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

your prayers, andI 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