Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Couldn’t do it. Not in the genes to contend with those who spoke a foreign language. Safest to hide and not let them embroil him in conversation he didn’t understand.

And meanwhile history rolled with them, burying Henry with his love of the thing that’s written rather than the thing that’s not, until he was just a squeak in the darkness.

Taugetz!

His father turned up once, Henry can’t even work out when that would have been — twenty years ago, twenty-five? — turned up unannounced, rapping on Henry’s door when Henry was in the middle of a seminar, proud, embarrassed, shit-eating grin on his face, ha, who’d have thought it, Henry the mother’s boy, who would rather run away from home than ask for his threepence back, heartfelt Henry a big man all of the sudden, with a roomful of girls bending their pretty giraffe ears to everything he said.

No boys, Henry? Did you never teach a boy ?

There were no boys, Dad. Not in my subject.

I blame your mother for that .

She wasn’t in charge of the intake, Dad.

She was in charge of you. You could have done something else .

Why does it matter? Why needed there be boys?

To keep your mind off the girls .

Then if that’s all, you don’t blame Mum. Chip off the old block, Dad.

I should leave him alone, Henry thinks. Honour thy father and thy mother. I should remember him as I wish to be remembered, justly, which is to say variously. I should remember how sweetly he smiled on me that day, holding up his hand to show that he didn’t mean to interrupt, hadn’t realised, mouthing roundly in a booming sibilant stage whisper, ‘I’ll wait outside,’ which he did, pacing the corridor for half an hour, for there were no chairs where they’d put Henry, just grey-green linoleum on the wind-tunnel floor and something institutional like asbestos, almost certainly asbestos, newly fitted — choke the bastard out — on the near-lightless ceiling. So upsetting, Henry thinks, and thought at the time, the sight of your father waiting for you, waiting for YOU, killing time, at the mercy of your busy schedule. Such a reversal of the proper order of things. Your father a petitioner, and petitioning makes a vassal of anyone.

If there were a dead man out there, Henry thought, dismissing his class — same time next week, same book, same judgement-aversion — would it be me shielding my father’s eyes now, or would we both revert in an instant? And which way would I want it?

No one ever upset Henry the way his father did. Rivers, Henry wept and weeps for his mother and her clan, those marvellously punctuated women who left him one by one, going down almost it seemed as it suited them, without a word of explanation, except for Marghanita who had her tragedy to explain to Henry before she too quit the scene. But for his father, even while he was alive, Henry felt a piercing grief. People had choice. People were responsible for what became of them. You owed it to people to believe that, at least, unless their circumstances were exceptional. Henry’s father’s circumstances were not exceptional, not until his wife’s accident they weren’t, anyway, yet Henry packed him round with enough extenuating circumstances to empty Hell. What happens to you, Henry thought, should not happen to a dog; but he could not have begun to explain what he meant by that, what exactly it was that befell his father that was so terrible. Carting Rivka Yoffey off to the Midland? Did that befall his father? A second home in St John’s Wood, as he now knows, with mermaid’s breasts to lean against whenever he retired to the quiet of the lavatory? Did that befall his father? It made no difference. None of it made a difference. His father broke his heart, whatever reason there was to be critical of him. Something to do with the way he floated just above the surface of things, folding his paper napkins and breathing his fire, as though the errand he was on had never been explained to him. Am I like him, then? Henry wondered. Was it him I was being when I couldn’t retrieve my threepence from the Yoffeys? Was that why he wouldn’t leave me alone about it — not because I was diffident like her but because I was baffled like him?

He took him to the students’ cafeteria with a view beyond to a field of sheep, baby sheep, mummy sheep, daddy sheep. Introduced him on the way in to Grynzspan (Dr), who did a little twirl for him and shook his hand. ‘Ah, the patriarch! So you’re the cause of Henry?’ she laughed.

Henry’s father was beguiled. ‘I hope you’re not saying that because he’s the cause of trouble.’

She gave him her grey eyes. Drown yourself in these. ‘Henry? No. Not half the trouble you’d be, I bet.’

Henry watched his father wish he’d brought his torches with him. She’d have adored that, Grynzspan; she’d have clapped her deadly little hands, egged him on and lit his wicks, the way ‘Hovis’ Belkin had. They loved Henry’s Dad, Henry’s enemies.

‘Nice woman,’ he said, after Henry had dragged him away and sat him down.

‘You think?’

‘Yeah, I think.’ She’d gone now, but he was still looking in her direction, as though seeing the twirling umbra she’d left behind her, like a candle’s. ‘You and she. .?’

‘You must be joking! We’d both rather have rats gnawing at our innards.’

‘She knocked you back, did she?’

‘For God’s sake, Dad, keep your voice down. And try to remember that pique is not the only motive that drives the universe.’

Taugetz , Henry could see him thinking.

‘These are radical feminists,’ Henry went on. ‘They don’t behave, up here, the way they do at home. They don’t toddle off to the Midland with you just because you ask them.’

Henry saw the light die from his father’s face. That again. The old refrain. Why do I do it? Henry wondered. Why can’t I leave him alone?

His father dunked a biscuit in his tea, his hands too big for so delicate an operation. Henry had forgotten how hard his father found it to hold a cup, the handles always too small for his fingers. In order to get a cup to his lips, Izzi Nagel had either to become a feeding bird, dropping his head after checking that no one was watching, or to make a sort of mechanical grabber of his hands, downing the tea in a single gulp. Hence the dunking: that way he could at least leave the cup where it was and suck the tea out of the biscuit. Except that biscuits fell apart in Henry’s father’s fingers faster than they did in any other man’s. Faster and further afield.

After which the toothpicking. A family joke, Izzi Nagel’s toothpicking. Or at least a Stern Girl joke. ‘I have never seen anyone make such a song and dance of being discreet,’ Henry remembered his grandmother Irina saying, luring Henry into laughter which he feared was treacherous, one side of the family against the other, the girls against the boys. ‘Someone must have told him it’s good form to shield your mouth, but they omitted to mention that you aren’t meant to go on exacavating for the duration of the meal. What do you think he’s doing behind that hand — taking out his dentures and cleaning them one at a time?’

The action reminded Henry more of someone undressing in a public place, a showgirl slipping noisily out of her undies behind a screen. Marilyn. Mae West. Come up and see me some time.

His poor father. Everything such a performance. Picking his teeth, knocking up a settee, burning down the garden, visiting his son — same difference.

Finished with his mouth, he looked around the room, taking in but not taking in his son’s world. The clatter of student trays, the pinball machines, the sheep in the fields beyond. Why had he come?