Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

My whole life, she thought, has been made a misery by him. She tried to remember a time when he hadn’t pursued her, dragged her out of parties, punched her boyfriends, wiped the lipstick off her face with the back of his hand, pulled her down the street by her hair while clutching at his heart, as though to threaten her with cardiac arrest. Look what you’re doing to me. You’re killing me. Though it was he — wasn’t it? — who was killing her.

Was it any surprise she laughed?

Once, she remembered, he threw her phone into a lake. The boy who’d rung her was talking as it drowned. That must have been two years ago. Was he still telling her how he couldn’t wait to see her again, still guggling his appreciation of her breasts under water?

Once, her father jumped up and down on her laptop. Once, he kicked down the bathroom door and smashed his fist into her mirror. Once, he threatened to put out a contract on a boy she was seeing. She was just fourteen at the time. The boy a year older. Once he jumped on to the bonnet of an older boyfriend’s car. Just keep driving, Beatrice had said, he’s got no sense of balance, he’ll fall off in the end. Once, he burst into a hotel room pretending he had a pistol in his pocket.

How could any other drama in her life compete with that? How could Gratan engross her to the degree her father had?

To show her how much he loved her — was that what it had all been about? To stop her falling in love with someone else?

Was it any surprise she shed a tear again?

The mad thing was — the maddest thing of all — it had worked. She couldn’t fall in love with anyone else.

She tried to concentrate the tears upon her mother, but she could think only of her father.

Why hadn’t he come after her?

He always came after her, so why not this time — the one time it mattered. If it mattered.

Had he given up on her? She had heard the story of how his father, her grandfather, had buried him on the eve of his marriage to a Gentile. Had he now decided to bury her? You marry a man with a penis like mine or I bury you!

Was it any surprise she laughed?

Laugh over it or cry over it, such a commandment could mean only one thing: he loved her.

She put an unexpected question to herself with her fifth Ladurée macaron: were Gratan to agree to his demand would her father want the operation to be a success or would he prefer that Gratan bled to death?

To go forward a bit:

D’Anton was unable to believe his ears. “He said that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“He said it.”

“In so many words?”

“I didn’t count the words.”

“He said, ‘Get yourself circumcised and you can have my daughter’? He definitely said that?”

“He said, ‘Get yourself circumcised and we can talk again. Until then there is no more to say.’ ”

“And you’re sure he wasn’t being figurative? He didn’t say anything about circumcision of the heart?”

“What’s circumcision of the heart?”

“Once upon a time, when this was a Christian country, a young man of your class would have gone to Sunday school and been taught about St. Paul. We can be better Christians, St. Paul argued, by understanding circumcision metaphorically, not following the letter of the law, but the spirit. We can be circumcised in the heart. Do you understand that?”

Gratan Howsome first nodded his head, then shook it. Whatever D’Anton was talking about, it didn’t apply in this instance. “Why,” he said, “would he want me to be a better Christian? I’m already too much of a Christian for him. He wants me to be a better Jew…Well, any Jew.”

“That’s what I mean. A Jew in the heart. Are you sure he wasn’t asking you to be that?”

“There was no mention of circumcising my heart. I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to that.”

“So are you telling me you have agreed to something?”

“I said I would talk it over with Beatrice.”

“ Beatrice !”

Howsome slapped the side of his head. The fool I am! Two minutes with D’Anton and he’d blurt out anything. He wondered if he could invent another Beatrice, but saw that that would only make things worse.

“Yes, Beatrice.”

“Plury’s Beatrice?”

In for a penny, Howsome thought. “Well she’s my Beatrice now. You have to understand, D’Anton, I’m in love with her.”

“Since when?”

“Since I first saw her.”

“Howsome, she’s a child!”

“That’s what her father said.”

“Well don’t you think he has a point. You’re twice her age.”

“So you think I should agree to let them castrate me?”

“I think you should agree to leave the girl alone.”

“It’s too late for that. She’s run away with me. She’s at Plury’s now, waiting.”

“Plury knows?”

“Yes. She rang to congratulate us. She left us a bottle of champagne.”

“Well I’d give you almost anything, as you know, but I wouldn’t give you champagne for this. Have you decided what you’ll do if the father comes after you?”

“That’s what I’ve come to you to ask. What should I do?”

“Give the girl back.”

“I’ve told you, I can’t. We love each other.”

“And how does she feel about her father’s demands? Does she want you to agree to them?”

“She thinks he’s a fucking maniac. She hates him and his Jew money and his Jew foundation.”

“Foundation! What foundation?”

“I don’t know, D’Anton. The Whatsitcalled Foundation. The FuckedifIknow Foundation. The Strulovitch Foundation, I suppose. Don’t ask me.”

D’Anton threw back the contents of his glass and let his eyes bulge.

“Did you say Strulovitch?”

“I think that’s how you pronounce it. I don’t think I’m obliged to know a man’s name just because I’ve run off with his daughter.”

D’Anton released his mind so that it might wander where it would. Beatrice Strulovitch…Beatrice Strulovitch…Had he known that? Had he known that was her name when he first recommended her to Plury, as an innocent diversion for Howsome, whose weakness for Jewesses so amused them both? Was he, in ways that were not clear to himself, a party to this mess? Had he connived at it, knowing or half knowing who Beatrice was?

Whatever he’d intended, he hadn’t intended that Gratan would fall in love with the girl and either lose his foreskin or elope with her.

Unless he had…Unless, well unless breaking the father’s heart had always been what he intended, no matter who else suffered along the way.

He raked through the history of his rancid relations with the art collector, benefactor, upstart, sore loser, moneybags, bloodsucker and vampire, Simon Strulovitch. Was this — for him — its lowest moment or its highest?

Unable to decide whether Gratan Howsome’s bombshell served his cause or impeded it, unable at this moment to remember what that cause was, he ordered more brandy.

—

When Gratan finally returned he found Beatrice stripped naked, dead upon the floor.

He let out a cry so fearsome that Beatrice had no choice but to open her eyes and tell him she was acting out the space he’d left when he deserted her.

“How can you act a space?” he wanted to know.

“In such a night as this how could you have deserted me?” she asked.

But he was too transfixed by the sight of her breasts to answer.

The man has no feeling for art, Beatrice thought, yielding herself reluctantly to him.

What chance that in two locations in the Golden Triangle, no more than a mile or so apart, two conversations about St. Paul’s views on circumcision of the heart should have been taking place at the very same hour?