirt and I wanted to burst into tears. I touched him on the elbow in a manner I recognized as belonging to my father. When had I acquired that? Had I picked it up years ago and been saving it for a rainy day?

‘I’m flush at the moment,’ I said. ‘We’ll all go out and I’ll look after it.’ Pure Joel Walzer. The hand reaching out to take the bill. The big fist closing over it. I’ll look after this.

Meanwhile the money to look after it with was in a brown paper bag in a phone box.

And did it work? Of course it worked. Hadn’t they all loved my old man for his big heart?

‘Thanks for your understanding,’ Twink said.

It must have been a nice experience, being my old man.

We caught a taxi back to his place in the wrong part of Prestwich so he could show me his records and CDs. He wanted us to take the METROLINK for which he had any number of concession cards — even one relating to his lazy bowel — but I wasn’t prepared to travel on anything called a METROLINK. ‘I’ll see to the taxi,’ I’d said.

In answer to my earlier question, yes, the tenors were going as strong as they’d ever gone. Stronger. Opera on record was the beginning and the end of his life. If you wanted to estimate Twink’s material value you would have had to weigh him in a scale against his operas. They were all he owned. The tiny flat was rented. The television was rented. The phone only worked if you rang in. The carpets, he told me, had come from his oldest boy’s house. All the clothes he possessed he was wearing. At the end of nearly sixty years as a son, a soldier, a husband and a father, he was down to just his operas. And the wherewithal to play them.

‘What else do I need?’ he said. ‘I come in, I turn on the stereo, I sit down, I listen, I go to bed.’

The stereo was clearly such as only the most single-minded listeners treat themselves to. ‘Is this a Bang and Olufsen?’ I asked. As if I knew from anything.

I won’t bother repeating his reply. For a start, Bang and Olufsen wouldn’t like it. And to be honest I didn’t take in very much of what he told me about the rarity and fragility of the valves or whatever on which his system depended. Some of the components were covered with tablecloths when they weren’t in use, I observed that. And there were places Twink was anxious that I didn’t stand. Otherwise I have nothing to report regarding the technical specifications of his equipment.

That it sounded good goes without saying. La Scala, in the wrong part of Prestwich, that’s where we were. The Metropolitan, just off Sandy Lane.

But it was the collection itself that took my breath away. Not just the extent of it — though it is not often you see all four walls of a council flat given over to boxed sets of opera from Ariadne auf Naxos to Zauberflöte. And not just the irreproachable library system according to which it was arranged, so that Twink could lay his hands on any single tenor aria sung by any single tenor in a matter of seconds. No, it was the comprehensiveness of the passion it represented which impressed me. There wasn’t an operatic argument that Twink didn’t have the means to put or to refute; not a conceivable operatic comparison, and not a song cycle or cantata comparison either, he didn’t have the source material to mount. It was all here: everything there was and everything Twink felt and thought about it.

As to the quality of his judgement, as we used to say at Golem; as to whether his mind was rich or poor, musically — I am in no position to comment. My own interest in opera had always been fitful. As a boy I had loved it because Twink and Aishk had loved it. At Golem I had revered Mozart because Yorath and Rubella had revered Mozart. Tenor arias of the romantic sort I had gone on loving independently of Yorath and Rubella because they spoke the language of my soul. E lucevan le stelle? — sure they were, not a star in the heavens that didn’t shine upon the head of the Mighty Walzer. But then came ‘Nessun Dorma’ at the World Cup in Italy, and that pretty well put paid to all tenors and all arias at once. The association of opera and football was too hard to bear. The spectacle of the ignorant suddenly discovering and delighting in an aria the rest of us had been humming since the cradle, simply because it was now bellowed on a football pitch, disgusted me. How could they not have heard it before? And the subsequent transformation of the once sweet-voiced Pavarotti and the once subtly lyrical Domingo into screamers for the masses, competitive sperm-chuckers from the Black Lagoon, was the last nail in my operatic coffin at least. So I was not the one to sit in judgement on Twink’s taste.