The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  But the other side of all this was that she didn’t want to worry him. The bacon smearers had been back. This time they had painted Death to Jewishes on the walls. Jewishes was Muslim hate talk. There were more and more reports of small children being abused as Jewishes in mixed schools. Hephzibah considered this a far more seriously menacing development than the swastikas with which white thugs defaced Jewish cemeteries. There was an idle half-heartedness in swastikas. It was more a memory of hate than hate itself. Whereas Jewishes! – the word had a terrible ring to it, to her. Jewishes were creeping things. They were made low and viscous by their faith. If you trod on them their Jewishesness would ooze out of them. It was an abuse that went far deeper than Yid or kike. It was directed not at individual Jews but at Jewish essence. And of course it came from a part of the world where the conflict was already soaked in blood, where hatreds were bitter and perhaps ineradicable.

  Libor, too, had been telling her things she would rather not have known. Passing stories of violence and malice on to her as though that was the only way he could empty his own system of them. ‘Do you know what the Swedish papers are saying?’ he asked her. ‘They are saying Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians in order to sell their organs on the international organ market. Remind you of anything?’

  Hephzibah bit her lip. She had been through this already at work.

  But Libor didn’t have colleagues he could exchange fears with. ‘It’s the blood libel,’ he told her, as though she needed telling.

  ‘Yes, Libor,’ she said.

  ‘They’ve got us feasting on blood again,’ he said. ‘And they’ve got us making big money out of it. We could be back living in the Middle Ages. But then what else can you expect from Swedes who have never left the Middle Ages!’

  She didn’t want to hear but she heard it every day. The roll-call of Jewish crimes. And the roll-call of answering acts of violence.

  Only the other day a security guard at a Jewish museum in Washington had been shot. This sent a little shock of fear through all those who ran Jewish public institutions. Emails of anxious solidarity began to be exchanged. They were fair game – that was the consensus. There was no stopping a lunatic striking anywhere, of course. But there was much in the currency of contemporary Israel-hating for lunatics to latch on to. There had been spillage, from regional conflict to religious hatred, there could be no doubt of that. Jews were again the problem. After a period of exceptional quiet, anti-Semitism was becoming again what it had always been – an escalator that never stopped, and which anyone could hop on at will.

  In keeping this from Treslove, not mentioning the guard who had been shot, not telling him about the emails, not passing on what Libor told her – though it was not impossible Libor was telling him himself – Hephzibah recognised that she was protecting him as she would have protected a parent or a child. Though more a parent, in that she was being careful of Jewish susceptibilities. She would have done the same for her father had he been alive. ‘Don’t tell your father, it will kill him,’ her mother would have said. Just as her father would have said, ‘Don’t tell your mother, it will kill her.’

  That’s what Jews did. They kept terrible news from one another. And now she was doing it with Treslove.

  5

  Finkler, who did not dream, had a dream.

  People were punching his father in the stomach.

  It had been friendly at first. His father was in the shop, entertaining customers. Go on, harder, harder. Do I feel anything? Not a tickle. And I had a cancer there two years ago. Impossible to believe, I know, but true. Ha ha!

  But then the atmosphere had changed. His father wasn’t joking any more. And his customers weren’t laughing with him. They had forced him to the floor of his shop where he lay among ripped cartons of sunglasses and punctured cases of deodorant spray. The shop always looked as though there had just been a delivery. Boxes remained unopened on the floor for weeks. Toothbrushes and babies’ dummies and combs and home perms lay where they had fallen or simply been left where the suppliers had placed them. ‘Who needs shelves when you’ve got a perfectly good floor?’ the comedian-chemist would say while grubbing about on his hands and knees, wiping whatever it was that a customer had asked for on his lab coat. It was his theatre, not a pharmacy. He performed there. But this time the chaos was not of his own making. Those people not punching him were pulling things from the shelves. Not looting them, just throwing them about as though they were not worth stealing.

  They had knocked his fedora off too, though in real life he never wore it in the shop. His fedora was for going to the synagogue in.

  Finkler, concealed in a corner of his dream, waited for his father to call for help.

  Samuel, Samuel, gvald!

  He was curious about himself, curious to see what he would do. But no cry for help came.

  It was when the kicking started that Finkler woke.

  He hadn’t even been in bed. He had fallen asleep in front of his computer.

  He was anxious about the following day. He had a speaking engagement with Tamara Krausz and two others in a hall in Holborn. The usual subject. Two against, two for. Normally he did these in his sleep. But his sleep was not a good place for him at the moment. He knew what he would say at the public meeting. And there was little to fear from those who opposed him. Or from the audience. Audiences were hungry to hear what Finkler told them, whatever the subject, on account of his being on television, but in the matter of Palestine they were as empty buckets. That didn’t mean they hadn’t made their minds up. They had. But they sought Finkler’s confirmation. A thinking Jew attacking Jews was a prize. People paid to hear that. So nothing to agitate him there. It was Tamara Krausz who made him jumpy.

  He didn’t trust himself with her. He didn’t mean romantically. She was more Treslove’s kind of woman than she was his. He remembered his friend running off a list of all the fraught women he had fallen for. They sounded like the string section of a women’s orchestra, or rather a women’s orchestra that had nothing but a string section in it. His nerves vibrated just listening to Treslove’s descriptions. ‘Not for me,’ he’d said, sucking his teeth. Now here he was allowing Tamara Krausz to run her bow across his spinal cord.

  He wondered if there was any way he could ask her to leave him alone. She would deny, of course, that she had done anything to him. He was flattering himself if he supposed she as much as noticed him as a man outside his professional capacity as fellow ASHamee. She had made no play for him. If he imagined her screaming in his arms, the drama was entirely of his own making.

  True, as far as it went, but the screaming he anticipated was not to be confused with the sounds a vain man fancies he can coax out of a sexually frustrated woman. The screams he heard in advance of Tamara Krausz actually screaming them were ideological. Zionism was her demon lover, not Finkler. She could not, in her fascinated, never quite sufficiently reciprocated hatred of Zionism, think about anything else. Which is how things are when you’re in love.

  Finkler’s fault, if Tamara had only to say ‘West Bank’ or ‘Gaza’ to set his nerves on edge. Finkler’s fault, if the word ‘occupation’ or ‘trauma’ on Tamara Krausz’s inappositely submissive lips – moist like a harlot’s in the middle of her small, anxious face – inflamed him almost to madness. He knew what would happen if by some mischance or mutual misunderstanding they ended up in bed together and she screamed the dialectic of her anti-Zionism in his ear – he would come into her six or seven times and then kill her. Slice off her tongue and then slit through her throat.

  Which might have been the very thing she was referring to when she spoke of the breakdown of the Jewish mind, the Final Solution causing Jews to go demented and seek final solutions of their own, the violence begot of violence. Indeed, Finkler would have done no more than illustrate her thesis.

  Was this not the very thing she sought? Kill me, you demented Jew bastard, and prove me right.

  The strange thing about all this was that
she had not yet, either in his hearing, or in any article of hers that he had read, said a word with which he disagreed. She was more sold on psychic disintegration than he was, and more trusting of Israel’s enemies – Finkler felt able to inveigh against the Jewish state without having to make friends with Arabs: as a philosopher he found human nature flawed on both sides of every divide – but otherwise their diagnoses concurred at every point. It was the way she put it that irked and excited him. It was the rise and fall of her voice. And it was her methodology, which was to quote whoever said something that supported her, and then to ignore them when they said something different.

  Again as a philosopher, Finkler was bound to condemn such a practice. It was the totality of a person’s thought one should adduce in argument, not stray bullets of opinion that just happened to suit yours. This made him wary of her personally, as well. You might inadvertently whisper something to her about one subject which she would quote against you on another. I can think only of you, I can hear only you, I can see only you, he might say to her in the dead of night, and she would bring it up it at an ASHamed Jews meeting as proof that his concentration had begun to wander and that he was no longer single-minded in his commitment to the group.

  It felt like spite. As though she had got wind of something the Jewish people had said about her – in the dorm after lights out – and was now hell-bent, by fair means or foul, on paying them back.

  He put on a black suit and a red tie. Normally he spoke from platforms in an open-necked shirt. On this occasion he wanted to be formidable in appearance as well as content. Or maybe he was concerned to protect his throat, confusing his with hers.

  They took their places next to each other on the platform. He was surprised to note how little of her there was below the desk; how short her legs were, and how small her feet. As he inspected her legs he was aware of her inspecting his. How long they are, she must have thought, and how big his feet. She made him feel ungainly. He hoped he made her feel insubstantial.

  At the other end of the table were two establishment Jews. Men on the boards of charities and synagogues, watchdogs of the community, custodians of the Jewish family and the good name of Israel, and therefore Finkler’s natural enemies. They didn’t mix, the watchmen Jews and the insurrectionary Jews of questions and ideas. One of them reminded Finkler of his father when he was out of the shop, praying or talking to other Jews who shared his communal concerns. He had that same look of worldly acumen combined with an untried innocence that comes with believing that God still took a particular interest in the Jewish people. Now protecting them as He protected no one else, now punishing them more ferociously than He punished any other of His creatures. The communal solipsism of the Jews. They blink with the ongoing wonder of it all, such men, while driving a hard bargain.

  Tamara Krausz leaned into him. ‘I see they’ve dug out the most hysterical ones they could find,’ she whispered. Her contempt was like fine oil sliding into his ear.

  ‘Hysterical’ was an ASHamed Jew word. Whoever did not admit to shame had capitulated to hysteria. The charge went all the way back to the medieval superstition of the effeminised Jew, the Jew who nursed a strange and secret wound and bled as women bleed. The new hysterical Jew was as a woman in that he was in a state of unmanly terror. Wherever he looked he saw only anti-Semites before whom he quaked in his soul.

  ‘They’ve dug out the most what they could find?’ Finkler asked.

  He’d heard but he wanted to hear again.

  ‘The most hysterical.’

  ‘Ah, hysterical . . . Are they hysterical?’

  He felt that all the strings in his body had shrunk, so that if he twitched a shoulder blade his fingers would retract and tighten into a fist.

  She didn’t have time to answer. The debate was under way.

  Finkler and Tamara Krausz won it, of course. Finkler argued that you couldn’t wax lyrical about one people’s desire for nationhood and at the same time deny it to another. Judaism is essentially an ethical religion, he said. Which made it fundamentally contradictory at heart, pace Kierkegaard, because it is impossible to be ethical and religious. Zionism had been Judaism’s great opportunity to escape its religiosity. To seek from others what they wanted for themselves, and to give back in the same spirit. But with military victory, Jewish ethics succumbed once more to the irrational triumphalism of religion. Only a return to ethics could save the Jews now.

  Tamara saw it somewhat differently. For her, the Zionist ideal was criminal from its inception. To prove this she quoted people who mainly believed the opposite. The victims of that criminality were not only the Palestinians, but Jews themselves. Jews everywhere. Even in this room. She spoke coldly, as though defending a client she didn’t quite believe in, until she came to the question of ‘what the West calls terrorism’. Then, as Finkler sitting next to her noticed, her body began to heat up. Her lips grew swollen, as though from a demon lover’s kisses. There is a kind of eroticism in violence, she told the enthralled assembly. You can gather those you kill to your heart. As you can gather those who kill you. But because the Jews had loved the Germans too much, and gone passively to their deaths, they had resolved against Eros, emptied their hearts of love, and now killed with a coldness that chilled the blood.

  Finkler didn’t know whether this was poetry, psychology, politics or piffle. But all the talk of killing discountenanced him. Had she somehow guessed what he wanted to do to her?

  The community Jews were no match for her. Which wasn’t saying much. They’d have been no match for a clown like Kugle. Had they been the only speakers they’d still have contrived to lose the debate. They confounded themselves. Finkler sighed as they went through routines that had been tired when he first heard them from his father thirty or more years before – how tiny Israel was, how long-standing were Jewish claims to the land, how few of the Palestinians were truly indigenous, how Israel had offered the world but every effort at peacemaking had been rebuffed by the Arabs, how much more necessary than ever a secure Israel was in a world in which anti-Semitism was on the increase . . .

  Why didn’t they hire him to write their scripts? He could have won it for them. You win by understanding something of what the other side thinks, and they understood nothing.

  He meant win in every sense. Win the argument and win the Kingdom of God.

  It was his oldest argument with his father: that Jews, for whom the stranger was supposed to be remembered and given water, for whom doing unto others as they would have done unto them was the virtue to end virtues, had turned into a people with ears only for themselves. He couldn’t bear his father’s clowning in the shop, but at least there he was a democrat and humanitarian; whereas dressed in his black coat and his fedora, talking politics on the way home from synagogue, he closed his face as resolutely as he closed his mind.

  ‘They fought and lost,’ his father used to say. ‘They would have thrown us into the sea but they fought and lost.’

  ‘That is no reason for us not to imagine what it is like to lose,’ the young Finkler argued. ‘The prophets didn’t say we had to show compassion only to the deserving.’

  ‘They get what they deserve. We give them what they deserve.’

  And so Finkler had thrown his skullcap away and shortened his name from Samuel to Sam.

  ‘Same old, same old,’ he muttered to Tamara.

  ‘As I said – hysterical,’ she answered in an undertone.

  Finkler’s fingers retracted so far he could feel his fists retreating into his sleeves.

  It was only when there were questions from the floor that the evening became lively. People on both sides of the debate shouted and told stories of a personal nature which they mistook for proof of whatever it was they believed. A Gentile woman with a sorrowing face stood and in the manner of a confessional told how she had been brought up to be in awe of what Professor Finkler – he wasn’t a professor but he let it go – had called the sublime Jewish ethic – he had said no such thi
ng but he let that go as well – but since then she had been to the Holy Land and discovered an apartheid country ruled by racist supremacists. She had a question for the gentlemen on the platform who complained that Israel was uniquely singled out for censure: what other country defines itself and those it permits to enter it on racial grounds? Is the reason you are uniquely singled out for censure, that you are uniquely racist?

  ‘She is a lesson to us,’ Tamara Krausz said to Finkler in her silken undertone. It was like listening to a woman you didn’t want to love removing her slip for you, Finkler thought.

  ‘How so?’ he asked.

  ‘She speaks from the bruised heart.’

  Was it that that made Finkler not wait for the gentlemen to whom the question had been put to answer it? Or was it his certain know-ledge that they would answer it as ineffectually as they had answered everything else? Finkler himself didn’t know. But what he said he too said from a bruised heart. The mystery was: whose bruised heart was it?

  6

  What Finkler said was this:

  How dare you?

  For a moment he said nothing else. It isn’t easy to let a phrase hang in silence at the noisy end of a public meeting when everyone is eager to be heard. But Finkler, one time exhibitionistic Oxford don, now experienced media philosopher, was not without some mastery of the tricks of eloquence. As one-time beloved husband of Tyler, now grieving widower, as one-time proud father, now not, as potential murderer of Tamara Krausz, he was possessed of some of the tricks of gravity, too.

  ‘How dare you? was unexpected of him politically, unexpected as a response to the careworn woman who had once been a celebrant of Jewish ethics and spoke now from the soul of suffering humanity, and unexpected by the violence of its tone. A single pistol shot would not have carried more threat.

  He allowed the report of it to go on reverberating through the hall – a tenth of a second, a half a second, a second and a quarter, a lifetime – and then, in a voice no less shocking for the calm pedagogic reasonableness in which he had cocooned it, he said: