The Mighty Walzer Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’d limbered up lifting empty chairs, he’d start on chairs that had my aunties in them. Not the introspective weightless aunties on my mother’s side, either, but rollicking Walzer aunties with round knees and deep chests. Three inches ... six inches ... a foot off the floor!
One-handed!
Oy a broch, Joel, you’ll rupture yourself! ‘Do you want me to tell you something, Oliver? — Solomon didn’t have the kaych your father has.’ I knew who they meant. They meant that Samson didn’t have my father’s kaych. And I also knew what my father did for an encore. A chair with an aunty sitting on it, plus me sitting on the aunty.
    I took the only path that was clear, to the men’s room, where I came upon my uncle Motty standing at a urinal, shaking his penis to get the last drop out of it, actually banging it the way you bang a near-empty ketchup bottle. My uncle Motty was the next Walzer brother down from my father. He was more placid than the others. A sofa to put his feet up on, a few quid in his pocket, the odd shtup — nothing serious, as long as it was with someone not his wife — and he was happy. When you looked at Motty’s big blond face you couldn’t understand why anyonefound life difficult. Which made it difficult for me to look at him. He winked at me. ‘Jew in a restaurant,’ he said without preamble. ‘Says to waiter — “Hey, you got matzo balls?” Waiter says, “No, I always walk like this.”’ He waited for me to laugh. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to but I couldn’t find the mechanism. Not for a smile either. Where to look, that was the problem. If I looked away it would be rude. If I looked at him I’d be looking at his penis — also big and blond, and still refusing to yield up its last reserves, no matter how hard my uncle Motty shook it. I turned an even deeper red and ran for it again.
    It was shortly after this encounter that I overheard him wondering how much longer I was going to cower in my shell. Unfortunately for me, the phrase struck a chord with my father. ‘Hello — are you in there?’ he’d ask, rapping me on the head as he passed me on the stairs — hardly a tactic to get a whelk or a tortoise to show its face, let alone to tickle out a shrinking invert like me. But my father wasn’t a man for gentle coaxing. Having a son in a shell seemed to infuriate him to such a degree that I knew it wouldn’t be long before he resorted to trying to beat me out of it. He was a beater, my father? Let’s just say he had been klopped by his own mother and that these were, as a matter of course, klopping times. In the nineteen-forties and fifties we were all klopped. And are now the better for it? What do you think?
    In the meantime, my sisters too wanted to get in on the act. I’d crawl out of bed in the morning and find a plate of lettuce outside my bedroom door. I’d put my foot in a shoe and find it full of broken eggshells. One morning I woke to the sight of a terrapin making eyes at me on my pillow. A gift tag was tied to one of its forelegs. ‘Hi, I’m Tilly,’ it read. ‘Can I be your girlfriend?’
    I was twelve now, and spending an increasing amount of time on my own. When I wasn’t knocking a ball against a wall with a book I was running to the toilet where I’d lock myself away for hours on end, also with a book.
     
    ‘How long’s he been in there this time?’ — my father, back from work, not even bothering to enquire where I was. He
knew
where I was.
    ‘Days!’ — my sisters, wanting to stir it.
    ‘What’s he doing in there?’
    ‘Reading’ — my mother, wanting to calm it.
    ‘Reading? Reading what?’
    ‘A book, Joel, what do you think?’
    ‘The time he spends in there he could have written a book.’
    ‘The time you spend away you could have written twenty books.’
    ‘It isn’t normal. You can’t tell me it’s good for you, sitting on top of your own chazzerei for that long.’
    ‘Normal? Let’s not talk about normal. Eat your