Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Alone. The other thing some of the less nice boys did was to disobey the school motto and take hold of someone else. I never went along with that. Such a practice was against the Kamenets Podolski faith which still pulsed faintly in my blood. Besides, I had no taste for it. I didn’t like what Church of England boys looked like. I preferred me.

Love — I don’t know what else to call it. I fell for myself. I swore eternal fidelity to myself, made myself promises I would never be able to keep. Jerk? No flesh has ever been shown steadier or more silky consideration than I showed to mine. Except that it wasn’t really me who was showing it. It was them. My mother’s side. They were the ones making promises they would never be able to keep.

Was I engaged, then, in multiple incest? Most definitely yes, if showing silky consideration to yourself while viewing photographs of your mother’s side, alive and dead, is incest. But incest isn’t the half of it. Oh, no. Incest isn’t the quarter of it. Not even when it’s multiple and mortuary incest. And if I am to accept my responsibility for the damnable things that were thought inside that shell and done behind that door, they must accept theirs.

I’ve promised brevity so I won’t waste time on all the usual psycho family biog stuff — the circumcision carried out by an aspen-leaf Mohel with delirium tremens and dirt beneath his fingernails; the bloody bandages; the mother’s guilt drying up the mother’s milk; the furious denunciation of God and His ways; the bet-hedging remorse, expressed in renewed prayers and promises; the pledge to make it up to the boy and his putz, to be over-and-above solicitous to the boy, and over-and-above over-and-above solicitous to his putz, for ever and ever Amen. Yes, I was fussed over. Yes, I was lovingly washed and exquisitely talcum’d and meticulously dried, as though the wound had never healed and never would heal. And yes, yes I was — to employ the humiliating idiom of my mother’s side — held out over the lavatory come pee-pee time, confidentially squeezed and shaken and squeezed again like a hose-pipe during a hose-pipe ban. But that’s normal. What was exceptional was the number of women doing it.

My father was serving in the army when I was born. Driving a truck and re-styling his officers’ trousers. (‘You look like a tailor, Walzer,’ they’d observed, ‘take these in.’ And he did.) It was news of me that got him out of going overseas where the fighting was. And by the time he’d completed his compassionate leave there was no fighting left. But there is driving and tailoring to be done even in peacetime, so he wasn’t demobbed immediately. Which meant that the world I was just starting to see the right way up was exclusively populated by females. I had two sisters. My mother had three sisters, one of whom, Fay, lived with us in the absence of my father, while the other two limited their visits to a dozen times a day, more often than not in the company of their mother. So how many women is that?

There was a grandfather on my mother’s side, but he was one of the reasons all the women came to us. He drank. Isaac Saffron, shicker to us, piss-pot to you. I’m still keeping it brief. He drank, actually pulled pints in the manner of a shaygets behind a bar in Collyhurst so he could be close to the supply, bet on the dogs, treated my grandmother like a domestic, klopped my aunties, and on one famous occasion — the straw that broke the camel’s back — drove out a party of my mother’s friends who had been sitting around in paper hats celebrating her eighteenth birthday. ‘There’ll be no bloody atheists in this house,’ he shouted, stumbling into the furniture and threatening to burn the place down. I have several photographs of my grandfather. He is handsome in the early ones, a little Polski princeling with sleepy eyes, a voluptuous mouth and dainty hands and feet. By the time there are photographs that have me in them as well he has lost his looks to alcohol. But in one regard nothing changes — in all of them he has his fists clenched.

The atheism charge was a reference to the free-thinking company my mother kept and provides a clue, over and above her delicate yet fleshy oval beauty, to why my father was so keen to marry her. She knew communists, she dated doctors, she hummed Tchaikovsky, she corresponded with men who were fighting with the International Brigade in Spain, and she read books. It wasn’t that she opened the door to the mind for my father; it was that she kept it closed. If he married her he’d be able to go on never reading a book himself. She could look after all that.

It was the best sort of match: they loved each other for what they didn’t have in common. For her part, she loved him because he brought the lightness of inconsequentiality into her life, entertained her with tsatskes, and wasn’t frightened of anything.

She was still only eighteen when they married, and he was hardly much older than that himself. Immediately after the wedding he drove her away in a big chocolate and cream shooting-brake which he’d coach-built for her with his own hands, along the lines of the mobster getaway saloons he’d seen in George Raft movies. My grandmother was unable to join the crowd of well-wishers waving them off. She stood with her back to the street, her face buried in her hands, praying aloud that they should be delivered from the evil eye — ‘Kayn aynhoreh zol nit zayn!’ My aunties, too, trembled for their sister. A husband, laughter, a big car — how much further could she push her luck?

The Shrinking Violets was the name my father gave his sisters-in-law. He always alluded to them collectively — ‘What, no Shrinking Violets for tea tonight?’ or ‘I hope we can at least go to that together, just the two of us, without the Shrinking Violets in tow’ — as though they were an established showbiz group like the Andrews Sisters. Inevitably you pictured them on stage with a big band singing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Shain’, which was ludicrous since it was actually impossible to picture them on stage doing anything.

They were frightened of everything, my mother’s side. A stroll in the park, the tweet of a bird, the approach of a stranger. Let a moth come in through an open window on a summer’s night and beat its wings in a lampshade, and their lives hung in doubt before them. A thread finer than cobweb attached them to life, finer than gossamer.

(And here’s something interesting — in its earliest days that was what ping-pong was called: Gossima.)

After my grandmother died, a whole wardrobe of unworn garments was discovered, some of it dating back to when she was a bride herself. Dozens of ‘best’ dresses on their original hangers, drawers of long skirts and high-buttoned blouses still folded as the shop-girls had folded them fifty years before, shoes in their boxes, silk stockings, items of underwear that had never been taken out of their wrappings. Gifts, most of them. Gifts she was unable to accept in her heart. She wasn’t worthy. Gifts were for other people. And ‘best’ was always for some future time which, like the Messiah, was never meant to come. Be seen by the Almighty risking the presumption of a ‘best’ frock, and the heavens would come down on you.

She was good company for a small boy. She turned Cheetham Hill into a Polish shtetl for me. The street signs said Waterloo Road, Elizabeth Street, St James’s Road, but we were in Sowalki. She wore furry boots in all weathers, and a scarf tied around her head against the wind howling across the steppes from Siberia. We crossed the roads slowly, watching where we put our feet, as though we were traversing muddy fields, our eyes peeled for the wolves waiting to pounce on us from the forest that was Mandley Park. She taught me to krich — to hobble along like a little old peasant with a back bent from years of carrying sacks of matzo meal. We kriched along together. Where she took me, no one spoke English. Or minded when she poked at their merchandise, showing me how you recognized bad fruit, how you opened up a hen’s legs and stuck your nose into its rectum to be certain it was fresh. She held my hand tightly, protected me from all dangers, and filled my head full of alarms. She wasn’t much taller than me either. When she patted me or kissed me I could look straight into her inconsolable blue eyes. It was like having a little girlfriend, ten times my age. And foreign to boot. I adored her.