Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

She takes a deep breath, as though trying to suffocate something inside herself. The name, when she delivers it, is stillborn. ‘Rivka Yoffey.’

‘Old man Yoffey’s wife? You’re joking.’

‘Someone might be joking, Henry. But it isn’t me.’

‘Isn’t Rivka Yoffey Orthodox?’

‘Exactly. But the Orthodox, as you know, give themselves latitude. She is also without looks. And without any hair to speak of.’

‘Isn’t that because Yoffey keeps pulling it out.’

‘I would like to think so. But I suspect it’s because she’s been wearing a wig since she was seventeen. Her head has never seen the light of day. I doubt if much else has either. Until last Monday, that is. But I am not concerned with the whys and wherefores, Henry. I am concerned that your father should take such a plain woman to the Midland Hotel.’

‘You think he should have taken her somewhere cheaper?’

‘I think he should not make love to women just because they’re to hand. I think that if he must be unfaithful to me he should at the very least work hard to find someone worth being unfaithful with.’

Henry puts this very argument to his father in his St John’s Wood home from home, where he sits, a bag of dust and bones, on the edge of his old armchair.

Rivka Yoffey, Dad, he says. Rivka Yoffey!

What about her?

How could you?

How could I what?

What’s the appropriate language, son to father? They were always formal with each other. Protectives, Izzi Nagel once advised Henry to be well provided with at all times. Their one and only discussion of the sexual life. Be amply stocked with protectives, Henry. Followed by his blessing. Go forth and don’t multiply. Not condoms, not rubbers, not johnnies even, but protectives. So Henry can’t say how could you have fucked Rivka Yoffey, Dad? How could you have fucked that poor, sad, ugly, Torahreading woman?

How could you have taken her to the Midland Hotel, is what he decides to ask instead.

You’d prefer that I’d taken her somewhere cheaper?

Funny, Henry remembers, that’s the very question I put to Mum.

I know you did .

She told you?

Of course she told me. That’s how it is between man and wife — though you wouldn’t know that — they tell each other everything. She said you were sarcastic about the whole thing .

I wasn’t sarcastic. I was just amused.

OK, amused. I have to get the word right, don’t I?

I think it helps. It made me laugh, that was all.

Yes, she told me that. Some son, she said. I tell him his father is with another woman and he laughs .

I wouldn’t have laughed had I known about here.

Where’s ‘here’?

Come on, Dad. Rivka Yoffey for a morning is one thing. .

Exactly what I told your mother. What’s a couple of hours with Rivka Yo fey between people who love each other? That was why you were able to find it funny. You knew it didn’t matter. And don’t say if I knew it didn’t matter why did I do it. That’s why I did it . Because it didn’t matter. A big inducement — a thing not mattering. It removes the barrier of a thing mattering. Though of course you wouldn’t know about that when it affected you personally. To you, personally, everything mattered.

We see things our own way, Dad.

Dead right we do, Henry. And we do things our own way too .

Did.

Did, does. . You are, you were, no saint, Henry. Letting everything matter to you didn’t make you a saint. Any more than it made your mother .

Leave my mother out of it.

OK. Just you then. It never made you a saint .

I never had a second wife.

Second ‘wife’? — nor did I. But then you never had a first wife. Not of your own .

I never ran a second home, Dad.

Taugetz .

Taugetz , otherwise fine, Henry, fine, whatever you say, I’m not going to argue with you. Izzi Nagel’s favourite word, often used in pairs — taugetz, taugetz — for bringing a conversation to an abrupt but not ill-tempered end. Taugetz , from the intransitive German verb taugen , pedantic Henry surmises, which in its negative form means not to be of very much use. Whatever you say, Henry. Whadever! — only who needs ‘whadever’ when you’ve got taugetz, smuggled, whenever, in some migrant’s luggage to North Manchester, all the way from Berlin via Podolia and the Volga?

Not only Henry’s mother who personalised music for Henry’s delight. His unmusical father, too, likes to write his own lyrics. Driving back from an engagement, with Henry on the front seat beside him, still blazing with the shame of being seen to be a fire-eater and origamist’s son, Uncle Izzi fits his favourite word to the tune of ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. Henry remembers it well and can sing it to this day. ‘ Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug / Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug . .’

Not Schubert, but it isn’t only lyric genius that makes hapless Henry weep.

Rather than travel with the body of a dead woman he never knew and have people looking sorrowfully at him from the pavement — Henry hates being the object of pity, even when it’s undeserved — he makes his own way to the crematorium. He takes a taxi, not trusting himself to the lottery of a bus lane or the discomfort and importunings of the Underground — though cosmopolitan in his soul, Henry is too much of a provincial by habit ever to have mastered the tube, and what is more does not like the idea of being gassed in a tunnel and buried alive, which is what they’re all afraid of now — and arrives an hour early. The crematorium is on a hill in north London, looking back towards the city. Henry sits on a bench and enjoys the prospect. Would this do? Could he be happy here? Where best to be dead has been a question for Henry for as long as he can remember, but it is less rhetorical today than it once was. It is getting time he made up his mind. The advantage of this position is its elevation, a fresh breeze keeps the damp away, and the view ensures you would never feel entirely disconnected from the living. Not having damp in his bones is an important consideration. Fear of chilled joints is what has turned Henry off many an otherwise idyllic churchyard. But then this isn’t a joint joint, Henry remembers, reminding himself he is in an ash garden and that the bodiless dead seep away like wine here, dust in the wind, dirt in his nostrils. So not for him, then, this pleasing view. Not an available option to Henry, ashes. The Book says you must be ready to meet your Maker pretty much as He made you, nothing added or taken away, and though Henry doesn’t in a general way set much store by what’s written in the Book, when it comes to death he doesn’t cavil. Better to be safe than sorry.

He wouldn’t mind having a tree dedicated to his memory, though. Or a shrub. Something light and green and ornamental. A miniature Bridge of Sighs arching over a lily pond, bullrushes at the edges. What about a bridge? Something serviceable. More and more, Henry wonders if death might not be his opportunity to do some of the things he has failed to do in life. Be easy on the eye. Be noticeable. Be of use.

He likes it here. He likes the kitsch. It is like a New Town. A Milton Keynes for the dead. In the past, Henry has thought he would prefer to die antiquely. Suddenly, he is pricked by the deathful possibilities of the present.

A gong sounds, more like a school dinner than a church bell, the signal for the previous mourners to leave the chapel. Henry watches them troop out, bereft of ritual, a steel-haired family group at a loss what to do with their extremities. Grandpa was easy, they could burn him. Knowing where to put your own heads and hands is the hard part. The younger relations just stand on the gravel looking down, as though the gravel might explain it all to them. A few of the older ones take a stroll in the garden, crossing Henry’s Bridge, pausing to look at Henry’s Ornamental Shrub — Henrix herbacea . These would be my visitors, Henry thinks. My admirers. No one looks long or sadly. No one wears a ravaged air. They have burnt to nothing a person they loved once, but no awfulness prevails. In Charnel House New Town this is just another day. After ten minutes they are back at their cars, exchanging directions, and then gone. And now it’s Henry’s turn. He doesn’t want to be hanging about when the hearse bringing his neighbour arrives, so he makes his way into the chapel. But he has to leave and let the coffin proceed before him. Protocol. When he returns, an electronic organ is playing Handel favourites. The coffin is on the conveyor belt, Lachlan is in his seat and a secular officiant with an unlined face — smooth, like the face of a pottery moon — is pacing up and down, consulting his watch. ‘Will these be all the mourners?’ Henry hears him ask of Lachlan. ‘More or less,’ Lachlan says, looking round. ‘I’d start anyway.’