Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Enough. He can’t stay here. Burning is too final. He will not be piped into a furnace and dispersed. Not in a meadow, not on a lake. He wishes, Henry, if he can, to keep himself to himself. On the way out he sees that Bud Flanagan has been burned here, and Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott and Bernie Winters and Nellie Wallace and Marc Bolan, whoever Marc Bolan is, and Hughie Green — ‘You were the star that made opportunity knock.’ Several generations of popular entertainment up in flames. Addio . No place for Henry.

Across the road — despite himself — the Jewish cemetery, Spanish and Portuguese to the right, Ashkenazim to the left. The Ashkenazim prefer their gravestones upright, like mantelpieces, whereas the Sephardic dead are remembered horizontally, in sarcophagi above ground. Mizrahi, Benezra, Benosiglio, Saady, Sassoon, Dellai — who are these people? A mystery to Henry, these lilting Jews from sunny places who don’t have the dour music of Eastern Europe in their blood. ‘ Geliebt und unvergessen ’ it says on the first Ashkenazi stone Henry bends his attention to, and lo! the magic still works. The native language of Jewish grief. Fucking German! The cruellest of all ironies to befall an ironic people. Falling in love with fucking German. Different if you’re a Benzecry or a Saatchi. More restless in their white stone coffins they are, too, uneven, turgid and confused, as though the earth is stirring with them. Expectant, are they? Impatient to be off, to be up and gone to where the sun shines on burning desert, the moment they hear the bugle call? Half close an eye and Henry reckons there is definitely movement on their side of the cemetery. As turbulent as the lurching sea they look to Henry. Alive still, as near as damn it. Unreconciled. One thing for sure: a messiah in a hurry would wake these before trying for some response from Henry’s lot, succumbed to cold, long given up the ghost, buried deep, in front of their silent mantelpieces.

Jewish burial! Not what Henry wants. Not the Polack way nor the Portuguese. Why can’t it come down on one side or another? Serene or clamorous. Either return me to the quietude of earth, or kick up a racket for me. Why are there no angels here? Why no declamations of defiance? If a garden isn’t really what you want, if the trees are merely incidental, and the grass there only because something must separate one plot from another, why not more gesticulating marble?

He remembers unveiling the stone to his parents, a year after he had put them in the ground, his anger overtaking his distress, so mute the ceremony, so bare the symbolism.

Of the close family, only Marghanita was with him. They leaned on each other, weeping.

‘We should have done better,’ Henry said.

‘There is no better,’ she told him. ‘The better is in your heart.’

He shook his head. ‘Not good enough. My heart will die. There should be better here, where it can be seen.’

He knew the arguments. Admired them even. They threw the myth of Jewish showiness and materialism back in the teeth of those who hated Jews. In quietness we pass away. Decorum in obsequies and entombment denies the privileged their last advantage. In death, everyone is equal. The poor man as geliebt und unvergessen as the rest. Great democrats, the Jews, as Nietzsche had observed — though from Nietzsche that wasn’t unadulterated praise.

As it wasn’t, always, praise from Henry either. The pursuit of democracy was an attempt to improve on the inequities of nature. Everything the Jews did was an attempt to better nature. Subdue the natural man, encode him into obedience, and you have civilisation. Well and good. Henry was all for that, as how could he not be, all trace of natural man having been squeezed from him in the womb. But it left you high and dry, he reckoned, when it came to death. The only way to make sense of dying was to see it as a return, but once you’ve turned your back on nature, there is nowhere to return to.

‘It’s not the seeing,’ Marghanita said, ‘it’s the feeling. They are remembered by how we feel about them.’

‘Yes, but look how banal the feelings,’ Henry said, reading from the nearby stones. ‘ Sadly missed. For ever in our thoughts. To know her was to love her . Trivial. If all you are is sadly missed you might as well not have lived.’

‘You can’t blame people for not being poets.’

‘Can’t you? I think you can. I think there is an obligation on us to be poets when the occasion calls for poetry and nothing less. It’s laziness of the heart, or maybe I mean cowardice of the heart — faint-heartedness — that stops us. We’d rather be commonplace. It takes less out of us.’

‘Henry, people find comfort in the commonplace. You know what they say about a sorrow shared. What we all feel the same about is easier to bear.’

‘Is it?’

And it was true, in so far as he and Marghanita felt the same about Ekaterina and Izzi. They sobbed plainly in each other’s arms. And it was easier to bear.

But when his turn came and somebody supervised the carving of For ever in our thoughts on his tomb, supposing there was anyone willing to supervise anything, what would he think and feel then? That death was comprehensible because he lived on as a sort of afterthought in some unpoetic person’s thoughts? Better a marble vault.

He jumps on another bus. And immediately falls to thinking about his father. It was after the unveiling that Marghanita made her point by planting a story in Henry’s mind which he would never forget, and which would indeed serve as his father’s memorial. And his mother’s too, because it was from his mother, Marghanita explained, that she had originally heard the story. And his mother had wept when she told it. ‘It makes me want to forgive him everything,’ she had said to Marghanita, ‘except that I can’t.’

Mia mama brava .

It was a Passover story. Not one of the usual ones. Nothing to do with Moses and Pharaoh. There are people who think everything is to do with everything — Henry spent a lifetime teaching in the spaces they allowed him — but this is not an allowable assumption in the context of Passover, for during Passover, of all festivals, nothing is as it usually is or resembles anything else. ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ asks the youngest child. Henry had asked that question in his time, though he has long forgotten the answer. Izzi too, when he was the youngest, asked it. Hard for Henry to imagine that. He must squeeze his eyes to do it. And even then he only sees himself.

Difference was of the essence, anyway. Passover is a night unlike all other nights. A boy will understand that as he may. For Izzi the reason was clear. This night was different from all other nights because it was his birthday. That’s what they told him anyway. They messed his hair and pinched his cheeks and muttered Yiddish over him. Vos draistu mir a kop? What are you twisting our heads with all these questions for? On this night, Got tsu danken , you came into the world. Mazeltov! Now eat your egg in salt water. Only a moderate lie, as Marghanita pointed out. It was your father’s luck — who’s to say whether it was his good luck or his bad luck? — to have been born within a few days of the period in which Passover usually falls. Your grandparents, as you know, were poor as mice. They had no money for birthday celebrations. A Pesach dinner, however, you have whether you can afford it or not. No Jew goes without Pesach. Was it such a crime, then, to allow Izzi to believe that Passover was for him, that the dinner was his birthday party, and that everyone was gathered in their best clothes to celebrate it in his name?

Yarmulkas instead of party hats, matzo instead of cake, and more remembrance of plagues than games of pass the parcel — but still, a party’s a party.