The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  Watching from the sidelines, Treslove was enviously baffled by their Finklerishness. Such confidence, such certainty of right, whether or not Libor was correct in thinking that all Finkler wanted was for non-Finklers to approve of him.

  Whatever Sam Finkler wanted, his effect on Julian Treslove was always to put him out of sorts and make him feel excluded from something. And false to a self he wasn’t sure he had. It had been the same at school. Finkler made him feel like someone he wasn’t. Clownish, somehow. Explain that.

  Treslove was considered good-looking in a way that was hard to describe; he resembled good-looking people. Symmetry was part of it. He had a symmetrical face. And neatness. He had neat features. And he dressed well, in the manner of who was it again? Whereas Finkler – whose father had invited customers to punch him in the belly – had allowed himself to put on weight, often let his own belly hang out of his shirt, spat at the camera, waddled slightly on his big feet when he went on one of those pointless television walks down the street where the laundry van knocked down Roland Barthes or through the field where Hobbes had an allotment, and when he sat down seemed to collapse into his own bulk like a merchant in a spice souk. And yet he, Treslove, felt the clown!

  Did philosophy have something to do with it? Every few years Treslove decided it was time he tried philosophy again. Rather than start at the beginning with Socrates or jump straight into epistemology, he would go out and buy what promised to be a clear introduction to the subject – by someone like Roger Scruton or Bryan Magee, though not, for obvious reasons, by Sam Finkler. These attempts at self-education always worked well at first. The subject wasn’t after all difficult. He could follow it easily. But then, at more or less the same moment, he would encounter a concept or a line of reasoning he couldn’t follow no matter how many hours he spent trying to decipher it. A phrase such as ‘the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis’ for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It was like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic.

  Did Finkler ever encounter the same resistance? Treslove asked him once. No, was the answer. To Finkler it all made perfect sense. And the people who read him found that he too made perfect sense. How else was one to account for there being so many of them?

  It was only when he waved goodbye that it occurred to Treslove that his old friend wanted company. Libor was right – Finkler was seeking love. A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has.

  Treslove looked up at the moon and let his head spin. He loved these warm high evenings, solitary and excluded. He took hold of the bars as though he meant to tear the gates down, but he did nothing violent, just listened to the park breathe. Anyone watching might have taken him for an inmate of an institution, a prisoner or a madman, desperate to get out. But there was another interpretation of his demeanour: he could have been desperate to get in.

  In the end he needed the gate to keep him upright, so intoxicated was he, not by Libor’s wine, though it had been plentiful enough for three grieving men, but by the sensuousness of the park’s deep exhalations. He opened his mouth as a lover might, and let the soft foliaged air penetrate his throat.

  How long since he had opened his mouth for a lover proper? Really opened it, he meant, opened it to gasp for air, to yell out in gratitude, to howl in joy and dread. Had he run out of women? He was a lover not a womaniser, so it wasn’t as though he had exhausted every suitable candidate for his affection. But they seemed not to be there any more, or had suddenly become pity-proof, the sort of women who in the past had touched his heart. He saw the beauty of the girls who tripped past him on the street, admired the strength in their limbs, understood the appeal, to other men, of their reckless impressionability, but they no longer had the lamp-post effect on him. He couldn’t picture them dying in his arms. Couldn’t weep for them. And where he couldn’t weep, he couldn’t love.

  Couldn’t even desire.

  For Treslove, melancholy was intrinsic to longing. Was that so unusual? he wondered. Was he the only man who held tightly to a woman so he wouldn’t lose her? He didn’t mean to other men. In the main he didn’t worry much about other men. That is not to say he had always seen them off – he was still scarred by the indolent manner in which the Italian who repaired sash windows had stolen from him – but he wasn’t jealous. Envy he was capable of, yes – he’d been envious and was envious still of Libor’s life lived mono-erotically (eloticshrly was how Libor said it, knitting its syllables with his twisted Czech teeth) – but jealousy no. Death was his only serious rival.

  ‘I have a Mimi Complex,’ he told his friends at university. They thought he was joking or being cute about himself, but he wasn’t. He wrote a paper on the subject for the World Literature in Translation module he’d taken after fluffing Environmental Decision Making – the pretext being the Henri Murger novel from which the opera La Bohème was adapted. His tutor gave him A for interpretation and D- for immaturity.

  ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ he said when Treslove questioned the mark.

  Treslove’s mark was upgraded to A++. All marks were upgraded if students questioned them. And since every student did question them, Treslove wondered why tutors didn’t just dish out regulation A++s and save time. But he never did grow out of his Mimi Complex. At forty-nine he still had it bad. Didn’t all opera lovers?

  And perhaps – like all lovers of Pre-Raphaelite painting, and all readers of Edgar Allan Poe – an Ophelia Complex too. The death betimes of a beautiful woman – what more poetic subject is there?

  Whenever Julian passed a willow or a brook, or best of all a willow growing aslant a brook – which wasn’t all that often in London – he saw Ophelia in the water, her clothes spread wide and mermaidlike, singing her melodious lay. Too much of water had she right enough – has any woman ever been more drowned in art? – but he was quick to add his tears to her inundation.

  It was as though a compact had been enjoined upon him by the gods (he couldn’t say God, he didn’t believe in God), to possess a woman so wholly and exclusively, to encircle her in his arms so completely, that death could find no way in to seize her. He made love in that spirit, in the days when he made love at all. Desperately, ceaselessly, as though to wear down and drive away whichever spirits of malevolence had designs upon the woman in his arms. Embraced by Treslove, a woman could consider herself for ever immune from harm. Dog-tired, but safe.

  How they slept when he had done with them, the women Treslove had adored. Sometimes, as he kept vigil over them, he thought they would never wake.

  It was a mystery to him, therefore, why they always left him or made it impossible for him not to leave them. It was the disappointment of his life. Framed to be another Orpheus who would retrieve his loved one from Hades, who would, at the last, look back over a lifetime of devotion to her, shedding tears of unbearable sorrow when she faded for the final time in his arms – ‘My love, my only love!’ – here he was instead, passing himself off as someone he wasn’t, a universal lookalike who didn’t feel as others felt, reduced to swallowing the fragrances of parks and weeping for losses which, in all decency, were not his to suffer.

  So that was something else he might have envied Libor – his bereavement.

  5

  He stayed at the park gates maybe half an hour, then strode back with measured steps towards the West End, passing the BBC – his old dead beat – and Nash’s church where he had once fallen in love with a woman he had watched lighting a candle and crossing herself. In grief, he’d presumed. In chiaroscuro. Crepuscular, like the light. Or like himself. Inconsolable. So he’d consoled her. />
  ‘It’ll be all right,’ he told her. ‘I’ll protect you.’

  She had fine cheekbones and almost transparent skin. You could see the light through her.

  After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, ‘Why do you keep telling me it’ll be all right? There isn’t anything wrong.’

  He shook his head. ‘I saw you lighting a candle. Come here.’

  ‘I like candles. They’re pretty.’

  He ran his hands through her hair. ‘You like their flicker. You like their transience. I understand.’

  ‘There’s something you should know about me,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit of an arsonist. Not serious. I wasn’t going to burn down the church. But I am turned on by flame.’

  He laughed and kissed her face. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Hush, my love.’

  In the morning he woke to twin realisations. The first was that she had left him. The second was that his sheets were on fire.

  Rather than walk along Regent Street he turned left at the church, stepping inside the columns, brushing its smooth animal roundness with his shoulder, and found himself among the small wholesale fashion shops of Riding House and Little Titchfield Streets, surprised as always at the speed with which, in London, one cultural or commercial activity gave way to another. His father had owned a cigarette and cigar shop here – Bernard Treslove: Smokes – so he knew the area and felt fondly towards it. For him it would always smell of cigars, as his father did. The windows of cheap jewellery and gaudy handbags and pashminas made him think of romance. He doubled back on himself, in no hurry to get home, then paused, as he always paused when he was here, outside J. P. Guivier & Co. – the oldest violin dealer and restorer in the country. Though his father played the violin, Treslove did not. His father had dissuaded him. ‘It will only make you upset,’ he said. ‘Forget all that.’

  ‘Forget all what?’

  Bernard Treslove, bald, browned, straight as a plumb line, blew cigar smoke in his son’s face and patted his head affectionately. ‘Music.’

  ‘So I can’t have a cello, either?’ J. P. Guivier sold beautiful cellos.

  ‘The cello will make you even sadder. Go and play football.’

  What Julian did was go and read romantic novels and listen to nineteenth-century operas instead. Which also didn’t please his father, for all that the books which Treslove read, like the operas he listened to, were on his father’s shelves.

  After this exchange, Bernard Treslove went into his own room to play the violin. As though he didn’t want to set a bad example to his family. Was it only Treslove’s fancy that his father wept into his violin as he played?

  So Julian Treslove played no instrument, though every time he passed J. P. Guivier’s window he wished he did. He could, of course, have taken up music any time he wanted to after his father died. Look at Libor who had learnt to play the piano in his eighties.

  But then Libor had someone to play it for, no matter that she was no longer with him. Whereas he . . .

  It was as he was looking at the violins, lost in these tristful reflections, that he was attacked, a hand seizing him by his neck without warning, as a valuable cat out on the tiles might be grabbed by a cat snatcher. Treslove flinched and dropped his head into his shoulders, exactly as a cat might. Only he didn’t claw or screech or otherwise put up a fight. He knew the people of the street – the beggars, the homeless, the dispossessed. Imaginatively, he was one of them. To him, too, the roads and pavements of the city were things of menace.

  Years before, between jobs, and in pursuit of a beautiful unshaven nose-ringed charity worker with whom he believed he was destined to be happy – or unhappy: it didn’t matter which, so long as it was destined – he had donated his services to the homeless and made representations on their behalf. He could hardly argue when they made representations for themselves. So he fell limp and allowed himself to be flung into the window and emptied.

  Allowed?

  The word dignified his own role in this. It was all over too quickly for him to have a say in the matter. He was grabbed, thrown, eviscerated.

  By a woman.

  But that wasn’t the half of it.

  It was what – reliving the event in the moments afterwards – he believed she had said to him. He could easily have been wrong. The attack had been too sudden and too brief for him to know what words had been exchanged, if any. He couldn’t be sure whether or not he had uttered a syllable himself. Had he really accepted it all in silence, without even a ‘Get off me!’ or a ‘How dare you?’ or even a ‘Help’? And the words he thought she had spoken to him might have been no more than the noise of his nose breaking on the pane or his cartilages exploding or his heart leaping from his chest. Nonetheless, a collection of jumbled sounds persisted and began to form and re-form themselves in his head . . .

  ‘Your jewels,’ he fancied he’d heard her say.

  A strange request, from a woman to a man, unless it had once been made of her and she was now revisiting it upon him in a spirit of bitter, vengeful irony. ‘Your jewels – now you know how it feels to be a woman!’

  Treslove had taken a module entitled Patriarchy and Politics at university. In the course of that he often heard the sentence, ‘Now you know how it feels to be a woman.’

  But what if he’d manufactured this out of some obscure masculinist guilt and what she had actually said was ‘You’re Jules’ – employing his mother’s fond nickname for him?

  This, too, took some explaining since he hardly needed telling who he was.

  It could have been her way of marking him, letting him know that she knew his identity – ‘You’re Jules and don’t suppose that I will ever forget it.’

  But something else would surely have followed from that. Something else of course did, or had, in that she comprehensively relieved him of his valuables. Wouldn’t she, though, for her satisfaction to be complete, have wanted him to know who she was in return? ‘You’re Jules, I’m Juliette – remember me now, you little prick!’

  The more he thought about it, the less sure he was that ‘Your’ or ‘You’re’ was quite the sound she’d made. It was more truncated. More a ‘You’ than a ‘Your’. And more accusatory in tone. More ‘You Jules’ than ‘You’re Jules’.

  ‘You Jules’, as in ‘You Jules, you!’

  But what did that mean?

  He had the feeling, further, that she hadn’t pronounced any ‘s’. He strained his restrospective hearing to catch an ‘s’ but it eluded him. ‘You Jule’ was more what she had said. Or ‘You jewel’.

  But is it consonant with calling someone a jewel that you smash his face in and rob him blind?

  Treslove thought not.

  Which returned him to ‘You Jule!’

  Also inexplicable.

  Unless what she had said as she was emptying his pockets was, ‘You Ju!’

  TWO

  1

  ‘What’s your favourite colour?’

  ‘Mozart.’

  ‘And your star sign?’

  ‘My eyesight?’

  ‘Star sign. Star.’

  ‘Oh, Jane Russell.’

  So had begun Libor’s first date of his widowhood.

  Date! That was some joke – he ninety, she not half that, maybe not a third of that. Date! But what other word was there?

  She did not appear to recognise the name Jane Russell. Libor wondered where the problem lay – in the accent he had not quite lost or the hearing he had not quite kept. It was beyond his comprehension that Jane Russell could simply be forgotten.

  ‘R-u-s-s-e-l-l,’ he spelt out. ‘J-a-n-e. Beautiful, big . . .’ He did the thing men do, or used to do, weighing the fullness of a woman’s breasts in front of him, like a merchant dealing in sacks of flour.

  The girl, the young woman, the child, looked away. She had no chest to speak of herself, Libor realised, and must therefore have been affronted by his mercantile gesture. Though if she’d had a chest she might have been more affronted still. The
things you had to remember with a woman you hadn’t been married to for half a century! The feelings you had to take into account!

  A great sadness overcame him. He wanted to be laughing with Malkie over it. ‘And then I . . .’

  ‘Libor – you didn’t!’

  ‘I did, I did.’

  He saw her put her hand to her mouth – the rings he had bought her, the fullness of her lips, the shake of her black hair – and wanted her back or wanted it to be over. His date, his awkwardness, his sorrow, everything.

  His date was called Emily. A nice name, he thought. Just a pity she worked for the World Service. In fact, the World Service was the reason friends had introduced them. Not to canoodle over the goulash and dumplings – Austro-Hungarian food was his idea: old world gluttony that would soak up any gaps in conversation – but to talk about the institution they had in common, maybe how it had changed since Libor had been there, maybe to discover she had worked with the children of whom Libor had known the parents.

  ‘Only if she’s not one of those smug leftists,’ Libor had said.

  ‘Libor!’

  ‘I can say it,’ he said. ‘I’m Czech. I’ve seen what leftists do. And they’re all smug leftists at the BBC. Especially the women. Jewish women the worst. It’s their preferred channel of apostasy. Half the girls Malkie grew up with disappeared into the BBC. They lost their sense of the ridiculous and she lost them.’

  He could say ‘Jewish women the worst’, too. He was one of the allowed.

  Fortunately, Emily wasn’t a Jewish leftist. Unfortunately she wasn’t anything else. Except depressed. Two years before, her boyfriend Hugh had killed himself. Thrown himself under a bus while she was waiting for him to collect her. At the Aldwych. That was the other reason friends had connected them – not, of course, with a view to anything romantic, but in the hope that they would briefly cheer each other up. But of the two – Emily and Hugh – Libor felt more of a connection to Hugh, dead under a bus.