Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

She is continuing to insist she isn’t Jewish, isn’t from the Danube or the Baltic.

‘You’re called Aultbach,’ he reminds her. ‘How can you not be Jewish?’

‘I’m only called Aultbach because I married Aultbach.’

‘And you’re telling me that a man called Aultbach would marry someone who isn’t Jewish?’

‘Aultbach’s barely Jewish himself.’

‘When it comes to being Jewish there is no barely,’ Henry explains.

‘Exactly,’ she says, ‘and I am not Jewish at all.’

It’s funny but he has never asked her maiden name. Maybe he doesn’t want to hear it. Moira Smith, Moira Pilkington, Moira Ainsworth — he’d find any of those hard. They wouldn’t stop him loving going up and down escalators with her, but they might dissuade him from doing it so often. It isn’t the Jewish bit he needs, it’s the foreign. He needs her to come from somewhere else.

Here has Henry in it. Somewhere else hasn’t. So come from somewhere else, I beg you, Moira.

He wants to play, anyway, whether she does or she doesn’t.

‘They are!’ he shouts. ‘That’s two more points to me.’

She wants to know how he knows. Still pretending that she needs guidance in Jewish and the opposite-to-Jewish ways.

So he goes along with her subterfuge, and explains. It’s to do with the manner in which the sandwich is addressed. True, all people temporarily assume a Jewish air when they enter a salt-beef bar, especially at the moment of examining the contents of their salt-beef sandwich. Indeed, you can almost say, if you are irreligious and given to the joys of stereotyping, that this is precisely wherein being Jewish lies — in choosing to order a salt-beef sandwich and then examining it minutely, either for too much or for too little, or for too fatty or for too lean, or for too dry or for too wet. But look more attentively and you discover that Gentiles also open up their sandwiches to count the pieces of salt beef. The difference being that when the Gentile has finished examining his sandwich he eats it — see him? a point to you! — whereas the Jew invariably calls the waiter.

‘I never call the waiter,’ she says. ‘Doesn’t that prove I’m not Jewish.’

‘No,’ he tells her. ‘The only reason you don’t call the waiter is that you wait yourself. It’s the freemasonry of the profession that stops you. But if you’re having trouble with Spot the Wej let’s go down market and play Dodge the Draught.’

In fact, you don’t so much play Dodge the Draught as watch other people playing it. Why? Because it can help in playing Spot the Wej, the easiest way of spotting Wejs being to notice whether or not they are prepared to sit in a draught. If they huddle together shivering and shouting for the manager, demanding that he find them a table where there is no draught, they are Jews. If, on the other hand, they are perfectly happy sitting in the draught, and what is more haven’t noticed any draught, because there is no draught — Henry laughs, expounding this — they are Gentile.

‘Oughtn’t you to have grown out of this by now, Henry?’ Moira asks him, folding her arms and looking at him evenly — which isn’t easy for her. ‘Aren’t you a bit old to be finding this amusing?’

He starts as though she has pinched him. ‘Aren’t you a bit old for this, Henry?’ His mother’s words, precisely. They were out together, taking tea — where were they? — some hotel, the Midland, yes, the Midland, scene of his father’s. . but he doesn’t want to remember that, by the by all that, done and dusted, what he prefers to remember is taking tea, pouring tea, picking cucumber sandwiches from a silver platter, laughing with his mother, agreeing that the dinky oblong of white sandwich with its crusts removed is always the best thing about tea, better than the scones, better than the little cakes, or fancies as they called them in those days, but whether this was before or after she’d become a decorator of cakes herself, that he can’t remember, but it must have been after her Nietzsche period because there was something Nietzschean about her attitude, indeed long after, else she would not have been wondering whether he wasn’t a bit old for what he was doing, which was playing Spot the Wej.

‘It’s just a game, Mother.’

Funny, isn’t it, what happens to the status of the game between a mother and her son. If Henry, in spite of all his heaviness, liked a game when he could get one, to whom did he owe his love of games but Ekaterina? Ah. . boo! — who taught him that? Who hid herself behind the chair? Who appeared again from behind another? Who made his dolls talk? Who put him, Henry, at the centre of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony? And then, when the boy has mastered play and become a man, who doesn’t find any of it funny any more? The greatest difference between the sexes — that men will play and play and play, and that the women who showed them play, won’t.

‘ Just games have stolen half my life away, Henry.’

He hung his head. He didn’t like being stopped mid-play. It made him feel foolish. No one likes having to choke on their own enthusiasm, the shy — who don’t easily show enthusiasm in the first place — least of all. But he was his mother’s boy and had read his mother’s books. The greatest of all tragedies in Henry’s eyes — a woman whose life has been stolen half away.

She was wearing a lovely floaty dress made of flimsy materials, in a print of faded flowers, the flowers you associate with elderly ladies living on their own. The flowers of loneliness. Blow on her, Henry thought, and that was the other half of her life gone.

He wanted to know, though, if she’d have felt the same had he been playing Spot Somebody Else, Spot the Serbo-Croat, for example, or Spot the Irish Catholic.

She thought about it. Probably not.

‘So it’s the Jew thing.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s the self-conscious Jew thing. I think that’s childish, Henry. No one’s asking you to pretend you’re somebody other than you are. If anything, I like it that you’re not in flight from any of that. But it’s provincial to keep going on about it. And insecure. In my experience people who can’t stop making jokes about their identity aren’t easy with it. The man of the world accepts who he is and the influences which have made him, and then gets on with living in the world. The big world.’

He was stung. Provincial? Henry! Whose head no sooner hit the pillow every night than it was filled with dances from the Danube.

‘Isn’t it a Jewish speciality,’ he said, ‘to enjoy making jokes at our own expense? Hasn’t that been the saving of us, our comic self-awareness?’

‘Well, if you call that saving , Henry. .’

‘You know what I mean. It’s our survival strategy.’

‘I call it rubbing at an itch. If you leave it, the itch will eventually go away of its own accord. But of course it feels like relief while you’re rubbing.’

She had the power, like no other woman, to shame him. Was that all he was doing, rubbing at himself? Was he no better than Warren Shukman who rubbed himself to death?

Was Henry’s Jewishness his dick?

Was Henry’s dick his Jewishness?

He reddened, having consciousness of dick at the table with his mother. ‘You think I’m a footler, I know,’ he challenged her, once he’d allowed his high colour to subside. ‘You think I’m a footler like Dad.’

Interesting. For a brief moment, although all he was really doing was bringing the conversation back to the point from which it started — capitulating to her, if anything — she flashed fire at him, refusing the alliance. Come the showdown, Henry, it might not be me and you against your father after all. You never know with lovers — and they had been lovers, Ekaterina and Izzi — even those closest to them, even the beloved boy-child, fruit of their union, even Henry never knew the depth of their loyalty to each other at any time.