Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“I just don’t know,” he repeated.

—

At breakfast Shylock said, “I can’t help noticing that you appear dishevelled and perturbed. I take it you have had no sleep and that your emotions are in disarray.”

“You could just say I look like shit.”

“I have seen you looking better. Can I be of assistance?”

“I am on a sea of indecision,” Strulovitch said.

“Whether to return to port or steam ahead…”

“That’s what a sea of indecision means.”

“Which course would you prefer to take?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t be on a sea of indecision.”

“Not necessarily. Your indecision might be to do with practicalities rather than preferences.”

When are you leaving, Strulovitch wondered. Why did you come and when will you be going?

He didn’t mean it. He remained awed by Shylock in his soul, and still sought his friendship as an idea, but in a day-to-day way, and especially given what was happening with Beatrice, he could find his linguistic exactingness, or was it his moral exactingness, or should he just call it his all-round Jewish exactingness, exacting…

“My indecision,” he answered with a sigh, “is neither about preferences nor practicalities.” He took a long time bringing out those words, as though their length were a severe trial to him. “It’s about morality. My rights and entitlements as a Jewish father versus my daughter’s rights and entitlements as — well, I don’t know what as. Do I have a right to pursue Beatrice and drag her home? Does she have a right to go off where and with whom she chooses? Am I entitled to insist she has a Jewish husband, or at least the nearest to a Jewish husband I can manufacture for her? Would she be within her rights to get me certified? Are her new friends entitled to laugh at me? Would I be justified in paying their laughter back with interest, tenfold or a hundredfold, by fair means or foul? That too is a component of my indecision — what weapons to employ to make them suffer.”

“The latter can’t be called an issue of morality,” Shylock said.

“You are being,” Strulovitch answered, “peculiarly pedantic this morning. Have I offended you as well?”

“Not in the slightest. I just want to be certain we are talking about the same thing before I offer an intervention.”

“If you are going to add to my indecision I ask you not to. My head aches.”

“My intervention won’t add to your indecision. On the contrary, I don’t see how it can do anything but make you resolute.”

“Resolute for what?”

“Recompense.”

“On what grounds?”

Shylock hesitated only fractionally. “Violation. Gratan Howsome took advantage of your daughter when she was underage.”

“My daughter is sixteen.”

“She was fifteen when Howsome first slept with her. I believe that’s against the law in your country.”

Strulovitch suddenly found swallowing difficult. He spread his hands on the table as though to show there was nothing between his fingers. He seemed to want Shylock to do the same. “How do you know this?” he asked.

“I know what I know. It’s late in the day for you to be questioning my modus operandi.”

“It’s not your modus operandi I question. It’s your sources. You’ve just made a serious allegation. I have to know whether or not I can trust it. How do you come by your information?”

“That’s not a question it profits you in any way to ask. Better you simply confirm what I have told you. Take a look on her computer. Check out her correspondence.”

“You’ve been reading her emails?”

“I only suggest that you do. It might go against your morality but you have told me you have sneaked half a look already. Try sneaking a whole look.”

“It goes against my morality.”

“And what about your daughter being abroad with a man twice her age who slept with her when she was fifteen? How do you square that with your morality?”

Thou torturest me, Tubal.

—

What if Tubal lied?

Had Shylock ever considered that?

Your daughter spent in Genoa, as I heard, in one night fourscore ducats…

You “heard,” Tubal? You fucking heard !

On the strength of Tubal’s “hearing”—mere hearsay — Shylock built a case against his daughter, and by extension every goy in Venice, that was bound to topple over into catastrophe. Even Othello took longer to be convinced.

Thou stick’st a dagger in me.

Was that Tubal’s intention? To inflame his friend to the point of madness? It isn’t necessary to find a motive. The inflaming of a friend is a motive in itself. The bigger question is why Shylock presented his chest with such alacrity to that dagger — with just so much alacrity as Antonio was to present his to Shylock’s knife. When it came to a hunger to be gored, they were mirror images of each other — the merchant and the Jew.

As for whether Tubal spoke the truth — matters were too advanced for that ever to be tested.

But still Strulovitch, discomfited by Shylock’s revelations, had to discomfit in return. A cruel vengefulness rose in his chest like bile.

“Did you ever consider that Tubal might have lied to you?”

Shylock was not slow to follow the logic of Strulovitch’s challenge. “You think I might be guilty of reporting falsely to you? Haven’t I said: go to her computer and corroborate what I tell you.”

“Does that mean you wished you’d corroborated Tubal’s reports?”

Shylock placed his elbows on the kitchen table and rested his chin on his fists. It looked painful, what he was doing, grinding his knuckles into his jaw. Or that might be what I want to think, Strulovitch thought. But he was not going to rush Shylock into speaking. His own silence was enough. Did you or didn’t you?

“At the moment of his telling me, no,” Shylock said, when at last it suited him to say something. His fists still supported his jaw, stopping him from speaking fluently. He seemed to want to find enunciation difficult. “Tubal told me what I dreaded, and what we dread we half want to come to pass. But on reflection, yes. On reflection I sometimes ask if Tubal could have been party to the general mischief and if I lost my daughter by attending to him. I still hold myself potentially accountable for that. I exist in an equipoise of grief and guilt. But to what end should I have doubted him? My Jessica was gone. I didn’t require a Tubal to tell me that. She had stolen what she alone knew where to find. So had I shaken Tubal to within an inch of his life what might I have rattled out of him that was more to my liking? That she’d gone through threescore ducats instead of four? Twoscore? Ten?”

“Such details matter. Was my daughter fifteen when Howsome slept with her or was she sixteen? Much hangs on the answer.”

“Then go to her computer. I am just the messenger.”

“Tubal would have said the same. But there are occasions when the messenger is no less odious than the message. Being ‘just the messenger’ doesn’t make a man unimpeachable. What if Tubal was morally in connivance with the thing he was relaying?”

“And you would like me to have cut his heart out? Who’s to say you aren’t right. Perhaps I should have taken my knife to his chest instead of Antonio’s. But messengers tell you how your repute stands, if nothing else. So they are always to be trusted in part. Jessica ran off. Where to and how much she spent when she was there is immaterial.”

“And the monkey?”

“What about the monkey?”

“What if Tubal lied about that? What if he conjured the monkey out of his own Jewish terrors?”

“There was a monkey.”

“What if he wished you harm?”