Operation Shylock

minutes before three, the sky was clear and the courtyard stones aglitter with light. It felt like a May afternoon, warm, breezy, lullingly serene, even though it was January of 1988 and we happened to be only a few hundred yards from where Israeli soldiers had teargassed a rock-throwing mob of young Arab boys just the day before. Demjanjuk was on trial for murdering close to a million Jews at Treblinka, Arabs were rising up against the Jewish authorities all over the Occupied Territories, and yet from where I was seated amid the lush shrubbery, between a lemon tree and an orange tree, the world could not have seemed any more enticing. Pleasant Arab waiters, singing little birds, a good cold beer — and this woman of his who evoked in me the illusion that nothing could be more durable than the perishable matter from which we are made.

All the while I read his dreadful letter she watched me as though she’d brought to the hotel directly from President Lincoln the original manuscript of the Gettysburg Address. The only reason I didn’t tell her, “This is as loony a piece of prose as I’ve ever received in my life,” and tear it into little pieces was because I didn’t want her to get up and go. I wanted to hear her talk, for one thing: it was my chance to find out more, only more lies perhaps, but then, enough lies, and maybe some truth would begin trickling through. And I wanted to hear her talk because of the beguilingly ambiguous timbre of her voice, which was harmonically a puzzle to me. The voice was like something you’ve gotten out of the freezer that’s taking its own sweet time to thaw: moist and spongy enough at the edges to eat, otherwise off-puttingly refrigerated down to its deep-frozen core. It was difficult to tell just how coarse she was, if there was a great deal going on in her or if maybe there was nothing at all and she was just a petty criminal’s obedient moll. Probably it was only my infatuation with the exciting fullness of such a female presence that led me to visualize a mist of innocence hanging over her bold carnality that might enable me to get somewhere. I folded the letter in thirds and slipped it into my inside pocket — what I should have done with his passport.

“It’s incredible,” she said. “Overwhelming. You even read the same way.”

“From left to right.”

“Your facial expressions, the way you take everything in, even your clothes — it’s uncanny.”

“But then everything is uncanny, is it not? Right down to our sharing the very same name.”

“And,” she said, smiling widely, “the sarcasm, too.”

“He tells me that I should judge him by the woman who bears his letter, but much as I’d like to, it’s hard, in my position, not to judge him by other things first.”

“By what he’s undertaken. I know. It’s so gigantic for Jews. For Gentiles, too. I think for everyone. The lives he’ll save. The lives he’s saved.”

“Already? Yes? Whose?”

“Mine, for one.”

“I thought it was you who was the nurse and he who was the patient — I thought you’d helped save him.”

“I’m a recovering anti-Semite. I was saved by A-S.A.”

“A-S.A.?”

“Anti-Semites Anonymous. The recovery group Philip founded.”

“It’s just one brainstorm after another with Philip,” I said. “He didn’t tell me about A-S.A.”

“He didn’t tell you hardly anything. He couldn’t. He’s so in awe of you, he got all bottled up.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say bottled up. I’d say unbottled up almost to a fault.”

“All I know is he came back in terrible shape. He’s still in bed. He says he disgraced himself. He came away thinking you hated him.”

“Why on earth would I hate Philip?”

“That’s why he wrote this letter.”

“And sent you to act as his advocate.”

“I’m not a big reader, Mr. Roth. I’m not a reader at all. When Philip was my patient I didn’t even know you existed, let alone that you were his look-alike. People are always mistaking him for you, everywhere we go — everywhere, everyone, except illiterate me. To me he was just the most intense person I’d ever met in my life. He still is. There’s no one like him.”

“Except?” I said, tapping my chest.

“I meant the way he’s set out to change the world.”

“Well, he’s come to the right place for that. Every year they treat dozens of tourists here who go around thinking themselves the Messiah and exhorting mankind to repent. It’s a famous phenomenon at the mental-health center — local psychiatrists call it ‘Jerusalem syndrome.’ Most of them think they’re the Messiah or God, and the rest claim to be Satan. You got off easy with Philip.”

But nothing I said, however disdainful or outright contemptuous of him, had any noticeable effect on the undampable conviction with which she continued extolling to me the achievements of this blatant fraud. Was it she suffering from that novel form of hysteria known as Jerusalem syndrome? The government psychiatrist who had entertained me with a witty exposition on the subject a few years back had told me that there are also Christians they find wandering out in the desert who believe themselves to be John the Baptist. I thought: his harbinger, Jinx the Baptist, mouthpiece for the Messiah in whom she’s discovered salvation and the exalted purpose of her life. “The Jews,” she said, staring straight out at me with her terribly gullible eyes, “are all he thinks about. Night and day, since his cancer, his life has been dedicated to the Jews.”

“And you,” I asked, “who believe in him so — are you now a Jew lover too?”

But I could not seem to say anything to impair her buoyancy, and for the first time I wondered if perhaps she was afloat on dope, if both of them were, and if that accounted for everything, including the very soulful smile my sharp words had evoked — if behind the audacious mystery of these two there was nothing but a pound of good pot.

“Philip lover, yes; Jew lover, no. Uh-uh. All Jinx can love, and it’s plenty for her, is no longer hating Jews, no longer blaming Jews, no longer detesting Jews on sight. No, I can’t say that Jinx Possesski is a lover of Jews or that Jinx Possesski ever will be. What I can say — okay? — is what I said: I’m a recovering anti-Semite.”

“And what’s that like?” I asked, thinking now that there was something not entirely unbelievable about her words and that I could do no better than to be still and listen.

“Oh, it’s a story.”

“How long are you in recovery?”

“Almost five years. I was poisoned by it. A lot, I think now, had to do with the job. I don’t blame the job, I blame Jinx — but still, there’s one thing about a cancer hospital: the pain is just something that you can’t imagine. When someone’s in pain, you almost want to run out of the room, screaming to get the pain medication. People have no idea, they really and truly have no idea, what it is like to have pain like that. Their pain is so outrageous, and everyone is afraid of dying. There’s a lot of failure in cancer — you know, it’s not a maternity ward. On a maternity ward, I might never have found out the truth about myself. It might never have happened to me. You want to hear all this?”

“If you want to tell me,” I said. What I wanted to hear was why she loved this fraud.

“I got drawn into people’s suffering,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. If they cry, I hold their hand, I hug them — if they cry, I cry. I hug them, they hug me — to me there’s no way not to. It’s like you were their savior. Jinx could do no wrong. But I can’t be their savior. And that got to me after a while.” The nonsensically happy look slipped suddenly from Jinx’s face and she was convulsed by a rush of tenderness that left her for a moment unable to go on. “These patients …” she said, her voice completely deiced now and as soft through and through as a small child’s, “… they look at you with those eyes. …” The magnitude of the emotions she was reckoning with took me by surprise. If this is an act, then she’s Sarah Bernhardt. “They look at you with those eyes, they’re so wide open — and they grab, they grab — and I give, but I can’t give them life. … After a while,” she went on, the emotion subsiding into something sad and rueful, “I was just helping people to die. Make you more comfortable. Give you more pain medication. Give you a back massage. Turn you a certain way. Anything. I did a lot for patients. I always went one beyond the medical thing. ‘You wanna play cards, you wanna smoke a little marijuana?’ The patients were the only thing that meant anything to me. After a day when maybe three people died, you bagged the last person — ‘This is