The Finkler Question (28 page)

He wanted to say he was sympathetic but couldn’t help. Because he was in no position to help and because none of it mattered. For none of it did matter. But finding the right form of words for saying to Emmy Oppenstein that none of it mattered was beyond him.

‘It’s not Kristallnacht,’ he thought.

But he couldn’t say that.

He’d had his Kristallnacht. Malkie dying – without God’s absolution of either of them, as far as he could see – what worse was there?

But he couldn’t say that either.

‘I’ll speak to a few people I know,’ was the best he could do.

But she knew he wouldn’t.

In return – in return for nothing but an old affection – she gave him the number of a bereavement counsellor. He told her he didn’t require a bereavement counsellor. She reached out and put a hand on each of his cheeks. This gesture meant that everyone needed a bereavement counsellor. Don’t think of it as counselling or therapy. Think of it as conversation.

So what was this? Was this not conversation?

A different kind of conversation, Libor. And it wouldn’t do, she explained, to be counselling him herself.

He was unable to decide whether he was disappointed that it wouldn’t do for her to counsel him or not. To know that he would have had to locate the part of himself in which expectation resides. And he couldn’t.

SEVEN

1

The agreement had been that Treslove would take his sons on holiday and then see.

Heads he’d resume his previous existence, forget all the rubbish, go out looking like Brad Pitt and return home, alone, at a reasonable hour in the evening to his Hampstead flat that wasn’t in Hampstead.

Tails he’d move in with Hephzibah.

‘I don’t want to be making room and then have you changing your mind in a fortnight,’ she told him. ‘I’m not saying this is for life, God help us both, but if you’re going to seriously disrupt me, disrupt me because you want to, not because you’re at a loose end.’

He had told her about the mugging, but she did not set much store by it. ‘That’s what I mean by being at a loose end,’ she said. ‘You go wandering around with your head in the clouds, get your phone snatched like just about everyone else at sometime or another, and think God’s called you. You aren’t busy enough. There’s been too little going on in your head and, from the sound of it, your heart.’

‘Libor’s been talking.’

‘Nothing to do with Libor. I can see it for myself. I saw it when I first clapped eyes on you. You were waiting for the roof to fall in.’

He went to kiss her. ‘And it did,’ he said with exaggerated courtliness.

She pushed him away. ‘I’m the roof now!’

He thought his heart would break with love for her. She was so Jewish.
I’m the roof now!
And he’d thought Tyler was the business. Well, when had poor Tyler ever done what Hephzibah had just done with language?
I’m the roof now!

That
was what it was to be a Jewess. Never mind the moist dark womanly mysteriousness. A Jewess was a woman who made even punctuation funny.

He couldn’t work out how she had done it. Was it hyperbole or was it understatement? Was it self-mockery or mockery of him? He decided it was tone. Finklers did tone. As with music, they might not have invented it, but they had mastered its range. They revealed depths in it which the inventors of tone, like the great composers themselves – for neither Verdi nor Puccini was a Finkler, Treslove knew that – could never have dreamed were there. They were interpreters of genius. They showed what could be done with sound.

I’m the roof now!
God, she was wonderful!

For his part he’d been ready to jump right in. Then and there. Marry me. I’ll do whatever has to be done. I’ll study. I’ll be circumcised. Just marry me and make Finkler jokes.

She was what he’d been promised. And the fact that she didn’t look anything like the woman he thought he’d been promised – the fact that she made fools of all his expectations – only proved that something far more powerful than his inclination was in operation. Far more powerful than his dreaming inclination, even, for she was decidedly not the schoolgirl bending to fasten her shoelace in his dreams. Hephzibah could not have bent that far down. When she tied her laces she put her foot up on a stool. She was not his kind of woman. She came from somewhere other than his wanting. Ergo – she was a gift.

It was she who was not sure. ‘I, you see,’ she explained, ‘have not been waiting for the roof to fall in.’

He tried to emulate her joke. ‘I’m not the roof!’

She didn’t notice.

He threw in everything he had – a shrug, a ‘so’, a ‘now’ and an extra exclamation mark. ‘
So, I’m not the roof now!!
’

Still she didn’t laugh. He couldn’t tell if she was annoyed with him for trying. Or maybe it was just that Finkler jokes didn’t work in the negative. It sounded funny enough to him.
So, I’m not the roof now!!
But it could have been that Finklers only permitted other Finklers to tell Finkler jokes.

She’d had two husbands and wasn’t looking for a third. Wasn’t, in fact, looking for anything.

Treslove didn’t believe that. Who isn’t looking? Stop looking and you stop being alive.

But what she was most not sure of was him. How sure, or how reliable in his sureness,
he
was.

‘I’m sure,’ he said.

‘You’ve slept with me once and you’re sure?’

‘It’s not about sleeping.’

‘It will be about sleeping if you meet someone you want to sleep with more.’

He thought about Kimberley and was glad he’d managed to squeeze her in in time. A last indulgence before life turned serious. Though she hadn’t been about sleeping either.

But he did as he was told. He went to Liguria with his two goyische sons and came back ready to move in.

‘My
feygelah
,’ he said, taking her in his arms.

She laughed one of her big laughs. ‘
Feygelah
, me? Do you know what
feygelah
means?’

‘Sure. Little bird. Also homosexual, but I wouldn’t be calling you a homosexual. I bought a Yiddish dictionary.’

‘Call me something else.’

He’d come prepared. When he was certain his sons weren’t looking he had studied the Yiddish dictionary by the swimming pool in Portofino. His aim had been a hundred Yiddish words to woo her with.

‘My
neshomeleh
,’ he said. ‘It means my little darling. It comes from neshomeh, meaning soul.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I fear you’re going to teach me how to be Jewish.’

‘I will if you like,
bubeleh
.’

She had an apartment opposite Lord’s. From her terrace you could watch the cricket. He was marginally disappointed. He hadn’t moved in to watch cricket. He was sorry she didn’t have a terrace that overlooked the Wailing Wall.

There was another problem he had to negotiate. She had once worked for the BBC. Not any longer, and it had been television rather than radio, which diluted her offence a little, but she retained a number of her BBC friendships.

‘I’ll go out when they come,’ he told her.

‘You’ll stay here,’ she said. ‘You say you want to be a Jew – well, the first thing you need to know is that Jewish men don’t go out without their wives or girlfriends. Unless they’re having an affair. Other than another woman’s flat there’s nowhere for Jewish men to go. They don’t do pubs, they hate being seen uncompanioned at the theatre, and they can’t eat on their own. Jewish men must have someone to talk to while they eat. They can’t do only one thing at a time with their mouths. You’ll learn. And you’ll learn to like my friends. They’re lovely.’

‘
Nishtogedacht
,’ Treslove replied.

The good news was that she had left the BBC to set up a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture – ‘what we have achieved, not what we have undergone; our triumphs not our tribulations’ – on Abbey Road where the Beatles had made some of their most famous records and pilgrims still turned up by the busload to cavort on the famous zebra crossing. Now they would have a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture to visit when they’d finished paying homage to the Beatles.

It wasn’t so far-fetched. The Beatles had a Jew as their manager in their breakthrough years. Brian Epstein. The fans knew how well he had guided them and that his suicide might have been prompted by his unrequited love for John Lennon, a non-Jew and therefore forbidden fruit. So there was a tragic Jewish element to the Beatles story. This wasn’t the prime motivation for building a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture on Abbey Road, but it was a practical consideration.

And yes, the Brian Epstein story would figure. A whole room was being given over to the contribution made by Jews to the British entertainment industry. Frankie Vaughan, Alma Cogan, Lew Grade, Mike and Bernie Winters, Joan Collins (only on her father’s side, but a half is better than nothing), Brian Epstein and even Amy Winehouse.

Hephzibah had been headhunted by the eccentric Anglo-Jewish philanthropist who was himself a music producer and whose brainchild the museum was. She was the best person for the job, in his view and in the view of his foundation. The only person for the job. And Hephzibah, for her part, relished the challenge.

‘Considering that he believes the BBC is biased in its reporting of the Middle East, it’s something of a surprise he chose me,’ she told Treslove.

‘He knows you’re not like the rest of them,’ Treslove said.

‘Not like the rest of them in what sense?’

‘In the sense of being biased in their reporting of the Middle East.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘About you? Yes.’

‘I mean about the rest of them?’

‘Being biased against what your Uncle Libor calls Isrrrae? Of course.’

‘Have you always thought that?’ She didn’t want him changing his politics just for her. He would only end up resenting her for that.

‘No, but that’s only because I didn’t think about it at all. Now I do, I remember what anti-Semites they all were there, especially the Jews.’

For a moment he wondered if that was the reason he had fared so badly at the BBC himself – anti-Semitism.

‘Then you must have known very different Jews at the Beeb to those I knew,’ she told him.

‘The Jews I knew pretended they weren’t Jewish. That was why they went to the BBC – to get a new identity. It was the next best thing to joining the Roman Catholic Church.’

‘Bollocks,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go there to get a new identity.’

‘Because you’re the exception, as I have said. The ones I met couldn’t wait to put their Jewish history behind them. They dressed like debutantes, spoke like minor royalty, took the
Guardian
, and shrank from you in horror if you so much as mentioned Isrrrae. Anyone would have thought the Gestapo was listening in. And all I was trying to do was ask them out an date.’

‘Why would you have said the word Isrrrae – and can we stop pronouncing it like that – if you only wanted to ask them out on a date?’

‘Small talk.’

‘Maybe they thought you couldn’t see them without thinking of Jewish history, have you put your mind to that?’

‘And why would that have been a problem for them?’

‘Because Jews don’t want to go around with nothing but their history on their faces, Julian.’

‘They should be proud.’

‘It’s not for you to say what they should be. But anyway, I have to say I never came across anything of the sort you’re describing. I would have opposed it if I had. Jew isn’t the only word in my vocabulary, but I am not prepared to have my Jewishness monkeyed about with. I can take care of myself.’