The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Only think of Julian,’ Libor continued, ‘and how disappointing his life must appear to him.’

  Finkler did as he was told and thought about it. The two spots of colour in his cheeks, previously the size of ten-pence pieces, grew into two blazing suns.

  ‘Yes, Julian. But then he has always been in waiting, hasn’t he? I never waited for anything. I took. I had the Jewish thing. Like you. I had to make it quick, while there was time. But that only means that what I am capable of doing I have done, whereas Julian, well, his time might yet come.’

  ‘And does that scare you?’

  ‘Scare me how?’

  ‘Scare you to think he might overhaul you in the end. You were close friends, after all. Close friends don’t get over their dread of being beaten in the final straight. It’s never over till it’s over with a friend.’

  ‘Who are you afraid might overtake you, Libor?’

  ‘Ah, with me it really is over. My rivals are all long dead.’

  ‘Well, Julian’s not exactly breathing down my neck, is he?’

  Libor surveyed him narrowly, like an old red-eyed crow watching something easy to get its beak into.

  ‘He’s not now likely to make it as a household name, you mean? No. But there are other yardsticks of success.’

  ‘God, I don’t doubt that.’ He paused to ponder Libor’s words. Other yardsticks, other yardsticks . . . But couldn’t think of any.

  Libor wondered if he’d gone too far. He remembered how touchy he had been about success at Finkler’s age. He decided to change the subject, re-examining the chopsticks Finkler had bought his wife. ‘These really are lovely,’ he said.

  ‘She talked about collecting them, but never did. She often discussed collecting things but never got round to it. What’s the point? she’d ask. I took that as a personal affront. That our life together wasn’t worth collecting for. Could she have known what was going to happen to her, do you think? Did she want it to happen to her?’

  Libor looked away. He was suddenly sorry he had come. He couldn’t take another man’s wife-sorrows on top of his own. ‘We can’t know those things,’ he said. ‘We can know only what we feel. And since we’re the ones who are left, only our feelings matter. Better we discuss Isrrrrae.’ He put a fourth ‘r’ in the word to irritate his friend out of pathos.

  ‘Libor, you promised.’

  ‘Anti-Semites, then. Did I make a promise not to discuss your friends the anti-Semites?’

  The comedic Jewish intonation was meant as a further irritant to Finkler. Libor knew that Finkler hated Jewishisms. Mauscheln, he called it, the hated secret language of the Jews, the Yiddishising that drove German Jews mad in the days when they thought the Germans would love them the more for playing down their Jewishness. The lost provincial over-expressiveness of his father.

  ‘I don’t have friends who are anti-Semites,’ Finkler said.

  Libor screwed up his face until he resembled a medieval devil. All he lacked were the horns. ‘Yes, you do. The Jewish ones.’

  ‘Oh, here we go, here we go. Any Jew who isn’t your kind of Jew is an anti-Semite. It’s a nonsense, Libor, to talk of Jewish anti-Semites. It’s more than a nonsense, it’s a wickedness.’

  ‘Don’t get kochedik with me for speaking the truth. How can it be a nonsense when we invented anti-Semitism?’

  ‘I know how this goes, Libor. Out of our own self-hatred . . .’

  ‘You think there’s no such thing? What do you say to St Paul, itching with a Jewishness he couldn’t scratch away until he’d turned half the world against it?’

  ‘I say thank you, Paul, for widening the argument.’

  ‘You call that widening? Strait is the gate, remember.’

  ‘That’s Jesus, not Paul.’

  ‘That’s Jesus as reported by Jews already systematically Paulised. He couldn’t take us on in the flesh so he extolled the spirit. You’re doing the same in your own way. You’re ashamed of your Jewish flesh. Have rachmones on yourself. Just because you’re a Jew doesn’t mean you’re a monster.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m a monster. I don’t even think you’re a monster. I’m ashamed of Jewish, no, Israyeli actions–’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘It’s not peculiar to Jews to dislike what some Jews do.’

  ‘No, but it’s peculiar to Jews to be ashamed of it. It’s our shtick. Nobody does it better. We know the weak spots. We’ve been doing it so long we know exactly where to stick the sword.’

  ‘You admit then there are weak spots?’

  And they were away.

  After Libor left, Finkler went into the bedroom and opened his late wife’s wardrobe. He had not removed her clothes. There they hung, rail after rail of them, the narrative of their life together, her lean and hungry social sharpness, his pride in her appearance, the heads that turned when they entered a room, she like a weapon at his side.

  He tried for sadness. Was there something she hadn’t worn, that would break his heart for the life she had not lived? He couldn’t find a thing. When Tyler bought a dress she wore it. Everything was for now. If she bought three dresses in a day she contrived to wear three dresses in a day. To garden in, if she had to. What was there to wait for?

  He breathed in her aroma, then closed the wardrobe doors, lay down on her side of the bed and wept.

  But the tears were not as he wanted them to be. They were not Libor’s tears. He couldn’t forget himself in them.

  After ten minutes he rose, went to his computer and logged on to online poker. In poker he could do what he couldn’t do in grief – he could forget himself.

  In winning he could forget himself even more.

  4

  In Treslove’s dream a young girl is running towards him. She bends, in her running, barely slowing down, to take off her shoes. She is a schoolgirl in school uniform, a pleated skirt, a white blouse, a blue jumper, an untied tie. Her shoes impede her. She bends in her running to take them off so that she can run faster, freer, in her grey school socks.

  It is an analytic dream. In it, Treslove questions its meaning. The dream’s meaning and the reason he is dreaming it, but also the meaning of the thing itself. Why does the girl affect him as she does? Is it the girl’s vulnerability, or the very opposite, her strength and resolution? Does he worry for her feet, shoeless on the hard pavement? Is he curious about the reason for her hurry? Jealous perhaps because she is heedless of him and running to someone else? Does he want to be the object of her hurry?

  He has dreamed this dream all his life and no longer knows if it has its origins in something he once saw. But it is as real to him as reality and he welcomes its recurrence, though he does not summon it before he goes to sleep and does not always remember it with clarity when he wakes. The debate as to its status takes place entirely within the dream. Sometimes, though, when he sees a schoolgirl running, or bending to tie or untie a shoelace, he has a dim recollection of knowing her from somewhere else.

  It is possible he dreamed this dream the night he was mugged. His sleep was deep enough for him to have dreamed it twice.

  He was a man who ordinarily woke to a sense of loss. He could not remember a single morning of his life when he had woken to a sense of possession. When there was nothing palpable he could reproach himself for having lost, he found the futility he needed in world affairs or sport. A plane had crashed – it didn’t matter where. An eminent and worthy person had been disgraced – it didn’t matter how. The English cricket team had been trounced – it didn’t matter by whom. Since he didn’t follow or give a fig for sport, it was nothing short of extraordinary that his abiding sense of underachievement should have found a way to associate itself with the national cricket team’s. He did the same with tennis, with footballers, with boxers, with snooker players even. When a fly and twitchy south Londoner called Jimmy White went into the final session of the World Snooker Championship seven frames ahead with eight to play and still managed to end the night a loser,
Treslove retired to his bed a beaten man and woke broken-hearted. Did he care about snooker? No. Did he admire Jimmy White and want him to win? No. Yet in White’s humiliating capitulation to the gods of failure Treslove was somehow able to locate his own. Not impossibly, White himself passed the day following his immeasurable loss laughing and joking with friends, buying everyone he knew drinks, in far better spirits than Treslove did.

  Strange, then, that the morning after his humiliating mugging Treslove had woken to an alien sensation of near-cheerfulness. Was this what had all along been missing from his life – a palpable loss to justify his hitherto groundless sensation of it, the theft of actual possessions as opposed to the constantly nagging consciousness of something having gone missing? An objective correlative, as T. S. Eliot called it in a stupid essay on Hamlet (Treslove had earned a B- upgraded to an A++ for his essay on T. S. Eliot’s), as though all Hamlet had ever needed to explain his feeling like a rogue and peasant slave was someone to divest him of his valuables.

  He and Finkler had quoted Hamlet endlessly to each other at school. It was the only work of literature they had both liked at the same time. Finkler was not a literary man. Literature was insufficiently susceptible to rationality for his taste. And lacked practical application. But Hamlet worked for him. Not knowing that Finkler wanted to kill his father, Treslove hadn’t understood why. He liked it himself, not because he wanted to kill his mother, but on account of Ophelia, the patron saint of watery women. Whatever their separate motivation, they entwined the play around their friendship. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Samuel, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ Treslove used to say when Finkler wouldn’t go to a party with him because he didn’t believe in getting pissed. ‘Come on, it’ll be a laugh.’ But Finkler, of course, was bound to tell him that he had of late, wherefore he knew not, lost all his mirth.

  After which he usually changed his mind and went to the party.

  Speaking for himself, all these years later, Treslove wasn’t sure he had any native mirth to regain. He hadn’t been amused for a long time. And he wasn’t exactly amused now. But without doubt he felt more purposeful this minute than he had in years. How this could be, he didn’t know. He would have expected himself to want to stay in bed and never rise again. Mugged by a woman! For a man whose life had been one absurd disgrace after another, this surely was the crowning ignominy. And yet it wasn’t.

  And this despite the unpleasant physical after-effects of the attack. His knees and elbows smarted. There was nasty bruising around his eyes. It pained him to breathe through his nostrils. But there was air out there and he was eager to breathe it.

  He got up and opened his curtains and then closed them again. There was nothing to see. He lived in a small flat in an area of London which people who couldn’t afford to live in Hampstead called Hampstead, but as it wasn’t Hampstead he had no view of the Heath. Finkler had Heath. Heath from every window. He – Finkler – had not the slightest interest in Heath but he had bought a house with a view of it from every window, just because he could. Treslove checked this near re-descent into consciousness of loss. A view of the Heath wasn’t everything. Tyler Finkler had enjoyed a different view of the Heath from every window and what good had any of them done her?

  During breakfast there was a light nosebleed. He normally liked to take an early walk to the shops but he couldn’t risk being seen by someone he knew. Nosebleeding – like grief, as Treslove recalled Libor saying – is something you do in the privacy of your own home.

  He remembered what, in his humiliation and exhaustion, he had forgotten the night before – to cancel his credit cards and report his mobile phone lost. If the woman who had robbed him had been on his phone all night to Buenos Aires, or had flown to Buenos Aries on one of his cards and been on the phone all morning from there to London, he would already be insolvent. But strangely, nothing had been spent. Perhaps she was still deciding where to go. Unless theft was not her motive.

  Had she wanted simply to complicate his life she couldn’t have chosen a more efficient method. He was on his house phone for the rest of the morning, waiting for real people who spoke a language he could understand to answer, having to prove he was who he said he was though why he would have been worrying about the loss of his cards if he wasn’t who he said he was he didn’t know. The loss of his mobile was more serious; it seemed he would have to have a new number just when he had finally got round to memorising the old one. Or maybe not. It depended on the plan he was on. He hadn’t known he was on a plan.

  Yet not once did he turn tetchy or ask to speak to a supervisor. If further proof was needed that actual as opposed to imaginary loss had done wonders for his temper, this was it. Not once did he ask for someone’s name or threaten to get them sacked. Not once did he mention the ombudsman.

  There was no mail for him. Though he had the emotional strength to open envelopes, as was not always the case with him in the morning, there was relief in there being nothing to open today. No mail meant no engagements, for he accepted engagements by no other means, no matter that they came directly from his agents. Agree by phone to show up God knows where looking like God knows whom and there was a fair chance it would be a wild goose chase. Only actual mail meant actual business. And about actual business he was conscientiously professional, never refusing a gig on the superstitious assumption that the first gig he refused would be his last. There were plenty of lookalikes out there clamouring for work. London was choked with other people’s doubles. Everyone looked like someone else. Fall out of sight and you’d soon be out of mind. As at the BBC. But he’d have had to refuse today given how he looked. Unless he was asked to turn up to someone’s party as Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

  Besides, he had things he needed some mental space to think about. Such as why he had been attacked. Not only to what end, if neither his credit cards nor his mobile phone had been used, but why him? There was an existential form this question could take: Why me, O Lord? And there was a practical one: Why me rather than somebody else?

  Was it because he looked an easy victim? An inadequately put-together man with a modular degree who was sure to offer no resistance? A nobody in particular who just happened to be at the window of J. P. Guivier when the woman – deranged, drunk or drugged – just happened to be passing? A lookalike for a man against whom she had a grievance, whoever she was?

  Or did she know him for himself and wreak a vengeance she had long been planning? Was there a woman out there who hated him that much?

  Mentally, he went through the list. The disappointees, the wronged (he didn’t know how he had wronged them, only that they looked and felt and sounded wronged), the upset, the insulted, the abused (he didn’t know how he had abused them etc.), the discontented, the never satisfied or appeased, the unhappy. But then they had all been unhappy. Unhappy when he found them and unhappier when they left. So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.

  But none of it his doing, for Christ’s sake.

  Had he ever raised a hand to a woman to explain why a woman should want to raise a hand to him? No. Not ever.

  Well, once . . . nearly.

  The fly incident.

  They’d been away for a long romantic weekend, he and Joia – Joia whose voice had the quality of organza tearing and whose nervous system was visible through her skin, a tracery of fine blue lines like rivers on an atlas – three fretful days in Paris during which they hadn’t been able to find a single place to eat. In Paris! They’d passed and looked into restaurants, of course, on some occasions even taken a seat, but whichever he fancied, she didn’t – on nutritional or dietetic or humanitarian or simply feel-wrong grounds – and whichever she did, he didn’t, either because he couldn’t afford it or the waiter had insulted him or the menu made greater demands of his French than he could bear Joia – Hoia – to witness. For three days they walked the length and breadth of the greatest eating city on earth, squabbling, ashamed and famished, and
then when they returned to Treslove’s flat in sullen silence they found upwards of ten thousand flies in their death throes – mouchoirs, no, mouches: how come he remembered that word alone of all the French he knew; what a pity mouches had not been on a single menu – a mass suicide of flies in its final stages, flies dying on the bed, on the windows and the windowsills, in the dressing-table drawers, in Joia’s shoes even. She had screamed in horror. It was possible he had screamed in horror too. But if he did, he stopped. And Joia, whose organza screams would have harrowed hell, did not. Treslove had seen enough films in which a man slapped a hysterical woman to bring her to her senses to know that that was how you brought a hysterical woman to her senses. But he only made as if to slap her.

  The making as if to slap her – the frozen gesture of a slap – was as bad, though, as if he’d slapped her in earnest, and maybe even worse since it signalled intentionality rather than temporary loss of sanity of which hunger was a contributory cause.

  He didn’t deny, to himself at least, that the sight of all those flies dying like . . . well, like flies – tombant commes des mouches – had a no less deranging effect on him than it had on Joia, and that his almost-slap was as much to calm his nerves as hers. But it is expected of a man to know what to do when the unforeseen happens, and his not knowing what to do counted as much against him as the almost-slap.

  ‘Hit the flies if you must hit someone,’ Joia cried, her voice quavering as though on a high wire of silk, ‘but don’t you ever, ever, ever, ever think of hitting me.’

  For a moment it occurred to Treslove that there were more evers multiplying in his bedroom than there were flies dying.

  He closed his eyes against the pain and when he opened them Joia was gone. He shut the door of his bedroom and went to sleep on his couch. The following day the flies were dead. Not a one twitched. He swept them up and filled the bin with them. No sooner had he finished than Joia’s brother came around to collect her things. ‘But not the shoes with the flies in,’ he told Treslove, as though Treslove was a man who out of malice put flies in women’s shoes. ‘Those my sister says you can keep to remember her by.’