The Mighty Walzer (2 page)

He womanized. What was he supposed to do, sweating in the shadow of a phallic prison six days a week? He was built like a prison himself — a brick shithouse — entertained grandiose illusions, wore a wicked Rupert of Hentzau moustache, was full of juice and jokes, and loved to look down and see appreciation swimming in the eyes of another man’s unclothed wife — what else was he ever going to do with his life except womanize it away?

And since he womanized, my grandmother tyrannized. Isn’t that how it goes?

He chases skirt, so she gives what for.

Her giving what for embraced her children as well as her husband. Whether it extended to her grandchildren too I can’t remember. I was scared of her, I know that. But that was mainly because she was swarthy and reminded me of a gypsy. Of all of us she was the only one who looked as though she still had mud from the Bug and the Dniester on her. And some of the
old religion mixed in with it. Every Passover and Yom Kippur, according to my father, she’d box the family’s ears. Every Succoth and Shevuoth the same. Every Chanukkah and Purim. Good yomtov, klop! ‘But at least that way,’ he said, ‘we got to know the festivals.’

This was why there was so much whispering afoot on the morning my father confided to his father his intention of competing in the World Yo-Yo Championships — August 5, 1933, was a Saturday, and Saturday, by my grandmother’s reckoning, was meant to be a day of rest from everything except her.

It’s my understanding of the thirties that when it came to observance we Walzers were essentially no different from most other families who’d made it over from some sucking bog outside Proskurov the generation before. We’d done it, that’s where we stood on the question. We’d done observant, now we were ready to do forgetful. If a Cohen wanted to change his name to Cornwallis, that was his affair. It was no mystery to any of us how come Hyman Kravtchik could go to bed one night as himself and the next morning wake as Henry Kay De Ville Chadwick. Enough with the ringlets and the fringes. Enough with the medieval magic. But we still bris’d and barmitzvah’d — klop! — and the seventh day was still the seventh day. Nothing fanatical; no sitting nodding in the dark or denying yourself hot food; no imaginary pieces of string beyond which you didn’t dare push the pram; and if you had to travel to see someone sick, you travelled —
and
you bought them fruit. All else being equal, though — which was where my grandmother put her foot down and k’vitshed and klogged and cried veh iz mir! and tore her hair and clutched her heart and tore everyone else’s hair — you rested. And even my father could see that competing in the World Yo-Yo Championships on a Shabbes wasn’t resting.

But that was not the reason, not the primary reason he slipped out of the house with his Yo-Yo concealed inside a holdall. Naturally, unless he meant for his mother to burst a couple of
blood vessels — his, not hers — he wouldn’t have wanted her to see what he was carrying. But he didn’t want
anyone
to see what he was carrying. His Yo-Yo was a secret weapon which no one at all knew about and which he would unveil for the first time only at the World Championships themselves. It might cross your mind, in that case, to wonder whether his trouser pocket wouldn’t have served just as well as a hiding place, better even in that it wouldn’t have attracted anything like so much notice. Have I not said that my father was grandiose? The truth is, the Yo-Yo with which he was planning to storm the World Championships, the Yo-Yo he had not simply gone out and bought from a toy shop like every other competitor but had spent weeks constructing, taking sheets of plywood and a fretsaw and a pot of glue to bed with him, working at night under his blankets so that not even his brothers should know what he was about, was on a scale utterly disproportionate to anything we normally associate with the contents of a boy’s trouser pocket.

This was why he was so confident. He had read and re-read the rules of the competition. (The last big piece of reading he ever did.) Nowhere did it say that a Yo-Yo had to approximate to the size of a cricket ball. Nowhere did it say that you couldn’t walk the dog with a Yo-Yo as big as a bicycle wheel.

When my father died, almost sixty years to the day after he’d competed in the first ever World Yo-Yo Championships, and in a house still not much more than a twenty-minute walk from where the River Irwell tries to hang itself on Kersal Dale — people I didn’t recognize stopped me in the street to tell me how much they’d loved him. ‘He had a big heart, your father,’ they all wanted me to know. They looked at me in a peculiar and personal way when they said this, as though his big-heartedness might have been lost on me, not a virtue I valued, or as though it was the one thing I hadn’t inherited from him. Grandiosity yes, big-heartedness no.

One of his old friends, Merton Bobker, to whom my father had
lent money before Merton won the pools and was in a position to pay the loan back (which he didn’t do), actually held me by the sleeve and wouldn’t release me until I gave him tangible proof I’d grasped the difference. ‘There are plenty of big dealers around,’ he said. He was dripping at the eyes and mouth, like an abandoned labrador. ‘You understand? In this town big dealers come cheap. But your father was a big
man.
Get me?’

He was a big boy, too, in the get me sense. Everybody who witnessed the shlemozzle he caused at the World Championships reckoned he came out of it with great credit. Even his father, who managed to make it to the Assembly Rooms after all, Shabbes or no Shabbes, did what fathers don’t always do and hugged him afterwards, telling him that by the only standards that counted he was the real winner.

What had happened was this:

He had taken my grandfather’s advice and not watched the one hundred and seventy-nine contestants prior to him. He had even found a dark room in the bowels of the Assembly Rooms, where he’d gone into a mild trance of premonitory euphoria, imagining what it would be like when he was the World Champion. As a consequence he missed his number when it was called and had to publicly plead with the competition referee to be allowed to perform out of sequence. So by the time he finally made it on to the stage, carrying his brown Rexine travelling-bag, he was already a character.

Don’t forget that in stature he was the same comical assemblage of sturdy right angles as my grandfather. In his square hand-me-down jacket and with his tie knotted clumsily at his throat he would have looked more like a parcel than a boy.

As for the spectators, remember that they had been there most of the day, sitting on uncomfortable seats, suffering the August humidity, and frankly beginning to lose any capacity to tell one loop the loop from another. What were they ever going to do, from the moment my father gave them his big smile and hauled
his chariot-wheel of a Yo-Yo out of his bag, but stomp their feet and cheer?

After that, as the
Manchester Evening News
reported it, ‘the competition descended into such mayhem that the city will be fortunate if it is ever given a comparable event to stage again.’

Allow for the hyperbole of the press. My father may have been the reason Manchester has never been given the Olympic Games, but even so allow for the hyperbole of the press. In fact, nothing occurred that was any more than boisterous. They’d taken to him, that was all. They thought he was plucky, and maybe a bit simple. But worth egging on, either way. From my father’s point of view all the hullabaloo was no more than he’d been expecting. He tried to loosen his tie but couldn’t budge the knot. He tried to roll up his sleeve to his elbow but couldn’t get it past his forearm. Perspiring heavily now — something else we do grandly in our family — he tested the tension of the string, clawed his fingers around the Yo-Yo, turned over his wrist and let it go. His stance was the conventional one, much like an ocean angler casting a line, legs slightly apart, the Yo-Yo propelled backhand from a height more or less level with his temple. He waited, knees sprung, shoulders braced, for the Yo-Yo to return fizzing in to his hand. How long did he wait? How long did it seem he waited? ‘Alles shvartz yoren!’ All the black years. An eternity.

I have often wondered if he exaggerated, to make it a grander débâcle than it actually was. Surely it came back up a little bit? But no. He always insisted there was no movement whatsoever, nothing, not so much as a quiver along the line. It just lay there at his feet, twenty inches in diameter, five or six pounds in weight, as inert as a dead fish, except that a dead fish had once known life.

He re-wound and tried again.

Same thing?

‘A worse thing.’ This time it didn’t even fizz down the string. It just dropped like a stone.

Thirty, forty, fifty years on, he could tell you where he’d gone wrong. He hadn’t allowed for the atmospheric conditions. It was a muggy Manchester day, the hammocks of cloud, bagging with the weight of warm Pennine rain, so low you could touch them. The string had sweated, become wet, and by the late afternoon lost its tensility. Something any experienced cotton worker would have thought of. But there you are — Rome wasn’t built in a day.

On the other hand, he was giving pleasure, wasn’t he? Listen to the crowd! And at the last it’s all about giving pleasure, isn’t it?

How hooked we’ve been been on the pleasure principle in our family! Pleasure, pleasure. But never for ourselves. The pleasure principle we’ve been hooked on, we Walzer men — even my grandfather looking down at the gratitude swimming in the eyes of another man’s wife — is the principle of giving it. As long as people say thank-you and remember us — that’s all we have ever asked.

The more the crowd whistled the more my father grinned. He stared accusingly at his stricken Yo-Yo, shrugged his square shoulders, and pointed an imaginary pistol at his brain. He seemed to be as amused as they were. To them it looked as if he had done exactly what he had meant to do. It was as if, although that wasn’t how anyone in Broughton Park spoke in those days, he had deliberately set out to deconstruct the Yo-Yo.

‘Third and final attempt,’ the tournament referee warned him.

I see the tournament referee, although my father never once described him to me. Round shouldered and blubbery, prematurely bald, with sad sea-lion moustaches and a broken-hearted demeanour. They upset easily in Manchester. It might be a climatic thing. Or a class thing. They nurse a deep hurt. And those who make it their business to adjudicate, to let a little equity into the universal unfairness of life, nurse a deeper hurt than most. I hear his defeated vowels, his cadences of hopelessness — ‘Third and final attempt’ — meaning try if you must, but you’re a dead man.

A dead boy the size of a dead man.

When all’s said and done, there are only two ways of getting a Yo-Yo into play — vertical or horizontal; you throw it down or you throw it out. Having failed with the vertical pass, my father concluded his programme with the horizontal …

Most of the spectators had the foresight to cover their faces or duck the moment my father let go. Despite its great size, therefore, his Yo-Yo did no one any damage as it at last spun the way a Yo-Yo should, whirring out into the hall with a sound like the beating of a pheasant’s wings, a meteor loosed from its orbit, cooling the air it travelled through, until it broke from its umbilical cord with a snap like a knuckle cracking, and flew free.

As luck would have it, it was his own father who stuck out a hand and caught it. Luck? Perhaps not. Who else in the hall had a hand big enough to pull off the catch?

He was carrying it under his arm when he met up with my father after the event. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take your tsatske.’

That was once my favourite word. Tsatske. When I was very small anybody could make me laugh just by saying it. It was like being tickled. Tsatske. Tsatske.

A tsatske is a toy or playing, a shmondrie, a bauble, a whifflery, a nothing. It can also mean a nebbish, a nobody, and by extension, a tart. Not a serious tart, not the sort of high-class call-girl you’d think of ruining your reputation as a carefree shtupper and family man for, more of a dizzy broad, a toy or a plaything, a shmontse to help you through the tedium of a wet Manchester afternoon.

But no definition is able to render the charge of fatuousness and triviality which I always heard in the word. A person who owned a tsatske was forever, it seemed to me, lost to seriousness and dignity. The way you were when you were being tickled.

Maybe I knew I was going to be forever lost to seriousness and dignity myself.

Before using a racket for the first time in a match a player shall, if so requested, show both sides of the blade to his opponent.

4.8
The Rules

I WAS A natural. Ping-pong just came to me.

One day, when I was eleven, I brought home a little white celluloid ping-pong ball I’d found bobbing on the boating lake in Heaton Park and began hitting it against the living-room wall with a book. I still remember the make of the ball. It was a Halex ***. A competition ball. Don’t ask me what a competition ball was doing in a lake in Heaton Park. Perhaps God had put it there. For what it’s worth I can still remember the title of the book as well —
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson, in the soft green pitted-leatherette Collins Classics series which my mother’s side was helping me collect. I already had about thirty of them lined up alphabetically according to author on a shelf over my bed — Austens, Jane; Brontës, Anne; Brontës, Charlotte; Brontës, Emily; Burneys, Fanny; Eliots, George; Gaskells, Mrs; Mitfords, Miss. You don’t need a degree in English Literature to work out that I must have chosen to hit the ball with Stevenson, Robert Louis, not because he came last in the line but because he was the only man I had.

What with the flexi-dimpling on the book and the glossy whorls of plaster on the living-room wall there was no knowing what even a Halex *** was going to do. Hit the eye of the same whorl as many times as you like, the ball will not come back to you at the same speed or with the same spin twice. I don’t care how good your opponent is, he won’t surprise you the way a plaster whorl will. In my own manual to ping-pong — long out of date now, and long out of print — I recommend a Collins Classic and an Artexed wall as the ideal surfaces for familiarizing a young player with the caprices of the game. As for the table you push up against the wall — there again, the more grooves and scratches in it the better.