Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“Please,” George said, “this is the royal road to the migraine.” He motioned impatiently for her to hand him my check. Pipik’s check.

“Another victim who can’t forget,” said Anna, meanwhile studying the face of the check with those globular eyes as though there at last she might find the clue to why fate had delivered her into this misery. “All these victims and their horrible scars. But, tell me,” she asked, and as simply as a child asks why the grass is green, “how many victims can possibly stand on this tiny bit of soil?”

“But he agrees with you,” her husband said. “That is why he is here .”

“In America,” she told me, “I thought I had married a man who had left all this victimization behind, a man of cultivation who knew what made life rich and full. I didn’t think I had married another Kamil, who can’t start being a human being until the occupation is over. These perpetual little brothers, claiming they can’t live, they can’t breathe, because somebody is casting a shadow over them! The moral childishness of these people! A man with George’s brain, strangling on spurious issues of loyalty! Why aren’t you loyal,” she cried, wildly turning on George, “to your intellect? Why aren’t you loyal to literature? People like you” — meaning me as well — “run for their lives from backwater provinces like this one. You ran, you were right to run, both of you, as far as you could from the provincialism and the egocentricity and the xenophobia and the lamentations, you were not poisoned by the sentimentality of these childish, stupid ethnic mythologies, you plunged into a big, new, free world with all your intellect and all your energy, truly free young men, devoted to art, books, reason, scholarship, to seriousness —”

“Yes, to everything noble and elevated. Look,” said George, “you are merely describing two snobbish graduate students — and we were not so pure even then. You paint a ridiculously naive portrait that would have struck us as laughable even then.”

“Well, all I mean,” she answered contemptuously, “is that you couldn’t possibly have been as idiotic as you are now.”

“You just prefer the high-minded idiocy of universities to the low-minded idiocy of political struggle. No one says it isn’t idiotic and stupid and perhaps even futile. But that is what it’s like, you see, for a human being to live on this earth.”

“No amount of money,” she said, ignoring the condescension to address me again about my check, “will change a single thing. Stay here, you’ll see. There is nothing in the future for these Jews and these Arabs but more tragedy, suffering, and blood. The hatred on both sides is too enormous, it envelops everything. There is no trust and there will not be for another thousand years. ‘To live on this earth.’ Living in Boston was living on this earth —” she angrily reminded George. “Or isn’t it ‘life’ any longer when people have a big, bright apartment and quiet, intelligent neighbors and the simple civilized pleasure of a good job and raising children? Isn’t it ‘life’ when you read books and listen to music and choose your friends because of their qualities and not because they share your roots? Roots! A concept for cavemen to live by! Is the survival of Palestinian culture, Palestinian people, Palestinian heritage, is that really a ‘must’ in the evolution of humanity? Is all that mythology a greater must than the survival of my son?”

“He’s going back,” George quietly replied.

“When? When?” She shook the check in George’s face. “When Philip Roth collects a thousand more checks from crazy Jews and the airlift to Poland begins? When Philip Roth and the Pope sit down together in the Vatican and solve our problems for us? I will not sacrifice my son to any more fanatics and their megalomaniacal fantasies!”

“He will go back,” George repeated sternly.

“Palestine is a lie! Zionism is a lie! Diasporism is a lie! The biggest lie yet! I will not sacrifice Michael to more lies!”

George phoned to downtown Ramallah for a taxi to come to his house to drive me to Jerusalem. The driver was a weathered-looking old man who seemed awfully sleepy given that it was only seven in the evening. I wondered aloud if this was the best George could do.

First George told him in Arabic where to take me, then, in English, he said, “He’s used to the checkpoints, and the soldiers there are familiar with him. You’ll get back all right.”

“To me he looks a little the worse for wear.”

“Don’t worry,” George said. He had wanted, in fact, to take me back himself, but in their bedroom, where Anna had gone to lie down in the dark, she had warned George that if he dared to go off in the evening to drive to Jerusalem and back, neither she nor Michael would be there when he returned, if he returned and didn’t wind up beaten to death by the army or shot by vigilante Jews. “It’s the migraine talking,” George explained. “I don’t want to make it worse.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “I already have.”

“Philip, we’ll speak tomorrow. There are many things to discuss. I’ll come in the morning. I want to take you somewhere. I want you to meet someone. You will be free in the morning?”

I had arranged a meeting with Aharon, I had somehow to get to see Apter, but I said, “For you, yes, of course. Say goodbye to Michael for me. And to Anna. …”

“He’s in there holding her hand.”

“Maybe this is all too much for him.”

“It does begin to look that way.” He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “My stupidity,” he moaned. “My fucking stupidity!”

At the door he embraced me. “Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what it’s going to mean for you when the Mossad finds out you’ve met with Arafat?”

“Arrange the meeting, Zee.”

“Oh, you’re the best of them!” he said emotionally. “The very best!”

Bullshit artist, I thought, actor, liar, fake, but all I did was return the embrace with no less fervent duplicitousness than was being proffered.

To circumvent the Ramallah roadblocks, which still barred the entrance to the city center and access to the telltale bloodstained wall, the taxi driver took the circuitous route through the hills that George had used earlier to get home. There were no lights to be seen anywhere once we were headed away from the complex of stone houses at the edge of the ravine, no cars appeared on the hillside roads, and for a long time I kept my eyes fixed on the path cut by our headlamps and was too apprehensive to think of anything other than making it safely back to Jerusalem. Shouldn’t he be driving with his brights on? Or were those feeble beams the brights? Going back with this old Arab, I thought, had to be a mistake but so was coming out with George, so, surely, was everything I had just said and done. This little leave I had taken not merely of my senses but of my life was inexplicable to me — it was as though reality had stopped and I had gotten off to do what I did and now I was being driven along these dark roads to where reality would be waiting for me to climb back on board and resume doing what I used to do. Had I even been present? Yes, yes, I most certainly had been, hidden no more than an inch or two behind that mild exercise in malicious cynicism. And yet I could swear that my carrying-on was completely innocent. The lengths I had gone to to mislead George hadn’t seemed to me any more underhanded than if we’d been two children at play in a sand-pile, no more insidious and about as mindless — for one of the few times in my life I couldn’t really satirize myself for thinking too much. What had I yielded to? How did I get here? The rattling car, the sleepy driver, the sinister road … it was all the unforeseen outcome of the convergence of my falseness with his, dissimulation to match dissimulation … unless George hadn’t been dissimulating, unless the only act was mine! But could he possibly have taken that blather seriously about Irving Berlin? No, no — here’s what they’re up to: They’re thinking of the infantile idealism and immeasurable egoism of all those writers who step momentarily onto the vast stage of history by shaking the hand of the revolutionary leader in charge of the local egalitarian dictatorship; they’re thinking of how, aside from flattering a writer’s vanity, it lends his life a sense of significance that he just can’t seem to get finding the mot juste (if he even comes anywhere close to finding it one out of five hundred times); they’re thinking that nothing does that egoism quite so much good as the illusion of submerging it for three or four days in a great and selfless, highly visible cause; they’re thinking along the lines that Shmuel the lawyer had been thinking when he observed that it might just be that I’d come round to the courtroom in the clutches of “the world’s pet victims” to beef up my credentials for the big prize. They’re thinking of Jesse Jackson, of Vanessa Redgrave, smiling in those news photographs arm in arm with their leader, and of how, in the public-relations battle with the Jews, which well might decide more in the end than all of the terrorism would, a photograph in Time with a celebrity Jew might just be worth ten seconds of the leader’s precious time. Of course! They’re setting me up for a photo opportunity, and the looniness of my Diasporism is inconsequential — Jesse Jackson isn’t exactly Gramsci either. Mitterrand has Styron, Castro has Márquez, Ortega has Pinter, and Arafat is about to have me.