by Philip Roth
I hadn’t heard a bolt turn in the door, and when I hurried over to the windows I found not only that they were unlocked but that one was open at the bottom. I had merely to push it up all the way to be able to crawl out, hang full length from the sill, and then drop from the window the ten or twelve feet to the courtyard below. I could then race the twenty yards down the alleyway and, once out into the street, start shouting for help—or make directly for Apter’s. Only what if they opened fire? What if I hurt myself jumping and they caught me and dragged me back inside? Because I still didn’t know who my captors were, I couldn’t decide which was the bigger risk: to escape or not to try to escape. That they hadn’t chained me to the wall of a windowless dungeon didn’t necessarily mean that they were nice fellows or that they would take lightly any failure to cooperate. But to cooperate with what? Hang around, I thought, and you’ll find out.
I soundlessly opened the window all the way, but when I peered out to gauge the drop, a pain went jaggedly crackling through the left hemisphere of my head and whatever can pulsate in a man began to pulsate in me. I wasn’t a man, I was now an engine being revved up by something beyond my control. I pulled the window down as soundlessly as I’d pulled it open, leaving it ajar at the bottom precisely as I’d found it, and, crossing to the center of the room, like the eager student who arrives first in the class, I took a seat in front of the blackboard, two rows from the teacher’s table and the TV set, convinced that I had no need to jump, because I had nothing to fear from Jews, and simultaneously stunned by my childish ingenuousness. Jews couldn’t beat me, starve me, torture me? No Jew could kill me?
Again I went over to the window, although this time all I did was look out into the courtyard, hoping that someone looking in would see me and understand from whatever I was able silently to signal that I was here against my will. And I was thinking that whatever it was that was happening to me and had been happening now for three days, it had all begun back when I’d first taken my seat in that small, ill-ventilated classroom that was the Newark original of this makeshift Jerusalem replica, during those darkening hours when I could barely bring myself to pay attention after a full day in the school where my heart was somehow always light, the public school from which I understood clearly, every day in a thousand ways, my real future was to arise. But how could anything come of going to Hebrew school? The teachers were lonely foreigners, poorly paid refugees, and the students—the best among us along with the worst—were bored, restless American kids, ten, eleven, twelve years old, resentful of being cooped up like this year after year, through the fall, winter, and spring, when everything seasonal was exciting the senses and beckoning us to partake freely of all our American delights. Hebrew school wasn’t school at all but a part of the deal that our parents had cut with their parents, the sop to pacify the old generation—who wanted the grandchildren to be Jews the way that they were Jews, bound as they were to the old millennial ways—and, at the same time, the leash to restrain the breakaway young, who had it in their heads to be Jews in a way no one had ever dared to be a Jew in our three-thousand-year history: speaking and thinking American English, only American English, with all the apostasy that was bound to beget. Our put-upon parents were simply middlemen in the classic American squeeze, negotiating between the shtetl-born and the Newark-born and taking blows from either side, telling the old ones, “Listen, it’s a new world—the kids have to make their way here,” while sternly rebuking the young ones, “You must, you have to, you cannot turn your back on everything!” What a compromise! What could possibly come of those three or four hundred hours of the worst possible teaching in the worst possible atmosphere for learning? Why, everything—what came of it was everything! That cryptography whose signification I could no longer decode had marked me indelibly four decades ago; out of the inscrutable words written on this blackboard had evolved every English word I had ever written. Yes, all and everything had originated there, including Moishe Pipik.
I began to make a plan. I would tell them the story of Moishe Pipik. I would differentiate for them between what he was up to and what I was up to. I would answer any questions they had about George Ziad—I had nothing to hide about our meetings and conversations or even about my own Diaspora diatribes. I would tell them about Jinx, describe every last thing that they wanted to know. “I am guilty of nothing,” I would tell them, “except perhaps failing to notify the police about Pipik’s threat to kidnap young Demjanjuk, and even that I can explain. I can explain everything. I came only to interview Aharon Appelfeld.” But if the people holding me here are indeed Pipik’s coconspirators, and if they have gotten me out of the way like this precisely now to go ahead and abduct young Demjanjuk, then that is the last thing I should say!
Exactly what justification should I offer—and who will swallow it anyway? Who that comes to interrogate me will believe that there is no conspiracy to which I am a party, no plot in which I have had a hand, that there is no collusion here, no secret machinations between Moishe Pipik and me or between George Ziad and me, that I have not put anyone up to anything for any personal, political, or propagandistic reason whatsoever, that I have devised no strategy to assist Palestinians or to compromise Jews or to intervene in this struggle in any way? How can I convince them that there is nothing artful here, no subtle aim or hidden plan undergirding everything, that these events are nonsensical and empty of meaning, that there is no pattern or sequence arising from some dark or sinister motive of mine or any motive of mine at all, that this is in no way an imaginative creation accessible to an interpretive critique but simply a muddle, a mix-up, and a silly fucking mess!
I remembered how, in the mid-sixties, a Professor Popkin had come forward with a carefully argued theory that there was not just a single Lee Harvey Oswald involved in killing Kennedy on November 22, 1963, but a second Oswald, a double of Oswald, who had been deliberately conspicuous around Dallas during the weeks before the assassination. The Warren Commission had dismissed these sightings of a second Oswald—at times when Oswald himself could be proved to have been elsewhere—as a case of mistaken identification, but Popkin argued that the instances of duplication were too frequent and the reports too well founded to be discounted, especially the reports of those episodes in which the look-alike had been seen shopping in a gun store and flamboyantly firing weapons at a local rifle range. The second Oswald was a real person, Popkin concluded, one of the assassins in a conspiracy in which the first Oswald played the role of a decoy or perhaps, unwittingly, of a patsy.
And it’s this, I thought, that I’m about to go up against, some conspiracy genius for whom it’s unimaginable that anyone like me or Lee Harvey Oswald could be out there plotless and on his own. My Pipik will father my Popkin, and the patsy this time will be me.
I spent nearly three hours alone in that classroom. Instead of jumping from the window into the courtyard and making a run for it, instead of opening the room’s unlocked door to see if it was possible simply to walk out the way I’d come in, I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I’ve done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright ridiculous, story and, next, how, after telling it, to fortify and defend myself from the affronted who read into the story an intention having perhaps to do less with the author’s perversity than with their own. Fellow writers will understand when I say that, excepting the difference in what might be at stake here and the dreadful imaginings that this fomented, preparing myself in that room to tell my story to my interrogator struck me as being not unlike waiting to see the review of your new book by the dumbest, clumsiest, shallowest, most thick-witted, wrongheaded, tone-deaf, tin- eared, insensate, and cliché-recycling book-reviewing dolt in the business. There’s not much hope of getting through. Who wouldn’t consider jumping out the window instead?
About midway through my second hour, when no one had as yet appeared to tie me up or beat me up or put a pistol
to my head and begin to ask me my opinions, I began to wonder if I might not be the victim of a practical joke and nothing more perilous than that. Three thugs and their car had been hired by Pipik to scare the life out of me—it could have cost him as little as two hundred bucks and, who knows, maybe not even half that much. They’d swept me up, dumped me off, and then gone on their merry way, nothing worse to show for their half hour’s work than my vomit on the tips of their shoes. It was pure Pipik, a brainstorm bearing all the earmarks of the putative private eye whose capacity for ostentatious provocation appeared to me inexhaustible. For all I knew, there was a peephole somewhere in this very room from behind which he was now watching me disgracefully being held prisoner by no one but myself. His revenge for my stealing his million dollars. His mockery for my stealing his Wanda Jane. The payoff for my breaking his glasses. Maybe she’s with him, pantyless on his lap, heroically planted on his implant and conscientiously feeding his excitement by peeping at me too. I am their peep show. I have been all along. The inventiveness of this nemesis is abysmal and bottomless.
But I drove this possibility out of my mind by studying the nine words on the blackboard, focusing on each character as though if I looked long and hard enough I might unexpectedly regain possession of my lost tongue and a secret message would be revealed to me. But no foreign language could have been any more foreign. The only feature of Hebrew that I could remember was that the lower dots and dashes were vowels and the upper markings generally consonants. Otherwise all memory of it had been extinguished.
Obeying an impulse nearly as old as I was, I took out my pen, and, on the back of my bill from the American Colony, I slowly copied down the words written on the blackboard. Perhaps they weren’t even words. I would have been no less stupid copying Chinese. All those hundreds of hours spent drawing these letters had disappeared without a trace, those hours might just as well have been a dream, and yet a dream in which I discovered everything that was forever thereafter to obsess my consciousness however much I might wish it otherwise.
This is what I painstakingly copied down, thinking that afterward, if there was an afterward, these markings might provide the clue to exactly where I’d been held captive and by whom.
I startled myself then by speaking out loud. I had been trying to convince myself that not everything sensible in me had as yet been stultified by fear, that I had strength enough left in me to sit tight and wait to see who and what I was truly up against, but instead I heard myself saying to an empty classroom, “Pipik, I know you are there,” the first words I’d uttered since in the car I’d asked my captors if they were Palestinians or Jews. “Abduction on top of identity theft. Pipik, the case against you gets worse by the hour. It’s still possible, if you want it, to negotiate a truce. I don’t press charges and you leave me alone. Speak and tell me that you are there.”
But no one spoke other than me.
I approached him next more practically. “How much would it take for you to leave me alone? Name a figure.”
Although an all but irrefutable argument could have been made at that moment—and was, by me—that he did not answer because he had nothing to do with my abduction, was nowhere nearby, and more than likely had left Jerusalem the night before, the long silence that once again followed my calling out to him simultaneously intensified my belief that he was there and that he did not respond either because I had not as yet found the formula that would provoke a response or because he was enjoying this spectacle far too much to intervene or interrupt and intended to hide the face that he went around Jerusalem advertising as my own until I had reached the uttermost limits of mortification and was contritely begging on my knees for mercy. Of course I knew how pathetically ridiculous I must appear if the abduction that bore all the clownish signs of Pipik’s authorship was the handiwork of someone else entirely, someone not at all clownish who constituted an even more drastic threat to me than he did and who was in fact monitoring me now, someone who far from conniving a singularly intimate, uncanny affiliation with me, one that might make him at least a little susceptible to my tender supplications, was beyond the reach of any appeal or offer or entreaty I might make. Because I feared that scrutinizing me in my molded-plastic student chair there might well be a surveillant even more alien than Pipik, lethally indifferent to my every need, to whom my name and my face could not have meant less, I discovered myself desperate to hear the voice of Moishe Pipik echoing mine. The plot that I had set out to flee at dawn on the grounds of its general implausibility, its total lack of gravity, its reliance on unlikely coincidence, the absence of inner coherence and of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose, that outlandish plot of Pipik’s that had disgusted me as much by its puerility as by its treachery and deceitfulness, now seemed to be my only hope. Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book!
“Pipik, are you with me, are you here? Is this or is this not your stinking idea? If it is, tell me so. Speak. I never was your enemy. Think back on what’s happened, review all the details, will you, please? Have I no right to claim that I have been provoked? Are you blameless entirely? Whatever pain my public standing may have caused you in those years before we met—well, how can I be responsible for that? And was it that injurious? Was the resemblance to me ever really much more than what most people would think of as a nuisance? It’s not I who told you to come to Jerusalem and pretend that we two were one—I cannot, in all fairness, be saddled with that. Do you hear me? Yes, you hear me—you don’t answer because that’s not what you hold against me. My offense is that I did not treat you with respect. I was not willing to entertain your proposal that we set up shop as partners. I was rude and caustic. I was dismissive and contemptuous. I was furious and threatening from the moment I saw you and, even before that, when I laid a trap on the phone as Pierre Roget. Look, that there is room for improvement I admit. Next time I will try harder to see your side of things before I take aim and fire. ‘Stop, breathe, think,’ instead of ‘Ready, aim, fire’—I’m trying hard to learn. Perhaps I was too antagonistic—perhaps. I don’t really know. I am not out to bullshit you, Pipik. You would despise me even more than you do already if, because you have the upper hand, I started kowtowing and kissing your ass. I am simply trying to explain that my response on meeting you, however offensive, was well within the range of what you might have expected from anyone in my position. But your grievance is deeper even than that. The million bucks. That’s a lot of money. Never mind that you extorted it by passing yourself off as me. Maybe you’re right and that’s not my business. Why should I care? Especially if it’s money in behalf of a good cause—and if you see it that way and say that it is, who am I to say it isn’t? I’m willing to believe that that was all between Smilesburger and you. Caveat emptor, Mr. Smilesburger. Though that’s not my crime either, is it? My crime is that it was I posing as you rather than you posing as me who extorted the money under false pretenses—by pretending to be you, I took what was not mine. In your eyes this amounts to grand larceny. You make the deal, I reap the harvest. Well, if it makes you feel better, I haven’t come away with a red cent. I haven’t got the check. I’m in your custody here, the boys who picked me up are your boys—you’re in charge in every way, and so I’m not about to lie to you. The check was lost. I lost it. You may or may not know this but I haven’t been contending here solely with you. The story is too long to tell, and you wouldn’t believe it anyway, so suffice it to say that the check disappeared in a situation where I was utterly powerless. Can’t we now go together to Mr. Smilesburger and explain to him his confusion? Get him to stop the old check and issue a new one? I would bet another million that the first check isn’t in anyone’s pocket but either got blown away by the wind or was trampled into the ground when some soldiers roughed me up on the road from Ramallah. That’s the story you won’t believe, though you ought to, really—it’s not a lot stranger than yours. I got caught in the crossfire of the fight being fought here, and that’s when you
r check disappeared. We’ll get you another one. I’ll help you get it. I’ll do everything I can in your behalf. Isn’t that what you’ve been asking from the start? My cooperation? Well, you’ve got it. This does it. I’m on your side. We’ll get you your million bucks back.”
I waited in vain for him to speak, but either he believed that I was lying and holding out on him, that his million was already in my account, or he wanted even more, or he wasn’t there.
“And I apologize,” I said, “about Jinx. Wanda Jane. For a man who’s gone through and survived the physical anguish that you’ve suffered, of course that’s bitterly infuriating. This probably has incensed you even more than the money. I don’t expect that you would believe me if I were to tell you that to pierce your heart was not my motive or intention. You think otherwise, of course. You think I meant to punish and humiliate you. You think I mean to steal what you prize most. You think I mean to strike a blow where you are most vulnerable. It won’t do me any good to try to tell you that you’re wrong. Particularly as you could be partially right. Human psychology being what it is, you could even be entirely right. But since the truth is the truth, let me add insult to insult and injury to injury—I did not do what I did without some feeling. For her, I mean. I mean that muzzling a virile response to her kind of magnetism has turned out to be no easier for me than it is for you. There’s yet another resemblance between us. I realize this was never the kind of partnership you had in mind but … But nothing. Enough. Wrong tack. I did it. I did it and in similar circumstances I would probably try to do it again. But there will be no such circumstances, that I promise you. The incident will never be repeated. I only ask you now to accept that by having been abducted and detained like this, by tasting all the terror that goes with sitting in this room not knowing what’s in store for me, I have been sufficiently disciplined for trespassing against you as I have.”
