The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘How dare you, a non Jew – and I have to say it impresses me not at all that you grew up in awe of Jewish ethics, if anything your telling me so chills me – how dare you even think you can tell Jews what sort of country they may live in, when it is you, a European Gentile, who made a separate country for Jews a necessity?

  ‘By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over – yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be construed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked respresentative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries . . .’

  He looked around him. There was no wall of applause. What did he expect? Some people enthusiastically clapped. Rather more booed. Had he not carried the authority he did, there would, he presumed – he bloody well hoped – have been cries of ‘Shame!’ A demagogue likes to hear cries of ‘Shame!’ But mainly what he saw was humanity trapped in conviction, like rats in rat traps.

  Those who saw as he saw, saw what he saw. Those who didn’t, didn’t. And the didn’t had it.

  Fuck it, he thought. It was at that moment the sum total of his philosophy. Fuck it.

  He turned his head to Tamara Krausz. ‘So what do you think?’ he enquired.

  She had a strange smile on her face, as though everything he had just said he had said at her bidding.

  ‘Hysterical,’ she told him.

  ‘You wouldn’t care to lie in my arms and scream that, would you?’ he asked, in his most inviting manner.

  TEN

  1

  In time, Treslove came to believe he could very easily have reason to suspect Finkler of setting his sights on Hephzibah. If this was a rather roundabout way of putting it, that was because Treslove’s suspicions were themselves rather roundabout.

  In fact, he had no reason to believe that Finkler had set his sights on Hephzibah but he chose to suspect him anyway. Nothing he had seen, nothing that either Finkler or Hephzibah had said, just a feeling. And in jealousy a feeling is a reason.

  He accepted that such a feeling might simply be the child of his devotion. When you love a woman deeply you are bound to imagine that every other man must love her deeply too. But it wasn’t every other man he had reason to believe had set his sights on Hephzibah. Just Finkler.

  Without doubt, Finkler had changed. He was less cocksure, somehow. He held his head differently. When he came round to dinner with Libor he was quiet and unwilling to be drawn on Isrrrae. It was Hephzibah’s understanding, and Hephzibah was professionally in the know, that he had fallen out with his fellow exponents of Jewish ASHamedness in the matter of the proposed academic boycott. Though how serious was the falling-out she couldn’t say.

  ‘That would be because he doesn’t want to lose an all-expenses-paid lecture tour of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Eilat,’ Treslove guessed.

  ‘Julian!’ Hephzibah said.

  (See!)

  ‘Julian what?’

  ‘Do you know that for a certainty?’

  Treslove conceded that he didn’t. But he knew his friend.

  ‘Well, I wonder sometimes if you do,’ Hephzibah said.

  (See!!)

  With Treslove, too, Finkler was less combative, as though sensitive to the changes wrought in him by Hephzibah’s influence. But did that mean he saw Treslove differently or simply wanted some of what Treslove had found for himself ?

  Yet Hephzibah was surely not Finkler’s type, particularly if Tyler was anything to go by. Treslove knew that Finkler had always taken mistresses. Jewish ones, too, Tyler had told him. But he was unable to picture them. The deep dark separation of Ronit Kravitz’s breasts, for example, would have come as a surprise to him had he seen them. When he put his mind to Finkler’s mistresses he imagined them as Jewish versions of Tyler whom he had always taken for a Jewess anyway. Razor-blade women with narrow jaws, more likely to favour sharply tailored trouser suits than shawls and cloaks. Women who hit the ground running, in creases and stilettos, not women who floated slowly down in acres of material. So no one remotely resembling Hephzibah. Which could mean one of two things: either Finkler was after Hephzibah only in order to get back at Treslove for something or other, or he had fallen for her as a woman entirely beyond his experience and preference, and in that case was likely to be dangerously smitten. Just as Treslove himself had been. Just as Treslove himself still was. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was what Hephzibah felt. Was she smitten too?

  He brought the matter up with her in bed at the end of a couple of unusually taciturn days between them. What he didn’t know was that she was keeping information about the second attack on the museum from him.

  ‘Should we have Sam over for dinner one night soon?’ he said. ‘With Libor? I think he’s lonely.’

  ‘Libor? Of course he’s lonely.’

  ‘No, Sam.’

  Hephzibah sipped her tea. ‘If you like.’

  ‘Well, only if you like.’

  ‘Yes, I like.’

  ‘Him or the idea of dinner?’

  ‘Explain that.’

  ‘Do you like the idea generally of having somebody round for dinner and that somebody might as well be Sam, or do you especially like the idea of its being Sam?’

  She put her tea down and rolled over to his side of the bed. He loved the billowing undulations of the mattress when Hephzibah moved in his direction. Everything was momentous with her. From the start the earth had moved for him in her company, the oceans had heaved, the skies had gathered and gone black. Making love to her was like surviving an electrical storm. And some nights he wouldn’t have minded had he not survived. But the mornings too were heavy with promise. Something would be said. Something would happen. No day went by without her being an event.

  So different from the mothers of his sons, whose pregnancies he had failed to notice.

  But then they had left him by the time they discovered they were pregnant.

  But then he should have noticed that they’d left him.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Hephzibah asked, coming at last to rest in the small corner of the bed that belonged to him.

  ‘This? Nothing. I just wondered if you liked the idea of dinner.’

  ‘With Sam?’

  ‘Ah, so you do like the idea of Sam? That’s to say of dinner with Sam?’

  ‘Julian, what’s this about?’

  ‘I’m wondering if you’re having an affair with him.’

  ‘With Sam?’

  ‘Or at least thinking about having an affair with him.’

  ‘With Sam?’

  ‘There you are, you see, you can’t stop saying his name.’

  ‘Julian, why would I be having or thinking of having an affair with anybody? I’m having an affair with you.’

  ‘That doesn’t stop people.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it stop you?’

  ‘Me, yes. But I’m not like other people.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘but then neither am I. You should believe that.’

  ‘Then I do.’

  She made him look at her. ‘I have no interest in Sam Finkler,’ she said. ‘I don’t find him interesting or attractive. He is the kind of Jewish man I have been avoiding all my
life.’

  ‘What kind is that?’

  ‘Arrogant, heartless, self-centred, ambitious, and convinced his intelligence makes him irresistible.’

  ‘That sounds like a description, from your own account, of the two men you married.’

  ‘Exactly. In between marrying them I was avoiding them. And since marrying them I have avoided them.’

  ‘But you only avoid what you fear, surely. Do you fear Sam?’

  She laughed loudly. Too loudly?

  ‘Well, he would no doubt love the idea that I do, but I don’t. It’s a strange question, though. Could it be that it’s you who fears Sam?’

  ‘Me? Why would I fear Sam?’

  ‘For the same reason that I do.’

  ‘But you said you don’t.’

  ‘And you aren’t sure you believe me. Did you have a thing together at school?’

  ‘Me and Sam? Christ, no.’

  ‘Don’t be so horrified. Boys do that, don’t they?’

  ‘Not any boys I knew.’

  ‘Then maybe you should have. I think it’s good to get all that out of the way early. Both my husbands had things at school.’

  ‘With each other?’

  ‘No, you fool. They didn’t know each other. With other boys.’

  ‘Yes and you weren’t happy being married to them.’

  ‘But not for that reason. I was waiting all along for you.’

  ‘The goy?’

  She wrapped a grand arm around him and gathered him into her bosom. ‘As a goy – I have to tell you – you’re a bit of a disappointment. Most goys I know don’t spend their time reading Moses Maimonides and memorising Yiddish endearments.’

  He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking.

  ‘Neshomeleh,’ he said, into her flesh.

  But he couldn’t leave it at that. The next day, over his five-pan omelette, he said, ‘Is there a special bond?’

  ‘Between?’

  ‘Jews.’

  ‘Depends on the Jews.’

  ‘Is it like being gay? Is there a Jewdar that enables you to pick one another out?’

  ‘Again, depends. I rarely think someone is Jewish when they’re not, but I quite often don’t know I’m talking to a Jew when I am.’

  ‘And what is it you look for?’

  ‘I’m not looking for anything.’

  ‘What is that you recognise, then?’

  ‘Can’t explain. It’s not one thing, it’s a collection of things. Features, facial expression, a way of talking, a way of moving.’

  ‘So you’re making racial calculations?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call them racial, no.’

  ‘Religious?’

  ‘No, definitely not religious.’

  ‘Then what?’

  She didn’t know what.

  ‘But you make a connection.’

  ‘Again, depends.’

  ‘And with Sam?’

  ‘What about with Sam?’

  ‘Do you make the connection?’

  She sighed.

  She sighed the next time Treslove brought it up as well. And the time after that. She thought she’d put his suspicions to bed. But that wasn’t the only reason she sighed the third time. Strangely enough, Sam had called in to see her that afternoon at the museum. This was not something he had ever done before. Nor was it a visit she could explain. It was as though, when she saw him, he had materialised out of Treslove’s conversation, or even out of Treslove’s will.

  He must have been surprised himself, so open-mouthed was her welcome.

  ‘To what do I owe this?’ she asked, giving him her hand.

  She knew the answer. She owed it to her lover’s fears.

  ‘Oh, I was driving past and I just thought I would call in,’ he said. ‘See how it’s going. Is Julian here?’

  ‘No. He’s stopped coming in. There’s not a lot he can do here while we’re still in this state.’

  He looked about. At the finished cabinets, at the murals, at the banks of computers and headphones. On a far wall he thought he caught sight of a photograph of Sir Isaiah Berlin and Frankie Vaughan. Not together.

  ‘It’s looking pretty well advanced to me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but nothing’s connected.’

  ‘So I can’t trace my genealogy yet?’

  ‘I didn’t know you wanted to.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. Who could say what he wanted? ‘Any chance of a guided tour,’ he asked, ‘or are you too busy?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘I can give you ten minutes,’ she said. ‘But only if you promise to be less ironical about us than you were the last time we talked. This is not, I remind you, a Holocaust memorial museum.’

  He smiled at her. He was not, she thought, so unattractive.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind if it were,’ he said.

  2

  When Treslove told Hephzibah he thought Finkler was looking lonely he omitted to mention where the thought came from. Other, that is, than from his own fear of being lonely. It came from a text Alfredo had sent him. saw your freaky telly friend out looking for tarts surprised you weren’t with him

  Treslove texted back how do you tell when a man’s out looking for tarts?

  It took Alfredo a couple of days to work up a reply. his tongues hanging out

  Treslove texted back you are no son of mine, but decided against sending it. He didn’t want to give Alfredo a free shot at him for his paternal negligence.

  As for Finkler, leaving Hephzibah out of it, he was sorry for him if Alfredo’s low supposition happened to be true, and sorrier still if it wasn’t but Finkler just looked like a man with no home to go to and no wife to care for.

  It was a terrible thing to lose the woman you loved.

  3

  ‘You’re probably imagining it,’ Libor said.

  Treslove had taken him out for a salt-beef sandwich in the reopened Nosh Bar on Windmill Street. Years before, Libor had brought Treslove and Finkler here. Part of his introducing the young men to the hidden delights of the city Libor had come to love above all others. Then, a salt-beef sandwich in Soho was to Treslove as a descent into the underworld of cosmopolitan debauchery. He felt as though he were living through the last days of the Roman Empire, no matter that the Romans would not have known of salt-beef sandwiches. Now Treslove wondered if he was living through the last days of himself.

  Libor, too, it seemed to him. The old man painstakingly separated the beef from the rye bread because the latter did not digest easily, and then he didn’t touch the beef. He had asked for no mustard. He wanted no pickled cucumber.

  He no longer ate his food, he merely pulled it apart.

  In the past he would have looked out of the window and enjoyed the parade of dissolutes. Today he stared as through shuttered eyes. I have done him no favours bringing him here, Treslove thought.

  But then the outing hadn’t been planned as a favour to Libor. It was a necessity to Treslove.

  ‘Why would I imagine it?’ he asked. ‘I’m happy. I’m in love. I believe I am loved. Where would I conjure up this dread from?’

  ‘The usual place,’ Libor said.

  ‘That’s too Czech for me, Libor. Where’s the usual place?’

  ‘The place everything we fear comes from. The place where we store our longing for the end of things.’

  ‘That’s more Czech still. I have no longing for the end of things.’

  Libor smiled at him and laid an old unsteady hand on his. But for the old and the unsteady the gesture reminded Treslove of Hephzibah. Why did everybody pat him?

  ‘My friend, all the years I’ve known you you’ve been longing for the end of things. You’ve lived in preparation, on the edge of tears, all your life. Malkie noticed that about you. She wasn’t sure she should even play Schubert when you were listening. He doesn’t need any encouragement, that one, she said
.’

  ‘Encouragement to do what?’

  ‘To throw yourself into the flames. Isn’t that what being with my niece and reading Moses Maimonides is about?’

  ‘I don’t think of Hephzibah as fire.’

  ‘Don’t you? Then what are you so anxious about? I think you’re getting what you went in there to get. The whole Jewish gesheft. You think it’s a short cut to catastrophe. And I’m not going to say you’re wrong.’

  He wanted to say that’s crap, Libor. But you don’t ask an elderly man out for salt-beef sandwiches he is unable to digest and tell him that what he’s saying is crap. ‘I don’t recognise what you’re describing,’ he said instead.

  Libor shrugged. If you don’t you don’t. He didn’t have the strength to argue. But he could see Treslove needed more. ‘The fall, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Last Judgement, Masada, Auschwitz – see a Jew and you think of Armageddon,’ he said. ‘We tell good creation stories but we do destruction even better. We’re at the beginning and the end of everything. And everyone’s after a piece of the action. Those who can’t wait to pitchfork us into the flames, want to go down screaming by our side. It’s one or the other. Temperamentally, you were always going to choose the other.’

  ‘You sound like your great-great-niece.’

  ‘Not surprising. We’re family, you know.’

  ‘But isn’t all this a bit solipsistic, Libor, as Sam would say? By your account there’s no escaping the Jews for anyone.’

  Libor pushed his plate aside. ‘There’s no escaping the Jews for anyone,’ he said.

  Treslove stared out of the window. On the opposite side of the narrow street, an ill-favoured, fat girl in a short skirt was trying to persuade men to come into a club only a desperate or a deranged person would enter. She saw him looking at her and beckoned him over. Bring your friend, her gesture implied. Bring your salt-beef sandwich. He lowered his eyes.

  ‘And you think,’ he said, picking up Libor’s thread, ‘that I am imagining Hephzibah and Sam in order to hasten my end?’

  Libor waved his hands in front of his face. ‘I didn’t quite say that. But people who expect the worst will always see the worst.’