The Finkler Question (31 page)

Mamzer
is Yiddish for bastard. Treslove can’t stop using the word.

Even of himself. Am I lucky
mamzer
or what am I? he asks.

In celebration of being such a lucky
mamzer
, Treslove invites Finkler and Libor to a dinner party. Come and toast my new life. He thought of asking his sons but changed his mind. He doesn’t like his sons. He doesn’t like Finkler either, come to that, but Finkler is an old friend. He chose him. He didn’t choose his sons.

Finkler whistled through his teeth when he walked out of the lift straight on to Hephzibah’s terrace.

‘You’ve landed on your feet,’ he whispered to Treslove.

Crude
mamzer
, Treslove thought. ‘Have I?’ he asked, tersely. ‘I wasn’t aware I’d been
off
my feet.’

Finkler dug his ribs. ‘Come on! Teasing.’

‘Is that what you’re doing? Well, glad you like it here, anyway. You can watch the cricket.’

‘Can I?’ Finkler liked cricket. Liking cricket made him, he thought, English.

‘I meant
one
can.
One
can watch cricket from here.’

He had no intention of inviting Finkler over to watch cricket. Finkler enjoyed enough advantages already. Let him buy a ticket. Failing which, let him sit on his own terrace and watch the Heath. There was lots to see on the Heath, as Treslove remembered. Not that he remembered much of Hampstead now. He had been in St John’s Wood three months and couldn’t recall ever having lived anywhere else. Or
with
anyone else.

Hephzibah occluded his past.

He took Finkler into the kitchen to meet Hephzibah who was brewing at the stove. He had been waiting for this moment a long time.

‘Sam, d’Jew know Jewno?’ he said.

Not a flicker of understanding or recollection from Finkler.

Treslove thought about spelling it out to jog his memory, though he believed it unlikely that Finkler ever forgot anything he himself had said. Finkler never went anywhere without a notebook in which he wrote down whatever he heard that interested him, mostly his own observations. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he once told Treslove, opening his notebook. Which Treslove took to mean that Finkler routinely recycled himself, knowing he could get a whole book out of a mumbled aside. So Treslove’s money was on Finkler remembering his D’Jew know Jewno jest but not wanting to allow Treslove a jest in return.

But by now the two had already shaken hands anyway, Hephzibah wiping hers on her cook’s apron.

‘Sam.’

‘Hephzibah.’

‘My delight is in you,’ Finkler said.

Hephzibah inclined her head graciously.

Treslove’s face was a question mark.

‘That’s what Hephzibah means in Hebrew,’ Finkler told him. ‘My delight is in you.’

‘I know that,’ Treslove said, miffed.

The bastard had got him again. You never knew from which direction it would come. You prepared yourself for a Finkler joke and they bamboozled you with Finkler scholarship. You could never steal a march on them. They always had something you didn’t, some verbal or theological reserve they could draw on, that would leave you stumped for a response. The
mamzers
.

‘I must go on with what I’m doing,’ Hephzibah said, ‘or you won’t eat tonight.’

‘My delight is in your cooking,’ Treslove said, to no one’s interest.

In fact, in Treslove’s eyes Hephzibah didn’t so much cook as lash out at her ingredients, goading and infuriating them into taste. No matter what she was preparing she always had at least five pans on the go, each of them big enough to boil a cat in. Steam rose from four of them. Burning oil from the fifth. Every window was open. An extractor fan sucked noisily at whatever it could find. Treslove had suggested closing the windows when the fan was on, or turning the fan off when the windows were open. They countermanded each other’s function, he explained scientifically, the fan sucking in half the fumes of St John’s Wood. But Hephzibah ignored him, banging her cupboard doors open and closed, using every spoon and every casserole she owned, breathing in the flames and the smoke. The sweat poured down her brow and stained her clothes. Every couple of minutes she would pause to wipe her eyes. Then on she’d go, like Vulcan stoking the fires of Etna. And at the end of it, there was an omelette and chives for Treslove’s supper.

Though he complained of the illogic of her methods, Treslove loved to watch her. A Jewish woman in her Jewish kitchen! His own mother had prepared five-course meals in an egg pan. The three of them would sit and wait for the food to cool and then eat in silence. As for the washing up, there wasn’t any. Just the egg pan and the three plates.

Finkler breathed in the odours of Hephzibah’s devastated kitchen – had the Cossacks been through they’d have left it tidier – and said, ‘Ahhhh! My favourite.’

‘You don’t even know what I’m preparing,’ Hephzibah laughed.

‘Still my favourite,’ Finkler said.

‘Name an ingredient.’

‘
Trayf
.’

Treslove knew what
trayf
meant.
Trayf
was whatever wasn’t kosher.

‘Not in this kitchen,’ Hephzibah said with mock offence. ‘My Julian won’t eat
trayf.
’

My Julian
. Music to Treslove’s ears. Schubert, played by Horowitz. Bruch played by Heifetz.

Hey, Sam – D’Jew know Jewno?

Finkler made a noise like a gargle from far back in his throat. ‘You’ve koshered the old boy now?’

‘He’s koshered himself.’

It disconcerted Treslove – her Julian or not – to watch the two Finklers go on eyeing each other up and verbally trying each other out. He felt like piggy in the middle. Hephzibah was his woman, his beloved, his Juno, but Finkler appeared to believe he had an older claim. It was as though they spoke a secret language. The secret language of the Jews.

I must learn it, Treslove thought. I must crack their code before I’m through.

But at the same time he felt pride in Hephzibah that she could do what he could not. In twenty seconds she had reached deeper into Finkler’s soul than he ever had. He even appeared relaxed in her company.

When Libor arrived, Treslove truly felt outnumbered. Hephzibah exerted an unexpected influence on his two guests – she dissolved their Jewish differences.

‘Nu?’ Libor asked of Finkler.

Treslove wasn’t sure if that was the way to report it. Do you ask ‘Nu’
of
? Or do you just ask, transitively?
‘Nu?’ he asked
. And is it even a question in the accepted sense?
‘Nu,’ he said
. Would that have been better?
Nu
, meaning how are things with you, but also I know how things are with you.

So much to master.

But the surprise was that Finkler answered in kind. When there had been no Hephzibah he had castigated Libor for his Jewish barbarisms, but today he twinkled like a rabbi. ‘
A halber emes izt a gantser lign
,’ he said.

‘A half truth is a whole lie,’ Hephzibah whispered to Treslove.

‘I know,’ he lied.

‘So who’s been telling you half-truths?’ Libor asked.

‘Who hasn’t?’ Finkler replied. But that was as far as he was prepared to go.

Nu,
then, wasn’t searching. You didn’t have to answer. It permitted prevarications in the name of our common imperfect humanity.

Got it, Treslove thought.

At dinner, though, Libor went for Finkler as in the old days. ‘Not your Jewish anti-Semite friends?’

‘Not my Jewish anti-Semite friends what?’

Normally, Treslove noted, Finkler denied his Jewish friends were anti-Semites.

‘Telling you lies?’

‘They’re fallible like the rest of us,’ he said.

‘You’re sick of them already? That’s good.’

‘What’s good,’ Finkler said, ‘is this . . .’ He reached for more of everything. Herrings in red wine, herrings in white wine, herrings in cream, sour cream, vinegar, herrings curled around an olive with toothpicks through them, herrings chopped in what was said to be a new way, and of course chopped still in the old – herrings brought in fresh from the North Sea on the trawler of which Hephzibah was the figurehead, one breast bared – and then the pickled meat, the pastrami, the smoked salmon, the egg and onion, the chopped liver, the cheese that had no taste; the blintzes, the tsimmes, the cholent. Only the cholent – the meat and bean and barley shtetl stew, or Czech stew as Hephzibah called it in honour of Libor who loved coming over to eat it – was hot. All those roaring flames, all those fuming pans, and yet everything that came to the table, barring the cholent, was cold.

Treslove marvelled. There was no getting to the bottom of the miracles his wife performed, allowing that she wasn’t yet his wife.

‘I knew it,’ Finkler said when he got to the cholent. ‘Helzel! I knew I could smell helzel.’

Treslove knew it, too, but only because Hephzibah had told him. Helzel was stuffed chicken neck. In her opinion, no cholent could call itself a cholent without helzel. Finkler clearly thought the same.

‘You’ve used oregano in the stuffing,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘Brilliant touch. My mother never thought of oregano.’

Mine neither, Treslove mused.

‘Is it a Sephardic version?’ Finkler wondered.

‘It’s
my
version,’ Hephzibah laughed.

Finkler looked at Treslove. ‘You’re a lucky man,’ he said.

A lucky
mamzer
.

Treslove smiled in agreement, savouring the helzel. Stuffed chicken neck, for Christ’s sake! The entire history of a people in a single neck of chicken.

And Finkler the philosopher and ASHamed Jew, licking his chops over it as though he’d never left Kamenetz Podolsky.

After the cholent, the towelling down.

Hephzibah kept an elegant table, had Treslove polish the glasses and the silverware hours before anyone arrived, but in the matter of napery they might as well have been in a transport cafe. In front of every guest was a stainless-steel dispenser of paper napkins. The first time Treslove ever set the table for the two of them he folded napkins as his mother had taught him, in the shape of sailing ships, one per person. Hephzibah commended his dexterity, unfurling the little ship and laying it daintily on her lap, but when he next went to fold the napkins he found the serviette dispensers in their place. ‘I am not encouraging gluttony,’ Hephzibah explained, ‘but I don’t want whoever sits at my table to feel they must hold back.’

Hephzibah herself would get through a dozen napkins, more after cholent. Treslove’s mother had brought him up not to leave a mark on a napkin if possible, so that it could be folded back into a sailing ship and used again. Now, following Hephzibah’s example, he used a fresh one for every finger.

Everything was different. Before Hephzibah he had eaten only with his mouth. Now he ate with his whole person. And it took many paper napkins to keep his whole person clean.

‘So this museum . . .’ Finkler said, when the table was cleared.

Hephzibah inclined her head in his direction.

‘. . . don’t we have enough of them already?’