Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“I can read what you’re thinking,” Shylock said. “All very well drawing a line under where we’ve been, but how do you draw a line under where your daughter wants to go? The answer is you can’t.”

Both men paused and looked down into the cold grey sludge they’d been sploshing through. They could have been back in the cemetery, hanging their heads in sorrow over the graves that contained people they loved.

They resumed a normal speed for a minute or two, until Shylock slowed them down again. “You know,” he said, as though they’d been discussing such things for weeks, and only this minute had a new thought come to him, “it wasn’t just to spite me that Jessica bought the monkey…” They were at a standstill now, close to the chapel with its Star of David over the door. It was in here that the young rabbi officiating at Strulovitch’s mother’s burial had mispronounced her name and Strulovitch had vowed never again to attend an event, solemn or light, at which a rabbi officiated.

“So why did she buy the monkey?”

“Excuse me, we wash our hands here,” Shylock said. Strulovitch stood his ground, perhaps a little too obdurately. Shylock went over to the washbasins at the rear of the building and poured water over his hands from a tin cup. Strulovitch knew the meaning of the custom. With water did you wash away the foul impurities of death. It made sense whether you were religious or not. But to Strulovitch it still smacked of fanaticism.

He had the grace to laugh at himself — Strulovitch the moderate.

Shylock picked up the conversation where they’d left it. “You were asking me why Jessica bought the monkey…”

“Yes.”

“To disavow the Jew in herself. I do well not to say ‘cursed be her name.’ ”

You are dead to me.

Dead at my foot.

“A lost daughter doesn’t have to be a dead daughter,” Strulovitch said. Wasn’t he a lost son who’d been found again?

Shylock dug his fingers into Strulovitch’s arm. “May you never come to understand the wrongness of those words. The loss I suffered I wouldn’t wish on my enemies.”

Strulovitch rode the rebuke. But he knew Shylock was lying. He would wish such a loss on his enemies.

He felt he’d joined his dad’s old club. The Rot-in-Hell Jewish Fathers’ Society. Much as he welcomed and was flattered by Shylock’s companionship, he wondered how much of this naked wrathfulness he could take. Back in the days when she had words, Kay would accuse him of bringing ancient theological disputation into the house. Ironical that he wanted to say to Shylock what she had said to him. Lighten up, Shylock.

—

They walked the rest of the short distance to Strulovitch’s hearse-like black Mercedes in silence. “Ah! I’m surprised,” Shylock commented when he saw it.

A black chauffeur was holding the door open for them. Strulovitch handed him Shylock’s Glyndebourne stool. “In the boot, Brendan,” he said.

To Shylock he said, “Surprised by what? That I have a driver?”

“That you have a German car.”

“I thought you believe we have to draw a line.”

“That’s another sort of line.”

“A line’s a line. We must let bygones be bygones.”

“I’m surprised you believe that.”

“I don’t.”

—

And so, sitting side by side in the back seat of the unexpected Mercedes, they’d dropped into the usual pattern of conversation between fathers on the pains of bringing up a family, especially fathers on whom the burden of bringing up a daughter had exclusively fallen.

“This may surprise you,” Shylock said, “but I half expect to hear from my too dear daughter every hour. I buried her in my heart the day she left, but a daughter doesn’t stay buried. Even a daughter that steals her father’s most precious possession…apart, that is, from herself.”

Strulovitch felt it behoved him not to present himself too alacritously as an equal in distress. Beatrice was giving him trouble but she hadn’t yet bunked off through a window with a thieving lout. “You haven’t heard anything so far then?” was the best he could think of saying.

Then he heard how ludicrous it sounded. So far !

“I say I half expect,” Shylock went on, staring beyond him as he spoke, looking but not looking at the Cheshire countryside, “but I confess there’s no volition in it. That’s simply a description of the state I’ve been left in. I am in expectation because that’s what follows when nothing does. But hope is idle because the story ends where the story ends. She could be on her way to me today, she could be knocking at my door this hour, but that’s a disallowable supposition. Today is always yesterday. There’s no Act Six. For me there wasn’t even an Act Five. But at least no resolution means no final rejection. Anything could be. There’s no knowing. Wounding doubt wounds not as fatally as wounding certainty. I am toyed with but I breathe.”

“So there is no looking forward?”

“None.”

“Are you telling me you don’t ever wonder how she is?”

“I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t wonder that. Some days I think I only want her to be happy. Some days I don’t. But it’s vain. There is no ‘is.’ Her story, too, stopped when it stopped. She and the vile layabout she ran off with — and for all I know their monkey — inherit my wealth, but they won’t ever see it. That’s some consolation. But I can’t help myself. I imagine her remorse. I am ashamed to say I pray for her to suffer agonies of remorse. I picture it. I see her ravaged face. But that’s to ask for something that can’t eventuate — might never have been, and certainly won’t ever be now.”

Strulovitch shook his head. “There must have been the seeds of remorse in her actions even as she took them. Who can set out on any journey without at the same time wishing they’d stayed at home? She must at times have looked back longingly.”

“Those are Old Testament misgivings.”

“Well who’s to say Jessica didn’t give in to them the minute she left the house?”

“The minute she left the house she bought a monkey.”

“That’s a sort of looking back.”

“Yes, but not a looking back to me. The monkey once and for all made her not my daughter. She found living in a Jewish house something worse than prison. But yes, yes, it’s always possible she didn’t like what she had become when she became it and experienced, if not remorse exactly, then something like the regret you speak of, if only for her dear mother’s sake. But I mustn’t give in to fancy. She grew to hate me and I dare say her mother too for dying. It’s crossed my mind to wonder whether the manner of her leaving was meant to mimic the manner of her mother’s — for she died abruptly, my beloved Leah. As was done to Jessica, in her perception, so Jessica did. Certainly the manner in which she eloped was cruel to the highest degree. Cruel, disdainful and blasphemous. Had she wished to show me how badly she’d fared without a mother, or a father who could better play the mother — how inconsiderate she’d grown under my tutelage and example, how brutal even — she could not have made a better job of it. My hope now is that the ill treatment she’s receiving makes her see things differently, though I will never know if it does or doesn’t. But this is not what a father should want — for his daughter to suffer so that she should understand how much suffering she has caused. I should wish her happiness, should I not?”

“You should. But now you are asking too much of yourself. No father can completely want his daughter to be happy.”

Shylock sucked air in through his teeth. “That’s harsh philosophy.”

“No, it’s harsh psychology.”