Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  “George is not fair to his informers,” the Jewish lawyer told me. “Yes, there are a great many of them, but why not? It is a traditional occupation in this region, one at which its practitioners are marvelously adept. Informing has a long and noble history here. Informing goes back not just to the British, not just to the Turks, it goes all the way back to Judas. Be a good cultural relativist, George—informing is a way of life here, no less deserving of your respect than the way of life indigenous to any society. You spent so many years abroad as an intellectual playboy, you were away so long from your own people, that you judge them, if I may say so, almost with the eyes of a condescending Israeli imperialist dog. You speak of informing, but informing offers a little relief from all that humiliation. Informing lends status, informing offers privileges. You really should not be so quick to slit the throats of your collaborators when collaborating is one of your society’s most estimable achievements. It is actually on the order of an anthropological crime to burn their hands and stone them to death—and for someone in your shoes, it is stupid as well. Since everybody in Ramallah already suspects everyone else of informing, some foolish hothead might someday be so misguided as to take you for a collaborator and slit your throat too. What if I were to spread the rumor myself? I might not find doing that too unpleasant.”

  “Shmuel,” George replied, “do what you do, spread false rumors if you like—”

  While their bantering continued, Kamil stood apart smoking in silence. He did not seem even to be listening, nor was there any reason why he should have been, since this bitter little vaudeville turn was clearly for the sake of my, and not his, education.

  The soldiers who’d been smoking together at the other end of the yard started back toward the courtroom door and, after expectorating into the dust from behind one hand, the lawyer Shmuel, too, abruptly headed off without another insult for any of us.

  Kamil said to me, now that Shmuel had gone, “I mistook you for somebody else.”

  Who this time? I wondered. I waited to hear more but for a while there was nothing more and his thoughts appeared to be elsewhere again. “There are too many things to do,” he finally explained, “in not enough time. We are all overworked and overstrained. No sleep begins to make you stupid.” A grave apology—and the gravity I found as unnerving as everything else about him. Because his rage wasn’t flaring up in your face every two minutes, it struck me as more fearsome than George’s to be near. It was like being in the vicinity of one of those bombs they unearth during urban excavations, the big ones that have lain unexploded since World War II. I imagined—as I didn’t when thinking about George—that Kamil could do a lot of damage when and if he ever went off.

  “Whom did you mistake me for?” I asked.

  He surprised me by smiling. “Yourself.”

  I did not like this smile from a man who I surmised never horsed around. Did he know what he was saying or was he saying that he had nothing more to say? All this performing didn’t mean that a play was in progress; it meant the opposite.

  “Yes,” I said, feigning friendliness, “I can see how you might be misled. But I assure you that I am no more myself than anyone else around here.”

  Something in that response made him promptly turn even more severe-looking than before the dubious gift of that smile. I really couldn’t understand what he was up to. Kamil spoke as though in a code known only to himself; or perhaps he was just trying to frighten me.

  “The judge,” George said, “has agreed that his brother should go to the hospital. Kamil is staying to be sure it happens.”

  “I hope nothing’s wrong with your brother,” I said, but Kamil continued to look at me as though I were the one who had given the boy the injection. Now that he had apologized for having mistaken me for somebody else, he seemed to have concluded that I was even more contemptible than the other guy.

  “Yes,” Kamil replied. “You are sympathetic. Very sympathetic. It is difficult not to be sympathetic when you see with your own eyes what is being perpetrated here. But let me tell you what will happen to your sympathy. You will leave here, and in a week, two weeks, a month at the most, you will forget. And Mr. Shmuel the lawyer, he will go home tonight and, even before he is in the front door, before he has even eaten his dinner and played with his children, he will forget. And George will leave here and perhaps even George will forget. If not today, tomorrow. George forgot once before.” Angrily he pointed back to the jail, but his voice was exceedingly gentle when he said, “The one who receives the strokes has an experience different from that of the one who counts the strokes.” And with that went back to where his brother was a prisoner of the Jews.

  George wanted to telephone his wife to tell her he would shortly be home with a guest, so we walked around to a door at the front of the complex, where there was no one standing guard, and George simply pushed it open and went in, with me following closely behind. I was astonished that a Palestinian like George and a perfect stranger like me could just start down the corridor without anyone’s stopping us, especially when I remembered that no one had checked at any point to see if we were armed. In an office at the end of the corridor, three female soldiers, Israeli girls of about eighteen or nineteen, were typing away, their radio tuned to the standard rock stuff—we had only to roll a grenade through the open door to take our revenge for Kamil’s brother. How come no one seemed alert to this possibility? One of the typists looked up when he asked in Hebrew if he could use the phone. She nodded perfunctorily, “Shalom, George,” and that’s when I thought, He is a collaborator.

  George, speaking English, was telling his wife how he’d run into me in Jerusalem, the great friend he hadn’t seen since 1955, and I looked at the posters on the walls of the dirty, drab little room, tacked up probably by the soldier-typists to help them forget where they worked—there was a travel poster from Colombia, a poster of little ducklings swimming cutely in a lily pond, a poster of wildflowers growing abundantly in a peaceful field—and all the while I pretended to be engaged by them and nothing more, I was thinking, He’s an Israeli spy—and who he is spying on is me. Only what kind of spy can he be if he doesn’t know that I’m not the right me? And why should Shmuel have exposed him if Shmuel works for Shin Bet himself? No, he’s a spy for the PLO. No, he’s a spy for no one. No one’s a spy. I’m the spy!

  Where everything is words, you’d think I’d have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said … no, I’d be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar’s a roar and one is hard put to miss its meaning. Here I had only the weakest understanding of what might underlie the fighting and the shadow fighting; nor was my own behavior much more plausible to me than anyone else’s.

  As we walked together down the hill and out past the guarded gatehouses, George berated himself for having imposed the miseries of the occupation on his wife and his son, neither of whom had the fortitude for a frontline existence, even though for Anna° there was compensation of a sort in living virtually next door to the widowed father whose failing health had been such a source of anxiety to her in America. He was a wealthy Ramallah businessman, nearly eighty, who had seen that Anna was sent to the best schools from the time she was ten, first, in the mid-fifties, to a Christian girls’ school in Beirut, after that to the United States, where she’d met and married George, who was also Christian. Anna had worked for years as a layout artist with a Boston advertising agency; here she ran a workshop for the production of propaganda posters, leaflets, and handouts, an operation whose clandestine nature took its toll in a daily dose of nagging medical problems and a weekly bout of migraines. Her abiding fear was of the Israelis coming at night and arresting not her but their fifteen-year-old son, Michael.°

  Yet for George himself had there been a choice? In Boston he’d held the line against Is
rael’s defenders at the Middle East seminars in Coolidge Hall, he obstinately opposed his Jewish friends even when it meant ruining his own dinner parties, he wrote op-ed pieces for the Globe and went on WGBH whenever Chris Lydon wanted someone to battle for three minutes with the local Netanyahu on his show; but idealistically resisting the occupier from the satisfying security of his tenured American professorship turned out to be even less tolerable to his conscience than the memory of going around all those years disavowing any connection to the struggle at all. Yet here in Ramallah, true to his duty, he worried continually about what returning with him was doing to Anna and, even more, to Michael, whose rebellion George hadn’t foreseen, though when he described it I wondered how he could have failed to. However heroic the cause had seemed to Michael amid the patriotic graffiti decorating his bedroom walls in suburban Newton, he felt now as only an adolescent son can toward what he sees as an obstacle to his self-realization raised by an obtuse father mandating an outmoded way of life. Most reluctantly, George was on the brink of accepting his father-in-law’s financial help and, at Anna’s insistence, sending Michael back to a New England boarding school for his remaining high school years. To George—who believed the boy was big enough to stay and be educated here in the hard truth of their lives, old enough now to share in the tribulation that was inescapably theirs and to embrace the consequences of being George’s son—the arguments with Michael were all the more punishing for being a reenactment of the bitter conflict that had alienated him from his own father and embittered them both.

  My heart went out to Michael, however callow a youth he might be. The shaming nationalism that the fathers throw on the backs of their sons, each generation, I thought, imposing its struggle on the next. Yet that was their family’s big drama and the one that weighed on George Ziad like a stone. Here is Michael, whose entitlement, his teenage American instinct tells him, is to be a new ungrateful generation, ahistorical and free, and here is another father in the heartbreaking history of fathers, who expects everything blindly selfish in a young son to capitulate before his own adult need to appease the ghost of the father whom he had affronted with his own selfishness. Yes, making amends to father had taken possession of George and, as anyone knows who’s tried it, making amends to father is hard work—all that hacking through the undergrowth of stale pathology with the machete of one’s guilt. But George was out to settle the issue of self-division once and for all, and that meant, as it usually does, immoderation with a vengeance. Half-measures are out for these people—but hadn’t they always been for George? He wanted a life that merged with that of others, first, as Zee in Chicago, with ours and now all over again here with theirs—subdue the inner quarrel with an act of ruthless simplification—and it never worked. But sensibly occupying the middle ground in Boston hadn’t worked either. His life couldn’t seem to merge with anyone’s anywhere no matter what drastic experiment in remodeling he tried. Amazing, that something as tiny, really, as a self should contain contending subselves—and that these subselves should themselves be constructed of subselves, and on and on and on. And yet, even more amazing, a grown man, an educated adult, a full professor, who seeks self-integration!

  Multiple selves had been on my mind for months now, beginning with my Halcion breakdown and fomented anew by the appearance of Moishe Pipik, and so perhaps my thinking about George was overly subjective; but what I was determined to understand, however imperfectly, was why whatever George said, even when, like a guy in a bar, he despaired about people as close to him as his wife and his child, didn’t seem to me quite to make sense. I kept hearing a man as out of his depth as he was out of control, convulsed by all his contradictions and destined never to arrive where he belonged, let alone at “being himself.” Maybe what it all came down to was that an academic, scholarly disposition had been overtaken by the mad rage to make history and that, his temperamental unfitness, rather than the urgency of a bad conscience, accounted for all this disjointedness I saw, the overexcitability, the maniacal loquacity, the intellectual duplicity, the deficiencies of judgment, the agitprop rhetoric—for the fact that amiable, subtle, endearing George Ziad had been turned completely inside out. Or maybe it just came down to injustice: isn’t a colossal, enduring injustice enough to drive a decent man mad?

  Our pilgrimage to the bloodstained wall where Israeli soldiers had dragged the local inhabitants to break their bones and beat them into submission was thwarted by a ring of impassable roadblocks around the central square, and we had, in fact, to detour up through the outlying hills to reach George’s house at the other side of Ramallah. “My father used to weep nostalgically about these hills, too. Even in spring, he’d say, he could smell the almond blossoms. You can’t,” George told me, “not in spring—they bloom in February. I was always kind enough to correct his hyperbole. Why couldn’t he be a man about those trees and stop crying?”

  In a tone of self-castigating resignation George wearily compiled an indictment of recollections like these all the way up, around, and down the back roads into the city—so perhaps I’d been right the first time, and it was remorse that, if not alone in determining the scale of this harsh transformation, intensified the wretched despair that polluted everything and had made hyperbole standard fare for George, too. For having sniped at a ruined father’s sentimental maunderings with a faultfinding adolescent’s spiteful tongue, Dr. Ziad’s little boy looked now to be paying the full middle-aged price and then some.

  Unless, of course, it was all an act.

  ___

  George’s was one of half a dozen stone houses separated by large patches of garden and clustered loosely around a picturesque old olive grove that stretched down to a small ravine—originally, during Anna’s early childhood, this had been a family compound full of brothers and cousins but most of them had emigrated by now. There was a biting chill in the air as it was getting to be dusk, and inside the house, in a tiny fireplace at the end of the narrow living room, a few sticks of wood were burning, a pretty sight but without effect against the chill pervasive dankness that went right to one’s bones. The place was cheerily fixed up, however, with bright textiles splashed about on the chairs and the sofa and several rugs with modernistic geometric designs scattered across the uneven stone floor. To my surprise I didn’t see books anywhere—maybe George felt his books were more secure at his university office—though there were a lot of Arabic magazines and newspapers strewn atop a table beside the sofa. Anna and Michael wore heavy sweaters as we sat close to the fire drinking our hot tea, and I warmed my hands on the cup, thinking, This aboveground cellar, after Boston. The cold smell of a dungeon on top of everything else. There was also the smell of a kerosene heater burning—one that might not have been in the best state of repair—but it seemed to be off in another room. This room opened through multipaned French doors onto the garden, and a four-bladed fan hung by a very long stem from an arched ceiling that must have been fifteen feet high, and though I could see how the place might have its charm once the weather grew warm, right now this wasn’t a home to inspire a mood of snug relaxation.

  Anna was a tiny, almost weightless woman whose anatomy’s whole purpose seemed to be to furnish the housing for her astonishing eyes. There wasn’t much else to her. There were the eyes, intense and globular, eyes to see with in the dark, set like a lemur’s in a triangular face not very much larger than a man’s fist, and then there was the tent of the sweater enshrouding the anorexic rest of her and, peeping out at the bottom, two feet in baby’s running shoes. I would have figured as a mate for the George I’d known a nocturnal creature fuller and furrier than Anna, but perhaps when they’d met and married in Boston some two decades back there’d been more in her of the sprightly gamine than of this preyed-upon animal who lives by night—if you can call it living—and during the day is gone.

  Michael was already a head taller than his father, an excruciatingly skinny, delicate brunette with marbleized skin, a prettyish boy whose shyness (or maybe just
exasperation) rendered him mute and immobile. His father was explaining that Diasporism was the first original idea that he had heard from a Jew in forty years, the first that promised a solution based on honest historical and moral foundations, the first that acknowledged that the only just way to partition Palestine was by transferring not the population that was indigenous to the region but the population to whom this region had been, from the start, foreign and inimical … and all the while Michael’s eyes remained rigidly fixed on some invisible dot that compelled his entire attention and that was situated in the air about a foot above my knee. Nor did Anna appear to take much hope from the fact that Jewry’s leading Diasporist was visiting her home for tea. Only George, I thought, is so far gone, only he is so crazily desperate … unless it’s all an act.

  Of course George understood that such a proposal would be received with nothing but scorn by the Zionists, whose every sacrosanct precept Diasporism exposed as fraudulent; and he went on to explain that even among Palestinians, who should be my ardent advocates, there would be those, like Kamil, lacking the imagination to grasp its political potential, who would stupidly misconstrue Diasporism as an exercise in Jewish nostalgia—

  “So that was his take,” I said, daring to interrupt the unbridled talker who, it occurred to me, perhaps with his voice alone had reduced his wife to little more than those eyes and battered his son into silence. “A nostalgic Jew, dreaming Broadway dreams about a musical-comedy shtetl.”