Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

It was enough to make a visitor from another planet believe he’d dropped in on a Christian country.

Perhaps to describe what passed between D’Anton and his sentimental beneficiary Gratan Howsome as a “conversation” is an exaggeration. What passed between Strulovitch and Shylock ditto. Though it wasn’t unevenness in the matter of comprehension that made this latter conversation not really a conversation at all. Rather it was that neither man spoke what he was thinking, though each knew the other was thinking it. A silent conversation, then. Or at least a conversation in which what was conversed was not what the conversation was actually about.

Not finding Beatrice waiting for him when he got back from the restaurant, Strulovitch fell into a despondency that even D’Anton might have envied. Whatever Howsome had been doing out on his own, it didn’t signify what he’d hoped it signified. He slumped into a chair with a bottle of whisky and pointed Shylock to the drinks cabinet. “Get drunk with me, please,” he said.

“I’m not able to get drunk,” Shylock said. “I was never drunk then so I can never be drunk now. It’s one of the disadvantages.”

“Then just have the odd one and sit with me.”

Shylock did as was requested of him.

They sat, looking at one another’s extended feet, for upwards of an hour. Then Shylock asked if he could ask something.

“You’ve just asked it.”

“Something else. The bris …”

“The bris !”

“The circumcision ritual.”

“I know what a fucking bris is. I thought that word applied only to eight-day-old babies.”

“And the footballer is what age again?”

Strulovitch laughed an ill-natured laugh. He would miss Shylock when he went. He needed a black-hearted friend. Jews had grown so careful now. If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? No, we shall not. We shall take it on the chin and be grateful. Unless we’re in Judea and Samaria, where we’re accused of being Nazis. Cowards or Nazis — which was it to be? The Rialto was not Samaria, but it too had bred a tougher Jew, Strulovitch thought. If he had, on pain of death, to be a Jew in Samaria, the Rialto or the Golden Triangle, he wouldn’t have chosen the Golden Triangle.

Then he remembered that Shylock had not even met Gratan. “Are you psychic as well as everything else?” he asked.

“A little,” Shylock said. “I enjoy a broad overview. But I also listen to what you tell me. And I did manage to grab a look at him as he was leaving the restaurant. Cavernicolo .”

Strulovitch shook his head from side to side as though wanting to rid his brain of all memory of that savage exchange of glances. Why hadn’t he gone over and collared him after all? “OK,” he said. “So what about the bris ?”

“Have you been having second thoughts?”

“If you’re psychic you should know.”

“I see you’re blaming me. That’s your prerogative. But you could always change the situation yourself by changing your mind. Let him off if your heart’s no longer in it. Give Beatrice your blessing.”

“She’s sixteen!”

“As you keep telling me. But she’s a very mature sixteen.”

“That’s the problem.”

“How old do you think Jessica was?”

“It has never occurred to me to wonder.”

“Precisely. Age isn’t the issue.”

“So what is?”

“Well answer me this: if you got the footballer to agree to your bloody terms—”

“Hold on a minute. Bloody terms coming from you—”

“No, you hang on a minute. I’m a guest in your house, so I ask you to forgive my rudeness. But you cannot presume to know how bloody or not I was prepared to be. You can guess, but you cannot know…”

“Do you know yourself ?”

“Leave me out of this and let’s go back to what I was saying. If you got the footballer to agree to your terms, however you describe them, would you be happy? Or do you expect him— want him — to reject them and leave your daughter alone?”

“Both. I want him to leave my daughter alone, and I want him to be circumcised, so long as…”

“So long as what? Why do you hesitate?”

“So long as I can be the one who wields the knife.”

“I think you’re fooling yourself. I don’t think you could do it. You are not capable of that.”

“Now it’s my turn to ask how you can presume to know what I am capable of. You have only known me a matter of days.”

“And how long do you suppose it takes? Mr. Strulovitch, I have known you forever.”

“Do you know how insulting that is?”

“I don’t mean it to be so. But let me ask you a question. How many brises have you been to?”

“You’re psychic. You tell me.”

“None. First, because you have no son. Second, because you scorn religious ceremony. But the real reason you haven’t seen a bris is that you know you would faint. Many men do. Many fathers, uncles, brothers. It is an upsetting sight. A knife taken to an eight-day-old baby.”

“Howsome is a mite older.”

“Which would make it even more gory. And besides, what makes you think you want to see his penis, let alone take a slice of it? How many Gentile penises have you seen? How many have you held between your fingers?”

“I don’t have to answer that.”

“But you’re confident you want to touch his?”

“I’ll wear gloves…”

“Hold it, wound it, make it bleed, hear him scream? This is all bravado and you know it. You’d run a mile.”

Strulovitch puts up a hand. “Just a minute,” he says. “Just a minute.”

Shylock puts up two hands as though he knows he might have gone too far.

“Can you tell me how,” Strulovitch wants to know, “we have proceeded from metaphor to literalism? All this begins when I ask a Gentile who’s been sleeping with my daughter to prove his good intentions. The next thing, under your tutelage, I’m slicing off his penis.”

“Welcome to my world,” says Shylock.

“So you, too, meant your pound of flesh metaphorically to begin with?”

Shylock makes his eyes droop in weary distaste. “Not that again.”

“I’d stop asking that question if you’d answer it.”

“Then ask it with more subtlety. Every transaction between Jew and Gentile is metaphorical. It’s the only way we don’t kill one another. But if you’re asking me if I meant it jestingly then yes, partly.”

“That’s not quite the same thing.”

“No, but there are degrees of earnest.”

“Then let me ask you: did you hope that Antonio would fail to meet his bond so you could harm him?”

“At the very moment of the jest, maybe not.”

“Then when?”

“As the tale unfolds, so does intention.”

“And when was that intention firm?”

“I could say after Jessica was taken from me. After Leah’s ring was stolen. After others thought they could renege on the bond for him. After they thought me manipulable. After I was backed into a corner. After I was left with no alternative…”

“So which?”

“All of them and none of them. I still don’t know how firm my intention was. The story stopped…What didn’t occur, didn’t occur. Anything further belongs to speculation not philosophy or psychology. And not to theology either.”

“But before it stopped…there was, there must have been, intention.”

“ Intention, well…What is intention? Whatever his intention, would Abraham have gone on to kill Isaac? I don’t dwell in the Old Testament any more than you do, but I have, as you might imagine, a special interest in that story.”

“The world has a special interest in that story.”