Operation Shylock

do believe me —”

“Oh, death is doing this, death — this isn’t you!”

“Oops — not me? Who then? Shall I guess? Can’t you think for one single moment about anybody but him? Is looking at me and thinking of him what gets you through our awful life? Is that what you imagine in the bed, is that how you are able, without vomiting, to satisfy my repellent desires — by pretending you’re in Jerusalem satisfying his? What’s the stumbling block? That his is real and mine is fake? That he is healthy and I am sick? That I will die and disappear and he will live on forever through all those wonderful books?”

Later in the morning, while he was sleeping off that tirade in their bed, she did as he had instructed and, in the barbecue pit on the back lawn, destroyed the unfinished manuscript of His Way. She knew that even if he awakened he was far too depleted to haul himself over to the window to watch her, and so, before dumping the contents of his briefcase straight into the flames, she quickly looked to read what she could of his expose of me. Only there was nothing there. All the pages were blank.

And so too were the tapes on which he’d claimed to have been recording his Diasporism book while she was off working her hospital shift during those last months of his life in the Berkshires. Six weeks after his death, though she still feared that hearing his disembodied voice might unleash those paroxysms of grief that had nearly killed her in the days after she’d relinquished his body to be buried by the Jews, she found herself one night yearning so for his presence that she had sat down with the tape recorder at the kitchen table and discovered that the tapes were blank as well. Alone in that remote little mountainside house, vainly listening for his voice on one tape after another, sitting all night and into the morning playing side after side and hearing absolutely nothing — and remembering too those mystifyingly empty pages that she had burned to cinders that awful morning in New Jersey — she understood, as people will often fully perceive the suffering of their loved ones only after they are gone, that I was the barrier to everything. He had not been lying about that. I was the obstacle to the fulfillment of his most altruistic dreams, choking off the torrent of all the potential originally his. At the end of his life, despite everything that he had been ordained to tell the Jews to prevent their destruction, the thought of my implacable hostility had impeded him from telling them anything, just as the menace of his Mansonish hatred (if I understood this letter correctly) was now supposed to stifle me.

Dear Jinx [I wrote],

You have my sympathy. I don’t know how you survived intact such a harrowing experience. Your stamina, patience, endurance, tolerance, loyalty, courage, forbearance, strength, compassion, your unwavering devotion while watching him struggle helplessly in the death grip of all those deep-buried devils that were tearing to pieces the last of his life — it’s all no less astonishing than the ordeal itself. You must feel that you’ve awakened from a colossal nightmare even as you continue to grieve over your loss.

I’ll never understand the excesses he was driven to by me — or by his mystique of me — all the while pleading the highest motives. Was it enchantment, that I cast a spell? It felt the other way round to me. Was it all about death and his struggle to elude it — to elude it as me, to be born again in me, to consign dying to me? I’d like to be able someday to understand what he was saving himself from. Though maybe to understand that is not my duty.

Recently I listened again to the so-called A-S.A. workout tape that found its way into my tape recorder back in my Jerusalem hotel. What was that chilling thought-stream about? This time round I wondered if maybe he wasn’t Jewish at all but a pathological Gentile, stuck with the Jewish look and out to exact unbridled revenge on the whole vile subspecies as represented by me. Could that possibly be true? Of his entire arsenal of stupid stunts, that sham — if such it was — remains the most sinister, demented, and, alas, compelling … yes, aesthetically alluring to me in its repugnant, sickish, Celine-like way. (Celine was also unhinged, a genius French novelist and clamorous anti-Semite circa World War II whom I try hard to despise — and whose reckless books I teach to my students) But what then to conclude? All I know for sure is that the dreadful wound that never healed preceded my appearance as a writer, I’m certain of that — I’m not, I can’t be, the terrible original blow. All the dizzying energy, all the chaos and the frenzy behind the pointlessness of contending with me, points to something else.

That he was immobilized as an author is not my fault, either. The deathbed tapes were blank and all those pages empty for very good reasons other than fear of my blockading publication. It’s writing that closes people off from writing. The power of the paranoid to project doesn’t necessarily extend to the page, bursting though he may be with ideologies to save the imperiled and with exposes to unfrock the fakes. The inexhaustible access to falsification that fortifies paranoidal rage has nothing in common with the illusion that lifts a book free of the ground.

His Way was never his to write. His Way was what lay in his way, the crowning impossibility to the unrealizable task of burying the shame of what shamed him most. Can you tell me what was so unbearably humiliating about whoever he originally was? Could what he began as have been any more scandalous or any less legitimate than what he became in the effort to escape it by becoming somebody else? The seeming paradox is that he could go so shamelessly overboard in the guise of me while, if my guess is right, he was all but annihilated by shame as himself. In this, actually, he came closer to the experience of authorship than he ever did thinking about writing those books and enacted, albeit back to front, a strategy for clinging to sanity that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to many novelists.

But is anything I’m saying of interest to you? Maybe all you want to know is if I want to get together again now that he’s finally out of the way. I could take a drive up some afternoon. You could show me his grave. I wouldn’t mind seeing it, despite the oddness of reading the name on his stone. I wouldn’t mind seeing you, either. Your abundant forthcomingness left a strong impression. The temptation is enormous to mine you for every last bit of information you can supply about him, though that, admittedly, isn’t the enticement that comes most pictorially to mind.

Well, I’d love to get together with you — yet I can’t think of a worse idea for either one of us. He may have been resonant with fragments of my inner life but, as best I can figure it out, that wasn’t the charge he carried for you. Rather, there was a macabre, nothing-to-lose, staring-death-in-the-face kind of manhood there, some macabre sense of freedom he had because he was dying — willing to take all kinds of risks and do anything because there’s so little time left — that appeals to a certain type of woman, a macabre manliness that makes the woman romantically selfless. I understand the seduction, I think: something about the way he takes that leads you to give the way you give. But it’s something about the frighteningly enticing way you give that leads me to wonder about what you take in exchange for the crazy burden. In short, you’ll have to complete the recovery from anti-Semitism without me. I’m sure you’ll find that, for a woman so willing to sacrifice herself so much, for a nurse with a body and soul like yours, with your hands, your health, your illness, there will be plenty of Jewish men around who will volunteer to help you on your way to loving our people as you should. But I’m too old for heavy work like that. It’s already taken up enough of my life.

The most I can offer is this: what he couldn’t write I’ll ghostwrite for him and publish under his name. I’ll do my best to be no less paranoid than he would have been and to do everything I can to make people believe that it was written by him, his way, a treatise on Diasporism that he would have been proud of. “We could be partners,” he told me, “copersonalities who work in tandem rather than stupidly divided in two.” Well, so we shall be. “All you do,” he protested, “is resist me.” That’s true. While he lived and raged I couldn’t do otherwise. I had to surmount him. But in death I embrace him and see him for the achievement that he was — I’d be a very foolish writer, now that he’s gone, not to be my impostor’s creature and, in my workshop, partake of his treasure (by which I no longer mean you). Your other P.R. assures you that the impostor’s voice will not be stifled by him (meaning me).

This letter remained unanswered.

* * *

It was only a week after I’d sent a copy of my final manuscript to his office that Smilesburger phoned from Kennedy Airport. He had received the book and read it. Should he come to Connecticut for us to talk it over, or would I prefer to meet in Manhattan? He was staying with his son and his daughter-in-law on the Upper West Side.

The moment I heard the resonating deep rumble of that Old Country voice — or rather, heard in response the note of respectful compliance in my own, disquieted though I was by his abrupt and irritating materialization — I realized how specious were my reasons for getting myself to do as he’d asked. What with the journals I’d kept and