The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  Three years after the ’67 victory, my father died and so he’s missed Menachem Begin. That’s too bad, for not even Ben-Gurion’s fortitude, Golda’s pride, and Dayan’s valor taken all together could have provided him with that profound sense of personal vindication that so many of his generation have found in an Israeli Prime Minister who could pass, from his appearance, for the owner of a downtown clothing store. Even Begin’s English is right, sounding more like the speech of their own impoverished immigrant parents than what emanates, say, from Abba Eban, cunning Jewish central casting’s spokesman to the Gentile world. After all, who better than the Jew caricatured by generation upon generation of pitiless enemies, the Jew ridiculed and despised for his funny accent and his ugly looks and his alien ways, to make it perfectly clear to everyone that what matters now isn’t what goyim think but what Jews do? The only person who might conceivably have delighted my father even more by issuing the general warning that Jewish helplessness in the face of violence is a thing of the past would have been, as commander in chief of the Israeli Army and Air Force, a little peddler with a long beard.

  * * *

  Until his trip to Israel eight months after the bypass surgery, my brother, Henry, had never shown any interest at all in the country’s existence or in its possible meaning for him as a Jewish homeland, and even that visit arose from neither an awakening of Jewish consciousness nor out of curiosity about the archaeological traces of Jewish history but strictly as a therapeutic measure. Though his physical rehabilitation had by then been successfully completed, at home after work he was succumbing still to fits of terrible despair, and many nights would drag himself away from the dinner table midway through the family meal to fall asleep on the couch in the study.

  Beforehand, the doctor had warned the patient and his wife about these depressions, and Carol had prepared the children. Even men like Henry who were young and healthy enough to make a rapid physical recovery from bypass surgery often suffered emotional repercussions lasting sometimes as long as a year. In his case it had been clear from the beginning that he wasn’t to escape the worst aftereffects. Twice during the week following the operation, he had to be moved from his private room into intensive care because of chest pains and arrhythmia, and when, after nineteen days, he was able to return home, he was twenty pounds lighter and barely strong enough to stand in front of the mirror and shave. He wouldn’t read or watch television, he ate practically nothing, and when Ruth, his favorite child, came in after school and offered to play for him the little tunes that he liked on her violin, he sent her away. He even refused to begin the exercise course at the cardiac rehab clinic, but lay instead under a blanket in the lounge chair on the back patio, looking out at Carol’s garden and weeping. Tearfulness, the doctor assured everyone, was common among patients after serious surgery, but Henry’s tears did not abate and after a while no one knew what he was crying about. If, when asked, he even bothered to reply, it was blankly, with the words “It’s staring me right in the face.” “What is?” Carol said. “Tell me, darling, and we’ll talk about it. What is staring you right in the face?” “The words,” he angrily told her, “the words ‘it’s staring you right in the face’!”

  At dinner one night, when Carol, trying still to be perky, suggested that now that he was physically himself again he might enjoy going along on the two-week snorkeling trip that Barry Shuskin was planning, he replied that she knew damn well that he couldn’t stand Shuskin, and headed for the studio couch. That was when she telephoned me. Although Carol was right to think that our rift had all but healed, she mistakenly believed that the reconciliation resulted from the visits I’d paid to the hospital while he was moving in and out of intensive care; she still knew nothing about the times he’d called on me in New York before the operation, when he found himself without anyone else to whom he dared confide what, in reality, was making the treatment of his disease unbearable.

  I reached him at his office the morning after Carol’s call.

  “The sun, the sea, the reefs—you deserve it,” I said, “after what you’ve been through. Let snorkeling wash away all the old debris.”

  “Yeah, and then what?”

  “You’ll come back. You’ll begin your new life.”

  “What’ll be new about it?”

  “It’ll pass, Henry, the depression will pass. Sooner rather than later, if you push yourself a little.”

  His voice sounded disembodied when he told me, “I don’t have the guts to change.”

  I wondered if he was talking about women again. “What sort of change do you have in mind?”

  “The one that’s staring me right in the face.”

  “Which is?”

  “How would I know? I’m not only too gutless to do it, I’m too stupid to know what it is.”

  “You had the guts for the operation. You had the guts to say no to the medication and take your chances on the block.”

  “And what’s it got me?”

  “I take it you’re off the drugs now—that you’re yourself again sexually.”

  “So what?”

  That night, while he was back brooding in the study, Carol phoned to say how much talking to me had meant to Henry and begged me to stay in touch with him. Though the call had hardly seemed to me successful, I nonetheless phoned him again a few days later and, in fact, spoke to him more over the next few weeks than I had since college, each conversation as hopelessly circular as the one before—until all at once he relented about the trip and, along with Shuskin and two other friends, set off one Sunday on TWA with his face mask and fins. Though Carol told me gratefully how it was my concern that had turned him around, I wondered if Henry hadn’t simply caved in, knuckled under to me the way he used to give in on the phone to our father back when he was a student at Cornell.

  One of the stops on their itinerary was Eilat, the coastal town at the southern end of the Negev. After snorkeling for three days in the coral grottoes, the others flew on to Crete; Henry, however, remained in Israel, and only in part because of Shuskin’s unbearable egomaniacal monologues. On a day tour of Jerusalem, he had broken away from the other four after lunch and wandered back by himself into the Orthodox quarter, Mea She’arim, where they had all been that morning with the guide. It was there, alone outside the classroom window of a religious school, that he had the experience that changed everything.

  “I was sitting in the sunshine on the stone sill of this broken-down old cheder. Inside was a class, a room full of kids, little eight-, nine-, ten-year-old kids with skullcaps and payess, screaming the lesson out for their teacher, all of them reciting in unison at the top of their voices. And when I heard them, there was a surge inside me, a realization—at the root of my life, the very root of it, I was them. I always had been them. Children chanting away in Hebrew, I couldn’t understand a word of it, couldn’t recognize a single sound, and yet I was listening as though something I didn’t even know I’d been searching for was suddenly reaching out for me. I stayed all week in Jerusalem. Every morning around eleven I went back to that school and sat on the windowsill and listened. You have to understand that the place isn’t picturesque. The surroundings are hideous. Rubble dumped between the buildings, old appliances piled on the porches, piled in the yards—everything clean enough, but dilapidated, crumbling, rusty, everything coming apart wherever you looked. And not a color, a flower, a leaf, not a blade of grass or fresh coat of paint, nothing bright or attractive anywhere, nothing trying to please you in any way. Everything superficial had been cleared away, burned away, didn’t matter—was trivial. In the courtyards there were all their underclothes strung on the line, big ugly underwear having nothing to do with sex, underwear from a hundred years ago. And the women, the married women—kerchiefs wrapped around their heads, underneath shaved to the bone, and no matter how young, absolutely unappealing women. I looked for a pretty woman and I couldn’t find one. The children too—gawky, awkward, drained and pale, utterly colorless little kids. Ha
lf the old people looked like dwarfs to me, little men in long black coats with noses right out of an anti-Semitic cartoon. I can’t describe it any other way. Only the uglier and more barren everything looked, the more it held me—the clearer everything became. I hung around there all one Friday, watching them get ready for the Sabbath. I watched the men going to the bathhouse with their towels under their arms and to me the towels looked like prayer shawls. I watched those bloodless little kids hurrying home, coming out of the bathhouse twisting their wet earlocks and then hurrying home for the Sabbath. Across from a barbershop, I watched the Orthodox men in those hats and coats going in to get their hair cut. The place was jammed, hair piling up around everyone’s shoes, nobody bothering to sweep it away—and I couldn’t move. Only a barbershop, yet I couldn’t move. I bought a challah in some little dungeon bakery—stood in the crush and bought a challah and carried it all day in a bag under my arm. When I got back to the hotel, I took it out of the bag and put it on the bureau. I didn’t eat it. I left it there the whole week—left it on the bureau and looked at it, as though it were a piece of sculpture, something precious I’d stolen from a museum. Everything was like this, Nathan. I couldn’t stop looking, over and over again going back to stare at the same places. And that’s when I began to realize that of all that I am, I am nothing, I have never been anything, the way that I am this Jew. I didn’t know this, had no idea of it, all of my life I was swimming against it—then sitting and listening to those kids outside that cheder window, suddenly it belonged to me. Everything else was superficial, everything else was burned away. Can you understand? I may not be expressing it right, but I actually don’t care how it sounds to you or to anyone. I am not just a few, I’m not also a Jew—I’m a Jew as deep as those Jews. Everything else is nothing. And it’s that, that, that all these months has been staring me right in the face! The fact that that is the root of my life!”

  He told me all this on the phone his first night back, talking at a terrific, almost incomprehensible clip, as though he could not otherwise communicate what had happened to make his life important again, to make life suddenly of the greatest importance. By the end of the first week, however, when nobody to whom he repeated the story seemed to warm to his identification with those cheder kids, when he couldn’t get anyone to take seriously that the more hideous the surroundings looked, the more purified he felt, when nobody at all seemed able to appreciate that it’s the sheer perversity of these conversions that is their transforming power, his fervent excitement turned to bitter disappointment and he began to feel even more depressed than before he’d left.

  Worn down, and by now pretty depressed herself, Carol telephoned the cardiologist to tell him that the trip had failed and that Henry was worse. He in turn told her that she was forgetting what he’d warned her at the outset—for some patients the emotional upheaval afterwards could be even more trying than the surgery. “He’s back working every day,” he reminded her—“despite the irrational episodes he’s able to get himself to do his job, and that means that sooner or later, he’s going to come completely around and be himself.”

  And maybe that’s what happened three weeks later when, halfway through the day, after telling Wendy to cancel his afternoon appointments, he took off his white coat and walked out of the office. He hired a taxi to drive him from Jersey all the way over to Kennedy, and from there he phoned Carol to tell her his decision and to say goodbye to the kids. Aside from his passport, which he’d been carrying with him for days, he flew off to Israel on the El Al night flight with nothing but the suit on his back and his credit cards.

  Five months had passed and he hadn’t returned.

  * * *

  Shuki now lectured in contemporary European history at the university and wrote a weekly column for one of the left-wing papers, but compared to the days when he was in government he saw relatively few people, kept mostly to himself, and taught abroad as often as he could. He was as tired of politics, he said, as of all his old amusements. “I’m not even a great sinner anymore,” he confessed. As a reserve military officer in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, he’d lost his hearing in one ear and most of the sight in one eye when an exploding Egyptian shell threw him fifteen feet from his position. His brother, a reserve paratroop officer who in civilian life had been the architect, was taken prisoner when the Golan Heights were overrun. After the Syrian retreat, they found him and the rest of his captured platoon with their hands tied behind them to stakes in the ground; they had been castrated, decapitated, and their penises stuffed in their mouths. Strewn around the abandoned battlefield were necklaces made of their ears. A month after he’d received this news, Shuki’s father, the welder, died of a stroke.

  Shuki told me all of this, matter-of-factly, while he maneuvered through the heavy traffic and circled the side streets to find a space within walking distance of the downtown cafés. Eventually he was able to squeeze his VW in at an angle between two cars, half up on the sidewalk in front of an apartment building. “We could have sat like two nice old fellows beside the tranquil sea, but I remember that last time you preferred sitting on Dizengoff Street. I remember you devouring the girls with your eyes as though you thought they were shiksas.”

  “Is that right? Well, I was probably never much good at telling the difference.”

  “I don’t go in for it any more myself,” Shuki said. “It isn’t that the girls aren’t interested in me—I’m so big now they don’t even see me.”

  Years back, after taking me to Jaffa and around the Tel Aviv sights, Shuki had entertained me one evening at a noisy café frequented by his journalist friends, where we’d wound up playing chess for several hours before moving on to the red-light district and my special sociological treat, a Rumanian prostitute on Yarkon Street. Now he led me into a barren colorless little place with some pinball machines in the back and nobody at any of the streetside tables except a couple of soldiers and their girls. At our table he said, “No, sit on this side, so I can hear you.”

  Though he hadn’t become quite the behemoth of his own self-caricature, he bore little resemblance to the dark, slim, mischievous hedonist who’d guided me to Yarkon Street eighteen years earlier—the hair that used to spring from his forehead in tenacious black tiers had thinned down to just a few gray wisps combed across his scalp, and because the face had considerably puffed out, the features seemed larger and less refined. But the biggest change was in the grin, a grin having nothing to do with amusement, though clearly he liked still to be amused and knew how to be amusing. Thinking about his brother’s death—and his father’s fatal stroke—I found myself equating that grin of his with the dressing over a wound.

  “How’s New York?” he asked.

  “I’m not living in New York anymore. I’m married to an English woman, I’ve moved to London.”

  “You in England? The Jersey boy with the dirty mouth who writes the books Jews love to hate—how do you survive there? How can you stand the silence? I was invited a couple of years ago to lecture at Oxford. I was there six months. At dinner, whatever I said, somebody next to me always replied, ‘Oh, really?’”

  “You didn’t like the small talk.”

  “Truthfully? I didn’t mind it. I needed a vacation from this place. Every Jewish dilemma there ever was is encapsulated in this country. In Israel it’s enough to live—you don’t have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted. Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? Even one ear is more than you need. Here everything is black and white, everybody is shouting, and everybody is always right. Here the extremes are too great for a country so small. Oxford was a relief. ‘Tell me, Mr. Elchanan, how is your dog?’ ‘I don’t have a dog.’ ‘Oh, really?’ My problem began when I got back. My wife’s family would meet at our house on Friday nights to argue about politics, and I couldn’t get a word in. During six months at Oxford I had learned civility and the rules of civilized discourse, and this turned out to be absolutely crippling in an Israeli discussion.”
<
br />   “Well,” I said, “that hasn’t changed—you still hear the best anti-Semitic cracks in a Dizengoff Street café.”

  “The only reason left to live here,” Shuki said. “Tell me about your English wife.”

  I told him how I had met Maria in New York a little over a year before, when she and the husband from whom she was already hopelessly estranged had moved into the duplex upstairs from my apartment. “They were divorced four months back and we married and moved to England. Life is fine there. If it wasn’t for Israel, everything in London would be wonderful.”

  “Yes? Israel’s also to blame for living conditions in London? I’m not surprised.”

  “Last night, at a dinner party, when Maria mentioned where I was off to today, I wasn’t the most popular boy at the table. You might have thought from the skiing holidays in Switzerland and the summer houses in Tuscany and the BMWs in the garage that all these nice, liberal, privileged Englishmen would have been a little leery of revolutionary socialism. But no, when it comes to Israel, it’s the Sayings of Chairman Arafat right down the line.”

  “Of course. In Paris as well. Israel is one of those places you know so much better before you wind up there.”

  “They were all friends of Maria’s, younger than I, in their thirties, television people, in publishing, a couple of journalists—all bright and successful. I was put right in the dock: how long can the Israelis keep importing cheap Jewish labor from North Africa to do their dirty work? It’s well known in W11 that Oriental Jews are brought to Israel to be exploited as an industrial proletariat. Imperialist colonization, capitalist exploitation—all carried on from behind the facade of Israeli democracy and the fiction of Jewish national unity. And that was only the beginning.”