The Mighty Walzer (42 page)

But at least he no longer had any invoices to lose.

For twenty-five, thirty years he tsatskied. It was his revenge on the big thing that never happened. You won’t approach me, I won’t approach you. If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, then Mahomet will just have to shmy around.

Big Thing 5. Joel Walzer 21.

Well done, Joel. Except that when you whop Big Thing, no one’s watching.

For twenty-five, thirty years he tsatskied, filled his arteries with cheese, and then he died.

I took my turn to sit up with him during some of his last nights in hospital, sat at his bedside holding his hand, while the other old men with blockages trailed hopelessly from their beds to the lavatories and back again, shaking their heads, carrying their cardboard chamber-pots in front of them, empty, empty, always empty.

One night while he was dozing he suddenly tapped himself on the forehead and said, ‘Well that’s that sorted.’

‘What is, Dad?’

‘What?’

‘What’s sorted?’

‘Oh, hello Oliver, where are you now?’

‘I’m here, Dad, with you.’

‘Tsedraiter! I mean where are you living now?’

‘Venice.’

‘Venice? Very nice.’ He changed his position in the bed, agonizingly slowly, using his elbows. He didn’t like it when anybody tried to help him. ‘Where’s Venice again?’

‘Italy. It’s the one with all the gondolas and canals. We used to do a coffee table with Venice on, remember.’

‘Don’t talk to me about coffee tables.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, I remember. Lots of water. I didn’t know you liked water. You can’t even swim, can you? You’d better not tell your mother you’re near water.’

The things he knew about me, my father. The things he’d had time to notice, after all.

‘I’m not there for the water,’ I said.

‘So what are you there for?’ Father to son. It’s all right, Oliver, you can tell me. Nekaiveh, eh? Bad boy. Tell me, tell me. Remind me of what it’s like to be somewhere you’re not supposed to be, with your eyes black and your heart thumping.

But I was, as I’d always been, a failure to him. A nebbish, primmed up by my aunties, prigged and prissified by Yorath and Rubella. A milksop.

‘I suppose I’m there for the light,’ I said. Just what he wanted to hear. ‘And the buildings. And my work.’

He nodded. Ah yes, work.

‘And I’m like you,’ I said. ‘I enjoy shmying arum. It’s easy to get lost in Venice. In that regard it’s like Salford.’

‘Is it?’ He seemed impressed. ‘Is there a gaff there?’

‘It’s all gaff,’ I said. ‘It’s just one big gaff’

‘So what are you doing in a place like that? You always hated the gaffs. You’re like your mother. She always hated the gaffs.’

‘Not always, Dad.’

‘She did. Always. Too sensitive. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Still won’t.’

‘I meant me. I didn’t always hate them.’

‘You did. You couldn’t wait to get away.’

‘It’s not true. I had some good times on the gaffs.’

‘Name one.’

‘Dad!’

‘Go on, name one.’

‘What about when the pig attacked us at Bakewell.’

‘Oh yes, the pig. Oink, oink! I’m sorry I missed that.’ He smiled at the recollection, tried to laugh, but ended up in a tangle with his tubes, having to bang the phlegm out of his chest.

‘And London Road,’ I said. ‘The day we found the Copestakes’ van on the bomb site before us and you decided we’d push it out of the way …’

This time he had to laugh, phlegm or no phlegm. ‘The look on your ponim,’ he said. ‘I can still see the look on your face when the side door opened and those nutters fell out.’

‘And what about the bricks?’ I said. ‘What about when they put bricks under the wheels to stop us pushing, so we had to run round taking them out, and they had to run round putting them back under, and we had to run around taking them out again …’

He held his hand up to get me to stop. Otherwise he would die laughing. I noticed the see-through plastic dog tag round his wrist. What was that for? Identification in case he got lost wandering from his bed to the lavatory? He used to have wrists like Victor Mature. He could have pulled a temple down with those wrists once upon a time. Even when I’d last seen him he could have shaken a small synagogue. Now, in a matter of a few months, they had become a little old man’s wrists, a frail tracery of sunspots and chicken bones, incapable of trembling a lulav.

Enough, Oliver, stop, you’ll make me die laughing. Well, why not. Better that way. Die choking on your own laughter, Dad. Die grinning that big daft boyish shmerkle with which you won the heart of my mother, the one you employed to wow them at the World Machareike Championships that sultry Saturday
afternoon in 1933 when you felt that something big was still within your grasp.

The one I didn’t inherit.

So no, I wouldn’t stop.

‘And what about the look on
your
face,’ I went on, ‘when Copestake called me a you-know-what? And the cops had to come to pull you off him? And what about the time you let me roast at the back of the edge with a nest of suitcases under my jumper? And what about Sheeny’s mad antics when he’d plunder everything and you’d get furious with him …’

But he was asleep now, haggard, ravaged, his breath troubled and uncertain, his cheeks wet.

And now my mother sits alone, surrounded by swag, with her head set further back on her shoulders than ever, tensed, blind-eyed and all-seeing like Tiresias. Yes, she knows where the blow will come from. It will come from us, the children or the children’s children, the only ones she has left. She has the air of someone who now does not expect to die herself. She will be here until we have all gone. It’s her job to be here until we have all gone, to shepherd us out, as she shepherded us in. To bear the scars left by the going of every one of us. So she sits and waits. And counts.

The last time I saw her she apologized for having given me life.

That’s how grave we have become, what’s left of us.

‘Don’t be foolish,’ I said. ‘What can you possibly suppose you have to apologize for? I have loved, I
am loving
, my life. I would not have been without it. I thank you for it.’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘That makes me feel better,’ she said. ‘But I know how hard it’s been for you.’

I shrugged, as if hard was nothing. ‘That’s part of it,’ I said.
But then suddenly rebelled against the idea that I’d had it hard at all. ‘Not that I’m sure I know what you mean,’ I added.

She looked at me long and evenly, my mother Tiresias. What did she know? I found my colour changing beneath her scrutiny. A phenomenon that had not occurred for forty years. Did she know about my box? Did she know what I’d done to Grandma, and to Aunty Dora and to Aunty Dolly and to Aunty Fay? Did she know about Lorna Peachley and what I’d wanted her to do to me? Some things a mother should not know about her son. Some things a son should not know his mother knows.

But if she did know she kept the details to herself. ‘You’ve had your disappointments,’ she said.

I wasn’t sure I even wanted to concede that. Doesn’t I’ve had my disappointments usually mean I’ve had
only
disappointments. Whereas I —

‘You’ve nothing to apologize for,’ I said again, backing off. This was all too elemental for me. Another reason I was holed up in Venice — to escape the final act of Families.

‘Well I hope you’re telling me the truth,’ she said.

And that was that.

In fairness to her, it’s hardly surprising her mood was grave. I was over for Channa’s wedding, and a lot of unanswered family questions were suddenly back buzzing around our heads.

Sabine had returned to Manchester with the children immediately we split up. No point hanging around the Christian world once Mr Shaygets himself had pissed off. From a fatherly point of view there was some advantage in this since it meant I could see my children whenever I was home for a funeral. But I suppose that from a filial point of view that was hardly well calculated to give me a good press. How come Daddy only ever comes to see us when someone’s died? Eventually Sabine would have had to tell them. Daddy isn’t a good man.

Herself, the moment she took up her Manchester matronage Sabine reverted to being the good woman it was always in her
Vulvick genes to be. No more hiding in cupboards with waiters from the Mogambo whom she was unable to respect. She let it be known that she had her one good eye fixed on an Orthodox marriage the second time around, but there was nothing doing. The Orthodox don’t give second time around. She settled in the end for quasi-mystical Zionist folksie, a freckled Canadian/Israeli who’d seen God at the Wailing Wall and now ran a travel agency on Bury Old Road, specializing in holidays for people desirous of doing likewise, and this was enough to direct my children into a course I would never have chosen for them. By the age of six, Channa (at this time still Charlotte) knew the words of every new Israeli folk song, was starting to be kitted out in those long, ill, shapeless you-can’t-see-my-cunt dresses to which all eerie cults are partial, had turned cross-eyed on account of the amount of Torah reading she was doing, and looked like the mother of ten children herself. Only two years her senior, though he was already more bent and crooked than his great-grandfathers on both sides, little Baruch (at this time still known as Marvin) was as fringed as a sultan’s tent, and as white and furry as a moth. When I lifted him up in my arms I felt I was holding cushion stuffing.

‘This isn’t my wish for them, you know,’ I told Sabine. But there is no repeating her reply.

It was getting time for me to back off anyway. Sabine’s new husband was wanting Marvin and Charlotte to call him daddy, and that’s the point at which you either stand and fight or quit the scene once and for all.

And we all know what a fighter I am.

If I found it undignified to battle for the points at deuce in a game of ping-pong, imagine how I relished the prospect of brawling over who had the right to have my children call him daddy. You want? You want that badly? Here, have, you sick fuck!

I consoled myself, in so far as I allowed myself to think about it once I was back in Saskatchewan or Wellington or wherever,
by imagining a time when they would rebel and come to me. I will be in the middle of a class on
Silas Marner
; there will be an unexpected knock on my office door; I will shock my students by my trembling; I will rise and go to see who it is who’s knocking, and I will find — yes, them, them, who else, no longer moth white, no longer cross-eyed, no longer flocked and frocked and fringed, two of the fairest and most secular children you have ever seen, bouncing up and down on the balls of their bold bare brown feet, crying, ‘Daddy, Daddy, look at us, we have run away from Yahweh!’ And I will take them in and smother them in kisses.

Well, I was almost right. They did rebel. They did reject their mother and their visionary second daddy. But not for the reasons I’d have liked. They rejected them for not being fervid enough. ‘But Mummy, Mummy, Moshiach is coming!’ they cried, changing their names to you-know-what and flinging themselves down that black well of messianic Hasidism of which Manchester is today as much a thriving battery farm as it once was of Yo-Yoists and Mosley’s Black Shirts. I suppose I should have been flattered. What are Hasids after all but mental orgiasts from our side of the Bug? In their own way Channa and Baruch were turning tail on their cold maternal Junker ancestry in favour of their daddy’s (their real daddy’s) bunch — the whirling Russki Walzers. A compliment to me, n’est çe pas?

Maybe that was why I got my invitation. The bride and groom must have wanted their union enriched by one drop of genuine Ukrainian peasant blood.

I’ve told you what I thought of the wedding. It turned my stomach. I watched my mother ratchet back her head another couple of degrees, then dab her eyes in the fashion of all grandmas; a marriage is a marriage is a marriage. I watched her lose herself in ceremony, shuffle back and forth in time, remember hers, remember mine, remember Fay’s that never was, but in the end I suspect the masculinism must have turned her stomach too. Not that I was able to find out. We weren’t allowed to sit together.

One consolation though: later I was allowed to dance with my new son-in-law.

If I had to compress all my objections into one objection then what I couldn’t forgive most about the thing Channa had done was the colour of her husband’s mouth. No daughter of mine should ever have wanted to put her lips to something as red and wet and unformed as that. That’s if they were ever intending to touch lips.

Not a subject a father should be putting his mind to? You bet it isn’t! But who were the ones making it impossible for me to do anything else? Who were the exhibitionists inviting me, by that hideous inverse law of demonstrative modesty, to imagine every immodesty known to man?

As with kindness so with chastity: it only becomes you when you keep the evidence of it to yourself.

They could of course — and this is their justification, my little ones — have me for dinner morally. They could argue that someone has to respect distance in a family; that my form of shrinking was hardly superior to theirs; that they at least don’t cut one another’s heads off in order to see how they would look on the bodies of trollops. And that they are not intending to abandon their children.

And they would have a point.

But then I could just as easily make plain to Channa that her refusal to invite my sisters — her own aunties — to her day of days, put her (as indeed it put Baruch, who should have counselled otherwise) for ever beyond the moral pale.

I learnt of this omission first on one of my mother’s absorbent sheets of Albanian notepaper. She was deeply wounded on my sisters’ behalf, but she sought as always a practical solution. We wouldn’t tell them.

‘T-G they’re not likely to hear of it where they’re living.’

I wrote back and said that under no circumstances would I dream of attending a wedding, even my own daughter’s, that excluded my sisters on the grounds that they were married to untouchables.