The Finkler Question (33 page)

It was a password to madness. Jew. One little word with no hiding place for reason in it. Say ‘Jew’ and it was like throwing a bomb.

Had Immanuel been boasting of his Jewishness? And if he had, why had he? To pay him, Finkler, back? To express his disappointment in him?
My father might be ashamed to be a Jew but I as sure as fuck am not
. Whereupon
whack
!

It all came back to
him
. Whichever way he looked at it, he was to blame. Bad husband, bad father, bad example, bad Jew – in which case, bad philosopher as well.

But this was no better than superstition, was it? He was a prin-cipled amoralist. What you did you did, and there was no retributive force out there holding you to account. Yes, there was material cause and effect. You drove badly, you had a crash. But there was no moral cause and effect. Your son did not get blinded by an anti-Semite because you took mistresses, or because you did not take the threat of anti-Semitism as seriously as some of your more hysterical fellow Jews believed you should.

Or did he?

This was not the first time, Finkler remembered, that mistresses had destabilised the workings of his highly rational mind. Take a mistress and you have a car crash. Finkler did not of course believe that. Except in the material cause-and-effect sense. Take a mistress and have her give you a blow job while you’re driving down the M40 and your car might well spin out of control. That’s not morality, it’s concentration. So why, when he was out driving with a mistress, did he feel a little less safe than when he was out driving with his wife? Men and women were not fashioned, he believed, to live monogamously. It was no crime against nature to sleep with more than one woman. It was a crime against aesthetics, maybe, to be out on the town with Ronit Kravitz’s vertiginous décolletage when he had an elegant wife waiting for him at home, but no payment was ever exacted by God or society for a crime against aesthetics. So whence his apprehension?

Yet apprehensive he always was, whenever he committed one of those sexual crimes which in his eyes were no crime. The car would crash. The hotel would burn down. And yes – for it was as primitive as this – his dick would fall off.

He could explain it. Terror pre-dated reason. Even in a scientific age men retained some of that prehistoric ignorance of which irrational fear was the child. That Finkler understood the causes and consequences of events made not a jot of difference. The sun might still not rise one morning because of something he had done or some ritual he had left unobserved. He was afraid, as a man born half a million years before him would have been afraid, that he had disobeyed the ordinances of the gods and they had visited their vengeance on his son.

He arrived at Immanuel’s lodgings sometime after one o’clock in the morning. There was no one in. He tried the phone again but the line was still engaged. Blaise, too, was not answering. He directed the driver to the Cowley Road where Blaise lived. The lights were on in her front room. Finkler knocked, needlessly, at her window. Someone he didn’t recognise drew the curtains back, then Blaise showed her face. She appeared astonished to see him.

‘This wasn’t necessary,’ she said, letting him in. ‘I said he’s OK.’

‘Is he here?’

‘Yes, he’s lying down on my bed.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘I’ve said. He’s fine.’

‘Let me see him.’

He found his son sitting up on Blaise’s bed reading a celebrity magazine and drinking rum and Coke. He had a plaster on his cheek and his arm was in a home-made sling. Otherwise he looked perfectly well.

‘Oops,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, “oops”?’

‘Oops as in oops-a-daisy. It’s what you used to say when one of us fell over.’

‘So you fell over, did you?’

‘I did, eventually, yes.’

‘What do you mean, “eventually”?’

‘Dad, are you going to keep asking me what I mean?’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘There’s a prior question, Dad.’

‘What’s that?’

‘How are you, Immanuel?’

‘I’m sorry. How are you, Immanuel?’

‘I’m reasonably OK, thank you, Dad. As you can see. There was a kerfuffle, that was what happened. Outside the Union. There’d been a debate –
This house believes that Israel has forfeited its right to exist
, or something along those lines. I was surprised, actually, that you hadn’t been invited to speak.’

So was Finkler, now that he’d come to hear of it.

‘And . . .’

‘And you know what these things are like. Tempers got a little frayed. Words were exchanged, and the next thing fists were flying.’

‘Are you hurt?’

Immanuel shrugged. ‘My arm hurts, but I doubt it’s broken.’

‘You haven’t been to the hospital?’

‘No need.’

‘Have you spoken to the police?’

‘The police have spoken to me.’

‘Have they charged anyone?’

‘Yes. Me.’

‘You!’

‘Well, they’re thinking about it, anyway. Depends on the other guys.’

‘Why would they think of charging you? Has the world gone mad?’

At that moment Blaise came into the room with coffee for them all. Finkler looked at her in wild alarm.

‘I was there,’ she said. ‘Your mad son started it.’

‘How do you mean “started it”?’

‘This is not an oral examination, Dad,’ Immanuel said from the bed. He had gone back to reading his magazine. Let his father and his sister sort it out. Her fault for calling him in the first place.

‘Blaise, you told me there’d been an anti-Semitic incident. How do you
start
with anti-Semites? Do you jump up and down and say “I’m a Jew, come and get me”?’

‘He didn’t have a go at anti-Semites. You have it the wrong way round.’

‘What are you saying, the wrong way round?’

‘They were Jews.’

‘Who were Jews?’

‘The people he picked a fight with.’

‘Immanuel picked a fight with Jews?’

‘They were Zionists. The real meshuggeners with black hats and fringes. Like settlers.’

‘Settlers? In Oxford?’

‘Settler types.’

‘And he picked a fight with them? What did he say?’

‘Nothing much. He accused them of stealing someone else’s country . . .’

She paused.

‘And?’

‘And practising apartheid . . .’

‘And?’

‘And slaughtering women and children.’

‘And?’

‘There is no and. That’s all.’

‘That’s all? That’s all he said? Immanuel, you said all this?’

Immanuel looked up. He reminded Finkler of his late wife, challenging him. He had that same expression of ironic unillusionedness that comes with knowing a person too well. ‘Yes, that’s what I said. It’s true, isn’t it? You’ve said as much yourself.’

‘Not specifically, to a person, Immanuel. It’s one thing to iterate a general political truth, it’s another thing to pick a fight with a person in the street.’

‘Well, I’m not a philosopher, Dad. I don’t iterate general political truths. I just told them all what I thought of them and their shitty little country and called one of them, who came up to me, a racist.’

‘A racist? What had he said to you?’

‘Nothing. It wasn’t about him. I was talking about his country.’

‘Was he an Israeli?’

‘How do I know? He wore a black hat. He was there to oppose the motion.’

‘Did that make him a racist?’

‘Well, what would you call it?’

‘I can think of other words.’

‘I can think of other words, too. But we weren’t playing Scrabble.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘And then I knocked his hat off.’

‘You knocked a Jew’s hat off.’

‘Is that so terrible?’

‘Jesus Christ, of course it’s so terrible. You don’t do that to anyone, least of all a Jew.’

‘Least of all a Jew! What? Are we a protected species now or something? These are people who bulldoze Palestinian villages. What’s a hat?’

‘Did you hurt him?’

‘Not enough.’

‘This is a racist assault, Immanuel.’

‘Dad, how can it be a racist assault when they’re the racists?’

‘I’m not even going to answer that.’

‘Do I look like a racist? Look at me.’

‘You look like a fucking little anti-Semite.’

‘How can I be an anti-Semite? I’m a Jew.’

Finkler looked at Blaise. ‘How long has this shit been going on?’ he asked.

‘How long has he been a fucking little anti-Semite? It comes and goes, depending on what he’s been reading.’

‘Are you telling me this is my fault? He won’t have got any of this racist/apartheid crap from me. I don’t go there.’

Blaise met his stare evenly. In her eyes, too, he saw his avenging wife.

‘No, I’m not telling you that. I doubt he reads a word you write, actually. But there are plenty of other people he can read.’

‘I also have a mind of my own,’ Immanuel said.

‘I doubt that,’ Finkler said. ‘I doubt you can call what you’ve got a mind at all.’

Had he known how to do such a thing, and had he not made a solemn promise to Tyler, he would have pulled his son off the bed and broken his other arm.

2

As Assistant Curator of the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture, Julian  Treslove did not exactly have too much on his plate. It would be different  when it was up and running, Hephzibah assured him, but in these early stages it was all about architects and electricians. The best Treslove could do for the museum, and for her, was ruminate. Think of who and what else they should be honouring. A suggestion which she no sooner made than she regretted. It wasn’t fair to him. Jews might have been possessed of a crowded almanac of Jewish event, a Jewish Who’s Who extending back to the first man and woman, but Treslove couldn’t be expected to know in every instance Who Was and Who Was Not, Who Had Changed His Name, Who Had Married In or Out. What is more he would have no instinct for it. Some things you cannot acquire. You have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi.

The museum was housed in a high-Victorian Gothic mansion built on the design of a Rhineland fortress. It had pointed gables, mock castellations, fantasy chimneys and even a rampart you couldn’t get out on to. To the side was a pretty garden in which Hephzibah imagined they would one day serve teas.

‘Jewish teas?’ Libor had asked.

‘What’s a Jewish tea?’ Treslove wondered.

‘It’s like an English tea only there’s twice as much of it.’

‘Libor!’ Hephzibah scolded him.

But the idea of serving specifically Jewish afternoon teas appealed to Treslove who had learned to call cakes
kuchen
, and crêpes stuffed with cream or jam
blintzes
.

‘Let me write the menu,’ he said. And Hephzibah agreed he could.

His only worry was that the location of the museum would prohibit the sort of passing trade you needed for a successful tea garden, or for a museum, come to that. It was only a short walk from the Beatles’ old studios but it wasn’t a walk you would naturally take. Parking would not be easy. There were yellow lines everywhere, and because of the slight incline in the road on which the Rhineland fortress had been built buses laboured at that very spot, distracting motorists who might have been searching for the museum. Plus there were overhanging trees.