Operation Shylock

Pipik?”

“And if I had a ready answer, could I in good conscience tell it to a writer with a mouth like yours? Accept my explanation and be done with Pipik, please. Pipik is not the product of Zionism. Pipik is not even the product of Diasporism. Pipik is the product of perhaps the most powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is Pipikism, the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything — farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything — our suffering as Jews not excluded. Enough about Pipik. I’m suggesting to you only how to give coherence to what you tell the newspapers. Keep it simple, they’re only journalists. ‘No exceptions, fellas: hypothetical book from beginning to end.’”

“George Ziad included.”

“George you don’t have to worry about. Didn’t his wife write to you? I would have thought, since you were such friends. … Don’t you know? Then I have to shock you. Your PLO handler is dead.”

“Is this so? Is this fact?”

“A horrible fact. Murdered in Ramallah. He was with his son. Five times he was stabbed by masked men. They didn’t touch the boy. About a year ago. Michael and his mother are living again in Boston.”

Free at last in Boston — and now never to be free — of fealty to the father’s quest. One more accursed son. All the wasted passion that will now be Michael’s dilemma for life! “But why?” I asked. “Murdered for what reason?”

“The Israelis say murdered as a collaborator by Palestinians. They murder one another like this every day. The Palestinians say murdered by Israelis — because Israelis are murderers.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say everything. I say maybe he was a collaborator who was murdered for the Israelis by Palestinians who are also collaborators — and then maybe not. To you who have written this book, I say I don’t know. I say the permutations are infinite in a situation like ours, where the object is to create an atmosphere in which no Arab can feel secure as to who is his enemy and who is his friend. Nothing is secure. This is the message to the Arab population in the territories. Of what is going on all around them, they should know very little and get everything wrong. And they do know very little and they do get everything wrong. And if this is the case with those who live there, then it follows that for someone like you, who lives here, you know even less and get even more wrong. That’s why to describe your book, laid in Jerusalem, as a figment of your imagination might not be as misleading as you fear. It might be altogether accurate to call the entire five hundred and forty-seven pages hypothetical formulation. You think I’m such a deceiver, so let me now be cruelly blunt about his book to a writer whose work I otherwise admire. I am not qualified to judge writing in English, though the writing strikes me as excellent. But as for the content — well, in all candor, I read it and I laughed, and not only when I was supposed to. This is not a report of what happened, because, very simply, you haven’t the slightest idea of what happened. You grasp almost nothing of the objective reality. Its meaning evades you completely. I cannot imagine a more innocent version of what was going on and what it signified. I won’t go so far as to say that this is the reality as a ten-year-old might understand it. I prefer to think of it as subjectivism at its most extreme, a vision of things so specific to the mind of the observer that to publish it as anything other than fiction would be the biggest lie of all. Call it an artistic creation and you will only be calling it what it more or less is anyway.”

We had finished eating a good twenty minutes earlier and the waiter had removed all the dishes except our coffee cups, which he’d already been back to refill several times. I had till then been oblivious to everything but the conversation and only now saw that customers were beginning to drift in for lunch and that among them were my friend Ted Solotaroff and his son Ivan, who were at a table up by the window and hadn’t yet noticed me. Of course I’d known that I wasn’t meeting Smilesburger in the subterranean parking garage where Woodward and Bernstein used to go to commune with Deep Throat, but still, at the sudden sight of someone here I knew, my heart thumped and I felt like a married man who, spotted at a restaurant in ardent conversation with an illicit lover, quickly begins to calculate how best to introduce her.

“Your contradictions,” I said softly to Smilesburger, “don’t add up to a convincing argument, but then, with me, you don’t believe you need any argument. You’re counting on my secret vice to prevail. The rest is an entertainment, amusing rhetoric, words as bamboozlement, your technique here as it was there. Do you even bother to keep track of your barrage? On the one hand, with this book — the whole of it now, not merely the final chapter — I am, in your certifiably unparanoid view, serving up to the enemy information that could jeopardize the security of your agents and their contacts, information that, from the sound of it, could lay the state of Israel open to God only knows what kind of disaster and compromise the welfare and security of the Jewish people for centuries to come. On the other hand, the book presents such a warped and ignorant misrepresentation of objective reality that to save my literary reputation and protect myself against the ridicule of all the clear-eyed empiricists, or from punishments that you intimate might be far, far worse, I ought to recognize this thing for what it is and publish Operation Shylock as — as what? Subtitled ‘A Fable’?”

“Excellent idea. A subjectivist fable. That solves everything.”

“Except the problem of accuracy.”

“But how could you know that?”

“You mean chained to the wall of my subjectivity and seeing only my shadow? Look, this is all nonsense.” I raised my arm to signal to the waiter for our check and unintentionally caught Ivan Solotaroff’s eye as well. I’d known Ivan since he was an infant back in Chicago in the mid-fifties, when the late George Ziad was there studying Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard and Ivan’s father and I were bristling graduate students teaching freshman composition together at the university. Ivan waved back, pointed out to Ted where I was sitting, and Ted turned and gave a shrug that indicated there could be no place on earth more appropriate than here for us to have run into each other after all our months of trying in vain to arrange to get together for a meal. I realized then the unequivocal way in which to introduce Smilesburger, and this made my heart thump again, only now in triumph.

“Let’s cut it short,” I said to Smilesburger when the check was placed on the table. “I cannot know things-in- themselves, but you can. I cannot transcend myself, but you can. I cannot exist apart from myself, but you can. I know nothing beyond my own existence and my own ideas, my mind determines entirely how reality appears to me, but for you the mind works differently. You know the world as it really is, and I know it only as it appears. Your argument is kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and is too absurd even to oppose.”

“You refuse absolutely.”

“Of course I do.”

“You’ll neither describe your book as what it is not nor censor out what they’re sure not to like.”

“How could I?”

“And if I were to rise above kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and invoke the wisdom of the Chofetz Chaim? ‘Grant me that I should say nothing unnecessary. …’ Would I be wasting my breath if, as a final plea, I reminded you of the laws of loshon hora?”

“It would not even help to quote Scripture.”

“Everything must be undertaken alone, out of personal conviction. You’re that sure of yourself. You’re that convinced that only you are right.”

“On this matter? Why not?”

“And the consequences of proceeding uncompromisingly, independent of every judgment but your own — to these consequences you are indifferent?”

“Don’t I have to be?”

“Well,” he said, while I snapped up the check before he could take it and compromisingly charge breakfast to the Mossad, “then that’s that. Too bad.”

Here he turned to the crutches that were balanced behind him on the coatrack. I came around to assist him to his feet, but he was already standing. The disappointment in his face, when his eyes engaged mine, looked as though it couldn’t possibly have been manufactured to deceive. And must there not be a point, even in him, where manipulation stops? It caused a soundless but not inconsiderable emotional upheaval in me to think that he might actually have shed his disguises and come here out of a genuine concern for my welfare, determined to spare me