The Mighty Walzer (17 page)

But none of us could quite go along with him in the matter of his having to read a ruling from the Talmud between every
point, or holding up his hand to re-arrange his fringes just as his opponent was about to serve.

Even his own brother wouldn’t back him. ‘You don’t bother with that stuff at home,’ he said. ‘At home you piss in your yarmulke.’

‘I’ve never pissed in my yarmulke.’

‘And you torture the cat with your tzitzits.’

‘We don’t have a cat.’

‘Did I say our cat? Any cat. I’ve seen you whipping cats with the fringes of your tzitzits. I’ve seen you tying their paws up.’

‘I don’t go near cats. I’m frightened of cats. They’re treife.’

‘What do you care about treife? You sneak bacon sandwiches into your bedroom in your yarmulke.’

‘Is that after I’ve pissed in it or before?’

‘What’s the matter with you? What gets into you as soon as you come out of the house? What are you trying to do — start a pogrom?’

‘Start one? That’s good,’ Selwyn said. ‘Start one! Next you’ll tell me that six million is an exaggeration.’

It was good for me that Selwyn was out of the tournament. We were at opposite ends of the draw. If he’d gone on making it through we’d have been looking at a showdown in the final. No problems about beating him — I’d never come close to losing to Selwyn Marks even in practice — but I didn’t want to win my first title that way. If I was going to be Manchester Closed Junior Champion I wanted to take out someone who wasn’t one of us in the final, someone who didn’t live next door to me, someone who didn’t have the murky waters of the Bug or Dniester flowing through his veins … what am I trying to say? — someone who was white.

Wasn’t Selwyn white? Only in a manner of speaking. Selwyn was pale. White only by default. What I had in mind was white white,
foreign
white.

It shouldn’t be that hard to understand. My ambition was to be
crowned conclusive champion of Somewhere Else, not champion of Our Street.

This was my debut tournament. There’d been others I could have entered earlier in the season but Aishky had advised me to keep myself a secret for the big one.

I was hurt by the idea that I was still an unknown quantity. ‘I’m hardly a secret, Aishk,’ I said. ‘I’m in the papers every week.’

‘Sure, sure, but most of these kids haven’t seen you with their own eyes yet. Think surprise element. It’ll be like Nagasaki. Pow!’

Was Nagasaki where Ogimura lived, I wondered. The paper house breathed and shivered. The champion lay motionless on his futon, staring at the ceiling.
Swish
went the geisha’s kimono.
Snap
went her suspender.

If I’d been saving myself for the big one, it follows that I’d been saving the big one for me. Turning out once a week for a league match was one thing, but a
tournament! —
everyone who was anyone in Manchester ping-pong, the League Secretary, the League Chairman, the League President, for God’s sake (men who had crossed ping-pong bats embroidered on the breast pockets of their blazers), to say nothing of players from higher divisions, strokemakers and tantrum-throwers and rule-benders whose gamesmanship was the stuff of legend, veterans of the sport, scouts, coaches, international selectors, commentators, and who could guess how many members of the ping-pong watching public, all gathered in one place and at one time and with one purpose ... To see me? Of course I did not really think that. But then again, of course I really did.

Within a week of the tournament I’d lost all capacity to sleep. I couldn’t even remember how to shut my eyes. The night before, I climbed into my bed like Cinderella stepping up into her pumpkin, quaking and overdressed, already in my tracksuit in case I suddenly found the trick of sleeping again and overdid
it. I needn’t have worried. By six in the morning I was on Oxford Road waiting for the University to open.

I checked and re-checked my registration form. By the Sports Hall, Manchester University, it did mean
this
Manchester University … ? There was bound to be a Manchester in the United States of America, and another in Canada, and probably a third in Rhodesia, and they were all bound to have a university, but that wouldn’t make any sense, would it, choosing one of those as the venue for
our
Manchester Closed?

Assuming it was
our
Manchester Closed.

I walked around Rusholme. Sat on a park bench. Refused one of the dawn whores — I think. Blushed in the event that I hadn’t. Blushed in the event that I had. Then found somewhere to have tea and toast. By the time I made it back to the University I was no longer early. Not late, just no longer early. I registered, nodded to a few people I recognized, pushed open the swing doors of the Sports Hall and pow! like Aishky had said, and I hadn’t even begun yet, pow! — all the exhilaration I’d felt when I first saw a room full of green tables in action in the Tower in Blackpool returned. Green, the green of the foothills to Heaven, wherever I looked. Eden. The Happy Valley. The Garden of the Hesperides. Hush, hear the nymphs — for they too had woken sleepless and turned up early — plock plock, plock plock, plock plock.

Shocking, how small the tables looked when there were so many of them in a single space. But wasn’t that the allure of the game for those of us who loved it? The confinement. No margin for error, and all the violence of competitive sport bounded by a nutshell. No spillage — there was the fatal beauty of ping-pong. No overflow or exorbitance. So there is no point blaming the players for being repressed. The game is repressed.

Plock plock, plock plock, went the shy Hesperides, and this time the music of the westernmost meadow on earth was for me.

There was my name, my certification, on the draw, accompanied
by an asterisk to denote that I was seeded. I’d never before seen a draw, or even thought that as a tangible thing, a physical chart, actual sheets of paper which you could touch and rustle, a draw existed. So that was a draw! I loved it. I was transfixed by the artwork: the grand all-embracing brackets — Me against Him, and then Him gone, dropped from the picture, and Me against Someone Else — the empty dotted lines issuing from the noses of the brackets like spikes from the snouts of marlins, decreasing, narrowing, closing like jaws on that last incontrovertible horizontal. Every time I won a round I took up a seat within sight of the board so that I could verify the written proof of my advance. The mathematics of a draw staggered me. One hundred and twenty-eight players reducible to just one after only seven rounds. In that computation I saw the future, how little it took, sum-wise, to be the last man standing.

I was intoxicated by the tumult. It made me tremble. Made my stomach lurch with apprehension. So many wills, so many separate ambitions, so many arms going, enough piston power to light up the whole of Manchester on a winter’s afternoon. On the green battlefield of my soul the two sides of my family took up their positions. ‘Impossible,’ my mother and my aunties whispered, ‘impossible to expect to prevail against so many. Just do well. Get close. Lose honourably. No shame in that. Sleep, you are going to sleep. We will count to ten and when you awake you will remember nothing, my darling, but the will to lose … nine … ten … lose!’ But then the Walzers grabbed me for a hokey-cokey, conga’d me past the draw where my seeded name kept on greedily coming — Walzer, O*; Walzer, O*; Walzer, O* — emboldening me with the least imaginative, and to tell the truth the least flattering, of all expressions of optimism — ‘Someone has to win, why shouldn’t it be you?’

I won.

Someone had to.

So potent was the magic which my mother’s side worked on
me — it is more captivating, when all is said and done, to be told that victory is not indiscriminate, but yours to throw away — that I can only suppose every other boy had a mother’s side working against him too. The closer I got to the final the more my aunties wheedled. My ears were wet with them. Their fingers paddled in my heart. I threw away leads, I served into the net on match point to me, I missed sitters — ‘That’s it, like that, my darling, just like that’ — but my opponents’ aunties must have loved them more, because for every sitter I missed, they missed two.

For the final itself all the lesser tables were cleared away and just one master table — the best and greenest table I had ever played on (a Jacques International Match Play Executive, I think it was called) — was erected in the centre of the hall. Then two hundred and eleven chairs were arranged around it.

I can be precise about the number. I counted them.

‘Do you think they’ve made a mistake?’ I asked Aishky.

Twink and Aishky had been knocked out of the senior tournament earlier in the day — if I haven’t mentioned a senior tournament that’s because I had no eyes for it — but they were staying on to give me encouragement. I doubt I was adequately grateful to them at the time. It takes courage to stay on at a tournament when it has no more use for you. And there were other things they could have been doing on a Saturday night. They were better friends to me than I deserved.

‘A mistake in what sense?’ Aishky wondered.

In the sense that two hundred and eleven chairs were hardly sufficient to seat a thousand spectators, was what I wanted to say. But I could hear in advance how that was going to sound. A man may think in thousands but he should never speak in them. I make no apologies for the wildness of my expectations. What did I know about tournaments? Wimbledon — that was my only model. All right, the Manchester Closed was not the All England, and table tennis was not lawn tennis, but I believed I’d made
allowances for the difference. I was only thinking thousands, not tens of thousands.

I let the subject drop. Aishky looked concerned for me. He had mistaken my grandiosity for finals’ nerves. He nodded in the direction of my opponent, Nils Hagtvet, who was lying across three chairs (three more chairs, I noted) underneath the draw, a packet of Stuyvesant’s on his belly, blowing smoke rings. ‘He’s more nervous than you are,’ Aishky said. ‘He’s a ball chaser. He hasn’t hit one all day. He knows what you’re going to do to him.’

‘Does he?’

Now I did have finals’ nerves. Was I up to beating a boy who could blow smoke rings?

More than that, was I up to beating someone quite so elongated? I had wanted to meet an incontrovertibly white boy in the finals. Be sure you really want what you want before you ask for it. Nils Hagtvet was the whitest and most extruded boy I had ever seen. He could have come out of a machine for rolling vermicelli. Where he actually came from no one seemed to know, but he played in a higher division than I did, for Tootal Ties.

Twink echoed Aishky’s concern. ‘Do yourself a favour,’ he advised me, ‘take a long shower. And then see if you can find somewhere dark to lie down for half an hour. Don’t think about anything.’

It was the same advice my grandfather had given my father on the morning of the World Yo-Yo Championships. Except that Aishky added, ‘And don’t play with your putz.’

I knew better than to play with my putz before a match.

But in the event, I did something worse.

I went looking for chairs. Not with the intention of carrying them out into the arena myself, I should make plain, but just so as I’d know where they were when the multitude turned restive.

* * *

‘Well?’

My grandmother, my mother and my aunty Fay were waiting for me when I got home.

I shrugged.

‘Never mind,’ they said. My seraglio of despairing counsel. How prompt they were with their siren consolations.

Too prompt, on this occasion.

‘I won,’ I said.

‘You won?’

‘I won.’

‘You won?’

‘I won. Big deal.’

‘Well it is a big deal.’ Now we could reverse roles. Now they could console me for discovering that victory was a trollop. Had my father been here, instead of broken down in the forecourt of a transport café outside Welshpool, he’d have given me a backhander for winning with so little grace. You pays your money …

I showed them my silver cup.

‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’ my mother said.

‘Swag,’ I said.

They passed it from one to the other, peering under and over their spectacles to see if there was an inscription. Not a good eye between the three of them.

‘I take it in to get my name engraved next week,’ I said.

They all said ‘ah!’ as though I’d told them something upsetting.

‘So how many people did you beat?’ Aunty Fay asked.

‘Seven.’

My grandmother shook her head. ‘Seven,’ she repeated. She seemed to see a challenge to the Almighty in it. ‘Seven,’ she said again, meaning no good could come of so big a number.

And she was right. No good had come of it.

I hadn’t won well, then? The crowds hadn’t cheered me to
the rafters? The girls hadn’t scratched me with their nails?

Crowds? Girls?

Why did it matter to me that of the two hundred and eleven chairs arranged around the Jacques International Match Play Executive the better part of two hundred remained unoccupied?

Because it made me feel I was in possession of a skill no one valued.

I needed the confirmation of others, then, did I? I placed no philosophical value on the ping-pongness of ping-pong for itself?

Yes and no. Perhaps what had really gone wrong was that my opponent, Nils Hagtvet, was an oaf, and that my ascendancy over him — as a player, and I like to think as a moral being — reawoke section two of my old compound contradictory existential bashfulness, that’s to say my shame at existing so successfully. It was like being back on the kitchen table at home making mincemeat of one of my father’s associates, while
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
smoked in my hand and my cheeks burned with consciousness of my own effrontery.

Nils Hagtvet’s speciality was a freeze serve. Taking up a position as far to one corner of the table as was possible without disappearing from it altogether, he would touch the playing surface with the ball, hitch up his shorts, exaggerate the flatness of his palm, freeze into a crouch, and then in a sudden spasm would toss the ball high enough for him to pass his bat under it twice before imparting what appeared to be the most terrifying spin to it on the third attempt. That he would occasionally miss the ball altogether was not surprising given the complexity of the manoeuvre. Fine, so long as the percentages favoured him. But what you would never have guessed until you faced one of Nils Hagtvet’s serves was that there was no spin on it whatsoever. No spin, no speed, no angle, nothing. How long did it take for him to crouch, hitch, freeze, and spasm? Forty-five seconds?
A minute? Humiliating for him, then, when you disdainfully smashed it past him before he’d even completed his convulsive follow-through.