Shylock Is My Name

by Howard Jacobson

  “Not for the first time,” Strulovitch resumed, “you elude my questions with the story stopping. Yes, the story stopped, but you haven’t. You are here. You have had time enough to reflect.”

  “Reflect! I do nothing but reflect. But reflection is not action. It is not even knowledge of action. I don’t have the answer to your question. I don’t know if I would have gone ahead and taken flesh from around his heart—or, even, since you have asked me this before, how the heart suddenly became the site of my revenge.”

  “Aha! You call it your revenge.”

  “I do, and willingly. I had much to avenge. My daughter, my wealth, my reputation…”

  “And a bloodthirst to slake?”

  “Now you sound like them.”

  “Then show me where I’m wrong. Do you wish you’d not been stopped?”

  “Stopped?” Shylock narrowed his gaze. Suddenly he did not look as relaxed as he had been. “I wish, for all the good it does me, that I had not been thwarted.”

  “From taking his heart?”

  “From finding out whether or not I could have done it.”

  “So you wish you had?”

  “That is not quite the same thing. Had I done so they would not have hesitated to take mine.”

  Strulovitch waved that consideration away. He wasn’t interested in consequences; he knew all about what they did to Jews; what intrigued him was what a Jew might do to them. “Let me trespass on your good nature one more time,” he pressed. “Would you have done it?”

  “And one more time—I don’t know. I have no more taste for blood than you do. Those men, I mentioned, who faint during a bris—well I am one of them. Twice I’ve fainted. It was that or cry louder than the baby. Like you, I’m made of the softest stuff and equally hate the sight and smell and even thought of blood. But understand—my own blood was up. My hatred for that superior, all-suffering, all-sorrowing, sanctimonious man boiled in my veins. There was, I believed, as he no doubt believed of me, no room in this world for both of us. We denied each other. He could not allow me to transact my way and I could not allow him to transact his. I stood for order, he for chaos. We both, of necessity, dealt in obligation. To be in business imposes obligation. And to be a husband, a father, a lover, imposes obligation too. I dealt in true obligation—I gave and I took. A quid pro quo that was agreed to on all sides and left nothing to doubt or misunderstanding. He dealt in false obligation. He could bear only to give. He would not profit financially or emotionally. So he must always be sacrificial, disappointed and alone. Which imposed a hidden but constant obligation on those he gave to. I could not function in a universe as raw and haphazard as his. And he could not function in a world as rational as mine. My legalistic rigidity, as he considered it, cancelled him out. His emotional coercion cancelled me. Which is why one of us has always to kill the other. So yes, it’s possible—all right, more than possible—that in that fuming rage I would have found the wherewithal, the joy, the obligation—as though answering a commandment from a furious God—and as a long-owed return on those centuries of despising, as a requital of the slander, and as a perfectly ironic eventuation of all their baseless fears, yes, it’s more than possible that I’d have found what was necessary—call it the heroic strength, call it the bliss, call it if you will the villainousness—to take what by any reasonable computation was owing to me…I felt myself to be, I won’t pretend otherwise, the instrument of justice. By the measure I was used, would it be measured to them. And there’s no violence a man is not capable of when he believes he is acting as God would have him act. And before you say anything, I am as aware as you of the blasphemy of claiming such entitlement. Let’s include that, then, in what I might have been on the point of summoning up, the blasphemy of taking life, had it come to that, in God’s name, except that it didn’t come to that. So I am sorry, I cannot tell you what the act of murder feels like and whether, at the point of a knife, I would have gone ahead and done it. But I can tell you how it is to be brought to the threshold of murder and to wish, with every part of oneself that ministers to resolution, to cross over. Does that go any way to answering your question?”

  But Strulovitch is asleep in his chair, worn out by too much anger and frustration, too much alcohol, and not impossibly too many questions.

  Shylock, though, has another explanation.

  This Strulovitch has a profound moral reluctance to stay awake, he thinks.

  This Strulovitch asks but he doesn’t want to know the answer.

  Jews are sentimental about themselves, and this Strulovitch, though he can’t decide if he’s a Jew or not, is no different. A Jew, by his understanding, is not capable of what non-Jews are capable of. A Jew does not take life. I am a hero to him by virtue of what I permitted to be done to me, not by what I did or might have done. Good Jew—kicked. Bad Jew—kicks.

  If you prick us do we not bleed, but if we prick back do we not shed blood?—he would rather not know.

  These famous ethics of ours have landed us in a fine mess, Shylock would like to say to his wife. If we cannot accept that we might murder as other men murder, we are not enhanced, but diminished.

  Do you agree with me Leah, my love?

  But it’s too late, and too cold to go outside. Always cold where she resides.

  And anyway, he knows that Leah will point out the sophistry in the account of himself he has just offered Strulovitch. Antonio had been his to kill. “The law allows it, and the court awards it,” the little lawyer with the squeaky voice had told him. That was the moment when history was his to make, and never mind “I cannot tell you what the act of murder feels like because it didn’t come to that”: it didn’t come to that because he didn’t let it. Give me my money and I’ll go, he’d said instead.

  Cowardice, was it? Or a pious adherence to Jewish law? The Almighty had fixed his canon against self-slaughter and self-slaughter it would assuredly have been had he shed a drop of Antonio’s blood.

  Either way—faint-heartedness or piety—does this mark the limit beyond which a Jew, with all his brave talk of vengeance, dare not go?

  No wonder Strulovitch, otherwise so eager to keep him to the mark, has chosen to fall asleep.

  Despite the lateness of the hour and the cold, he goes outside to face Leah’s reproach after all. He had chosen to stay alive when there was nothing left for him to stay alive for. He could have killed his enemy and joined his wife. So why hadn’t he?

  EIGHTEEN

  “Darling! I’ve rushed back. I wouldn’t even let them finish me.”

  Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Wiser Than Solomon Christine skipped into the room carrying a posy of hand-tied forget-me-nots and roses. She had a bandage over one eye, like a pirate. The rest of her was lipblistered.

  “You look like a bridesmaid,” Beatrice cried, not knowing what else to say.

  “Darling, I feel like a bridesmaid.”

  She searched the bed sheets with her one good eye.

  “You can’t be looking for blood?” Beatrice cried.

  “Of course not. I’m looking for Gratan.”

  Then she nodded interrogatively in the direction of the bathroom.

  “He’s not here,” Beatrice said.

  “You haven’t…?”

  “No, no we haven’t…”

  “So you are still…?”

  “Yes, we are still. But he hasn’t been here much since we arrived.”

  “That was only yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “Correct. He’s done a lot of nipping down and slipping out in that time. He’s just popped off again. I’m not sure why.”

  “Maybe he’s making arrangements.”

  “What for?”

  Plurabelle made as though to wink at her. “You know.”

  Beatrice scowled. “I can’t promise you a wedding any time soon,” she said.

  The expression of disappointment that swept across Plurabelle’s beleaguered face made Beatrice doubt the resoluti
ons she had made the night before in Gratan’s absence. He had come home, as he had promised, at a reasonable hour—supposing there was any reasonable hour for a man in his position to be out until—and, again as he had promised, as sober as a newt. But she had decided not to stay awake—and then, in a coup de théâtre, not to stay alive for him.

  It did occur to her to wonder, as she lay there listening to the boards creaking outside the bedroom, that it could have been her father come to rescue her. In which case—but no, she decided against covering her nakedness. Let them all see what they had done to her. And how well she could perform it.

  In the event it was Gratan.

  That bloody father of hers. Never there when you wanted him.

  She’d had a strange evening, lying there on pillows as fluffed as Plury’s lips, sipping champagne like a thirsty bee, alternating glugs with macarons, and thinking about life’s paradoxes.

  However much of a fight she’d put up against her father’s covenantal obsessions—a fight that seemed to her to have gone on all her short life—in some corner of her soul she respected them. Them, or her father’s fanatic embrace of them? She wasn’t sure that a bridal bower lent to her by Plury was conducive to the making of such fine distinctions. But she had read about hostages falling in love with their captors and their captors’ ideologies, and she did wonder if that was what had happened to her—the captor being her father, not Gratan. Explain it she could not, and approve it she could not either, but now that the argument with her father had finally boiled over into flight, she saw him differently and thought he might be right. Not right in how he’d brought her up, exactly, but right in how he hadn’t. She had girlfriends she could easily have envied for their freedom to come and go as they pleased. One, the daughter of atheists, had been sleeping with her boyfriend in the next room to her easy-thinking parents since she was thirteen. Another, the child of poets, was allowed to throw parties at her own home—parties her mother and father and even her grandparents attended—at which substances that Beatrice had never heard of were ingested through parts of the body she had never seen, and sexual practices she would not have thought practicable were openly encouraged.

  So why didn’t she envy them? Queer for her to hear herself say this but the reason she didn’t envy them was that they lacked example. They swung free like gates come off their hinges, whereas she had had to learn resistance. Better your father be your adversary than your friend, she reasoned.

  Don’t waste yourself on chthonic arseholes, Beatrice, he’d told her. Wasn’t she lucky having a father who thought like that? Less lucky, she thought, having a father who distinguished between Jewish chthonic arseholes and Gentile chthonic arseholes and measured the time she wasted on them differently. Wasn’t waste waste?

  She had never been happy with the Jew thing. “It’s such a horrible little word,” she remembered saying to her parents when she was just a little girl. “Jew. It sounds like a black beetle with spikes.”

  It was her mother who had smacked her then. Her father, she recalled, had laughed.

  “So if we don’t do Jewish things, and we don’t have Jewish friends, and we don’t eat Jewish food, and we don’t celebrate Jewish festivals, why must I go out with Jewish boys?” she asked him later.

  “For the sake of continuity,” he told her.

  “What do you want me to continue?”

  “The thing you were born to be.”

  “Jewish?”

  “Continuous.”

  “I just don’t know what that means.”

  “Neither do I. But I do know you weren’t born to toss yourself aside. You aren’t random, Beatrice. You didn’t begin with yourself so you can’t end with yourself. Life is a serious business. You can’t be shaken by every passing fancy.”

  You aren’t a gate that’s come off its hinges.

  And now, to preserve that continuity—though he wouldn’t be genuinely continuous even then—her Gentile chthonic arsehole boyfriend has to bleed. Maybe bleed to death. Explain to me how that works, Daddy…

  He might love me but he’s a butcher, Beatrice thought. His mind’s an abattoir.

  —

  “So what’s wrong?” Plurabelle wanted to know.

  And Beatrice told her.

  —

  It was important to D’Anton, when it came to helping friends, to be even-handed. He now had two things to do for Barnaby. Get him the Solomon Joseph Solomon sketch and lie to Plury for him about his ring. So what two things could he do for Gratan? Extricate him from the mess with Beatrice was one, but Gratan appeared to have his heart set on the girl. Get Strulovitch to relent was a second, but he didn’t immediately see how he was going to achieve that. Apart from Beatrice herself, he had nothing that Strulovitch wanted. And even if he found a way of prising her from Gratan and delivering her back to her father, what would that achieve for Gratan? Procuring a top-class surgeon to perform the operation—say the surgeon who attended to royal circumcisions, assuming they were still performed—was of course a third, but his gorge rose at the prospect of being in any way instrumental in this. I am not going to pimp for that Jew, he decided.

  Then he remembered that several years before he had stood in the way of Strulovitch’s opening a gallery of Anglo-Jewish art in memory of his parents. What if he were to say he would stand in the way of it no more? What if he were to go still further and offer to use his not inconsiderable influence to facilitate it?

  I’ll do that for you, Mr. Strulovitch, and all I want in return is—what? He did his sums again and came up with two things he wanted from Strulovitch. The Solomon Joseph Solomon and Gratan’s release from the threat of dismemberment. What if Strulovitch would do a deal on one and not the other? What if it fell to him, D’Anton, to prioritise? Gratan’s plight was clearly far more serious than Barnaby’s, but if truth be told D’Anton preferred Barnaby to Gratan and felt more sympathetic to his suit. Gratan had got himself into this mess, blindly following that part of himself which, quite frankly, deserved to suffer retribution. Whereas Barnaby was just trying to please a lovely if whimsical lady. There, too, lay the other basis for his preference: he would rather be the indirect cause of Plury’s felicity than Beatrice’s, Beatrice Strulovitch being…well, a Strulovitch.

  Solomon himself—the other Solomon—D’Anton thought, would have trouble sorting this one out. The irony was that Plurabelle’s own television show, The Kitchen Counsellor, was the perfect place to adjudicate between these claims on D’Anton’s givingness, but the Solomon Joseph Solomon was to be a surprise to her and a discussion of the rights and wrongs of circumcision would surely have a deleterious effect on ratings. Which left him back where he began, wanting to be even-handed but not knowing how.

  He was being premature in his calculations, anyway, he reminded himself, in assuming that Strulovitch would play ball with him at all. He didn’t doubt that his own loathing—no, he didn’t loathe Strulovitch, did he? His natural aversion then, his discomfort, his reluctance to like—was reciprocated. What if Strulovitch would rather keep the Solomon Joseph Solomon and risk losing his daughter than accept D’Anton’s condescension—as he would no doubt view it—in a matter that had once raised so much bitterness between them? Had there ever been a Jew yet—just a question—that was not inflexible and vengeful?

  Thinking it over, D’Anton was pleased he had not yet sent Strulovitch the letter. Better not to show his hand yet. Better not to let Strulovitch know what he wanted. Did this not prove, once more, that time taken to plan a move was never time wasted? He went to look again at the letter, with a view to toning down any note of imploration, only to discover that it was no longer on his desk. There was only one explanation for this. His assistant, desirous as always to please a man so busily engaged in pleasing others, had hand-delivered it to the address on the envelope.

  D’Anton bent over his desk as if in pain. He felt it was he who had been hand-delivered to Strulovitch. In his mind’s eye he saw his mortal enemy, hunched a
s though over a money bag, fingering his words with diabolic satisfaction.

  D’Anton shuddered. It wasn’t just Gratan Howsome who had something to fear from the Jew’s malevolence.

  NINETEEN

  Timing, thought Strulovitch, is everything.

  If he’d received D’Anton’s letter before seeing him at Ristorante Treviso hugger-mugger with Gratan Howsome he might have looked kindly on the request. Well, “kindly” would have been to overstate it, but with an irony-drenched beneficence at least. How amusing that such a man should come cap in hand to him. And how amusing it would be to do such a man a kindness in return: sell him the Solomon Joseph Solomon for exactly what it had cost him, thereby depriving D’Anton of the pleasure of calling him a usurer and rogue. He liked the study for its pictorial flair and anatomical attention, but not as much as he’d have liked the sumptuous work it originally became. No one would have got that from him for any price. But the first attempt—yes, lovely as it was, he could bear to let it go, especially when the reward was so sweet. Here, D’Anton, my dear fellow, you must have known you had only to ask. I cannot tell you how delighted I am to learn you are a convert to Jew art at last.

  Why, he might even have made him a gift of it.

  But Strulovitch now knew him to be a friend and possibly a co-conspirator of Howsome’s. Difficult to see what the men could possibly have in common, but that wasn’t his affair. Companions in nefariousness they clearly were. Who was to say D’Anton hadn’t played a part in Howsome’s making off with his daughter? They’d been together, looking shifty, on the evening of the day Beatrice had decamped, which strange occurrence suggested D’Anton might have given the lovers shelter that very night. Who was to say that they weren’t there still, enjoying D’Anton’s florid hospitality—Strulovitch guessed it would be florid; florid and abstemious all at once—drinking sake from fine Japanese porcelain and toasting Strulovitch’s displeasure in Bellinis?