FIVE

1

You don’t say ‘Find her and bring her’ to an obsessive man.

But Treslove was damned if he was going to give the ‘her’ in question another minute of his time. One day you just have to say no to a compulsion. He put on a coat and took it off again. Enough was enough. He knew what he thought. He knew what he had heard. You Jew. Not You Bloody Jew or You Dirty Jew or You Lovely Jew. Just You Jew. And it was the oddity of that, all things considered, that proved that she had said it. Why would he make up anything so strange? You Jew, unvarnished – You pure unvarnished Jew – supported no theory or assumption. It answered to no necessity that Treslove recognised in himself. It provided nothing, solved nothing, assuaged nothing.

Treslove knew the argument against. He had made it up out of need. So show him the need?

Its very arbitrariness was the proof of its authenticity. His psychology was innocent of seeking or finding the slightest gratification from it. But that still left the mugger. Would she have called him Jew just for the fun of it? No, she had called him Jew because she’d seen a Jew. Why she needed to tell him what she’d seen was a different question. She didn’t, all things considered, have to say anything. She could have taken his valuables and left without a word. He wasn’t exactly putting up a fight. Or looking for a thank-you. Most muggers, he assumed, didn’t identify their victims while they were mugging them. You Protestant, You Chinaman. Why bother? The Protestant and the Chinaman could be relied on to know what they were without a mugger telling them. So You Jew was either an expression of irrepressible rage or it was intended to be informative. I’ve taken your watch, your wallet, your fountain pen, your mobile phone and your self-respect – your jewels, in short – but in return I give you something: just in case you didn’t know it, and I have a sneaking little feeling (don’t ask me why) that you might not have known it, you’re a Jew.

Bye.

Treslove was not willing to accept that he had encountered a person with a screw loose, or that he had just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d been subject to enough accident. His whole life had been an accident. His birth was an accident – his parents had told him that, ‘You weren’t planned, Julian, but you were a nice surprise.’ His own sons the same. Only he’d never told them they were a nice surprise. Doing a modular degree had been an accident; in another age he’d have read classics or theology. The BBC was an accident. A malign accident. The women he’d loved were all accidents. If life didn’t have a thread of meaning to it, why live it? Some men find God where they least expect to. Some discover their purpose in social action or self-sacrifice. Treslove had been in waiting for as long as he could remember. Very well then. My fate cries out, he thought.

Two nights later he was dining with fellow Jews at Libor’s place.

2

Half a year before his wife died, Sam Finkler accepted an invitation to be a castaway on Desert Island Discs.

It would be cruel to assume that the two events were anything but coincidentally related.

They were sitting in their garden, only a low gate dividing them from the Heath, when Finkler first brought up the invitation. It was that or help Tyler plant. Their garden had long been designated an area of non-relaxation on account of Tyler always being busy in it and Finkler having an allergic reaction to lawns, flowers and the idea of taking things easy. ‘That’s called a lounger – lounge!’ Tyler used to order him. But she had discovered what he had always known – that his body wasn’t built for lounging in a lounger. ‘I’ll lounge long enough in due course,’ had been his answer. So either he didn’t venture out into the garden at all, or he paced around its perimeter like a private detective looking for a corpse in the bushes, pausing to discuss what was on his mind, and that – at least the part he could relate to Tyler – was invariably work. The moment he dried up or slowed down he knew Tyler would recruit him to hold a bamboo stake for her, or to put his finger on a knot of green string. Not onerous tasks in themselves, but they made Finkler feel his life was ebbing away into manure and mulch.

‘I’ve landed Desert Island Discs,’ he told her from the garden’s furthest extremity, his hands behind him holding on to a down-pipe for safety.

Tyler was on her hands and knees, coaxing life out of the stony soil. Absorbed in dirt. She didn’t look up. ‘Landed? How do you mean landed? I didn’t know you were fishing for it.’

‘I wasn’t. They fished for me.’

‘Then tell them to throw you back.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Why wouldn’t you? What do you want with Desert Island Discs? For a start you go to pieces in a garden never mind a desert island. And you’ve never owned a disc. You don’t know any music.’

‘I do.’

‘Name some music that you like.’

‘Ah, like – that’s not the same as know.’

‘Pedantic sod!’ she said. ‘It’s not enough you’re a liar. You have to be a pedant as well. I recommend you don’t do the programme. It will do you no favours. People can tell when you’re making it up. You shout.’

Finkler might have been fished for, but he did not rise to his wife’s bait. ‘I won’t be lying. Not every one of my records has to be music.’

‘So what are you going to choose – Bertrand Russell reading his memoirs? I can’t wait.’

She stood up and wiped her hands on the gardener’s apron he had bought her years ago. She was wearing earrings he had bought her, too. And the gold Rolex he had given her on their tenth wedding anniversary. Tyler gardened fully made-up and in her jewellery. She could have gone from spreading fertiliser to dining at the Ritz without needing to do anything but peel off her gloves and run her fingers through her hair. The sight of his wife rising from the compost like a beau-monde Venus was the reason Finkler couldn’t keep out of the garden no matter how much he feared it. It was a mystery to him why he bothered to have mistresses when he found his wife so much more desirable than any of them.

Was he a bad man or just a foolish one? He didn’t feel bad to himself. As a husband he believed himself to be essentially good and loyal. It just wasn’t written in a man’s nature to be monogamous, that was all. And he owed something to his nature even when his nature was at odds with his desire, which was to stay home and cherish his wife.

It was his nature – all nature, the rule of nature – that was the bastard, not him.

‘Well, to begin with,’ he said, feeling sentimental, ‘I thought of the music we had at our wedding . . .’

She walked over to the tap to turn on the hose. ‘Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”? Not exactly original. And I’d prefer, if you don’t mind, that you kept our wedding out of it, since it’s the last thing you’ll be thinking about on your desert island. If Mendelssohn is the best you can come up with, my advice is to tell them you’re too busy. Unless he wrote an “Adultery March”.’

‘Too busy for Desert Island Discs? No one’s too busy for Desert Island Discs. It’s one of those offers you have to grab – it’s a career thing.’

‘You have a career. Grab the end of the hose for me instead.’

Finkler was not able to determine where the end of the hose was and began to stalk his garden like a private detective again, staring into bushes and scratching his head.

‘It’s the bit with the water coming out, you imbecile. How many years have you lived here? – and you still don’t know where your own hosepipe is. Ha!’ She laughed at her joke. He didn’t.

‘You can’t be seen not to be asked to do Desert Island Discs,’ he continued, finding the hose at last and then wondering what he was meant to do with it.

‘You’ve been asked. They’ve asked you. Why can’t you be seen to refuse? I’d have thought that would do your career no end of good. Prove you’re not pushy. Give it here.’

‘Not pushy?’

‘Not eager. Not desperate.’

‘You said pushy.’

‘And?’

‘Not a pushy Jew, you mean?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. That’s not at all what I meant and you know it. Pushy Jew is your own projection. If that’s how you fear people see you that’s your problem, not mine. I think you’re just pushy full stop. Anyway, I’m the Jew in this relationship, remember.’

‘That’s nonsense and you know it.’

‘Recite the Amidah, then. Tell me one of the Eighteen Blessings . . .’

Finkler looked away.

Once upon a time she might have thought about spraying him with water, knowing that he would spray her back and they would have a hose fight in the garden, ending in laughter or even lovemaking on the grass and bugger the neighbours. But they were past that . . .

. . . assuming it had ever happened. She tried to picture him chasing her and catching her, pressing his mouth to hers, and was alarmed to realise she was unable to.

 

He canvassed his friends. Not for their opinion as to whether he should do it or not. He knew he had to do it. But for music to lie on a desert island to. Libor suggested Schubert’s Impromptus. And some fiddle concertos. Treslove wrote him down the names of the great death arias in Italian opera. ‘How many do you need?’ he asked. ‘Six?’

‘One’s fine. They want variety.’

‘I’ve given you six to be on the safe side. They’re all very different. Sometimes it’s the woman who’s dying, sometimes it’s the man. And I’ve even thrown in one in which they die together. Make a great end to the programme.’

And to my career, Finkler thought.

At last, though not without canvassing Alfredo as well, Finkler trusted his own instincts for populism and chose Bob Dylan, Queen, Pink Floyd, Felix Mendelssohn (going for Libor’s suggestion of the Violin Concerto rather than the ‘Wedding March’), Girls Aloud, a tranche of obvious Elgar, Bertrand Russell reading from his memoirs, and Bruce Springsteen, whom he referred to on the show as the Boss. For his book he picked the Dialogues of Plato but also wondered if they would bend the rules this once and let him take along the complete Harry Potter as well.

‘As light relief from all that seriousness?’ the presenter asked.

‘No, that’s the Plato,’ Finkler said. Joking, of course, but also meaning it for those who wanted him to mean it.

To prove to his wife that she was not the only Jew in their marriage he made much of going to the synagogue every morning with his father and listening to him saying prayers for his parents, great searing lamentations that moved and, yes, marked him deeply. Yisgadal viyiskadash . . . the ancient language of the Hebrew tolling for the dead. May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified. A prayer which he in turn said when he was orphaned. The rationalist philosopher acknowledging God in the face of truths that reason could never hope to penetrate. You could hear, he thought, a pin drop in the studio. His Jewishness had always been immeasurably important to him, he confided, a matter of daily solace and inspiration, but he couldn’t stay silent about the dispossession of the Palestinians. ‘In the matter of Palestine,’ he went on, with a falter in his voice, ‘I am profoundly ashamed.’

‘Profoundly self-important you mean,’ Tyler said when she heard the programme. ‘How could you?’

‘How couldn’t I?’

‘Because that wasn’t what the programme was about, that’s how you couldn’t. Because no one was asking.’

‘Tyler . . .’

‘I know – your conscience made you. A convenient entity your conscience. There when you need it, not when you don’t. Well, I’m ashamed of your public display of shame and I’m not even Jewish.’

‘That’s precisely why,’ Finkler said.

 

Finkler was disappointed that none of his wittily glossed selections made Pick of the Week but was flattered to receive a letter, a fortnight after transmission, from a number of well-known theatrical and academic Jews inviting him to join a group which had been no more than an idea without direction so far but which they now intended to reform and name in honour of his courage in speaking out – Ashamed Jews.

Finkler was moved. Praise from his peers affected him almost as deeply as the prayers he had never said for his grandfather. He scanned the list. Most of the professors he knew already and didn’t care about, but the actors represented a new scaling of the heights of fame. Though he had never been much of a theatregoer and turned his nose up at most of Tyler’s let’s-go-and-see-a-play suggestions, he viewed being written to by actors – even actors he didn’t think very highly of qua actors – in a different light. There was a celebrity chef on the list too, and a couple of stellar stand-up comedians. ‘Jesus!’ Finkler said when he got the letter.

Tyler was in the garden, lounging this time. A coffee cup in her hand, the papers open. She had been sleeping though it was only late morning. Finkler had not noticed that she tired more quickly than she used to.

‘Jesus!’ he repeated, so that she should hear him.

She didn’t stir. ‘Someone suing you for breach of promise, dearest?’

‘Not everyone, it seems, was ashamed of me,’ he said, naming the most eminent signatories to the letter. Slowly. One by one.

‘And?’

She took as long over the one word as her husband had taken over the dozen names.

He flared his nostrils at her. ‘What do you mean “and”?’

She sat up and looked at him. ‘Samuel, there is not a person whose name you have just read out for whom you have the slightest regard. You abominate academics. You don’t like actors – you particularly don’t like those actors – you have no time for celebrity chefs and you can’t abide stand-up comedians, especially those stand-up comedians. Not funny, you say about them. Seriously not funny. Why would I – no, why would you care what any of them think?’

‘My judgement of them as performers is hardly pertinent in this instance, Tyler.’

‘So what is? Your judgement of them as political analysts? Historians? Theologians? Moral philosophers? I don’t recall your ever saying to me that though they were shit as comedians you thought them profound as thinkers. Every time you’ve worked with actors you’ve pronounced them to be cretins, incapable of putting a single sentence together or expressing half a thought. And certainly unable to understand yours. What’s changed, Samuel?’

‘It’s pleasing to receive support.’

‘From anywhere? From anyone?’

‘I wouldn’t call these people anyone.’

‘No, in your own words less than anyone. Except they’re someone now they’re praising you.’

He knew he could not read her the whole letter, could not tell her that his ‘courage’ had inspired or at least revitalised a movement – small now, but capable of growing to who could say what size – could not say that it was nice to be appreciated, Tyler, so fuck you.

Yet still he could not leave her presence.

So he kept it brief. ‘Praise is different when it’s your own who are praising you.’

She closed her eyes. She could read his mind without having to keep them open.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Shmuelly,’ she said. ‘Your own! Have you forgotten that you don’t like Jews? You shun the company of Jews. You have publicly proclaimed yourself disgusted by Jews because they throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God. And now because a few mediocre half-household-name Jews have decided to come out and agree with you, you’re mad for them. Was that all it ever needed? Would you have been the goodest of all good Jewish boys if only the other Jewish boys had loved you earlier? I don’t get it. It makes no sense. Becoming an enthusiastic Jew again in order to turn on Judaism.’

‘It’s not Judaism I’m turning on.’

‘Well, it’s sure as hell not Christianity. Ashamed Jews? It would be more honourable of you to kick around with David Irving or join the BNP. Remember what it is you really want, Samuel . . . Sam! And what you really want isn’t the attention of Jews. There aren’t enough of them.’

He didn’t listen to her. He went upstairs to his desk, his ears ringing, and wrote a letter of appreciation to Ashamed Jews – a letter in appreciation of their appreciation. He was honoured to join them.

But might he make a suggestion? In the age of sound bites, which, like it or not, this assuredly was, one simple, easy to remember acronym could do the work of a thousand manifestos. Well, an acronym – or something much like an acronym – lay concealed in the very name the group had already given itself. Instead of ‘Ashamed Jews’, what about ‘ASHamed Jews’, which might or might not, depending on how others felt, be shortened now or in the future to ASH, the peculiar felicity of which, in the circumstances, he was sure it wasn’t necessary for him to point out?

Within a week he received an enthusiastic response on notepaper headed ‘ASHamed Jews’.

He felt a deep sense of pride, mitigated, of course, by sadness on behalf of those whose suffering had made ASHamed Jews necessary.

Tyler was cruelly wrong about him. He didn’t want what she accused him of wanting. His hunger for acclaim – or even for approval – was not that voracious. As God was his witness, he felt approved of enough. This wasn’t about acceptance. It was about the truth. Someone had to speak it. And now others were ready to speak it with him. And in his name.

Had Ronit Kravitz not been the daughter of an Israyeli general he’d have rung her to propose a weekend of making ASHamed Jew whoopee in Eastbourne.

3

Tyler did, as it turned out, watch a second of her husband’s television programmes in Treslove’s Hampstead apartment that wasn’t in Hampstead. And, at decent intervals, further series after that. She saw it as a consolation for her husband doing so much television. The thing she and Julian had going never blossomed into an affair. Neither was looking for an affair – or at least Tyler wasn’t and Treslove had grown wary of looking for anything – but they found a way of showing kindnesses to each other over and above the conventions of an afternoon adultery fuelled by anger and envy.

Her growing tired was not lost on Treslove.

‘You look pale,’ he told her once, smothering her face with kisses.

She submitted to them, laughing. Her quiet, not her raucous laugh.

‘And you are subdued somehow,’ he said, kissing her again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come round to depress you.’

‘You don’t depress me. Your pallor becomes you. I like a woman to look tragic.’

‘God – tragic now. Is it as bad as that?’

It was as bad as that, yes.

Treslove would have said Come and die at my place but he knew he couldn’t. A woman must die in her own home and in her own husband’s arms, no matter that her lover would mop her brow with more consideration than the husband ever could.

‘I do love you, you know,’ he told her on what they both in their hearts suspected would be their last tryst. He had told her he loved her the first time they slept together, watching Sam on the box. But this time he meant it. Not that he didn’t mean it then. But this time he meant it differently. This time he meant it for her.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him.

‘I do.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I truly do.’

‘You truly don’t, but I am touched by your wanting to. You have been lovely to me. I am under no illusions, Julian. I get men. I know the bizarre way masculine friendship works. I have never fooled myself that I am any different to other wives in this position – a means for you two to work out your rivalry. I told you that at the beginning. But I’ve been happy to take advantage of that for my own purposes. And I thank you for having made me feel it was me you wanted.’

‘It was you I wanted.’

‘I believe it was. But not as much as you wanted Samuel.’

Treslove was horrified. ‘I, want Sam?’

‘Oh, not in the wanting to fuck him sense. I’ve never loved him in the wanting to fuck him sense. I doubt anybody has. He’s not a fuckable man. Not that that’s ever stopped him . . . or them. But he has something, my husband, not a glow exactly, but some air of secrecy that you want to penetrate, a kind of fast-track competence or know-how that you would like to have rub off on you. He is one of those Jews to whom, in an another age, even the most avidly Jew-hating emperor or sultan would have given high office. He appears connected, he knows how to get on, and you feel that if you are close to him he will get on for the both of you. But I don’t have to tell you. You feel it. I know you feel it.’

‘Well, I didn’t know I felt it.’

‘Trust me, you feel it. And that’s where I come in. I’m the bit that rubs off on you. Through me you connect to him.’

‘Tyler –’

‘It’s all right. I don’t mind being the stolen stardust that sprinkles you with second-hand importance. I get my revenge on him and at the same time get to feel more cared for by you.’

She kissed him. A thank-you kiss.

The kiss, Treslove thought, that a woman gives a man who doesn’t shake her to her soul. For that was what his ‘caring’ for her denoted – that he was kind but not challenging, not a man of influence, not someone who gave her access to the fast track. Yes, she came round to his house, slid with angular infidelity into his bed and fucked him, but without ever truly noticing he was there. Even this kiss somehow glanced by him, as though she were really kissing a man standing in the room behind.

Was it true, what she had said? That sleeping with Sam’s wife gave him temporary honorary entry to Sam’s success? If it was true, why then didn’t he feel more successful? He liked the idea of Sam being an unfuckable man, but what was that information worth if he was an unfuckable man himself. Poor Tyler, fucking two unfuckable men. No wonder she looked ill.

But poor me as well, Treslove thought.

A means to work out their rivalry, she had called herself. Their rivalry – implying that there was something in this for Sam too. Did that mean he knew? Was it possible that when she got home Tyler would tell her husband what an unfuckable man his friend was? And would Sam get off on that? Would they get off on it together?

Did Finklers do that?

For the first time, Treslove broke the rule all adulterers must obey or perish, and pictured them in bed together. Tyler, fresh from Treslove, turning to her husband smiling, facing him as she had never once faced Treslove, holding his penis in front of her like a bridal bouquet, not a problem to be solved behind her back like Treslove’s. Looking at it even, perhaps giving it name, confronting it head-on, admiring it, as she had never once confronted and admired his.

‘In the meantime,’ she said, looking at her watch, though she didn’t mean ‘this minute’, ‘he’s got himself a new craze.’

Did Treslove care? ‘What?’ he wondered.

She waved the subject away as though, now he asked, she wished she hadn’t brought it up, or as though she felt he would never understand the ins and outs of it.

‘Oh, this Israel business. Sorry, Palestine, as he insists on calling it.’

‘I know. I’ve heard him.’

‘You heard him on Desert Island Discs?’

‘Missed it,’ Treslove lied. He hadn’t missed it. He had gone to great lengths not to hear it or to be in contact with anyone who had. Watching Finkler on television while sleeping with his wife was one thing, but Desert Island Discs to which the whole country tuned in . . .

‘Wise move. I wish I’d missed it. In fact I’d have come round here in order to miss it but he wanted me to listen to it with him. Which should have made me suspicious. How come no Ronit . . . ?’

Again Treslove found himself thinking of Tyler and Sam in bed together, face to face, listening to Desert Island Discs, Tyler admiring Sam’s penis, crooning over it while on the radio the man himself did his Palestine thing.

He said nothing.

‘Anyway, that was where he came out with it.’

‘Came out with what?’

‘His confession of shame.’

‘Shame about Ronit?’

‘Shame about Israel, you fool.’

‘Oh, that. I’ve heard him on the subject with Libor. It’s nothing new.’

‘It’s new to announce it to the country. Do you know how many people listen to that programme?’

Treslove had a fair idea but didn’t want to get into a discussion about numbers. Mention of millions hurt Treslove’s ear. ‘So does he regret it now?’

‘Regret it! He’s like the cat that got the cream. He has a whole new bunch of friends. The ASHamed Jews. They’re a bit like the Lost Boys. It’s all down to careless mothering if you ask me.’

Treslove laughed. Partly in appreciation of Tyler’s joke, partly to dispel the idea of Finkler having new friends. ‘Does he know you call them that?’

‘The Lost Boys?’

‘No, the ASHamed Jews.’

‘Oh, they’re not my invention. They call themselves that. They’re a movement, inspired, would you believe, by my hubby. They write letters to the papers.’

‘As ASHamed Jews?’

‘As ASHamed Jews.’

‘That’s a bit disempowering, isn’t it?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, to make your shame your platform. Reminds me of the Ellen Jamesians.’

‘Haven’t heard of them. Are they anti-Zionists too? Don’t tell Sam. If they’re anti-Zionist and women he’ll join in a shot.’

‘They’re the deranged feminists in The World According to Garp. John Irving – no? Garrulous American novelist. Wrestler. Writes a bit like one. I made one of my first radio programmes about the Ellen Jamesians. They cut out their tongues in solidarity with a young woman who was raped and mutilated. Something of a self-defeating action, since they couldn’t thereafter effectively voice their anger. A good anti-feminist joke, I always thought, not that I’m, you know –’

‘Well. I doubt there’ll be any tongue cutting with this lot. They’re a gobby bunch, used to the limelight and the sound of their own voices. Sam’s on the phone to them every minute God sends. And then there are the meetings.’

‘They have meetings?’

‘Not public ones, as far as I know. Not yet, anyway. But they meet at one another’s houses. Sounds disgusting to me. Like group confessionals. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Sam’s their father confessor. “I forgive you, my child. Say three I am ashameds and don’t go to Eilat for your holidays.” I won’t allow them in my house.’

‘And is that all they stand for – being ashamed of being Jewish?’

‘Whoa!’ She laid a hand on his arm. ‘You’re not allowed to say that. It’s not Jews they’re ashamed of being. It’s Israel. Palestine. Whatever.’

‘So are they Israelis?’

‘You know Sam is not an Israeli. He won’t even go there.’

‘I meant the others.’

‘I don’t know about all of them, but they’re actors and comedians and those I’ve heard of certainly aren’t Israelis.’

‘So how can they be ashamed? How can you be ashamed of a country that’s not yours?’ Treslove truly was puzzled.

‘It’s because they’re Jewish.’

‘But you said they’re not ashamed of being Jewish.’

‘Exactly. But they’re ashamed as Jews.’

‘Ashamed as Jews of a country of which they are not citizens . . . ?’

Tyler laid a hand on his arm again. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘what do we know? I think you’ve got to be one to get it.’

‘Be one what? One of the ASHamed?’

‘A Jew. You’ve got to be a Jew to get why you’re ashamed of being a Jew.’

‘I always forget that you’re not.’

‘Well, I’m not. Except by adoption and hard work.’

‘But at least that way you’re not ashamed.’

‘Indeed I’m not. If anything I’m rather proud. Though not of my husband. Of him I’m ashamed.’

‘So you’re both ashamed.’

‘Yes, but of different things. He’s ashamed because he’s a Jew, I’m ashamed because he’s not.’

‘And the kids?’

Tyler became abrupt. ‘They’re at university, Julian, remember. Which means they’re old enough to make up their own minds . . . but I haven’t brought them up Jewish only to be ashamed.’ She laughed at her own words. ‘Listen to me – brought them up Jewish.’

Treslove wanted to tell her he loved her again.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘And what?’

‘And what are they?’

‘One is, one isn’t, one’s not sure.’

‘You have three?’

She pretended to hit him, but with little force. ‘You’re the one who should be ashamed,’ she said.

‘Oh, I am, don’t worry. I am ashamed of most things though none of them have anything to do with Jews. Unless I should be ashamed of us.’

She exchanged a long look with him, a look that spoke of the past, not the future. ‘Don’t you get sick of us?’ she said, as though wanting to change the subject. ‘I don’t mean us us, I mean Jews. Don’t you get sick of our, their, self-preoccupation?’

‘I never get sick of you.’

‘Stop it. Answer me – don’t you wish they’d shut up about themselves?’

‘ASHamed Jews?’

‘All Jews. Endlessly falling out in public about how Jewish to be, whether they are or they aren’t, whether they’re practising or they’re not, whether to wear fringes or eat bacon, whether they feel safe here or precarious, whether the world hates them or it doesn’t, the fucking Holocaust, fucking Palestine . . .’

‘No. Can’t say I notice. Sam, maybe, yes. I always feel when he talks about Palestine that he’s paying his parents back for something. It reminds me of swearing for the first time when you’re a kid – daring God to strike you down. And wanting to show you belong to the kids who already do swear. But I don’t understand the politics. Only that if anyone’s going to be ashamed then maybe we all should be.’

‘Exactly. The arrogance of them – ASHamed Jews for God’s sake, as though the world waits upon the findings of their consciences. That’s what shames me –’

‘As a Jewess.’

‘I’ve warned you about that word.’

‘I know,’ said Treslove, ‘but I get hot saying it.’

‘Well, you mustn’t.’

‘My Jewess,’ he said, ‘my unashamed Jewess that isn’t,’ and took her to him and held her. She felt smaller in his arms than when he’d first tried to hold her a year ago or more. There was less spring in her flesh, he thought. And her clothes were less sharp. Literally sharp. He bled when he first held her. There was anger in her still, but no fight. That she would consent to enter his arms at all, let alone be still in them, proved her alteration. The less of her there was, the more of her was his.

‘I meant it,’ he said, ‘I truly do love you.’

‘And I meant it when I thanked you for your kindness.’

For a moment it seemed to Treslove that they were the outsiders, just the two of them in the darkness, excluded from the pack of others. Today he didn’t want her to go home, back to Sam’s bed, back to Sam’s penis. Was Sam now ashamed of his penis, too? Treslove wondered.

He had flaunted his circumcision at school. ‘Women love it,’ he’d told Treslove in the shower room.

‘Liar.’

‘I’m not. It’s true.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve read. It gives them greater satisfaction. With one of these beauties you can go for ever.’

Treslove read up about it himself. ‘You don’t get the pleasure I get,’ he told his friend. ‘You’ve lost the most sensitive part.’

‘It might be sensitive but it’s horrible. No woman will want to touch yours. So what’s the sensitivity worth? Unless you want to spend the rest of your life being sensitive with yourself.’

‘You’ll never experience what I experience.’

‘With that thing you’ll never experience anything.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘We’ll see.’

And now? Did Finkler’s Jewish shame extend to his Jewish dick?

Or was his dick the one part of him to enjoy exclusion from the slur? Could an ASHamed Jew go on giving women greater satisfaction than an unashamed Gentile, Palestine or no Palestine?

That’s if there’d ever been a grain of truth in any of it. You never knew with Jews what was a joke and what wasn’t, and Finkler wasn’t even a Jew who joked much. Treslove longed for Tyler to tell him. Solve the mystery once and for all. Did women have a preference? She was in the best position to make the comparison. Yes or no? Could her Shmuelly go for ever? Was her willingness to look at her husband’s penis but not her lover’s attributable to the foreskin and the foreskin alone? Was Treslove uncut too ugly to look at? Had the Jews got that one right at least?

It would explain, wouldn’t it, why she fiddled with him the way she did, behind his back. Was she unconsciously trying to screw off his prepuce?

He didn’t ask her. Didn’t have the courage. And in all likelihood didn’t want to hear the answer. Besides, Tyler wasn’t well enough to be questioned.

 You take your opportunity when you have it. Treslove was never given another.

4

‘So where is she?’ Libor asked, opening the door to Treslove. Normally he would have buzzed his friend in, but this time he came down in the lift. He wanted a private introduction to the mystery mugger who could smell a man’s religion on him.

Treslove showed Libor the palms of his hands. Empty. Then pointed to his heart. ‘In here,’ he said.

Libor pointed to his friend’s head. ‘You sure she’s not in there?’

‘I can always leave.’

‘And get attacked again? Don’t leave. Come and meet the other guests. And by the way, we’re having a Seder.’

‘What’s a Seder?’

‘A Passover service.’

‘I’ll come back.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’ll enjoy it. Everyone enjoys a Seder. There’s even singing.’

‘I’ll come back.’

‘You’ll come up. It’s an interesting gathering. Old, but interesting. And God is meant to be present. Or at least his Angel. We pour a glass of wine for him.’

‘Is that why you’re dressed formally? To greet the Angel?’

Libor was wearing a grey suit with a grey stripe in it and a grey lawyer’s tie. The overall greyness made his face all but disappear. Treslove pretended to look down into his jacket to see where he had gone.

Libor nodded. ‘You aren’t surprised?’

‘By your suit? Yes. Particularly by the fact that your trousers reach your shoes.’

‘I’m getting shorter, that’s all that means. Thank you for noticing. But I meant aren’t you surprised by our having a Seder in September?’

‘Why? When should you be having a Seder?’

Libor looked at him sideways, as it to say, So much for your being Jewish. ‘March, April – about the time you have Easter. It’s a moon thing.’

‘So why are you having it early? For me?’

‘We’re not having it early, we’re having it late. I have a dying great-great-great-somebody or other. Hard to credit, I know. She must be a hundred and forty. She’s Malkie’s side of the family. She was indisposed for this year’s Seder and doubts she’ll survive to see another. So we’re making her one last one before she goes.’

Treslove touched Libor’s grey sleeve. The idea of one last anything always upset him. ‘And you can do that?’

‘By a rabbi, maybe not. But by me it’s immaterial. You have one when you feel like one. It might be my last as well.’

Treslove ignored that. ‘Will I follow it?’

‘Some of it. We’re doing the speeded-up version. Quick, while there’s life left.’

So as the old lady nodded through the last Seder of her life, Treslove, bowing to the assembled guests but being quiet about it, took a chair at his first.

 

He knew the story. Who doesn’t know the story? Treslove knew it because he had sung in Handel’s Israel in Egypt at school, an unnecessarily lavish production which Finkler’s father had helped to fund by paying for the costumes and presenting every member of the cast with a strip of his miracle pills, no matter that the costumes were bed sheets sewn together by Finkler’s mother and the pills gave everyone diarrhoea. Whatever Treslove sang, stayed in his mind . . . The new pharaoh who knew not Joseph and set over Israel taskmasters to afflict them with burthens, the children of Israel sighing by reason of their bondage – he had loved ‘sighing’ over that bondage in the choir – Moses and Aaron turning the waters into blood, causing frogs to infest the pharaoh’s bedchamber and blotches and blains to break forth on man and beast, and a thick darkness to cover the land, ‘even darkness which might be felt’. In the choir they had closed their eyes and stretched out their hands, as though to feel the darkness. It was a darkness that Treslove could still close his eyes and touch. Small wonder, he thought, that Egypt was glad to see the Israelites depart, ‘for the fear of them fell upon them’ . . . Job done, in his view.

But then there was Part the Second which consisted mainly of the children of Israel telling God what He had done for them, and how like unto Him there was no other.

‘Is that why your God abandoned you,’ he remembered saying to Finkler after the concert, ‘because you bored the living fucking daylights out of him?’

‘Our God has not abandoned us,’ Finkler had replied in anger. ‘And don’t you blaspheme.’

Those were the days!

Watching people around him reading from right to left he recalled Finkler’s schoolyard boast. ‘We can read from both ends of a book,’ he had told Treslove, who couldn’t begin to imagine how it was possible to do such a thing or what powers of secret knowledge and necromancy were necessary to achieve it. And not just any old book, but books written in a script so ancient it should have been scratched with a sharp stone in rock not written back to front on paper. No wonder Finkler didn’t dream – there was no room in his head for dreams.

Libor had quietly deposited Treslove more or less in the middle of a long table that sat about twenty people, all with their heads in books, reading from right to left. He was between an old lady and a young – young by the standards of the gathering, that was. Allowing for the wrinkles on the older lady and the somewhat too much flesh on the younger, Treslove took them to be closely related. Something about the way they bent forward over the table, like birds. He assumed that they were grandmother and grandaughter or maybe divided by one generation more than that, but he didn’t want to scrutinise their features too closely while they were engrossed in the story of Jewish deliverance. One thing he could not take his eyes off, though, was the book from which the older lady read. It appeared to be a children’s picture book with pop-ups and pull-outs. Fascinated, he watched her make a nursery game of reading, turning a wheel that on one page denoted the ceaseless tortures imposed on the Israelites as they laboured regardless of the hour, now under a burning sun, now under an icy scimitar-scooped moon – and on the opposite page showed the frogs and the boils and the darkness so thick you could feel it.

When it came to the crossing of the Red Sea the old lady pulled a tab, and lo! where the Israelites had crossed in safety the waters overwhelmed their enemies, and ‘there was not one of them left’. She pulled the tab again and again, drowning the Egyptians over and over.

Talk about disproportionality, Treslove thought, remembering something he had read of Finkler’s recently about Jews taking two eyes for every one. But when he next looked, the old lady was irritably tugging at another tab and making a little boy in a skullcap disappear beneath the table and come up with a piece of matzo. This, too, she caused to happen again and again. So it was repetition for the fun of it, not the vengeance.

He looked around him, struck by how different Libor’s table was from how he remembered it in Malkie’s day, or even the last time he was here with Finkler. So many Finklers today – though no Sam Finkler – so much food he didn’t recognise, and so many elderly people at a form of prayer that was not always to be distinguished from chatter or sleep.

The next thing he knew he was being asked, as the youngest manchild present – ‘Me?’ he said in astonishment – whether he would like to recite the Four Questions.

‘I would if I could,’ he told them. ‘In fact, there are many more than four questions I would like to ask. But I cannot read Hebrew.’

‘Wrong order,’ the old lady said, not taking her eyes from her book. ‘We’ve gone past the Four Questions. We never do things in the right order in this family. Everything’s upside down. Who is he anyway? Another of our Bernice’s?’

‘Mother, Bernice died thirty years ago,’ someone at the other end of the table said.

‘Then he shouldn’t be here,’ the old lady said.

Treslove wondered what he’d started.

The granddaughter, as he supposed, or was it the great-granddaughter laid a gentle hand on his. ‘Take no notice,’ she whispered. ‘She’s always like this at a Seder. She loves it but it makes her angry. I think it’s the plagues. She feels a little guilty for them. But you don’t have to read Hebrew. You can ask the Four Questions in English.’

‘But I can’t read right to left,’ Treslove whispered back.

‘In English you don’t need to.’

She opened the Haggadah at the relevant page and pointed.

Treslove looked across at Libor who nodded and said, ‘So ask the questions.’ He had screwed his face up to resemble an old pantomime Israelite. ‘You’re the Jew boy, ask the questions’ was the message Treslove read in it.

And Treslove, much embarrassed, but with a beating heart, did as he was told.

 

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Why on this night must we eat bitter herbs?

Why on this night do we dip our food twice?

On all other nights we may eat either sitting or leaning, but why on this night must we all lean?

 

He found it difficult to listen to the answers. He had been made too self-conscious by his reading. How did he know how to ask Jewish questions in a room of Jews he had never before met? Were the questions meant to be rhetorical? Were they a joke? Should he have asked them as Jack Benny or Shelley Berman might have asked them, with the bitter herbs comically inflected? Or hyperbolically to denote the extremity of Jewish grief? The Jews were a hyperbolic people. Had he been hyperbolical enough?

Biiii . . . ttaah – what if he should he have delivered it like that, with shuddery theatricality, in the manner of Donald Wolfit playing Hamlet’s father’s ghost?

‘That’s not the way you say them,’ the old lady had shouted before he’d even finished asking the first question. But apart from calls of ‘Shush, Mother’ no one had taken any notice of her. But then no one had applauded him either.

If the answers to his questions amounted to anything it was that this story had to be told and retold – ‘The more one speaks about the departure from Egypt the better,’ he read. Which wasn’t, if he understood the matter correctly, remotely Finkler’s position. ‘Oh, here we go, Holocaust, Holocaust,’ he heard Finkler saying. So would he say the same about Passover? ‘Oh, here we go, Exodus, Exodus . . .’

Treslove liked the idea of telling and retelling. It suited his obsessive personality. Further proof, if further proof were needed . . .

The service – if that was the word for something quite so shapeless and intermittent – continued at a leisurely pace. Some groups pointed passages out to one another, as though losing one’s place and having it found for one again was part of the joy of it all, others fell into what Treslove took to be extraneous conversation, individuals nodded off or left the table to visit one of Libor’s many lavatories, some not returning until the Jews were well out of Egypt, while one or two just stared into space, though whether they were remembering their people’s departure from Egypt five thousand years before or were looking into their own departure tomorrow, Treslove was unable to tell.

‘There aren’t enough children here,’ an old man sitting opposite him said. He had outworn skin and a great cowl of boastful black hair underneath which he glowered at the entire table as though everybody there had wronged him at one time or another.

Treslove looked about. ‘I think there are no children here,’ he replied.

The old man stared at him in fury. ‘That’s what I said. Why don’t you listen to what I’m saying? There are no children here.’

The table came together again for the Passover meal, which seemed to mark the end of all liturgy. Treslove ate what was given him, not expecting to enjoy it. Bitter herbs plastered between two slices of matzo – ‘To remind us of the bitter times we went through,’ a person who had changed places with the woman who had helped him with the Four Questions said. ‘And are still going through, if you ask me,’ said someone else; an explanation contradicted by a third party who said, ‘Rubbish, it represents the cement with which we built the pyramids with our bare hands’ – followed by egg in salt water (‘It symbolises our tears, the tears we spilt’), then chicken soup with kneidlach, then more chicken and potatoes which as far as Treslove could tell symbolised nothing. He was pleased about that. Food that symbolised nothing was easier to digest.

Libor came over to see how he was getting on. ‘You like the chicken?’ he asked.

‘I like everything, Libor. You cook it yourself ?’

‘I have a team of women. The chicken symbolises the pleasure Jewish men take in having a team of women to cook it for them.’

But if Treslove thought the ceremony had concluded with the meal, he was mistaken. No sooner were the plates cleared away than it began again, with thanks for God’s enduring loving kindness, songs which everyone knew and quibbles which no one attended to and fine points of learned exposition culled from the Jewish sages. Treslove marvelled. Rabbi Yehoshua had said this. Hillel had done that. Of Rabbi Eliezer a certain story was told . . . It wasn’t just a historical event that was being remembered, it was the stored intelligence of the people.

His people . . .

He introduced himself, when it seemed appropriate, to the woman he took to be the old lady’s great-granddaughter. She had taken up her place again after visiting people at the furthest reaches of the room. She had the look of a weary traveller returned from an arduous journey. ‘Julian,’ he told her, lingering on the first syllable.

‘Hephzibah,’ she said, giving him a plump and many-silver-ringed hand. ‘Hephzibah Weizenbaum.’

Saying her name seemed to tire her too.

Treslove smiled and repeated it. Hephzibah Weizenbaum – getting his tongue knotted on the ‘ph’ which she pronounced somewhere between an ‘h’ and an ‘f’, but which he, for some reason – a Finkler thing? – couldn’t. ‘Hepzibah,’ he said. ‘Hepzibah, Heffzibah, I can’t say it, but such a beautiful name.’

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. ‘The 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!