The Finkler Question (30 page)

Kugle groaned.

‘You have something more to say?’ Finkler snapped.

Kugle shook his head. ‘Just clearing my throat.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ cried Leonie Leapmann.

‘You don’t believe in God,’ Lonnie Eysenbach reminded her.

‘Let me see if I can help here.’ The speaker was Tamara Krausz, academically the best known of the ASHamed Jews, a woman whose quiet authority commanded respect not only in England but in America and the Middle East, wherever anti-Zionists – Finkler would not have gone so far as to say wherever anti-Semites – were gathered.

Even Finkler wilted a little in her presence.

‘Don’t we have to show,’ she continued – though her continuance was never in doubt, for who would dare interrupt her? – ‘that to be a Jew is a wonderful and various thing, and that it carries no more of a compulsion to defend Israel against all criticism than it does to live in constant fear. We are not, are we, a victim people? As that brave Israeli philosopher’ – a nod here to Finkler – ‘Avital Avi said recently in a heartwarming speech in Tel Aviv which I had the honour to hear from the platform, it is we who are keeping the Holocaust alive today, we who continue where the Kapos left off. Yes, of course it demeans the dead to forget them, but to disinter them in order to justify carnage demeans them more.’

Her voice was silvery and controlled, a reproach in particular, Finkler thought, to Leonie Leapmann whose diction lolled and wavered. In her clothes, too, she put Leonie to shame. Leonie dressed like a native of no place one could quite put a name to – the People’s Republic of Ethnigrad was Finkler’s best shot – whereas Tamara never appeared in public looking anything other than an executive of a fashion consultancy, at once businesslike and softly feminine.

Finkler, waiting, eyed her up. In shape she reminded him of his late wife, but she was at once more steely and more fragile. She clawed the air, he noticed, when she spoke, making fists at random, as though to crush the life out of any idea that wasn’t hers. He imagined her screaming in his arms, he didn’t know why. Just something to do with the way she was put together and the atmosphere of psychic disintegration she gave off. In fact, psychic disintegration was precisely how she understood the history of modern Israyel. Sent mad in the Holocaust, not least by their own impotence and passivity, Jews were spilling what was left of their brains over the Palestinians and calling it self-defence. Finkler didn’t share this theory of madness begetting madness, but he was saving up the occasion when he would tell her so, in the hope of getting her to scream in his arms.

While in Palestine, Tamara reported – it was as though she was telling the group about her holidays: indeed, Finkler wondered how long it would be before the snaps came out – she had met with a number of representatives of Hamas to express her concern in the matter of its recent forced Islamisation programme, which included accosting unsuitably dressed women on the beach, harassing shopkeepers who openly sold Western-style lingerie, segregating the sexes in schools, and generally imposing more and more restrictions on the human rights of women. That this would impact negatively on the support Hamas could count on from otherwise sympathetic groups in Europe and America she did not scruple to warn them. Entranced, Finkler imagined the leadership of Hamas quaking before Tamara’s exquisitely outraged feminism. Did they, too, imagine her screaming in their arms?

‘Not good,’ he said.

‘No,’ she agreed, ‘not good at all. And especially not good as we can expect pro-Zionists to pounce on this as evidence of Hamas’s intrinsic extremism and intolerance. Whereas . . .’

Tamara Krausz breathed deeply. Finkler breathed with her.

‘Whereas . . .’ he said.

‘Whereas the truth of it is that what is being enacted here is the direct consequence of the illegal occupation. You cannot isolate a people, cut them off from their natural connection to the country, degrade and starve them, and not expect extremism to follow.’

‘You certainly cannot,’ Leonie said.

‘No,’ Tamara said quickly, before Leonie could say anything else. ‘Avital, with whom I discussed this, even went so far as to suggest it was a dark fulfilment of deliberate Israeli policy. Drive Gaza further and further into itself until the West would be begging Israel to reconquer it.’

‘Sheesh,’ Finkler said.

‘I know,’ she said, meeting his eyes.

‘How is Avital?’ he asked suddenly.

Tamara Krausz opened her face to him. Finkler felt he’d been handed a flower. ‘He isn’t well,’ she said. ‘Not that he’d admit it. He’s tireless.’

‘Yes, isn’t he,’ Finkler replied. ‘And Navah?’

‘Well, thank God. Well. She’s his right hand.’

‘Is she ever.’ Finkler smiled, handing her a flower in return.

The knowledge that this moment of insider intimacy between them was driving the others crazy filled him with a quiet satisfaction. He could hear Kugle’s heart shrivel.

Only poker gave him comparable pleasure.

3

Libor went to see the bereavement counsellor Emmy had recommended. A dark, towering woman big enough to dangle him on her knee. She could have been the ventriloquist, he her dummy.

‘Jean Norman,’ she said, extending an arm long enough to go around his back and work his levers.

Jean Norman. Such a plain name for such an exotic personage, he thought it must have been assumed to calm the bereaved. Real name Adelgonda Remedios Arancibia.

He did it as a favour to Emmy. For himself he wouldn’t have bothered. What did he hope to be counselled into feeling? Cheerful about his prospects?

He felt bad that he had not been able to answer Emmy’s appeal for support. Finkler was the most eminent public figure he knew now and Finkler was hardly going to speak out against the film director who understood why people wanted to kill Jews. For all Libor knew to the contrary the two were bosom friends.

So going to the bereavement counsellor was the second-best thing he could do for Emmy.

Jean Norman. Real name Adelaïda Inessa Ulyana Miroshnichenkop.

She lived in Maida Vale, not all that far from where Treslove lived, though Treslove had called it Hampstead, or rather from where Treslove
had
lived before he moved in with Libor’s great-great niece. He would have preferred it had she worked out of a clinic or a hospital, but she saw him in the front room of her house.

She was, she explained, retired. But still counselled . . .

Libor thought she was going to say for a hobby or to keep her hand in, but she left the sentence to dangle like a person on the end of a rope . . .

The house was large but the room she invited Libor into was diminutive, almost like a room in a doll’s house. There were prints on the walls of rural scenes. Shepherds and shepherdesses. And a collection of porcelain thimbles on the mantelpiece. She was too tall for the room, Libor thought. She had to fold herself almost into three in order to fit into her chair. Her height made Libor feel foolish. Even with both of them sitting down he had to look up at her.

She had a fine Roman nose with open dark nostrils into which Libor had no choice but to stare. Despite her foreignness there was an air of the Women’s Institute about her, that look of shy strait-laced provincial glamour which proved such a success when women of this sort took their clothes off for a charity calendar. She would have long pendulous breasts and a deep dark open Sicilian navel, Libor guessed.

He wondered if her ability to make him imagine her without clothes, though she was covered from her neck to her ankles and never made a movement that was remotely suggestive, was part of her bereavement counselling technique.

They talked briefly about Emmy. Emmy had told her who Libor was. She remembered his articles and even described one or two of them correctly. There were famous photographs. She remembered some of those too. Libor laughing with Garbo. Libor lying on a bed with Jane Russell, Libor looking the less masculine of the two. Libor dancing with Marilyn Monroe, cheek to cheek in an impossible parody of romance, given all the disparities.

‘You should have seen me dance with my wife,’ Libor said.

He said it as a favour to her, just as coming to see her was a favour to Emmy. He assumed this was his role. To do favours and be bereaved.

He was relieved she didn’t say anything inane about the death of loved ones – he hated the expression loved ones; there weren’t loved ones, there was only loved Malkie – or cycles of emotion or pathways for grief.

Nor, for which he was no less grateful, did she treat him to any sideways glances of compassion. She did not sorrow for him. She left him to sorrow for himself.

As the time wore on he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything she was saying. Jean Norman. Real name Fruzsina Orsolya Fonnyasztó.

He continued to look up into her nostrils where it was soothingly dark and quiet.

As for what he said to her, he had no idea. He mouthed his feelings. He play-acted at grief. He spoke the words which he imagined the bereaved spoke at such a time. Even made the accompanying gestures. Had he stayed there long enough he believed he’d have begun to wring his hands and tear his hair.

His self-consciousness surprised and appalled him. What need was there for this? Why did he not simply speak his heart?

Because the heart did not speak, that was why. Because language presupposes artificiality. Because in the end there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to be said.

Did she know that, Jean Norman? Real name Maarit Tuulikki Jääskeläinen. Was it part of her professional knowledge that the bereaved sat in front of her, looked up into her nostrils and lied?

He should have howled like an animal. That at least would have been a genuine expression of how he felt. Except that it wasn’t. There was no genuine expression of how he felt.

She had a question for him before he left. She became, in the asking of it, more animated than in the whole time he had been with her. Clearly this was the real, in fact the only, reason he was here. What she was about to ask him she had wanted to ask him from the moment he walked in the room. No, from the moment she knew he was coming to see her.

‘About Marilyn,’ she said.

‘Marilyn Monroe? What about her?’

‘You knew her well?’

‘Yes.’

She blew out her cheeks and patted her chest. ‘So tell me . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Did she take her own life, or was she murdered?’

4

Treslove and Hephzibah are singing love duets in the bath.

Finkler is losing money at poker.

Libor is sinking fast.

Finkler is losing money at poker but his books are selling well and at least he hasn’t made a pass at Tamara Krausz.

Libor is sinking fast because he has lost Malkie. Emmy has been ringing him with news of her grandson. He will not get his sight back. There has been another attack on two Jewish boys wearing fringes, Emmy also tells him. And headstones in a Jewish cemetery in north London have been defaced. Swastikas. What does she want him to do? Start a vigilante group? Mount a guard on every Jewish burial place in London?

Libor is at pains not to confuse his feelings about Jews being attacked again in public places with his feelings for Malkie.

Treslove and Hephzibah are singing ‘O soave fanciulla’, ‘Parigi o cara’, ‘E il sol dell’anima’, ‘Là ci darem la mano’, and so on.

Whatever aria he knows she knows. How astonishing is that? he asks himself.

Everything they sing is either a hello or a goodbye. That’s opera for you. Treslove sings them all as goodbyes. Hephzibah as hellos. So even when they differ they are complementary and he is the beneficiary.

Her voice is strong, more suited to Wagner. But they won’t be singing any Wagner, not even
Tristan und Isolde
. ‘My rule of thumb is that if there’s an “und” anywhere I won’t be singing it,’ she tells him.

He’s beginning to understand Finkler culture. It’s like Libor and Marlene Dietrich, assuming Libor had told the truth about Marlene Dietrich. There are some things you don’t do. Very well, Treslove won’t do them either. Show him a German and he’ll kick the living shit out of the
mamzer
.