The Finkler Question (49 page)

He drank another whisky then left the pub and climbed slowly up the downlands, bent as the trees and shrubs were bent. With no sun on them, the cliffs looked grimy, a mass of dirty chalk crumbling into the sea.

‘You’d need some nerve to do this,’ he remembered saying to Malkie.

Malkie had fallen silent, thinking about it. ‘The dark would be best,’ she had said at last, as they’d strolled back, arm in arm. ‘I’d wait till it was dark and just keep on walking.’

He passed the little pile of stones, like something Jacob or Isaac might have built, with the plaque on which Psalm 93 was engraved.
Mightier than the thunder of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea. The Lord on high is mighty
.

It seemed to him there were fewer of the randomly planted wooden crosses than he remembered. There should, surely, have been more. Unless, after a decent period of time, they were removed.

What was a decent period of time?

But again, tied to a scrap of wire fencing, there was a bunch of flowers. This one was from Marks & Spencer, with the price tag attached. £4.99. Don’t splash out, he thought.

The place was not isolated. A bus had unloaded a party of pensioners. People walked their dogs and flew kites. Peered over. Shuddered. A hiking couple said hello to him. But it was very quiet, the wind blowing voices off the edge. He heard a sheep. ‘Baaa.’ Unless it was a seagull. And remembered home.

There was no evidence to support Malkie’s fanciful conviction that it would take her beloved husband an unconscionable time to reach the bottom. Despite her believing she had married an exceptional man, he didn’t fly or float. He went straight down like anybody else.

4

Treslove learned that Alfredo had been sitting opposite Libor on the Eastbourne train from Alfredo’s mother. Alfredo had seen Libor’s photograph on the South East television news – veteran journalist plunges to his death in Beachy Head’s third suicide in a month – and realised it was the hundred-year-old man he had talked to on the train. This he mentioned to his mother, and this his mother took the trouble to communicate to Treslove when she herself read the dead man’s name in the paper and recognised him as a friend of the father of her son.

‘Strange coincidence,’ she said in the same BBC voice with which she used to unpack rafts of ideas and unpick Treslove’s sanity.

‘Strange how?’

‘Alfredo and your friend on the same train.’

‘That’s a coincidence. What makes it strange?’

‘Two people from your past coming together.’

‘Libor isn’t from my past.’

‘Everybody’s from your past, Julian. That’s where you put people.’

‘Fuck you,’ Treslove told her, ringing off.

He didn’t hear of Libor’s death this way. Had he done so he didn’t know what violence he might have committed on Alfredo and Josephine. He didn’t want them in the same breath or sentence as poor Libor, he didn’t wish to think of them as having even shared existence with him. The fool of a boy should have seen something was wrong, should have engaged the old man in conversation, should have told someone. This wasn’t any old train. You were meant to scrutinise people travelling alone to Eastbourne because there was just about only one reason why a single person would choose to go there.

He felt the same about the taxi driver. Who takes a lonely old man to a noted suicide spot in the late afternoon and leaves him? In fact, the driver thought this very thing about an hour after dropping Libor off and notified the police, but by then it was too late. This, as much as anything else, distressed Treslove – that his friend’s last hour on earth had been spent staring at that cretin Alfredo in his pork-pie hat and discussing the weather with a numbskull Eastbourne taxi driver.

But he couldn’t go on blaming other people. It was his fault in more ways than he could number. He had neglected Libor in recent months, thinking only about himself. And when he had spent time with him it was only to talk sexual jealousy. You don’t talk sexual jealousy – you don’t, if you have a grain of tact or discretion in your body, talk sexual anything to an old man who has recently lost the woman he had been in love with all his life. That was gross. And it was grosser still – worse than gross: it was brutal – to burden Libor with the knowledge of his affair with Tyler. That was a secret Treslove should have taken to the grave, as he supposed Tyler had. And Libor himself.

It wasn’t out of the question that this uncalled-for confession was among the reasons Libor had ended his life – so that he didn’t have to bear his friend’s turpitude any longer. Treslove had seen Libor’s face blacken when he’d bragged – let’s call a spade a spade, it
was
bragging – about those stolen afternoons with Finkler’s wife; he had seen the lights go out in the old man’s eyes. It seemed to be a villainy too far for Libor. Treslove had blemished, discredited, defiled, the story of the three men’s long-standing friendship, turned the trust between them, whatever their differences, into a fiction, a delusion, a lie.

Falsities spill over. Perhaps it wasn’t only the romance of their friendship that Treslove had defiled; perhaps it was the idea of romance altogether. Once one cherished illusion goes, what’s to stop the next? Had Treslove and Tyler’s iniquity poisoned everything?

No, that in itself could not have not killed Libor. But who was to say it hadn’t weakened his resolve to stay alive?

Treslove would have admitted all this to Hephzibah, begged for absolution in her arms, but to have done that he would have had to tell her, too, about Tyler, and that was something he couldn’t do.

She was in a bad way herself. Though it was Libor who had brought Treslove and Hephzibah together, Treslove in his turn had made Libor more important to her than he had previously been. There had always been a fondness between them, but great-great-nieces are rarely intimate with their great-great-uncles. In her time with Treslove, though, this old, somewhat formal affection had blossomed into love, to the point where she was unable to remember not having him there, close to her, reminding her of Aunt Malkie, and making her love for Julian almost a family affair. She, too, castigated herself for allowing other concerns to consume her attention. She should have been keeping an eye on Libor.

But these other concerns would not let her alone. The murder of that Arab family on a bus was an unbearable event. She didn’t know anyone who wasn’t horrified. Horrified on behalf of the Arabs. Horrified
for
them. But, yes, horrified as well in anticipation of the consequences. Jews were being depicted everywhere as bloodthirsty monsters, however the history of Zionism was explained – whether bloodthirsty in their seizure of someone else’s country from the start, or bloodthirsty as a consequence of events which bit by bit had made them strangers to compassion – yet no Jew was cheering the death of this Arab family, not in the streets nor in the quiet of their homes, no Jewish women gathered by the wells and ululated their jubilation, no Jewish men went to the synagogue to dance their thanks to the Almighty. Thou shalt not kill. They could say what they liked, the libellers and hate-mongers, stigmatising Jews as racists and supremacists, thou shalt not kill was emblazoned on the hearts of Jews.

And Jewish soldiers?

Well, Meyer Abramsky was no Jewish soldier. He vexed her moral sense in no way at all. It was only a pity he had been stoned to death. She would have liked to see him tried and found a thousand times guilty by Jews.
He is not one of ours
.

And then stoned to death by those whose moral character he had fouled.

A monument would eventually be erected in his name, of course. The settlers had to have their heroes. Who were these people? Where had they suddenly appeared from? They were alien to her education and upbringing. They had nothing to do with any Jewishness she recognised. They were the children of a universal unreason, of the same extraction as suicide bombers and all the other End of Time death cultists and apocalyptics, not the children of Abraham whose name they defamed. But try telling that to those who had taken to the streets and squares of London again, ready at a moment’s notice with their chants and placards as though they woke to speak violence against the one country in the world of which the majority of the population was Jewish and were disappointed when a fresh day brought no justification for it.

It had started again, anyway. Her emails streamed reported menace and invective. A brick was thrown through a window of the museum. An Orthodox man in his sixties was beaten up at a bus stop in Temple Fortune. Graffiti began to appear again on synagogue walls, the Star of David crossed with the swastika. The Internet bubbled and boiled with madness. She couldn’t bear to open a newspaper.

Was it something or was it nothing?

Meanwhile there had to be a coroner’s inquest into Libor’s death. And more searching questions to be answered in their hearts by those who had loved him.

She knew what she thought. She thought Libor had gone for a walk at dusk – without doubt a lonely, melancholy walk, but just a walk – and had fallen. People do fall. Not everything is deliberated upon.

Libor fell.

5

‘The hardest part,’ Finkler told Treslove, ‘is not to be defined by one’s enemies. Just because I am no longer an ASHamed Jew does not mean I have relinquished my prerogative to be ashamed.’

‘Why bring being ashamed into it at all?’

‘You sound like my poor wife.’

‘Do I?’ Treslove, head down, blushed.

Finkler, thankfully, did not notice. ‘ “What’s it to you?” she used to ask me. “How does it reflect on you?” But it does. It reflects on me because I expect better.’

‘Isn’t that grandiosity?’

‘Ha! My wife again. You didn’t discuss me with her, did you? That’s a rhetorical question. No, I don’t think it’s grandiosity to take what that lunatic Abramsky did personally. If any man’s death diminishes me, because I am of mankind, then any man’s act of murder does the same.’

‘Then be diminished as a member of mankind. The grandiosity is to feel diminished as a Jew.’

Finkler clapped an arm around his friend’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be paid out as a Jew,’ he said, ‘whatever you think.’

He smiled weakly, seeing Treslove in a
yarmulke
. The two men had walked aside, leaving Libor’s family to be at his graveside with him, alone. The service had concluded, but Hephzibah and a number of others had wanted time to reflect away from the attentions of gravediggers and rabbis. When they had gone, Treslove and Finkler would have their hour.

They would rather not have talked about Abramsky. About Abramsky there was nothing civilised to say. But they held back from discussing Libor because they were afraid of their feelings. Treslove, especially, was unable to look at the ground in which Libor – still warm, was how he imagined him, still aggrieved and hurt – had been laid. Next to his mound of earth was Malkie’s grave. The thought of them lying side by side, silent for all eternity, no laughter, no obscenities, no music, was more than he could bear.

Would he and Hephzibah . . . ? Would he be allowed to lie in a Jewish cemetery at all? They had already asked. All depended. If she wanted to be buried where her parents were buried, in a cemetery administered by the Orthodox, Treslove would probably be refused the right to be buried next to her. If, however . . . So many complications when you took up with a Jew, as Tyler had discovered. It was a shame she wasn’t still here to ask. ‘In the matter of sleeping-over rights, Tyler . . . ?’

Libor and Malkie had wanted to be buried in the same grave, one above the other, but there had been objections to that, as there were objections to everything, in death as in life, though no one was sure whether on religious grounds or simply because the earth was too stony to take a grave deep enough for two. And anyway, Malkie had joked, they would only end up fighting over who was to be on top. So they lay democratically, side by side, in their decorous Queen-size bed.

Hephzibah signalled that she and the family were leaving. She looked rather wonderful, Treslove thought, in veiled, shawled black, like a Victorian widow. A majestic relict. Treslove motioned that they would stay a little. The two men took each other’s arms. Treslove was grateful for the support. He thought his legs would give way beneath him. He was not framed for cemeteries. They spoke too vividly to him of the end of love.

Had he looked around he would have been struck by the lack of statuary eloquence. A Jewish cemetery is a blank, mute place. As though by the time one reaches here there is nothing further to be said. But he kept his eyes to the ground, hoping to see nothing.