The Finkler Question (19 page)

‘No but this was a mugging with a difference. This was a mega-mugging.’

‘God, is he hurt?’ Janice wondered.

‘Well here’s the thing. Apparently he says no but Uncle Sam thinks yes.’

‘You’ve seen Uncle Sam?’

‘Ran into him in a bar. That’s how I know about it.’

‘Your father would make a fuss about it if he’d been hurt,’ Josephine put in. ‘He makes a fuss if he cuts his finger.’

‘It’s not that kind of hurt. Sam says it’s shaken him badly but he won’t accept it. He’s in denial, Sam reckons.’

‘He’s always been in denial,’ Josephine said. ‘He’s in denial that he’s a bastard.’

‘What does Sam think he’s in denial about?’ Janice asked.

‘Hard to say. His identity or whatever.’

Josephine snorted. ‘Tell me something new.’

‘It’s weirder than that. It seems he was mugged by a woman.’

‘A woman?’ Rodolfo couldn’t contain his amusement. ‘I knew he was a wimp, but a woman – !’

‘Sounds like some sort of wish-fulfilment,’ Janice said.

‘Yeah, mine,’ Josephine laughed. ‘I only wish I could tell you it was me that did it.’

‘Josephine!’ Janice admonished her.

‘Come off it. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to mug him if you saw him coming down the street looking like Leonardo DiCaprio’s grandfather and dodging the cracks or whatever he does now?’

‘Why don’t you come off the fence and tell us what you really think of Dad?’ Rodolfo said, still amused at the idea of his father cowering before a woman.

‘You mean admit I love him?’ She put her fingers down her throat.

‘Sam says it’s bollocks, anyway,’ Alfredo said. ‘His theory is that Dad’s stressed out.’

‘By what?’ Janice wanted to know.

‘By what happened to Auntie Tyler and the wife of another of his friends. Too much dying for him to handle, Uncle Sam reckons.’

‘That’s your father all over,’ Josephine said. ‘Greedy little grave robber. Why can’t he allow other men to mourn their own wives? Why must he always get in on the act?’

‘Sam said he was very fond of both women.’

‘Yeah – I’ll bet. Especially when they snuffed it.’

Ignoring this, Janice said, ‘So Sam thinks this mugger materialised from Julian’s grief . . .’

‘Grief!’

‘No, it’s an intriguing thought. Maybe this is what a ghost is – the embodiment of what’s upsetting you. But why as a mugger, I wonder? Why the violence?’

‘This conversation is getting beyond me,’ Rodolfo said. ‘Can’t we go back to Dad being bashed by some bag lady?’

‘Guilt’s my guess,’ Josephine said, ignoring him. ‘He’d probably been shafting them both. Or worse, singing Puccini arias to them.’

‘Yours were Verdi,’ Janice reminded her.

‘Anyway,’ Alfredo went on, ‘Sam suggested we send him away for a bit.’

‘To the loony bin?’

‘Arrange a holiday for him. You know how reluctant he is to make plans to go away. Frightened of trains, frightened of planes, frightened to be somewhere he doesn’t know the local word for paracetamol. It would be best, Uncle Sam said, for us actually to go with him. Anyone want to go on holiday with Dad?’

‘Not me,’ Rodolfo said.

‘Not me,’ Janice said.

‘Not if he was the last man on the planet,’ Josephine said. ‘Let Sam Finkler go with him if he thinks it’s such a good idea.’

‘So that’s a no then, is it?’ Alfredo laughed.

It was only as they were getting up to leave again, having agreed that the boys should at least give him a call and maybe take him out for lunch, that Alfredo remembered something else Uncle Sam had told him. ‘And,
and
 . . . he’s decided he’s a Jew.’

‘Uncle Sam? Isn’t Uncle Sam already a Jew?’

‘No, Dad.
Dad
’s decided he’s a Jew.’

‘Dad’s decided he’s a Jew? Dad, a Jew?’

All four sat down again.

‘Yep.’

‘How do you mean decided?’ Rodolfo wanted to know. ‘You can’t just get up one morning and
decide
you’re a Jew – or can you?’

‘I’ve worked with a lot of people at BH who got up one morning and decided they were
not
a Jew,’ Josephine said.

‘But it can’t work the other way, surely?’

‘Search me,’ said Alfredo. ‘But I don’t think Dad’s planning to become a Jew. If I understood Uncle Sam he’s got this bee in his bonnet that he already
is
a Jew.’

‘Christ,’ Rodolfo said, ‘what does that make us?’

‘Not Jewish,’ Josephine said. ‘Don’t worry about it. Jews don’t trust their women in the sack, so you can only be Jewish through the vagina. And I don’t have a Jewish vagina.’

‘Nor me,’ Janice said. ‘Nor mine.’

Alfredo and Rodolfo exchanged vomit faces with each other.

But Rodolfo was perplexed as well as nauseated. ‘I don’t get how that works. If you can’t trust your women why would you want them to be the ones that make you Jewish?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t be a Jew at all if you relied on your father and he was a bloody big Arab with gold teeth.’

‘Do Jewish women sleep with Arabs?’

‘Darling, Jewish women sleep with anybody.’

‘Hush it,’ Janice said, signalling the waiters with a mute revolution of her head. They were, don’t forget – her eyes warned them – in a Lebanese restaurant.

‘Interesting, though,’ Rodolfo said. ‘If I discover I’m half Jewish will I suddenly become half clever?’

Janice ruffled her son’s hair. ‘You don’t need
him
to make you half clever,’ she said.

‘Half rich, then?’

FIVE

1

You don’t say ‘Find her and bring her’ to an obsessive man.

But Treslove was damned if he was going to give the ‘her’ in question another minute of his time. One day you just have to say no to a compulsion. He put on a coat and took it off again. Enough was enough. He knew what he thought. He knew what he had heard.
You Jew
. Not
You Bloody Jew
or
You Dirty Jew
or
You Lovely Jew
.
Just You Jew
. And it was the oddity of that, all things considered, that proved that she had said it. Why would he make up anything so strange?
You Jew,
unvarnished –
You pure unvarnished Jew –
supported no theory or assumption. It answered to no necessity that Treslove recognised in himself. It provided nothing, solved nothing, assuaged nothing.

Treslove knew the argument against. He had made it up out of need. So show him the need?

Its very arbitrariness was the proof of its authenticity. His psychology was innocent of seeking or finding the slightest gratification from it. But that still left the mugger. Would she have called him
Jew
just for the fun of it? No, she had called him
Jew
because she’d seen a Jew. Why she needed to tell him what she’d seen was a different question. She didn’t, all things considered, have to say anything. She could have taken his valuables and left without a word. He wasn’t exactly putting up a fight. Or looking for a thank-you. Most muggers, he assumed, didn’t identify their victims while they were mugging them.
You Protestant, You Chinaman
. Why bother? The Protestant and the Chinaman could be relied on to know what they were without a mugger telling them. So
You Jew
was either an expression of irrepressible rage or it was intended to be informative.
I’ve taken your watch, your wallet, your fountain pen, your mobile phone and your self-respect – your jewels, in short – but in return I give you something: just in case you didn’t know it, and I have a sneaking little feeling (don’t ask me why) that you might not have known it, you’re a Jew.

Bye.

Treslove was not willing to accept that he had encountered a person with a screw loose, or that he had just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d been subject to enough accident. His whole life had been an accident. His birth was an accident – his parents had told him that, ‘You weren’t planned, Julian, but you were a nice surprise.’ His own sons the same. Only he’d never told them they were a nice surprise. Doing a modular degree had been an accident; in another age he’d have read classics or theology. The BBC was an accident. A malign accident. The women he’d loved were all accidents. If life didn’t have a thread of meaning to it, why live it? Some men find God where they least expect to. Some discover their purpose in social action or self-sacrifice. Treslove had been in waiting for as long as he could remember. Very well then. My fate cries out, he thought.

Two nights later he was dining with fellow Jews at Libor’s place.

2

Half a year before his wife died, Sam Finkler accepted an invitation to be a castaway on
Desert Island Discs
.

It would be cruel to assume that the two events were anything but coincidentally related.

They were sitting in their garden, only a low gate dividing them from the Heath, when Finkler first brought up the invitation. It was that or help Tyler plant. Their garden had long been designated an area of non-relaxation on account of Tyler always being busy in it and Finkler having an allergic reaction to lawns, flowers and the idea of taking things easy. ‘That’s called a lounger – lounge!’ Tyler used to order him. But she had discovered what he had always known – that his body wasn’t built for lounging in a lounger. ‘I’ll lounge long enough in due course,’ had been his answer. So either he didn’t venture out into the garden at all, or he paced around its perimeter like a private detective looking for a corpse in the bushes, pausing to discuss what was on his mind, and that – at least the part he could relate to Tyler – was invariably work. The moment he dried up or slowed down he knew Tyler would recruit him to hold a bamboo stake for her, or to put his finger on a knot of green string. Not onerous tasks in themselves, but they made Finkler feel his life was ebbing away into manure and mulch.

‘I’ve landed
Desert Island Discs
,’ he told her from the garden’s furthest extremity, his hands behind him holding on to a down-pipe for safety.

Tyler was on her hands and knees, coaxing life out of the stony soil. Absorbed in dirt. She didn’t look up. ‘Landed? How do you mean landed? I didn’t know you were fishing for it.’

‘I wasn’t. They fished for me.’

‘Then tell them to throw you back.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Why wouldn’t you? What do you want with
Desert
Island Discs
? For a start you go to pieces in a garden never mind a desert island. And you’ve never owned a disc. You don’t know any music.’

‘I do.’

‘Name some music that you like.’

‘Ah,
like
– that’s not the same as know.’

‘Pedantic sod!’ she said. ‘It’s not enough you’re a liar. You have to be a pedant as well. I recommend you don’t do the programme. It will do you no favours. People can tell when you’re making it up. You shout.’

Finkler might have been fished for, but he did not rise to his wife’s bait. ‘I won’t be lying. Not every one of my records has to be music.’