The Finkler Question (35 page)

‘And you?’

‘The same. He needs a bit of looking after, but then so do I.’

‘I’m very fond of you both,’ he said. ‘I want you to be happy.’

‘We should be half as happy as you and Aunt Malkie were,’ Hephzibah said.

Libor patted her hand and then fell vacant.

Hephzibah was worried about him. But as Treslove noticed the day she helped him with the Four Questions, worrying over men came naturally to her. It was another of those Finkler traits that he admired. Finkler women knew that men were fragile. Just Finkler men or all men? He wasn’t sure. But he was the beneficiary of her concern either way. Seeing him in low spirits, she would gather him into her arms, graze him accidentally with her rings – it hurt, but what the hell! – and hide him away in her shawls. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him. When his actual mother had found him downcast she would peck him on the cheek and give him an orange. It wasn’t love he’d lacked, it was envelopment. Wrapped around in Hephzibah he knew true peace. It was better there – inside her in the non-erotic sense, though it wasn’t without its eroticism – than anywhere he’d ever been before.

‘You’re not having second thoughts?’ she asked, seeing him slumped in an armchair looking heavenwards.

‘About us, absolutely not.’

‘About what then?’

‘Yours is a tough religion,’ he said.

‘Tough? It’s you that’s always saying how full of love we are.’

‘Intellectually tough. You keep going off into metaphysics.’

‘I do?’

‘Not you specifically, your faith. It does my head in, as one of my sons says, just don’t ask me which.’

‘That’s because you insist on understanding it. You should try just living it.’

‘But I don’t know what parts to live.’

‘Maimonides not helping?’

He pulled a weary face. ‘I guess no one ever promised that the process of being unperplexed would be easy.’

But secretly he wondered if the task was beyond him. He felt sorry for Hephzibah. Had he passed himself off as something he could never be? He was in danger of reverting to type and picturing only one end to this – Hephzibah dying in his arms while he told her how much he adored her. Verdi and Puccini played in his head, even as he ploughed on with Moses Maimonides.
The Guide for the Perplexed
became a romantic opera for him, ending the way all the operas he loved ended, with Treslove onstage alone, sobbing. Only this time as a Jew.

That’s if he ever made it as a Jew.

He stumbled blindly from one chapter to another. ‘Of the divine Names composed of Four’, ‘Twelve and Forty-two Letters’, ‘Seven Methods by which the
Philosophers sought to Prove the Eternity of the Universe’, ‘Examination of a passage from Pirke di-Rabbi Eliezer in reference to Creation’.

And then he got on to circumcision and found himself galvanised into thought.

‘As regards circumcision,’ Maimonides had written, ‘I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.’

He read it again.

‘As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.’

And then again.

But we don’t have to follow him through every reading.

As a matter of course he read every sentence of Maimonides a minimum of three times, but that was to seek clarity. Here was no obfuscation in need of conscientious penetration. Circumcision, Moses Maimonides argued, ‘counteracts excesssive lust’, ‘weakens the power of sexual excitement’ and ‘sometimes lessens the natural enjoyment’.

Such a claim merited reading and rereading simply for itself. And indeed for himself, if he was ever to get to the bottom of who Finklers were and what they really wanted.

Among the many thoughts that crowded into Treslove’s mind was this one: did it mean he’d been having a better time than Finkler – Sam Finkler himself – all along? At school Finkler had boasted of his circumcision. ‘With one of these beauties you can go for ever,’ he had said. And Treslove had countered with what he’d read, and with what made perfect sense to him, that Finkler had lost the most feeling part of himself. A verdict in which Moses Maimonides unequivocally concurred. Not only had Finkler lost the most feeling part of himself, it had been taken from him precisely in order that he should not feel what Treslove felt.

A great sadness, on behalf of Tyler, suddenly welled up in him. He had enjoyed her more than Finkler had. No question of it. He had the wherewithal to enjoy her more with.

But did it follow from that that she had enjoyed him more than she had enjoyed Finkler? He had not thought so at the time. ‘No woman will want to touch yours,’ Finkler had warned him at school, and Tyler’s apparent reluctance to look at him seemed to bear that out. But was it a reluctance or was it a kind of holy dread? Did she fear to look upon what gave her so much pleasure? Had he been a godhead to her?

For what gave him more pleasure must surely have given her more pleasure too. A man made reluctant by his circumcision would logically communicate that reluctance to his partner. The ‘weakened power of sexual excitement’ had to work both ways. What counteracted ‘excessive lust’ in the one had to counteract ‘excessive lust’ in the other, else there was no point in it. Why maim the man to limit sexual intercourse if the woman went on demanding it as fervently as ever?

Indeed, Maimonides said as much. ‘It is hard for a woman, with whom an uncircumcised had sexual intercourse, to separate from him.’ Women had not found it hard to separate from Treslove, but that could have been attributable to other causes. And initially he had always done reasonably well – ‘If you think I’m going to let you fuck me on our first date you’ve got another think coming,’ they had said to him, letting him fuck them on their first date – which suggested it was what they later discovered about him as a person that was the problem, not the prepuce.

He felt possessed of a thrilling power he had never known was his. He was the
uncircumcised
. From whom women found it hard to separate.

Physically hard to separate, did Maimonides mean, in that the uncircumcised somehow knotted inside the woman like a dog? Or emotionally, in that the uncircumcised’s untiring lustfulness besotted her?

Both, he decided.

He was the
uncircumcised
, and he had spoken. Both.

In retrospect, he fell in love with Tyler all over again, knowing now that she must have loved him more than she could ever admit. And had been afraid to look upon that which made her wanton.

Poor Tyler. Besotted with him. Or at least besotted with his dick.

And poor him for missing out on that exquisite knowledge at the time.

If only he’d known.

If only he’d known, what then? He wasn’t sure. Just if only he’d known.

But it wasn’t all regret. He was also excited by this discovery of his own erotic power. Lucky Hephzibah at least.

Unless his untiring lustfulness both wearied and disgusted her. And as a matter of ethno-religious principle she would have preferred him snipped.

3

He rang Finkler.

‘You ever read Moses Maimonides?’ he asked.

‘Is that the purpose of your call?’

‘That and to enquire how you are.’

‘I’ve been better, thank you.’

‘And Moses Maimonides?’

‘I guess he’s been better too. But have I read him? Of course. I count him as among my inspirations.’

‘I didn’t think you found Jewish thought inspiring.’

‘Then you think wrong. He teaches how to make abstruse thought available to the intelligent layman. He is all along saying more than he appears to say. We plough the same furrow, he and I.’

Oh yeah, Treslove thought –
Guide for the Perplexed
and
John Duns Scotus and Self-Esteem:
a Manual for the Menstruating
.

But what he said was, ‘So what do you reckon to what he says about circumcision?’

Finkler laughed. ‘Why don’t you just come right out with it, Julian? Hephzibah wants you to have it done – yes? Well, I wouldn’t stand in her way. But between ourselves – ha! – I think you might be a wee bit old. As I recall, Maimonides warns against it past the eighth day. So that’s you out. Just.’

‘No, Hephzibah does not want me to have it done. She loves me as I am. Why would she not? Maimonides says circumcision limits sexual intercourse. I impose no limits myself.’

‘I am pleased to hear it. But is this about you or Moses Maimonides?’

‘It’s not about me. I simply wonder what you, as a philosopher who ploughs the same furrow, think about Maimonides’ theory.’

‘That circumcision is to put a brake on sex? Well, it certainly exists to make us afraid, and making us afraid of sex is part of it.’

‘You always told me Jews enjoyed sex inordinately.’

‘Did I? That must have been a long time ago. But if you’re asking me whether circumcision as a means of inhibiting the sexual impulse is specifically Jewish, I would say not. Anthropologically speaking, it isn’t primarily about sex anyway, except in so far as all initiation ceremonies are about sex. It’s about cutting the apron strings. What
is
Jewish is interpreting the circumcision rite in the way Maimonides does. It’s he – the medieval Jewish philosopher – who would wish us to be more restrained and imagines circumcision as the instrument. But I have to tell you it has never worked on me.’

‘Never?’

‘Not ever that I recall. And I think I would recall it. But I do know someone who believes himself to have been cheated of pleasure, and is in the process of having the operation reversed.’

‘You can have it reversed?’

‘Some people think so. Read Alvin Poliakov’s blog. You can find it at something like www.ifnotnowwhen.com. Alternatively I can fix you up with an introduction. He’s perfectly affable, wants to talk about nothing else, and might even show you his dick if you ask him nicely. Apparently it’s progressing. He’s halfway to not being a Jew any more.’

‘He’s one of your ASHamed Jews, presumably.’

‘Sure is. You don’t get more ashamed than that.’

‘You’re not ashamed of yours, then?’

‘You think I should be?’

‘Just asking. You carried it with pride at school.’

‘I was probably trying to rile you. I just carry it, Julian. I am a widower. Being circumcised or not does not figure high among my concerns right now.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I’m pleased for you that your life is dickcentric at the moment.’

‘I’m only speaking philosophically, Sam.’

‘I know you are, Julian. I expect nothing less of you.’

Treslove remembered one more question before he rang off. ‘As a matter of interest,’ he asked, ‘are your boys circumcised?’

‘Ask them,’ Finkler said, putting down the phone.

He had more conversational joy with Libor.

Libor’s fears that he would see less of Treslove now that he was no longer single had been unfounded. Any change was in Libor himself. He ventured out less. But he would still occasionally take a taxi to Hephzibah’s apartment in the afternoon when Hephzibah was at the museum and the two of them would sit at the kitchen table together drinking white tea.

They both liked it that the ghost of Hephzibah boiling up a witches’ coven of cauldrons in which to cook a single egg inhabited the space. They breathed her in and smiled at each other with the knowledge of her, incorrigible wifelovers that they were.

Libor was now walking with a stick. ‘It’s come to this,’ he said.

‘It suits you,’ Treslove said. ‘It suggests old Bohemia. You should get one with a blade in the handle.’

‘To protect myself against the anti-Semites?’

‘Why you? I’m the one who gets attacked.’