The Finkler Question (48 page)

Finkler smiled. Fancy Tyler, in her jewellery and furs, caring about the Australian Aborigine.

She saw it this way . . .

The cheek of her!
She saw it this way
. Tyler Gallagher, the granddaughter of Irish tinkers, who won a prize at Sunday school when she was eight years old for a drawing of the baby Jesus holding out his podgy hands to take his Christmas presents from the Three Wise Men. Telling him how she saw it.

This, anyway, was the way it looked to her, whatever her husband thought.

'For pogrom after pogrom Jews bowed their heads and held on. God had picked them for His own. God would help them. The Holocaust - yes, yes, here we go, Shmuelly, Holocaust, Holocaust!! - the Holocaust changed all that FOREVER. Jews finally woke up to being on their own. They had to look out for themselves. And that meant having their own country. In fact they already had it, but let's not get into that, Mr Palestine. They had to have their own country and when you have your own country you become different from who you were
before
you had your own country. You become like everybody else! Only
you
and
your cronies
won't let them be like everybody else, because for you, Shmuel, they are still obliged to obey the God (in whom you don't believe!) and be an example to the world!

'Explain to your poor, uneducated, would-be Jewish wife why else you can't leave the Jews of the country I've even heard you call Canaan, you sick fucker, alone? Are you afraid that if you don't get in with your criticism early, worse will come from somewhere else? Is yours some perverted patriotism that burns up territory you're afraid of losing so that it won't fall into enemy hands??

'Answer me this: Why don't you mind your own fucking business, Shmuel? You won't be judged alongside Israyelis unless you choose to be. You have your country, they have theirs - a fact, to quote you on being married to me, that "invites neither exceptional sympathy nor exceptional censure". They are now just ordinary bastards, half right, half wrong, like the
rest
of us.

'Because even you, my false, beloved husband, are not ALL wrong.'

This time he didn't fold her little essay away but sat with it awhile in front of him. Poor Tyler. Which he knew very well was Finkler-speak for poor him. He missed her. They'd fought and fought but there had always been companionableness in it. He had never raised his hand to her, nor she to him. They had always talked everything through, the sound of each other's voice a daily source of unremarked pleasure to them both. He would have loved to hear her voice now. What he would have given to be able to go out into their now neglected garden with her and put his finger on the knot of green string she was always asking him to help her tie.

They had not been together long enough for it to be one of the great marital adventures, akin to that enjoyed by Libor and Malkie, but they'd been on an enjoyable trek together. And they'd brought up three smart children, no matter that some were smarter than others.

He sat and cried a little. Tears were good in that they were undiscriminating. He didn't have to know for whom or what he wept. He wept for everything.

He liked Tyler's point about his being a patriot, burning up what he was afraid of losing. He didn't know if it was true but he liked the idea. So was Tamara the same? Were all the ASHamed Jews killing the thing they loved for fear of its falling into the enemy's hands?

Tyler's was as good a guess as any. Something had to explain the queer, passionate hatred of these people. Self-hate certainly didn't get it. Self-haters would surely go about in surly isolation, but the ASHamed sought out one another's company, cheered one another on, expressed their feelings as a group activity, as soldiers might on the eve of battle. It could easily be, in that case, just as poor Tyler had described it, another version of the old beleaguered Jewish tribalism. The enemy remained who the enemy had always been. The
others
. This was just the latest tactic in the age-old war. To kill our own before the
others
could.

Certainly, Finkler never once came away from their meetings without feeling exactly as he had felt when accompanying his father to synagogue - that the world was too Jewish for him, too old, too communal in an anthropological, almost primal sense - too far back, too deep down, too long ago.

He was a thinker who didn't know what he thought, except that he had loved and failed and now missed his wife, and that he hadn't escaped what was oppressive about Judaism by joining a Jewish group that gathered to talk feverishly about the oppressiveness of being Jewish. Talking feverishly about being Jewish
was
being Jewish.

He stayed up late watching television, trying to stay away from his computer. Enough with the poker.

But poker served a purpose. T. S. Eliot told Auden that the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.

Patience, poker . . . What difference?

TWELVE

1

It was thought that Meyer Abramsky had been suffering from severe depression. He had seven children and his wife was heavy with his eighth. He had been told by the Israeli army to prepare to remove his family from the settlement he had helped to found, in accordance with God's promise, sixteen years before. He had travelled from Brooklyn with his young wife in order to keep his bargain with God. And they were doing this to him! Assistance would be given to rehouse him, and consideration would be shown to his wife's condition. But the settlement had to go. Thus spake Obama.

It was agreed that they would not go quietly, not any of them. To go quietly would be to accede to blasphemy. This was their land. They didn't have to share it, they didn't have to do deals to secure it, it was theirs. He could point to the verse in the Torah where it said so. There the promise, there the place. Why, if you looked closely and read as you were meant to read, Meyer Abramsky's house itself was mentioned. There. Right there where the page was worn thin with pointing.

After threatening to barricade his family in their house and shoot whoever tried to move them - never mind that they were fellow Jews; fellow Jews do not eject their own people from sacred land - Meyer Abramsky read about himself in the newspapers. There was talk of his succumbing to a 'siege mentality'.
Siege mentality!
What else did they expect? It wasn't only Meyer Abramsky who was under seige, it was the entire Jewish people.

He never did carry out his threat to shoot the Israeli soldiers who ejected him. Instead, he boarded a bus and shot an Arab family. A mother, a father, a baby. One, two, three bullets. One, two, three victims. Thus spake the Lord.

2

It was not known whether Libor read about the incident and was affected by it. It seemed unlikely. Libor had not read a newspaper for weeks.

Whether he bought a paper to read on the train to Eastbourne isn't known either. Had he done so he would certainly have seen photographs of Meyer Abramsky on the front pages. But by that time Libor had already made his decision. Why else would he have taken the train to Eastbourne?

He sat opposite Treslove's son Alfredo on the train without either knowing who the other was. Only later did this emerge, causing Treslove to unwind a chain of improbable causality at the end of which he found his guilt. Had Treslove been a better father and not fallen out with Alfredo he might have had him round to dinner at Hephzibah's where he would have met Libor, and had he met Libor he would have recognised him on the train and then . . .

So Treslove was to blame.

Alfredo was travelling to Eastbourne with his dinner jacket in his overnight bag. He would be playing 'Happy Birthday' and similar requests at the best hotel in Eastbourne that night.

He thought the old man sitting opposite him was yellow. He must have been about a hundred, he said. Alfredo didn't like old men much. These things probably start with fathers and Alfredo didn't like his father. In answer to the question of whether the old man sitting opposite him appeared anxious or depressed he repeated that he looked about a hundred - how else are you going to look at that age but anxious and depressed? He didn't talk to the old man other than to offer him a peppermint, which was refused, and to ask where he was going.

'Eastbourne,' the old man told him.

Yes, obviously Eastbourne, but where specifically? To stay with family? A hotel? (Alfredo hoped not the hotel he was playing at, which had an old enough clientele already.)

'Nowhere,' the old man told him.

Libor was more precise in his instructions to the taxi driver when he got to Eastbourne. 'Bitchy 'Ead,' he said.

'Do you mean Beachy Head?' the driver asked.

'What did I just say?' Libor answered. 'Bitchy 'Ead!'

Did he want to be dropped anywhere in particular? The pub, the lookout . . .?

'Bitchy 'Ead.'

The driver who had a father of his own and knew that old men were made irritable by age explained that if he wanted him to wait he would. Otherwise he could ring for him to come back and collect him. 'Or there's a bus,' he said. 'A 12a.'

'Not necessary,' Libor said.

'Well, if you do need me,' the driver insisted, handing him his card.

Libor put the card in his pocket without looking at it.

3

He drank a whisky in the slate-floored pub, sitting at a small round table looking out to sea. He thought it was the identical table to the one he and Malkie had sat at on the day they drove here long ago to test each other's courage, but he might have been wrong about that. It didn't matter. The view was the same, the coast swirling away to the west, flinty and ancient, the sea colourless but for the thin line of silver on the horizon.

He drank another whisky then left the pub and climbed slowly up the downlands, bent as the trees and shrubs were bent. With no sun on them, the cliffs looked grimy, a mass of dirty chalk crumbling into the sea.

'You'd need some nerve to do this,' he remembered saying to Malkie.

Malkie had fallen silent, thinking about it. 'The dark would be best,' she had said at last, as they'd strolled back, arm in arm. 'I'd wait till it was dark and just keep on walking.'

He passed the little pile of stones, like something Jacob or Isaac might have built, with the plaque on which Psalm 93 was engraved.
Mightier than the thunder of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea. The Lord on high is mighty
.

It seemed to him there were fewer of the randomly planted wooden crosses than he remembered. There should, surely, have been more. Unless, after a decent period of time, they were removed.

What was a decent period of time?

But again, tied to a scrap of wire fencing, there was a bunch of flowers. This one was from Marks & Spencer, with the price tag attached. PS4.99. Don't splash out, he thought.

The place was not isolated. A bus had unloaded a party of pensioners. People walked their dogs and flew kites. Peered over. Shuddered. A hiking couple said hello to him. But it was very quiet, the wind blowing voices off the edge. He heard a sheep. 'Baaa.' Unless it was a seagull. And remembered home.

There was no evidence to support Malkie's fanciful conviction that it would take her beloved husband an unconscionable time to reach the bottom. Despite her believing she had married an exceptional man, he didn't fly or float. He went straight down like anybody else.

4

Treslove learned that Alfredo had been sitting opposite Libor on the Eastbourne train from Alfredo's mother. Alfredo had seen Libor's photograph on the South East television news - veteran journalist plunges to his death in Beachy Head's third suicide in a month - and realised it was the hundred-year-old man he had talked to on the train. This he mentioned to his mother, and this his mother took the trouble to communicate to Treslove when she herself read the dead man's name in the paper and recognised him as a friend of the father of her son.

'Strange coincidence,' she said in the same BBC voice with which she used to unpack rafts of ideas and unpick Treslove's sanity.

'Strange how?'