EPILOGUE

Since Libor has no children, we will say Kaddish for him, Hephzibah and Finkler had agreed. As a non-Jew, Treslove was not permitted to recite the Jewish prayer for the dead and so had been excluded from their deliberations.

I am not a synagogue person, Hephzibah says. I cannot bear the business of who you can and who you cannot say Kaddish for, where and when you sit, let alone what is permitted to a woman and how that differs from one denomination of synagogue to another. Our religion does not exactly make it easy for you. So I will pray at home.

And she does.

For the dead and the dead to her.

For Libor she cries her eyes dry.

For Julian, because she cannot in her heart exclude Julian, she cries bitter tears that come from a part of her she doesn’t recognise. She’s cried for men she’s loved before. But with them it was the finality of separation that pained her. With Julian it’s different: was he ever there to feel separated from? Was she just an experiment for him? Was he just an experiment for her?

He’d told her she was his fate. Who wants to be somebody’s fate?

It is less convenient for Samuel Finkler but perhaps more straightforward. He must go to his nearest synagogue and say the prayer he first heard on his own father’s lips. Yisgadal viyiskadash . . . the ancient language of the Hebrews tolling for the dead. May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified. This he does three times a day. When the deceased is not a parent the obligation to say Kaddish ceases after thirty days rather than eleven months. But Finkler does not give up saying it after thirty days. No one can make him. He is not sure he will even give up saying it after eleven months, though he grasps the reasoning in favour of stopping: so that the souls of the unlamented dead might find their way at last to Paradise. But he doesn’t think it will be his praying that prevents them getting there.

The beauty of the Kaddish, to his sense, is that it’s non-specific. He can simultaneously mourn as many of the dead as he chooses.

Tyler at last, he doesn’t know why. He thinks that Libor has somehow made that possible. Unloosed something.

Tyler whom he failed as a husband, Libor whom he failed as a friend.

Yisgadal viyiskadash . . . It’s so all-embracing he might as well be mourning the Jewish people.

Not that he draws the line at Jews. Even Treslove gets a look in, a sideways glance of grief, though he is alive and well – as well as he ever can be – and presumably back working as a lookalike.

It’s from Hephzibah, with whom he is in frequent contact, that Samuel Finkler takes his cue. Her sense of incompletion, of a thing not finished that might never have begun, becomes his sense. He never really knew Treslove either. And that too strikes him as a reason for lamentation.

There are no limits to Finkler’s mourning.