The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson

change the situation. But as God is my witness, darling, I will
never
get over it,
never
.’ Ask Henry to name what exactly it was she would never get over, whether it was an event he had seen with his own eyes or not, and he would have been at a loss. Hiroshima? Someone turning up at an engagement party in the same dress as hers? Fog? In the face of her extravagant alarms, the objective world gave up the ghost. Nothing was but as his mother told it, a great halo of migraine encircling everything.
    The big question for Henry: did she make him afraid of life, or did he make her?
    And then, with a sort of blithe impertinence, as when the sky suddenly clears after a wild storm – bad weather? what bad weather? – she would irradiate him with happiness again, dancing him on her knee, serenading him with songs popular on the radio. He adored her singing. ‘Whistle While You Work’ especially, with the inexpert whistling thrown in – more humming through the lips than whistling – while she busied herself at the stove, boiling cans of food for him. She had no cooking skills. No Stern Girl cooked. They just boiled cans. Beans. Macaroni. Stews. Vegetables. Soups. If a chicken dinner had come in a can they’d have boiled that. And without ever emptying the can into a pan, for that too would have been esteemed cooking, a concession to the men who were never there. It was the one domestic skill the Stern women passed down the line – dropping cans into boiling water and then forgetting about them until the water boiled away and the kitchen filled with the smell of roasting metal. Eventually the cans exploded – that was how you knew the meal was ready. Sometimes, when his father came home late asking for his tea, Ekaterina would point to the kitchen ceiling. ‘It’s there,’ she’d say.
    Then Henry’s father would go out into the garden, fill his mouth with paraffin, and burn down more trees.
    I have pyromaniacal parents, Henry thought later. They lay waste to everything. But what he still can’t decide is whether they had laid waste to him as well, or whether he had done that to himself.
    â€˜Whistle While You Work’ wasn’t her only song. She also did ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ and ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’, and on mercifully migraine-free days, when she wore a turban to keep the odour of molten aluminium out of her hair, ‘The Desert Song’, performed in the mode of Myrna Loy but with the voice of Jeanette MacDonald. Henry loved nothing more than this, especially when he was feverish and bedridden, watching the patterns on the wallpaper throb and mouth at him – the house alive with the sound of his mother, the cans dry-rattling in their pans, and the whole world safe. Ask Henry, between the age of three and thirteen, what heaven is and he will tell you heaven is his mother at home, singing, burning his dinner.
    â€˜How lovely you are,’ she would lullaby him in the afternoon, as the Pennine-frilled northern darkness closed in on them, tapping out the tune on his knees, matching the words to the ethereal second movement of Schubert’s heaven-sent Fifth Symphony, a piece of music they had listened to together on the Third Programme – Henry’s first piece of real music – and which they had made their most favourite piece of music of all time.
    â€˜How lovely you are, how lovely-ey-ey you are, how lovely you are, how how how lovely you are.’ Set any Schubert loose on Henry now and he will not be responsible for his tears. But he knows that if by accident he gets to hear Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, he will not survive it.
    You can have too much feeling.
    Henry explains many of the strange things he has done in his life this way: he has safeguarded himself against too much feeling. Of course, you can have too little feeling, also. But Henry is not aware he has ever safeguarded himself