Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Jesus, Sheeny,’ I said, backing out of his embrace, ‘you look as though you’ve just come from judging the Turner Prize.’

Had I thought about what I was saying I wouldn’t have said it. What would Sheeny Waxman know about the Turner Prize?

But then I wouldn’t have said it had Sheeny Waxman not looked like what he looked like.

‘You’re talking to a man who’s gone one better than that,’ he said, hoarser than ever. ‘You’re talking to a man who’s just got two of his artists on to the shortlist for the Turner Prize. Eh? Come in and I’ll show you.’

I looked at Sheeny’s priestly get-up, belied by his festive roistering expression, then I looked over his shoulder into the window of Gallery W where was laid out an installation of sacks of rice and mutilated parts of women together with a bank of video screens showing me looking at those sacks of rice and mutilated parts of women, and in the words of my old friend Twink Starr, I nearly collapsed.

Sheeny Waxman was become an art dealer! What is more he was become an art dealer at the very cutting edge of the market. Heavily varnished prints in gaudily gilded frames? Ha! — I’d got that wrong in a big way. There wasn’t a frame in sight. And nothing that could be framed. Floor art, that was Sheeny’s passion. Ideational tsatskes. Shmondries you moved around. It looked like the Tate kindergarten in there. So, yes, the higher swag right enough. But never in a thousand years would I have imagined Sheeny this high.

‘Well? Is this a good flash or is this a good flash?’ he asked.

‘It’s a fantastic flash,’ I said.

‘Charles Saatchi, eat your heart out!’ he laughed.

‘So is that your ambition, Sheeny?’ I asked. ‘To become the next great shaper of the contemporary aesthetic?’

I heard my own words but could scarcely believe I was uttering them. It was too eerie. Conversations of this sort I did not have with Sheeny Waxman. The subjects of my conversation with Sheeny Waxman were the Kardomah, keife, and pigs. His job was to sit in the back of the van with his shmeckle out, looking not unlike a piece of pork itself, while I drove us to a ping-pong match, slowing down for any bit of skirt we happened to encounter on the way.

But if I was at a loss to know where or who I was, Sheeny didn’t look troubled. He was the right way up and utterly himself.

‘What’s with this “become”?’ he said. ‘I’m already his only serious competitor. I might not have his funds but I’ve got better taste than he has. And I’m more loyal to my artists. You come to Sheeny Waxman, you stay with Sheeny Waxman. What do you think of these?’

He had linked arms with me, for all the world as though we were a pair of AC/DC Greenwich Village dilettantes in polka-dot bowties, and was walking me around, showing me work which was strictly speaking not for sale, his private collection. ‘These’ were a stand of dripping monoliths, made of something that resembled candle wax, vaguely reminiscent of termite mounds which had started to bubble over.

‘They’re interesting,’ I said. ‘I like the way they appear to be humming.’

(Good, Walzer — now go out there and sell, men!)

Sheeny’s eyes were dancing. ‘I love this sort of gear,’ he said, reaching over and stroking them. ‘They’re much less grainy than you’d think. Go ahead, touch. Does that get you going, or what? You know, I picked these up for next to gornisht in Switzerland. The artist had gone mechullah. Guess how much I paid for them?’

I had no idea.

He pulled me to him and whispered a modest figure in my ear. ‘For all three! Is that cheap or is that cheap?’

‘That’s cheap, Sheeny,’ I said.

He was laughing now. ‘It cost me fucking twice as much to ship them over.’

But there was no vulgar triumph in his laughter. He hadn’t got the better of anybody. The earth had yielded up its bounty, and he, Sheeny Waxman, adventurer extraordinary, had gratefully accepted.

If the bargain hunting was important to him, it did not determine how he bought. It simply went with the territory; it was integral to his innocence. He loved the work and should there be a story of adventitiousness attached, well he loved to tell that too.

You’ll have noticed I’m defending him. From whom?

From Yorath and Rubella, that’s whom. From me, from the me who cleaved to Yorath and Rubella — that’s if there had ever been a me of any other sort.

But sentiment apart, now, how good was Sheeny’s taste? Was he intelligent? Was his mind good?

Lig in drerd, Walzer! Lie in the cold earth!

I spent half the day in his company, my feet never touching the ground. I saw no more than one-tenth of what he showed me — the voluptuously guggling obelisks I was invited to be turned on by, the heads in formaldehyde, the moulds of chairs commemorating places where people had once sat, the videos showing nothing happening (or were they?), the empty spaces filled with sounds of moaning women (labour or orgasm? — aha!), the lifesize mutilated fairies which would have served my purposes admirably in the old cut and paste lavatory days. (Thank God I wasn’t a kid growing up now.) And I heard no more than a tenth of what he told me — the partnership with Benny the Pole (did I remember him?), the Jaguar concession, the marriage to the daughter of a Derbyshire natural form sculptor he’d picked up in the Kardomah, the grand tour of the great European galleries, the awakening, the passion. Too much, too much to take in all at once. I would need to go away and think about this. I would need a further fifty years to sort it out in my mind. I knew how Aishky felt. I was tsemisht. But it was a warm tsemisht, akin to a wet rubber sheet when you’re eighteen months old.

He gave me another hug before I left and repeated his offer to look after the taxi. I saw that he was relieved when I refused, not because it saved him a few quid but because it signified I wasn’t short. He wanted us all to be having a good time together.

‘So what do you think?’ he asked. ‘Is it a nobbel, or what?’

I knew what he meant. He meant all this, the gantse geshecht — what had become of him, what he was, what he did, the transformation. For he too thought it was a tremendous joke.

‘Sheeny, I think it’s the greatest nobbel on earth,’ I said.

He pulled off his most spectacular twitch ever, both eyes on a simultaneous sideways roll, the Muslim shirt gulping down the entirety of his neck, one shoulder jerking up as far as the headless partridge which Vidal Sassoon had deposited on his head.

‘You know something — I really loved your old man,’ he called out, as my taxi pulled away.

Aishky was in hiding when we arrived to collect him at the gates of the Allied Jam and Marmalade works.

The place was silent and ill floodlit, surrounded by high wire fencing, the car-park yard cringeing and cold, even in June, criss-crossed by angular shadows. Belsen, I thought. What was Aishky doing working somewhere that resembled Belsen?

I’d forgotten that you don’t have that many choices in Greater Manchester, where every workspace has been desolate for decades, waiting to be cleared to make room for that Olympic Village which, thanks to what my father did in 1933, will never be built.

‘He’s over there,’ I said to Twink. ‘I can just see him.’

I recognized the shape of his head peering out from behind a wall, the beaky profile silhouetted like a Pulcinella mask on the factory yard. Remarkable that I should know it after all this time. Remarkable it should have changed so little.

‘Aishky, what’s the matter with you?’ Twink called. ‘Oliver’s here to see you.’

Something else that hadn’t changed — Twink enjoying having a nervous system more fragile than his own to show consideration to.