The Finkler Question (47 page)

In the stealthy alternations of rudery and sweetness, somewhere between waking and sleep, light and darkness, they found - she found, she found - a modus mortis.

It was bearable, then. Not a peace or a resignation, but an engagement of the fact of death with the fact of life. Though she was dying they were still living, together. He would turn the lights out and return to her side and listen to her going off and know that she was living with dying.

But in the morning the horror of it returned. Not only the horror of the pain and what she knew she must have looked like, but the horror of the knowledge.

If Libor could only have spared her that knowledge! He would have died for her to spare her that knowledge, only that would have been to burden her with another, and she assured him, greater loss. He could not bear, when morning broke, her waking up to what she had perhaps forgotten all about while she slept. He imagined the finest division of time, the millionth of a millionth of a second of pure mental excruciation in which the terrible incontrovertibility of her finished life returned to her. No laughter or consoling obscenities in the first minutes of the morning. No companionable sorrowing together either. She lay there on her own, not wanting to hear from him, unavailable to him, staring up at the ceiling - as though that was the route out she would finally take - seeing the ice-cold certainty of her soon becoming nothing.

The morning was always waiting for her. No matter where they had got to the night before, no matter what quiet almost bearable illusion of living with her dying he believed her to have attained, the morning always dashed it.

So the morning was always waiting for Libor too. The morning waiting for her to wake. And now the morning waiting for himself to wake.

He wished he'd been a believer. He wished they both had, though perhaps one of them might have taken the other along. But belief had its underbelly of doubting, too. How could it be otherwise? You would see the meaning in the night, see God's face even, if you were lucky - the
shechina
: he had always loved that concept, or the sound of it at least, God's refulgence - but the next day, or the next, it would be gone. Faith wasn't a mystery to him; the mystery to him was holding on to faith.

He kissed her eyes at night and tried to fall asleep himself in hope. But things didn't get better; they got worse, precisely because every careful crafting of feeling better, of assent, submission, accommodation - he didn't have the word - survived no more than a single night. Nothing was ever settled. Nothing ever sealed. The day began again as though the horror had that very moment been borne in on her for the first time.

And on him.

6

Tyler's life was over much more quickly. A brisk woman in all her dealings, including her adulteries, she dealt in a businesslike manner with death. She arranged what needed arranging, left instructions, demanded certain promises of Finkler, took as unemotional a farewell of her children as she could bear to take, shook hands with Finkler as over a deal that had not worked out wonderfully but had not worked out too badly either, all things considered, and died.

'Is this all I get?' Finkler wanted to shake her and say.

But over time he discovered there were things she had wanted to say to him, matter she had wanted to bring up, but had not, either for fear of upsetting him or for fear of upsetting herself. Not tender things or sentimental matter - though he continued to find letters he had written to her and photographs of them both and of the family which she had bundled prettily and tied with ribbons and kept in places he presumed to be sacred - but issues of a practical and even argumentative nature, souvenirs of their disagreements, such as the documents relating to her conversion to Judaism, and a number of articles he had written which she had, unknown to him, annotated and filed, and a tape of the broadcast of
Desert Island Discs
in which he had announced his shame to the world and for which she had never, and never would for all eternity, she had vowed, forgive him.

In a box marked 'To Be Opened By My Husband When I Have Gone', which at first he thought she might have prepared prior to going in a more mundane sense - had she ever
seriously
thought of leaving him? he wondered - he found photographs of him as a nice Jewish boy being bar mitzvahed, and photographs of him as a nice Jewish bridegroom being married to her, and photographs of him as a nice Jewish father at the bar mitzvahs of his sons (these in an envelope bearing a large? as though to ask why, why, Shmuelly, did you consent to any of these ceremonials if you intended to shit on them?), together with a number of articles on the Jewish faith and on Zionism, some written by him, and heavily annotated again, some written by other journalists and scholars, and one short typewritten manuscript, expostulatory, overpunctuated, and tidied-up in a plastic folder, like homework, the author of which was none other than Tyler Finkler, his wife.

Finkler folded himself in two and wept when he found this.

She was too overwrought to be a good writer, Finkler had always thought. Finkler himself was no stylist, but he knew how to make a sentence trot along. A reviewer of one of Finkler's first self-help books - Finkler wasn't sure whether he meant to be kind or unkind, so he took it for the former - described reading his prose as being like taking a train journey in the company of someone who might have been a genius, but then might just as easily have been a halfwit. Tyler's writing did not veer between these extremes. Reading her was like being on a train journey with an indubitably clever person who had given her life to composing messages on greetings cards. A criticism, as it happens, that had been levelled at Finkler's early bestseller
The Socratic Flirt: How to Reason Your Way into a Better Sex Life.

Tyler had had a sudden insight into her husband, that was what made her put her thoughts on paper. He was too Jewish. He didn't suffer from an insufficiency of Jewish thought or temperament, but the opposite. They all did, these
Shande
Jews. (
Shande
Jews was her name for the ASHamed.
Shande
means shame as in disgrace, and that was what she thought about them. That they
brought
shame.) But he, the pompous prick, more than the others.

'The thing with my husband,' she wrote, as if to a divorce lawyer, though Finkler himself was the addressee, 'is that he thinks he has jumped the Jewish fence his father put around him, but he still sees everything from a WHOLLY Jewish point of view, including the Jews who disappoint him. Wherever he looks, in Jerusalem or Stamford Hill or Elstree, he sees Jews living no better than anybody else. And because they are not exceptionally good, it follows - to his extremist Jewish logic - that they are exceptionally bad! Just like the conventional Jews he scorns to spite his father, my husband adheres with arrogance to the principle that Jews either exist to be "a light unto the nations" (
Isaiah 42: 6
) or don't deserve to exist at all.'

Finkler cried a couple more times. Not because of what his wife had charged him with, but because of the childlike conscientiousness of her Bible citations. He could see her bent over the page, concentrating. Perhaps reaching for a Bible to be sure she had cited Isaiah correctly. It made him think of her as a little girl at Sunday school, reading about the Jews with a pencil in her mouth, not knowing that one day she would marry and give her life to one, and become a Jew herself, though not in the eyes of Orthodox Jews like his father. And maybe not even in the eyes of Finkler either.

He had at no time been sympathetic to Tyler's Jewish aspirations. He didn't need to be married to a Jew. He was Jew enough - at least in his antecedence - for both of them. Fine, he'd said when she told him what she intended to do. He assumed she wanted a Jewish wedding. What woman didn't want a Jewish wedding? Fine.

So off she went to talk to the rabbis and when she told him she would take the Reform route he nodded without listening. She could have been describing a bus journey she was planning. It would take about a year, she said, perhaps more for her because she was starting from scratch. Fine, he said. Take as long as you like. It wasn't that this gave him time to be with his mistresses. He had not yet married Tyler - she wouldn't marry him until she was a Jew - and so mistresses were not yet in the picture. He was a scrupulous man. He would not have taken a mistress before he had a wife. Another woman yes, a mistress no. He was a philosopher; nomenclature mattered to him. So there was no motive for his indifference. He was unable to put his mind to Tyler getting a Jewish education for the pure and simple reason that he couldn't have cared less.

She went to classes once a week for fourteen months. There she learned Hebrew, he gathered, was told God knows what about the Bible, told what not to eat, told what not to wear, told what not to say, taught how to run a Jewish home and be a Jewish mother, paraded before a council of rabbis, submerged (at her own insistence) in water - and lo! he had a Jewish bride. He didn't listen when she came back each week and tried to interest him in what she'd learned.
His
life was more interesting. He nodded his head, waited for her to finish, then told her he'd been to see a publisher. He hadn't yet written a book, but he felt he needed a publisher. He was on the way. People were taking notice. She wanted a Moses to lead her into the Promised Land? He was that Moses. She should just follow him.

So little notice did he take of her studies that she might have been having an affair with one of the rabbis for all he knew. These things happened. Rabbis, too, were men of flesh and blood. And teaching was . . . well Finkler, knew as well as anyone what teaching was.

He wouldn't begrudge her if she had. Now that she was dead he wanted her to have had a better life than he had given her. No husband is ever more magnanimous, he thought, than when he becomes a widower. There was an article in that.

It was in her conversion class, presumably, that she had been told about the Jewish aspiration to be 'a light unto the nations'. Had they - had the rabbi he wished to have been in love with her and who he hoped had secretly taken her to kosher restaurants to teach her how to eat lokshen pudding - had
he
shown her how to put a little bracket around the chapter and verse that she was citing?

Poor Tyler.

(Tyler Finkler 49: 3) The age at which she died and the number of children she had left motherless.

It broke his heart. But that didn't mean he cared to go on reading. The last thing he wanted to remember about his wife was her baby Hebrew education. He put her little essay back into its folder, blew it a kiss, and stored the box it came in at the bottom of her wardrobe, where she had kept her shoes.

Only on the night he returned from accompanying Hephzibah and Treslove to
Sons of Abraham
did the impulse to look at it again seize him. He couldn't have said why. Maybe he was lonely without her. Maybe he was desperate to hear her voice. Or maybe he just needed something, anything, to stop him going to his computer and playing poker.

Her argument was as he remembered but he felt more tenderly towards it now. It can take time for a husband to discover that his wife's words are worth attending to.

She had hit upon a paradox.

(Think of it - Tyler hitting on a paradox! The things of which a husband does not know his wife to be capable!)

Her paradox was this:

'The
Shande
Jews my husband spends his evenings with, (when he isn't spending them with his mistress), accuse Israelis and those they call 'Zionist fellow-travellers' of thinking they enjoy a
special
moral status which entitles them to treat everyone else like shit; but this accusation is itself founded on the assumption that Jews enjoy a special moral status and should know better. (Do you remember what you used to say to the kids, Shmuel, when they complained they were being told off for doing nothing different to what other kids did? "I judge you by a more exacting standard," you told them. Why? Why do you -
you
of all people - judge Jews by a more exacting standard?)'

Her own 'wise' husband had told her that the state of Israyel - a state he could not bear to name without putting in a derisive
y
- had been founded on an act of brutal expropriation. So what state wasn't? Tyler asked, mentioning the American Indian and the Australian Aborigine.