Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

He suffered migraines as a boy. They suffered them together, Henry and Ekaterina. First she got hers — coronas of pain which lit up her pillows and hurt Henry’s eyes — then he got his. Then she called him into her bed.

‘If it wasn’t for worrying what would happen to you,’ she sometimes told him, ‘I’d end it all now.’

He stroked her hair. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘Don’t press so hard.’

What caused these migraines? He knew what caused his — the daddy-long-legs ambling across his brain when he lay defenceless in his mother’s tummy caused his, she’d told him that, warned him of his terrible beginnings, the psychic indignity, the disgustingness — but what caused hers? And why did she want to end it all?

Was it his father? Henry knew there was a problem of some sort with his father. ‘Per se, he’s a wonderful man,’ he’d heard Ekaterina say about him. Henry thought he understood what she meant by per se . She meant the animal man as opposed to anything the animal man said or did, the husband and the father whose nature was enthusiastic and hopeful, whose face glowed with the adventure of being alive, who had only to enter a room for everything oppressive in it, even the darkness that would otherwise have lingered in the corners, to be dispelled. He made light, Izzi Nagel, even Henry, reluctantly pursing his lips for his father to wipe away the imaginary lipstick, conceded that. Not his mother’s sort of light, which went straight to your brain cells and illuminated their ache, but an altogether lighter form of light, weightless light, which made you forget on the spot what it had ever been like to feel heavy.

Midway between his father per se and his father per accidens was his father the willing but inadequate provider, the upholsterer who made everything too big and charged too little for it. For his part, Henry looked forward to his visits to his father’s workshop with its smell of glue and horsehair, its half-finished chairs spilling springs, its huge cards of piping cord — Izzi Nagel was a great piper of furniture, an over-piper if the truth be told — and its view of the Pennines. It suited his father, Henry thought, to be stuffing cushions, carrying bales of Rexine from one part of the workshop to another, humming tunelessly with a mouth full of tacks. It became him to hammer, to be absorbed, careless of what anybody thought of him. How a man should be, Henry decided, secretly selling his mother down the river, relishing the apostasy. But he also knew that not everybody valued his father’s upholstery as much as he did. ‘It’s a great settee lengthwise, Izzi,’ Henry remembers a client telling his father in the street. ‘The only trouble is it takes up two rooms and the cushions are so high you need a ladder to climb on to them.’ ‘That’s only because the springs are new,’ Henry’s father explained. ‘They’ll wear in.’ But Henry knew bluster when he heard it. Izzi’s armchairs and sofas never wore in. They were built on too grand a scale. Somewhere in his soul Izzi Nagel was upholstering furniture for a tsar.

What most definitely was not comprised by Henry’s mother’s per se , though, was Izzi Nagel the performer, what she (if not he) thought of as the entirely accidental man — the part-time fire-eater, origamist and illusionist. But in particular the fire-eater. At first she had worried about the damage he might do himself. Then she had worried about the damage he might do her. Now she worried about Henry. ‘It’s just a trick,’ he had tried to explain to her at every stage. ‘You could do it. Your mother could do it. Let me just show you how cold the flame is.’

‘Don’t come near me with any of that,’ she had warned him. ‘Come near me with flame and I’m leaving you.’

‘It’s as safe as houses,’ he’d assured her. ‘It’s no different from snuffing out a candle, I swear to you.’

‘With your mouth, Izzi!’

‘But nothing really goes into my mouth. No flame. I’m blowing out. It only looks as though I’m swallowing.’

‘We have a child to bring up, Izzi,’ she told him. ‘You’re supposed to blow bubbles at a baby, not flames.’

‘He’s not a baby. He’s a boy — or haven’t you noticed?’

‘Izzi, no one wants you breathing fire over their children. When were you last asked to fire-eat at a children’s party?’

He thought about it. ‘So far, never,’ he conceded. ‘But it just needs one to set the ball rolling. The word has to get out.’

She sat him down and took his hands in hers. ‘Izzi,’ she said, ‘the word’s got out. People have seen our garden. They’ve seen what you’ve reduced it to. Nothing grows there any more. Nothing ever will grow there again for another thousand years. People don’t want you doing that to their gardens. They won’t pay you to torch their homes. They want you to come along in a funny hat and a bendy wand, and they want you to fold serviettes. The two things don’t go together, Izzi. You can’t work in paper and fire. Surely you can see that.’ She pleaded with him. ‘Please? Tell me you can see that. Please?’

He hung his head. He was a good man. When a woman begged, he gave. Yes, he could see it. But she knew that in his heart he wasn’t convinced. If you couldn’t work with paper and fire that was paper’s fault. She knew what he was thinking. That he would have to find or invent paper which didn’t burn.

Otherwise, though, as a couple per se , they appeared happy and well matched. He loved her for her haughty beauty and her elocution, and she loved him for his triviality. It wouldn’t be quite true to say that he entertained her, for what astonished her initially about his fire-eating, like his paper-folding, was not that he could do it but that he wanted to, a grown man; but without doubt he made the world a toy to her; made a toy of her some days, too — she the top, he the whip — dancing and whirling her out of herself. Away from the mothering of Henry, she cut a confident and rousing figure. How could she not? She was a Stern Girl. An exceptional Stern Girl in that she had a man who loved her. On occasions, seeing her abroad, walking briskly, throwing her head back in conversation, shaking her hair, glittering with laughter — light! — Henry felt she had betrayed him. Where were the migraines now?

So was it his — heavy Henry’s — fault? If it wasn’t for him she would end it, she had said, but was she saying what she didn’t mean? Was existence a fearful thing to her, to be endured only for his sake, only when she was with him . Was that it? Did he draw all lightness out of her? The opposite of his father, was he? The one dispelling all oppression from a room, the other taking it everywhere he went? Certainly when Ekaterina described to Henry some event he had seen with his own eyes, or had heard about from someone else, she made it, as though for his behoof — as though that was the obligation she felt to his oppressive nature — more shocking, more humiliating or depressing, more negatively melodramatic, than it had actually been. She grew physically heavier in the telling it as well. Extremity of expression hung in jowls from her face, inordinacy of vocabulary thickened her neck. ‘I thought I’d die , Henry,’ she would say, gathering him into her offended bulk, actually underlining words with her fingers as she spoke, ‘I thought it was the end of me. Where this leaves me now , I have no idea, none . Maybe something will change the situation. But as God is my witness, darling, I will never get over it, never .’ Ask Henry to name what exactly it was she would never get over, whether it was an event he had seen with his own eyes or not, and he would have been at a loss. Hiroshima? Someone turning up at an engagement party in the same dress as hers? Fog? In the face of her extravagant alarms, the objective world gave up the ghost. Nothing was but as his mother told it, a great halo of migraine encircling everything.