The Finkler Question (50 page)

'What do I know, except that you ain't no dead man, Sam.'

Or was he? Sam the Dead Man. Treslove didn't dare raise his eyes from the earth to look at his friend. He hadn't seen him since they'd got here. He hadn't seen anything or anyone - except of course Hephzibah whom he couldn't miss.

'Well, of the two of us-' Finkler began, but he was unable to finish. A third person had arrived at the graveside. She stood quietly, anxious not to disturb their conversation. After a moment, she bent and took a handful of soil which she sprinkled like seeds on the mound of earth.

The men fell quiet, making her self-conscious. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'll come back.'

'Please don't,' Finkler said. 'We're going in a minute ourselves.'

Before she rose, Treslove was able to get a look at her. An elderly woman, but not aged, elegant, her head covered with a light scarf, poised, not unaccustomed to Jewish cemeteries and funerals, he thought. This much Treslove had discovered: the Jewish faith frightened even Jews. Only a few were at home in all the ceremonials. This woman was not awed, even by death.

'Are you a relative?' Finkler asked. He wanted to tell her that the family had been and left, and that if she wanted to join them . . .

She stood, without difficulty, and shook her head. 'Just a long-time friend,' she said.

'Us too,' Treslove said.

'This is a very sad day,' the woman said.

She was dry-eyed. Dryer by far than Treslove. He couldn't have said how dry Finkler was.

'Heartbreaking,' he said. Finkler added his assent.

They found themselves walking away from the grave together. 'My name is Emmy Oppenstein,' the woman said.

The two men introduced themselves to her. There were no handshakes. Treslove liked that. The Jews were good at making one occasion not like another, he thought. The protocol alarmed him but he admired it. Good to divide this from that. Why is this night different from all other nights. Or
was
it good? They pursued difference to the grave.

'How long is it since either of you saw him?' Emmy Oppenstein enquired.

She wanted to know how he had been in the time before his death. She herself had not seen him for many months, but they had spoken on the phone a few times more recently than that.

'In the normal course of events you saw a lot of him, then?' Treslove asked. Annoyed for Malkie.

'No, not at all. In the normal course of events I saw him once every half century.'

'Ah.'

'I made contact with him again after all that time because I needed his help. I suppose I'm wanting to hear that I didn't put more pressure on him than he could bear.'

'Well, he never said anything,' Treslove told her. He wanted to add that Libor had never so much as mentioned her existence, but he couldn't be quite so cruel to a woman her age.

'And did you get his help?' Finkler asked.

She hesitated. 'I got his company,' she said. 'But his help, no, I don't think I can say he was able to give me that.'

'Not like him.'

'No, that was what I thought. Though of course after such a long time I was in no position to know what he was like. But it hurt him to refuse me, I thought. The strange thing was that it felt as though he wanted it to hurt him. And of course it saddens me deeply to think I was in some way the agency of his hurting himself.'

'We are all punishing ourselves with that sadness,' Finkler said.

'Are you? I'm sorry to hear that. But that's a natural thing for friends to feel. I hadn't been a friend for so long I have no right, and indeed
had
no right, to think of myself as one. But I needed a favour.'

She told them, in the end, what the favour was. Told them about the work she did, about what she feared, about the Jew-hatred which was beginning to infect the world she'd inhabited all her life, the world where people had once prided themselves on thinking before they rushed to judgement, and about her grandson, blinded by a person she didn't scruple to call a terrorist.

Both men were affected by the story. Libor was, too, she said, but the last time she saw him he seemed to turn his back on it. That was the way of things, he had told her. That was what happened to Jews. Change your tune.

'Libor said that?' Treslove asked.

She nodded.

'Then he was in a worse way than I realised,' he said. The emotion which had been misting up his eyes ever since he had seen Libor's coffin lowered into the earth began to choke him.

Finkler, too, found it hard to find words. He remembered all the arguments he'd had with Libor on the subject. And it pleased him not at all that Libor had surrendered at the last. Some arguments you don't have in order that you will win.

Finkler and Emmy Oppenstein wished each other long life on parting. Hephzibah had told Treslove of this custom. At a funeral Jews wish one another long life. It is a vote for life's continuance in the face of death.

He turned to Emmy Oppenstein. 'I wish you long life,' he said, looking up.

6

Treslove, who has always dreamed, dreams that he is beckoned to a death chamber. The room is dark and smells. Not of death but food. The remains of lamb chops which have been left out too long. To be precise it is the sweet smell of lamb fat he can smell. Strange, because he recalls Libor saying that he could never bear to eat lamb as a consequence of adopting as a childhood pet a lamb which had nibbled grass in a field behind his house in Bohemia. 'Baaa,' the lamb had said to little Libor. And 'Baaa,' little Libor had said back. Once you've conversed with a lamb you can't eat it, Libor had explained. Same with any other animal.

In his dream, Treslove wonders what St Francis found to eat.

He doesn't doubt he has come to pay his last respects to Libor but dreads seeing him. He is afraid of the face of death.

To his horror, a weak voice calls him from the bed. 'Julian, Julian. A word . . . come.'

The voice is not Libor's. It is Finkler's. Faint, but decidedly Finkler's.

Treslove knows what he is going to hear. Finkler is playing their old clever-clogs schoolyard game. 'If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,' he is going to say, 'absent thee from felicity awhile . . .'

And Treslove will say back, 'Felicity? Who's Felicity?'

He approaches the bed.

'Closer,' Finkler says. The voice strong suddenly.

Treslove does as he is told. When he is close enough to feel Finkler's breath, Finkler sits up and spits in his face, a violent stream of filth - phlegm, sour wine, lamb fat, vomit.

'That's for Tyler,' he says.

Treslove knows his way, by now, around his dreams. So he doesn't even bother to ask himself whether it was really a dream or just a vivid dread.

It was both.

Or whether the dread was half desire.

Aren't all dreads half desires?

He had begun to wake to the old sense of absurd loss again. Searching for the acute disappointment he felt and locating it in a sporting catastrophe: a tennis player he didn't care about losing to another tennis player he had never heard of; the English cricket team being defeated by an innings and several hundred runs on the Indian subcontinent; a football match, any football match, ending in a gross injustice; even a golfer losing his nerve on the final hole - golf a game he neither played nor followed.

It wasn't that sport allowed him to deflect his melancholy; sport
spoke
for his melancholy. Its vanity of expectation was his vanity of expectation.

He had discerned something Jewish in this, an avid reaching after setback and frustration, like supporting Tottenham Hotspur as some of Hephzibah's Jewish friends did, but now he was not so sure.

He was seeing too many dawns. Dawns did not suit Treslove.

'What you'd prefer is a dawn that happens at about midday,' Hephzibah had joked when she first discovered his fear of them. She loved them herself and in their first months together would wake him to see. One of the advantages of her high-terraced apartment was that she could walk directly out of her bedroom and catch the wonderful panorama of a London dawn. It was a measure of how much he loved her that he would wake the moment she shook him and step out on to the terrace with her and gasp at the glory of it as he knew she wanted him to. The dawn was their element. Their creation. Treslove the new-born happy man and Jew. As long as the dawn broke all was well in their world. And not just their world. The whole world.

Well, the dawn still broke but their world was no longer well. He loved her no less. She had not disenchanted him. Nor he, he hoped, her. But Libor was dead. Finkler was dying in his dreams and, if appearances were anything to go by, putrefying in his life. And, he, Treslove, was no Jew. For which, perhaps, he should have been grateful. This was not a good time to be a Jew. Never had been, he knew that. Not even if you went back a thousand, two thousand years. But he had thought it would at least be a good time for
him
to be a Jew.

You can't, though, can you, have one happy Jew in an island of apprehensive or ashamed ones? Least of all when that Jew happens to be Gentile.

Now he was rising early not because Hephzibah woke him to see the beauty of the daybreak but because he couldn't sleep. So these were reluctant, resented dawns. Hephzibah was right about their spendour. But not about their breaking. The verb was wrong. It suggested too sudden and purposeful a disclosure. From her terrace the great London dawn bled slowly into sight, a thin line of red blood leaking out between the rooftops, appearing at the windows of the buildings it had infiltrated, one at a time, as though in a soundless military coup. On some mornings it was as though a sea of blood rose from the city floor. Higher up, the sky would be mauled with rough blooms of deep blues and burgundies like bruising. Pummelled into light, the hostage day began.

Treslove, wrapped in a dressing gown, paced the terrace drinking tea that was too hot for him.

There was disgrace in it. He wasn't sure whose. Just the being part of nature, maybe. Just the not having got beyond its rising tide of blood after all these hundreds of thousands of years of trying. Or was it the city that was a disgrace? The illusion of civility it stood for? Its faceless indomitability, like the blank, mulish obstinacy of a child that wouldn't learn its lesson? Which one had swallowed up Libor as though he had never been, and would soon swallow up the rest of them? Who was to blame?

Alternatively, the disgrace was himself, Julian Treslove, who looked like everyone and everybody but was in fact no one and nobody. He sipped his tea, scalding his tongue. Such specificity as he sought - if someone as indeterminate as he was could ever be called specific - was unnecessary. The disgrace was universal. Just to be a human animal was to be a disgrace. Life was a disgrace, an absurd disgrace, to be exceeded in disgracefulness only by death.

Hephzibah heard him get up and go outside and didn't want to follow him. There was no longer any charm in sharing the dawn with him. You know when the person you're living with finds life disgraceful.

She would not have been human had she not asked herself whether it was her fault. Not so much what she had done as what she had failed to do. Treslove was another in a long line of men who needed saving. Were they the only men who came to her - the lost, the floundering, the dispossessed? Or was there no other sort?

Either way their demands wearied her. Who did they think she was - America?
Give me your tired, your poor
. . .
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore
. She looked strong and secure enough to house them, that was the problem. She looked capacious. She looked like safe harbour.

Well, Treslove, for one, had that wrong. She hadn't saved him. Perhaps he wasn't savable.

Much of it was about Libor, she knew that. He had still not grasped it. For reasons she didn't understand, he appeared to blame himself. On top of which, quite simply, he missed Libor's company. Therefore she had no business barging in and asking, 'Anything I've done, honey?' The decent thing was to leave him alone for a while. She could use the privacy herself. She too was grieving. But still she wondered and was sorry.