Philip Roth: Operation Shylock

“Why can’t you contact the Israeli police?” she asked.

“I think the Israeli police may find themselves facing problems more pressing than mine right now. What would I tell them? Arrest him? Deport him? On what grounds? As far as I know, he hasn’t passed a phony check in my name, he hasn’t been paid for any services in my name —”

“But he must have entered Israel with a phony passport, with papers in your name. That’s illegal.”

“But do we know this? We don’t. It’s illegal but not very likely. I suspect that all he’s done in my name is to shoot his mouth off.”

“But there must be legal safeguards. A person cannot simply run off to a foreign country and go around pretending to be someone he is not.”

“Happens probably more often than you think. How about some realism? Darling, how about your taking a reasonable perspective?”

“I don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s my reasonable perspective.”

“What ‘happened’ to me happened to me many months ago now.”

“Are you really up to this? I have to ask you, Philip.”

“There’s nothing for me to be ‘up to.’ Did anything like what happened to me ever happen to me before that drug? Has anything like it happened to me since the drug? Tomorrow they’re printing a retraction. They’re faxing Helene a copy. That’s enough for now.”

“Well, I don’t understand this calm of yours — or hers, frankly.”

“Now the calm’s upsetting. This morning it was my chagrin.”

“Yes, well — I don’t believe it.”

“Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“Promise me you won’t do anything ridiculous.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know . Trying to find this person. Trying to fight with this person. You have no idea whom you might be dealing with. You must not try to look for him and solve this stupid thing yourself. At least promise that you won’t do that.”

I laughed at the very idea. “My guess,” I said, lying once again, “is that by the time I get to Jerusalem, he won’t be anywhere to be found.”

“You won’t do it.”

“I won’t have to. Look, see it this way, will you? I have everything on my side, he has nothing on his, absolutely nothing.”

“But you’re wrong. You know what he has on his side? It’s clear from every word you speak. He has you.”

After our dinner that evening I told Claire that I was going off to my study at the top of the house to sit down again with Aharon’s novels to continue making my notes for the Jerusalem conversation. But no more than five minutes had passed after I’d settled at the desk, when I heard the television set playing below and I picked up the phone and called the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and asked to be put through to 511. To disguise my voice I used a French accent, not the bedroom accent, not the farcical accent, not that French accent descended from Charles Boyer through Danny Kaye to the TV ads for table wines and traveler’s checks, but the accent of highly articulate and cosmopolitan Frenchmen like my friend the writer Philippe Sollers, no “zis,” no “zat,” all initial h ’s duly aspirated — fluent English simply tinged with the natural inflections and marked by the natural cadences of an intelligent foreigner. It’s an imitation I don’t do badly — once, on the phone, I fooled even mischievous Sollers — and the one I’d decided on even while Claire and I were arguing at the dinner table about the wisdom of my trip, even while, I must admit, the exalted voice of Reason had been counseling me, earlier that day, that doing nothing was the surest way to do him in. By nine o’clock that night, curiosity had all but consumed me, and curiosity is not a very rational whim.

“Hello, Mr. Roth? Mr. Philip Roth?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this really the author I’m speaking to?”

“It is.”

“The author of Portnoy et son complexe? ”

“Yes, yes. Who is this, please?”

My heart was pounding as though I were out on my first big robbery with an accomplice no less brilliant than Jean Genet — this was not merely treacherous, this was interesting . To think that he was pretending at his end of the line to be me while I was pretending at my end not to be me gave me a terrific, unforeseen, Mardi Gras kind of kick, and probably it was this that accounted for the stupid error I immediately made. “I am Pierre Roget,” I said, and only in the instant after uttering a convenient nom de guerre that I’d plucked seemingly out of nowhere did I realize that its initial letters were the same as mine — and the same as his. Worse, it happened also to be the barely transmogrified name of the nineteenth-century word cataloger who is known to virtually everyone as the author of the famous thesaurus. I hadn’t realized that either — the author of the definitive book of synonyms!

“I am a French journalist based in Paris,” I said. “I have just read in the Israeli press about your meeting with Lech Walesa in Gdansk.”

Slip number two: Unless I knew Hebrew, how could I have read his interview in the Israeli press? What if he now began speaking to me in a language that I had learned just badly enough to manage to be bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen and that I no longer understood at all?

Reason: “You are playing right into his plan. This is the very situation his criminality craves. Hang up.”

Claire: “Are you really all right? Are you really up to this? Don’t go.”

Pierre Roget: “If I read correctly, you are leading a movement to resettle Europe with Israeli Jews of European background. Beginning in Poland.”

“Correct,” he replied.

“And you continue at the same time to write your novels?”

“Writing novels while Jews are at a crossroads like this? My life now is focused entirely on the Jewish European resettlement movement. On Diasporism.”

Did he sound anything like me? I would have thought that my voice could far more easily pass for someone like Sollers speaking English than his could pass for mine. For one thing, he had much more Jersey in his speech than I’d ever had, though whether because it came naturally to him or because he mistakenly thought it would make the impersonation more convincing, I couldn’t figure out. But then this was a more resonant voice than mine as well, richer and more stentorian by far. Maybe that was how he thought somebody who had published sixteen books would talk on the phone to an interviewer, while the fact is that if I talked like that I might not have had to write sixteen books. But the impulse to tell him this, strong as it was, I restrained; I was having too good a time to think of stifling either one of us.

“You are a Jew,” I said, “who in the past has been criticized by Jewish groups for your ‘self-hatred’ and your ‘anti-Semitism.’ Would it be correct to assume —”

“Look,” he said, abruptly breaking in, “I am a Jew, period. I would not have gone to Poland to meet with Walesa if I were anything else. I would not be here visiting Israel and attending the Demjanjuk trial if I were anything else. Please, I will be glad to tell you all you wish to know about resettlement. Otherwise I haven’t time to waste on what has been said about me by stupid people.”

“But,” I persisted, “won’t stupid people say that because of this resettlement idea you are an enemy of Israel and its mission? Won’t this confirm —”

“I am Israel’s enemy,” he interrupted again, “if you wish to put it that sensationally, only because I am for the Jews and Israel is no longer in the Jewish interest. Israel has become the gravest threat to Jewish survival since the end of World War Two.”