The Finkler Question (38 page)

'Then send them to Sunday school, or a madrasa. I will have no more Jews.'

She shook her head and rose to leave. This time he didn't stop her.

It crossed his mind to ask her to go upstairs with him. It seemed a shame to waste the Ritz.

But it was too late for all that.

2

On a night he lost in excess of two thousand pounds playing online poker, Finkler went to find himself a prostitute. Perhaps Libor, sitting next to one, had transmitted the thought to him by magic. They were close, no matter that they disagreed about everything.

Finkler was not in need of sex, he was in need of something to do. The only arguments against going with prostitutes that had ever carried any weight with him, as a rational amoralist, were cost and the clap. A man is free to do as he wishes with his body, but you don't impoverish or infect your family in the process. However, when you've lost two thousand pounds playing poker, three hundred more for an hour with a decent-looking prostitute is hardly going to make much difference, philosophically speaking. And as for the clap - there was no one left he could infect.

There was another calculation he had to make. People knew his face. It was unlikely the prostitute would. Prostitutes are working at the time documentaries go out on television. But other men looking for prostitutes might recognise him, and he knew he could not count on any solidarity of the fallen. In minutes he would be up on someone's Facebook as having been seen prowling around Shepherd Market, never mind that the person who had seen him was out prowling himself.

He could have gone to the bar of one of the obvious Park Lane hotels, where the pickup was more discreet, but it was the prowling he liked. Prowling mimicked the fruitless search for the hidden face or memory which was all the pursuit of sexual happiness amounted to. Prowling was romance skinned to the bone. You could prowl and then go home empty-handed and still tell yourself you'd had a good night. A
better
night in Finkler's case, since he couldn't remember ever having found a prostitute he'd liked; but then what he liked was the hidden face or memory whose function was to stay forever hidden. In fact, he wouldn't have said no to a nice Jewish girl with Manawatu Gorge breasts, rather than another of those slender ice-pick Polacks, but he probably wouldn't have said yes to her either.

Which made it safe for him, he thought, to prowl the streets. A man as visibly lukewarm in his desires as he was ran only a minimal risk of being suspected of looking for sex.

So he almost jumped out of his skin when he heard his name called.

'Sam! Uncle Sam!'

The wise thing would have been to ignore the call and keep on walking. But he knew he had jerked his head at the sound of his name, and to have gone on walking then would have been to invite suspicion. He turned round and saw Alfredo standing outside the Market Tavern, at the edge of a crowd of drinkers, sucking on a bottle of Corona.

'Hey, Alfredo.'

'Hey, Uncle Sam. You off somewhere special?'

'Depends what you call special.' Finkler looked at his watch. 'I have to meet my producer any minute. Already a bit late.'

'This another telly series?'

'Well, early stages of.'

'What's this one?'

Finkler let his hands make circles of profound vagueness in the air.

'Oh, Spinoza, Hobbes, free speech, CCTV cameras, all that.'

Alfredo took off his sunglasses, put them back again, and rubbed his neck. Finkler could smell drink on his breath. Was he too out looking for a prostitute? Finkler wondered. And was he drinking to get his courage up?

If so he'd overdone it. No prostitute would go near this amount of courage.

'Do you know what I think about all this surveillance shit, Uncle Sam?' Alfredo said.

Finkler hated it when Alfredo Uncled him. The sarcastic little shit. He looked at his watch. 'Tell me.'

'I think it's a blast. I hope we're being looked at by a camera now. I hope we all are.'

'Why's that, Alfredo?'

'Because we're such lying, cheating, thieving bastards.'

'That's a very bitter analysis. Has someone just done any one of those things to you?'

'Yes, my father.'

'Your father? What's your father done?'

'What hasn't my father done, you mean.'

Finkler wondered if Alfredo was going to fall over, so unsteady was he.

'I thought you were getting on with your father. Didn't you go on holiday with him recently?'

'That was ages ago. And haven't heard a word from him since, though now I hear he's moved in with a woman.'

'Hephzibah, yes. I'm surprised he hasn't told you. No doubt he means to. Is your point that more cameras in the street would have caught him moving in?'

'My point, Uncle Sam, my point, as you call it, is that my father, as you call him, invites friendship one minute and doesn't speak to you the next.'

Finkler thought about saying he knew what Alfredo meant, but suddenly didn't relish the role of playing proxy father. Let Julian sort his kids out himself. 'Julian's got a lot going on in his head at the moment,' he said.

'And a lot in his pants, too, from what I hear.'

'I must go,' Finkler said.

'Me too,' Alfredo said. He nodded, as though to say
coming, coming
, in the direction of a group of young men, a couple of whom, Finkler thought, were wearing Palestinian scarves, though it was hard to tell these days, given that many fashion scarves looked the same and were worn similarly.

He wondered if there'd been a demo earlier that day in Trafalgar Square. If so, he wondered why he hadn't been invited to address it.

'Then I'll see you when I see you,' he said. 'Where are you playing at the moment?'

'Here, there and everywhere.' He took Finkler's hand and drew him close. 'Uncle Sam, tell me - you're his friend - what's all this Jew shit?'

Slurred, Jew shit came out sounding more like Jesuit, a word which Alfredo would not have known even when sober. The other thing he seemed not to know, or to have forgotten, was that Finkler was Jew shit himself.

'Why don't you ask him?'

'No, but listen - I mean altogether. I've been reading that none of it happened, you understand what I'm saying . . .'

'None of what, Alfredo?'

'That shit. Camps and all that. One big lie.'

'And where have you been reading that?'

'Books, you know. And friends have been telling me. There's this Jewish boogie-woogie drummer I've been playing with.' Alfredo played air drums with a pair of imaginary sticks, in case Finkler didn't know what a drummer did. 'It's all bullshit, he says. So why would he say that if it isn't the truth? He was like a soldier in the Israeli army or some shit and now he plays the skins like Gene Krupa. He says it's all bullshit and lies so that we'll look the other way.'

'Look the other way from what?'

'Whatever they're doing there. Concentration camps and shit.'

'Concentration camps? Where are there concentration camps?'

'Wherever, whatever. Nazis, fucking gas chambers, except that none of it happened, right?'

'Happened where?'

'Israel, Germany, I don't fucking know. But it's all -'

'I really must,' Finkler said, freeing himself, 'Or I'll be late for my producer. But listen, don't believe everything people tell you.'

'What do you believe, Uncle Sam?'

'Me? I believe in believing nothing.'

Alfredo made to kiss him. 'That's two of us. I believe in believing nothing either. It's all bullshit. Like that fucking hepcat says.'

He beat the air again with his sticks.

Finkler took a taxi home.

3

Strange, how well you can come to feel you know a person, Treslove thought, from a name, a word, and a few photographs of his penis.

But then Treslove could afford to be generous: he had what Alvin Poliakov, epispasmist, had wanted all his life - a foreskin.

Epispamos, Treslove learned from Alvin Poliakov's blog, is foreskin restoration. Except, as Alvin Poliakov explains, you cannot restore a foreskin. Once it's gone, it's gone. But it is not beyond the ingenuity of man to conjure up a faux foreskin in its place. This, Alvin Poliakov sits in front of a camera every day to prove.

For interest's sake, and by way of a break from Maimonides, and what with Hephzibah being out often at the moment, attending to problems with the museum, Treslove watches him.

Alvin Poliakov, son of a depressed Hebrew teacher, bachelor, bodybuilder, one-time radio engineer and inventor, founder member of ASHamed Jews, begins his morning by tugging at the loose skin on his penis, easing a little more skin up the shaft. He does this for two hours, breaks for mid-morning tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit, and then begins again. It is a slow, slow process. In the afternoon he takes measurements, collates the morning's data and writes his blog.

'I speak,' he confides to his readers, 'for the millions of mutilated Jews the world over, who feel what I have felt all my life. But not only for Jews, because there are millions of Gentiles out there who have been circumcised under the erroneous medical assumption that you are better without a foreskin than with.'

He doesn't say,
the Jews misleading the world again
, but only an uncomplaining fool, happy to be unforeskinned, could miss the implication.

Alvin Poliakov writes the way cinema newsreel announcers of the 1940s spoke, as though mistrustful of the technology and so shouting to be heard.

'Ever since the dawn of civilisation,' he says, 'men have sought to restore what was stolen from them, in violation of their human rights, before they were old enough to have a say in the matter. What has driven them to do this is a sense of incompletion, a consciousness of something as disabling as amputation.'

He cites the anguish of Jews in classical Greek and Roman society, longing to assimilate and strut their stuff but unable to go to the baths and show other men their penises, for fear of encountering mockery. (How many Jewish men actually wanted to do this? Treslove wonders.) This has led many desperate Jews to seek a remedy in surgery, often with tragic consequences. (Treslove shudders.) The only proven method of restoring an at best passable simulacrum of a foreskin is the one the blogger himself practises.

Behold.

Do not hope for too much. But do not settle for too little. This is Alvin Poliakov's philosophy.

As for the methodology--

Procure a good supply of sticky paper, surgical adhesive, office tape (Treslove finds himself thinking about the Sellotape with which Josephine, the mother of one of his children, he was not sure he could remember which, repaired her boots), suspender straps, elastic bands, weights and one strong wooden chair.

Every morning Alvin Poliakov photographs his penis from various angles with a view to posting the photographs on the Web later in the afternoon, along with diagrammatic details of the procedures he has followed in the course of the day - the construction of cardboard collars, the application of tape, the lubrication of sore skin, the hours spent slumped forward on his wooden chair coaxing the skin downward, ever downward, and the system of weights he has devised using copper jewellery, keys from a children's xylophone, and a pair of small brass candlesticks, which, he earnestly explains, can be bought cheaply from any good market or shop selling Indian knick-knacks.

Like a monk of self-denial he sits, shaven-headed, pumped-up and muscled, with his head between his knees, a snake charmer who knows the snake will not show himself for years, that's if he shows himself at all. There is no lubricity in the procedure. Whatever sex there once was in Alvin Poliakov's head has long since vanished in the service of the tapes, the adhesives, the collars and the weights. It was because he felt cheated of pleasure that Alvin Poliakov embarked on this course, but pleasure is not the issue any longer. Jews are the issue.

As an accompaniment to the photographs and the diagrams, Alvin Poliakov appends a daily portion of tirade against the Jewish religion in whose anti-service, so to speak, he now expends his energies. The crime of sexual mutilation, he argues, is just one more of the countless offences against humanity to be laid at the gates of the Jews. Every day he publishes the name of another Jewish child, just come into the world, whose integrity has been compromised and whose rights to a full complement of sexual activities have been tragically curtailed.