The Mighty Walzer (7 page)

Trying to find some saving grace in all this, I can only thank the Almighty in whom my grandmother placed her trust that split-beaver shots were not around when I was twelve.

I repeat, too, that I never co-opted a single page of
Health and Efficiency
to my cause. I come from a culture which attaches a near religious significance to the family and sanctifies the old: I wasn’t going to have a grandmother of mine kriching after a volleyball on some beach in Scandinavia.

Exceptionally, strict observance of the prescribed method of service may be waived where the umpire is notified, before play begins, that compliance is prevented by physical disability.

7.7
The Rules

IN FAIRNESS TO them, the Akiva ping-pong players, on whose mercies my father had thrown me, could have given me a much harder time of it than they did.

They could have left me standing there for the whole evening, for example, the way I was left standing on the touchline at St Onan’s, instead of just for the first hour. I wouldn’t have complained. I wasn’t in any position to complain. What rights did I have? It was their table. They were grown men, some of them, sort of. And I was wearing a school blazer enjoining me to take a firm hold of myself, a comic strip bat in my hand.

As it turned out, it was the bat that broke the ice.

When I say they were grown men, some of them, sort of, I mean to render not so much the uncertainties of an unusually apprehensive twelve-year-old, as the approximateness of the company itself. If I were to encounter them again as they were then, myself as I am now, I think I would still be struck by how sort of they were. And it was the most sort of of them all — a
tall, baby-bald man in his forties, I reckoned, who neither played nor sat down, but circumnavigated the room the whole time in a buttoned-up blue raincoat and heavy shoes, talking and laughing to himself — who finally addressed me. He’d climbed up on to the little stage, presumably to win attention for his cleverness (there is always a little stage in the room where people play table tennis, just as there is always a scullery where the janitor keeps the mops), and was standing where the comedian would have stood. ‘Someone’s gotta tell you, so I will — you’re in the wrong club, son.’ He had a queer quick stuttering delivery, like an automatic weapon that cut out after every other round. ‘We don’t play lacrosse here. Why don’t you get your old man to take you to the YMCA?’

It pleases me to recall that no one was amused. ‘Nisht, Gershom, nisht,’ I heard one of them say. Leaving me to roast was one thing, being outright rude to me was another.

‘Come and have a hit,’ the ‘nisht, Gershom, nisht’ person invited me, after Gershom had shrugged his shoulders and gone on another self-communing ramble round the room. ‘But not with that bat. You’ll shneid the ball.’

He handed me his bat. A Victor Barna: nipple-brown rubber pimples, medium fast, smooth stubby wooden handle with no tape or strapping around it. It slid into my grip like the hand of an old friend. In an earlier life I must have played with a Victor Barna. Owner of the best backhand there has ever been, and winner of more world championship titles than any other player before or since, Victor Barna first took the men’s singles in 1929—30, lost it the following year to Miklos Szabados, then recaptured and held on to it for four years running, defeating Szabados (in the finals, twice), Kolar and Bellak. Players, from the sound of it, from roughly the same neck of the woods as my father’s side; the Bug, the Dniester, the Danube — Slavs and Magyars whichever way you cut us. In an earlier life could I have been Victor Barna?

I took off my jacket and stood at the table, not daring to pop my head out of my burning shell and look around me, scalded, abashed, suffocating, certain that no one would give me a game. And certainly no one wanted to. The likeliest was the owner of the Barna bat, but then how could he play me if I had his bat? Twink, I’d heard the others call him, when he’d done something worthy of remark, or suffered a reverse, on the table. ‘Shot, Twink.’ ‘Unlucky, Twink.’ Otherwise, Theo. ‘You going to Laps’ later, Theo?’ So he had two names: a social name and a ping-pong name. He was lanky, very thin, sixteen or seventeen years old, with an asthmatic cough, a little face that was all but shut out by a cascade of Tony Curtis quiffs, and good looping attacking shots. Whenever he over-hit or netted, he coughed up something phlegmy from his lungs and banged his bat against his leg. I was impressed by his ability to use the width of the table and find the edges. Not overawed, just impressed.

It was Theo ... no, Twink ... no, Theo, for this was a social act … yes, but ping-pong related — it was Twink who, having lent me his bat, got me a game. ‘Go on, Aishky, give the teapot lid a knock. What’ll it cost you?’

Aishky looked like Esau — strong armed, superfluously freckled, an angry mob of red hair overrunning his shirt and fanning out around his neck and shoulders. But it was Esau’s father Isaac who was the short-sighted one as I recall, so in that regard Aishky was more like him. He wore inch-thick bulletproof lenses in his glasses, which he had to wipe between points.

We fell immediately into a lengthy version of the knock-up, forehand drive against forehand drive, backhand against backhand, no scoring, no one trying to win a point, simply keeping the ball in play. How did I understand this convention, how did I know, without ever having been taught any of the interpersonal skills of ping-pong, not to try to pass or thwart Aishky, not to try to out-fox or out-chop him, but just to keep it going, plock, plock; plock, plock; plock, plock; plock, plock? Reincarnation.
In an earlier life I
had
been Victor Barna. Even if Victor Barna himself was not dead yet.

Since I did understand the convention, though, it was wrong of me to break it. But what could I do? We’d been knocking up for ten minutes and he hadn’t yet acknowledged I existed. He was hitting the ball automatically, with half his eye on it — and half an eye for Aishky was a quarter of an eye for anybody else — continuing his conversation with Twink/Theo and the rest of them about some bird with big bristles he’d been seen dancing with in the Azlap on Oxford Road on Saturday night. (Bristles, notice, not bristols. In fifties Manchester we thought of women as bristling with breast.) ‘What was she like?’ he wanted to know. ‘I had my bins off, I couldn’t see her. Was she fair?’ Plock.

‘Meers,’ the others teased him. ‘A dog. But if you were happy…’

‘Who says I was happy?’ Plock.

‘You had your eyes closed.’

‘I was asleep.’ Plock.

‘Nebach. You missed seeing the bristles to end all bristles.’

‘What do you mean I missed seeing them?’ Plock.

‘She had them out.’

‘On the dance floor?’ Plock.

‘Sure.’

‘Out of her bra?’ Plock.

‘Completely.’

‘You’re moodying me.’ Plock.

‘I’m not.’

‘Moody-merchant!’ Plock.

‘She had them
completely out of her bra,
Aishky. How many more times?’

‘Both of them?’ Plock.

‘What’s with the both? You think there were only two?’

‘My mazel! I’d been trying to get those bristles out all night. That’s why I was so tired. Now you’re telling me I slept through them.’ Plock. Plock.

Tcheppehing, we called this in those days. Anglicized to chipping. Verbal lumberjacking. I loved it. How much longer before I would be allowed to join in? Be one of the boys at last? ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ I thought of contributing. But I didn’t have the balls.

In the meantime my opponent was still taking no more notice of me than if I’d been the plaster whorl I practised against at home; less, because you had to watch a whorl. So when a ball finally did sit up for hitting I hit it, not diagonally in the direction it had come from, making it easy for him to return by reflex, without looking and while still tcheppehing his chinas, and not with a nice high friendly topspin bounce either, but straight down the line and flat — a shot that is all feint and deviance — and faster than the speed of light.

Years later, even after he had lost two fingers from his right hand in an accident in a phone box and had taught himself to play again with his left, right up until the time he lost a further two fingers, this time from his left hand, in an explosion at a retail bedding warehouse, Aishky Mistofsky was still recounting the story of how we’d met. ‘To tell you the emmes, that night I’d gone along to the club for a quiet game of kalooki. I didn’t feel like running around. My nerves were giving me trouble. And I’d just come out of a bath. Yes, I had my bat with me, but that didn’t mean anything. Anyone who knows me will tell you I don’t go anywhere without my bat. Anyway, I get to the card room and no one’s turned up yet, so I think I may as well take a kuk at the table tennis room. How far is it to walk? The usual gang’s there — Sheeny Waxman, Twink Starr, Louis Marks, Gershom Finkel, all nice people. And we’re sitting around, having a knock and a nobbel, when suddenly — and you’ll split your sides at this — in walks this kid carrying a bat as big as the Empire State Building, challenges me to a game and starts shmeissing the ball past me. I’m telling you I’ve never seen a ball hit faster. And this is just the knock-up! I think OK, Chaim Yankel, say your prayers, and
I start zetzing the ball myself. Makes no difference. I hit it hard, he hits it back twice as hard. Then he puts a chop on it. Oy! — I see it spinning backwards in the air. And fizzing. Like Superman’s chopped it. That’s it. I put my bat down, look across at Twink Starr, whose mouth has fallen half-way off his face, and I say, “OK, maestro, so you give the teapot lid a knock. What’ll it cost you?” But we both knew a legend had been born.’

Sweet of him. Doubly sweet of him, considering the tragedy of his own career. But the reality was more mundane. They woke up to the fact that I could play a bit, that was all that happened. They took an interest in me. All of them except Gershom Finkel who said, ‘He’s got brawn but no timing. He’s a shtarker, nothing else.’

‘Do me a favour, Gershom,’ Aishky said to him. ‘You know as well as I do that you can’t hit a ball that hard unless you know how to time it.’

‘Depends how it comes to you. You were feeding his strengths. You never played him short.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘I don’t say what I can’t do. I could clean the kid up with my wrong hand.’

(Where am I while all this is going on? I’m standing there like a kuni-lemele, counting the pimples on Twink’s bat, shell-locked, listening to the patter of my perspiration on the club floor.)

‘So do it,’ Aishky dared him. ‘I’d like to see you.’

‘I’m in my coat,’ Gershom said. ‘I’m not taking my coat off.’

‘Keep it on. If you can clean him up with your wrong hand, you can clean him up in your coat.’

‘I don’t have anything to prove,’ Gershom said. ‘And I don’t give free lessons.’ Whereupon he went walkabout again.

‘Ignore him,’ Aishky advised me. ‘He used to be a great player. Now he’s just a mamzer.’

‘What do you mean a
great
player?’ Twink put in. ‘One of the
greatest.
The guy was mustard. He played for England twice.
And made it to the quarter-finals in Baden the year Bergmann won. It may even have been Bergmann who beat him. That’s how good he was. Louis’ll know. Louis, who beat Gershom in Baden in ‘39?’

I hadn’t taken much notice of Louis. He hadn’t played, that was why. I hadn’t seen what he was made of. He’d scored a few games and laughed hysterically at the bristle jokes, groaning with pain because he’d hurt his ribs and pulled muscles in his back and chest and laughing made them worse; but I hadn’t otherwise been aware of him. It was hard to tell how old he was. He lifted weights — which was how he had come to have damaged most of the muscles in his body — and this gave him the torso of a man in his twenties. But in the face he was a fifteen-year-old boy, a grinner, almost as shy as I was, with a mass of black hair that had never been combed and that muddy Dniester complexion that put me off my grandmother on my father’s side. Test him with a name or a date, though, and his skin shone like a Yakipak’s.

‘Baden was ‘37 not ‘39!’ he retorted. Why retort? He had only been asked a question. But I had noticed that no one spoke in a normal voice here. There was no discourse. Everyone shouted. Not in anger, but in a sort of perpetual sorrow that everyone else should be so wrong about everything for so much of the time.

‘Does it matter when it was? I’m asking you who beat him.’

‘I’m telling you — Sol Schiff, the finger-spinner. 26–24 in the third.’

‘So who beat Schiff?’

‘Who do you think! Bergmann. But not easily. No one beat Schiff easily. No one could handle his finger-spin service.’

‘I thought they’d banned Sol Schiff’s service,’ Aishky said.

‘Later — that was later. You’re thinking of the Americans.’

‘Why would I be thinking of the Americans?’

‘Because they banned it.’

‘Louis, do me a favour — was it banned or wasn’t it?’

‘It was banned in America, I’ve told you, but not in Baden. It took the International Federation another few years to wake up.’

‘That means that if the World Championships had been held in America –’

Twink saw where Aishky was heading. ‘- And Gershom had been drawn against Schiff there –’

Louis laughed wildly. It was almost a sob. ‘- He’d have been given a walk-over, yeah. And maybe gone on to take the title. But what’s the point of talking? He didn’t.’

We exchanged crestfallen expressions, then turned our eyes as one man on the strange loping buttoned-up figure of Gershom Finkel, wispily bald in that manner that suggests the hairs are yet to come rather than that they’ve been and gone, still circumnavigating the room and still muttering and laughing sarcastically to himself. We were all thinking the same thing. Was this any way for a great ping-pong player to have ended up?

My father was waiting for me as he’d promised, asleep on the wheel of his bus. I’d been in the club four hours. I was surprised I recognized him.