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

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