Howard Jacobson: Shylock Is My Name

“I am not your best man.”

“I am joking,” Strulovitch said.

“Your joke is not welcome.”

“It was kindly meant.”

“I thought we had agreed that no joke is kindly meant.”

Fifteen minutes of tense silence between them in the course of which first one, and then another, repaired to a bathroom to inspect his appearance in a mirror.

It was Strulovitch who spoke first. “I am wondering,” he said, “if we ought to make sure that all is well at the clinic.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Ideological misgivings.”

“It’s a circumcision clinic.”

“You can never rule out second thoughts.”

“Second thoughts on the part of whom?”

“The surgeon.”

“He does this operation all the time. It’s a routine procedure for him. It’s how he makes his living. If I were you I’d be more concerned about D’Anton turning up.”

“D’Anton! Of D’Anton I have not the slightest doubt. I have sounded his nature to its dregs — not much of an achievement I grant you, given how little of his nature is anything else. But I know him, I have him, he is mine. He will need, more than anything, to demonstrate his bravery and in the process show us to be inhuman wretches. He might even be hoping we will kill him. I am only sorry we can’t oblige.”

“We?”

Strulovitch stopped what he was doing and looked across at Shylock who was not looking across at him. “Don’t tell me it’s your constancy I should be worrying about.”

“Do I owe you constancy? I am not aware I owe anyone anything. I certainly don’t owe this D’Anton harm.”

“No, you don’t owe me or D’Anton a thing. But our actions have consequences.”

“You will have to explain that.”

“There are consequences to setting an example.”

“I set an example! I ?”

Shylock would have liked at that moment to be in Strulovitch’s garden, expressing incredulity to his wife. “My host seems to see me,” he would tell her, “as a role model. Would you believe that?”

“I shouldn’t let this go to your head, my dear,” he knew Leah would reply, “but you were always a hero to me too.”

“Then you are both fools.”

—

D’Anton, though eager until the last moment to know if there’d been news from the Rialto, was perhaps the least anxious of the actors. Let the axe fall. What would be, would be. The readiness is all.

Considering his initial reluctance to Plurabelle’s plans, he was in remarkably good spirits. But then she had worked on him and got him to understand how much hung on his co-operation. He too, she hoped she didn’t need to remind him, could only gain from this in the end.

But she was impressed nonetheless by how calm he seemed on the day. “I am armed by the knowledge of our rectitude,” he said, taking her hand and putting it to his cheek.

“And I by the quietness of your spirit,” she said.

They both laughed.

—

When Strulovitch and Shylock arrived a small party was gathered in a snowy white tent, warmed by banks of the most efficient patio heaters money could buy.

It fell to Shylock, who was not wearing his hat, to effect the introductions.

“It seems odd,” Plurabelle said, shaking Strulovitch’s hand, “that we have not met until now.”

“Since we don’t move in the same circles, except those my daughter runs around me, and you around her, I don’t find that odd at all,” Strulovitch replied. What did, however, strike him as odd was the look of hurt surprise — like a person drowning where there is no water — which the thousand cuts of surgery had lent Plurabelle’s every feature. May the knife do as ill with D’Anton, he wished.

He is as horrible as I imagined, Plurabelle thought, feeling a renewed surge of pity for Beatrice. No wonder her own father had hated Jews. For the first time she understood the tests he’d devised for her prospective lovers. They were calculated to protect her from the depredations of such monsters. Of the two examples here, she much preferred Shylock, a preference she emphasised by taking him by the arm and walking him into the marquee, scattering him like gold dust among her friends.

“Who are these people?” Strulovitch enquired, following her.

“They are well-wishers of D’Anton and friends of mine,” she told him. “You were invited to bring an equal number of supporters.”

“I have no need of supporters.”

“I promise you they are not here to sway opinion, one way or another.”

“There is no opinion to be swayed. I and your co-conspirator in the abduction of my daughter are agreed as to what will happen should Gratan not return Beatrice by noon, and I see we are only a few minutes away from that. It doesn’t look as though they are coming.”

At noon exactly, D’Anton emerged from the house and, with eyes becomingly lowered, his back bent slightly as though feigning weariness, he walked to meet Strulovitch. Strulovitch noted that under his coat and jacket he wore a shirt as snowy as the earth, the top three buttons of it open like a crooner’s. Has he forgotten what we’re here for, Strulovitch wondered. Does he think I have designs on his heart?

Neither man made an attempt to shake the hand of the other.

“The matter is settled then,” Strulovitch said, looking at his watch. “You will submit to my wishes in place of your crony, Gratan—”

“He is not my crony.”

“As you wish. You will submit in his place, and once the thing is done—”

“The slate between us will be clean. You will have no further call on any of us, including your daughter.”

“My daughter will remain my daughter, I will not consent to thinking of her as ‘one of you,’ but yes, whatever she wants I will consent to so long as I have written assurance that you have left the clinic other than as you entered it.”

“That exceeds our agreement, I think. Will it not give you room from now until evermore to complain that I am still, in some respect or other, the man I was before?”

“How you remain, ‘in some respect or other,’ is none of my affair. The state of your mind, your character, your affections and temperament, your prejudices, are yours to do with as you please. They are such as the Devil himself could not change and I don’t flatter myself that I could. You know what I ask. It is a strictly circumscribed demand.”

“That I return, God willing, fit to be your son-in-law…”

“That you will never be.”

“Nor will I ever want to be. I mean in your ‘strictly circumscribed’ sense only. Fit in your God’s eyes to be a Jewish husband were I ever to desire to be one. Ha!”

Strulovitch wondered what it was about that phrase “your God’s eyes” that made him want to put out D’Anton’s. He had been hoping, even after the clocks struck, that Beatrice would turn up, with or without Gratan. Now he prayed she wouldn’t.

He nodded his assent.

“Then do your worst,” D’Anton said.

He looked around, hoping to see Barnaby. It was only a shame that it wasn’t his but Gratan’s debt he was paying. There was poetry in his heart for Barney. “Give me your hand, Barnaby,” he could have said. “Bid your wife judge whether Barnaby had not once a love…” D’Anton was a man for a dying fall. “Bid your wife judge whether Gratan had not once a love” had a very different ring to it.

He was about to ask Plurabelle to commend him to Barnaby’s favour, but Plurabelle had business of her own to attend to. “May I make a final plea,” she said, addressing Strulovitch, “before this business is concluded. I understand a father’s pain. My father died dreading what might befall his daughter. I won’t say he did too much to protect me, but his precautions didn’t exactly smooth my way. Sometimes a father must chance his child to the world—”