The Finkler Question (42 page)

'Yes, I like.'

'Him or the idea of dinner?'

'Explain that.'

'Do you like the idea generally of having somebody round for dinner and that somebody might as well be Sam, or do you especially like the idea of its being Sam?'

She put her tea down and rolled over to his side of the bed. He loved the billowing undulations of the mattress when Hephzibah moved in his direction. Everything was momentous with her. From the start the earth had moved for him in her company, the oceans had heaved, the skies had gathered and gone black. Making love to her was like surviving an electrical storm. And some nights he wouldn't have minded had he not survived. But the mornings too were heavy with promise. Something would be said. Something would happen. No day went by without her being an event.

So different from the mothers of his sons, whose pregnancies he had failed to notice.

But then they had left him by the time they discovered they were pregnant.

But then he should have noticed that they'd left him.

'What's this about?' Hephzibah asked, coming at last to rest in the small corner of the bed that belonged to him.

'
This?
Nothing. I just wondered if you liked the idea of dinner.'

'With Sam?'

'Ah, so you do like the idea of Sam? That's to say of dinner with Sam?'

'Julian, what's this about?'

'I'm wondering if you're having an affair with him.'

'With
Sam
?'

'Or at least thinking about having an affair with him.'

'With
Sam
?'

'There you are, you see, you can't stop saying his name.'

'Julian, why would I be having or thinking of having an affair with anybody? I'm having an affair with you.'

'That doesn't stop people.'

'Wouldn't it stop you?'

'Me, yes. But I'm not like other people.'

'That's true,' she said, 'but then neither am I. You should believe that.'

'Then I do.'

She made him look at her. 'I have no interest in Sam Finkler,' she said. 'I don't find him interesting or attractive. He is the kind of Jewish man I have been avoiding all my life.'

'What kind is that?'

'Arrogant, heartless, self-centred, ambitious, and convinced his intelligence makes him irresistible.'

'That sounds like a description, from your own account, of the two men you married.'

'Exactly. In between marrying them I was avoiding them. And since marrying them I
have
avoided them.'

'But you only avoid what you fear, surely. Do you fear Sam?'

She laughed loudly. Too loudly?

'Well, he would no doubt love the idea that I do, but I don't. It's a strange question, though. Could it be that it's you who fears Sam?'

'Me? Why would I fear Sam?'

'For the same reason that I do.'

'But you said you don't.'

'And you aren't sure you believe me. Did you have a thing together at school?'

'Me and Sam? Christ, no.'

'Don't be so horrified. Boys do that, don't they?'

'Not any boys I knew.'

'Then maybe you should have. I think it's good to get all that out of the way early. Both my husbands had things at school.'

'With each other?'

'No, you fool. They didn't know each other. With other boys.'

'Yes and you weren't happy being married to them.'

'But not for that reason. I was waiting all along for you.'

'The goy?'

She wrapped a grand arm around him and gathered him into her bosom. 'As a goy - I have to tell you - you're a bit of a disappointment. Most goys I know don't spend their time reading Moses Maimonides and memorising Yiddish endearments.'

He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking.

'
Neshomeleh
,' he said, into her flesh.

But he couldn't leave it at that. The next day, over his five-pan omelette, he said, 'Is there a special bond?'

'Between?'

'Jews.'

'Depends on the Jews.'

'Is it like being gay? Is there a Jewdar that enables you to pick one another out?'

'Again, depends. I rarely think someone is Jewish when they're not, but I quite often don't know I'm talking to a Jew when I am.'

'And what is it you look for?'

'I'm not looking for anything.'

'What is that you recognise, then?'

'Can't explain. It's not one thing, it's a collection of things. Features, facial expression, a way of talking, a way of moving.'

'So you're making racial calculations?'

'I wouldn't call them racial, no.'

'Religious?'

'No, definitely not religious.'

'Then what?'

She didn't know what.

'But you make a connection.'

'Again, depends.'

'And with Sam?'

'What about with Sam?'

'Do you make the connection?'

She sighed.

She sighed the next time Treslove brought it up as well. And the time after that. She thought she'd put his suspicions to bed. But that wasn't the only reason she sighed the third time. Strangely enough, Sam had called in to see her that afternoon at the museum. This was not something he had ever done before. Nor was it a visit she could explain. It was as though, when she saw him, he had materialised out of Treslove's conversation, or even out of Treslove's will.

He must have been surprised himself, so open-mouthed was her welcome.

'To what do I owe this?' she asked, giving him her hand.

She knew the answer. She owed it to her lover's fears.

'Oh, I was driving past and I just thought I would call in,' he said. 'See how it's going. Is Julian here?'

'No. He's stopped coming in. There's not a lot he can do here while we're still in this state.'

He looked about. At the finished cabinets, at the murals, at the banks of computers and headphones. On a far wall he thought he caught sight of a photograph of Sir Isaiah Berlin and Frankie Vaughan. Not together.

'It's looking pretty well advanced to me,' he said.

'Yes, but nothing's connected.'

'So I can't trace my genealogy yet?'

'I didn't know you wanted to.'

He shrugged his shoulders. Who could say what he wanted? 'Any chance of a guided tour,' he asked, 'or are you too busy?'

She looked at her watch. 'I can give you ten minutes,' she said. 'But only if you promise to be less ironical about us than you were the last time we talked. This is not, I remind you, a Holocaust memorial museum.'

He smiled at her. He was not, she thought, so unattractive.

'Oh, I wouldn't mind if it were,' he said.

2

When Treslove told Hephzibah he thought Finkler was looking lonely he omitted to mention where the thought came from. Other, that is, than from his own fear of being lonely. It came from a text Alfredo had sent him.
saw your freaky telly friend out looking for tarts surprised you weren't with him

Treslove texted back
how do you tell when a man's out looking for tarts?

It took Alfredo a couple of days to work up a reply.
his tongues hanging out

Treslove texted back
you are no son of mine
, but decided against sending it. He didn't want to give Alfredo a free shot at him for his paternal negligence.

As for Finkler, leaving Hephzibah out of it, he was sorry for him if Alfredo's low supposition happened to be true, and sorrier still if it wasn't but Finkler just looked like a man with no home to go to and no wife to care for.

It was a terrible thing to lose the woman you loved.

3

'You're probably imagining it,' Libor said.

Treslove had taken him out for a salt-beef sandwich in the reopened Nosh Bar on Windmill Street. Years before, Libor had brought Treslove and Finkler here. Part of his introducing the young men to the hidden delights of the city Libor had come to love above all others. Then, a salt-beef sandwich in Soho was to Treslove as a descent into the underworld of cosmopolitan debauchery. He felt as though he were living through the last days of the Roman Empire, no matter that the Romans would not have known of salt-beef sandwiches. Now Treslove wondered if he was living through the last days of himself.

Libor, too, it seemed to him. The old man painstakingly separated the beef from the rye bread because the latter did not digest easily, and then he didn't touch the beef. He had asked for no mustard. He wanted no pickled cucumber.

He no longer ate his food, he merely pulled it apart.

In the past he would have looked out of the window and enjoyed the parade of dissolutes. Today he stared as through shuttered eyes. I have done him no favours bringing him here, Treslove thought.

But then the outing hadn't been planned as a favour to Libor. It was a necessity to Treslove.

'Why would I imagine it?' he asked. 'I'm happy. I'm in love. I believe I am loved. Where would I conjure up this dread from?'

'The usual place,' Libor said.

'That's too Czech for me, Libor. Where's the usual place?'

'The place everything we fear comes from. The place where we store our longing for the end of things.'

'That's more Czech still. I have no longing for the end of things.'

Libor smiled at him and laid an old unsteady hand on his. But for the old and the unsteady the gesture reminded Treslove of Hephzibah. Why did everybody pat him?

'My friend, all the years I've known you you've been longing for the end of things. You've lived in preparation, on the edge of tears, all your life. Malkie noticed that about you. She wasn't sure she should even play Schubert when you were listening. He doesn't need any encouragement, that one, she said.'

'Encouragement to do what?'

'To throw yourself into the flames. Isn't that what being with my niece and reading Moses Maimonides is about?'

'I don't think of Hephzibah as fire.'

'Don't you? Then what are you so anxious about? I think you're getting what you went in there to get. The whole Jewish
gesheft
. You think it's a short cut to catastrophe. And I'm not going to say you're wrong.'

He wanted to say that's crap, Libor. But you don't ask an elderly man out for salt-beef sandwiches he is unable to digest and tell him that what he's saying is crap. 'I don't recognise what you're describing,' he said instead.

Libor shrugged. If you don't you don't. He didn't have the strength to argue. But he could see Treslove needed more. 'The fall, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Last Judgement, Masada, Auschwitz - see a Jew and you think of Armageddon,' he said. 'We tell good creation stories but we do destruction even better. We're at the beginning and the end of everything. And everyone's after a piece of the action. Those who can't wait to pitchfork us into the flames, want to go down screaming by our side. It's one or the other. Temperamentally, you were always going to choose the other.'