Howard Jacobson: Shylock Is My Name

She thought her heart would stop. “Tell me I haven’t gone and married a footler-schmootler,” she pleaded as they wandered back to their hotel. He could feel her quivering by his side, like a five-masted sailing ship. “Tell me you’re not a funny-man.”

They had reached the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, where he paused and drew her to him. He could have told her that the church was founded in 1492, the year the Jews were expelled from Spain. Kiss me to make up for it, darling, he could have said. Kiss me to show you’re sorry. And she would have done it, imagining him leaving Toledo with his entourage, praying at the Ibn Shoshan Synagogue for the last time, erect in bearing, refusing to compromise his faith. Yes, on the fine, persecuted brow of her black-bearded hidalgo husband she would have planted a lipstick star. “Go forth, my lord, be brave, and may the God of Abraham and Moses go with you. I will follow you with the children in due course.” But he told her no such thing and gave her no such opportunity. Instead, aggressively playing the fool, he breathed herrings, dumplings, borscht, into her anxious little face, the fatalism of villages unvisited by light or learning, the broken-backed superstitions of shmendricks called Moishe and Mendel. “Chaim Yankel, ribbon salesman,” he said, knowing how little such a name would amuse her, “complains to the buyer at Harrods that he never orders ribbon from him. ‘All right, all right,’ says the buyer, ‘send me sufficient ribbon to stretch from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis.’ A fortnight later a thousand boxes of ribbon turn up at Harrods’ receiving centre. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ the buyer screams at Chaim Yankel down the phone. ‘I said enough ribbon to reach from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis, and you send me a thousand miles of it.’ ‘The tip of my penis,’ says Chaim Yankel, ‘is in Poland.’ ”

She stared at him in disbelieving horror. She was shorter than he was, finely constructed, exquisite in her almost boyish delicacy. Her eyes, just a little too big for her face, were shadowy pools of hurt perplexity. Anyone would think, he thought, looking deep into them, that I have just told her someone close to us has died.

“You see,” he said relenting, “you’ve nothing to worry about, I’m not a funny-man.”

“Enough,” she pleaded.

“Enough Poland?”

“Shut up about Poland!”

“My people, Ophelia…”

“Your people are from Manchester. Isn’t that bad enough for you?”

“The joke wouldn’t work if I resituated the punchline to Manchester.”

“The joke already doesn’t work. None of your jokes work.”

“What about the one where the doctor tells Moishe Greenberg to stop masturbating?”

The Campo Santa Maria Formosa must have been witness to many sighs, but few so dolorous as Ophelia-Jane’s. “I beg you,” she said, almost folding herself in half. “On my bended knees, I implore you — no more jokes about your thing .”

She shook the word from her as though it were an importunate advance from a foul-smelling stranger.

“A foolish thing is but a toy,” was all he could think of saying.

“Then it’s time you stopped playing with it.” Strulovitch showed her his hands.

“Metaphorically, Simon!”

She wanted to cry.

He too.

She traduced him. He, playing? How could she not know by now that he had not an ounce of play in his body?

And his thing …why did she call it that?

And on their honeymoon, to make things worse.

It was a site of sorrows, not a thing. The object of countless comic stories for the reason that it wasn’t comic in the least. He quoted Beaumarchais to her. “I hasten to laugh at everything for fear I might be obliged to weep at it.”

“You? Weep! When did you last weep?”

“I am weeping now. Jews jest, Ophelia-Jane, because they are not amused.”

“Then I’d have made a good Jew,” she said, “because neither am I.”

—

When mothers see what’s been done to their baby boys the milk turns sour in their breasts. The young Strulovitch, slaloming through the world’s religions, was told this at a garden party given by a great-great-grand-nephew of Cardinal Newman in Oxford. His informant was a Baha’i psychiatrist called Eugenia Carloff whose field of specialism was circumcision trauma within the family.

“ All mothers?” he asked.

A sufficient number of them of your persuasion, she told him, to explain the way they mollycoddle their sons thereafter. They have a double guilt to expiate. Allowing blood to be spilled and withholding milk.

“Withholding milk? Are you kidding?”

Strulovitch was sure he’d been breastfed. Sometimes he feels as though he’s being breastfed still.

“All men of your persuasion think they were copiously suckled,” Eugenia Carloff told him.

“Are you telling me I wasn’t?” he said.

She looked him up and down. “I can’t say definitively, but my guess is no, actually, you weren’t.”

“Do I look undernourished?”

“Hardly.”

Deprived then?”

“Not deprived, denied.”

“It was my father who did that.”

“Ah,” Eugenia Carloff said, tapping her nose, “there is no end to what those executioners we call fathers do. First they maim their boy children then they torment them.”

Sounds right, Strulovitch thought. On the other hand, his father liked amusing him with anecdotes and rude jokes. And sometimes ruffled his hair absent-mindedly when they were out walking. He mentioned that to Eugenia Carloff who shook her head. “They never love you. Not really. They remain excluded from the eternal nativity play of guilt and recompense which they initiated, forever sidelined and angry, trying to make amends in rough affection and funny stories. This is the bitter nexus that binds them.”

“That binds the father and the son?”

“That binds men of your persuasion, the penis and the joke.”

I’m not a man of any persuasion, he wanted to tell Eugenia Carloff. I have yet to be persuaded. Instead he asked her out.

She laughed wildly. “Do you think I want to get into all that?” she said. “Do you think I’m mad?”

—

Poor Ophelia-Jane, who must have been mad, did all in her power in the few years they were together to make their marriage work. But in the end he was too much for her. He agreed with her in his heart. He upset and even frightened people. It was the acrid jeering that did it. The death-revel ironies. Did he or didn’t he belong? Was he or wasn’t he funny? His own mortal indecision for which everyone who knew him — Ophelia-Jane more than any of them — had to pay.

“You could just have loved me, you know,” she said sadly on the day they agreed to divorce. “I was willing to do anything to make you happy. You could just have enjoyed our life together.”

He enfolded her in his arms one final time and told her he was sorry. “It’s just who we are,” he said.

“ We !”

It was the last word she said before she walked out on him.

There was one small consolation. They had been virtually children when they married and they were still virtually children when they parted.

They could be done with each other and still have plenty of life left with which to start again. And they hadn’t had children of their own — the cause of all human discontent.

But the divorce itself was wormwood to them both. And in the end she couldn’t help herself. Though she believed Jews to have been grievously maligned, when the final papers were delivered to be signed she still stigmatised them, through the person of her husband, in the usual way. “Happy now you’ve extracted your pound of flesh?” she rang him to ask.