Read Online The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson - Free Book Online

most sort of of them all — atall, 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