The Finkler Question (15 page)

england
:

England his England. And read that in Manchester a thirty-one-year-old Jew was beaten by several men who shouted 'for Gaza' as they attacked him, leaving him with a black eye and several bruises.

In Birmingham, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl fled a mob of children no older than she was chanting 'Death to Jews'.

And in London, just around the corner from the BBC, a forty-nine-year-old blue-eyed Gentile with orderly features was robbed of his valuables and called a Ju.

He rang Finkler after all to say how nice it had been to see him and did he know that in Caracas and in Buenos Aires and in Toronto - yes, Toronto! - and in Fontenay-sous-Bois and in London, but Finkler stopped him there . . .

'I'm not saying it makes pleasant listening,' he said, 'but it's not exactly Kristallnacht, is it?'

An hour later, after thinking about it, Treslove rang again. 'Kristallnacht didn't happen out of nowhere,' he said, though he had only a vague idea of what Kristallnacht did happen out of.

'Ring me when a Jew gets murdered for being a Jew on Oxford Street,' Finkler said.

4

Though it wasn't Kristallnacht, the unprovoked attack on him for being a Jew had become in Treslove's imagination little short of an atrocity. He admitted to himself that he was overexcited. The night with Kimberley, her misattribution of Jewish characteristics to him, as a consequence of which, he was bound to consider, he might just have had - at forty-nine! - the best sex of his life (well, at least they had both smiled during it), and the sense of history swirling around him, all made him an unreliable witness to his own life.

Did he any longer remember what actually had happened?

He decided to revisit the scene of the crime, re-run the evening's events, not starting with dinner at Libor's - he didn't want to involve Libor, he had kept the whole thing from Libor, Libor had troubles enough - but at the gates to Regent's Park. It had turned chillier in the weeks since the mugging, so he was not able to dress as he had on the night in question. Muffled up, he looked bulkier, but otherwise his assailant - Judith, as he now called her - had she too returned to the scene of the crime, would have recognised him.

He had no choice but to name her Judith. Something to do with the Canadian security man threatening to saw the Jewish student's head off. It was Judith who beheaded Holofernes. True, she was Jewish herself, but her action had a similiar whiff of vengeful Middle Eastern violence about it. Where Treslove came from - call it Hampstead, to save time - people left even their enemies' heads on their shoulders.

To be on the safe side he had left his phone and his credit cards at home.

So what was he doing - inviting her to rough him up again? Come on, Judith, do your worst.
Hoping
she would rough him up again? (Only this time she would find him, forewarned and forearmed, a tougher proposition.) Or just wanting to confront her, the Jew-hater, eyeball to eyeball, and let fate decide the rest?

No to any one of those, but maybe yes, in an investigative way, to all of them.

Somewhere at the back of his disordered mind, too, was forming the resolution to apprehend her, if she so much as showed her face, and effect a citizen's arrest.

He clung to the park gates and looked in, breathing the foliage. He could not be light-headed again to will, could not make himself innocent of a knowledge which now crowded out all other thoughts. But had he been innocent a fortnight earlier? Or had he been looking for trouble?

There'd been Finkler talk at Libor's, he remembered that. He remembered the old sensation of exclusion, envying the men their animal warmth even as they'd argued routinely on
the
Finkler question of the hour, each of them saying 'Oh, here we go' every time the other spoke, as though mutual mistrust was stamped into Finklers like the name of a seaside resort into rock -
Here we go, here we go
- just as mutual love appeared to be. So he had their musk on him. Anyone who didn't especially care for that particular smell would have detected it on him. He suddenly wondered whether it was a mistake not to call on Libor and share a glass of wine with him. Could he hope to reproduce the other evening without having had proximity at least to Libor first?

He doubled back on himself and rang the bell. No one answered. Libor was out, then, maybe on another date, making himself discuss star signs with a girl too young to have heard of Jane Russell. Unless he was lying up there collapsed across the Bechstein with an emptied bottle of aspirin on the keyboard and a piano-wire noose around his throat, as he, Treslove, would be, had Malkie been his wife and left him all alone in the world.

His eyes filled with tears, hearing the Schubert in his head. Why hadn't his father let him play? What had he been afraid of in his son? Morbidity? Finkler's word. What was so wrong with morbidity?

He trod his way gingerly past the dangers, spiritual and actual, of Broadcasting House and rounded Nash's church again. He wasn't sure he could remember exactly the route he had taken on the night of the assault, but knew he had dawdled among the wholesale clothes showrooms where his father's cigar shop had been, so he tried up Riding House Street and then back down Mortimer Street towards J. P. Guivier, only he had to make sure he approached the violin shop from the right direction, which necessitated - he thought - returning the way he'd come and staying a little longer on Regent Street before cutting in again. Once off Regent Street he reminded himself to take more notice of shapes in doorways than was his customary practice. He also thought it a good idea to make himself appear more than usually vulnerable, though anyone who knew him would not have noticed any difference either in his gait or general air of agitation.

The streets were about as busy as they had been a fortnight earlier. The same hairdresser's and dim sum restaurant were open for late business. The same newsagent's was still undergoing renovation. But for the nip in the air the nights were identical. Treslove approached J. P. Guivier with his heart in his mouth. Foolish, he knew. The woman who attacked him must have better things to do than wait in the shadows on the off chance he'd return. And for what? She already had his only valuables.

But since none of it had added up then, there was no reason why it should add up now. What if she regretted what she had done and wanted to give him his valuables back? Or perhaps the mugging was just a taster of what she really had in store in him. A knife in his heart, maybe. A pistol at his head. A saw at his throat. Payback for some imaginary wrong he had done her. Or payback for some real wrong she had suffered at the hands of Finkler with whom she had confused him.

That possibility was truly frightening - not the being mistaken for Sam Finkler, though that was insult enough, but the being held responsible for something Finkler had done. Treslove didn't put it past Finkler to hurt a woman and drive her to the edge of madness. He imagined dying for Finkler, lying bleeding on the pavement, unattended, for a crime he had not and could never have committed. His legs went weak under him with the bitter irony of it. An ironical end to his life was not an abstract supposition for Treslove: he apprehended it as he apprehended a looming lamp-post or a falling tree.

And saw himself kicked out of the way by passers-by, like a Jew's dog on the streets of Caracas, or Buenos Aires, or Fontenay-sous-Bois, or Toronto.

He stood before the window of J. P. Guivier admiring the instruments in their cases and the resins, a new satisfying arrangement of which had appeared - packaged like expensive chocolates - since he'd last looked. A hand tapped him on the shoulder - 'Judith!' he cried in shock - and the blood left his body.

FOUR

1

At around about this time - give or take half an hour - in a restaurant close by - give or take a quarter of a mile - Treslove's sons were settling the bill for dinner. They were in the company of their mothers. This was not the first time the two women had met, though they had known nothing of each other's existence in the months they were carrying Ralph and Alf respectively, or indeed in the years immediately following their sons' delivery.

Treslove was no Finkler. He could not lose his heart to more than one woman at a time. He loved too absorbedly for that. But he always knew when he was about to be thrown over and was quick to make provision, where he could, to love absorbedly again. As a consequence of which there was sometimes a brief overlap of new and old. On principle he didn't mention this to either of the overlapping parties - neither the one who had still not quite left him, nor the one who had not quite taken her place. Women were already hurt enough, in his view; there was no reason to hurt them further. In this, again, he saw himself as different to Finkler who evidently did not bother to conceal his mistresses from his wife. Treslove envied Finkler his mistresses but accepted they were beyond him. Even wives were beyond Treslove. Girlfriends were all he had ever managed. But there was still propriety in keeping overlapping girlfriends apart.

By the same reasoning he would have kept his sons apart, too, had he not confused the day of his right to have Rodolfo (Treslove didn't hold with anglicising their names) with the day of his right to have Alfredo. The boys were six and seven, though Treslove couldn't be expected always to be precise in the matter of which was what. He didn't see enough of them for that, and in their absence found it easier to conflate them. Was that so serious? They were equally objects of devotion to him. That he merged their names and ages only went to show how very much and without favouritism he loved them both.

A surprise to each other on the day they met at their father's apartment, but infinitely preferring playing with someone roughly their own age to kicking a ball around a desolate park with Treslove - who tired easily, was always looking somewhere else, and when he did remember they were there asked too many soulful questions about the state of their mothers' health - Alf and Ralph begged their father to confuse his visiting rights again.

The boys talked excitedly of their new half-brothers when they returned home, and soon Treslove was in receipt of unkind letters from his old girlfriends - in the case of Rodolfo's mother, reproaching him for a retrospective infidelity she wanted it to be clear she was hurt by only in the abstract, and in the case of Alfredo's, informing him his visiting rights were suspended until he heard otherwise from her lawyers. But eventually the wishes of the boys prevailed over the indolent malice (as Treslove called it) of their mothers, and in time the latter thought that they too might find a bristling sort of comfort in each other's company, not to say an answer to the question of why not just one woman but two had consented to have a baby by a man they didn't give a fig for. An inaccurate account, Treslove believed when it was relayed to him, given that consent on the one side implies request on the other, and he had never in his life requested any woman to have his baby. Why would he? The curtain always came down on Treslove's fantasy of happiness with him crying 'Mimi!' or 'Violetta!' and kissing the cold dead lips a last goodbye that would leave him inconsolable for ever. He couldn't have done that with a child there. A child turned a tragic opera into an
opera buffa
and necessitated at least another act, for which Treslove lacked both the stamina and imagination.

The women were taken aback, when they first met, by how alike not just the boys but they were.

'I could understand him going for a dark woman with large breasts and rounded thighs and a fiery Latin temperament,' Josephine said, 'but what could he possibly have thought he was seeing in you that he hadn't already got from me? We're both scrawny Anglo-Saxon cows.'

She was unamused but tried for laughter - an exhalation of sour breath, like a gasp, that frilled her narrow lips.

'That's assuming you have his defections in the right chronological order,' Janice replied. Her lips, too, were scalloped like the hem of a lace undergarment and seemed to move sideways rather than up and down.

Neither was sure which of them was on the scene first, and the ages of the boys didn't help, since Treslove was not exactly a clean finisher with women and sometimes visited an old girlfriend when he was with a new. But they both agreed he was a man who needed to be given his marching orders - 'Chop, chop,' in Janice words - and that they were equally lucky to be rid of him.

Treslove had met Josephine at the BBC and been sorry for her. The best-looking women at the BBC were the Jewesses but he didn't have the courage in those days to approach a Jewess. And it was partly because Josephine had neither the coloration nor the confidence of the BBC Jewesses that he felt sorry for her - though only partly. For all that she was, as she admitted, scrawny, she had the broad legs of a much larger woman which she drew attention to by wearing spidery patterned stockings. She was fond of lacy see-through blouses through which Treslove saw that she wore the brassiere of a woman twice her breast size together with at least one slip, something he believed was called a chemise, and something he recalled his mother referring to as a liberty bodice. Sitting opposite her at an awards ceremony - she was the recipient of a Sony Radio Academy Award for a programme she had made about the male menopause - Treslove, who was not the recipient of an award for anything, counted five straps on each of her shoulders. She blushed when she accepted her award - making a brief speech about unpacking a raft of ideas, which was how people at the BBC described having a thought - just as she blushed whenever Treslove accosted her in the corridor or the canteen, her skin remaining blotchy for hours afterwards. Treslove understood the shame that went with blushing and invited her to hide herself from the world by burying her face in his shoulder.