The Finkler Question (26 page)

For the holiday he wore a black velvet ribbon in his ponytail.

'Has it occurred to you that you might be gay?' he said at last.

Rodolfo got up out of his deckchair. 'Are you mad?' he said.

'I'm just asking.'

'Why are you asking?

'Well, in fact I'm not asking anything. You're the one who's asking what's normal. Everything is normal is my answer to that, or nothing is normal. Why do you care?'

'Why do you think I'm gay?'

'I don't think you're gay. And even if you were -'

'I'm not. OK?'

'OK.'

Rodolfo returned to his deckchair.

'I like
her
,' he said after a decent interval, nodding at the figure of a young woman climbing out of the pool. So did Treslove. What woman doesn't look good coming up out of a pool? But over and above that - woman rising from the amniotic slime - she had the famished look that excited him. A far cry from . . . well, from what was waiting for him at home.

The bottom half of the woman's bikini hung loose and wet on her. It was impossible not to imagine sliding a hand inside, palm flat, fingers pointing downwards, the tickle of the fur. Presumably Rodolfo, now he wasn't gay, was imagining that very thing.

Unless he was just faking it for his father.

'Go get her, son,' Treslove enjoyed saying.

That evening there was dancing on the hotel terrace. Both Alfredo and Rodolfo had found women. Treslove watched them contentedly. That's all as it should be then, he thought. Successful fathering was not as hard as people made out.

After the dancing Alfredo brought his woman to meet his father.

'Hannah, my dad; Dad, Hannah.'

'I'm pleased to meet you,' Treslove said, getting up and bowing. To his daughters-in-law, presumably, a man had to be ultra-courteous.

'You've got something in common,' Alfredo said behind his sunglasses, laughing his empty restaurant pianist's laugh.

'What's that?'

'You're both Jewish.'

'So what was that about?' Treslove asked before the three of them retired. The women had gone. Treslove didn't ask his sons if they were intending to go after them.

This generation was easier about women than his had been. They didn't go running. If the women left, they left. In Treslove's day a woman leaving was catastrophic to your self-esteem. It presaged the end of the universe.

'It was about fun, Dad.'

'You know what I'm talking about. What was that about my being Jewish?'

'Aren't you?'

'Would it matter to you if I were?'

'There you go, answering a question with a question. That in itself makes you Jewish, doesn't it?'

'I'll ask you again. Would it matter to you if I were?'

'Are you asking if we're anti-Semites?' Rodolfo said.

'And would it matter to you if we were?' Alfredo added.

'Well I'm definitely no anti-Semite,' Rodolfo said. 'You, Alf?'

'Nope. You, Dad?'

'Everyone's an anti-Semite to a degree. Look at your Uncle Sam, and he's Jewish.'

'Yes, but you?'

'What's this about? What's been said to you?'

'Who by? You mean our mums?'

'You tell me. What's the joke?'

'I ran into Uncle Sam a few weeks ago. He said you'd been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack. He said a few other things as well, but let's just stick with the anti-Semitic part. I asked how you could be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack if you weren't a Semite. He said he'd asked you the same question, and your answer was that you were.'

'I think that's one of my friend Finkler's famous simplifications.'

'Maybe, but
are
you?'

He looked from Alfredo to Rodolfo and back again, wondering if he'd ever seen them before, and if so where. 'It doesn't mean that
you
are,' he said, 'if that's what's concerning you. You can continue being whatever you want to be. Not that I know what that is. Your mothers never told me.'

'Maybe you should have asked them,' Rodolfo said. 'Maybe they would have appreciated your taking a hand in our religious education.'

He snorted before he'd finished.

'Let's not get into that,' Alfredo said. 'You say that just because
you
are it doesn't mean that
we
are. But it does, doesn't it, a bit?'

'Depends which bit you're referring to,' Rodolfo said, still snorting.

'You can't be a bit Jewish,' Treslove said.

'Why not? You can be a quarter Indian or one tenth Chinese. Why can't you be part Jewish? In fact, it would make us half and half, wouldn't it? Which is considerably more than a bit. I'd call that a lot. I have to say I quite fancy the idea, what about you, Ralph?'

Rodolfo went into an imitation of Alec Guinness being Fagin. 'I don't mind if I do, my dears,' he said, rubbing his hands.

The two boys laughed.

'Meet one of the half-chosen,' Alfredo said, extending his hand to his brother.

'And allow me to introduce you to the other half,' Rodolfo said.

No, never seen them in my life before, Treslove thought. And wasn't sure he wanted to again.

My sons the goyim.

3

Out of the blue, Libor received a letter from a woman he hadn't seen in more than fifty years. She wanted to know if he was still writing his column.

He wrote back to her saying how nice it was to hear from her after all this time but he'd stopped writing his column in 1979.

He wondered how she'd found his address. He'd moved several times since he'd known her. She must have put herself to some trouble to find where he lived now.

He didn't tell her his wife had died. He couldn't be sure she even knew he'd been married. And you don't go mentioning to women you haven't seen in fifty years, and who have put themselves to trouble to find your address, that you're a widower.

Hope life has been kind to you
, he wrote.
It has to me
.

After he sent the letter he worried that the melancholy tone would give her a clue.
It has to me
- there was a dying fall in that. It invited the question,
And does it go on being kind to you?
On top of which it somehow painted him as frail: a man in need of kindness.

Only afterwards did it occur to him that he hadn't asked the reason for her enquiry.
Are you still writing your column?
Why did she want to know?

That was rude of me
, he wrote on the back of a postcard.
Did you enquire about my column with a purpose
?

After he posted the postcard - it was a Rembrandt self-portrait, the artist as an old man - he feared she would think he had chosen it to solicit her pity. So he sent her another one of King Arthur in full regalia and in the bloom of youth. No message. Just his signature. She would understand.

Oh, and nothing meant by it, his phone number.

That was how he came to be sitting in the bar of the University Women's Club in Mayfair, clinking glasses of house champagne with the only woman other than Malkie he had ever lost his heart to. A little. Emmy Oppenstein. He had thought she'd said Oppenheimer when they first met in 1950 or thereabouts. That wasn't the reason he had fallen for her, but without doubt it added to her attractiveness. Libor was no snob but he was a child of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and names and titles mattered to him. But by the time he'd realised his mistake they had slept together and he was interested in her for herself.

Or at least he thinks he was.

He sees nothing in her face that he remembers and of course nothing in her figure. A woman in her eighties does not have a figure. He intended no unkindness by that. To himself he said he meant no more than that at eighty a woman is entitled at last to be free of being ogled for her shape.

He could see that she had been beautiful in a Slav way, with wide apart ice-grey eyes and cheekbones on which an unwary man might cut himself going for a kiss. But it wasn't a beauty he remembered. Would it be the same sitting with Malkie, he wondered, had he left her fifty years ago and were she living still? Had Malkie retained her beauty for him because she'd retained it for a fact, for everyone who saw her, or had he kept her beauty alive in his eyes by feasting on it every day? And if so, did that make her beauty illusory?

Emmy Oppenstein was out of the question for him. He saw that at once. He hadn't gone to meet her with the intention of courting her again, he absolutely had not. But had he,
had
he, he would have been disappointed. As he hadn't, he was not disappointed, how could he be, but
had
he . . .

Not disappointed because she had worn badly. For most decidedly she had not; she was, if anything, remarkable for her age - alert, elegant, well dressed in a fluffy woven suit, which Malkie had taught him to recognise as Chanel, and even wore high heels. For her age a woman couldn't have looked better. But
for her age
. . . Libor wasn't looking for a woman to replace Malkie, but had he been looking for a woman to replace Malkie the brutal truth was that this woman was, well, too old.

Libor was not blind to the cruel absurdity of such thoughts. He was an elfin man with no hair, his trousers didn't always reach his shoes, his ties had lain in drawers for half a century and had lost their colour, he was liver-spotted from head to foot - who the hell was he to find any woman too old? What is more, where he had shrunk, she must have grown taller, because he had no memory of ever lying with a woman this size. A thought which he could see, as she surveyed him, mirrored hers exactly. No doubt about it: if she was out of the question for him, he was still more out of the question for her.

And all this Libor had decided in the moment of their shaking hands.

She was, or she had been, a school governor, a justice of the peace, the chair of an eminent Jewish charity, the mother of five children, and a bereavement counsellor. Libor noticed that she left the bereavement counselling to the end. Was that because she knew of Malkie and of her death? Was that why she had written to him? Did she want to help him through?

'You must be wondering -' she began.

'I
am
wondering but I am also marvelling,' Libor said. 'You look so wonderfully well.'

She smiled at him. 'Life has been kind to me,' she said, 'as you wrote that it had been to you.'

She touched his hand. Rock steady hers, as quivery as a jellyfish his. Her nails had been freshly painted. She wore, as far as he could tell, at least three engagement rings. But one might have been her mother's and another her grandmother's. And then again they might have been all hers.

He enjoyed a retrospective pride in his own manliness for having slept with a woman as impressive as she was. He wished he could remember her but he couldn't. Time and Malkie, maybe just Malkie, had wiped out all erotic memories.

So did that mean he hadn't slept with her at all? Libor feared losing the life he had lived. He forgot things - places he had visited, people he had known, thoughts that were once important to him. So would he soon lose Malkie? And would it then be as though she too had never existed erotically (
eloticshrly
) for him? As though she had never existed at all in fact.

He told Emmy about Malkie, as he imagined to keep her alive a little longer.