The Mighty Walzer (23 page)

‘Why were you trying to get your mind in order?’ they asked him.

‘Because I was worrying. I’m a worrier.’

‘And what, on the night in question, were you specifically worrying about?’

Apparently Aishky didn’t even hesitate. ‘Crimes against the Jewish people,’ he said.

Would anyone really have attempted to look through the letter-box of a burning building? It was hard to swallow, but nothing otherwise linked Aishky to the crime. He had no record of wrong-doing. He was not known to the Copestakes. He was not known to be known to the Beenstocks. It was impossible to connect him with Benny the Pole, who for his part contemptuously brushed aside all knowledge of such a person and was especially brusque with the imputation that he, Benny the Pole, was unable to put paid to a shmattie warehouse full of foam chips and duck feathers without an accomplice.

In the end, the only person who thought Aishky Mistofsky could have been implicated in the destruction of Copestake’s Bedding Emporium was me. There was a connection which the police hadn’t made. Aishky and Benny the Pole via Sheeny Waxman. Sheeny was like a son, as we used to say in the days when being a son was the highest measure of human affection we could imagine — Sheeny was like a son to Benny the Pole. He had modelled himself on Benny and probably enjoyed as much of his confidence as anybody did. He was also harsh in his opinion of Aishky. Assuming Benny the Pole had said, ‘Sheeny, find me a shmulke who’ll watch the front of the store for gornisht and ask no questions,’ I could well imagine Aishky Mistofsky being the first name Sheeny came up with.

Does this say more about me than it says about Aishky Mistofsky or Sheeny Waxman? Was it me who harboured the low opinion of Aishky? I loved Aishky, I hope I have said nothing that could call that into doubt. I thought he was an entirely lovable man. But I loved my aunties, and my mother, and my grandmother too, and look what I did with them. What if the grandiose are in a trap of their own making and cannot
respect where they have decided to love? Tsatskes — that’s how you see those to whom you give merely your heart. Playthings of the feelings. And how can you have respect for a tsatske?

All that aside, what did anyone’s opinions of Aishky have to do with what Aishky himself chose to do or not do? Was there any reason to believe he’d have gone along with such a deal even had it been put to him? None. And yet I still suspected him. I felt I owed it to him not to not suspect him, that’s the best I can say. One should never be certain of anyone.

That was the end of the Akiva as a fighting ping-pong force anyway. Aishky joked that he could learn to play pen-hand next, but none of us believed that was ever going to happen. Whether or not the fight had gone out of him, it had gone out of us.

I made an arrangement to go over and see him — after dark, but not so late that his parents would be home from work — in order to deliver the news that Sheeny had decided to play for the Hagganah, that I was thinking of doing likewise, that Selwyn had taken up swimming with the intention of ridding the sport of its rampant anti-Semitism, that Louis was going to Israel to get away from all the talk about Jews, and that nobody cared what happened to Gershom Finkel.

He was less upset than I feared he’d be. ‘All good things,’ he said.

Then, employing his ruined hands robotically, as though they were cake slices, he put Mario Lanza singing ‘I’ll Walk with God’ on the turntable and we sang along with it, hitting the high notes together.

‘So what’ll you do?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean what’ll I do?’

What did I mean? Now that you can’t use those wonderful strong red Esau forearms for anything, was what I meant, but how could I say that?

‘For sport,’ I said.

‘Sport? Who’s been doing sport?’

We both laughed. Of course ping-pong wasn’t sport. Football was sport. Cricket was sport. Ping-pong was — But we both knew, without saying, what ping-pong was.

‘Anyway, I’ve got some reading I want to do,’ he said. And then he asked me if I knew the
The Scourge of the Swastika
by Lord Russell of Liverpool.

So maybe he
had
been wandering down Cheetham Hill Road at three in the morning worrying about crimes against the Jewish people.

Be that as it may, it was to be forty years before I saw him again, as well.

The final choice as to who among your club mates and friends would make an ideal partner for you will ultimately rest with your own judgment having due regard to your own particularities of style, methods of playing and weaknesses (which you yourself know better than anybody else).

Twenty-One Up,
Richard Bergmann

WHY COULDN’T IT have been Gershom Finkel who saw smoke coming from Copestake’s warehouse and thought to verify his suspicions by opening the letter-box and putting his head inside?

Boom!

Much unnecessary suffering might we all have been spared.

But it was too late by then anyway. Both my aunties were already hooked.

Never look a gift-horse in the mouth — that was the worldly wisdom which we subsequently had to pick out of our teeth. Who else was ever going to court my aunty Dolly? For whom else had she ever put on lipstick, straightened the seams in her stockings and learnt dance steps? Gershom Finkel was a one-off, a once-only, a chance in a million. Sure he was freaky, but let’s face
it, as my father put it, ‘It took one to love one.’ On top of that - and in the fifties these considerations still counted, whether or not the alternative was ES for eternal spinsterhood — he was one of us, a Bug and Dniester davener with a covenant from the Almighty in his pocket and a snipped-off in-between to prove it. Obscene but true: when the family beheld Dolly on the arm of Gershom – and when I say the family I mean both sides of the family - they made the calculation that while no in-between inside her might have been better than Gershom’s in-between inside her, Gershom’s in-between inside her was infinitely to be preferred to any pale and floppy-prepuced in-between inside her. On such delicate matters of preference does a kinship system based upon religion dwell.

But then as I knew better than anyone, this was the trouble with S for spinsters – by some insalubrious inverse law of non-desire, you couldn’t keep your minds out of their C for cunts.

I don’t think I was jealous of Gershom. I was growing up quickly, even if not quickly enough to satisfy myself, and was putting my aunties behind me. But it’s worth remarking, in the name of honesty, that while I rarely had recourse to my perfumed box of mutilated mishpokheh these days, on those occasions when I did, I excepted, I excused, my aunty Dolly. Sorry Dolly, you just don’t work for me any more. And that could only have been because I didn’t feel she was any longer mine to cut up, which I suppose is another way of saying that I was not prepared to share her, even severed, with Gershom.

Not that Gershom was himself possessive. Far from it. So casual was Gershom in his attentions to Dolly, in fact, that my parents frequently wondered if his real motive for dating her wasn’t simply access to our house, food, warmth, company, shelter. A theory which was lent credence, I have to say, by Gershom’s reluctance ever to visit Dolly in her own house.

‘I can understand that,’ my father said. ‘Your father’s there.’

‘Exactly,’ my mother said.

‘And it’s poky there.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And it’s dark there. Mind you, if I was courting Dolly …’

‘Joel!’

But he was generous, my father, in the matter of our house being the place where everything social happened for my mother’s side, where her mother could escape her husband, where the Violets could bunch together for a
Book at Bedtime
and a crossword and a bit of fussing over me, and now where the oldest of them could do her canoodling. He’d grown up in a big family himself. He knew how fifteen people could live fifteen separate lives in one room. In fact our living area was probably smaller than the one my mother’s side fled from every day — for we only had what was called a Sunshine Semi, which meant that the sun came in through the front window and went right out again through the back — but at least it was Heaton Park and not Lower Broughton, at least you could sniff the Pennines instead of Poland, and at least my maternal grandfather wasn’t there. Of course it didn’t cost my father much to be generous, since he was out of the house himself most of the time; but he could have had thoughts about wear and tear, which he didn’t, and he could have played up on Sundays when he was home and the house prickled with spinster embarrassments, but he didn’t do that either.

It was the way Gershom Finkel threw himself into Sundays at our place that convinced my father it was us he was after — our food, our company — rather than Dolly. Sunday was bagel day. Now that bagels belong to any-old-place, any-old-time international convenience cuisine, and figure (however uncomfortably) in the vocabulary of the pale and floppy-prepuced, along with chutzpah (with a baby ch for choo-choo train) and shmo (with the open O of the wonder-struck and the unworldly – O gosh! O no!), it may be hard for some people to understand why they once counted for so much. Well, they tasted better in those days, for a start: crisper, nuttier, crunchier, sweeter,
saltier, browner, plumper, more burnished, more almondy, more flowery, more boiled, stickier, more elastic; chewier in the dough, sleeker to the touch, more differentiated as to top and bottom, more variegated as to middle and sides, more distinct as to inside and out. The trek to get them was more arduous than it would be now, as well. You had to choose whether you felt like Needhof’s bagels or Tobias’s bagels or Bookbinder’s bagels, then you had to measure that against whether you felt like Needhof’s chopped liver or Tobias’s chopped liver or Bookbinder’s chopped liver, then you had to divide how many they were likely to have left by the time it now was, and get going. They would still be warm when you walked back in with them, too, provided you hadn’t over-extended yourself with the extras. But then if you’d under-extended yourself with the extras no one would have been much pleased either. Chopped liver wasn’t the half of it. There was chopped herring — old-style chopped herring and new-style chopped herring. (The difference? Sugar, aroma, blind prejudice and who could say what subtle variation of uric content.) There was egg and onion — a yellow baby mash, new-laid and salmonella-free, which the aged and the toothless could suck up through a straw. There were cucumbers: in a tin, in a jar, loose; cucumbers plain, sweet and sour, just sweet, just sour, and new green. There were fish balls, and to give the fish balls taste there was horseradish (chrain, pronounced
ch
rain, an old world ch with a convulsion of the larynx), which we with our soft nursery palates thought was fiery simply because it was red. There were rollmops, not to be confused with Bismark herring. There was Bismark herring, not to be confused with rollmops. There were anchovies. There was smoked salmon. There were latkes. There was pickled meat with a dropped d — pickle meat, as though it was itself in the active business of pickling and might pickle you. And then – the Sunday morning
ne plus ultra
in our cow-mad house — there was smetana and kez — sour cream and cream cheese, this kind of cream and that kind of cream — which
no one ever mixed with more dedication, more feeling for texture and consistency, more of an instinct for what looked alike but wasn’t, than my father did.

Now
does it seem so fanciful of us to have wondered whether Gershom Finkel was stepping out with the most shrinking of the Shrinking Violets solely in order to get at our food?

This much I can say: from the moment he became Dolly’s beau Gershom never missed a single one of our Sunday morning bagel fress-ups. He’d arrive early, in no matter what weathers, often well before Dolly got to us, often before any of us were awake ourselves (he thought nothing about knocking us up), so as to be absolutely certain he’d be in position when the bagels turned up warm. ‘Have they come yet?’ he’d ask, as though they got there under their own steam. Agitation made him louder and more staccato than usual. He fired off bagel-related interrogations. ‘Is that them?’ ‘Where they coming from today?’ Otherwise he had nothing to say. He wouldn’t even take off his coat and make himself comfortable. He simply sat on the edge of a dining chair, leafing absently through the
News of the World
and
The People,
mouth open, like a fledgling waiting to be fed.

‘You’d think,’ I remember my father saying, ‘he’d have the decency to get the bagels himself just once in a while.’

‘Or at least the smetana and kez,’ my sisters added.

‘Or even just the kez,’ I said.

‘It’s not as though he’s pink lint exactly,’ my father said.

‘Not with three houses,’ my sisters said.

‘Four,’ my father corrected them. He’d heard four. All in Didsbury, all divided into flats, and all bringing in nice rents.

I said nothing. When it came to Gershom Finkel’s property I took a shtum powder. I knew where the original funds had come from. Plock plock, I lose, I win.

But I shared in the family censoriousness. We didn’t care for landlordism. Nothing we could put our finger on. Just something we’d brought over with us from the Bug. Had we stayed out
there we’d have been Marxist-Leninists, or at the very least Bundists.

Which might have been why, over and above the fact that we wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Dolly, we put up with her admirer. Landlord or not, there was something of the stray dog, even the mad dog, about him. Reason dictated he be put down. But we couldn’t go along with that. There’d been too much putting down. So we took him in. And let him fress our bagels.

Canoodling? Did I say canoodling? There was none of that on his part. Try as I might, I am unable to remember Gershom Finkel ever showing my poor aunty Dolly a single sign of his affection. The snuggling-up, such as it was, was all on her side. She’d drape herself over him while he was idling through the papers as though she couldn’t bear not to be reading what he was reading, or she’d suddenly make a dart for him, like a wild impulsive girl, and leap up and kiss him plum in the middle of that born-bald, stayed-bald head of his, or she’d talk about ‘we’ in a way that seemed simultaneously to give him satisfaction and cause him pain. ‘We’ weren’t taking milk in our tea any more. ‘We’ had been to hear Perry Como at the Free Trade Hall. ‘We’ didn’t enjoy him as much as ‘we’d’ enjoyed Sammy Davis Jnr the week before. ‘We’ believed that while some of the changes were to be welcomed, the Rent Act still favoured tenants at the expense of landlords.