The Finkler Question (39 page)

Alvin Poliakov writes the way cinema newsreel announcers of the 1940s spoke, as though mistrustful of the technology and so shouting to be heard.

‘Ever since the dawn of civilisation,’ he says, ‘men have sought to restore what was stolen from them, in violation of their human rights, before they were old enough to have a say in the matter. What has driven them to do this is a sense of incompletion, a consciousness of something as disabling as amputation.’

He cites the anguish of Jews in classical Greek and Roman society, longing to assimilate and strut their stuff but unable to go to the baths and show other men their penises, for fear of encountering mockery. (How many Jewish men actually wanted to do this? Treslove wonders.) This has led many desperate Jews to seek a remedy in surgery, often with tragic consequences. (Treslove shudders.) The only proven method of restoring an at best passable simulacrum of a foreskin is the one the blogger himself practises.

Behold.

Do not hope for too much. But do not settle for too little. This is Alvin Poliakov’s philosophy.

As for the methodology --

Procure a good supply of sticky paper, surgical adhesive, office tape (Treslove finds himself thinking about the Sellotape with which Josephine, the mother of one of his children, he was not sure he could remember which, repaired her boots), suspender straps, elastic bands, weights and one strong wooden chair.

Every morning Alvin Poliakov photographs his penis from various angles with a view to posting the photographs on the Web later in the afternoon, along with diagrammatic details of the procedures he has followed in the course of the day – the construction of cardboard collars, the application of tape, the lubrication of sore skin, the hours spent slumped forward on his wooden chair coaxing the skin downward, ever downward, and the system of weights he has devised using copper jewellery, keys from a children’s xylophone, and a pair of small brass candlesticks, which, he earnestly explains, can be bought cheaply from any good market or shop selling Indian knick-knacks.

Like a monk of self-denial he sits, shaven-headed, pumped-up and muscled, with his head between his knees, a snake charmer who knows the snake will not show himself for years, that’s if he shows himself at all. There is no lubricity in the procedure. Whatever sex there once was in Alvin Poliakov’s head has long since vanished in the service of the tapes, the adhesives, the collars and the weights. It was because he felt cheated of pleasure that Alvin Poliakov embarked on this course, but pleasure is not the issue any longer. Jews are the issue.

As an accompaniment to the photographs and the diagrams, Alvin Poliakov appends a daily portion of tirade against the Jewish religion in whose anti-service, so to speak, he now expends his energies. The crime of sexual mutilation, he argues, is just one more of the countless offences against humanity to be laid at the gates of the Jews. Every day he publishes the name of another Jewish child, just come into the world, whose integrity has been compromised and whose rights to a full complement of sexual activities have been tragically curtailed.

Where these names come from, Treslove cannot imagine. Have they been lifted from the births and deaths pages of Jewish news-papers? It is impossible to imagine that the guilty parents would have given them to him. In which case isn’t Alvin Poliakov himself guilty of stealing from the child what the child is too young to give freely?

Or has he just made them up?

Imperturbable, for he cannot hear Treslove’s objections and would not heed them if he could, Alvin Poliakov, breathing like an athlete, coaxes the skin of his penis into a foreskin. Every evening he believes he can see one coming, but every morning it is as though he must start again. Except for those nights when he attends meetings of ASHamed Jews, he does not leave the house. An elderly sister does the shopping for him. She has recently converted to Catholicism. It is not clear whether she is aware of how her brother passes his days, but he is not a man to keep his causes to himself. And she must wonder what he is doing on his wooden chair, tugging at his penis. Though it is possible she misinterprets.

He listens to the radio, noting how rarely the sufferings of mutilated Jews, or Gentiles mutilated as proxy Jews, are referred to. That the BBC has a pro-Jewish bias he does not have the slightest doubt. Why else is there so little heard from those whose lives have been destroyed by Zionists and circumcision?

He wrote an afternoon play about one such life himself. But the BBC, though it thanked him for it, has not put it on. Censorship.

This barbarous ritual, Alvin Poliakov maintains, is analagous to cutting off young men’s hair before enrolling them in the army, and serves an identical function. It is to destroy individuality and subjugate every man to the tyranny of the group, whether religious or military. There is irrefutably, therefore, in Alvin Poliakov’s view, a direct link between the Jewish ritual of circumcision and Zionist slaughter. The helpless Jewish baby and the unarmed Palestinian become one in the innocent blood that Jews do not scruple to take from both.

While he is sitting with his head between his knees, Alvin Poliakov thinks up dedications to the victims of Zionist brutality. He likes to post a new dedication whenever he can, above the latest photograph of his brutalised penis, thereby hammering home the connection. On the day Treslove decides he won’t continue any longer with the blog, the dedication above Alvin Poliakov’s penis, from which weights of assorted sizes and materials hang, reads:
To
the mutilated of Shatila, Nebateya, Sabra, Gaza. Your struggle is my struggle
.

‘Put it this way,’ Treslove said, describing the blog to Hephzibah who had declined his offer to email her the link, ‘if you were a Palestinian –’

‘Absolutely. With friends like him . . .’

‘But not just that. It’s the appropriation–’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And in such a trivial cause.’

‘Not trivial to him, though, clearly.’

‘No, but all other questions aside, aren’t Muslims circumcised anyway?’

‘As far I know they are,’ she said, turning away, not wishing to encourage him in this new interest.

‘So . . . ?’

‘Yes, precisely,’ she said.

‘And yet this Alvin Poliakov receives commendations at least purporting to be from Palestinians.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He posts them.’

‘Darling, you mustn’t believe everything you read on the Internet. But even if they’re genuine it’s understandable. We all turn a blind eye to one issue for the sake of another. And these are desperate people.’

‘Isn’t everybody?’

She told him to close his eyes. Then she kissed them.

‘
You
aren’t.’

He thought about it. No, he wasn’t desperate. But he was agitated.

‘This is weird stuff,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel unsafe.’

‘
You
unsafe?’

‘Everybody unsafe. What if ideas are like germs? What if we are all being infected? This Alvin Poliakov – hasn’t he been infected somewhere along the line?’

‘Take no notice,’ she said. She was beginning to prepare supper, getting pans out. ‘The man’s a meshuggener.’

‘How can you take no notice? The work of a meshuggener or not, this stuff circulates. It comes from somewhere. It goes somewhere. Opinion doesn’t evaporate. It stays in the universe.’

‘I don’t think that’s true. We don’t as a society believe today what we believed yesterday. We have abolished slavery. We have given votes to women. We don’t bait bears in the public streets.’

‘And Jews?’

‘Oh, darling, Jews!’

With which she kissed his eyes closed again.

4

She liked him. She definitely liked him. He was a change for her. He seemed without ambition, a lack she had not encountered in her husbands. He listened to her when she talked, which the others hadn’t. And he appeared to want to be with her, keeping her in bed in the morning, not for sex – not
only
for sex – and following her around the apartment when she was in, which could have been irritating yet wasn’t.

But there was a tendency to sudden gloom in him which worried her. And more than that a hunger for gloom, as though there wasn’t enough to satisfy him in his own person and he had come to suck out hers. Was that, at bottom, all that his Jewish thing was really about, she wondered, a search for some identity that came with more inwrought despondency than he could manufacture out of his own gene pool? Did he want the whole fucking Jewish catastrophe?

He wasn’t the first, of course. You could divide the world into those who wanted to kill Jews and those who wanted to be Jews. The bad times were simply those in which the former outnumbered the latter.

But it was a bloody cheek. Jews proper had to suffer for their suffering; and here was Julian Treslove who thought he could just nip on the roundabout whenever the fancy took him and feel immediately sick.

And she wasn’t even sure he liked Jews as much as he claimed to. She didn’t doubt his affection for her. He slept inside her skin and kissed her with gratitude the minute he awoke. But she couldn’t be the all-in-all Jewess to him he wanted. For a start she wasn’t, at least in her own view, anything like Jewish enough. She didn’t open her eyes to the world and say Hello, here comes another Jewish day, which she had a feeling was what Julian wanted her to say and hoped he would soon start saying on his own behalf. Hello, here comes another Jewish day, except that . . .

The ‘except that’ was half the stuff she tried on his insistence to initiate him into. ‘I want the ritual,’ he had told her, ‘I want the family, I want the day-to-day tick-tock of the Jewish clock,’ but he was no sooner given it than he backed away. She had taken him to synagogue – not, of course, the synagogue next door where they prayed in PLO scarves – and he hadn’t liked it. ‘All they do is thank God for creating them,’ he complained. ‘But what’s the point of being created if all you do with your life is thank God for it?’

She had taken him to Jewish weddings and engagements and bar mitzvahs but he hadn’t liked those either. ‘Not serious enough,’ was his complaint.

‘You want them to be thanking God more?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You are hard to please, Julian.’

‘That’s because I’m Jewish,’ he said.

And though he raved like a madman about Jewish family and Jewish warmth, the moment she introduced him to her family, he fell silent in their company – Libor excepted – and behaved as though he hated them, which he assured her he didn’t, and generally embarrassed her by his lack of – well, warmth.

‘I’m shy,’ he said. ‘I am abashed by the vitality.’

‘I thought you liked the vitality.’

‘I love the vitality. I just can’t do it. I’m too
nebbishy
.’

She kissed him. She was always kissing him. ‘A
nebbish
doesn’t know he’s a
nebbish
,’ she said. ‘You aren’t a
nebbish
.’

He kissed her back. ‘See how subtle that is,’ he said. ‘ “A
nebbish
doesn’t know he’s a
nebbish
.” It’s too sophisticated for me. You’re all too quick on your feet.’

‘Have to be,’ she said. ‘You never know when you might be packing your bags.’

‘I’ll carry them. That’s my role. I’m the
schlepper
. Or doesn’t a
schlepper
know he’s
schlepper
?’

‘Oh, a
schlepper
knows he’s a
schlepper
all right. Unlike a
nebbish
, a
schlepper
is defined by his knowledge of himself.’