Operation Shylock

“Pipik, are you with me, are you here? Is this or is this not your stinking idea? If it is, tell me so. Speak. I never was your enemy. Think back on what’s happened, review all the details, will you, please? Have I no right to claim that I have been provoked? Are you blameless entirely? Whatever pain my public standing may have caused you in those years before we met — well, how can I be responsible for that? And was it that injurious? Was the resemblance to me ever really much more than what most people would think of as a nuisance? It’s not I who told you to come to Jerusalem and pretend that we two were one — I cannot, in all fairness, be saddled with that. Do you hear me? Yes, you hear me — you don’t answer because that’s not what you hold against me. My offense is that I did not treat you with respect. I was not willing to entertain your proposal that we set up shop as partners. I was rude and caustic. I was dismissive and contemptuous. I was furious and threatening from the moment I saw you and, even before that, when I laid a trap on the phone as Pierre Roget. Look, that there is room for improvement I admit. Next time I will try harder to see your side of things before I take aim and fire. ‘Stop, breathe, think,’ instead of ‘Ready, aim, fire’ — I’m trying hard to learn. Perhaps I was too antagonistic — perhaps. I don’t really know. I am not out to bullshit you, Pipik. You would despise me even more than you do already if, because you have the upper hand, I started kowtowing and kissing your ass. I am simply trying to explain that my response on meeting you, however offensive, was well within the range of what you might have expected from anyone in my position. But your grievance is deeper even than that. The million bucks. That’s a lot of money. Never mind that you extorted it by passing yourself off as me. Maybe you’re right and that’s not my business. Why should I care? Especially if it’s money in behalf of a good cause — and if you see it that way and say that it is, who am I to say it isn’t? I’m willing to believe that that was all between Smilesburger and you. Caveat emptor, Mr. Smilesburger. Though that’s not my crime either, is it? My crime is that it was I posing as you rather than you posing as me who extorted the money under false pretenses — by pretending to be you, I took what was not mine. In your eyes this amounts to grand larceny. You make the deal, I reap the harvest. Well, if it makes you feel better, I haven’t come away with a red cent. I haven’t got the check. I’m in your custody here, the boys who picked me up are your boys — you’re in charge in every way, and so I’m not about to lie to you. The check was lost. I lost it. You may or may not know this but I haven’t been contending here solely with you. The story is too long to tell, and you wouldn’t believe it anyway, so suffice it to say that the check disappeared in a situation where I was utterly powerless. Can’t we now go together to Mr. Smilesburger and explain to him his confusion? Get him to stop the old check and issue a new one? I would bet another million that the first check isn’t in anyone’s pocket but either got blown away by the wind or was trampled into the ground when some soldiers roughed me up on the road from Ramallah. That’s the story you won’t believe, though you ought to, really — it’s not a lot stranger than yours. I got caught in the crossfire of the fight being fought here, and that’s when your check disappeared. We’ll get you another one. I’ll help you get it. I’ll do everything I can in your behalf. Isn’t that what you’ve been asking from the start? My cooperation? Well, you’ve got it. This does it. I’m on your side. We’ll get you your million bucks back.”

I waited in vain for him to speak, but either he believed that I was lying and holding out on him, that his million was already in my account, or he wanted even more, or he wasn’t there.

“And I apologize,” I said, “about Jinx. Wanda Jane. For a man who’s gone through and survived the physical anguish that you’ve suffered, of course that’s bitterly infuriating. This probably has incensed you even more than the money. I don’t expect that you would believe me if I were to tell you that to pierce your heart was not my motive or intention. You think otherwise, of course. You think I meant to punish and humiliate you. You think I mean to steal what you prize most. You think I mean to strike a blow where you are most vulnerable. It won’t do me any good to try to tell you that you’re wrong. Particularly as you could be partially right. Human psychology being what it is, you could even be entirely right. But since the truth is the truth, let me add insult to insult and injury to injury — I did not do what I did without some feeling. For her, I mean. I mean that muzzling a virile response to her kind of magnetism has turned out to be no easier for me than it is for you. There’s yet another resemblance between us. I realize this was never the kind of partnership you had in mind but … But nothing. Enough. Wrong tack. I did it. I did it and in similar circumstances I would probably try to do it again. But there will be no such circumstances, that I promise you. The incident will never be repeated. I only ask you now to accept that by having been abducted and detained like this, by tasting all the terror that goes with sitting in this room not knowing what’s in store for me, I have been sufficiently disciplined for trespassing against you as I have.”

I waited for an answer. This was never the kind of partnership you had in mind. I needn’t have said that, but otherwise, I thought, in a predicament as ambiguously menacing as this, no one could have spoken much more adroitly. Nor had I been craven. I had said more or less what he wanted me to say while still saying what was more or less true.

But when still no answer was forthcoming, I all at once lost whatever adroitness I may have had and announced in a voice no longer calm and steady, “Pipik, if you cannot forgive me, give me a sign that you’re there, that you’re here, that you hear me, that I am not talking to a wall!” Or, I thought, to someone even less forgiving than you and capable of a rebuke sterner even than your silence. “What do you require, burnt offerings? I will never again go near your girl, we’ll get you back your goddamn money — now say something! Speak!”

And only then did I understand what he did require of me, not to mention understanding finally just how very maladroit I was with him and had been from the start, how unforgivably self- damaging a miscalculation it had been to deny this impostor the thing that any impostor covets and can least do without and that only I could meaningfully anoint him with. Only when I spoke my name as though I believed it was his name as well, only then would Pipik reveal himself and negotiations commence to propitiate his rage.

“Philip,” I said.

He did not answer.

“Philip,” I said again, “I am not your enemy. I don’t want to be your enemy. I would like to establish cordial relations. I am nearly overcome by how this has turned out and, if it’s not too late, I’d like to be your friend.”

Nothing. No one.

“I was sardonic and unfeeling and I’m chastened,” I said. “It was not right to exalt myself and denigrate you by addressing you as I have. I should have called you by your name as you called me by mine. And from now on I will. I will. I am Philip Roth and you are Philip Roth, I am like you and you are like me, in name and not only in name. …”

But he wasn’t buying it or else he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there. An hour later the door opened and into the classroom hobbled Smilesburger.

“Good of you to wait,” he said. “Terribly sorry, but I was detained.”

10 YOU SHALL NOT HATE YOUR BROTHER IN YOUR HEART

I was reading when he came in. To make it appear to whoever might be observing me that I was not yet incapacitated by fear or running wild with hallucination, that I was waiting as though for nothing more than my turn in the dental chair or at the barbershop, to force my attention to something other than the timorousness that kept me nailed warily to my seat — even more urgently, to focus on something other than the overbold boldness insistently charging me now to jump out the window — I had removed from my pockets the purported diaries of Leon Klinghoffer and shunted myself, with a huge mental effort, onto the verbal track.

How pleased my teachers would be, I thought — reading, even here! But then this was not the first time, or the last, when, powerless before the uncertainty at hand, I looked to print to subjugate my fears and keep the world from coming apart. In 1960, not a hundred yards from the Vatican walls, I had sat one evening in the empty waiting room of an unknown Italian doctor’s office reading a novel of Edith Wharton’s, while on the far side of the doctor’s door, my then wife underwent an illegal abortion. Once on a plane with a badly smoking engine, I had heard the pilot’s horrifyingly calm announcement as to how and where he planned to set down and had quickly told myself, “You just concentrate on Conrad,” and continued my reading of Nostromo, mordantly keeping at the back of my mind the thought that at least I would die as I’d lived. And two years after escaping Jerusalem unharmed, when I wound up one night an emergency patient in the coronary unit of New York Hospital, an oxygen tube in my nose and an array of doctors and nurses fastidiously monitoring my vital signs, I waited for a decision to be made about operating on my obstructed arteries while reading, not without some