Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“You’re misunder stand ing him,” she pleaded. “It will stop. He’s sick about how this has upset you. What happened has sent him reeling. I mean with vertigo. I mean literally he can’t stand up . I left him there in bed. He crashed, Mr. Roth, completely.”

“I see. He thought I wouldn’t mind. He thought the interviews with the journalists would just roll off my back.”

“If you would meet with him one more time —”

“I met with him . I’m meeting with you,” I said, and pulled my arm out from beneath her hand. “If you love him, Miss Possesski, and are devoted to him, and want to avoid the sort of trouble that might possibly endanger the health of a cancer patient in remission, then you’d be well advised to stop him now . He must stop using my name now. This is as far as I go with meetings.”

“But,” she said, her voice heating up and her hands clenched in anger, “that’s like asking you to stop using his name.”

“No, no, not at all! Your patient in remission is a liar . Whatever great motives may be motivating him, he happens to be lying through his teeth! His name is not the same as mine, and if he told you that it was, then he lied to you, too.”

Just the contortion of her mouth caused me instinctively to raise a hand to ward off a blow. And what I caught with that hand was a fist quite hard enough to have broken my nose. “Prick!” she snarled. “Your name! Your name! Do you ever, ever, ever think of anything other than your fucking name!”

Interlocked on the tabletop now, our fingers began a fight of their own; her grip was anything but girlish, and even pressing with all my strength, I was barely able to keep her five fingers immobilized between mine. Meanwhile I kept an eye on the other hand.

“You’re asking the wrong man,” I said. “The question is, ‘Does he?’”

Our struggle was being watched by the hotel waiters. A group of them had gathered just inside the windowed door to the lobby so as to look on at what must have struck them as a lovers’ quarrel, no more or less dangerous — and entertaining — than that, a touch of comic relief from the violence in the street, and probably not a little pornographically piquant.

“You should be a tenth as selfless, a hundredth as selfless! Do you know many dying men? Do you know many dying men whose thoughts are only for saving others? Do you know many people kept alive on a hundred and fifty pills a day who could begin to do what he is doing? What he went through in Poland just to see Walesa! I was worn out. But Philip would not be stopped, not by anything . Dizzy spells that would fell a horse and still he doesn’t stop! He falls down, he gets up, he keeps going. And the pain — he is like trying to excrete his own insides! The people we have to see before we even get to Walesa! It wasn’t the shipyards where we met him. That’s just stuff for the papers. It was way the hell out and beyond. The car rides, the passwords, the hiding places — and still this man does not stop! Eighteen months ago every last doctor gave him no more than six months to live — and here he is, in Jerusalem, alive! Let him have what keeps him alive! Let this man go on with his dream!”

“The dream that he is me?”

“You! You! Nothing in your world but you! Stop stroking my hand! Let go of my hand! Stop coming on with me!”

“You tried to hit me with that hand.”

“You are trying to seduce me! Let me go!”

She was wearing a belted blue poplin raincoat over a short denim skirt and a white ribbed sweater, a very youthful outfit, and it made her appear, when our fingers fell apart and she rose in a fury from her chair, rather statuesquely pubescent, a woman’s fullness coyly displayed in mock-maidenly American disguise.

In the features of one of the young waiters huddled up to the glass of the lobby door I saw the feverish look of a man who hopes with all his heart that the long-awaited striptease is about to begin. Or perhaps, when her hand reached down into her raincoat pocket, he thought that he was going to witness a shooting, that the voluptuous woman was about to pull a gun. And as I was still completely in the dark about what this couple was after and what they were truly contriving to do, my expectations were all at once no more realistic than his. In coming to Jerusalem like this, refusing to consider seriously an impostor’s more menacing meaning, heeding only my desperate yearning to be intact and entire, to prove that I was unimpaired by that ghastly breakdown and once again a robust, forceful, undamaged man, I had made the biggest, stupidest mistake yet, even more unfortunate a mistake than my lurid first marriage and one from which, it appeared, there was to be no escape. I should have listened to Claire .

But what the voluptuous woman pulled from her pocket was only an envelope. “You shit! The remission depends on this!” And hurling the envelope onto the table, she ran from the courtyard and out of the hotel through the lobby, where the thrill-seeking, mesmerized waiters were no longer to be seen.

Only when I began to read this second communication from him, which was composed in longhand like the first, did I realize how skillfully he had worked to make his handwriting resemble my own. Alone now, without all her radiant realness to distract me, I saw on this sheet of paper the pinched and twisted signs of my own impatient, overaccelerated left-handed scrawl, the same irregular slope climbing unevenly uphill, the o ’s and e ’s and α’s compressed and all but indistinguishable from i ’s, the i ’s themselves hastily undotted and the t ’s uncrossed, the “The” in the heading atop the page a perfect replica of the “The” I’d been writing since elementary school, which looked more like “Fli.” It was, like mine, a hand in a hurry to be finished with writing abnormally into, rather than flowing right-handedly away from, the barrier of its own impeding torso. Of all the falsifications I knew of so far, including the phony passport, this document was far and away the most professional and even more infuriating to behold than the forgery of his conniving face. He’d even taken a crack at my style. At least the style wasn’t his, if that loonily cryptic, slash-bedecked letter she’d given me first was any sample of the prose that came to this counterfeiter “naturally.”

1. We admit that we are haters prone to prejudice and powerless to control our hatred.

2. We recognize that it is not Jews who have wronged us but we who hold Jews responsible for our troubles and the world’s evils. It is we who wrong them by believing this.

3. A Jew may well have shortcomings like any other human being, but the shortcomings we are here to be honest about are our own, i.e., paranoia, sadism, negativism, destructiveness, envy.

4. Our money problems are not of the Jews’ making but of our own.

5. Our job problems are not of the Jews’ making but of our own (so too with sexual problems, marital problems, problems in the community).

6. Anti-Semitism is a form of flight from reality, a refusal to think honestly about ourselves and our society.

7. Inasmuch as anti-Semites cannot control their hatred, they are not like other people. We recognize that even to drop a casual anti-Semitic slur endangers our struggle to rid ourselves of our sickness.

8. Helping to detoxify others is the cornerstone of our recovery. Nothing will so much ensure immunity from the illness of anti-Semitism as intensive work with other anti-Semites.