The Finkler Question (7 page)

He could tell she couldn’t figure out what he was showing her. When he presented his bald head to Malkie she would polish it with her sleeve.

It used to excite her. Not just the head but the act of polishing it.

They had furnished their apartment in the style of Biedermeier. Libor’s taste not Malkie’s (though Malkie had Biedermeier blood in her veins), but she had humoured the aspiring European petit bourgeois in him. ‘Reminds me of our escritoire,’ she would tell him. ‘It responds in the same way to a good buffing.’

It amused him to be her furniture. ‘You can open my drawers whenever you like,’ he would say. And she would laugh and cuff him with her sleeve. At the end they had talked dirty to each other. It was their defence against pathos.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told the girl, folding his napkin. ‘This isn’t fair to you.’

He signalled to the waiter before remembering his manners. ‘You don’t want a dessert do you, Emily?’ he asked. He was pleased he could recall her name.

She shook her head.

He paid the bill.

She was as relieved as he was when they parted.

2

‘I could use the company but I can’t go through the pain of getting it,’ he told Treslove on the phone.

It was a week after they had dined together. Treslove hadn’t told Libor about the attack. Why worry him? Why make Libor afraid of his own neighbourhood?

Not that Libor was the one who needed protecting. Treslove marvelled at his courage – dressing himself up, going out on a date, making small talk. He pictured him in his David Niven outfit, fine white polo neck jumper worn under a blue blazer with faux military buttons. Most men Libor’s age wore lovat jackets, the colour of sick, and trousers that were too short for them. This had always bemused and worried Treslove. At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them. Explain that.

But not Libor. Or at least not Libor when he was got up to meet a friend, or a woman. He was still the Mittel European dandy. Only on the telephone did he sound his age. It was as though the telephone filtered out everything that wasn’t of the voice alone – the comedy, the bravado, the dancing hands. An old torn tissue-paper larynx was all that was left. Treslove knew to picture Libor in the flesh when he spoke to him on the phone, spruce in his polo neck, but the sound still depressed him. He heard a dead man speaking.

‘I bet it wasn’t as painful as you’re pretending,’ he said.

‘You weren’t there. On top of that it wasn’t decent.’

‘Why, what did you do?’

‘I mean proper.’

‘Why, what did you do?’

‘I mean it was wrong of me to agree to meet her. I was there under false pretences. I don’t want to be with another woman. I can’t look at another woman without making the comparison.’

When Malkie was alive Libor carried her photograph in his wallet. Now that she was gone, he had her on his mobile phone. While he rarely used his phone as a phone – he found it hard to read the keyboard – he consulted her image a hundred times a day, flipping and unflipping the lid in the middle of a conversation. A ghost that never left him, gifted by technology. Gifted by Finkler, to be precise, since he was the one who had set it up for him.

Libor had showed the screen to Treslove, Malkie not as she was at the end of her life, but as she had looked at the beginning of her time with Libor. Her eyes smiling and wicked, appreciative, adoring, and slightly blurred, as though seen through a mist – unless that was a mist clouding Treslove’s vision.

Treslove imagined Libor opening his phone and looking at Malkie under the table, even as his date asked him his star sign and his favourite band.

‘I bet the girl had a ball with you,’ Treslove said.

‘Trust me, she didn’t. I have sent her flowers to apologise.’

‘Libor, that will just make her think you want to go on.’

‘Ech, you English! You see a flower and you think you’ve been proposed to. Trust me, she won’t. I enclosed a handwritten note.’

‘You weren’t rude to her.’

‘Of course not. I just wanted her to see how shaky my handwriting was.’

‘She may have taken that as proof she excited you.’

‘She won’t have. I told her I was impotent.’

‘Did you have to be so personal?’

‘That was to stop it being personal. I didn’t say
she
had made me impotent.’

Treslove was embarrassed by potency talk. And not just because he’d recently been divested of his manliness by a woman. He had not been brought up, as Finkler men evidently were, to discuss matters of a sexual nature with someone with whom he was not having sex.

‘Anyway –’ he said.

But Libor didn’t detect his embarrassment. ‘I am not in fact impotent,’ he went on, ‘though I’m reminded of a time when I was. It was Malkie’s doing. Did I ever tell you she met Horowitz?’

Treslove wondered what was coming. ‘You didn’t,’ he said tentatively, not wanting to be thought to be leading Libor on.

‘Well, she did. Twice in fact. Once in London and once in New York. At Carnegie Hall. He invited her backstage. “Maestro”, she called him. “Thank you, Maestro,” she said and he kissed her hand. His own hands, she told me, were icy cold. I’ve always been jealous of that.’

‘His icy hands?’

‘No, her calling him Maestro. Do you think that’s strange?’

Treslove thought about it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. A man doesn’t want the woman he loves calling other men Maestro.’

‘But why not? He
was
a maestro. It’s funny. I wasn’t in competition with him. I’m no maestro. But for three months after I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get it up. Couldn’t rise to the challenge.’

‘Yes, that is funny,’ Treslove said.

Sometimes even a Finkler as reverend and aged as Libor could make him feel like a Benedictine monk.

‘The power of words,’ Libor went on. ‘
Maestro
– she calls him
Maestro
and I might as well not have a pecker. But listen, do you want to go out somewhere to eat tonight?’

Twice in one week! It wasn’t that long ago that they hadn’t seen each other twice in a year. And even now that widowerhood had rebonded them they were not seeing each other twice in a month. Were things as bad as that for Libor?

‘I can’t,’ Treslove said. He was unable to tell his friend the truth: that the reason he couldn’t come out was that he had a black eye, maybe a broken nose and was still unsteady on his legs. ‘I have things I must do.’

‘What things?’ Nearing ninety, you could ask such questions.

‘
Things
, Libor.’

‘I know you. You never say “things” if you really have things to do. You always name them. Something’s the matter.’

‘You’re right, I don’t have things to do. And that’s what’s the matter.’

‘Then let’s go eat.’

‘Can’t face it, Libor. Sorry.
I need to be alone
.’

The reference was to the title of Libor’s most famous show-business book. An unofficial biography of Greta Garbo with whom Libor was once rumoured to have had an affair.

‘With Garbo?’ Libor exclaimed when Treslove once asked him whether it was true. ‘Impossible. She was gone sixty when I met her. And she looked German.’

‘So?’

‘So sixty was too old for me. Sixty is still too old for me.’

‘That’s not what I was querying. I was querying her looking German.’

‘Julian, I stared deep into her eyes. As I’m staring into yours now. Trust me – they were the eyes of a Teuton. It was like looking into the wastes of the frozen North.’

‘Libor, you come from a cold place yourself.’

‘Prague is hot. Only the pavements and the Vltava are cold.’

‘Even so, I don’t see why that should have been a problem. Come on – Greta Garbo!’

‘Only a problem had I been contemplating an affair with her. Or she with me.’

‘You absolutely could not contemplate having an affair with someone who looked German?’

‘I could contemplate it. I couldn’t do it.’

‘Not even Marlene Dietrich?’

‘Especially not her.’

‘Why not?’

Libor had hesitated, scrutinising his old pupil’s face. ‘Some things you don’t do,’ he said. ‘And besides, I was in love with Malkie.’

Treslove had made a mental note.
Some things you don’t do.
Would he ever get to the bottom of the things Finklers did and didn’t do? Such conversational indelicacy one moment, such scrupulousness as to the ethno-erotic niceties the next.

Over the phone, this time, Libor ignored the allusion. ‘One day you will regret needing to be alone, Julian, when you have no choice.’

‘I regret it now.’

‘Then come out and play. It’s you or someone who wants to know my star sign.’

‘Libor,
I
want to know your star sign. Just not tonight.’

He felt guilty. You don’t refuse the desperation of a lonely impotent old man.

But he had his own impotence to nurse.

3

Finkler, who did not dream, had a dream.

He dreamed that he was punching his father in the stomach.

His mother screamed for him to stop. But his father only laughed and shouted, ‘Harder!’

‘Los the boy allein
,’ he told his wife. Which was cod Yiddish for ‘Leave the boy alone’.

In life, when his father spoke to him in cod Yiddish, Finkler turned his back on him. Why his father, English university-educated and normally softly spoken – a man of learning and unshakeable religious conviction – had to make this spectacle of himself in his shop, throwing his hands around and yelling in a peasant tongue, Finkler couldn’t understand. Other people loved his father for these shows of Jewish excitability, but Finkler didn’t. He had to walk away.

But in the dream he didn’t walk away. In the dream he summoned all his strength and threw punch after punch into his father’s stomach.

What woke him was his father’s stomach opening. When Finkler saw the cancer swimming towards him in a sea of blood he could not go on dreaming.

He, too, was surprised when Libor rang. Like Treslove, he found it upsetting that Libor needed company twice in the same week. But he was able to be more accommodating than his friend. Perhaps because he too needed company twice in the same week.

‘Come over,’ he said. ‘I’ll order in Chinese.’

‘You speak Chinese now?’

‘Funny guy, Libor. Be here at eight.’

‘You sure you’re up for it?’

‘I’m a philosopher, I’m not sure about anything. But come. Just don’t bring the Sanhedrin with you.’

The Sanhedrin were the judges of the ancient land of Israel. Finkler wasn’t in the mood for Israyel talk. Not with Libor.

‘Not a word, I promise,’ Libor said. ‘On condition that none of your Nazi friends will be there to steal my chicken in black bean sauce. You will remember that I like chicken in black bean sauce?’

‘I don’t have Nazi friends, Libor.’

‘Whatever you call them.’

Finkler sighed. ‘There’ll be just the two of us. Come at eight. I’ll have chicken with cashew nuts.’

‘Black bean sauce.’

‘Whatever.’

He set two places, antique horn chopsticks for each of them. One of his last gifts to his wife, hitherto unused. It was risky but he risked it.

‘These are beautiful,’ Libor noted with tenderness, widower to widower.