The Finkler Question (20 page)

‘So what are you going to choose – Bertrand Russell reading his memoirs? I can’t wait.’

She stood up and wiped her hands on the gardener’s apron he had bought her years ago. She was wearing earrings he had bought her, too. And the gold Rolex he had given her on their tenth wedding anniversary. Tyler gardened fully made-up and in her jewellery. She could have gone from spreading fertiliser to dining at the Ritz without needing to do anything but peel off her gloves and run her fingers through her hair. The sight of his wife rising from the compost like a beau-monde Venus was the reason Finkler couldn’t keep out of the garden no matter how much he feared it. It was a mystery to him why he bothered to have mistresses when he found his wife so much more desirable than any of them.

Was he a bad man or just a foolish one? He didn’t feel bad to himself. As a husband he believed himself to be essentially good and loyal. It just wasn’t written in a man’s nature to be monogamous, that was all. And he owed something to his nature even when his nature was at odds with his desire, which was to stay home and cherish his wife.

It was his nature – all nature, the rule of nature – that was the bastard, not him.

‘Well, to begin with,’ he said, feeling sentimental, ‘I thought of the music we had at our wedding . . .’

She walked over to the tap to turn on the hose. ‘Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”? Not exactly original. And I’d prefer, if you don’t mind, that you kept our wedding out of it, since it’s the last thing you’ll be thinking about on your desert island. If Mendelssohn is the best you can come up with, my advice is to tell them you’re too busy. Unless he wrote an “Adultery March”.’

‘Too busy for
Desert Island Discs
? No one’s too busy for
Desert Island Discs
. It’s one of those offers you have to grab – it’s a career thing.’

‘You have a career. Grab the end of the hose for me instead.’

Finkler was not able to determine where the end of the hose was and began to stalk his garden like a private detective again, staring into bushes and scratching his head.

‘It’s the bit with the water coming out, you imbecile. How many years have you lived here? – and you still don’t know where your own hosepipe is. Ha!’ She laughed at her joke. He didn’t.

‘You can’t be seen not to be asked to do
Desert Island Discs
,’ he continued, finding the hose at last and then wondering what he was meant to do with it.

‘You’ve been asked. They’ve asked you. Why can’t you be seen to refuse? I’d have thought that would do your career no end of good. Prove you’re not pushy. Give it here.’

‘Not pushy?’

‘Not eager. Not desperate.’

‘You said pushy.’

‘And?’

‘Not a pushy Jew, you mean?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. That’s not at all what I meant and you know it. Pushy Jew is your own projection. If that’s how you fear people see you that’s your problem, not mine. I think you’re just pushy full stop. Anyway, I’m the Jew in this relationship, remember.’

‘That’s nonsense and you know it.’

‘Recite the Amidah, then. Tell me one of the Eighteen Blessings . . .’

Finkler looked away.

Once upon a time she might have thought about spraying him with water, knowing that he would spray her back and they would have a hose fight in the garden, ending in laughter or even lovemaking on the grass and bugger the neighbours. But they were past that . . .

. . . assuming it had ever happened. She tried to picture him chasing her and catching her, pressing his mouth to hers, and was alarmed to realise she was unable to.

He canvassed his friends. Not for their opinion as to whether he should do it or not. He knew he had to do it. But for music to lie on a desert island to. Libor suggested Schubert’s Impromptus. And some fiddle concertos. Treslove wrote him down the names of the great death arias in Italian opera. ‘How many do you need?’ he asked. ‘Six?’

‘One’s fine. They want variety.’

‘I’ve given you six to be on the safe side. They’re all very different. Sometimes it’s the woman who’s dying, sometimes it’s the man. And I’ve even thrown in one in which they die together. Make a great end to the programme.’

And to my career
, Finkler thought.

At last, though not without canvassing Alfredo as well, Finkler trusted his own instincts for populism and chose Bob Dylan, Queen, Pink Floyd, Felix Mendelssohn (going for Libor’s suggestion of the Violin Concerto rather than the ‘Wedding March’), Girls Aloud, a tranche of obvious Elgar, Bertrand Russell reading from his memoirs, and Bruce Springsteen, whom he referred to on the show as the Boss. For his book he picked the Dialogues of Plato but also wondered if they would bend the rules this once and let him take along the complete
Harry Potter
as well.

‘As light relief from all that seriousness?’ the presenter asked.

‘No, that’s the Plato,’ Finkler said. Joking, of course, but also meaning it for those who wanted him to mean it.

To prove to his wife that she was not the only Jew in their marriage he made much of going to the synagogue every morning with his father and listening to him saying prayers for his parents, great searing lamentations that moved and, yes, marked him deeply.
Yisgadal viyiskadash
 . . . the ancient language of the Hebrew tolling for the dead.
May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.
A prayer which he in turn said when he was orphaned. The rationalist philosopher acknowledging God in the face of truths that reason could never hope to penetrate. You could hear, he thought, a pin drop in the studio. His Jewishness had always been immeasurably important to him, he confided, a matter of daily solace and inspiration, but he couldn’t stay silent about the dispossession of the Palestinians. ‘In the matter of Palestine,’ he went on, with a falter in his voice, ‘I am profoundly ashamed.’

‘Profoundly self-important you mean,’ Tyler said when she heard the programme. ‘How could you?’

‘How couldn’t I?’

‘Because that wasn’t what the programme was about, that’s how you couldn’t. Because no one was asking.’

‘Tyler . . .’

‘I know – your conscience made you. A convenient entity your conscience. There when you need it, not when you don’t. Well, I’m ashamed of your public display of shame and I’m not even Jewish.’

‘That’s precisely why,’ Finkler said.

Finkler was disappointed that none of his wittily glossed selections made
Pick of the Week
but was flattered to receive a letter, a fortnight after transmission, from a number of well-known theatrical and academic Jews inviting him to join a group which had been no more than an idea without direction so far but which they now intended to reform and name in honour of his courage in speaking out – Ashamed Jews.

Finkler was moved. Praise from his peers affected him almost as deeply as the prayers he had never said for his grandfather. He scanned the list. Most of the professors he knew already and didn’t care about, but the actors represented a new scaling of the heights of fame. Though he had never been much of a theatregoer and turned his nose up at most of Tyler’s let’s-go-and-see-a-play suggestions, he viewed being written to by actors – even actors he didn’t think very highly of qua actors – in a different light. There was a celebrity chef on the list too, and a couple of stellar stand-up comedians. ‘Jesus!’ Finkler said when he got the letter.

Tyler was in the garden, lounging this time. A coffee cup in her hand, the papers open. She had been sleeping though it was only late morning. Finkler had not noticed that she tired more quickly than she used to.

‘Jesus!’ he repeated, so that she should hear him.

She didn’t stir. ‘Someone suing you for breach of promise, dearest?’

‘Not everyone, it seems, was ashamed of me,’ he said, naming the most eminent signatories to the letter. Slowly. One by one.

‘And?’

She took as long over the one word as her husband had taken over the dozen names.

He flared his nostrils at her. ‘What do you mean “and”?’

She sat up and looked at him. ‘Samuel, there is not a person whose name you have just read out for whom you have the slightest regard. You abominate academics. You don’t like actors – you particularly don’t like
those
actors – you have no time for celebrity chefs and you can’t abide stand-up comedians, especially
those
stand-up comedians. Not funny, you say about them. Seriously
not funny
. Why would I – no, why would
you
care what any of them think?’

‘My judgement of them as performers is hardly pertinent in this instance, Tyler.’

‘So what is? Your judgement of them as political analysts? Historians? Theologians? Moral philosophers? I don’t recall your ever saying to me that though they were shit as comedians you thought them profound as thinkers. Every time you’ve worked with actors you’ve pronounced them to be cretins, incapable of putting a single sentence together or expressing half a thought. And certainly unable to understand yours. What’s changed, Samuel?’

‘It’s pleasing to receive support.’

‘From anywhere? From anyone?’

‘I wouldn’t call these people
anyone
.’

‘No, in your own words
less than anyone
. Except they’re someone now they’re praising you.’

He knew he could not read her the whole letter, could not tell her that his ‘courage’ had inspired or at least revitalised a movement – small now, but capable of growing to who could say what size – could not say that it was nice to be appreciated, Tyler, so fuck you.

Yet still he could not leave her presence.

So he kept it brief. ‘Praise is different when it’s your own who are praising you.’

She closed her eyes. She could read his mind without having to keep them open.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Shmuelly,’ she said. ‘Your
own
! Have you forgotten that you don’t like Jews? You shun the company of Jews. You have publicly proclaimed yourself disgusted by Jews because they throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God. And now because a few mediocre half-household-name Jews have decided to come out and agree with you, you’re mad for them. Was that all it ever needed? Would you have been the goodest of all good Jewish boys if only the other Jewish boys had loved you earlier? I don’t get it. It makes no sense. Becoming an enthusiastic Jew again in order to turn on Judaism.’

‘It’s not Judaism I’m turning on.’

‘Well, it’s sure as hell not Christianity.
Ashamed Jews?
It would be more honourable of you to kick around with David Irving or join the BNP. Remember what it is you really want, Samuel . . . Sam! And what you really want isn’t the attention of Jews. There aren’t enough of them.’

He didn’t listen to her. He went upstairs to his desk, his ears ringing, and wrote a letter of appreciation to Ashamed Jews
–
a letter in appreciation of their appreciation. He was honoured to join them.

But might he make a suggestion? In the age of sound bites, which, like it or not, this assuredly was, one simple, easy to remember acronym could do the work of a thousand manifestos. Well, an acronym – or something much like an acronym – lay concealed in the very name the group had already given itself. Instead of ‘Ashamed Jews’, what about ‘ASHamed Jews’, which might or might not, depending on how others felt, be shortened now or in the future to ASH, the peculiar felicity of which, in the circumstances, he was sure it wasn’t necessary for him to point out?

Within a week he received an enthusiastic response on notepaper headed ‘ASHamed Jews’.

He felt a deep sense of pride, mitigated, of course, by sadness on behalf of those whose suffering had made ASHamed Jews necessary.