The Finkler Question (40 page)

As she said it she realised she had been less any of those things since she had met him. He constrained her. He wanted her to be a certain kind of woman and she didn't want to let him down. But on some nights she would have preferred watching a soap opera on television to discussing circumcision or Moses Maimonides. It was a strain being a representative of your people to a man who had decided to idealise them. It wasn't only him she didn't want to let down; it was Judaism, all five thousand troubled years of it.

'Then let's do something boisterous,' he said. 'There's a klezmer band with Jewish dancing on at the Jewish Cultural Centre down the road. Why don't we go there?'

'I think I'd rather have your baby,' she said.

'Would you?'

'Joking.'

She could hear his mind whirring. How does telling someone you would like to have his baby constitute a joke for Jews?

But the other side of all this was that she didn't want to worry him. The bacon smearers had been back. This time they had painted
Death to Jewishes
on the walls.
Jewishes
was Muslim hate talk. There were more and more reports of small children being abused as
Jewishes
in mixed schools. Hephzibah considered this a far more seriously menacing development than the swastikas with which white thugs defaced Jewish cemeteries. There was an idle half-heartedness in swastikas. It was more a memory of hate than hate itself. Whereas
Jewishes
! - the word had a terrible ring to it, to her.
Jewishes
were creeping things. They were made low and viscous by their faith. If you trod on them their
Jewishesness
would ooze out of them. It was an abuse that went far deeper than Yid or kike. It was directed not at individual Jews but at Jewish essence. And of course it came from a part of the world where the conflict was already soaked in blood, where hatreds were bitter and perhaps ineradicable.

Libor, too, had been telling her things she would rather not have known. Passing stories of violence and malice on to her as though that was the only way he could empty his own system of them. 'Do you know what the Swedish papers are saying?' he asked her. 'They are saying Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians in order to sell their organs on the international organ market. Remind you of anything?'

Hephzibah bit her lip. She had been through this already at work.

But Libor didn't have colleagues he could exchange fears with. 'It's the blood libel,' he told her, as though she needed telling.

'Yes, Libor,' she said.

'They've got us feasting on blood again,' he said. 'And they've got us making big money out of it. We could be back living in the Middle Ages. But then what else can you expect from Swedes who have never left the Middle Ages!'

She didn't want to hear but she heard it every day. The roll-call of Jewish crimes. And the roll-call of answering acts of violence.

Only the other day a security guard at a Jewish museum in Washington had been shot. This sent a little shock of fear through all those who ran Jewish public institutions. Emails of anxious solidarity began to be exchanged. They were fair game - that was the consensus. There was no stopping a lunatic striking anywhere, of course. But there was much in the currency of contemporary Israel-hating for lunatics to latch on to. There had been spillage, from regional conflict to religious hatred, there could be no doubt of that. Jews were again the problem. After a period of exceptional quiet, anti-Semitism was becoming again what it had always been - an escalator that never stopped, and which anyone could hop on at will.

In keeping this from Treslove, not mentioning the guard who had been shot, not telling him about the emails, not passing on what Libor told her - though it was not impossible Libor was telling him himself - Hephzibah recognised that she was protecting him as she would have protected a parent or a child. Though more a parent, in that she was being careful of Jewish susceptibilities. She would have done the same for her father had he been alive. 'Don't tell your father, it will kill him,' her mother would have said. Just as her father would have said, 'Don't tell your mother, it will kill her.'

That's what Jews did. They kept terrible news from one another. And now she was doing it with Treslove.

5

Finkler, who did not dream, had a dream.

People were punching his father in the stomach.

It had been friendly at first. His father was in the shop, entertaining customers. Go on, harder, harder. Do I feel anything? Not a tickle. And I had a cancer there two years ago. Impossible to believe, I know, but true. Ha ha!

But then the atmosphere had changed. His father wasn't joking any more. And his customers weren't laughing with him. They had forced him to the floor of his shop where he lay among ripped cartons of sunglasses and punctured cases of deodorant spray. The shop always looked as though there had just been a delivery. Boxes remained unopened on the floor for weeks. Toothbrushes and babies' dummies and combs and home perms lay where they had fallen or simply been left where the suppliers had placed them. 'Who needs shelves when you've got a perfectly good floor?' the comedian-chemist would say while grubbing about on his hands and knees, wiping whatever it was that a customer had asked for on his lab coat. It was his theatre, not a pharmacy. He performed there. But this time the chaos was not of his own making. Those people not punching him were pulling things from the shelves. Not looting them, just throwing them about as though they were not worth stealing.

They had knocked his fedora off too, though in real life he never wore it in the shop. His fedora was for going to the synagogue in.

Finkler, concealed in a corner of his dream, waited for his father to call for help.

Samuel, Samuel,
gvald
!

He was curious about himself, curious to see what he would do. But no cry for help came.

It was when the kicking started that Finkler woke.

He hadn't even been in bed. He had fallen asleep in front of his computer.

He was anxious about the following day. He had a speaking engagement with Tamara
Krausz and two others in a hall in Holborn. The usual subject. Two against, two for. Normally he did these in his sleep. But his sleep was not a good place for him at the moment. He knew what he would say at the public meeting. And there was little to fear from those who opposed him. Or from the audience. Audiences were hungry to hear what Finkler told them, whatever the subject, on account of his being on television, but in the matter of Palestine they were as empty buckets. That didn't mean they hadn't made their minds up. They had. But they sought Finkler's confirmation. A thinking Jew attacking Jews was a prize. People paid to hear that. So nothing to agitate him there. It was Tamara Krausz who made him jumpy.

He didn't trust himself with her. He didn't mean romantically. She was more Treslove's kind of woman than she was his. He remembered his friend running off a list of all the fraught women he had fallen for. They sounded like the string section of a women's orchestra, or rather a women's orchestra that had nothing but a string section in it. His nerves vibrated just listening to Treslove's descriptions. 'Not for me,' he'd said, sucking his teeth. Now here he was allowing Tamara Krausz to run her bow across his spinal cord.

He wondered if there was any way he could ask her to leave him alone. She would deny, of course, that she had done anything to him. He was flattering himself if he supposed she as much as noticed him as a man outside his professional capacity as fellow ASHamee. She had made no play for him. If he imagined her screaming in his arms, the drama was entirely of his own making.

True, as far as it went, but the screaming he anticipated was not to be confused with the sounds a vain man fancies he can coax out of a sexually frustrated woman. The screams he heard in advance of Tamara Krausz actually screaming them were ideological. Zionism was her demon lover, not Finkler. She could not, in her fascinated, never quite sufficiently reciprocated hatred of Zionism, think about anything else. Which is how things are when you're in love.

Finkler's fault, if Tamara had only to say 'West Bank' or 'Gaza' to set his nerves on edge. Finkler's fault, if the word 'occupation' or 'trauma' on Tamara Krausz's inappositely submissive lips - moist like a harlot's in the middle of her small, anxious face - inflamed him almost to madness. He knew what would happen if by some mischance or mutual misunderstanding they ended up in bed together and she screamed the dialectic of her anti-Zionism in his ear - he would come into her six or seven times and then kill her. Slice off her tongue and then slit through her throat.

Which might have been the very thing she was referring to when she spoke of the breakdown of the Jewish mind, the Final Solution causing Jews to go demented and seek final solutions of their own, the violence begot of violence. Indeed, Finkler would have done no more than illustrate her thesis.

Was this not the very thing she sought? Kill me, you demented Jew bastard, and prove me right.

The strange thing about all this was that she had not yet, either in his hearing, or in any article of hers that he had read, said a word with which he disagreed. She was more sold on psychic disintegration than he was, and more trusting of Israel's enemies - Finkler felt able to inveigh against the Jewish state without having to make friends with Arabs: as a philosopher he found human nature flawed on both sides of every divide - but otherwise their diagnoses concurred at every point. It was the way she put it that irked and excited him. It was the rise and fall of her voice. And it was her methodology, which was to quote whoever said something that supported her, and then to ignore them when they said something different.

Again as a philosopher, Finkler was bound to condemn such a practice. It was the totality of a person's thought one should adduce in argument, not stray bullets of opinion that just happened to suit yours. This made him wary of her personally, as well. You might inadvertently whisper something to her about one subject which she would quote against you on another. I can think only of you, I can hear only you, I can see only you, he might say to her in the dead of night, and she would bring it up it at an ASHamed Jews meeting as proof that his concentration had begun to wander and that he was no longer single-minded in his commitment to the group.

It felt like spite. As though she had got wind of something the Jewish people had said about her - in the dorm after lights out - and was now hell-bent, by fair means or foul, on paying them back.

He put on a black suit and a red tie. Normally he spoke from platforms in an open-necked shirt. On this occasion he wanted to be formidable in appearance as well as content. Or maybe he was concerned to protect his throat, confusing his with hers.

They took their places next to each other on the platform. He was surprised to note how little of her there was below the desk; how short her legs were, and how small her feet. As he inspected her legs he was aware of her inspecting his. How long they are, she must have thought, and how big his feet. She made him feel ungainly. He hoped he made her feel insubstantial.

At the other end of the table were two establishment Jews. Men on the boards of charities and synagogues, watchdogs of the community, custodians of the Jewish family and the good name of Israel, and therefore Finkler's natural enemies. They didn't mix, the watchmen Jews and the insurrectionary Jews of questions and ideas. One of them reminded Finkler of his father when he was out of the shop, praying or talking to other Jews who shared his communal concerns. He had that same look of worldly acumen combined with an untried innocence that comes with believing that God still took a particular interest in the Jewish people. Now protecting them as He protected no one else, now punishing them more ferociously than He punished any other of His creatures. The communal solipsism of the Jews. They blink with the ongoing wonder of it all, such men, while driving a hard bargain.

Tamara Krausz leaned into him. 'I see they've dug out the most hysterical ones they could find,' she whispered. Her contempt was like fine oil sliding into his ear.

'Hysterical' was an ASHamed Jew word. Whoever did not admit to shame had capitulated to hysteria. The charge went all the way back to the medieval superstition of the effeminised Jew, the Jew who nursed a strange and secret wound and bled as women bleed. The new hysterical Jew was as a woman in that he was in a state of unmanly terror. Wherever he looked he saw only anti-Semites before whom he quaked in his soul.

'They've dug out the most
what
they could find?' Finkler asked.