The Finkler Question (22 page)

'I meant it,' he said, 'I truly do love you.'

'And I meant it when I thanked you for your kindness.'

For a moment it seemed to Treslove that they were the outsiders, just the two of them in the darkness, excluded from the pack of others. Today he didn't want her to go home, back to Sam's bed, back to Sam's penis. Was Sam now ashamed of his penis, too? Treslove wondered.

He had flaunted his circumcision at school. 'Women love it,' he'd told Treslove in the shower room.

'Liar.'

'I'm not. It's true.'

'How do you know?'

'I've read. It gives them greater satisfaction. With one of these beauties you can go for ever.'

Treslove read up about it himself. 'You don't get the pleasure I get,' he told his friend. 'You've lost the most sensitive part.'

'It might be sensitive but it's horrible. No woman will want to touch yours. So what's the sensitivity worth? Unless you want to spend the rest of your life being sensitive with yourself.'

'You'll never experience what I experience.'

'With that thing you'll never experience anything.'

'We'll see.'

'We'll see.'

And now? Did Finkler's Jewish shame extend to his Jewish dick?

Or was his dick the one part of him to enjoy exclusion from the slur? Could an ASHamed Jew go on giving women greater satisfaction than an unashamed Gentile, Palestine or no Palestine?

That's if there'd ever been a grain of truth in any of it. You never knew with Jews what was a joke and what wasn't, and Finkler wasn't even a Jew who joked much. Treslove longed for Tyler to tell him. Solve the mystery once and for all. Did women have a preference? She was in the best position to make the comparison. Yes or no? Could her Shmuelly go for ever? Was her willingness to look at her husband's penis but not her lover's attributable to the foreskin and the foreskin alone? Was Treslove uncut too ugly to look at? Had the Jews got that one right at least?

It would explain, wouldn't it, why she fiddled with him the way she did, behind his back. Was she unconsciously trying to screw off his prepuce?

He didn't ask her. Didn't have the courage. And in all likelihood didn't want to hear the answer. Besides, Tyler wasn't well enough to be questioned.

You take your opportunity when you have it. Treslove was never given another.

4

'So where is she?' Libor asked, opening the door to Treslove. Normally he would have buzzed his friend in, but this time he came down in the lift. He wanted a private introduction to the mystery mugger who could smell a man's religion on him.

Treslove showed Libor the palms of his hands. Empty. Then pointed to his heart. 'In here,' he said.

Libor pointed to his friend's head. 'You sure she's not in there?'

'I can always leave.'

'And get attacked again? Don't leave. Come and meet the other guests. And by the way, we're having a
Seder
.'

'What's a
Seder
?'

'A Passover service.'

'I'll come back.'

'Don't be silly. You'll enjoy it. Everyone enjoys a
Seder
. There's even singing.'

'I'll come back.'

'You'll come up. It's an interesting gathering. Old, but interesting. And God is meant to be present. Or at least his Angel. We pour a glass of wine for him.'

'Is that why you're dressed formally? To greet the Angel?'

Libor was wearing a grey suit with a grey stripe in it and a grey lawyer's tie. The overall greyness made his face all but disappear. Treslove pretended to look down into his jacket to see where he had gone.

Libor nodded. 'You aren't surprised?'

'By your suit? Yes. Particularly by the fact that your trousers reach your shoes.'

'I'm getting shorter, that's all that means. Thank you for noticing. But I meant aren't you surprised by our having a
Seder
in September?'

'Why? When should you be having a
Seder
?'

Libor looked at him sideways, as it to say,
So much for your being Jewish.
'March, April - about the time you have Easter. It's a moon thing.'

'So why are you having it early? For me?'

'We're not having it early, we're having it late. I have a dying great-great-great-somebody or other. Hard to credit, I know. She must be a hundred and forty. She's Malkie's side of the family. She was indisposed for this year's
Seder
and doubts she'll survive to see another. So we're making her one last one before she goes.'

Treslove touched Libor's grey sleeve. The idea of one last anything always upset him. 'And you can do that?'

'By a rabbi, maybe not. But by me it's immaterial. You have one when you feel like one. It might be my last as well.'

Treslove ignored that. 'Will I follow it?'

'Some of it. We're doing the speeded-up version. Quick, while there's life left.'

So as the old lady nodded through the last
Seder
of her life, Treslove, bowing to the assembled guests but being quiet about it, took a chair at his first.

He knew the story. Who doesn't know the story? Treslove knew it because he had sung in Handel's
Israel in Egypt
at school, an unnecessarily lavish production which Finkler's father had helped to fund by paying for the costumes and presenting every member of the cast with a strip of his miracle pills, no matter that the costumes were bed sheets sewn together by Finkler's mother and the pills gave everyone diarrhoea. Whatever Treslove sang, stayed in his mind . . . The new pharaoh who knew not Joseph and set over Israel taskmasters to afflict them with burthens, the children of Israel sighing by reason of their bondage - he had loved 'sighing' over that bondage in the choir - Moses and Aaron turning the waters into blood, causing frogs to infest the pharaoh's bedchamber and blotches and blains to break forth on man and beast, and a thick darkness to cover the land, 'even darkness which might be felt'. In the choir they had closed their eyes and stretched out their hands, as though to feel the darkness. It was a darkness that Treslove could still close his eyes and touch. Small wonder, he thought, that Egypt was glad to see the Israelites depart, 'for the fear of them fell upon them' . . . Job done, in his view.

But then there was Part the Second which consisted mainly of the children of Israel telling God what He had done for them, and how like unto Him there was no other.

'Is that why your God abandoned you,' he remembered saying to Finkler after the concert, 'because you bored the living fucking daylights out of him?'

'Our God has not abandoned us,' Finkler had replied in anger. 'And don't you blaspheme.'

Those were the days!

Watching people around him reading from right to left he recalled Finkler's schoolyard boast. 'We can read from both ends of a book,' he had told Treslove, who couldn't begin to imagine how it was possible to do such a thing or what powers of secret knowledge and necromancy were necessary to achieve it. And not just any old book, but books written in a script so ancient it should have been scratched with a sharp stone in rock not written back to front on paper. No wonder Finkler didn't dream - there was no room in his head for dreams.

Libor had quietly deposited Treslove more or less in the middle of a long table that sat about twenty people, all with their heads in books, reading from right to left. He was between an old lady and a young - young by the standards of the gathering, that was. Allowing for the wrinkles on the older lady and the somewhat too much flesh on the younger, Treslove took them to be closely related. Something about the way they bent forward over the table, like birds. He assumed that they were grandmother and grandaughter or maybe divided by one generation more than that, but he didn't want to scrutinise their features too closely while they were engrossed in the story of Jewish deliverance. One thing he could not take his eyes off, though, was the book from which the older lady read. It appeared to be a children's picture book with pop-ups and pull-outs. Fascinated, he watched her make a nursery game of reading, turning a wheel that on one page denoted the ceaseless tortures imposed on the Israelites as they laboured regardless of the hour, now under a burning sun, now under an icy scimitar-scooped moon - and on the opposite page showed the frogs and the boils and the darkness so thick you could feel it.

When it came to the crossing of the Red Sea the old lady pulled a tab, and lo! where the Israelites had crossed in safety the waters overwhelmed their enemies, and 'there was not one of them left'. She pulled the tab again and again, drowning the Egyptians over and over.

Talk about disproportionality, Treslove thought, remembering something he had read of Finkler's recently about Jews taking two eyes for every one. But when he next looked, the old lady was irritably tugging at another tab and making a little boy in a skullcap disappear beneath the table and come up with a piece of matzo. This, too, she caused to happen again and again. So it was repetition for the fun of it, not the vengeance.

He looked around him, struck by how different Libor's table was from how he remembered it in Malkie's day, or even the last time he was here with Finkler. So many Finklers today - though no Sam Finkler - so much food he didn't recognise, and so many elderly people at a form of prayer that was not always to be distinguished from chatter or sleep.

The next thing he knew he was being asked, as the youngest manchild present - 'Me?' he said in astonishment - whether he would like to recite the Four Questions.

'I would if I could,' he told them. 'In fact, there are many more than four questions I would like to ask. But I cannot read Hebrew.'

'Wrong order,' the old lady said, not taking her eyes from her book. 'We've gone past the Four Questions. We never do things in the right order in this family. Everything's upside down. Who is he anyway? Another of our Bernice's?'

'Mother, Bernice died thirty years ago,' someone at the other end of the table said.

'Then he shouldn't be here,' the old lady said.

Treslove wondered what he'd started.

The granddaughter, as he supposed, or was it the great-granddaughter laid a gentle hand on his. 'Take no notice,' she whispered. 'She's always like this at a
Seder
. She loves it but it makes her angry. I think it's the plagues. She feels a little guilty for them. But you don't have to read Hebrew. You can ask the Four Questions in English.'

'But I can't read right to left,' Treslove whispered back.

'In English you don't need to.'

She opened the Haggadah at the relevant page and pointed.

Treslove looked across at Libor who nodded and said, 'So ask the questions.' He had screwed his face up to resemble an old pantomime Israelite. 'You're the Jew boy, ask the questions' was the message Treslove read in it.

And Treslove, much embarrassed, but with a beating heart, did as he was told.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Why on this night must we eat bitter herbs?

Why on this night do we dip our food twice?

On all other nights we may eat either sitting or leaning, but why on this night must we all lean?

He found it difficult to listen to the answers. He had been made too self-conscious by his reading. How did he know how to ask Jewish questions in a room of Jews he had never before met? Were the questions meant to be rhetorical? Were they a joke? Should he have asked them as Jack Benny or Shelley Berman might have asked them, with the
bitter herbs
comically inflected? Or hyperbolically to denote the extremity of Jewish grief? The Jews were a hyperbolic people. Had he been hyperbolical enough?

Biiii
. . .
ttaah
- what if he should he have delivered it like that, with shuddery theatricality, in the manner of Donald Wolfit playing Hamlet's father's ghost?