The Finkler Question (46 page)

And then when they did . . .

3

The face-painting incident.

Once, in his student days, Treslove met a very beautiful hippy girl, a true wispy child of nature and marijuana, dressed in a big girl’s version of a little girl’s nightgown. The occasion was a gestalt nostalgia party in East Sussex. They were being their parents as they imagined their parents had been. But they were doing it for real as well, in the sense that they had an ecological agenda.

Though Treslove was doing a module in Pollution and Conservation he didn’t exactly have an ecological agenda himself. But he was happy that other people did. It made for a good party.

It was an early summer’s evening, and gentleness was in the air. Everyone sat on cushions on the floor and told everyone else what they thought of them. Only rarely did anyone express anything other than deep affection. There were candles in the garden, music played, people kissed, cut out shapes from coloured paper which they hung from trees, and painted one another’s faces.

Treslove had little aptitude for art of any sort, but for face-painting he had no aptitude whatsoever. The beautiful hippy girl floated across to where he was sitting on a garden bench, smoking dope. Through her little girl’s dress he could see her big girl’s breasts. ‘Peace,’ he said, offering her the spliff.

She was carrying paints. ‘Paint me,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he told her. ‘I have no aptitude.’

‘We can all paint,’ she said, kneeling in front of him, offering her face. ‘Just let the colours flow.’

‘Colours don’t flow with me,’ he explained. ‘And I can never think of a subject.’

‘Paint the me you see,’ she told him, closing her eyes and pulling back her hair.

So Treslove painted a clown. Not an elegant or tragic clown. Not a Pierrot or Pirouette, but an Auguste with an absurd red nose, and big splotches of white outlined with black around the mouth and above the eyes, and crimson patches on the cheeks. A drooling, dribbling splosher of a clown.

She cried when she saw what he had done to her. The host of the party asked him to leave. Everyone was looking. Including Finkler who was down from Oxford for the weekend and whom Treslove had taken to the party. Finkler had his arms around a girl whose face he had exquisitely painted with floating shapes, in the manner of Chagall.

‘What have I done?’ Treslove wanted to know.

‘You’ve made a fool of me,’ the girl said.

Treslove would not have made a fool of her for the world. In point of fact he had fallen in love with her while he painted her. It was just that a red nose and big white mouth and crimson patches on the cheeks were all that he could think of painting.

‘You have humiliated me,’ the girl cried, sobbing into a tissue. The tears mingling with the face paint made her look even more ridiculous than Treslove had made her look. She was beside herself with distress.

Treslove looked over to Finkler for support. Finkler shook his head as over someone to whom he had shown infinite patience in the past but could forgive no more. He enfolded his girl in his arms so that she should not have to see what his friend had done.

‘Leave,’ the host said.

Treslove was a long time recovering from this incident. It marked him, in his own eyes, as a man who didn’t know how to relate to people, especially women. Thereafter, he hesitated when he was invited to a party. And started, in the way that some people start from spiders, whenever he saw a box of children’s paints or people painting one another’s faces at a fete.

That the girl he had painted as a clown might have been the Judith who avenged herself on him outside the window of J. P. Guivier had of course crossed his mind. Everything crossed Treslove’s mind. But for it to have been her, she must have changed considerably over the years both in physique and in temper.

Was it likely, either, that she would nurse her grievance, not only for more than a quarter of a century but to the extent of deliberately tracing Treslove’s whereabouts and tracking him through the streets of London? No. But then again trauma is incalculable in its effects. Could he, with a box of paints, have made an insanely unforgiving brute out of that sweet-natured girl?

Such questions were purely academic now that he had become a Finkler. What had been, had been. Indeed, he remembered the face-painting incident only when Hephzibah took him to a family birthday party at which the paints came out. Though children did not normally take much account of Treslove whom they managed not to see, this little girl – he was not sure of her relation to Hephzibah, so assumed a great-great-niece: it was either that or great-great-aunt – this little girl for some unaccountable reason did.

‘Are you Hephzibah’s husband?’ she asked him.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ he replied.

‘In a manner of speaking yes or no?’

Treslove was uncomfortable talking to children, not knowing whether he should address them as very young versions of himself, or very old versions of himself. Since she was a Finkler and therefore, he assumed, preternaturally smart, he opted for the very old version of himself. ‘In a manner of speaking both,’ he said. ‘In the eyes of God, if not in the eyes of society, I am her husband.’

‘My daddy says there is no God,’ the little girl said.

This took Treslove to the limits of what he knew about speaking to children. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there you are then.’

‘You’re funny,’ the little girl told him. There was a precocity about her he couldn’t fathom. She appeared almost to be flirting with him. An impression augmented by how grown-up her clothes were. He had noticed this before about Finkler children. Their mothers dressed them in the height of adult fashion, as though no opportunity to find a husband was to be forgone.

‘Funny in what way?’

‘Different funny.’

‘I see,’ he said. By different did she mean not Finkler? Was it evident to a child?

It was at this point that Hephzibah came over carrying paints. ‘You two seem to be hitting it off,’ she said.

‘She knows I’m not
unserer
,’ Treslove said under his breath. ‘She’s picked me for
anderer
. It’s uncanny.’

Unserer
, as Hephzibah’s family used the word, meant Jewish. One of us.
Anderer
was one of them. The enemy. The alien. Julian Treslove.

‘That’s nonsense,’ Hephzibah said, under her breath.

‘Why are you whispering?’ the little girl asked. ‘My daddy says it’s rude to whisper.’

Rude to whisper, Treslove thought, but not rude to be a fucking atheist at seven.

‘I know what,’ Hephzibah said, ‘why don’t you ask Julian nicely and he’ll paint your face for you?’

‘Julian Nicely, will you paint my face for me?’ the little girl said, much amused by her own joke.

‘No,’ Treslove said.

The little girl’s mouth fell open.

‘Julian!’ Hephzibah said.

‘I can’t.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘I can’t, leave it at that.’

‘Is this because you think she knows you’re not
unserer
?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I just don’t paint faces.’

‘Paint hers for me. Look, she’s upset.’

‘I’m sorry if you’re upset,’ he said to the little girl. ‘But you might as well get used to the idea that we don’t always get what we want.’

‘Julian!’ Hephzibah said again. ‘It’s only face-painting. She isn’t asking you to buy her a house.’

‘
She
,’ Treslove said, ‘isn’t asking for anything. It’s you.’

‘So
I
am to be taught a lesson in what not to expect from life?’

‘I’m not teaching anyone anything. I just don’t do face-paints.’

‘Even though two young women are deeply upset by your refusal?’

‘Don’t be cute, Hep.’

‘And don’t you be objectionable. Just paint her fucking face.’

‘No. How many more times must I say it? No. Face-painting is not my scene. OK?’

Whereupon, in what Hephzibah was to describe to herself as a most unmanly fit of petulance, he swept out of the room and indeed out of the house. When Hephzibah returned several hours later she found him in their bed, his face turned to the wall.

Hephzibah was not a woman who allowed silences to build up. ‘So what was that about?’ she asked.

‘You know what it was about. I don’t do face-painting.’

Hephzibah assumed this was code for
I don’t do your family
.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Then would you please stop this fantasy about how wonderful you find us?’

Treslove assumed
us
was code for Finklers.

He didn’t promise he would stop. But nor did he tell her she was wrong in her assumption.

It was all too much for him – children, parties, face paints, families, Finklers.

He had bitten off more than he could chew.

4

And yet he was more them than they were, felt more for them and what they stood for than they, as far he could see, were capable of feeling for themselves. He wouldn’t have gone so far as to say they needed him, but they did, didn’t they? They
needed
him.

He had left the theatre seething with rage. On behalf of Hephzibah. On behalf of Libor. On behalf of Finkler, whatever Finkler felt or pretended to feel about the poison play. Why, he was even prepared to feel rage on behalf of Abe, whose client called the Holocaust a holiday and wondered why he’d lost his job while he was snorkelling in the Med.

Someone had to feel what he felt because on behalf of themselves what did they feel? Not enough. Hephzibah he knew was angry and disconsolate but preferred to look somewhere else. Finkler thought it was a joke. Libor had turned his head away from everything and everyone. Leaving only him, Julian Treslove, son of a melancholy and friendless cigar seller who played the fiddle where no one could hear him; Julian Treslove, ex of the BBC, ex arts administrator, one-time lover of a host of hopeless unfleshly girls who wore too many bras, father of a sandwich-making in-denial homosexual and a Jew-hating opportunist piano player; Julian Treslove, Finklerphile and would-be Finkler except that the Finklers in their ethno-religious separatism or whatever one was meant to call it just didn’t fucking want to know.

Hard to go on feeling outrage for people who behaved to you exactly as they were accused of behaving to everyone else precisely because of which accusations you were outraged for them. Hard, but not impossible. Treslove saw where this was taking him and refused to go there. A principle of truth – political truth and art truth – stood beyond such personal betrayals and disappointments.
Sons of Abraham
, like much else of its kind, was a travesty of dramatic thought because it lacked imagination of otherness, because it accorded to its own self-righteousness a supremacy of truth, because it mistook propaganda for art, because it was rabble-rousing, and Treslove owed it to himself, never mind his inadequately affronted friends, not to be rabble-roused. He wished he had an arts programme to produce again. He would have enjoyed giving
Sons
– as it was no doubt called within the fraternity – the once over at three o’clock in the morning.

Treslove’s bit for honour and veracity.

‘But are you saying Zionism is exempt from criticism? Are you denying what we have seen with our own eyes on television?’ the BBC bosses would have asked him at programme review, as though he, Julian Treslove, son of a melancholy and friendless cigar seller etc., had suddenly become Zionism’s spokesman, or truth was to be apprehended in ten seconds flat on
Newsnight
, or humanity was incapable of addressing one wrong without instigating another.