Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘You have. It starts there and ends there.’

‘That’s the shape.’

‘ Taugetz .’

‘It is. That’s how I’m built. It’s how I came.’

‘Who you came from, you mean.’

‘Well, I came from you, Dad.’

‘Yeah, indirectly.’

‘Is there any other way?’

‘You should get out more.’

‘I’m out. I’m out with you.’

‘I mean with your chinas.’

Henry says nothing. Problems with his chinas, even then. Some dissatisfaction. Not knowing what friends are for. Wanting a little girlfriend, yes, but that’s different, and not what his father means by chinas, anyway.

And also not knowing what his father’s for. .

He would have asked, had he dared, had the hour been right. ‘Dad, what exactly do you get out of this?’

Driving?

‘No, not driving. This. .’ But he couldn’t spoil the party.

So ask it now, Henry. No, Dad, not the driving. This. . that. . Go on, Henry, spoil the party now. That fire-eating and stuff.

I enjoyed it. It gave pleasure. You saw that with your own eyes. You saw the expressions on those kids’ faces.

Should Henry say that had his father set about the estate with a blow-torch, that too would have lit up those kids’ faces? No. Stick to what he wants to know. Which is not why they enjoyed it, but why he did.

Why the hell shouldn’t I have enjoyed it? Fun, Henry. Remember fun? No, you wouldn’t. Not you with your endless sick notes from your mother in your pocket. You wouldn’t remember anything about taking risks either. Or the joys of expressing a little wildness. Feeling your blood heat. Ever felt your blood heat, Henry? No. I thought not. And all right, I admit it, enjoying the attention. Is that so terrible? There was a song your mother liked — ‘I don’t want to set the world on fire, I just want to start a blaze in your heart .’

Different things inflame different people, Dad. Had you wanted to start a blaze in my heart, you’d have tried alternative methods.

Such as what? Burning your books? You’d have liked that. Then you could have called me a Nazi. No, Henry, I didn’t want to start a blaze in your heart. I knew my limits. No one was ever able to set you alight.

Too damp, you think?

Too frightened .

I wasn’t frightened of the fire-eating. I thought it was ugly.

Well, that was your opinion, Henry. Other people have always found fire beautiful .

I’m not talking about the fire. It’s what you did with it. The smell, the paraffin, the putting things in your mouth, all that.

You didn’t like the smell of para fin, I didn’t like the smell of ink. But I didn’t say your homework was ugl y.

He could have, though, Henry thinks. Given what Henry’s maps and tables looked like, given the spider-scrawl Henry called writing, he’d have been within his rights. But then that’s the line down which his own ugliness has travelled. Patrilineal, the mess Henry made with a pen — must have been, given the beautiful hand his mother had. Not that any of this is to the point. Nothing, of course, is to the point now. Should all be left dead and buried. Unhealthy, all this disinterring. Dispiriting. Like his father’s fire-eating. Dispiriting. Soulless. Leave him alone.

Soulless? Don’t start me o f, Henry. Your soul was a luxury we made available to you. Not everyone had your advantages. No one sat me on their knee and read me books. I had my hands, that was all. Big hands. There’s Izzi, the geezer with the big hands. You make the most of what you’ve been given. I had this friend called Aaron Eisenfeldt, who kept egging me on. I bet you can’t knock this nail in this piece of wood with your fist. So I did. I bet you can’t rip a telephone directory in half. So I did. I bet you can’t put your hand in fire. So I did.

It was a good job, then, says Henry the Pious, that this Aaron Eisenfeldt didn’t bet you you couldn’t kill the headmaster with your thumb.

You’re dead right there, Henry. He became a High Court judge in later life .

And you, Henry thinks, became a children’s entertainer.

But just because someone dared you to do something, he says, it didn’t mean you had to do it. Least of all that you had to go on doing it.

Nothing his father says makes any sense to him. He is flesh of his flesh, but they might as well belong to separate species. Henry knows what he’d have said to Aaron Eisenfeldt had Aaron Eisenfeldt come to him with fire.

Fuck off, Aaron!

Eat shit, Aaron!

But why blame Aaron. Just because, it doesn’t have to mean –

I agree with you. It didn’t have to mean that .

And just because you put your hand successfully in fire once didn’t mean you had to put your tongue in fire for the rest of your life.

Who said I was successful? If you want to know, I burnt it .

Ah, so that’s it. So now you have to prove yourself for ever.

Taugetz. Was that the psychology they taught you at university? We wasted our money, in that case. No. I got a taste, the same way you got a taste for books. I don’t say to you that you read books to prove yourself, because once you couldn’t finish one. I did it because I liked it. I liked the illusion part of it, I liked the gadget part of it, I liked the danger part of it — but don’t tell your mother that — and I liked amazing people with what I could do. I ask you again, was that so terrible?

Henry thinks about it. No, it was not so terrible. Except that it was so terrible because it was so common. That’s the word, Henry is afraid. Common. He knows he ought to have thought differently of it. He should have tried thinking it was exotic instead, tried telling himself that he was luckier than most boys who had dentists or accountants for fathers. My father is a fire-eater! What a start for a boy! What a beginning to what is meant, after all, to be a great adventure. Thank you, Dad, he ought to have said, for lifting me, by your example, out of the common. For it is not a common profession for a father, a fire-eater. Could Henry name one other boy who had a father who ate fire, or who ate anything but chopped liver on bagels, come to that? He could not. So he must have been using common in another sense. He was. He is. By common, when he employed it of his father, Henry meant low, lacking grace and sophistication, of little value, low class (unlike ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s family), inferior, goyische, unrefined. On account of which commonness Henry was ashamed to be his father’s son. And hung his head.

Driving home from Liverpool, scene of his father’s greatest éclat to date, he sits, hunched quietly, looking into the headlights of the oncoming cars.

And then, out of the blue, in a ditch of its own making on the other side of the road, a car on its back, exquisite like a sculpture in the yellow-fever moonlight, a thing designed for speed become utterly still, except for one of its rear wheels, spinning, spinning with infernal beauty, as though powered by a battery designed for that very purpose.

Some sights, however inconsequent, you see for ever. Henry still sees that spinning wheel, though in his memory he suspects he turns it slower than it turned in actuality, and bathes it in more yellow moonlight than there really was. Milking it. Smoking it. Or maybe just wanting to invest it with greater significance than it warranted. Never sure, Henry, whether he is doing enough or too much justice to event. Perhaps because he draws too big a distinction, unless he draws too small a one, between event and him. Is this an uncertainty which is bound to follow when you take no interest in world history?

But then his father took no interest in world history either, yet to Henry there never seemed to be an event that didn’t have his father at the centre of it. Mr Busy. Forget Superman: it was Henry’s father who was always first on the scene. And who always knew what to do. He was one of those men, Henry’s father, who are born to make a human bridge of their own back, to be the rope down which the injured slide, to hold crumbling apartment blocks apart, to scoop unconscious babies from under the wheels of runaway trains, to take Rivka Yoffey to the Midland. Did the bastard breathe fire, Henry sometimes wondered, only in order to put it out? Was that it?