Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

Strulovitch felt the surge of dark forgotten powers. The uncanny…If only.

“Shall I go on with the joke?” Shylock said.

Strulovitch remembered his manners. “Yes, please. G rr eenberg’s at the doctor’s…”

“ ‘G rr eenberg,’ says the doctor, ‘you’re going to have to stop masturbating.’ ‘Stop masturbating!’ exclaims G rr eenberg, ‘Vy is that?’ ‘In order,’ says the doctor, ‘that I can examine you.’ ”

Strulovitch laughed. It was one of his favourite jokes but he wouldn’t have got it if he hadn’t known it already. He had never heard it told so badly. Job could have told it better. Maybe that was Shylock’s point. Telling it how they told it. He knew Shylock to be a man of savage humour. The fact of his never smiling was the irrefragable proof of that. Perhaps he was one of those who had to write his own material. And write it out of extremity — at the edge, or in the crevices. No wonder people couldn’t always tell for sure when he was jesting and when he wasn’t.

“I love that joke,” Strulovitch told him, remembering the consternation it had caused Ophelia-Jane.

“You should have stopped me if you knew it.”

“I wouldn’t have stopped you for the world. But now you tell me something — why are there are so many stories about Jews masturbating? Onan, Leopold Bloom, your Alexander Portnoy, G rr eenberg. Is that how Gentiles see us? Or is it how we see ourselves?”

He expected Shylock to take his time replying. But a scholar who had written a neglected paper on the subject could not have been more prompt with his reply. “Both,” he said. “After so many years of being told what Gentiles see when they look at us it’s hardly a surprise that we end up seeing something similar. That’s how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor. If that’s how I look, that’s what I must be .”

“Well, if they must see us as something depraved it accords better with our own instinct for self-mockery that they see us as masturbators. Better that than misers.”

“There’s no difference. Jews hunched over their private parts, Jews hunched over their money. In the eyes of Gentiles it’s one vast fevered panorama of degenerate self-interest. We spend as we hoard, exclusively, keeping our sperm and money out of general circulation. They claim their hatred of us has economic justification but if you ask me the genitalia are the root of it. They haven’t been able to draw their imaginations from us sexually for centuries. You know they used to believe we bled like women, then they accused us of castrating Christian children. Even just thinking about us dirtied their minds. It’s a mix of ignorance and dread that goes back to circumcision. If we would do that to ourselves, what might we not do to them?”

A gentle knock at the living-room door roused Strulovitch from the dark trance of thought into which these words had plunged him. It was his wife’s night-time carer. Could Mr. Strulovitch spare a minute? Mrs. Strulovitch was asking for him.

“My wife wants me,” he said, rising. He had intended the subject of his ailing wife to go largely unspoken between them. Sympathy was not what he was looking for. And Shylock, anyway, did not strike him as the man to give it. “I’ll be back presently,” he said, making everything sound as ordinary as possible.

But his heart was thumping. Could Kay have compounded all that was not ordinary about the day by actually calling for him by name?

The answer to that was no. The carer was worried about Kay, that was all. She had heard noises in the house and seemed more than usually distressed. But by the time Strulovitch got to her she was asleep in her chair, her head lolling to one side, no word for Strulovitch on her nerveless lips. He straightened her up, kissed her brow, and went downstairs again. He wondered whether Shylock would still be there. Or whether he had ever been there at all.

“So where were we?” he asked, finding him as he’d left him, folded tight in his chair, all light excluded from his face.

Shylock shrugged.

Did that mean he was tiring? Strulovitch would have sat with him, swirling liquid in his glass, enjoying the dark quiet, but the longer he didn’t speak the more he thought about Kay.

“And now?” he asked, after as prolonged a silence as he could bear.

“And now what do the Gentiles think? I’d be surprised if they’re not thinking what they’ve always thought. Certainly their minds are no cleaner.”

“No, I meant what now for you?”

“Me personally?”

Strulovitch decided to risk the other’s wrath. He had invited Shylock into his stricken home. Now Shylock had to invite Strulovitch into his.

“Yes, you personally.”

Shylock rubbed his face with his hands. Would it still be there when he took his hands away? His fingers, Strulovitch noted, were coated with a dark fur. Is he closer to the apes than I am, he wondered.

“For me personally, ” Shylock said, charging the word with all its long history of insolence and obloquy, “there is no now. I live when I lived. I have told you: where the story stopped, I stop. But sometimes, for the hellish pleasure of it, I roll the exit line of another dupe of fools around my tongue. I hanker, as you will easily imagine, for a resounding exit line.”

Strulovitch made as though to rack his brain for the exit line in question. But it was late for tests.

“ I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you, ” Shylock said impatiently. How long did Strulovitch need? “I have always had a soft spot for Puritans,” he explained. “Which I suppose is not surprising since they have a soft spot for us. We return each other’s compliments. I like the idea that I, a heartless Jew, should be fortified in my unforgivingness by a Puritan.”

“I’m surprised,” Strulovitch said, displeased to have been found wanting, “that you take hellish pleasure in those words. They sound feeble to me, like an old man wagging his finger at small children.”

“That’s because you know they can’t be acted upon. Malvolio, too, stops where the story stopped. He won’t ever enjoy that revenge. But the intention echoes onwards through time. He has finally tasted blood. Until now he has only played at being a moralist, his Puritanism the stuff of pantomime. We are all the stuff of pantomime until we run up against reality. Now he knows whereof the little jesting world of men and women is really made.”

For a man who reined in his agitation, Shylock had grown excited. Deep grooves appeared, like brackets — bracketing all that had not been and never would be said — about his sunken eyes.

Strulovitch looked at him warily. “You aren’t, I hope, intending violence.”

“That would depend…”

“On what?”

“Your definition of violence.”

Plurabelle — who wanted to be loved for herself, that’s to say for what she was rather than what she had, but who was as hard to distinguish from what she had as people generally are, and she more so than most because it was what she had that gave her the confidence and the leisure to be who she was — thus vexed and double-vexed, Plurabelle could not stop asking Barney to reaffirm his valuation of her. Once you have presented yourself as a prize wrapped up in an enigma it is difficult not to want to go on being guessed at and bid for. On her television show blindfolded contestants sipped dainty bits from a saucer, like cats, and hoped to prefer what she’d prepared. That way they’d win her company for the evening, and who could say what else? Back in the real-time world of the Golden Triangle, Barney had to second-guess which dress she liked herself in most that day, which earrings were the best accompaniment to what she had chosen to wear, which hotel in which country she wanted to be taken to on her birthday, whether she wanted her lobster cracked or in the shell, thermidor or Newburg, whether she wanted sex straightforward or perverse, with the lights on or off, with the windows open or closed.