The Finkler Question (27 page)

'I'm sorry,' she said when he had finished. 'I had heard something.'

'Would you drink to her with me?' he said. 'You can't drink to her memory because you didn't know her, but you can drink to my memory of her.'

'To your memory of her,' she said.

'And you?'

She lowered her gaze. 'Yes, the same.'

'Then I drink to you and your memories,' Libor said.

And so they sat and sipped champagne together companionably, both bereft, while single university ladies, some probably older than Malkie was when she died, drifted by them lost in thought, or slowly climbed the stairs to their bedrooms for an afternoon sleep in their London club.

Be a good place to die if you were a single woman, Libor thought. Or a single man.

'I'm flattered,' he said after a while, 'that you knew I had a column, even if you hadn't noticed I'd stopped writing it a century ago.'

'It's hard to keep up,' she said, unembarrassed.

Had she ever been embarrassed? Libor wondered. Had she been embarrassed when he'd undressed her, that's if he ever had? More likely, looking at her now, that she'd undressed him.

'I'll tell you why I contacted you,' she continued. 'I've been writing to all my friends who have a public voice.'

Libor dismissed the idea of his having a public voice, but that only seemed to make her impatient. She shifted in her chair. Gracefully. And shook her hair. Grey, but not an elderly grey. Grey as though it were a colour of her choosing.

'To what end?' he asked. He recognised the public woman, the charity chief, used to commandeering the airwaves of men's attention for causes she cared about.

And then she told him, without tears, without false sentiment, that her twenty-two-year-old grandson had been stabbed in the face and blinded by an Algerian man who had shouted 'God is great' in Arabic, and 'Death to all Jews'.

'I'm very sorry,' Libor said. 'Did this happen in Algeria?'

'It happened here, Libor.'

'In London?'

'Yes, in London.'

He didn't know what further questions to ask. Had the Algerian been arrested? Did he offer any explanation for what he'd done? How did he know the boy was Jewish? Did it happen in an area known to be dangerous?

But what was the point of any of them? Libor had been lucky in love but in politics he was from a part of the world that expected nothing good of anybody. Jew-hating was back - of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn't go away. There was nowhere for them to go to. They were indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.

It wasn't even the Algerian's fault in the end. He just did what history had told him to do. God is great . . . kill all Jews. It was hard to take offence - unless, of course, the blinded boy was your child or grandson.

'I'm unable to find anything to say that isn't banal,' he told her. 'It's terrible.'

'Libor,' she said, touching his hand again, 'it will be more terrible still, unless people speak up. People in your profession for a start.'

He wanted to laugh. '
People in my profession?
People in my profession interview famous film stars. And I'm not even in my profession any more.'

'You don't write at all now?'

'Not a word, except for the odd poem to Malkie.'

'But you must know people still, in journalism, in the film industry.'

He wondered what the film industry had to do with anything. Was she hoping he knew someone who would make a film about the attack upon her grandson?

But she had another reason for her specificity, for seeking out a journalist of Libor's sort, with Libor's connections. She named a film director of whom Libor had assuredly heard but had never met - not his sort of film director, not Hollywood, not show business - whose recent comments, she believed, were nothing short of scandalous. Libor must have read them.

He hadn't. He wasn't up with the gossip.

'It's not gossip,' she explained. 'He has said he understands why some people might want to blind my grandson.'

'Because they're deranged?'

'No. Because of Israel. Because of Gaza, he says he understands why people hate Jews and want to kill them.'

For the first time, her hand began to shake.

'Well, I can see why one might want to trace cause and effect,' Libor said.

'Cause and effect! Where's the cause in the sentence "The Jews are a murderous people who deserve all they get"? In the Jews or in the author of the sentence? I can tell you the effect, but where's the cause, Libor?'

'Ah, Emmy, now you are turning logician on me.'

'Libor, listen to me.' She bent her ice-grey eyes upon him. 'Everything has a cause, I know that. But he says he
understands
. What does
understand
mean here? Is he simply saying he can see why people are driven to do appalling and terrible things? Or is he saying something else? Is he saying that there is a justice in it, that my grandson's blindness is justified by Gaza? Or that Gaza vindicates in advance whatever crimes are committed in its name? Can no wickedness now be done to any Jew of any age living anywhere that doesn't have Gaza as its reasoning? This isn't tracing an effect back to its cause, Libor, this is applauding the effect. I
understand
why people hate Jews today, he says, this man of culture. From which it must follow that I
understand
whatever actions they take in expression of their hatred. Dear God, will we now
understand
the Shoah as justified by German abhorrence of the Jews? Or worse, as retrospective justice for what the Jews were
going
to do in Gaza? Where does it end, this
understanding
?'

Libor knew where it ended. Where it always ends.

He shook his head, as though to contradict his own bleak thoughts.

'So I ask you,' Emmy Oppenstein went on, 'as I am asking as many people in your profession as I know, to speak out against this man, whose sphere, like yours, is the imagination, but who abuses the sacred trust of the imagination.'

'You cannot tell the imagination where it can and cannot go, Emmy.'

'No. But you can insist that where it goes, it goes with generosity and fairness.'

'No, you can't, Emmy. Fairness is not a province of the imagin-ation. Fairness is the business of a tribunal, which is not the same animal.'

'I don't mean that sort of fairness, and you know it. I'm not talking balance. But what is the imagination for if not to grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think?'

'But isn't that the very understanding you cannot forgive in your film man?'

'No, Libor, it is not. His sympathy is the simple expression of political allegiance. He understands what his politics lead him to understand. He agrees - that's all. Poof!' She clicked her fingers. A thing worth no more of her time than that. 'Which means all he understands is himself, and his own propensity to hate.'

'Well, that's something.'

'It's nothing. It's less than nothing if you don't call that propensity what it is. People hate Jews because they hate Jews, Libor. They don't need an excuse. The trigger isn't the violence in Gaza. The trigger, in so far as they need a trigger - and many don't - is the violent, partial, inflammatory reporting of it. The trigger is the inciting word.'

He felt that she was blaming him. Not his profession -
him
.

'Every story is a distortion, Emmy. Will your way of telling it be any more impartial than his?'

'Yes,' she said, 'it will. I see villains on all sides. I see two people with competing claims, now justified, now not. I spread the wrong.'

A couple of women settled at a table opposite, both two decades younger than Emmy, Libor guessed. He thought in decades now - ten years his lowest unit of measurement. They smiled at him. He smiled back. They looked like vice chancellors. Something about the length of their skirts. Two vice chancellors meeting to discuss their respective universities. He could live here, if they'd have him, as a sort of mascot. He would promise not to make a nuisance of himelf, not to play his radio late at night and not to talk about Jews. Take tea and biscuits with lady professors and rectors. Discuss declining standards of written and spoken English. At least they'd know who Jane Russell was.

He changed his mind. They wouldn't. And anyway, they weren't Malkie.

Villains on all sides, yes. And the word. What had she just said about the word? Its power to incite. Well, that had never been a journey any of his words had been on. Excite, maybe. Incite, never. He lacked the seriousness.

'There is a big difference,' he reminded her, as though half ashamed of what he had done with his life, 'between writing about Anita Ekberg's chest and the rights and wrongs of Zionism.'

But that wasn't the category of nicety she had met him to discuss. 'I tell you where the big difference is, Libor. The big difference is between
understanding
- ha! - and acquittal. Only God can give absolution. You know that.'

He wanted to say he was sympathetic but couldn't help. Because he was in no position to help and because none of it mattered. For none of it did matter. But finding the right form of words for saying to Emmy Oppenstein that none of it mattered was beyond him.

'It's not Kristallnacht,' he thought.

But he couldn't say that.

He'd had his Kristallnacht. Malkie dying - without God's absolution of either of them, as far as he could see - what worse was there?

But he couldn't say that either.

'I'll speak to a few people I know,' was the best he could do.

But she knew he wouldn't.

In return - in return for nothing but an old affection - she gave him the number of a bereavement counsellor. He told her he didn't require a bereavement counsellor. She reached out and put a hand on each of his cheeks. This gesture meant that everyone needed a bereavement counsellor. Don't think of it as counselling or therapy. Think of it as conversation.

So what was this? Was this not conversation?

A different kind of conversation, Libor. And it wouldn't do, she explained, to be counselling him herself.

He was unable to decide whether he was disappointed that it wouldn't do for her to counsel him or not. To know that he would have had to locate the part of himself in which expectation resides. And he couldn't.

SEVEN

1

The agreement had been that Treslove would take his sons on holiday and then see.

Heads he'd resume his previous existence, forget all the rubbish, go out looking like Brad Pitt and return home, alone, at a reasonable hour in the evening to his Hampstead flat that wasn't in Hampstead.

Tails he'd move in with Hephzibah.

'I don't want to be making room and then have you changing your mind in a fortnight,' she told him. 'I'm not saying this is for life, God help us both, but if you're going to seriously disrupt me, disrupt me because you want to, not because you're at a loose end.'

He had told her about the mugging, but she did not set much store by it. 'That's what I mean by being at a loose end,' she said. 'You go wandering around with your head in the clouds, get your phone snatched like just about everyone else at sometime or another, and think God's called you. You aren't busy enough. There's been too little going on in your head and, from the sound of it, your heart.'

'Libor's been talking.'

'Nothing to do with Libor. I can see it for myself. I saw it when I first clapped eyes on you. You were waiting for the roof to fall in.'

He went to kiss her. 'And it did,' he said with exaggerated courtliness.