The Mighty Walzer (27 page)

Just before my grandmother died Sabine Weinberger posted me an invitation to a party at her house.

‘You’ll be going to that,’ my father said.

I told him that I didn’t feel up to a party what with my grandmother dying downstairs and everything.

‘It wasn’t a question,’ my father said. ‘I said you’ll be going to that.’

He made me wash my hair and oversaw my wardrobe. He made me stand still as a tailor’s dummy while he verified that I’d polished my sad never-trodden-upon winkle-pickers and properly buttoned my Italian suit. He even straightened my tie, he who had never in his life known how to decently knot his own. Then he opened the front door and pushed me out.

‘Don’t be late,’ my mother called.

‘Don’t be early,’ my father said.

I never went. I got as far as Sabine Weinberger’s front door, heard the music, saw the dancing, saw the size of the girls, and bottled out. It was the dancing that did me every time. Kids with whom I was completely comfortable, kids I knew from school and Laps’, kids I regularly made pickle meat of on a ping-pong table, were suddenly transformed into sophisticates the minute I saw them dancing. It was with dancing the way it had been with ball-playing: I’d turned my head away for two minutes and they’d learnt how to do it. With big girls, too. How come? How were they always able to steal an advantage over me? The size of those girls! What use would I be with girls as big as that — I with my rubbery little virgin in-between?

I never went. Never knocked. Never showed my face. I knew I couldn’t go back home and suffer my father’s wrath so I crept back into our garden and hid in the privet hedge for three hours, listening to my poor grandmother having trouble with her breathing. When I finally asked to be let in I had soil on my suit and twigs in my hair.

‘I see someone’s been having a good time,’ my father said.

I thought he was going to kiss me.

When I next ran into her in the street, Sabine Weinberger gave me one of those strange sideways glass-eyed looks of hers and reproached me for not coming to her party. I blushed and
said I’d wanted to, but that my grandmother was dying. When I ran into her after that I no longer had a grandmother.

She knew. She’d seen the hearse leave from our house. Which meant that she’d seen me sobbing like a baby. She touched my shoulder and wished me long life. ‘I know how much you loved her,’ she said.

I thought she was going to kiss me.

And had she done so, I was suprised to realize, I would not have half minded.

So there was Alec Watson and Mitchell with its stock of oofplock foam and sponges, and there were the Saturday-morning ping-pong tables up and ready, and there was Sabine Weinberger waiting behind the cash register with her prominent bust and glass eye — and there were we, Sheeny Waxman and me, miles away on a gaff at Worksop. Or there we
should
have been. All very well talking about going to town and re-rubbering, but when do you get the time if you’re a gaff worker and a gaff worker’s son? ‘Do I ever get a Saturday off from this job?’ Sheeny had once asked my father. ‘Yeah, when pigs fly,’ my father had told him. ‘Oink, oink!’ Sheeny said disconsolately.

And then, out of nowhere, pigs flew!

The van broke down. Five o’clock in the morning we were outside Sheeny’s house, ticking over, waiting for his curtains to open, waiting for Sheeny’s mother to show herself, distraught, at his window, and then for Sheeny’s father to show himself, distraught, at another window, and finally for Sheeny to appear in person, coughing and twitching and complaining — ‘Oy a broch, Joel, what time do you call this?’ — when the van went into paroxysms of its own, shook, spluttered, convulsed and died.

‘Nishtogedacht!’ my father said. ‘That’s all we need.’

‘I’m going back in for a kip,’ Sheeny croaked. ‘Honk me when you’ve got her going.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ my father said. ‘You’ll sit here and put your foot on the pedal when I tell you to.’

‘You’re not going to push her?’

‘Where am I going to push her? Into your bedroom? Show me a hill, Einstein, and I’ll push her.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Crank her.’

‘Joel, don’t be meshugge. You’ll wake the neighbours. It’s Shabbes.’

‘And some of us have to work on Shabbes,’ my father said.

But there was no cranking the Commer back to life, Shabbes or no Shabbes. My father disappeared under the chassis for an hour. Then he disappeared into the bonnet, just his short Walzer legs sticking out like those of a creature stuck up the anus of another creature in that Bosch picture we had once failed to turn into a commercial enterprise. Then he disappeared into Sheeny’s house, covered in oil, but not swearing, never swearing, to make a couple of phone calls. It was nearly nine o’clock before he could get a mechanic over. And gone ten when the tow-truck arrived.

‘That’s it,’ he finally conceded. ‘You’ve got the day off.’

By that time Mrs Waxman was up and about in a cerise nightie, preparing him Welsh rarebit. She seemed to know how he liked it — lots of cheese.

Sheeny had been asleep in the cab the whole time. Snoring heavily but careful, even while comatose, not to crush his whistle or soil his cuffs. I shook him to tell him the good news.

‘What, what?’ he cried, trying to throw me off. ‘I didn’t!’ Then comprehension returned to his jittery blue eyes. He twitched his head out from his shoulders, a ratchet at a time. I looked away, one tortoise from another. When he was finally free of himself he said, ‘Oink, oink! Let’s go and get some new bats then I’ll take you to the Kardomah.’

‘The Kardomah!’

‘Geshwint. Before the shops close.’

The Kardomah?
I
was going to the Kardomah!
Me
?

Oink, oink!

But first we had to do the bats. And Sabine Weinberger.

‘I wish you long life,’ she said when she saw me.

Hadn’t she already said that? It was my understanding that you said it once and that was that. On with life, no more references to death — wasn’t that the point of it? But then she was the one with the rabbinical background, she was the half-Vulvick, she should know.

She looked different behind a counter. Older. Taller. More assured. Maybe even more desirable. Her hair was up in a beehive, which drew attention to the fixity of her glass eye, though even that had a gleam in it I hadn’t seen before. Did she change marbles? One for home, one for school, one for work?

‘This is my friend Sheeny Waxman,’ I said. As though there was anyone in Manchester who needed to be introduced to Sheeny Waxman. ‘We want some help with rubbers.’

Did I see them exchange looks? Or was that just her new glass eye and Sheeny’s tic?

We put an hour in on one of Alec Watson and Mitchell’s tables, delighting mere sublunary shoppers, even signing a couple of autographs between shots. ‘You should pay us for doing this,’ Sheeny joked to Sabine Weinberger. ‘We’re good for business.’

‘I’d pay you if the shop was mine,’ she said.

‘You mean it’s not? Oliver, I thought you told me we were going to Weinberger and Mitchell’s.’

Sabine Weinberger laughed, putting her prominent bust into it.

‘So there’s no discount?’ Sheeny said.

‘I could ask.’

‘We don’t want it if it’s not from you,’ Sheeny said.

Sabine Weinberger made an exaggerated curtsy and squeezed us a glimpse of her tongue.

She was oddly kitted out for working a Saturday morning in a
sports shop, in fine steel stilettos (that was why she looked taller) and a tight black jumper (that was why she looked more than usually prominent) and stiff petticoats under a black skirt. Just like Sheeny, she looked as though she’d come to work straight from the Plaza. Though in Sheeny’s case all creases had miraculously fallen out of his clothes, and there was not a speck of dust on him, whereas Sabine Weinberger was as crumpled as a used paper bag and had a serious lint problem.

What I couldn’t decide was what I thought of her legs. Ask me what I think today and I still wouldn’t be able to answer. All legs come up better in stilettos, that goes without saying; but a certain sadness attaches to lumpen, stubbly legs in high heels. On the other hand there is something fascinating about them too, by very virtue of the thing that makes you sad. Because in the end, isn’t uncouth more rousing than couth?

If you followed the trail of Sabine Weinberger’s stubble you were soon on a journey whose reason was a mystery to you, and those journeys are always the best.

But I am getting ahead of myself again. We were here for bats.

In those days shops in the centre of northern English towns closed at lunch-time on a Saturday. Given that you weren’t likely to make it to a city store on a Saturday morning before about eleven, by which time the sales staff were already getting agitated about knocking off, it’s hard to see why anyone bothered with Saturday opening at all. But northern life was organized around the same principle as desire for Sabine Weinberger. It was the absence of amenities that kept you coming for more.

Being a Saffron, I suffered greater sensitivities to staff impatience than Sheeny did. ‘I think they’re waiting for us to go,’ I said.

‘Are you waiting for us to go?’ Sheeny asked Sabine Weinberger.

‘I’m
not,’ she said.

‘So what do you think?’ Sheeny said to me.

‘I still prefer a bat I can hear,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but think of it this way,’ Sheeny said, ‘if you can’t hear it then they can’t hear it. That’s gotta be worth five points a game.’

‘Not if they’re playing with a silent one too.’

‘Shmerel! — then it’s worth five points to them if you’re
not.’
After which he turned to Sabine Weinberger and asked, ‘Am I right or am I right?’

She was nothing if not accommodating. ‘I think you’re both right,’ she said.

Is that what was meant by her having a reputation?

‘How can we both be right?’

‘By using sandwich. Some people come in here and they feel right playing with sponge immediately. I can see that you two don’t. You’re not natural sponge players. And the only answer to sponge is sandwich.’

‘You think I might be a natural sandwich man?’

‘I think you both are.’

‘What do you reckon, Oliver?’ Sheeny said. ‘You a sponge or a sandwich man?’

‘I need more time to decide,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what sort of man I am.’

‘A sandwich just for me, then,’ Sheeny said. And while Sabine Weinberger was taking his money he asked, in an unusually croak-free voice for him, ‘So what will you be doing when you close?’

She shrugged and looked away, plucking lint from her far too prominent bust.

‘Then you’re coming to the KD with us,’ Sheeny told her.

The KD.

Not K for King and D for David, but K for Kar and D for Domah.

Kar Domah, the ancient Hebrew scholar and socialite who had
urged resistance against the Romans and held out against them for thirteen years, bare-handed and in his tefillin, on an unfortified mountain top in Market Street.

The KD.

I’d be lying if I said I could remember the old Market Street KD with any exactitude, what shape the tables were, what colour the carpet was, whether a waiter or a waitress served us coffee, or a fabled beast that was half horse, half water serpent. I wouldn’t have been any clearer on the details at the time. I wasn’t really looking. Not with my eyes. You used other senses to experience the Market Street Kardomah. You took it in through your pores.

Of course Benny the Pole wasn’t working his pitch on the pavement outside the KD this Saturday afternoon. Benny the Pole was still repaying his debt to society in Strangeways. Other frog-voiced men past their prime were holding on to their toupees and giving their spiel, but none of them interested Sheeny and so none of them interested me. We went deep into the bowels of the KD, I remember that. As far in as you could go. And every time we approached a table the occupants looked up, looked us over, recognized us or didn’t, but knew everything there was to know about us — from the quality of the shampoo we used to how long it took us to wear down the heels of our shoes — before we’d passed. It was like being at a Walzer wedding. No, it was like being the bride and groom at a Walzer wedding, making your entrance only after everyone was seated, negotiating your way to high table while the Klutzberg Trio played ‘Chossen-kalleh mazeltov’ and all your uncles and aunties banged cutlery. So why, all of a sudden, didn’t I mind the exposure? Because this was the KD, that’s why. The Kingdom of Dreams.

One thing I hadn’t expected — how many of
our
women, Bug and Dniester Beckies, the stubble and sparkle gang, I was going to see. You came to the KD looking to form short-term, obligation-free relationships with cory, ladies of other faiths and cultures, that was how I had always understood it. The KD wasn’t
a social club. Yes, it was a meat market, but a
treife
meat market. Now I saw what I saw it all made perfect sense. Our girls were here looking for the same. A non-kosher beanfeast. A pig-out. We kept ourselves clean for them, and they kept themselves clean for us, by doing whatever it was we had to do outside the nest. We played away and they played away. Fine. I can’t say it didn’t come as a shock to me to discover that our girls played at all. Other girls yes, but not our girls. I’d been brought up, by precept and example, to believe that virginity was an exclusively Jewish property. Why would a hymen have been called a hymen if it wasn’t Jewish? I had cousins called Hymen. We all did. Becky and Shoshanna Hymen. I could no more think of our girls without a hymen than I could their girls
with
one. But if I’d got that wrong I’d got that wrong. That’s what you went to the KD for — to learn. Fine. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but fine. We played away and they played away. It was practical. It was like wishing the bereaved long life. It acknowledged that life was for the living. That some matters had to be attended to. It accepted harsh realities.

Whether it actually worked, though, is another matter. What you aspired to was a condition of coruscating short-sightedness. When your own walked by you rose and embraced them, but you never thereafter noticed they were there. Even if they took the table next to yours you didn’t see them. Stars danced in your eyes, fireflies flickered on the rim of your Kardomah coffee cup, you glimmered brilliantly, but you were aware of nothing beyond the ring of fire which cut your table off from all the others. And when, despite yourself, you saw your sister making out with a shvartzer? Ah, then …