He snorted before he’d finished.
‘Let’s not get into that,’ Alfredo said. ‘You say that just because you are it doesn’t mean that we are. But it does, doesn’t it, a bit?’
‘Depends which bit you’re referring to,’ Rodolfo said, still snorting.
‘You can’t be a bit Jewish,’ Treslove said.
‘Why not? You can be a quarter Indian or one tenth Chinese. Why can’t you be part Jewish? In fact, it would make us half and half, wouldn’t it? Which is considerably more than a bit. I’d call that a lot. I have to say I quite fancy the idea, what about you, Ralph?’
Rodolfo went into an imitation of Alec Guinness being Fagin. ‘I don’t mind if I do, my dears,’ he said, rubbing his hands.
The two boys laughed.
‘Meet one of the half-chosen,’ Alfredo said, extending his hand to his brother.
‘And allow me to introduce you to the other half,’ Rodolfo said.
No, never seen them in my life before, Treslove thought. And wasn’t sure he wanted to again.
My sons the goyim.
3
Out of the blue, Libor received a letter from a woman he hadn’t seen in more than fifty years. She wanted to know if he was still writing his column.
He wrote back to her saying how nice it was to hear from her after all this time but he’d stopped writing his column in 1979.
He wondered how she’d found his address. He’d moved several times since he’d known her. She must have put herself to some trouble to find where he lived now.
He didn’t tell her his wife had died. He couldn’t be sure she even knew he’d been married. And you don’t go mentioning to women you haven’t seen in fifty years, and who have put themselves to trouble to find your address, that you’re a widower.
Hope life has been kind to you, he wrote. It has to me.
After he sent the letter he worried that the melancholy tone would give her a clue. It has to me – there was a dying fall in that. It invited the question, And does it go on being kind to you? On top of which it somehow painted him as frail: a man in need of kindness.
Only afterwards did it occur to him that he hadn’t asked the reason for her enquiry. Are you still writing your column? Why did she want to know?
That was rude of me, he wrote on the back of a postcard. Did you enquire about my column with a purpose?
After he posted the postcard – it was a Rembrandt self-portrait, the artist as an old man – he feared she would think he had chosen it to solicit her pity. So he sent her another one of King Arthur in full regalia and in the bloom of youth. No message. Just his signature. She would understand.
Oh, and nothing meant by it, his phone number.
That was how he came to be sitting in the bar of the University Women’s Club in Mayfair, clinking glasses of house champagne with the only woman other than Malkie he had ever lost his heart to. A little. Emmy Oppenstein. He had thought she’d said Oppenheimer when they first met in 1950 or thereabouts. That wasn’t the reason he had fallen for her, but without doubt it added to her attractiveness. Libor was no snob but he was a child of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and names and titles mattered to him. But by the time he’d realised his mistake they had slept together and he was interested in her for herself.
Or at least he thinks he was.
He sees nothing in her face that he remembers and of course nothing in her figure. A woman in her eighties does not have a figure. He intended no unkindness by that. To himself he said he meant no more than that at eighty a woman is entitled at last to be free of being ogled for her shape.
He could see that she had been beautiful in a Slav way, with wide apart ice-grey eyes and cheekbones on which an unwary man might cut himself going for a kiss. But it wasn’t a beauty he remembered. Would it be the same sitting with Malkie, he wondered, had he left her fifty years ago and were she living still? Had Malkie retained her beauty for him because she’d retained it for a fact, for everyone who saw her, or had he kept her beauty alive in his eyes by feasting on it every day? And if so, did that make her beauty illusory?
Emmy Oppenstein was out of the question for him. He saw that at once. He hadn’t gone to meet her with the intention of courting her again, he absolutely had not. But had he, had he, he would have been disappointed. As he hadn’t, he was not disappointed, how could he be, but had he . . .
Not disappointed because she had worn badly. For most decidedly she had not; she was, if anything, remarkable for her age – alert, elegant, well dressed in a fluffy woven suit, which Malkie had taught him to recognise as Chanel, and even wore high heels. For her age a woman couldn’t have looked better. But for her age . . . Libor wasn’t looking for a woman to replace Malkie, but had he been looking for a woman to replace Malkie the brutal truth was that this woman was, well, too old.
Libor was not blind to the cruel absurdity of such thoughts. He was an elfin man with no hair, his trousers didn’t always reach his shoes, his ties had lain in drawers for half a century and had lost their colour, he was liver-spotted from head to foot – who the hell was he to find any woman too old? What is more, where he had shrunk, she must have grown taller, because he had no memory of ever lying with a woman this size. A thought which he could see, as she surveyed him, mirrored hers exactly. No doubt about it: if she was out of the question for him, he was still more out of the question for her.
And all this Libor had decided in the moment of their shaking hands.
She was, or she had been, a school governor, a justice of the peace, the chair of an eminent Jewish charity, the mother of five children, and a bereavement counsellor. Libor noticed that she left the bereavement counselling to the end. Was that because she knew of Malkie and of her death? Was that why she had written to him? Did she want to help him through?
‘You must be wondering –’ she began.
‘I am wondering but I am also marvelling,’ Libor said. ‘You look so wonderfully well.’
She smiled at him. ‘Life has been kind to me,’ she said, ‘as you wrote that it had been to you.’
She touched his hand. Rock steady hers, as quivery as a jellyfish his. Her nails had been freshly painted. She wore, as far as he could tell, at least three engagement rings. But one might have been her mother’s and another her grandmother’s. And then again they might have been all hers.
He enjoyed a retrospective pride in his own manliness for having slept with a woman as impressive as she was. He wished he could remember her but he couldn’t. Time and Malkie, maybe just Malkie, had wiped out all erotic memories.
So did that mean he hadn’t slept with her at all? Libor feared losing the life he had lived. He forgot things – places he had visited, people he had known, thoughts that were once important to him. So would he soon lose Malkie? And would it then be as though she too had never existed erotically (eloticshrly) for him? As though she had never existed at all in fact.
He told Emmy about Malkie, as he imagined to keep her alive a little longer.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said when he had finished. ‘I had heard something.’
‘Would you drink to her with me?’ he said. ‘You can’t drink to her memory because you didn’t know her, but you can drink to my memory of her.’
‘To your memory of her,’ she said.
‘And you?’
She lowered her gaze. ‘Yes, the same.’
‘Then I drink to you and your memories,’ Libor said.
And so they sat and sipped champagne together companionably, both bereft, while single university ladies, some probably older than Malkie was when she died, drifted by them lost in thought, or slowly climbed the stairs to their bedrooms for an afternoon sleep in their London club.
Be a good place to die if you were a single woman, Libor thought. Or a single man.
‘I’m flattered,’ he said after a while, ‘that you knew I had a column, even if you hadn’t noticed I’d stopped writing it a century ago.’
‘It’s hard to kee
p up,’ she said, unembarrassed.
Had she ever been embarrassed? Libor wondered. Had she been embarrassed when he’d undressed her, that’s if he ever had? More likely, looking at her now, that she’d undressed him.
‘I’ll tell you why I contacted you,’ she continued. ‘I’ve been writing to all my friends who have a public voice.’
Libor dismissed the idea of his having a public voice, but that only seemed to make her impatient. She shifted in her chair. Gracefully. And shook her hair. Grey, but not an elderly grey. Grey as though it were a colour of her choosing.
‘To what end?’ he asked. He recognised the public woman, the charity chief, used to commandeering the airwaves of men’s attention for causes she cared about.
And then she told him, without tears, without false sentiment, that her twenty-two-year-old grandson had been stabbed in the face and blinded by an Algerian man who had shouted ‘God is great’ in Arabic, and ‘Death to all Jews’.
‘I’m very sorry,’ Libor said. ‘Did this happen in Algeria?’
‘It happened here, Libor.’
‘In London?’
‘Yes, in London.’
He didn’t know what further questions to ask. Had the Algerian been arrested? Did he offer any explanation for what he’d done? How did he know the boy was Jewish? Did it happen in an area known to be dangerous?
But what was the point of any of them? Libor had been lucky in love but in politics he was from a part of the world that expected nothing good of anybody. Jew-hating was back – of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn’t go away. There was nowhere for them to go to. They were indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.
It wasn’t even the Algerian’s fault in the end. He just did what history had told him to do. God is great . . . kill all Jews. It was hard to take offence – unless, of course, the blinded boy was your child or grandson.
‘I’m unable to find anything to say that isn’t banal,’ he told her. ‘It’s terrible.’
‘Libor,’ she said, touching his hand again, ‘it will be more terrible still, unless people speak up. People in your profession for a start.’
He wanted to laugh. ‘People in my profession? People in my profession interview famous film stars. And I’m not even in my profession any more.’
‘You don’t write at all now?’
‘Not a word, except for the odd poem to Malkie.’
‘But you must know people still, in journalism, in the film industry.’
He wondered what the film industry had to do with anything. Was she hoping he knew someone who would make a film about the attack upon her grandson?
But she had another reason for her specificity, for seeking out a journalist of Libor’s sort, with Libor’s connections. She named a film director of whom Libor had assuredly heard but had never met – not his sort of film director, not Hollywood, not show business – whose recent comments, she believed, were nothing short of scandalous. Libor must have read them.
He hadn’t. He wasn’t up with the gossip.
‘It’s not gossip,’ she explained. ‘He has said he understands why some people might want to blind my grandson.’
‘Because they’re deranged?’
‘No. Because of Israel. Because of Gaza, he says he understands why people hate Jews and want to kill them.’
For the first time, her hand began to shake.
‘Well, I can see why one might want to trace cause and effect,’ Libor said.
‘Cause and effect! Where’s the cause in the sentence “The Jews are a murderous people who deserve all they get”? In the Jews or in the author of the sentence? I can tell you the effect, but where’s the cause, Libor?’
‘Ah, Emmy, now you are turning logician on me.’
‘Libor, listen to me.’ She bent her ice-grey eyes upon him. ‘Everything has a cause, I know that. But he says he understands. What does understand mean here? Is he simply saying he can see why people are driven to do appalling and terrible things? Or is he saying something else? Is he saying that there is a justice in it, that my grandson’s blindness is justified by Gaza? Or that Gaza vindicates in advance whatever crimes are committed in its name? Can no wickedness now be done to any Jew of any age living anywhere that doesn’t have Gaza as its reasoning? This isn’t tracing an effect back to its cause, Libor, this is applauding the effect. I understand why people hate Jews today, he says, this man of culture. From which it must follow that I understand whatever actions they take in expression of their hatred. Dear God, will we now understand the Shoah as justified by German abhorrence of the Jews? Or worse, as retrospective justice for what the Jews were going to do in Gaza? Where does it end, this understanding?’
Libor knew where it ended. Where it always ends.
He shook his head, as though to contradict his own bleak thoughts.
‘So I ask you,’ Emmy Oppenstein went on, ‘as I am asking as many people in your profession as I know, to speak out against this man, whose sphere, like yours, is the imagination, but who abuses the sacred trust of the imagination.’
‘You cannot tell the imagination where it can and cannot go, Emmy.’
‘No. But you can insist that where it goes, it goes with generosity and fairness.’
‘No, you can’t, Emmy. Fairness is not a province of the imagin-ation. Fairness is the business of a tribunal, which is not the same animal.’
‘I don’t mean that sort of fairness, and you know it. I’m not talking balance. But what is the imagination for if not to grasp how the world feels to those who don’t think what you think?’
‘But isn’t that the very understanding you cannot forgive in your film man?’
‘No, Libor, it is not. His sympathy is the simple expression of political allegiance. He understands what his politics lead him to understand. He agrees – that’s all. Poof!’ She clicked her fingers. A thing worth no more of her time than that. ‘Which means all he understands is himself, and his own propensity to hate.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing if you don’t call that propensity what it is. People hate Jews because they hate Jews, Libor. They don’t need an excuse. The trigger isn’t the violence in Gaza. The trigger, in so far as they need a trigger – and many don’t – is the violent, partial, inflammatory reporting of it. The trigger is the inciting word.’
He felt that she was blaming him. Not his profession – him.
‘Every story is a distortion, Emmy. Will your way of telling it be any more impartial than his?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it will. I see villains on all sides. I see two people with competing claims, now justified, now not. I spread the wrong.’
A couple of women settled at a table opposite, both two decades younger than Emmy, Libor guessed. He thought in decades now – ten years his lowest unit of measurement. They smiled at him. He smiled back. They looked like vice chancellors. Something about the length of their skirts. Two vice chancellors meeting to discuss their respective universities. He could live here, if they’d have him, as a sort of mascot. He would promise not to make a nuisance of himelf, not to play his radio late at night and not to talk about Jews. Take tea and biscuits with lady professors and rectors. Discuss declining standards of written and spoken English. At least they’d know who Jane Russell was.
He changed his mind. They wouldn’t. And anyway, they weren’t Malkie.
Villains on all sides, yes. And the word. What had she just said about the word? Its power to incite. Well, that had never been a journey any of his words had been on. Excite, maybe. Incite, never. He lacked the seriousness.
‘There is a big difference,’ he reminded her, as though half ashamed of what he had done with his life, ‘between writing about Anita Ekberg’s chest and the rights and wrongs of Zionism.’
But that wasn’t the category of nicety she had me
t him to discuss. ‘I tell you where the big difference is, Libor. The big difference is between understanding – ha! – and acquittal. Only God can give absolution. You know that.’
He wanted to say he was sympathetic but couldn’t help. Because he was in no position to help and because none of it mattered. For none of it did matter. But finding the right form of words for saying to Emmy Oppenstein that none of it mattered was beyond him.
‘It’s not Kristallnacht,’ he thought.
But he couldn’t say that.
He’d had his Kristallnacht. Malkie dying – without God’s absolution of either of them, as far as he could see – what worse was there?
But he couldn’t say that either.
‘I’ll speak to a few people I know,’ was the best he could do.
But she knew he wouldn’t.
In return – in return for nothing but an old affection – she gave him the number of a bereavement counsellor. He told her he didn’t require a bereavement counsellor. She reached out and put a hand on each of his cheeks. This gesture meant that everyone needed a bereavement counsellor. Don’t think of it as counselling or therapy. Think of it as conversation.
So what was this? Was this not conversation?
A different kind of conversation, Libor. And it wouldn’t do, she explained, to be counselling him herself.
He was unable to decide whether he was disappointed that it wouldn’t do for her to counsel him or not. To know that he would have had to locate the part of himself in which expectation resides. And he couldn’t.
SEVEN
1
The agreement had been that Treslove would take his sons on holiday and then see.
Heads he’d resume his previous existence, forget all the rubbish, go out looking like Brad Pitt and return home, alone, at a reasonable hour in the evening to his Hampstead flat that wasn’t in Hampstead.
Tails he’d move in with Hephzibah.
‘I don’t want to be making room and then have you changing your mind in a fortnight,’ she told him. ‘I’m not saying this is for life, God help us both, but if you’re going to seriously disrupt me, disrupt me because you want to, not because you’re at a loose end.’
The Finkler Question Page 18