The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

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 widowerhood 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