The Finkler Question Read online

  ‘What bands do you like?’ she asked him, after a longer dumpling-filled silence than she could bear.

  Libor pondered the question.

  The girl laughed, as at her own absurdity. She twirled a lifeless lock of hair around a finger that had an Elastoplast on it. ‘What bands did you used to like,’ she corrected herself, then blushed as though she knew the second question was more absurd than the first.

  Libor turned his ear to her and nodded. ‘I’m not in principle keen on banning anything,’ he said.

  She stared at him.

  Oh, God, he remembered in time, she will want me to be against fox hunting and runways and animal experiments and electric light bulbs. But there was no point starting out – not that they were going anywhere – with a lie.

  ‘Four-wheel drives,’ he said. ‘Dropped aitches – mine are cultural – talk radio, socialism, trainers, Russia, but definitely not fur coats. If you’d seen Malkie in her chinchilla . . .’

  She went on staring at him. He feared she was going to cry.

  ‘No, bands,’ she said at last. ‘Bands.’

  Deciding against saying the Czech Philharmonic, Libor sighed and showed her his hands. The flesh, disfigured with liver spots, was loose enough for her to slide her fingers under. It would peel clean away, like the skin on a lightly roasted chicken. His knuckles were swollen, his fingernails yellow and bent over at the ends.

  Then he ran his hands over his baldness and inclined his head. He had always been a balding man. Balding had suited him. But he was plucked clean by time now. The patina of extreme old age was on him. He wanted her to see her own reflection in his pate, measure all the time she had left in the dull mirror of his antiquity.

  He could tell she couldn’t figure out what he was showing her. When he presented his bald head to Malkie she would polish it with her sleeve.

  It used to excite her. Not just the head but the act of polishing it.

  They had furnished their apartment in the style of Biedermeier. Libor’s taste not Malkie’s (though Malkie had Biedermeier blood in her veins), but she had humoured the aspiring European petit bourgeois in him. ‘Reminds me of our escritoire,’ she would tell him. ‘It responds in the same way to a good buffing.’

  It amused him to be her furniture. ‘You can open my drawers whenever you like,’ he would say. And she would laugh and cuff him with her sleeve. At the end they had talked dirty to each other. It was their defence against pathos.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told the girl, folding his napkin. ‘This isn’t fair to you.’

  He signalled to the waiter before remembering his manners. ‘You don’t want a dessert do you, Emily?’ he asked. He was pleased he could recall her name.

  She shook her head.

  He paid the bill.

  She was as relieved as he was when they parted.

  2

  ‘I could use the company but I can’t go through the pain of getting it,’ he told Treslove on the phone.

  It was a week after they had dined together. Treslove hadn’t told Libor about the attack. Why worry him? Why make Libor afraid of his own neighbourhood?

  Not that Libor was the one who needed protecting. Treslove marvelled at his courage – dressing himself up, going out on a date, making small talk. He pictured him in his David Niven outfit, fine white polo neck jumper worn under a blue blazer with faux military buttons. Most men Libor’s age wore lovat jackets, the colour of sick, and trousers that were too short for them. This had always bemused and worried Treslove. At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them. Explain that.

  But not Libor. Or at least not Libor when he was got up to meet a friend, or a woman. He was still the Mittel European dandy. Only on the telephone did he sound his age. It was as though the telephone filtered out everything that wasn’t of the voice alone – the comedy, the bravado, the dancing hands. An old torn tissue-paper larynx was all that was left. Treslove knew to picture Libor in the flesh when he spoke to him on the phone, spruce in his polo neck, but the sound still depressed him. He heard a dead man speaking.

  ‘I bet it wasn’t as painful as you’re pretending,’ he said.

  ‘You weren’t there. On top of that it wasn’t decent.’

  ‘Why, what did you do?’

  ‘I mean proper.’

  ‘Why, what did you do?’

  ‘I mean it was wrong of me to agree to meet her. I was there under false pretences. I don’t want to be with another woman. I can’t look at another woman without making the comparison.’

  When Malkie was alive Libor carried her photograph in his wallet. Now that she was gone, he had her on his mobile phone. While he rarely used his phone as a phone – he found it hard to read the keyboard – he consulted her image a hundred times a day, flipping and unflipping the lid in the middle of a conversation. A ghost that never left him, gifted by technology. Gifted by Finkler, to be precise, since he was the one who had set it up for him.

  Libor had showed the screen to Treslove, Malkie not as she was at the end of her life, but as she had looked at the beginning of her time with Libor. Her eyes smiling and wicked, appreciative, adoring, and slightly blurred, as though seen through a mist – unless that was a mist clouding Treslove’s vision.

  Treslove imagined Libor opening his phone and looking at Malkie under the table, even as his date asked him his star sign and his favourite band.

  ‘I bet the girl had a ball with you,’ Treslove said.

  ‘Trust me, she didn’t. I have sent her flowers to apologise.’

  ‘Libor, that will just make her think you want to go on.’

  ‘Ech, you English! You see a flower and you think you’ve been proposed to. Trust me, she won’t. I enclosed a handwritten note.’

  ‘You weren’t rude to her.’

  ‘Of course not. I just wanted her to see how shaky my handwriting was.’

  ‘She may have taken that as proof she excited you.’

  ‘She won’t have. I told her I was impotent.’

  ‘Did you have to be so personal?’

  ‘That was to stop it being personal. I didn’t say she had made me impotent.’

  Treslove was embarrassed by potency talk. And not just because he’d recently been divested of his manliness by a woman. He had not been brought up, as Finkler men evidently were, to discuss matters of a sexual nature with someone with whom he was not having sex.

  ‘Anyway –’ he said.

  But Libor didn’t detect his embarrassment. ‘I am not in fact impotent,’ he went on, ‘though I’m reminded of a time when I was. It was Malkie’s doing. Did I ever tell you she met Horowitz?’

  Treslove wondered what was coming. ‘You didn’t,’ he said tentatively, not wanting to be thought to be leading Libor on.

  ‘Well, she did. Twice in fact. Once in London and once in New York. At Carnegie Hall. He invited her backstage. “Maestro”, she called him. “Thank you, Maestro,” she said and he kissed her hand. His own hands, she told me, were icy cold. I’ve always been jealous of that.’

  ‘His icy hands?’

  ‘No, her calling him Maestro. Do you think that’s strange?’

  Treslove thought about it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. A man doesn’t want the woman he loves calling other men Maestro.’

  ‘But why not? He was a maestro. It’s funny. I wasn’t in competition with him. I’m no maestro. But for three months after I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get it up. Couldn’t rise to the challenge.’

  ‘Yes, that is funny,’ Treslove said.

  Sometimes even a Finkler as reverend and aged as Libor could make him feel like a Benedictine monk.

  ‘The power of words,’ Libor went on. ‘Maestro – she calls him Maestro and I might as well not have a pecker. But listen, do you want to go out somewhere to eat tonight?’

  Twice in one week! It wasn’t that long ago that they hadn’t seen each other twice in a year. And even now that wid
owerhood had rebonded them they were not seeing each other twice in a month. Were things as bad as that for Libor?

  ‘I can’t,’ Treslove said. He was unable to tell his friend the truth: that the reason he couldn’t come out was that he had a black eye, maybe a broken nose and was still unsteady on his legs. ‘I have things I must do.’

  ‘What things?’ Nearing ninety, you could ask such questions.

  ‘Things, Libor.’

  ‘I know you. You never say “things” if you really have things to do. You always name them. Something’s the matter.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t have things to do. And that’s what’s the matter.’

  ‘Then let’s go eat.’

  ‘Can’t face it, Libor. Sorry. I need to be alone.’

  The reference was to the title of Libor’s most famous show-business book. An unofficial biography of Greta Garbo with whom Libor was once rumoured to have had an affair.

  ‘With Garbo?’ Libor exclaimed when Treslove once asked him whether it was true. ‘Impossible. She was gone sixty when I met her. And she looked German.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So sixty was too old for me. Sixty is still too old for me.’

  ‘That’s not what I was querying. I was querying her looking German.’

  ‘Julian, I stared deep into her eyes. As I’m staring into yours now. Trust me – they were the eyes of a Teuton. It was like looking into the wastes of the frozen North.’

  ‘Libor, you come from a cold place yourself.’

  ‘Prague is hot. Only the pavements and the Vltava are cold.’

  ‘Even so, I don’t see why that should have been a problem. Come on – Greta Garbo!’

  ‘Only a problem had I been contemplating an affair with her. Or she with me.’

  ‘You absolutely could not contemplate having an affair with someone who looked German?’

  ‘I could contemplate it. I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Not even Marlene Dietrich?’

  ‘Especially not her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Libor had hesitated, scrutinising his old pupil’s face. ‘Some things you don’t do,’ he said. ‘And besides, I was in love with Malkie.’

  Treslove had made a mental note. Some things you don’t do. Would he ever get to the bottom of the things Finklers did and didn’t do? Such conversational indelicacy one moment, such scrupulousness as to the ethno-erotic niceties the next.

  Over the phone, this time, Libor ignored the allusion. ‘One day you will regret needing to be alone, Julian, when you have no choice.’

  ‘I regret it now.’

  ‘Then come out and play. It’s you or someone who wants to know my star sign.’

  ‘Libor, I want to know your star sign. Just not tonight.’

  He felt guilty. You don’t refuse the desperation of a lonely impotent old man.

  But he had his own impotence to nurse.

  3

  Finkler, who did not dream, had a dream.

  He dreamed that he was punching his father in the stomach.

  His mother screamed for him to stop. But his father only laughed and shouted, ‘Harder!’

  ‘Los the boy allein,’ he told his wife. Which was cod Yiddish for ‘Leave the boy alone’.

  In life, when his father spoke to him in cod Yiddish, Finkler turned his back on him. Why his father, English university-educated and normally softly spoken – a man of learning and unshakeable religious conviction – had to make this spectacle of himself in his shop, throwing his hands around and yelling in a peasant tongue, Finkler couldn’t understand. Other people loved his father for these shows of Jewish excitability, but Finkler didn’t. He had to walk away.

  But in the dream he didn’t walk away. In the dream he summoned all his strength and threw punch after punch into his father’s stomach.

  What woke him was his father’s stomach opening. When Finkler saw the cancer swimming towards him in a sea of blood he could not go on dreaming.

  He, too, was surprised when Libor rang. Like Treslove, he found it upsetting that Libor needed company twice in the same week. But he was able to be more accommodating than his friend. Perhaps because he too needed company twice in the same week.

  ‘Come over,’ he said. ‘I’ll order in Chinese.’

  ‘You speak Chinese now?’

  ‘Funny guy, Libor. Be here at eight.’

  ‘You sure you’re up for it?’

  ‘I’m a philosopher, I’m not sure about anything. But come. Just don’t bring the Sanhedrin with you.’

  The Sanhedrin were the judges of the ancient land of Israel. Finkler wasn’t in the mood for Israyel talk. Not with Libor.

  ‘Not a word, I promise,’ Libor said. ‘On condition that none of your Nazi friends will be there to steal my chicken in black bean sauce. You will remember that I like chicken in black bean sauce?’

  ‘I don’t have Nazi friends, Libor.’

  ‘Whatever you call them.’

  Finkler sighed. ‘There’ll be just the two of us. Come at eight. I’ll have chicken with cashew nuts.’

  ‘Black bean sauce.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  He set two places, antique horn chopsticks for each of them. One of his last gifts to his wife, hitherto unused. It was risky but he risked it.

  ‘These are beautiful,’ Libor noted with tenderness, widower to widower.

  ‘It’s either part with them, which I can’t bear to do, or use them. There’s no point in making a mausoleum of unused things. Tyler would have said use them.’

  ‘Harder to do with dresses,’ Libor said.

  Finkler laughed a laughless laugh.

  ‘What is it about a dress a woman never got to wear?’ Libor asked. ‘You’d think it would be those that carry the memory of her shape and warmth, that still have her perfume on them, that you couldn’t bear to touch. But the unworn ones are harder.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ Finkler said. ‘When you look at a dress Malkie never wore you see her alive and unworn in it herself.’

  Libor appeared unconvinced. ‘That feels too backward-looking to me.’

  ‘We’re allowed to look back.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. I do nothing else. Since Malkie went I feel as though my head has been put on backwards. It’s your explanation of the sadness of unused things I find too backward-looking. When I see an unworn dress, and Malkie had so many – saving them up for special occasions that never came, some with their labels still on as though she might yet take them back to the store – I see the future time that was stolen from her. I look forwards into the life she didn’t have, the Malkie she didn’t get to be, not the Malkie she was.’

  Finkler listened. Malkie was eighty when she died. How much more life could Libor imagine for her? Tyler never made it to fifty. So why couldn’t he feel what Libor felt? Though convinced he was gifted with an unenvious nature – what, when all was said and done, did he have to envy? – he was envious nonetheless, not of the longer life Malkie enjoyed, but of Libor’s range of grief. He could not, as Libor did, throw his sorrow into the future. He did not miss the Tyler who never got to be, only the Tyler who was.

  He measured his husbandly worth against the older man’s. With mirth, it’s true, but also meaning it, Libor had always claimed to be the perfect husband, refusing the bed of some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. ‘Not because I’m handsome did they want me, you understand, but because I made them laugh. The more beautiful the woman, the more she needs to laugh. That’s why Jewish guys have always done so well. But for me they were easy to resist. Because I had Malkie who was more beautiful than all of them. And who made me laugh.’

  Who knew the truth of it?

  Libor told how Marilyn Monroe, desperate for laughter but notoriously confused by international time zones – in Libor’s stories all beautiful women never knew what time it was – would ring him in the dead of night. Malkie always took the phone. It was on her side of the bed. ‘Marilyn for you,’
she would say in a bored, sleepy voice, waking her husband. Fucking Marilyn again.

  She never doubted his fidelity because she was so secure in it. So did that fidelity – a fidelity with no pains or deprivations in it, Libor insisted, a fidelity filled to the brim with sensual delight – explain Libor’s exemption from remorse? Guilt had become Finkler’s medium when he thought about his wife, and guilt existed only in the past. Guilt-free, assuming he told the truth, Libor was able to sorrow over the future he and Malkie, though aged, didn’t have. At any age there is future one doesn’t have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can’t take a little more. Sadness for sadness, Finkler did not know which was the more estimable, if sadness can be esteemed – feeling cheated of more of the happiness you’d enjoyed, or never having had it in the first place. But it looked better to be Libor.

  And that, maybe, because it was better to have been married to Malkie. Finkler tried to dismiss this thought but could not: it takes two to create fidelity, and while he wouldn’t go so far as to say Tyler was not worthy of his, she certainly hadn’t made it easy. Was this why he didn’t feel robbed of a future life with Tyler? Because he couldn’t be sure he had one to look forward to? And whose fault was that?

  ‘Do you ever wonder,’ he mused as they ate, ‘whether you’re doing it all right?’

  ‘Grieving?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, but not just grieving. Everything. Do you ever wake in the morning and ask yourself if you’ve lived the best life you could have lived? Not morally. Or not only morally. Just squeezed the most out of your opportunities.’

  ‘I’m surprised to hear that question from you, of all people,’ Libor said. ‘I remember you as a bright pupil, right enough. But there are many bright pupils and I would never have guessed you would achieve what you have.’

  ‘You’re telling me I have made a little go a long way.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. But to my eye you have fulfilled yourself more than most men. You’re a household name –’

  Finkler, pleased, waved the compliment away. Who cared about being a household name? The flush of satisfaction in his cheeks was probably not satisfaction at all, just embarrassment. Household name – for God’s sake. Household name! How many households, he wondered, were naming him this very moment? How many households did it take to make a household name?