The Finkler Question (51 page)

Treslove, wrapped in a dressing gown, paced the terrace drinking tea that was too hot for him.

There was disgrace in it. He wasn’t sure whose. Just the being part of nature, maybe. Just the not having got beyond its rising tide of blood after all these hundreds of thousands of years of trying. Or was it the city that was a disgrace? The illusion of civility it stood for? Its faceless indomitability, like the blank, mulish obstinacy of a child that wouldn’t learn its lesson? Which one had swallowed up Libor as though he had never been, and would soon swallow up the rest of them? Who was to blame?

Alternatively, the disgrace was himself, Julian Treslove, who looked like everyone and everybody but was in fact no one and nobody. He sipped his tea, scalding his tongue. Such specificity as he sought – if someone as indeterminate as he was could ever be called specific – was unnecessary. The disgrace was universal. Just to be a human animal was to be a disgrace. Life was a disgrace, an absurd disgrace, to be exceeded in disgracefulness only by death.

Hephzibah heard him get up and go outside and didn’t want to follow him. There was no longer any charm in sharing the dawn with him. You know when the person you’re living with finds life disgraceful.

She would not have been human had she not asked herself whether it was her fault. Not so much what she had done as what she had failed to do. Treslove was another in a long line of men who needed saving. Were they the only men who came to her – the lost, the floundering, the dispossessed? Or was there no other sort?

Either way their demands wearied her. Who did they think she was – America?
Give me your tired, your poor
 . . .
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore
. She looked strong and secure enough to house them, that was the problem. She looked capacious. She looked like safe harbour.

Well, Treslove, for one, had that wrong. She hadn’t saved him. Perhaps he wasn’t savable.

Much of it was about Libor, she knew that. He had still not grasped it. For reasons she didn’t understand, he appeared to blame himself. On top of which, quite simply, he missed Libor’s company. Therefore she had no business barging in and asking, ‘Anything I’ve done, honey?’ The decent thing was to leave him alone for a while. She could use the privacy herself. She too was grieving. But still she wondered and was sorry.

On top of which, the museum . . .

She was growing increasingly anxious about the opening. Not because the building would still be unfinished – that didn’t matter – but because the atmosphere was wrong. People wanted to hear less of Jews right now, not more. There are times when you open your doors, and there are times when you close them. Had there been only herself to consider, Hephzibah would have bricked the museum up.

All she could do was hope that the world would, on a whim, change its tune, that the ugly talk would somehow stop of its own accord, that a gust of fresh wind would blow clean away the deadly miasmas poisoning Jews and their endeavours.

So hope was what she did.

Head down, eyes lowered, fingers crossed.

7

Except that it wasn’t in her nature to submit passively to events. She couldn’t leave the matter where her masters, the philanthropic sponsors of the museum, wanted her to leave it. Again, she urged the badness of the timing. A postponement would be embarrassing, but not exactly unheard of. They could cite building delays. The economy. Somebody’s ill health.
Her
ill health.

That would be no lie. She wasn’t in good mental health. She was reading what it did her no good to read – the wild proliferation of conspiracy theory, Jews planning 9/11, Jews bringing down the banks, Jews poisoning the world with pornography, Jews harvesting body organs, Jews faking their own Holocaust.

Holocaust fucking Holocaust. She felt about the word Holocaust as she felt about the word anti-Semite – she cursed those who reduced her to wearing it out. But what to do? There was blackmail in the wind. Shut up about your fucking Holocaust, they were saying, or we will deny it ever happened. Which meant she couldn’t shut up about it.

The Holocaust had become negotiable. She had recently run into her ex-husband – not Abe the attorney, but Ben the blasphemous, actor, raconteur and liar (funny how you no sooner ran into one unreliable ex-husband than you ran into another) – and had listened to him spin a hellish tale about his sleeping with a Holocaust denier and negotiating numbers in return for favours. He’d come down a million if she’d do this to him, but would want to put a million back in return for doing that to her.

‘I felt like Whatshisname,’ he told her.

‘Give me a clue.’

‘The one who had a list.’

‘Ko-Ko?’

‘Did I tell you I once played the Mikado, in Japan?’

‘A thousand times.’

‘Did I? I’m humiliated. But not him. The other list man.’

‘Schindler?’

‘Schindler, yes – only in my case I was saving those already exterminated.’

‘That’s foul, Ben,’ she had said. ‘That could be the foulest joke, no, those could be the foulest
two
jokes, I’ve ever heard.’

‘Who’s joking? That’s the way of it out there now. The Holocaust has become a commodity you trade. There’s a Spanish mayor who’s cancelled his town’s Holocaust Memorial Day because of Gaza, as though they’re somehow connected.’

‘I know. The implication being that the dead of Buchenwald only get to be memorialised if the living of Tel Aviv behave themselves. But I don’t believe you.’

‘What don’t you believe?’

‘That you slept with a Holocaust denier. Even you couldn’t have done that.’

‘I did it out of honourable motives. I hoped I might fuck her to death.’

‘Why didn’t you just strangle her without fucking her?’

‘I’m Jewish.’

‘It’s allowed with Holocaust deniers. It’s more than allowed, it’s obligatory. The Eleventh Commandment – Thou shalt wring the necks of all deniers for denial is an abomination.’

‘Probably is, but I also wanted to reform her. Like with hookers. You know me –’

‘Still soft hearted –’

He’d have kissed her had she let him.

‘Still soft-hearted,’ he said.

‘And did you?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Reform her.’

‘No, but I got her up to 3 million.’

‘What did you have to do for that?’

‘Don’t ask.’

She didn’t tell her bosses the Ben story. You never knew what a Jew was or was not going to find funny.

As for the Museum, it would open when they wanted it to open. You couldn’t run scared. Not in the twenty-first century. Not in St John’s Wood.

THIRTEEN

1

On mornings when the disgrace was too great to bear, and too insulting for poor Hephzibah to have to witness, Treslove put on a coat, left the apartment and walked through the park to Libor’s place. He still called it Libor’s place. There was no fancy in this. He didn’t expect that he would see Libor at the window. But something of Libor remained harboured there, as he feared that something of his own disgrace still lingered on Hephzibah’s terrace though in actual person he had left it.

At this time, Regent’s Park was the property of joggers, dog owners and geese. The fowl all had their hour. In the early morning the geese were in possession, taking to the dry land with their beaks, pecking at the earth for what was theirs. Later on it would be the herons’ turn, and then the swans’ and then the ducks’. It would have been good, Treslove thought, had humans learned to apportion their lives similarly. Never mind fighting over land, simply parcel out the days. Muslims in the morning, Gentiles in the afternoon, Jews at night. Or some other ordering. It didn’t matter who got when, only that they all got a part.

The park was the biggest outdoor space for thinking in London, bigger even than Hampstead where too many thinkers jostled with you for thought room. Some mornings Treslove believed he was the only person in the entire park thinking – simply thinking, not thinking while running, or thinking while walking a dog, but doing nothing but thinking. He would send his thoughts out at one end of the park and meet them again at the other, borne along by the otherwise unoccupied trees – as telegraph poles transmit the human voice. The same thoughts which he’d brought into the park waiting for him as he left it.

It was not purposeful thinking, it was just thinking. Reliving himself. Thinking meaning existing in his head.

And what then did these mornings of free, unimpeded thinking amount to?

Nothing.

Zero.

Gornisht
.

He’d had a fancy when he’d first taken up with Hephzibah that they would walk together to the lake, sit on a bench for half an hour, watch the herons, talk about Jews and Nature – why the Bible was so light in natural description, why even Paradise was sketchy in the matter of vegetation etc. – and wait for Libor to join them. Whereupon, after much exchange of kisses, Hephzibah would leave to go to the museum and Libor and Treslove would stroll together arm in arm like a pair of elderly Austro-Hungarian gentlemen, swapping anecdotes in a Yiddish in which Treslove would by then have become wonderfully proficient. Later they would sit again on a bench by the lake and Libor would explain why Jews were so expert at living in the city. Treslove had lived in the metropolis all his life but did not ‘exude’ it as Libor did. As the geese were to Regent’s Park lake, so was Libor to the streets around it. And yet he hadn’t even been born here and mispronounced half the English words he used. Treslove not only wanted that skill explained, he wanted to be told how it could be acquired.

If this fancy was idle, only circumstance had made it so. Hephzibah being busy, Treslove being forgetful, the weather being inclement, and Libor being unwilling, unable and eventually vanishing from Treslove’s life like an unheeded ghost. But he, Treslove, had wanted it intensely. It was to be a way of living. Not a path to a new way of living, though he saw himself emerging from it as a different person, but the new life itself. This is what it would consist of – the walks with Hephzibah and Libor in their demi-Eden, however unappreciated from the point of view of nature, a Jew on each arm and a Jew, of sorts, in the middle.

Well, the symmetry was broken now. But in truth it had only ever been Treslove’s idea and no one else’s. Only Treslove was looking for a way out or a way in. Libor had taken his. And Hephzibah had been happy where she was until Treslove had turned up to idealise her into misery.

So every walk in the park was now a memorial walk to the new life that had not materialised. Anyone observing him – though no one did observe him, because dog walkers care only for what’s at the end of their leads and joggers care only for their heartbeat – would have taken him to be a man in mourning.

What they would not have known was how much and how many he was in mourning for.

What it was on this particular day that made him return to the park after he had completed his pilgrimage to Libor’s – what made this day different from all other days – he couldn’t have said. He had followed his usual course, rubbing at the itch of memory, coming out at the gate closest to Libor’s apartment, where he would stand and look up for half an hour, identifying the windows with the rooms behind them, and the rooms with what he had done or seen in them: Malkie playing Schubert, the countless animated dinner parties, Libor’s heavy furniture, Libor’s initialled bedroom slippers, Libor and Finkler jousting over Isrrrae, seeing Hephzibah for the first time – ‘Call me Juno if it would be easier for you’. He had only happy memories of Libor’s apartment, no matter that he had shed many a tear there and been mugged a few hundred yards from it, for that, too, was a happy memory in that it had led more or less directly to Hephzibah.

What he would normally do then was walk briskly past the BBC, that rathole of a place of which he had not a single happy memory, linger a little outside the window of J. P. Guivier, breathe in the cigar smells that still clung to the brickwork of the street in which his father had had his shop, stop for coffee, indulge a little melancholy for the hell of it – too much time on his hands, that was the problem, too much waiting for whatever it was to happen – and eventually go home in a taxi. But today, the weather being more inviting than it had been for weeks, with great puffball clouds tumbling through the sky, he took twice the time to do all these things, decided he would have an expiatory lunch in the salt-beef bar where he had violated Libor’s hearing, and then that he would return to the park and walk home slowly the way he had come. By mid-afternoon he was tired and surprised himself by snoozing on a bench like an old tramp. He woke with a neck ache, his chin bobbing on his chest. He had taken a circuitous route back, deliberately not hurrying, through a wilder stretch of park. He didn’t normally like it here. It didn’t feel like London, or it felt like the wrong London. It smelt of trouble, though all that ever happened was that Brazilian boys played thirty-a-side football against Polish boys and made a lot of noise.