NINE

1

Libor’s mind was turning fetid. That was his own verdict.

In the first months following Malkie’s death he had found the melancholy of his mornings unbearable. He woke hoping to discover her. He imagined he saw the sheets stir on her side of the bed. He spoke to her. He opened her wardrobe doors and imagined helping her to choose clothes. If he put an outfit together in his mind, perhaps she would emerge in it.

Everything he remembered was painful by virtue of its sweetness. But now the pain was of another kind. So many bad things had happened to them, between them, as a consequence of them. He had angered her parents. He had robbed her of a musical career. They had failed to have a child, no unbearable loss for either of them, but there’d been a miscarriage which upset them precisely because it didn’t. She hadn’t travelled to Hollywood with him, not liking aeroplanes or caring to make new acquaintances. The only company she wanted, she told him, was his. Only he interested her. But now he came to think of it, hadn’t that been awful for her, and an intolerable burden on him? He had been lonely without her. He was subjected to temptations he would have overcome with less ado had she been with him. And he dared never fail her, whether as an indefatigable companion who came home from his travels with wonderful stories to tell, as a man who would return her love and show her it had not been wasted, or as a husband bound at every turn to justify her complete confidence in him.

None of these thoughts turned him against her. But they changed the atmosphere around the memory of her, as though a golden halo had – no, not slipped but darkened. This might be for the best, he thought. Nature’s way of helping him through. But what if he didn’t want to be helped through? Who was nature to decide!

And worst of all were the black events he kept recalling, which had spoilt their life together whether they’d known it at the time or not. There was a Yiddish phrase his parents had used and which he thought meant ‘long ago’. Ale shvartse yorn – all the black years. All those black years were now their black years – his and Malkie’s. The events that marred them were the anti-myths of their romance, peopled by monsters, proving that they had not lived in paradise together at all, but – through no fault of their own – in a place that was more like hell.

Malkie’s parents, the guttural Hofmannsthals, had been property-owning German Jews. For Libor – whose politics were hopelessly, Czechoslovakianly confused – this made them on two accounts the worst kind of Jews of all. They had been so disappointed in her choice of husband they had all but disowned her, treating Libor as though he were dirt beneath their feet, refusing to attend their wedding, demanding he stay away from every family function, including funerals. ‘What do they think I’m going to do, dance on their graves?’ he asked her.

They were right to worry. He would have.

And what was his sin? Being too poor for her. Being a journalist. Being a Sevcik, not a Hofmannsthal, being a Czech Jew, not a German Jew.

They couldn’t entirely disown her. They had to will their property to someone. They left her a small block of flats in Willesden. Willesden! Anyone would have thought from their exclusivism, Libor thought, that they were aristocracy, and all they were were fucking landlords of some run-down flats in Willesden.

‘It’s a good job I’m Jewish,’ he told Malkie, ‘otherwise your lot would have turned me Fascist.’

‘They might have liked you more had you not been Jewish,’ Malkie said, meaning had he only been a musician or had property of his own.

‘So what did Horowitz have? A dacha in Kiev?’

‘He had fame, darling.’

‘I have fame.’

‘Wrong sort. And you didn’t have any sort when I married you.’

But if he despised her German parents and their property he despised even more their tenants on account of whom he and Malkie, as property owners themselves now, had no choice but to soil their souls with commerce. Here was every sort of mean, malingering, whining and thieving human nature. These tenants, to whom he would not in any other circumstance have given shelter, not so much as a cardboard box, knew the letter of every law that might indulge them while breaking every other law there was. They fouled the space they inhabited while they lived there, then stole from it with a minute pettiness – every switch and bulb, every latch and handle, every thread from every carpet – when they left.

Get rid of the whole block was his advice, it isn’t worth the vexation. But she felt it tied her to her parents. They had made their lives again in London, and to have sold Willesden would have been to wipe their history out a second time. ‘A dirty money-grubbing Jew,’ the tenants called her when she did not flinch before their menace. And they were right in that she’d been grubbed and dirtied by her contact with them.

Human vermin, Libor thought, lover of the English though he was. Except that vermin probably honoured their habitations more. Now, in his imagination he conflated these tenant troubles with Malkie’s illness, though she had long before done what Libor had suggested and sold them off. How dared they call a woman in her frail health such names! How horrible for her that at such a time she had to encounter the human animal at its most repugnant. All the black years. Yes, they’d been happy together. They’d loved each other. But if they thought they’d escaped contamination they’d fooled themselves. It was as though black spiders crawled across the belly of his beautiful beloved Malkie as she slept in the filthy earth.

He called up Emmy and asked her to have breakfast with him. She was surprised by the request. Why breakfast? In the morning, he explained, I am at my blackest. And the advantage to me in that? she wondered. None, he said. It’s for me. She laughed.

They met at the Ritz. He had dressed up for her. David Niven as he lived and breathed. But with the sad defeated Prague Spring smile of Alexander Dubček.

‘You aren’t wooing me here again?’ she asked.

There was no reason not to. She was an elegant woman with good legs and Libor had no vows or memories to protect. The past was infested with black spiders. But he was curious about her use of the words ‘here’ and ‘again’.

‘This was where you brought me last time.’

‘For breakfast?’

‘Well, for bed and breakfast. I see you have forgotten.’

He apologised. He was about to say it had escaped his memory, but the expression sounded wrong for the occasion, as though his memory was a captor of good times. An idea which she could construe as insulting, if he had allowed this good time to get away.

‘Gone,’ he said, touching his head. ‘Like just about everything else.’

Had he really brought her here for bed and breakfast? How could he have afforded the Ritz all those years ago in his impoverished pre-Malkie days? Unless it was not as long ago as that, in which case . . . In which case it were better all memory of it had gone.

Yet how could it have gone?

She gave him time to think what he was thinking – it wasn’t hard to tell what he was thinking – then enquired as to the progress of his bereavement counselling.

Bereavement counselling? Then he remembered. ‘Gone,’ he said, touching his head again.

‘I’ve asked you here,’ he said, not giving her time, ‘one, because I’m lonely and wanted the company of a beautiful woman, and two, in order to say that I can’t do anything.’

She didn’t understand.

‘I can’t do anything about your grandson. Or about that anti-Semite film director. Or whatever else. I can’t do anything about any of it.’

She smiled him an understanding smile, putting the fingers of her well-looked-after hands together. Her rings flashed fire under the chandeliers. Ah well. ‘If you can’t, you can’t,’ she said.

‘Can’t and won’t,’ he said.

She started back as though he’d made to hit her.

A Russian couple at the next table turned to stare at them.

‘Won’t?’

Libor stared back at the Russians. Clinking oligarch and pale-painted prostitute. But when had Russians ever been anything else?

You don’t sit next to a citizen of Prague if you are a Russian and you know what’s good for you, Libor thought.

‘Won’t because there is no point,’ he said, turning back to Emmy. ‘This is how things are. And maybe how things should be.’

He was surprised himself by what he said, heard his words as though someone else were speaking them, but still he knew what this other person meant. He meant that as long as there were Jews like Malkie’s parents in the world, there would be people to hate them.

Emmy Oppenstein shook her head as though she wanted to rid Libor from it.

‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you want to punish me for – I assure you there isn’t anything either of us has done that warrants it – but I understand why it is necessary for you to do so. I hated everyone when Theo died.’

She rose to leave but Libor stayed her. ‘Just listen to me for five more minutes,’ he said. ‘I don’t hate you.’

He wondered if the Russians thought he too was an oligarch squabbling with his prostitute, never mind that both of them were in their eighties. What else could the Russian imagination conceive?

Emmy sat down. Libor admired her movements. When she rose from the table it was as a chief justice taking leave of the court. Now she was returned to deliver judgement.

But he admired in a part of his brain that wasn’t working properly.

He leaned forward and took her hands. ‘I have discovered in myself a profound necessity,’ he said, ‘to think ill of my fellow Jews.’

He waited.

She said nothing.

He would have liked to see fear or hatred in her eyes, but he saw only a patient curiosity. Maybe not even curiosity. Maybe only patience.

‘I don’t wish ill on them, you understand,’ he went on, ‘I only think ill of them. Which makes it difficult for me to care what happens to them. It’s been going on too long. What’s that phrase you read sometimes in the papers – compassion fatigue, is it?’

She blinked her eyes at him.

‘Except that it never was compassion that I felt. Compassion comes from another place. You can’t feel compassionate towards yourself or towards your own. It’s more fiercely protective than that. When a Jew was attacked, I was attacked. These are the generations of Adam . . . We go back to the same father. I was my brother’s keeper. But it’s too long ago now. Too long ago for us, and too long ago for those who aren’t us. There has to be a statute of limitation. That’s enough now with the Jew business. Let’s not hear from any of you on the subject again, especially from you Jews yourselves. Have a bit of decency. Accept that when your time is up, your time is up.’

He waited, as though to hear her make a speech of acceptance. Yes, Libor, my time is up.

She let him wait. And then, in a lowered voice – the Russians, Libor, the Russians are listening – she said, ‘But what you’re describing is not what you call “thinking ill”. I feared you were going to say we get what we deserve. That it is my grandson’s fault that he is blinded. The logic of our film director friend. A Jew dispossesses an Arab in Palestine, another Jew must be blinded in London. What the Jewish people sow, the Jewish people will reap. I don’t think I hear you saying that.’

Now her hands were holding his.

‘My dear wife’s parents,’ he said, ‘who must have had something good in their souls or they would not have produced her, were contemptible people. I can tell you what made them contemptible, I can imagine circumstances way back – let’s say hundreds, let’s say thousands of years ago – that would have made them something else. But I can’t go on making these allowances. I can’t go on telling myself that that American swindler who has just been put in jail to serve a hundred life sentences is only coincidentally Jewish, or that bad-faced business Jew we see on television who brags about his money and the ruthlessness of his pursuit of it – I can’t convince me, let alone others, that it is only by chance that such men resemble every archetype of Jewish evil that Christian or Muslim history has thrown up. When Jews of this sort enjoy the eminence they do, how can we expect to be left to live in peace? If we are back in the medieval world it is because the medieval Jew himself is back. Did he even go away, Emmy? Or did he survive the rubble of the destruction and the entombments like a cockroach?’

She tightened her hold on his fingers, as though to squeeze this upsetting ugliness out of him.

‘I will tell you something,’ she said. ‘What you see is not what non-Jews see. Not the fair-minded ones and most of them are that. The bad-faced business Jew you refer to, assuming I know who you mean – and it doesn’t matter because, yes, of course I know the type – is not the hate figure to Gentiles that he is to you. Some like him, some admire him, some don’t bother their heads about him one way or another. You might be surprised to learn how few people see the archetypal Jew every time they see him. Or even know that he’s a Jew. Or care. You are the anti-Semite, not they. You’re the one who sees the Jew in the Jew. And cannot bear to look. This is about you, Libor.’

He did her the justice of thinking about her words.

‘I would not be so quick to see the Jew in the Jew,’ he said at last, ‘if the Jew in the Jew were not so quick to show himself. Must he talk about his wealth? Must he smoke his cigar? Must he be photographed stepping into his Rolls?’

‘We are not the only people to smoke cigars.’

‘No, but we are the very people who should not.’

‘Ah,’ she said.

The sound carried so much force of revelation that Libor thought he heard the Russian and his trollop echo it. As though even they could see him now for what he was.

‘Ah what?’ he said. As much to them as to her.

‘Ah, you have given the game away. It is you who say the Jew must live his life differently to others. It is you who would segregate us in your head. We have as much right to our cigars as anyone. You have the Yellow Star mentality, Libor.’

He smiled at her. ‘I have lived in England a long time,’ he said.

‘So have I.’

He allowed her that, before saying, ‘You aren’t, I hope, accusing me of merely expressing hatred of myself. I have a clever friend of whom that is true. And I am nothing like him. It doesn’t pain me that Jews are lording it for a brief period in the Middle East. I am not one of those who is comfortable only when Jews are scattered and under someone else’s heel. Which they will be again, anyway, soon enough. This is not about Israel.’

He did not, with Emmy, treble the r s or lose the l. There was no necessity.

‘I know that,’ she said.

‘I cheer Israel,’ he went on. ‘It’s one of the best things we’ve done these last two thousand years, or it would have been had Zionism remembered its secular credentials and kept the rabbis away.’

‘Then go there. But you won’t escape cigar-smoking Jews in Tel Aviv.’

‘I wouldn’t mind them in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is where they should be doing it. But as I have said, this is not about Israel. None of it is about Israel. Not even what most of its critics say about Israel is about Israel.’

‘No. So why do you bring it up?’

‘Because I am not like my clever friend, the rabid anti-Zionist. I want to think ill of Jews my way, and for my own reasons.’

‘Well, you are looking backwards, Libor. I must look forwards. I have grandchildren to be concerned for.’

‘Then send them to Sunday school, or a madrasa. I will have no more Jews.’

She shook her head and rose to leave. This time he didn’t stop her.

It crossed his mind to ask her to go upstairs with him. It seemed a shame to waste the Ritz.

But it was too late for all that.

2

On a night he lost in excess of two thousand pounds playing online poker, Finkler went to find himself a prostitute. Perhaps Libor, sitting next to one, had transmitted the thought to him by magic. They were close, no matter that they disagreed about everything.

Finkler was not in need of sex, he was in need of something to do. The only arguments against going with prostitutes that had ever carried any weight with him, as a rational amoralist, were cost and the clap. A man is free to do as he wishes with his body, but you don’t impoverish or infect your family in the process. However, when you’ve lost two thousand pounds playing poker, three hundred more for an hour with a decent-looking prostitute is hardly going to make much difference, philosophically speaking. And as for the clap – there was no one left he could infect.

There was another calculation he had to make. People knew his face. It was unlikely the prostitute would. Prostitutes are working at the time documentaries go out on television. But other men looking for prostitutes might recognise him, and he knew he could not count on any solidarity of the fallen. In minutes he would be up on someone’s Facebook as having been seen prowling around Shepherd Market, never mind that the person who had seen him was out prowling himself.

He could have gone to the bar of one of the obvious Park Lane hotels, where the pickup was more discreet, but it was the prowling he liked. Prowling mimicked the fruitless search for the hidden face or memory which was all the pursuit of sexual happiness amounted to. Prowling was romance skinned to the bone. You could prowl and then go home empty-handed and still tell yourself you’d had a good night. A better night in Finkler’s case, since he couldn’t remember ever having found a prostitute he’d liked; but then what he liked was the hidden face or memory whose function was to stay forever hidden. In fact, he wouldn’t have said no to a nice Jewish girl with Manawatu Gorge breasts, rather than another of those slender ice-pick Polacks, but he probably wouldn’t have said yes to her either.

Which made it safe for him, he thought, to prowl the streets. A man as visibly lukewarm in his desires as he was ran only a minimal risk of being suspected of looking for sex.

So he almost jumped out of his skin when he heard his name called.

‘Sam! Uncle Sam!’

The wise thing would have been to ignore the call and keep on walking. But he knew he had jerked his head at the sound of his name, and to have gone on walking then would have been to invite suspicion. He turned round and saw Alfredo standing outside the Market Tavern, at the edge of a crowd of drinkers, sucking on a bottle of Corona.

‘Hey, Alfredo.’

‘Hey, Uncle Sam. You off somewhere special?’

‘Depends what you call special.’ Finkler looked at his watch. ‘I have to meet my producer any minute. Already a bit late.’

‘This another telly series?’

‘Well, early stages of.’

‘What’s this one?’

Finkler let his hands make circles of profound vagueness in the air.

‘Oh, Spinoza, Hobbes, free speech, CCTV cameras, all that.’

Alfredo took off his sunglasses, put them back again, and rubbed his neck. Finkler could smell drink on his breath. Was he too out looking for a prostitute? Finkler wondered. And was he drinking to get his courage up?

If so he’d overdone it. No prostitute would go near this amount of courage.

‘Do you know what I think about all this surveillance shit, Uncle Sam?’ Alfredo said.

Finkler hated it when Alfredo Uncled him. The sarcastic little shit. He looked at his watch. ‘Tell me.’

‘I think it’s a blast. I hope we’re being looked at by a camera now. I hope we all are.’

‘Why’s that, Alfredo?’

‘Because we’re such lying, cheating, thieving bastards.’

‘That’s a very bitter analysis. Has someone just done any one of those things to you?’

‘Yes, my father.’

‘Your father? What’s your father done?’

‘What hasn’t my father done, you mean.’

Finkler wondered if Alfredo was going to fall over, so unsteady was he.

‘I thought you were getting on with your father. Didn’t you go on holiday with him recently?’

‘That was ages ago. And haven’t heard a word from him since, though now I hear he’s moved in with a woman.’

‘Hephzibah, yes. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you. No doubt he means to. Is your point that more cameras in the street would have caught him moving in?’

‘My point, Uncle Sam, my point, as you call it, is that my father, as you call him, invites friendship one minute and doesn’t speak to you the next.’

Finkler thought about saying he knew what Alfredo meant, but suddenly didn’t relish the role of playing proxy father. Let Julian sort his kids out himself. ‘Julian’s got a lot going on in his head at the moment,’ he said.

‘And a lot in his pants, too, from what I hear.’

‘I must go,’ Finkler said.

‘Me too,’ Alfredo said. He nodded, as though to say coming, coming, in the direction of a group of young men, a couple of whom, Finkler thought, were wearing Palestinian scarves, though it was hard to tell these days, given that many fashion scarves looked the same and were worn similarly.

He wondered if there’d been a demo earlier that day in Trafalgar Square. If so, he wondered why he hadn’t been invited to address it.

‘Then I’ll see you when I see you,’ he said. ‘Where are you playing at the moment?’

‘Here, there and everywhere.’ He took Finkler’s hand and drew him close. ‘Uncle Sam, tell me – you’re his friend – what’s all this Jew shit?’

Slurred, Jew shit came out sounding more like Jesuit, a word which Alfredo would not have known even when sober. The other thing he seemed not to know, or to have forgotten, was that Finkler was Jew shit himself.

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘No, but listen – I mean altogether. I’ve been reading that none of it happened, you understand what I’m saying . . .’

‘None of what, Alfredo?’

‘That shit. Camps and all that. One big lie.’

‘And where have you been reading that?’

‘Books, you know. And friends have been telling me. There’s this Jewish boogie-woogie drummer I’ve been playing with.’ Alfredo played air drums with a pair of imaginary sticks, in case Finkler didn’t know what a drummer did. ‘It’s all bullshit, he says. So why would he say that if it isn’t the truth? He was like a soldier in the Israeli army or some shit and now he plays the skins like Gene Krupa. He says it’s all bullshit and lies so that we’ll look the other way.’

‘Look the other way from what?’

‘Whatever they’re doing there. Concentration camps and shit.’

‘Concentration camps? Where are there concentration camps?’

‘Wherever, whatever. Nazis, fucking gas chambers, except that none of it happened, right?’

‘Happened where?’

‘Israel, Germany, I don’t fucking know. But it’s all –’

‘I really must,’ Finkler said, freeing himself, ‘Or I’ll be late for my producer. But listen, don’t believe everything people tell you.’

‘What do you believe, Uncle Sam?’

‘Me? I believe in believing nothing.’

Alfredo made to kiss him. ‘That’s two of us. I believe in believing nothing either. It’s all bullshit. Like that fucking hepcat says.’

He beat the air again with his sticks.

Finkler took a taxi home.

3

Strange, how well you can come to feel you know a person, Treslove thought, from a name, a word, and a few photographs of his penis.

But then Treslove could afford to be generous: he had what Alvin Poliakov, epispasmist, had wanted all his life – a foreskin.

Epispamos, Treslove learned from Alvin Poliakov’s blog, is foreskin restoration. Except, as Alvin Poliakov explains, you cannot restore a foreskin. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. But it is not beyond the ingenuity of man to conjure up a faux foreskin in its place. This, Alvin Poliakov sits in front of a camera every day to prove.

For interest’s sake, and by way of a break from Maimonides, and what with Hephzibah being out often at the moment, attending to problems with the museum, Treslove watches him.

 

Alvin Poliakov, son of a depressed Hebrew teacher, bachelor, bodybuilder, one-time radio engineer and inventor, founder member of ASHamed Jews, begins his morning by tugging at the loose skin on his penis, easing a little more skin up the shaft. He does this for two hours, breaks for mid-morning tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit, and then begins again. It is a slow, slow process. In the afternoon he takes measurements, collates the morning’s data and writes his blog.

‘I speak,’ he confides to his readers, ‘for the millions of mutilated Jews the world over, who feel what I have felt all my life. But not only for Jews, because there are millions of Gentiles out there who have been circumcised under the erroneous medical assumption that you are better without a foreskin than with.’

He doesn’t say, the Jews misleading the world again, but only an uncomplaining fool, happy to be unforeskinned, could miss the implication.

Alvin Poliakov writes the way cinema newsreel announcers of the 1940s spoke, as though mistrustful of the technology and so shouting to be heard.

‘Ever since the dawn of civilisation,’ he says, ‘men have sought to restore what was stolen from them, in violation of their human rights, before they were old enough to have a say in the matter. What has driven them to do this is a sense of incompletion, a consciousness of something as disabling as amputation.’

He cites the anguish of Jews in classical Greek and Roman society, longing to assimilate and strut their stuff but unable to go to the baths and show other men their penises, for fear of encountering mockery. (How many Jewish men actually wanted to do this? Treslove wonders.) This has led many desperate Jews to seek a remedy in surgery, often with tragic consequences. (Treslove shudders.) The only proven method of restoring an at best passable simulacrum of a foreskin is the one the blogger himself practises.

Behold.

Do not hope for too much. But do not settle for too little. This is Alvin Poliakov’s philosophy.

As for the methodology --

Procure a good supply of sticky paper, surgical adhesive, office tape (Treslove finds himself thinking about the Sellotape with which Josephine, the mother of one of his children, he was not sure he could remember which, repaired her boots), suspender straps, elastic bands, weights and one strong wooden chair.

Every morning Alvin Poliakov photographs his penis from various angles with a view to posting the photographs on the Web later in the afternoon, along with diagrammatic details of the procedures he has followed in the course of the day – the construction of cardboard collars, the application of tape, the lubrication of sore skin, the hours spent slumped forward on his wooden chair coaxing the skin downward, ever downward, and the system of weights he has devised using copper jewellery, keys from a children’s xylophone, and a pair of small brass candlesticks, which, he earnestly explains, can be bought cheaply from any good market or shop selling Indian knick-knacks.

Like a monk of self-denial he sits, shaven-headed, pumped-up and muscled, with his head between his knees, a snake charmer who knows the snake will not show himself for years, that’s if he shows himself at all. There is no lubricity in the procedure. Whatever sex there once was in Alvin Poliakov’s head has long since vanished in the service of the tapes, the adhesives, the collars and the weights. It was because he felt cheated of pleasure that Alvin Poliakov embarked on this course, but pleasure is not the issue any longer. Jews are the issue.

As an accompaniment to the photographs and the diagrams, Alvin Poliakov appends a daily portion of tirade against the Jewish religion in whose anti-service, so to speak, he now expends his energies. The crime of sexual mutilation, he argues, is just one more of the countless offences against humanity to be laid at the gates of the Jews. Every day he publishes the name of another Jewish child, just come into the world, whose integrity has been compromised and whose rights to a full complement of sexual activities have been tragically curtailed.

Where these names come from, Treslove cannot imagine. Have they been lifted from the births and deaths pages of Jewish news-papers? It is impossible to imagine that the guilty parents would have given them to him. In which case isn’t Alvin Poliakov himself guilty of stealing from the child what the child is too young to give freely?

Or has he just made them up?

Imperturbable, for he cannot hear Treslove’s objections and would not heed them if he could, Alvin Poliakov, breathing like an athlete, coaxes the skin of his penis into a foreskin. Every evening he believes he can see one coming, but every morning it is as though he must start again. Except for those nights when he attends meetings of ASHamed Jews, he does not leave the house. An elderly sister does the shopping for him. She has recently converted to Catholicism. It is not clear whether she is aware of how her brother passes his days, but he is not a man to keep his causes to himself. And she must wonder what he is doing on his wooden chair, tugging at his penis. Though it is possible she misinterprets.

He listens to the radio, noting how rarely the sufferings of mutilated Jews, or Gentiles mutilated as proxy Jews, are referred to. That the BBC has a pro-Jewish bias he does not have the slightest doubt. Why else is there so little heard from those whose lives have been destroyed by Zionists and circumcision?

He wrote an afternoon play about one such life himself. But the BBC, though it thanked him for it, has not put it on. Censorship.

This barbarous ritual, Alvin Poliakov maintains, is analagous to cutting off young men’s hair before enrolling them in the army, and serves an identical function. It is to destroy individuality and subjugate every man to the tyranny of the group, whether religious or military. There is irrefutably, therefore, in Alvin Poliakov’s view, a direct link between the Jewish ritual of circumcision and Zionist slaughter. The helpless Jewish baby and the unarmed Palestinian become one in the innocent blood that Jews do not scruple to take from both.

While he is sitting with his head between his knees, Alvin Poliakov thinks up dedications to the victims of Zionist brutality. He likes to post a new dedication whenever he can, above the latest photograph of his brutalised penis, thereby hammering home the connection. On the day Treslove decides he won’t continue any longer with the blog, the dedication above Alvin Poliakov’s penis, from which weights of assorted sizes and materials hang, reads: To the mutilated of Shatila, Nebateya, Sabra, Gaza. Your struggle is my struggle.

 

‘Put it this way,’ Treslove said, describing the blog to Hephzibah who had declined his offer to email her the link, ‘if you were a Palestinian –’

‘Absolutely. With friends like him . . .’

‘But not just that. It’s the appropriation–’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And in such a trivial cause.’

‘Not trivial to him, though, clearly.’

‘No, but all other questions aside, aren’t Muslims circumcised anyway?’

‘As far I know they are,’ she said, turning away, not wishing to encourage him in this new interest.

‘So . . . ?’

‘Yes, precisely,’ she said.

‘And yet this Alvin Poliakov receives commendations at least purporting to be from Palestinians.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He posts them.’

‘Darling, you mustn’t believe everything you read on the Internet. But even if they’re genuine it’s understandable. We all turn a blind eye to one issue for the sake of another. And these are desperate people.’

‘Isn’t everybody?’

She told him to close his eyes. Then she kissed them.

‘You aren’t.’

He thought about it. No, he wasn’t desperate. But he was agitated.

‘This is weird stuff,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel unsafe.’

‘You unsafe?’

‘Everybody unsafe. What if ideas are like germs? What if we are all being infected? This Alvin Poliakov – hasn’t he been infected somewhere along the line?’

‘Take no notice,’ she said. She was beginning to prepare supper, getting pans out. ‘The man’s a meshuggener.’

‘How can you take no notice? The work of a meshuggener or not, this stuff circulates. It comes from somewhere. It goes somewhere. Opinion doesn’t evaporate. It stays in the universe.’

‘I don’t think that’s true. We don’t as a society believe today what we believed yesterday. We have abolished slavery. We have given votes to women. We don’t bait bears in the public streets.’

‘And Jews?’

‘Oh, darling, Jews!’

With which she kissed his eyes closed again.

4

She liked him. She definitely liked him. He was a change for her. He seemed without ambition, a lack she had not encountered in her husbands. He listened to her when she talked, which the others hadn’t. And he appeared to want to be with her, keeping her in bed in the morning, not for sex – not only for sex – and following her around the apartment when she was in, which could have been irritating yet wasn’t.

But there was a tendency to sudden gloom in him which worried her. And more than that a hunger for gloom, as though there wasn’t enough to satisfy him in his own person and he had come to suck out hers. Was that, at bottom, all that his Jewish thing was really about, she wondered, a search for some identity that came with more inwrought despondency than he could manufacture out of his own gene pool? Did he want the whole fucking Jewish catastrophe?

He wasn’t the first, of course. You could divide the world into those who wanted to kill Jews and those who wanted to be Jews. The bad times were simply those in which the former outnumbered the latter.

But it was a bloody cheek. Jews proper had to suffer for their suffering; and here was Julian Treslove who thought he could just nip on the roundabout whenever the fancy took him and feel immediately sick.

And she wasn’t even sure he liked Jews as much as he claimed to. She didn’t doubt his affection for her. He slept inside her skin and kissed her with gratitude the minute he awoke. But she couldn’t be the all-in-all Jewess to him he wanted. For a start she wasn’t, at least in her own view, anything like Jewish enough. She didn’t open her eyes to the world and say Hello, here comes another Jewish day, which she had a feeling was what Julian wanted her to say and hoped he would soon start saying on his own behalf. Hello, here comes another Jewish day, except that . . .

The ‘except that’ was half the stuff she tried on his insistence to initiate him into. ‘I want the ritual,’ he had told her, ‘I want the family, I want the day-to-day tick-tock of the Jewish clock,’ but he was no sooner given it than he backed away. She had taken him to synagogue – not, of course, the synagogue next door where they prayed in PLO scarves – and he hadn’t liked it. ‘All they do is thank God for creating them,’ he complained. ‘But what’s the point of being created if all you do with your life is thank God for it?’

She had taken him to Jewish weddings and engagements and bar mitzvahs but he hadn’t liked those either. ‘Not serious enough,’ was his complaint.

‘You want them to be thanking God more?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You are hard to please, Julian.’

‘That’s because I’m Jewish,’ he said.

And though he raved like a madman about Jewish family and Jewish warmth, the moment she introduced him to her family, he fell silent in their company – Libor excepted – and behaved as though he hated them, which he assured her he didn’t, and generally embarrassed her by his lack of – well, warmth.

‘I’m shy,’ he said. ‘I am abashed by the vitality.’

‘I thought you liked the vitality.’

‘I love the vitality. I just can’t do it. I’m too nebbishy.’

She kissed him. She was always kissing him. ‘A nebbish doesn’t know he’s a nebbish,’ she said. ‘You aren’t a nebbish.’

He kissed her back. ‘See how subtle that is,’ he said. ‘ “A nebbish doesn’t know he’s a nebbish.” It’s too sophisticated for me. You’re all too quick on your feet.’

‘Have to be,’ she said. ‘You never know when you might be packing your bags.’

‘I’ll carry them. That’s my role. I’m the schlepper. Or doesn’t a schlepper know he’s schlepper?’

‘Oh, a schlepper knows he’s a schlepper all right. Unlike a nebbish, a schlepper is defined by his knowledge of himself.’

He kissed her again. These Finklers! Here he was, as good as married to one. Almost one himself. In his heart one, certainly. Only in his practice deficient. And yet there still seemed so far to go.

‘Don’t ever leave me,’ he said. He wanted to add, ‘Don’t go first. Promise me you won’t go first.’ But he remembered that those had been Malkie’s words to Libor, and to have reproduced them would have struck him as sacrilege.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘Unless they make me.’

‘In which event,’ he told her, ‘I’ll be your schlepper.’

 

He had not yet introduced her to his sons. Why was that? His explanation to her, since she’d with good reason asked for one, was that he didn’t much care for them.

‘So?’

‘So why would I want them to come into contact with you for whom I do much care?’

‘Julian, that is a nonsense in more ways than I have sufficient breath in my body to tell you. Perhaps if you met them with me you would like them more.’

‘They are a part of my life I want to be done with.’

‘You told me you were done with them before you’d even met them.’

‘That’s true. And that’s the part of my life I want to be done with – being done with people.’

‘And how does not introducing them to me ensure that?’

‘It wouldn’t work out. You wouldn’t like them. And then I’d have to be done with them again.’

‘Are you sure you don’t think it’s they who wouldn’t like me?’

He shrugged. ‘They might not. Who cares? It’s a matter of profound indifference to me.’

She wondered if that were true.

She couldn’t tell if he wanted a child by her. He’d raised the matter in the course of one of his interminable circumcision conversations – was he beautiful enough for her, was there too much of him, was he too sensitive, what would they do if they had a son, would he be like his father or like Moses? – but it had all been highly hypothetical and more about him than a child. She wasn’t thinking children herself. ‘No hurry,’ she’d told him. Which was a nice way of saying ‘no interest’. But would he see that as a failure between them? By his own account he was the worst father in history. He told her that again and again in a way that made her wonder if he wanted to prove he could do better.

She asked him.

‘What, be a Jewish father this time? I don’t think so. Unless you . . .’

‘No, no, absolutely not. It was you I was . . .’

As for the Jew thing in general, it had struck her as amusing to begin with but now concerned her. Had he come to suck that out of her along with her gloom? It worried her that he confused the two.

‘Jews can be joyous, you know,’ she told him.

‘How can I forget that when I met you at a Pesach dinner?’

‘Well that wasn’t joyous in the way I mean. Remembering when we were slaves in Egypt. Maybe I’ve used the wrong word. I mean boisterous, vulgar, earthy.’

As she said it she realised she had been less any of those things since she had met him. He constrained her. He wanted her to be a certain kind of woman and she didn’t want to let him down. But on some nights she would have preferred watching a soap opera on television to discussing circumcision or Moses Maimonides. It was a strain being a representative of your people to a man who had decided to idealise them. It wasn’t only him she didn’t want to let down; it was Judaism, all five thousand troubled years of it.

‘Then let’s do something boisterous,’ he said. ‘There’s a klezmer band with Jewish dancing on at the Jewish Cultural Centre down the road. Why don’t we go there?’

‘I think I’d rather have your baby,’ she said.

‘Would you?’

‘Joking.’

She could hear his mind whirring. How does telling someone you would like to have his baby constitute a joke for Jews?

But the other side of all this was that she didn’t want to worry him. The bacon smearers had been back. This time they had painted Death to Jewishes on the walls. Jewishes was Muslim hate talk. There were more and more reports of small children being abused as Jewishes in mixed schools. Hephzibah considered this a far more seriously menacing development than the swastikas with which white thugs defaced Jewish cemeteries. There was an idle half-heartedness in swastikas. It was more a memory of hate than hate itself. Whereas Jewishes! – the word had a terrible ring to it, to her. Jewishes were creeping things. They were made low and viscous by their faith. If you trod on them their Jewishesness would ooze out of them. It was an abuse that went far deeper than Yid or kike. It was directed not at individual Jews but at Jewish essence. And of course it came from a part of the world where the conflict was already soaked in blood, where hatreds were bitter and perhaps ineradicable.

Libor, too, had been telling her things she would rather not have known. Passing stories of violence and malice on to her as though that was the only way he could empty his own system of them. ‘Do you know what the Swedish papers are saying?’ he asked her. ‘They are saying Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians in order to sell their organs on the international organ market. Remind you of anything?’

Hephzibah bit her lip. She had been through this already at work.

But Libor didn’t have colleagues he could exchange fears with. ‘It’s the blood libel,’ he told her, as though she needed telling.

‘Yes, Libor,’ she said.

‘They’ve got us feasting on blood again,’ he said. ‘And they’ve got us making big money out of it. We could be back living in the Middle Ages. But then what else can you expect from Swedes who have never left the Middle Ages!’

She didn’t want to hear but she heard it every day. The roll-call of Jewish crimes. And the roll-call of answering acts of violence.

Only the other day a security guard at a Jewish museum in Washington had been shot. This sent a little shock of fear through all those who ran Jewish public institutions. Emails of anxious solidarity began to be exchanged. They were fair game – that was the consensus. There was no stopping a lunatic striking anywhere, of course. But there was much in the currency of contemporary Israel-hating for lunatics to latch on to. There had been spillage, from regional conflict to religious hatred, there could be no doubt of that. Jews were again the problem. After a period of exceptional quiet, anti-Semitism was becoming again what it had always been – an escalator that never stopped, and which anyone could hop on at will.

In keeping this from Treslove, not mentioning the guard who had been shot, not telling him about the emails, not passing on what Libor told her – though it was not impossible Libor was telling him himself – Hephzibah recognised that she was protecting him as she would have protected a parent or a child. Though more a parent, in that she was being careful of Jewish susceptibilities. She would have done the same for her father had he been alive. ‘Don’t tell your father, it will kill him,’ her mother would have said. Just as her father would have said, ‘Don’t tell your mother, it will kill her.’

That’s what Jews did. They kept terrible news from one another. And now she was doing it with Treslove.

5

Finkler, who did not dream, had a dream.

People were punching his father in the stomach.

It had been friendly at first. His father was in the shop, entertaining customers. Go on, harder, harder. Do I feel anything? Not a tickle. And I had a cancer there two years ago. Impossible to believe, I know, but true. Ha ha!

But then the atmosphere had changed. His father wasn’t joking any more. And his customers weren’t laughing with him. They had forced him to the floor of his shop where he lay among ripped cartons of sunglasses and punctured cases of deodorant spray. The shop always looked as though there had just been a delivery. Boxes remained unopened on the floor for weeks. Toothbrushes and babies’ dummies and combs and home perms lay where they had fallen or simply been left where the suppliers had placed them. ‘Who needs shelves when you’ve got a perfectly good floor?’ the comedian-chemist would say while grubbing about on his hands and knees, wiping whatever it was that a customer had asked for on his lab coat. It was his theatre, not a pharmacy. He performed there. But this time the chaos was not of his own making. Those people not punching him were pulling things from the shelves. Not looting them, just throwing them about as though they were not worth stealing.

They had knocked his fedora off too, though in real life he never wore it in the shop. His fedora was for going to the synagogue in.

Finkler, concealed in a corner of his dream, waited for his father to call for help.

Samuel, Samuel, gvald!

He was curious about himself, curious to see what he would do. But no cry for help came.

It was when the kicking started that Finkler woke.

 

He hadn’t even been in bed. He had fallen asleep in front of his computer.

He was anxious about the following day. He had a speaking engagement with Tamara Krausz and two others in a hall in Holborn. The usual subject. Two against, two for. Normally he did these in his sleep. But his sleep was not a good place for him at the moment. He knew what he would say at the public meeting. And there was little to fear from those who opposed him. Or from the audience. Audiences were hungry to hear what Finkler told them, whatever the subject, on account of his being on television, but in the matter of Palestine they were as empty buckets. That didn’t mean they hadn’t made their minds up. They had. But they sought Finkler’s confirmation. A thinking Jew attacking Jews was a prize. People paid to hear that. So nothing to agitate him there. It was Tamara Krausz who made him jumpy.

He didn’t trust himself with her. He didn’t mean romantically. She was more Treslove’s kind of woman than she was his. He remembered his friend running off a list of all the fraught women he had fallen for. They sounded like the string section of a women’s orchestra, or rather a women’s orchestra that had nothing but a string section in it. His nerves vibrated just listening to Treslove’s descriptions. ‘Not for me,’ he’d said, sucking his teeth. Now here he was allowing Tamara Krausz to run her bow across his spinal cord.

He wondered if there was any way he could ask her to leave him alone. She would deny, of course, that she had done anything to him. He was flattering himself if he supposed she as much as noticed him as a man outside his professional capacity as fellow ASHamee. She had made no play for him. If he imagined her screaming in his arms, the drama was entirely of his own making.

True, as far as it went, but the screaming he anticipated was not to be confused with the sounds a vain man fancies he can coax out of a sexually frustrated woman. The screams he heard in advance of Tamara Krausz actually screaming them were ideological. Zionism was her demon lover, not Finkler. She could not, in her fascinated, never quite sufficiently reciprocated hatred of Zionism, think about anything else. Which is how things are when you’re in love.

Finkler’s fault, if Tamara had only to say ‘West Bank’ or ‘Gaza’ to set his nerves on edge. Finkler’s fault, if the word ‘occupation’ or ‘trauma’ on Tamara Krausz’s inappositely submissive lips – moist like a harlot’s in the middle of her small, anxious face – inflamed him almost to madness. He knew what would happen if by some mischance or mutual misunderstanding they ended up in bed together and she screamed the dialectic of her anti-Zionism in his ear – he would come into her six or seven times and then kill her. Slice off her tongue and then slit through her throat.

Which might have been the very thing she was referring to when she spoke of the breakdown of the Jewish mind, the Final Solution causing Jews to go demented and seek final solutions of their own, the violence begot of violence. Indeed, Finkler would have done no more than illustrate her thesis.

Was this not the very thing she sought? Kill me, you demented Jew bastard, and prove me right.

The strange thing about all this was that she had not yet, either in his hearing, or in any article of hers that he had read, said a word with which he disagreed. She was more sold on psychic disintegration than he was, and more trusting of Israel’s enemies – Finkler felt able to inveigh against the Jewish state without having to make friends with Arabs: as a philosopher he found human nature flawed on both sides of every divide – but otherwise their diagnoses concurred at every point. It was the way she put it that irked and excited him. It was the rise and fall of her voice. And it was her methodology, which was to quote whoever said something that supported her, and then to ignore them when they said something different.

Again as a philosopher, Finkler was bound to condemn such a practice. It was the totality of a person’s thought one should adduce in argument, not stray bullets of opinion that just happened to suit yours. This made him wary of her personally, as well. You might inadvertently whisper something to her about one subject which she would quote against you on another. I can think only of you, I can hear only you, I can see only you, he might say to her in the dead of night, and she would bring it up it at an ASHamed Jews meeting as proof that his concentration had begun to wander and that he was no longer single-minded in his commitment to the group.

It felt like spite. As though she had got wind of something the Jewish people had said about her – in the dorm after lights out – and was now hell-bent, by fair means or foul, on paying them back.

He put on a black suit and a red tie. Normally he spoke from platforms in an open-necked shirt. On this occasion he wanted to be formidable in appearance as well as content. Or maybe he was concerned to protect his throat, confusing his with hers.

They took their places next to each other on the platform. He was surprised to note how little of her there was below the desk; how short her legs were, and how small her feet. As he inspected her legs he was aware of her inspecting his. How long they are, she must have thought, and how big his feet. She made him feel ungainly. He hoped he made her feel insubstantial.

At the other end of the table were two establishment Jews. Men on the boards of charities and synagogues, watchdogs of the community, custodians of the Jewish family and the good name of Israel, and therefore Finkler’s natural enemies. They didn’t mix, the watchmen Jews and the insurrectionary Jews of questions and ideas. One of them reminded Finkler of his father when he was out of the shop, praying or talking to other Jews who shared his communal concerns. He had that same look of worldly acumen combined with an untried innocence that comes with believing that God still took a particular interest in the Jewish people. Now protecting them as He protected no one else, now punishing them more ferociously than He punished any other of His creatures. The communal solipsism of the Jews. They blink with the ongoing wonder of it all, such men, while driving a hard bargain.

Tamara Krausz leaned into him. ‘I see they’ve dug out the most hysterical ones they could find,’ she whispered. Her contempt was like fine oil sliding into his ear.

‘Hysterical’ was an ASHamed Jew word. Whoever did not admit to shame had capitulated to hysteria. The charge went all the way back to the medieval superstition of the effeminised Jew, the Jew who nursed a strange and secret wound and bled as women bleed. The new hysterical Jew was as a woman in that he was in a state of unmanly terror. Wherever he looked he saw only anti-Semites before whom he quaked in his soul.

‘They’ve dug out the most what they could find?’ Finkler asked.

He’d heard but he wanted to hear again.

‘The most hysterical.’

‘Ah, hysterical . . . Are they hysterical?’

He felt that all the strings in his body had shrunk, so that if he twitched a shoulder blade his fingers would retract and tighten into a fist.

She didn’t have time to answer. The debate was under way.

Finkler and Tamara Krausz won it, of course. Finkler argued that you couldn’t wax lyrical about one people’s desire for nationhood and at the same time deny it to another. Judaism is essentially an ethical religion, he said. Which made it fundamentally contradictory at heart, pace Kierkegaard, because it is impossible to be ethical and religious. Zionism had been Judaism’s great opportunity to escape its religiosity. To seek from others what they wanted for themselves, and to give back in the same spirit. But with military victory, Jewish ethics succumbed once more to the irrational triumphalism of religion. Only a return to ethics could save the Jews now.

Tamara saw it somewhat differently. For her, the Zionist ideal was criminal from its inception. To prove this she quoted people who mainly believed the opposite. The victims of that criminality were not only the Palestinians, but Jews themselves. Jews everywhere. Even in this room. She spoke coldly, as though defending a client she didn’t quite believe in, until she came to the question of ‘what the West calls terrorism’. Then, as Finkler sitting next to her noticed, her body began to heat up. Her lips grew swollen, as though from a demon lover’s kisses. There is a kind of eroticism in violence, she told the enthralled assembly. You can gather those you kill to your heart. As you can gather those who kill you. But because the Jews had loved the Germans too much, and gone passively to their deaths, they had resolved against Eros, emptied their hearts of love, and now killed with a coldness that chilled the blood.

Finkler didn’t know whether this was poetry, psychology, politics or piffle. But all the talk of killing discountenanced him. Had she somehow guessed what he wanted to do to her?

The community Jews were no match for her. Which wasn’t saying much. They’d have been no match for a clown like Kugle. Had they been the only speakers they’d still have contrived to lose the debate. They confounded themselves. Finkler sighed as they went through routines that had been tired when he first heard them from his father thirty or more years before – how tiny Israel was, how long-standing were Jewish claims to the land, how few of the Palestinians were truly indigenous, how Israel had offered the world but every effort at peacemaking had been rebuffed by the Arabs, how much more necessary than ever a secure Israel was in a world in which anti-Semitism was on the increase . . .

Why didn’t they hire him to write their scripts? He could have won it for them. You win by understanding something of what the other side thinks, and they understood nothing.

He meant win in every sense. Win the argument and win the Kingdom of God.

It was his oldest argument with his father: that Jews, for whom the stranger was supposed to be remembered and given water, for whom doing unto others as they would have done unto them was the virtue to end virtues, had turned into a people with ears only for themselves. He couldn’t bear his father’s clowning in the shop, but at least there he was a democrat and humanitarian; whereas dressed in his black coat and his fedora, talking politics on the way home from synagogue, he closed his face as resolutely as he closed his mind.

‘They fought and lost,’ his father used to say. ‘They would have thrown us into the sea but they fought and lost.’

‘That is no reason for us not to imagine what it is like to lose,’ the young Finkler argued. ‘The prophets didn’t say we had to show compassion only to the deserving.’

‘They get what they deserve. We give them what they deserve.’

And so Finkler had thrown his skullcap away and shortened his name from Samuel to Sam.

‘Same old, same old,’ he muttered to Tamara.

‘As I said – hysterical,’ she answered in an undertone.

Finkler’s fingers retracted so far he could feel his fists retreating into his sleeves.

It was only when there were questions from the floor that the evening became lively. People on both sides of the debate shouted and told stories of a personal nature which they mistook for proof of whatever it was they believed. A Gentile woman with a sorrowing face stood and in the manner of a confessional told how she had been brought up to be in awe of what Professor Finkler – he wasn’t a professor but he let it go – had called the sublime Jewish ethic – he had said no such thing but he let that go as well – but since then she had been to the Holy Land and discovered an apartheid country ruled by racist supremacists. She had a question for the gentlemen on the platform who complained that Israel was uniquely singled out for censure: what other country defines itself and those it permits to enter it on racial grounds? Is the reason you are uniquely singled out for censure, that you are uniquely racist?

‘She is a lesson to us,’ Tamara Krausz said to Finkler in her silken undertone. It was like listening to a woman you didn’t want to love removing her slip for you, Finkler thought.

‘How so?’ he asked.

‘She speaks from the bruised heart.’

Was it that that made Finkler not wait for the gentlemen to whom the question had been put to answer it? Or was it his certain know-ledge that they would answer it as ineffectually as they had answered everything else? Finkler himself didn’t know. But what he said he too said from a bruised heart. The mystery was: whose bruised heart was it?

6

What Finkler said was this:

How dare you?

For a moment he said nothing else. It isn’t easy to let a phrase hang in silence at the noisy end of a public meeting when everyone is eager to be heard. But Finkler, one time exhibitionistic Oxford don, now experienced media philosopher, was not without some mastery of the tricks of eloquence. As one-time beloved husband of Tyler, now grieving widower, as one-time proud father, now not, as potential murderer of Tamara Krausz, he was possessed of some of the tricks of gravity, too.

‘How dare you? was unexpected of him politically, unexpected as a response to the careworn woman who had once been a celebrant of Jewish ethics and spoke now from the soul of suffering humanity, and unexpected by the violence of its tone. A single pistol shot would not have carried more threat.

He allowed the report of it to go on reverberating through the hall – a tenth of a second, a half a second, a second and a quarter, a lifetime – and then, in a voice no less shocking for the calm pedagogic reasonableness in which he had cocooned it, he said:

‘How dare you, a non Jew – and I have to say it impresses me not at all that you grew up in awe of Jewish ethics, if anything your telling me so chills me – how dare you even think you can tell Jews what sort of country they may live in, when it is you, a European Gentile, who made a separate country for Jews a necessity?

‘By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others?  Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity.  Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over – yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be construed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked respresentative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries . . .’

He looked around him. There was no wall of applause. What did he expect? Some people enthusiastically clapped. Rather more booed. Had he not carried the authority he did, there would, he presumed – he bloody well hoped – have been cries of ‘Shame!’ A demagogue likes to hear cries of ‘Shame!’ But mainly what he saw was humanity trapped in conviction, like rats in rat traps.

Those who saw as he saw, saw what he saw. Those who didn’t, didn’t. And the didn’t had it.

Fuck it, he thought. It was at that moment the sum total of his philosophy. Fuck it.

He turned his head to Tamara Krausz. ‘So what do you think?’ he enquired.

She had a strange smile on her face, as though everything he had just said he had said at her bidding.

‘Hysterical,’ she told him.

‘You wouldn’t care to lie in my arms and scream that, would you?’ he asked, in his most inviting manner.