The Finkler Question (33 page)

'This wasn't necessary,' she said, letting him in. 'I said he's OK.'

'Is he here?'

'Yes, he's lying down on my bed.'

'Is he all right?'

'I've said. He's fine.'

'Let me see him.'

He found his son sitting up on Blaise's bed reading a celebrity magazine and drinking rum and Coke. He had a plaster on his cheek and his arm was in a home-made sling. Otherwise he looked perfectly well.

'Oops,' he said.

'What do you mean, "oops"?'

'Oops as in oops-a-daisy. It's what you used to say when one of us fell over.'

'So you fell over, did you?'

'I did, eventually, yes.'

'What do you mean, "eventually"?'

'Dad, are you going to keep asking me what I mean?'

'Tell me what happened.'

'There's a prior question, Dad.'

'What's that?'

'How are you, Immanuel?'

'I'm sorry. How are you, Immanuel?'

'I'm reasonably OK, thank you, Dad. As you can see. There was a kerfuffle, that was what happened. Outside the Union. There'd been a debate -
This house believes that Israel has forfeited its right to exist
, or something along those lines. I was surprised, actually, that you hadn't been invited to speak.'

So was Finkler, now that he'd come to hear of it.

'And . . .'

'And you know what these things are like. Tempers got a little frayed. Words were exchanged, and the next thing fists were flying.'

'Are you hurt?'

Immanuel shrugged. 'My arm hurts, but I doubt it's broken.'

'You haven't been to the hospital?'

'No need.'

'Have you spoken to the police?'

'The police have spoken to me.'

'Have they charged anyone?'

'Yes. Me.'

'You!'

'Well, they're thinking about it, anyway. Depends on the other guys.'

'Why would they think of charging you? Has the world gone mad?'

At that moment Blaise came into the room with coffee for them all. Finkler looked at her in wild alarm.

'I was there,' she said. 'Your mad son started it.'

'How do you mean "started it"?'

'This is not an oral examination, Dad,' Immanuel said from the bed. He had gone back to reading his magazine. Let his father and his sister sort it out. Her fault for calling him in the first place.

'Blaise, you told me there'd been an anti-Semitic incident. How do you
start
with anti-Semites? Do you jump up and down and say "I'm a Jew, come and get me"?'

'He didn't have a go at anti-Semites. You have it the wrong way round.'

'What are you saying, the wrong way round?'

'They were Jews.'

'Who were Jews?'

'The people he picked a fight with.'

'Immanuel picked a fight with Jews?'

'They were Zionists. The real meshuggeners with black hats and fringes. Like settlers.'

'Settlers? In Oxford?'

'Settler types.'

'And he picked a fight with them? What did he say?'

'Nothing much. He accused them of stealing someone else's country . . .'

She paused.

'And?'

'And practising apartheid . . .'

'And?'

'And slaughtering women and children.'

'And?'

'There is no and. That's all.'

'That's all? That's all he said? Immanuel, you said all this?'

Immanuel looked up. He reminded Finkler of his late wife, challenging him. He had that same expression of ironic unillusionedness that comes with knowing a person too well. 'Yes, that's what I said. It's true, isn't it? You've said as much yourself.'

'Not specifically, to a person, Immanuel. It's one thing to iterate a general political truth, it's another thing to pick a fight with a person in the street.'

'Well, I'm not a philosopher, Dad. I don't iterate general political truths. I just told them all what I thought of them and their shitty little country and called one of them, who came up to me, a racist.'

'A racist? What had he said to you?'

'Nothing. It wasn't about him. I was talking about his country.'

'Was he an Israeli?'

'How do I know? He wore a black hat. He was there to oppose the motion.'

'Did that make him a racist?'

'Well, what would you call it?'

'I can think of other words.'

'I can think of other words, too. But we weren't playing Scrabble.'

'And then what happened?'

'And then I knocked his hat off.'

'You knocked a Jew's hat off.'

'Is that so terrible?'

'Jesus Christ, of course it's so terrible. You don't do that to anyone, least of all a Jew.'

'Least of all a Jew! What? Are we a protected species now or something? These are people who bulldoze Palestinian villages. What's a hat?'

'Did you hurt him?'

'Not enough.'

'This is a racist assault, Immanuel.'

'Dad, how can it be a racist assault when they're the racists?'

'I'm not even going to answer that.'

'Do I look like a racist? Look at me.'

'You look like a fucking little anti-Semite.'

'How can I be an anti-Semite? I'm a Jew.'

Finkler looked at Blaise. 'How long has this shit been going on?' he asked.

'How long has he been a fucking little anti-Semite? It comes and goes, depending on what he's been reading.'

'Are you telling me this is my fault? He won't have got any of this racist/apartheid crap from me. I don't go there.'

Blaise met his stare evenly. In her eyes, too, he saw his avenging wife.

'No, I'm not telling you that. I doubt he reads a word you write, actually. But there are plenty of other people he can read.'

'I also have a mind of my own,' Immanuel said.

'I doubt that,' Finkler said. 'I doubt you can call what you've got a mind at all.'

Had he known how to do such a thing, and had he not made a solemn promise to Tyler, he would have pulled his son off the bed and broken his other arm.

2

As Assistant Curator of the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture, Julian Treslove did not exactly have too much on his plate. It would be different when it was up and running, Hephzibah assured him, but in these early stages it was all about architects and electricians. The best Treslove could do for the museum, and for her, was ruminate. Think of who and what else they should be honouring. A suggestion which she no sooner made than she regretted. It wasn't fair to him. Jews might have been possessed of a crowded almanac of Jewish event, a Jewish Who's Who extending back to the first man and woman, but Treslove couldn't be expected to know in every instance Who Was and Who Was Not, Who Had Changed His Name, Who Had Married In or Out. What is more he would have no instinct for it. Some things you cannot acquire. You have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi.

The museum was housed in a high-Victorian Gothic mansion built on the design of a Rhineland fortress. It had pointed gables, mock castellations, fantasy chimneys and even a rampart you couldn't get out on to. To the side was a pretty garden in which Hephzibah imagined they would one day serve teas.

'Jewish teas?' Libor had asked.

'What's a Jewish tea?' Treslove wondered.

'It's like an English tea only there's twice as much of it.'

'Libor!' Hephzibah scolded him.

But the idea of serving specifically Jewish afternoon teas appealed to Treslove who had learned to call cakes
kuchen
, and crepes stuffed with cream or jam
blintzes
.

'Let me write the menu,' he said. And Hephzibah agreed he could.

His only worry was that the location of the museum would prohibit the sort of passing trade you needed for a successful tea garden, or for a museum, come to that. It was only a short walk from the Beatles' old studios but it wasn't a walk you would naturally take. Parking would not be easy. There were yellow lines everywhere, and because of the slight incline in the road on which the Rhineland fortress had been built buses laboured at that very spot, distracting motorists who might have been searching for the museum. Plus there were overhanging trees.

'People just won't see it,' he warned Hephzibah. 'Or they'll crash looking.'

'Well, that's helpful,' she said. 'What would you like me to do, have the road flattened?'

Treslove saw himself standing outside in his curator's uniform, waving down the traffic.

He had another worry which he chose not to express. Vandalism. It was licensed hereabouts. Just about everyone who visited the Abbey Road Studios wrote messages on the outside walls. Mostly these were good-natured -
So-and-So loves so-and-so, We all live in a yellow submarine, Rest in peace, John!
- but one day when Treslove was passing he noticed a new aerosoled graffito in Arabic script. Perhaps it too was a message of love -
Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do -
but what if it was a message of hate -
Imagine there's no Israel, imagine there's no Jew
. . .?

That he had no reason to suppose any such thing, he knew. Which was partly why he kept his suspicions to himself. But the Arab script looked angry. It was like a scribble over everything else that had been written on the walls, a refutation of the spirit of the place.

Or did he imagine that, too?

Though he was sensitive to condescension, Hephzibah's suggestion that the best thing he could do for her right now was ruminate suited him just fine. There was much to think about and he was happy to think about it in a semi-professional capacity. Sometimes he thought about it at home, in an office Hephzibah had made for him from a room where she stored the Hampstead Bazaar shawls she had essentially finished with but didn't quite want to throw away. (Treslove was pleased to observe that when it came to a choice between him and the shawls, the shawls lost.) At other times he thought about what there was to think about in the as-yet-unfinished museum library - the advantage of that being the access he had to Jewish books. The disadvantage being the hammering of carpenters and the suspect graffiti he had to read on the way.

In the end he stayed in the shawl room. Or sat and read on the terrace with its view of Lord's. And to the left, a few buildings along, a view of a synagogue, or at least a view of its courtyard. He had hoped he would see bearded Jews singing and dancing here, carrying their children on their shoulders, ceremonially cutting their hair in the way he'd seen in a television documentary, or arriving solemnly for a festival, their prayer shawls under their arms, their eyes turned towards God. But it seemed not to be that sort of synagogue. Either he looked at the wrong times, or the only person using the synagogue was a burly Jew (he looked like Topol, that's how Treslove knew he was a Jew) who came and went on a big black motorbike. Treslove didn't know if he was the caretaker - he had too much swagger for a caretaker - or the rabbi - but he didn't look much like a rabbi either. It wasn't just the motorbike that counted against the rabbi proposition, it was the fact that he wore a PLO scarf which he would wind around his face, like a warrior going into battle, before putting on his helmet and roaring off on his bike.