The Finkler Question Read online

  Unless he was just too tall to dream.

  So Treslove had to figure out his own dreams for himself. They were about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were about being too late, unless they were about being too early. They were about waiting for an axe to fall, a bomb to drop, a dangerous woman to dabble her fingers in his heart. Julie, Judith, Juno . . .

  Huno.

  He also dreamed about misplacing things and never being able to find them despite the most desperate searches in unlikely places – behind skirting boards, inside his father’s violin, between the pages of a book even when what he was looking for was bigger than the book. Sometimes the sensation of having misplaced something precious lasted throughout the day.

  Libor, more than three times their age when they met him, had turned up out of the blue – he really did look, in his maroon velvet suit and matching bow tie, as though he’d pushed open the wrong door, like Treslove in his dreams – to teach them European history, though mainly what he wanted to talk to them about was communist oppression (from which he’d had the foresight to flee in 1948,just before it sunk its claws into his country), Hussite Bohemia and the part played by windows in Czech history. Julian Treslove thought he had said ‘widows’ and became agitated.

  ‘Widows in Czech history, sir?’

  ‘Windows, chlapec, windows!’

  He had been a journalist of sorts in his own country, a well-connected film critic and gossip columnist, and then again, as Egon Slick, a showbusiness commentator in Hollywood, squiring beautiful actresses around the bars of Sunset Boulevard, and writing about them for the glamour-starved English press, yet now here he was teaching the absurdities of Czech history to English schoolboys in a north London Grammar School. If anything could be more existentially absurd than Czech history, it was his own.

  It was for Malkie that he’d relinquished Hollywood. She never accompanied him on his assignments, preferring to keep the home fires burning. ‘I like waiting for you,’ she told him. ‘I love the anticipation of your return.’ But he could tell the anticipation was wearing thin. And there were material cares he didn’t feel he could leave her to go on handling on her own. He broke a contract and argued with his editor. He wanted time to write the stories of where he’d been and who he’d met. Teaching gave him that time.

  Pacific Palisades to Highgate, Garbo to Finkler – the trajectory of his career made him laugh disrespectfully during his own classes, which endeared him to his pupils. Morning after morning he delivered the same lesson – a denunciation of Hitler and Stalin followed by the First and – ‘if you’re well behaved’ – the Second Defenestration of Prague. Some days he’d ask one of the boys to give his lesson for him since they all knew it so well. When no questions about the First, the Second or indeed Any Subsequent Defenestrations of Prague appeared on their examination papers, the class complained to Libor. ‘Don’t look to me to prepare you for examinations,’ he told them, curling his already curly lip. ‘There are plenty of teachers who can help you get good marks. The point of me is to give you a taste of the wider world.’

  Libor would have liked to tell them about Hollywood but Hollywood wasn’t on the syllabus. Prague and its defenestrations he could slip in, the stars and their indiscretions he could not.

  He didn’t last long. Teachers who wear bow ties and talk about the wider world seldom do. Six months later he was working for the Czech Department at the World Service by day, and writing biog-raphies of some of Hollywood’s loveliest women by night.

  Malkie didn’t mind. Malkie adored him and found him funny. Funny was better than absurd. Her finding him funny kept him sane, ‘And you can’t say that about many Czechs,’ he joked.

  He continued to see the two boys when he had time. Their innocence diverted him; he had never known boyish innocence himself. He would take them out to bars they could not afford to go to on their own, mixing them drinks they had never before heard of let alone tasted, describing in considerable detail his erotic exploits – he actually used the word erotic, snagging his tongue on it as though the salaciousness of the syllables themselves was enough to arouse him – and telling them about the Bohemia from which he had luckily escaped and expected never to see again.

  Of the nations of the free world, only England and America were worth living in, in Libor’s view. He loved England and shopped as he imagined the English shopped, buying scented tea and Gentleman’s Relish at Fortnum & Mason and his shirts and blazers in Jermyn Street, where he also indulged in a shave and hot towels soaked in limes as many mornings as he could manage. Israel, too, he spoke up for, as a Finkler himself, though that was more about needling people with the fact of its existence, Treslove thought, than wanting to live there. Whenever Libor said the word Israel he sounded the ‘r’ as though there were three of them and let the ‘l’ fall away to suggest that the place belonged to the Almighty and he couldn’t bring himself fully to pronounce it. Finklers were like that with language, Treslove understood. When they weren’t playing with it they were ascribing holy properties to it. Or the opposite. Sam Finkler would eventually spit out Israel-associated words like Zionist and Tel Aviv and Knesset as though they were curses.

  One day Libor told them a secret. He was married. And had been for more than twenty years. To a woman who looked like Ava Gardner. A woman so beautiful that he did not dare bring home his friends to meet her in case they were blinded by what they saw. Treslove wondered why, since he hadn’t told them about her before, he was telling them about her now. ‘Because I think you’re ready,’ was his answer.

  ‘Ready to go blind?’

  ‘Ready to risk it.’

  The real reason was that Malkie had nieces the same age as Treslove and Finkler, girls who had trouble finding boyfriends. Nothing came of the matchmaking – even Treslove couldn’t fall in love with Malkie’s nieces who bore not the slightest physical resemblance to her, though he did, of course, fall in love with Malkie, despite her being old enough to be his mother. Libor had not exaggerated. Malkie looked so like Ava Gardner that the boys canvassed the possibility between them that she was Ava Gardner.

  The friendship faded a little after that. Having shown the boys his wife, Libor had little else to impress them with. And the boys for their part had Ava Gardners of their own to find.

  Shortly afterwards the first of the biographies was published, quickly followed by another. Juicy and amusing and slightly fatalistic. Libor became famous all over again. Indeed more famous than he had been before, because a number of the women he was writing about were now dead and it was thought they had confided more of their secrets to Libor than to any other man.In several of the photographs, which showed Libor dancing with them cheek to cheek, you could almost see them spilling their souls to him. It was because he was funny that they could trust him.

  For several years Sam and Julian kept in touch with Libor’s progress only through these biographies. Julian envied him. Sam less so. Word of Hollywood rarely penetrated the deserted late-night corridors of Broadcasting House which were home – if a hell can be called a home – to Julian Treslove. And because he considered Libor’s career to be the inverse of his own, he was continuously, if secretly, seduced by it.

  Sam Finkler, or Samuel Finkler as he still was then, had not done a modular degree at a seaside university. He knew better, he said, which side his bread was buttered. Finklerish of him, Treslove thought admiringly, wishing he had the instincts for knowing on which side his own bread was buttered.

  ‘So what’s it going to be?’ he asked. ‘Medicine? Law? Accountancy?’

  ‘Do you know what that’s called?’ Finkler asked him.

  ‘What what’s called?’

  ‘The thing you’re doing.’

  ‘Taking an interest?’

  ‘Stereotyping. You’ve just stereotyped me.’

  ‘You said you knew which side your bread was buttered. Isn’t that stereotyping yourself?’

  ‘I am allowed to stereotype myself,’
Finkler told him.

  ‘Ah,’ Treslove said. As always he wondered if he would ever get to the bottom of what Finklers were permitted to say about themselves that non-Finklers were not.

  Unstereotypically – to think which was a further form of mental stereotyping, Treslove realised – Finkler studied moral philosophy at Oxford. Though this didn’t appear an especially wise career move at the time, and his five further years at Oxford teaching rhetoric and logic to small classes seemed less wise still, Finkler justified his reputation for shrewdness in Treslove’s eyes by publishing first one and then another, and then another and then another, of the self-help practical philosophy books that made his fortune. The Existentialist in the Kitchen was the first of them. The Little Book of Household Stoicism was the second. Thereafter Treslove stopped buying them.

  It was at Oxford that Finkler dropped the name Samuel in favour of Sam. Was that because he now wanted people to think he was a private investigator? Treslove wondered. Sam the Man. It crossed his mind that what his friend didn’t want to be thought was a Finkler, but then it would have made more sense to change the Finkler not the Samuel. Perhaps he just wanted to sound like a person who was easy to get on with. Which he wasn’t.

  In fact, Treslove’s intuition that Finkler no longer wanted to be thought a Finkler was the right one. His father had died, in great pain at the last, miracle pills or no miracle pills. And it had been his father who had kept him to the Finkler mark. His mother had never quite understood any of it and understood less now she was on her own. So that was it for Finkler. Enough now with the irrational belief systems. What Treslove couldn’t have understood was that the Finkler name still meant something even if the Finkler idea didn’t. By staying Finkler, Finkler kept alive the backward sentiment of his faith. By ditching Samuel he forswore the Finkler future.

  On the back of the success of his series of practical wisdom guides he had gone on – his big feet and verbal sprinkling and, in Treslove’s view, all-round unprepossessingness of person notwithstanding – to become a well-known television personality, making programmes showing how Schopenhauer could help people with their love lives, Hegel with their holiday arrangements, Wittgenstein with memorising pin numbers. (And Finklers with their physical disadvantages, Treslove thought, turning off the television in irritation.)

  ‘I know what you all think of me,’ Finkler pretended to apologise in company when his success became difficult for those who knew and loved him to accept, ‘but I have to earn money fast in preparation for when Tyler leaves and takes me for all I’ve got.’ Hoping she would say she loved him too much to dream of leaving him, but she never did. Which might have been because she did little else but dream of leaving him.

  Whereas Finkler, if Treslove’s supposition was correct, was too tall to dream of anything.

  Though their lives had gone in different directions, they had never lost contact with each other or with each other’s families – in so far as Treslove could be said to have a family – or with Libor who, first at the height of his fame, and then as it dimmed and his wife’s illness became his preoccupation, would suddenly remember their existence and invite them to a party, a house-warming, or even the premiere of a film. The first time Julian Treslove went to Libor’s grand apartment in Portland Place and heard Malkie play Schubert’s Impromptu Opus 90 No. 3 he wept like a baby.

  Since then, bereavement had ironed out the differences in their ages and careers and rekindled their affection. Bereavement – heartless bereavement – was the reason they were seeing more of one another than they had in thirty years.

  With their women gone, they could become young men again.

  For ‘gone’, in Treslove’s sense, read gone as in packed their bags, or found someone less emotionally demanding, or just not yet crossed his path on the dangerous streets and destroyed his peace of mind.

  4

  After dinner, Julian had walked alone to the gates of Regent’s Park and looked inside. Finkler had offered him a lift but he refused it. He didn’t want to sink into the leather of Sam’s big black Mercedes and feel envy heat up his rump. He hated cars but resented Sam his Mercedes and his driver for nights when he knew he would be drunk – where was the sense in that? Did he want a Mercedes? No. Did he want a driver for nights when he knew he would be drunk? No. What he wanted was a wife and Sam no longer had one of those. So what did Sam have that he hadn’t? Nothing.

  Except maybe self-respect.

  And that also needed explaining. How could you make programmes associating Blaise Pascal and French kissing and still have self-respect? Answer – you couldn’t.

  And yet he did.

  Maybe it wasn’t self-respect at all. Maybe self didn’t enter into it, maybe it was actually a freedom from self, or at least from self in the Treslove sense of self – a timid awareness of one’s small place in a universe ringed by a barbed-wire fence of rights and limits. What Sam had, like his father the showman parmaceutical chemist before him, was a sort of obliviousness to failure, a grandstanding cheek, which Treslove could only presume was part and parcel of the Finkler heritage. If you were a Finkler you just found it in your genes, along with other Finkler attributes it was not polite to talk about.

  They barged in, anyway, these Finklers – Libor, too – where non-Finklers were hesitant to tread. That evening, for example, when they weren’t listening to music, they had discussed the Middle East, Treslove staying out of it because he believed he had no right to an opinion on a subject which wasn’t, at least in the way it was to Sam and Libor, any business of his. But did they truly know more than he did – and if they did, how come they disagreed about every aspect of the subject – or were they simply unabashed by their own ignorance?

  ‘Here we go,’ Finkler would say whenever the question of Israel arose, ‘Holocaust, Holocaust,’ even though Treslove was certain that Libor had never mentioned the Holocaust.

  It was always possible, Treslove conceded, that Jews didn’t have to mention the Holocaust in order to have mentioned the Holocaust. Perhaps they were able by a glance to thought-transfer the Holocaust to one another. But Libor didn’t look as though he were thought-transferring Holocausts.

  And Libor, in his turn, would say, ‘Here we go, here we go, more of the self-hating Jew stuff,’ even though Treslove had never met a Jew, in fact never met anybody, who hated himself less than Finkler did.

  Thereafter they went at it as though examining and shredding each other’s evidence for the first time, whereas Treslove, who knew nothing, knew they’d been saying the same things for decades. Or at least since Finkler had gone to Oxford. At school, Finkler had been so ardent a Zionist that when the Six Day War broke out he tried to enlist in the Israeli air force, though he was only seven at the time.

  ‘You’ve misremembered what I told you,’ Finkler corrected Treslove when he reminded him of that. ‘It was the Palestinian air force I tried to enlist for.’

  ‘The Palestinians don’t have an air force,’ Treslove replied.

  ‘Precisely,’ Finkler said.

  Libor’s position with regard to Israel with three ‘r’s and no ‘l’ – Isrrrae – was what Treslove had heard described as the lifeboat pos-ition. ‘No, I’ve never been there and don’t ever want to go there,’ he said, ‘but even at my age the time might not be far away when I have nowhere else to go. That is history’s lesson.’

  Finkler did not allow himself to use the word Israel at all. There was no Israel, there was only Palestine. Treslove had even heard him, on occasions, refer to it as Canaan. Israelis, however, there had to be, to distinguish the doers from the done-to. But whereas Libor pronounced Israel as a holy utterance, like the cough of God, Finkler put a seasick ‘y’ between the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ – Israyelis – as though the word denoted one of the illnesses for which his father had prescribed his famous pill.

  ‘History’s lesson!’ he snorted. ‘History’s lesson is that the Israyelis have never fought an enemy yet that wasn’t made stron
ger by the fight. History’s lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.’

  ‘Then why not just wait for that to happen?’ Treslove tentatively put in. He could never quite get whether Finkler resented Israel for winning or for being about to lose.

  Though he detested his fellow Jews for their clannishness about Israel, Finkler couldn’t hide his disdain for Treslove for so much as daring, as an outsider, to have a view. ‘Because of the blood that will be spilled while we sit and do nothing,’ he said, spraying Treslove with his contempt. And then, to Libor, ‘And because as a Jew I am ashamed.’

  ‘Look at him,’ Libor said, ‘parading his shame to a Gentile world that has far better things to think about, does it not, Julian?’

  ‘Well,’ Treslove began, but that was as much of what the Gentile world thought as either of them cared to hear.

  ‘By what right do you describe me as “parading” anything?’ Finkler wanted to know.

  But Libor persisted blindly. ‘Don’t they love you enough for the books you write them? Must they love you for your conscience as well?’

  ‘I am not seeking anyone’s love. I am seeking justice.’

  ‘Justice? And you call yourself a philosopher! What you are seeking is the warm glow of self-righteousness that comes with saying the word. Listen to me – I used to be your teacher and I’m old enough to be your father – shame is a private matter. One keeps it to oneself.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the family argument.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with the family argument?’

  ‘When a member of your family acts erroneously, Libor, is it not your duty to tell him?’

  ‘Tell him, yes. Boycott him, no. What man would boycott his own family?’

  And so on until the needs of men who lacked the consolations of female company – another glass of port, another unnecessary visit to the lavatory, an after dinner snooze – reclaimed them.