Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“Why would he do that?”

“Because Jews are kinds of devils, even to one another.”

“There was a monkey.”

—

An hour later Strulovitch was back at the breakfast table, his face flushed, his voice harsh. He looked as though he’d been drinking. But he’d only been at his daughter’s computer.

“I’ll kill him,” he said.

Good, Shylock thought. Let’s see if you have the courage. But what he said was, “First you have to find him.”

“ Oy gevalto, we’re on the Rialto,” Beatrice said.

Gratan looked at her in bafflement. The air was full of confused sounds — gondoliers singing, waiters shouting, canals rising, church bells ringing, umbrellas going up. “I didn’t catch that,” he said.

“ Oy gevalto, we’re on the Rialto.”

He was none the wiser.

“It doesn’t matter,” Beatrice said.

She wasn’t exactly disappointed. How many times had she said that to herself in Gratan’s company? But if she wasn’t exactly disappointed, what exactly had she been expecting? Nothing — was that it? In which case what was she doing here?

How many times had she asked herself that in Gratan’s company?

She’d been to Venice before, accompanying her father to the Biennale, going from pavilion to pavilion listening to him inveighing against installations, videos, whitened canvasses or blackened rooms in which faceless women screamed in agony or orgasm — all the stuff she liked. So she knew what it was to be in Venice with an ill-tempered man, but she also knew what it was to be in Venice when the sun shone and the ill-tempered man was ill-tempered on aesthetic principle, rather than…Well, why was Gratan ill-tempered? Had she become a wife to him already? She sat under the dripping awning, watched water falling into water, and sighed deeply. Venice could do better than this, that was her point. And she’d spent enough time with Gratan to know that outside the environs of sex he couldn’t do better than this. As for it being more fun to be with a Jewish man who got her jokes — she wasn’t going to give her father the satisfaction of knowing she’d even entertained such a thought. But her expression would have given her away had he seen it.

“Anyone else won’t know what you’re talking about,” he’d been warning her for years. “They won’t get the cultural allusions. Just remember — your intelligence is five thousand years old, they were born yesterday. They can only think one thing at a time; you can think a dozen.”

“I only want to fuck them,” she’d answered back once.

He’d slapped her face.

So much for being truthful.

She’d wondered many times since why she hadn’t called a policeman or taken him to the Court of Human Rights. You can’t just hit your children because they use bad language.

Or had he hit her only because she wanted to fuck Christians?

Well, the lunatic had got his comeuppance now. The thing he’d most dreaded had come about. She was on the run, to all intents and purposes married (or would have been had he not been married already) to a Gentile who couldn’t even think one thing at a time. And it had come about because he — her lunatic all-fearing father — made it come about.

If I could be sure this is where I want to be right now, and that I’m with a man I want to be with, I’d thank him, Beatrice thought. But she wasn’t. Unhappiness didn’t describe her state exactly. It was three days since Plury and D’Anton had bundled them on to a plane, and in that time Gratan had finally grasped that she didn’t want him nipping off the minute they found themselves alone together. So she had his company, at least in the sense that shomerim, the Jewish sentinels of the dead, have the company of a corpse. And the rain was not without its consolations. It was almost fun — for her, at any rate — negotiating St. Mark’s Square over duckboards and sitting in cafés catching rain in coffee cups. If this were any old break from the kind of man her father didn’t want her to be with she’d have considered it only a moderate fiasco, and she’d had enough of those in her young life. But it wasn’t any old break. They waited nervously for news. They kept their eyes open for police. Her father might have alerted Interpol. Gratan feared he might have breached his contract with Stockport County who, in his view, were looking for any excuse to terminate it. Already he was talking wildly about learning Italian (that was a joke: he had still to master the rudiments of English) and signing on for Venezia reserves. And there had been a disagreeable atmosphere at the airport where Plury and D’Anton had made it clear they were displeased — a change from Plury’s initial excitement for them — and Gratan had told D’Anton he was not prepared, at his age, to be treated like a child, which D’Anton had answered by saying, “Then stop acting like one.” So the risks had to be worth it — for both of them — didn’t they? She had to conceal the fact that she’d been born five thousand years ago and he had to be the man she wanted to spend the next five thousand years with. He had to amuse and scintillate her. He had to take an interest in performance art and get her jokes. He had to make her knees shake when she looked at him. He had to make her feel proud of him when he opened his mouth. He had to look more of a mensch. And—?

And he didn’t.

“Oy vey, why have I run away?” Beatrice wondered.

—

D’Anton rarely answers his own front door. It takes him too long to rearrange his face into something resembling civility. Nothing can be done in a hurry if you are a man of sorrows. Besides which, D’Anton doesn’t welcome surprise. For this reason he has an assistant to answer the door for him, when necessary. In the Golden Triangle it is rare for people to call on one another without prior arrangement. It is unlikely that the person you want to see will be in, for one thing; and front doors are generally a long gravelly walk from where you will have parked the car. So it’s easier all round to make phone calls and meet out. This is one reason why D’Anton has never installed an intercom system. It will almost never be used. The other reason he hasn’t installed such a thing is that it’s ugly. There is a plaited bell pull which, after much haggling, he’d been able to persuade the janitor of a monastery in Burma to sell him. But none of the infrequent visitors ever pull hard enough, and D’Anton is not going to put up a hideous notice telling them to do so.

Today, his assistant is off, nursing a sick relative in the country. They don’t, in the Golden Triangle, call where they live the country, any more than they call it town. So when the mellifluous Burmese bell that never rings unexpectedly does so, D’Anton jumps with surprise and annoyance. He has to make the long trek down from his study in person, just as the monks had to come down from the mountain for afternoon prayers. It rings three more times before he has made it all the way. This person is impatient, D’Anton recognises. And rough-mannered. So not Barnaby or a Jehovah’s Witness. Whoever it is that’s pulling, pulls so hard that D’Anton fears the bell will be yanked from the wall. “Yes, yes,” he shouts. “I am coming as fast as I can.”

As fast he can, that is, in his Nepalese slippers with their Ali Baba points.

And when he unbolts and opens the door he finds Strulovitch.

—

The two men, who would rather not, in any circumstances, wish to be exchanging glances, direct their gazes over each other’s shoulder. If D’Anton were a pirate with a parrot, Strulovitch would be addressing that. D’Anton himself is looking even further to the rear of his guest, as though at Strulovitch’s grandparents in their headscarves and skullcaps, falling under the hooves of Cossacks’ horses, muttering to their mouldy god while their hovels go up in flames…But enough of that, D’Anton tells himself.