The Finkler Question (53 page)

Finkler? Was Finkler in or out? Finkler hidden in the small crowd, biding his time, or in the building, Hephzibah’s proxy escort since her real one had let her down?

It was a Finkler event. Sam had a more natural right to be inside than Treslove did.

He wasn’t outside, anyway. These were just smokers, Treslove decided. Or people come out to get some air.

He walked around them to the entrance where a couple of security men asked to see his invitation. He didn’t have it. There was no reason, he explained, for him to be carrying an invitation. He was not a guest. He was virtually the host.

Entrance was strictly by invitation only, they told him. No invitation, no party. He explained that it wasn’t a party. It was a reception. See! – how would he know it was a reception and not a party if he was merely a stranger looking for trouble? He could tell them what was in every room. Go on, test me. Hephzibah Weizenbaum, the director of the museum, was his partner. Perhaps if someone could notify her he was here . . .

They shook their heads. He wondered if she’d warned them not to let him in. Or maybe they smelt alcohol on his breath.

‘Come on, guys,’ he said, attempting to push past them, but non-aggressively, a sort of ironic sidle. The bigger of the two grabbed him by his arm.

‘Hey!’ Treslove said. ‘That’s assault.’

He turns in the hope of encountering a sympathetic face. Perhaps someone who recognises him and can vouch for the truth of what he’s saying. But he finds himself looking into the wild eyes of the grizzled warrior Jew in the PLO scarf who parks his motorbike in the forecourt of the synagogue he can see from the terrace of Hephzibah’s apartment. Ah, he thinks. Ah! He gets it. These people are not, after all, smokers or guests from the reception come out to take the air. They are holding a silent vigil. A woman is carrying a blown-up photograph of an Arab family. A mother, a father, a baby. Next to her, a man carries a candle. They themselves might be Arabs, but not all the party are. The grizzled biker in the PLO scarf, for example. He is not an Arab.

‘So what’s this?’ Treslove asks.

They ignore him. No one wants trouble. The security man who grabbed Treslove’s arm approaches him again. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to move on, sir,’ he says.

‘Are you Jewish?’ Treslove asks.

‘Sir,’ the security man says.

‘I’m asking you a civil question,’ Treslove says. ‘Because if you’re Jewish I want to know why you’re allowing this demonstration to go ahead. This is not an embassy. And if you’re not Jewish I want to know what you’re doing here at all.’

‘It’s not a demonstration,’ the man holding the candle says. ‘We’re just here.’

‘
You’re just here
. I can see that,’ Treslove says. ‘But why are you just here? This is a Jewish museum. It’s a place of study and reflection. It isn’t the fucking West Bank. We’re not at war here.’

Someone takes hold of him. He is not sure who. Perhaps two people take hold of him. They might be the security men, they might not. Treslove knows where this must end. He is not frightened. The Sephardic boy was not frightened, he will not be frightened. He sees the boy’s weary, accustomed face. ‘It’s a Jew!’ That’s just the way of it. He sees the schoolgirl bending to tie her shoelace. ‘Freak!’

He lashes out. He doesn’t care who he hits. Or who hits him. He would like it to be, either way, the traitor in the PLO scarf. But if it isn’t, it isn’t. He has no desire, though, to hit an Arab. He hears shouting. He would like it if one of them pushed him up against a wall and said, ‘You Ju!’ It’s heroic to die a Jew. If you have to die for something, let it be for being Jewish. ‘You Ju,’ and then the knife at your throat. That’s what you call a serious death, not the shit Treslove’s been doing all his life.

Something presses in his ribs but it’s not a knife. It’s a fist. He punches back. They are struggling now, Treslove and he is not sure who or how many. He hears a commotion, but it might be the commotion of his heart. He stumbles, losing his footing on the unlevel ground. Then he falls headlong. Headlights blind him. Suddenly his shoulder hurts. He closes his eyes.

When he opens them the Jew in the PLO scarf is bending over him. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

Treslove is surprised by the gentleness of his manner. He would have expected him to spit fire, like his motor bike.

‘Do you know where you are?’ His questions are almost doctorly. Is that what the madman is, Treslove wonders – an eminent Ju physician in a PLO scarf?

He stares up at him, wondering if he’s been recognised as the glowerer from Hephzibah’s terrace. Since this is Hephzibah’s occasion the connection would not be difficult to make.

But if the biker does recognise him, he doesn’t let on. ‘Do you know your name?’ he persists, still showing concern.

‘Brad Pitt,’ Treslove replies. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Sydney.’ His voice is cultivated and soothing. Patient. He takes off his scarf and makes a pillow of it for Treslove’s head. ‘You were lucky he had good brakes,’ he says.

‘Who?’ Treslove asks, but doesn’t hear the answer.

Rather than be beholden to Sydney, and whatever sickly cause of humane self-abnegation he serves by wreathing himself in the scarf of his people’s enemies, Treslove wishes the brakes had not been so good.

Rather than be beholden to Treslove and the woman with the dog, had the young Sephardic Jew wished, likewise, to be left to his tormentors?

Funny thing, ingratitude, Treslove thinks, closing his eyes again. It’s been a long day.

He is not badly hurt but the hospital keeps him in overnight. To be on the safe side. Hephzibah visits but he is sleeping. ‘Don’t wake him,’ she says.

She believes he knows she’s there but doesn’t want to acknowledge her. She has become part of all that disgusts him. Like Libor, he wants out. She’s wrong. But it doesn’t matter. What she might be wrong about today she will be right about tomorrow.

EPILOGUE

Since Libor has no children, we will say Kaddish for him, Hephzibah and Finkler had agreed. As a non-Jew, Treslove was not permitted to recite the Jewish prayer for the dead and so had been excluded from their deliberations.

I am not a synagogue person, Hephzibah says. I cannot bear the business of who you can and who you cannot say Kaddish for, where and when you sit, let alone what is permitted to a woman and how that differs from one denomination of synagogue to another. Our religion does not exactly make it easy for you. So I will pray at home.

And she does.

For the dead and the dead to her.

For Libor she cries her eyes dry.

For Julian, because she cannot in her heart exclude Julian, she cries bitter tears that come from a part of her she doesn’t recognise. She’s cried for men she’s loved before. But with them it was the finality of separation that pained her. With Julian it’s different: was he ever there to feel separated from? Was she just an experiment for him? Was he just an experiment for her?

He’d told her she was his fate. Who wants to be somebody’s fate?

It is less convenient for Samuel Finkler but perhaps more straightforward. He must go to his nearest synagogue and say the prayer he first heard on his own father’s lips.
Yisgadal viyiskadash
 . . . the ancient language of the Hebrews tolling for the dead.
May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.
This he does three times a day. When the deceased is not a parent the obligation to say Kaddish ceases after thirty days rather than eleven months. But Finkler does not give up saying it after thirty days. No one can make him. He is not sure he will even give up saying it after eleven months, though he grasps the reasoning in favour of stopping: so that the souls of the unlamented dead might find their way at last to Paradise. But he doesn’t think it will be his praying that prevents them getting there.

The beauty of the Kaddish, to his sense, is that it’s non-specific. He can simultaneously mourn as many of the dead as he chooses.

Tyler at last, he doesn’t know why. He thinks that Libor has somehow made that possible. Unloosed something.

Tyler whom he failed as a husband, Libor whom he failed as a friend.

Yisgadal viyiskadash
 . . . It’s so all-embracing he might as well be mourning the Jewish people.

Not that he draws the line at Jews. Even Treslove gets a look in, a sideways glance of grief, though he is alive and well – as well as he ever can be – and presumably back working as a lookalike.

It’s from Hephzibah, with whom he is in frequent contact, that Samuel Finkler takes his cue. Her sense of incompletion, of a thing not finished that might never have begun, becomes his sense. He never really knew Treslove either. And that too strikes him as a reason for lamentation.

There are no limits to Finkler’s mourning.

A Note on the Author

An award-winning novelist and critic, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester and read English at Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. He taught at the University of Sydney, Selwyn College, Cambridge, and finally Wolverhampton Polytechnic – the inspiration for his first novel,
Coming From Behind
. Other novels include
The Mighty Walzer
(winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize),
Kalooki Nights
(longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and, most recently, the highly acclaimed
The Act of Love
. Howard Jacobson writes a weekly column for the
Independent
and has written and presented several documentaries for television. He lives in London.