The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  So, no, he is all right about where he is. It was all a long time ago.

  The distress he feels is centred somewhere else. He searches for it, even as Moira lies folded like one of his father’s napkins in his arms, searches for it in the rhythm of her breathing. The association isn’t accidental. His father. He can’t bear it for his father. This isn’t a straight exchange of sorrows: giving to his father the sympathy which had once belonged, unthinkingly, to his mother. It’s worse, was worse, for his father. His father had no words. You can’t breathe out your grief in fire. You can’t cut dollies out of paper to express your longing. Crist, if my love were in my arms . . . What means did his father possess to body forth yearning of that sort? Why, even when he tried to talk to Henry, Henry looked away in embarrassment. That’s what you do with dads; you piss them off. Mums you open your hearts to, dads you turn your back on.

  Did the Stern Girls know? Did the secret they were keeping for Ekaterina die, as far as they were concerned, with Marghanita?

  ‘The poor child!’

  Henry never asked Marghanita who that poor child was. She was too far gone to tell him, even supposing she knew herself. That was how he explained it, anyway. Never was much of an asker of questions, Henry. Too afraid of the answers. And didn’t like to be beholden. Better to lower your eyes and nod your head and pretend to know. What you don’t ask doesn’t hurt you. And who you don’t ask doesn’t hurt you either.

  Also, he had thought it was a composite. The poor child, meaning Marghanita, seen at the eleventh hour as a third party, someone not herself, to be sorrowed over because of the circumstances in which she had come, illegitimately, into the world; and meaning Henry as well. Poor Henry, to be sorrowed over by Marghanita because of the circumstances in which he had failed to conquer the world, when they laid it on a plate for him. Here, Henry, have! Have! Only he wasn’t sure how to take it. Poor her, poor him. More recently, since the sighting of the bench in Eastbourne, he has wondered if the poor child could have been his mother too. Poor abandoned Ekaterina, scratching at the earth to find a place of peace.

  Now he has another thought.

  His father. The father who never grew up.

  He remembers that it was Marghanita who told him that his father had been encouraged to think for years that Passover was a party just for him. The poor child. Did Marghanita also know that later he grew frantic for his wife, not understanding why her attention had wandered from him, not grasping that she had bestowed her heart upon another man, only dimly aware – for dim awareness was the best his father ever managed ( taugetz, Henry) – that though she remained with him most of the time in body, an audience for his fireballs and his origami, in every other respect she was somewhere else, wife to a husband who was not him. An Arab who loved her.

  You could do it, presumably, with pages torn from this book, but Henry’s father recommended three sheets of newspaper of the sort he never read – The Times, Telegraph, Observer. ‘Three full sheets’, was the instruction. No half-measures for Izzi. If you’re going to go for it, you go for it. A) three full sheets of newspaper, B) a rubber band, C) a pair of scissors.

  These for the making of a paper beanstalk, twice as tall as yourself . Depends who the self is of course, but Izzi Nagel had in mind an averagely small child, say Henry the size he was when he fucked up with the threepenny bit.

  Then what you do is you fold the newspaper in half lengthwise and tear along the fold to make six strips. Take one of these strips and roll it into a tube about two inches in diameter, like so:

  When you have got six inches from the end, you take a second strip, insert it, and continue rolling.

  Now go on doing the same until all the strips are used up . . .

  In his mind’s eye, perhaps because he was there at the proof stage when his father was preparing his little book of tricks and puzzles for the printer, Henry can still see the triumphant concluding page to this particular example of paper magic, the mounting excitement, the mind-spinning arrows etched with such urgency, as though disaster would surely befall you if your cutting went awry, the exhortation to believe, and the final great flowering beanstalk of newsprint, growing beyond a boy’s capacity to imagine.

  Put the rubber band firmly round one end:

  Cut or tear the roll as straight as you can at the four places shown by the dotted lines:

  Then fold back the flaps:

  Hold the roll with one hand and with the other pull the inside paper gently. Your beanstalk will grow and grow and grow!!

  For the same reason, presumably – though he has borne no children to entertain in this way, and hasn’t looked at the instructions for half a century – Henry can still remember how to make the paper beanstalk.

  So that’s what he does, he makes a couple, using unread newspapers containing ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s obituaries, remembering to cut as straight as he can, and to fold back the flaps, and to pull the inside papers gently, and then he stands them on either side of the bed – suitably Middle Eastern they look, too, more like palm trees than beanstalks – from which his father was excluded.

  The poor child.

  FIFTEEN

  A week or so later a letter arrives for Henry. From Eastbourne Council, Cleansing Department. Permission has been granted to inform Mr Nagel that the bench erected in his mother’s name was kindly donated by the family of Mr Fouad Yafi.

  So that’s that. Ends tied up. Neat as a button. No more to say.

  ‘Would you surmise from that,’ he asks Moira, ‘that Fouad Yafi himself is dead?’

  ‘I would,’ she tells him. She is sitting at Henry’s dressing table, that’s to say his mother’s dressing table – funny how Levantine it suddenly looks with its floral inlays and ornamental mouldings – putting up her hair. Nymphlike.

  He has taken to calling her that. ‘My nymph.’

  ‘Ha – some nymph!’ is her accustomed response.

  Henry wonders how he ever managed without a nymph to greet him every morning. All those years, nymphless – because another man’s nymph is not your own any more than is a nymph who is merely passing through. All those mornings. Thousands of them. Amazing.

  ‘Me too,’ he muses. ‘But I wonder when he died. I wonder how close to my mother. It would be touching to think he wasn’t able to survive her long. If he did survive her, though, wouldn’t he have donated the bench? Him personally. A love-offering. Like the Taj Mahal. But if he didn’t, and if the bench truly was put up by the family, how come it wasn’t dedicated to them both? Do you suppose the family couldn’t come at that?’

  ‘Too many imponderables there, Henry,’ Moira says. ‘And I have a feeling you’re searching for a slight.’

  ‘Only a slight slight.’

  ‘If they wanted to slight your mother, Henry, they wouldn’t have paid for a bench at all.’

  Henry thinks about that. ‘True. But there is such a thing as a half-regard. They may have felt well disposed to her, but not disposed enough to see their father’s or their uncle’s name – whatever their relation to him – entwined with hers. A Jewess, don’t forget. Like you.’

  ‘Henry!’

  ‘And then, if Mr Yafi did die all that time ago, how come they have only just got round to offering me this place? His wife could still have been alive, I suppose. But then again –’

  ‘Does this matter, Henry?’

  ‘Only in that I’d like – no, it doesn’t matter. It’s just that I want it to have been right, through and through, for them. And then, you know . . .’

  ‘I don’t know. What?’

  ‘Well, if I can square it for them, I can square it for Dad.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit idealistic? Do you really think it would make a jot of difference to him how it was for them?’

  Henry suddenly doesn’t like her. Common sense: whenever she tries to send a blast of cold common sense through his cogitations, he doesn’t like her. There’s a reason, he wants to tell her, why they call common sense common. Tau
getz, Henry, his father might well have chosen to say at the very same moment. But his father’s taugetz wasn’t common. It refused imaginative cooperation right enough, but not in the name of common reason. It had the grace to descend into other-worldly daftness. Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz. Let’s mess about. If you insist on being oversophisticated you’re on your own; I can’t join you. Which wasn’t quite what Moira was doing. Moira was refusing to see what he saw, because she believed it wasn’t there. Make a difference to your dad! How could it make a difference to your dad? But it was obvious to Henry, and should have been obvious to Moira, why it would have made a difference to his dad – because he was a man of immense reserves of decency, sympathetic decency, and would have wanted his wife happy even in her faithlessness, would have wanted her loved by someone kind, treated with consideration, remembered fondly, a credit to them both.

  Taugetz. Well, maybe. Maybe Henry is imagining a father in the image he would imagine for himself. And maybe he is only annoyed with Moira because she won’t indulge his idealism.

  He makes an appeal to her. ‘Seen all round,’ he says, ‘and in a long life, though they were cruelly denied that, I grant you, there are errors and brutalities which can be absorbed back into the original edifice – I mean of the relationship if not the marriage – which can be understood to be a part of it anyway, as further interesting contributions if you like, and not just dismissed automatically as fallings off that can never be forgiven. I think it would have made a difference to my father, yes, and added to his own sense of worth, that my mother wasn’t being messed about, that she was well regarded, that she hadn’t stepped below herself, that she was doing something that made her feel happy and worthwhile even though it broke his heart. Yes, I think that.’

  She hears the irritation in his voice. And the disappointment too. It’s how she knows that all this is of importance to her as well – the fact that it hurts her to be a disappointment to him.

  She has a way of putting her teeth together when she is angry with herself which he likes. There is something of the schoolgirl in it. A sort of resolution, made in the presence of the head-mistress, to do better. ‘Well, you must forgive my surface cynicism,’ she says. ‘I have no right to make assumptions about your father. But have a heart, Henry – you are heavy going just at the moment, heavy on yourself particularly, and is it so terrible of me to want to lighten things for you?’

  ‘No,’ he says, going over to her and blowing in her hair. ‘No, it isn’t.’

  Bracing, her hair. Like a breeze coming in off the Bay of Riga, if Riga has a bay. Knowing Henry’s geography, it could simply be the word rigour he’s thinking of. Moira’s rigorous good manners to him, her rigorous protection of his feelings, and her rigorous clarity in the matter of her own meanings. Like a breeze coming in off the Bay of Rigour. You can misjudge women, Henry thinks, if you go only on the furry bags they carry.

  He considers himself a lucky man. Have a heart, Henry – you are heavy going just at the moment. What has heavy-going Henry done – heavy going from the moment his mother went into protracted labour with him – to deserve a woman who tells him that he is heavy going just at the moment?

  If that isn’t tact bred of benevolence bred of love, he doesn’t know what it is.

  Thank you, God, for finding me such a person. Now organise for me to live for ever with her and You’ll be a mensch.

  Once upon a time Henry entertained the fancy of meeting his father’s mistress. Strange, because when he tries to recapture the fancy it seems to be of ancient origin, like an imagining from childhood, but he cannot understand how this can be since sure knowledge of one mistress in particular, as opposed to mere suspicion of a string of Rivka Yoffeys, with maybe someone special in London thrown in for good measure, came only with the letter from Shapira and Mankowicz. Was the fancy wish-fulfilment, then? Do boys desire their fathers to have mistresses as intensely as they wish their fathers not to have their mothers? All very simple to explain if that’s the case. Go to her, Dad, go enjoy the rest of your life, and leave Mum to enjoy the blessings of conjugality at my hands.

  But why, then, the folderol of imagining actually meeting the mistress, Henry is unable say. Unless the mistress is a further mother – alternative and supererogatory – which boys also crave. So was Henry hoping not only to retrieve his first mother from his father’s thieving hands, but also to nab the second one into the bargain? Did he want everything his father had?

  Honesty-box Henry concedes there could be something in this, because the fancy, in so far as he can remember it – and he can, oh yes he can – entailed the mistress being struck by Henry’s charms, not flirting with him exactly, but registering wherein he was his father to a T, though with youth and a degree in girls’ literature thrown in, and wherein he was another and no less fascinating person altogether.

  Whether or not Henry is right that the fancy is of remote unconscious origin, it must, over the years, have been subject to many accretions – like one of Grynszpan and Delahunty’s palimpsests of suppressed female creativity – because now the mistress is talking to Henry of his father as a man very much alive, and now she is lamenting him, tears brimming in her black eyes (fathers’ mistresses must have black eyes), her ringed hands (ditto) – painted fingers browned in sun and experience, lined with sensuality and grief – seeking Henry’s own for comfort. ‘Not possible, you will understand, simply out of the question for me to live here any more’ – an obvious interpolation, for Henry knew nothing of a ‘here’, of St John’s Wood or its environs, when the fancy first took hold – ‘not within a hundred miles of here, nor anywhere that reminds me – I know you’ll understand this – of Regent’s Park, which we so loved.’ The face averted. Hand pressed on Henry’s. Henry’s head big to bursting with the idea that his father loved a park. Did he torch it? he wondered. ‘What we would like’ – the mistress putting celestial quotation marks around the ‘we’ – so Henry was not the only one still in communication with his long-abducted father – ‘is for you to have it.’

  ‘The park?’

  ‘The apartment.’

  Irrelevant now, all of it. The mistress even deader than the father. A ghost of one who never was, let Henry conjure all he will.

  But Henry does wonder if he doesn’t owe it to all concerned parties to try to form a comparable image, without the finger-touching, of Fouad Yafi.

  Would have been nice, wouldn’t it, to have met the man who loved his mother so deeply as to have accommodated her son. Would have been nice to have said thank you. Thank you for what you’ve done for me, thank you for what you did for Mum. And you will understand if I do not thank you for what you did for Dad. Failing that, taking Mr Yafi to be dead, it would also have been nice to meet the in-laws. The extended family. The machatonim , as they’re called. Me Nagel, you Yafis. Me Jew, you Arabs. Shalom !

  Could a lasting peace between Arab and Jew have grown out of this? Why not? You have to start somewhere. And it would have been a scream, would it not, had Henry who knew nothing of the political affairs of the world been an agent in their change. All those years in hiding from event in the Pennines – were they but a preparation, like Christ’s days in the wilderness, or Cromwell’s in his garden, for this? A peace prize, thereafter, for Henry? The ultimate vindication of his humane ignorance of things. To say nothing of his mother’s. For if anyone really deserved the prize, it was her surely, not Henry. Ekaterina Nagel who found peace here between Arab and Jew.

  In waves it is borne in on Henry how bold, viewed from every angle, his mother’s adultery was. From Jane Eyre to a pasha’s pavilion in a single bound – all right, to an over-upholstered apartment in St John’s Wood – but still, quite a journey. Though then again, wasn’t that a version of Jane Eyre’s story too? What quiet girls do – they make their way. What Henry has done, no less. From Jane Eyre to a pasha’s pavilion, pausing only, for most of his waking life, at a poly in the Pennines. And all thanks to his mother.

 
Could it be that he was always wrong about her? And therefore wrong about himself? That she hadn’t taught him to shrink from life at all, that he had done that by himself? That it wasn’t her thin skin he had inherited, but, if anybody’s, his father’s? Henry would like to be finished with all questions of skin now, thick or thin. Time, at his age, to be done putting your papery wrist to your ear and listening to the unprotected humming of your blood. Time to be getting ready to have no skin. But his father has not let him alone about his skin in more than fifty years. Still doesn’t, when Henry invites him along for one of their dusky evening chats – though Henry does less of that now he has Moira to converse with. You would think, listening to him, that there was more skin on the old man dead than there had ever been on Henry alive. Easy, Henry, easy. Watch that skin now.

  Henry would like to say a few words to his father about this. Not have a few words. The son has heard the father out on the question of the son’s translucency long enough. Finally, Henry has rumbled him. ‘It’s not my skin we’ve been discussing, birthday boy – Passover-birthday boy, get me? – it’s yours! That’s how you always knew so much about it, why you hated it and mocked it, and why you always happened to be at the right place at the right time, clomping your great paraffin-smelling hand over my fainting eyes. Cut from the same cloth, Dad, extruded from the same sheet of newspaper – was that what you dreaded? Not another Ekaterina on the planet, but another you? Well, you had less to be ashamed of than you think. You were who you were. And I am who I am. Now rest in peace. But before you do, hear this . . .’

  Hear what? Henry can’t think of anything. That’s to say he can think of everything, but neither of them has time for that. It’s Moira who tells him what to say. ‘Say nothing,’ she says. ‘Just buy him a bench. I’ll ring Cleansing at Eastbourne. Maybe they can find a place for it next to hers.’

  In St John’s Wood High Street the summer is eking out the last of its gederem. Gederem meaning bowels, but by implication strength. One of his father’s favourite words. In the same way that Izzi loved carveries he loved intestinal Yiddish. Kishkes another one. A hard-working man shleps his kishkes or his gederem out. And Izzi Nagel worked hard. At his upholstery, at his fire-eating, at being married – well, who can say? – and certainly at being Henry’s father. Whoever spends time with Henry has to work hard. Should Henry put that on the bench? – IN MEMORY OF IZZI NAGEL WHO WHATEVER ELSE THERE IS TO SAY SHLEPPED HIS KISHKES OUT FOR ME – HIS LOVING SON.