Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

Gal told me that in six months he would be finishing four years as an army officer. Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn’t know. That’s why he was devouring two and three books a day — to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life. At night, he said, every night, he dreamed about leaving Israel after his time was up and going to NYU to study film. Did I know the film school at NYU? He mentioned the names of some teachers there. Did I know these people?

“How long,” I asked him, “will you stay in America?”

“I don’t know. If Sharon comes to power … I don’t know. Now I go home on leave, and my mother tiptoes around me as though I’m somebody just released from the hospital, as though I’m crippled or an invalid. I can stand only so much of it. Then I start shouting at her. ‘Look, you want to know if I personally beat anyone? I didn’t. But I had to do an awful lot of maneuvering to avoid it!’ She’s glad and she cries and it makes her feel better. But then my father starts shouting at the two of us. ‘Breaking hands? It happens in New York City every night. The victims are black. Will you go running from America because they break hands in America?’ My father says, ‘Take the British, put them here, face them with what we are facing — they would act out of morality? The Canadians would act out of morality? The French? A state does not act out of moral ideology, a state acts out of self-interest. A state acts to preserve its existence.’ ‘Then maybe I prefer to be stateless,’ I tell him. He laughs at me. ‘We tried it,’ he tells me. ‘It didn’t work out.’ As if I need his stupid sarcasm — as if half of me doesn’t believe exactly what he believes! Still I have to deal with women and children who look me in the eyes and scream. They look at me ordering my troops to take away their brothers and their sons, and what they see is an Israeli monster in sunglasses and boots. My father is disgusted with me when I say such things. He throws his dishes on the floor in the middle of the meal. My mother starts crying. I start crying. I cry! And I never cry. But I love my father, Mr. Roth, so I cry! Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done to make my father proud of me. That was why I became an officer. My father survived Auschwitz when he was ten years younger than I am now. I am humiliated that I can’t survive this. I know what reality is. I’m not a fool who believes that he is pure or that life is simple. It is Israel’s fate to live in an Arab sea. Jews accepted this fate rather than have nothing and no fate. Jews accepted partition and the Arabs did not. If they’d said yes, my father reminds me, they would be celebrating forty years of statehood too. But every political decision with which they have been confronted, invariably they have made the wrong choice. I know all this . Nine tenths of their misery they owe to the idiocy of their own political leaders. I know that . But still I look at my own government and I want to vomit. Would you write a recommendation for me to NYU?”

A big soldier armed with a pistol, a two-hundred-pound leader of men whose face was darkly stubbled with several days’ whiskers and whose combat uniform foully reeked of sweat, and yet, the more he recounted of his unhappiness with his father and his father’s with him, the younger and more defenseless he had seemed to me. And now this request, uttered almost in the voice of a child. “So —” I laughed — “that’s why you saved my life out there. That’s why you didn’t let them break my hands — so I could write your recommendation.”

“No, no, no,” he quickly replied, a humorless boy distressed by my laughter and even more grave now than he’d been before, “no — no one would have hurt you. Yes, it’s there, of course it’s there, I’m not saying it’s not there — some of the boys are brutal. Most because they are frightened, some because they know the others are watching and they don’t want to be cowards, and some because they think, ‘Better them than us, better him than me.’ But no, I assure you — you were never in real danger.”

“It’s you who’s in real danger.”

“Of falling apart? You can tell that? You can see that?”

“You know what I see?” I said. “I see that you are a Diasporist and you don’t even know it. You don’t even know what a Diasporist is. You don’t know what your choices really are.”

“A Diasporist? A Jew who lives in the Diaspora.”

“No, no. More than that. Much more. It is a Jew for whom authenticity as a Jew means living in the Diaspora, for whom the Diaspora is the normal condition and Zionism is the abnormality — a Diasporist is a Jew who believes that the only Jews who matter are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who will survive are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who are Jews are the Jews of the Diaspora —”

It would have been hard to say where I found the energy after what I’d been through in just forty-eight hours, but suddenly here in Jerusalem something was running away with me again and there seemed to be nothing I had more strength for than this playing-at-Pipik. That lubricious sensation that is fluency took over, my eloquence grew, and on I went calling for the de-Israelization of the Jews, on and on once again, obeying an intoxicating urge that did not leave me feeling quite so sure of myself as I may have sounded to poor Gal, torn in two as he was by the rebellious and delinquent feelings of a loyal, loving son.

When I went up to the desk for the key to my room, the young clerk smiled and said, “But you have it, sir.”

“If I had it I wouldn’t be asking for it.”

“Earlier, when you came out of the bar, I gave it to you, sir.”

“I haven’t been in the bar. I’ve been everywhere in Israel but the bar. Look, I’m thirsty. I’m hungry. I’m dirty and I need a bath. I’m out on my feet. The key.”

“Yes, a key!” he chirped, pretending to laugh at his own stupidity, and turned away to find one for me while slowly I caught up with the meaning of what I had just heard.

I sat with my key in one of the wicker chairs in the corner of the lobby. The desk clerk by whom I’d first been confused tiptoed up to me after about twenty minutes and asked in a quiet voice whether I needed assistance to my room; worried that I might be ill, he had brought, on a tray, a bottle of mineral water and a glass. I took the water and drank it all down, and then, when he remained at my side, looking concerned, I assured him that I was all right and could make my way to my room alone.

It was almost eleven. If I waited another hour, might he not leave on his own — or would he just get into my pajamas and go to bed? Perhaps the solution was to take a taxi over to the King David Hotel and ask for his key as casually as he, apparently, had walked off with mine. Yes, go there and sleep there. With her. And tomorrow he meets with Aharon to complete our conversation while she and I get on with the promotion of the cause. I just pick up where I left off in the jeep.

I remained half dozing in that corner chair, groggily thinking that this was still last summer and that everything I took to be actuality — the Jewish courtroom in Ramallah, George’s desperate wife and child, my impersonating Moishe Pipik for them, the farcical taxi ride with the shitting driver, my alarming run-in with the Israeli army, my impersonating Moishe Pipik for Gal — was all a Halcion hallucination. Moishe Pipik was himself a Halcion hallucination; as was Jinx Possesski; as was this Arab hotel; as was the city of Jerusalem. If this were Jerusalem I’d be where I always stay, the municipal guest house, Mishkenot Sha’ananim. I would have seen Apter and all my friends here. …