When he returned he saw that Sam had joined the party again. Sam, Hephzibah, Abe. A cosy coterie of Finklers. Or maybe it’s just me who’s had his chips, Treslove thought.
ELEVEN
1
Walking to the museum a week later, Hephzibah thought I am at the end of my tether with the lot of them.
She didn’t know if Finkler was chasing her. But Abe, her ex, definitely was. He rang her two or three times after their chance meeting at Sons of Abraham. No dice, she told him, I’m happy.
He replied that he could see she was happy, which was no more than she deserved, but wanted to know what her being happy had to do with meeting him for a drink.
‘I don’t drink.’
‘You were drinking the other night.’
‘That was a special occasion. I’d just been accused of infanticide. When you’re accused of infanticide you drink.’
‘I’ll accuse you of infanticide.’
‘Don’t joke about it.’
‘All right, you don’t drink. But you do talk.’
‘We’re talking.’
‘I’d like to hear about the museum.’
‘It’s a museum. I’ll send you a prospectus.’
‘Is it a Holocaust museum?’
Christ, another one, she thought.
One in, one out. Finkler had stopped being ironical about the museum. He hadn’t paid another surprise visit to her there but he somehow or other contrived to be around her more, showed up where he was not expected, and even when he wasn’t in evidence in person somehow succeeded in making his presence felt, popping up on television or in some third party’s conversation, as when Abe, trying to prise her out, said how pleased he was to meet Sam Finkler at the theatre as he had always admired him. Though she was by no means a sexually vain woman – she was too reliant on shawls for sexual vanity – she didn’t quite believe in Finkler’s latest expressions of curiosity about her work. Curiosity did not come naturally to him. But at least the jeering had been replaced by civility. As for what that civility denoted she couldn’t judge it clearly because Treslove’s apprehensions clouded her view.
So she was at the end of her tether with herself as well. Yet again seeing the world as the man she loved saw it.
But perhaps all these irritations were a smokescreen for some other anger or sadness altogether. Julian worried her. He was beginning to look like a man who didn’t know what to do with himself next. Libor too. She had barely seen him in weeks and when she did he didn’t make her laugh. Libor without jokes was not Libor.
And the information that poured into her office – continuing accusations of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, news of world charities and human rights organisations citing war crimes and advocating boycotts, an incessant buzzing of rumour and reproach in the ears of Jews, a demoralisation that was no less effective for being random (she hoped to God that it was random) – only added fuel to her disquiet. Hephzibah was not a fervent Zionist. She had never been a land-centred Jew. St John’s Wood was fine for her as a place to be Jewish in. She only wished she could find a reference in the Bible to God’s covenant with English Jews, promising them St John’s Wood High Street. But Zionism’s achievements could not go unnoticed in a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture, given the contribution to Zionism English Jews had made, even a museum situated a step from the zebra crossing made famous by the Beatles. The question she had to wrestle with was how far Zionism’s failures had to be noticed as well.
There had been a lull in odious incident. No bacon had been smeared on the door handles for weeks, no defacements vowing revenge and death. (Revenge, in St John’s Wood!) Things had fallen quiet in the Middle East, at least as far as the British media was concerned, so the rage that clung on to the coat-tails of news report had temporarily abated. Yes, Sons of Abraham had reinvigorated some of it among the broadsheeet-reading, theatregoing classes where, it seemed to her, it lay smouldering all the time now, like a fire that wouldn’t go out, but at least Jews weren’t for the moment the only topic of educated conversation. The trouble was that the calm felt more sinister than the storm. What would it take, what action against Gaza or Lebanon or even Iran, what act of belligerence or retaliation, what event in Wall Street, what incidence of Jewish influence of the wrong sort round the corner in Downing Street, for it all to start up again, next time with more violence than the last, the more virulent for its slumbers?
She herself hadn’t slept easily in an age, and that wasn’t simply down to having Treslove in her bed. She didn’t walk to work in easy spirits. She didn’t meet her friends in easy spirits. An anxiety had settled like a fine dust on everything she did, and on everyone she knew – on all the Jews at least. They too were looking askance – not over their shoulders exactly, but into a brittly uncertain future which bore fearful resemblances to an only too certain past.
Paranoia, was it? she asked herself. The question itself had become monotonous to her. It was the natural one to ask as she walked to work in the wintry sunshine, skirting an empty Lord’s, wishing she could be a man who forgot himself in sport, full of dread as to what she would find when she arrived at the museum. Am I becoming paranoid? The rhythm of the wondering affected her pace. She had begun to walk in time to it.
The thought that the museum was a target frightened her. But she was frightened of her fear no less. Jews were supposed to have put all this behind them. ‘Never again’ and all that. Well, it was hard to picture herself as a deportee in a thin floral dress, carrying a little suitcase, her eyes hollow with terror, as she strolled through leafy St John’s Wood with her jewellery clinking and a bag costing fifteen hundred pounds under her arm. But the hollow-eyed woman in the floral dress – wouldn’t she have once found her fate hard to picture too?
So was it paranoia? She didn’t know. No one knew. There were people who claimed that the paranoid create the thing they fear. But how could that be? How does being afraid of hate manufacture it? Were there Nazis out there who didn’t know they were Nazis until a Jew showed his alarm? Did the smell of Jewish apprehension send them out to the costumiers in search of a brown shirt and jackboots?
The old foetor Judaicus. She had always taken the imagined smell to be sulphurous, an accompaniment to the tail and horns, conclusive proof that the Jew was friendly with the devil and that his natural habitat was hell. A cabinet in her museum would mention the foetor Judaicus along with other Christian superstitions about Jews, now long consigned to the dustbin of medieval hatred, a reminder of how far Jews in this country had travelled.
Or had they?
But what if the foetor Judaicus was not hellish in origin at all? What if the smell that medieval Christians sniffed on the horned and hairy bodies of Jews was simply the smell of fear?
If so – if there are people who will murder you because they are aroused by the odour of your fear – is the concept of anti-Semitism itself an aphrodisiac, an erotic spur to loathing?
Could be. She loathed the word herself. Anti-Semitism. It had a medicinal, antiseptic ring to it. It was something you kept locked away in your bathroom cabinet. She had long ago made a vow never to open the cupboard. If you can help it, don’t see the thing; if you can avoid it, don’t use the word. Anti-Semite, anti-Semite, anti-Semite – its unmusicality pained her ear, its triteness degraded her.
If there was one thing she couldn’t forgive the anti-Semites for, it was making her call them anti-Semites.
A couple of Muslim men, perhaps stopping for a talk on their way to the Regent’s Park Mosque, looked at her in a way she found uncomfortable. Or was she looking at them in a way they found uncomfortable? She paused to root through her handbag for her keys. The men moved on. Across the road a boy of about nineteen was talking into his mobile phone. He held it suspiciously she thought, cradling it, as though only pretending to talk. Had he been using it as a camera?
Or a detonator?
2
Treslove tried to fix a time to see Finkler. There were things to talk ab
out. Libor for one. Where was he? How was he?
And the play. All very well for Finkler to clown about it, but something needed to be said. Perhaps an answering play to be written. Sons of Ishmael, or Jesus’s Children. Treslove would have been prepared to have a go himself, but he wasn’t a writer. Nor do I know much about the subject, he told Hephzibah, though that, as they agreed, hadn’t stopped the authors of Sons of Abraham. Finkler, on the other hand, was a one man word factory. And appeared to have become more fluid in his politics. More fluid in something, anyway.
‘Don’t count on it,’ Hephzibah said, which Treslove interpreted in a dozen ways, all of them upsetting to his peace of mind.
Hephzibah was, of course, another reason to see Finkler, face to face.
It wasn’t his intention to bring the subject of her up. But Finkler might. And whether he did or he didn’t, the odd phrase or look would surely betray something.
And then there was the matter of the prostitutes. He had no intention of prying or giving advice. He had no advice to give. But he was supposed to be Finkler’s friend. And if Finkler was in distress, well . . .
He got him on the phone. ‘Come out and play,’ he said.
But Finkler wasn’t in the mood. ‘I have of late,’ he said, ‘lost all my mirth.’
They had worked out a standard answer to that in school.
‘I’ll find it for you.’
‘Nice of you, but I doubt you’ll know where to look. I’ll take a raincheck if that’s all right.’
He didn’t say he had prostitutes to visit. Or online poker to play. Or that what he had in fact lost of late was his money. Nor did he say, And give my love to Hep. Was that significant?
Alfredo’s prostitute text continued to cause Treslove unease. About Alfredo not least. Why the malice? Why the mischief? Or was he trying to tell his father that he was reduced to going out looking for prostitutes himself thanks to his deprived upbringing? You were such a shit dad that I must seek the consolation of whores.
Treslove wished the pox on him. Then immediately unwished it. All this being a Jew when he might have done better being a father.
He did not understand why anyone would seek the consolation of whores. He did not, himself, do unassociated desire. And he had no reason to think Finkler did. So either he was so far from himself that there was no knowing what he would do, including make a move on Hephzibah, or he had already made a move on Hephzibah, been rejected and turned to prostitutes as Treslove turned to opera.
Unless he had made a move on Hephzibah, been accepted and turned to prostitutes either a) to assuage his guilt, or b) to express the superabundance of his satisfaction. That one Treslove did understand: that you might go with a second woman as a delirious after-effect of having just been with the first.
But not a prostitute. Not after Hephzibah!
Treslove didn’t want to be feeling any of this. Either about his friend who in all likelihood was simply in the deep dejection of widowerhood still. Or about Hephzibah who was worried sick about the imminent opening of the museum, and wouldn’t have thanked Treslove for saddling her with the extraneous perturbations of adultery. Or about himself. He wanted to be happy. Or, if he was happy, he wanted to be happier. Sane. Or, if he was sane, saner.
He didn’t quite believe his own suspicions. Jealousy wasn’t in his nature. That wasn’t self-flattery. He tried to work up a passion over Finkler and Abe and anyone else Hephzibah might be seeing at the museum, the architect, the works foreman, the electrician, the person employed to wipe the bacon fat off door handles, the person doing the smearing even, but he couldn’t find any lasting rage or sorrow. What Treslove did was exclusion, not jealousy. And though they were related, they were not the same. Jealousy would have made him angry with Hephzibah, it might even have aroused him; but all he felt was lonely and rejected.
It was like being a child among adults; not unloved but unlistened to. At best humoured. He wasn’t the real McCoy, that was what it came to. Not only wasn’t he a Jew, he was a jest to Jews.
The real McGoy.
Hephzibah’s mysteriously extended family was a case in point. Every time she took him round to meet the second half-cousin of an aunt-in-law three times removed, always surrounded by nephews and nieces and the children of nephews and nieces who looked just like the last lot but weren’t, they pounced on Treslove, as though he had just been found wandering naked and without language in the Mata Atlântica, in order to be the first to explain to him the complexities of family relations in the civilised world, information for which he would certainly have been grateful had it not been delivered to him as though any kinship system beyond being the only child of divorced drug-taking parents was bound to be outside the comprehension of a Gentile.
It was in the same spirit, too, that they fed him, pushing food on him as though he hadn’t had a square meal since being abandoned to savages twenty years before and neither knew the names of any foodstuff that wasn’t grass nor was prepared for any taste that wasn’t coconut. ‘Be careful, that’s hot!’ they would shout when he spooned horseradish on to a slice of tongue, though he reckoned the mashed banana and strained peach with which one of the babies was covering his face would have been far hotter. Followed by, ‘You might not like that, it’s tongue, not everybody can cope with tongue.’
Not everybody? Did they become everybody the minute they clapped eyes on him?
No harm was meant, he knew. Quite the opposite. And Hephzibah found it all very funny, going over to him while it was happening and running her hands through his hair. But it wore him down. It wouldn’t stop. There was never a time when they opened the door to him and said Julian, how nice to see you, come in, we have nothing in the way of food or other secrets of our culture to test you with today and are no more conscious of your being a Gentile than you are of our being Jews.
He was always a curiosity to them. Always a bit of a barbarian who had to be placated with beads and mirrors. He charged himself with ingratitude and humourlessness. Each time he fell into a pet he promised he would learn to do better. But he never did. They wouldn’t let him. Wouldn’t let him in.
And then when they did . . .
3
The face-painting incident.
Once, in his student days, Treslove met a very beautiful hippy girl, a true wispy child of nature and marijuana, dressed in a big girl’s version of a little girl’s nightgown. The occasion was a gestalt nostalgia party in East Sussex. They were being their parents as they imagined their parents had been. But they were doing it for real as well, in the sense that they had an ecological agenda.
Though Treslove was doing a module in Pollution and Conservation he didn’t exactly have an ecological agenda himself. But he was happy that other people did. It made for a good party.
It was an early summer’s evening, and gentleness was in the air. Everyone sat on cushions on the floor and told everyone else what they thought of them. Only rarely did anyone express anything other than deep affection. There were candles in the garden, music played, people kissed, cut out shapes from coloured paper which they hung from trees, and painted one another’s faces.
Treslove had little aptitude for art of any sort, but for face-painting he had no aptitude whatsoever. The beautiful hippy girl floated across to where he was sitting on a garden bench, smoking dope. Through her little girl’s dress he could see her big girl’s breasts. ‘Peace,’ he said, offering her the spliff.
She was carrying paints. ‘Paint me,’ she said.
‘I can’t,’ he told her. ‘I have no aptitude.’
‘We can all paint,’ she said, kneeling in front of him, offering her face. ‘Just let the colours flow.’
‘Colours don’t flow with me,’ he explained. ‘And I can never think of a subject.’
‘Paint the me you see,’ she told him, closing her eyes and pulling back her hair.
So Treslove painted a clown. Not an elegant or tragic clown. Not a Pierrot or Pirouette, but an Auguste with
an absurd red nose, and big splotches of white outlined with black around the mouth and above the eyes, and crimson patches on the cheeks. A drooling, dribbling splosher of a clown.
She cried when she saw what he had done to her. The host of the party asked him to leave. Everyone was looking. Including Finkler who was down from Oxford for the weekend and whom Treslove had taken to the party. Finkler had his arms around a girl whose face he had exquisitely painted with floating shapes, in the manner of Chagall.
‘What have I done?’ Treslove wanted to know.
‘You’ve made a fool of me,’ the girl said.
Treslove would not have made a fool of her for the world. In point of fact he had fallen in love with her while he painted her. It was just that a red nose and big white mouth and crimson patches on the cheeks were all that he could think of painting.
‘You have humiliated me,’ the girl cried, sobbing into a tissue. The tears mingling with the face paint made her look even more ridiculous than Treslove had made her look. She was beside herself with distress.
Treslove looked over to Finkler for support. Finkler shook his head as over someone to whom he had shown infinite patience in the past but could forgive no more. He enfolded his girl in his arms so that she should not have to see what his friend had done.
‘Leave,’ the host said.
Treslove was a long time recovering from this incident. It marked him, in his own eyes, as a man who didn’t know how to relate to people, especially women. Thereafter, he hesitated when he was invited to a party. And started, in the way that some people start from spiders, whenever he saw a box of children’s paints or people painting one another’s faces at a fete.
That the girl he had painted as a clown might have been the Judith who avenged herself on him outside the window of J. P. Guivier had of course crossed his mind. Everything crossed Treslove’s mind. But for it to have been her, she must have changed considerably over the years both in physique and in temper.
The Finkler Question Page 30