Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“I have chanced my child to the world,” Strulovitch said, “and the world has undone her. I have struck a bargain which won’t bring her back, but a bargain is a bargain. This gentleman is by repute — certainly by his own repute — a man of honour. By that honour he owes me the little I have left to ask.”

“It is not a little to him,” Plurabelle said.

Strulovitch coughed, looking to Shylock for corroboration of the infelicity, before remembering that Shylock wasn’t a corroborating man. Without his hat he looked a more genial figure. Unamused but lenitive. The headmaster of a progressive, but not too progressive, secondary school.

“This is an operation,” Plurabelle continued, “that can go terribly wrong. You mean it as a humiliation, and a humiliation it most certainly is. Do you also mean it as a fatal injury? You think I exaggerate but I have details here”—she brought from her pocket a computer printout bearing, Strulovitch noticed, the Wikipedia logo—“of accidents and, yes, fatalities that must surely make you think again. I am your daughter’s friend. I believed myself to be her protector. As such I plead with you, by your own faith and hers, to spare a man who would not intentionally have hurt a hair on her head.”

She seemed to be speaking by rote, not even looking into the eyes of the person she was trying to persuade.

“It’s too late for any of this,” Strulovitch said. “We have struck our deal. Let’s get it over with. So that we can be done with one another for all time. The car, I believe, is waiting.”

He made a courtly motion with his hand to D’Anton. After you.

The men made to go but were again halted.

“Tarry a moment. A word before you leave.”

Strulovitch turned in surprise. The speaker this time was Shylock who, until that moment, had been holding himself theatrically aloof, a man worthy of notice for his lack of interest in the day’s events or any of the parties to them. Shylock bored. Shylock somewhere else. But that was then. Now, as though snapped into action by some external agency, he was another man. Shylock urgent. Shylock here. Conciliatory in tone, gently spoken, hatless, avuncular, but insistent on being heard.

“What’s this?” Strulovitch said.

“A moment of your time,” Shylock said. “No more.”

“It’s all been said.”

“Not all.”

“Have I forgotten something?” Strulovitch asked. “Or have you?”

“Forgotten something? I, no.” Shylock paused as though the matter of their being different men with different memories merited careful thought. “But you, yes, you have forgotten something.”

The banal sky felt thundery all of a sudden. Shylock could do that; he could affect the atmospheric pressure, perturb the weather with whatever was perturbing him. Strulovitch looked up, saw the future and the past. The weariness of the prophets descended on him.

“I have no time for this triteness,” he said. “I am not in need of a lesson. The matter is agreed.” Here he inclined his head to D’Anton who was resigned to his fate, whatever the meaning of Shylock’s intervention.

But Shylock hadn’t finished yet. “You accept the terms?” he asked, looking into D’Anton’s face for the first time.

D’Anton’s eyelids dropped like heavy curtains. “Fully,” he said.

“You allow them to be just?”

“Just? Does justice enter into this?”

“If you think it does not, then you cannot accept the terms.”

“I accept the terms because I have to.”

“By what reasoning?”

“I have no option.”

“You could refuse.”

“If I refuse, those I love will suffer consequences.”

“And you? Will you suffer consequences?”

“I don’t count what happens to myself.”

“You are a willing sacrifice?”

“I am.”

“Therefore by this action both sides will achieve the thing they seek. I call that just.”

D’Anton nodded his head.

“So I ask again: You allow these terms to be just?”

“Cruel, but just.”

“But just?” It is like extracting teeth, Shylock thought.

“Yes,” D’Anton conceded. “Just.” He smiled faintly at his own joke. “Just just.”

Shylock, unamused, nodded and turned his face back to Strulovitch’s. “Then,” he said, “must the Jew be merciful…”

Strulovitch knew exactly what he had to say in return. You don’t always have a choice.

“On what compulsion must I?” he asked.

Whereupon Shylock said what he too had to say. “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…”

—

Strulovitch owned an etching by an unknown nineteenth-century artist that showed Ulysses lashed to the mast of his ship to protect him from the treacherous mellifluence of the sirens. The sirens themselves were a touch too Rubensesque for Strulovitch’s taste but he liked the way their songs were drawn as musical notations that flew towards Ulysses like birds, assailing all his senses. Struggling against his bonds, his eyes popping out of his head, Ulysses clearly regretted his decision to be restrained. But what about the sailors whose ears were stopped with wax? Did a single flying melody get through to them as they laboured at their oars? Or was there just a wall of yammering and the mermaids miming?

Having no wax to din out Shylock, Strulovitch deafened himself, instead, by act of will, stringing a procession of black thoughts, like funeral bunting if such a thing existed, from ear to ear. Everything he could recall that had ever made him angry, every slight, every exclusion, every bad thing done to him and every bad thing he had done. It was more than a match, in its malignancy, for Shylock’s honeyed peroration.

This, had he listened — but had he listened he would only have heard what he knew he was going to hear — was what Shylock said:

“The quality of mercy is not strained…You ask on what compulsion you should be merciful, you who have received no mercy yourself from him I ask you to show mercy to — you ask why you should requite what you have not received — and I say to you: Be an exemplary of mercy; give not in expectation of receiving mercy back — for mercy is not a transaction — but give it for what it constitutes in itself. Show pity for pity’s sake and not the profit of your soul. Eyes without pity will become blind, but it is not only in order that you may see that you should practise it. Pity is not compromised by profit or deserts, it does not minister to self-love, it is not a substitute for forgiveness, but builds its modest house wherever there is need of it. And what need is there of it here, you ask, where justice alone cries out for what is owing to it. The need is this: God asks it. What pertains to him, must pertain to you, otherwise you cannot claim that you are acting justly in His name. And will God love the sinner more than the sinned against? No, he will love you equally. No man can love as God loves, and it is profane of any man to try. But you can act in the spirit of God’s love, show charity, give though it is gall and wormwood to you to give, spare the undeserving, love those that do not love you — for where is the virtue merely in returning love? — give to those who would take from you and, where they have taken, do not recompense them in kind, for the greater the offence the greater the merit in refusing to be offended. Who shows rachmones does not diminish justice. Who shows rachmones acknowledges the just but exacting law under which we were created. And so worships God.”

Though he wouldn’t attend, Strulovitch waited. Manners too are a species of that compassion Jews call rachmones .

“You are finished?” he asked at last.

Shylock signalled to those who had applauded him that such an ovation was unnecessary. “Yes I am finished,” he said.