Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

Crush him. I was indignant enough to think that I could. I certainly knew that I should. Our moment had arrived, the face-to-face showdown between just the two of us: the genuine versus the fake, the responsible versus the reckless, the serious versus the superficial, the resilient versus the ravaged, the multiform versus the monomaniacal, the accomplished versus the unfulfilled, the imaginative versus the escapist, the literate versus the unschooled, the judicious versus the fanatic, the essential versus the superfluous, the constructive versus the useless. …

The taxi waited for me in the circular drive outside the King David Hotel while, at this early hour, the armed security guard at the hotel door accompanied me to the front desk. I repeated to the desk clerk what I’d told the guard: Mr. Roth was expecting me.

The clerk smiled. “Your brother.”

I nodded.

“Twin.”

I nodded again. Why not?

“He is gone. No longer with us.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Your brother left half an hour ago.”

Meema Gitcha’s words exactly!

“They all left?” I asked. “Our Orthodox cousins, too?”

“He was alone, sir.”

“No. Couldn’t be. I was to meet him here with our cousins. Three bearded men in yarmulkes.”

“Not tonight, Mr. Roth.”

“They didn’t show up,” I said.

“I don’t believe so, sir.”

“And he’s gone. At four-thirty. And not coming back. No message for me.”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“I believe to Romania.”

“At four-thirty in the morning. Of course. And did Meir Kahane visit my brother tonight, by any chance? You know who I mean? Rabbi Meir Kahane?”

“I know who Rabbi Kahane is, sir. Rabbi Kahane was not in the hotel.”

I asked if I might use the pay phone across the lobby. I dialed the American Colony and asked for my old room. I had told the clerk there, after paying the bill, that my wife was asleep and would be leaving in the morning. But it turned out that she had left already.

“You’re sure?” I asked him.

“Mister and Missus. They’re both gone.”

I hung up, waited a minute, and phoned the hotel again.

“Mr. Demjanjuk’s room,” I said.

“Who is calling, please?”

“This is the jail calling.”

A moment later I heard an anxious, sharp “Hello?”

“You all right?” I asked.

“Hello? Who is this? Who is this?”

He was there, I was here, they were gone. I hung up. They were gone, he was safe. They’d fled their own plot!

And that plot’s purpose? Only larceny? Or was the whole hoax merely that, a hoax, two crazy X’s off on a lark?

Standing at the phone and thinking that this entire mishap might just have come to a sudden end, I was more mystified than ever, wondering if these were two X’s who were themselves escaping the world or two X’s whom the world itself was escaping or two X’s who’d only been falsifying everything so as to befuddle me … though why that should be a goal of anyone’s was the most mystifying question of all. And it looked now as though I’d probably never know the answer — and as though what had enthralled me from the start was the question! Had they wanted only me to think that all their falseness was real, or had they themselves imagined it to be real, or was their excitement in creating the Pirandellian effect by derealizing everything and everyone, beginning with themselves? Some hoax that was!

I returned to the front desk. “I’ll take my brother’s room.”

“Let me give you a room that has not been occupied, sir.”

I pulled a fifty-dollar bill from my wallet. “His will be just fine.”

“Your passport, please, Mr. Roth.”

“Our parents liked the name so much,” I explained, passing it across the counter with the fifty, “that they gave it to both of us.”

I waited while he examined my photograph and recorded the passport number in the registration book. He handed the passport back to me without any comment. I then filled out the registration card and received the key to suite 511. The security guard had meanwhile returned to the front door of the hotel. I gave him twenty dollars to pay the taxi driver and told him to keep the change for himself.

For the next half hour, until it was dawn, I searched Pipik’s room and found nothing in any of the drawers, nothing on the desk, no notes on the notepad, no magazines or newspapers left behind, nothing beneath the bed, nothing behind the cushions of the armchair, nothing hanging in the closet or lying on the closet floor. When I peeled back the bedspread and the blanket, the sheets and pillow-cases were freshly ironed and smelled still of the laundry. No one had slept there since housekeeping had made up the room the previous morning. The towels in the bathroom were also fresh. Only when I lifted the toilet seat did I find a trace of his occupancy. A kinked spiral of dark pubic hair about the size of a fourteen-point ampersand adhered to the enamel rim of the bowl. I tweezed it loose between two fingernails and deposited it into a hotel envelope from the stationery drawer of the desk. I searched the bathroom floor for a strand of her hair, an eyelash, a snippet of toenail, but the tiles had been swept spotlessly clean — nothing there either. I got up off my knees to wash my hands in the sink, and it was there that I discovered along the lip of the basin, just beneath the hot-water tap, the minute filings of a man’s beard. I blotted them carefully into a square of toilet tissue — a scattering of maybe ten filings in all — folded the tissue in quarters, and put it into a second envelope. The filings could, of course, have been anyone’s — they could even have been my own; he could have found them when he was snooping around my hotel bathroom and, to seal our oneness, transferred them here to his. Having done everything else he’d done, why not that too? Perhaps even the pubic hair was mine. It certainly could have passed for mine, but then, with coils of stray pubic hair, it’s difficult often, using just the naked eye, to distinguish exactly whose is whose. Still, I took it — if he could disguise himself as the writer, I could pretend to be the detective.

These two envelopes, along with the cloth star and his handwritten “Ten Tenets of A-S.A.,” are beside me on the desk as I write, here to attest to the tangibility of a visitation that even I must be continually reassured was only cloaked in the appearance of a nonsensical, crude, phantasmagorical farce. These envelopes and their contents remind me that the spectral, half-demented appearance was, in fact, the very earmark of its indisputable lifelike realness and that, when life looks least like what it’s supposed to look like, it may then be most like whatever it is.

I also have here the audiotape cassette that, to my astonishment, I found when I went to play one of Aharon Appelfeld’s taped conversations with me on my return to London. It had been inserted in the very tape recorder that I’d locked away in the hotel closet at the American Colony and that I hadn’t opened or used since I’d stolen with my bag out of that room, leaving Jinx asleep in the bed. There is no way for me to explain how the cassette had got placed into my machine before I’d returned to the room other than to think that Pipik had picked the closet lock using the skills he had acquired as a tracer of missing persons. The handwriting on the label that looks so like mine is, of course, his; so is the voice babbling the toxic babble of the people who destroyed almost everything, the maddening, diseased, murderous arraignment that only sounds unreal. The label reads: “A-S.A. Workout Tape #2. ‘Did the Six Million Really Die?’ Copyright Anti-Semites Anonymous, 1988. All rights reserved.”