Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

He would not have agreed with me, anyway, that civilization died the day Pavarotti puffed out his barrel chest and skvitshed what no one had ever sung more feelingly than Björling, out of context, out of season, out of place, for the cameras of a lost footy-fevered species. He was not a Yorath and Rubella man. He was not a cultural Domesday merchant. When I caught myself thinking the worse of him for that, I wondered if I hadn’t myself died the day Golem College let me in.

We sat in the dark, just as we had when we were boys, comparing liebestods — Nilsson good, Nilsson powerful, but oh God, the wine-dark anguish of Flagstad! — and by the flickering lights of his thousand-valved amplifier I could see he was transfigured.

At last I recognized him.

When I got home my mother had retired but there was a message waiting for me on my pillow. Sheeny Waxman had rung — Jesus, how much more! — Sheeny Waxman, if I remembered who he was, had rung to say that Phil Radic, if I remembered who he was, had thought he’d seen me leaving G-MEX the day before and had mentioned it to Sheeny on the golf course that morning. If it was me and I was back, would I ring —.

Sleep on that, Walzer! All I needed now was for Selwyn Marks to enter my bedroom in a winding sheet and we’d have been complete, the Akiva team up and running, ready to take on anybody.

I woke early, in something of a quandary. Who ought I to ring first — Aishky or Sheeny? It mattered, the order in which I rang, because I believed I would feel differently about the one after speaking to the other. Aishky enjoyed precedence in the sense that his name had cropped up earlier in the day. But Sheeny had rung me. On the other hand, although I had no idea what Sheeny had been up to for the last thirty years or more, I doubted he was working as a doorman. Therefore, I reasoned, he needed my call less.

I was reasoning needs, now? I was weighing them up like a soup-kitchen ladler?

Of course I was. We were old men. There was nothing left of us but needs.

I rang Aishky, because he came earlier in the alphabet.

He didn’t seem all that surprised to hear from me. ‘Yeah, Oliver, Oliver Walzer, I remember, you had a good backhand.’

‘You too,’ I said. ‘You had a wonderful backhand.’

‘And I had a good forehand,’ he said, ‘before my accident. You probably don’t know about my accident.’

‘Aishky, I was there.’

‘No one was there. That was the trouble.’

‘I was as good as there. I’ve never forgotten it. But listen, how are you?’

‘I’ve had three tragedies. My mother, alav ha-shalom, died. My father, God rest his dear soul, died. And the young lady I was seeing, alav ha-shalom, she died.’

‘Aishky, I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah …’ His voice went dreamy. ‘I took my mother’s death very badly. My father’s even worse. Elizabeth’s very, very badly. I never did so much crying in my life over three people. It affected me. I had a breakdown. You’re not going to believe this — I’ve had a breakdown every single day since my father passed away.’

‘Oh, Aishky —’

‘I’m not even well now. I’ve got some meshuggener illness. I say things that don’t make sense. I’m tsemisht. I get a lot of headaches. The doctor says I probably do too much reading. I read all the time.’

I asked him what he was reading. A Yorath and Rubella question. Was he reading what he should be reading. But when all’s said and done, what else could I ask him?

‘The Holocaust. I’ve been studying it for forty-three years. I’ve gone way beyond Martin Gilbert. The only difference is that I don’t have initials after my name.’

‘So get initials after your name. Do a degree, Aishky. It’s the age of the mature student.’

‘To be truthful with you, Oliver, and don’t take this the wrong way, I’d like to be teaching myself. I know everything there is to know about the subject. The only thing is, I get klogedik sometimes, very very bitter. I have terrible thoughts.’

‘What sort of thoughts?’

The phone went quiet for several moments. Then he said, ‘I hate the enemy. I hate the people who murdered our people.’

‘You’re allowed.’

‘When I say my prayers at night, I have terrible thoughts.’

I was out of my depth. Prayers floor me every time. Too private, prayers. ‘So listen,’ I said, ‘when are we going to get together, the three of us?’

‘Well it’s hard for me because of the hours I work. I work late every night.’

‘I was going to ask you about that. Twink said he saw you in Spring Gardens the other week and then suddenly you weren’t there any more. Instead of you there was a shvartzer. He was worried.’

‘Was he a tall shvartzer or a short shvartzer?’

‘I don’t know, Aishky. Twink never said. Just a shvartzer.’

‘It was probably Clive. He’s a very nice person, actually. But, yeah, no, I’ve moved. I’m in Dukinfield, now. You remember the Jam and Marmalade works where we used to play table tennis? — you’ll split your sides at this —’

‘That was my first ever league match, Aishk, I’m never likely to forget it.’

‘Yeah, well I’m a security officer there now. What do you think of that?’

‘I think it’s a long way for you to travel, especially in the fog.’

‘It takes me three buses, door to door.’

‘Is that mamzer Cartwright still there?’

‘The one with the shmatte bat?’

‘The one who was always complaining about our shmatte balls.’

‘I think he died a few years ago.’

‘Listen, Akishky, do you work late every night?’

‘Of course. I’m a security officer. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays until midnight. Thursdays and Fridays until 9.30.’

Today was Thursday. ‘Then we’ll pick you up there tonight at 9.30,’ I said. ‘I know the address.’

And before he could put any obstacles in my way or add to the list of dead loved ones — dead hated ones, too — I rang off.

Then I said a prayer of my own.

My call to Sheeny Waxman was less metaphysically vexing. I reached his secretary. ‘Mr Waxman said that if you called I had to tell you to jump straight in a taxi at his expense and ask to be brought to Gallery W in Wilmslow. He will be here all day. Oh, and he also said to say “Oink, oink.”’

I rang Twink on his receive-calls-only telephone to tell him what I’d arranged with Aishky, mentioned Sheeny Waxman about whom he was as incurious as he had always been, then did the extravagant thing I’d been told to do and jumped in a taxi. Gallery W? I was unable to make a single reasonable stab at what Gallery W made or sold. Mirrors? Greetings cards? Wedding stationery? Tsatskes, I was certain of that. The higher swag, as befitted the mock-Tudor, mock-Georgian, mock-Edwardian village of Wilmslow. Heavily varnished prints of English country scenes in gaudily gilded frames? Twelve-branched chandeliers? Reproduction antique furniture even? But really I was at a loss. I suppose I was also in shock. Too much of the past in too short a time. Too many memories I couldn’t be absolutely sure were mine.

And too many I could, come to that.

I saw Sheeny before I saw Gallery W. He was standing on the pavement looking up and down the street. For me? How touching if that were so.

We fell into each other’s arms. His doing. I felt slightly overwhelmed by him again, just as I had when I’d first encountered him and he’d put me down for being a kid. And now to go with the alarming tic and the KD demeanour was a killingly contemporary London haircut — parted not quite in the middle, fuller on the top than the sides, like a headless partridge flecked with copper highlights — and an abstemious black curatorial suit, worn over a crisp white cod muezzin shirt with no collar.