The Finkler Question (8 page)

‘It’s either part with them, which I can’t bear to do, or use them. There’s no point in making a mausoleum of unused things. Tyler would have said use them.’

‘Harder to do with dresses,’ Libor said.

Finkler laughed a laughless laugh.

‘What is it about a dress a woman never got to wear?’ Libor asked. ‘You’d think it would be those that carry the memory of her shape and warmth, that still have her perfume on them, that you couldn’t bear to touch. But the unworn ones are harder.’

‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ Finkler said. ‘When you look at a dress Malkie never wore you see her alive and unworn in it herself.’

Libor appeared unconvinced. ‘That feels too backward-looking to me.’

‘We’re allowed to look back.’

‘Oh, I know that. I do nothing else. Since Malkie went I feel as though my head has been put on backwards. It’s your explanation of the sadness of unused things I find too backward-looking. When I see an unworn dress, and Malkie had so many – saving them up for special occasions that never came, some with their labels still on as though she might yet take them back to the store – I see the future time that was stolen from her. I look forwards into the life she didn’t have, the Malkie she didn’t get to be, not the Malkie she was.’

Finkler listened. Malkie was eighty when she died. How much more life could Libor imagine for her? Tyler never made it to fifty. So why couldn’t he feel what Libor felt? Though convinced he was gifted with an unenvious nature – what, when all was said and done, did he have to envy? – he was envious nonetheless, not of the longer life Malkie enjoyed, but of Libor’s range of grief. He could not, as Libor did, throw his sorrow into the future. He did not miss the Tyler who never got to be, only the Tyler who was.

He measured his husbandly worth against the older man’s. With mirth, it’s true, but also meaning it, Libor had always claimed to be the perfect husband, refusing the bed of some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. ‘Not because I’m handsome did they want me, you understand, but because I made them laugh. The more beautiful the woman, the more she needs to laugh. That’s why Jewish guys have always done so well. But for me they were easy to resist. Because I had Malkie who was more beautiful than all of them. And who made
me
laugh.’

Who knew the truth of it?

Libor told how Marilyn Monroe, desperate for laughter but notoriously confused by international time zones – in Libor’s stories all beautiful women never knew what time it was – would ring him in the dead of night. Malkie always took the phone. It was on her side of the bed. ‘Marilyn for you,’ she would say in a bored, sleepy voice, waking her husband. Fucking Marilyn again.

She never doubted his fidelity because she was so secure in it. So did that fidelity – a fidelity with no pains or deprivations in it, Libor insisted, a fidelity filled to the brim with sensual delight – explain Libor’s exemption from remorse? Guilt had become Finkler’s medium when he thought about his wife, and guilt existed only in the past. Guilt-free, assuming he told the truth, Libor was able to sorrow over the future he and Malkie, though aged, didn’t have. At any age there is future one doesn’t have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can’t take a little more. Sadness for sadness, Finkler did not know which was the more estimable, if sadness can be esteemed – feeling cheated of more of the happiness you’d enjoyed, or never having had it in the first place. But it looked better to be Libor.

And that, maybe, because it was better to have been married to Malkie. Finkler tried to dismiss this thought but could not: it takes two to create fidelity, and while he wouldn’t go so far as to say Tyler was not worthy of his, she certainly hadn’t made it easy. Was this why he didn’t feel robbed of a future life with Tyler? Because he couldn’t be sure he had one to look forward to? And whose fault was that?

‘Do you ever wonder,’ he mused as they ate, ‘whether you’re doing it all right?’

‘Grieving?’

‘No. Well, yes, but not just grieving. Everything. Do you ever wake in the morning and ask yourself if you’ve lived the best life you could have lived? Not morally. Or not only morally. Just squeezed the most out of your opportunities.’

‘I’m surprised to hear that question from you, of all people,’ Libor said. ‘I remember you as a bright pupil, right enough. But there are many bright pupils and I would never have guessed you would achieve what you have.’

‘You’re telling me I have made a little go a long way.’

‘Not at all, not at all. But to my eye you have fulfilled yourself more than most men. You’re a household name –’

Finkler, pleased, waved the compliment away. Who cared about being a household name? The flush of satisfaction in his cheeks was probably not satisfaction at all, just embarrassment.
Household name
– for God’s sake.
Household name!
How many households, he wondered, were naming him this very moment? How many households did it take to make a household name?

‘Only think of Julian,’ Libor continued, ‘and how disappointing his life must appear to him.’

Finkler did as he was told and thought about it. The two spots of colour in his cheeks, previously the size of ten-pence pieces, grew into two blazing suns.

‘Yes, Julian. But then he has always been in waiting, hasn’t he? I never waited for anything. I took. I had the Jewish thing. Like you. I had to make it quick, while there was time. But that only means that what I am capable of doing I have done, whereas Julian, well, his time might yet come.’

‘And does that scare you?’

‘Scare me how?’

‘Scare you to think he might overhaul you in the end. You were close friends, after all. Close friends don’t get over their dread of being beaten in the final straight. It’s never over till it’s over with a friend.’

‘Who are you afraid might overtake you, Libor?’

‘Ah, with me it really is over. My rivals are all long dead.’

‘Well, Julian’s not exactly breathing down my neck, is he?’

Libor surveyed him narrowly, like an old red-eyed crow watching something easy to get its beak into.

‘He’s not now likely to make it as a household name, you mean? No. But there are other yardsticks of success.’

‘God, I don’t doubt that.’ He paused to ponder Libor’s words. Other yardsticks, other yardsticks . . . But couldn’t think of any.

Libor wondered if he’d gone too far. He remembered how touchy he had been about success at Finkler’s age. He decided to change the subject, re-examining the chopsticks Finkler had bought his wife. ‘These really are lovely,’ he said.

‘She talked about collecting them, but never did. She often discussed collecting things but never got round to it. What’s the point? she’d ask. I took that as a personal affront. That our life together wasn’t worth collecting for. Could she have known what was going to happen to her, do you think? Did she
want
it to happen to her?’

Libor looked away. He was suddenly sorry he had come. He couldn’t take another man’s wife-sorrows on top of his own. ‘We can’t know those things,’ he said. ‘We can know only what we feel. And since we’re the ones who are left, only our feelings matter. Better we discuss Isrrrrae.’ He put a fourth ‘r’ in the word to irritate his friend out of pathos.

‘Libor, you promised.’

‘Anti-Semites, then. Did I make a promise not to discuss your friends the anti-Semites?’

The comedic Jewish intonation was meant as a further irritant to Finkler. Libor knew that Finkler hated Jewishisms.
Mauscheln
, he called it, the hated secret language of the Jews, the Yiddishising that drove German Jews mad in the days when they thought the Germans would love them the more for playing down their Jewishness. The lost provincial over-expressiveness of his father.

‘I don’t have friends who are anti-Semites,’ Finkler said.

Libor screwed up his face until he resembled a medieval devil. All he lacked were the horns. ‘Yes, you do. The Jewish ones.’

‘Oh, here we go, here we go. Any Jew who isn’t your kind of Jew is an anti-Semite. It’s a nonsense, Libor, to talk of Jewish anti-Semites. It’s more than a nonsense, it’s a wickedness.’

‘Don’t get
kochedik
with me for speaking the truth. How can it be a nonsense when we invented anti-Semitism?’

‘I know how this goes, Libor. Out of our own self-hatred . . .’

‘You think there’s no such thing? What do you say to St Paul, itching with a Jewishness he couldn’t scratch away until he’d turned half the world against it?’

‘I say thank you, Paul, for widening the argument.’

‘You call that widening? Strait is the gate, remember.’

‘That’s Jesus, not Paul.’

‘That’s Jesus as reported by Jews already systematically Paulised. He couldn’t take us on in the flesh so he extolled the spirit. You’re doing the same in your own way. You’re ashamed of your Jewish flesh. Have
rachmones
on yourself. Just because you’re a Jew doesn’t mean you’re a monster.’

‘I don’t think I’m a monster. I don’t even think
you’re
a monster. I’m ashamed of Jewish, no, Israyeli actions–’

‘There you are then.’

‘It’s not peculiar to Jews to dislike what some Jews do.’

‘No, but it’s peculiar to Jews to be
ashamed
of it. It’s our
shtick
. Nobody does it better. We know the weak spots. We’ve been doing it so long we know exactly where to stick the sword.’

‘You admit then there are weak spots?’

And they were away.

After Libor left, Finkler went into the bedroom and opened his late wife’s wardrobe. He had not removed her clothes. There they hung, rail after rail of them, the narrative of their life together, her lean and hungry social sharpness, his pride in her appearance, the heads that turned when they entered a room, she like a weapon at his side.

He tried for sadness. Was there something she hadn’t worn, that would break his heart for the life she had not lived? He couldn’t find a thing. When Tyler bought a dress she wore it. Everything was for now. If she bought three dresses in a day she contrived to wear three dresses in a day. To garden in, if she had to. What was there to wait for?

He breathed in her aroma, then closed the wardrobe doors, lay down on her side of the bed and wept.

But the tears were not as he wanted them to be. They were not Libor’s tears. He couldn’t forget himself in them.

After ten minutes he rose, went to his computer and logged on to online poker. In poker he could do what he couldn’t do in grief – he could forget himself.

In winning he could forget himself even more.

4

In Treslove’s dream a young girl is running towards him. She bends, in her running, barely slowing down, to take off her shoes. She is a schoolgirl in school uniform, a pleated skirt, a white blouse, a blue jumper, an untied tie. Her shoes impede her. She bends in her running to take them off so that she can run faster, freer, in her grey school socks.

It is an analytic dream. In it, Treslove questions its meaning. The dream’s meaning and the reason he is dreaming it, but also the meaning of the thing itself. Why does the girl affect him as she does? Is it the girl’s vulnerability, or the very opposite, her strength and resolution? Does he worry for her feet, shoeless on the hard pavement? Is he curious about the reason for her hurry? Jealous perhaps because she is heedless of him and running to someone else? Does he want to be the object of her hurry?

He has dreamed this dream all his life and no longer knows if it has its origins in something he once saw. But it is as real to him as reality and he welcomes its recurrence, though he does not summon it before he goes to sleep and does not always remember it with clarity when he wakes. The debate as to its status takes place entirely within the dream. Sometimes, though, when he sees a schoolgirl running, or bending to tie or untie a shoelace, he has a dim recollection of knowing her from somewhere else.