ELEVEN

1

Walking to the museum a week later, Hephzibah thought I am at the end of my tether with the lot of them.

She didn’t know if Finkler was chasing her. But Abe, her ex, definitely was. He rang her two or three times after their chance meeting at Sons of Abraham. No dice, she told him, I’m happy.

He replied that he could see she was happy, which was no more than she deserved, but wanted to know what her being happy had to do with meeting him for a drink.

‘I don’t drink.’

‘You were drinking the other night.’

‘That was a special occasion. I’d just been accused of infanticide. When you’re accused of infanticide you drink.’

‘I’ll accuse you of infanticide.’

‘Don’t joke about it.’

‘All right, you don’t drink. But you do talk.’

‘We’re talking.’

‘I’d like to hear about the museum.’

‘It’s a museum. I’ll send you a prospectus.’

‘Is it a Holocaust museum?’

Christ, another one, she thought.

One in, one out. Finkler had stopped being ironical about the museum. He hadn’t paid another surprise visit to her there but he somehow or other contrived to be around her more, showed up where he was not expected, and even when he wasn’t in evidence in person somehow succeeded in making his presence felt, popping up on television or in some third party’s conversation, as when Abe, trying to prise her out, said how pleased he was to meet Sam Finkler at the theatre as he had always admired him. Though she was by no means a sexually vain woman – she was too reliant on shawls for sexual vanity – she didn’t quite believe in Finkler’s latest expressions of curiosity about her work. Curiosity did not come naturally to him. But at least the jeering had been replaced by civility. As for what that civility denoted she couldn’t judge it clearly because Treslove’s apprehensions clouded her view.

So she was at the end of her tether with herself as well. Yet again seeing the world as the man she loved saw it.

But perhaps all these irritations were a smokescreen for some other anger or sadness altogether. Julian worried her. He was beginning to look like a man who didn’t know what to do with himself next. Libor too. She had barely seen him in weeks and when she did he didn’t make her laugh. Libor without jokes was not Libor.

And the information that poured into her office – continuing accusations of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, news of world charities and human rights organisations citing war crimes and advocating boycotts, an incessant buzzing of rumour and reproach in the ears of Jews, a demoralisation that was no less effective for being random (she hoped to God that it was random) – only added fuel to her disquiet. Hephzibah was not a fervent Zionist. She had never been a land-centred Jew. St John’s Wood was fine for her as a place to be Jewish in. She only wished she could find a reference in the Bible to God’s covenant with English Jews, promising them St John’s Wood High Street. But Zionism’s achievements could not go unnoticed in a museum of Anglo-Jewish culture, given the contribution to Zionism English Jews had made, even a museum situated a step from the zebra crossing made famous by the Beatles. The question she had to wrestle with was how far Zionism’s failures had to be noticed as well.

There had been a lull in odious incident. No bacon had been smeared on the door handles for weeks, no defacements vowing revenge and death. (Revenge, in St John’s Wood!) Things had fallen quiet in the Middle East, at least as far as the British media was concerned, so the rage that clung on to the coat-tails of news report had temporarily abated. Yes, Sons of Abraham had reinvigorated some of it among the broadsheeet-reading, theatregoing classes where, it seemed to her, it lay smouldering all the time now, like a fire that wouldn’t go out, but at least Jews weren’t for the moment the only topic of educated conversation. The trouble was that the calm felt more sinister than the storm. What would it take, what action against Gaza or Lebanon or even Iran, what act of belligerence or retaliation, what event in Wall Street, what incidence of Jewish influence of the wrong sort round the corner in Downing Street, for it all to start up again, next time with more violence than the last, the more virulent for its slumbers?

She herself hadn’t slept easily in an age, and that wasn’t simply down to having Treslove in her bed. She didn’t walk to work in easy spirits. She didn’t meet her friends in easy spirits. An anxiety had settled like a fine dust on everything she did, and on everyone she knew – on all the Jews at least. They too were looking askance – not over their shoulders exactly, but into a brittly uncertain future which bore fearful resemblances to an only too certain past.

Paranoia, was it? she asked herself. The question itself had become monotonous to her. It was the natural one to ask as she walked to work in the wintry sunshine, skirting an empty Lord’s, wishing she could be a man who forgot himself in sport, full of dread as to what she would find when she arrived at the museum. Am I becoming paranoid? The rhythm of the wondering affected her pace. She had begun to walk in time to it.

The thought that the museum was a target frightened her. But she was frightened of her fear no less. Jews were supposed to have put all this behind them. ‘Never again’ and all that. Well, it was hard to picture herself as a deportee in a thin floral dress, carrying a little suitcase, her eyes hollow with terror, as she strolled through leafy St John’s Wood with her jewellery clinking and a bag costing fifteen hundred pounds under her arm. But the hollow-eyed woman in the floral dress – wouldn’t she have once found her fate hard to picture too?

So was it paranoia? She didn’t know. No one knew. There were people who claimed that the paranoid create the thing they fear. But how could that be? How does being afraid of hate manufacture it? Were there Nazis out there who didn’t know they were Nazis until a Jew showed his alarm? Did the smell of Jewish apprehension send them out to the costumiers in search of a brown shirt and jackboots?

The old foetor Judaicus. She had always taken the imagined smell to be sulphurous, an accompaniment to the tail and horns, conclusive proof that the Jew was friendly with the devil and that his natural habitat was hell. A cabinet in her museum would mention the foetor Judaicus along with other Christian superstitions about Jews, now long consigned to the dustbin of medieval hatred, a reminder of how far Jews in this country had travelled.

Or had they?

But what if the foetor Judaicus was not hellish in origin at all? What if the smell that medieval Christians sniffed on the horned and hairy bodies of Jews was simply the smell of fear?

If so – if there are people who will murder you because they are aroused by the odour of your fear – is the concept of anti-Semitism itself an aphrodisiac, an erotic spur to loathing?

Could be. She loathed the word herself. Anti-Semitism. It had a medicinal, antiseptic ring to it. It was something you kept locked away in your bathroom cabinet. She had long ago made a vow never to open the cupboard. If you can help it, don’t see the thing; if you can avoid it, don’t use the word. Anti-Semite, anti-Semite, anti-Semite – its unmusicality pained her ear, its triteness degraded her.

If there was one thing she couldn’t forgive the anti-Semites for, it was making her call them anti-Semites.

A couple of Muslim men, perhaps stopping for a talk on their way to the Regent’s Park Mosque, looked at her in a way she found uncomfortable. Or was she looking at them in a way they found uncomfortable? She paused to root through her handbag for her keys. The men moved on. Across the road a boy of about nineteen was talking into his mobile phone. He held it suspiciously she thought, cradling it, as though only pretending to talk. Had he been using it as a camera?

Or a detonator?

2

Treslove tried to fix a time to see Finkler. There were things to talk about. Libor for one. Where was he? How was he?

And the play. All very well for Finkler to clown about it, but something needed to be said. Perhaps an answering play to be written. Sons of Ishmael, or Jesus’s Children. Treslove would have been prepared to have a go himself, but he wasn’t a writer. Nor do I know much about the subject, he told Hephzibah, though that, as they agreed, hadn’t stopped the authors of Sons of Abraham. Finkler, on the other hand, was a one man word factory. And appeared to have become more fluid in his politics. More fluid in something, anyway.

‘Don’t count on it,’ Hephzibah said, which Treslove interpreted in a dozen ways, all of them upsetting to his peace of mind.

Hephzibah was, of course, another reason to see Finkler, face to face.

It wasn’t his intention to bring the subject of her up. But Finkler might. And whether he did or he didn’t, the odd phrase or look would surely betray something.

And then there was the matter of the prostitutes. He had no intention of prying or giving advice. He had no advice to give. But he was supposed to be Finkler’s friend. And if Finkler was in distress, well . . .

He got him on the phone. ‘Come out and play,’ he said.

But Finkler wasn’t in the mood. ‘I have of late,’ he said, ‘lost all my mirth.’

They had worked out a standard answer to that in school.

‘I’ll find it for you.’

‘Nice of you, but I doubt you’ll know where to look. I’ll take a raincheck if that’s all right.’

He didn’t say he had prostitutes to visit. Or online poker to play. Or that what he had in fact lost of late was his money. Nor did he say, And give my love to Hep. Was that significant?

Alfredo’s prostitute text continued to cause Treslove unease. About Alfredo not least. Why the malice? Why the mischief? Or was he trying to tell his father that he was reduced to going out looking for prostitutes himself thanks to his deprived upbringing? You were such a shit dad that I must seek the consolation of whores.

Treslove wished the pox on him. Then immediately unwished it. All this being a Jew when he might have done better being a father.

He did not understand why anyone would seek the consolation of whores. He did not, himself, do unassociated desire. And he had no reason to think Finkler did. So either he was so far from himself that there was no knowing what he would do, including make a move on Hephzibah, or he had already made a move on Hephzibah, been rejected and turned to prostitutes as Treslove turned to opera.

Unless he had made a move on Hephzibah, been accepted and turned to prostitutes either a) to assuage his guilt, or b) to express the superabundance of his satisfaction. That one Treslove did understand: that you might go with a second woman as a delirious after-effect of having just been with the first.

But not a prostitute. Not after Hephzibah!

Treslove didn’t want to be feeling any of this. Either about his friend who in all likelihood was simply in the deep dejection of widowerhood still. Or about Hephzibah who was worried sick about the imminent opening of the museum, and wouldn’t have thanked Treslove for saddling her with the extraneous perturbations of adultery. Or about himself. He wanted to be happy. Or, if he was happy, he wanted to be happier. Sane. Or, if he was sane, saner.

He didn’t quite believe his own suspicions. Jealousy wasn’t in his nature. That wasn’t self-flattery. He tried to work up a passion over Finkler and Abe and anyone else Hephzibah might be seeing at the museum, the architect, the works foreman, the electrician, the person employed to wipe the bacon fat off door handles, the person doing the smearing even, but he couldn’t find any lasting rage or sorrow. What Treslove did was exclusion, not jealousy. And though they were related, they were not the same. Jealousy would have made him angry with Hephzibah, it might even have aroused him; but all he felt was lonely and rejected.

It was like being a child among adults; not unloved but unlistened to. At best humoured. He wasn’t the real McCoy, that was what it came to. Not only wasn’t he a Jew, he was a jest to Jews.

The real McGoy.

Hephzibah’s mysteriously extended family was a case in point. Every time she took him round to meet the second half-cousin of an aunt-in-law three times removed, always surrounded by nephews and nieces and the children of nephews and nieces who looked just like the last lot but weren’t, they pounced on Treslove, as though he had just been found wandering naked and without language in the Mata Atlântica, in order to be the first to explain to him the complexities of family relations in the civilised world, information for which he would certainly have been grateful had it not been delivered to him as though any kinship system beyond being the only child of divorced drug-taking parents was bound to be outside the comprehension of a Gentile.

It was in the same spirit, too, that they fed him, pushing food on him as though he hadn’t had a square meal since being abandoned to savages twenty years before and neither knew the names of any foodstuff that wasn’t grass nor was prepared for any taste that wasn’t coconut. ‘Be careful, that’s hot!’ they would shout when he spooned horseradish on to a slice of tongue, though he reckoned the mashed banana and strained peach with which one of the babies was covering his face would have been far hotter. Followed by, ‘You might not like that, it’s tongue, not everybody can cope with tongue.’

Not everybody? Did they become everybody the minute they clapped eyes on him?

No harm was meant, he knew. Quite the opposite. And Hephzibah found it all very funny, going over to him while it was happening and running her hands through his hair. But it wore him down. It wouldn’t stop. There was never a time when they opened the door to him and said Julian, how nice to see you, come in, we have nothing in the way of food or other secrets of our culture to test you with today and are no more conscious of your being a Gentile than you are of our being Jews.

He was always a curiosity to them. Always a bit of a barbarian who had to be placated with beads and mirrors. He charged himself with ingratitude and humourlessness. Each time he fell into a pet he promised he would learn to do better. But he never did. They wouldn’t let him. Wouldn’t let him in.

And then when they did . . .

3

The face-painting incident.

Once, in his student days, Treslove met a very beautiful hippy girl, a true wispy child of nature and marijuana, dressed in a big girl’s version of a little girl’s nightgown. The occasion was a gestalt nostalgia party in East Sussex. They were being their parents as they imagined their parents had been. But they were doing it for real as well, in the sense that they had an ecological agenda.

Though Treslove was doing a module in Pollution and Conservation he didn’t exactly have an ecological agenda himself. But he was happy that other people did. It made for a good party.

It was an early summer’s evening, and gentleness was in the air. Everyone sat on cushions on the floor and told everyone else what they thought of them. Only rarely did anyone express anything other than deep affection. There were candles in the garden, music played, people kissed, cut out shapes from coloured paper which they hung from trees, and painted one another’s faces.

Treslove had little aptitude for art of any sort, but for face-painting he had no aptitude whatsoever. The beautiful hippy girl floated across to where he was sitting on a garden bench, smoking dope. Through her little girl’s dress he could see her big girl’s breasts. ‘Peace,’ he said, offering her the spliff.

She was carrying paints. ‘Paint me,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he told her. ‘I have no aptitude.’

‘We can all paint,’ she said, kneeling in front of him, offering her face. ‘Just let the colours flow.’

‘Colours don’t flow with me,’ he explained. ‘And I can never think of a subject.’

‘Paint the me you see,’ she told him, closing her eyes and pulling back her hair.

So Treslove painted a clown. Not an elegant or tragic clown. Not a Pierrot or Pirouette, but an Auguste with an absurd red nose, and big splotches of white outlined with black around the mouth and above the eyes, and crimson patches on the cheeks. A drooling, dribbling splosher of a clown.

She cried when she saw what he had done to her. The host of the party asked him to leave. Everyone was looking. Including Finkler who was down from Oxford for the weekend and whom Treslove had taken to the party. Finkler had his arms around a girl whose face he had exquisitely painted with floating shapes, in the manner of Chagall.

‘What have I done?’ Treslove wanted to know.

‘You’ve made a fool of me,’ the girl said.

Treslove would not have made a fool of her for the world. In point of fact he had fallen in love with her while he painted her. It was just that a red nose and big white mouth and crimson patches on the cheeks were all that he could think of painting.

‘You have humiliated me,’ the girl cried, sobbing into a tissue. The tears mingling with the face paint made her look even more ridiculous than Treslove had made her look. She was beside herself with distress.

Treslove looked over to Finkler for support. Finkler shook his head as over someone to whom he had shown infinite patience in the past but could forgive no more. He enfolded his girl in his arms so that she should not have to see what his friend had done.

‘Leave,’ the host said.

 

Treslove was a long time recovering from this incident. It marked him, in his own eyes, as a man who didn’t know how to relate to people, especially women. Thereafter, he hesitated when he was invited to a party. And started, in the way that some people start from spiders, whenever he saw a box of children’s paints or people painting one another’s faces at a fete.

That the girl he had painted as a clown might have been the Judith who avenged herself on him outside the window of J. P. Guivier had of course crossed his mind. Everything crossed Treslove’s mind. But for it to have been her, she must have changed considerably over the years both in physique and in temper.

Was it likely, either, that she would nurse her grievance, not only for more than a quarter of a century but to the extent of deliberately tracing Treslove’s whereabouts and tracking him through the streets of London? No. But then again trauma is incalculable in its effects. Could he, with a box of paints, have made an insanely unforgiving brute out of that sweet-natured girl?

Such questions were purely academic now that he had become a Finkler. What had been, had been. Indeed, he remembered the face-painting incident only when Hephzibah took him to a family birthday party at which the paints came out. Though children did not normally take much account of Treslove whom they managed not to see, this little girl – he was not sure of her relation to Hephzibah, so assumed a great-great-niece: it was either that or great-great-aunt – this little girl for some unaccountable reason did.

‘Are you Hephzibah’s husband?’ she asked him.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ he replied.

‘In a manner of speaking yes or no?’

Treslove was uncomfortable talking to children, not knowing whether he should address them as very young versions of himself, or very old versions of himself. Since she was a Finkler and therefore, he assumed, preternaturally smart, he opted for the very old version of himself. ‘In a manner of speaking both,’ he said. ‘In the eyes of God, if not in the eyes of society, I am her husband.’

‘My daddy says there is no God,’ the little girl said.

This took Treslove to the limits of what he knew about speaking to children. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there you are then.’

‘You’re funny,’ the little girl told him. There was a precocity about her he couldn’t fathom. She appeared almost to be flirting with him. An impression augmented by how grown-up her clothes were. He had noticed this before about Finkler children. Their mothers dressed them in the height of adult fashion, as though no opportunity to find a husband was to be forgone.

‘Funny in what way?’

‘Different funny.’

‘I see,’ he said. By different did she mean not Finkler? Was it evident to a child?

It was at this point that Hephzibah came over carrying paints. ‘You two seem to be hitting it off,’ she said.

‘She knows I’m not unserer,’ Treslove said under his breath. ‘She’s picked me for anderer. It’s uncanny.’

Unserer, as Hephzibah’s family used the word, meant Jewish. One of us. Anderer was one of them. The enemy. The alien. Julian Treslove.

‘That’s nonsense,’ Hephzibah said, under her breath.

‘Why are you whispering?’ the little girl asked. ‘My daddy says it’s rude to whisper.’

Rude to whisper, Treslove thought, but not rude to be a fucking atheist at seven.

‘I know what,’ Hephzibah said, ‘why don’t you ask Julian nicely and he’ll paint your face for you?’

‘Julian Nicely, will you paint my face for me?’ the little girl said, much amused by her own joke.

‘No,’ Treslove said.

The little girl’s mouth fell open.

‘Julian!’ Hephzibah said.

‘I can’t.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘I can’t, leave it at that.’

‘Is this because you think she knows you’re not unserer?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I just don’t paint faces.’

‘Paint hers for me. Look, she’s upset.’

‘I’m sorry if you’re upset,’ he said to the little girl. ‘But you might as well get used to the idea that we don’t always get what we want.’

‘Julian!’ Hephzibah said again. ‘It’s only face-painting. She isn’t asking you to buy her a house.’

‘She,’ Treslove said, ‘isn’t asking for anything. It’s you.’

‘So I am to be taught a lesson in what not to expect from life?’

‘I’m not teaching anyone anything. I just don’t do face-paints.’

‘Even though two young women are deeply upset by your refusal?’

‘Don’t be cute, Hep.’

‘And don’t you be objectionable. Just paint her fucking face.’

‘No. How many more times must I say it? No. Face-painting is not my scene. OK?’

Whereupon, in what Hephzibah was to describe to herself as a most unmanly fit of petulance, he swept out of the room and indeed out of the house. When Hephzibah returned several hours later she found him in their bed, his face turned to the wall.

Hephzibah was not a woman who allowed silences to build up. ‘So what was that about?’ she asked.

‘You know what it was about. I don’t do face-painting.’

Hephzibah assumed this was code for I don’t do your family.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Then would you please stop this fantasy about how wonderful you find us?’

Treslove assumed us was code for Finklers.

He didn’t promise he would stop. But nor did he tell her she was wrong in her assumption.

It was all too much for him – children, parties, face paints, families, Finklers.

He had bitten off more than he could chew.

4

And yet he was more them than they were, felt more for them and what they stood for than they, as far he could see, were capable of feeling for themselves. He wouldn’t have gone so far as to say they needed him, but they did, didn’t they? They needed him.

He had left the theatre seething with rage. On behalf of Hephzibah. On behalf of Libor. On behalf of Finkler, whatever Finkler felt or pretended to feel about the poison play. Why, he was even prepared to feel rage on behalf of Abe, whose client called the Holocaust a holiday and wondered why he’d lost his job while he was snorkelling in the Med.

Someone had to feel what he felt because on behalf of themselves what did they feel? Not enough. Hephzibah he knew was angry and disconsolate but preferred to look somewhere else. Finkler thought it was a joke. Libor had turned his head away from everything and everyone. Leaving only him, Julian Treslove, son of a melancholy and friendless cigar seller who played the fiddle where no one could hear him; Julian Treslove, ex of the BBC, ex arts administrator, one-time lover of a host of hopeless unfleshly girls who wore too many bras, father of a sandwich-making in-denial homosexual and a Jew-hating opportunist piano player; Julian Treslove, Finklerphile and would-be Finkler except that the Finklers in their ethno-religious separatism or whatever one was meant to call it just didn’t fucking want to know.

Hard to go on feeling outrage for people who behaved to you exactly as they were accused of behaving to everyone else precisely because of which accusations you were outraged for them. Hard, but not impossible. Treslove saw where this was taking him and refused to go there. A principle of truth – political truth and art truth – stood beyond such personal betrayals and disappointments. Sons of Abraham, like much else of its kind, was a travesty of dramatic thought because it lacked imagination of otherness, because it accorded to its own self-righteousness a supremacy of truth, because it mistook propaganda for art, because it was rabble-rousing, and Treslove owed it to himself, never mind his inadequately affronted friends, not to be rabble-roused. He wished he had an arts programme to produce again. He would have enjoyed giving Sons – as it was no doubt called within the fraternity – the once over at three o’clock in the morning.

Treslove’s bit for honour and veracity.

‘But are you saying Zionism is exempt from criticism? Are you denying what we have seen with our own eyes on television?’ the BBC bosses would have asked him at programme review, as though he, Julian Treslove, son of a melancholy and friendless cigar seller etc., had suddenly become Zionism’s spokesman, or truth was to be apprehended in ten seconds flat on Newsnight, or humanity was incapable of addressing one wrong without instigating another.

He knew what he thought. He thought there would be no settling this until there’d been another Holocaust. He could see because he was outside it. He could afford to see what they – his friends, the woman he loved – dared not. The Jews would not be allowed to prosper except as they had always prospered, at the margins, in the concert halls and at the banks. End of. As his sons said. Anything else would not be tolerated. A brave rearguard action in the face of insuperable odds was one thing. Anything resembling victory and peace was another. It could not be borne, whether by Muslims for whom Jews were a sort of erroneous and lily-livered brother, always to be kept in their place, or by Christians to whom they were anathema, or by themselves to whom they were an embarrassment.

That was the total of Treslove’s findings after a year of being an adopted Finkler in his own eyes if in no one else’s – they didn’t have a chance in hell.

Just as he didn’t.

 

So that, at least, was something they were in together. Schtuck.

‘In schtuck’ was a favourite expression of his father’s, a man who got by essentially without expression. Remembering it recently, Treslove thought the word must have been Yiddish and his father’s using it the proof that something Jewish was trying to force its way out of him. Schtuck – it looked Yiddish, it sounded Yiddish, and it meant something – a sort of sticky mess – that only Yiddish could adequately express; but he didn’t find the word in any of the museum’s Yiddish dictionaries. The evidence of his Jewish antecedence proved as recalcitrant as ever. But in this at least he was a Jew – he was in deep schtuck.

5

The worst times, Libor remembered, were the mornings. For her and for him, but it was her he was thinking about.

There was never making any peace with it; neither had what could be called religious faith, both rejected false consolation, but there would be an hour there when the lights were dim and he would lie by her side, stroking her hair or holding her hand, not knowing if she was awake or asleep – but he was thinking about her, not him – an hour when, awake or asleep, she appeared to have accepted what she had no choice but to accept, and the idea of returning to earth, or even to nothing, caught the quiet of assent.

She could smile at him in the night when the pain was eased. She could look deep into his eyes, beckon him to her and whisper what he thought would be a fond memory into his ear, but which turned out to be a raucous allusion, an obscenity even. She wanted him to laugh, because they had laughed so often together. He had made her laugh at the beginning. Laughter had been his most precious gift to her. His ability to make her laugh was the reason – one of the reasons – she had chosen him above Horowitz. Laughter had never been at war with the softer emotions in her. She could roar and be gentle in the same breath. And now she wanted laughter to be her final gift to him.

In the stealthy alternations of rudery and sweetness, somewhere between waking and sleep, light and darkness, they found – she found, she found – a modus mortis.

It was bearable, then. Not a peace or a resignation, but an engagement of the fact of death with the fact of life. Though she was dying they were still living, together. He would turn the lights out and return to her side and listen to her going off and know that she was living with dying.

But in the morning the horror of it returned. Not only the horror of the pain and what she knew she must have looked like, but the horror of the knowledge.

If Libor could only have spared her that knowledge! He would have died for her to spare her that knowledge, only that would have been to burden her with another, and she assured him, greater loss. He could not bear, when morning broke, her waking up to what she had perhaps forgotten all about while she slept. He imagined the finest division of time, the millionth of a millionth of a second of pure mental excruciation in which the terrible incontrovertibility of her finished life returned to her. No laughter or consoling obscenities in the first minutes of the morning. No companionable sorrowing together either. She lay there on her own, not wanting to hear from him, unavailable to him, staring up at the ceiling – as though that was the route out she would finally take – seeing the ice-cold certainty of her soon becoming nothing.

The morning was always waiting for her. No matter where they had got to the night before, no matter what quiet almost bearable illusion of living with her dying he believed her to have attained, the morning always dashed it.

So the morning was always waiting for Libor too. The morning waiting for her to wake. And now the morning waiting for himself to wake.

He wished he’d been a believer. He wished they both had, though perhaps one of them might have taken the other along. But belief had its underbelly of doubting, too. How could it be otherwise? You would see the meaning in the night, see God’s face even, if you were lucky – the shechina: he had always loved that concept, or the sound of it at least, God’s refulgence – but the next day, or the next, it would be gone. Faith wasn’t a mystery to him; the mystery to him was holding on to faith.

He kissed her eyes at night and tried to fall asleep himself in hope. But things didn’t get better; they got worse, precisely because every careful crafting of feeling better, of assent, submission, accommodation – he didn’t have the word – survived no more than a single night. Nothing was ever settled. Nothing ever sealed. The day began again as though the horror had that very moment been borne in on her for the first time.

And on him.

6

Tyler’s life was over much more quickly. A brisk woman in all her dealings, including her adulteries, she dealt in a businesslike manner with death. She arranged what needed arranging, left instructions, demanded certain promises of Finkler, took as unemotional a farewell of her children as she could bear to take, shook hands with Finkler as over a deal that had not worked out wonderfully but had not worked out too badly either, all things considered, and died.

‘Is this all I get?’ Finkler wanted to shake her and say.

But over time he discovered there were things she had wanted to say to him, matter she had wanted to bring up, but had not, either for fear of upsetting him or for fear of upsetting herself. Not tender things or sentimental matter – though he continued to find letters he had written to her and photographs of them both and of the family which she had bundled prettily and tied with ribbons and kept in places he presumed to be sacred – but issues of a practical and even argumentative nature, souvenirs of their disagreements, such as the documents relating to her conversion to Judaism, and a number of articles he had written which she had, unknown to him, annotated and filed, and a tape of the broadcast of Desert Island Discs in which he had announced his shame to the world and for which she had never, and never would for all eternity, she had vowed, forgive him.

In a box marked ‘To Be Opened By My Husband When I Have Gone’, which at first he thought she might have prepared prior to going in a more mundane sense – had she ever seriously thought of leaving him? he wondered – he found photographs of him as a nice Jewish boy being bar mitzvahed, and photographs of him as a nice Jewish bridegroom being married to her, and photographs of him as a nice Jewish father at the bar mitzvahs of his sons (these in an envelope bearing a large ? as though to ask why, why, Shmuelly, did you consent to any of these ceremonials if you intended to shit on them?), together with a number of articles on the Jewish faith and on Zionism, some written by him, and heavily annotated again, some written by other journalists and scholars, and one short typewritten manuscript, expostulatory, overpunctuated, and tidied-up in a plastic folder, like homework, the author of which was none other than Tyler Finkler, his wife.

Finkler folded himself in two and wept when he found this.

She was too overwrought to be a good writer, Finkler had always thought. Finkler himself was no stylist, but he knew how to make a sentence trot along. A reviewer of one of Finkler’s first self-help books – Finkler wasn’t sure whether he meant to be kind or unkind, so he took it for the former – described reading his prose as being like taking a train journey in the company of someone who might have been a genius, but then might just as easily have been a halfwit. Tyler’s writing did not veer between these extremes. Reading her was like being on a train journey with an indubitably clever person who had given her life to composing messages on greetings cards. A criticism, as it happens, that had been levelled at Finkler’s early bestseller The Socratic Flirt: How to Reason Your Way into a Better Sex Life.

Tyler had had a sudden insight into her husband, that was what made her put her thoughts on paper. He was too Jewish. He didn’t suffer from an insufficiency of Jewish thought or temperament, but the opposite. They all did, these Shande Jews. (Shande Jews was her name for the ASHamed. Shande means shame as in disgrace, and that was what she thought about them. That they brought shame.) But he, the pompous prick, more than the others.

‘The thing with my husband,’ she wrote, as if to a divorce lawyer, though Finkler himself was the addressee, ‘is that he thinks he has jumped the Jewish fence his father put around him, but he still sees everything from a WHOLLY Jewish point of view, including the Jews who disappoint him. Wherever he looks, in Jerusalem or Stamford Hill or Elstree, he sees Jews living no better than anybody else. And because they are not exceptionally good, it follows – to his extremist Jewish logic – that they are exceptionally bad! Just like the conventional Jews he scorns to spite his father, my husband adheres with arrogance to the principle that Jews either exist to be “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42: 6) or don’t deserve to exist at all.’

Finkler cried a couple more times. Not because of what his wife had charged him with, but because of the childlike conscientiousness of her Bible citations. He could see her bent over the page, concentrating. Perhaps reaching for a Bible to be sure she had cited Isaiah correctly. It made him think of her as a little girl at Sunday school, reading about the Jews with a pencil in her mouth, not knowing that one day she would marry and give her life to one, and become a Jew herself, though not in the eyes of Orthodox Jews like his father. And maybe not even in the eyes of Finkler either.

He had at no time been sympathetic to Tyler’s Jewish aspirations. He didn’t need to be married to a Jew. He was Jew enough – at least in his antecedence – for both of them. Fine, he’d said when she told him what she intended to do. He assumed she wanted a Jewish wedding. What woman didn’t want a Jewish wedding? Fine.

So off she went to talk to the rabbis and when she told him she would take the Reform route he nodded without listening. She could have been describing a bus journey she was planning. It would take about a year, she said, perhaps more for her because she was starting from scratch. Fine, he said. Take as long as you like. It wasn’t that this gave him time to be with his mistresses. He had not yet married Tyler – she wouldn’t marry him until she was a Jew – and so mistresses were not yet in the picture. He was a scrupulous man. He would not have taken a mistress before he had a wife. Another woman yes, a mistress no. He was a philosopher; nomenclature mattered to him. So there was no motive for his indifference. He was unable to put his mind to Tyler getting a Jewish education for the pure and simple reason that he couldn’t have cared less.

She went to classes once a week for fourteen months. There  she learned Hebrew, he gathered, was told God knows what about the Bible, told what not to eat, told what not to wear, told what not to say, taught how to run a Jewish home and be a Jewish mother, paraded before a council of rabbis, submerged (at her own insistence) in water – and lo! he had a Jewish bride. He didn’t listen when she came back each week and tried to interest him in what she’d learned. His life was more interesting. He nodded his head, waited for her to finish, then told her he’d been to see a publisher. He hadn’t yet written a book, but he felt he needed a publisher. He was on the way. People were taking notice. She wanted a Moses to lead her into the Promised Land? He was that Moses. She should just follow him.

So little notice did he take of her studies that she might have been having an affair with one of the rabbis for all he knew. These things happened. Rabbis, too, were men of flesh and blood. And teaching was . . . well Finkler, knew as well as anyone what teaching was.

He wouldn’t begrudge her if she had. Now that she was dead he wanted her to have had a better life than he had given her. No husband is ever more magnanimous, he thought, than when he becomes a widower. There was an article in that.

It was in her conversion class, presumably, that she had been told about the Jewish aspiration to be ‘a light unto the nations’. Had they – had the rabbi he wished to have been in love with her and who he hoped had secretly taken her to kosher restaurants to teach her how to eat lokshen pudding – had he shown her how to put a little bracket around the chapter and verse that she was citing?

Poor Tyler.

(Tyler Finkler 49: 3) The age at which she died and the number of children she had left motherless.

It broke his heart. But that didn’t mean he cared to go on reading. The last thing he wanted to remember about his wife was her baby Hebrew education. He put her little essay back into its folder, blew it a kiss, and stored the box it came in at the bottom of her wardrobe, where she had kept her shoes.

Only on the night he returned from accompanying Hephzibah and Treslove to Sons of Abraham did the impulse to look at it again seize him. He couldn’t have said why. Maybe he was lonely without her. Maybe he was desperate to hear her voice. Or maybe he just needed something, anything, to stop him going to his computer and playing poker.

Her argument was as he remembered but he felt more tenderly towards it now. It can take time for a husband to discover that his wife’s words are worth attending to.

She had hit upon a paradox.

(Think of it – Tyler hitting on a paradox! The things of which a husband does not know his wife to be capable!)

Her paradox was this:

‘The Shande Jews my husband spends his evenings with, (when he isn’t spending them with his mistress), accuse Israelis and those they call ‘Zionist fellow-travellers’ of thinking they enjoy a special moral status which entitles them to treat everyone else like shit; but this accusation is itself founded on the assumption that Jews enjoy a special moral status and should know better. (Do you remember what you used to say to the kids, Shmuel, when they complained they were being told off for doing nothing different to what other kids did? “I judge you by a more exacting standard,” you told them. Why? Why do you – you of all people – judge Jews by a more exacting standard?)’

Her own ‘wise’ husband had told her that the state of Israyel – a state he could not bear to name without putting in a derisive y – had been founded on an act of brutal expropriation. So what state wasn’t? Tyler asked, mentioning the American Indian and the Australian Aborigine.

Finkler smiled. Fancy Tyler, in her jewellery and furs, caring about the Australian Aborigine.

She saw it this way . . .

The cheek of her! She saw it this way. Tyler Gallagher, the granddaughter of Irish tinkers, who won a prize at Sunday school when she was eight years old for a drawing of the baby Jesus holding out his podgy hands to take his Christmas presents from the Three Wise Men. Telling him how she saw it.

This, anyway, was the way it looked to her, whatever her husband thought.

‘For pogrom after pogrom Jews bowed their heads and held on. God had picked them for His own. God would help them. The Holocaust – yes, yes, here we go, Shmuelly, Holocaust, Holocaust!! – the Holocaust changed all that FOREVER. Jews finally woke up to being on their own. They had to look out for themselves. And that meant having their own country. In fact they already had it, but let’s not get into that, Mr Palestine. They had to have their own country and when you have your own country you become different from who you were before you had your own country. You become like everybody else! Only you and your cronies won’t let them be like everybody else, because for you, Shmuel, they are still obliged to obey the God (in whom you don’t believe!) and be an example to the world!

‘Explain to your poor, uneducated, would-be Jewish wife why else you can’t leave the Jews of the country I’ve even heard you call Canaan, you sick fucker, alone? Are you afraid that if you don’t get in with your criticism early, worse will come from somewhere else? Is yours some perverted patriotism that burns up territory you’re afraid of losing so that it won’t fall into enemy hands??

‘Answer me this: Why don’t you mind your own fucking business, Shmuel? You won’t be judged alongside Israyelis unless you choose to be. You have your country, they have theirs – a fact, to quote you on being married to me, that “invites neither exceptional sympathy nor exceptional censure”. They are now just ordinary bastards, half right, half wrong, like the rest of us.

‘Because even you, my false, beloved husband, are not ALL wrong.’

 

This time he didn’t fold her little essay away but sat with it awhile in front of him. Poor Tyler. Which he knew very well was Finkler-speak for poor him. He missed her. They’d fought and fought but there had always been companionableness in it. He had never raised his hand to her, nor she to him. They had always talked everything through, the sound of each other’s voice a daily source of unremarked pleasure to them both. He would have loved to hear her voice now. What he would have given to be able to go out into their now neglected garden with her and put his finger on the knot of green string she was always asking him to help her tie.

They had not been together long enough for it to be one of the great marital adventures, akin to that enjoyed by Libor and Malkie, but they’d been on an enjoyable trek together. And they’d brought up three smart children, no matter that some were smarter than others.

He sat and cried a little. Tears were good in that they were undiscriminating. He didn’t have to know for whom or what he wept. He wept for everything.

He liked Tyler’s point about his being a patriot, burning up what he was afraid of losing. He didn’t know if it was true but he liked the idea. So was Tamara the same? Were all the ASHamed Jews killing the thing they loved for fear of its falling into the enemy’s hands?

Tyler’s was as good a guess as any. Something had to explain the queer, passionate hatred of these people. Self-hate certainly didn’t get it. Self-haters would surely go about in surly isolation, but the ASHamed sought out one another’s company, cheered one another on, expressed their feelings as a group activity, as soldiers might on the eve of battle. It could easily be, in that case, just as poor Tyler had described it, another version of the old beleaguered Jewish tribalism. The enemy remained who the enemy had always been. The others. This was just the latest tactic in the age-old war. To kill our own before the others could.

Certainly, Finkler never once came away from their meetings without feeling exactly as he had felt when accompanying his father to synagogue – that the world was too Jewish for him, too old, too communal in an anthropological, almost primal sense – too far back, too deep down, too long ago.

He was a thinker who didn’t know what he thought, except that he had loved and failed and now missed his wife, and that he hadn’t escaped what was oppressive about Judaism by joining a Jewish group that gathered to talk feverishly about the oppressiveness of being Jewish. Talking feverishly about being Jewish was being Jewish.

 

He stayed up late watching television, trying to stay away from his computer. Enough with the poker.

But poker served a purpose. T. S. Eliot told Auden that the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.

Patience, poker . . . What difference?