The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘That doesn’t make you Jewish. Wagner listened to operas and wanted to play the violin. Hitler loved opera and wanted to play the violin. When Mussolini visited Hitler in the Alps they played the Bach double violin concerto together. “And now let’s kill some Jews,” Hitler said when they’d finished. You don’t have to be Jewish to like music.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘That you don’t have to be Jewish to like music? Of course it’s true.’

  ‘No, about Hitler and Mussolini.’

  ‘Who cares if it’s true. You can’t libel a dead Fascist. Listen, if you were what this imaginary woman said you were, and you’d have wanted to play the violin, you’d have played the violin. Nothing would have stopped you.’

  ‘I obeyed my father. Doesn’t that prove something? I respected his wishes.’

  ‘Obeying your father doesn’t make you a Jew. Obeying your mother would make you more of one. While your father’s not wanting you to play the violin almost certainly makes him not a Jew. If there’s one thing all Jewish fathers agree on –’

  ‘Sam would say that’s stereotyping. And you leave out the possibility that my father didn’t want me to play the violin for the reason that he didn’t want me to be like him.’

  ‘He was a violinist?’

  ‘Yes. Like you. See?’

  ‘And why wouldn’t he have wanted you to be like him? Was he that bad a violinist?’

  ‘Libor, I’m trying to be serious. He might have had his reasons.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But in what way would he have wanted you to be different from him? Was he unhappy? Did he suffer?’

  Treslove thought about it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He took things hard. My mother’s death broke his heart. But there was something broken-hearted about him before that. As though he knew what was coming and had been preparing himself for it all his life. He could have been protecting me from deep feelings, saving me from something he feared in himself, something undesirable, dangerous even.’

  ‘The Jews aren’t the only broken-hearted people in the world, Julian.’

  Treslove looked disappointed to hear it. He blew out his cheeks, breathing hard, and shook his head, appearing to be disagreeing with himself as much as with Libor.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘In all the time I was growing up I didn’t once hear the word Jew. Don’t you think that’s strange? Nor, in all the time I was growing up, did I meet a Jew in my father’s company, in my father’s shop, or in my parents’ home. Every other word I heard. Every other kind of person I met. Hottentots I met in my father’s shop. Tongans I met. But never a Jew. Not until I met Sam did I even know what a Jew looked like. And when I brought him home my father told me he didn’t think he made a suitable friend. “That Finkler,” he used to ask me, “that Finkler, are you still kicking about with him?” Explain that.’

  ‘Easy. He was an anti-Semite.’

  ‘If he’d been an anti-Semite, Libor, Jew would have been the only word I heard.’

  ‘And your mother? If you are, then it has to be through her.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Libor, I was a Gentile five minutes ago, now you’re telling me I can only be Jewish through the right channels. Will you be checking to see if I’m circumcised next? I don’t know about my mother. I can only tell you she didn’t look Jewish.’

  ‘Julian, you don’t look Jewish. Forgive me, I don’t mean it as an insult, but you are the least Jewish-looking person I have ever met, and I have met Swedish cowboys and Eskimo stuntmen and Prussian film directors and Polish Nazis working as set builders in Alaska. I would stake my life on it that no Jewish gene has been near the gene of a member of your family for ten thousand years and ten thousand years ago there weren’t any Jews. Be grateful. A man can live a good and happy life and not be Jewish.’ He paused. ‘Look at Sam Finkler.’

  They both laughed wildly and wickedly at this.

  ‘Cruel,’ Treslove said, taking another drink and banging his chest. ‘But that only serves my argument. These things are not to be decided superficially. You can be called Finkler and fall short of the mark; or you can be called Treslove –’

  ‘Which is not exactly a Jewish name –’

  ‘Exactly, and yet still come up to scratch. Wouldn’t it have made sense, if my father didn’t want me to know we were Jews, or for anyone else to know we were Jews for that matter, to have changed our name to the least Jewish one he could find? Treslove, for Christ’s sake. It screams “Not Jewish” at you. I rest my case.’

  ‘I’ll tell how you can rest your case, Mr Perry Mason. You can rest your case by stopping these ridiculous speculations and asking somebody. Ask an uncle, ask one of your father’s friends, ask anyone who knew your family. This is a mystery that is solvable with a phone call.’

  ‘No one knew my family. We kept ourselves to ourselves. I have no uncles. My father had no brothers or sisters, my mother neither. It was what attracted them to each other. They told me about it. Two orphans, as good as. Two babes in the wood. You tell me what that’s a metaphor for.’

  Libor shook his head and topped up their whiskies. ‘It’s a metaphor for your not wanting to know the truth because you prefer to make it up. OK, make it up. You’re Jewish. Trog es gezunterhait.’ And he raised his glass.

  He sat down and crossed his little feet. He had changed into a pair of ancien régime slippers which bore his initials, woven in gold thread. A present from Malkie, Treslove surmised. Wasn’t everything a present from Malkie? In these slippers Libor looked even more wispy and transparent, fading away. And yet to Treslove he was enviably secure. At home. Himself. In love still with the only woman he had ever loved. On his mantelpiece photographs of the two of them being married by a rabbi, Malkie veiled, Libor in a skullcap. Deep rooted, ancient, knowledgeable about themselves. Musical because music spoke to the romance of their origins.

  Looking again in admiration at Libor’s slippers he saw that the initials on one read LS while on the other they read ES. That was right of course; Libor had changed his own name, in his Hollywood years, from Libor Sevcik to Egon Slick. It was what Jews did, wasn’t it, what Jews had to do? So why wasn’t Libor/Egon more sympathetic to Teitelbaum/Treslove?

  He swirled his whisky round in his glass. Bohemian Crystal. His father too had favoured crystal whisky glasses but they had been somehow different. More formal. Probably more expensive. Colder to the lip. That, essentially, was what the difference amounted to – temperature. Libor and Malkie – even poor Malkie dead – were somehow warmed by their submersion in a heated past. In comparison, Treslove felt that he had been brought up to play on the surface of life, like those vegetables that grow above ground, where it is chill.

  Libor was smiling at him. ‘Now you’re a Jew, come to dinner,’ he said. ‘Come to dinner next week – not with Sam – and I’ll introduce you to some people who would be pleased to meet you.’

  ‘You make it sound sinister. Some people. Which people? Watchmen of the Jewish faith who will scrutinise my credentials? I have no credentials. And why wouldn’t they have been pleased to meet me before I was Jewish?’

  ‘That’s good, Julian. Getting touchy is a good sign. You can’t be Jewish if you can’t do touchy.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll come if I can bring the woman who attacked me. She’s my credentials.’

  Libor shrugged. ‘Bring her. Find her and bring her.’

  He made the possibility sound so remote he could have been talking about Treslove finding God.

  Something that worried Treslove ever so slightly as he lay on his bed, struggling for the thread that would wind him into sleep: Libor’s story about Heifetz at the Royal Albert Hall . . . Wasn’t it, in its – he didn’t have the word: its preciousness, its preciosity, its oh-so-Jewish cultural-vulturalness – wasn’t it a bit uncomfortably close to Libor’s story about Malkie and Horowitz at the Carnegie?

  They could conceivably both be true, but then again, the echo, once one heard it, was disconcerti
ng.

  True or not true, as family mythologies went, these were enviably top-drawer. It wasn’t Elvis Presley whom Malkie had called Maestro. It was Horowitz. As Egon Slick, Libor had put in half a lifetime rubbing shoulders with the vulgarly famous, and yet when the chips were down, when it was necessary to impress, he pulled his cards, without blushing, from another deck. It wasn’t Liza Minnelli or Madonna he was claiming as his cousin – it was Heifetz. You had to place a high value on intellectual ritziness to want Horowitz and Heifetz at your party. And who did intellectually ritzy as Finklers did intellectually ritzy?

  Yes, you had to hand it to them . . . they were brazen, they had cheek, but it was cheek predicated on a refined musical education.

  Finding his thread, Treslove drifted into a deep sleep.

  3

  Although there had been little commerce between the Finklers and the Tresloves – not counting the commerce between Tyler Finkler and Julian Treslove – the Finkler boys and the Treslove boys had on occasions met, and certainly Alfredo and Rodolfo knew of Finkler well enough through his books and television to enjoy thinking of him as their famous uncle Sam. Whether Sam had any interest in thinking of them as his charming nephews Alf and Ralph was another matter. It was Treslove’s suspicion that he didn’t know either of them from Adam.

  In this, as in so many other matters related and indeed unrelated to Finkler, Treslove was wrong. It was Treslove who didn’t know either of his sons from Adam.

  Finkler, as it happened, was well aware of his old friend’s sons and felt warmly disposed to them, not impossibly because he was Treslove’s rival in fatherhood and unclehood as well as in everything else, and wanted to be seen to be making up to the boys for what their real father hadn’t given them. Making up to them and giving them a higher standard to judge by. Alf was the one he knew better, on account of an incident at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne – the gist of it being that Finkler had calculated on the Grand being a reliably romantic and discreet place to take a woman for a Friday night and Saturday morning – seagulls outside the windows and the other guests being too old to be able to place him or to do anything about it if they had – but he hadn’t calculated on finding Alf playing the piano during dinner.

  This was two years before Tyler’s death, two years before her illness had been diagnosed even, so his misbehaviour was not of the utterly unforgivable sort. Had he only known it, Tyler was herself misbehaving at the time, with Treslove as it happened, so that too, weighing one thing against another, took fractionally from his criminality. Even so, to go over to the piano to ask the pianist to play ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’ for Ronit Kravitz and to discover he was talking to Treslove’s son Alfredo was a misfortune Finkler would rather have avoided.

  He didn’t register Alfredo immediately – where you don’t expect to find people you don’t know well it is easy not to recognise them – but Alfredo, having the advantage of seeing him frequently on television, recognised Finkler at once.

  ‘Uncle Sam,’ he said. ‘Wow!’

  Finkler thought about saying ‘Do I know you?’ but doubted he could put the words together with any conviction.

  ‘Ahem!’ he said instead, deciding to accept that he’d been caught red-handed and to play the naughty uncle about it. Given the incontrovertibility of Ronit Kravitz’s décolletage, there was certainly no point in saying he was in Eastbourne for a business meeting

  Alfredo looked across at the table Finkler had vacated and said, ‘Auntie Tyler couldn’t be with you tonight then?’

  On the spot, Finkler realised that he had never liked Alfredo. He wouldn’t have sworn that he had ever truly liked Alfredo’s father either, but school friends are school friends. Alfredo closely resembled his father, but had turned himself into an older version of him, wearing round gold-rimmed glasses which he probably didn’t need and plastering his hair into a kind of greasy cowl that gave him the air of a 1920s Berlin gigolo. Only without the sex appeal.

  ‘I was going to ask you to play a tune for my companion,’ Finkler said, ‘but in the circumstances –’

  ‘Oh, no, I’ll play it,’ Alfredo said. ‘I’m here for that. What would she like – “Happy Birthday to You”?’

  For some reason Finkler was unable to ask for the song he had been sent to ask for. Had he forgotten it in the embarrassment of being found out, or was he punishing Ronit for being the cause of that embarrassment?

  ‘ “My Yiddishe Mama”,’ he said. ‘If you know that.’

  ‘Play it all the time,’ Alfredo said.

  And he did, more derisively than Finkler had ever heard it played, with crude honky-tonk syncopations followed by absurdly drawn-out slow passages, almost like a fugue, as though it was a mockery of motherhood, not a celebration of it.

  ‘That’s not “Stars Fell on Alabama”,’ Ronit Kravitz said. Other than her décolletage, which was bigger than she was, there was little to observe on Ronit Kravitz’s person. Under the table she wore high-heeled shoes with diamantés on them, but these were not visible. And though her hair was a beautiful blue-black, catching light from the chandeliers, it too, like every eye, fell into the boundless golden chasm which she carried before her as a proud disabled person carries an infirmity. The Manawatu Gorge was how Finkler thought of it when he wasn’t in love with her, as he wasn’t in love with her now.

  ‘It’s his interpretation,’ he said. ‘I’ll hum it to you the way you like it later.’

  It was a lesson he just seemed unable to learn: that the company of preposterously sexy women always makes a man look a fool. Too long the legs, too high the skirt, too exposed the breasts, and it’s laughter you inspire as the consort, not envy. For a moment he longed to be at home with Tyler, until he remembered that she was showing too much of everything these days as well. And she was a mother.

  He didn’t once wink at Alfredo across the dining room, or take him aside at the end of the evening and slip a fifty-pound note into the top pocket of his dinner jacket with a request to, you know, keep this between them. As a practical philosopher, Finkler was hot on the etiquette of treachery and falsehood. It was not appropriate, he thought, to strike up male collusion with the child of an old friend, let alone embroil him in an older generation’s way of doing adultery, laughable or otherwise. He’d said ‘Ahem’. That would have to suffice. But they did run into each other in the men’s lavatory.

  ‘Another night at the Copacabana knocked on the head,’ Alfredo said, wearily zipping himself up and replastering his hair in the mirror. That done, he popped on a perky pork-pie hat which at a stroke took away all suggestion of Berlin and made Finkler think of Bermondsey.

  His father’s boy, all right, Finkler thought, capable of looking like everyone and no one.

  ‘You don’t like your job?’

  ‘Like it?! You should try playing the piano to people who are here to eat. Or die. Or both. They’re too busy listening to their own stomachs to hear a note I play. They wouldn’t know if I was giving them Chopsticks or Chopin. I make background noise. Do you know what I do to entertain myself while I’m playing? I make up stories about the diners. This one’s screwing that one, that one’s screwing this one – which is hard to do in a joint like this, I can tell you, where most of them won’t have had sex since before I was born.’

  Finkler didn’t point out that he was an exception to this rule. ‘You hide your discontent well,’ he lied.

  ‘Do I? That’s because I vanish. I’m somewhere else. In my head I’m playing at Caesar’s Palace.’

  ‘Well, you hide that well, too.’

  ‘It’s a job.’

  ‘We all settle for just a job,’ Finkler told him, as though to camera.

  ‘Is that how you see what you do?’

  ‘Mostly, yes.’

  ‘How sad for you, then, as well.’

  ‘As well as for you, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, as well as for me, but I’m young. There’s time for anything to happen to me. I might make it to Casear’s P
alace yet. I meant how sad as well for Dad.’

  ‘Is he unhappy?’

  ‘What do you think? You’ve known him like for ever. Does he look a satisfied man to you?’

  ‘No, but he never did.’

  ‘Didn’t he? Never – ha! That figures. I can’t imagine him young. He’s like a man who’s always been old.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Finkler said, ‘I think of him as a man who’s always been young. All to do with when one meets a person, I guess.’

  Under his pert pork-pie hat, Alfredo rolled his eyes, as though to say Don’t go deep on me, Uncle Sam.

  What he actually said was, ‘We don’t hit it off especially – I think he secretly prefers my half-brother – but I’m sorry for him, doing that stupid doubling thing, especially if it all feels to him the way it all feels to me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, at your age the glass is half full.’

  ‘No, it’s at your age that the glass is half full. At my age we don’t want half a glass, full or empty. In fact we don’t want a glass, end of. We want a tankard and we want it overflowing. We are the have-everything generation, remember.’

  ‘No, we’re the have-everything generation.’

  ‘Well we’re the pissed generation then.’

  Finkler smiled at him and felt a new book coming on. The Glass Half Empty: Schopenhauer for Teen Binge Drinkers.

  It wasn’t a cynical calculation. Quite unexpectedly, he experienced a vicarious paternal rush for the boy. Perhaps it was a resurfacing of something he had felt for Treslove all those years ago. Perhaps it was usurpation ecstasy – the joy that comes with being a father to someone else’s children – the mirror image of the joyous role Treslove was enjoying that very hour – being a husband to someone else’s wife, even if that wife insisted on turning away from him and fiddling with his penis behind her back, as though having trouble with the fastening of a complicated brassiere.

  Before they left the lavatory together Finkler handed Alfredo his card. ‘Give me a ring sometime when you’re in town,’ he said. ‘You’re not stuck down here all the time, are you?’