The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “You’re making this up. Carnovsky’s brother on the West Bank? This is another of your hilarious ideas.”

  “My sister-in-law wishes it were. No, Henry’s made it up. Henry appears to have left his wife, his kids, and his mistress to come to Israel to become an authentic Jew.”

  “Why would he want to be something like that?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “Which settlement is it?”

  “Not far from Hebron, in the Judean hills. It’s called Agor. His wife says he’s found a hero there—a man named Mordecai Lippman.”

  “Oh, has he?”

  “You know Lippman?”

  “Nathan, I can’t talk about these things. It’s too painful for me. I mean this. Your brother is a follower of Lippman’s?”

  “Carol says that when Henry calls to speak to the kids, Lippman’s all he talks about.”

  “Yes? He’s so impressed? Well, when you see Henry, tell him all he has to do is go to the jail and he can meet plenty of little gangsters just as impressive.”

  “He intends to stay on, to live at Agor after he’s finished his Hebrew course, because of Lippman.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful. Lippman drives into Hebron with his pistol and tells the Arabs in the market how the Jews and Arabs can live happily side by side as long as the Jews are on top. He’s dying for somebody to throw a Molotov cocktail. Then his thugs can really go to town.”

  “Carol mentioned Lippman’s pistol. Henry told the kids all about it.”

  “Of course. Henry must find it very romantic,” Shuki said. “The American Jews get a big thrill from the guns. They see Jews walking around with guns and they think they’re in paradise. Reasonable people with a civilized repugnance for violence and blood, they come on tour from America, and they see the guns and they see the beards, and they take leave of their senses. The beards to remind them of saintly Yiddish weakness and the guns to reassure them of heroic Hebrew force. Jews ignorant of history, Hebrew, Bible, ignorant of Islam and the Middle East, they see the guns and they see the beards, and out of them flows every sentimental emotion that wish fulfillment can produce. A regular pudding of emotions. The fantasies about this place make me sick. And what about the beards? Is your brother as thrilled by the religion as by the explosives? These settlers, you know, are our great believing messianic Jews. The Bible is their bible—these idiots take it seriously. I tell you, all the madness of the human race is in the sanctification of that book. Everything going wrong with this country is in the first five books of the Old Testament. Smite the enemy, sacrifice your son, the desert is yours and nobody else’s all the way to the Euphrates. A body count of dead Philistines on every other page—that’s the wisdom of their wonderful Torah. If you’re going out there, go tomorrow for the Friday night service and watch them sitting around kissing God’s ass, telling him how big and wonderful he is—telling the rest of us how wonderful they are, bravely doing his work as courageous pioneers in biblical Judea. Pioneers! They work all day in government jobs in Jerusalem and drive home to biblical Judea for dinner at night. Only eating chopped chicken liver at the biblical source, only going to bed on the biblical sites, can a Jew find true Judaism. Well, if they want so much to sleep at the biblical source because that is where Abraham tied his shoelaces, then they can sleep there under Arab rule! Please, don’t talk to me about what these people are up to. It makes me too crazy. I’ll need a year at Oxford.”

  “Tell me more about my brother’s hero.”

  “Lippman? I smell fascism on people like Lippman.”

  “What’s that smell like here?”

  “It smells the same here as it does everywhere. The situation gets so complicated that it seems to require a simple solution, and that’s where Lippman comes in. His racket is to play upon Jewish insecurity—he says to the Jews, ‘I have the solution to our problem of fear.’ Of course there’s a long history of these people. Mordecai Lippman doesn’t come from nowhere. In every Jewish community there was always such a person. What could the rabbi do for their fears? The rabbi looks like you, Nathan—the rabbi is tall, he is thin, he is introverted and ascetic, always over his books, and usually he’s also ill. He is not a person who can deal with the goyim. So in every community there is a butcher, a teamster, a porter, he is big, he is healthy—you sleep with one, two, maybe three women, he sleeps with twenty-seven, and all at the same time. He deals with the fear. He marches off at night with the other butcher and when he comes back there are a hundred goyim you don’t ever have to worry about again. There was even a name for him: the shlayger. The whipper. The only difference between the Old Country shlayger and Mordecai Lippman is that on a superficial level Mr. Lippman is very deep. He hasn’t only a Jewish gun, he has a Jewish mouth—remnants even of a Jewish brain. There is now so much antagonism between Arab and Jew that even a child would understand that the best thing is to keep them apart—so Mr. Lippman drives into Arab Hebron wearing his pistol. Hebron! This state was not established for Jews to police Nablus and Hebron! This was not the Zionist idea! Look, I have no illusions about Arabs and I have no illusions about Jews. I just don’t want to live in a country that’s completely crazy. It excites you to hear me going on like this—I can see it. You envy me—you think, ‘Craziness and dangerousness—that sounds like fun!’ But believe me, when you have so much of it over so many years that even craziness and dangerousness become tedious and boring, then it’s really dangerous. People are frightened here for thirty-five years—when will there be another war? The Arabs can lose and lose and lose, and we can lose only once. All that is true. But what is the result? Onto the stage comes Menachem Begin—and the logical step after Begin, a gangster like Mordecai Lippman, who tells them, ‘I have the solution to our Jewish problem of fear.’ And the worse Lippman is, the better. He’s right, they say, that’s the kind of world we live in. If the humane approach fails, try brutality.”

  “And yet my little brother likes him.”

  “Ask your little brother, then, ‘What are the consequences of this delightful man?’ The destruction of the country! Who comes to this country now to settle and live? The intellectual Jew? The humane Jew? The beautiful Jew? No, not the Jew from Buenos Aires, or Rio, or Manhattan. The ones who come from America are either religious or crazy or both. This place has become the American-Jewish Australia. Now who we get is the Oriental Jew and the Russian Jew and the social misfits like your brother, roughnecks in yarmulkes from Brooklyn.”

  “My brother’s from suburban New Jersey. You couldn’t possibly describe him as a misfit. The problem that brought him here may have been the opposite: he fit all too well into his comfortable existence.”

  “So what did he come for? The pressure? The tensions? The problems? The danger? Then he’s really meshugge. You’re the only smart one—you, of all people, are the only normal Jew, living in London with an English Gentile wife and thinking you won’t even bother to circumcise your son. You, who say, I live in this time, I live in this world, and out of that I form my life. This, you understand, was supposed to be the place where to become a normal Jew was the goal. Instead we have become the Jewish obsessional prison par excellence! Instead it has become the breeding ground for every brand of madness that Jewish genius can devise!”

  It was dusk when we started back to the car. Waiting there with his wife and his little child was a darkish, strongly built man in his early thirties, crisply dressed in pale slacks and a white short-sleeve shirt. It seemed that Shuki, by angling the VW half onto the sidewalk, had inadvertently made it impossible for this other driver to back his car out of the space in front. At the sight of us approaching the VW, he started shouting and shaking his fist, and I wondered if he might not be an Israeli Arab. His fury was amazing. Shuki raised his voice to reply, but there wasn’t really much fury in him, and while the angry man screamed away, menacing him up close with a clenched fist, Shuki unlocked the car and let me in.

  I asked, once we were dri
ving off, in what language the fellow had been berating him, Arabic or Hebrew.

  “Hebrew.” Shuki laughed. “The man is like you, Nathan, a Jew. Hebrew, of course. He was telling me, ‘I can’t believe it—another Ashkenazi donkey! Every Ashkenazi I meet is another donkey!’”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “I don’t know—Tunis, Algiers, Casablanca. Have you heard who is now coming to live here? Jews from Ethiopia. So desperate are these bastards like Begin to perpetuate the old mythology that they’re beginning to drag black Jews here. Pleasant, affectionate, good-natured people, most of them peasants, they come here speaking the Ethiopian language. Some are so sick when they arrive they have to be taken by stretcher and rushed to the hospital. Most are unable to read or write. They have to be taught how to turn on the tap and turn off the tap and how to use a toilet and what stairs are. Technologically they live in the thirteenth century. But within a year, I assure you, they’ll already be Israelis, shouting about their rights and staging sitdown strikes, and soon enough they will be calling me an Ashkenazi donkey because of how I park my car.”

  At my hotel, Shuki apologized for being unable to have dinner with me, but he didn’t like leaving his wife alone at night and she wasn’t up to socializing. It was a bad time for her. Their eighteen-year-old son, who had emerged through competition as one of the outstanding young musicians in the country, had been drafted into the army for his three years of service and as a result would be unable to practice his piano regularly, if at all. Daniel Barenboim had listened to Mati play and offered to help arrange for him to study in America, but the boy had decided that he couldn’t leave the country to pursue his own ambitions while his friends were doing their military service. Once he had finished his basic training, allowances were supposed to be made for him to practice several times a week, but Shuki doubted that even this would happen. “Maybe he doesn’t need our approbation anymore, but he still needs theirs. Mati’s not so obstinate out of the house. If they tell him to go and hose down the tanks at the hour reserved for his practice, Mati is not going to take his note out of his pocket and say, ‘Daniel Barenboim suggests I play the piano instead.’”

  “Your wife wanted him to go to America.”

  “She tells him his responsibility is to music and not to the stupid infantry. In his nice loud voice, he says, ‘Israel has given me plenty! I’ve had a good time here! I have to do my duty!’ and she goes completely crazy. I try to intervene but I am as effective as one of the fathers in your books. I even thought about you while it was happening. I thought it really didn’t require all the agonies of creating a Jewish state where our people could shed their ghetto behavior, for me to wind up like a helpless father out of a Zuckerman novel, a real old-fashioned Jewish father who’s either kissing the children or shouting at them. Another powerless Jewish father against whom the poor Jewish son has nevertheless to stage his ridiculous rebellion.”

  “Goodbye, Shuki,” I said, taking his hand.

  “Goodbye, Nathan. And don’t forget to come again in another twenty years. I’m sure if Begin is still in power I’ll have even more good news.”

  * * *

  I decided, after Shuki left, that rather than stay in Tel Aviv that evening, I’d have the front desk phone ahead to Jerusalem to arrange a room for the night. From there I’d get in touch with Henry and try to get him to meet me for dinner. If Shuki hadn’t exaggerated, and Lippman was anything like the shlayger he’d described, then it was possible that Henry was as much captive as disciple, and, in fact, something like what might have been in Carol’s mind when she’d indicated that dealing with a suburban husband who’d turned himself into a born-again Jew was like having a child become a Moonie. How could she go ahead, she asked, and institute separation proceedings leading to a divorce if the man had really lost his mind? When she’d phoned me in London it was because she’d begun to feel as though she might be losing her mind herself—and because she didn’t know whom else to turn to.

  “I don’t want to match his irrationality with my own, I don’t want to act prematurely, but he couldn’t have gone any farther from me if he had died in surgery. If he’s cast me off for good, and the practice, and everything else, I have to act, I can’t wait here like an idiot for him to come to his senses. But I’m paralyzed—I cannot grasp it—I don’t understand what has happened at all. Do you? You’ve known him all his life. In a way brothers probably know each other better than they ever know anyone else.”

  “How they know each other, in my experience, is as a kind of deformation of themselves.”

  “Nathan, he can’t put you off the way he can me. Before I do anything that’s going to destroy it for good, I have to know if he’s completely flipped out.”

  I thought I ought to know too. The relationship to Henry was the most elemental connection I had left, and however vexing its surface had become after the long years of our estrangement, what was evoked in me by Carol’s call was the need to be responsible not so much to the disapproving brother with whom I’d already come to blows but to the little boy in the flannel pajamas who was known to sleepwalk when he was overexcited.

  Not that it was filial duty alone that was goading me on. I was also deeply curious about this swift and simple conversion of a kind that isn’t readily allowed to writers unless they wish to commit the professional blunder of being uninquiring. Henry’s life was no longer coming true in its most pedestrian form, and I had to ask if it all had been as mindlessly gained as Carol meant by suggesting he’d “flipped out.” Wasn’t there possibly more genius than madness in this escape? However unprecedented in the annals of suffocating domesticity, wasn’t this escape somehow incontestable in a way that it never would have been had he run off with an alluring patient? Certainly the rebellious script that he had tried following ten years back could hardly touch this one for originality.

  Within half an hour I’d settled my bill, and my bag was beside me in the taxi heading away from the sea. The industrial outskirts of Tel Aviv were already disappearing in the winter darkness when we turned onto the thruway and eastward across the citrus groves to the Jerusalem hills. As soon as I had a room at the hotel, I called Agor. The woman who answered seemed at first to be quite convinced that nobody named Henry Zuckerman lived at Agor. “The American,” I said loudly, “the American—the dentist from New Jersey!” Here she disappeared and I didn’t know quite what was up.

  While waiting for someone to come back on the phone, I recalled in detail the message I’d got from Henry’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Ruth, during dinner in London the evening before. It was a collect person-to-person call, placed in New Jersey after school from the house of a friend. Her mother had told her that I was going down to see her father, and though she wasn’t sure she was right even to be phoning me—for a week now she’d been putting it off from one day to the next—she wondered if she could ask me to tell him something “confidentially,” something she herself was not able to say on Sundays what with her older brother, Leslie, and her younger sister, Ellen, and sometimes even her mother hovering over the phone. But first she wanted me to know that she didn’t happen to agree with her mother that her father was behaving “childishly.” “She keeps saying,” Ruthie told me, “that he’s not reliable anymore, that she doesn’t trust his motives, and that if he wants to see us it’s going to have to be here. We were supposed to fly over for the school holiday and travel with him around the country, but now I’m not really sure she’s going to let us. She’s very down on him right now—very. She’s hurting terribly and I can sympathize. But what I would like you to tell my dad for me is that I think I understand better than Leslie and Ellen. Leave out Leslie and Ellen—just tell him that I understand.” “You understand what?” “He’s out there to learn something—he’s trying to find something out. I don’t say I understand everything, but I do think he’s not too old to learn—and I think he has the right.” “I’ll tell him that,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s so?’ she
asked. “What do you think about all this, Uncle Nathan? Do you mind my asking?” “Well,” I said, “I don’t know if it’s where I’d go, but I suppose I’ve done similar things myself.” “Have you really?” “Things that look childish to other people? I have. And perhaps for the reason you suggest—trying to find something out.” “In a way,” said Ruth, “I even admire him. It’s awfully brave to go so far—isn’t it? I mean he’s giving up an awful lot.” “It looks that way. Are you afraid that he’s given you up?” “No, Ellen is, I’m not. Ellen’s the one who’s in a bad way. She’s a mess right now, though don’t tell him—he shouldn’t have to worry about that too.” “And your brother?” “He’s just bossier than ever—he’s now the man around here, you see.” “You sound okay, Ruth.” “Well, I’m not great, frankly. I miss him. I’m confused without my father.” “Do you want me to tell him that too, that you’re confused without him?” “If you think it’s a good idea, I guess so.”

  Henry must have been at the other end of the settlement—maybe, I thought, attending evening prayers—because it was a full ten minutes before they found him and he finally came to the phone. I wondered if he was wearing his prayer shawl. I really didn’t know what to expect.

  “It’s me,” I announced, “Cain to your Abel, Esau to your Jacob, here in the Land of Canaan. I’m calling from the King David Hotel. I just arrived from London.”

  “My, my.” Sardonic words, just two of them, and then the long pause. “Here for Chanukah?” he finally asked.

  “Chanukah first and to see you second.”

  A longer pause. “Where’s Carol?”

  “I’m alone.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I thought you might come in to have dinner with me in Jerusalem. They could probably find a bed for you here in the hotel if you wanted to stay over.”

  As he was now an even longer time replying, I figured he was about to hang up. “I have a class tonight,” he eventually said.