Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

When she went.

The silence roared in his ears.

—

“She’s a beautiful girl,” Shylock said after they heard the front door slam. “Lovely.”

“Beautiful, yes,” Strulovitch said. He was still angry with his guest. Still felt intruded on. And Shylock seemed to know and enjoy it. “Lovely I’m not so sure about.”

“I can only speak for her appearance. For the impression she gives.”

“Yes. And what’s not lovely about her is what’s not lovely about all of them. She has natural discernment but it’s not strong enough to overcome the culture she’s been born into.”

“You are in danger of sounding like an old man.”

“Weren’t you? Isn’t a father by definition an old man? You locked your doors on yours.”

“I had to. I’d lost one woman. I didn’t want to lose a second.”

“That’s called being an old man.”

“I knew the danger she was in.”

“From shallow foppery and drumbeats? How great a danger was that, really? Don’t we create the thing we fear by hyperbolising it? You kept a sober house, but a sober house is no place for a young girl.”

“And are you telling me you let yours run wild?”

“I can’t stop her.”

“But you try.”

“I try. I have a sacred obligation to try.”

“That was all I was doing.”

“And we both failed,”

“You haven’t failed yet.”

Strulovitch looked long into his guest’s fierce, melancholy eyes. His own were undistinguished, a pearly, uncertain grey, the colour of the North Sea on a blustery day. Shylock’s were deep ponds of pitted umber, like old oil paint that had somehow — not by restoration, more by inadvertent rubbing — regained its sheen. They were dark with that Rembrandtian darkness that holds light. Ironic that when Strulovitch looked into them he felt as though he were in the crypt of a church. We are not the slightest bit alike, he thought, except in what we feel for our daughters. So what was it Gentiles saw that told them they were both Jews?

Shylock knew, from the intensity of Strulovitch’s scrutiny, what he was thinking. “No we aren’t remotely alike,” he said. “Not in appearance nor in the manner we have lived our lives. You don’t keep a kosher house, you don’t attend synagogue and I’m prepared to wager you don’t speak a word of Hebrew. So what does it mean to say we are both Jewish?”

“I’m more interested in what it means to them . What do they see that unites us?”

“Something older than themselves,” he said.

“In you, maybe…I don’t intend that unkindly.”

“I know how you intend it. But in you too. It isn’t wear and tear. It’s an inability to be indifferent. You might think you don’t believe but you’re still listening to ancient injunction.”

“That makes me no different from a Muslim or a Christian.”

“Yes it does. Christians are so anxious to accommodate to the modern they have stopped listening. They sing carols and call it faith. Before long there will be none of them left, the long interregnum will have come to an end and we’ll be back with just pagans and Jews.”

“And Muslims.”

“Yes, and Muslims, but they are out on their own, in an argument with everybody but themselves. Look at you — you are riven. Islam does not encourage the schizophrenia you live by. When a Muslim listens to ancient injunction he attends with the whole of himself and finds a sort of peace in it.”

“Peace? Iraq! Syria! Afghanistan!”

“Stop! You don’t have to name every failed country in the Middle East. I’m talking about an inner conviction of peace, however we judge the political consequences. We Jews are more self-suspicious, always wondering if it’s time to defect but knowing there’s nothing we could finally bear to defect to.”

“Not true of my daughter. She is the soul of defection.”

Shylock understood this was his cue to invite intimacy. “So this is the showdown you said you were heading for…”

For answer, Strulovitch made more coffee. He had hoped to be complimented on it but Shylock was not free with compliments. “She wants me,” Strulovitch finally confided, “to give her a date when she can bring her new boyfriend round for me to vet.”

“To vet? You get to examine him like a dog?”

“I don’t think that’s on offer. She didn’t in fact say ‘vet,’ she said ‘meet.’ I’m putting the best interpretation on it. If she wants me to meet him it means she’s serious. I’ve been fearing this hour.”

“You’re lucky she values your opinion.”

“Lucky! She’s sixteen for Christ’s sake! My opinion, as you call it, should be law.”

“She’s old enough to question law. It’s not every daughter who cares what her father thinks.”

“She doesn’t. It’s her mother she’s feeling guilty about. She believes that so long as she doesn’t alienate me she is honouring her.”

Shylock cleared his throat. “Why then are you so anxious?”

Strulovitch showed him all his ten fingers. If he were to count the reasons for his anxiety they would both be here till Judgement Day.

But he had to begin somewhere. “Here’s the ridiculous thing,” he said. “The last time she brought someone round I was expecting an uncombed boy in trainers and nose rings and the politics of…well, an uncombed boy in trainers and nose rings. He turned out to be a tutor whose politics were no better but at least he was clean.”

“And ‘not’…?”

“Of course ‘not,’ Beatrice only does ‘nots.’ I say he was clean. I should have said he was too clean. When he called me Mr. Strulovitch he gargled the word. It was as though he were washing his mouth out. The joke is that while I’m plotting ways to put Beatrice off him, she gets rid of him herself…”

“…and finds someone worse…”

“Far worse. Here I’ve been, steeling myself against the next over-principled, money-hating, ISIS-backing Judaeo-phobe with an MA in fine art she’s going to bring back from college and she hits on someone who’s probably never opened a book and certainly never heard of Noam Chomsky — a hyper-possessive uneducated uber-goy from round the corner. I’ve no idea how or where she met him. At a wrestling match, is my guess, or on the dodgems. But it’s my doing. I was looking for danger in the wrong place. If I hadn’t frightened her off Jewish boys by telling her she had to find one she might have met a nice quiet embroiderer of skullcaps.”

“She was never going to satisfy you. What if your embroiderer of skullcaps had been a woman?”

“I wouldn’t have minded. I don’t hanker for grandchildren.”

“You would have found something not quite right about her.”

“Maybe. But there’s something not quite right and then there’s something in every way wrong.”

“How serious is it?”

“Very, or she wouldn’t be bringing him over. She wants my blessing. That’s serious.”

“So they’ve known each other a long time.”

“She hasn’t been alive a long time. But too long for comfort. She might be sixteen now, but how old was she when she met him? And how far has it gone?”

“You could ask her.”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“I assume you’ve looked on her phone.”

“And on her computer. But it isn’t easy. She is guarded with more passwords than a bank vault. And I daren’t leave any trace I’ve been there. Otherwise”—he made as though to cut his throat—“I’m a dead man.”

“It could be that she isn’t hiding anything. You might find you like him.”

“It doesn’t matter whether or not I like him. He’s beyond the pale for all the obvious reasons. And then for several more.”