The Finkler Question (32 page)

‘Museums in general, you mean?’

‘Jewish museums. Everywhere you go now, every town, every shtetl, you find a Holocaust museum. Do we need a Holocaust museum in Stevenage or Letchworth?’

‘I’d be surprised if you’d find a Holocaust museum in Letchworth. But this isn’t a Holocaust museum anyway. It’s a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture.’

Finkler laughed. ‘Is there any? Will it mention our being thrown out in 1290?’

‘Of course. And of our being welcomed back in in 1655.’

Finkler shrugged, as though to an audience who already believed what he believed. ‘Same old, same old,’ he said. ‘You’ll get to the Holocaust in the end, if only under the heading “British Attitudes To”. You’ll stick up photographs of the gas ovens, you mark my word. Jewish museums always do. What I want to know, if we must have suffering, is why we can’t at least change the track from time to time. What about a Museum of the Russian Pogrom? Or a Museum of the Babylonian Exile? Or, in your case, since you already have the site, a Museum of All the Nasty Things the English Have Ever Done to Us?’

‘The brief is not to bring up English nastiness,’ Hephzibah said.

‘I’m glad of it.’

‘Nor,’ Treslove chimed in, ‘is it to bring up anybody else’s. Our museum won’t so much as mention the Holocaust.’

Finkler stared at him.
Our!
Who asked you?
his expression said.

Libor stirred in his chair. In an inconsequent but oracular voice, he said, ‘The grandson of a friend of mine has just been blinded.’

Finkler wasn’t sure what to do with his face. Was this some sort of a wind-up?
So?
was what he wanted to ask.
So how does that bear upon our conversation?

‘Oh, Libor, who?’ Hephzibah asked.

‘You don’t know the grandson, you don’t know the grandmother.’

‘Well, what happened?’

So Libor told them, leaving out the information that in another age he and Emmy had been lovers.

‘And this,’ Finkler said, ‘you adduce as reason for there to be a Holocaust museum in every parish in the country.’

‘I notice you say
parish
,’ Treslove said. ‘Your satire acknowledges an incongruity that is only to be explained by Christianity’s inhospitability to Jews.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Julian. My satire, as you call it, acknowledges no such thing. I see Libor is upset. I mean no disrespect to his feelings. But the actions of one deranged person don’t justify us wringing our hands and claiming the Nazis are back.’

‘No, and nor do I claim any such thing,’ Libor said in return.

Hephzibah left the table and went over to him. She stood behind his chair and put her hands on his cheeks as though he were her little boy. Her rings were bigger than his ears. Libor leaned back into her. Hephzibah put her lips to his bald head. Treslove feared the old man was going to cry. But that might only have been because he feared
he
was going to cry.

‘I’m all right,’ Libor said. ‘I am as much upset by my own impotence as by what’s happened to my friend’s grandson whom I have never met and didn’t know existed two months ago.’

‘Well, there’s nothing you can do,’ Hephzibah said.

‘I know that. But it isn’t only the doing nothing that’s upsetting, it’s the feeling nothing.’

‘I wonder whether we feel nothing,’ Finkler said, ‘precisely because we rehearse our feelings on the subject too freely and too often.’

‘Crying Wolfowitz, you mean?’ Hephzibah said with a wild laugh.

God, I love her, Treslove thought.

‘You think we don’t?’ Finkler persisted.

‘I think we can’t.’

‘You don’t believe that too many false alarms result in no one taking any notice?’

‘When is an alarm a false alarm?’ Hephzibah persisted.

Treslove saw Finkler wondering whether to say
When our friend Julian raises it
. What he said instead was: ‘It seems to me we create a climate of unnecessary anxiety, a) by picturing ourselves forever as the victim of events, and b) by failing to understand why people might occasionally feel they have good reason to dislike us.’

‘And blind our children,’ Hephzibah said. Her hands were still on Libor’s face.

Libor put his hands up to hers, as though to deafen himself. ‘As in
anti-Semitism is perfectly comprehensible to me
,’ he said, in imitation of the empathetic film director.

‘And so around it comes,’ Hephzibah said.

Finkler shook his head as though there was nothing to be done with any of them. ‘So your Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture is a museum of the Holocaust after all,’ he said.

The
yutz
, Treslove thought. The
groisser putz
. The
shtick drek
.

Finkler and Libor sat and drank whisky while Treslove and Hephzibah washed up. Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink couldn’t take would stay on the kitchen table. Pans and crockery sufficient for a hundred guests. Treslove liked that about her. She didn’t believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn’t a price to pay for pleasure.

She didn’t leave the dishes so that
he
should do them either. She just left them. It seemed fatalistic to him. A carelessness acquired courtesy of the Cossacks. Since you don’t know where you’re going to be tomorrow, or indeed whether you’re going to be alive or dead, why worry over dishes?

But tonight she led him by the elbow into the kitchen. And neither Finkler nor Libor offered to get up and help out. It was as if each couple was giving the other space.

‘Our friend appears very happy,’ Libor said.

Finkler agreed. ‘He does. There’s a shine on him.’

‘And my niece, too. I think she’s good for him. It would seem that what he needed was a mother.’

‘Always did,’ Finkler said. ‘Always did.’

EIGHT

1

Finkler was looking forward to a few hands of online poker before bed, so he was disappointed, when he arrived home, to find a message on his answerphone from his daughter Blaise. Immanuel, the younger of his two sons, had been involved in an anti-Semitic incident. Absolutely nothing to worry about. He was perfectly OK. But Blaise wanted her father to hear it from her first, rather than from some other, possibly mischievous, source.

Over a crackling line, Finkler could not make out all the details. As he pressed the replay button it occurred to him that the message could easily be a wind-up – Julian, Libor and Hephzibah, who were still drinking when he left, teaching him a little moral lesson. See how you feel when it happens to you, Mr ASHamed Jew Philosopher. But the voice was definitely Blaise’s. And though she said there was absolutely nothing to worry about, there obviously was, otherwise why would she have rung?

He rang back but Blaise wasn’t answering. She often didn’t. Immanuel’s line was permanently engaged. Maybe the bastards had stolen his phone. He tried his other son, Jerome, but he was at a redder, more robust university than Blaise and Immanuel and was inclined to be scathing about their doings. ‘Anti-Semites massing outside Balliol? I don’t think so, Dad.’

As it was too late to call his driver, and he was too drunk to drive himself, Finkler rang a limo firm he sometimes used. Oxford, he told the operator. Right away.

He had to ask for the radio to be turned down and then turned off altogether. This so incensed the driver, who claimed he needed it on for traffic alerts, that Finkler feared he was going to be involved in an anti-Semitic incident himself. Traffic alerts! At midnight! Once they were out of London, on quieter roads, it occurred to Finkler that the real reason the driver needed the radio on was to keep him awake. ‘Maybe we should have it on after all,’ he said.

He fell prey to all manner of irrational anxiety. He had unnecessarily annoyed the person taking him to see his son. He had, for all he knew, annoyed his son, too, in any one of the thousands of ways that a father annoys his children. Had his son got into a fight with anti-Semites on his father’s behalf? Shamed or not shamed, Finkler was an eminent English Jew. You couldn’t expect racist thugs to grasp the fine distinctions of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Ha, so you’re Sam Finkler’s son are you, you little kike? Then here’s a bloody nose
.

Unless it was worse than a bloody nose.

He curled up in the corner of the Mercedes and began to cry. What would Tyler say? He felt he had let her down. She had made him promise to make the children his first priority. ‘Not your fucking career, not your Jewish mistresses with fat tits, not those weirdos you hang around with at the Groucho – your sons and daughter. Your sons and daughter, Shmuelly – promise!’

He’d promised and he meant it. At the funeral he’d put his arms around the boys and they had stood together a long time looking into Tyler’s grave, three lost men. Blaise had held herself apart from them. She was with her mother. Against all men, lost or not. The three of them had stayed with him a week, and then gone back to their universities. He wrote to them, he rang them, he invited them to launches and screenings. Some weekends he drove to Oxford, on others to Nottingham, booking himself into the best hotel he could find and treating them to slap-up dinners. He believed he had done well, morally, on those occasions, not to take a woman with him. Especially when he stayed at Raymond Blanc’s Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire, a hugger-mugger hotel-restaurant which cried out for a mistress. But a promise is a promise. He was putting his children first.

He liked his children. They reminded him, in their different ways, of his poor wife – sharp, edgy, scratchy boys, a scathing girl. None had chosen to study philosophy. He was glad of that. Blaise was a lawyer. Immanuel, more unsteady, had changed from architecture to languages and looked set to change again. Jerome was an engineer. ‘I’m proud of you,’ Finkler told him. ‘A nice non-Jewish occupation.’

‘How do you know I won’t be going over to Israel to build walls when I’m qualified?’ the boy said. But his father looked so alarmed he had to explain he was only joking.

Both the boys had girlfriends to whom, he believed, they were fastidiously faithful. Blaise was wilder and uncommitted. Like her mother. Jerome wasn’t sure he had found Miss Right yet. Immanuel thought he might have. Already, he wanted children of his own. Finkler imagined him wheeling his family around the Ashmolean, bending over their prams, explaining this and that, adoring their little bodies. The new man. He had never quite managed to be that sort of a father himself. There were too many things he had found interesting apart fom his children, apart from his wife, too, come to that. But he was trying to make amends now.

What if it was all a bit late? What if his neglect had contributed in some ways to this attack? Had he left his children vulnerable, unable to take care of themselves, insufficiently aware of danger?

And then there’d been the conversation earlier in the evening. He had listened unsympathetically to the story of a boy blinded for no other reason than that he was a Jew. Was that chancing providence? Finkler didn’t believe in the validity of such a thought, but he had it nonetheless. Had he dared the Jewish God to do His worst? And had the Jewish God decided, for the first time in however many thousands of years, to buckle up and meet the challenge? A terrible thought occurred to him: had Immanuel been blinded?

And a more terrible thought still: was it his doing?

Finkler the rationalist and gambler made a compact through his tears. If Immanuel had suffered any serious harm he would tell the ASHamed Jews where to shove it. And if he hadn’t suffered any serious harm . . . ?

Finkler didn’t know.

It made no sense to implicate ASHamed Jews in this. They were not to blame for anything. They just
were
. As anti-Semites just
were
. But you can’t play fast and loose with primal passions. He wasn’t sure, though, as he crouched in the corner of the car, willing the miles to fly by, whether it was any longer defensible even to use the word Jew in a public place. After everything that had happened, wasn’t it a word for private consumption only? Out there in the raging public world it was as a goad to every sort of violence and extremism.