Free The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Nosebleeding - like grief, as Treslove recalled Libor saying - is something you do in the privacy of your own home.
    He remembered what, in his humiliation and exhaustion, he had forgotten the night before - to cancel his credit cards and report his mobile phone lost. If the woman who had robbed him had been on his phone all night to Buenos Aires, or had flown to Buenos Aries on one of his cards and been on the phone all morning from there to London, he would already be insolvent. But strangely, nothing had been spent. Perhaps she was still deciding where to go. Unless theft was not her motive.
    Had she wanted simply to complicate his life she couldn't have chosen a more efficient method. He was on his house phone for the rest of the morning, waiting for real people who spoke a language he could understand to answer, having to prove he was who he said he was though why he would have been worrying about the loss of his cards if he wasn't who he said he was he didn't know. The loss of his mobile was more serious; it seemed he would have to have a new number just when he had finally got round to memorising the old one. Or maybe not. It depended on the plan he was on. He hadn't known he was on a plan.
    Yet not once did he turn tetchy or ask to speak to a supervisor. If further proof was needed that actual as opposed to imaginary loss had done wonders for his temper, this was it. Not once did he ask for someone's name or threaten to get them sacked. Not once did he mention the ombudsman.
    There was no mail for him. Though he had the emotional strength to open envelopes, as was not always the case with him in the morning, there was relief in there being nothing to open today. No mail meant no engagements, for he accepted engagements by no other means, no matter that they came directly from his agents. Agree by phone to show up God knows where looking like God knows whom and there was a fair chance it would be a wild goose chase. Only actual mail meant actual business. And about actual business he was conscientiously professional, never refusing a gig on the superstitious assumption that the first gig he refused would be his last. There were plenty of lookalikes out there clamouring for work. London was choked with other people's doubles. Everyone looked like someone else. Fall out of sight and you'd soon be out of mind. As at the BBC. But he'd have had to refuse today given how he looked. Unless he was asked to turn up to someone's party as Robert De Niro in Raging Bull .
    Besides, he had things he needed some mental space to think about. Such as why he had been attacked. Not only to what end, if neither his credit cards nor his mobile phone had been used, but why him ? There was an existential form this question could take: Why me, O Lord? And there was a practical one: Why me rather than somebody else?
    Was it because he looked an easy victim? An inadequately put-together man with a modular degree who was sure to offer no resistance? A nobody in particular who just happened to be at the window of J. P. Guivier when the woman - deranged, drunk or drugged - just happened to be passing? A lookalike for a man against whom she had a grievance, whoever she was?
    Or did she know him for himself and wreak a vengeance she had long been planning? Was there a woman out there who hated him that much?
    Mentally, he went through the list. The disappointees, the wronged (he didn't know how he had wronged them, only that they looked and felt and sounded wronged), the upset, the insulted, the abused (he didn't know how he had abused them etc.), the discontented, the never satisfied or appeased, the unhappy. But then they had all been unhappy. Unhappy when he found them and unhappier when they left. So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.
    But none of it his doing, for Christ's sake.
    Had he ever raised a hand to a woman to explain why a woman should want to raise a hand to him? No. Not ever.
    Well, once . . . nearly.

    The