The Finkler Question (5 page)

'The Palestinians don't have an air force,' Treslove replied.

'Precisely,' Finkler said.

Libor's position with regard to Israel with three 'r's and no 'l' - Isrrrae - was what Treslove had heard described as the lifeboat pos-ition. 'No, I've never been there and don't ever want to go there,' he said, 'but even at my age the time might not be far away when I have nowhere else
to
go. That is history's lesson.'

Finkler did not allow himself to use the word Israel at all. There was no Israel, there was only Palestine. Treslove had even heard him, on occasions, refer to it as Canaan. Israelis, however, there had to be, to distinguish the doers from the done-to. But whereas Libor pronounced Israel as a holy utterance, like the cough of God, Finkler put a seasick 'y' between the 'a' and the 'e' - Isra
y
elis - as though the word denoted one of the illnesses for which his father had prescribed his famous pill.

'History's lesson!' he snorted. 'History's lesson is that the Israyelis have never fought an enemy yet that wasn't made stronger by the fight. History's lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.'

'Then why not just wait for that to happen?' Treslove tentatively put in. He could never quite get whether Finkler resented Israel for winning or for being about to lose.

Though he detested his fellow Jews for their clannishness about Israel, Finkler couldn't hide his disdain for Treslove for so much as daring, as an outsider, to have a view. 'Because of the blood that will be spilled while we sit and do nothing,' he said, spraying Treslove with his contempt. And then, to Libor, 'And because as a Jew I am ashamed.'

'Look at him,' Libor said, 'parading his shame to a Gentile world that has far better things to think about, does it not, Julian?'

'Well,' Treslove began, but that was as much of what the Gentile world thought as either of them cared to hear.

'By what right do you describe me as "parading" anything?' Finkler wanted to know.

But Libor persisted blindly. 'Don't they love you enough for the books you write them? Must they love you for your conscience as well?'

'I am not seeking anyone's love. I am seeking justice.'

'Justice? And you call yourself a philosopher! What you are seeking is the warm glow of self-righteousness that comes with saying the word. Listen to me - I used to be your teacher and I'm old enough to be your father - shame is a private matter. One keeps it to oneself.'

'Ah, yes, the family argument.'

'And what's wrong with the family argument?'

'When a member of your family acts erroneously, Libor, is it not your duty to tell him?'

'Tell him, yes. Boycott him, no. What man would boycott his own family?'

And so on until the needs of men who lacked the consolations of female company - another glass of port, another unnecessary visit to the lavatory, an after dinner snooze - reclaimed them.

Watching from the sidelines, Treslove was enviously baffled by their Finklerishness. Such confidence, such certainty of right, whether or not Libor was correct in thinking that all Finkler wanted was for non-Finklers to approve of him.

Whatever Sam Finkler wanted, his effect on Julian Treslove was always to put him out of sorts and make him feel excluded from something. And false to a self he wasn't sure he had. It had been the same at school. Finkler made him feel like someone he wasn't. Clownish, somehow. Explain that.

Treslove was considered good-looking in a way that was hard to describe; he resembled good-looking people. Symmetry was part of it. He had a symmetrical face. And neatness. He had neat features. And he dressed well, in the manner of who was it again? Whereas Finkler - whose father had invited customers to punch him in the belly - had allowed himself to put on weight, often let his own belly hang out of his shirt, spat at the camera, waddled slightly on his big feet when he went on one of those pointless television walks down the street where the laundry van knocked down Roland Barthes or through the field where Hobbes had an allotment, and when he sat down seemed to collapse into his own bulk like a merchant in a spice souk. And yet he, Treslove, felt the clown!

Did philosophy have something to do with it? Every few years Treslove decided it was time he tried philosophy again. Rather than start at the beginning with Socrates or jump straight into epistemology, he would go out and buy what promised to be a clear introduction to the subject - by someone like Roger Scruton or Bryan Magee, though not, for obvious reasons, by Sam Finkler. These attempts at self-education always worked well at first. The subject wasn't after all difficult. He could follow it easily. But then, at more or less the same moment, he would encounter a concept or a line of reasoning he couldn't follow no matter how many hours he spent trying to decipher it. A phrase such as 'the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis' for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It was like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic.

Did Finkler ever encounter the same resistance? Treslove asked him once. No, was the answer. To Finkler it all made perfect sense. And the people who read him found that he too made perfect sense. How else was one to account for there being so many of them?

It was only when he waved goodbye that it occurred to Treslove that his old friend wanted company. Libor was right - Finkler
was
seeking love. A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has.

Treslove looked up at the moon and let his head spin. He loved these warm high evenings, solitary and excluded. He took hold of the bars as though he meant to tear the gates down, but he did nothing violent, just listened to the park breathe. Anyone watching might have taken him for an inmate of an institution, a prisoner or a madman, desperate to get out. But there was another interpretation of his demeanour: he could have been desperate to get in.

In the end he needed the gate to keep him upright, so intoxicated was he, not by Libor's wine, though it had been plentiful enough for three grieving men, but by the sensuousness of the park's deep exhalations. He opened his mouth as a lover might, and let the soft foliaged air penetrate his throat.

How long since he had opened his mouth for a lover proper? Really opened it, he meant, opened it to gasp for air, to yell out in gratitude, to howl in joy and dread. Had he run out of women? He was a lover not a womaniser, so it wasn't as though he had exhausted every suitable candidate for his affection. But they seemed not to be there any more, or had suddenly become pity-proof, the sort of women who in the past had touched his heart. He saw the beauty of the girls who tripped past him on the street, admired the strength in their limbs, understood the appeal, to other men, of their reckless impressionability, but they no longer had the lamp-post effect on him. He couldn't picture them dying in his arms. Couldn't weep for them. And where he couldn't weep, he couldn't love.

Couldn't even desire.

For Treslove, melancholy was intrinsic to longing. Was that so unusual? he wondered. Was he the only man who held tightly to a woman so he wouldn't lose her? He didn't mean to other men. In the main he didn't worry much about other men. That is not to say he had always seen them off - he was still scarred by the indolent manner in which the Italian who repaired sash windows had stolen from him - but he wasn't jealous. Envy he was capable of, yes - he'd been envious and was envious still of Libor's life lived mono-erotically (
eloticshrly
was how Libor said it, knitting its syllables with his twisted Czech teeth) - but jealousy no. Death was his only serious rival.

'I have a Mimi Complex,' he told his friends at university. They thought he was joking or being cute about himself, but he wasn't. He wrote a paper on the subject for the World Literature in Translation module he'd taken after fluffing Environmental Decision Making - the pretext being the Henri Murger novel from which the opera
La Boheme
was adapted. His tutor gave him A for interpretation and D-for immaturity.

'You'll grow out of it,' he said when Treslove questioned the mark.

Treslove's mark was upgraded to A++. All marks were upgraded if students questioned them. And since every student did question them, Treslove wondered why tutors didn't just dish out regulation A++s and save time. But he never did grow out of his Mimi Complex. At forty-nine he still had it bad. Didn't all opera lovers?

And perhaps - like all lovers of Pre-Raphaelite painting, and all readers of Edgar Allan Poe - an Ophelia Complex too. The death betimes of a beautiful woman - what more poetic subject is there?

Whenever Julian passed a willow or a brook, or best of all a willow growing aslant a brook - which wasn't all that often in London - he saw Ophelia in the water, her clothes spread wide and mermaidlike, singing her melodious lay. Too much of water had she right enough - has any woman ever been more drowned in art? - but he was quick to add his tears to her inundation.

It was as though a compact had been enjoined upon him by the gods (he couldn't say God, he didn't believe in God), to possess a woman so wholly and exclusively, to encircle her in his arms so completely, that death could find no way in to seize her. He made love in that spirit, in the days when he made love at all. Desperately, ceaselessly, as though to wear down and drive away whichever spirits of malevolence had designs upon the woman in his arms. Embraced by Treslove, a woman could consider herself for ever immune from harm. Dog-tired, but safe.

How they slept when he had done with them, the women Treslove had adored. Sometimes, as he kept vigil over them, he thought they would never wake.

It was a mystery to him, therefore, why they always left him or made it impossible for him not to leave them. It was the disappointment of his life. Framed to be another Orpheus who would retrieve his loved one from Hades, who would, at the last, look back over a lifetime of devotion to her, shedding tears of unbearable sorrow when she faded for the final time in his arms - 'My love, my only love!' - here he was instead, passing himself off as someone he wasn't, a universal lookalike who didn't feel as others felt, reduced to swallowing the fragrances of parks and weeping for losses which, in all decency, were not his to suffer.

So that was something else he might have envied Libor - his bereavement.

5

He stayed at the park gates maybe half an hour, then strode back with measured steps towards the West End, passing the BBC - his old dead beat - and Nash's church where he had once fallen in love with a woman he had watched lighting a candle and crossing herself. In grief, he'd presumed. In chiaroscuro. Crepuscular, like the light. Or like himself. Inconsolable. So he'd consoled her.

'It'll be all right,' he told her. 'I'll protect you.'

She had fine cheekbones and almost transparent skin. You could see the light through her.

After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, 'Why do you keep telling me it'll be all right? There isn't anything wrong.'

He shook his head. 'I saw you lighting a candle. Come here.'

'I like candles. They're pretty.'

He ran his hands through her hair. 'You like their flicker. You like their transience. I understand.'

'There's something you should know about me,' she said. 'I'm a bit of an arsonist. Not serious. I wasn't going to burn down the church. But I am turned on by flame.'

He laughed and kissed her face. 'Hush,' he said. 'Hush, my love.'

In the morning he woke to twin realisations. The first was that she had left him. The second was that his sheets were on fire.

Rather than walk along Regent Street he turned left at the church, stepping inside the columns, brushing its smooth animal roundness with his shoulder, and found himself among the small wholesale fashion shops of Riding House and Little Titchfield Streets, surprised as always at the speed with which, in London, one cultural or commercial activity gave way to another. His father had owned a cigarette and cigar shop here -
Bernard Treslove: Smokes
- so he knew the area and felt fondly towards it. For him it would always smell of cigars, as his father did. The windows of cheap jewellery and gaudy handbags and pashminas made him think of romance. He doubled back on himself, in no hurry to get home, then paused, as he always paused when he was here, outside J. P. Guivier & Co. - the oldest violin dealer and restorer in the country. Though his father played the violin, Treslove did not. His father had dissuaded him. 'It will only make you upset,' he said. 'Forget all that.'