The Finkler Question (23 page)

The next thing he knew he was being asked, as the youngest manchild present – ‘Me?’ he said in astonishment – whether he would like to recite the Four Questions.

‘I would if I could,’ he told them. ‘In fact, there are many more than four questions I would like to ask. But I cannot read Hebrew.’

‘Wrong order,’ the old lady said, not taking her eyes from her book. ‘We’ve gone past the Four Questions. We never do things in the right order in this family. Everything’s upside down. Who is he anyway? Another of our Bernice’s?’

‘Mother, Bernice died thirty years ago,’ someone at the other end of the table said.

‘Then he shouldn’t be here,’ the old lady said.

Treslove wondered what he’d started.

The granddaughter, as he supposed, or was it the great-granddaughter laid a gentle hand on his. ‘Take no notice,’ she whispered. ‘She’s always like this at a
Seder
. She loves it but it makes her angry. I think it’s the plagues. She feels a little guilty for them. But you don’t have to read Hebrew. You can ask the Four Questions in English.’

‘But I can’t read right to left,’ Treslove whispered back.

‘In English you don’t need to.’

She opened the Haggadah at the relevant page and pointed.

Treslove looked across at Libor who nodded and said, ‘So ask the questions.’ He had screwed his face up to resemble an old pantomime Israelite. ‘You’re the Jew boy, ask the questions’ was the message Treslove read in it.

And Treslove, much embarrassed, but with a beating heart, did as he was told.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Why on this night must we eat bitter herbs?

Why on this night do we dip our food twice?

On all other nights we may eat either sitting or leaning, but why on this night must we all lean?

He found it difficult to listen to the answers. He had been made too self-conscious by his reading. How did he know how to ask Jewish questions in a room of Jews he had never before met? Were the questions meant to be rhetorical? Were they a joke? Should he have asked them as Jack Benny or Shelley Berman might have asked them, with the
bitter herbs
comically inflected? Or hyperbolically to denote the extremity of Jewish grief? The Jews were a hyperbolic people. Had he been hyperbolical enough?

Biiii
 . . .
ttaah
– what if he should he have delivered it like that, with shuddery theatricality, in the manner of Donald Wolfit playing Hamlet’s father’s ghost?

‘That’s not the way you say them,’ the old lady had shouted before he’d even finished asking the first question. But apart from calls of ‘Shush, Mother’ no one had taken any notice of her. But then no one had applauded him either.

If the answers to his questions amounted to anything it was that this story had to be told and retold – ‘The more one speaks about the departure from Egypt the better,’ he read. Which wasn’t, if he understood the matter correctly, remotely Finkler’s position. ‘Oh, here we go, Holocaust, Holocaust,’ he heard Finkler saying. So would he say the same about Passover? ‘Oh, here we go, Exodus, Exodus . . .’

Treslove liked the idea of telling and retelling. It suited his obsessive personality. Further proof, if further proof were needed . . .

The service – if that was the word for something quite so shapeless and intermittent – continued at a leisurely pace. Some groups pointed passages out to one another, as though losing one’s place and having it found for one again was part of the joy of it all, others fell into what Treslove took to be extraneous conversation, individuals nodded off or left the table to visit one of Libor’s many lavatories, some not returning until the Jews were well out of Egypt, while one or two just stared into space, though whether they were remembering their people’s departure from Egypt five thousand years before or were looking into their own departure tomorrow, Treslove was unable to tell.

‘There aren’t enough children here,’ an old man sitting opposite him said. He had outworn skin and a great cowl of boastful black hair underneath which he glowered at the entire table as though everybody there had wronged him at one time or another.

Treslove looked about. ‘I think there are
no
children here,’ he replied.

The old man stared at him in fury. ‘That’s what I said. Why don’t you listen to what I’m saying? There are no children here.’

The table came together again for the Passover meal, which seemed to mark the end of all liturgy. Treslove ate what was given him, not expecting to enjoy it. Bitter herbs plastered between two slices of matzo – ‘To remind us of the bitter times we went through,’ a person who had changed places with the woman who had helped him with the Four Questions said. ‘And are still going through, if you ask me,’ said someone else; an explanation contradicted by a third party who said, ‘Rubbish, it represents the cement with which we built the pyramids with our bare hands’ – followed by egg in salt water (‘It symbolises our tears, the tears we spilt’), then chicken soup with kneidlach, then more chicken and potatoes which as far as Treslove could tell symbolised nothing. He was pleased about that. Food that symbolised nothing was easier to digest.

Libor came over to see how he was getting on. ‘You like the chicken?’ he asked.

‘I like everything, Libor. You cook it yourself ?’

‘I have a team of women. The chicken symbolises the pleasure Jewish men take in having a team of women to cook it for them.’

But if Treslove thought the ceremony had concluded with the meal, he was mistaken. No sooner were the plates cleared away than it began again, with thanks for God’s enduring loving kindness, songs which everyone knew and quibbles which no one attended to and fine points of learned exposition culled from the Jewish sages. Treslove marvelled. Rabbi Yehoshua had said this. Hillel had done that. Of Rabbi Eliezer a certain story was told . . . It wasn’t just a historical event that was being remembered, it was the stored intelligence of the people.

His
people . . .

He introduced himself, when it seemed appropriate, to the woman he took to be the old lady’s great-granddaughter. She had taken up her place again after visiting people at the furthest reaches of the room. She had the look of a weary traveller returned from an arduous journey. ‘Julian,’ he told her, lingering on the first syllable.

‘Hephzibah,’ she said, giving him a plump and many-silver-ringed hand. ‘Hephzibah Weizenbaum.’

Saying her name seemed to tire her too.

Treslove smiled and repeated it.
Hephzibah Weizenbaum
– getting his tongue knotted on the ‘ph’ which she pronounced somewhere between an ‘h’ and an ‘f’, but which he, for some reason – a Finkler thing? – couldn’t. ‘Hepzibah,’ he said. ‘Hepzibah, Heffzibah, I can’t say it, but such a beautiful name.’

She was amused by him. ‘Thank you,’ she said, moving her hands more than he thought was necessary, ‘however you want to say it.’

Her rings confounded him. They appeared to have been bought at a Hell’s Angels’ shop. But he knew where her clothes came from. Hampstead Bazaar. There was a Hampstead Bazaar near his apartment which he sometimes peered into on his way home, wondering why no woman he had ever proposed marriage to ever looked like the multilaterally swathed models in the window. Hampstead Bazaar designed clothes for women who had something to hide, whereas all Treslove’s women had been skin and bones, the only thing they had to hide being Treslove. What would have happened, he mused, had his taste in women been different? Would a woman with a fuller figure have stayed longer in his company? Might he have found happiness with her? Might she have anchored him?

Hephzibah Weizenbaum was tented and suggested the Middle East. There was an Arab shop on Oxford Street which sprayed perfume into the traffic. Treslove, on his way to nowhere in particular, sometimes stopped and breathed it in. Hephzibah Weizenbaum smelt like that – of car fumes, and crowds of tourists, and the Euphrates where it all began.

She smiled, not guessing what he was thinking. The smile enveloped him, like the warm waters of a pool buoying up a swimmer. He felt he floated in her eyes, which were more purple than black. He tapped the back of her hand, not thinking what he was doing. With her free hand she tapped his. The silver rings stung him in a way he found arousing.

‘So,’ he said.

‘So,’ she replied.

She had a warm voice, like melted chocolate. She was probably full of chocolate, Treslove thought. Normally fastidious about fat, he decided it looked good on her, swathed out of sight as it was.

She had a strong face, broad cheekbones – more Mongolian than Middle Eastern – and a full, vivacious mouth. Mocking, but not mocking him, and not mocking the ceremony. Just mocking.

Was he in love with her?

He thought he was, though he was not sure he would know how to love a woman who looked so healthy.

‘This is your first one, then,’ she said.

Treslove was astonished. How could she have known she was his first healthy woman?

She saw his confusion. ‘Your first Passover,’ she said.

He smiled, relieved. ‘Yes, but I hope not my last,’ he said.

‘I’ll remember to invite you to mine, then,’ she said, bunching up her eyes at him.

‘I’d like that,’ Treslove answered. He hoped the reason she knew it was his first Passover was his ignorance of the ritual, not his alien appearance.

‘Libor has spoken of you many times,’ she said. ‘You and your friend.’

‘Sam.’

‘Yes, Sam. Julian and Sam, I feel I know you both well. I am Libor’s great-great-niece by marriage, that’s to say on Malkie’s side, unless I am his great-great-great cousin.’

‘Is everyone here the great-great-great cousin of the person sitting next to them?’ he asked.

‘Unless they are more closely related, yes,’ she said.

He nodded in the direction of the old lady. ‘She your . . . ?’

‘She’s my something. Just don’t ask me to say precisely what. All Jews are at furthest remove one another’s great-great-great cousins. We don’t do six degrees of separation. We do three.’

‘One big happy family?’

‘I don’t know about the happy. But family, yes. It can be a pain.’

‘It wouldn’t be a pain if you had never known an extended family.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘A mother and a father – that was it.’

He suddenly sounded orphaned to himself and hoped the spectacle of his loneliness wouldn’t make her cry. Or not too much.

‘What I sometimes wouldn’t give to have had a mother and a father and that’s it,’ Hephzibah surprised him by saying. ‘Though God knows I miss them.’

‘They aren’t here?’

‘Passed away. So I turn myself into a sort of universal daughter.’

(
And mother?
Treslove wondered.)

‘You have siblings?’

‘Not exactly. So I turn myself into a sort of universal sister too. I have aunts, I have uncles, I have cousins, I have cousins of cousins . . . I spend a month’s salary on birthday cards. And don’t remember half their names.’

‘And children of your own?’ Treslove made it sound casual, like a question about the weather.
You finding it cold today?

She smiled. ‘Not yet. No hurry.’

Treslove, who had not been good with babies, saw the babies they were going to have, for this time it would be different. Jacob, Esther, Ruth, Moishe, Isaac, Rachel, Abraham, Leah, Leopold, Lazarus, Miriam . . . He began to run out of names. Samuel – no, not Samuel – Esau, Eliezer, Bathsheba, Enoch, Jezebel, Tabitha, Tamar, Judith . . .

Hudith.

‘
You?’ she asked.

‘Siblings? No.’

‘Children?’

‘Two. Sons. Both grown up. But I wasn’t strictly instrumental in their rearing. I hardly know them really.’