Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“Look,” I said to him from the doorway, “I’m going to get the house detective. He’s going to call the police. You’ve broken into my room. You’ve trespassed on my property. I don’t know what you may have taken —”

“What I’ve taken?” And saying this, he swung about and sat himself up on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his hands so that for the moment I couldn’t see the grief-stricken face and the resemblance to my own, by which I was still transfixed and horrified. Nor could he see me and the resemblance to which he had succumbed out of a motive that was still anything but clear in its personal particulars. I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life. It wasn’t even that Pipik had gone further than most — he was, in the mirror, improbably evolved into somebody else already; there was very little more for him to imitate or fantasize. I could understand the temptation to quash oneself and become imperfect and a sham in entertainingly new ways — I had succumbed too, and not just a few hours earlier with the Ziads and then with Gal, but more sweepingly even than that in my books: looking like myself, sounding like myself, even laying claim to convenient scraps of my biography, and yet, beneath the disguise of me, someone entirely other.

But this was no book, and it wouldn’t do. “Get off my bed,” I told him, “get out!”

But he had picked up Aharon’s Tzili and was showing me how far he’d got in reading it. “This stuff is real poison,” he said. “Everything Diasporism fights against. Why do you think highly of this guy when he is the last thing we need? He will never relinquish anti-Semitism. It’s the rock he builds his whole world on. Eternal and unshakable anti-Semitism. The man is irreparably damaged by the Holocaust — why do you want to encourage people to read this fear-ridden stuff?”

“You miss the point — I want only to encourage you to leave.”

“It astonishes me that you, of all people, after all that you have written, should want to reinforce the stereotype of the Jewish victim. I read your dialogue with Primo Levi last year in the Times . I heard you had a breakdown after he killed himself.”

“Who’d you hear it from? Walesa?”

“From your brother. From Sandy.”

“You’re in touch with my brother, too? He’s never mentioned it.”

“Come in. Close the door. We have a lot to talk about. We have been intertwined for decades in a thousand different ways. You don’t want to know how uncanny this whole thing is, do you? All you want is to get rid of it. But it goes back, Philip, all the way back to Chancellor Avenue School.”

“Yes, you went to Chancellor?”

He began quietly to sing, in a soft baritone voice — a singing voice chillingly familiar to me — a few bars of the Chancellor Avenue School song, words that had been set, early in the thirties, to the tune of “On Wisconsin.” “… We will do our best … try to always be victorious … put us through the test, rah-rah-rah …” He smiled at me wanly with the grief-stricken face. “Remember the cop who crossed you at the corner of Chancellor and Summit? Nineteen thirty-eight — the year you started kindergarten. Remember his name?”

While he spoke I glanced back toward the staircase, and there, to my relief, I saw just the person I was looking for. He paused at the landing, a short, stocky man in shirtsleeves, with closely cropped black hair and a masklike, inexpressive face, or so the face appeared from that distance. He looked toward me now without any attempt to disguise the fact that he was there and that he too sensed that something suspicious was going on. It was the plainclothesman.

“Al,” Pipik was saying once again, his head falling back on the pillows. “Al the Cop,” he repeated wistfully.

While Pipik babbled on from the bed, the plainclothesman, without my even signaling him, started along the corridor toward where I was waiting in the open doorway.

“You used to jump up to touch his arms,” Pipik was reminding me. “He’d hold his arms straight out to stop the traffic, and you little kids would jump up and touch his arms as you crossed the street. Every morning, ‘Hi, Al!’ and jump up and touch his arms. Nineteen thirty-eight. Remember?”

“Sure,” I said, and as the plainclothesman approached, I smiled to let him know that, although he was needed, the situation was not yet out of control. He leaned close to my ear and mumbled something. He spoke in English but because of his accent the softly uttered words were unintelligible at first.

“What?” I whispered.

“Want me to blow you?” he whispered back.

“Oh, no — thanks, no. My mistake.” And I stepped into the room and pulled the door firmly shut.

“Pardon the intrusion,” I said.

“Remember Al?”

I sat down in the easy chair by the window, not quite knowing what else to do now that I was locked in with him. “You don’t look so hot, Pipik.”

“Pardon?”

“You look awful. You look physically ill. This business is not doing you a world of good — you look like somebody in very serious trouble.”

“Pipik?” He was sitting up now on the bed. Contemptuously he asked, “You call me Pipik?”

“Don’t take it so hard. What else should I call you?”

“Cut the shit — I came for the check.”

“What check?”

“My check!”

“Yours? Please. Did anyone ever tell you about my great-aunt who lived in Danbury, Pipik? My grandfather’s older sister on my father’s side. Nobody tell you yet about our Meema Gitcha?”

“I want that check.”

“You found out about Al the Cop, somebody taught you all the words to the Chancellor song, so now perhaps it’s time you learned about Meema Gitcha, the family ancient, and how we would visit her and the phone calls we made to her when we got home from her house, safe and sound. You’re so interested in 1938 — this is about 1940.”

“You’re not stealing from me stealing that check, you’re not stealing from Smilesburger — you’re stealing from the Jewish people.”

“Please. Please . Enough. Meema Gitcha was also a Jewish person, you know — listen to me .” I can’t say that I had any idea of what I was doing but I told myself that if I just took charge and kept talking I could wear him down to nothing and then proceed from there … But to do what? “Meema Gitcha — a very foreign-looking Old Country woman, big and bossy and bustling, and she wore a wig and shawls and long dark dresses, and going to visit her in Danbury was a terrific outing, almost like leaving America.”

“I want that check. Now.”

“Pipik, pipe down.”

“Cut the Pipik crap!”

“Then listen . This is interesting . Once every six months or so we went out in two carloads to visit Meema Gitcha for the weekend. Her husband had been a hatter in Danbury. He used to work at Fishman’s in Newark with my grandfather, who was also a hatter for a while, but when the hat factories left for Connecticut, Gitcha and her family moved up with them to Danbury. About ten years later, Gitcha’s husband, working in off-hours, taking a stock of finished hats to the shipping room, was trapped and died in an accident in the elevator. Gitcha was on her own and so two, three times a year, we all went north to see her. A five-hour car ride in those days. Aunts, uncles, cousins, my grandmother, all packed in together, coming and going. It was somehow the most Jewishy-Yiddishy event of my childhood — we could have been driving all the way back to the folkland of Galicia traveling up to Danbury on those trips. Meema Gitcha’s was a household with a lot of melancholy and confusion — poor lighting, food always cooking, illness in the wings, some new tragedy always imminent — relatives very different from the lively, healthy, Americanized contingent stuffed into the new Studebakers. Meema Gitcha never got over her husband’s accident. She was always sure we were going to be killed in a car crash on the way up, and when we weren’t, she was sure we would be killed in a crash on the way down, and so the custom was that as soon as we got home on Sunday night, the very moment we stepped through the door, before anybody even went to the bathroom or got out of his coat, Meema Gitcha had to be phoned and reassured that we were still alive. But, of course, in those days, in our world, a long-distance phone call was unheard of — other than in an emergency, nobody would dream of making one. Nonetheless, when we got home from Meema Gitcha’s, no matter how late it was, my mother got on the phone and, as though what she was doing was entirely on the up and up, dialed the operator and asked to place a long-distance call to Meema Gitcha’s Connecticut number and to speak there person-to-person with Moishe Pipik. Even while my mother was holding the phone, my brother and I used to put our ears up next to hers on the receiver because it was tremendously exciting to hear the goyisch operator trying to get her tongue around ‘Moishe Pipik.’ She always got it wrong, and my mother, who was wonderful at this and celebrated for it in the family, my mother very calmly, very precisely, would say, ‘No, operator, no — person-to-person to Moí-she … Pí-pik. Mr. Moishe … Pipik.’ And when finally the operator got it marginally right, we would hear the voice of Meema Gitcha jumping in at the other end — ‘Moishe Pipik? He’s not here! He left half an hour ago!’ and immediately, bang, she’d hang up before the phone company caught on to what we were doing and threw the whole bunch of us in jail.”