The Finkler Question (14 page)

He lay on his back and felt the tears well in his eyes. He told her he loved her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know me. That was Sam you were doing it to.’

He sat up. ‘It most certainly was not.’

‘I don’t mind. It suits me. We might even do it again. And if it turns you on to be doing your friend – doing him or doing him over, let’s not finesse here – it’s fine by me.’

Treslove propped himself up on his elbow to look at her but she was turned away from him again. He reached out to stroke her hair.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

‘What you don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is that this is the first time for me.’

‘The first time you’ve had sex?’ She didn’t actually sound all that surprised.

‘The first time’ – it sounded tasteless now he had to put it into words – ‘the first time . . . you know . . .’

‘The first time you’ve done the dirty on Samuel? I shouldn’t worry about that. He wouldn’t hesitate to do it to you. Probably already has. He sees it as a
droit de philosophe
. Being a thinker he thinks he has a right to fuck whoever takes his fancy.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that you’re my first . . .’

He could hear his hesitancy irritating her. The bed chilled around her. ‘First what? Spit it out. Married woman? Mother? Wife of a television presenter? Woman without a degree?’

‘Don’t you have a degree?’

‘First what, Julian?’

He swallowed the word a couple of times but needed to hear himself say it. Saying it was almost as sweet in its unholiness as doing it. ‘Jew,’ he finally got out. But that wasn’t quite the word he was after either. ‘Jewess,’ he said, taking a long time to finish it, letting the heated hiss of all those
sss
s linger on his lips.

She turned round as though for the first time she needed to see what he looked like, her eyes dancing with mockery. ‘Jewess? You think I’m actually a
Jewess
?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘That’s the nicest question you could have asked me. But where did you get the idea from that I’m the real deal?’

Treslove couldn’t think of what to say, there was so much. ‘Everything,’ was all he could come up with in the end. He remembered attending one of the Finkler boys’ bar mitzvahs but as he wasn’t sure which he remained silent on the subject.

‘Well, your everything is a nothing,’ she said.

He was bitterly upset. Not a Jewess, Tyler? Then what
was
that dark humidity he had entered?

She hung her bottom lip at him. (And
that
, wasn’t that Jewish?) ‘Do you honestly think,’ she went on, ‘that Samuel would have married someone Jewish?’

‘Well, I hadn’t thought he wouldn’t.’

‘Then how little you know him. It’s the Gentiles he’s out to conquer. Always has been. You must know that. He’s done Jewish. He was born Jewish. They can’t reject him. So why waste time on them? He’d have married me in a church had I asked him. He was the tiniest bit furious with me when I didn’t.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

She laughed. A dry rattle from a parched throat. ‘I’m another version of him, that’s why. We were each out to conquer the other’s universe. He wanted the goyim to love him. I wanted the Jews to love me. And I liked the idea of having Jewish children. I thought they’d do better at school. And boy, have they done better!’

(Her pride in them – wasn’t
that
Jewish as well?)

Treslove was perplexed. ‘Can you have Jewish children if you’re not Jewish yourself?’

‘Not in the eyes of the Orthodox. Not easily, anyway. But we had a liberal wedding. And I had to convert even for that. Two years I put in, learning how to run a Jewish home, how to be a Jewish mother. Ask me anything you need to know about Judaism and I can tell you. How to kosher a chicken, how to light the Shabbes candles, what to do in a mikva. Do you want me to tell you how a good Jewish woman knows her period is over? I am possessed of more Jewishkeit than all the
echt
Jewish women in Hampstead rolled together.’

Treslove absented himself, mentally rolling together all the
echt
Jewish women in Hampstead. But what he asked was, ‘What’s a mikva?’

‘A ritual bath. You go there to cleanse yourself for your Jewish husband who will die if he encounters a drop of your blood.’

‘Sam wanted you to do that?’

‘Not Samuel, me. Samuel couldn’t have given a monkey’s. He thought it was barbaric, worrying about menstrual blood which in point of fact he quite likes, the sicko. I went to the mikva for me. I found it calming. I’m the Jew of the two of us even if I was born a Catholic. I’m the Jewish princess you read about in the fairy stories, only I’m not Jewish. The irony being –’

‘That he’s out fucking shiksas?’

‘Too obvious. I’m still the shiksa to him. If he wants the forbidden he can get it at home. The irony is that he’s out fucking Jews. That lump of lard Ronit Kravitz, his production assistant. I wouldn’t put it past him to be converting her.’

‘I thought you said she’s already Jewish.’

‘Converting her to Christianity, you fool.’

Treslove fell silent. There was so much he didn’t understand. And so much to be upset about. He felt he’d been give a prize he had long coveted, only to have it snatched away from him again before he’d even found a place for it on his mantelpiece. Tyler Finkler, not a Finkler! Therefore the deep damp dark mysteriousness of a Finkler woman was still, strictly speaking – and this was a strict concept or it was nothing – unknown to him.

She began to dress. ‘I hope I haven’t disappointed you,’ she said.

‘Disappointed me? Hardly. Will you be coming for the second programme?’

‘You have a think about it.’

‘What’s there to think about?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said.

She didn’t kiss him when she left.

But she popped her head back around his door. ‘A word from the wise. Just don’t let them catch you saying “Jew
ess
”,’ she warned him, imitating the languorous snakiness he had imparted to the word. ‘They don’t like it.’

Always something they didn’t like.

But he did as she suggested, and had a think.

He thought about the betrayal of his friend and wondered why he wasn’t guiltier. Wondered whether following Finkler into his wife’s vagina was a pleasure in itself. Not the only pleasure, but a significant contribution to it. Wondered whether Finkler had in effect koshered his wife from the inside regardless of her origins, so that he, Treslove, could believe he had as good as had a Jewess –
ess, ess, ess
– (which word he mustn’t for some reason let them catch him saying) after all. Or not. And if not, did he have to go back to the very beginning of wondering what it would be like?

And was still wondering about these and similar mysteries of the religio-erotic life after Tyler Finkler’s tragic death.

3

Normally a heavy sleeper, Treslove began to lie awake night after night, revolving the attack in his mind.

What had happened? How would he tell it to the police, supposing that he
was
going to tell it to the police, which he wasn’t? He had spent the evening with two old friends, Libor Sevcik and Sam Finkler, both recently made widowers – no, officer, I am not myself married – discussing grief, music and the politics of the Middle East. He had left Libor’s apartment at about 11 p.m., spent a little time looking into the park, smelling foliage – do I always do that? no, only sometimes when I am upset – and then had ambled back past Broadcasting House, may its name be damned, may its foundations crumble – only joking – to a part of London where his father had owned a famous cigar shop – no, officer, I had not been drinking inordinately – when without any warning . . .

Without any warning, that was the shocking thing, without the slightest apprehension of danger or unease on his part, and he normally so finely attuned to hazard.

Unless . . .

Unless he had, after all, as he had turned into Mortimer Street, seen a figure lurking in the shadows on the opposite side of the road, seen it half emerge from a passageway, still in shadow, a large, looming, but possibly, very possibly, womanly figure . . .

In which case – the question was conditional: if he
had
seen him, it, her – why had he not minded himself more, why had he turned to Guivier’s window, presenting his defencelesss neck to whatever harm anyone, man or woman, might choose to do him . . .

Culpability.

Culpability again.

But did it matter what he’d seen or hadn’t seen?

For some reason it did. If he’d seen her and invited her to attack him – or at least
permitted
her to attack him – that surely explained, or part explained, what she had said. He knew it was not morally or intellectually acceptable to accuse Jews of inviting their own destruction, but was there a proneness to disaster in these people which the woman had recognised? Had he, in other words, played the Finkler?

And if he had,
why
had he?

One question always led to another with Treslove. Let’s say he had played the Finkler, and let’s say the woman had observed it – did that justify her attacking him?

Whatever explanation could be found for his actions, what pos-sible explanation could be found for hers? Was a man no longer free to play the Finkler when the fancy took him? Let’s say he had been standing staring into the window of J. P. Guivier looking like Horowitz, or Mahler, or Shylock, say, or Fagin, or Billy Crystal, or David Schwimmer, or Jerry Seinfeld, or Jerry Springer, or Ben Stiller, or David Duchovny, or Kevin Kline, or Jeff Goldblum, or Woody Allen, or Groucho Fucking Marx, was that any reason for her to attack him?

Was being a Finkler an open invitation to assault?

So far he had taken it personally – you do when someone calls you by your name, or something very like, and gets you to empty your pockets – but what if this was a random anti-Semitic attack that just happened to have gone wrong only in the sense that he wasn’t a Semite? How many more of these incidents were taking place? How many real Finklers were being attacked in the streets of the capital every night? Round the corner from the BBC, for Christ’s sake!

He wondered who to ask. Finkler himself was not the man to tell him. And he didn’t want to frighten Libor by asking him how many Jews got beaten up outside his door most evenings. Not expecting to find anything post-thirteenth-century Chelmno, he looked up ‘Anti-Semitic Incidents’ on the internet and was surprised to find upwards of a hundred pages. Not all of them round the corner from the BBC, it was true, but still far more in parts of the world that called themselves civilised than he would ever have imagined. One well-maintained site gave him the option to choose by country. He started from far away –

venezuela
:

And read that in Caracas about 15 armed men had tied up a security guard and forced their way into a synagogue, defacing its administrative offices with anti-Semitic graffiti and throwing Torah scrolls to the ground in a rampage that lasted nearly five hours. Graffiti left at the scene included the phrases ‘Damn the Jews’, ‘Jews out’, ‘Israeli assassins’ and a picture of a devil.

The devil detail intrigued him. It meant that these fifteen men had not gone out on the razzle, found themselves outside a synagogue and forced their way in on a whim. For who goes out on a razzle with a picture of the devil in his pocket?

argentina
:

And read that in Buenos Aires a crowd celebrating Israel’s anniversary was attacked by a gang of youths armed with clubs and knives. Three weeks earlier, on Holocaust Memorial Day – here we go, Holocaust, Holocaust – an ancient Jewish cemetery was defaced with swastikas.