Operation Shylock

“Is he lying?”

“Is he! The defense has nothing.”

“Sheftel looks awfully cocky to me.”

“Bluff, all bluff — there’s no alibi at all. The alibi’s proved false a dozen times over. And the card, the Trawniki card, it’s got to be Demjanjuk’s — it’s his picture, his signature.”

“And not a fake?”

“The prosecution has proved it’s not fake. And those old people on the witness stand, the people who cleaned out the gas chambers for him, the people who worked alongside him every day, it’s overwhelming, the case against him. Anyway, Demjanjuk knows they know. He acts like a stupid peasant but he’s a cunning bastard and no fool. He knows he’ll be hanged. He knows it’s coming to him, too.”

“So why does he continue to lie?”

She jerked a thumb toward the lobby, a brusque little gesture that took me by surprise after the impassioned vulnerability of her aria, something she’d probably learned to mime, along with the anti-Semitism, from the boiler engineer, her father. And what she was saying about the trial I figured she must be miming too, for these were no longer words stained with her blood but words she repeated as though she didn’t even believe in the meaning of words. Parroting her hero, I thought, as the adoring mate of a hero will.

“The son,” she explained. “He wants the son to be good and not to know. Demjanjuk’s lying for the son. If Demjanjuk confessed, that boy would be finished. He wouldn’t have a chance.” One of those hands of hers settled familiarly on my arm, one of those hands whose history of besmirchment by the body’s secretions I could not stop myself envisioning; and for me, in that raw contact, there was such a shock of intimacy that I felt momentarily absorbed into her being, very like what an infant must feel back when the mother’s hands aren’t mere appendages but the very incarnation of her whole warm, wonderful big body. Resist, I thought, this overtempting presence — these are not two people with your interests at heart!

“Talk to him. Sit down and talk to Philip, please.”

“‘Philip’ and I have nothing to talk about.”

“Oh, don’t,” she begged me, and as her fingers closed on me even more tightly, the pressure of her thumb in the crook of my arm triggered a rush of just about everything urging me in the wrong direction, “please, don’t. …”

“Don’t what?”

“Undermine what he is doing!”

“It’s not I who is doing the undermining.”

“But the man,” she cried, “is in remission!”

Even under less excitable conditions, “remission” is not a word easy to ignore, any more than “guilty” or “innocent” is in the courtroom when pronounced by the jury foreman to the judge.

I said, “Remission from cancer is nothing that I am against, for him or anyone. I am not even against his so-called Diasporism. I have no interest in those ideas either way. What I am against is his entangling our two lives and confusing people about who is who. What I cannot permit and what I will not permit is his encouraging people to believe that he is me. That must stop!”

“It will — okay? It’ll stop.”

“Will it? How do you know?”

“Because Philip told me to tell you that it would.”

“Yes, did he? Why didn’t you then? Why didn’t he, in that letter — that completely idiotic letter!” I said, angrily remembering the vacuous pithiness, the meaningless dissonance, the hysterical incoherence of that life-and-death longhand, remembering all those stupid slashes only vaguely disguising what I surmised he’d as soon do with me.

“You’re misunderstanding him,” she pleaded. “It will stop. He’s sick about how this has upset you. What happened has sent him reeling. I mean with vertigo. I mean literally he can’t stand up. I left him there in bed. He crashed, Mr. Roth, completely.”

“I see. He thought I wouldn’t mind. He thought the interviews with the journalists would just roll off my back.”

“If you would meet with him one more time —”

“I met with him. I’m meeting with you,” I said, and pulled my arm out from beneath her hand. “If you love him, Miss Possesski, and are devoted to him, and want to avoid the sort of trouble that might possibly endanger the health of a cancer patient in remission, then you’d be well advised to stop him now. He must stop using my name now. This is as far as I go with meetings.”

“But,” she said, her voice heating up and her hands clenched in anger, “that’s like asking you to stop using his name.”

“No, no, not at all! Your patient in remission is a liar. Whatever great motives may be motivating him, he happens to be lying through his teeth! His name is not the same as mine, and if he told you that it was, then he lied to you, too.”

Just the contortion of her mouth caused me instinctively to raise a hand to ward off a blow. And what I caught with that hand was a fist quite hard enough to have broken my nose. “Prick!” she snarled. “Your name! Your name! Do you ever, ever, ever think of anything other than your fucking name!”

Interlocked on the tabletop now, our fingers began a fight of their own; her grip was anything but girlish, and even pressing with all my strength, I was barely able to keep her five fingers immobilized between mine. Meanwhile I kept an eye on the other hand.

“You’re asking the wrong man,” I said. “The question is, ‘Does he?’”

Our struggle was being watched by the hotel waiters. A group of them had gathered just inside the windowed door to the lobby so as to look on at what must have struck them as a lovers’ quarrel, no more or less dangerous — and entertaining — than that, a touch of comic relief from the violence in the street, and probably not a little pornographically piquant.

“You should be a tenth as selfless, a hundredth as selfless! Do you know many dying men? Do you know many dying men whose thoughts are only for saving others? Do you know many people kept alive on a hundred and fifty pills a day who could begin to do what he is doing? What he went through in Poland just to see Walesa! I was worn out. But Philip would not be stopped, not by anything. Dizzy spells that would fell a horse and still he doesn’t stop! He falls down, he gets up, he keeps going. And the pain — he is like trying to excrete his own insides! The people we have to see before we even get to Walesa! It wasn’t the shipyards where we met him. That’s just stuff for the papers. It was way the hell out and beyond. The car rides, the passwords, the hiding places — and still this man does not stop! Eighteen months ago every last doctor gave him no more than six months to live — and here he is, in Jerusalem, alive! Let him have what keeps him alive! Let this man go on with his dream!”

“The dream that he is me?”

“You! You! Nothing in your world but you! Stop stroking my hand! Let go of my hand! Stop coming on with me!”

“You tried to hit me with that hand.”

“You are trying to seduce me! Let me go!”

She was wearing a belted blue poplin raincoat over a short denim skirt and a white ribbed sweater, a very youthful outfit, and it made her appear, when our fingers fell apart and she rose in a fury from her chair, rather statuesquely pubescent, a woman’s fullness coyly displayed in mock-maidenly American disguise.

In the features of one of the young waiters huddled up to the glass of the lobby door I saw the feverish look of a man who hopes with all his heart that the long-awaited striptease is about to begin. Or perhaps, when her hand reached down into her raincoat pocket, he thought that he was going to witness a shooting, that the voluptuous woman was about to pull a gun. And as I was still completely in the dark about what this couple was after and what they were truly contriving to do, my expectations were all at once no more realistic than his. In coming to Jerusalem like this, refusing to consider seriously an impostor’s more menacing meaning, heeding only