SEVEN

1

The agreement had been that Treslove would take his sons on holiday and then see.

Heads he’d resume his previous existence, forget all the rubbish, go out looking like Brad Pitt and return home, alone, at a reasonable hour in the evening to his Hampstead flat that wasn’t in Hampstead.

Tails he’d move in with Hephzibah.

‘I don’t want to be making room and then have you changing your mind in a fortnight,’ she told him. ‘I’m not saying this is for life, God help us both, but if you’re going to seriously disrupt me, disrupt me because you want to, not because you’re at a loose end.’

He had told her about the mugging, but she did not set much store by it. ‘That’s what I mean by being at a loose end,’ she said. ‘You go wandering around with your head in the clouds, get your phone snatched like just about everyone else at sometime or another, and think God’s called you. You aren’t busy enough. There’s been too little going on in your head and, from the sound of it, your heart.’

‘Libor’s been talking.’

‘Nothing to do with Libor. I can see it for myself. I saw it when I first clapped eyes on you. You were waiting for the roof to fall in.’

He went to kiss her. ‘And it did,’ he said with exaggerated courtliness.

She pushed him away. ‘I’m the roof now!’

He thought his heart would break with love for her. She was so Jewish. I’m the roof now! And he’d thought Tyler was the business. Well, when had poor Tyler ever done what Hephzibah had just done with language? I’m the roof now!

That was what it was to be a Jewess. Never mind the moist dark womanly mysteriousness. A Jewess was a woman who made even punctuation funny.

He couldn’t work out how she had done it. Was it hyperbole or was it understatement? Was it self-mockery or mockery of him? He decided it was tone. Finklers did tone. As with music, they might not have invented it, but they had mastered its range. They revealed depths in it which the inventors of tone, like the great composers themselves – for neither Verdi nor Puccini was a Finkler, Treslove knew that – could never have dreamed were there. They were interpreters of genius. They showed what could be done with sound.

I’m the roof now! God, she was wonderful!

For his part he’d been ready to jump right in. Then and there. Marry me. I’ll do whatever has to be done. I’ll study. I’ll be circumcised. Just marry me and make Finkler jokes.

She was what he’d been promised. And the fact that she didn’t look anything like the woman he thought he’d been promised – the fact that she made fools of all his expectations – only proved that something far more powerful than his inclination was in operation. Far more powerful than his dreaming inclination, even, for she was decidedly not the schoolgirl bending to fasten her shoelace in his dreams. Hephzibah could not have bent that far down. When she tied her laces she put her foot up on a stool. She was not his kind of woman. She came from somewhere other than his wanting. Ergo – she was a gift.

It was she who was not sure. ‘I, you see,’ she explained, ‘have not been waiting for the roof to fall in.’

He tried to emulate her joke. ‘I’m not the roof!’

She didn’t notice.

He threw in everything he had – a shrug, a ‘so’, a ‘now’ and an extra exclamation mark. ‘So, I’m not the roof now!!’

Still she didn’t laugh. He couldn’t tell if she was annoyed with him for trying. Or maybe it was just that Finkler jokes didn’t work in the negative. It sounded funny enough to him. So, I’m not the roof now!! But it could have been that Finklers only permitted other Finklers to tell Finkler jokes.

She’d had two husbands and wasn’t looking for a third. Wasn’t, in fact, looking for anything.

Treslove didn’t believe that. Who isn’t looking? Stop looking and you stop being alive.

But what she was most not sure of was him. How sure, or how reliable in his sureness, he was.

‘I’m sure,’ he said.

‘You’ve slept with me once and you’re sure?’

‘It’s not about sleeping.’

‘It will be about sleeping if you meet someone you want to sleep with more.’

He thought about Kimberley and was glad he’d managed to squeeze her in in time. A last indulgence before life turned serious. Though she hadn’t been about sleeping either.

But he did as he was told. He went to Liguria with his two goyische sons and came back ready to move in.

‘My feygelah,’ he said, taking her in his arms.

She laughed one of her big laughs. ‘Feygelah, me? Do you know what feygelah means?’

‘Sure. Little bird. Also homosexual, but I wouldn’t be calling you a homosexual. I bought a Yiddish dictionary.’

‘Call me something else.’

He’d come prepared. When he was certain his sons weren’t looking he had studied the Yiddish dictionary by the swimming pool in Portofino. His aim had been a hundred Yiddish words to woo her with.

‘My neshomeleh,’ he said. ‘It means my little darling. It comes from neshomeh, meaning soul.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I fear you’re going to teach me how to be Jewish.’

‘I will if you like, bubeleh.’

 

She had an apartment opposite Lord’s. From her terrace you could watch the cricket. He was marginally disappointed. He hadn’t moved in to watch cricket. He was sorry she didn’t have a terrace that overlooked the Wailing Wall.

There was another problem he had to negotiate. She had once worked for the BBC. Not any longer, and it had been television rather than radio, which diluted her offence a little, but she retained a number of her BBC friendships.

‘I’ll go out when they come,’ he told her.

‘You’ll stay here,’ she said. ‘You say you want to be a Jew – well, the first thing you need to know is that Jewish men don’t go out without their wives or girlfriends. Unless they’re having an affair. Other than another woman’s flat there’s nowhere for Jewish men to go. They don’t do pubs, they hate being seen uncompanioned at the theatre, and they can’t eat on their own. Jewish men must have someone to talk to while they eat. They can’t do only one thing at a time with their mouths. You’ll learn. And you’ll learn to like my friends. They’re lovely.’

‘Nishtogedacht,’ Treslove replied.

The good news was that she had left the BBC to set up a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture – ‘what we have achieved, not what we have undergone; our triumphs not our tribulations’ – on Abbey Road where the Beatles had made some of their most famous records and pilgrims still turned up by the busload to cavort on the famous zebra crossing. Now they would have a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture to visit when they’d finished paying homage to the Beatles.

It wasn’t so far-fetched. The Beatles had a Jew as their manager in their breakthrough years. Brian Epstein. The fans knew how well he had guided them and that his suicide might have been prompted by his unrequited love for John Lennon, a non-Jew and therefore forbidden fruit. So there was a tragic Jewish element to the Beatles story. This wasn’t the prime motivation for building a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture on Abbey Road, but it was a practical consideration.

And yes, the Brian Epstein story would figure. A whole room was being given over to the contribution made by Jews to the British entertainment industry. Frankie Vaughan, Alma Cogan, Lew Grade, Mike and Bernie Winters, Joan Collins (only on her father’s side, but a half is better than nothing), Brian Epstein and even Amy Winehouse.

Hephzibah had been headhunted by the eccentric Anglo-Jewish philanthropist who was himself a music producer and whose brainchild the museum was. She was the best person for the job, in his view and in the view of his foundation. The only person for the job. And Hephzibah, for her part, relished the challenge.

‘Considering that he believes the BBC is biased in its reporting of the Middle East, it’s something of a surprise he chose me,’ she told Treslove.

‘He knows you’re not like the rest of them,’ Treslove said.

‘Not like the rest of them in what sense?’

‘In the sense of being biased in their reporting of the Middle East.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘About you? Yes.’

‘I mean about the rest of them?’

‘Being biased against what your Uncle Libor calls Isrrrae? Of course.’

‘Have you always thought that?’ She didn’t want him changing his politics just for her. He would only end up resenting her for that.

‘No, but that’s only because I didn’t think about it at all. Now I do, I remember what anti-Semites they all were there, especially the Jews.’

For a moment he wondered if that was the reason he had fared so badly at the BBC himself – anti-Semitism.

‘Then you must have known very different Jews at the Beeb to those I knew,’ she told him.

‘The Jews I knew pretended they weren’t Jewish. That was why they went to the BBC – to get a new identity. It was the next best thing to joining the Roman Catholic Church.’

‘Bollocks,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go there to get a new identity.’

‘Because you’re the exception, as I have said. The ones I met couldn’t wait to put their Jewish history behind them. They dressed like debutantes, spoke like minor royalty, took the Guardian, and shrank from you in horror if you so much as mentioned Isrrrae. Anyone would have thought the Gestapo was listening in. And all I was trying to do was ask them out an date.’

‘Why would you have said the word Isrrrae – and can we stop pronouncing it like that – if you only wanted to ask them out on a date?’

‘Small talk.’

‘Maybe they thought you couldn’t see them without thinking of Jewish history, have you put your mind to that?’

‘And why would that have been a problem for them?’

‘Because Jews don’t want to go around with nothing but their history on their faces, Julian.’

‘They should be proud.’

‘It’s not for you to say what they should be. But anyway, I have to say I never came across anything of the sort you’re describing. I would have opposed it if I had. Jew isn’t the only word in my vocabulary, but I am not prepared to have my Jewishness monkeyed about with. I can take care of myself.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘That, though, doesn’t mean I don’t allow other Jews to be as lukewarm about their Jewishness as they like. OK?’

‘OK.’

She kissed him. Yes, OK.

But he returned to the subject later. ‘You should ask Libor what he thinks,’ he said. ‘Libor’s World Service experiences were very similar to mine.’

‘Oh, Libor’s an old Czech reactionary.’

She had, in fact, already asked Libor, not about Jewish anti-Semitism at the BBC but about Treslove. Was he for real? Was he fucking with her mind? Had he really been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack? Could Libor vouch for him at any level?

Yes, no, who could say and absolutely, Libor replied. He had known Treslove since he was a schoolboy. He was deeply fond of him. Would he make a good husband . . .

‘I’m not looking for a husband.’

. . . only time would tell. But he hoped they would be very happy. With one reservation.

She looked alarmed.

‘I lose a friend.’

‘How do you lose him? He’ll be living closer to you if anything. And you can come here for your supper.’

‘Yes, but he won’t be free to come out whenever I call him. And I’m too old to be making long-range appointments. I take it a day at a time now.’

‘Oh, Libor, nonsense.’

But it did strike her that he wasn’t in the pink.

 

‘In the pink? He’s nearly ninety and he’s recently lost his wife. It’s a miracle he can still breathe.’

Turning over in bed, Treslove surveyed the miracle that had transformed his life. He had never shared a mattress with anyone her size before. Some of the women he had slept with had been so narrow he hadn’t always known they were there when he woke. He had to search the bedclothes for them. And as often as not they were gone. Hopped it. Slipped away in the early morning without a sound, as slithery as rats. When Hephzibah so much as stirred Treslove’s half of the bed rolled like the Atlantic. He had to hang on to the mattress. This didn’t disturb his sleep. On the contrary he slept the sleep of his life, confident in the knowledge that she was by his side – let her toss as tumultuously as she liked – and was not going anywhere.

He now understood what Kimberley was for. She had been given him to soften him up. To wean him off aetiolated women. She was a halfway house to Hephzibah – his Juno.

She was not mountainous, his Juno. He wasn’t sure it was fair even to call her plump. She was simply made of some other material than he was accustomed to women being made of. He remembered the woman coming out of the pool in Liguria, the bottom half of her bikini wet and loose, her skin the same, at one and the same time spare and floppy, as though the small amount of flesh she did have was still too big for her bones. Hephzibah occupied her frame, that was how he saw it. She was physically in harmony with herself. She filled herself out. Without her clothes she was not bulky as he’d feared, there were no rolls of plumpness or flaps of excess flesh. If anything she was taut and strong, only her neck a trifle too thick. Consequently she was better to look at out of her clothes than in them. He had dreaded what those purple and maroon Hampstead Bazaar cloaks and shawls would conceal, and lo, when she removed them she was beautiful! Hunoesque.

The big surprise was the lightness of her skin. Light in colour, he meant, not light in weight. Every time he met a Finkler they changed the rules to which Finklers were meant to adhere. Sam Finkler hadn’t been dark and beetling, he’d been red and spidery. Libor was a dandy not a scholar. And here was Hephzibah whose name evoked belly dancers and bazaars and the perfume they sprayed outside the Arab shop on Oxford Street, but whose looks once you peeled her clothes off her were . . . he thought Polish or Ukrainian at first, but the longer he feasted on her nakedness, the more he thought Scandinavian, Baltic maybe. She could have been the figurehead of an Estonian fishing boat – the Lembitu, the Veljo – that plied the Gulf of Riga for herring. He had done a module on Norse sagas at university. Now he knew why. To prepare him for his own Brunhild. As his friendships with Finkler and Libor were to prepare him for his Brunhild being Jewish.

There were no accidents. Everything had a meaning.

It was like a religious conversion. He would wake to the sight of Hephzibah heaving towards him and experience an unfathomable joy, as though the universe and his consciousness of it had miraculously joined up, and there was nothing inharmonious in himself or in anything outside him. It wasn’t just Hephzibah he loved, it was the whole world.

God, being Jewish had stuff going for it!

 

He gave up working as a double at her request. It demeaned him to be playing someone else, she thought. Now he had found her it was time he played himself.

Thanks to provident parents and a couple of good divorces she was not short of money. She was sufficiently not short, at least, for him to be able to take time to think about what he was going to do. What about getting back into arts administration? Hephzibah’s suggestion. Every town in England, every village in England, now had a literary festival; they must be crying out for people with his knowledge and experience. Perhaps he could even start one of his own on Abbey Road, close to the recording studios and the museum. Between the Beatles and the Jews, a St John’s Wood Festival of the Written and Performing Arts. Perhaps featuring a permanently sited Centre of BBC Atrocities? His suggestion. Hephzibah thought not.

He wasn’t sold on the festival idea, anyway. He remembered the woman who kept her Birkenstocks on during lovemaking. No, he was done with the arts.

He wondered about training to be a rabbi.

‘There could be obstacles to that,’ she told him.

He was disappointed. ‘What about a lay rabbi?’

She wasn’t sure whether Judaism recognised a laity in the way that Anglicanism did. Perhaps Liberal Judaism had something of the laity in it, but she was pretty sure he would still have to submit himself to strict Judaic criteria. And there was something called Reconstructionism, but she thought that was American, and she didn’t want to go and live in America with him.

In fact she didn’t want him to be a rabbi full stop.

‘You can want a break from Jewishry,’ she said.

He said he hoped that wasn’t why she’d chosen him.

She said it wasn’t, but she’d had two Jewish husbands, and while she wasn’t for a moment suggesting that she and he were looking to get spliced, she was relieved not to be living with a third Jewish man in any capacity. Not a Jewish man in the usually accepted sense of the term, at any rate, she added hurriedly.

Then she had a bright idea. What about assisting her in setting up the museum? In just how professional a capacity she couldn’t be certain until she’d discussed it with the philanthropist and his board, but she would appreciate his help in whatever form it came, if only while he looked about him.

He was elated. He didn’t wait for her to discuss him with the board. He gave himself a job description. Assistant Curator of the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture.

It was what he had been waiting for all his life.

2

What Finkler hadn’t been waiting for all his life was a dressing-down from an ASHamed Jewish comedian.

Least of all when that comedian was Ivo Cohen who thought it was funny to fall over.

On his own initiative, Finkler had begun to refer to ASHamed Jews as ASH, the acronym he had suggested on the day he agreed to join the group. ‘We in ASH,’ he said in a newspaper interview about his work with ASHamed Jews, and he had repeated the phrase on an early-morning radio show.

‘Firstly there already is an ASH,’ Ivo Cohen said. ‘It’s an anti-smoking charity with which, as a thirty-a-day man, I would rather not be confused. Secondly, it sounds like we’ve been burnt alive.’

‘And thirdly,’ Merton Kugle interposed, ‘it too closely resembles AISH.’

AISH was an educational and dating organisation for young Orthodox Jews, one of whose aims was to promote travel to Israel.

‘Not much chance we’d be confused with that,’ Finkler said.

‘All we’re asking,’ Merton Kugle said, ‘is that you don’t change our name without discussing it with us first. It isn’t your movement.’

The unresolved boycott issue still rankled with Kugle who had now taken to stealing Israeli produce from his supermarket and getting himself arrested.

Merton Kugle, burnt-out match of a man, according to Finkler, a dead-faced blogger whom nobody read, an activist who activated nothing, a no one – a nebbish, a nishtikeit, a nebechel: sometimes, even for Finkler, only Yiddish would do – a gornisht who belonged to every anti-Zionist group that existed, along with several that did not, no matter that some were sponsored by far-out Muslims who believed that Kugle, as a Jew, dreamed of world conspiracy, and others expressed the views of ultra-Orthodox Jews with whom Kugle would not in any other circumstances have shared a biscuit; so long as the phrase anti-Zionist was in the large or in the small print, Kugle signed up.

‘I am a Jew by virtue of the fact that I am not a Zionist,’ he had recently written in a soul-searching blog.

How can you be anything, Finkler wanted to know, by virtue of what you’re not? Am I a Jew by virtue of not being a Blackfoot Indian?

Looking around the room, Finkler met the blinking red-lidded gaze of the oral-sociologist and socio-psychologist Leonie Leapmann. Finkler had known Leonie Leapmann at Oxford when she was a literary theorist, famous for her short skirts. She had a forest of flaming red hair in those days, far more livid than his pale orange, which she would arrange around herself when she sat, her naked legs drawn up to her chin, like a cat clothed only in its fur. Now her hair was cropped and the fires had all but gone out of it. The tiny skirts had gone too, in favour of ethnic leggings of all sorts, on this occasion a set of Hare Krishna jodhpurs with dropped crotch. It was a look Finkler couldn’t read. Why would a woman want to wear a garment that made her resemble an overgrown baby that had filled its pants? It affected all his dealings with her, as though whenever she spoke there was a smell in the room from which he had to avert his nose.

‘Oh please, not this again,’ she pleaded.

Finkler averted his nose.

Leonie Leapmann had always just come back from, or was always just about to go to, the Occupied Territories where she had many close personal friends of all persuasions, including Jews who were as ashamed as she was. On Leonie people could reach out and touch the conflict. In the orbs of her strained, red-lidded eyes they could see the suffering as in a goldfish bowl.

It was like watching a film in 3D.

‘Not what again, Leonie?’ Lonnie Eysenbach enquired with offensively studied politeness.

Lonnie was a presenter of children’s television programmes and a writer of school geography books from which he famously omitted Israel. He had a hungry horse’s face and yellow horse’s teeth which his producers were growing extremely anxious about. He was scaring the children.

Lonnie and Leonie, both fractious and inflammable, had once been lovers and carried the embers of a simmering resentment along to every meeting.

‘I have friends out there, of both persuasions, who are close to suicidal or homicidal despair,’ Leonie said – which, to Finkler’s sense, though he wasn’t going to make an issue of it, amounted almost to a threat of violence against his person – ‘and here we are still discussing who we are and what to call ourselves.’

‘Excuse me,’ Kugle said, ‘I am not aware that I have been discussing what to call ourselves. I am a democrat. I bow to the majority decision. It’s Sam with his ASH –’

‘We can call ourselves the Horsemen of the Fucking Apocalypse for all I care,’ Leonie shouted.

‘Horsemen of the Fucking Apocalypse is good,’ Lonnie said. ‘Though shouldn’t it be Horsemen and Horsewomen.’

‘Fuck you!’ Leonie told him.

Averting his nose, Finkler sighed a sigh deep enough to shake the foundations of the Groucho club. What was the point of this rehearsal of first principles every time they met? But it pained him to agree with Kugle about anything. If day followed night to Kugle, then Finkler prayed for night never to end. ‘I bow to no one in my Jewish shame,’ he said. ‘But isn’t it important that we make a distinction here?’

Kugle groaned.

‘You have something more to say?’ Finkler snapped.

Kugle shook his head. ‘Just clearing my throat.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ cried Leonie Leapmann.

‘You don’t believe in God,’ Lonnie Eysenbach reminded her.

‘Let me see if I can help here.’ The speaker was Tamara Krausz, academically the best known of the ASHamed Jews, a woman whose quiet authority commanded respect not only in England but in America and the Middle East, wherever anti-Zionists – Finkler would not have gone so far as to say wherever anti-Semites – were gathered.

Even Finkler wilted a little in her presence.

‘Don’t we have to show,’ she continued – though her continuance was never in doubt, for who would dare interrupt her? – ‘that to be a Jew is a wonderful and various thing, and that it carries no more of a compulsion to defend Israel against all criticism than it does to live in constant fear. We are not, are we, a victim people? As that brave Israeli philosopher’ – a nod here to Finkler – ‘Avital Avi said recently in a heartwarming speech in Tel Aviv which I had the honour to hear from the platform, it is we who are keeping the Holocaust alive today, we who continue where the Kapos left off. Yes, of course it demeans the dead to forget them, but to disinter them in order to justify carnage demeans them more.’

Her voice was silvery and controlled, a reproach in particular, Finkler thought, to Leonie Leapmann whose diction lolled and wavered. In her clothes, too, she put Leonie to shame. Leonie dressed like a native of no place one could quite put a name to – the People’s Republic of Ethnigrad was Finkler’s best shot – whereas Tamara never appeared in public looking anything other than an executive of a fashion consultancy, at once businesslike and softly feminine.

Finkler, waiting, eyed her up. In shape she reminded him of his late wife, but she was at once more steely and more fragile. She clawed the air, he noticed, when she spoke, making fists at random, as though to crush the life out of any idea that wasn’t hers. He imagined her screaming in his arms, he didn’t know why. Just something to do with the way she was put together and the atmosphere of psychic disintegration she gave off. In fact, psychic disintegration was precisely how she understood the history of modern Israyel. Sent mad in the Holocaust, not least by their own impotence and passivity, Jews were spilling what was left of their brains over the Palestinians and calling it self-defence. Finkler didn’t share this theory of madness begetting madness, but he was saving up the occasion when he would tell her so, in the hope of getting her to scream in his arms.

While in Palestine, Tamara reported – it was as though she was telling the group about her holidays: indeed, Finkler wondered how long it would be before the snaps came out – she had met with a number of representatives of Hamas to express her concern in the matter of its recent forced Islamisation programme, which included accosting unsuitably dressed women on the beach, harassing shopkeepers who openly sold Western-style lingerie, segregating the sexes in schools, and generally imposing more and more restrictions on the human rights of women. That this would impact negatively on the support Hamas could count on from otherwise sympathetic groups in Europe and America she did not scruple to warn them. Entranced, Finkler imagined the leadership of Hamas quaking before Tamara’s exquisitely outraged feminism. Did they, too, imagine her screaming in their arms?

‘Not good,’ he said.

‘No,’ she agreed, ‘not good at all. And especially not good as we can expect pro-Zionists to pounce on this as evidence of Hamas’s intrinsic extremism and intolerance. Whereas . . .’

Tamara Krausz breathed deeply. Finkler breathed with her.

‘Whereas . . .’ he said.

‘Whereas the truth of it is that what is being enacted here is the direct consequence of the illegal occupation. You cannot isolate a people, cut them off from their natural connection to the country, degrade and starve them, and not expect extremism to follow.’

‘You certainly cannot,’ Leonie said.

‘No,’ Tamara said quickly, before Leonie could say anything else. ‘Avital, with whom I discussed this, even went so far as to suggest it was a dark fulfilment of deliberate Israeli policy. Drive Gaza further and further into itself until the West would be begging Israel to reconquer it.’

‘Sheesh,’ Finkler said.

‘I know,’ she said, meeting his eyes.

‘How is Avital?’ he asked suddenly.

Tamara Krausz opened her face to him. Finkler felt he’d been handed a flower. ‘He isn’t well,’ she said. ‘Not that he’d admit it. He’s tireless.’

‘Yes, isn’t he,’ Finkler replied. ‘And Navah?’

‘Well, thank God. Well. She’s his right hand.’

‘Is she ever.’ Finkler smiled, handing her a flower in return.

The knowledge that this moment of insider intimacy between them was driving the others crazy filled him with a quiet satisfaction. He could hear Kugle’s heart shrivel.

Only poker gave him comparable pleasure.

3

Libor went to see the bereavement counsellor Emmy had recommended. A dark, towering woman big enough to dangle him on her knee. She could have been the ventriloquist, he her dummy.

‘Jean Norman,’ she said, extending an arm long enough to go around his back and work his levers.

Jean Norman. Such a plain name for such an exotic personage, he thought it must have been assumed to calm the bereaved. Real name Adelgonda Remedios Arancibia.

He did it as a favour to Emmy. For himself he wouldn’t have bothered. What did he hope to be counselled into feeling? Cheerful about his prospects?

He felt bad that he had not been able to answer Emmy’s appeal for support. Finkler was the most eminent public figure he knew now and Finkler was hardly going to speak out against the film director who understood why people wanted to kill Jews. For all Libor knew to the contrary the two were bosom friends.

So going to the bereavement counsellor was the second-best thing he could do for Emmy.

Jean Norman. Real name Adelaïda Inessa Ulyana Miroshnichenkop.

She lived in Maida Vale, not all that far from where Treslove lived, though Treslove had called it Hampstead, or rather from where Treslove had lived before he moved in with Libor’s great-great niece. He would have preferred it had she worked out of a clinic or a hospital, but she saw him in the front room of her house.

She was, she explained, retired. But still counselled . . .

Libor thought she was going to say for a hobby or to keep her hand in, but she left the sentence to dangle like a person on the end of a rope . . .

The house was large but the room she invited Libor into was diminutive, almost like a room in a doll’s house. There were prints on the walls of rural scenes. Shepherds and shepherdesses. And a collection of porcelain thimbles on the mantelpiece. She was too tall for the room, Libor thought. She had to fold herself almost into three in order to fit into her chair. Her height made Libor feel foolish. Even with both of them sitting down he had to look up at her.

She had a fine Roman nose with open dark nostrils into which Libor had no choice but to stare. Despite her foreignness there was an air of the Women’s Institute about her, that look of shy strait-laced provincial glamour which proved such a success when women of this sort took their clothes off for a charity calendar. She would have long pendulous breasts and a deep dark open Sicilian navel, Libor guessed.

He wondered if her ability to make him imagine her without clothes, though she was covered from her neck to her ankles and never made a movement that was remotely suggestive, was part of her bereavement counselling technique.

They talked briefly about Emmy. Emmy had told her who Libor was. She remembered his articles and even described one or two of them correctly. There were famous photographs. She remembered some of those too. Libor laughing with Garbo. Libor lying on a bed with Jane Russell, Libor looking the less masculine of the two. Libor dancing with Marilyn Monroe, cheek to cheek in an impossible parody of romance, given all the disparities.

‘You should have seen me dance with my wife,’ Libor said.

He said it as a favour to her, just as coming to see her was a favour to Emmy. He assumed this was his role. To do favours and be bereaved.

He was relieved she didn’t say anything inane about the death of loved ones – he hated the expression loved ones; there weren’t loved ones, there was only loved Malkie – or cycles of emotion or pathways for grief.

Nor, for which he was no less grateful, did she treat him to any sideways glances of compassion. She did not sorrow for him. She left him to sorrow for himself.

As the time wore on he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything she was saying. Jean Norman. Real name Fruzsina Orsolya Fonnyasztó.

He continued to look up into her nostrils where it was soothingly dark and quiet.

As for what he said to her, he had no idea. He mouthed his feelings. He play-acted at grief. He spoke the words which he imagined the bereaved spoke at such a time. Even made the accompanying gestures. Had he stayed there long enough he believed he’d have begun to wring his hands and tear his hair.

His self-consciousness surprised and appalled him. What need was there for this? Why did he not simply speak his heart?

Because the heart did not speak, that was why. Because language presupposes artificiality. Because in the end there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to be said.

Did she know that, Jean Norman? Real name Maarit Tuulikki Jääskeläinen. Was it part of her professional knowledge that the bereaved sat in front of her, looked up into her nostrils and lied?

He should have howled like an animal. That at least would have been a genuine expression of how he felt. Except that it wasn’t. There was no genuine expression of how he felt.

She had a question for him before he left. She became, in the asking of it, more animated than in the whole time he had been with her. Clearly this was the real, in fact the only, reason he was here. What she was about to ask him she had wanted to ask him from the moment he walked in the room. No, from the moment she knew he was coming to see her.

‘About Marilyn,’ she said.

‘Marilyn Monroe? What about her?’

‘You knew her well?’

‘Yes.’

She blew out her cheeks and patted her chest. ‘So tell me . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Did she take her own life, or was she murdered?’

4

Treslove and Hephzibah are singing love duets in the bath.

 

Finkler is losing money at poker.

 

Libor is sinking fast.

 

Finkler is losing money at poker but his books are selling well and at least he hasn’t made a pass at Tamara Krausz.

Libor is sinking fast because he has lost Malkie. Emmy has been ringing him with news of her grandson. He will not get his sight back. There has been another attack on two Jewish boys wearing fringes, Emmy also tells him. And headstones in a Jewish cemetery in north London have been defaced. Swastikas. What does she want him to do? Start a vigilante group? Mount a guard on every Jewish burial place in London?

Libor is at pains not to confuse his feelings about Jews being attacked again in public places with his feelings for Malkie.

Treslove and Hephzibah are singing ‘O soave fanciulla’, ‘Parigi o cara’, ‘E il sol dell’anima’, ‘Là ci darem la mano’, and so on.

Whatever aria he knows she knows. How astonishing is that? he asks himself.

Everything they sing is either a hello or a goodbye. That’s opera for you. Treslove sings them all as goodbyes. Hephzibah as hellos. So even when they differ they are complementary and he is the beneficiary.

Her voice is strong, more suited to Wagner. But they won’t be singing any Wagner, not even Tristan und Isolde. ‘My rule of thumb is that if there’s an “und” anywhere I won’t be singing it,’ she tells him.

He’s beginning to understand Finkler culture. It’s like Libor and Marlene Dietrich, assuming Libor had told the truth about Marlene Dietrich. There are some things you don’t do. Very well, Treslove won’t do them either. Show him a German and he’ll kick the living shit out of the mamzer.

Mamzer is Yiddish for bastard. Treslove can’t stop using the word.

Even of himself. Am I lucky mamzer or what am I? he asks.

 

In celebration of being such a lucky mamzer, Treslove invites Finkler and Libor to a dinner party. Come and toast my new life. He thought of asking his sons but changed his mind. He doesn’t like his sons. He doesn’t like Finkler either, come to that, but Finkler is an old friend. He chose him. He didn’t choose his sons.

Finkler whistled through his teeth when he walked out of the lift straight on to Hephzibah’s terrace.

‘You’ve landed on your feet,’ he whispered to Treslove.

Crude mamzer, Treslove thought. ‘Have I?’ he asked, tersely. ‘I wasn’t aware I’d been off my feet.’

Finkler dug his ribs. ‘Come on! Teasing.’

‘Is that what you’re doing? Well, glad you like it here, anyway. You can watch the cricket.’

‘Can I?’ Finkler liked cricket. Liking cricket made him, he thought, English.

‘I meant one can. One can watch cricket from here.’

He had no intention of inviting Finkler over to watch cricket. Finkler enjoyed enough advantages already. Let him buy a ticket. Failing which, let him sit on his own terrace and watch the Heath. There was lots to see on the Heath, as Treslove remembered. Not that he remembered much of Hampstead now. He had been in St John’s Wood three months and couldn’t recall ever having lived anywhere else. Or with anyone else.

Hephzibah occluded his past.

He took Finkler into the kitchen to meet Hephzibah who was brewing at the stove. He had been waiting for this moment a long time.

‘Sam, d’Jew know Jewno?’ he said.

Not a flicker of understanding or recollection from Finkler.

Treslove thought about spelling it out to jog his memory, though he believed it unlikely that Finkler ever forgot anything he himself had said. Finkler never went anywhere without a notebook in which he wrote down whatever he heard that interested him, mostly his own observations. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he once told Treslove, opening his notebook. Which Treslove took to mean that Finkler routinely recycled himself, knowing he could get a whole book out of a mumbled aside. So Treslove’s money was on Finkler remembering his D’Jew know Jewno jest but not wanting to allow Treslove a jest in return.

But by now the two had already shaken hands anyway, Hephzibah wiping hers on her cook’s apron.

‘Sam.’

‘Hephzibah.’

‘My delight is in you,’ Finkler said.

Hephzibah inclined her head graciously.

Treslove’s face was a question mark.

‘That’s what Hephzibah means in Hebrew,’ Finkler told him. ‘My delight is in you.’

‘I know that,’ Treslove said, miffed.

The bastard had got him again. You never knew from which direction it would come. You prepared yourself for a Finkler joke and they bamboozled you with Finkler scholarship. You could never steal a march on them. They always had something you didn’t, some verbal or theological reserve they could draw on, that would leave you stumped for a response. The mamzers.

‘I must go on with what I’m doing,’ Hephzibah said, ‘or you won’t eat tonight.’

‘My delight is in your cooking,’ Treslove said, to no one’s interest.

In fact, in Treslove’s eyes Hephzibah didn’t so much cook as lash out at her ingredients, goading and infuriating them into taste. No matter what she was preparing she always had at least five pans on the go, each of them big enough to boil a cat in. Steam rose from four of them. Burning oil from the fifth. Every window was open. An extractor fan sucked noisily at whatever it could find. Treslove had suggested closing the windows when the fan was on, or turning the fan off when the windows were open. They countermanded each other’s function, he explained scientifically, the fan sucking in half the fumes of St John’s Wood. But Hephzibah ignored him, banging her cupboard doors open and closed, using every spoon and every casserole she owned, breathing in the flames and the smoke. The sweat poured down her brow and stained her clothes. Every couple of minutes she would pause to wipe her eyes. Then on she’d go, like Vulcan stoking the fires of Etna. And at the end of it, there was an omelette and chives for Treslove’s supper.

Though he complained of the illogic of her methods, Treslove loved to watch her. A Jewish woman in her Jewish kitchen! His own mother had prepared five-course meals in an egg pan. The three of them would sit and wait for the food to cool and then eat in silence. As for the washing up, there wasn’t any. Just the egg pan and the three plates.

Finkler breathed in the odours of Hephzibah’s devastated kitchen – had the Cossacks been through they’d have left it tidier – and said, ‘Ahhhh! My favourite.’

‘You don’t even know what I’m preparing,’ Hephzibah laughed.

‘Still my favourite,’ Finkler said.

‘Name an ingredient.’

‘Trayf.’

Treslove knew what trayf meant. Trayf was whatever wasn’t kosher.

‘Not in this kitchen,’ Hephzibah said with mock offence. ‘My Julian won’t eat trayf.’

My Julian. Music to Treslove’s ears. Schubert, played by Horowitz. Bruch played by Heifetz.

Hey, Sam – D’Jew know Jewno?

Finkler made a noise like a gargle from far back in his throat. ‘You’ve koshered the old boy now?’

‘He’s koshered himself.’

 

It disconcerted Treslove – her Julian or not – to watch the two Finklers go on eyeing each other up and verbally trying each other out. He felt like piggy in the middle. Hephzibah was his woman, his beloved, his Juno, but Finkler appeared to believe he had an older claim. It was as though they spoke a secret language. The secret language of the Jews.

I must learn it, Treslove thought. I must crack their code before I’m through.

But at the same time he felt pride in Hephzibah that she could do what he could not. In twenty seconds she had reached deeper into Finkler’s soul than he ever had. He even appeared relaxed in her company.

When Libor arrived, Treslove truly felt outnumbered. Hephzibah exerted an unexpected influence on his two guests – she dissolved their Jewish differences.

‘Nu?’ Libor asked of Finkler.

Treslove wasn’t sure if that was the way to report it. Do you ask ‘Nu’ of? Or do you just ask, transitively? ‘Nu?’ he asked. And is it even a question in the accepted sense? ‘Nu,’ he said. Would that have been better? Nu, meaning how are things with you, but also I know how things are with you.

So much to master.

But the surprise was that Finkler answered in kind. When there had been no Hephzibah he had castigated Libor for his Jewish barbarisms, but today he twinkled like a rabbi. ‘A halber emes izt a gantser lign,’ he said.

‘A half truth is a whole lie,’ Hephzibah whispered to Treslove.

‘I know,’ he lied.

‘So who’s been telling you half-truths?’ Libor asked.

‘Who hasn’t?’ Finkler replied. But that was as far as he was prepared to go.

Nu, then, wasn’t searching. You didn’t have to answer. It permitted prevarications in the name of our common imperfect humanity.

Got it, Treslove thought.

At dinner, though, Libor went for Finkler as in the old days. ‘Not your Jewish anti-Semite friends?’

‘Not my Jewish anti-Semite friends what?’

Normally, Treslove noted, Finkler denied his Jewish friends were anti-Semites.

‘Telling you lies?’

‘They’re fallible like the rest of us,’ he said.

‘You’re sick of them already? That’s good.’

‘What’s good,’ Finkler said, ‘is this . . .’ He reached for more of everything. Herrings in red wine, herrings in white wine, herrings in cream, sour cream, vinegar, herrings curled around an olive with toothpicks through them, herrings chopped in what was said to be a new way, and of course chopped still in the old – herrings brought in fresh from the North Sea on the trawler of which Hephzibah was the figurehead, one breast bared – and then the pickled meat, the pastrami, the smoked salmon, the egg and onion, the chopped liver, the cheese that had no taste; the blintzes, the tsimmes, the cholent. Only the cholent – the meat and bean and barley shtetl stew, or Czech stew as Hephzibah called it in honour of Libor who loved coming over to eat it – was hot. All those roaring flames, all those fuming pans, and yet everything that came to the table, barring the cholent, was cold.

Treslove marvelled. There was no getting to the bottom of the miracles his wife performed, allowing that she wasn’t yet his wife.

‘I knew it,’ Finkler said when he got to the cholent. ‘Helzel! I knew I could smell helzel.’

Treslove knew it, too, but only because Hephzibah had told him. Helzel was stuffed chicken neck. In her opinion, no cholent could call itself a cholent without helzel. Finkler clearly thought the same.

‘You’ve used oregano in the stuffing,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘Brilliant touch. My mother never thought of oregano.’

Mine neither, Treslove mused.

‘Is it a Sephardic version?’ Finkler wondered.

‘It’s my version,’ Hephzibah laughed.

Finkler looked at Treslove. ‘You’re a lucky man,’ he said.

A lucky mamzer.

Treslove smiled in agreement, savouring the helzel. Stuffed chicken neck, for Christ’s sake! The entire history of a people in a single neck of chicken.

And Finkler the philosopher and ASHamed Jew, licking his chops over it as though he’d never left Kamenetz Podolsky.

After the cholent, the towelling down.

Hephzibah kept an elegant table, had Treslove polish the glasses and the silverware hours before anyone arrived, but in the matter of napery they might as well have been in a transport cafe. In front of every guest was a stainless-steel dispenser of paper napkins. The first time Treslove ever set the table for the two of them he folded napkins as his mother had taught him, in the shape of sailing ships, one per person. Hephzibah commended his dexterity, unfurling the little ship and laying it daintily on her lap, but when he next went to fold the napkins he found the serviette dispensers in their place. ‘I am not encouraging gluttony,’ Hephzibah explained, ‘but I don’t want whoever sits at my table to feel they must hold back.’

Hephzibah herself would get through a dozen napkins, more after cholent. Treslove’s mother had brought him up not to leave a mark on a napkin if possible, so that it could be folded back into a sailing ship and used again. Now, following Hephzibah’s example, he used a fresh one for every finger.

Everything was different. Before Hephzibah he had eaten only with his mouth. Now he ate with his whole person. And it took many paper napkins to keep his whole person clean.

‘So this museum . . .’ Finkler said, when the table was cleared.

Hephzibah inclined her head in his direction.

‘. . . don’t we have enough of them already?’

‘Museums in general, you mean?’

‘Jewish museums. Everywhere you go now, every town, every shtetl, you find a Holocaust museum. Do we need a Holocaust museum in Stevenage or Letchworth?’

‘I’d be surprised if you’d find a Holocaust museum in Letchworth. But this isn’t a Holocaust museum anyway. It’s a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture.’

Finkler laughed. ‘Is there any? Will it mention our being thrown out in 1290?’

‘Of course. And of our being welcomed back in in 1655.’

Finkler shrugged, as though to an audience who already believed what he believed. ‘Same old, same old,’ he said. ‘You’ll get to the Holocaust in the end, if only under the heading “British Attitudes To”. You’ll stick up photographs of the gas ovens, you mark my word. Jewish museums always do. What I want to know, if we must have suffering, is why we can’t at least change the track from time to time. What about a Museum of the Russian Pogrom? Or a Museum of the Babylonian Exile? Or, in your case, since you already have the site, a Museum of All the Nasty Things the English Have Ever Done to Us?’

‘The brief is not to bring up English nastiness,’ Hephzibah said.

‘I’m glad of it.’

‘Nor,’ Treslove chimed in, ‘is it to bring up anybody else’s. Our museum won’t so much as mention the Holocaust.’

Finkler stared at him. Our! Who asked you? his expression said.

Libor stirred in his chair. In an inconsequent but oracular voice, he said, ‘The grandson of a friend of mine has just been blinded.’

Finkler wasn’t sure what to do with his face. Was this some sort of a wind-up? So? was what he wanted to ask. So how does that bear upon our conversation?

‘Oh, Libor, who?’ Hephzibah asked.

‘You don’t know the grandson, you don’t know the grandmother.’

‘Well, what happened?’

So Libor told them, leaving out the information that in another age he and Emmy had been lovers.

‘And this,’ Finkler said, ‘you adduce as reason for there to be a Holocaust museum in every parish in the country.’

‘I notice you say parish,’ Treslove said. ‘Your satire acknowledges an incongruity that is only to be explained by Christianity’s inhospitability to Jews.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Julian. My satire, as you call it, acknowledges no such thing. I see Libor is upset. I mean no disrespect to his feelings. But the actions of one deranged person don’t justify us wringing our hands and claiming the Nazis are back.’

‘No, and nor do I claim any such thing,’ Libor said in return.

Hephzibah left the table and went over to him. She stood behind his chair and put her hands on his cheeks as though he were her little boy. Her rings were bigger than his ears. Libor leaned back into her. Hephzibah put her lips to his bald head. Treslove feared the old man was going to cry. But that might only have been because he feared he was going to cry.

‘I’m all right,’ Libor said. ‘I am as much upset by my own impotence as by what’s happened to my friend’s grandson whom I have never met and didn’t know existed two months ago.’

‘Well, there’s nothing you can do,’ Hephzibah said.

‘I know that. But it isn’t only the doing nothing that’s upsetting, it’s the feeling nothing.’

‘I wonder whether we feel nothing,’ Finkler said, ‘precisely because we rehearse our feelings on the subject too freely and too often.’

‘Crying Wolfowitz, you mean?’ Hephzibah said with a wild laugh.

God, I love her, Treslove thought.

‘You think we don’t?’ Finkler persisted.

‘I think we can’t.’

‘You don’t believe that too many false alarms result in no one taking any notice?’

‘When is an alarm a false alarm?’ Hephzibah persisted.

Treslove saw Finkler wondering whether to say When our friend Julian raises it. What he said instead was: ‘It seems to me we create a climate of unnecessary anxiety, a) by picturing ourselves forever as the victim of events, and b) by failing to understand why people might occasionally feel they have good reason to dislike us.’

‘And blind our children,’ Hephzibah said. Her hands were still on Libor’s face.

Libor put his hands up to hers, as though to deafen himself. ‘As in anti-Semitism is perfectly comprehensible to me,’ he said, in imitation of the empathetic film director.

‘And so around it comes,’ Hephzibah said.

Finkler shook his head as though there was nothing to be done with any of them. ‘So your Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture is a museum of the Holocaust after all,’ he said.

The yutz, Treslove thought. The groisser putz. The shtick drek.

 

Finkler and Libor sat and drank whisky while Treslove and Hephzibah washed up. Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink couldn’t take would stay on the kitchen table. Pans and crockery sufficient for a hundred guests. Treslove liked that about her. She didn’t believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn’t a price to pay for pleasure.

She didn’t leave the dishes so that he should do them either. She just left them. It seemed fatalistic to him. A carelessness acquired courtesy of the Cossacks. Since you don’t know where you’re going to be tomorrow, or indeed whether you’re going to be alive or dead, why worry over dishes?

But tonight she led him by the elbow into the kitchen. And neither Finkler nor Libor offered to get up and help out. It was as if each couple was giving the other space.

‘Our friend appears very happy,’ Libor said.

Finkler agreed. ‘He does. There’s a shine on him.’

‘And my niece, too. I think she’s good for him. It would seem that what he needed was a mother.’

‘Always did,’ Finkler said. ‘Always did.’