‘I haven’t seen anything.’
‘Exactly.’
Treslove put his elbows on the table. ‘Libor, since you tell me Hephzibah is your family, what’s your view? Do you think she would do this?’
‘With Sam?’
‘With anybody?’
‘Well, her being my family doesn’t make her different from any other woman. Though I have never gone along with the view that women are by nature inconstant. My own experience has been very different. Malkie never played me false.’
‘Can you be sure?’
‘Of course I can’t be sure. But if she allowed me to believe she had never played me false, then she never played me false. You don’t judge fidelity by every act; it’s the desire to say you’re faithful and the desire to be believed.’
‘That can’t be true, Libor. Outside Prague.’
‘We didn’t live in Prague. What I’m saying is that an indiscretion needn’t matter. It’s the overall intention of fidelity that counts.’
‘So Hephzibah might mean to be faithful to me but still happen to be fucking Sam.’
‘I hope she isn’t.’
‘I hope she isn’t.’
‘And I doubt she is. The question is, why don’t you doubt she is, if you have seen nothing to make you suppose otherwise.’
Treslove thought about it.
‘I need to order another sandwich,’ he said, as though truthful reflection were dependent on it.
‘Have mine,’ Libor said.
Treslove shook his head and thought of Tyler. ‘Have mine,’ Finkler had said, if not in so many words. ‘Have mine, I am otherwise engaged.’
He had never told Libor of his evenings with Tyler, watching Finkler’s documentaries. He had never told anybody. They were not his alone to tell. They were poor Tyler’s too. And in a sense they were Finkler’s also. But he wished he could mention the affair, if it ever really was an affair, to Libor now. It would help to explain something, though he wasn’t sure what. But how would he know what if he didn’t hear himself put the question into words. Libor was old. Who would he tell? The secret that would otherwise go to the grave with Treslove, would surely go to the grave much sooner with Libor.
So on an impulse, he told.
Libor listened quietly. When it was over, to Treslove’s astonishment, he cried. Not copious tears, just a tear or two in the corner of an old man’s rheumy eye.
‘I’m sorry,’ Treslove said.
‘You should be.’
Treslove didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected a response of this sort. Libor was a man of the world. Just squeeze me in a little fuck when you come to make a report of my life, he had told Treslove. Men and women did these things. An indiscretion needn’t matter – Libor’s own words.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Treslove said. ‘It was wrong of me.’
Libor looked into his hands. ‘Yes, it was wrong of you to tell me,’ he said, as though not talking to Treslove at all. ‘Probably more wrong of you to tell me than to do it. I don’t want the burden of the knowledge. I would prefer to remember Tyler differently. And you. Sam it doesn’t really matter about. He can look after himself. Though I would rather have not known about the falsity of your friendship. You make the world a sadder place, Julian, and it is already sad enough, believe me. Why did you tell me? It was unkind of you.’
‘I don’t know. And I say again I’m truly sorry. I don’t know what made me do this.’
‘You do. One always does know why one tells. Is it because you are proud of it as an escapade?’
‘An escapade? God, no.’
‘A conquest, then?’
‘A conquest? God, no.’
‘So you are proud of it as something. Are you proud of it because you got one over on Sam?’
Treslove knew he had a duty to think about his answer. Saying God, no all the time would not suffice.
‘Not got one over, Libor. I hope not that. More having got into his world. Their world.’
‘From which you’d felt excluded?’
He had a duty to think about that, too. ‘Yes.’
‘Because they were a glamorously successful pair?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘But Sam was your friend. You’d grown up with him. You continued to see him. He didn’t inhabit a universe that was beyond yours.’
‘I’d grown up with him but he’d always been different to me. A mystery in some way.’
‘Because he was clever? Because he was famous? Because he was a Jew?’
Treslove’s salt-beef sandwich arrived, dripping in mustard the way he’d learned to like it. Accompanied by not one but two pickled cucumbers chopped into fine slices.
‘That’s a tough one to answer,’ he said. ‘But yes, all right, all of those.’
‘So when you lay in the arms of his wife you were, for a moment, as clever as he was, as famous as he was, as Jewish as he was.’
Treslove didn’t say that he had never lain in Tyler’s arms, and that she had never lain in his. He didn’t want Libor to know that she had turned her back to him.
‘I guess.’
‘Any one more than the others?’
Treslove sighed. A sigh from deep in the bowels of his guilt and of his fears. ‘I can’t say,’ he said.
‘Then let me say for you. It was the Jew part that mattered to you most.’
Treslove leaned across the table to halt him. ‘Before you go on,’ he said, ‘you do know that Tyler wasn’t Jewish. I’d thought she was, but it turned out that she wasn’t.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
‘I was, a little.’
‘All the more, then, I say it was the Jew. And I know that it was the Jew because of what you are afraid of in Sam and Hephzibah now.’
Treslove looked at him, an old man with no digestion system left, telling riddles. ‘Don’t follow,’ he said.
‘You suspect Sam and Hephzibah of what? Having sex together. And on what evidence? None, except that you suppose that is what they will do because they share something that excludes you. They are Jews, you are not, therefore they are fucking.’
‘Oh, come on, Libor.’
‘Please yourself. But you have no better explanation for your suspicions. You won’t be the first Gentile to ascribe lasciviousness to Jews. We had horns once, and a tail, like goats or like the devil. We bred like vermin. We polluted Christian women. The Nazis –’
‘Libor, stop – this is foolish and insulting.’
The old man sat back in his chair and rubbed his head. Once upon a time he had a wife who rubbed it for him, laughing as she polished, like a housewife delighting in her chores. But that was long ago.
Insulting? He shrugged.
‘I am deeply ashamed,’ Treslove said. ‘For telling you what I told you.’
‘You are deeply ashamed? Then that’s something else you two share.’
‘Show me mercy,’ Treslove begged.
‘Julian, you started this,’ Libor said. ‘You invited me out to discuss your fear that Sam and Hephzibah are fucking. I ask you what your suspicions are built on. You tell me an indefinable dread. I’m your friend – so I’m doing my best to define it for you. You attribute strange and secret sexual powers to them, that’s why you are afraid. You think they can’t stop themselves because they are driven by an ungovernable sexual urge, Jew to Jew, and you think they won’t stop themselves because they are unscrupulous, Jew to Gentile. Julian, you’re an anti-Semite.’
‘Me?’
‘Don’t sound so astonished. You’re not alone. We’re all anti-Semites. We have no choice. You. Me. Everyone.’
He had not eaten a bite of food.
4
They went to the theatre together – Hephzibah, Treslove and Finkler. It was Treslove’s birthday and Hephzibah had suggested an outing instead of a party, since every day was a party for them. They had asked Libor along but he didn’t fancy the sound of the play.
None of them f
ancied the sound of the play. But as Finkler said, if you don’t go to the theatre whenever you don’t like the sound of a play, when do you ever go to the theatre? Besides, it was only on for a week, a piece of agitprop that people were writing angry or enthusiastic letters to the papers about. London was buzzing with it.
‘Are you sure it won’t spoil your birthday?’ Hephzibah asked, having second thoughts.
‘I’m not a child,’ Treslove told her. He didn’t add that everything was spoiling his birthday so why pick on this.
It was called Sons of Abraham and charted the agonies of the Chosen People from ancient times up until the present when they decided to visit their agonies on someone else. The final scene was a well-staged tableau of destruction, all smoke and rattling metal sheets and Wagnerian music, to which the Chosen People danced like slow-motion devils, baying and hallooing, bathing their hands and feet in the blood that oozed like ketchup from the corpses of their victims, a fair number of whom were children.
Finkler, sitting on the other side of Hephzibah to Treslove, was surprised to discover from the programme notes that Tamara Krausz had neither written it nor assisted in its production. Watching it made him feel she was in the theatre somewhere. Not quite next to him. Hephzibah was next to him. But nearby. He could smell the harlot allure of her vindictive intelligence, laying out her daughters of Hebron beauty for her father’s enemies to feast and avenge themselves upon.
In the final seconds of the drama an aerial shot of a mass grave at Auschwitz was projected on to a gauze curtain, before dissolving into a photograph of the rubble of Gaza.
Pure Tamara.
It received a standing ovation. Neither Hephzibah nor Treslove rose from their seats. Finkler laughed loudly, turning round so that people could observe him. Treslove was surprised by this reaction. Not just by the judgement it implied but by the antic nature of it. Had Finkler flipped his lid?
A number of ASHamed Jews were in the audience but Finkler thought their response to seeing him there was decidedly cold. Only Merton Kugle made an approach.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Superb,’ Finkler said. ‘Simply superb.’
‘So why were you laughing?’
‘Wasn’t laughter, Merton. Those were the contortions of grief.’
Kugle nodded and went out into the street.
Finkler wondered if he’d popped into a supermarket on his way to the theatre and had tins of proscribed Israeli sturgeon in his pockets.
People left the theatre quietly, deep in thought. That deep in thought that is available only to those who already know what they think. They were mainly from the caring and the performing professions, Finkler reckoned. He believed he recognised a number of them from demos in Trafalgar Square. They had the air of seasoned marchers. End the massacre! Stop Israeli genocide! At another time he’d have shaken hands with them, in sombre festivity, like survivors of an air raid.
He suggested a birthday drink for Treslove at the bar in the crypt of the theatre. It reminded them all of their student days. Rare ales on tap. Houmous and tabbouleh with pitta bread to eat. Old couches draped with black curtains to talk things over on. Finkler bought the drinks, clinked his glass with Treslove and Hephzibah and then fell quiet. For ten minutes they didn’t speak. Treslove wondered whether the silence denoted suppressed eroticism on the part of the other two. It surprised him greatly that Finkler had accepted their invitation – that’s to say Hephzibah’s invitation – to accompany them to the play. He must have known they would react differently to it from him and perhaps even end up having a row. So there was an underlying motive to his aceptance. Out of the side of his head, Treslove kept an eye on their mutual glances and hand movements. He saw nothing.
In the end it was another person who broke what Treslove took to be their ideological deadlock.
‘Hey! Surprised to see you here.’
Treslove heard the voice before he saw the person.
‘Abe!’
Hephzibah, getting caught up in the couch drapes, rose in a tangle of shawls. ‘Julian, Sam, this is Abe – my ex.’
Which one of us, Treslove speculated, does Abe think she’s with now – Julian or Sam?
Abe shook hands and joined them. A roguish and yet somehow angelically handsome man with a crinkled halo of black hair shot with white, like gleams of light, a hawkish nose and eyes close together. He has a face that bores, Treslove thought, meaning a face that stabs and pierces not a face that wearies. A prophet’s or philosopher’s face – which thought pleased him in that it would be Finkler who should be jealous, therefore, not him.
Hephzibah had of course told him about her two husbands, Abe and Ben, but he had to rack his brains to remember which was the lawyer and which the actor. Given where they were, how he looked and the black T-shirt he was wearing, he calculated that Abe must be the actor.
‘Abe’s a lawyer,’ Hephzibah said. She was flushed, even flustered, Treslove thought, with the attentions of so many men. Her past, her present, her future . . .
‘So why did you say you were surprised to see Hep here?’ Treslove asked, staking a claim which a more confident man would have considered already staked.
Abe glowed like the embers of a fire that had only just gone out. ‘Not her kind of play,’ he said.
‘Do I have a kind of play?’ Hephzibah enquired. Skittish, Treslove reckoned, noticing everything.
‘Well, not this kind.’
‘You’ve heard about my museum?’
‘I have.’
‘Then it shouldn’t surprise you that I have to keep my ear to the ground.’
‘Though not necessarily that low to it,’ Finkler said.
Treslove was astonished. ‘You’re telling me you didn’t like it?’
Hephzibah too. ‘That’s interesting,’ she said.
So was that what he was doing, Treslove wondered, interesting Hephzibah?
Finkler turned to Abe. ‘Julian and I went to school together,’ he said. ‘He thinks he knows what I like.’
Treslove stood up for himself. ‘You’re an ASHamed Jew. You’re the Sam the Man of ASHamed Jews. You had to like it. It was written for you. Could have been written by you. I’ve heard you speak it.’
‘Not those words have you ever heard me speak. I don’t do Nazi analogies. The Nazis were the Nazis. Anyway, did you hear me say I didn’t like it? I loved it. I only wished there’d been more singing and dancing. It lacked a show-stopper like “Springtime for Hitler”, that’s my only complaint. I couldn’t tap my feet. Put it this way, did you see anyone going out humming the Wagner?’
‘So let me get this straight,’ Treslove said. ‘This is a taste issue for you, is it?’
‘Isn’t it for you?’
‘Not in the musical sense, no.’
Finkler put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to leave this conversation to the rest of you. I’ll get more birthday drinks. Abe?’
Abe didn’t drink. Ot at least he didn’t drink tonight. In a manner of speaking, he told them, he was working.
‘Aren’t you always,’ Hephzibah said, exercising the privilege of an ex.
‘Doing what?’ Treslove asked.
‘Well, essentially just watching the play and gauging responses to it. One of the co-writers is a client.’
‘And you’re here to see if he has a case for claiming damages from the Jewish people?’ Hephzibah continued, squeezing his arm. Treslove felt that he had seen into their marriage and wished he hadn’t.
On two glasses of wine, more than her year’s allowance, Hephzibah had, in his view, exceeded her yearly allowance of skittishness also.
‘Well, if you’re here to gauge responses I’m happy to give you mine,’ he said, but he was out of time with the conversation and wasn’t heard.
‘Abe always did know how to screw the last penny out of a defendant,’ Hephzibah told him.
‘That’s not quite the way of it,’ Abe said.
&
nbsp; ‘What, the Jewish people are suing him?’
‘No, not the Jews. And it’s not about money either. He’s just been sacked by his university department. He’s a marine biologist when he’s not writing plays. He was sacked when he was underwater. I’m trying to get him his job back.’
‘Sacked for writing this play?’
‘Not exactly. For saying that Auschwitz was more a holiday camp than a hell for most of the Jews in there.’
‘And where there’s no hell, there’s no devil – is that the idea?’
‘Well I can’t speak for his theology. What he argues, and claims he can prove beyond doubt, is that there were casinos and spas and prostitutes laid on. He has photographs of Jews lying on their backs in swimming pools being fed iced strawberries by camp hostesses.’
Hephzibah guffawed. ‘Then by the terms of his own play,’ she said, ‘Gaza must be a holiday camp too. He can’t have it both ways. No point calling out the Jews as Nazis if the Nazis turn out to have been fun-loving philanthropists.’
‘Maybe Sam was right in that case and what we’ve just watched was a light romantic comedy,’ Treslove said, but he was out of time again.
‘I think that’s being a bit literalist about the way analogy is meant to work,’ Abe said, replying to Hephzibah not Treslove. But he looked at Treslove, man to man, husband to husband. Such literalists, wives!
‘So as a Jew, what do you think?’ Treslove asked, raising his tempo.
‘Well as a lawyer –’
‘No, as a Jew what do you think?’
‘About the play? Or about my client?’
‘About the lot. The play, your client, the Auschwitz lido.’
Abe showed him the palms of his hands. ‘As a Jew I believe that every argument has a counter-argument,’ he said.
‘That’s why we make such good lawyers,’ Hephzibah laughed, squeezing both men’s arms.
These people don’t know how to stand up for themselves, Treslove thought. These people have had their chips.
He went to the bathroom. Bathrooms always made him angry. They were places that returned him to himself. Illusionless, he looked in the mirror. They’ve ceded their sense of outrage, he said to his reflection, washing his hands.
The Finkler Question Page 29