The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  Treslove fell silent. There was so much he didn’t understand. And so much to be upset about. He felt he’d been give a prize he had long coveted, only to have it snatched away from him again before he’d even found a place for it on his mantelpiece. Tyler Finkler, not a Finkler! Therefore the deep damp dark mysteriousness of a Finkler woman was still, strictly speaking – and this was a strict concept or it was nothing – unknown to him.

  She began to dress. ‘I hope I haven’t disappointed you,’ she said.

  ‘Disappointed me? Hardly. Will you be coming for the second programme?’

  ‘You have a think about it.’

  ‘What’s there to think about?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said.

  She didn’t kiss him when she left.

  But she popped her head back around his door. ‘A word from the wise. Just don’t let them catch you saying “Jewess”,’ she warned him, imitating the languorous snakiness he had imparted to the word. ‘They don’t like it.’

  Always something they didn’t like.

  But he did as she suggested, and had a think.

  He thought about the betrayal of his friend and wondered why he wasn’t guiltier. Wondered whether following Finkler into his wife’s vagina was a pleasure in itself. Not the only pleasure, but a significant contribution to it. Wondered whether Finkler had in effect koshered his wife from the inside regardless of her origins, so that he, Treslove, could believe he had as good as had a Jewess – ess, ess, ess – (which word he mustn’t for some reason let them catch him saying) after all. Or not. And if not, did he have to go back to the very beginning of wondering what it would be like?

  And was still wondering about these and similar mysteries of the religio-erotic life after Tyler Finkler’s tragic death.

  3

  Normally a heavy sleeper, Treslove began to lie awake night after night, revolving the attack in his mind.

  What had happened? How would he tell it to the police, supposing that he was going to tell it to the police, which he wasn’t? He had spent the evening with two old friends, Libor Sevcik and Sam Finkler, both recently made widowers – no, officer, I am not myself married – discussing grief, music and the politics of the Middle East. He had left Libor’s apartment at about 11 p.m., spent a little time looking into the park, smelling foliage – do I always do that? no, only sometimes when I am upset – and then had ambled back past Broadcasting House, may its name be damned, may its foundations crumble – only joking – to a part of London where his father had owned a famous cigar shop – no, officer, I had not been drinking inordinately – when without any warning . . .

  Without any warning, that was the shocking thing, without the slightest apprehension of danger or unease on his part, and he normally so finely attuned to hazard.

  Unless . . .

  Unless he had, after all, as he had turned into Mortimer Street, seen a figure lurking in the shadows on the opposite side of the road, seen it half emerge from a passageway, still in shadow, a large, looming, but possibly, very possibly, womanly figure . . .

  In which case – the question was conditional: if he had seen him, it, her – why had he not minded himself more, why had he turned to Guivier’s window, presenting his defencelesss neck to whatever harm anyone, man or woman, might choose to do him . . .

  Culpability.

  Culpability again.

  But did it matter what he’d seen or hadn’t seen?

  For some reason it did. If he’d seen her and invited her to attack him – or at least permitted her to attack him – that surely explained, or part explained, what she had said. He knew it was not morally or intellectually acceptable to accuse Jews of inviting their own destruction, but was there a proneness to disaster in these people which the woman had recognised? Had he, in other words, played the Finkler?

  And if he had, why had he?

  One question always led to another with Treslove. Let’s say he had played the Finkler, and let’s say the woman had observed it – did that justify her attacking him?

  Whatever explanation could be found for his actions, what pos-sible explanation could be found for hers? Was a man no longer free to play the Finkler when the fancy took him? Let’s say he had been standing staring into the window of J. P. Guivier looking like Horowitz, or Mahler, or Shylock, say, or Fagin, or Billy Crystal, or David Schwimmer, or Jerry Seinfeld, or Jerry Springer, or Ben Stiller, or David Duchovny, or Kevin Kline, or Jeff Goldblum, or Woody Allen, or Groucho Fucking Marx, was that any reason for her to attack him?

  Was being a Finkler an open invitation to assault?

  So far he had taken it personally – you do when someone calls you by your name, or something very like, and gets you to empty your pockets – but what if this was a random anti-Semitic attack that just happened to have gone wrong only in the sense that he wasn’t a Semite? How many more of these incidents were taking place? How many real Finklers were being attacked in the streets of the capital every night? Round the corner from the BBC, for Christ’s sake!

  He wondered who to ask. Finkler himself was not the man to tell him. And he didn’t want to frighten Libor by asking him how many Jews got beaten up outside his door most evenings. Not expecting to find anything post-thirteenth-century Chelmno, he looked up ‘Anti-Semitic Incidents’ on the internet and was surprised to find upwards of a hundred pages. Not all of them round the corner from the BBC, it was true, but still far more in parts of the world that called themselves civilised than he would ever have imagined. One well-maintained site gave him the option to choose by country. He started from far away –

  venezuela:

  And read that in Caracas about 15 armed men had tied up a security guard and forced their way into a synagogue, defacing its administrative offices with anti-Semitic graffiti and throwing Torah scrolls to the ground in a rampage that lasted nearly five hours. Graffiti left at the scene included the phrases ‘Damn the Jews’, ‘Jews out’, ‘Israeli assassins’ and a picture of a devil.

  The devil detail intrigued him. It meant that these fifteen men had not gone out on the razzle, found themselves outside a synagogue and forced their way in on a whim. For who goes out on a razzle with a picture of the devil in his pocket?

  argentina:

  And read that in Buenos Aires a crowd celebrating Israel’s anniversary was attacked by a gang of youths armed with clubs and knives. Three weeks earlier, on Holocaust Memorial Day – here we go, Holocaust, Holocaust – an ancient Jewish cemetery was defaced with swastikas.

  canada:

  Canada? Yes, Canada.

  And read that in the course of Canada’s now annual Israeli Apartheid Week events held on campuses throughout the country security officers roughed up Jewish hecklers, one of them warning a Jewish student to ‘shut the fuck up or I’ll saw your head off ’.

  Was that a home-grown Canadian deterrent, he wondered, sawing Jews’ heads off?

  Then tried closer to home.

  france:

  And read that in Fontenay-sous-Bois a man wearing a Star of David necklace was stabbed in the head and neck.

  In Nice, ‘Death to Jews’ was spray-painted on the walls of a primary school. So death to Jews of all ages.

  In Bischheim, three Molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue.

  In Creteil, two sixteen-year-old Jews were beaten in front of a kosher restaurant by a gang that shouted ‘Palestine will win, dirty Jews!’

  germany:

  What, they were still doing it in fucking Germany?

  And didn’t bother to read what they were still doing in fucking Germany.

  england:

  England his England. And read that in Manchester a thirty-one-year-old Jew was beaten by several men who shouted ‘for Gaza’ as they attacked him, leaving him with a black eye and several bruises.

  In Birmingham, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl fled a mob of children no older than she was chanting ‘Death to Jews’.

  And in London, just around the corner from the
BBC, a forty-nine-year-old blue-eyed Gentile with orderly features was robbed of his valuables and called a Ju.

  He rang Finkler after all to say how nice it had been to see him and did he know that in Caracas and in Buenos Aires and in Toronto – yes, Toronto! – and in Fontenay-sous-Bois and in London, but Finkler stopped him there . . .

  ‘I’m not saying it makes pleasant listening,’ he said, ‘but it’s not exactly Kristallnacht, is it?’

  An hour later, after thinking about it, Treslove rang again. ‘Kristallnacht didn’t happen out of nowhere,’ he said, though he had only a vague idea of what Kristallnacht did happen out of.

  ‘Ring me when a Jew gets murdered for being a Jew on Oxford Street,’ Finkler said.

  4

  Though it wasn’t Kristallnacht, the unprovoked attack on him for being a Jew had become in Treslove’s imagination little short of an atrocity. He admitted to himself that he was overexcited. The night with Kimberley, her misattribution of Jewish characteristics to him, as a consequence of which, he was bound to consider, he might just have had – at forty-nine! – the best sex of his life (well, at least they had both smiled during it), and the sense of history swirling around him, all made him an unreliable witness to his own life.

  Did he any longer remember what actually had happened?

  He decided to revisit the scene of the crime, re-run the evening’s events, not starting with dinner at Libor’s – he didn’t want to involve Libor, he had kept the whole thing from Libor, Libor had troubles enough – but at the gates to Regent’s Park. It had turned chillier in the weeks since the mugging, so he was not able to dress as he had on the night in question. Muffled up, he looked bulkier, but otherwise his assailant – Judith, as he now called her – had she too returned to the scene of the crime, would have recognised him.

  He had no choice but to name her Judith. Something to do with the Canadian security man threatening to saw the Jewish student’s head off. It was Judith who beheaded Holofernes. True, she was Jewish herself, but her action had a similiar whiff of vengeful Middle Eastern violence about it. Where Treslove came from – call it Hampstead, to save time – people left even their enemies’ heads on their shoulders.

  To be on the safe side he had left his phone and his credit cards at home.

  So what was he doing – inviting her to rough him up again? Come on, Judith, do your worst. Hoping she would rough him up again? (Only this time she would find him, forewarned and forearmed, a tougher proposition.) Or just wanting to confront her, the Jew-hater, eyeball to eyeball, and let fate decide the rest?

  No to any one of those, but maybe yes, in an investigative way, to all of them.

  Somewhere at the back of his disordered mind, too, was forming the resolution to apprehend her, if she so much as showed her face, and effect a citizen’s arrest.

  He clung to the park gates and looked in, breathing the foliage. He could not be light-headed again to will, could not make himself innocent of a knowledge which now crowded out all other thoughts. But had he been innocent a fortnight earlier? Or had he been looking for trouble?

  There’d been Finkler talk at Libor’s, he remembered that. He remembered the old sensation of exclusion, envying the men their animal warmth even as they’d argued routinely on the Finkler question of the hour, each of them saying ‘Oh, here we go’ every time the other spoke, as though mutual mistrust was stamped into Finklers like the name of a seaside resort into rock – Here we go, here we go – just as mutual love appeared to be. So he had their musk on him. Anyone who didn’t especially care for that particular smell would have detected it on him. He suddenly wondered whether it was a mistake not to call on Libor and share a glass of wine with him. Could he hope to reproduce the other evening without having had proximity at least to Libor first?

  He doubled back on himself and rang the bell. No one answered. Libor was out, then, maybe on another date, making himself discuss star signs with a girl too young to have heard of Jane Russell. Unless he was lying up there collapsed across the Bechstein with an emptied bottle of aspirin on the keyboard and a piano-wire noose around his throat, as he, Treslove, would be, had Malkie been his wife and left him all alone in the world.

  His eyes filled with tears, hearing the Schubert in his head. Why hadn’t his father let him play? What had he been afraid of in his son? Morbidity? Finkler’s word. What was so wrong with morbidity?

  He trod his way gingerly past the dangers, spiritual and actual, of Broadcasting House and rounded Nash’s church again. He wasn’t sure he could remember exactly the route he had taken on the night of the assault, but knew he had dawdled among the wholesale clothes showrooms where his father’s cigar shop had been, so he tried up Riding House Street and then back down Mortimer Street towards J. P. Guivier, only he had to make sure he approached the violin shop from the right direction, which necessitated – he thought – returning the way he’d come and staying a little longer on Regent Street before cutting in again. Once off Regent Street he reminded himself to take more notice of shapes in doorways than was his customary practice. He also thought it a good idea to make himself appear more than usually vulnerable, though anyone who knew him would not have noticed any difference either in his gait or general air of agitation.

  The streets were about as busy as they had been a fortnight earlier. The same hairdresser’s and dim sum restaurant were open for late business. The same newsagent’s was still undergoing renovation. But for the nip in the air the nights were identical. Treslove approached J. P. Guivier with his heart in his mouth. Foolish, he knew. The woman who attacked him must have better things to do than wait in the shadows on the off chance he’d return. And for what? She already had his only valuables.

  But since none of it had added up then, there was no reason why it should add up now. What if she regretted what she had done and wanted to give him his valuables back? Or perhaps the mugging was just a taster of what she really had in store in him. A knife in his heart, maybe. A pistol at his head. A saw at his throat. Payback for some imaginary wrong he had done her. Or payback for some real wrong she had suffered at the hands of Finkler with whom she had confused him.

  That possibility was truly frightening – not the being mistaken for Sam Finkler, though that was insult enough, but the being held responsible for something Finkler had done. Treslove didn’t put it past Finkler to hurt a woman and drive her to the edge of madness. He imagined dying for Finkler, lying bleeding on the pavement, unattended, for a crime he had not and could never have committed. His legs went weak under him with the bitter irony of it. An ironical end to his life was not an abstract supposition for Treslove: he apprehended it as he apprehended a looming lamp-post or a falling tree.

  And saw himself kicked out of the way by passers-by, like a Jew’s dog on the streets of Caracas, or Buenos Aires, or Fontenay-sous-Bois, or Toronto.

  He stood before the window of J. P. Guivier admiring the instruments in their cases and the resins, a new satisfying arrangement of which had appeared – packaged like expensive chocolates – since he’d last looked. A hand tapped him on the shoulder – ‘Judith!’ he cried in shock – and the blood left his body.

  FOUR

  1

  At around about this time – give or take half an hour – in a restaurant close by – give or take a quarter of a mile – Treslove’s sons were settling the bill for dinner. They were in the company of their mothers. This was not the first time the two women had met, though they had known nothing of each other’s existence in the months they were carrying Ralph and Alf respectively, or indeed in the years immediately following their sons’ delivery.

  Treslove was no Finkler. He could not lose his heart to more than one woman at a time. He loved too absorbedly for that. But he always knew when he was about to be thrown over and was quick to make provision, where he could, to love absorbedly again. As a consequence of which there was sometimes a brief overlap of new and old. On principle he didn’t mention this to either of the ov
erlapping parties – neither the one who had still not quite left him, nor the one who had not quite taken her place. Women were already hurt enough, in his view; there was no reason to hurt them further. In this, again, he saw himself as different to Finkler who evidently did not bother to conceal his mistresses from his wife. Treslove envied Finkler his mistresses but accepted they were beyond him. Even wives were beyond Treslove. Girlfriends were all he had ever managed. But there was still propriety in keeping overlapping girlfriends apart.

  By the same reasoning he would have kept his sons apart, too, had he not confused the day of his right to have Rodolfo (Treslove didn’t hold with anglicising their names) with the day of his right to have Alfredo. The boys were six and seven, though Treslove couldn’t be expected always to be precise in the matter of which was what. He didn’t see enough of them for that, and in their absence found it easier to conflate them. Was that so serious? They were equally objects of devotion to him. That he merged their names and ages only went to show how very much and without favouritism he loved them both.

  A surprise to each other on the day they met at their father’s apartment, but infinitely preferring playing with someone roughly their own age to kicking a ball around a desolate park with Treslove – who tired easily, was always looking somewhere else, and when he did remember they were there asked too many soulful questions about the state of their mothers’ health – Alf and Ralph begged their father to confuse his visiting rights again.

  The boys talked excitedly of their new half-brothers when they returned home, and soon Treslove was in receipt of unkind letters from his old girlfriends – in the case of Rodolfo’s mother, reproaching him for a retrospective infidelity she wanted it to be clear she was hurt by only in the abstract, and in the case of Alfredo’s, informing him his visiting rights were suspended until he heard otherwise from her lawyers. But eventually the wishes of the boys prevailed over the indolent malice (as Treslove called it) of their mothers, and in time the latter thought that they too might find a bristling sort of comfort in each other’s company, not to say an answer to the question of why not just one woman but two had consented to have a baby by a man they didn’t give a fig for. An inaccurate account, Treslove believed when it was relayed to him, given that consent on the one side implies request on the other, and he had never in his life requested any woman to have his baby. Why would he? The curtain always came down on Treslove’s fantasy of happiness with him crying ‘Mimi!’ or ‘Violetta!’ and kissing the cold dead lips a last goodbye that would leave him inconsolable for ever. He couldn’t have done that with a child there. A child turned a tragic opera into an opera buffa and necessitated at least another act, for which Treslove lacked both the stamina and imagination.