The Finkler Question (46 page)

'You have humiliated me,' the girl cried, sobbing into a tissue. The tears mingling with the face paint made her look even more ridiculous than Treslove had made her look. She was beside herself with distress.

Treslove looked over to Finkler for support. Finkler shook his head as over someone to whom he had shown infinite patience in the past but could forgive no more. He enfolded his girl in his arms so that she should not have to see what his friend had done.

'Leave,' the host said.

Treslove was a long time recovering from this incident. It marked him, in his own eyes, as a man who didn't know how to relate to people, especially women. Thereafter, he hesitated when he was invited to a party. And started, in the way that some people start from spiders, whenever he saw a box of children's paints or people painting one another's faces at a fete.

That the girl he had painted as a clown might have been the Judith who avenged herself on him outside the window of J. P. Guivier had of course crossed his mind. Everything crossed Treslove's mind. But for it to have been her, she must have changed considerably over the years both in physique and in temper.

Was it likely, either, that she would nurse her grievance, not only for more than a quarter of a century but to the extent of deliberately tracing Treslove's whereabouts and tracking him through the streets of London? No. But then again trauma is incalculable in its effects. Could he, with a box of paints, have made an insanely unforgiving brute out of that sweet-natured girl?

Such questions were purely academic now that he had become a Finkler. What had been, had been. Indeed, he remembered the face-painting incident only when Hephzibah took him to a family birthday party at which the paints came out. Though children did not normally take much account of Treslove whom they managed not to see, this little girl - he was not sure of her relation to Hephzibah, so assumed a great-great-niece: it was either that or great-great-aunt - this little girl for some unaccountable reason did.

'Are you Hephzibah's husband?' she asked him.

'In a manner of speaking,' he replied.

'In a manner of speaking yes or no?'

Treslove was uncomfortable talking to children, not knowing whether he should address them as very young versions of himself, or very old versions of himself. Since she was a Finkler and therefore, he assumed, preternaturally smart, he opted for the very old version of himself. 'In a manner of speaking both,' he said. 'In the eyes of God, if not in the eyes of society, I am her husband.'

'My daddy says there is no God,' the little girl said.

This took Treslove to the limits of what he knew about speaking to children. 'Well,' he said, 'there you are then.'

'You're funny,' the little girl told him. There was a precocity about her he couldn't fathom. She appeared almost to be flirting with him. An impression augmented by how grown-up her clothes were. He had noticed this before about Finkler children. Their mothers dressed them in the height of adult fashion, as though no opportunity to find a husband was to be forgone.

'Funny in what way?'

'Different funny.'

'I see,' he said. By different did she mean not Finkler? Was it evident to a child?

It was at this point that Hephzibah came over carrying paints. 'You two seem to be hitting it off,' she said.

'She knows I'm not
unserer
,' Treslove said under his breath. 'She's picked me for
anderer
. It's uncanny.'

Unserer
, as Hephzibah's family used the word, meant Jewish. One of us.
Anderer
was one of them. The enemy. The alien. Julian Treslove.

'That's nonsense,' Hephzibah said, under her breath.

'Why are you whispering?' the little girl asked. 'My daddy says it's rude to whisper.'

Rude to whisper, Treslove thought, but not rude to be a fucking atheist at seven.

'I know what,' Hephzibah said, 'why don't you ask Julian nicely and he'll paint your face for you?'

'Julian Nicely, will you paint my face for me?' the little girl said, much amused by her own joke.

'No,' Treslove said.

The little girl's mouth fell open.

'Julian!' Hephzibah said.

'I can't.'

'Why can't you?'

'I can't, leave it at that.'

'Is this because you think she knows you're not
unserer
?'

'Don't be ridiculous. I just don't paint faces.'

'Paint hers for me. Look, she's upset.'

'I'm sorry if you're upset,' he said to the little girl. 'But you might as well get used to the idea that we don't always get what we want.'

'Julian!' Hephzibah said again. 'It's only face-painting. She isn't asking you to buy her a house.'

'
She
,' Treslove said, 'isn't asking for anything. It's you.'

'So
I
am to be taught a lesson in what not to expect from life?'

'I'm not teaching anyone anything. I just don't do face-paints.'

'Even though two young women are deeply upset by your refusal?'

'Don't be cute, Hep.'

'And don't you be objectionable. Just paint her fucking face.'

'No. How many more times must I say it? No. Face-painting is not my scene. OK?'

Whereupon, in what Hephzibah was to describe to herself as a most unmanly fit of petulance, he swept out of the room and indeed out of the house. When Hephzibah returned several hours later she found him in their bed, his face turned to the wall.

Hephzibah was not a woman who allowed silences to build up. 'So what was that about?' she asked.

'You know what it was about. I don't do face-painting.'

Hephzibah assumed this was code for
I don't do your family
.

'Fine,' she said. 'Then would you please stop this fantasy about how wonderful you find us?'

Treslove assumed
us
was code for Finklers.

He didn't promise he would stop. But nor did he tell her she was wrong in her assumption.

It was all too much for him - children, parties, face paints, families, Finklers.

He had bitten off more than he could chew.

4

And yet he was more them than they were, felt more for them and what they stood for than they, as far he could see, were capable of feeling for themselves. He wouldn't have gone so far as to say they needed him, but they did, didn't they? They
needed
him.

He had left the theatre seething with rage. On behalf of Hephzibah. On behalf of Libor. On behalf of Finkler, whatever Finkler felt or pretended to feel about the poison play. Why, he was even prepared to feel rage on behalf of Abe, whose client called the Holocaust a holiday and wondered why he'd lost his job while he was snorkelling in the Med.

Someone had to feel what he felt because on behalf of themselves what did they feel? Not enough. Hephzibah he knew was angry and disconsolate but preferred to look somewhere else. Finkler thought it was a joke. Libor had turned his head away from everything and everyone. Leaving only him, Julian Treslove, son of a melancholy and friendless cigar seller who played the fiddle where no one could hear him; Julian Treslove, ex of the BBC, ex arts administrator, one-time lover of a host of hopeless unfleshly girls who wore too many bras, father of a sandwich-making in-denial homosexual and a Jew-hating opportunist piano player; Julian Treslove, Finklerphile and would-be Finkler except that the Finklers in their ethno-religious separatism or whatever one was meant to call it just didn't fucking want to know.

Hard to go on feeling outrage for people who behaved to you exactly as they were accused of behaving to everyone else precisely because of which accusations you were outraged for them. Hard, but not impossible. Treslove saw where this was taking him and refused to go there. A principle of truth - political truth and art truth - stood beyond such personal betrayals and disappointments.
Sons of Abraham
, like much else of its kind, was a travesty of dramatic thought because it lacked imagination of otherness, because it accorded to its own self-righteousness a supremacy of truth, because it mistook propaganda for art, because it was rabble-rousing, and Treslove owed it to himself, never mind his inadequately affronted friends, not to be rabble-roused. He wished he had an arts programme to produce again. He would have enjoyed giving
Sons
- as it was no doubt called within the fraternity - the once over at three o'clock in the morning.

Treslove's bit for honour and veracity.

'But are you saying Zionism is exempt from criticism? Are you denying what we have seen with our own eyes on television?' the BBC bosses would have asked him at programme review, as though he, Julian Treslove, son of a melancholy and friendless cigar seller etc., had suddenly become Zionism's spokesman, or truth was to be apprehended in ten seconds flat on
Newsnight
, or humanity was incapable of addressing one wrong without instigating another.

He knew what he thought. He thought there would be no settling this until there'd been another Holocaust. He could see because he was outside it. He could afford to see what they - his friends, the woman he loved - dared not. The Jews would not be allowed to prosper except as they had always prospered, at the margins, in the concert halls and at the banks.
End of
. As his sons said. Anything else would not be tolerated. A brave rearguard action in the face of insuperable odds was one thing. Anything resembling victory and peace was another. It could not be borne, whether by Muslims for whom Jews were a sort of erroneous and lily-livered brother, always to be kept in their place, or by Christians to whom they were anathema, or by themselves to whom they were an embarrassment.

That was the total of Treslove's findings after a year of being an adopted Finkler in his own eyes if in no one else's - they didn't have a chance in hell.

Just as he didn't.

So that, at least, was something they were in together. Schtuck.

'In schtuck' was a favourite expression of his father's, a man who got by essentially without expression. Remembering it recently, Treslove thought the word must have been Yiddish and his father's using it the proof that something Jewish was trying to force its way out of him. Schtuck - it looked Yiddish, it sounded Yiddish, and it meant something - a sort of sticky mess - that only Yiddish could adequately express; but he didn't find the word in any of the museum's Yiddish dictionaries. The evidence of his Jewish antecedence proved as recalcitrant as ever. But in this at least he was a Jew - he was in deep schtuck.

5

The worst times, Libor remembered, were the mornings. For her and for him, but it was her he was thinking about.

There was never making any peace with it; neither had what could be called religious faith, both rejected false consolation, but there would be an hour there when the lights were dim and he would lie by her side, stroking her hair or holding her hand, not knowing if she was awake or asleep - but he was thinking about her, not him - an hour when, awake or asleep, she appeared to have accepted what she had no choice but to accept, and the idea of returning to earth, or even to nothing, caught the quiet of assent.

She could smile at him in the night when the pain was eased. She could look deep into his eyes, beckon him to her and whisper what he thought would be a fond memory into his ear, but which turned out to be a raucous allusion, an obscenity even. She wanted him to laugh, because they had laughed so often together. He had made her laugh at the beginning. Laughter had been his most precious gift to her. His ability to make her laugh was the reason - one of the reasons - she had chosen him above Horowitz. Laughter had never been at war with the softer emotions in her. She could roar and be gentle in the same breath. And now she wanted laughter to be her final gift to him.