Operation Shylock

phone.

“He’s going to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son.”

But I had only my one objective and didn’t bother to answer her. You can’t make a mistake doing nothing.

“They’re plotting right this minute to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son!”

Outside the door Pipik’s Possesski, below the window the Arabs in ski masks running rocks — I closed my eyes to compose in my head a last question to leave with Aharon before I flew off. Living in this society, you are bombarded by news and political disputation. Yet, as a novelist, you have, by and large, pushed aside the Israeli daily turbulence —

“Mr. Roth, they intend to do it!”

— in order to contemplate markedly different Jewish predicaments. What does this turbulence mean to a novelist like yourself? How does being a citizen of —

Jinx was softly sobbing now. “He wears this. Walesa gave it to him. Mr. Roth, you’ve got to help …”

— of this self-revealing, self-asserting, self-challenging, self-legendizing society affect your writing life? Does this news-producing reality ever tempt your imagination?

“This will be the end of him.”

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn’t restrain myself and spoke my mind. “Good!”

“It’ll destroy everything he’s done.”

“Perfect!”

“You must take some responsibility.”

“None!”

Meanwhile I had got down on my hands and knees and was trying to reach under the bureau to see what she had pushed beneath the door. I was able, finally, to fish it out with my shoe.

A jagged piece of fabric about the size of my hand and as weightless as a swatch of gauze — a cloth Star of David, something I’d only seen before in those photographs of pedestrians on the streets of occupied Europe, Jews tagged as Jews with a bit of yellow material. This surprise shouldn’t have exasperated me more than anything else issuing from Pipik’s excesses but it did, it exasperated me violently. Stop. Breathe. Think. His pathology is his, not yours. Treat it with realistic humor — and go! But instead I gave way to my feelings. Hold off, hold off, but I couldn’t — there seemed no way for me to treat the appearance of this tragic memento as just a harmless amusement. There was absolutely nothing he wouldn’t turn into a farce. A blasphemer even of this. I cannot endure him.

“Who is this madman! Tell me who this madman is!”

“I will! Let me in!”

“Everything! The truth!”

“All I know! I will!”

“You’re alone?”

“All alone. I am. I swear to you I am.”

“Wait.”

Stop. Breathe. Think. But I did instead what I’d decided not to do until it was time to make a safe exit. I edged the big bureau away from the door just enough to open it, and then I unlocked the door and let squeeze into the room the coconspirator he had sent to entice me, dressed for those pickup bars where the oncology nurses used to go to irrigate themselves of all that death and dying back when Jinx Possesski was still a full-fledged, unreclaimed hater of Jews. Big dark glasses covered half her face, and the black dress she was wearing couldn’t have made her look any shapelier. She couldn’t have looked any shapelier without it. It was a great cheap dress. Lots of lipstick, the unkempt pale pile of Polish cornsilk, and enough of her protruding for me to conclude not only that she was up to no good but that it may not have been my terrible temper alone that had enjoined me from stopping and breathing and thinking, that I had let Jinx past my barricade because I was up to no good myself and had been for some time now. It occurred to me, friends, when she wriggled through the door and then turned the key to lock us in — and him out? — that I should never have left the front stoop in Newark. I never longed so passionately, not for her, not that quite yet, but for my life before impersonation and imitation and twofoldedness set in, life before self- mockery and self-idealization (and the idealization of the mockery; and the mockery of the idealization; and the idealization of the idealization; and the mockery of the mockery), before the alternating exaltations of hyperobjectivity and hypersubjectivity (and the hyper- objectivity about the hypersubjectivity; and the hypersubjectivity about the hyperobjectivity), back when what was outside was outside and what was inside was inside, when everything still divided cleanly and nothing happened that couldn’t be explained. I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, had been the same since.

I didn’t want this temptress, I wanted to be ten; despite a lifelong determinedly antinostalgic stance, I wanted to be ten and back in the neighborhood when life was not yet a blind passage out but still like baseball, where you came home, and when the voluptuous earthliness of women other than my mamma was nothing I yet wished to gorge myself on.

“Mr. Roth, he’s waiting to hear from Meir Kahane. They’re going to do it. Somebody has to stop them!”

“Why did you bring this?” I said, angrily thrusting the yellow star in her face.

“I told you. Walesa gave it to him. In Gdansk. Philip wept. Now he wears it under his shirt.”

“The truth! The truth! Why at three in the morning do you come with this star and this story? How did you get this far anyway? How did you pass the desk downstairs? How do you get across Jerusalem at this hour, with all this danger and dressed like fucking Jezebel? This is a city seething with hatred, the violence will be terrible, it’s dreadful already, and look at how he sent you here! Look at how he’s fitted you out in this femme fatale Bond movie get-up! The man has got the instincts of a pimp! Forget the crazy Arabs — a crazy pack of pious Jews could have stoned you to death in this dress!”

“But they are going to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son and send him back piece by piece until Demjanjuk confesses! They’re writing Demjanjuk’s confession right now. They say to Philip, You, writer — do it good!’ Toe by toe, finger by finger, eyeball by eyeball, until his father speaks the truth, they are going to torture the son. Religious people in skullcaps, and you should hear what they are saying — and Philip sits there writing the confession! Kahane! Philip is anti-Kahane, calls him a savage, and he’s sitting there waiting for a phone call from the savage fanatic he hates most in the world!”

“Answer me please with the truth. Why did he send you here in this dress? With this star? How does a person like him come about? The chicanery is inexhaustible.”

“I ran! I told him, ‘I cannot listen anymore. I cannot watch you destroy everything!’ I ran away!”

“To me.”

“You must give him back the check!”

“I lost the check. I don’t have the check. I told him that. Something untoward happened. Certainly the girlfriend of your boyfriend can understand that. The check is gone.”

“But your keeping the money is what’s making him wild! Why did you accept Mr. Smilesburger’s money when you knew it wasn’t meant for you!”

I pushed the cloth star into her hand. “Take this with you and get out of here.”

“But Demjanjuk’s son!”

“Miss, I was not born to Bess and Herman Roth in Newark’s Beth Israel Hospital to protect this man Demjanjuk’s son.”

“Then protect Philip!”

“That is what I’m doing.”

“But it’s to prove himself to you that he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s out of his mind for your admiration. You are the hero, like it or not!”

“Please, with a dick like his he doesn’t need me for a hero. He was nice enough to come here to show it to me. Did you know that? He’s not particularly pestered by inhibitions, is he?”

“No,” she muttered, “oh, no,” and here she caved in and dropped to the edge of the bed in tears.

“Nope,” I said, “uh-uh, you two aren’t taking turns — get up and get out.”

But she was crying so pathetically that all I could do was to return to the easy chair by the window and sit