The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Maybe when he grew up it would be different. You need to be mature to be ordered. You have to be accepting. But so long as he stayed chaotic, how could Henry grow up?

  How did you manage to grow up and yet stay chaotic, Dad?

  Taugetz, Henry.

  FIVE

  ‘Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug / Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug . . .’

  Henry’s father, the paper-magician, happy and blithering his favourite song. ‘Taugetz, taugetz, give me your answer do . . .’ Beside him on the front seat, Henry, the misery-magician, not happy. How old is Henry now? Thirteen – thirteen going on three hundred, according to his father’s calculations.

  They have been to what Henry’s father has recently taken to calling a gig. Another humiliation for Henry. Gigs being what rock musicians do – even rockless Schubertian Henry knows that – and are not to be confused with tearing up newsprint into pretty shapes for a bunch of four-year-olds who couldn’t give a shit. Henry has been helping out, the paper-sorcerer’s apprentice, now that he is of an age to be useful. He carries the cases. Makes sure they’ve packed enough newspapers and serviettes, not to mention the torches, the fire extinguisher, the blanket, the bucket of water. Come the performance, he holds one end of whatever his father wants one end holding. He is the butt of his father’s mirth. ‘Here you are, Charlie, catch’ – that’s his stage name, Charlie – ‘oops, couldn’t catch a cold, could you, Charlie?’ And he does the navigating, getting them the length and breadth of the county, from one kindergarten gig to another. Tonight they have been to Liverpool. Hard town, Liverpool, his father had warned him before they set out. ‘How can it be hard, Dad,’ Henry wanted to know, ‘when the person whose party it is is five? What are they going to do, knife us?’ ‘You’ll see,’ his father told him. ‘You’ll see.’

  And his father was right. They were hard. Old lags in short pants, potato-faced, thug-nosed, jelly-spitting mafiosi with piggy proletarian eyes, who booed when they should have clapped, and heckled when they should have marvelled, who belched and farted and shouted ‘Fucking rubbish!’ – and that was only the little girls – and who, when Izzi presented them with a dancing paper dolly each, screwed them up and threw them back at Henry.

  ‘Told you, Charlie,’ Izzi whispered to his son. ‘Only one thing for it – you’ll have to go and get the other stuff from the car.’

  ‘What other stuff?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Ah, Dad!’

  ‘Just go! And as for you’ – to the under-age delinquents – ‘I’ve got something that’ll keep you quiet.’ With which wild boast he swept them up behind him like the rats of Hamelin, down into their cancered concrete garden, a place of rusted bloodbaths, broken bicycles with tampered brakes, seatless swings and ruined roundabouts, promising them real magic this time, blood and thunder, death and dissolution, inferno. Yeah? – we’d like to see it! Yeah, well, you’re going to see it. Yeah? – well, where is it? Yeah, well, it’s just coming. And two minutes later back it came – Henry with the bags of torches. Him? No, not him. Yeah – well, it had better not be him. And of course it wasn’t him, not Henry, no one ever produced Henry if the call was for blood and thunder.

  In no time, no longer than it took him to unzip a bag, pour paraffin, light a match and summon up a mouthful of spittle, Uncle Izzi had become volcanic, gargling lava, bouncing fireballs off his lips like balloons. Head back, throat open, smiling – for smiling pulls the lips away from danger, that much even Henry knew – he addressed his baby audience in flames, the fiery words evaporating when he breathed, exploding and vanishing as though they’d never been spoken. Or he would swallow fire – seem to swallow fire, there was the trick – sucking it into his stomach which must have been as one of the boiler rooms of Hell.

  You like that, kids? You like that better?

  Without doubt they liked it better. Offered the choice between paper-folding and a man with his face on fire, how could you not prefer the man with his face on fire. These, Henry reminded himself, were the children of arsonists and incendiaries, pyromaniacs and safe-blowers. They had grown up with sticks of dynamite in their cots the way other children had grown up with dummies. They were heat-resistant. They felt no pain. They had no imagination of pain.

  Their eyes burned with excitement. Now you’re talking, now you’re cooking with gas, this is what you call a children’s party. If only Henry’s father would set fire to Henry as an encore, they’d suck their thumbs and go to beddy-byes content.

  Smelling the paraffin, hearing the children’s shouts, seeing the sky light up, the entire proletariat of Henry’s reading and foreboding came out to look – missing persons, rent-evaders, men in hiding, IRA men, men with prices on their heads, dodgers, defaulters, defectors, defecators, escaped convicts, wife-beaters, spies, snoops, grasses, bigamists, bombers, whisky priests, welfare cheats, distillers of illicit hooch, contrabandists, drug dealers, inbreeders, squatters, illegal immigrants, under-age runaways, child-molesters, tower-block prostitutes and their pimps, men who slept with their mothers, neighbours who hadn’t spoken since their blood feud first broke out in another country in another century, creatures not men, creatures with iron claws for hands, creatures with bullets for teeth, creatures who knew what they wanted, took what they wanted, what they borrowed never returned, inexpugnable, shatterproof, immortal. Whoosh, went Izzi’s breath. Whoa, went the estate. Could they have been thinking that Henry’s father had been sent by the council to burn the disgrace that was their habitation to the ground? Were they hoping to collect on the insurance? Who cared why they roared. Not Izzi. At last – an audience appreciative of his genius at last . Boiling hot, like a blacksmith, two scorched circles on his cheeks, like Old Nick, he blew four more fire rings at the moon, then took his bow.

  See. See what happens when you’re given a chance. My first ever Gentile gig, Henry.

  You’ve done loads of Gentile gigs, Dad.

  My first ever über-Gentile gig. What does that tell you?

  Henry knew what it told him: never to come to such a place again.

  But to his father it told a different story. From now on, paper for the Yiddlers, fire for the goyim.

  That could have been the moment, Henry now realises, when his father decided to take a second wife.

  Hence happy in the car home. ‘Taugetz, taugetz . . . Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me what?’

  ‘That Liverpool was a hard town.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘And didn’t we show ’em?’

  ‘You showed ’em, yes.’

  ‘Was I good or was I good?’

  ‘You were very good.’

  ‘Shame we didn’t bring your mother.’

  Silence from Henry.

  ‘She’d have liked it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. The excitement would have been too much for her. What do you think?’

  ‘I think so, Dad.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. And you? You all right?’

  ‘Me? Absolutely. Yeah.’

  His father steals a sideways look at him. Concentrating on the road ahead. Not much traffic, but there’s a light rain falling, making conditions treacherous. ‘Oil and water,’ he says. And then, returning to what’s on his mind. ‘So why the long face?’

  ‘I haven’t got a long face.’

  ‘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 ugly.

  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?

  Mindful in disaster, he didn’t slam on his brakes, not with oil and water on the road – oh no, not Henry’s father – but slid gently into the verge. That’s the way to do it, Henry. Suit the driving to the conditions, even in an emergency – correction, especially in an emergency. Then he was off, across the road almost before he’d stopped, his paper-magician’s jacket with its big
patched pockets flying behind him. And he was strong. If need be he would right the upturned vehicle with his own hands, then peel it open like a sardine tin. He was wrenching at a door and all but had it off by the time Henry was out of his seat. Henry not one of those in whom catastrophe finds a hero. Henry more circumspect, weighing up the pros and the cons, not wanting to make a bad business worse.

  Cometh the hour, cometh not Henry.

  Your fault, Dad, you were always there before me.

  If we waited for you, Henry . . .

  Don’t rationalise it. You were always there before me because you wanted to be there before me. Had I run you’d have raced me.

  There were people dying, Henry.

  There were always people dying. And you were always the first to find them.

  You think I should have left it to you find them? You were just a boy.

  So how was I ever to learn to be a man?

  Not by seeing people decapitated in their cars.

  Ah, that! Thanks, Dad. At least no one can say you never called a spade a spade.

  Henry only got to hear about people with their heads missing at the inquest where, red and incoherent, he had been subject to cross-examination – asked questions anyway, which was tantamount to a cross-examination as far as Henry was concerned – in the matter of what he’d witnessed. To which his answer, probe him as they might, was precisely nothing. In our family, Henry tried to explain, it is my father who does the witnessing.

  For the moment he had joined his father at the ruined car, its wheel spinning, smoking in the night, his father had clapped a heavy hand across Henry’s eyes and twisted his head from the scene. Not for you, Henry. Not for you to behold what’s happened here.

  ‘Wave a car down,’ he’d said, ‘quickly, go on, now!’ His voice urgent, in command, but from the immeasurable depths of adult sorrow. Henry knew the sound. Keep the sight of death from the kid – that sound. Used on Henry before, first when poor Anastasia decided to give up the ghost while they were visiting her mob-handed in hospital, suddenly, as though that was the only way to get rid of them, the grey creeping across her face like the afternoon light passing from the Pennines; and then again when a neighbour popped in to get his breath and without a word of explanation collapsed on their living-room carpet, his lips fluttering as though in final indecision. On both those occasions, and with a tenderness which surprised and doubly saddened Henry, his father had covered his eyes and led him away.