The Finkler Question Page 16

  She was amused by him. ‘Thank you,’ she said, moving her hands more than he thought was necessary, ‘however you want to say it.’

  Her rings confounded him. They appeared to have been bought at a Hell’s Angels’ shop. But he knew where her clothes came from. Hampstead Bazaar. There was a Hampstead Bazaar near his apartment which he sometimes peered into on his way home, wondering why no woman he had ever proposed marriage to ever looked like the multilaterally swathed models in the window. Hampstead Bazaar designed clothes for women who had something to hide, whereas all Treslove’s women had been skin and bones, the only thing they had to hide being Treslove. What would have happened, he mused, had his taste in women been different? Would a woman with a fuller figure have stayed longer in his company? Might he have found happiness with her? Might she have anchored him?

  Hephzibah Weizenbaum was tented and suggested the Middle East. There was an Arab shop on Oxford Street which sprayed perfume into the traffic. Treslove, on his way to nowhere in particular, sometimes stopped and breathed it in. Hephzibah Weizenbaum smelt like that – of car fumes, and crowds of tourists, and the Euphrates where it all began.

  She smiled, not guessing what he was thinking. The smile enveloped him, like the warm waters of a pool buoying up a swimmer. He felt he floated in her eyes, which were more purple than black. He tapped the back of her hand, not thinking what he was doing. With her free hand she tapped his. The silver rings stung him in a way he found arousing.

  ‘So,’ he said.

  ‘So,’ she replied.

  She had a warm voice, like melted chocolate. She was probably full of chocolate, Treslove thought. Normally fastidious about fat, he decided it looked good on her, swathed out of sight as it was.

  She had a strong face, broad cheekbones – more Mongolian than Middle Eastern – and a full, vivacious mouth. Mocking, but not mocking him, and not mocking the ceremony. Just mocking.

  Was he in love with her?

  He thought he was, though he was not sure he would know how to love a woman who looked so healthy.

  ‘This is your first one, then,’ she said.

  Treslove was astonished. How could she have known she was his first healthy woman?

  She saw his confusion. ‘Your first Passover,’ she said.

  He smiled, relieved. ‘Yes, but I hope not my last,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll remember to invite you to mine, then,’ she said, bunching up her eyes at him.

  ‘I’d like that,’ Treslove answered. He hoped the reason she knew it was his first Passover was his ignorance of the ritual, not his alien appearance.

  ‘Libor has spoken of you many times,’ she said. ‘You and your friend.’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘Yes, Sam. Julian and Sam, I feel I know you both well. I am Libor’s great-great-niece by marriage, that’s to say on Malkie’s side, unless I am his great-great-great cousin.’

  ‘Is everyone here the great-great-great cousin of the person sitting next to them?’ he asked.

  ‘Unless they are more closely related, yes,’ she said.

  He nodded in the direction of the old lady. ‘She your . . . ?’

  ‘She’s my something. Just don’t ask me to say precisely what. All Jews are at furthest remove one another’s great-great-great cousins. We don’t do six degrees of separation. We do three.’

  ‘One big happy family?’

  ‘I don’t know about the happy. But family, yes. It can be a pain.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a pain if you had never known an extended family.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘A mother and a father – that was it.’

  He suddenly sounded orphaned to himself and hoped the spectacle of his loneliness wouldn’t make her cry. Or not too much.

  ‘What I sometimes wouldn’t give to have had a mother and a father and that’s it,’ Hephzibah surprised him by saying. ‘Though God knows I miss them.’

  ‘They aren’t here?’

  ‘Passed away. So I turn myself into a sort of universal daughter.’

  (And mother? Treslove wondered.)

  ‘You have siblings?’

  ‘Not exactly. So I turn myself into a sort of universal sister too. I have aunts, I have uncles, I have cousins, I have cousins of cousins . . . I spend a month’s salary on birthday cards. And don’t remember half their names.’

  ‘And children of your own?’ Treslove made it sound casual, like a question about the weather. You finding it cold today?

  She smiled. ‘Not yet. No hurry.’

  Treslove, who had not been good with babies, saw the babies they were going to have, for this time it would be different. Jacob, Esther, Ruth, Moishe, Isaac, Rachel, Abraham, Leah, Leopold, Lazarus, Miriam . . . He began to run out of names. Samuel – no, not Samuel – Esau, Eliezer, Bathsheba, Enoch, Jezebel, Tabitha, Tamar, Judith . . .

  Hudith.

  ‘You?’ she asked.

  ‘Siblings? No.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Two. Sons. Both grown up. But I wasn’t strictly instrumental in their rearing. I hardly know them really.’

  He didn’t want Hephzibah – Heppzibah . . . Heffzibah – Weizenbaum to feel threatened or excluded by his children. There were more children in him, he wanted her to understand.

  ‘You and their mother divorced, then?’

  ‘Mothers. Yes. Well, not divorced exactly. We only ever lived together. Separately, of course. And not for long.’

  He didn’t want her to feel threatened or excluded by the mothers of his children either. But nor did he want her to think he was a fly-by-night. He did something with his shoulders which he hoped she would interpret as emotional pain, but not too much.

  ‘If you don’t want to talk about it –’ she said.

  ‘No, no. It’s just that this seems such a big family, and I haven’t made much of a job of family –’ yet, he thought about adding, but heard how wrong it might sound to her.

  ‘Don’t idealise us,’ she warned, waving her ringed hands at him.

  Us.

  He melted into the word.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For all the usual reasons. And don’t marvel at our warmth.’

  Our.

  Treslove looked at her evenly, though he felt the floor was swaying. ‘Then I won’t,’ he said, warmly. ‘But I do wonder, since you say Libor has mentioned me many times, why he has never introduced us. Has he been keeping you under wraps?’

  Not tactful – wraps.

  Had he not already been flushed from reading the Four Questions, he would have flushed now. But not only on account of his lack of tact. On account of his lack of reserve. ‘Where have you been all my life?’ his expression said.

  She put her lips together and shrugged. A gesture Treslove thought she should forgo, given what it did to the flesh under her chin. He would find a nice way of telling her that when they were married.

  Then she laughed, as though it had taken her a minute to hear what he had asked. ‘It would need some wrap,’ she said, pulling her shawl or tabard or whatever it was around her

  He was unable to hide his embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  He met her eyes and searched for a question the answer to which would bring their faces closer together. ‘Hepzibah,’ he said, ‘Heffzibah –’ but his uncertainty around her name left him floundering for the question.

  It brought her face closer to his anyway. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if I’m too much of a mouthful for you –’

  ‘You aren’t.’

  ‘But if I am . . .’

  This time he showed her his teeth. ‘Believe me, you aren’t.’

  ‘But if I am, my friends call me Juno.’

  Treslove held on to the undercarriage of his chair. ‘Juno? Juno!’

  She wasn’t sure why he was quite so astonished. She made a downward gesture with her hands, showing herself to him. Her bulk. She was under no illusions about her size. ‘Th
e war goddess,’ she said, laughing.

  He laughed back. Or he tried to laugh back. Jovially, like the war god.

  ‘Though the real reason,’ she quickly added, ‘is, I’m afraid, more prosaic. I played Juno in Juno and the Paycock at school.’

  ‘Juno? D’Jew say Juno?’

  She looked at him in perplexity.

  Well, that was something, Treslove thought. They don’t all play word games. Not that for her he wouldn’t have set himself the task of mastering every trick of verbal funsterism in the Finkler book of high-semantic footling. Words had numeric significance for Finklers, he’d read that somewhere. And even the name of God was a pun on something else. No doubt Juno, if he only knew how to numeralise and decode it, spelt out Treslove’s Hour Has Come.

  Why is this night different from all other nights?

  The question answered itself.

  Juno. Juno, by Jesus!

  Part Two

  SIX

  1

  Every other Wednesday, festivals and High Holy Days permitting, Finkler met with fellow ASHamed Jews at the Groucho Club in Soho. Not all of them dreamed of punching their fathers in the stomach. Some still felt a tender attachment to the faith in which they’d been nurtured – hence their having to make their excuses when an ASHamed Jew night clashed with what they were still Jewish enough to call Yom Tov: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Succot, Simchat Torah, Shavuot, Purim, Pesach, Hanukkah. ‘And Uncle Tom Cobley and all,’ as Finkler said.

  In the case of such ASHamed Jews as these it wasn’t the J word but the Z word of which they were ashamed. For which reason there was always a degree of fretting at the edges of the movement in the matter of what they called themselves. Wouldn’t it more accurately describe the origin and nature of their shame if they changed their name to ASHamed Zionists?

  On grounds of euphony, Finkler didn’t think so. And on grounds of logic he didn’t think so at all. ‘Call yourselves ASHamed Zionists,’ he said, ‘and you at once preclude someone like me who was never a Zionist in the first place. What is more you open the group to a non-Jewish membership, allowing that there are many people out there who are, in their humanity, ashamed of Zionism. Whereas we are ashamed in our humanity as Jews. Which is the point of us, I think.’

  It struck one or two of the members that there was racism implicit in this, as though a higher value was to be placed on Jewish shame than on any other sort, but Finkler quietened these rumblings by making the point that while they didn’t have a monopoly on shame, and were surely open to the idea of making common cause with others who were as ashamed as they were – he, personally, welcomed a degree of ecumenicism in this – only Jews could be Jewishly ashamed. That is to say, only they could express, from the inside, the emotion of betrayal.

  This did lead briefly to a discussion as to whether Betrayed Jews wouldn’t, in that case, be the best name for them of the lot. But again Finkler won the day, arguing that betrayal was too petulant a word to nail their colours to, implying as it did that they were against Zionism only because it had excluded or jilted them in some way, and not because it was a crime against humanity.

  If one or two ASHamed Jews thought Finkler was having it both ways on this – making a virtue of personal hurt and then decrying it – they kept the thought to themselves. Perhaps because for them too their shame both was and was not an accident of biography, both was and was not a murmuring of their hearts, both was and was not public property, its justice susceptible now to reason, now to poetry.

  It was settled, at least temporarily, in this manner: those ASHamed Jews who were only partially ashamed – that’s to say who were ashamed, qua Jews, of Zionism but not, qua Jews, of being Jewish – were permitted to put their mortification into abeyance on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, etc., and would resume it again when the calendar turned secular.

  As for the others, they were free to be whatever sorts of Jews they wanted. The group was nothing if not heterogeneous. It included Jews like Finkler, whose shame comprehended the whole Jew caboodle and who didn’t give a hoot about a High Holy Day, and Jews who knew nothing of any of it, who had been brought up as Marxists and atheists, or whose parents had changed their names and gone to live in rural Berkshire where they kept horses, and who only assumed the mantle of Jewishness so they could throw it off.

  The logic that made it impossible for those who had never been Zionists to call themselves ASHamed Zionists did not extend to Jews who had never been Jews. To be an ASHamed Jew did not require that you had been knowingly Jewish all your life. Indeed, one among them only found out he was Jewish at all in the course of making a television programme in which he was confronted on camera with who he really was. In the final frame of the film he was disclosed weeping before a memorial in Auschwitz to dead ancestors who until that moment he had never known he’d had. ‘It could explain where I get my comic genius from,’ he told an interviewer for a newspaper, though by then he had renegotiated his new allegiance. Born a Jew on Monday, he had signed up to be an ASHamed Jew by Wednesday and was seen chanting ‘We are all Hezbollah’ outside the Israeli Embassy on the following Saturday.

  It had been Finkler who suggested the Groucho Club as a venue for their meetings when ASHamed Jews co-opted him to their cause. Until then, the embryo ashamed had met at one another’s houses in Belsize Park and Primrose Hill, but Finkler argued that that domesticated their struggle and made it inward-looking. To those who shrank from discussing matters of such urgency in a place of alcohol and laughter (and what is more was named after a Jew who joked about being Jewish) he urged the virtues of publicity. It made no sense at all to be ashamed of being an ASHamed Jew. The whole point of their shame was that it was out there for all to see.

  It was Tyler’s view that, for her husband, being an ASHamed Jew was continuous with being at the reflective end of show business. She had accompanied him to the Groucho Club on earlier non-ASHamed Jew business and seen the way he behaved – the ostentation with which he distributed alms to the educated dossers and Big Issue sellers who congregated on the street outside, the flourish with which he inscribed his signature in the members’ book, the small talk he made with the staff who rewarded him by being on mellifluous terms with his name, the pleasure he took in mixing with film directors and fellow media-academics at the bar. Now throw in his being a big shot with the ASHamed Jews and Tyler knew exactly how his triumph felt to him – the immodest delight he took in seeing his influence extend far beyond philosophy.

  After Tyler’s death – though he might have been expected, as a man no longer judged ironically by his wife, to have seized the opportunity to be more riotously self-satisfied still – he, if anything, toned his behaviour down. He owed her memory that, he thought. His seemliness a sort of epitaph to her.

  That she would have preferred it had he given up being ASHamed altogether, he knew. But that far he couldn’t go. The movement needed him. The Palestinians needed him. The Groucho needed him.

  It wasn’t all smooth sailing. On quiet nights a corner table in the restaurant gave them just the right degree of being ‘out there’ that they needed, but when the club was busy other guests could overhear their conversation and sometimes assumed they were free to join in. This was tolerable so long as uninvited interventions were sympathetic and not over-boisterous, but disagreements could get out of hand, as when a party of music-industry diners wearing red string Kabbalah bracelets got wind of what ASHamed Jews were about and tried to have them ejected from the club as anti-Semites. An ill-tempered altercation followed in the course of which the comedian Ivo Cohen ended up on the floor for the second time as an ASHamed Jew (the other coming at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, on that occasion with a group calling themselves Christians for Israel).

  ‘A fine example of Jewish spirituality, this is!’ he huffed, tucking in his shirt, echoing his ‘A fine example of Christian spirituality, this is!’ with which he’d challenged his assailants in Trafalgar Square. He was a short round ma
n who didn’t have far to fall. And as his stage act belonged to the genre known as Marxist slapstick (Karl, not Groucho), which necessitated his falling over a great deal, no one took the incident too seriously. But the club wasn’t prepared to allow an event of this sort to occur again and insisted that all further meetings of ASHamed Jews take place either somewhere else or in a private room on the second floor.

  Though he had no desire to upset Kabbalists, whose teaching had a flakily practical side of which he approved, and who numbered among their seekers after truth Madonna and David Beckham – both of whom, he suspected, were readers of his books and would have liked to meet him – Finkler felt he couldn’t let the occasion go without berating them for a scurrilousness that did the Jewish mysticism of which they claimed to be serious students no credit. As for charging ASHamed Jews with anti-Semitism, ‘The imputation,’ he told them, closing his face, ‘leaves us stone cold.’

  The quotation was from someone else. Finkler couldn’t remember who. Doubtless some anti-Semite. Not that it mattered. It’s not who says it, or what it means, but how you say it, and in what company.

  Pleased with the reception from his fellow-ASHamees, Finkler repeated the formulation – ‘The imputation that we are self-hating Jews leaves us stone cold’ – in a rough draft of a letter that was ultimately published in the Guardian and signed by the twenty most eminent of the ASHamed along with ‘65 others’. ‘Far from hating our Jewishness,’ the letter went on, ‘it is we who continue the great Jewish traditions of justice and compassion.’

  One member of the group recognised the quotation and wanted it removed. Another feared that the phrase ‘we are self-hating Jews’ would be taken out of context and used against them, in the way that theatres extracted a phrase like ‘wonderful drama’ from the sentence ‘A wonderful drama this is not’. A third asked why he and several other less prominent ASHamees were not named as signatories to the letter but had to suffer ignominious inclusion among the ‘65 others’. And a fourth questioned the efficacy of writing letters to the Guardian at all.