The Finkler Question (32 page)

'Well, there's nothing you can do,' Hephzibah said.

'I know that. But it isn't only the doing nothing that's upsetting, it's the feeling nothing.'

'I wonder whether we feel nothing,' Finkler said, 'precisely because we rehearse our feelings on the subject too freely and too often.'

'Crying Wolfowitz, you mean?' Hephzibah said with a wild laugh.

God, I love her, Treslove thought.

'You think we don't?' Finkler persisted.

'I think we can't.'

'You don't believe that too many false alarms result in no one taking any notice?'

'When is an alarm a false alarm?' Hephzibah persisted.

Treslove saw Finkler wondering whether to say
When our friend Julian raises it
. What he said instead was: 'It seems to me we create a climate of unnecessary anxiety, a) by picturing ourselves forever as the victim of events, and b) by failing to understand why people might occasionally feel they have good reason to dislike us.'

'And blind our children,' Hephzibah said. Her hands were still on Libor's face.

Libor put his hands up to hers, as though to deafen himself. 'As in
anti-Semitism is perfectly comprehensible to me
,' he said, in imitation of the empathetic film director.

'And so around it comes,' Hephzibah said.

Finkler shook his head as though there was nothing to be done with any of them. 'So your Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture is a museum of the Holocaust after all,' he said.

The
yutz
, Treslove thought. The
groisser putz
. The
shtick drek
.

Finkler and Libor sat and drank whisky while Treslove and Hephzibah washed up. Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink couldn't take would stay on the kitchen table. Pans and crockery sufficient for a hundred guests. Treslove liked that about her. She didn't believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn't a price to pay for pleasure.

She didn't leave the dishes so that
he
should do them either. She just left them. It seemed fatalistic to him. A carelessness acquired courtesy of the Cossacks. Since you don't know where you're going to be tomorrow, or indeed whether you're going to be alive or dead, why worry over dishes?

But tonight she led him by the elbow into the kitchen. And neither Finkler nor Libor offered to get up and help out. It was as if each couple was giving the other space.

'Our friend appears very happy,' Libor said.

Finkler agreed. 'He does. There's a shine on him.'

'And my niece, too. I think she's good for him. It would seem that what he needed was a mother.'

'Always did,' Finkler said. 'Always did.'

EIGHT

1

Finkler was looking forward to a few hands of online poker before bed, so he was disappointed, when he arrived home, to find a message on his answerphone from his daughter Blaise. Immanuel, the younger of his two sons, had been involved in an anti-Semitic incident. Absolutely nothing to worry about. He was perfectly OK. But Blaise wanted her father to hear it from her first, rather than from some other, possibly mischievous, source.

Over a crackling line, Finkler could not make out all the details. As he pressed the replay button it occurred to him that the message could easily be a wind-up - Julian, Libor and Hephzibah, who were still drinking when he left, teaching him a little moral lesson. See how you feel when it happens to you, Mr ASHamed Jew Philosopher. But the voice was definitely Blaise's. And though she said there was absolutely nothing to worry about, there obviously was, otherwise why would she have rung?

He rang back but Blaise wasn't answering. She often didn't. Immanuel's line was permanently engaged. Maybe the bastards had stolen his phone. He tried his other son, Jerome, but he was at a redder, more robust university than Blaise and Immanuel and was inclined to be scathing about their doings. 'Anti-Semites massing outside Balliol? I don't think so, Dad.'

As it was too late to call his driver, and he was too drunk to drive himself, Finkler rang a limo firm he sometimes used. Oxford, he told the operator. Right away.

He had to ask for the radio to be turned down and then turned off altogether. This so incensed the driver, who claimed he needed it on for traffic alerts, that Finkler feared he was going to be involved in an anti-Semitic incident himself. Traffic alerts! At midnight! Once they were out of London, on quieter roads, it occurred to Finkler that the real reason the driver needed the radio on was to keep him awake. 'Maybe we should have it on after all,' he said.

He fell prey to all manner of irrational anxiety. He had unnecessarily annoyed the person taking him to see his son. He had, for all he knew, annoyed his son, too, in any one of the thousands of ways that a father annoys his children. Had his son got into a fight with anti-Semites on his father's behalf? Shamed or not shamed, Finkler was an eminent English Jew. You couldn't expect racist thugs to grasp the fine distinctions of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Ha, so you're Sam Finkler's son are you, you little kike? Then here's a bloody nose
.

Unless it was worse than a bloody nose.

He curled up in the corner of the Mercedes and began to cry. What would Tyler say? He felt he had let her down. She had made him promise to make the children his first priority. 'Not your fucking career, not your Jewish mistresses with fat tits, not those weirdos you hang around with at the Groucho - your sons and daughter. Your sons and daughter, Shmuelly - promise!'

He'd promised and he meant it. At the funeral he'd put his arms around the boys and they had stood together a long time looking into Tyler's grave, three lost men. Blaise had held herself apart from them. She was with her mother. Against all men, lost or not. The three of them had stayed with him a week, and then gone back to their universities. He wrote to them, he rang them, he invited them to launches and screenings. Some weekends he drove to Oxford, on others to Nottingham, booking himself into the best hotel he could find and treating them to slap-up dinners. He believed he had done well, morally, on those occasions, not to take a woman with him. Especially when he stayed at Raymond Blanc's Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire, a hugger-mugger hotel-restaurant which cried out for a mistress. But a promise is a promise. He was putting his children first.

He liked his children. They reminded him, in their different ways, of his poor wife - sharp, edgy, scratchy boys, a scathing girl. None had chosen to study philosophy. He was glad of that. Blaise was a lawyer. Immanuel, more unsteady, had changed from architecture to languages and looked set to change again. Jerome was an engineer. 'I'm proud of you,' Finkler told him. 'A nice non-Jewish occupation.'

'How do you know I won't be going over to Israel to build walls when I'm qualified?' the boy said. But his father looked so alarmed he had to explain he was only joking.

Both the boys had girlfriends to whom, he believed, they were fastidiously faithful. Blaise was wilder and uncommitted. Like her mother. Jerome wasn't sure he had found Miss Right yet. Immanuel thought he might have. Already, he wanted children of his own. Finkler imagined him wheeling his family around the Ashmolean, bending over their prams, explaining this and that, adoring their little bodies. The new man. He had never quite managed to be that sort of a father himself. There were too many things he had found interesting apart fom his children, apart from his wife, too, come to that. But he was trying to make amends now.

What if it was all a bit late? What if his neglect had contributed in some ways to this attack? Had he left his children vulnerable, unable to take care of themselves, insufficiently aware of danger?

And then there'd been the conversation earlier in the evening. He had listened unsympathetically to the story of a boy blinded for no other reason than that he was a Jew. Was that chancing providence? Finkler didn't believe in the validity of such a thought, but he had it nonetheless. Had he dared the Jewish God to do His worst? And had the Jewish God decided, for the first time in however many thousands of years, to buckle up and meet the challenge? A terrible thought occurred to him: had Immanuel been blinded?

And a more terrible thought still: was it his doing?

Finkler the rationalist and gambler made a compact through his tears. If Immanuel had suffered any serious harm he would tell the ASHamed Jews where to shove it. And if he hadn't suffered any serious harm . . .?

Finkler didn't know.

It made no sense to implicate ASHamed Jews in this. They were not to blame for anything. They just
were
. As anti-Semites just
were
. But you can't play fast and loose with primal passions. He wasn't sure, though, as he crouched in the corner of the car, willing the miles to fly by, whether it was any longer defensible even to use the word Jew in a public place. After everything that had happened, wasn't it a word for private consumption only? Out there in the raging public world it was as a goad to every sort of violence and extremism.

It was a password to madness. Jew. One little word with no hiding place for reason in it. Say 'Jew' and it was like throwing a bomb.

Had Immanuel been boasting of his Jewishness? And if he had, why had he? To pay him, Finkler, back? To express his disappointment in him?
My father might be ashamed to be a Jew but I as sure as fuck am not
. Whereupon
whack
!

It all came back to
him
. Whichever way he looked at it, he was to blame. Bad husband, bad father, bad example, bad Jew - in which case, bad philosopher as well.

But this was no better than superstition, was it? He was a prin-cipled amoralist. What you did you did, and there was no retributive force out there holding you to account. Yes, there was material cause and effect. You drove badly, you had a crash. But there was no moral cause and effect. Your son did not get blinded by an anti-Semite because you took mistresses, or because you did not take the threat of anti-Semitism as seriously as some of your more hysterical fellow Jews believed you should.

Or did he?

This was not the first time, Finkler remembered, that mistresses had destabilised the workings of his highly rational mind. Take a mistress and you have a car crash. Finkler did not of course believe that. Except in the material cause-and-effect sense. Take a mistress and have her give you a blow job while you're driving down the M40 and your car might well spin out of control. That's not morality, it's concentration. So why, when he was out driving with a mistress, did he feel a little less safe than when he was out driving with his wife? Men and women were not fashioned, he believed, to live monogamously. It was no crime against nature to sleep with more than one woman. It was a crime against aesthetics, maybe, to be out on the town with Ronit Kravitz's vertiginous decolletage when he had an elegant wife waiting for him at home, but no payment was ever exacted by God or society for a crime against aesthetics. So whence his apprehension?

Yet apprehensive he always was, whenever he committed one of those sexual crimes which in his eyes were no crime. The car would crash. The hotel would burn down. And yes - for it was as primitive as this - his dick would fall off.

He could explain it. Terror pre-dated reason. Even in a scientific age men retained some of that prehistoric ignorance of which irrational fear was the child. That Finkler understood the causes and consequences of events made not a jot of difference. The sun might still not rise one morning because of something he had done or some ritual he had left unobserved. He was afraid, as a man born half a million years before him would have been afraid, that he had disobeyed the ordinances of the gods and they had visited their vengeance on his son.

He arrived at Immanuel's lodgings sometime after one o'clock in the morning. There was no one in. He tried the phone again but the line was still engaged. Blaise, too, was not answering. He directed the driver to the Cowley Road where Blaise lived. The lights were on in her front room. Finkler knocked, needlessly, at her window. Someone he didn't recognise drew the curtains back, then Blaise showed her face. She appeared astonished to see him.