Was it any surprise she laughed?
Once, she remembered, he threw her phone into a lake. The boy who’d rung her was talking as it drowned. That must have been two years ago. Was he still telling her how he couldn’t wait to see her again, still guggling his appreciation of her breasts under water?
Once, her father jumped up and down on her laptop. Once, he kicked down the bathroom door and smashed his fist into her mirror. Once, he threatened to put out a contract on a boy she was seeing. She was just fourteen at the time. The boy a year older. Once he jumped on to the bonnet of an older boyfriend’s car. Just keep driving, Beatrice had said, he’s got no sense of balance, he’ll fall off in the end. Once, he burst into a hotel room pretending he had a pistol in his pocket.
How could any other drama in her life compete with that? How could Gratan engross her to the degree her father had?
To show her how much he loved her—was that what it had all been about? To stop her falling in love with someone else?
Was it any surprise she shed a tear again?
The mad thing was—the maddest thing of all—it had worked. She couldn’t fall in love with anyone else.
She tried to concentrate the tears upon her mother, but she could think only of her father.
Why hadn’t he come after her?
He always came after her, so why not this time—the one time it mattered. If it mattered.
Had he given up on her? She had heard the story of how his father, her grandfather, had buried him on the eve of his marriage to a Gentile. Had he now decided to bury her? You marry a man with a penis like mine or I bury you!
Was it any surprise she laughed?
Laugh over it or cry over it, such a commandment could mean only one thing: he loved her.
She put an unexpected question to herself with her fifth Ladurée macaron: were Gratan to agree to his demand would her father want the operation to be a success or would he prefer that Gratan bled to death?
To go forward a bit:
D’Anton was unable to believe his ears. “He said that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“He said it.”
“In so many words?”
“I didn’t count the words.”
“He said, ‘Get yourself circumcised and you can have my daughter’? He definitely said that?”
“He said, ‘Get yourself circumcised and we can talk again. Until then there is no more to say.’ ”
“And you’re sure he wasn’t being figurative? He didn’t say anything about circumcision of the heart?”
“What’s circumcision of the heart?”
“Once upon a time, when this was a Christian country, a young man of your class would have gone to Sunday school and been taught about St. Paul. We can be better Christians, St. Paul argued, by understanding circumcision metaphorically, not following the letter of the law, but the spirit. We can be circumcised in the heart. Do you understand that?”
Gratan Howsome first nodded his head, then shook it. Whatever D’Anton was talking about, it didn’t apply in this instance. “Why,” he said, “would he want me to be a better Christian? I’m already too much of a Christian for him. He wants me to be a better Jew…Well, any Jew.”
“That’s what I mean. A Jew in the heart. Are you sure he wasn’t asking you to be that?”
“There was no mention of circumcising my heart. I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to that.”
“So are you telling me you have agreed to something?”
“I said I would talk it over with Beatrice.”
“Beatrice!”
Howsome slapped the side of his head. The fool I am! Two minutes with D’Anton and he’d blurt out anything. He wondered if he could invent another Beatrice, but saw that that would only make things worse.
“Yes, Beatrice.”
“Plury’s Beatrice?”
In for a penny, Howsome thought. “Well she’s my Beatrice now. You have to understand, D’Anton, I’m in love with her.”
“Since when?”
“Since I first saw her.”
“Howsome, she’s a child!”
“That’s what her father said.”
“Well don’t you think he has a point. You’re twice her age.”
“So you think I should agree to let them castrate me?”
“I think you should agree to leave the girl alone.”
“It’s too late for that. She’s run away with me. She’s at Plury’s now, waiting.”
“Plury knows?”
“Yes. She rang to congratulate us. She left us a bottle of champagne.”
“Well I’d give you almost anything, as you know, but I wouldn’t give you champagne for this. Have you decided what you’ll do if the father comes after you?”
“That’s what I’ve come to you to ask. What should I do?”
“Give the girl back.”
“I’ve told you, I can’t. We love each other.”
“And how does she feel about her father’s demands? Does she want you to agree to them?”
“She thinks he’s a fucking maniac. She hates him and his Jew money and his Jew foundation.”
“Foundation! What foundation?”
“I don’t know, D’Anton. The Whatsitcalled Foundation. The FuckedifIknow Foundation. The Strulovitch Foundation, I suppose. Don’t ask me.”
D’Anton threw back the contents of his glass and let his eyes bulge.
“Did you say Strulovitch?”
“I think that’s how you pronounce it. I don’t think I’m obliged to know a man’s name just because I’ve run off with his daughter.”
D’Anton released his mind so that it might wander where it would. Beatrice Strulovitch…Beatrice Strulovitch…Had he known that? Had he known that was her name when he first recommended her to Plury, as an innocent diversion for Howsome, whose weakness for Jewesses so amused them both? Was he, in ways that were not clear to himself, a party to this mess? Had he connived at it, knowing or half knowing who Beatrice was?
Whatever he’d intended, he hadn’t intended that Gratan would fall in love with the girl and either lose his foreskin or elope with her.
Unless he had…Unless, well unless breaking the father’s heart had always been what he intended, no matter who else suffered along the way.
He raked through the history of his rancid relations with the art collector, benefactor, upstart, sore loser, moneybags, bloodsucker and vampire, Simon Strulovitch. Was this—for him—its lowest moment or its highest?
Unable to decide whether Gratan Howsome’s bombshell served his cause or impeded it, unable at this moment to remember what that cause was, he ordered more brandy.
—
When Gratan finally returned he found Beatrice stripped naked, dead upon the floor.
He let out a cry so fearsome that Beatrice had no choice but to open her eyes and tell him she was acting out the space he’d left when he deserted her.
“How can you act a space?” he wanted to know.
“In such a night as this how could you have deserted me?” she asked.
But he was too transfixed by the sight of her breasts to answer.
The man has no feeling for art, Beatrice thought, yielding herself reluctantly to him.
SEVENTEEN
What chance that in two locations in the Golden Triangle, no more than a mile or so apart, two conversations about St. Paul’s views on circumcision of the heart should have been taking place at the very same hour?
It was enough to make a visitor from another planet believe he’d dropped in on a Christian country.
Perhaps to describe what passed between D’Anton and his sentimental beneficiary Gratan Howsome as a “conversation” is an exaggeration. What passed between Strulovitch and Shylock ditto. Though it wasn’t unevenness in the matter of comprehension that made this latter conversation not really a conversation at all. Rather it was that neither man spoke what he was thinking, though each knew the oth
er was thinking it. A silent conversation, then. Or at least a conversation in which what was conversed was not what the conversation was actually about.
Not finding Beatrice waiting for him when he got back from the restaurant, Strulovitch fell into a despondency that even D’Anton might have envied. Whatever Howsome had been doing out on his own, it didn’t signify what he’d hoped it signified. He slumped into a chair with a bottle of whisky and pointed Shylock to the drinks cabinet. “Get drunk with me, please,” he said.
“I’m not able to get drunk,” Shylock said. “I was never drunk then so I can never be drunk now. It’s one of the disadvantages.”
“Then just have the odd one and sit with me.”
Shylock did as was requested of him.
They sat, looking at one another’s extended feet, for upwards of an hour. Then Shylock asked if he could ask something.
“You’ve just asked it.”
“Something else. The bris…”
“The bris!”
“The circumcision ritual.”
“I know what a fucking bris is. I thought that word applied only to eight-day-old babies.”
“And the footballer is what age again?”
Strulovitch laughed an ill-natured laugh. He would miss Shylock when he went. He needed a black-hearted friend. Jews had grown so careful now. If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? No, we shall not. We shall take it on the chin and be grateful. Unless we’re in Judea and Samaria, where we’re accused of being Nazis. Cowards or Nazis—which was it to be? The Rialto was not Samaria, but it too had bred a tougher Jew, Strulovitch thought. If he had, on pain of death, to be a Jew in Samaria, the Rialto or the Golden Triangle, he wouldn’t have chosen the Golden Triangle.
Then he remembered that Shylock had not even met Gratan. “Are you psychic as well as everything else?” he asked.
“A little,” Shylock said. “I enjoy a broad overview. But I also listen to what you tell me. And I did manage to grab a look at him as he was leaving the restaurant. Cavernicolo.”
Strulovitch shook his head from side to side as though wanting to rid his brain of all memory of that savage exchange of glances. Why hadn’t he gone over and collared him after all? “OK,” he said. “So what about the bris?”
“Have you been having second thoughts?”
“If you’re psychic you should know.”
“I see you’re blaming me. That’s your prerogative. But you could always change the situation yourself by changing your mind. Let him off if your heart’s no longer in it. Give Beatrice your blessing.”
“She’s sixteen!”
“As you keep telling me. But she’s a very mature sixteen.”
“That’s the problem.”
“How old do you think Jessica was?”
“It has never occurred to me to wonder.”
“Precisely. Age isn’t the issue.”
“So what is?”
“Well answer me this: if you got the footballer to agree to your bloody terms—”
“Hold on a minute. Bloody terms coming from you—”
“No, you hang on a minute. I’m a guest in your house, so I ask you to forgive my rudeness. But you cannot presume to know how bloody or not I was prepared to be. You can guess, but you cannot know…”
“Do you know yourself?”
“Leave me out of this and let’s go back to what I was saying. If you got the footballer to agree to your terms, however you describe them, would you be happy? Or do you expect him—want him—to reject them and leave your daughter alone?”
“Both. I want him to leave my daughter alone, and I want him to be circumcised, so long as…”
“So long as what? Why do you hesitate?”
“So long as I can be the one who wields the knife.”
“I think you’re fooling yourself. I don’t think you could do it. You are not capable of that.”
“Now it’s my turn to ask how you can presume to know what I am capable of. You have only known me a matter of days.”
“And how long do you suppose it takes? Mr. Strulovitch, I have known you forever.”
“Do you know how insulting that is?”
“I don’t mean it to be so. But let me ask you a question. How many brises have you been to?”
“You’re psychic. You tell me.”
“None. First, because you have no son. Second, because you scorn religious ceremony. But the real reason you haven’t seen a bris is that you know you would faint. Many men do. Many fathers, uncles, brothers. It is an upsetting sight. A knife taken to an eight-day-old baby.”
“Howsome is a mite older.”
“Which would make it even more gory. And besides, what makes you think you want to see his penis, let alone take a slice of it? How many Gentile penises have you seen? How many have you held between your fingers?”
“I don’t have to answer that.”
“But you’re confident you want to touch his?”
“I’ll wear gloves…”
“Hold it, wound it, make it bleed, hear him scream? This is all bravado and you know it. You’d run a mile.”
Strulovitch puts up a hand. “Just a minute,” he says. “Just a minute.”
Shylock puts up two hands as though he knows he might have gone too far.
“Can you tell me how,” Strulovitch wants to know, “we have proceeded from metaphor to literalism? All this begins when I ask a Gentile who’s been sleeping with my daughter to prove his good intentions. The next thing, under your tutelage, I’m slicing off his penis.”
“Welcome to my world,” says Shylock.
“So you, too, meant your pound of flesh metaphorically to begin with?”
Shylock makes his eyes droop in weary distaste. “Not that again.”
“I’d stop asking that question if you’d answer it.”
“Then ask it with more subtlety. Every transaction between Jew and Gentile is metaphorical. It’s the only way we don’t kill one another. But if you’re asking me if I meant it jestingly then yes, partly.”
“That’s not quite the same thing.”
“No, but there are degrees of earnest.”
“Then let me ask you: did you hope that Antonio would fail to meet his bond so you could harm him?”
“At the very moment of the jest, maybe not.”
“Then when?”
“As the tale unfolds, so does intention.”
“And when was that intention firm?”
“I could say after Jessica was taken from me. After Leah’s ring was stolen. After others thought they could renege on the bond for him. After they thought me manipulable. After I was backed into a corner. After I was left with no alternative…”
“So which?”
“All of them and none of them. I still don’t know how firm my intention was. The story stopped…What didn’t occur, didn’t occur. Anything further belongs to speculation not philosophy or psychology. And not to theology either.”
“But before it stopped…there was, there must have been, intention.”
“Intention, well…What is intention? Whatever his intention, would Abraham have gone on to kill Isaac? I don’t dwell in the Old Testament any more than you do, but I have, as you might imagine, a special interest in that story.”
“The world has a special interest in that story.”
“The world did. I doubt it has any more.”
“That’s as maybe. But the question has still to be asked. Would Abraham have gone on and killed his son?”
“Did Abraham ultimately have it in him to commit a murder? That too is an illegitimate line of enquiry.”
“Illegitimate or unanswerable?”
“Both. It’s the ‘ultimately’ we can’t know about.”
“So what is it legitimate to ask?”
“Whether anything in Abraham’s character until that point would lead one to think of him as a child killer.”
“The answer being no?”
“Exactly. No. And in mi
ne neither. Was there anything in my personal history—mine specifically; mine as they knew of me, not mine as a member of a feared and hated race—to suggest I had a taste for blood? If there had been the slightest suspicion of such propensities the Gentiles would surely have kept their distance. But it was they who complained that I avoided them. Ask yourself this: would you agree a binding contract with a man who would cut your heart out if you reneged on it? Would you dare to steal from such a man? Take his jewels? Rob him of his daughter? Spit on him in the street? A man suspected of being free with his knife commands more respect than I did. More dread, too. Until I stood firm upon my bond they believed a few ducats’ reparation would quiet my temper. In their contempt and confidence you can discern my innocence of violent reputation.”
“They called you a cur and thought you wolfish.”
“They thought Jews wolfish—not me in particular, Jews—but in reality they barely believed their own libels. In the eyes of Christians and Muslims we have never been warlike enough. We are emasculated men who bleed like women. That’s what makes it so hard for them to forgive us when we do strike tellingly back. To lose to Jews is to lose to half-men.”
“Wasn’t there something of the warrior about Abraham?”
“Something, yes. But by the standards of the time he was a pussy cat.”
“So if he had so little violence in him, how do you understand his readiness to kill Isaac?”
“By not calling it a readiness. A particular precipitating circumstance led him so far on the road to murder, is all one can say. But did he have murder in his heart, even then? We cannot know. He did not know himself. The story stops, and will remain stopped for all eternity.”
“Abraham’s precipitating circumstance was God. What was yours?”
“The same.”
—
But Strulovitch couldn’t leave the matter alone. A chance comes along, you take it. And Shylock was looking more relaxed than he’d seen him, sitting in the half-dark with his legs outstretched, listening to the silence whenever Strulovitch allowed it to be silent. A man easy to ambush.
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