Operation Shylock

Or is he here to investigate why we are two and what we two are conspiring to do?

Though nothing could be heard from within the room and though he had perhaps come and gone, having already stolen or destroyed whatever he was after, I was convinced that even if there was only the remotest chance that he was inside, it would still be foolish to enter alone and so I turned and started back toward the staircase just as the door to my room opened a ways and there, peering out of it, was Moishe Pipik’s head. I was actually hastening in double time along the corridor by then, but because I didn’t want him to know how afraid of him I had become, I stopped and even took a few slow steps back toward where he was standing now, half in and half out of the room. And what I saw, as I stepped closer, so shocked me that I had all I could do not to turn and run full speed for help. His face was the face I remembered seeing in the mirror during the months when I was breaking down. His glasses were off, and I saw in his eyes my own dreadful panic of the summer before, my eyes at their most fearful, back when I could think of little other than how to kill myself. He wore on his face what had so terrified Claire: my look of perpetual grief.

“You,” he said. That was all. But for him that was the accusation: I who was I.

“Come in,” he said, weakly.

“No, you come out. Get your shoes” — he was in his stocking feet and his shirt was hanging out of his trousers — “get whatever is yours, hand over the key, and get out of here.”

Without even bothering to answer he turned back into the room. I approached as far as the door and looked inside to see if Jinx was with him. But he was stretched diagonally across the bed, all alone and looking sorrowfully at the whitewashed, vaulted ceiling. The pillows were wadded up by the headboard, and the spread was turned back and dragged down onto the tile floor, and beside him on the bed was an opened book, my copy of Aharon Appelfeld’s novel Tzili. In the small room nothing else appeared to have been disarranged; I am orderly with my things, even in a hotel room, and everything of mine looked to me as I’d left it. I hadn’t had much with me to begin with: on the little desk by the large, arched window was the folder containing the notes of my conversations with Aharon, the three tapes Aharon and I had made so far, and Aharon’s books in English translation. Because my tape recorder was in my one suitcase and the suitcase locked inside the closet, whose key was in my wallet, he couldn’t have listened to the tapes; perhaps he’d rifled through the shirts and socks and underwear laid out in the middle bureau drawer, perhaps I’d find later that he’d even defiled them in some way, but so long as he hadn’t sacrificed a goat in the bathtub, I knew enough to consider myself lucky.

“Look,” I said to him from the doorway, “I’m going to get the house detective. He’s going to call the police. You’ve broken into my room. You’ve trespassed on my property. I don’t know what you may have taken —”

“What I’ve taken?” And saying this, he swung about and sat himself up on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his hands so that for the moment I couldn’t see the grief-stricken face and the resemblance to my own, by which I was still transfixed and horrified. Nor could he see me and the resemblance to which he had succumbed out of a motive that was still anything but clear in its personal particulars. I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life. It wasn’t even that Pipik had gone further than most — he was, in the mirror, improbably evolved into somebody else already; there was very little more for him to imitate or fantasize. I could understand the temptation to quash oneself and become imperfect and a sham in entertainingly new ways — I had succumbed too, and not just a few hours earlier with the Ziads and then with Gal, but more sweepingly even than that in my books: looking like myself, sounding like myself, even laying claim to convenient scraps of my biography, and yet, beneath the disguise of me, someone entirely other.

But this was no book, and it wouldn’t do. “Get off my bed,” I told him, “get out!”

But he had picked up Aharon’s Tzili and was showing me how far he’d got in reading it. “This stuff is real poison,” he said. “Everything Diasporism fights against. Why do you think highly of this guy when he is the last thing we need? He will never relinquish anti-Semitism. It’s the rock he builds his whole world on. Eternal and unshakable anti-Semitism. The man is irreparably damaged by the Holocaust — why do you want to encourage people to read this fear-ridden stuff?”

“You miss the point — I want only to encourage you to leave.”

“It astonishes me that you, of all people, after all that you have written, should want to reinforce the stereotype of the Jewish victim. I read your dialogue with Primo Levi last year in the Times. I heard you had a breakdown after he killed himself.”

“Who’d you hear it from? Walesa?”

“From your brother. From Sandy.”

“You’re in touch with my brother, too? He’s never mentioned it.”

“Come in. Close the door. We have a lot to talk about. We have been intertwined for decades in a thousand different ways. You don’t want to know how uncanny this whole thing is, do you? All you want is to get rid of it. But it goes back, Philip, all the way back to Chancellor Avenue School.”

“Yes, you went to Chancellor?”

He began quietly to sing, in a soft baritone voice — a singing voice chillingly familiar to me — a few bars of the Chancellor Avenue School song, words that had been set, early in the thirties, to the tune of “On Wisconsin.” “… We will do our best … try to always be victorious … put us through the test, rah-rah-rah …” He smiled at me wanly with the grief-stricken face. “Remember the cop who crossed you at the corner of Chancellor and Summit? Nineteen thirty-eight — the year you started kindergarten. Remember his name?”

While he spoke I glanced back toward the staircase, and there, to my relief, I saw just the person I was looking for. He paused at the landing, a short, stocky man in shirtsleeves, with closely cropped black hair and a masklike, inexpressive face, or so the face appeared from that distance. He looked toward me now without any attempt to disguise the fact that he was there and that he too sensed that something suspicious was going on. It was the plainclothesman.

“Al,” Pipik was saying once again, his head falling back on the pillows. “Al the Cop,” he repeated wistfully.

While Pipik babbled on from the bed, the plainclothesman, without my even signaling him, started along the corridor toward where I was waiting in the open doorway.

“You used to jump up to touch his arms,” Pipik was reminding me. “He’d hold his arms straight out to stop the traffic, and you little kids would jump up and touch his arms as you crossed the street. Every morning, ‘Hi, Al!’ and jump up and touch his arms. Nineteen thirty-eight. Remember?”

“Sure,” I said, and as the plainclothesman approached, I smiled to let him know that, although he was needed, the situation was not yet out of control. He leaned close to my ear and mumbled something. He spoke in English but because of his accent the softly uttered words were unintelligible at first.

“What?” I whispered.

“Want me to blow you?” he whispered back.

“Oh, no — thanks, no. My mistake.” And I stepped into the room and pulled the door firmly shut.

“Pardon the intrusion,” I said.

“Remember Al?”

I sat down in the easy chair by the window, not quite knowing what else to do now that I was locked in with him. “You don’t look so hot, Pipik.”

“Pardon?”

“You look awful. You look physically ill. This business is not doing you a world of good — you look like somebody in very serious trouble.”

“Pipik?” He was sitting up now on the bed. Contemptuously he asked, “You call me Pipik?”

“Don’t take it so hard. What else should I call you?”

“Cut the shit — I came for the check.”

“What check?”

“My check!”

“Yours? Please. Did anyone ever tell you about my great-aunt who lived in Danbury, Pipik? My grandfather’s