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 man 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.

‘Gaza burns and we quibble over efficacy!’ Finkler remonstrated.

A sentiment which could have been said to meet with universal approval had Finkler only approved it himself. In fact, he wished he hadn’t said it. Gaza had galvanised the movement as it had galvanised the country but for his part, perhaps because he liked to lead events not follow them, Finkler could have looked the other way as far as Gaza was concerned. Gaza didn’t do it for him. The philosopher in him recoiled from all the talk of massacre and slaughter on the streets. You keep the big unequivocal words for the big unequivocal occasions, Finkler thought. And there was an illogicality in charging the country he didn’t choose to name with wanton and unprovoked violence while at the same time complaining its bombardment of Gaza had been disproportionate. Disproportionate to what? Disproportionate to the provocation. In which case the operation had not been unprovoked.

Logically, too, disproportion was a dog’s dinner of a concept. How do you measure? Do you trade rocket for rocket, life for life? Are you, once provocation is conceded, not permitted to mete out retribution that will put paid to it?

He was thinking beyond the specifics. The Israyelis were out of control. He didn’t doubt that. But what is true in the individual instance has to be true in the general. And what his fellow ASHamees were saying in this instance could easily be shown to be nonsense when applied elsewhere. He did what was required of him; he drafted letters and stood on platforms, but his heart wasn’t quite in it. The frightening part was wondering if he might just start forgetting what he was ASHamed of. Was there such a thing as a Gaza-induced Alzheimer’s?

Prior to Gaza – and Gaza, he hoped, was his dirty little secret – the ASHamed Jews had pronounced themselves largely satisfied with his de facto leadership. He was seen to have given the fledgling movement a populist intellectualism which fully justified their original wooing of him.

Shortly after the Kabbalah fracas it was agreed with the club that they could start with dinner in the restaurant, in the course of which they would lower their voices and keep the conversation uncontroversial, and then move up to a private room on the second floor where they could talk without fear of being overheard or interrupted. Not even a drinks waiter would disturb them, if that was how they wanted it. This gave a clandestine and even dangerous savour to their deliberations.

It was here, about two years into his association with the group, that Finkler felt, for the first time since he’d joined – since, not to beat about the bush, he’d as good as fathered it – that there was growing opposition to his influence. He wasn’t sure what caused it. Envy, presumably. Even the best causes are susceptible to envy. He had written too many of the group’s letters. He had put himself forward for too many editions of Newsnight and the Today programme. He had taken away something of the group shame and appropriated it to himself. Sam Finkler – the ASHamed Jew.

‘They’ll soon realise their mistake,’ Tyler had prophesied. ‘With a greedy bastard like you around they’ll soon discover how hard it is to get their own share of shame.’

But you can detect envy, Finkler believed, in the way people look at you when they think you’re not looking at them, and in the way they stop being able to listen to you, as though every word you utter is a trial for them, and this was a less personally based, more ideological, dissatisfaction, which caused people to rub their faces and screw up their eyes. Was Gaza the cause? Did they know him to be wobbling? He didn’t believe he had been rumbled. His equivocations confused himself, never mind them. He had even lent his name to the disproportion argument in a much noticed article that went out under the heading ‘How Many Eyes, How Many Teeth?’

Eventually it became clear to him that Gaza wasn’t the problem, the problem was the ‘Boycott’.

‘The Boycott’ was a shorthand term for the Comprehensive Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli Universities and Institutions. There were other boycotts on the table but the Comprehensive Academic and Cultural Boycott  was the talk of the hour, the boycott that trumped all other boycotts, mainly for the reason that its chief sponsors were academics or otherwise cultured persons themselves and could imagine no greater deprivation than being denied access to academic conferences or having your latest paper refused by a learned magazine.

Finkler had poured scorn on the idea, firstly because he thought it feeble – ‘What will we have next,’ he asked, ‘the Philatelic Association of Great Britain banning the licking of stamps in Israel?’ – and secondly because it closed down conversation where conversation was most likely to bear fruit. ‘I am in principle against anything which denies dialogue or trade,’ he had said, ‘but to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.’

‘What else is there to hear?’ Merton Kugle wanted to know. Merton Kugle was the group’s prime boycotter. Already he was boycotting Israel in  a private capacity, going through every item on his supermarket shelves to ascertain its origin and complaining to the manager when he found a tin or packet that was suspect. In pursuit of ‘racist merchandise’ – usually, in his experience, concealed on the lowest shelves in the darkest recesses of the shop – Merton Kugle had ruined his spine and all but worn out his eyes.

In Finkler’s view, Kugle was one of the walking dead. But more than that, his putrefaction was infectious. The moment Kugle spoke, Finkler wanted to curl up in a corner and die.

‘There is always more to hear, Merton,’ Finkler said, holding on to the table to stay upright. ‘Just as there is always more to say.’

‘Well, some of us don’t have the time to sit here and hear you say it,’ Kugle said. ‘So far you’ve asked us to oppose a consumer boycott of all Israeli goods and produce, a boycott on tourism to Israel, except where it might be of incidental benefit to the Palestinians, a boycott of Israeli athletes and sportsmen –’

‘There aren’t any,’ Finkler said.

‘– a boycott of all produce grown in the Occupied Territories, a suspension of EU trade with Israel –’

‘What about where it might be of incidental benefit to Palestinians?’

‘– divestment from Israeli companies, divestment from companies which invest in Israel or otherwise sponsor the illegal state, and now –’

Finkler looked around the room to gauge what support Kugle could command. As always he was disappointed to see so few of the illustrious actors and comedians – Ivo Cohen was not illustrious – so few of the living legends of the culture – Merton Kugle was not living – whose commitment to ASHamed Jews was what had originally attracted him to the group. He enjoyed being the star of the show, right enough, but he would have preferred the show in which he starred to have been a trifle starrier. First among equals was how he had envisaged his role, but where were his equals? Every now and then a letter or a text would be read out from one of the greats, presently touring in Australia or South America, wishing the group well in its indispensable work, and occasionally a DVD would show up in which the eminent musician or playwright would address the ASHamed Jews as though they were the Nobel Prize Committee whose faith in him he deeply appreciated and was only sorry he was unable to receive the award in person. Otherwise, only academics with nowhere else to go attended regularly, and writers like Kugle who hadn’t written anything anyone wanted to publish, and a number of the free-floating opinionated who called themselves analysts and spokespersons, and the odd self-appointed director of the Institute of Nothing in Particular, and a couple of semi-secular rabbis with worried eyes.

If Finkler had gone into adult education, these were the sorts of people with whom he would have spent his evenings.

And they dared to be having second thoughts about him! Well,  he had news for them: he was having second thoughts about them.

There were moments when he wondered what he’d let himself in for here. If I don’t particularly want to be with Jews, where’s the sense, he asked himself, in being with these Jews, solely because they don’t particularly want to be with Jews either?

He could see that Reuben Tuckman was trying to say something. Tuckman was a Liberal rabbi who wore expensive summer suits in all seasons and suffered from a soft stuttering lisp – unless it was an affectation, which would not have surprised Finkler – that caused his eyes to close when he spoke. This gave his already raffish face a sleepy sensuousness which accorded ill, Finkler wanted to tell him, with the sanctity of his office. Tuckman, a man on semi-permanent sabbatical, had recently enjoyed notoriety for mounting a lonely vigil outside the Wigmore Hall where a little-known ensemble from Haifa was due to play. In fact, the ensemble had cancelled because of ill heath but Tuckman had kept up his protest anyway, as much to shame the concert hall (and as much, Finkler thought, to show off his new Brioni linen suit in Marylebone) as to dissuade the public from buying tickets. ‘I love m-music as much as anyone,’ he told a reporter, ‘but I cannot allow my thoul to thoar on the back of innothent blood.’

Rather than be sidetracked into the turgid shallows of Tuckman’s conversation, Finkler returned to Kugle.

‘I want to ask you something, Merton,’ he said. ‘Are we not family?’

‘You and me?’

‘Don’t look so worried. Not you and me in particular. All of us. We’ve had this argument a thousand times, but what are we ashamed of if not our own? We wouldn’t call ourselves ASHamed Jews if the object of our criticism was Burma or Uzbekistan. We’re ashamed of our family, are we not?’

Merton Kugle could not give his assent to this. Where was the catch? The other ASHamed Jews looked wary also.

Reuben Tuckman had put his hands together horizontally, as though praying Buddhistically. ‘Th-Tham,’ he said, making a peace offering of Finkler’s name.

But Finkler couldn’t wait. ‘So if we’re family, what’s with the boycott? Whoever boycotted his own family?’

He had stolen the line shamelessly from Libor. But that’s what friends were for. To give you things.

He was pleased to remember Libor, a Jew he liked.

2

‘Dad, how do you ever know you’re with the right woman?’

‘How do I ever know or how does one ever know?’

‘How do I ever know?’

It relieved Treslove to hear Rodolfo express any sort of interest in women, let alone wonder how he would know when he’d found the right one.

‘Your heart tells you,’ Treslove said, laying a hand on his.

‘Forgive my French, but that’s bollocks, Dad,’ Alfredo butted in.

They weren’t in France, they were in Italy, on the Ligurian Riviera, eating pesto by a hotel pool and looking at women. The holiday which both Finkler and Libor had suggested he take he was finally taking, only in the company of his sons, which no one had suggested. It was entirely his own idea.

A five-day excursion, arranged very hurriedly, Dad paying, in the course of which they would eat well, enjoy some late autumn sunshine, get to know one another at last, and Treslove would attempt to clear his head of some of the nonsense that had been filling it.

‘So why is it bollocks?’ Treslove asked.

‘Well look at that one. Don’t tell me that whoever you’re with you’re not going to want a piece of that.’

‘Her,’ Treslove said.

‘Yes, her.’

‘No, her.’

Alfredo stared at him.

‘You called her that. A piece of that. You should say a piece of her.’

‘Christ, Dad. I thought we were meant to be on holiday. Her, then. But take my point. Look at her figure. Perfect. Long legs, lean stomach, small breasts. You take a woman like that away with you and you think you’ll never look at another woman again. But now you see that – her. Voluptuous figure, big tits, creamy thighs, and you wonder what you ever saw in the skinny one.’

‘You’re nothing if not a philosopher,’ Treslove said. ‘Have you been dipping into Uncle Sam’s book on Descartes and Dating again?’

‘Well, you never did any better,’ Rodolfo chipped in. ‘Mum says you were never with any woman for more than a fortnight.’

‘Well that’s only what your mum says.’

‘Mine says the same,’ Alfredo said.

‘They have always thought alike on many matters,’ Treslove said, ordering another bottle of Montalcino.

He wanted to spoil the boys. Give them what they’d missed. And spoil himself too. Clear his head. That was the phrase he kept using. Clear his head.

He lay in a deckchair and read – hiding his book when he thought someone might be looking – while his sons swam and talked to women. It was pleasant. Not the view – the view down into the Ligurian Sea was spectacular. What was pleasant – no more than pleasant, but pleasant was enough – was the being here with his sons. Should he leave it at this? he wondered. Accept the role of paterfamilias, take his sons away twice a year, and forget the rest. He would be fifty soon. Time to settle. Nothing else had to happen. Who he was, he was. Julian Treslove. Bachelor of this parish. Gentile. Enough.

Enough already.

In the middle of the afternoon Rodolfo came to sit by him.

Treslove hid his book.

‘So?’ Rodolfo asked.

‘So, what?’

‘So what’s the answer to my question? How do you settle? How can you be sure? And if you aren’t sure, isn’t the decent thing to do nothing? Don’t worry, I’m not asking your advice or anything. I just want to talk about it. I want to know I’m not abnormal.’

Treslove wondered how to bring up the sandwich shop in which Rodolfo wore an apron to mix ingredients. Not a leather or a PVC apron. A floral apron.

For the holiday he wore a black velvet ribbon in his ponytail.

‘Has it occurred to you that you might be gay?’ he said at last.

Rodolfo got up out of his deckchair. ‘Are you mad?’ he said.

‘I’m just asking.’

‘Why are you asking?

‘Well, in fact I’m not asking anything. You’re the one who’s asking what’s normal. Everything is normal is my answer to that, or nothing is normal. Why do you care?’

‘Why do you think I’m gay?’

‘I don’t think you’re gay. And even if you were –’

‘I’m not. OK?’

‘OK.’

Rodolfo returned to his deckchair.

‘I like her,’ he said after a decent interval, nodding at the figure of a young woman climbing out of the pool. So did Treslove. What woman doesn’t look good coming up out of a pool? But over and above that – woman rising from the amniotic slime – she had the famished look that excited him. A far cry from . . . well, from what was waiting for him at home.

The bottom half of the woman’s bikini hung loose and wet on her. It was impossible not to imagine sliding a hand inside, palm flat, fingers pointing downwards, the tickle of the fur. Presumably Rodolfo, now he wasn’t gay, was imagining that very thing.

Unless he was just faking it for his father.

‘Go get her, son,’ Treslove enjoyed saying.

That evening there was dancing on the hotel terrace. Both Alfredo and Rodolfo had found women. Treslove watched them contentedly. That’s all as it should be then, he thought. Successful fathering was not as hard as people made out.

After the dancing Alfredo brought his woman to meet his father.

‘Hannah, my dad; Dad, Hannah.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Treslove said, getting up and bowing. To his daughters-in-law, presumably, a man had to be ultra-courteous.

‘You’ve got something in common,’ Alfredo said behind his sunglasses, laughing his empty restaurant pianist’s laugh.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re both Jewish.’

 

‘So what was that about?’ Treslove asked before the three of them retired. The women had gone. Treslove didn’t ask his sons if they were intending to go after them.

This generation was easier about women than his had been. They didn’t go running. If the women left, they left. In Treslove’s day a woman leaving was catastrophic to your self-esteem. It presaged the end of the universe.

‘It was about fun, Dad.’

‘You know what I’m talking about. What was that about my being Jewish?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Would it matter to you if I were?’

‘There you go, answering a question with a question. That in itself makes you Jewish, doesn’t it?’

‘I’ll ask you again. Would it matter to you if I were?’

‘Are you asking if we’re anti-Semites?’ Rodolfo said.

‘And would it matter to you if we were?’ Alfredo added.

‘Well I’m definitely no anti-Semite,’ Rodolfo said. ‘You, Alf?’

‘Nope. You, Dad?’

‘Everyone’s an anti-Semite to a degree. Look at your Uncle Sam, and he’s Jewish.’

‘Yes, but you?’

‘What’s this about? What’s been said to you?’

‘Who by? You mean our mums?’

‘You tell me. What’s the joke?’

‘I ran into Uncle Sam a few weeks ago. He said you’d been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack. He said a few other things as well, but let’s just stick with the anti-Semitic part. I asked how you could be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack if you weren’t a Semite. He said he’d asked you the same question, and your answer was that you were.’

‘I think that’s one of my friend Finkler’s famous simplifications.’

‘Maybe, but are you?’

He looked from Alfredo to Rodolfo and back again, wondering if he’d ever seen them before, and if so where. ‘It doesn’t mean that you are,’ he said, ‘if that’s what’s concerning you. You can continue being whatever you want to be. Not that I know what that is. Your mothers never told me.’

‘Maybe you should have asked them,’ Rodolfo said. ‘Maybe they would have appreciated your taking a hand in our religious education.’

He snorted before he’d finished.

‘Let’s not get into that,’ Alfredo said. ‘You say that just because you are it doesn’t mean that we are. But it does, doesn’t it, a bit?’

‘Depends which bit you’re referring to,’ Rodolfo said, still snorting.

‘You can’t be a bit Jewish,’ Treslove said.

‘Why not? You can be a quarter Indian or one tenth Chinese. Why can’t you be part Jewish? In fact, it would make us half and half, wouldn’t it? Which is considerably more than a bit. I’d call that a lot. I have to say I quite fancy the idea, what about you, Ralph?’

Rodolfo went into an imitation of Alec Guinness being Fagin. ‘I don’t mind if I do, my dears,’ he said, rubbing his hands.

The two boys laughed.

‘Meet one of the half-chosen,’ Alfredo said, extending his hand to his brother.

‘And allow me to introduce you to the other half,’ Rodolfo said.

No, never seen them in my life before, Treslove thought. And wasn’t sure he wanted to again.

My sons the goyim.

3

Out of the blue, Libor received a letter from a woman he hadn’t seen in more than fifty years. She wanted to know if he was still writing his column.

He wrote back to her saying how nice it was to hear from her after all this time but he’d stopped writing his column in 1979.

He wondered how she’d found his address. He’d moved several times since he’d known her. She must have put herself to some trouble to find where he lived now.

He didn’t tell her his wife had died. He couldn’t be sure she even knew he’d been married. And you don’t go mentioning to women you haven’t seen in fifty years, and who have put themselves to trouble to find your address, that you’re a widower.

Hope life has been kind to you, he wrote. It has to me.

After he sent the letter he worried that the melancholy tone would give her a clue. It has to me – there was a dying fall in that. It invited the question, And does it go on being kind to you? On top of which it somehow painted him as frail: a man in need of kindness.

Only afterwards did it occur to him that he hadn’t asked the reason for her enquiry. Are you still writing your column? Why did she want to know?

That was rude of me, he wrote on the back of a postcard. Did you enquire about my column with a purpose?

After he posted the postcard – it was a Rembrandt self-portrait, the artist as an old man – he feared she would think he had chosen it to solicit her pity. So he sent her another one of King Arthur in full regalia and in the bloom of youth. No message. Just his signature. She would understand.

Oh, and nothing meant by it, his phone number.

That was how he came to be sitting in the bar of the University Women’s Club in Mayfair, clinking glasses of house champagne with the only woman other than Malkie he had ever lost his heart to. A little. Emmy Oppenstein. He had thought she’d said Oppenheimer when they first met in 1950 or thereabouts. That wasn’t the reason he had fallen for her, but without doubt it added to her attractiveness. Libor was no snob but he was a child of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and names and titles mattered to him. But by the time he’d realised his mistake they had slept together and he was interested in her for herself.

Or at least he thinks he was.

He sees nothing in her face that he remembers and of course nothing in her figure. A woman in her eighties does not have a figure. He intended no unkindness by that. To himself he said he meant no more than that at eighty a woman is entitled at last to be free of being ogled for her shape.

He could see that she had been beautiful in a Slav way, with wide apart ice-grey eyes and cheekbones on which an unwary man might cut himself going for a kiss. But it wasn’t a beauty he remembered. Would it be the same sitting with Malkie, he wondered, had he left her fifty years ago and were she living still? Had Malkie retained her beauty for him because she’d retained it for a fact, for everyone who saw her, or had he kept her beauty alive in his eyes by feasting on it every day? And if so, did that make her beauty illusory?

Emmy Oppenstein was out of the question for him. He saw that at once. He hadn’t gone to meet her with the intention of courting her again, he absolutely had not. But had he, had he, he would have been disappointed. As he hadn’t, he was not disappointed, how could he be, but had he . . .

Not disappointed because she had worn badly. For most decidedly she had not; she was, if anything, remarkable for her age – alert, elegant, well dressed in a fluffy woven suit, which Malkie had taught him to recognise as Chanel, and even wore high heels. For her age a woman couldn’t have looked better. But for her age . . . Libor wasn’t looking for a woman to replace Malkie, but had he been looking for a woman to replace Malkie the brutal truth was that this woman was, well, too old.

Libor was not blind to the cruel absurdity of such thoughts. He was an elfin man with no hair, his trousers didn’t always reach his shoes, his ties had lain in drawers for half a century and had lost their colour, he was liver-spotted from head to foot – who the hell was he to find any woman too old? What is more, where he had shrunk, she must have grown taller, because he had no memory of ever lying with a woman this size. A thought which he could see, as she surveyed him, mirrored hers exactly. No doubt about it: if she was out of the question for him, he was still more out of the question for her.

And all this Libor had decided in the moment of their shaking hands.

She was, or she had been, a school governor, a justice of the peace, the chair of an eminent Jewish charity, the mother of five children, and a bereavement counsellor. Libor noticed that she left the bereavement counselling to the end. Was that because she knew of Malkie and of her death? Was that why she had written to him? Did she want to help him through?

‘You must be wondering –’ she began.

‘I am wondering but I am also marvelling,’ Libor said. ‘You look so wonderfully well.’

She smiled at him. ‘Life has been kind to me,’ she said, ‘as you wrote that it had been to you.’

She touched his hand. Rock steady hers, as quivery as a jellyfish his. Her nails had been freshly painted. She wore, as far as he could tell, at least three engagement rings. But one might have been her mother’s and another her grandmother’s. And then again they might have been all hers.

He enjoyed a retrospective pride in his own manliness for having slept with a woman as impressive as she was. He wished he could remember her but he couldn’t. Time and Malkie, maybe just Malkie, had wiped out all erotic memories.

So did that mean he hadn’t slept with her at all? Libor feared losing the life he had lived. He forgot things – places he had visited, people he had known, thoughts that were once important to him. So would he soon lose Malkie? And would it then be as though she too had never existed erotically (eloticshrly) for him? As though she had never existed at all in fact.

He told Emmy about Malkie, as he imagined to keep her alive a little longer.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said when he had finished. ‘I had heard something.’

‘Would you drink to her with me?’ he said. ‘You can’t drink to her memory because you didn’t know her, but you can drink to my memory of her.’

‘To your memory of her,’ she said.

‘And you?’

She lowered her gaze. ‘Yes, the same.’

‘Then I drink to you and your memories,’ Libor said.

And so they sat and sipped champagne together companionably, both bereft, while single university ladies, some probably older than Malkie was when she died, drifted by them lost in thought, or slowly climbed the stairs to their bedrooms for an afternoon sleep in their London club.

Be a good place to die if you were a single woman, Libor thought. Or a single man.

‘I’m flattered,’ he said after a while, ‘that you knew I had a column, even if you hadn’t noticed I’d stopped writing it a century ago.’

‘It’s hard to keep up,’ she said, unembarrassed.

Had she ever been embarrassed? Libor wondered. Had she been embarrassed when he’d undressed her, that’s if he ever had? More likely, looking at her now, that she’d undressed him.

‘I’ll tell you why I contacted you,’ she continued. ‘I’ve been writing to all my friends who have a public voice.’

Libor dismissed the idea of his having a public voice, but that only seemed to make her impatient. She shifted in her chair. Gracefully. And  shook her hair. Grey, but not an elderly grey. Grey as though it were a colour of her choosing.

‘To what end?’ he asked. He recognised the public woman, the charity chief, used to commandeering the airwaves of men’s attention for causes she cared about.

And then she told him, without tears, without false sentiment, that her twenty-two-year-old grandson had been stabbed in the face and blinded by an Algerian man who had shouted ‘God is great’ in Arabic, and ‘Death to all Jews’.

‘I’m very sorry,’ Libor said. ‘Did this happen in Algeria?’

‘It happened here, Libor.’

‘In London?’

‘Yes, in London.’

He didn’t know what further questions to ask. Had the Algerian been arrested? Did he offer any explanation for what he’d done? How did he know the boy was Jewish? Did it happen in an area known to be dangerous?

But what was the point of any of them? Libor had been lucky in love but in politics he was from a part of the world that expected nothing good of anybody. Jew-hating was back – of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn’t go away. There was nowhere for them to go to. They were indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.

It wasn’t even the Algerian’s fault in the end. He just did what history had told him to do. God is great . . . kill all Jews. It was hard to take offence – unless, of course, the blinded boy was your child or grandson.

‘I’m unable to find anything to say that isn’t banal,’ he told her. ‘It’s terrible.’

‘Libor,’ she said, touching his hand again, ‘it will be more terrible still, unless people speak up. People in your profession for a start.’

He wanted to laugh. ‘People in my profession? People in my profession interview famous film stars. And I’m not even in my profession any more.’

‘You don’t write at all now?’

‘Not a word, except for the odd poem to Malkie.’

‘But you must know people still, in journalism, in the film industry.’

He wondered what the film industry had to do with anything. Was she hoping he knew someone who would make a film about the attack upon her grandson?

But she had another reason for her specificity, for seeking out a journalist of Libor’s sort, with Libor’s connections. She named a film director of whom Libor had assuredly heard but had never met – not his sort of film director, not Hollywood, not show business – whose recent comments, she believed, were nothing short of scandalous. Libor must have read them.

He hadn’t. He wasn’t up with the gossip.

‘It’s not gossip,’ she explained. ‘He has said he understands why some people might want to blind my grandson.’

‘Because they’re deranged?’

‘No. Because of Israel. Because of Gaza, he says he understands why people hate Jews and want to kill them.’

For the first time, her hand began to shake.

‘Well, I can see why one might want to trace cause and effect,’ Libor said.

‘Cause and effect! Where’s the cause in the sentence “The Jews are a murderous people who deserve all they get”? In the Jews or in the author of the sentence? I can tell you the effect, but where’s the cause, Libor?’

‘Ah, Emmy, now you are turning logician on me.’

‘Libor, listen to me.’ She bent her ice-grey eyes upon him. ‘Everything has a cause, I know that. But he says he understands. What does understand mean here? Is he simply saying he can see why people are driven to do appalling and terrible things? Or is he saying something else? Is he saying that there is a justice in it, that my grandson’s blindness is justified by Gaza? Or that Gaza vindicates in advance whatever crimes are committed in its name? Can no wickedness now be done to any Jew of any age living anywhere that doesn’t have Gaza as its reasoning? This isn’t tracing an effect back to its cause, Libor, this is applauding the effect. I understand why people hate Jews today, he says, this man of culture. From which it must follow that I understand whatever actions they take in expression of their hatred. Dear God, will we now understand the Shoah as justified by German abhorrence of the Jews? Or worse, as retrospective justice for what the Jews were going to do in Gaza? Where does it end, this understanding?’

Libor knew where it ended. Where it always ends.

He shook his head, as though to contradict his own bleak thoughts.

‘So I ask you,’ Emmy Oppenstein went on, ‘as I am asking as many people in your profession as I know, to speak out against this man, whose sphere, like yours, is the imagination, but who abuses the sacred trust of the imagination.’

‘You cannot tell the imagination where it can and cannot go, Emmy.’

‘No. But you can insist that where it goes, it goes with generosity and fairness.’

‘No, you can’t, Emmy. Fairness is not a province of the imagin-ation. Fairness is the business of a tribunal, which is not the same animal.’

‘I don’t mean that sort of fairness, and you know it. I’m not talking balance. But what is the imagination for if not to grasp how the world feels to those who don’t think what you think?’

‘But isn’t that the very understanding you cannot forgive in your film man?’

‘No, Libor, it is not. His sympathy is the simple expression of political allegiance. He understands what his politics lead him to understand. He agrees – that’s all. Poof!’ She clicked her fingers. A thing worth no more of her time than that. ‘Which means all he understands is himself, and his own propensity to hate.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing if you don’t call that propensity what it is. People hate Jews because they hate Jews, Libor. They don’t need an excuse. The trigger isn’t the violence in Gaza. The trigger, in so far as they need a trigger – and many don’t – is the violent, partial, inflammatory reporting of it. The trigger is the inciting word.’

He felt that she was blaming him. Not his profession – him.

‘Every story is a distortion, Emmy. Will your way of telling it be any more impartial than his?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it will. I see villains on all sides. I see two people with competing claims, now justified, now not. I spread the wrong.’

A couple of women settled at a table opposite, both two decades younger than Emmy, Libor guessed. He thought in decades now – ten years his lowest unit of measurement. They smiled at him. He smiled back. They looked like vice chancellors. Something about the length of their skirts. Two vice chancellors meeting to discuss their respective universities. He could live here, if they’d have him, as a sort of mascot. He would promise not to make a nuisance of himelf, not to play his radio late at night and not to talk about Jews. Take tea and biscuits with lady professors and rectors. Discuss declining standards of written and spoken English. At least they’d know who Jane Russell was.

He changed his mind. They wouldn’t. And anyway, they weren’t Malkie.

Villains on all sides, yes. And the word. What had she just said about the word? Its power to incite. Well, that had never been a journey any of his words had been on. Excite, maybe. Incite, never. He lacked the seriousness.

‘There is a big difference,’ he reminded her, as though half ashamed of what he had done with his life, ‘between writing about Anita Ekberg’s chest and the rights and wrongs of Zionism.’

But that wasn’t the category of nicety she had met him to discuss. ‘I tell you where the big difference is, Libor. The big difference is between understanding – ha! – and acquittal. Only God can give absolution. You know that.’

He wanted to say he was sympathetic but couldn’t help. Because he was in no position to help and because none of it mattered. For none of it did matter. But finding the right form of words for saying to Emmy Oppenstein that none of it mattered was beyond him.

‘It’s not Kristallnacht,’ he thought.

But he couldn’t say that.

He’d had his Kristallnacht. Malkie dying – without God’s absolution of either of them, as far as he could see – what worse was there?

But he couldn’t say that either.

‘I’ll speak to a few people I know,’ was the best he could do.

But she knew he wouldn’t.

In return – in return for nothing but an old affection – she gave him the number of a bereavement counsellor. He told her he didn’t require a bereavement counsellor. She reached out and put a hand on each of his cheeks. This gesture meant that everyone needed a bereavement counsellor. Don’t think of it as counselling or therapy. Think of it as conversation.

So what was this? Was this not conversation?

A different kind of conversation, Libor. And it wouldn’t do, she explained, to be counselling him herself.

He was unable to decide whether he was disappointed that it wouldn’t do for her to counsel him or not. To know that he would have had to locate the part of himself in which expectation resides. And he couldn’t.