Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  When my phone rang at almost eight a.m. I had been asleep in the chair beside it since I’d last checked on Demjanjuk’s son at about five-thirty. I had dreamed that I owed $128 million on my water bill. That was what my mind came up with after all I’d just been through.

  On awakening I smelled something enormous putrefying. I smelled must and feces. I smelled the walls of a damp old chimney. I smelled the fermenting smell of sperm. I smelled her asleep in my trousers—she was that heavy, clinging, muttony stench and she was also that pleasingly unpleasing brackishness on the middle fingers of the hand that picked up the receiver of the ringing phone. My unwashed face was rank with her. Dipped in her. In everyone. I smelled of them all. The shitting driver. The fat lawyer. Pipik. He was the smell of incense and old, dried blood. I smelled of every second of every minute of my last twenty-four hours, smelled like the container of something forgotten in the refrigerator whose lid you pop open after three weeks. Not until I decompose in my coffin will I ever be so immensely pungent again.

  The phone was ringing in a hotel room where nobody I knew knew that I was.

  A man said, “Roth?” Again a man with an accent. “Roth? You there?”

  “Who …?”

  “The office of Rabbi Meir Kahane.”

  “Wants Roth?”

  “This Roth? I am the press secretary. Why do you call the rabbi?”

  “Pipik!” I cried.

  “Hello? This is the Roth, the self-hating Jewish assimilationist?”

  “Pipik, where are you?”

  “And fuck you too.”

  I bathe.

  Two words.

  I dress in clean clothes.

  Five words.

  I no longer smell.

  Four words.

  Eleven words, and I no longer know if I ever did smell like my corpse.

  And this, I thought, my mind already, first thing, careening around its densely overstocked little store of concerns, this is how Demjanjuk does it. Everything putrid in the past just snaps off and falls away. Only America happened. Only the children and the friends and the church and the garden and the job have happened. The accusations? Well, they might as well charge him with owing $128 million on the water bill. Even if they had his signature on the water bill, even if they had his photograph on the water bill, how could it possibly be his water bill? How could anyone use that much water? Admittedly he bathed, sprinkled the lawn, wet down the garden, washed the car, there was a washer-dryer, an automatic dishwasher, there was water for cooking, there were houseplants to water, there were floors to wash every week, they were a family of five, and five people use water—but does that add up to $128 million worth of water? You sent me the bill for the city of Cleveland. You sent me the bill for the state of Ohio. You sent me the bill for the whole fucking world! Look at me in this courtroom, under all this, and still at the end of the day all I have sipped from my glass is maybe three or four ounces of water. I’m not saying that I don’t take a drink of water when I’m thirsty, of course I do, and in the summertime I drink my fill after going out and weeding the garden. But do I look to you like somebody who could be wasteful of water to the tune of $128 million? Do I strike you as somebody who, twenty-four hours a day, thirty days a month, twelve months a year, year in and year out, is thinking about water and nothing else? Is water running out of my nose and my mouth? Are my clothes sopping wet? Is there a puddle where I walk, is there water under the chair where I sit? Pardon me, but you’ve got the wrong man. Some Jew, if I may say so, stuck six zeros on my bill just because I am Ukrainian and supposed to be stupid. But I am not so stupid that I don’t know my own water bill. My bill is one hundred and twenty-eight dollars—one—two—eight! There has been a mistake. I am just an average suburban consumer of water and I should not be on trial for this gigantic bill!

  ___

  As I was leaving the room on my way to get something to eat before racing off to the trial, I suddenly remembered Apter, and the thought of him wondering if I had abandoned him, the thought of his vulnerability, of his lonely, fear-ridden, fragile existence, sent me back into the room to phone him, at least to assure him that he hadn’t been forgotten and that as soon as I possibly could, I would come to see him … but it turned out that I had seen him. It turned out that I’d had lunch with him just the day before: while Aharon and I had been eating together at the Ticho House, Apter and I had been eating together only a few blocks away at a vegetarian restaurant off Ethiopia Street where we’d always gone in the past for our meal together. It turned out that while Smilesburger was presenting me with his staggering contribution, Apter had been telling me again that he was afraid to go to his stall in the Old City for fear that the Arabs there would kill him with their knives. He was afraid now even to leave his room. And even in his bed, he lay awake, watchful all night long, afraid that if he were to so much as blink his eyes, they would steal through his window and devour him. He had cried and begged me to take him back with me to America, he had lost control of himself completely, bawling and shrieking that he was powerless and that only I could save him.

  And I had acceded. At lunch with him I had agreed. He was to come to live in my barn in Connecticut. I had told him that I would build a big new room for him in the unused barn, fix up a room with a skylight and a bed and whitewashed walls, where he could live securely and paint his landscapes and never again have to worry about being eaten alive while he slept.

  On the phone he wept with gratitude even as he reminded me of all that I had promised the day before … and so how could I tell him that it hadn’t been me? And was I even certain that it had been Pipik? It couldn’t be! It had to be Apter dreaming aloud, under the pressure of the Arab uprising; it had to be the eruption of the hysteria of a resourceless, deformed, infolded spirit on whom the grip of a horrible past was never relaxed, someone who, even without an insurrection in progress, hourly awaited his execution. It had to be Apter pining for that restful safety he could never possibly know, longing for the lost family and the stolen life; it had to be the unreality of the hysteria of this little blank-faced man shut off and in dread of everything, whose whole existence was shrinking; it had to be withdrawal and longing and fear—because if it wasn’t that and had indeed been Pipik conscientiously back at work pretending he was me, if it wasn’t either Apter cut loose from his tiny anchor to life and fantastically deluded or Apter openly lying, Apter simulating Apter so as to alarm me into understanding how fantastically deluded existing as Apter required him to be, if Pipik had really made it his business to hunt him down and take him to lunch and toy like this with Apter’s ruined life, then I’d been exaggerating nothing, then I was up against a purpose that was as diabolical as it was intangible, I was up against someone wearing my mask who wasn’t human at all, someone who could get up to anything in order to make things into what they were not. Which does Pipik despise more, reality or me?

  “I won’t be a small boy—don’t worry, Cousin Philip. I’ll just be in the barn, that’s all.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes,” and this was the only thing I was able to say.

  “I’ll be no bother. I won’t bother anyone. I need nothing at all,” Apter assured me. “I’ll paint. I’ll paint the American countryside. I’ll paint the stone walls you told me about. I’ll paint the big maple trees. I’ll paint pictures of the barns and of the banks of the river.”

  On he went, the whole load of his life falling away as he gave free rein, at fifty-four, to his naked need and the fairy tale it engendered of the perfect refuge. I wanted to ask, “Did this happen, Apter? Did he take you to lunch and tell you about the stone walls? Or has the violence so filled you with terror that, whether you know it or not, you are making all this up?” But even as Apter fell deeper and deeper under the spell of the dream of the unhaunted life, I heard myself asking Pipik, “Did you really do this to him? Did you really excite in this banished being who can barely maintain his equilibrium this beautiful vision of an American Gan Eden wher
e he will be saved from the blight and din of his past? Answer me, Pipik!” Whereupon Pipik replied, “I couldn’t resist, I couldn’t do otherwise, neither as a Diasporist nor as a human being. Every word he spoke was filled with his fears. How could I deny him what he’s craved all his life? Why are you so outraged? What have I done that’s so awful? No more than any Jew would do for a frightened Jewish relative in trouble.” “And now you are my conscience, too?” I cried. “You, you are going to instruct me in matters of decency, responsibility, and ethical obligation? Is there nothing that you will not pollute with your mouth? I want a serious answer! Is there nothing that you will not befoul? Is there anyone you will not mislead? What joy do you take in raising false hopes and sowing all this confusion?”

  I want a serious answer. From Moishe Pipik. And after that, how about peace on earth and goodwill among men? I want a serious answer—as who doesn’t?

  “Apter,” I wanted to say, “you are out of contact with reality. I did not take you to lunch yesterday. I had lunch with Aharon Appelfeld, I took him to lunch. If you had this conversation at lunch yesterday, it was not with me. Either it was with that man who is in Jerusalem pretending to be me or it was perhaps a conversation with yourself—is it possibly an exchange you imagined?”

  But every word he spoke was so filled with fear that I did not have the heart to do anything other than repeat “Yes” to it all. I would leave him to awaken by himself from this delusion … and if it was no delusion? I imagined myself ripping the tongue out of Pipik’s mouth with my own two hands. I imagined myself … but I could not give any more thought to the possibility that this was other than a delusion of Apter’s for the simple reason that I would have exploded.

  ___

  That morning’s Jerusalem Post was outside my door when I left the room, and I picked it up and quickly scanned the front page. The first lead story was about the 1988 Israeli budget—“Worry over Exports Casts Shadow on New State Budget.” The second lead story concerned three judges who were to be put on trial and three others who were facing disciplinary action on charges of corruption. Situated between these stories was a photograph of the defense minister visiting the wall that George had tried to take me to see the day before, and beneath that were three stories about the West Bank violence, one datelined Ramallah and headed, “Rabin Inspects Wall of Bloody Beatings.” On the lower half of the page I spotted the words “PLO” and “Hezbollah” and “Mubarak” and “Washington” but nowhere the name “Demjanjuk.” Nor did I find my name. I ran quickly over the paper’s remaining nine pages while going down in the elevator. The only mention of the trial I could find was under the television listings. “Israel Channel 2. 8.30 Demjanjuk trial—live broadcast.” And further on, “20.00 Demjanjuk trial roundup.” That was all. Nothing calamitous was reported to have happened to any Demjanjuk in the night.