Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

No, a man’s character isn’t his fate; a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character.

We hadn’t yet reached the houses sporting their Eiffel Tower TV antennas but we were out of the hills and on the main road south to Jerusalem when the taxi driver spoke his first words to me. In English, which he did not pronounce with much assurance, he asked, “Are you a Zionist?”

“I’m an old friend of Mr. Ziad’s,” I replied. “We went to university together in America. He is an old friend.”

“Are you a Zionist?”

And who is this guy? I thought. This time I ignored him and continued looking out the window for some unmistakable sign, like those TV aerials, that we were approaching the outskirts of Jerusalem. Only what if we weren’t anywhere near the road to Jerusalem but on the road to somewhere else? Where were the Israeli checkpoints? So far we hadn’t passed one.

“Are you a Zionist?”

“Tell me,” I replied as agreeably as I could, “what you mean by a Zionist and I’ll tell you if I’m a Zionist.”

“Are you a Zionist?” he repeated flatly.

“Look,” I snapped back, thinking, Why don’t you just say no? “what business is that of yours? Drive, please. This is the road to Jerusalem, is it not?”

“Are you a Zionist?”

The car was now perceptibly losing speed, the road was pitch-black, and beyond it I could see nothing.

“Why are you slowing down?”

“Bad car. Not work.”

“It was working a few minutes ago.”

“Are you a Zionist?”

We were barely rolling along now.

“Shift,” I said, “shift the car down and give it some gas.”

But here the car stopped.

“What’s going on!”

He did not answer but got out of the car with a flashlight, which he began clicking on and off.

“Answer me! Why are you stopping out here like this? Where are we? Why are you flashing that light?”

I didn’t know whether to stay in the car or to jump out of the car or whether either was going to make any difference to whatever was about to befall me. “Look,” I shouted, leaping after him onto the road, “did you understand me? I am George Ziad’s friend! ”

But I couldn’t find him. He was gone.

And this is what you get for fucking around in the middle of a civil insurrection! This is what you get for not listening to Claire and not turning everything over to lawyers! This is what you get for failing to comply with a sense of reality like everyone else’s! Easter Parade! This is what you get for your bad jokes!

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey, you! Where are you?”

When there was no reply, I opened the driver’s door and felt around for the ignition: he’d left the keys . I got in and shut the door and, without hesitating, started the car, accelerating hard in neutral to prevent it from stalling. Then I pulled onto the road and tried to build up speed — there must be a checkpoint somewhere! But I hadn’t driven fifty feet before the driver appeared in the dim beam of the headlights waving one hand for me to stop and clutching his trousers around his knees with the other. I had to swerve wildly to avoid hitting him, and then, instead of stopping to let him get back in and drive me the rest of the way, I gunned the motor and pumped the gas pedal but nothing was able to get the thing to pick up speed and, only seconds later, the motor conked out.

Back behind me in the road I saw the flashlight wavering in the air, and in a few minutes the old driver was standing, breathless, beside the car. I got out and handed him the keys and he got back in and, after two or three attempts, started the motor, and we began to move off, jerkily at first, but then everything seemed to be all right and we were driving along once again in what I decided to believe was the right direction.

“You should have said you had to shit. What was I supposed to think when you just stopped the car and disappeared?”

“Sick,” he answered. “Stomach.”

“You should have told me that. I misunderstood.”

“Are you a Zionist?”

“Why do you keep asking that? If you mean Meir Kahane, then I am not a Zionist. If you mean Shimon Peres …” But why was I favoring with an answer this harmless old man with bowel problems, answering him seriously in a language he understood only barely … where the hell was my sense of reality? “Drive, please,” I said. “Jerusalem. Just get me to Jerusalem. And without talking!”

But we hadn’t got more than three or four miles closer to Jerusalem when he drove the car over to the shoulder, shut off the engine, took up the flashlight, and got out. This time I sat calmly in the back seat while he found himself some spot off the road to take another crap. I even began to laugh aloud at how I had exaggerated the menacing side of all this, when suddenly I was blinded by headlights barreling straight toward the taxi. Just inches from the front bumper, the other vehicle stopped, although I had braced for the impact and may even have begun to scream. Then there was noise everywhere, people shouting, a second vehicle, a third, there was a burst of light whitening everything, a second burst and I was being dragged out of the car and onto the road. I didn’t know which language I was hearing, I could discern virtually nothing in all that incandescence, and I didn’t know what to fear more, to have fallen into the violent hands of marauding Arabs or a violent band of Israeli settlers. “English!” I shouted, even as I tumbled along the surface of the highway. “I speak English!”

I was up and doubled over the car fender and then I was yanked and spun around and something knocked glancingly against the back of my skull and then I saw, hovering enormously overhead, a helicopter. I heard myself shouting, “Don’t hit me, God damn it, I’m a Jew!” I’d realized that these were just the people I’d been looking for to get me safely back to my hotel.

I couldn’t have counted all the soldiers pointing rifles at me even if I could have managed successfully to count — more soldiers even than there’d been in the Ramallah courtroom, helmeted and armed now, shouting instructions that I couldn’t have heard, even if their language was one I understood, because of the noise of the helicopter.

“I hired this taxi in Ramallah!” I shouted back to them. “The driver stopped to shit!”

“Speak English!” someone shouted to me.

“THIS IS ENGLISH! HE STOPPED TO MOVE HIS BOWELS!”

“Yes? Him?”

“The driver! The Arab driver!” But where was he? Was I the only one they’d caught? “There was a driver!”

“Too late at night!”

“Is it? I didn’t know.”

“Shit?” a voice asked.

“Yes — we stopped for the driver to shit, he was only flashing the flashlight —”

“To shit!”

“Yes!”

Whoever had been asking the questions began to laugh. “That’s all?” he shouted.

“As far as I know, yes . I could be wrong.”

“You are!”

Just then one of them approached, a young, heavyset soldier, and he had a hand extended toward mine. In his other hand was a pistol. “Here.” He gave me my wallet. “You dropped this.”

“Thank you.”

“This is quite a coincidence,” he said politely in perfect English, “I just today, this afternoon, finished one of your books.”

Thirty minutes later, I was safely at the door of my hotel, chauffeured there in an army jeep by Gal Metzler,° the young lieutenant who that very afternoon had read the whole of The Ghost Writer . Gal was the twenty-two-year-old son of a successful Haifa manufacturer who’d been in Auschwitz as a boy and with whom Gal had a relationship, he told me, exactly like the one Nathan Zuckerman had with his father in my book. Side by side in the jeep’s front seats, we sat in the parking area in front of the hotel while Gal talked to me about his father and himself, and while I was thinking that the only son I’d seen yet in Greater Israel who was not in conflict with his father was John Demjanjuk, Jr. There there was only harmony.