The Finkler Question (6 page)

'Forget all what?'

Bernard Treslove, bald, browned, straight as a plumb line, blew cigar smoke in his son's face and patted his head affectionately. 'Music.'

'So I can't have a cello, either?' J. P. Guivier sold beautiful cellos.

'The cello will make you even sadder. Go and play football.'

What Julian did was go and read romantic novels and listen to nineteenth-century operas instead. Which also didn't please his father, for all that the books which Treslove read, like the operas he listened to, were on his father's shelves.

After this exchange, Bernard Treslove went into his own room to play the violin. As though he didn't want to set a bad example to his family. Was it only Treslove's fancy that his father wept into his violin as he played?

So Julian Treslove played no instrument, though every time he passed J. P. Guivier's window he wished he did. He could, of course, have taken up music any time he wanted to after his father died. Look at Libor who had learnt to play the piano in his eighties.

But then Libor had someone to play it for, no matter that she was no longer with him. Whereas he . . .

It was as he was looking at the violins, lost in these tristful reflections, that he was attacked, a hand seizing him by his neck without warning, as a valuable cat out on the tiles might be grabbed by a cat snatcher. Treslove flinched and dropped his head into his shoulders, exactly as a cat might. Only he didn't claw or screech or otherwise put up a fight. He knew the people of the street - the beggars, the homeless, the dispossessed. Imaginatively, he was one of them. To him, too, the roads and pavements of the city were things of menace.

Years before, between jobs, and in pursuit of a beautiful unshaven nose-ringed charity worker with whom he believed he was destined to be happy - or unhappy: it didn't matter which, so long as it was destined - he had donated his services to the homeless and made representations on their behalf. He could hardly argue when they made representations for themselves. So he fell limp and allowed himself to be flung into the window and emptied.

Allowed?

The word dignified his own role in this. It was all over too quickly for him to have a say in the matter. He was grabbed, thrown, eviscerated.

By a woman.

But that wasn't the half of it.

It was what - reliving the event in the moments afterwards - he believed she had said to him. He could easily have been wrong. The attack had been too sudden and too brief for him to know what words had been exchanged, if any. He couldn't be sure whether or not he had uttered a syllable himself. Had he really accepted it all in silence, without even a 'Get off me!' or a 'How dare you?' or even a 'Help'? And the words he thought she had spoken to him might have been no more than the noise of his nose breaking on the pane or his cartilages exploding or his heart leaping from his chest. Nonetheless, a collection of jumbled sounds persisted and began to form and re-form themselves in his head . . .

'Your jewels,' he fancied he'd heard her say.

A strange request, from a woman to a man, unless it had once been made of her and she was now revisiting it upon him in a spirit of bitter, vengeful irony. 'Your jewels - now you know how it feels to be a woman!'

Treslove had taken a module entitled Patriarchy and Politics at university. In the course of that he often heard the sentence, 'Now you know how it feels to be a woman.'

But what if he'd manufactured this out of some obscure masculinist guilt and what she had actually said was 'You're Jules' - employing his mother's fond nickname for him?

This, too, took some explaining since he hardly needed telling who he was.

It could have been her way of marking him, letting him know that she knew his identity - 'You're Jules and don't suppose that I will ever forget it.'

But something else would surely have followed from that. Something else of course did, or had, in that she comprehensively relieved him of his valuables. Wouldn't she, though, for her satisfaction to be complete, have wanted him to know who she was in return? 'You're Jules, I'm Juliette - remember me now, you little prick!'

The more he thought about it, the less sure he was that 'Your' or 'You're' was quite the sound she'd made. It was more truncated. More a 'You' than a 'Your'. And more accusatory in tone. More 'You Jules' than 'You're Jules'.

'You Jules', as in 'You Jules, you!'

But what did that mean?

He had the feeling, further, that she hadn't pronounced any 's'. He strained his restrospective hearing to catch an 's' but it eluded him. 'You Jule' was more what she had said. Or 'You jewel'.

But is it consonant with calling someone a jewel that you smash his face in and rob him blind?

Treslove thought not.

Which returned him to 'You Jule!'

Also inexplicable.

Unless what she had said as she was emptying his pockets was, 'You Ju!'

TWO

1

'What's your favourite colour?'

'Mozart.'

'And your star sign?'

'My eyesight?'

'Star sign.
Star
.'

'Oh, Jane Russell.'

So had begun Libor's first date of his widowhood.

Date! That was some joke - he ninety, she not half that, maybe not a third of that. Date! But what other word was there?

She did not appear to recognise the name Jane Russell. Libor wondered where the problem lay - in the accent he had not quite lost or the hearing he had not quite kept. It was beyond his comprehension that Jane Russell could simply be forgotten.

'R-u-s-s-e-l-l,' he spelt out. 'J-a-n-e. Beautiful, big . . .' He did the thing men do, or used to do, weighing the fullness of a woman's breasts in front of him, like a merchant dealing in sacks of flour.

The girl, the young woman, the child, looked away. She had no chest to speak of herself, Libor realised, and must therefore have been affronted by his mercantile gesture. Though if she'd had a chest she might have been more affronted still. The things you had to remember with a woman you hadn't been married to for half a century! The feelings you had to take into account!

A great sadness overcame him. He wanted to be laughing with Malkie over it. 'And then I . . .'

'Libor - you didn't!'

'I did, I did.'

He saw her put her hand to her mouth - the rings he had bought her, the fullness of her lips, the shake of her black hair - and wanted her back or wanted it to be over. His date, his awkwardness, his sorrow, everything.

His date was called Emily. A nice name, he thought. Just a pity she worked for the World Service. In fact, the World Service was the reason friends had introduced them. Not to canoodle over the goulash and dumplings - Austro-Hungarian food was his idea: old world gluttony that would soak up any gaps in conversation - but to talk about the institution they had in common, maybe how it had changed since Libor had been there, maybe to discover she had worked with the children of whom Libor had known the parents.

'Only if she's not one of those smug leftists,' Libor had said.

'Libor!'

'I can say it,' he said. 'I'm Czech. I've seen what leftists do. And they're all smug leftists at the BBC. Especially the women. Jewish women the worst. It's their preferred channel of apostasy. Half the girls Malkie grew up with disappeared into the BBC. They lost their sense of the ridiculous and she lost them.'

He could say 'Jewish women the worst', too. He was one of the allowed.

Fortunately, Emily wasn't a Jewish leftist. Unfortunately she wasn't anything else. Except depressed. Two years before, her boyfriend Hugh had killed himself. Thrown himself under a bus while she was waiting for him to collect her. At the Aldwych. That was the other reason friends had connected them - not, of course, with a view to anything romantic, but in the hope that they would briefly cheer each other up. But of the two - Emily and Hugh - Libor felt more of a connection to Hugh, dead under a bus.

'What bands do you like?' she asked him, after a longer dumpling-filled silence than she could bear.

Libor pondered the question.

The girl laughed, as at her own absurdity. She twirled a lifeless lock of hair around a finger that had an Elastoplast on it. 'What bands did you
used
to like,' she corrected herself, then blushed as though she knew the second question was more absurd than the first.

Libor turned his ear to her and nodded. 'I'm not in principle keen on banning anything,' he said.

She stared at him.

Oh, God, he remembered in time, she will want me to be against fox hunting and runways and animal experiments and electric light bulbs. But there was no point starting out - not that they were going anywhere - with a lie.

'Four-wheel drives,' he said. 'Dropped aitches - mine are cultural - talk radio, socialism, trainers, Russia, but definitely not fur coats. If you'd seen Malkie in her chinchilla . . .'

She went on staring at him. He feared she was going to cry.

'No, bands,' she said at last. '
Bands
.'

Deciding against saying the Czech Philharmonic, Libor sighed and showed her his hands. The flesh, disfigured with liver spots, was loose enough for her to slide her fingers under. It would peel clean away, like the skin on a lightly roasted chicken. His knuckles were swollen, his fingernails yellow and bent over at the ends.

Then he ran his hands over his baldness and inclined his head. He had always been a balding man. Balding had suited him. But he was plucked clean by time now. The patina of extreme old age was on him. He wanted her to see her own reflection in his pate, measure all the time she had left in the dull mirror of his antiquity.

He could tell she couldn't figure out what he was showing her. When he presented his bald head to Malkie she would polish it with her sleeve.

It used to excite her. Not just the head but the act of polishing it.

They had furnished their apartment in the style of Biedermeier. Libor's taste not Malkie's (though Malkie had Biedermeier blood in her veins), but she had humoured the aspiring European petit bourgeois in him. 'Reminds me of our escritoire,' she would tell him. 'It responds in the same way to a good buffing.'

It amused him to be her furniture. 'You can open my drawers whenever you like,' he would say. And she would laugh and cuff him with her sleeve. At the end they had talked dirty to each other. It was their defence against pathos.

'I'm sorry,' he told the girl, folding his napkin. 'This isn't fair to you.'

He signalled to the waiter before remembering his manners. 'You don't want a dessert do you, Emily?' he asked. He was pleased he could recall her name.

She shook her head.

He paid the bill.

She was as relieved as he was when they parted.

2

'I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it,' he told Treslove on the phone.

It was a week after they had dined together. Treslove hadn't told Libor about the attack. Why worry him? Why make Libor afraid of his own neighbourhood?

Not that Libor was the one who needed protecting. Treslove marvelled at his courage - dressing himself up, going out on a date, making small talk. He pictured him in his David Niven outfit, fine white polo neck jumper worn under a blue blazer with faux military buttons. Most men Libor's age wore lovat jackets, the colour of sick, and trousers that were too short for them. This had always bemused and worried Treslove. At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them. Explain that.

But not Libor. Or at least not Libor when he was got up to meet a friend, or a woman. He was still the Mittel European dandy. Only on the telephone did he sound his age. It was as though the telephone filtered out everything that wasn't of the voice alone - the comedy, the bravado, the dancing hands. An old torn tissue-paper larynx was all that was left. Treslove knew to picture Libor in the flesh when he spoke to him on the phone, spruce in his polo neck, but the sound still depressed him. He heard a dead man speaking.