The Finkler Question (37 page)

Everything he remembered was painful by virtue of its sweetness. But now the pain was of another kind. So many bad things had happened to them, between them, as a consequence of them. He had angered her parents. He had robbed her of a musical career. They had failed to have a child, no unbearable loss for either of them, but there’d been a miscarriage which upset them precisely because it didn’t. She hadn’t travelled to Hollywood with him, not liking aeroplanes or caring to make new acquaintances. The only company she wanted, she told him, was his. Only he interested her. But now he came to think of it, hadn’t that been awful for her, and an intolerable burden on him? He had been lonely without her. He was subjected to temptations he would have overcome with less ado had she been with him. And he dared never fail her, whether as an indefatigable companion who came home from his travels with wonderful stories to tell, as a man who would return her love and show her it had not been wasted, or as a husband bound at every turn to justify her complete confidence in him.

None of these thoughts turned him against her. But they changed the atmosphere around the memory of her, as though a golden halo had – no, not slipped but darkened. This might be for the best, he thought. Nature’s way of helping him through. But what if he didn’t want to be helped through? Who was nature to decide!

And worst of all were the black events he kept recalling, which had spoilt their life together whether they’d known it at the time or not. There was a Yiddish phrase his parents had used and which he thought meant ‘long ago’.
Ale shvartse yorn
– all the black years. All those black years were now
their
black years – his and Malkie’s. The events that marred them were the anti-myths of their romance, peopled by monsters, proving that they had not lived in paradise together at all, but – through no fault of their own – in a place that was more like hell.

Malkie’s parents, the guttural Hofmannsthals, had been property-owning German Jews. For Libor – whose politics were hopelessly, Czechoslovakianly confused – this made them on two accounts the worst kind of Jews of all. They had been so disappointed in her choice of husband they had all but disowned her, treating Libor as though he were dirt beneath their feet, refusing to attend their wedding, demanding he stay away from every family function, including funerals. ‘What do they think I’m going to do, dance on their graves?’ he asked her.

They were right to worry. He would have.

And what was his sin? Being too poor for her. Being a journalist. Being a Sevcik, not a Hofmannsthal, being a Czech Jew, not a German Jew.

They couldn’t entirely disown her. They had to will their property to someone. They left her a small block of flats in Willesden. Willesden! Anyone would have thought from their exclusivism, Libor thought, that they were aristocracy, and all they were were fucking landlords of some run-down flats in Willesden.

‘It’s a good job I’m Jewish,’ he told Malkie, ‘otherwise your lot would have turned me Fascist.’

‘They might have liked you more had you not been Jewish,’ Malkie said, meaning had he only been a musician or had property of his own.

‘So what did Horowitz have? A dacha in Kiev?’

‘He had fame, darling.’

‘I have fame.’

‘Wrong sort. And you didn’t have any sort when I married you.’

But if he despised her German parents and their property he despised even more their tenants on account of whom he and Malkie, as property owners themselves now, had no choice but to soil their souls with commerce. Here was every sort of mean, malingering, whining and thieving human nature. These tenants, to whom he would not in any other circumstance have given shelter, not so much as a cardboard box, knew the letter of every law that might indulge them while breaking every other law there was. They fouled the space they inhabited while they lived there, then stole from it with a minute pettiness – every switch and bulb, every latch and handle, every thread from every carpet – when they left.

Get rid of the whole block was his advice, it isn’t worth the vexation. But she felt it tied her to her parents. They had made their lives again in London, and to have sold Willesden would have been to wipe their history out a second time. ‘A dirty money-grubbing Jew,’ the tenants called her when she did not flinch before their menace. And they were right in that she’d been grubbed and dirtied by her contact with them.

Human vermin, Libor thought, lover of the English though he was. Except that vermin probably honoured their habitations more. Now, in his imagination he conflated these tenant troubles with Malkie’s illness, though she had long before done what Libor had suggested and sold them off. How dared they call a woman in her frail health such names! How horrible for her that at such a time she had to encounter the human animal at its most repugnant. All the black years. Yes, they’d been happy together. They’d loved each other. But if they thought they’d escaped contamination they’d fooled themselves. It was as though black spiders crawled across the belly of his beautiful beloved Malkie as she slept in the filthy earth.

He called up Emmy and asked her to have breakfast with him. She was surprised by the request. Why breakfast? In the morning, he explained, I am at my blackest. And the advantage to me in that? she wondered. None, he said. It’s for me. She laughed.

They met at the Ritz. He had dressed up for her. David Niven as he lived and breathed. But with the sad defeated Prague Spring smile of Alexander Dub
č
ek.

‘You aren’t wooing me here again?’ she asked.

There was no reason not to. She was an elegant woman with good legs and Libor had no vows or memories to protect. The past was infested with black spiders. But he was curious about her use of the words ‘here’ and ‘again’.

‘This was where you brought me last time.’

‘For breakfast?’

‘Well, for bed and breakfast. I see you have forgotten.’

He apologised. He was about to say it had escaped his memory, but the expression sounded wrong for the occasion, as though his memory was a captor of good times. An idea which she could construe as insulting, if he had allowed this good time to get away.

‘Gone,’ he said, touching his head. ‘Like just about everything else.’

Had he really brought her here for bed and breakfast? How could he have afforded the Ritz all those years ago in his impoverished pre-Malkie days? Unless it was not as long ago as that, in which case . . . In which case it were better all memory of it had gone.

Yet how could it have gone?

She gave him time to think what he was thinking – it wasn’t hard to tell what he was thinking – then enquired as to the progress of his bereavement counselling.

Bereavement counselling? Then he remembered. ‘Gone,’ he said, touching his head again.

‘I’ve asked you here,’ he said, not giving her time, ‘one, because I’m lonely and wanted the company of a beautiful woman, and two, in order to say that I can’t do anything.’

She didn’t understand.

‘I can’t do anything about your grandson. Or about that anti-Semite film director. Or whatever else. I can’t do anything about any of it.’

She smiled him an understanding smile, putting the fingers of her well-looked-after hands together. Her rings flashed fire under the chandeliers. Ah well. ‘If you can’t, you can’t,’ she said.

‘Can’t and won’t,’ he said.

She started back as though he’d made to hit her.

A Russian couple at the next table turned to stare at them.

‘Won’t?’

Libor stared back at the Russians. Clinking oligarch and pale-painted prostitute. But when had Russians ever been anything else?

You don’t sit next to a citizen of Prague if you are a Russian and you know what’s good for you, Libor thought.

‘Won’t because there is no point,’ he said, turning back to Emmy. ‘This is how things are. And maybe how things should be.’

He was surprised himself by what he said, heard his words as though someone else were speaking them, but still he knew what this other person meant. He meant that as long as there were Jews like Malkie’s parents in the world, there would be people to hate them.

Emmy Oppenstein shook her head as though she wanted to rid Libor from it.

‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you want to punish me for – I assure you there isn’t anything either of us has done that warrants it – but I understand why it is necessary for you to do so. I hated everyone when Theo died.’

She rose to leave but Libor stayed her. ‘Just listen to me for five more minutes,’ he said. ‘I don’t hate you.’

He wondered if the Russians thought he too was an oligarch squabbling with his prostitute, never mind that both of them were in their eighties. What else could the Russian imagination conceive?

Emmy sat down. Libor admired her movements. When she rose from the table it was as a chief justice taking leave of the court. Now she was returned to deliver judgement.

But he admired in a part of his brain that wasn’t working properly.

He leaned forward and took her hands. ‘I have discovered in myself a profound necessity,’ he said, ‘to think ill of my fellow Jews.’

He waited.

She said nothing.

He would have liked to see fear or hatred in her eyes, but he saw only a patient curiosity. Maybe not even curiosity. Maybe only patience.

‘I don’t
wish
ill on them, you understand,’ he went on, ‘I only
think
ill of them. Which makes it difficult for me to care what happens to them. It’s been going on too long. What’s that phrase you read sometimes in the papers – compassion fatigue, is it?’

She blinked her eyes at him.

‘Except that it never was compassion that I felt. Compassion comes from another place. You can’t feel compassionate towards yourself or towards your own. It’s more fiercely protective than that. When a Jew was attacked, I was attacked.
These are the generations of Adam
 . . . We go back to the same father. I
was
my brother’s keeper. But it’s too long ago now. Too long ago for us, and too long ago for those who aren’t us. There has to be a statute of limitation. That’s enough now with the Jew business. Let’s not hear from any of you on the subject again, especially from you Jews yourselves. Have a bit of decency. Accept that when your time is up, your time is up.’

He waited, as though to hear her make a speech of acceptance.
Yes, Libor, my time is up
.

She let him wait. And then, in a lowered voice – the Russians, Libor, the Russians are listening – she said, ‘But what you’re describing is not what you call “thinking ill”. I feared you were going to say we get what we deserve. That it is my grandson’s fault that he is blinded. The logic of our film director friend. A Jew dispossesses an Arab in Palestine, another Jew must be blinded in London. What the Jewish people sow, the Jewish people will reap. I don’t think I hear you saying that.’

Now her hands were holding his.

‘My dear wife’s parents,’ he said, ‘who must have had something good in their souls or they would not have produced her, were contemptible people. I can tell you what made them contemptible, I can imagine circumstances way back – let’s say hundreds, let’s say thousands of years ago – that would have made them something else. But I can’t go on making these allowances. I can’t go on telling myself that that American swindler who has just been put in jail to serve a hundred life sentences is only coincidentally Jewish, or that bad-faced business Jew we see on television who brags about his money and the ruthlessness of his pursuit of it – I can’t convince me, let alone others, that it is only by chance that such men resemble every archetype of Jewish evil that Christian or Muslim history has thrown up. When Jews of this sort enjoy the eminence they do, how can we expect to be left to live in peace? If we are back in the medieval world it is because the medieval Jew himself is back. Did he even go away, Emmy? Or did he survive the rubble of the destruction and the entombments like a cockroach?’

She tightened her hold on his fingers, as though to squeeze this upsetting ugliness out of him.

‘I will tell you something,’ she said. ‘What you see is not what non-Jews see. Not the fair-minded ones and most of them are that. The bad-faced business Jew you refer to, assuming I know who you mean – and it doesn’t matter because, yes, of course I know the type – is not the hate figure to Gentiles that he is to you. Some like him, some admire him, some don’t bother their heads about him one way or another. You might be surprised to learn how few people see the archetypal Jew every time they see him. Or even know that he’s a Jew. Or care. You are the anti-Semite, not they. You’re the one who sees the Jew in the Jew. And cannot bear to look. This is about you, Libor.’