The Finkler Question (41 page)

He'd heard but he wanted to hear again.

'The most hysterical.'

'Ah, hysterical . . . Are they hysterical?'

He felt that all the strings in his body had shrunk, so that if he twitched a shoulder blade his fingers would retract and tighten into a fist.

She didn't have time to answer. The debate was under way.

Finkler and Tamara Krausz won it, of course. Finkler argued that you couldn't wax lyrical about one people's desire for nationhood and at the same time deny it to another. Judaism is essentially an ethical religion, he said. Which made it fundamentally contradictory at heart,
pace
Kierkegaard, because it is impossible to be ethical
and
religious. Zionism had been Judaism's great opportunity to escape its religiosity. To seek from others what they wanted for themselves, and to give back in the same spirit. But with military victory, Jewish ethics succumbed once more to the irrational triumphalism of religion. Only a return to ethics could save the Jews now.

Tamara saw it somewhat differently. For her, the Zionist ideal was criminal from its inception. To prove this she quoted people who mainly believed the opposite. The victims of that criminality were not only the Palestinians, but Jews themselves. Jews everywhere. Even in this room. She spoke coldly, as though defending a client she didn't quite believe in, until she came to the question of 'what the West calls terrorism'. Then, as Finkler sitting next to her noticed, her body began to heat up. Her lips grew swollen, as though from a demon lover's kisses. There is a kind of eroticism in violence, she told the enthralled assembly. You can gather those you kill to your heart. As you can gather those who kill you. But because the Jews had loved the Germans too much, and gone passively to their deaths, they had resolved against Eros, emptied their hearts of love, and now killed with a coldness that chilled the blood.

Finkler didn't know whether this was poetry, psychology, politics or piffle. But all the talk of killing discountenanced him. Had she somehow guessed what he wanted to do to her?

The community Jews were no match for her. Which wasn't saying much. They'd have been no match for a clown like Kugle. Had they been the only speakers they'd still have contrived to lose the debate. They confounded themselves. Finkler sighed as they went through routines that had been tired when he first heard them from his father thirty or more years before - how tiny Israel was, how long-standing were Jewish claims to the land, how few of the Palestinians were truly indigenous, how Israel had offered the world but every effort at peacemaking had been rebuffed by the Arabs, how much more necessary than ever a secure Israel was in a world in which anti-Semitism was on the increase . . .

Why didn't they hire him to write their scripts? He could have won it for them. You win by understanding something of what the other side thinks, and they understood nothing.

He meant win in every sense. Win the argument and win the Kingdom of God.

It was his oldest argument with his father: that Jews, for whom the stranger was supposed to be remembered and given water, for whom doing unto others as they would have done unto them was the virtue to end virtues, had turned into a people with ears only for themselves. He couldn't bear his father's clowning in the shop, but at least there he was a democrat and humanitarian; whereas dressed in his black coat and his fedora, talking politics on the way home from synagogue, he closed his face as resolutely as he closed his mind.

'They fought and lost,' his father used to say. 'They would have thrown us into the sea but they fought and lost.'

'That is no reason for us not to imagine what it is like to lose,' the young Finkler argued. 'The prophets didn't say we had to show compassion only to the deserving.'

'They get what they deserve. We give them what they deserve.'

And so Finkler had thrown his skullcap away and shortened his name from Samuel to Sam.

'Same old, same old,' he muttered to Tamara.

'As I said - hysterical,' she answered in an undertone.

Finkler's fingers retracted so far he could feel his fists retreating into his sleeves.

It was only when there were questions from the floor that the evening became lively. People on both sides of the debate shouted and told stories of a personal nature which they mistook for proof of whatever it was they believed. A Gentile woman with a sorrowing face stood and in the manner of a confessional told how she had been brought up to be in awe of what Professor Finkler - he wasn't a professor but he let it go - had called the sublime Jewish ethic - he had said no such thing but he let that go as well - but since then she had been to the Holy Land and discovered an apartheid country ruled by racist supremacists. She had a question for the gentlemen on the platform who complained that Israel was uniquely singled out for censure: what other country defines itself and those it permits to enter it on racial grounds? Is the reason you are uniquely singled out for censure, that you are uniquely racist?

'She is a lesson to us,' Tamara Krausz said to Finkler in her silken undertone. It was like listening to a woman you didn't want to love removing her slip for you, Finkler thought.

'How so?' he asked.

'She speaks from the bruised heart.'

Was it that that made Finkler not wait for the gentlemen to whom the question had been put to answer it? Or was it his certain know-ledge that they would answer it as ineffectually as they had answered everything else? Finkler himself didn't know. But what he said he too said from a bruised heart. The mystery was: whose bruised heart was it?

6

What Finkler said was this:

How dare you?

For a moment he said nothing else. It isn't easy to let a phrase hang in silence at the noisy end of a public meeting when everyone is eager to be heard. But Finkler, one time exhibitionistic Oxford don, now experienced media philosopher, was not without some mastery of the tricks of eloquence. As one-time beloved husband of Tyler, now grieving widower, as one-time proud father, now not, as potential murderer of Tamara Krausz, he was possessed of some of the tricks of gravity, too.

'How dare you? was unexpected of him politically, unexpected as a response to the careworn woman who had once been a celebrant of Jewish ethics and spoke now from the soul of suffering humanity, and unexpected by the violence of its tone. A single pistol shot would not have carried more threat.

He allowed the report of it to go on reverberating through the hall - a tenth of a second, a half a second, a second and a quarter, a lifetime - and then, in a voice no less shocking for the calm pedagogic reasonableness in which he had cocooned it, he said:

'How dare you, a non Jew - and I have to say it impresses me not at all that you grew up in awe of Jewish ethics, if anything your telling me so chills me - how dare you even think you can tell Jews what sort of country they may live in, when it is you, a European Gentile, who made a separate country for Jews a necessity?

'By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state's offer of safety to Jews the world over - yes, Jews first - while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be construed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked respresentative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries . . .'

He looked around him. There was no wall of applause. What did he expect? Some people enthusiastically clapped. Rather more booed. Had he not carried the authority he did, there would, he presumed - he bloody well hoped - have been cries of 'Shame!' A demagogue likes to hear cries of 'Shame!' But mainly what he saw was humanity trapped in conviction, like rats in rat traps.

Those who saw as he saw, saw what he saw. Those who didn't, didn't. And the didn't had it.

Fuck it, he thought. It was at that moment the sum total of his philosophy.
Fuck it
.

He turned his head to Tamara Krausz. 'So what do you think?' he enquired.

She had a strange smile on her face, as though everything he had just said he had said at her bidding.

'Hysterical,' she told him.

'You wouldn't care to lie in my arms and scream that, would you?' he asked, in his most inviting manner.

TEN

1

In time, Treslove came to believe he could very easily have reason to suspect Finkler of setting his sights on Hephzibah. If this was a rather roundabout way of putting it, that was because Treslove's suspicions were themselves rather roundabout.

In fact, he had no reason to believe that Finkler had set his sights on Hephzibah but he chose to suspect him anyway. Nothing he had seen, nothing that either Finkler or Hephzibah had said, just a feeling. And in jealousy a feeling is a reason.

He accepted that such a feeling might simply be the child of his devotion. When you love a woman deeply you are bound to imagine that every other man must love her deeply too. But it wasn't every other man he had reason to believe had set his sights on Hephzibah. Just Finkler.

Without doubt, Finkler had changed. He was less cocksure, somehow. He held his head differently. When he came round to dinner with Libor he was quiet and unwilling to be drawn on Isrrrae. It was Hephzibah's understanding, and Hephzibah was professionally in the know, that he had fallen out with his fellow exponents of Jewish ASHamedness in the matter of the proposed academic boycott. Though how serious was the falling-out she couldn't say.

'That would be because he doesn't want to lose an all-expenses-paid lecture tour of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Eilat,' Treslove guessed.

'Julian!' Hephzibah said.

(See!)

'Julian what?'

'Do you know that for a certainty?'

Treslove conceded that he didn't. But he knew his friend.

'Well, I wonder sometimes if you do,' Hephzibah said.

(See!!)

With Treslove, too, Finkler was less combative, as though sensitive to the changes wrought in him by Hephzibah's influence. But did that mean he saw Treslove differently or simply wanted some of what Treslove had found for himself?

Yet Hephzibah was surely not Finkler's type, particularly if Tyler was anything to go by. Treslove knew that Finkler had always taken mistresses. Jewish ones, too, Tyler had told him. But he was unable to picture them. The deep dark separation of Ronit Kravitz's breasts, for example, would have come as a surprise to him had he seen them. When he put his mind to Finkler's mistresses he imagined them as Jewish versions of Tyler whom he had always taken for a Jewess anyway. Razor-blade women with narrow jaws, more likely to favour sharply tailored trouser suits than shawls and cloaks. Women who hit the ground running, in creases and stilettos, not women who floated slowly down in acres of material. So no one remotely resembling Hephzibah. Which could mean one of two things: either Finkler was after Hephzibah only in order to get back at Treslove for something or other, or he had fallen for her as a woman entirely beyond his experience and preference, and in that case was likely to be dangerously smitten. Just as Treslove himself had been. Just as Treslove himself still was. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was what Hephzibah felt. Was she smitten too?

He brought the matter up with her in bed at the end of a couple of unusually taciturn days between them. What he didn't know was that she was keeping information about the second attack on the museum from him.

'Should we have Sam over for dinner one night soon?' he said. 'With Libor? I think he's lonely.'

'Libor? Of course he's lonely.'

'No, Sam.'

Hephzibah sipped her tea. 'If you like.'

'Well, only if
you
like.'