The Finkler Question (43 page)

Libor, too, it seemed to him. The old man painstakingly separated the beef from the rye bread because the latter did not digest easily, and then he didn’t touch the beef. He had asked for no mustard. He wanted no pickled cucumber.

He no longer ate his food, he merely pulled it apart.

In the past he would have looked out of the window and enjoyed the parade of dissolutes. Today he stared as through shuttered eyes. I have done him no favours bringing him here, Treslove thought.

But then the outing hadn’t been planned as a favour to Libor. It was a necessity to Treslove.

‘Why would I imagine it?’ he asked. ‘I’m happy. I’m in love. I believe I am loved. Where would I conjure up this dread from?’

‘The usual place,’ Libor said.

‘That’s too Czech for me, Libor. Where’s the usual place?’

‘The place everything we fear comes from. The place where we store our longing for the end of things.’

‘That’s more Czech still. I have no longing for the end of things.’

Libor smiled at him and laid an old unsteady hand on his. But for the old and the unsteady the gesture reminded Treslove of Hephzibah. Why did everybody pat him?

‘My friend, all the years I’ve known you you’ve been longing for the end of things. You’ve lived in preparation, on the edge of tears, all your life. Malkie noticed that about you. She wasn’t sure she should even play Schubert when you were listening. He doesn’t need any encouragement, that one, she said.’

‘Encouragement to do what?’

‘To throw yourself into the flames. Isn’t that what being with my niece and reading Moses Maimonides is about?’

‘I don’t think of Hephzibah as fire.’

‘Don’t you? Then what are you so anxious about? I think you’re getting what you went in there to get. The whole Jewish
gesheft
. You think it’s a short cut to catastrophe. And I’m not going to say you’re wrong.’

He wanted to say that’s crap, Libor. But you don’t ask an elderly man out for salt-beef sandwiches he is unable to digest and tell him that what he’s saying is crap. ‘I don’t recognise what you’re describing,’ he said instead.

Libor shrugged. If you don’t you don’t. He didn’t have the strength to argue. But he could see Treslove needed more. ‘The fall, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Last Judgement, Masada, Auschwitz – see a Jew and you think of Armageddon,’ he said. ‘We tell good creation stories but we do destruction even better. We’re at the beginning and the end of everything. And everyone’s after a piece of the action. Those who can’t wait to pitchfork us into the flames, want to go down screaming by our side. It’s one or the other. Temperamentally, you were always going to choose the other.’

‘You sound like your great-great-niece.’

‘Not surprising. We’re family, you know.’

‘But isn’t all this a bit solipsistic, Libor, as Sam would say? By your account there’s no escaping the Jews for anyone.’

Libor pushed his plate aside. ‘There’s no escaping the Jews for anyone,’ he said.

Treslove stared out of the window. On the opposite side of the narrow street, an ill-favoured, fat girl in a short skirt was trying to persuade men to come into a club only a desperate or a deranged person would enter. She saw him looking at her and beckoned him over. Bring your friend, her gesture implied. Bring your salt-beef sandwich. He lowered his eyes.

‘And you think,’ he said, picking up Libor’s thread, ‘that I am imagining Hephzibah and Sam in order to hasten my end?’

Libor waved his hands in front of his face. ‘I didn’t quite say that. But people who expect the worst will always see the worst.’

‘I haven’t
seen
anything.’

‘Exactly.’

Treslove put his elbows on the table. ‘Libor, since you tell me Hephzibah is your family, what’s your view? Do you think she would do this?’

‘With Sam?’

‘With anybody?’

‘Well, her being my family doesn’t make her different from any other woman. Though I have never gone along with the view that women are by nature inconstant. My own experience has been very different. Malkie never played me false.’

‘Can you be sure?’

‘Of course I can’t be sure. But if she allowed me to believe she had never played me false, then she never played me false. You don’t judge fidelity by every act; it’s the desire to say you’re faithful and the desire to be believed.’

‘That can’t be true, Libor. Outside Prague.’

‘We didn’t live in Prague. What I’m saying is that an indiscretion needn’t matter. It’s the overall intention of fidelity that counts.’

‘So Hephzibah might mean to be faithful to me but still happen to be fucking Sam.’

‘I hope she isn’t.’

‘
I
hope she isn’t.’

‘And I doubt she is. The question is, why don’t you doubt she is, if you have seen nothing to make you suppose otherwise.’

Treslove thought about it.

‘I need to order another sandwich,’ he said, as though truthful reflection were dependent on it.

‘Have mine,’ Libor said.

Treslove shook his head and thought of Tyler. ‘Have mine,’ Finkler had said, if not in so many words. ‘Have mine, I am otherwise engaged.’

He had never told Libor of his evenings with Tyler, watching Finkler’s documentaries. He had never told anybody. They were not his alone to tell. They were poor Tyler’s too. And in a sense they were Finkler’s also. But he wished he could mention the affair, if it ever really was an affair, to Libor now. It would help to explain something, though he wasn’t sure what. But how would he know what if he didn’t hear himself put the question into words. Libor was old. Who would he tell? The secret that would otherwise go to the grave with Treslove, would surely go to the grave much sooner with Libor.

So on an impulse, he told.

Libor listened quietly. When it was over, to Treslove’s astonishment, he cried. Not copious tears, just a tear or two in the corner of an old man’s rheumy eye.

‘I’m sorry,’ Treslove said.

‘You should be.’

Treslove didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected a response of this sort. Libor was a man of the world. Just squeeze me in a little fuck when you come to make a report of my life, he had told Treslove. Men and women did these things.
An indiscretion needn’t matter
– Libor’s own words.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Treslove said. ‘It was wrong of me.’

Libor looked into his hands. ‘Yes, it was wrong of you to tell me,’ he said, as though not talking to Treslove at all. ‘Probably more wrong of you to tell me than to do it. I don’t want the burden of the knowledge. I would prefer to remember Tyler differently. And you. Sam it doesn’t really matter about. He can look after himself. Though I would rather have not known about the falsity of your friendship. You make the world a sadder place, Julian, and it is already sad enough, believe me. Why did you tell me? It was unkind of you.’

‘I don’t know. And I say again I’m truly sorry. I don’t know what made me do this.’

‘You do. One always does know why one tells. Is it because you are proud of it as an escapade?’

‘An escapade? God, no.’

‘A conquest, then?’

‘A conquest? God, no.’

‘So you are proud of it as something. Are you proud of it because you got one over on Sam?’

Treslove knew he had a duty to think about his answer. Saying
God, no
all the time would not suffice.

‘Not got one
over
, Libor. I hope not that. More having got
into
his world. Their world.’

‘From which you’d felt excluded?’

He had a duty to think about that, too. ‘Yes.’

‘Because they were a glamorously successful pair?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘But Sam was your friend. You’d grown up with him. You continued to see him. He didn’t inhabit a universe that was beyond yours.’

‘I’d grown up with him but he’d always been different to me. A mystery in some way.’

‘Because he was clever? Because he was famous? Because he was a Jew?’

Treslove’s salt-beef sandwich arrived, dripping in mustard the way he’d learned to like it. Accompanied by not one but two pickled cucumbers chopped into fine slices.

‘That’s a tough one to answer,’ he said. ‘But yes, all right, all of those.’

‘So when you lay in the arms of his wife you were, for a moment, as clever as he was, as famous as he was, as Jewish as he was.’

Treslove didn’t say that he had never lain in Tyler’s arms, and that she had never lain in his. He didn’t want Libor to know that she had turned her back to him.

‘I guess.’

‘Any one more than the others?’

Treslove sighed. A sigh from deep in the bowels of his guilt and of his fears. ‘I can’t say,’ he said.

‘Then let me say for you. It was the Jew part that mattered to you most.’

Treslove leaned across the table to halt him. ‘Before you go on,’ he said, ‘you do know that Tyler wasn’t Jewish. I’d thought she was, but it turned out that she wasn’t.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

‘I was, a little.’

‘All the more, then, I say it was the Jew. And I know that it was the Jew because of what you are afraid of in Sam and Hephzibah now.’

Treslove looked at him, an old man with no digestion system left, telling riddles. ‘Don’t follow,’ he said.

‘You suspect Sam and Hephzibah of what? Having sex together. And on what evidence? None, except that you suppose that is what they will do because they share something that excludes you. They are Jews, you are not, therefore they are fucking.’

‘Oh, come on, Libor.’

‘Please yourself. But you have no better explanation for your suspicions. You won’t be the first Gentile to ascribe lasciviousness to Jews. We had horns once, and a tail, like goats or like the devil. We bred like vermin. We polluted Christian women. The Nazis –’

‘Libor, stop – this is foolish and insulting.’

The old man sat back in his chair and rubbed his head. Once upon a time he had a wife who rubbed it for him, laughing as she polished, like a housewife delighting in her chores. But that was long ago.

Insulting? He shrugged.

‘I am deeply ashamed,’ Treslove said. ‘For telling you what I told you.’

‘You are deeply ashamed? Then that’s something else you two share.’

‘Show me mercy,’ Treslove begged.

‘Julian, you started this,’ Libor said. ‘You invited me out to discuss your fear that Sam and Hephzibah are fucking. I ask you what your suspicions are built on. You tell me an indefinable dread. I’m your friend – so I’m doing my best to define it for you. You attribute strange and secret sexual powers to them, that’s why you are afraid. You think they can’t stop themselves because they are driven by an ungovernable sexual urge, Jew to Jew, and you think they won’t stop themselves because they are unscrupulous, Jew to Gentile. Julian, you’re an anti-Semite.’

‘Me?’

‘Don’t sound so astonished. You’re not alone. We’re all anti-Semites. We have no choice. You. Me. Everyone.’

He had not eaten a bite of food.

4

They went to the theatre together – Hephzibah, Treslove and Finkler. It was Treslove’s birthday and Hephzibah had suggested an outing instead of a party, since every day was a party for them. They had asked Libor along but he didn’t fancy the sound of the play.

None of them fancied the sound of the play. But as Finkler said, if you don’t go to the theatre whenever you don’t like the sound of a play, when do you ever go to the theatre? Besides, it was only on for a week, a piece of agitprop that people were writing angry or enthusiastic letters to the papers about. London was buzzing with it.