by Philip Roth
No, a man’s character isn’t his fate; a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character.
We hadn’t yet reached the houses sporting their Eiffel Tower TV antennas but we were out of the hills and on the main road south to Jerusalem when the taxi driver spoke his first words to me. In English, which he did not pronounce with much assurance, he asked, “Are you a Zionist?”
“I’m an old friend of Mr. Ziad’s,” I replied. “We went to university together in America. He is an old friend.”
“Are you a Zionist?”
And who is this guy? I thought. This time I ignored him and continued looking out the window for some unmistakable sign, like those TV aerials, that we were approaching the outskirts of Jerusalem. Only what if we weren’t anywhere near the road to Jerusalem but on the road to somewhere else? Where were the Israeli checkpoints? So far we hadn’t passed one.
“Are you a Zionist?”
“Tell me,” I replied as agreeably as I could, “what you mean by a Zionist and I’ll tell you if I’m a Zionist.”
“Are you a Zionist?” he repeated flatly.
“Look,” I snapped back, thinking, Why don’t you just say no? “what business is that of yours? Drive, please. This is the road to Jerusalem, is it not?”
“Are you a Zionist?”
The car was now perceptibly losing speed, the road was pitch-black, and beyond it I could see nothing.
“Why are you slowing down?”
“Bad car. Not work.”
“It was working a few minutes ago.”
“Are you a Zionist?”
We were barely rolling along now.
“Shift,” I said, “shift the car down and give it some gas.”
But here the car stopped.
“What’s going on!”
He did not answer but got out of the car with a flashlight, which he began clicking on and off.
“Answer me! Why are you stopping out here like this? Where are we? Why are you flashing that light?”
I didn’t know whether to stay in the car or to jump out of the car or whether either was going to make any difference to whatever was about to befall me. “Look,” I shouted, leaping after him onto the road, “did you understand me? I am George Ziad’s friend!”
But I couldn’t find him. He was gone.
And this is what you get for fucking around in the middle of a civil insurrection! This is what you get for not listening to Claire and not turning everything over to lawyers! This is what you get for failing to comply with a sense of reality like everyone else’s! Easter Parade! This is what you get for your bad jokes!
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey, you! Where are you?”
When there was no reply, I opened the driver’s door and felt around for the ignition: he’d left the keys. I got in and shut the door and, without hesitating, started the car, accelerating hard in neutral to prevent it from stalling. Then I pulled onto the road and tried to build up speed—there must be a checkpoint somewhere! But I hadn’t driven fifty feet before the driver appeared in the dim beam of the headlights waving one hand for me to stop and clutching his trousers around his knees with the other. I had to swerve wildly to avoid hitting him, and then, instead of stopping to let him get back in and drive me the rest of the way, I gunned the motor and pumped the gas pedal but nothing was able to get the thing to pick up speed and, only seconds later, the motor conked out.
Back behind me in the road I saw the flashlight wavering in the air, and in a few minutes the old driver was standing, breathless, beside the car. I got out and handed him the keys and he got back in and, after two or three attempts, started the motor, and we began to move off, jerkily at first, but then everything seemed to be all right and we were driving along once again in what I decided to believe was the right direction.
“You should have said you had to shit. What was I supposed to think when you just stopped the car and disappeared?”
“Sick,” he answered. “Stomach.”
“You should have told me that. I misunderstood.”
“Are you a Zionist?”
“Why do you keep asking that? If you mean Meir Kahane, then I am not a Zionist. If you mean Shimon Peres …” But why was I favoring with an answer this harmless old man with bowel problems, answering him seriously in a language he understood only barely … where the hell was my sense of reality? “Drive, please,” I said. “Jerusalem. Just get me to Jerusalem. And without talking!”
But we hadn’t got more than three or four miles closer to Jerusalem when he drove the car over to the shoulder, shut off the engine, took up the flashlight, and got out. This time I sat calmly in the back seat while he found himself some spot off the road to take another crap. I even began to laugh aloud at how I had exaggerated the menacing side of all this, when suddenly I was blinded by headlights barreling straight toward the taxi. Just inches from the front bumper, the other vehicle stopped, although I had braced for the impact and may even have begun to scream. Then there was noise everywhere, people shouting, a second vehicle, a third, there was a burst of light whitening everything, a second burst and I was being dragged out of the car and onto the road. I didn’t know which language I was hearing, I could discern virtually nothing in all that incandescence, and I didn’t know what to fear more, to have fallen into the violent hands of marauding Arabs or a violent band of Israeli settlers. “English!” I shouted, even as I tumbled along the surface of the highway. “I speak English!”
I was up and doubled over the car fender and then I was yanked and spun around and something knocked glancingly against the back of my skull and then I saw, hovering enormously overhead, a helicopter. I heard myself shouting, “Don’t hit me, God damn it, I’m a Jew!” I’d realized that these were just the people I’d been looking for to get me safely back to my hotel.
I couldn’t have counted all the soldiers pointing rifles at me even if I could have managed successfully to count—more soldiers even than there’d been in the Ramallah courtroom, helmeted and armed now, shouting instructions that I couldn’t have heard, even if their language was one I understood, because of the noise of the helicopter.
“I hired this taxi in Ramallah!” I shouted back to them. “The driver stopped to shit!”
“Speak English!” someone shouted to me.
“THIS IS ENGLISH! HE STOPPED TO MOVE HIS BOWELS!”
“Yes? Him?”
“The driver! The Arab driver!” But where was he? Was I the only one they’d caught? “There was a driver!”
“Too late at night!”
“Is it? I didn’t know.”
“Shit?” a voice asked.
“Yes—we stopped for the driver to shit, he was only flashing the flashlight—”
“To shit!”
“Yes!”
Whoever had been asking the questions began to laugh. “That’s all?” he shouted.
“As far as I know, yes. I could be wrong.”
“You are!”
Just then one of them approached, a young, heavyset soldier, and he had a hand extended toward mine. In his other hand was a pistol. “Here.” He gave me my wallet. “You dropped this.”
“Thank you.”
“This is quite a coincidence,” he said politely in perfect English, “I just today, this afternoon, finished one of your books.”
___
Thirty minutes later, I was safely at the door of my hotel, chauffeured there in an army jeep by Gal Metzler,° the young lieutenant who that very afternoon had read the whole of The Ghost Writer. Gal was the twenty-two-year-old son of a successful Haifa manufacturer who’d been in Auschwitz as a boy and with whom Gal had a relationship, he told me, exactly like the one Nathan Zuckerman had with his father in my book. Side by side in the jeep’s front seats, we sat in the parking area in front of the hotel while Gal talked to me about his father and himself, and while I was thinking that the only son I’d seen yet in Greater Israel who was not in conflict with his father was John Demjanjuk, Jr
. There there was only harmony.
Gal told me that in six months he would be finishing four years as an army officer. Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn’t know. That’s why he was devouring two and three books a day—to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life. At night, he said, every night, he dreamed about leaving Israel after his time was up and going to NYU to study film. Did I know the film school at NYU? He mentioned the names of some teachers there. Did I know these people?
“How long,” I asked him, “will you stay in America?”
“I don’t know. If Sharon comes to power … I don’t know. Now I go home on leave, and my mother tiptoes around me as though I’m somebody just released from the hospital, as though I’m crippled or an invalid. I can stand only so much of it. Then I start shouting at her. ‘Look, you want to know if I personally beat anyone? I didn’t. But I had to do an awful lot of maneuvering to avoid it!’ She’s glad and she cries and it makes her feel better. But then my father starts shouting at the two of us. ‘Breaking hands? It happens in New York City every night. The victims are black. Will you go running from America because they break hands in America?’ My father says, ‘Take the British, put them here, face them with what we are facing—they would act out of morality? The Canadians would act out of morality? The French? A state does not act out of moral ideology, a state acts out of self-interest. A state acts to preserve its existence.’ ‘Then maybe I prefer to be stateless,’ I tell him. He laughs at me. ‘We tried it,’ he tells me. ‘It didn’t work out.’ As if I need his stupid sarcasm—as if half of me doesn’t believe exactly what he believes! Still I have to deal with women and children who look me in the eyes and scream. They look at me ordering my troops to take away their brothers and their sons, and what they see is an Israeli monster in sunglasses and boots. My father is disgusted with me when I say such things. He throws his dishes on the floor in the middle of the meal. My mother starts crying. I start crying. I cry! And I never cry. But I love my father, Mr. Roth, so I cry! Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done to make my father proud of me. That was why I became an officer. My father survived Auschwitz when he was ten years younger than I am now. I am humiliated that I can’t survive this. I know what reality is. I’m not a fool who believes that he is pure or that life is simple. It is Israel’s fate to live in an Arab sea. Jews accepted this fate rather than have nothing and no fate. Jews accepted partition and the Arabs did not. If they’d said yes, my father reminds me, they would be celebrating forty years of statehood too. But every political decision with which they have been confronted, invariably they have made the wrong choice. I know all this. Nine tenths of their misery they owe to the idiocy of their own political leaders. I know that. But still I look at my own government and I want to vomit. Would you write a recommendation for me to NYU?”
A big soldier armed with a pistol, a two-hundred-pound leader of men whose face was darkly stubbled with several days’ whiskers and whose combat uniform foully reeked of sweat, and yet, the more he recounted of his unhappiness with his father and his father’s with him, the younger and more defenseless he had seemed to me. And now this request, uttered almost in the voice of a child. “So—” I laughed—“that’s why you saved my life out there. That’s why you didn’t let them break my hands—so I could write your recommendation.”
“No, no, no,” he quickly replied, a humorless boy distressed by my laughter and even more grave now than he’d been before, “no—no one would have hurt you. Yes, it’s there, of course it’s there, I’m not saying it’s not there—some of the boys are brutal. Most because they are frightened, some because they know the others are watching and they don’t want to be cowards, and some because they think, ‘Better them than us, better him than me.’ But no, I assure you—you were never in real danger.”
“It’s you who’s in real danger.”
“Of falling apart? You can tell that? You can see that?”
“You know what I see?” I said. “I see that you are a Diasporist and you don’t even know it. You don’t even know what a Diasporist is. You don’t know what your choices really are.”
“A Diasporist? A Jew who lives in the Diaspora.”
“No, no. More than that. Much more. It is a Jew for whom authenticity as a Jew means living in the Diaspora, for whom the Diaspora is the normal condition and Zionism is the abnormality—a Diasporist is a Jew who believes that the only Jews who matter are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who will survive are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who are Jews are the Jews of the Diaspora—”
It would have been hard to say where I found the energy after what I’d been through in just forty-eight hours, but suddenly here in Jerusalem something was running away with me again and there seemed to be nothing I had more strength for than this playing-at-Pipik. That lubricious sensation that is fluency took over, my eloquence grew, and on I went calling for the de-Israelization of the Jews, on and on once again, obeying an intoxicating urge that did not leave me feeling quite so sure of myself as I may have sounded to poor Gal, torn in two as he was by the rebellious and delinquent feelings of a loyal, loving son.
II
6
His
Story
When I went up to the desk for the key to my room, the young clerk smiled and said, “But you have it, sir.”
“If I had it I wouldn’t be asking for it.”
“Earlier, when you came out of the bar, I gave it to you, sir.”
“I haven’t been in the bar. I’ve been everywhere in Israel but the bar. Look, I’m thirsty. I’m hungry. I’m dirty and I need a bath. I’m out on my feet. The key.”
“Yes, a key!” he chirped, pretending to laugh at his own stupidity, and turned away to find one for me while slowly I caught up with the meaning of what I had just heard.
I sat with my key in one of the wicker chairs in the corner of the lobby. The desk clerk by whom I’d first been confused tiptoed up to me after about twenty minutes and asked in a quiet voice whether I needed assistance to my room; worried that I might be ill, he had brought, on a tray, a bottle of mineral water and a glass. I took the water and drank it all down, and then, when he remained at my side, looking concerned, I assured him that I was all right and could make my way to my room alone.
It was almost eleven. If I waited another hour, might he not leave on his own—or would he just get into my pajamas and go to bed? Perhaps the solution was to take a taxi over to the King David Hotel and ask for his key as casually as he, apparently, had walked off with mine. Yes, go there and sleep there. With her. And tomorrow he meets with Aharon to complete our conversation while she and I get on with the promotion of the cause. I just pick up where I left off in the jeep.
I remained half dozing in that corner chair, groggily thinking that this was still last summer and that everything I took to be actuality—the Jewish courtroom in Ramallah, George’s desperate wife and child, my impersonating Moishe Pipik for them, the farcical taxi ride with the shitting driver, my alarming run-in with the Israeli army, my impersonating Moishe Pipik for Gal—was all a Halcion hallucination. Moishe Pipik was himself a Halcion hallucination; as was Jinx Possesski; as was this Arab hotel; as was the city of Jerusalem. If this were Jerusalem I’d be where I always stay, the municipal guest house, Mishkenot Sha’ananim. I would have seen Apter and all my friends here. …
With a start, I surfaced, and there to either side of me was a large potted fern; there too was the kind clerk, offering water again and asking if I was sure I didn’t need help. I saw by my watch that it was half past eleven. “Tell me please, the day, the month, and the year.”
“Tuesday, January 26, 1988. In thirty minutes, sir, it will be the twenty-seventh.”
“And this is Jerusalem.”
He smiled. “Yes, sir.”
