Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“I try to separate my daughter.”

“You try uncommonly hard. You have a kosher mind. So why jib at a kosher stomach?”

“I jib at making it a reason for offending or inconveniencing others.”

“Does my diet offend or inconvenience you?” Strulovitch laughed. “Me? No. Not yet it doesn’t.”

“I will be happy with toast so long as I am under your roof.”

“I suspect you never said that to the Christians you refused to eat with.”

“Do you think it would have made any difference? Do you think they would have liked me more?”

“They might have dis liked you less.”

“Are you speaking now from your own experience of being liked? If so, then tell me: are you the more loved for what you give? For your bequests and benefactions? Or does a still greater repugnancy attach to you on account of your having the wherewithal to make them?”

“Repugnancy?”

I am not you, Strulovitch thought. I don’t arouse such aversion. I am someone else living in another time.

But he almost regretted it were so.

“If the word offends you,” Shylock said, “find another. But they won’t ever forgive you in their hearts. You might as well whet your knife on the sole of your shoe.”

“Is that your advice to me?”

Shylock said nothing.

“Nonetheless,” Strulovitch continued, “you did on occasions eat with them.”

“Yes, and I live to regret having done so. But it wasn’t in order to win their affection that I went. It was to provoke them. I went to make their food taste like ratsbane in their gullets. There has to be some pleasure in life. It can’t all be work and prayer.”

Ah, Strulovitch thought, there’s a provocation I do understand.

—

Silence between them.

Shylock eating dry toast.

Strulovitch wondering if it was true he had a kosher mind.

Beatrice…

Where was Beatrice?

Strulovitch wondered if she could have overheard this conversation. And if so, what would she be thinking — a modern girl who did what she wanted, kissed whom she wanted, ate what she wanted?

“Who is this guy, Dad? What’s he doing here? Is he trying to convert you?”

And what would Shylock’s reaction be when he met her? Would the sight of a living daughter, still at home, break his heart?

“So, your daughter…” Shylock mused into his coffee, his punctuation implying he had been keeping pace with Strulovitch’s thoughts, “is she in residence?”

Among D’Anton’s more lovable qualities, in Plurabelle’s view — and he was a man made of lovable qualities — was his capacity to listen. Especially to listen to her. She had only to say she wanted a thing — for herself or for a friend — for D’Anton to seek ways to get it.

And so it was with a Jewess for the footballer Gratan Howsome. The minute she learned he had a thing for Jewish women, Plurabelle decreed that they should find him one. And Plurabelle had only to decree — especially in a matter that bore on Gratan’s felicity — for D’Anton to act.

Even as they were speaking he remembered being struck by the appearance of a student he had encountered at the Golden Triangle Academy, an institution on which, in his most princely manner, he bestowed time, delivering occasional public musings on beauty and renunciation. Her looks weren’t pleasing to him personally but, with his gift for altruistically entering into a foreign aesthetic, even a limited foreign aesthetic, he was able see how they could be pleasing to someone else — like Thai scorpion soaked in whisky or black bed linen. Something about her, perhaps even something about her family name, to which he wouldn’t have paid much attention, lodged in his memory. He smiled at Plurabelle’s good-hearted suggestion and tapped his nose. “Leave it with me,” he said, more spiritedly than Plurabelle could remember him having said anything.

—

Plurabelle liked her from the beginning, immediately forgetting she’d been procured for the footballer. “You remind me of me when I was your age,” she told the girl, in all likelihood remembering the time before she’d had work done on her face.

She loved the idea that the girl was studying with a view eventually to being a performance artist and expressed the hope that she would one day perform at one of her weekends. “We could put a stage up for you,” she said.

Modestly, the girl explained that a performance artist didn’t employ a stage. Hers was, or would be, a different sort of performance, subverting expectations of what performance space was, even violating what people normally thought of as their space. Art should go where it was not normally welcomed, she said.

Plurabelle listened to her in wonderment. So precocious. So lustrous and bejewelled, though the bejewelled part was an effect of her natural beauty only. “Well your art will always be welcome here,” she said. “My house is yours, violate it as much as you like. I will invite some important people to be violated by you.”

“I’m a long way from being ready for that, Plurabelle,” the girl had replied with a becoming blush.

“Call me Plury,” Plury said.

The girl thought the sky above her head would burst, it had so many stars in it.

It was Plurabelle’s suggestion, one evening, that they dress for dinner as boys. The girl was uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure how she’d look. But she went along with it. Plurabelle had wardrobes of dressing-up clothes.

“Suits you,” Plurabelle said scandalously, knotting a scarf around her neck and putting a cap on her head. “I feel we’re brothers.”

Gratan Howsome, who of course was at the table, was smitten at once.

Thereafter, they did this often. It always ended the same way, with Plurabelle smothering the beautiful girl with Levantine lips in rapturous kisses, laughing wildly, and calling her “My little Jewboy.”

And with Gratan burning into her with his eyes.

—

This was how, unknown to Simon Strulovitch, his daughter Beatrice became an intimate of Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine.

“She’s in residence in a manner of speaking,” Strulovitch said. “Certainly she officially resides here. But where she’s living in her head or in her heart…Look, to be brief with you, I’d say we’re heading for a showdown.”

“Your doing,” Shylock wanted to know, “or hers?”

“I’m not sure we’re separate enough for me to be able to answer that. We seem to want to bring things to a head, and then step back again, at exactly the same time. It’s what’s kept her here so far…it’s what’s kept us together.”

“Your simultaneity of rage?”

“I couldn’t have put it better. But it’s an equally simultaneous fear of that rage too. We both, I think, dread the final collision. Somewhere I believe she is sorry for me.”

“Sorry for you ?”

“Yes, since Kay took ill at least. Before that she thought I was out of my mind. Now she thinks I’m still out of my mind but doing my best for a father without aptitude or assistance.”

Shylock appeared on the point of saying something, but before their conversation could proceed further, Beatrice herself appeared, a little the worse for wear, in an indigo Stella McCartney robe which Strulovitch had bought her for her last birthday, and a towel around her head. A couple of strands of wet hair fell about her face giving her, to Strulovitch, for all the indolent, burnt butteriness of her skin and the laconic way she moved her limbs, a bewitching mermaid look. She could have come in straight from swimming with the ornamental fish. It pained him, how lovely to his eyes she was.