The Finkler Question Read online

  ‘Well, you’re right about that at least,’ she told him. ‘This is the end. I’m leaving you.’

  ‘Just because I’m in demand?’

  ‘Because you’re not in demand with me.’

  ‘Please don’t leave. If I wasn’t a rock before, I’ll be a rock from now on.’

  ‘You won’t. It isn’t in your nature.’

  ‘Don’t I look after you when you’re ill?’

  ‘You do. You’re marvellous to me when I’m ill. It’s when I’m well that you’re no use.’

  He begged her not to go. Took his chance and threw his arms around her, weeping into her neck.

  ‘Some rock,’ she said.

  Her name was June.

  Demand is a relative concept. He wasn’t so much in demand as a lookalike for everybody and nobody that there weren’t many vacant hours in which to think about all that had befallen him, or rather all that hadn’t, about women and the sadness he felt for them, about his loneliness, and about that absence in him for which he didn’t have the word. His incompletion, his untogetherness, his beginning waiting for an end, or was it his end waiting for a beginning, his story waiting for a plot.

  It was exactly 11.30 p.m. when the attack occurred. Treslove knew that because something had made him look at his watch the moment before. Maybe the foreknowledge that he would never look at it again. But with the brightness of the street lamps and the number of commercial properties lit up – a hairdresser’s was still open and a dim sum restaurant and a newsagent’s having a refit – it could have been afternoon. The streets were not deserted. At least a dozen people might have come to Treslove’s rescue, but none did. Perhaps the effrontery of the assault – just a hundred yards from Regent Street, almost within cursing distance of the BBC – perplexed whoever saw it. Perhaps they thought the participants were playing or had become embroiled in a domestic row on the way home from a restaurant or the theatre. They could – there was the strange part – have been taken for a couple.

  That was what Treslove found most galling. Not the interruption to one of his luxuriating, vicariously widowed reveries. Not the shocking suddenness of the attack, a hand seizing him by the back of his neck and shoving him so hard into the window of Guivier’s violin shop that the instruments twanged and vibrated behind the shattering pane, unless the music he heard was the sound of his nose breaking. And not even the theft of his watch, his wallet, his fountain pen and his mobile phone, sentimental as his attachment to the first of those was, and inconvenient as would be the loss of the second, third and fourth. No, what upset him beyond all these was the fact that the person who had robbed, assaulted and, yes, terrified him – a person against whom he put up not a whisper of a struggle – was . . . a woman.

  3

  Until the assault, Treslove’s evening had been sweetly painful but not depressing. Though they complained of being without compass or purpose on their own, the three men – the two widowers and Treslove, who counted as an honorary third – enjoyed one another’s company, argued about the economy and world affairs, remembered jokes and anecdotes from the past, and almost managed to convince themselves they’d gone back to a time before they had wives to lose. It was a dream, briefly, their falling in love, the children they’d fathered – Treslove had inadvertently fathered two that he knew of – and the separations that had devastated them. No one they loved had left them because they had loved no one yet. Loss was a thing of the future.

  Then again, who were they fooling?

  After dinner, Libor Sevcik, at whose apartment between Broadcasting House and Regent’s Park they dined, sat at the piano and played the Schubert Impromptus Opus 90 his wife Malkie had loved to play. Treslove thought he would die with grief for his friend. He didn’t know how Libor had survived Malkie’s death. They had been married for more than half a century. Libor was now approaching his ninetieth year. What could there be left for him to live for?

  Malkie’s music, maybe. Libor had never once sat at the piano while she was alive – the piano stool was sacred to her, he would as soon sit on it as burst in on her in the lavatory – but many a time he had stood behind her while she played, in the early days accompanying her on the fiddle, but later, at her quiet insistence (‘Tempo, Libor, tempo!’), standing behind her without his fiddle, marvelling at her expertise, at the smell of aloes and frankincense (all the perfumes of Arabia) that rose from her hair, and at the beauty of her neck. A neck more graceful, he had told her the day they had met, than a swan’s. Because of his accent, Malkie had thought he had said her neck was more graceful than a svontz, which had reminded her of a Yiddish word her father often used, meaning penis. Could Libor really have meant that her neck was more graceful than a penis?

  Had she not married Libor, or so the family mythology had it, Malkie Hofmannsthal would in all likelihood have gone on to be a successful concert pianist. Horowitz heard her play Schubert in a drawing room in Chelsea and commended her. She played the pieces as they should be played, he said, as though Schubert were inventing as he went along – emotional improvisations with a bracing undernote of intellectuality. Her family regretted her marriage for many reasons, not the least of them being Libor’s lack of intellectuality and breeding, his low journalistic tone, and the company he kept, but mostly they regretted it on account of the musical future she threw away.

  ‘Why can’t you marry Horowitz if you have to marry someone?’ they asked her.

  ‘He is twice my age,’ Malkie told them. ‘You might as well ask why I don’t marry Schubert.’

  ‘So who said a husband can’t be twice your age? Musicians live for ever. And if you do outlive him, well . . .’

  ‘He doesn’t make me laugh,’ she said. ‘Libor makes me laugh.’

  She could have added that Horowitz was already married to Toscanini’s daughter.

  And that Schubert had died of syphilis.

  She never once regretted her decision. Not when she heard Horowitz play at Carnegie Hall – her parents had paid for her to go to America to forget Libor and bought her front-row seats so that Horowitz shouldn’t miss her – not when Libor won a measure of renown as a show-business journalist, travelling to Cannes and Monte Carlo and Hollywood without her, not when he fell into one of his Czech depressions, not even when Marlene Dietrich, unable to figure out the time anywhere in the world but where she was, would ring their London apartment from the Chateau Marmont at three thirty in the morning, call Libor ‘my darling’, and sob down the phone.

  ‘I find my entire fulfilment in you,’ Malkie told Libor. There was a rumour that Marlene Dietrich had told him the same, but he still chose Malkie whose neck was more graceful than a svontz.

  ‘You must go on playing,’ he insisted, buying her a Steinway upright with gilded candelabra at an auction in south London.

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘I will play every day. But only when you’re here.’

  When he could afford it he bought her a Bechstein concert grand in an ebonised case. She wanted a Blüthner but he wouldn’t have anything in their apartment manufactured behind the Iron Curtain.

  In their later years she had made him promise her he would not die before her, so incapable was she of surviving an hour without him – a promise he had solemnly kept.

  ‘Laugh at me,’ he told Treslove, ‘but I got down on one knee to make her that promise, exactly as I did the day I proposed to her. That is the only reason I am staying alive now.’

  Unable to find words, Treslove got down on one knee himself and kissed Libor’s hand.

  ‘We did discuss throwing ourselves off Bitchy ’Ead together if one of us got seriously sick,’ Libor said, ‘but Malkie thought I was too light to hit the sea at the same time she did and she didn’t fancy the idea of hanging around in the water waiting.’

  ‘Bitchy ’Ead?’ Treslove wondered.

  ‘Yes. We even drove there for a day out. Daring each other. Lovely spot. Great spiralling downs with seagulls circling and dead bunches of flowers tied t
o barbed-wire fences – one with its price ticket still on, I remember – and there was a plaque with a quotation from Psalms about God being mightier than the thunder of many waters and lots of little wooden crosses planted in the grass. It was probably the crosses that decided us against.’

  Treslove didn’t understand what Libor was talking about. Barbed-wire fences? Had he and Malkie driven on a suicide pact to Treblinka?

  Seagulls, though . . . And crosses . . . Search him.

  Malkie and Libor did nothing about it anyway. Malkie was the one who got seriously sick and they did not a damned thing about it.

  Three months after her death, Libor ventured bravely into the eye of his despair and hired a tutor, who smelt of old letters, cigarettes and Guinness, to teach him to play the impromptus which Malkie had interpreted as though Schubert were in the room with them (inventing as he went), and these he played over and over again with four of his favourite photographs of Malkie on the piano in front of him. His inspiration, his instructress, his companion, his judge. In one of them she looked unbearably young, leaning laughing over the pier at Brighton, the sun in her face. In another she wore her wedding dress. In all of them she had eyes only for Libor.

  Julian Treslove wept openly the moment the music began. Had he been married to Malkie he didn’t doubt he would have wept over her beauty every morning he woke to find her in his bed. And then, when he woke to find her in his bed no more, he couldn’t imagine what he’d have done . . . Thrown himself off Bitchy ’Ead – why not?

  How do you go on living knowing that you will never again – not ever, ever – see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

  He wanted to ask Libor that. ‘How did you get through the first night of being alone, Libor? Did you sleep? Have you slept since? Or is sleep all that’s left to you?’

  But he couldn’t. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  Though once Libor did say, ‘Just when you think you’ve overcome the grief, you realise you are left with the loneliness.’

  Treslove tried to imagine a loneliness greater than his own. ‘Just when you get over the loneliness,’ he thought, ‘you realise you are left with the grief.’

  But then he and Libor were different men.

  He was shocked when Libor let him into a secret. At the end they had used bad language to each other. Really bad language.

  ‘You and Malkie?’

  ‘Me and Malkie. We talked vulgar. It was our defence against pathos.’

  Treslove couldn’t bear the thought. Why did anyone want a defence against pathos?

  Libor and Malkie were of the same generation as his parents, both long deceased. He had loved his parents without being close to them. They would have said the same about him. The watch of which he would be divested later that evening was a gift from his ever-anxious mother. ‘Jewels for my Jules,’ it was inscribed. But she never called him Jules in life. The sense of being properly put together which he had lost, likewise, was an inheritance from his father, a man who stood so straight he created a sort of architectural silence around himself. You could hang a plumb line from him, Treslove remembered. But he didn’t believe his parents were the reason for the tears he shed in Libor’s company. What moved him was this proof of the destructibility of things; everything exacted its price in the end, and perhaps happiness exacted it even more cruelly than its opposite.

  Was it better then – measuring the loss – not to know happiness at all? Better to go through life waiting for what never came, because that way you had less to mourn?

  Could that be why Treslove so often found himself alone? Was he protecting himself against the companioned happiness he longed for because he dreaded how he would feel when it was taken from him?

  Or was the loss he dreaded precisely the happiness he craved?

  Thinking about the causes of his tears only made him cry the more.

  The third member of the group, Sam Finkler, did not, throughout Libor’s playing, shed a single tear. The shockingly premature death of his own wife – by horrible coincidence in the very same month that Libor was made a widower – had left him almost more angry than sorrowful. Tyler had never told Sam he was her ‘entire fulfilment’. He had loved her deeply all the same, with an expectant and even watchful devotion – which did not preclude other devotions on the side – as though he hoped she would vouchsafe her true feelings for him one day. But she never did. Sam sat by her bedside throughout her last night. Once she beckoned to him to come closer. He did as she bade him, putting his ear to her poor dry mouth; but if she meant to say something tender to him she did not succeed. A gasp of pain was all he heard. A sound that could just as easily have come from his own throat.

  Theirs, too, had been a loving if sometimes fractious marriage, and a more fruitful one, if you count children, than Libor and Malkie’s, but Tyler had always struck Sam as withheld or secretive somehow. Perhaps faithless, he didn’t know. He might not have minded had he known. He didn’t know that either. He was never given the opportunity to find out. And now her secrets were, as they say, buried with her. There were tears in Sam Finkler, but he was as watchful of them as he had been of his wife. Were he to weep he wanted to be certain he wept out of love, not anger. So it was preferable – at least until he grew better acquainted with his grief – not to weep at all.

  And anyway, Treslove had tears enough for all of them.

  Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler had been at school together. More rivals than friends, but rivalry too can last a lifetime. Finkler was the cleverer. Samuel, he insisted on being called then. ‘My name’s Samuel, not Sam. Sam’s a private investigator’s name. Samuel was a prophet.’

  Samuel Ezra Finkler – how could he be anything but cleverer with a name like that?

  It was to Finkler that Treslove had gone running in high excitement after he’d had his future told on holiday in Barcelona. Treslove and Finkler were sharing a room. ‘Do you know anyone called Juno?’ Treslove asked.

  ‘J’you know Juno?’ Finkler replied, making inexplicable J noises between his teeth.

  Treslove didn’t get it.

  ‘J’you know Juno? Is that what you’re asking me?’

  Treslove still didn’t get it. So Finkler wrote it down. D’Jew know Jewno?

  Treslove shrugged. ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

  ‘It is to me,’ Finkler said. ‘But please yourself.’

  ‘Is it funny for a Jew to write the word Jew? Is that what’s funny?’

  ‘Forget it,’ Finkler said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I understand? If I wrote Non-Jew don’t know what Jew know I’d be able to tell you what’s funny about it.’

  ‘There’s nothing funny about it.’

  ‘Exactly. Non-Jews don’t find it hilarious to see the word Non-Jew. We aren’t amazed by the written fact of our identity.’

  ‘And d’Jew know why that is?’ Finkler asked.

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ Treslove told him.

  ‘And that’s Non-Jew humour, is it?’

  Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew – small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes. He had extravagant features, a prominent jaw, long arms and big feet for which he had trouble finding wide enough shoes, even at fifteen. (Treslove noticed feet; his were dainty like a dancer’s.) What is more – and everything was more on Finkler – he had a towering manner that made him look taller than he actually was, and delivered verdicts on people and events with such assurance that he almost spat them out of his mouth. ‘Say it, don’t spray it,’ other boys sometimes said to him, though they took their lives in their hands when they did. If this was what all Jews looked like, Treslove thought, then Finkler, which sounded like Sprinkler, was a better name for them than Jew. So
that was what he called them privately – Finklers.

  He would have liked to tell his friend this. It took away the stigma, he thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say, or the Finklerish Conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself.

  They were both the sons of uppity shopkeepers. Treslove’s father sold cigars and smoking accoutrements, Finkler’s pharmaceuticals. Sam Finkler’s father was famous for dispensing pills which reinvigorated people apparently at death’s door. They took his pills and their hair grew back, their backs straightened, their biceps swelled. Finkler senior was himself a walking miracle, a one-time stomach cancer patient now become the living proof of what his pills were capable of achieving. He would invite customers to his pharmacy, no matter what their ailments, to punch him in the stomach. Right where his cancer had once been. ‘Harder,’ he’d say. ‘Punch me harder. No, no good, I still don’t feel a thing.’

  And then when they marvelled at his strength he would produce his box of pills. ‘Three a day, with meals, and you too will never feel pain again.’

  For all the circus hocus-pocus he was a religious man who wore a black fedora, was an active member of his synagogue, and prayed to God to keep him alive.

  Julian Treslove knew he would never be clever in a Finklerish way. D’Jew know Jewno . . . He’d never be able to come up with anything like that. His brain worked at a different temperature. It took him longer to make his mind up and no sooner did he make his mind up than he wanted to change it again. But he was, he believed, and perhaps for that reason, the more boldly imaginative of the two. He would come to school balancing his night’s dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders. Most of them were about being left alone in vast echoing rooms, or standing over empty graves, or watching houses burn. ‘What do you think that was about?’ he’d ask his friend. ‘Search me,’ was Finkler’s invariable reply. As though he had more important things to think about. Finkler never dreamed. On principle, it sometimes seemed to Treslove, Finkler never dreamed.