his father on the stage, and even I, a newcomer, had spotted him when Demjanjuk, several times that morning, had looked down into the first row, where John junior was seated, and, grimacing unself-consciously, had signaled to him his boredom with the tiresome legal wrangling. I calculated that John junior had been no more than eleven or twelve when his father had first been fingered as Ivan the Terrible by U.S. immigration. The boy had gone through his childhood thinking, as so many lucky children do, that he had a name no more or less distinctive than anyone else’s and, happily enough, a life to match. Well, he would never be able to believe that again: forevermore he was the namesake of the Demjanjuk whom the Jews had tried before all of mankind for someone else’s horrible crime. Justice may be served by this trial, but his children, I thought, are now plunged into the hatred — the curse is revived.
Did no survivor in all of Israel think of killing John Demjanjuk, Jr., of taking revenge on the guilty father through the perfectly innocent son? Was there no one whose family had been exterminated at Treblinka who had thought of kidnapping him and of then mutilating him, gradually, piecemeal, an inch at a go, until Demjanjuk could take no more and admitted to the court who he was? Was there no survivor, driven insane with rage by this defendant’s carefree yawning and his indifferent chewing of his cud, no grieving, wrathful wreck of a survivor, blighted and enraged enough to envisage in the torturing of the one the means of extracting a confession from the other, to perceive in the outright murder of the next in line a perfectly just and fitting requital?
I asked these questions of myself when I saw the tall, slender, well-groomed young man headed briskly toward the main exit with the three defense lawyers — I was astonished that, like Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s namesake, his male successor and only son, was about to step into the Jerusalem streets wholly unprotected.
Outside the courtroom the balmy winter weather had taken a dramatic turn. It was another day entirely. A tremendous rainstorm was raging, sheets of rain driven laterally by a strong wind that made it impossible to discern anything beyond the first few rows of cars in the lot surrounding the convention center. The people trying to determine how to leave the building were packed together in the outer foyer and on the walkway under the overhang. It was only when I’d moved into this crowd that I remembered whom I’d come looking for — my tiny local difficulty had been utterly effaced by a very great mass of real horror. To have run off, as I had, to hunt him down seemed to me now far worse than rash; it was to succumb momentarily to a form of insanity. I was thoroughly ashamed of myself and disgusted once again for getting into a dialogue with this annoyance — how crazy and foolish to have taken the bait! And how little urgency finding him had for me now. Laden with all I’d just witnessed, I resolved to put myself to my proper use.
I was to meet Aharon for lunch just off Jaffa Street, at the Ticho House, but with the rainstorm growing more and more violent I didn’t see how I could possibly get there in time. Yet, having just removed myself from standing in my own way, I was determined that nothing, but nothing, should obstruct me, least of all the inclement weather. Squinting through the rain to search for a taxi, I suddenly saw young Demjanjuk dart out from beneath the overhang, following behind one of his lawyers into the open door of a waiting car. I had the impulse to race after him and ask if I could bum a ride to downtown Jerusalem. I didn’t do it, of course, but if I had, might I not myself have been mistaken for the self-appointed Jewish avenger and been gunned down in my tracks? But by whom? Young Demjanjuk was there for the taking. And could I be the only person in all of this crowd to see how very easy taking him could be?
About a quarter of a mile up a hill from the parking lot, there was a big hotel that I remembered seeing on the drive in, and, desperate, I finally stepped out of the crowd and into the rainstorm and made a dash for the hotel. Minutes later, my clothes soaked and my shoes filled with water, I was standing in the hotel lobby looking for a phone to call a taxi, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to find facing me the other Philip Roth.
3 WE
“I can’t speak,” he said. “It’s you. You came!”
But the one who couldn’t speak was I. I was breathless, and only in part because of running uphill against the lashing force of that storm. I suppose until that moment I’d never wholeheartedly believed in his existence, at least as anything more substantial than that pompous voice on the telephone and some transparently ridiculous newspaper blather. Seeing him materialize voluminously in space, measurable as a customer in a clothing shop, palpable as a prizefighter up in the ring, was as frightening as seeing a vaporous ghost — and simultaneously electrifying, as though after immersion in that torrential storm, I’d been doused, for good measure, like a cartoon- strip character, full in the face with an antihallucinogenic bucket of cold water. As jolted by the spellbinding reality of his unreality as by its immensely disorienting antithesis, I was at a loss to remember the plans I’d made for how to act and what to say when I’d set out to hunt him down in the taxi that morning — in the mental simulation of our face-off I had failed to remember that the face-off would not, when it came to pass, be a mental simulation. He was crying. He had taken me in his arms, sopping wet though I was, and begun to cry, and not undramatically either — as though one or the other of us had just returned intact from crossing Central Park alone at night. Tears of joyous relief — and I had imagined that confronted with the materialization of
“Philip Roth! The real Philip Roth — after all these years!” His body trembled with emotion, tremendous emotion even in the two hands that tightly grasped my back.
It required a series of violent thrusts with my elbows to unlock his hold on me. “And you,” I said, shoving him a little as I stepped away, “you must be the fake Philip Roth.”
He laughed. But still cried! Not even in my mental simulation had I loathed him quite as I did seeing those stupid, unaccountable tears.
“Fake, oh, compared to you,
To this dazzling little question, so ingenuously put, I heard myself reply, “Passing through.”
“I’m looking at myself,” he said, ecstatically, “except it’s
He was exaggerating, something he may have been inclined to do. I saw before me a face that I would not very likely have taken for my own had I found it looking back at me that morning from the mirror. Someone else, a stranger, someone who had seen only my photograph or some newspaper caricature of me, might possibly have been taken in by the resemblance, especially if the face called itself by my name, but I couldn’t believe that there was anyone who would say, “Don’t fool me, you’re really that writer,” had it gone about its business as Mr. Nusbaum’s or Dr. Schwartz’s. It was actually a conventionally better-looking face, a little less mismade than my own, with a more strongly defined chin and not so large a nose, one that, also, didn’t flatten Jewishly like mine at the tip. It occurred to me that he looked like the after to my before in the plastic surgeon’s advertisement.
“What’s your game, my friend?”
“No game,” he replied, surprised and wounded by my angry tone. “And I’m no fake. I was using ‘real’ ironically.”
“Well, I’m not so pretty as you and I’m not so ironical as you and I was using ‘fake’
“Hey, take it easy, you don’t know your strength. Don’t call names, okay?”
“You go around pretending to be me.”
This brought that smile back — “You go around pretending to be
“You exploit the physical resemblance,” I went on, “by telling people that you are the writer, the author of my books.”
“I don’t have to tell them anything. They take me for the author of those books right off. It happens all the
