The Finkler Question (17 page)

‘You believe in the cross?’

‘No, but I believe in suffering.’

Treslove touched his friend’s shoulder. Libor looked smaller tonight than he remembered him, as though the streets diminished him. Unless it was being without Malkie that did it.

‘And did they give you a good valuation on your fiddle?’ he asked. It was that or weep.

‘Not so good that it was worth parting with. But I promised Malkie I would no longer insist on our playing duets. My fiddling was the only part of me she didn’t adore, and she didn’t want there to be any part of me she didn’t adore.’

‘Were you really no good?’

‘I thought I was very good, but I wasn’t in Malkie’s class, despite my being related to Heifetz on my mother’s side.’

‘You’re related to Heifetz? Jesus!’

‘You mean Judith!’

‘You never told me you were related to Heifetz.’

‘You never asked.’

‘I didn’t know Heifetz was Czech.’

‘He wasn’t. He was Lithuanian. My mother’s family came originally from that porous Polish–Czech border area known as Suwalki. Every country has occupied it. The Red Army gave it to the Germans so that they could kill the Jews there. Then they took it back to kill any that were left. I’m Heifetz’s fourth or fifth cousin but my mother always made out we were half-brothers. She rang me from Prague when she read that Heifetz was playing at the Albert Hall and made me solemnly promise I would go backstage to introduce myself. I tried, but this is a long time ago, I didn’t have the connections then that I had later and I hadn’t yet learned how to manage without them. His flunkeys gave me a signed photograph and ordered me to leave. “So what did he say?” my mother asked me the next day. “He sent his love,” I told her. Sometimes it does no harm to lie. “And did he look well?” Marvellous. “And his playing?” Superb. “And he remembered everybody?” By name. To you he blew a kiss.’

And standing there outside J. P. Guivier’s at eleven o’clock on a London night he made the kiss, the lugubrious Baltic kiss that Heifetz would have blown his mother had Libor only been able to get to him.

Jews, Treslove thought, admiringly. Jews and music. Jews and families. Jews and their loyalties. (Finkler excepted.)

‘But you,’ Libor said, taking Treslove’s arm, ‘what really brings you to this window if it isn’t Judith? I haven’t heard from you for days. You don’t ring, you don’t write, you don’t knock. You tell me you’re too agitated to come out. And here you are a hundred yards from my door. You have, I hope, some explanation for this uncharacteristic behaviour.’

And suddenly Treslove, who loved it when Libor linked his arm in the street, feeling it made a clever little wizened European Jew of him, knew he had to spill the beans.

‘Let’s find a cafe,’ he suggested.

‘No, let’s go back to my place,’ Libor said.

‘No, let’s find a cafe. We might see her.’

‘
Her?
Who’s
her
? This Judith woman?’

Rather than tell him all at once, Treslove agreed to go home with Libor.

It was Libor’s view that Treslove was overwrought – had been for some time – and probably needed a holiday. They could go away together to somewhere warm. Rimini, maybe. Or Palermo.

‘That’s what Sam said.’

‘That you and I should go to Rimini or that you and he should go to Rimini? Why don’t we all go?’

‘No, that I was overwrought. In fact, he thought I needed to see less of you both, not more. Too much death, was his diagnosis. Too many widowers in my life. And this guy’s a philosopher, don’t forget.’

‘Then do as he says. I’ll miss you, but take his advice. I have friends in Hollywood I could introduce you to. Or at least the great-great-grandchildren of friends.’

‘Why is it so difficult for people to believe that what happened, happened?’

‘Because women don’t mug men, that’s why. Me a woman might have had a shot at. Me you can blow over. But you – you’re still young and strong. That’s A. B, women don’t make a practice of attacking men in the street and calling them Jew, especially, C, when they’re not Jewish. C’s good. C clinches it.’

‘Well, that’s what she did and that’s what she said.’

‘That’s what you think she said.’

Treslove settled down into the plush discomfort of Libor’s Biedermeier sofa.

‘Just what if?’ he asked, taking hold of the wooden arm, anxious not to put his hands on the fabric, so exquisitely taut was it.

‘What if what?’

‘What if she was right?’

‘That you’re . . . ?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re not.’

‘We
think
I’m not.’

‘And did you ever before think you were?’

‘No . . . Well, yes. I was a musical boy. I listened to operas and wanted to play the violin.’

‘That doesn’t make you Jewish. Wagner listened to operas and wanted to play the violin. Hitler loved opera and wanted to play the violin. When Mussolini visited Hitler in the Alps they played the Bach double violin concerto together. “And now let’s kill some Jews,” Hitler said when they’d finished. You don’t have to be Jewish to like music.’

‘Is that true?’

‘That you don’t have to be Jewish to like music? Of course it’s true.’

‘No, about Hitler and Mussolini.’

‘Who cares if it’s true. You can’t libel a dead Fascist. Listen, if you were what this imaginary woman said you were, and you’d have wanted to play the violin, you’d have played the violin. Nothing would have stopped you.’

‘I obeyed my father. Doesn’t that prove something? I respected his wishes.’

‘Obeying your father doesn’t make you a Jew. Obeying your mother would make you more of one. While your father’s not wanting you to play the violin almost certainly makes him not a Jew. If there’s one thing all Jewish fathers agree on –’

‘Sam would say that’s stereotyping. And you leave out the possibility that my father didn’t want me to play the violin for the reason that he didn’t want me to be like him.’

‘He was a violinist?’

‘Yes. Like you. See?’

‘And why wouldn’t he have wanted you to be like him? Was he that bad a violinist?’

‘Libor, I’m trying to be serious. He might have had his reasons.’

‘I’m sorry. But in what way would he have wanted you to be different from him? Was he unhappy? Did he suffer?’

Treslove thought about it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He took things hard. My mother’s death broke his heart. But there was something broken-hearted about him before that. As though he knew what was coming and had been preparing himself for it all his life. He could have been protecting me from deep feelings, saving me from something he feared in himself, something undesirable, dangerous even.’

‘The Jews aren’t the only broken-hearted people in the world, Julian.’

Treslove looked disappointed to hear it. He blew out his cheeks, breathing hard, and shook his head, appearing to be disagreeing with himself as much as with Libor.

‘Let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘In all the time I was growing up I didn’t once hear the word Jew. Don’t you think that’s strange? Nor, in all the time I was growing up, did I meet a Jew in my father’s company, in my father’s shop, or in my parents’ home. Every other word I heard. Every other kind of person I met. Hottentots I met in my father’s shop. Tongans I met. But never a Jew. Not until I met Sam did I even know what a Jew looked like. And when I brought him home my father told me he didn’t think he made a suitable friend. “That Finkler,” he used to ask me, “that
Finkler
, are you still kicking about with him?” Explain that.’

‘Easy. He was an anti-Semite.’

‘If he’d been an anti-Semite, Libor, Jew would have been the
only
word I heard.’

‘And your mother? If you are, then it has to be through her.’

‘Jesus Christ, Libor, I was a Gentile five minutes ago, now you’re telling me I can only be Jewish through the right channels. Will you be checking to see if I’m circumcised next? I don’t know about my mother. I can only tell you she didn’t look Jewish.’

‘Julian,
you
don’t look Jewish. Forgive me, I don’t mean it as an insult, but you are the least Jewish-looking person I have ever met, and I have met Swedish cowboys and Eskimo stuntmen and Prussian film directors and Polish Nazis working as set builders in Alaska. I would stake my life on it that no Jewish gene has been near the gene of a member of your family for ten thousand years and ten thousand years ago there weren’t any Jews. Be grateful. A man can live a good and happy life and not be Jewish.’ He paused. ‘Look at Sam Finkler.’

They both laughed wildly and wickedly at this.

‘Cruel,’ Treslove said, taking another drink and banging his chest. ‘But that only serves my argument. These things are not to be decided superficially. You can be called Finkler and fall short of the mark; or you can be called Treslove –’

‘Which is not exactly a Jewish name –’

‘Exactly, and yet still come up to scratch. Wouldn’t it have made sense, if my father didn’t want me to know we were Jews, or for anyone else to know we were Jews for that matter, to have changed our name to the least Jewish one he could find? Treslove, for Christ’s sake. It screams “Not Jewish” at you. I rest my case.’

‘I’ll tell how you can rest your case, Mr Perry Mason. You can rest your case by stopping these ridiculous speculations and asking somebody. Ask an uncle, ask one of your father’s friends, ask anyone who knew your family. This is a mystery that is solvable with a phone call.’

‘No one knew my family. We kept ourselves to ourselves. I have no uncles. My father had no brothers or sisters, my mother neither. It was what attracted them to each other. They told me about it. Two orphans, as good as. Two babes in the wood. You tell me what that’s a metaphor for.’

Libor shook his head and topped up their whiskies. ‘It’s a metaphor for your not wanting to know the truth because you prefer to make it up. OK, make it up. You’re Jewish.
Trog es gezunterhait
.’ And he raised his glass.

He sat down and crossed his little feet. He had changed into a pair of
ancien régime
slippers which bore his initials, woven in gold thread. A present from Malkie, Treslove surmised. Wasn’t everything a present from Malkie? In these slippers Libor looked even more wispy and transparent, fading away. And yet to Treslove he was enviably secure. At home. Himself. In love still with the only woman he had ever loved. On his mantelpiece photographs of the two of them being married by a rabbi, Malkie veiled, Libor in a skullcap. Deep rooted, ancient, knowledgeable about themselves. Musical because music spoke to the romance of their origins.

Looking again in admiration at Libor’s slippers he saw that the initials on one read
LS
while on the other they read
ES
. That was right of course; Libor had changed his own name, in his Hollywood years, from Libor Sevcik to Egon Slick. It was what Jews did, wasn’t it, what Jews had to do? So why wasn’t Libor/Egon more sympathetic to Teitelbaum/Treslove?

He swirled his whisky round in his glass. Bohemian Crystal. His father too had favoured crystal whisky glasses but they had been somehow different. More formal. Probably more expensive. Colder to the lip. That, essentially, was what the difference amounted to – temperature. Libor and Malkie – even poor Malkie dead – were somehow warmed by their submersion in a heated past. In comparison, Treslove felt that he had been brought up to play on the surface of life, like those vegetables that grow above ground, where it is chill.

Libor was smiling at him. ‘Now you’re a Jew, come to dinner,’ he said. ‘Come to dinner next week – not with Sam – and I’ll introduce you to some people who would be pleased to meet you.’

‘You make it sound sinister.
Some
people. Which people? Watchmen of the Jewish faith who will scrutinise my credentials? I have no credentials. And why wouldn’t they have been pleased to meet me before I was Jewish?’