EIGHT

1

Finkler was looking forward to a few hands of online poker before bed, so he was disappointed, when he arrived home, to find a message on his answerphone from his daughter Blaise. Immanuel, the younger of his two sons, had been involved in an anti-Semitic incident. Absolutely nothing to worry about. He was perfectly OK. But Blaise wanted her father to hear it from her first, rather than from some other, possibly mischievous, source.

Over a crackling line, Finkler could not make out all the details. As he pressed the replay button it occurred to him that the message could easily be a wind-up – Julian, Libor and Hephzibah, who were still drinking when he left, teaching him a little moral lesson. See how you feel when it happens to you, Mr ASHamed Jew Philosopher. But the voice was definitely Blaise’s. And though she said there was absolutely nothing to worry about, there obviously was, otherwise why would she have rung?

He rang back but Blaise wasn’t answering. She often didn’t. Immanuel’s line was permanently engaged. Maybe the bastards had stolen his phone. He tried his other son, Jerome, but he was at a redder, more robust university than Blaise and Immanuel and was inclined to be scathing about their doings. ‘Anti-Semites massing outside Balliol? I don’t think so, Dad.’

As it was too late to call his driver, and he was too drunk to drive himself, Finkler rang a limo firm he sometimes used. Oxford, he told the operator. Right away.

He had to ask for the radio to be turned down and then turned off altogether. This so incensed the driver, who claimed he needed it on for traffic alerts, that Finkler feared he was going to be involved in an anti-Semitic incident himself. Traffic alerts! At midnight! Once they were out of London, on quieter roads, it occurred to Finkler that the real reason the driver needed the radio on was to keep him awake. ‘Maybe we should have it on after all,’ he said.

He fell prey to all manner of irrational anxiety. He had unnecessarily annoyed the person taking him to see his son. He had, for all he knew, annoyed his son, too, in any one of the thousands of ways that a father annoys his children. Had his son got into a fight with anti-Semites on his father’s behalf? Shamed or not shamed, Finkler was an eminent English Jew. You couldn’t expect racist thugs to grasp the fine distinctions of Jewish anti-Zionism. Ha, so you’re Sam Finkler’s son are you, you little kike? Then here’s a bloody nose.

Unless it was worse than a bloody nose.

He curled up in the corner of the Mercedes and began to cry. What would Tyler say? He felt he had let her down. She had made him promise to make the children his first priority. ‘Not your fucking career, not your Jewish mistresses with fat tits, not those weirdos you hang around with at the Groucho – your sons and daughter. Your sons and daughter, Shmuelly – promise!’

He’d promised and he meant it. At the funeral he’d put his arms around the boys and they had stood together a long time looking into Tyler’s grave, three lost men. Blaise had held herself apart from them. She was with her mother. Against all men, lost or not. The three of them had stayed with him a week, and then gone back to their universities. He wrote to them, he rang them, he invited them to launches and screenings. Some weekends he drove to Oxford, on others to Nottingham, booking himself into the best hotel he could find and treating them to slap-up dinners. He believed he had done well, morally, on those occasions, not to take a woman with him. Especially when he stayed at Raymond Blanc’s Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire, a hugger-mugger hotel-restaurant which cried out for a mistress. But a promise is a promise. He was putting his children first.

He liked his children. They reminded him, in their different ways, of his poor wife – sharp, edgy, scratchy boys, a scathing girl. None had chosen to study philosophy. He was glad of that. Blaise was a lawyer. Immanuel, more unsteady, had changed from architecture to languages and looked set to change again. Jerome was an engineer. ‘I’m proud of you,’ Finkler told him. ‘A nice non-Jewish occupation.’

‘How do you know I won’t be going over to Israel to build walls when I’m qualified?’ the boy said. But his father looked so alarmed he had to explain he was only joking.

Both the boys had girlfriends to whom, he believed, they were fastidiously faithful. Blaise was wilder and uncommitted. Like her mother. Jerome wasn’t sure he had found Miss Right yet. Immanuel thought he might have. Already, he wanted children of his own. Finkler imagined him wheeling his family around the Ashmolean, bending over their prams, explaining this and that, adoring their little bodies. The new man. He had never quite managed to be that sort of a father himself. There were too many things he had found interesting apart fom his children, apart from his wife, too, come to that. But he was trying to make amends now.

What if it was all a bit late? What if his neglect had contributed in some ways to this attack? Had he left his children vulnerable, unable to take care of themselves, insufficiently aware of danger?

And then there’d been the conversation earlier in the evening. He had listened unsympathetically to the story of a boy blinded for no other reason than that he was a Jew. Was that chancing providence? Finkler didn’t believe in the validity of such a thought, but he had it nonetheless. Had he dared the Jewish God to do His worst? And had the Jewish God decided, for the first time in however many thousands of years, to buckle up and meet the challenge? A terrible thought occurred to him: had Immanuel been blinded?

And a more terrible thought still: was it his doing?

Finkler the rationalist and gambler made a compact through his tears. If Immanuel had suffered any serious harm he would tell the ASHamed Jews where to shove it. And if he hadn’t suffered any serious harm . . . ?

Finkler didn’t know.

It made no sense to implicate ASHamed Jews in this. They were not to blame for anything. They just were. As anti-Semites just were. But you can’t play fast and loose with primal passions. He wasn’t sure, though, as he crouched in the corner of the car, willing the miles to fly by, whether it was any longer defensible even to use the word Jew in a public place. After everything that had happened, wasn’t it a word for private consumption only? Out there in the raging public world it was as a goad to every sort of violence and extremism.

It was a password to madness. Jew. One little word with no hiding place for reason in it. Say ‘Jew’ and it was like throwing a bomb.

Had Immanuel been boasting of his Jewishness? And if he had, why had he? To pay him, Finkler, back? To express his disappointment in him? My father might be ashamed to be a Jew but I as sure as fuck am not. Whereupon whack!

It all came back to him. Whichever way he looked at it, he was to blame. Bad husband, bad father, bad example, bad Jew – in which case, bad philosopher as well.

But this was no better than superstition, was it? He was a prin-cipled amoralist. What you did you did, and there was no retributive force out there holding you to account. Yes, there was material cause and effect. You drove badly, you had a crash. But there was no moral cause and effect. Your son did not get blinded by an anti-Semite because you took mistresses, or because you did not take the threat of anti-Semitism as seriously as some of your more hysterical fellow Jews believed you should.

Or did he?

This was not the first time, Finkler remembered, that mistresses had destabilised the workings of his highly rational mind. Take a mistress and you have a car crash. Finkler did not of course believe that. Except in the material cause-and-effect sense. Take a mistress and have her give you a blow job while you’re driving down the M40 and your car might well spin out of control. That’s not morality, it’s concentration. So why, when he was out driving with a mistress, did he feel a little less safe than when he was out driving with his wife? Men and women were not fashioned, he believed, to live monogamously. It was no crime against nature to sleep with more than one woman. It was a crime against aesthetics, maybe, to be out on the town with Ronit Kravitz’s vertiginous décolletage when he had an elegant wife waiting for him at home, but no payment was ever exacted by God or society for a crime against aesthetics. So whence his apprehension?

Yet apprehensive he always was, whenever he committed one of those sexual crimes which in his eyes were no crime. The car would crash. The hotel would burn down. And yes – for it was as primitive as this – his dick would fall off.

He could explain it. Terror pre-dated reason. Even in a scientific age men retained some of that prehistoric ignorance of which irrational fear was the child. That Finkler understood the causes and consequences of events made not a jot of difference. The sun might still not rise one morning because of something he had done or some ritual he had left unobserved. He was afraid, as a man born half a million years before him would have been afraid, that he had disobeyed the ordinances of the gods and they had visited their vengeance on his son.

 

He arrived at Immanuel’s lodgings sometime after one o’clock in the morning. There was no one in. He tried the phone again but the line was still engaged. Blaise, too, was not answering. He directed the driver to the Cowley Road where Blaise lived. The lights were on in her front room. Finkler knocked, needlessly, at her window. Someone he didn’t recognise drew the curtains back, then Blaise showed her face. She appeared astonished to see him.

‘This wasn’t necessary,’ she said, letting him in. ‘I said he’s OK.’

‘Is he here?’

‘Yes, he’s lying down on my bed.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘I’ve said. He’s fine.’

‘Let me see him.’

He found his son sitting up on Blaise’s bed reading a celebrity magazine and drinking rum and Coke. He had a plaster on his cheek and his arm was in a home-made sling. Otherwise he looked perfectly well.

‘Oops,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, “oops”?’

‘Oops as in oops-a-daisy. It’s what you used to say when one of us fell over.’

‘So you fell over, did you?’

‘I did, eventually, yes.’

‘What do you mean, “eventually”?’

‘Dad, are you going to keep asking me what I mean?’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘There’s a prior question, Dad.’

‘What’s that?’

‘How are you, Immanuel?’

‘I’m sorry. How are you, Immanuel?’

‘I’m reasonably OK, thank you, Dad. As you can see. There was a kerfuffle, that was what happened. Outside the Union. There’d been a debate – This house believes that Israel has forfeited its right to exist, or something along those lines. I was surprised, actually, that you hadn’t been invited to speak.’

So was Finkler, now that he’d come to hear of it.

‘And . . .’

‘And you know what these things are like. Tempers got a little frayed. Words were exchanged, and the next thing fists were flying.’

‘Are you hurt?’

Immanuel shrugged. ‘My arm hurts, but I doubt it’s broken.’

‘You haven’t been to the hospital?’

‘No need.’

‘Have you spoken to the police?’

‘The police have spoken to me.’

‘Have they charged anyone?’

‘Yes. Me.’

‘You!’

‘Well, they’re thinking about it, anyway. Depends on the other guys.’

‘Why would they think of charging you? Has the world gone mad?’

At that moment Blaise came into the room with coffee for them all. Finkler looked at her in wild alarm.

‘I was there,’ she said. ‘Your mad son started it.’

‘How do you mean “started it”?’

‘This is not an oral examination, Dad,’ Immanuel said from the bed. He had gone back to reading his magazine. Let his father and his sister sort it out. Her fault for calling him in the first place.

‘Blaise, you told me there’d been an anti-Semitic incident. How do you start with anti-Semites? Do you jump up and down and say “I’m a Jew, come and get me”?’

‘He didn’t have a go at anti-Semites. You have it the wrong way round.’

‘What are you saying, the wrong way round?’

‘They were Jews.’

‘Who were Jews?’

‘The people he picked a fight with.’

‘Immanuel picked a fight with Jews?’

‘They were Zionists. The real meshuggeners with black hats and fringes. Like settlers.’

‘Settlers? In Oxford?’

‘Settler types.’

‘And he picked a fight with them? What did he say?’

‘Nothing much. He accused them of stealing someone else’s country . . .’

She paused.

‘And?’

‘And practising apartheid . . .’

‘And?’

‘And slaughtering women and children.’

‘And?’

‘There is no and. That’s all.’

‘That’s all? That’s all he said? Immanuel, you said all this?’

Immanuel looked up. He reminded Finkler of his late wife, challenging him. He had that same expression of ironic unillusionedness that comes with knowing a person too well. ‘Yes, that’s what I said. It’s true, isn’t it? You’ve said as much yourself.’

‘Not specifically, to a person, Immanuel. It’s one thing to iterate a general political truth, it’s another thing to pick a fight with a person in the street.’

‘Well, I’m not a philosopher, Dad. I don’t iterate general political truths. I just told them all what I thought of them and their shitty little country and called one of them, who came up to me, a racist.’

‘A racist? What had he said to you?’

‘Nothing. It wasn’t about him. I was talking about his country.’

‘Was he an Israeli?’

‘How do I know? He wore a black hat. He was there to oppose the motion.’

‘Did that make him a racist?’

‘Well, what would you call it?’

‘I can think of other words.’

‘I can think of other words, too. But we weren’t playing Scrabble.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘And then I knocked his hat off.’

‘You knocked a Jew’s hat off.’

‘Is that so terrible?’

‘Jesus Christ, of course it’s so terrible. You don’t do that to anyone, least of all a Jew.’

‘Least of all a Jew! What? Are we a protected species now or something? These are people who bulldoze Palestinian villages. What’s a hat?’

‘Did you hurt him?’

‘Not enough.’

‘This is a racist assault, Immanuel.’

‘Dad, how can it be a racist assault when they’re the racists?’

‘I’m not even going to answer that.’

‘Do I look like a racist? Look at me.’

‘You look like a fucking little anti-Semite.’

‘How can I be an anti-Semite? I’m a Jew.’

Finkler looked at Blaise. ‘How long has this shit been going on?’ he asked.

‘How long has he been a fucking little anti-Semite? It comes and goes, depending on what he’s been reading.’

‘Are you telling me this is my fault? He won’t have got any of this racist/apartheid crap from me. I don’t go there.’

Blaise met his stare evenly. In her eyes, too, he saw his avenging wife.

‘No, I’m not telling you that. I doubt he reads a word you write, actually. But there are plenty of other people he can read.’

‘I also have a mind of my own,’ Immanuel said.

‘I doubt that,’ Finkler said. ‘I doubt you can call what you’ve got a mind at all.’

Had he known how to do such a thing, and had he not made a solemn promise to Tyler, he would have pulled his son off the bed and broken his other arm.

2

As Assistant Curator of the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture, Julian  Treslove did not exactly have too much on his plate. It would be different  when it was up and running, Hephzibah assured him, but in these early stages it was all about architects and electricians. The best Treslove could do for the museum, and for her, was ruminate. Think of who and what else they should be honouring. A suggestion which she no sooner made than she regretted. It wasn’t fair to him. Jews might have been possessed of a crowded almanac of Jewish event, a Jewish Who’s Who extending back to the first man and woman, but Treslove couldn’t be expected to know in every instance Who Was and Who Was Not, Who Had Changed His Name, Who Had Married In or Out. What is more he would have no instinct for it. Some things you cannot acquire. You have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi.

The museum was housed in a high-Victorian Gothic mansion built on the design of a Rhineland fortress. It had pointed gables, mock castellations, fantasy chimneys and even a rampart you couldn’t get out on to. To the side was a pretty garden in which Hephzibah imagined they would one day serve teas.

‘Jewish teas?’ Libor had asked.

‘What’s a Jewish tea?’ Treslove wondered.

‘It’s like an English tea only there’s twice as much of it.’

‘Libor!’ Hephzibah scolded him.

But the idea of serving specifically Jewish afternoon teas appealed to Treslove who had learned to call cakes kuchen, and crêpes stuffed with cream or jam blintzes.

‘Let me write the menu,’ he said. And Hephzibah agreed he could.

His only worry was that the location of the museum would prohibit the sort of passing trade you needed for a successful tea garden, or for a museum, come to that. It was only a short walk from the Beatles’ old studios but it wasn’t a walk you would naturally take. Parking would not be easy. There were yellow lines everywhere, and because of the slight incline in the road on which the Rhineland fortress had been built buses laboured at that very spot, distracting motorists who might have been searching for the museum. Plus there were overhanging trees.

‘People just won’t see it,’ he warned Hephzibah. ‘Or they’ll crash looking.’

‘Well, that’s helpful,’ she said. ‘What would you like me to do, have the road flattened?’

Treslove saw himself standing outside in his curator’s uniform, waving down the traffic.

He had another worry which he chose not to express. Vandalism. It was licensed hereabouts. Just about everyone who visited the Abbey Road Studios wrote messages on the outside walls. Mostly these were good-natured – So-and-So loves so-and-so, We all live in a yellow submarine, Rest in peace, John! – but one day when Treslove was passing he noticed a new aerosoled graffito in Arabic script. Perhaps it too was a message of love – Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do – but what if it was a message of hate – Imagine there’s no Israel, imagine there’s no Jew . . . ?

That he had no reason to suppose any such thing, he knew. Which was partly why he kept his suspicions to himself. But the Arab script looked angry. It was like a scribble over everything else that had been written on the walls, a refutation of the spirit of the place.

Or did he imagine that, too?

 

Though he was sensitive to condescension, Hephzibah’s suggestion that the best thing he could do for her right now was ruminate suited him just fine. There was much to think about and he was happy to think about it in a semi-professional capacity. Sometimes he thought about it at home, in an office Hephzibah had made for him from a room where she stored the Hampstead Bazaar shawls she had essentially finished with but didn’t quite want to throw away. (Treslove was pleased to observe that when it came to a choice between him and the shawls, the shawls lost.) At other times he thought about what there was to think about in the as-yet-unfinished museum library – the advantage of that being the access he had to Jewish books. The disadvantage being the hammering of carpenters and the suspect graffiti he had to read on the way.

In the end he stayed in the shawl room. Or sat and read on the terrace with its view of Lord’s. And to the left, a few buildings along, a view of a synagogue, or at least a view of its courtyard. He had hoped he would see bearded Jews singing and dancing here, carrying their children on their shoulders, ceremonially cutting their hair in the way he’d seen in a television documentary, or arriving solemnly for a festival, their prayer shawls under their arms, their eyes turned towards God. But it seemed not to be that sort of synagogue. Either he looked at the wrong times, or the only person using the synagogue was a burly Jew (he looked like Topol, that’s how Treslove knew he was a Jew) who came and went on a big black motorbike. Treslove didn’t know if he was the caretaker – he had too much swagger for a caretaker – or the rabbi – but he didn’t look much like a rabbi either. It wasn’t just the motorbike that counted against the rabbi proposition, it was the fact that he wore a PLO scarf which he would wind around his face, like a warrior going into battle, before putting on his helmet and roaring off on his bike.

Day after day, Treslove sat on the terrace and looked out for the Jew on the motorbike. This became so obvious that day after day the Jew on the motorbike looked out for Treslove. He glowered up, Treslove glowered down. Why was he wearing a PLO scarf, Treslove wanted to know. And not just wearing it but swathing himself in it as though it and it alone defined his identity. In a synagogue!

Treslove accepted that under Libor’s tutelage he had grown obsessive about the PLO scarf. It frightened him. Whatever its innocent origins as a headdress ideally suited to a cruel climate – Abraham and Moses, presumably, would have worn something like – it had taken on a huge symbolic significance, no matter that the PLO was now, as Libor explained to him, the least of Isrrrae’s worries. To wear it was to make an aggressive statement, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation. Fine, if you were a Palestinian, Libor always said; a Palestinian had a right under all the laws of grievance to his aggression. But on an Englishman it only ever denoted that greed for someone else’s cause, wedded to a nostalgia for simplicities that never were, that was bound to make a refugee from the horrors of leftism shudder. So Treslove, who was a refugee only from Hampstead, shuddered along with him.

But this ageing biker who couldn’t wait to muffle himself in a PLO scarf was not just one more English ghoul feeding on the corpses of the oppressed, he was a Jew, and what is more he was a Jew who seemed to have made his home in a Jewish house of prayer! Explain that, Libor. But Libor couldn’t. ‘We have become a sick people,’ was all he said.

In the end Treslove had no choice but to ask Hephzibah, whom he had wanted to spare.

‘Oh, I make a point of never looking there,’ she told him when he at last mentioned what he’d been watching for the last however many weeks.

She made the place sound like Sodom, which one cast an eye over at one’s peril.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What else goes on there?’

‘Oh, I doubt anything goes on. But they do parade their humanity a bit.’

‘Well, I’m all for humanity,’ Treslove was quick to make clear.

‘I know you are, darling. But the humanity they parade is largely on behalf of whoever isn’t us. By us, I mean . . .’

Treslove waved away her awkwardness. ‘I know who you mean. But couldn’t they do that without going so far as to wear that scarf? Can’t you want better of your own without actually cheering on your enemy? By your, I mean . . .’

She kissed the back of his head. Meaning, he had a lot to learn.

 

So he sat at home and tried to learn it. He felt that Hephzibah preferred it that way, not having him under her feet in the museum. And he preferred it that way too, guarding the apartment while she was out, being a proud Jewish husband, breathing in the smell of her, waiting for her to come home, sighing a bit with the excess weight she carried, her silver rings jingling like a belly dancer’s on her fingers.

He liked the hopeful way she would call his name the moment she let herself in. ‘Julian! Hello!’ It made him feel wanted. When the others used to call his name it was in the hope that he was out.

It was a relief to hear her. It meant he could call it a day with his education. He wished he had done a module or two in Jewish Studies at university. Perhaps one on the Talmud, and one on the Kabbalah. And maybe another on why a Jew would wear a PLO scarf. Starting from scratch was not easy. Libor had suggested he learn Hebrew and was even able to recommend a teacher, a remarkable person almost ten years older than he was and with whom he sometimes enjoyed a leisurely lemon tea at Reuben’s restaurant on Baker Street.

‘By leisurely I mean it takes him three hours to drink it through a straw,’ Libor explained. ‘He taught me the little Hebrew I know in Prague before the Nazis turned up. You’ll have to go to him, and you might not be able to understand much of what he’s telling you, his accent is still pretty thick, he came from Ostrava originally – he certainly won’t be able to hear you, by the way, so there’s no point in your asking him anything – and you’ll have to put up with the odd neck spasm – his, I mean, not yours – and he’ll cough over you a lot, and maybe even shed a tear or two, remembering his wife and children, but he speaks a beautiful classical pre-Israeli Hebrew.’

But Treslove considered Hebrew, even if he could find someone to teach him who was still alive, to be beyond him. It was more history he wanted. In the history of ideas sense. And the knack of thinking Jewishly. For this Hephzibah recommended Moses Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed. She hadn’t read it herself, but she knew it to be a highly regarded text of the twelfth century, and since Treslove owned himself to be perplexed and in need of a guide, she didn’t see how he could do any better.

‘You’re sure you don’t just want me out of your hair?’ he checked, once he’d seen the contents page and the size of the print. It looked like one of those books which you started as a child and finished in an old persons’ home lying in a bed next to Libor’s Hebrew teacher.

‘Look, as far as I’m concerned you’re perfect as you are,’ she told him. ‘I love you perplexed. This is what you keep saying you want.’

‘You sure you love me perplexed?’

‘I adore you perplexed.’

‘What about uncircumcised?’

It was a subject to which he frequently returned.

‘How often must I tell you,’ Hephzibah told him. ‘All that’s immaterial to me.’

‘All that?’

‘Immaterial.’

‘Well, it isn’t exactly immaterial to me, Hep.’

He offered to talk to someone. It was never too late. She wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It would be barbaric,’ she said.

‘And if we have a son?’

‘We aren’t planning to have a son.’

‘But if we do?’

‘That would be different.’

‘Ah, so what would be good for him, would not be good for me. Already, there are competing criteria of maleness in this house.’

‘What’s maleness got to do with it?’

‘That’s my question.’

‘Well, go and get yourself an answer from some higher authority. Read Moses Maimonides.’

He dreaded getting so far with Maimonides and then suddenly hitting that blank wall of incomprehension that awaited him at about the same point, even at about the same page, in every work of philosophy he had ever tried to read. It was so lovely, bathing in the lucidities of a thinker’s preliminary thoughts, and then so disheartening when the light faded, the water turned brackish, and he found himself drowning in mangrove and sudd. But this didn’t happen with Maimonides. With Maimonides he was drowning by the end of the first sentence.

‘Some have been of opinion,’ Maimonides began, ‘that by the Hebrew zelem, the shape and figure of a thing is to be understood, and this explanation led men to believe in the corporeality [of the Divine Being]: for they thought that the words “Let us make man in our zelem” (Gen. i. 26), implied that God had the form of a human being, i.e., that He had figure and shape, and that, consequently, He was corporeal.’

Of themselves, Treslove believed he might have made some headway with these refined distinctions relating to the appearance, or not, of the divine, but first he had to ascertain the exact status of the word zelem and at that point he was among the mystics and the dreamers. OK, literally the word meant what Maimonides said it meant, an image or a likeness, but it had a strange disquieting sound to Treslove’s ear, almost like a magic incantation, and when he tried to track down those with whose ‘opinion’ Maimonides was arguing – for one needed to know the extent of one’s perplexity in order to be guided out of it – he found himself in a world where commentary was piled upon commentary, striations of reference and disagreement as old as the universe itself – until there was no knowing who was arguing with whom, or why. If man was indeed made in the zelem of God, then God must have been incomprehensible to Himself.

This religion is too old for me, Treslove thought. He felt like a child lost in a dark forest of decrepit lucubrations.

Hephzibah noticed that a mood of despondency had fallen on him. She put it down at first to his not having enough to do. ‘Another few months and we’ll be up and running,’ she said.

What exactly Treslove’s responsibilities were going to be when the museum was up and running had never properly been discussed. Sometimes Treslove imagined he would be a sort of Anglo-Jewish culture maître d’, welcoming people to the museum, showing them the way to the exhibits, explaining what they were looking at – the Anglo as well as the Jewish – exhibiting in himself that spirit of free unschismatic enquiry and cross-cultural interchange the museum existed to foster. And it was possible that Hephzibah had not progressed beyond that idea herself.

The question of what precisely Treslove was for – whether in the professional, the religious or indeed the marital sense – remained to be addressed.

‘Everything all right between you?’ Libor had asked his great-great-niece early on.

‘Perfect,’ she had told him. ‘I believe he loves me.’

‘And you?’

‘The same. He needs a bit of looking after, but then so do I.’

‘I’m very fond of you both,’ he said. ‘I want you to be happy.’

‘We should be half as happy as you and Aunt Malkie were,’ Hephzibah said.

Libor patted her hand and then fell vacant.

Hephzibah was worried about him. But as Treslove noticed the day she helped him with the Four Questions, worrying over men came naturally to her. It was another of those Finkler traits that he admired. Finkler women knew that men were fragile. Just Finkler men or all men? He wasn’t sure. But he was the beneficiary of her concern either way. Seeing him in low spirits, she would gather him into her arms, graze him accidentally with her rings – it hurt, but what the hell! – and hide him away in her shawls. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him. When his actual mother had found him downcast she would peck him on the cheek and give him an orange. It wasn’t love he’d lacked, it was envelopment. Wrapped around in Hephzibah he knew true peace. It was better there – inside her in the non-erotic sense, though it wasn’t without its eroticism – than anywhere he’d ever been before.

‘You’re not having second thoughts?’ she asked, seeing him slumped in an armchair looking heavenwards.

‘About us, absolutely not.’

‘About what then?’

‘Yours is a tough religion,’ he said.

‘Tough? It’s you that’s always saying how full of love we are.’

‘Intellectually tough. You keep going off into metaphysics.’

‘I do?’

‘Not you specifically, your faith. It does my head in, as one of my sons says, just don’t ask me which.’

‘That’s because you insist on understanding it. You should try just living it.’

‘But I don’t know what parts to live.’

‘Maimonides not helping?’

He pulled a weary face. ‘I guess no one ever promised that the process of being unperplexed would be easy.’

But secretly he wondered if the task was beyond him. He felt sorry for Hephzibah. Had he passed himself off as something he could never be? He was in danger of reverting to type and picturing only one end to this – Hephzibah dying in his arms while he told her how much he adored her. Verdi and Puccini played in his head, even as he ploughed on with Moses Maimonides. The Guide for the Perplexed became a romantic opera for him, ending the way all the operas he loved ended, with Treslove onstage alone, sobbing. Only this time as a Jew.

That’s if he ever made it as a Jew.

He stumbled blindly from one chapter to another. ‘Of the divine Names composed of Four’, ‘Twelve and Forty-two Letters’, ‘Seven Methods by which the Philosophers sought to Prove the Eternity of the Universe’, ‘Examination of a passage from Pirke di-Rabbi Eliezer in reference to Creation’.

And then he got on to circumcision and found himself galvanised into thought.

‘As regards circumcision,’ Maimonides had written, ‘I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.’

He read it again.

‘As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.’

And then again.

But we don’t have to follow him through every reading.

As a matter of course he read every sentence of Maimonides a minimum of three times, but that was to seek clarity. Here was no obfuscation in need of conscientious penetration. Circumcision, Moses Maimonides argued, ‘counteracts excesssive lust’, ‘weakens the power of sexual excitement’ and ‘sometimes lessens the natural enjoyment’.

Such a claim merited reading and rereading simply for itself. And indeed for himself, if he was ever to get to the bottom of who Finklers were and what they really wanted.

Among the many thoughts that crowded into Treslove’s mind was this one: did it mean he’d been having a better time than Finkler – Sam Finkler himself – all along? At school Finkler had boasted of his circumcision. ‘With one of these beauties you can go for ever,’ he had said. And Treslove had countered with what he’d read, and with what made perfect sense to him, that Finkler had lost the most feeling part of himself. A verdict in which Moses Maimonides unequivocally concurred. Not only had Finkler lost the most feeling part of himself, it had been taken from him precisely in order that he should not feel what Treslove felt.

A great sadness, on behalf of Tyler, suddenly welled up in him. He had enjoyed her more than Finkler had. No question of it. He had the wherewithal to enjoy her more with.

But did it follow from that that she had enjoyed him more than she had enjoyed Finkler? He had not thought so at the time. ‘No woman will want to touch yours,’ Finkler had warned him at school, and Tyler’s apparent reluctance to look at him seemed to bear that out. But was it a reluctance or was it a kind of holy dread? Did she fear to look upon what gave her so much pleasure? Had he been a godhead to her?

For what gave him more pleasure must surely have given her more pleasure too. A man made reluctant by his circumcision would logically communicate that reluctance to his partner. The ‘weakened power of sexual excitement’ had to work both ways. What counteracted ‘excessive lust’ in the one had to counteract ‘excessive lust’ in the other, else there was no point in it. Why maim the man to limit sexual intercourse if the woman went on demanding it as fervently as ever?

Indeed, Maimonides said as much. ‘It is hard for a woman, with whom an uncircumcised had sexual intercourse, to separate from him.’ Women had not found it hard to separate from Treslove, but that could have been attributable to other causes. And initially he had always done reasonably well – ‘If you think I’m going to let you fuck me on our first date you’ve got another think coming,’ they had said to him, letting him fuck them on their first date – which suggested it was what they later discovered about him as a person that was the problem, not the prepuce.

He felt possessed of a thrilling power he had never known was his. He was the uncircumcised. From whom women found it hard to separate.

Physically hard to separate, did Maimonides mean, in that the uncircumcised somehow knotted inside the woman like a dog? Or emotionally, in that the uncircumcised’s untiring lustfulness besotted her?

Both, he decided.

He was the uncircumcised, and he had spoken. Both.

In retrospect, he fell in love with Tyler all over again, knowing now that she must have loved him more than she could ever admit. And had been afraid to look upon that which made her wanton.

Poor Tyler. Besotted with him. Or at least besotted with his dick.

And poor him for missing out on that exquisite knowledge at the time.

If only he’d known.

If only he’d known, what then? He wasn’t sure. Just if only he’d known.

But it wasn’t all regret. He was also excited by this discovery of his own erotic power. Lucky Hephzibah at least.

Unless his untiring lustfulness both wearied and disgusted her. And as a matter of ethno-religious principle she would have preferred him snipped.

3

He rang Finkler.

‘You ever read Moses Maimonides?’ he asked.

‘Is that the purpose of your call?’

‘That and to enquire how you are.’

‘I’ve been better, thank you.’

‘And Moses Maimonides?’

‘I guess he’s been better too. But have I read him? Of course. I count him as among my inspirations.’

‘I didn’t think you found Jewish thought inspiring.’

‘Then you think wrong. He teaches how to make abstruse thought available to the intelligent layman. He is all along saying more than he appears to say. We plough the same furrow, he and I.’

Oh yeah, Treslove thought – Guide for the Perplexed and John Duns Scotus and Self-Esteem: a Manual for the Menstruating.

But what he said was, ‘So what do you reckon to what he says about circumcision?’

Finkler laughed. ‘Why don’t you just come right out with it, Julian? Hephzibah wants you to have it done – yes? Well, I wouldn’t stand in her way. But between ourselves – ha! – I think you might be a wee bit old. As I recall, Maimonides warns against it past the eighth day. So that’s you out. Just.’

‘No, Hephzibah does not want me to have it done. She loves me as I am. Why would she not? Maimonides says circumcision limits sexual intercourse. I impose no limits myself.’

‘I am pleased to hear it. But is this about you or Moses Maimonides?’

‘It’s not about me. I simply wonder what you, as a philosopher who ploughs the same furrow, think about Maimonides’ theory.’

‘That circumcision is to put a brake on sex? Well, it certainly exists to make us afraid, and making us afraid of sex is part of it.’

‘You always told me Jews enjoyed sex inordinately.’

‘Did I? That must have been a long time ago. But if you’re asking me whether circumcision as a means of inhibiting the sexual impulse is specifically Jewish, I would say not. Anthropologically speaking, it isn’t primarily about sex anyway, except in so far as all initiation ceremonies are about sex. It’s about cutting the apron strings. What is Jewish is interpreting the circumcision rite in the way Maimonides does. It’s he – the medieval Jewish philosopher – who would wish us to be more restrained and imagines circumcision as the instrument. But I have to tell you it has never worked on me.’

‘Never?’

‘Not ever that I recall. And I think I would recall it. But I do know someone who believes himself to have been cheated of pleasure, and is in the process of having the operation reversed.’

‘You can have it reversed?’

‘Some people think so. Read Alvin Poliakov’s blog. You can find it at something like www.ifnotnowwhen.com. Alternatively I can fix you up with an introduction. He’s perfectly affable, wants to talk about nothing else, and might even show you his dick if you ask him nicely. Apparently it’s progressing. He’s halfway to not being a Jew any more.’

‘He’s one of your ASHamed Jews, presumably.’

‘Sure is. You don’t get more ashamed than that.’

‘You’re not ashamed of yours, then?’

‘You think I should be?’

‘Just asking. You carried it with pride at school.’

‘I was probably trying to rile you. I just carry it, Julian. I am a widower. Being circumcised or not does not figure high among my concerns right now.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I’m pleased for you that your life is dickcentric at the moment.’

‘I’m only speaking philosophically, Sam.’

‘I know you are, Julian. I expect nothing less of you.’

Treslove remembered one more question before he rang off. ‘As a matter of interest,’ he asked, ‘are your boys circumcised?’

‘Ask them,’ Finkler said, putting down the phone.

 

He had more conversational joy with Libor.

Libor’s fears that he would see less of Treslove now that he was no longer single had been unfounded. Any change was in Libor himself. He ventured out less. But he would still occasionally take a taxi to Hephzibah’s apartment in the afternoon when Hephzibah was at the museum and the two of them would sit at the kitchen table together drinking white tea.

They both liked it that the ghost of Hephzibah boiling up a witches’ coven of cauldrons in which to cook a single egg inhabited the space. They breathed her in and smiled at each other with the knowledge of her, incorrigible wifelovers that they were.

Libor was now walking with a stick. ‘It’s come to this,’ he said.

‘It suits you,’ Treslove said. ‘It suggests old Bohemia. You should get one with a blade in the handle.’

‘To protect myself against the anti-Semites?’

‘Why you? I’m the one who gets attacked.’

‘Then you get a stick with a blade in it.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Treslove said, ‘where do you stand on circumcision?’

‘Uncomfortably,’ Libor said.

‘Has it been a problem to you?’

‘It would have been a problem to me had it been a problem to Malkie. But she never said anything. Should she have?’

‘It hasn’t stopped you enjoying sex?’

‘I think what you carry around would have stopped me enjoying sex. Don’t get me wrong – on you I’m sure it looks wonderful, but on me it wouldn’t have looked so good. Aesthetically I have nothing to complain about. I look the way I’m supposed to look. Or I did. It is aesthetics we’re talking?’

‘No, not really. I’ve been reading that circumcision reduces sexual excitation. I’m canvassing opinion.’

‘Well, it will certainly reduce yours if you decide to have it done at your age. As for me, I have never known any different. And I’ve never thought to complain. To be candid with you, I wouldn’t have wanted to be any more sexually excited than I’ve been. It’s been plenty, thank you. In fact, more than enough. Does that answer your question?’

‘Yes, I suppose it does.’

‘You only suppose it does?’ He saw Treslove looking at him narrowly. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘What am I thinking?’

‘You’re thinking I protest too loudly. Had I not been circumcised, you’re thinking, I wouldn’t have found it so easy to resist Marlene Dietrich. You’re too polite to say so but you’re wondering whether it was only God’s covenant with Abraham that kept me away from the Hun.’

‘Well, you have always claimed you were the most faithful of husbands, despite facing temptations most men can’t begin to comprehend . . .’

‘And you’re asking if it was having a desensitised penis that kept me faithful?’

‘I would never put it so grossly, Libor.’

‘Except that you just have.’

‘Forgive me.’

Libor sat back in his chair and rubbed his head. A melancholy smile from somewhere very far away lit up his face. An old smile.

‘This is my own fault,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ve been too anxious to promote a particular view of myself, and perhaps you’ve been too ready to believe it. I ask this one favour of you: in the report you give of me when I am gone, speak of me as a loving husband but don’t make me too chaste. Allow me at least one errant little fuck.’

 

‘Regarding that errant little fuck,’ he said before he left. He wanted Treslove to understand that he’d been thinking and worrying about what he’d said.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s for Malkie, too, I ask it.’

Treslove blushed. ‘Are you telling me that Malkie . . . ?’

‘No, not that I would ever know or want to know. I mean it’s her reputation, too, I ask you to protect. A woman shouldn’t be married to a totally faithful man all her life.’

‘Why not?’

‘It demeans her.’

Treslove blushed again, this time for himself. ‘I don’t understand that, Libor,’ he said.

Libor kissed his cheek and said no more.

But Treslove read his silence. ‘You don’t understand because you’re not one of us,’ he read.

4

As a rule, Hephzibah took a shower the moment she returned home from the museum. It was still something of a building site over there and she was unable to relax until she had washed the dust and the grime from her. She would shout to Treslove to let him know she was home, and either he would pour a glass of wine for them both – she liked the gesture of his pouring for her but she rarely touched a drop – or, if he was more Priapus than Bacchus that evening, he would join her in the shower.

It wasn’t always what she wanted. A shower was a private place to Hephzibah, not least as she took up most of the available room in it. But she was careful not to rebuff Treslove’s ardour, and was sometimes grateful for the massage he would give her when it became plain that she was looking for nothing else.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she would say, and he enjoyed feeling her back relax under his fingers in the hot spray.

There was something about the way she pronounced the word ‘good’, in reference to whatever he was doing to her – whether in the phrase ‘Oh, that’s good’, or ‘Oh, that’s so good’, or ‘That’s good of you’ or ‘You’re very good to do that’ – that made Treslove feel he had found his niche as a man.

As a man?

Well, he knew that she was always just a fraction away from saying, as he was just a fraction away from hearing, ‘Who’s a good boy?’ A rhetorical question beloved of dogs and children. He made no bones about this to himself. She ran the show, and he was happy with the arrangement. But it wasn’t only the mother or the dog walker that he looked up to in her. It was – not to allow this to become too fanciful – the creative Jewish force: if you like, the Creator herself. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Good in that sense was what Treslove heard when Hephzibah praised his efforts. Good meaning more than good – good meaning congruent, perfected, harmonious.

Good as an expression of the absolute rightness of the universe.

He had been a man of misadventures and now he was a man of congeniality. Everything fitted. He was a good man in a good world. With a good woman.

What was good about her kept changing the longer he was with her. He had thought of it as a Finkler thing at first. A matter of fecundity, though not in the offspring sense. A fecundity of affection and loyalty, a fecundity of friends and family, a fecundity of past and future. Alone, Treslove felt himself spinning pointlessly around the universe like a fragment of a forgotten planet. Hephzibah was his firmament. His Finkler firmament. He had a place in her. He felt populous in her orbit.

Whether this was, after all, a Finkler thing he didn’t know. Drop the Finkler, then. What she was to him was humanly important, whatever that meant. And he idolised her for it. The sun did not shine out of her, the sun was her.

So go tell him he wasn’t Jewish.

 

And then one evening she came home, sat down at the kitchen table, not only asked him for a drink but drank it, and burst into tears.

He went to put his arms around her but she gestured him away.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

She covered her face and shook, though whether it was with grief or laughter he couldn’t tell.

‘Hep, what is it?’

When she showed him her face he still couldn’t tell if something too terrible to express had happened, or something laughable beyond words.

She collected herself, requested another glass of wine – the wine really did disturb him: two glasses of wine was for Hephzibah a year’s ration – and told him.

‘You know the oak doors that have just been fitted? Perhaps you don’t. They’re the external doors to the side entrance. To where your tea rooms will eventually be. I showed you photographs of the brass handles which we’ve had made to resemble shofars – rams’ horns – remember? Right, well, don’t get a shock, but they’ve been defaced. It must have happened while I was inside with the architect late this afternoon because they were fine when I popped out for lunch, but when I left the building tonight, there it was, or rather there they were. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Julian, why would anyone do that? Why?’

Swastikas, Treslove thought. He had read about the swastikas reappearing everywhere. He had told Finkler about them and Finkler had said ring me back when they’re killing Jews in the streets again. Fucking swastikas!

‘So what were they?’ he asked. ‘Painted on?’

He dreaded hearing blood. Blood and faeces were favourite. Blood and faeces and sperm. Hephzibah had already received a couple of letters written in blood and shit.

‘I haven’t finished telling you.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘It was bacon.’

‘It was what?’

‘It was bacon. They – I’m assuming they – had wrapped rashers of bacon around the handles. Two or three packets of them – so no expense spared.’

She seemed about to cry again.

He went over to her, determinedly this time. ‘That’s terrible,’ he said. ‘How vile!’

She shook behind her hands.

He put his arms around her. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘who are these people? It makes you want to kill them.’

It was then he realised she was laughing.

‘It’s only bacon,’ she said.

‘Only bacon?’

‘I’m not saying it’s nice. You’re right, it’s vile. The desire to do it is vile. But it’s such a feeble gesture. What do they think we’re going to do? Pack up and go home? Scrap the plans because of a few rashers of bacon? Sell the site? Leave the country? It’s too absurd. You have to see the funny side.’

Treslove tried. ‘I suppose you do,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’re quite right. It’s laughable.’ And he tried a laugh as well.

Hephzibah dried her tears. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘it makes you wonder what’s going on out there. You read things like this happening in Berlin in the twenties and you think why didn’t they read the signs and get out.’

‘Perhaps because they never really believed them,’ Treslove said. ‘Perhaps because they tried to see the funny side.’

He had turned solemn again.

Hephzibah sighed. ‘In St John’s Wood,’ she said, ‘of all places.’

‘Nowhere’s safe now,’ Treslove said, remembering what had been done to him, virtually on the doorstep of the BBC.

You Ju.

They both fell silent, each picturing the hordes of anti-Semites marauding through the West End of London.

Then Hephzibah began to laugh. She saw the rashers of bacon wrapped painstakingly around the ram-horn handles. And the plugs of meat and fat, which she hadn’t got round to telling him about, stuffed into the keyholes of the doors. She imagined the vandals going into Marks & Spencer and buying what they needed, paying at the till, perhaps using a reward card, and then, like vigilantes, vigilantes armed with bacon, the greatest defilement they could conceive, descending on the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture, which didn’t have signs up yet, and so which strictly couldn’t even be said to exist.

‘It isn’t just their overestimation of our horror of the pig,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘I’m sure, for example, they don’t know how much I love a bacon sandwich, but it isn’t only that, it’s their exaggeration of our presence. They find us before we find ourselves. Nowhere is safe from them because they think nowhere is safe from us.’

Treslove couldn’t keep up with the fluctuations of her feelings. She wasn’t, he realised, going from fear to amusement and back again, she was experiencing both emotions simultaneously. It wasn’t even a matter of reconciling opposites because they were not opposites for her. Each partook of the other.

He didn’t know how to do what she did. He didn’t possess the emotional flexibility. And wasn’t sure he wanted to. Wasn’t there an irresponsibilty in it? It was as though he were to laugh at the moment Violetta dies in Alfredo’s arms. A thought he found unthinkable even as he tried to think it.

Not for the first time in recent days, Treslove felt he’d failed a test.