Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  So now I was seeing things too. Working the cash register from atop a stool in the snack bar was just another old man with a bald head and a scaling skull, who could not possibly have been the retired New York jeweler disenchanted with Israel. I’m seeing double, I thought, doubles, I thought, but because of not eating, because of barely getting any sleep, or because I’m coming apart again for the second time in a year? How could I have convinced myself that I alone am personally responsible for overseeing the safety of Demjanjuk’s son if I weren’t coming apart? In the aftermath of that testimony, in the aftermath of Demjanjuk’s laughter and Rosenberg’s rage, how could the asinine clowning of that nonsensical Pipik continue to make a claim on my life?

  But just then I heard shouting outside the building and, through the glass doors, saw two soldiers armed with rifles running at full speed toward the parking lot. I ran out of the lobby after them, toward where some twenty or thirty people had now gathered to encircle whatever disturbance was transpiring. And when I heard from within that circle a voice loudly shouting in English, I knew for sure that he was here and the worst had happened. The all-out paranoid who I had by now become was asserting his panicked confidence in the unstoppable unraveling of the disaster; our mutual outrage with each other had been churned into a real catastrophe by that octopus of paranoia that, interlinked, the two of us had become.

  But the man who was shouting looked to be nearly seven feet tall, taller by far than either Pipik or me, a treelike person, a gigantic redheaded creature with an amazing chin the shape of a boxing glove. His big bowl of a forehead was flushed with his fury, and the hands he waved about high in the air looked to be as large as cymbals—you wouldn’t want your two little ears caught between the clanging of those two huge hands.

  In either hand he clutched a white pamphlet, which he fluttered violently over the heads of the onlookers. Although a few in the crowd held copies of the pamphlet and were flipping through its pages, mostly the pamphlets were strewn on the pavement underfoot. The Jewish giant’s English was limited, but his voice was a large, cascading thing, every inch of him in that swelling voice, and when he spoke the effect was of someone sounding an organ. He was the biggest and the loudest Jew that I had ever seen and he was booming down at a priest, an elderly, round-faced Catholic priest, who, though of medium height and rather stoutly built, looked, by comparison, like a little, shatterable statuette of a Catholic priest. He stood very rigidly, holding his ground, doing his best not to be intimidated by this gigantic Jew.

  I stooped to pick up one of the pamphlets. In the center of the white cover was a blue trident whose middle prong was in the shape of the Cross; the pamphlet, a dozen or so pages long, bore the English title “Millennium of Christianity in Ukraine.” The priest must have been distributing the pamphlets to those who’d left the courtroom and come outside for air. I read the first sentence of the pamphlet’s first page. “1988 is a significant year for Ukrainian Christians throughout the world—it is the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to the land called Ukraine.”

  The crowd, mostly Israelis, seemed to understand neither the pamphlet’s contents nor what the dispute was about, and because his English was so poor, it was a moment before what the Jewish giant was shouting was intelligible even to me and I understood that he was assaulting the priest with the names of Ukrainians whom he identified as the instigators of violent pogroms. The one name I recognized was Chmielnicki, who I seemed to recall was a national hero on the order of Jan Hus or Garibaldi. I had lived among working-class Ukrainians on the Lower East Side when I’d first come to New York in the mid-fifties and remembered vaguely the annual block parties where dozens of little children danced around the streets dressed in folk costumes. There were speeches from an outdoor stage denouncing Communism and the Soviet Union, and the names Chmielnicki and Saint Volodymyr showed up on the crayoned signs in the local shop windows and outside the Orthodox Ukrainian church just around the corner from my basement apartment.

  “Where murderer Chmielnicki in book!” were the words that I finally understood the giant Jew to be shouting. “Where murderer Bandera in book! Where murderer Petlura son of bitch! Killer! Murderer! All Ukrainian anti-Semite!”

  Defiantly cocking his head, the priest snapped back, “Petlura, if you knew anything, was himself murdered. Martyred. In Paris. By Soviet agents.” He was an American, as it turned out, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest who, from the sound of his voice, was more than likely a New Yorker and who seemed to have come to Jerusalem all the way from New York, perhaps even from Second Avenue and Eighth Street, specifically to distribute his pamphlets celebrating the thousand years of Ukrainian Christianity to the Jews attending the Demjanjuk trial. Wasn’t he in his right mind, either?

  And then I realized that I was the one who had to be out of his mind to be taking him for a priest and that this was more of the masquerade, a performance designed to create a disturbance, to distract the police and soldiers, to draw away the crowd … I could no more free myself of the thought that Pipik was behind it all than Pipik could free himself of the thought that I was perpetually behind him. This priest is Pipik’s decoy and part of Pipik’s plot.

  “No!” the Jewish giant was shouting. “Petlura murdered, yes—by Jew! For killing Jew! By brave Jew!”

  “Please,” said the priest, “you have had your say, you have spoken. Everybody can hear you from here to Canarsie—allow me, will you, please, to address those good people here who might like to listen to somebody else for a change.” And turning away from the Jewish giant, he resumed the lecture he’d apparently been delivering before their ruckus had begun. As he spoke, the crowd grew larger, just as Pipik had anticipated “Around the year 860,” the priest was telling them, “two blood brothers, Cyril and Methodius, left their monastery in Greece to preach Christianity among the Slavic people. Our forefathers had no alphabet and no written language. These brothers created for us an alphabet called the Cyrillic alphabet, after the name of one of the brothers—”

  But again the Jewish giant interposed himself between the onlookers and the priest, and again he began to shout at him in that astoundingly large voice. “Hitler and Ukrainian! Two brother! One thing! Kill Jew! I know! Mother! Sister! Everybody! Ukrainian kill!”

  “Listen, bud,” said the priest, his fingers whitening around the thick stack of pamphlets that he was still clutching to his chest, “Hitler, for your information, was no friend of the Ukrainian people. Hitler gave away half of my country to Nazified Poland, in case you haven’t heard. Hitler gave Bukovina to Fascist Romania, Hitler gave Bessarabia—”

  “No! Shut up! Hitler give you big present! Hitler give you big, big present! Hitler,” he boomed, “give you Jew to kill!”

  “Cyril and Methodius,” the priest resumed, again bravely turning his back on the giant to address the crowd, “translated the Bible and the Holy Mass into Slavonic, as the language was called. They set out to Rome, to obtain permission from Pope Adrian II to say Mass in the language they had translated. Pope Adrian approved it and our Slavonic Mass, or Ukrainian liturgy, was celebrated—”

  That was as much about the brothers Cyril and Methodius as the giant Jew could bear to hear. He reached out for the priest with his two giant’s hands and I saw him suddenly as created not by a malfunctioning pituitary gland but by a thousand years of Jewish dreaming. Our final solution to the Ukrainian Christianity problem. Not Zionism, not Diasporism, but Gigantism—Golemism! The five soldiers looking on with their rifles from the edge of the crowd surged forward to intervene and protect the priest, but what happened happened so quickly that before the soldiers could stop anything, everything was over and everyone was laughing and already walking away—laughing not because the priest from New York City had been lifted into the air and smashed to the ground and dispatched from this life into the next by the enormous muddy boots on the giant’s two feet but because a couple of hundred pamphlets went sailing up over our heads and that was the end of t
hat. The giant had yanked from the priest’s hands all of his pamphlets, hurled them as high as he could, and with that the incident was over.

  As the crowd dispersed to return to the courtroom, I stood there watching the priest set out to recover his pamphlets, some of which were scattered as far as fifty feet away. And I saw the giant, still shouting, moving off alone toward the street, where buses were running and traffic was flowing as though it was what indeed it was, in Jerusalem as everywhere else: just another day. A sunny, pleasant day at that. The priest, of course, had nothing at all to do with Pipik, and the plot that I had resolved to foil existed nowhere other than in my head. Whatever I thought or did was wrong and for the simple reason that there was, I now realized, no right thing for someone whose double in this world was Mr. Moishe Pipik—so long as he and I both lived, this mental chaos would prevail. I’ll never again know what’s really going on or whether my thoughts are nonsense or not; everything I can’t immediately understand will have for me a bizarre significance and, even if I have no idea where he is and never hear tell of him again, so long as he goes about, as he does, giving my life its shallowest meaning, I’ll never be free of exaggerated thoughts or these insufferable sieges of confusion. Even worse than never being free of him, I’ll never again be free of myself; and nobody can know any better than I do that this is a punishment without limits. Pipik will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of Ambiguity forever.

  The priest continued to gather up the pamphlets one by one, and because he was much older than I’d realized when he was defiantly standing up to the giant, the effort was not easy for him. He was a very weak, very stout old man, and although the encounter had not ended violently, it seemed to have left him as enfeebled as if he had in fact received a terrible blow. Maybe bending over picking up the pamphlets was making him dizzy, because he didn’t look at all well. He was terrifyingly ashen, whereas facing down the giant, he had been a pluckier, much more vivid shade.

  “Why,” I said to him, “why, in all of this world, do you come here with those pamphlets on a day like this one?”

  He’d fallen to his knees to gather together the pamphlets more easily, and from his knees he answered me. “To save Jews.” A little of his strength seemed to return when he repeated to me, “To save you Jews.”

  “You might do better to worry about yourself.” Although this had not been my intention, I stepped forward to offer him my hand; I didn’t see how else he could get back on his feet. Two bystanders, two young men in jeans, two very tough customers indeed, young and lithe and scornful, were watching us from only a few feet away. The rest of the crowd had all moved off.

  “If they convict an innocent man,” the priest said as I tried to remember where I’d seen these two in jeans before, “this will have the same result as the Crucifixion of Jesus.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, not that old chestnut, Father. Not the Crucifixion of Christ again!” I said, steadying him now that he was standing erect.

  His voice shook when he replied, not because he was winded but because my angry response had left him incensed. “Through two thousand years, Jewish people paid for that—rightly or wrongly, they paid for the Crucifixion. I don’t want the conviction of Johnny to have similar results!”

  And it was just here that I felt myself leaving the ground. I was being removed from where I was to somewhere else. I did not know what was happening but I felt as though a pipe were digging into either side of me and on these pipes I was being hoisted and carried away. My feet were cycling in the air, and then they met the ground and I saw that the two pipes were arms belonging to the two men in jeans.

  “Don’t shout,” one of them said.

  “Don’t struggle,” the other said.

  “Do nothing,” the first one said.

  “But—” I began.

  “Don’t speak.”

  “You speak too much.”

  “You speak to everyone.”

  “You speak speak speak.”

  “Speak speak speak speak speak speak—”

  They put me into a car, and someone drove us away. Roughly the two men patted me all over to see if I was carrying a weapon.

  “You have the wrong man,” I said.

  The driver laughed loudly. “Good. We want the wrong man.”

  “Oh,” I heard myself asking through a great fog of terror, “is this going to be a humorous experience?”

  “For us,” replied the driver, “or for you?”

  “Who are you?” I cried. “Palestinians? Jews?”

  “Why,” said the driver, “that’s the very question we want to ask you.”

  I thought it best to say no more, though “thought” does not describe in any way the process by which my mind was now operating. I began to vomit, which did not endear me to my captors.

  I was driven to a stone building in a decaying neighborhood just back of the central market, not far from where I’d run into George the day before and somewhere very near where Apter lived. There were some six or seven tiny Orthodox children, their skulls crystalline, playing a game in the street, strikingly transparent little things, whose youngish mothers, most of them pregnant, stood not far away, holding bags of groceries from their shopping expeditions and animatedly gossiping together. Huddling close to the women were three pigtailed little girls wearing long white stockings and they alone blandly looked my way as I was propelled past them into a narrow alleyway and back through to where freshly washed undergarments were strung up on lines crisscrossing a small courtyard. We turned into a stone stairway, a door was unlocked, and we entered the rear foyer of what looked to me to be a very shabby dentist’s or doctor’s office. I saw a table littered with Hebrew magazines, there was a woman receptionist speaking on the phone, and then I was through another door and into a tiny bathroom, where a light was flipped on and I was told to wash.

  I was a long time soaking my face and my clothes and repeatedly rinsing out my mouth. That they allowed me to be alone like this, that apparently they didn’t want me to be left disgustingly smelly, that I had not been gagged or blindfolded, that nobody was banging on the door of the cubicle with the butt of a pistol telling me to hurry up—all this provided my first tinge of hope and suggested to me that these were not Palestinians but Pipik’s Jews, the Orthodox coconspirators whom he had double-crossed by ducking out and who now had me confused with him.

  Once I was clean I was led, and now without too much force from behind, out of the washroom and down the corridor to a narrow staircase whose twenty-three shallow steps took us to a second story, where four classrooms angled off of a central landing. Overhead there was a skylight, opaque with soot, and the floorboards beneath my shoes were badly scuffed and worn. The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke, a smell that carried me back some forty-five years, to the little Talmud Torah, one flight above our local synagogue, where I went unenthusiastically with my friends to study Hebrew for an hour in the late afternoons three days a week in the early 1940s. The rabbi who ran the show there had been a heavy smoker and, as best I could remember it, that second floor of the synagogue back in Newark, aside from smelling exactly the same, hadn’t looked too unlike this place either—shabby, dreary, just a little disagreeably slummy.

  They put me in one of the classrooms and closed the door. I was alone again. Nobody had kicked me or slapped me or tied my hands or shackled my legs. On the blackboard I saw something written in Hebrew. Nine words. I couldn’t read one of them. Four decades after those three years of afternoon classes at the Hebrew school, I could no longer even identify the letters of the alphabet. There was a nondescript wooden table at the front of the classroom, and in back of it a slatted chair for the teacher. On the table was a TV set. That we did not have in 1943, nor did we sit on these movable molded-plastic student chairs but on long benches nailed to the floor before sloped wooden desks on which we wrote our lessons from right to left. For one hour a day, three days a week, fresh from six and a half hours
of public school, we sat there and learned to write backwards, to write as though the sun rose in the west and the leaves fell in the spring, as though Canada lay to the south, Mexico to the north, and we put our shoes on before our socks; then we escaped back into our cozy American world, aligned just the other way around, where all that was plausible, recognizable, predictable, reasonable, intelligible, and useful unfolded its meaning to us from left to right, and the only place we proceeded in reverse, where it was natural, logical, in the very nature of things, the singular and unchallengeable exception, was on the sandlot diamond. In the early 1940s, reading and writing from right to left made about as much sense to me as belting the ball over the outfielder’s head and expecting to be credited with a triple for running from third to second to first.