textile business to Beersheba. The decision to fly to America to see me, and, while here, to spend a few days with his two American grandchildren, had been made wholly on his own. My manuscript had been forwarded to him from his old office, where he hadn’t set foot since his retirement; as far as he could tell, no one had opened the sealed envelope and read the manuscript, although it wouldn’t be difficult for either of us, he said, to imagine the response there if anyone had.
“Same as yours,” I offered.
“No. Not so considered as mine.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that. And nothing they can do about it.”
“And, on your part, no responsibility.”
“Look, I’ve been around this track as a writer before. My failed ‘responsibility’ has been the leitmotif of my career with the Jews. We signed no contract. I made no promises. I performed a service for you — I believe I performed it adequately.”
“More than adequately. Your modesty is glaring. You performed it expertly. It’s one thing to be an extremist with your mouth. And even that is risky for writers. To then go and do what you did — there was nothing in your life to prepare you for this, nothing. I knew you could think. I knew you could write. I knew you could do things in your head. I didn’t know you could do something as large in reality. I don’t imagine that you knew it either. Of course you feel proud of your accomplishment. Of course you want to broadcast your daring to the whole world. I would too if I were you.”
When I looked up at the young waiter who was pouring coffee into our cups, I saw, as did Smilesburger, that he was either Indian or Pakistani.
After he moved off, having left behind our menus, Smilesburger asked, “Who will fall captive to whom in this city? The Indian to the Jew, the Jew to the Indian, or both to the Latino? Yesterday I made my way to Seventy- second Street. All along Broadway blacks eating bagels baked by Puerto Ricans, sold by Koreans. … You know the old joke about a Jewish restaurant like this one?”
“Do I? Probably.”
“About the Chinese waiter in the Jewish restaurant. Who speaks perfect Yiddish.”
“I was sufficiently entertained in Jerusalem with the Chofetz Chaim — you don’t have to tell me Jewish jokes in New York. We’re talking about my book. Nothing was said beforehand, not one word, about what I might or might not write afterward. You yourself drew my attention to the professional possibilities the operation offered. As an enticement, if you recall. ‘I see quite a book coming out of this,’ you told me. An even better book if I went on to Athens for you than if I didn’t. And that was before the book had even entered my mind.”
“Hard to believe,” he responded mildly, “but if you say so.”
“It was what you said that put it
“I haven’t said that or anything like it.”
“Mr. Smilesburger, there’s no advantage to be gained by the old- geezer act.”
“Well” — shrugging his shoulders, grinning, offering it for whatever an old geezer’s opinion was worth — “if you fictionalized a little, well, no, I suppose it might not hurt.”
“But it’s not a book of fiction. And ‘a little’ fictionalization isn’t what you’re talking about. You want me to invent another operation entirely.”
“I want?” he said. “I want only what is best for you.”
The Indian waiter was back and waiting to take the order.
“What do you eat here?” Smilesburger asked me. “What do you like?” So insipid a man in retirement that he wouldn’t dare order without my help.
“The chopped-herring salad on a lightly toasted onion bagel,” I said to the waiter. “Tomato on the side. And bring me a glass of orange juice.”
“Me too,” said Smilesburger. “The same exactly.”
“You are here,” I said to Smilesburger, “to give me a hundred other ideas, just as good and just as true to life. You can find me a story even more wonderful than this one. Together we can come up with something even more exciting and interesting for my readers than what happened to have happened that weekend in Athens. Only I don’t want something else. Is that clear?”
“Of course you don’t. This is the richest material you have ever gotten firsthand. You couldn’t be clearer or more disagreeable.”
“Good,” I said. “I went where I went, did what I did, met whom I met, saw what I saw, learned what I learned — and nothing that occurred in Athens, absolutely nothing, is interchangeable with something else. The implications of these events are intrinsic to these events and to none other.”
“Makes sense.”
“I didn’t go looking for this job. This job came looking for me, and with a vengeance. I have adhered to every condition agreed on between us, including sending a copy of the manuscript to you well before publication. In fact, you’re the first person to have read it. Nothing was forcing me to do this. I am back in America. I’m no longer recovering from that Halcion madness. This is the fourth book I’ve written since then. I’m myself again, solidly back on my own ground. Yet I did do it: you asked to see it, and you’ve seen it.”
“And it was a good idea to show it. Better me now than someone less well disposed to you later.”
“Yes? What are you trying to tell me? Will the Mossad put a contract out on me the way the Ayatollah did with Rushdie?”
“I can only tell you that this last chapter will not go unnoticed.”
“Well, if anyone should come complaining to me, I’ll direct them to your garden in the Negev.”
“It won’t help. They’ll assume that, no matter what ‘enticement’ I offered back then, no matter how irresistible an adventure it may be for you to write about and to crow about, you should know by now how detrimental your publishing this could be to the interests of the state. They’ll maintain that confidence was placed in your loyalty and that with this chapter you have betrayed that confidence.”
“I am not now, nor was I ever, an employee of yours.”
“Theirs.”
“I was offered no compensation, and I asked for none.”
“No more or less than Jews all around the world who volunteer their services where their expertise can make a difference. Diaspora Jews constitute a pool of foreign nationals such as no other intelligence agency in the world can call on for loyal service. This is an immeasurable asset. The security demands of this tiny state are so great that, without these Jews to help, it would be in a very bad way. People who do work of the kind you did find compensation not in financial payment and not in exploiting their knowledge elsewhere for personal gain but in fostering the security and welfare of the Jewish state. They find their compensation,
“Well, I didn’t see it that way then and I don’t now.”
Here our food arrived, and for the next few minutes, as we began to eat, Smilesburger pedantically discussed the ingredients of his late beloved mother’s chopped herring with the young Indian waiter: her proportion of herring to vinegar, vinegar to sugar, chopped egg to chopped onion, etc. “This meets the highest specifications for chopped herring,” he told him. To me he said, “You didn’t give me a bum steer.”
“Why would I?”
“Because I don’t think you’ve come to like me as much as I’ve come to like you.”
“I probably have,” I replied. “As much exactly.”
“At what point in the life of a negative cynic does this yearning for the flavors of innocent childhood reassert itself? And may I tell the joke, now that the sugared herring is running in your blood? A man comes into a Jewish restaurant like this one. He sits at a table and picks up the menu and he looks it over and decides what he’s going to eat and when he looks up again there is the waiter and he’s Chinese. The waiter says,
