TWELVE

1

It was thought that Meyer Abramsky had been suffering from severe depression. He had seven children and his wife was heavy with his eighth. He had been told by the Israeli army to prepare to remove his family from the settlement he had helped to found, in accordance with God’s promise, sixteen years before. He had travelled from Brooklyn with his young wife in order to keep his bargain with God. And they were doing this to him! Assistance would be given to rehouse him, and consideration would be shown to his wife’s condition. But the settlement had to go. Thus spake Obama.

It was agreed that they would not go quietly, not any of them. To go quietly would be to accede to blasphemy. This was their land. They didn’t have to share it, they didn’t have to do deals to secure it, it was theirs. He could point to the verse in the Torah where it said so. There the promise, there the place. Why, if you looked closely and read as you were meant to read, Meyer Abramsky’s house itself was mentioned. There. Right there where the page was worn thin with pointing.

After threatening to barricade his family in their house and shoot whoever tried to move them – never mind that they were fellow Jews; fellow Jews do not eject their own people from sacred land – Meyer Abramsky read about himself in the newspapers. There was talk of his succumbing to a ‘siege mentality’. Siege mentality! What else did they expect? It wasn’t only Meyer Abramsky who was under seige, it was the entire Jewish people.

He never did carry out his threat to shoot the Israeli soldiers who ejected him. Instead, he boarded a bus and shot an Arab family. A mother, a father, a baby. One, two, three bullets. One, two, three victims. Thus spake the Lord.

2

It was not known whether Libor read about the incident and was affected by it. It seemed unlikely. Libor had not read a newspaper for weeks.

Whether he bought a paper to read on the train to Eastbourne isn’t known either. Had he done so he would certainly have seen photographs of Meyer Abramsky on the front pages. But by that time Libor had already made his decision. Why else would he have taken the train to Eastbourne?

He sat opposite Treslove’s son Alfredo on the train without either knowing who the other was. Only later did this emerge, causing Treslove to unwind a chain of improbable causality at the end of which he found his guilt. Had Treslove been a better father and not fallen out with Alfredo he might have had him round to dinner at Hephzibah’s where he would have met Libor, and had he met Libor he would have recognised him on the train and then  . . .

So Treslove was to blame.

Alfredo was travelling to Eastbourne with his dinner jacket in his overnight bag. He would be playing ‘Happy Birthday’ and similar requests at the best hotel in Eastbourne that night.

He thought the old man sitting opposite him was yellow. He must have been about a hundred, he said. Alfredo didn’t like old men much. These things probably start with fathers and Alfredo didn’t like his father. In answer to the question of whether the old man sitting opposite him appeared anxious or depressed he repeated that he looked about a hundred – how else are you going to look at that age but anxious and depressed? He didn’t talk to the old man other than to offer him a peppermint, which was refused, and to ask where he was going.

‘Eastbourne,’ the old man told him.

Yes, obviously Eastbourne, but where specifically? To stay with family? A hotel? (Alfredo hoped not the hotel he was playing at, which had an old enough clientele already.)

‘Nowhere,’ the old man told him.

Libor was more precise in his instructions to the taxi driver when he got to Eastbourne. ‘Bitchy ’Ead,’ he said.

‘Do you mean Beachy Head?’ the driver asked.

‘What did I just say?’ Libor answered. ‘Bitchy ’Ead!’

Did he want to be dropped anywhere in particular? The pub, the lookout . . . ?

‘Bitchy ’Ead.’

The driver who had a father of his own and knew that old men were made irritable by age explained that if he wanted him to wait he would. Otherwise he could ring for him to come back and collect him. ‘Or there’s a bus,’ he said. ‘A 12a.’

‘Not necessary,’ Libor said.

‘Well, if you do need me,’ the driver insisted, handing him his card.

Libor put the card in his pocket without looking at it.

3

He drank a whisky in the slate-floored pub, sitting at a small round table looking out to sea. He thought it was the identical table to the one he and Malkie had sat at on the day they drove here long ago to test each other’s courage, but he might have been wrong about that. It didn’t matter. The view was the same, the coast swirling away to the west, flinty and ancient, the sea colourless but for the thin line of silver on the horizon.

He drank another whisky then left the pub and climbed slowly up the downlands, bent as the trees and shrubs were bent. With no sun on them, the cliffs looked grimy, a mass of dirty chalk crumbling into the sea.

‘You’d need some nerve to do this,’ he remembered saying to Malkie.

Malkie had fallen silent, thinking about it. ‘The dark would be best,’ she had said at last, as they’d strolled back, arm in arm. ‘I’d wait till it was dark and just keep on walking.’

He passed the little pile of stones, like something Jacob or Isaac might have built, with the plaque on which Psalm 93 was engraved. Mightier than the thunder of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea. The Lord on high is mighty.

It seemed to him there were fewer of the randomly planted wooden crosses than he remembered. There should, surely, have been more. Unless, after a decent period of time, they were removed.

What was a decent period of time?

But again, tied to a scrap of wire fencing, there was a bunch of flowers. This one was from Marks & Spencer, with the price tag attached. £4.99. Don’t splash out, he thought.

The place was not isolated. A bus had unloaded a party of pensioners. People walked their dogs and flew kites. Peered over. Shuddered. A hiking couple said hello to him. But it was very quiet, the wind blowing voices off the edge. He heard a sheep. ‘Baaa.’ Unless it was a seagull. And remembered home.

 

There was no evidence to support Malkie’s fanciful conviction that it would take her beloved husband an unconscionable time to reach the bottom. Despite her believing she had married an exceptional man, he didn’t fly or float. He went straight down like anybody else.

4

Treslove learned that Alfredo had been sitting opposite Libor on the Eastbourne train from Alfredo’s mother. Alfredo had seen Libor’s photograph on the South East television news – veteran journalist plunges to his death in Beachy Head’s third suicide in a month – and realised it was the hundred-year-old man he had talked to on the train. This he mentioned to his mother, and this his mother took the trouble to communicate to Treslove when she herself read the dead man’s name in the paper and recognised him as a friend of the father of her son.

‘Strange coincidence,’ she said in the same BBC voice with which she used to unpack rafts of ideas and unpick Treslove’s sanity.

‘Strange how?’

‘Alfredo and your friend on the same train.’

‘That’s a coincidence. What makes it strange?’

‘Two people from your past coming together.’

‘Libor isn’t from my past.’

‘Everybody’s from your past, Julian. That’s where you put people.’

‘Fuck you,’ Treslove told her, ringing off.

He didn’t hear of Libor’s death this way. Had he done so he didn’t know what violence he might have committed on Alfredo and Josephine. He didn’t want them in the same breath or sentence as poor Libor, he didn’t wish to think of them as having even shared existence with him. The fool of a boy should have seen something was wrong, should have engaged the old man in conversation, should have told someone. This wasn’t any old train. You were meant to scrutinise people travelling alone to Eastbourne because there was just about only one reason why a single person would choose to go there.

He felt the same about the taxi driver. Who takes a lonely old man to a noted suicide spot in the late afternoon and leaves him? In fact, the driver thought this very thing about an hour after dropping Libor off and notified the police, but by then it was too late. This, as much as anything else, distressed Treslove – that his friend’s last hour on earth had been spent staring at that cretin Alfredo in his pork-pie hat and discussing the weather with a numbskull Eastbourne taxi driver.

But he couldn’t go on blaming other people. It was his fault in more ways than he could number. He had neglected Libor in recent months, thinking only about himself. And when he had spent time with him it was only to talk sexual jealousy. You don’t talk sexual jealousy – you don’t, if you have a grain of tact or discretion in your body, talk sexual anything to an old man who has recently lost the woman he had been in love with all his life. That was gross. And it was grosser still – worse than gross: it was brutal – to burden Libor with the knowledge of his affair with Tyler. That was a secret Treslove should have taken to the grave, as he supposed Tyler had. And Libor himself.

It wasn’t out of the question that this uncalled-for confession was among the reasons Libor had ended his life – so that he didn’t have to bear his friend’s turpitude any longer. Treslove had seen Libor’s face blacken when he’d bragged – let’s call a spade a spade, it was bragging – about those stolen afternoons with Finkler’s wife; he had seen the lights go out in the old man’s eyes. It seemed to be a villainy too far for Libor. Treslove had blemished, discredited, defiled, the story of the three men’s long-standing friendship, turned the trust between them, whatever their differences, into a fiction, a delusion, a lie.

Falsities spill over. Perhaps it wasn’t only the romance of their friendship that Treslove had defiled; perhaps it was the idea of romance altogether. Once one cherished illusion goes, what’s to stop the next? Had Treslove and Tyler’s iniquity poisoned everything?

No, that in itself could not have not killed Libor. But who was to say it hadn’t weakened his resolve to stay alive?

Treslove would have admitted all this to Hephzibah, begged for absolution in her arms, but to have done that he would have had to tell her, too, about Tyler, and that was something he couldn’t do.

She was in a bad way herself. Though it was Libor who had brought Treslove and Hephzibah together, Treslove in his turn had made Libor more important to her than he had previously been. There had always been a fondness between them, but great-great-nieces are rarely intimate with their great-great-uncles. In her time with Treslove, though, this old, somewhat formal affection had blossomed into love, to the point where she was unable to remember not having him there, close to her, reminding her of Aunt Malkie, and making her love for Julian almost a family affair. She, too, castigated herself for allowing other concerns to consume her attention. She should have been keeping an eye on Libor.

But these other concerns would not let her alone. The murder of that Arab family on a bus was an unbearable event. She didn’t know anyone who wasn’t horrified. Horrified on behalf of the Arabs. Horrified for them. But, yes, horrified as well in anticipation of the consequences. Jews were being depicted everywhere as bloodthirsty monsters, however the history of Zionism was explained – whether bloodthirsty in their seizure of someone else’s country from the start, or bloodthirsty as a consequence of events which bit by bit had made them strangers to compassion – yet no Jew was cheering the death of this Arab family, not in the streets nor in the quiet of their homes, no Jewish women gathered by the wells and ululated their jubilation, no Jewish men went to the synagogue to dance their thanks to the Almighty. Thou shalt not kill. They could say what they liked, the libellers and hate-mongers, stigmatising Jews as racists and supremacists, thou shalt not kill was emblazoned on the hearts of Jews.

And Jewish soldiers?

Well, Meyer Abramsky was no Jewish soldier. He vexed her moral sense in no way at all. It was only a pity he had been stoned to death. She would have liked to see him tried and found a thousand times guilty by Jews. He is not one of ours.

And then stoned to death by those whose moral character he had fouled.

A monument would eventually be erected in his name, of course. The settlers had to have their heroes. Who were these people? Where had they suddenly appeared from? They were alien to her education and upbringing. They had nothing to do with any Jewishness she recognised. They were the children of a universal unreason, of the same extraction as suicide bombers and all the other End of Time death cultists and apocalyptics, not the children of Abraham whose name they defamed. But try telling that to those who had taken to the streets and squares of London again, ready at a moment’s notice with their chants and placards as though they woke to speak violence against the one country in the world of which the majority of the population was Jewish and were disappointed when a fresh day brought no justification for it.

It had started again, anyway. Her emails streamed reported menace and invective. A brick was thrown through a window of the museum. An Orthodox man in his sixties was beaten up at a bus stop in Temple Fortune. Graffiti began to appear again on synagogue walls, the Star of David crossed with the swastika. The Internet bubbled and boiled with madness. She couldn’t bear to open a newspaper.

Was it something or was it nothing?

Meanwhile there had to be a coroner’s inquest into Libor’s death. And more searching questions to be answered in their hearts by those who had loved him.

She knew what she thought. She thought Libor had gone for a walk at dusk – without doubt a lonely, melancholy walk, but just a walk – and had fallen. People do fall. Not everything is deliberated upon.

Libor fell.

5

‘The hardest part,’ Finkler told Treslove, ‘is not to be defined by one’s enemies. Just because I am no longer an ASHamed Jew does not mean I have relinquished my prerogative to be ashamed.’

‘Why bring being ashamed into it at all?’

‘You sound like my poor wife.’

‘Do I?’ Treslove, head down, blushed.

Finkler, thankfully, did not notice. ‘ “What’s it to you?” she used to ask me. “How does it reflect on you?” But it does. It reflects on me because I expect better.’

‘Isn’t that grandiosity?’

‘Ha! My wife again. You didn’t discuss me with her, did you? That’s a rhetorical question. No, I don’t think it’s grandiosity to take what that lunatic Abramsky did personally. If any man’s death diminishes me, because I am of mankind, then any man’s act of murder does the same.’

‘Then be diminished as a member of mankind. The grandiosity is to feel diminished as a Jew.’

Finkler clapped an arm around his friend’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be paid out as a Jew,’ he said, ‘whatever you think.’

He smiled weakly, seeing Treslove in a yarmulke. The two men had walked aside, leaving Libor’s family to be at his graveside with him, alone. The service had concluded, but Hephzibah and a number of others had wanted time to reflect away from the attentions of gravediggers and rabbis. When they had gone, Treslove and Finkler would have their hour.

They would rather not have talked about Abramsky. About Abramsky there was nothing civilised to say. But they held back from discussing Libor because they were afraid of their feelings. Treslove, especially, was unable to look at the ground in which Libor – still warm, was how he imagined him, still aggrieved and hurt – had been laid. Next to his mound of earth was Malkie’s grave. The thought of them lying side by side, silent for all eternity, no laughter, no obscenities, no music, was more than he could bear.

Would he and Hephzibah . . . ? Would he be allowed to lie in a Jewish cemetery at all? They had already asked. All depended. If she wanted to be buried where her parents were buried, in a cemetery administered by the Orthodox, Treslove would probably be refused the right to be buried next to her. If, however . . . So many complications when you took up with a Jew, as Tyler had discovered. It was a shame she wasn’t still here to ask. ‘In the matter of sleeping-over rights, Tyler . . . ?’

Libor and Malkie had wanted to be buried in the same grave, one above the other, but there had been objections to that, as there were objections to everything, in death as in life, though no one was sure whether on religious grounds or simply because the earth was too stony to take a grave deep enough for two. And anyway, Malkie had joked, they would only end up fighting over who was to be on top. So they lay democratically, side by side, in their decorous Queen-size bed.

Hephzibah signalled that she and the family were leaving. She looked rather wonderful, Treslove thought, in veiled, shawled black, like a Victorian widow. A majestic relict. Treslove motioned that they would stay a little. The two men took each other’s arms. Treslove was grateful for the support. He thought his legs would give way beneath him. He was not framed for cemeteries. They spoke too vividly to him of the end of love.

Had he looked around he would have been struck by the lack of statuary eloquence. A Jewish cemetery is a blank, mute place. As though by the time one reaches here there is nothing further to be said. But he kept his eyes to the ground, hoping to see nothing.

The two men stood silently together, like headstones themselves. ‘To what base uses we may return,’ Finkler said after a while.

‘I’m sorry,’ Treslove said, ‘I can’t play. Not today.’

‘Fair enough. It wasn’t my intention to be flippant.’

‘I know,’ Treslove said. ‘I wouldn’t accuse you of that. I don’t doubt you loved him as much as I did.’

Silence again between them. Then, ‘So what could we have done differently?’ Finkler asked.

Treslove was surprised. That category of question normally belonged to him.

‘Watched over him.’

‘Would he have let us?’

‘Had we done it as it should have been done he wouldn’t have noticed.’

‘Strange,’ Finkler mused, not meaning to disagree, ‘but I felt he left us.’

‘Well, he’s done that all right.’

‘I mean earlier.’

‘How much earlier?’

‘When Malkie died. Didn’t you think that when Malkie died he stopped?’

Treslove thought about it. ‘No, that’s not how I felt it,’ he said. For Treslove a woman’s death was a beginning. He was a man made to mourn. He had always imagined himself bent double, like the aged Thomas Hardy, revisiting the torn haunts of love. If anything, he had found Libor a touch vigorous after Malkie died. He would have cut a more distraught, tormented figure himself. ‘To me,’ he went on, ‘it seemed that he left when I got together with Hephzibah.’

‘Now who’s being grandiose?’ Finkler said. ‘Do you think he thought his earthly task was done then, or what?’

If Finkler thought that was grandiose, what would he say if he ever found out that Treslove thought Libor had committed suicide because of what he knew about his and Tyler’s adultery? Not that he ever would find that out. Supposing, of course, that he didn’t already know.

‘No, of course not that. But my new beginning, for what it is’ – why did I say that, Treslove wondered, why the apology? – ‘my new beginning with Hephzibah might have made him think there could be no new beginnings for him.’

‘He should have palled out with me more in that case,’ Finkler said. ‘I’d have kept him company in no new beginnings.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Oh, come on nothing. We couldn’t have competed with you. Yours was a beginning to end beginnings. You weren’t a widower. You weren’t even a divorcee. You started from scratch. New woman, new religion. Me and Libor were dead men inhabiting a dead faith. You took both our souls on two counts. Good luck to you. We had no use for them. But you can’t pretend the three of us were ever in anything together. We weren’t the Three Musketeers. We died so that you could live, Julian. If that isn’t too Christian a thought in such a place. You tell me.’

‘What do I know, except that you ain’t no dead man, Sam.’

Or was he? Sam the Dead Man. Treslove didn’t dare raise his eyes from the earth to look at his friend. He hadn’t seen him since they’d got here. He hadn’t seen anything or anyone – except of course Hephzibah whom he couldn’t miss.

‘Well, of the two of us -’ Finkler began, but he was unable to finish. A third person had arrived at the graveside. She stood quietly, anxious not to disturb their conversation. After a moment, she bent and took a handful of soil which she sprinkled like seeds on the mound of earth.

The men fell quiet, making her self-conscious. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll come back.’

‘Please don’t,’ Finkler said. ‘We’re going in a minute ourselves.’

Before she rose, Treslove was able to get a look at her. An elderly woman, but not aged, elegant, her head covered with a light scarf, poised, not unaccustomed to Jewish cemeteries and funerals, he thought. This much Treslove had discovered: the Jewish faith frightened even Jews. Only a few were at home in all the ceremonials. This woman was not awed, even by death.

‘Are you a relative?’ Finkler asked. He wanted to tell her that the family had been and left, and that if she wanted to join them . . .

She stood, without difficulty, and shook her head. ‘Just a long-time friend,’ she said.

‘Us too,’ Treslove said.

‘This is a very sad day,’ the woman said.

She was dry-eyed. Dryer by far than Treslove. He couldn’t have said how dry Finkler was.

‘Heartbreaking,’ he said. Finkler added his assent.

They found themselves walking away from the grave together. ‘My name is Emmy Oppenstein,’ the woman said.

The two men introduced themselves to her. There were no handshakes. Treslove liked that. The Jews were good at making one occasion not like another, he thought. The protocol alarmed him but he admired it. Good to divide this from that. Why is this night different from all other nights. Or was it good? They pursued difference to the grave.

‘How long is it since either of you saw him?’ Emmy Oppenstein enquired.

She wanted to know how he had been in the time before his death. She herself had not seen him for many months, but they had spoken on the phone a few times more recently than that.

‘In the normal course of events you saw a lot of him, then?’ Treslove asked. Annoyed for Malkie.

‘No, not at all. In the normal course of events I saw him once every half century.’

‘Ah.’

‘I made contact with him again after all that time because I needed his help. I suppose I’m wanting to hear that I didn’t put more pressure on him than he could bear.’

‘Well, he never said anything,’ Treslove told her. He wanted to add that Libor had never so much as mentioned her existence, but he couldn’t be quite so cruel to a woman her age.

‘And did you get his help?’ Finkler asked.

She hesitated. ‘I got his company,’ she said. ‘But his help, no, I don’t think I can say he was able to give me that.’

‘Not like him.’

‘No, that was what I thought. Though of course after such a long time I was in no position to know what he was like. But it hurt him to refuse me, I thought. The strange thing was that it felt as though he wanted it to hurt him. And of course it saddens me deeply to think I was in some way the agency of his hurting himself.’

‘We are all punishing ourselves with that sadness,’ Finkler said.

‘Are you? I’m sorry to hear that. But that’s a natural thing for friends to feel. I hadn’t been a friend for so long I have no right, and indeed had no right, to think of myself as one. But I needed a favour.’

She told them, in the end, what the favour was. Told them about the work she did, about what she feared, about the Jew-hatred which was beginning to infect the world she’d inhabited all her life, the world where people had once prided themselves on thinking before they rushed to judgement, and about her grandson, blinded by a person she didn’t scruple to call a terrorist.

Both men were affected by the story. Libor was, too, she said, but the last time she saw him he seemed to turn his back on it. That was the way of things, he had told her. That was what happened to Jews. Change your tune.

‘Libor said that?’ Treslove asked.

She nodded.

‘Then he was in a worse way than I realised,’ he said. The emotion which had been misting up his eyes ever since he had seen Libor’s coffin lowered into the earth began to choke him.

Finkler, too, found it hard to find words. He remembered all the arguments he’d had with Libor on the subject. And it pleased him not at all that Libor had surrendered at the last. Some arguments you don’t have in order that you will win.

Finkler and Emmy Oppenstein wished each other long life on parting. Hephzibah had told Treslove of this custom. At a funeral Jews wish one another long life. It is a vote for life’s continuance in the face of death.

He turned to Emmy Oppenstein. ‘I wish you long life,’ he said, looking up.

6

Treslove, who has always dreamed, dreams that he is beckoned to a death chamber. The room is dark and smells. Not of death but food. The remains of lamb chops which have been left out too long. To be precise it is the sweet smell of lamb fat he can smell. Strange, because he recalls Libor saying that he could never bear to eat lamb as a consequence of adopting as a childhood pet a lamb which had nibbled grass in a field behind his house in Bohemia. ‘Baaa,’ the lamb had said to little Libor. And ‘Baaa,’ little Libor had said back. Once you’ve conversed with a lamb you can’t eat it, Libor had explained. Same with any other animal.

In his dream, Treslove wonders what St Francis found to eat.

He doesn’t doubt he has come to pay his last respects to Libor but dreads seeing him. He is afraid of the face of death.

To his horror, a weak voice calls him from the bed. ‘Julian, Julian. A word . . . come.’

The voice is not Libor’s. It is Finkler’s. Faint, but decidedly Finkler’s.

Treslove knows what he is going to hear. Finkler is playing their old clever-clogs schoolyard game. ‘If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,’ he is going to say, ‘absent thee from felicity awhile . . .’

And Treslove will say back, ‘Felicity? Who’s Felicity?’

He approaches the bed.

‘Closer,’ Finkler says. The voice strong suddenly.

Treslove does as he is told. When he is close enough to feel Finkler’s breath, Finkler sits up and spits in his face, a violent stream of filth – phlegm, sour wine, lamb fat, vomit.

‘That’s for Tyler,’ he says.

 

Treslove knows his way, by now, around his dreams. So he doesn’t even bother to ask himself whether it was really a dream or just a vivid dread.

It was both.

Or whether the dread was half desire.

Aren’t all dreads half desires?

 

He had begun to wake to the old sense of absurd loss again. Searching for the acute disappointment he felt and locating it in a sporting catastrophe: a tennis player he didn’t care about losing to another tennis player he had never heard of; the English cricket team being defeated by an innings and several hundred runs on the Indian subcontinent; a football match, any football match, ending in a gross injustice; even a golfer losing his nerve on the final hole – golf a game he neither played nor followed.

It wasn’t that sport allowed him to deflect his melancholy; sport spoke for his melancholy. Its vanity of expectation was his vanity of expectation.

He had discerned something Jewish in this, an avid reaching after setback and frustration, like supporting Tottenham Hotspur as some of Hephzibah’s Jewish friends did, but now he was not so sure.

He was seeing too many dawns. Dawns did not suit Treslove.

‘What you’d prefer is a dawn that happens at about midday,’ Hephzibah had joked when she first discovered his fear of them. She loved them herself and in their first months together would wake him to see. One of the advantages of her high-terraced apartment was that she could walk directly out of her bedroom and catch the wonderful panorama of a London dawn. It was a measure of how much he loved her that he would wake the moment she shook him and step out on to the terrace with her and gasp at the glory of it as he knew she wanted him to. The dawn was their element. Their creation. Treslove the new-born happy man and Jew. As long as the dawn broke all was well in their world. And not just their world. The whole world.

Well, the dawn still broke but their world was no longer well. He loved her no less. She had not disenchanted him. Nor he, he hoped, her. But Libor was dead. Finkler was dying in his dreams and, if appearances were anything to go by, putrefying in his life. And, he, Treslove, was no Jew. For which, perhaps, he should have been grateful. This was not a good time to be a Jew. Never had been, he knew that. Not even if you went back a thousand, two thousand years. But he had thought it would at least be a good time for him to be a Jew.

You can’t, though, can you, have one happy Jew in an island of apprehensive or ashamed ones? Least of all when that Jew happens to be Gentile.

Now he was rising early not because Hephzibah woke him to see the beauty of the daybreak but because he couldn’t sleep. So these were reluctant, resented dawns. Hephzibah was right about their spendour. But not about their breaking. The verb was wrong. It suggested too sudden and purposeful a disclosure. From her terrace the great London dawn bled slowly into sight, a thin line of red blood leaking out between the rooftops, appearing at the windows of the buildings it had infiltrated, one at a time, as though in a soundless military coup. On some mornings it was as though a sea of blood rose from the city floor. Higher up, the sky would be mauled with rough blooms of deep blues and burgundies like bruising. Pummelled into light, the hostage day began.

Treslove, wrapped in a dressing gown, paced the terrace drinking tea that was too hot for him.

There was disgrace in it. He wasn’t sure whose. Just the being part of nature, maybe. Just the not having got beyond its rising tide of blood after all these hundreds of thousands of years of trying. Or was it the city that was a disgrace? The illusion of civility it stood for? Its faceless indomitability, like the blank, mulish obstinacy of a child that wouldn’t learn its lesson? Which one had swallowed up Libor as though he had never been, and would soon swallow up the rest of them? Who was to blame?

Alternatively, the disgrace was himself, Julian Treslove, who looked like everyone and everybody but was in fact no one and nobody. He sipped his tea, scalding his tongue. Such specificity as he sought – if someone as indeterminate as he was could ever be called specific – was unnecessary. The disgrace was universal. Just to be a human animal was to be a disgrace. Life was a disgrace, an absurd disgrace, to be exceeded in disgracefulness only by death.

Hephzibah heard him get up and go outside and didn’t want to follow him. There was no longer any charm in sharing the dawn with him. You know when the person you’re living with finds life disgraceful.

She would not have been human had she not asked herself whether it was her fault. Not so much what she had done as what she had failed to do. Treslove was another in a long line of men who needed saving. Were they the only men who came to her – the lost, the floundering, the dispossessed? Or was there no other sort?

Either way their demands wearied her. Who did they think she was – America? Give me your tired, your poor . . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. She looked strong and secure enough to house them, that was the problem. She looked capacious. She looked like safe harbour.

Well, Treslove, for one, had that wrong. She hadn’t saved him. Perhaps he wasn’t savable.

Much of it was about Libor, she knew that. He had still not grasped it. For reasons she didn’t understand, he appeared to blame himself. On top of which, quite simply, he missed Libor’s company. Therefore she had no business barging in and asking, ‘Anything I’ve done, honey?’ The decent thing was to leave him alone for a while. She could use the privacy herself. She too was grieving. But still she wondered and was sorry.

On top of which, the museum . . .

She was growing increasingly anxious about the opening. Not because the building would still be unfinished – that didn’t matter – but because the atmosphere was wrong. People wanted to hear less of Jews right now, not more. There are times when you open your doors, and there are times when you close them. Had there been only herself to consider, Hephzibah would have bricked the museum up.

All she could do was hope that the world would, on a whim, change its tune, that the ugly talk would somehow stop of its own accord, that a gust of fresh wind would blow clean away the deadly miasmas poisoning Jews and their endeavours.

So hope was what she did.

Head down, eyes lowered, fingers crossed.

7

Except that it wasn’t in her nature to submit passively to events. She couldn’t leave the matter where her masters, the philanthropic sponsors of the museum, wanted her to leave it. Again, she urged the badness of the timing. A postponement would be embarrassing, but not exactly unheard of. They could cite building delays. The economy. Somebody’s ill health. Her ill health.

That would be no lie. She wasn’t in good mental health. She was reading what it did her no good to read – the wild proliferation of conspiracy theory, Jews planning 9/11, Jews bringing down the banks, Jews poisoning the world with pornography, Jews harvesting body organs, Jews faking their own Holocaust.

Holocaust fucking Holocaust. She felt about the word Holocaust as she felt about the word anti-Semite – she cursed those who reduced her to wearing it out. But what to do? There was blackmail in the wind. Shut up about your fucking Holocaust, they were saying, or we will deny it ever happened. Which meant she couldn’t shut up about it.

The Holocaust had become negotiable. She had recently run into her ex-husband – not Abe the attorney, but Ben the blasphemous, actor, raconteur and liar (funny how you no sooner ran into one unreliable ex-husband than you ran into another) – and had listened to him spin a hellish tale about his sleeping with a Holocaust denier and negotiating numbers in return for favours. He’d come down a million if she’d do this to him, but would want to put a million back in return for doing that to her.

‘I felt like Whatshisname,’ he told her.

‘Give me a clue.’

‘The one who had a list.’

‘Ko-Ko?’

‘Did I tell you I once played the Mikado, in Japan?’

‘A thousand times.’

‘Did I? I’m humiliated. But not him. The other list man.’

‘Schindler?’

‘Schindler, yes – only in my case I was saving those already exterminated.’

‘That’s foul, Ben,’ she had said. ‘That could be the foulest joke, no, those could be the foulest two jokes, I’ve ever heard.’

‘Who’s joking? That’s the way of it out there now. The Holocaust has become a commodity you trade. There’s a Spanish mayor who’s cancelled his town’s Holocaust Memorial Day because of Gaza, as though they’re somehow connected.’

‘I know. The implication being that the dead of Buchenwald only get to be memorialised if the living of Tel Aviv behave themselves. But I don’t believe you.’

‘What don’t you believe?’

‘That you slept with a Holocaust denier. Even you couldn’t have done that.’

‘I did it out of honourable motives. I hoped I might fuck her to death.’

‘Why didn’t you just strangle her without fucking her?’

‘I’m Jewish.’

‘It’s allowed with Holocaust deniers. It’s more than allowed, it’s obligatory. The Eleventh Commandment – Thou shalt wring the necks of all deniers for denial is an abomination.’

‘Probably is, but I also wanted to reform her. Like with hookers. You know me –’

‘Still soft hearted –’

He’d have kissed her had she let him.

‘Still soft-hearted,’ he said.

‘And did you?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Reform her.’

‘No, but I got her up to 3 million.’

‘What did you have to do for that?’

‘Don’t ask.’

She didn’t tell her bosses the Ben story. You never knew what a Jew was or was not going to find funny.

As for the Museum, it would open when they wanted it to open. You couldn’t run scared. Not in the twenty-first century. Not in St John’s Wood.