Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  “Well, I didn’t see it that way then and I don’t now.”

  Here our food arrived, and for the next few minutes, as we began to eat, Smilesburger pedantically discussed the ingredients of his late beloved mother’s chopped herring with the young Indian waiter: her proportion of herring to vinegar, vinegar to sugar, chopped egg to chopped onion, etc. “This meets the highest specifications for chopped herring,” he told him. To me he said, “You didn’t give me a bum steer.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because I don’t think you’ve come to like me as much as I’ve come to like you.”

  “I probably have,” I replied. “As much exactly.”

  “At what point in the life of a negative cynic does this yearning for the flavors of innocent childhood reassert itself? And may I tell the joke, now that the sugared herring is running in your blood? A man comes into a Jewish restaurant like this one. He sits at a table and picks up the menu and he looks it over and decides what he’s going to eat and when he looks up again there is the waiter and he’s Chinese. The waiter says, ‘vos vilt ihr essen?’ In perfect Yiddish, the Chinese waiter asks him, ‘What do you want to eat?’ The customer is astonished but he goes ahead and orders and, with each course that arrives, the Chinese waiter says here is your this and I hope you enjoyed that, and all of it in perfect Yiddish. When the meal’s over, the customer picks up the check and goes to the cash register, where the owner is sitting, exactly as that heavyset fellow in the apron is sitting at the register over there. In a funny accent much like my own, the owner says to the customer, ‘Everything was all right? Everything was okay?’ And the customer is ecstatic. ‘It was perfect, ’he tells him, ‘everything was great. And the waiter—this is the most amazing thing—the waiter is Chinese and yet he speaks absolutely perfect Yiddish.’ ‘Shah, shhh,’ says the owner, ‘not so loud—he thinks he’s learning English.’”

  I began to laugh, and he said, smiling, “Never heard that before?”

  “You would think by now I’d have heard all the jokes there are about Jews and Chinese waiters, but no, not that one.”

  “And it’s an old one.”

  “I never heard it.”

  I wondered while we ate in silence if there could be any truth in this man at all, if anything could exist more passionately in him than did the instinct for maneuver, contrivance, and manipulation. Pipik should have studied under him. Maybe he had.

  “Tell me,” I suddenly said. “Who hired Moishe Pipik? It’s time I was told.”

  “That’s paranoia asking, if I may say so, and not you—the organizing preconception of the shallow mind faced with chaotic phenomena, the unthinking man’s intellectual life, and the everyday occupational hazard of our work. It’s a paranoid universe but don’t overdo it. Who hired Pipik? Life hired Pipik. If all the intelligence agencies in the world were abolished overnight, there would still be Pipiks aplenty to complicate and wreck people’s orderly lives. Self- employed, nonessential nudniks whose purpose is simply balagan, meaningless mayhem, a mess, are probably rooted more deeply in reality than are those who are only dedicated, as you and I are, to coherent, essential, and lofty goals. Let’s not waste any more frenzied dreaming on the mystery of irrationality. It needs no explanation. There is something frighteningly absent from life. One gets from someone like your Moishe Pipik a faint idea of all that’s missing. This revelation one must learn to endure without venerating it with fantasy. Let us move on. Let us be serious. Listen to me. I am here at my own expense. I am here, on my own, as a friend. I am here because of you. You may not feel responsible to me, but I happen to feel responsible to you. I am responsible to you. Jonathan Pollard will never forgive his handlers for abandoning him in his hour of need. When the FBI closed in on Pollard, Mr. Yagur and Mr. Eitan left him utterly on his own to fend for himself. So did Mr. Peres and Mr. Shamir. They did not, in Pollard’s words, ‘take the minimum precaution with my personal security,’ and now Pollard is incarcerated for life in the worst maximum-security prison in America.”

  “The cases are somewhat dissimilar.”

  “And that’s what I’m pointing out. I recruited you, perhaps even with a false enticement, and now I will do everything to prevent your exposing yourself to the difficulties that the publication of this last chapter could cause for a very long time to come.”

  “Be explicit.”

  “I can’t be explicit, because I am no longer a member of the club. I only can tell you, from past experience, that when someone causes the kind of consternation that is going to be caused by publishing this chapter as it now stands, indifference is never the result. If anyone should think that you have jeopardized the security of a single agent, a single contact—”

  “In short, I am being threatened by you.”

  “A retired functionary like me is in no position to threaten anyone. Don’t mistake a warning for a threat. I came to New York because I couldn’t possibly have communicated to you on the phone or through the mail the seriousness of your indiscretion. Please listen to me. In the Negev now, I have begun to catch up on my reading after many years. I started out by reading all of your books. Even the book about baseball, which, you have to understand, for someone of my background was a bit like reading Finnegans Wake.”

  “You wanted to see if I was worth saving.”

  “No, I wanted to have a good time. And I did. I like you, Philip, whether you believe me or not. First through our work together and then through your books, I have come to have considerable respect for you. Even, quite unprofessionally, something like familial affection. You are a fine man, and I don’t wish to see you being harmed by those who will want to discredit you and to smear your name or perhaps to do even worse.”

  “Well, you still give a beguiling performance, retired or not. You are a highly entertaining deceiver altogether. But I don’t think that it’s a sense of responsibility to me that’s operating here. You have come on behalf of your people to intimidate me into shutting my mouth.”

  “I come quite on my own, at substantial personal expense actually, to ask you, for your own good, here at the end of this book, to do nothing more than you have been doing as a writer all your life. A little imagination, please—it won’t kill you. To the contrary.”

  “If I were to do as you ask, the whole book would be specious. Calling fiction fact would undermine everything.”

  “Then call it fiction instead. Append a note: ‘I made this up.’ Then you will be guilty of betraying no one—not yourself, your readers, or those whom, so far, you have served faultlessly.”

  “Not possible. Not possible in any way.”

  “Here’s a better suggestion, then. Instead of replacing it with something imaginary, do yourself the biggest favor of your life and just lop off the chapter entirely.”

  “Publish the book without its ending.”

  “Yes, incomplete, like me. Deformed can be effectual too, in its own unsightly way.”

  “Don’t include what I went specifically to Athens to get.”

  “Why do you persist in maintaining that you undertook this operation as a writer only, when in your heart you know as well as I now do, having only recently enjoyed all your books, that you undertook and carried it out as a loyal Jew? Why are you so determined to deny the Jewish patriotism, you in whom I realize, from your writings, the Jew is lodged like nothing else except, perhaps, for the male libido? Why camouflage your Jewish motives like this, when you are in fact no less ideologically committed than your fellow patriot Jonathan Pollard was? I, like you, prefer never to do the obvious thing if I can help it, but continuing to pretend that you went to Athens only for the sake of your calling—is this really less compromising to your independence than admitting that you did it because you happen to be Jewish to the core? Being as Jewish as you are is your most secret vice. Any reader of your work knows that. As a Jew you went to Athens and as a Jew you will suppress this chapter. The Jews have suppressed plenty for you. Even you’ll admit that.
”

  “Yes? Have they? Suppressed what?”

  “The very strong desire to pick up a stick and knock your teeth down your throat. Yet in forty years nobody’s done it. Because they are Jews and you are a writer, they give you prizes and honorary degrees instead. Not exactly how his kind have rewarded Rushdie. Just who would you be without the Jews? What would you be without the Jews? All your writing you owe to them, including even that book about baseball and the wandering team without a home. Jewishness is the problem they have set for you—without the Jews driving you crazy with that problem there would be no writer at all. Show some gratitude. You’re almost sixty—best to give while your hand is still warm. I remind you that tithing was once a widespread custom among the Jews as well as the Christians. One tenth of their earnings to support their religion. Can you not cede to the Jews, who have given you everything, one eleventh of this book? A mere one fiftieth, probably, of one percent of all the pages you have ever published, thanks to them? Cede to them chapter 11 and then go overboard and, whether it is true or not, call what remains a work of art. When the newspapers ask, tell them, ‘Smilesburger? That blabbering cripple with the comical accent an Israeli intelligence officer? Figment of my fecund imagination. Moishe Pipik? Wanda Jane? Fooled you again. Could such walking dreams as those two have possibly crossed anyone’s path? Hallucinatory projections, pure delirium—that’s the book’s whole point.’ Say something to them along these lines and you will save yourself a lot of tsuras. I leave the exact wording to you.”

  “Yes, Pipik too? Are you finally answering me about who hired Pipik? Are you telling me that Pipik is a product of your fecund imagination? Why? Why? I cannot understand why. To get me to Israel? But I was already coming to Israel to see Aharon Appelfeld. To lure me into conversation with George? But I already knew George. To get me to the Demjanjuk trial? You had to know that I’m interested in those things and would have found it on my own. Why did you need him to get me involved? Because of Jinx? You could have gotten another Jinx. What is the reason from your side for constructing this creature? From the point of view of the Mossad, which is an intelligence operation, goal-oriented, why did you produce this Pipik?”

  “And if I had a ready answer, could I in good conscience tell it to a writer with a mouth like yours? Accept my explanation and be done with Pipik, please. Pipik is not the product of Zionism. Pipik is not even the product of Diasporism. Pipik is the product of perhaps the most powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is Pipikism, the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything—our suffering as Jews not excluded. Enough about Pipik. I’m suggesting to you only how to give coherence to what you tell the newspapers. Keep it simple, they’re only journalists. ‘No exceptions, fellas: hypothetical book from beginning to end.’”

  “George Ziad included.”

  “George you don’t have to worry about. Didn’t his wife write to you? I would have thought, since you were such friends. … Don’t you know? Then I have to shock you. Your PLO handler is dead.”

  “Is this so? Is this fact?”

  “A horrible fact. Murdered in Ramallah. He was with his son. Five times he was stabbed by masked men. They didn’t touch the boy. About a year ago. Michael and his mother are living again in Boston.”

  Free at last in Boston—and now never to be free—of fealty to the father’s quest. One more accursed son. All the wasted passion that will now be Michael’s dilemma for life! “But why?” I asked. “Murdered for what reason?”

  “The Israelis say murdered as a collaborator by Palestinians. They murder one another like this every day. The Palestinians say murdered by Israelis—because Israelis are murderers.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “I say everything. I say maybe he was a collaborator who was murdered for the Israelis by Palestinians who are also collaborators—and then maybe not. To you who have written this book, I say I don’t know. I say the permutations are infinite in a situation like ours, where the object is to create an atmosphere in which no Arab can feel secure as to who is his enemy and who is his friend. Nothing is secure. This is the message to the Arab population in the territories. Of what is going on all around them, they should know very little and get everything wrong. And they do know very little and they do get everything wrong. And if this is the case with those who live there, then it follows that for someone like you, who lives here, you know even less and get even more wrong. That’s why to describe your book, laid in Jerusalem, as a figment of your imagination might not be as misleading as you fear. It might be altogether accurate to call the entire five hundred and forty-seven pages hypothetical formulation. You think I’m such a deceiver, so let me now be cruelly blunt about his book to a writer whose work I otherwise admire. I am not qualified to judge writing in English, though the writing strikes me as excellent. But as for the content—well, in all candor, I read it and I laughed, and not only when I was supposed to. This is not a report of what happened, because, very simply, you haven’t the slightest idea of what happened. You grasp almost nothing of the objective reality. Its meaning evades you completely. I cannot imagine a more innocent version of what was going on and what it signified. I won’t go so far as to say that this is the reality as a ten-year-old might understand it. I prefer to think of it as subjectivism at its most extreme, a vision of things so specific to the mind of the observer that to publish it as anything other than fiction would be the biggest lie of all. Call it an artistic creation and you will only be calling it what it more or less is anyway.”

  We had finished eating a good twenty minutes earlier and the waiter had removed all the dishes except our coffee cups, which he’d already been back to refill several times. I had till then been oblivious to everything but the conversation and only now saw that customers were beginning to drift in for lunch and that among them were my friend Ted Solotaroff and his son Ivan, who were at a table up by the window and hadn’t yet noticed me. Of course I’d known that I wasn’t meeting Smilesburger in the subterranean parking garage where Woodward and Bernstein used to go to commune with Deep Throat, but still, at the sudden sight of someone here I knew, my heart thumped and I felt like a married man who, spotted at a restaurant in ardent conversation with an illicit lover, quickly begins to calculate how best to introduce her.

  “Your contradictions,” I said softly to Smilesburger, “don’t add up to a convincing argument, but then, with me, you don’t believe you need any argument. You’re counting on my secret vice to prevail. The rest is an entertainment, amusing rhetoric, words as bamboozlement, your technique here as it was there. Do you even bother to keep track of your barrage? On the one hand, with this book—the whole of it now, not merely the final chapter—I am, in your certifiably unparanoid view, serving up to the enemy information that could jeopardize the security of your agents and their contacts, information that, from the sound of it, could lay the state of Israel open to God only knows what kind of disaster and compromise the welfare and security of the Jewish people for centuries to come. On the other hand, the book presents such a warped and ignorant misrepresentation of objective reality that to save my literary reputation and protect myself against the ridicule of all the clear-eyed empiricists, or from punishments that you intimate might be far, far worse, I ought to recognize this thing for what it is and publish Operation Shylock as—as what? Subtitled ‘A Fable’?”

  “Excellent idea. A subjectivist fable. That solves everything.”

  “Except the problem of accuracy.”

  “But how could you know that?”

  “You mean chained to the wall of my subjectivity and seeing only my shadow? Look, this is all nonsense.” I raised my arm to signal to the waiter for our check and unintentionally caught Ivan Solotaroff’s eye as well. I’d known Ivan since he was an infant back in Chicago in the mid-fifties, when the late George Ziad was there studying Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard an
d Ivan’s father and I were bristling graduate students teaching freshman composition together at the university. Ivan waved back, pointed out to Ted where I was sitting, and Ted turned and gave a shrug that indicated there could be no place on earth more appropriate than here for us to have run into each other after all our months of trying in vain to arrange to get together for a meal. I realized then the unequivocal way in which to introduce Smilesburger, and this made my heart thump again, only now in triumph.

  “Let’s cut it short,” I said to Smilesburger when the check was placed on the table. “I cannot know things-in-themselves, but you can. I cannot transcend myself, but you can. I cannot exist apart from myself, but you can. I know nothing beyond my own existence and my own ideas, my mind determines entirely how reality appears to me, but for you the mind works differently. You know the world as it really is, and I know it only as it appears. Your argument is kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and is too absurd even to oppose.”

  “You refuse absolutely.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You’ll neither describe your book as what it is not nor censor out what they’re sure not to like.”

  “How could I?”

  “And if I were to rise above kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and invoke the wisdom of the Chofetz Chaim? ‘Grant me that I should say nothing unnecessary. …’ Would I be wasting my breath if, as a final plea, I reminded you of the laws of loshon hora?”

  “It would not even help to quote Scripture.”

  “Everything must be undertaken alone, out of personal conviction. You’re that sure of yourself. You’re that convinced that only you are right.”