Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

You know, like, okay? — and still there was enough persuasiveness there to make you know.

“She was young,” she told me, “strong. Their will is very, very strong. It’ll keep them going forever, despite as much pain as they can endure. Even more pain than they can endure and they endure. It’s horrible. So you give them more medication because their heart is so strong and their will is so strong. They’re in pain, Mr. Roth — you have to give them something! You know? You know?”

“I do now, yes.”

“They need an almost elephant dose of morphine, the people that are so young.” And she made none of the effort she had the moment before to hide her weeping in her shoulder or to pause and steady herself. “They’re young — it’s doubly bad! I shouted at Dr. Kaplan, ‘I will not allow someone to be cruel to someone who is dying!’ So he got it for me. And I gave it to her.” Momentarily she seemed to see herself in the scene, to see herself giving it to her, to that woman her own age, “so young, so young.” She was there again. Maybe, I thought, she’s always there and that’s why she’s with him.

“What happened?” I asked her.

Weakly — and this was no weakling — but very weakly she finally answered, all the while looking down at the hands that I persisted in envisioning everywhere, hands that she once must have washed two hundred times a day. “She died,” she said.

When she looked up again she was smiling sadly, certifying with that smile that she was out of cancer now, that all the dying, though it hadn’t stopped, though it never stopped, no longer required that she smoke pot and down piña coladas and hate the likes of Dr. Kaplan and me. “She was going to die anyway, she was ready to die, but she died on me. I killed her. Her skin was beautiful. You know? She was a waitress. A good person. An outgoing person. She told me she wanted six children. But I gave her morphine and she died. I went berserk. I went to the bathroom and I went hysterical. The Jews! The Jews! The head nurse came in. She was the reason why you see me here and not in jail. Because the family was very bad. They came in screaming. ‘What happened? What happened?’ Families get so guilt-ridden because they can’t do anything and they don’t want her to die. They know that she’s suffering horribly, that there’s no hope, yet when she dies, ‘What happened? What happened?’ But the head nurse was, like, so good, a great woman, and she held me. ‘Possesski, you gotta get out of here.’ It took me a year. I was twenty-six years old. I got transferred. I got on the surgical floor. There’s always hope on the surgical floor. Except there’s a procedure called ‘open and close.’ Where you open them up and the doctor won’t even attempt anything. And they stay and they die. They die! Mr. Roth, I couldn’t get away from death . Then I met Philip. He had cancer. He was operated on. Hope! Hope! Then the pathology report. Three lymph nodes are involved. So I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I didn’t want to get attached. I tried to stop myself. You always try to stop yourself. That’s what the cursing is all about. The tough talk isn’t so tough, you know? You think it’s cold. It’s not cold at all. That happened with Philip. I thought I hated him. Okay, I wanted to hate him. I should have learned from that girl I killed. Stay away. Look at his looks. But instead I fell in love with him, I fell in love with his looks, with every flicking Jewish thing about him. That talk. Those jokes. That intensity. The imitations. Crazy with life. He was the one patient ever who gave me more strength than I gave them. We fell in love.”

Just then, through the large window opposite me, I noticed Demjanjuk’s legal team in the lobby beyond the courtyard — they too must be guests here in this East Jerusalem hotel and on their way either to or from the afternoon session. I recognized Sheftel first, the Israeli lawyer, and then the other two; with them, still dressed impeccably in suit and tie, as though he were lawyer number four, was Demjanjuk’s tall young son. Jinx looked to see what had diverted my attention from her life’s searing drama of death and love.

“Know why Demjanjuk continues lying?” she asked.

“Is he lying?”

“Is he! The defense has nothing.”

“Sheftel looks awfully cocky to me.”

“Bluff, all bluff — there’s no alibi at all . The alibi’s proved false a dozen times over. And the card, the Trawniki card, it’s got to be Demjanjuk’s — it’s his picture, his signature.”

“And not a fake?”

“The prosecution has proved it’s not fake. And those old people on the witness stand, the people who cleaned out the gas chambers for him, the people who worked alongside him every day , it’s overwhelming , the case against him. Anyway, Demjanjuk knows they know. He acts like a stupid peasant but he’s a cunning bastard and no fool. He knows he’ll be hanged. He knows it’s coming to him, too.”

“So why does he continue to lie?”

She jerked a thumb toward the lobby, a brusque little gesture that took me by surprise after the impassioned vulnerability of her aria, something she’d probably learned to mime, along with the anti-Semitism, from the boiler engineer, her father. And what she was saying about the trial I figured she must be miming too, for these were no longer words stained with her blood but words she repeated as though she didn’t even believe in the meaning of words. Parroting her hero, I thought, as the adoring mate of a hero will.

“The son,” she explained. “He wants the son to be good and not to know. Demjanjuk’s lying for the son. If Demjanjuk confessed, that boy would be finished. He wouldn’t have a chance.” One of those hands of hers settled familiarly on my arm, one of those hands whose history of besmirchment by the body’s secretions I could not stop myself envisioning; and for me, in that raw contact, there was such a shock of intimacy that I felt momentarily absorbed into her being, very like what an infant must feel back when the mother’s hands aren’t mere appendages but the very incarnation of her whole warm, wonderful big body. Resist, I thought, this overtempting presence — these are not two people with your interests at heart!

“Talk to him. Sit down and talk to Philip, please.”

“‘Philip’ and I have nothing to talk about.”

“Oh, don’t,” she begged me, and as her fingers closed on me even more tightly, the pressure of her thumb in the crook of my arm triggered a rush of just about everything urging me in the wrong direction, “please, don’t. …”

“Don’t what?”

“Undermine what he is doing!”

“It’s not I who is doing the undermining.”

“But the man,” she cried, “is in remission!”

Even under less excitable conditions, “remission” is not a word easy to ignore, any more than “guilty” or “innocent” is in the courtroom when pronounced by the jury foreman to the judge.

I said, “Remission from cancer is nothing that I am against, for him or anyone. I am not even against his so-called Diasporism. I have no interest in those ideas either way. What I am against is his entangling our two lives and confusing people about who is who. What I cannot permit and what I will not permit is his encouraging people to believe that he is me. That must stop!”

“It will — okay? It’ll stop.”

“Will it? How do you know?”

“Because Philip told me to tell you that it would.”

“Yes, did he? Why didn’t you then? Why didn’t he , in that letter — that completely idiotic letter!” I said, angrily remembering the vacuous pithiness, the meaningless dissonance, the hysterical incoherence of that life-and-death longhand, remembering all those stupid slashes only vaguely disguising what I surmised he’d as soon do with me.