The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  But he couldn’t go on blaming other people. It was his fault in more ways than he could number. He had neglected Libor in recent months, thinking only about himself. And when he had spent time with him it was only to talk sexual jealousy. You don’t talk sexual jealousy – you don’t, if you have a grain of tact or discretion in your body, talk sexual anything to an old man who has recently lost the woman he had been in love with all his life. That was gross. And it was grosser still – worse than gross: it was brutal – to burden Libor with the knowledge of his affair with Tyler. That was a secret Treslove should have taken to the grave, as he supposed Tyler had. And Libor himself.

  It wasn’t out of the question that this uncalled-for confession was among the reasons Libor had ended his life – so that he didn’t have to bear his friend’s turpitude any longer. Treslove had seen Libor’s face blacken when he’d bragged – let’s call a spade a spade, it was bragging – about those stolen afternoons with Finkler’s wife; he had seen the lights go out in the old man’s eyes. It seemed to be a villainy too far for Libor. Treslove had blemished, discredited, defiled, the story of the three men’s long-standing friendship, turned the trust between them, whatever their differences, into a fiction, a delusion, a lie.

  Falsities spill over. Perhaps it wasn’t only the romance of their friendship that Treslove had defiled; perhaps it was the idea of romance altogether. Once one cherished illusion goes, what’s to stop the next? Had Treslove and Tyler’s iniquity poisoned everything?

  No, that in itself could not have not killed Libor. But who was to say it hadn’t weakened his resolve to stay alive?

  Treslove would have admitted all this to Hephzibah, begged for absolution in her arms, but to have done that he would have had to tell her, too, about Tyler, and that was something he couldn’t do.

  She was in a bad way herself. Though it was Libor who had brought Treslove and Hephzibah together, Treslove in his turn had made Libor more important to her than he had previously been. There had always been a fondness between them, but great-great-nieces are rarely intimate with their great-great-uncles. In her time with Treslove, though, this old, somewhat formal affection had blossomed into love, to the point where she was unable to remember not having him there, close to her, reminding her of Aunt Malkie, and making her love for Julian almost a family affair. She, too, castigated herself for allowing other concerns to consume her attention. She should have been keeping an eye on Libor.

  But these other concerns would not let her alone. The murder of that Arab family on a bus was an unbearable event. She didn’t know anyone who wasn’t horrified. Horrified on behalf of the Arabs. Horrified for them. But, yes, horrified as well in anticipation of the consequences. Jews were being depicted everywhere as bloodthirsty monsters, however the history of Zionism was explained – whether bloodthirsty in their seizure of someone else’s country from the start, or bloodthirsty as a consequence of events which bit by bit had made them strangers to compassion – yet no Jew was cheering the death of this Arab family, not in the streets nor in the quiet of their homes, no Jewish women gathered by the wells and ululated their jubilation, no Jewish men went to the synagogue to dance their thanks to the Almighty. Thou shalt not kill. They could say what they liked, the libellers and hate-mongers, stigmatising Jews as racists and supremacists, thou shalt not kill was emblazoned on the hearts of Jews.

  And Jewish soldiers?

  Well, Meyer Abramsky was no Jewish soldier. He vexed her moral sense in no way at all. It was only a pity he had been stoned to death. She would have liked to see him tried and found a thousand times guilty by Jews. He is not one of ours.

  And then stoned to death by those whose moral character he had fouled.

  A monument would eventually be erected in his name, of course. The settlers had to have their heroes. Who were these people? Where had they suddenly appeared from? They were alien to her education and upbringing. They had nothing to do with any Jewishness she recognised. They were the children of a universal unreason, of the same extraction as suicide bombers and all the other End of Time death cultists and apocalyptics, not the children of Abraham whose name they defamed. But try telling that to those who had taken to the streets and squares of London again, ready at a moment’s notice with their chants and placards as though they woke to speak violence against the one country in the world of which the majority of the population was Jewish and were disappointed when a fresh day brought no justification for it.

  It had started again, anyway. Her emails streamed reported menace and invective. A brick was thrown through a window of the museum. An Orthodox man in his sixties was beaten up at a bus stop in Temple Fortune. Graffiti began to appear again on synagogue walls, the Star of David crossed with the swastika. The Internet bubbled and boiled with madness. She couldn’t bear to open a newspaper.

  Was it something or was it nothing?

  Meanwhile there had to be a coroner’s inquest into Libor’s death. And more searching questions to be answered in their hearts by those who had loved him.

  She knew what she thought. She thought Libor had gone for a walk at dusk – without doubt a lonely, melancholy walk, but just a walk – and had fallen. People do fall. Not everything is deliberated upon.

  Libor fell.

  5

  ‘The hardest part,’ Finkler told Treslove, ‘is not to be defined by one’s enemies. Just because I am no longer an ASHamed Jew does not mean I have relinquished my prerogative to be ashamed.’

  ‘Why bring being ashamed into it at all?’

  ‘You sound like my poor wife.’

  ‘Do I?’ Treslove, head down, blushed.

  Finkler, thankfully, did not notice. ‘ “What’s it to you?” she used to ask me. “How does it reflect on you?” But it does. It reflects on me because I expect better.’

  ‘Isn’t that grandiosity?’

  ‘Ha! My wife again. You didn’t discuss me with her, did you? That’s a rhetorical question. No, I don’t think it’s grandiosity to take what that lunatic Abramsky did personally. If any man’s death diminishes me, because I am of mankind, then any man’s act of murder does the same.’

  ‘Then be diminished as a member of mankind. The grandiosity is to feel diminished as a Jew.’

  Finkler clapped an arm around his friend’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be paid out as a Jew,’ he said, ‘whatever you think.’

  He smiled weakly, seeing Treslove in a yarmulke. The two men had walked aside, leaving Libor’s family to be at his graveside with him, alone. The service had concluded, but Hephzibah and a number of others had wanted time to reflect away from the attentions of gravediggers and rabbis. When they had gone, Treslove and Finkler would have their hour.

  They would rather not have talked about Abramsky. About Abramsky there was nothing civilised to say. But they held back from discussing Libor because they were afraid of their feelings. Treslove, especially, was unable to look at the ground in which Libor – still warm, was how he imagined him, still aggrieved and hurt – had been laid. Next to his mound of earth was Malkie’s grave. The thought of them lying side by side, silent for all eternity, no laughter, no obscenities, no music, was more than he could bear.

  Would he and Hephzibah . . . ? Would he be allowed to lie in a Jewish cemetery at all? They had already asked. All depended. If she wanted to be buried where her parents were buried, in a cemetery administered by the Orthodox, Treslove would probably be refused the right to be buried next to her. If, however . . . So many complications when you took up with a Jew, as Tyler had discovered. It was a shame she wasn’t still here to ask. ‘In the matter of sleeping-over rights, Tyler . . . ?’

  Libor and Malkie had wanted to be buried in the same grave, one above the other, but there had been objections to that, as there were objections to everything, in death as in life, though no one was sure whether on religious grounds or simply because the earth was too stony to take a grave deep enough for two. And anyway, Malkie had joked, they would only end up fighting over w
ho was to be on top. So they lay democratically, side by side, in their decorous Queen-size bed.

  Hephzibah signalled that she and the family were leaving. She looked rather wonderful, Treslove thought, in veiled, shawled black, like a Victorian widow. A majestic relict. Treslove motioned that they would stay a little. The two men took each other’s arms. Treslove was grateful for the support. He thought his legs would give way beneath him. He was not framed for cemeteries. They spoke too vividly to him of the end of love.

  Had he looked around he would have been struck by the lack of statuary eloquence. A Jewish cemetery is a blank, mute place. As though by the time one reaches here there is nothing further to be said. But he kept his eyes to the ground, hoping to see nothing.

  The two men stood silently together, like headstones themselves. ‘To what base uses we may return,’ Finkler said after a while.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Treslove said, ‘I can’t play. Not today.’

  ‘Fair enough. It wasn’t my intention to be flippant.’

  ‘I know,’ Treslove said. ‘I wouldn’t accuse you of that. I don’t doubt you loved him as much as I did.’

  Silence again between them. Then, ‘So what could we have done differently?’ Finkler asked.

  Treslove was surprised. That category of question normally belonged to him.

  ‘Watched over him.’

  ‘Would he have let us?’

  ‘Had we done it as it should have been done he wouldn’t have noticed.’

  ‘Strange,’ Finkler mused, not meaning to disagree, ‘but I felt he left us.’

  ‘Well, he’s done that all right.’

  ‘I mean earlier.’

  ‘How much earlier?’

  ‘When Malkie died. Didn’t you think that when Malkie died he stopped?’

  Treslove thought about it. ‘No, that’s not how I felt it,’ he said. For Treslove a woman’s death was a beginning. He was a man made to mourn. He had always imagined himself bent double, like the aged Thomas Hardy, revisiting the torn haunts of love. If anything, he had found Libor a touch vigorous after Malkie died. He would have cut a more distraught, tormented figure himself. ‘To me,’ he went on, ‘it seemed that he left when I got together with Hephzibah.’

  ‘Now who’s being grandiose?’ Finkler said. ‘Do you think he thought his earthly task was done then, or what?’

  If Finkler thought that was grandiose, what would he say if he ever found out that Treslove thought Libor had committed suicide because of what he knew about his and Tyler’s adultery? Not that he ever would find that out. Supposing, of course, that he didn’t already know.

  ‘No, of course not that. But my new beginning, for what it is’ – why did I say that, Treslove wondered, why the apology? – ‘my new beginning with Hephzibah might have made him think there could be no new beginnings for him.’

  ‘He should have palled out with me more in that case,’ Finkler said. ‘I’d have kept him company in no new beginnings.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Oh, come on nothing. We couldn’t have competed with you. Yours was a beginning to end beginnings. You weren’t a widower. You weren’t even a divorcee. You started from scratch. New woman, new religion. Me and Libor were dead men inhabiting a dead faith. You took both our souls on two counts. Good luck to you. We had no use for them. But you can’t pretend the three of us were ever in anything together. We weren’t the Three Musketeers. We died so that you could live, Julian. If that isn’t too Christian a thought in such a place. You tell me.’

  ‘What do I know, except that you ain’t no dead man, Sam.’

  Or was he? Sam the Dead Man. Treslove didn’t dare raise his eyes from the earth to look at his friend. He hadn’t seen him since they’d got here. He hadn’t seen anything or anyone – except of course Hephzibah whom he couldn’t miss.

  ‘Well, of the two of us -’ Finkler began, but he was unable to finish. A third person had arrived at the graveside. She stood quietly, anxious not to disturb their conversation. After a moment, she bent and took a handful of soil which she sprinkled like seeds on the mound of earth.

  The men fell quiet, making her self-conscious. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Finkler said. ‘We’re going in a minute ourselves.’

  Before she rose, Treslove was able to get a look at her. An elderly woman, but not aged, elegant, her head covered with a light scarf, poised, not unaccustomed to Jewish cemeteries and funerals, he thought. This much Treslove had discovered: the Jewish faith frightened even Jews. Only a few were at home in all the ceremonials. This woman was not awed, even by death.

  ‘Are you a relative?’ Finkler asked. He wanted to tell her that the family had been and left, and that if she wanted to join them . . .

  She stood, without difficulty, and shook her head. ‘Just a long-time friend,’ she said.

  ‘Us too,’ Treslove said.

  ‘This is a very sad day,’ the woman said.

  She was dry-eyed. Dryer by far than Treslove. He couldn’t have said how dry Finkler was.

  ‘Heartbreaking,’ he said. Finkler added his assent.

  They found themselves walking away from the grave together. ‘My name is Emmy Oppenstein,’ the woman said.

  The two men introduced themselves to her. There were no handshakes. Treslove liked that. The Jews were good at making one occasion not like another, he thought. The protocol alarmed him but he admired it. Good to divide this from that. Why is this night different from all other nights. Or was it good? They pursued difference to the grave.

  ‘How long is it since either of you saw him?’ Emmy Oppenstein enquired.

  She wanted to know how he had been in the time before his death. She herself had not seen him for many months, but they had spoken on the phone a few times more recently than that.

  ‘In the normal course of events you saw a lot of him, then?’ Treslove asked. Annoyed for Malkie.

  ‘No, not at all. In the normal course of events I saw him once every half century.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I made contact with him again after all that time because I needed his help. I suppose I’m wanting to hear that I didn’t put more pressure on him than he could bear.’

  ‘Well, he never said anything,’ Treslove told her. He wanted to add that Libor had never so much as mentioned her existence, but he couldn’t be quite so cruel to a woman her age.

  ‘And did you get his help?’ Finkler asked.

  She hesitated. ‘I got his company,’ she said. ‘But his help, no, I don’t think I can say he was able to give me that.’

  ‘Not like him.’

  ‘No, that was what I thought. Though of course after such a long time I was in no position to know what he was like. But it hurt him to refuse me, I thought. The strange thing was that it felt as though he wanted it to hurt him. And of course it saddens me deeply to think I was in some way the agency of his hurting himself.’

  ‘We are all punishing ourselves with that sadness,’ Finkler said.

  ‘Are you? I’m sorry to hear that. But that’s a natural thing for friends to feel. I hadn’t been a friend for so long I have no right, and indeed had no right, to think of myself as one. But I needed a favour.’

  She told them, in the end, what the favour was. Told them about the work she did, about what she feared, about the Jew-hatred which was beginning to infect the world she’d inhabited all her life, the world where people had once prided themselves on thinking before they rushed to judgement, and about her grandson, blinded by a person she didn’t scruple to call a terrorist.

  Both men were affected by the story. Libor was, too, she said, but the last time she saw him he seemed to turn his back on it. That was the way of things, he had told her. That was what happened to Jews. Change your tune.

  ‘Libor said that?’ Treslove asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Then he was in a worse way than I realised,’ he said. The emotion which had been m
isting up his eyes ever since he had seen Libor’s coffin lowered into the earth began to choke him.

  Finkler, too, found it hard to find words. He remembered all the arguments he’d had with Libor on the subject. And it pleased him not at all that Libor had surrendered at the last. Some arguments you don’t have in order that you will win.

  Finkler and Emmy Oppenstein wished each other long life on parting. Hephzibah had told Treslove of this custom. At a funeral Jews wish one another long life. It is a vote for life’s continuance in the face of death.

  He turned to Emmy Oppenstein. ‘I wish you long life,’ he said, looking up.

  6

  Treslove, who has always dreamed, dreams that he is beckoned to a death chamber. The room is dark and smells. Not of death but food. The remains of lamb chops which have been left out too long. To be precise it is the sweet smell of lamb fat he can smell. Strange, because he recalls Libor saying that he could never bear to eat lamb as a consequence of adopting as a childhood pet a lamb which had nibbled grass in a field behind his house in Bohemia. ‘Baaa,’ the lamb had said to little Libor. And ‘Baaa,’ little Libor had said back. Once you’ve conversed with a lamb you can’t eat it, Libor had explained. Same with any other animal.

  In his dream, Treslove wonders what St Francis found to eat.

  He doesn’t doubt he has come to pay his last respects to Libor but dreads seeing him. He is afraid of the face of death.

  To his horror, a weak voice calls him from the bed. ‘Julian, Julian. A word . . . come.’

  The voice is not Libor’s. It is Finkler’s. Faint, but decidedly Finkler’s.

  Treslove knows what he is going to hear. Finkler is playing their old clever-clogs schoolyard game. ‘If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,’ he is going to say, ‘absent thee from felicity awhile . . .’

  And Treslove will say back, ‘Felicity? Who’s Felicity?’

  He approaches the bed.

  ‘Closer,’ Finkler says. The voice strong suddenly.

  Treslove does as he is told. When he is close enough to feel Finkler’s breath, Finkler sits up and spits in his face, a violent stream of filth – phlegm, sour wine, lamb fat, vomit.