The Finkler Question (36 page)

‘Then you get a stick with a blade in it.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Treslove said, ‘where do you stand on circumcision?’

‘Uncomfortably,’ Libor said.

‘Has it been a problem to you?’

‘It would have been a problem to me had it been a problem to Malkie. But she never said anything. Should she have?’

‘It hasn’t stopped you enjoying sex?’

‘I think what you carry around would have stopped me enjoying sex. Don’t get me wrong – on you I’m sure it looks wonderful, but on me it wouldn’t have looked so good. Aesthetically I have nothing to complain about. I look the way I’m supposed to look. Or I did. It is aesthetics we’re talking?’

‘No, not really. I’ve been reading that circumcision reduces sexual excitation. I’m canvassing opinion.’

‘Well, it will certainly reduce yours if you decide to have it done at your age. As for me, I have never known any different. And I’ve never thought to complain. To be candid with you, I wouldn’t have wanted to be any more sexually excited than I’ve been. It’s been plenty, thank you. In fact, more than enough. Does that answer your question?’

‘Yes, I suppose it does.’

‘You only suppose it does?’ He saw Treslove looking at him narrowly. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘What am I thinking?’

‘You’re thinking I protest too loudly. Had I not been circumcised, you’re thinking, I wouldn’t have found it so easy to resist Marlene Dietrich. You’re too polite to say so but you’re wondering whether it was only God’s covenant with Abraham that kept me away from the Hun.’

‘Well, you have always claimed you were the most faithful of husbands, despite facing temptations most men can’t begin to comprehend . . .’

‘And you’re asking if it was having a desensitised penis that kept me faithful?’

‘I would never put it so grossly, Libor.’

‘Except that you just have.’

‘Forgive me.’

Libor sat back in his chair and rubbed his head. A melancholy smile from somewhere very far away lit up his face. An old smile.

‘This is my own fault,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ve been too anxious to promote a particular view of myself, and perhaps you’ve been too ready to believe it. I ask this one favour of you: in the report you give of me when I am gone, speak of me as a loving husband but don’t make me too chaste. Allow me at least one errant little fuck.’

‘Regarding that errant little fuck,’ he said before he left. He wanted Treslove to understand that he’d been thinking and worrying about what he’d said.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s for Malkie, too, I ask it.’

Treslove blushed. ‘Are you telling me that Malkie . . . ?’

‘No, not that I would ever know or want to know. I mean it’s her reputation, too, I ask you to protect. A woman shouldn’t be married to a totally faithful man all her life.’

‘Why not?’

‘It demeans her.’

Treslove blushed again, this time for himself. ‘I don’t understand that, Libor,’ he said.

Libor kissed his cheek and said no more.

But Treslove read his silence. ‘You don’t understand because you’re not one of us,’ he read.

4

As a rule, Hephzibah took a shower the moment she returned home from the museum. It was still something of a building site over there and she was unable to relax until she had washed the dust and the grime from her. She would shout to Treslove to let him know she was home, and either he would pour a glass of wine for them both – she liked the gesture of his pouring for her but she rarely touched a drop – or, if he was more Priapus than Bacchus that evening, he would join her in the shower.

It wasn’t always what she wanted. A shower was a private place to Hephzibah, not least as she took up most of the available room in it. But she was careful not to rebuff Treslove’s ardour, and was sometimes grateful for the massage he would give her when it became plain that she was looking for nothing else.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she would say, and he enjoyed feeling her back relax under his fingers in the hot spray.

There was something about the way she pronounced the word ‘good’, in reference to whatever he was doing to her – whether in the phrase ‘Oh, that’s good’, or ‘Oh, that’s so good’, or ‘That’s good of you’ or ‘You’re very good to do that’ – that made Treslove feel he had found his niche as a man.

As a man?

Well, he knew that she was always just a fraction away from saying, as he was just a fraction away from hearing, ‘Who’s a good boy?’ A rhetorical question beloved of dogs and children. He made no bones about this to himself. She ran the show, and he was happy with the arrangement. But it wasn’t only the mother or the dog walker that he looked up to in her. It was – not to allow this to become too fanciful – the creative Jewish force: if you like, the Creator herself.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good
.

Good
in that sense was what Treslove heard when Hephzibah praised his efforts.
Good
meaning more than good –
good
meaning congruent, perfected, harmonious.

Good
as an expression of the absolute rightness of the universe.

He had been a man of misadventures and now he was a man of congeniality. Everything fitted. He was a good man in a good world. With a good woman.

What was good about her kept changing the longer he was with her. He had thought of it as a Finkler thing at first. A matter of fecundity, though not in the offspring sense. A fecundity of affection and loyalty, a fecundity of friends and family, a fecundity of past and future. Alone, Treslove felt himself spinning pointlessly around the universe like a fragment of a forgotten planet. Hephzibah was his firmament. His Finkler firmament. He had a place in her. He felt populous in her orbit.

Whether this was, after all, a Finkler thing he didn’t know. Drop the Finkler, then. What she was to him was
humanly
important, whatever that meant. And he idolised her for it. The sun did not shine out of her, the sun
was
her.

So go tell him he wasn’t Jewish.

And then one evening she came home, sat down at the kitchen table, not only asked him for a drink but drank it, and burst into tears.

He went to put his arms around her but she gestured him away.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

She covered her face and shook, though whether it was with grief or laughter he couldn’t tell.

‘Hep, what is it?’

When she showed him her face he still couldn’t tell if something too terrible to express had happened, or something laughable beyond words.

She collected herself, requested another glass of wine – the wine really did disturb him: two glasses of wine was for Hephzibah a year’s ration – and told him.

‘You know the oak doors that have just been fitted? Perhaps you don’t. They’re the external doors to the side entrance. To where your tea rooms will eventually be. I showed you photographs of the brass handles which we’ve had made to resemble shofars – rams’ horns – remember? Right, well, don’t get a shock, but they’ve been defaced. It must have happened while I was inside with the architect late this afternoon because they were fine when I popped out for lunch, but when I left the building tonight, there it was, or rather there
they
were. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Julian, why would anyone do that? Why?’

Swastikas, Treslove thought. He had read about the swastikas reappearing everywhere. He had told Finkler about them and Finkler had said ring me back when they’re killing Jews in the streets again. Fucking swastikas!

‘So what were they?’ he asked. ‘Painted on?’

He dreaded hearing blood. Blood and faeces were favourite. Blood and faeces and sperm. Hephzibah had already received a couple of letters written in blood and shit.

‘I haven’t finished telling you.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘It was bacon.’

‘It was what?’

‘It was bacon. They – I’m assuming
they
– had wrapped rashers of bacon around the handles. Two or three packets of them – so no expense spared.’

She seemed about to cry again.

He went over to her, determinedly this time. ‘That’s terrible,’ he said. ‘How vile!’

She shook behind her hands.

He put his arms around her. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘who are these people? It makes you want to kill them.’

It was then he realised she was laughing.

‘It’s only bacon,’ she said.

‘Only bacon?’

‘I’m not saying it’s nice. You’re right, it’s vile. The desire to do it is vile. But it’s such a feeble gesture. What do they think we’re going to do? Pack up and go home? Scrap the plans because of a few rashers of bacon? Sell the site? Leave the country? It’s too absurd. You have to see the funny side.’

Treslove tried. ‘I suppose you do,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’re quite right. It’s laughable.’ And he tried a laugh as well.

Hephzibah dried her tears. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘it makes you wonder what’s going on out there. You read things like this happening in Berlin in the twenties and you think why didn’t they read the signs and get out.’

‘Perhaps because they never really believed them,’ Treslove said. ‘Perhaps because they tried to see the funny side.’

He had turned solemn again.

Hephzibah sighed. ‘In St John’s Wood,’ she said, ‘of all places.’

‘Nowhere’s safe now,’ Treslove said, remembering what had been done to him, virtually on the doorstep of the BBC.

You Ju
.

They both fell silent, each picturing the hordes of anti-Semites marauding through the West End of London.

Then Hephzibah began to laugh. She saw the rashers of bacon wrapped painstakingly around the ram-horn handles. And the plugs of meat and fat, which she hadn’t got round to telling him about, stuffed into the keyholes of the doors. She imagined the vandals going into Marks & Spencer and buying what they needed, paying at the till, perhaps using a reward card, and then, like vigilantes, vigilantes armed with bacon, the greatest defilement they could conceive, descending on the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture, which didn’t have signs up yet, and so which strictly couldn’t even be said to exist.

‘It isn’t just their overestimation of our horror of the pig,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘I’m sure, for example, they don’t know how much I love a bacon sandwich, but it isn’t only that, it’s their exaggeration of our presence. They find us before we find ourselves. Nowhere is safe from them because they think nowhere is safe from us.’

Treslove couldn’t keep up with the fluctuations of her feelings. She wasn’t, he realised, going from fear to amusement and back again, she was experiencing both emotions simultaneously. It wasn’t even a matter of reconciling opposites because they were not opposites for her. Each partook of the other.

He didn’t know how to do what she did. He didn’t possess the emotional flexibility. And wasn’t sure he wanted to. Wasn’t there an irresponsibilty in it? It was as though he were to laugh at the moment Violetta dies in Alfredo’s arms. A thought he found unthinkable even as he tried to think it.

Not for the first time in recent days, Treslove felt he’d failed a test.

NINE

1

Libor’s mind was turning fetid. That was his own verdict.

In the first months following Malkie’s death he had found the melancholy of his mornings unbearable. He woke hoping to discover her. He imagined he saw the sheets stir on her side of the bed. He spoke to her. He opened her wardrobe doors and imagined helping her to choose clothes. If he put an outfit together in his mind, perhaps she would emerge in it.