The Finkler Question (44 page)

‘Are you sure it won’t spoil your birthday?’ Hephzibah asked, having second thoughts.

‘I’m not a child,’ Treslove told her. He didn’t add that everything was spoiling his birthday so why pick on this.

It was called
Sons of Abraham
and charted the agonies of the Chosen People from ancient times up until the present when they decided to visit their agonies on someone else. The final scene was a well-staged tableau of destruction, all smoke and rattling metal sheets and Wagnerian music, to which the Chosen People danced like slow-motion devils, baying and hallooing, bathing their hands and feet in the blood that oozed like ketchup from the corpses of their victims, a fair number of whom were children.

Finkler, sitting on the other side of Hephzibah to Treslove, was  surprised to discover from the programme notes that Tamara Krausz had neither written it nor assisted in its production. Watching it made him feel she was in the theatre somewhere. Not quite next to him. Hephzibah was next to him. But nearby. He could smell the harlot allure of her vindictive intelligence, laying out her daughters of Hebron beauty for her father’s enemies to feast and avenge themselves upon.

In the final seconds of the drama an aerial shot of a mass grave at Auschwitz was projected on to a gauze curtain, before dissolving into a photograph of the rubble of Gaza.

Pure Tamara.

It received a standing ovation. Neither Hephzibah nor Treslove rose from their seats. Finkler laughed loudly, turning round so that people could observe him. Treslove was surprised by this reaction. Not just by the judgement it implied but by the antic nature of it. Had Finkler flipped his lid?

A number of ASHamed Jews were in the audience but Finkler thought their response to seeing him there was decidedly cold. Only Merton Kugle made an approach.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Superb,’ Finkler said. ‘Simply superb.’

‘So why were you laughing?’

‘Wasn’t laughter, Merton. Those were the contortions of grief.’

Kugle nodded and went out into the street.

Finkler wondered if he’d popped into a supermarket on his way to the theatre and had tins of proscribed Israeli sturgeon in his pockets.

People left the theatre quietly, deep in thought. That deep in thought that is available only to those who already know what they think. They were mainly from the caring and the performing professions, Finkler reckoned. He believed he recognised a number of them from demos in Trafalgar Square. They had the air of seasoned marchers.
End the massacre! Stop Israeli genocide!
At another time he’d have shaken hands with them, in sombre festivity, like survivors of an air raid.

He suggested a birthday drink for Treslove at the bar in the crypt of the theatre. It reminded them all of their student days. Rare ales on tap. Houmous and tabbouleh with pitta bread to eat. Old couches draped with black curtains to talk things over on. Finkler bought the drinks, clinked his glass with Treslove and Hephzibah and then fell quiet. For ten minutes they didn’t speak. Treslove wondered whether the silence denoted suppressed eroticism on the part of the other two. It surprised him greatly that Finkler had accepted their invitation – that’s to say Hephzibah’s invitation – to accompany them to the play. He must have known they would react differently to it from him and perhaps even end up having a row. So there was an underlying motive to his aceptance. Out of the side of his head, Treslove kept an eye on their mutual glances and hand movements. He saw nothing.

In the end it was another person who broke what Treslove took to be their ideological deadlock.

‘Hey! Surprised to see you here.’

Treslove heard the voice before he saw the person.

‘Abe!’

Hephzibah, getting caught up in the couch drapes, rose in a tangle of shawls. ‘Julian, Sam, this is Abe – my ex.’

Which one of us, Treslove speculated, does Abe think she’s with now – Julian or Sam?

Abe shook hands and joined them. A roguish and yet somehow angelically handsome man with a crinkled halo of black hair shot with white, like gleams of light, a hawkish nose and eyes close together. He has a face that bores, Treslove thought, meaning a face that stabs and pierces not a face that wearies. A prophet’s or philosopher’s face – which thought pleased him in that it would be Finkler who should be jealous, therefore, not him.

Hephzibah had of course told him about her two husbands, Abe and Ben, but he had to rack his brains to remember which was the lawyer and which the actor. Given where they were, how he looked and the black T-shirt he was wearing, he calculated that Abe must be the actor.

‘Abe’s a lawyer,’ Hephzibah said. She was flushed, even flustered, Treslove thought, with the attentions of so many men. Her past, her present, her future . . .

‘So why did you say you were surprised to see Hep here?’ Treslove asked, staking a claim which a more confident man would have considered already staked.

Abe glowed like the embers of a fire that had only just gone out. ‘Not her kind of play,’ he said.

‘Do I have a kind of play?’ Hephzibah enquired. Skittish, Treslove reckoned, noticing everything.

‘Well, not this kind.’

‘You’ve heard about my museum?’

‘I have.’

‘Then it shouldn’t surprise you that I have to keep my ear to the ground.’

‘Though not necessarily that low to it,’ Finkler said.

Treslove was astonished. ‘You’re telling me you didn’t like it?’

Hephzibah too. ‘That’s interesting,’ she said.

So was that what he was doing, Treslove wondered,
interesting
Hephzibah?

Finkler turned to Abe. ‘Julian and I went to school together,’ he said. ‘He thinks he knows what I like.’

Treslove stood up for himself. ‘You’re an ASHamed Jew. You’re the Sam the Man of ASHamed Jews. You had to like it. It was written for you. Could have been written
by
you. I’ve heard you speak it.’

‘Not
those
words have you ever heard me speak. I don’t do Nazi analogies. The Nazis were the Nazis. Anyway, did you hear me say I didn’t like it? I loved it. I only wished there’d been more singing and dancing. It lacked a show-stopper like “Springtime for Hitler”, that’s my only complaint. I couldn’t tap my feet. Put it this way, did you see anyone going out humming the Wagner?’

‘So let me get this straight,’ Treslove said. ‘This is a taste issue for you, is it?’

‘Isn’t it for you?’

‘Not in the musical sense, no.’

Finkler put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to leave this conversation to the rest of you. I’ll get more birthday drinks. Abe?’

Abe didn’t drink. Ot at least he didn’t drink tonight. In a manner of speaking, he told them, he was working.

‘Aren’t you always,’ Hephzibah said, exercising the privilege of an ex.

‘Doing what?’ Treslove asked.

‘Well, essentially just watching the play and gauging responses to it. One of the co-writers is a client.’

‘And you’re here to see if he has a case for claiming damages from the Jewish people?’ Hephzibah continued, squeezing his arm. Treslove felt that he had seen into their marriage and wished he hadn’t.

On two glasses of wine, more than her year’s allowance, Hephzibah had, in his view, exceeded her yearly allowance of skittishness also.

‘Well, if you’re here to gauge responses I’m happy to give you mine,’ he said, but he was out of time with the conversation and wasn’t heard.

‘Abe always did know how to screw the last penny out of a defendant,’ Hephzibah told him.

‘That’s not quite the way of it,’ Abe said.

‘What, the Jewish people are suing him?’

‘No, not the Jews. And it’s not about money either. He’s just been sacked by his university department. He’s a marine biologist when he’s not writing plays. He was sacked when he was underwater. I’m trying to get him his job back.’

‘Sacked for writing this play?’

‘Not exactly. For saying that Auschwitz was more a holiday camp than a hell for most of the Jews in there.’

‘And where there’s no hell, there’s no devil – is that the idea?’

‘Well I can’t speak for his theology. What he argues, and claims he can prove beyond doubt, is that there were casinos and spas and prostitutes laid on. He has photographs of Jews lying on their backs in swimming pools being fed iced strawberries by camp hostesses.’

Hephzibah guffawed. ‘Then by the terms of his own play,’ she said, ‘Gaza must be a holiday camp too. He can’t have it both ways. No point calling out the Jews as Nazis if the Nazis turn out to have been fun-loving philanthropists.’

‘Maybe Sam was right in that case and what we’ve just watched was a light romantic comedy,’ Treslove said, but he was out of time again.

‘I think that’s being a bit literalist about the way analogy is meant to work,’ Abe said, replying to Hephzibah not Treslove. But he looked at Treslove, man to man, husband to husband. Such literalists, wives!

‘So as a Jew, what do
you
think?’ Treslove asked, raising his tempo.

‘Well as a lawyer –’

‘No, as a Jew what do you think?’

‘About the play? Or about my client?’

‘About the lot. The play, your client, the Auschwitz lido.’

Abe showed him the palms of his hands. ‘As a Jew I believe that every argument has a counter-argument,’ he said.

‘That’s why we make such good lawyers,’ Hephzibah laughed, squeezing both men’s arms.

These people don’t know how to stand up for themselves, Treslove thought. These people have had their chips.

He went to the bathroom. Bathrooms always made him angry. They were places that returned him to himself. Illusionless, he looked in the mirror. They’ve ceded their sense of outrage, he said to his reflection, washing his hands.

When he returned he saw that Sam had joined the party again. Sam, Hephzibah, Abe. A cosy coterie of Finklers. Or maybe it’s just me who’s had his chips, Treslove thought.

ELEVEN

1

Walking to the museum a week later, Hephzibah thought I am at the end of my tether with the lot of them.

She didn’t know if Finkler was chasing her. But Abe, her ex, definitely was. He rang her two or three times after their chance meeting at
Sons of Abraham
. No dice, she told him, I’m happy.

He replied that he could see she was happy, which was no more than she deserved, but wanted to know what her being happy had to do with meeting him for a drink.

‘I don’t drink.’

‘You were drinking the other night.’

‘That was a special occasion. I’d just been accused of infanticide. When you’re accused of infanticide you drink.’

‘I’ll accuse you of infanticide.’

‘Don’t joke about it.’

‘All right, you don’t drink. But you do talk.’

‘We’re talking.’

‘I’d like to hear about the museum.’

‘It’s a museum. I’ll send you a prospectus.’

‘Is it a Holocaust museum?’

Christ, another one, she thought.

One in, one out. Finkler had stopped being ironical about the museum. He hadn’t paid another surprise visit to her there but he somehow or other contrived to be around her more, showed up where he was not expected, and even when he wasn’t in evidence in person somehow succeeded in making his presence felt, popping up on television or in some third party’s conversation, as when Abe, trying to prise her out, said how pleased he was to meet Sam Finkler at the theatre as he had always admired him. Though she was by no means a sexually vain woman – she was too reliant on shawls for sexual vanity – she didn’t quite believe in Finkler’s latest expressions of curiosity about her work. Curiosity did not come naturally to him. But at least the jeering had been replaced by civility. As for what that civility denoted she couldn’t judge it clearly because Treslove’s apprehensions clouded her view.