Operation Shylock

baffled quest for guardianship (among the Protestants, the Catholics, and the Jews), I had maintained as best I could the maximum skepticism. Charm there was, admittedly, but her verbal authority was really not great, and I told myself that, in any circumstance less drastic than this (if, say, I’d sidled up to her at one of those Chicago singles bars when she was a nurse hanging out), after five minutes of listening I would have been hard put not to try my luck with someone who wasn’t being endlessly reborn. Yet, all this said, the effect of her smile was to make me tumescent.

I didn’t know what to make of her. A woman forged by the commonplace at its most cruelly ridiculous smiles up from a hotel bed at a man who has every reason in the world to be nowhere near her, a man to whom she is the mate in no way whatsoever, and the man is underground with Persephone. You are in awe of eros’s mythological depths when something like that happens to you. What Jung calls “the uncontrollability of real things,” what a registered nurse just calls “life.”

“We aren’t indistinguishable, you know.”

“That word. That’s the word. He uses it a hundred times a day. ‘We’re indistinguishable.’ He’s looking in the mirror and that’s what he says — ‘We’re indistinguishable.’”

“Well, we’re not,” I informed her, “not by a long shot.”

“No? What is it then, you’ve got a different Life line? I do palmistry. I learned it once, hitchhiking. I read palms instead of books.”

And I did next the stupidest thing I’d yet done in Jerusalem and perhaps in my entire life. I got up from the chair by the window and stepped across to the bed and took hold of the hand that she was extending. I placed my hand in hers, in the nurse’s hand that had been everywhere, the nurse’s tabooless, transgressive hand, and she ran her thumb lightly along my palm and then palpated in turn each of its cushioned corners. For at least a full minute she said only, “Ummm … ummm …,” all the while carefully studying my hand. “It’s not surprising,” she finally told me very, very quietly, as though not to awaken a third person in the bed, “that the Head line is surprisingly long and deep. Your Head line is the strongest line in the hand. It’s a Head line dominated by imagination rather than by money or heart or reason or intellect. There’s a strong warlike component to your Fate line. Your Fate line sort of rises in the Mount of Mars. You actually have three Fate lines. Which is very unusual. Most people don’t have any.”

“How many does your boyfriend have?”

“Only one.”

And I was thinking, If you want to get killed, if you are determined to die on your knees like Walter Sweeney, then this is the way to get the job done. This palm reader is his treasure. This recovering anti-Semite fingering your Fate line is that madman’s prize!

“All of these lines from the Mount of Venus into your Life line indicate how deeply you’re ruled by your passions. The deep, deep clear lines on this part of the hand — see? — intersect with the Life line. They actually aren’t crossed, which means that rather than passion bringing you misfortune, it doesn’t. If they were crossed, I’d say that in you sexual appetite leads to decadence and corruption. But that’s not true. Your sexual appetite is quite pure.”

“What do you know,” I replied, thinking, Do this and he will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and kill you. You should have fled. You didn’t need her answers to all your questions. Her answers are as useless to you if they are true as they are if they are false. This is his trap, I thought, just as she looked up into my face with that smile that was her Fate line and said, “It’s all such complete bullshit but it’s sort of fun — you know?” Stop. Breathe. Think. She believes you are in possession of Smilesburger’s million and is simply changing sides. Anything could be happening and you’d be the last to know.

“It’s sort of the hand of a … I mean if I didn’t know anything about you, if I were reading the hands of a stranger and didn’t know who you were, I would say it’s sort of the hand of a … of a great leader.”

I should have fled. Instead I implanted myself and then I fled. I penetrated her and I ran. Both. Talk about the commonplace at its most ridiculous.

8 THE UNCONTROLLABILITY OF REAL THINGS

Here is the Pipik plot so far.

A middle-aged American Jew settles into a suite at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel and proposes publicly that Israeli Jews of Ashkenazi descent, who make up the more influential half of the country’s population and who constituted the original cadre that settled the state, return to their countries of origin to resurrect the European Jewish life that Hitler all but annihilated between 1939 and 1945. He argues that this post-Zionist political program, which he has called “Diasporism,” is the only means by which to avert a “second Holocaust,” in which either the three million Jews of Israel will be massacred by their Arab enemies or the enemies will be decimated by Israeli nuclear weapons, a victory that, like a defeat, would destroy the moral foundations of Jewish life for good. He believes that, with assistance from traditional Jewish philanthropic sources, he can raise the money and marshal the political will of influential Jews everywhere to institute and realize this program by the year 2000. He justifies his hopefulness by alluding to the history of Zionism and comparing his supposedly unattainable dream to the Herzlian plan for a Jewish state, which, in its own time, struck Herzl’s numerous Jewish critics as contemptibly ludicrous, if not insane. He concedes the troubling persistence of a substantial anti-Semitic European population but proposes to implement a massive recovery program that will rehabilitate those several tens of millions still powerless before the temptations of traditional anti-Semitism and enable them to learn to control their antipathy to their Jewish compatriots once the Jews have been re-rooted in Europe. He calls the organization that will implement this program Anti-Semites Anonymous and is accompanied on his proselytizing fund-raising travels by a member of the charter chapter of A-S.A., an American nurse of Polish and Irish Catholic extraction, who identifies herself as a “recovering anti-Semite” and who came to be influenced by his ideology when he was her cancer patient in the Chicago hospital where she worked.

The champion of Diasporism and founder of A-S.A. turns out to have had a prior career as a private detective, running his own small agency in Chicago, which specialized in missing-persons cases. His involvement with political ideas and his concern for the survival of the Jews and of Jewish ideals seems to date from the cancer battle, when he felt himself summoned to dedicate to a higher calling whatever life remained to him. (In addition, the conviction of the American Jew Jonathan Pollard as an Israeli spy sensitively positioned within the U.S. defense establishment — and Pollard’s coldhearted abandonment by his Israeli Secret Service handlers the moment his operation was compromised — seems to have had a strong effect on the formulation of his ideas, consolidating his fears for Diaspora Jewry so long as they are an expendable, exploitable resource to a Jewish state that, as he sees it, Machiavellianly exacts from them unquestioning loyalty.) Little is known of his earlier life other than that, as a young man, he conscientiously set out to disassociate himself from any social or vocational role that might mark him as a Jew. His acolyte mistress has spoken of a mother who disciplined him pitilessly as a small child, but otherwise his biography is a blank and, even in its sketchy outline, seems a story patched together by the same unhis torical imagination that dreamed up the improbabilities and exaggerations of Diasporism.

Now it so happens that this man bears a decided physical resemblance to the American writer Philip Roth, claims that Philip Roth is his name as well, and is not averse to playing upon this unaccountable, if not utterly fantastical, coincidence to foster the belief that he is the author and thus to advance the cause of Diasporism. Through this subterfuge he is able to convince Louis B. Smilesburger, an elderly, disabled Holocaust victim who has retired unhappily to Jerusalem after having made his fortune as a New York jeweler, to contribute to him one million dollars. But, when Smilesburger sets out to deliver the check personally to the Diasporist Philip Roth, who should he come upon but the writer Philip Roth, who had arrived in Jerusalem just two days earlier to interview the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. The writer is having lunch with Appelfeld at a Jerusalem cafe when Smilesburger locates him there and, mistakenly imagining that the writer and the Diasporist are one, approaches the wrong man with the check.

By this time the paths of the two look-alikes have already crossed not far from the Jerusalem courtroom where John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian American autoworker extradited to Israel from Cleveland by the U.S. Department of Justice, is on trial, accused of being the sadistic Treblinka guard and mass murderer of Jews known to his victims as Ivan the Terrible. This trial and the uprising against the Israeli government by the Arabs in the