Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  “On this matter? Why not?”

  “And the consequences of proceeding uncompromisingly, independent of every judgment but your own—to these consequences you are indifferent?”

  “Don’t I have to be?”

  “Well,” he said, while I snapped up the check before he could take it and compromisingly charge breakfast to the Mossad, “then that’s that. Too bad.”

  Here he turned to the crutches that were balanced behind him on the coatrack. I came around to assist him to his feet, but he was already standing. The disappointment in his face, when his eyes engaged mine, looked as though it couldn’t possibly have been manufactured to deceive. And must there not be a point, even in him, where manipulation stops? It caused a soundless but not inconsiderable emotional upheaval in me to think that he might actually have shed his disguises and come here out of a genuine concern for my welfare, determined to spare me any further misfortune. But even if that was so, was it any reason to cave in and voluntarily give them a pound of my flesh?

  “You’ve come a long way from that broken man whom you describe as yourself in the first chapter of this book.” He had somehow gathered up his attaché case along with the crutches and clutched the handle round with what I noticed, for the very first time, were the powerful, tiny, tufted fingers of a primate somewhat down the scale from man, something that could swing through a jungle by its prehensile tail in the time that it would take Smilesburger to get from our table to the street. I assumed that in the attaché case was my manuscript. “All that uncertainty, all that fear and discomposure—it all seems safely behind you now. You are impermeable,” he said. “Mazel tov.”

  “For now,” I replied, “for now. Nothing is secure. Man the pillar of instability. Isn’t that the message? The unsureness of everything.”

  “The message of your book? I wouldn’t say so. It’s a happy book, as I read it. Happiness radiates from it. There are all kinds of ordeals and trials but it’s about someone who is recovering. There’s so much élan and energy in his encounters with the people he meets along the way that anytime he feels his recovery is slipping and that thing is coming over him again, why, he rights himself and comes through unscathed. It’s a comedy in the classic sense. He comes through it all unscathed.”

  “Only up to this point, however.”

  “That too is true,” said Smilesburger, nodding sadly.

  “But what I meant by ‘the unsureness of everything’ was the message of your work. I meant the inculcation of pervasive uncertainty.”

  “That? But that’s a permanent, irrevocable crisis that comes with living, wouldn’t you say?”

  This is the Jewish handler who handles me. I could have done worse, I thought. Pollard did. Yes, Smilesburger is my kind of Jew, he is what “Jew” is to me, the best of it to me. Worldly negativity. Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. The this-worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. The malice. The comedy. The endurance. The acting. The injury. The impairment.

  I followed behind him until I saw Ted rise to say hello. “Mr. Smilesburger,” I said, “one minute. I want you to meet Mr. Solotaroff, the editor and writer. And this is Ivan Solotaroff. Ivan’s a journalist. Mr. Smilesburger pretends to be a gardener in the desert these days, fulfilling the commandments of our Lord. In fact, he’s an Israeli spy- master, the very handler who handles me. If there is an inmost room in Israel where somebody is able to say, ‘Here lies our advantage,’ then it’s the joy of the Smilesburgers to obtain it. Israel’s enemies would tell you that he is, institutionally, simply the sharp end of national and patriotic and ethnic psychosis. I would say, from my experience, that if there is such a thing in that frenetic state as a central will, it appears to me to be invested in him. He is, to be sure, as befits his occupation, also an enigma. Is he, for instance, assing around on these crutches? Is he actually a great athlete? This too could be. At any rate, he has treated me to some wonderfully confusing adventures, which you will soon be reading about in my book.”

  Smiling almost sheepishly, Smilesburger shook hands first with the father and then with the son.

  “Spying for Jews?” Ivan asked me, amused. “I thought you made a living spying on them.”

  “A distinction, in this case, without a difference—and a source of contention between Mr. Smilesburger and me.”

  “Your friend,” said Smilesburger to Ted, “is impatient to construct his own disaster. Has he always been in this hurry to overdo things?”

  “Ted, I’ll call you,” I said, even while Ted stood towering above Smilesburger, puzzling over what sort of connection we might have other than the one I had so deliberately and loquaciously delineated. “Ivan, good to see you. So long!”

  Softly Ted said to Smilesburger, “Take care now,” and together my handler and I made our way to the register, where I paid the bill, and then we were out of the store and into the street.

  On the corner of West Eighty-sixth Street, only a few feet from the steps of a church where a destitute black couple slept beneath a filthy blanket as the midday traffic rolled noisily by, Smilesburger offered me his attaché case and asked me to open it for him. I found inside the photocopied pages of the original eleven chapters of this book, still in the large manila envelope in which I’d initially mailed them to him, and beneath that, a second, smaller envelope, thick and oblong, just about the size and shape of a brick, my name written boldly across the face of it.

  “What’s this?” I asked. But I had only to heft the envelope in my hand to realize what it contained. “Whose idea is this?”

  “Not mine.”

  “How much is in here?”

  “I don’t know. I would think quite a lot.”

  I had a violent urge to heave the envelope as far as I could out into the street, but then I saw the shopping cart crammed with all the worldly goods belonging to the black couple on the steps of the church and thought to just go over and drop it in there. “Three thousand ducats,” I said to Smilesburger, repeating aloud for the first time since Athens the identifying code words that I’d been given to use by him before leaving on the mission purportedly for George.

  “However much it is,” he said, “it’s yours.”

  “For what? For services already rendered or for what I’m now being advised to do?”

  “I found it in my briefcase when I got off the plane. Nobody has told me anything. I opened the briefcase on the way in from Kennedy. There it was.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I shouted at him. “This is what they did to Pollard—shtupped the poor schnuk with money until he was compromised up to his ears!”

  “Philip, I don’t want what doesn’t belong to me. I don’t wish to be accused of stealing what isn’t mine. I ask you please to take this off my hands before I am the one who is compromised in the middle of an affair where I no longer play any role. Look, you never put in for your Athens expenses. You charged the hotel to American Express and even got stuck with a big restaurant bill. Here. To cover the costs you incurred spying at the fountainhead of Western civilization.”

  “I was thinking, just before, that I could have done much worse than you,” I said. “Now it’s hard to imagine how.” I held the envelope containing my manuscript under my arm while placing the envelope full of money back in the attaché case. “Here,” I said, snapping the case shut and offering it to Smilesburger, but he held tightly to his crutches, refusing to accept it back. “All right,” I said and, seeing that the woman who’d been sleeping beside her companion on the church steps was awake now and cautiously watching the two of us, I set the case down on the pavement before Smilesburger’s feet. “The Mossad Fund for Homeless Non-Jews.”

  “No jokes, please—pick up the case,” he said, “and take it. You don’t know what could be in store for you otherwise. Take the money and do what they want. Ruining reputations is no less serious an intelligence operation than destroying nuclear reactors. When they are out to silence a voice th
ey don’t like, they know how to accomplish it without the blundering of our Islamic brothers. They don’t issue a stupid, barbaric fatwa that makes a martyred hero out of the author of a book that nobody can read—they quietly go to work on the reputation instead. And I don’t mean halfheartedly, as they did in the past with you, turning loose the intellectual stooges at their magazine. I mean hardball—loshon hora: the whispering campaign that cannot be stopped, rumors that it’s impossible to quash, besmirchment from which you will never be cleansed, slanderous stories to belittle your professional qualifications, derisive reports of your business deceptions and your perverse aberrations, outraged polemics denouncing your moral failings, misdeeds, and faulty character traits—your shallowness, your vulgarity, your cowardice, your avarice, your indecency, your falseness, your selfishness, your treachery. Derogatory information. Defamatory statements. Insulting witticisms. Disparaging anecdotes. Idle mockery. Bitchy chatter. Malicious absurdities. Galling wisecracks. Fantastic lies. Loshon hora of such spectacular dimensions that it is guaranteed not only to bring on fear, distress, disease, spiritual isolation, and financial loss but to significantly shorten a life. They will make a shambles of the position that you have worked nearly sixty years to achieve. No area of your life will go uncontaminated. And if you think this is an exaggeration you really are deficient in a sense of reality. Nobody can ever say of a secret service, ‘That’s something they don’t do.’ Knowledge is too dispersed for that conclusion to be drawn. They can only say, ‘Within my experience, it wasn’t done. And beyond that again, there’s always a first time.’ Philip, remember what happened to your friend Kosinski! The Chofetz Chaim wasn’t just whistling Dixie: there is no verbal excess, no angry word, no evil speech that is unutterable to a Jew with an unguarded tongue. You are not Jonathan Pollard—you are being neither abandoned nor disowned. Instead you are being given the benefit of a lifetime’s experience by someone who has developed the highest regard for you and cannot sit by and watch you destroyed. The consequences of what you’ve written are simply beyond calculation. I fear for you. Name a raw nerve and you recruit it. It is not a quiet book you’ve written—it is a suicidal book, even within the extremely Jewish stance you assume. Take the money, please. I beg you. I beg you. Otherwise the misery you suffered from Moishe Pipik will seem like a drop in the bucket of humiliation and shame. They will turn you into a walking joke beside which Moishe Pipik will look like Elie Wiesel, speaking words that are only holy and pure. You’ll yearn for the indignities of a double like Pipik; when they get done desecrating you and your name, Pipik will seem the personification of modesty, dignity, and the passion for truth. Lead them not into temptation, because their creativity knows no bounds when the job is to assassinate the character even of a tzaddik like you. A righteous person, a man of moral rectitude, that is what I have come to understand you to be—and against the disgrace of such a person it is my human obligation to cry out! Philip, pick up the attaché case, take it home, and put the money in your mattress. Nobody will ever know.”

  “And in return?”

  “Let your Jewish conscience be your guide.”

  Note to the Reader

  This book is a work of fiction. The formal conversational exchange with Aharon Appelfeld quoted in chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in The New York Times on March 11, 1988; the verbatim minutes of the January 27, 1988, morning session of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem District Court provided the courtroom exchanges quoted in chapter 9. Otherwise the names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This confession is false.

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