The Finkler Question (29 page)

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘That, though, doesn’t mean I don’t allow other Jews to be as lukewarm about their Jewishness as they like. OK?’

‘OK.’

She kissed him. Yes, OK.

But he returned to the subject later. ‘You should ask Libor what he thinks,’ he said. ‘Libor’s World Service experiences were very similar to mine.’

‘Oh, Libor’s an old Czech reactionary.’

She had, in fact, already asked Libor, not about Jewish anti-Semitism at the BBC but about Treslove. Was he for real? Was he fucking with her mind? Had he really been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack? Could Libor vouch for him at any level?

Yes, no, who could say and absolutely, Libor replied. He had known Treslove since he was a schoolboy. He was deeply fond of him. Would he make a good husband . . .

‘I’m not looking for a husband.’

. . . only time would tell. But he hoped they would be very happy. With one reservation.

She looked alarmed.

‘I lose a friend.’

‘How do you lose him? He’ll be living closer to you if anything. And you can come here for your supper.’

‘Yes, but he won’t be free to come out whenever I call him. And I’m too old to be making long-range appointments. I take it a day at a time now.’

‘Oh, Libor, nonsense.’

But it did strike her that he wasn’t in the pink.

‘In the pink? He’s nearly ninety and he’s recently lost his wife. It’s a miracle he can still breathe.’

Turning over in bed, Treslove surveyed the miracle that had transformed his life. He had never shared a mattress with anyone her size before. Some of the women he had slept with had been so narrow he hadn’t always known they were there when he woke. He had to search the bedclothes for them. And as often as not they were gone. Hopped it. Slipped away in the early morning without a sound, as slithery as rats. When Hephzibah so much as stirred Treslove’s half of the bed rolled like the Atlantic. He had to hang on to the mattress. This didn’t disturb his sleep. On the contrary he slept the sleep of his life, confident in the knowledge that she was by his side – let her toss as tumultuously as she liked – and was not going anywhere.

He now understood what Kimberley was for. She had been given him to soften him up. To wean him off aetiolated women. She was a halfway house to Hephzibah – his Juno.

She was not mountainous, his Juno. He wasn’t sure it was fair even to call her plump. She was simply made of some other material than he was accustomed to women being made of. He remembered the woman coming out of the pool in Liguria, the bottom half of her bikini wet and loose, her skin the same, at one and the same time spare and floppy, as though the small amount of flesh she did have was still too big for her bones. Hephzibah occupied her frame, that was how he saw it. She was physically in harmony with herself. She filled herself out. Without her clothes she was not bulky as he’d feared, there were no rolls of plumpness or flaps of excess flesh. If anything she was taut and strong, only her neck a trifle too thick. Consequently she was better to look at out of her clothes than in them. He had dreaded what those purple and maroon Hampstead Bazaar cloaks and shawls would conceal, and lo, when she removed them she was beautiful! Hunoesque.

The big surprise was the lightness of her skin. Light in colour, he meant, not light in weight. Every time he met a Finkler they changed the rules to which Finklers were meant to adhere. Sam Finkler hadn’t been dark and beetling, he’d been red and spidery. Libor was a dandy not a scholar. And here was Hephzibah whose name evoked belly dancers and bazaars and the perfume they sprayed outside the Arab shop on Oxford Street, but whose looks once you peeled her clothes off her were . . . he thought Polish or Ukrainian at first, but the longer he feasted on her nakedness, the more he thought Scandinavian, Baltic maybe. She could have been the figurehead of an Estonian fishing boat – the
Lembitu
, the
Veljo
– that plied the Gulf of Riga for herring. He had done a module on Norse sagas at university. Now he knew why. To prepare him for his own Brunhild. As his friendships with Finkler and Libor were to prepare him for his Brunhild being Jewish.

There were no accidents. Everything had a meaning.

It was like a religious conversion. He would wake to the sight of Hephzibah heaving towards him and experience an unfathomable joy, as though the universe and his consciousness of it had miraculously joined up, and there was nothing inharmonious in himself or in anything outside him. It wasn’t just Hephzibah he loved, it was the whole world.

God, being Jewish had stuff going for it!

He gave up working as a double at her request. It demeaned him to be playing someone else, she thought. Now he had found her it was time he played himself.

Thanks to provident parents and a couple of good divorces she was not short of money. She was sufficiently not short, at least, for him to be able to take time to think about what he was going to do. What about getting back into arts administration? Hephzibah’s suggestion. Every town in England, every village in England, now had a literary festival; they must be crying out for people with his knowledge and experience. Perhaps he could even start one of his own on Abbey Road, close to the recording studios and the museum. Between the Beatles and the Jews, a St John’s Wood Festival of the Written and Performing Arts. Perhaps featuring a permanently sited Centre of BBC Atrocities? His suggestion. Hephzibah thought not.

He wasn’t sold on the festival idea, anyway. He remembered the woman who kept her Birkenstocks on during lovemaking. No, he was done with the arts.

He wondered about training to be a rabbi.

‘There could be obstacles to that,’ she told him.

He was disappointed. ‘What about a lay rabbi?’

She wasn’t sure whether Judaism recognised a laity in the way that Anglicanism did. Perhaps Liberal Judaism had something of the laity in it, but she was pretty sure he would still have to submit himself to strict Judaic criteria. And there was something called Reconstructionism, but she thought that was American, and she didn’t want to go and live in America with him.

In fact she didn’t want him to be a rabbi full stop.

‘You can want a break from Jewishry,’ she said.

He said he hoped that wasn’t why she’d chosen him.

She said it wasn’t, but she’d had two Jewish husbands, and while she wasn’t for a moment suggesting that she and he were looking to get spliced, she was relieved not to be living with a third Jewish man in any capacity. Not a Jewish man in the usually accepted sense of the term, at any rate, she added hurriedly.

Then she had a bright idea. What about assisting her in setting up the museum? In just how professional a capacity she couldn’t be certain until she’d discussed it with the philanthropist and his board, but she would appreciate his help in whatever form it came, if only while he looked about him.

He was elated. He didn’t wait for her to discuss him with the board. He gave himself a job description. Assistant Curator of the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture.

It was what he had been waiting for all his life.

2

What Finkler hadn’t been waiting for all his life was a dressing-down from an ASHamed Jewish comedian.

Least of all when that comedian was Ivo Cohen who thought it was funny to fall over.

On his own initiative, Finkler had begun to refer to ASHamed Jews as ASH, the acronym he had suggested on the day he agreed to join the group. ‘We in ASH,’ he said in a newspaper interview about his work with ASHamed Jews, and he had repeated the phrase on an early-morning radio show.

‘Firstly there already is an ASH,’ Ivo Cohen said. ‘It’s an anti-smoking charity with which, as a thirty-a-day man, I would rather not be confused. Secondly, it sounds like we’ve been burnt alive.’

‘And thirdly,’ Merton Kugle interposed, ‘it too closely resembles AISH.’

AISH was an educational and dating organisation for young Orthodox Jews, one of whose aims was to promote travel to Israel.

‘Not much chance we’d be confused with that,’ Finkler said.

‘All we’re asking,’ Merton Kugle said, ‘is that you don’t change our name without discussing it with us first. It isn’t your movement.’

The unresolved boycott issue still rankled with Kugle who had now taken to stealing Israeli produce from his supermarket and getting himself arrested.

Merton Kugle, burnt-out match of a man, according to Finkler, a dead-faced blogger whom nobody read, an activist who activated nothing, a no one – a
nebbish
, a
nishtikeit
, a
nebechel
: sometimes, even for Finkler, only Yiddish would do – a
gornisht
who belonged to every anti-Zionist group that existed, along with several that did not, no matter that some were sponsored by far-out Muslims who believed that Kugle, as a Jew, dreamed of world conspiracy, and others expressed the views of ultra-Orthodox Jews with whom Kugle would not in any other circumstances have shared a biscuit; so long as the phrase anti-Zionist was in the large or in the small print, Kugle signed up.

‘I am a Jew by virtue of the fact that I am not a Zionist,’ he had recently written in a soul-searching blog.

How can you be anything, Finkler wanted to know, by virtue of what you’re not? Am I a Jew by virtue of not being a Blackfoot Indian?

Looking around the room, Finkler met the blinking red-lidded gaze of the oral-sociologist and socio-psychologist Leonie Leapmann. Finkler had known Leonie Leapmann at Oxford when she was a literary theorist, famous for her short skirts. She had a forest of flaming red hair in those days, far more livid than his pale orange, which she would arrange around herself when she sat, her naked legs drawn up to her chin, like a cat clothed only in its fur. Now her hair was cropped and the fires had all but gone out of it. The tiny skirts had gone too, in favour of ethnic leggings of all sorts, on this occasion a set of Hare Krishna jodhpurs with dropped crotch. It was a look Finkler couldn’t read. Why would a woman want to wear a garment that made her resemble an overgrown baby that had filled its pants? It affected all his dealings with her, as though whenever she spoke there was a smell in the room from which he had to avert his nose.

‘Oh please, not this again,’ she pleaded.

Finkler averted his nose.

Leonie Leapmann had always just come back from, or was always just about to go to, the Occupied Territories where she had many close personal friends of all persuasions, including Jews who were as ashamed as she was. On Leonie people could reach out and touch the conflict. In the orbs of her strained, red-lidded eyes they could see the suffering as in a goldfish bowl.

It was like watching a film in 3D.

‘Not
what
again, Leonie?’ Lonnie Eysenbach enquired with offensively studied politeness.

Lonnie was a presenter of children’s television programmes and a writer of school geography books from which he famously omitted Israel. He had a hungry horse’s face and yellow horse’s teeth which his producers were growing extremely anxious about. He was scaring the children.

Lonnie and Leonie, both fractious and inflammable, had once been lovers and carried the embers of a simmering resentment along to every meeting.

‘I have friends out there, of both persuasions, who are close to suicidal or homicidal despair,’ Leonie said – which, to Finkler’s sense, though he wasn’t going to make an issue of it, amounted almost to a threat of violence against his person – ‘and here we are still discussing who we are and what to call ourselves.’

‘Excuse me,’ Kugle said, ‘I am not aware that I have been discussing what to call ourselves. I am a democrat. I bow to the majority decision. It’s Sam with his ASH –’

‘We can call ourselves the Horsemen of the Fucking Apocalypse for all I care,’ Leonie shouted.

‘Horsemen of the Fucking Apocalypse is good,’ Lonnie said. ‘Though shouldn’t it be Horsemen and Horsewomen.’

‘Fuck you!’ Leonie told him.

Averting his nose, Finkler sighed a sigh deep enough to shake the foundations of the Groucho club. What was the point of this rehearsal of first principles every time they met? But it pained him to agree with Kugle about anything. If day followed night to Kugle, then Finkler prayed for night never to end. ‘I bow to no one in my Jewish shame,’ he said. ‘But isn’t it important that we make a distinction here?’