The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “How about tomorrow? I’ll drive out to you.”

  “You do have to admit it’s a little bizarre that you’re the one Carol deputized to fly in to remind me of my family obligations.”

  “I didn’t come down here to bring you back alive.”

  “You couldn’t,” he snapped, “if you wanted to. I know what I’m doing and there’s nothing to say—the decision’s irrevocable.”

  “Then what harm can I do? I’d like to see Agor.”

  “This is rich,” he said. “You in Jerusalem.”

  “Well, neither of us was renowned in New Jersey for his pious devotion.”

  “What do you want, Nathan?”

  “To visit you. To find out how you’re doing.”

  “And Carol’s not with you?”

  “I don’t play those games. Neither Carol nor the cops. I flew from London by myself.”

  “On the spur of the moment.”

  “Why not?”

  “And what if I tell you to go back to London on the spur of the moment?”

  “Why should you?”

  “Because I don’t need anyone to come out here and decide if I’m deranged. Because I’ve made the appropriate explanations already. Because—”

  Once Henry got going like that I knew he’d have to see me.

  * * *

  When I’d visited Israel back in 1960, the Old City was still on the other side of the border. Across the narrow valley opening out behind this same hotel, I’d been able to watch the armed Jordanian soldiers posted as guards atop the Wall but of course I’d never got to visit the Temple remnant known as the Western or Wailing Wall. I was curious now to see if anything like what had happened to my brother in Mea She’arim would surprise and overtake me while standing at this, the most hallowed of all Jewish places. When I asked at the desk, the hotel clerk had assured me that I wouldn’t find myself alone there, not at any hour. “Every Jew should go at night,” he told me, “you’ll remember it for the rest of your life.” With nothing to do until I left the next morning for Agor, I got a cab to drive me over.

  It was more impressive than I’d anticipated, perhaps because the floodlights dramatizing the massive weight of the ancient stones seemed simultaneously to be illuminating the most poignant of history’s themes: Transience, Endurance, Destruction, Hope. The Wall was asymmetrically framed by a pair of minarets jutting up from the holy Arab compound just beyond, and by two mosque domes there, the grand one of gold and a smaller one of silver, placed as though subtly to unbalance the picturesque composition. Even the full moon, hoisted to an unobtrusive height so as to avoid the suggestion of superfluous kitsch, seemed, beside those domes silhouetting the sky, decorative ingenuity in a very minor mode. This gorgeous Oriental nighttime backdrop made of the Wailing Wall square an enormous outdoor theater, the stage for some lavish, epic, operatic production whose extras one could watch walking casually about, a handful already got up in their religious costumes and the rest, unbearded, still in street clothes.

  Approaching the Wall from the old Jewish quarter, I had to pass through a security barrier at the top of a long flight of stairs. A middle-aged Sephardic soldier, scruffily dressed in army fatigues, fumbled through the tourists’ shopping bags and purses before letting them pass on. At the foot of the stairs, lounging back on their elbows, as oblivious to the Divine Presence as to the crowd milling about, were four more Israeli soldiers, all quite young, any one of whom, I thought, could have been Shuki’s son, out not practicing his piano. Like the guard up by the barrier, each appeared to have improvised a uniform from a heap of old clothes at an army surplus store. They reminded me of the hippies I used to see around Bethesda Fountain in Central Park during the Vietnam War years, except that slung across these Israeli khaki rags were automatic weapons.

  A stone divider insulated those who’d come to pray piously at the Wall from the people circulating in the square. There was a small table at one end of the barrier and on it a box of cardboard yarmulkes for hatless male visitors—women prayed by themselves down at their own partitioned segment of the Wall. Two of the Orthodox were stationed—or had decided to situate themselves—just beside the table. The older one, a slight, bent figure with a storybook white beard and a cane, was seated on the stone bench running parallel to the Wall; the other, who was probably younger than I, was a bulky man in a long black coat, with a heavy face and a stiff beard shaped like a coal scoop or a shovel. He stood above the man with the cane, talking with great intensity; however, no sooner had I placed a yarmulke on my head than abruptly he turned his attention on me. “Shalom. Shalom aleichem.”

  “Shalom,” I replied.

  “I collect. Charity.”

  “Me too,” the old man chimed in.

  “Yes? Charity for what?”

  “Poor families,” answered the one with the black shovel beard.

  I reached into my pocket and came up with all my change, Israeli and English. To me this seemed a generous enough donation given the nebulous quality of the philanthropy he claimed to represent. He offered in return, however, a just perceptible look that I had to admire for its fine expressive blend of incredulity and contempt. “You don’t have paper money?” he asked. “A couple of dollars?”

  Because my meticulous concern for his “credentials” suddenly struck me as pretty funny in the circumstances, and also because old-fashioned shnorring is so much more humanly appealing than authorized, respectable, humanitarian “fund-raising,” I began to laugh. “Gentlemen,” I said, “fellows—” but the shovel-beard was already showing me, rather like a curtain dropping when the act is over, the back of his extensive black coat, and had already resumed firing his Yiddish at the seated old man. It hadn’t taken all day for him to decide not to waste time on a cheap Jew like me.

  Standing singly at the Wall, some rapidly swaying and rhythmically bobbing as they recited their prayers, others motionless but for the lightning flutter of their mouths, were seventeen of the world’s twelve million Jews communing with the King of the Universe. To me it looked as though they were communing solely with the stones in whose crevices pigeons were roosting some twenty feet above their heads. I thought (as I am predisposed to think), “If there is a God who plays a role in our world, I will eat every hat in this town”—nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be gripped by the sight of this rock-worship, exemplifying as it did to me the most awesomely retarded aspect of the human mind. Rock is just right, I thought: what on earth could be less responsive? Even the cloud drifting by overhead, Shuki’s late father’s “Jewish cloud,” appeared less indifferent to our encompassed and uncertain existence. I think that I would have felt less detached from seventeen Jews who openly admitted that they were talking to rock than from these seventeen who imagined themselves telexing the Creator directly; had I known for sure it was rock and rock alone that they knew they were addressing, I might even have joined in. Kissing God’s ass, Shuki had called it, with more distaste than I could muster. I was simply reminded of my lifelong disaffection from such rites.

  I edged up to the Wall to get a better look, and from only a few feet away watched a man in an ordinary business suit, a middle-aged man with a monogrammed briefcase at his feet, conclude his prayers by placing two soft kisses upon the stone, kisses such as my own mother would lay upon my brow when I was a child home in bed with a fever. The fingertips of one hand remained in gentlest conjunction with the Wall even after he had lifted his lips from the last lingering kiss.

  Of course, to be as tenderized by a block of stone as a mother is by her ailing child needn’t really mean a thing. You can go around kissing all the walls in the world, and all the crosses, and the femurs and tibias of all the holy blessed martyrs ever butchered by the infidel, and back in your office be a son of a bitch to the staff and at home a perfect prick to your family. Local history hardly argued that transcendence over ordinary human failings, let alone the really vicious proclivities, is likely to be expedited by pious deeds committed in Jer
usalem. Nonetheless, at that moment, even I got a little carried away, and would have been willing to concede that what had just been enacted before me with such affecting sweetness might not be entirely inane. Then again I could have been wrong.

  Nearby, an archway opened into a large cavernous vault where, through a floodlit grate in the stone floor, you could see that there was even more Wailing Wall below the ground than above—way back then was way down there. A hundred or so square feet, the entry to this chamber, were partitioned off into a smallish makeshift room that, except for the fire-blackened, roughly vaulted ceiling and the stones of the Second Temple Wall, looked something like the unprepossessing neighborhood synagogue where I had been enrolled for late-afternoon Hebrew classes at the age of ten. The large Torah ark might have been built as a woodwork project by a first-year shop class in vocational school—it was as unholy-looking as it could possibly be. Rows of storage shelves along the wall facing the ark were piled unevenly with a couple of hundred worn prayer books, and, randomly scattered about, were a dozen battered plastic chairs. But what reminded me most of my old Talmud Torah wasn’t so much the similarity of the decor as the congregation. A chazan stood off in one corner, flanked by two very thin teenagers in Chasidic garb who chanted intermittently with great fervor while he intoned in a rough baritone wail—otherwise the worshippers seemed only marginally engaged by the liturgy. It was very much as I remembered things back on Schley Street in Newark: some of them kept turning around to see if anything of more piquancy might be developing elsewhere, while others looked every which way, as though for friends they were expecting to arrive. The remaining few, in a desultory way, seemed to be counting the house.

  I was just easing myself in beside the bookshelves—so as to look on unobtrusively from the sidelines—when I was approached by a young Chasid, distinguished in this assemblage by the elegant fit of his long satin coat and the unblemished black sheen of a new velvet hat with a low crown and an imposing brim. His pallor was alarming, however, a skin tone a breath away from the morgue. The elongated fingers with which he was tapping my shoulder suggested something erotically creepy at one extreme and excruciatingly delicate at the other, the hand of the helpless maiden and of the lurid ghoul. He was inviting me, worldlessly, to take a book and join the minyan. When I whispered no, he replied, in hollow, accented English, “Come. We need you, mister.”

  I shook my head again just as the chazan, with a raw, wrenching wail that could well have been some terrible reprimand, pronounced “Adonoi,” the name of the Lord.

  Unfazed, the young Chasid repeated, “Come,” and pointed beyond the partition to what looked more like an empty warehouse than a house of prayer, the sort of space that a smart New York entrepreneur would jump to convert to sauna, tennis courts, steam room, and swimming pool: The Wailing Wall Health and Racquet Club.

  In there too were pious worshippers, seated with their prayer books only inches from the Wall. Leaning forward, their elbows on their knees, they reminded me of poor souls who’d been waiting all day in a welfare office or on an unemployment line. Low lozenge-like floodlights did not serve to make the place any cozier or more congenial. Religion couldn’t come less adorned than this. These Jews needed nothing but that wall.

  Collectively they emitted a faint murmur that sounded like bees at work—the bees genetically commandeered to pray for the hive.

  Still patiently waiting at my side was the elegant young Chasid.

  “I can’t help you out,” I whispered.

  “Only a minute, mister.”

  You couldn’t say he was insisting. In a way he didn’t even seem to care. From the fixed look in his eye and the flat, forceless voice, I might even have concluded, in another context, that he was mentally a little deficient, but I was trying hard here to be a generous, tolerant cultural relativist—trying a hell of a lot harder than he was.

  “Sony,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “Where are you from? The States? You were bar mitzvah?”

  I looked away.

  “Come,” he said.

  “Please—enough.”

  “But you are a Jew who was bar mitzvah.”

  Here we go. One Jew is about to explain to another Jew that he is not the same kind of Jew that the first Jew is—the source, this situation, of several hundred thousand jokes, not to mention all the works of fiction. “I am not observant,” I said. “I don’t participate in prayer.”

  “Why do you come here?” But it was again as though he wasn’t asking because he really cared. I was beginning to doubt that he fully understood his own English, let alone mine.

  “To see the Old Temple Wall,” I replied. “To see Jews who do participate in prayer. I’m a tourist.”

  “You had religious education?”

  “None that you could take seriously.”

  “I pity you.” So flatly stated that he might as well have been telling me the time.

  “Yes, you feel sorry for me?”

  “Secular don’t know what they are living for.”

  “I can see how to you it might look that way.”

  “Secular are coming back. Jews worse than you.”

  “Really? How much worse?”

  “I don’t like to say even.”

  “What is it? Drugs? Sex? Money?”

  “Worse. Come, mister. It’ll be mitzvah, mister.”

  If I was correctly reading his persistence, my secularism represented to him nothing more than a slightly ridiculous mistake. It wasn’t even worth getting excited about. That I wasn’t pious was the result of some misunderstanding.

  Even while I was making a stab at surmising what he thought, I realized that of course I could have no more idea of what was going on in his mind than he could have of what was going on in mine. I doubt that he even tried to figure out what was in mine.

  “Leave me alone, okay?”

  “Come,” he said.

  “Please, what’s it to you whether I pray or not?” I didn’t bother to tell him—because I didn’t think it was my place to—that frankly I consider praying beneath my dignity. “Let me just stand quietly out of the way here and watch.”

  “Where in the States? Brooklyn? California?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From? I am a Jew. Come.”

  “Look, I’m not criticizing your observance or your outfit or your appearance, I don’t even mind your insinuations about my shortcomings—so why are you so offended by me?” Not that he appeared in the least offended, but I was trying to place our discussion on a higher plane.

  “Mister, you are circumcised?”

  “Do you want me to draw you a picture?”

  “Your wife is a shiksa,” he suddenly announced.

  “That wasn’t as hard to figure out as you like to make it seem,” I said, but in the bloodless face there was neither amusement nor fellow-feeling—only a pair of unfazed eyes focused blandly on my ridiculous resistance. “All four of my wives have been shiksas,” I told him.

  “Why, mister?”

  “That’s the sort of Jew I am, Mac.”

  “Come,” he said, motioning to indicate that it was time for me to stop being silly and to do as I was told.

  “Look, get yourself another boy, all right?”

  But because he couldn’t completely follow what I was saying, or because he wanted to harass me and drive my sinfulness from this holy place, or because he wished to correct the little mistake of my having left the fold, or maybe because he simply needed another pious Jew in the world the way someone who is thirsty needs a glass of water, he wouldn’t let me be. He just stood there saying “Come,” and just as stubbornly I remained where I was. I wasn’t committing any infraction of religious law, and refused either to do as he wished or to take flight as an intruder. I wondered if, in fact, I hadn’t been right at the outset, and if he wasn’t perhaps a little defective, though on further reflection, I saw it could well appear that the man without all his marbles had to be the one wit
h four Gentile wives.

  I was out of the cavern no more than a minute, taking a last look around the square at the minarets, the moon, the domes, the Wall, when someone was shouting at me, “It’s you!”

  Standing in my path was a tall young man with a thin, scraggly growth of beard who looked as though he had all he could do not to give me an enormous hug. He was panting hard, whether from excitement or from having run to catch me, I couldn’t tell. And he was laughing, gusts of jubilant, euphoric laughter. I don’t think I’ve ever before come across anyone so tickled to see me.

  “It’s really you! Here! Great! I’ve read all your books! You wrote about my family! The Lustigs of West Orange! In Higher Education! That’s them! I’m your biggest admirer in the world! Mixed Emotions is your best book, better than Carnovsky! How come you’re wearing a cardboard yarmulke? You should be wearing a beautiful, embroidered kipa like mine!”

  He showed me the skullcap—held by a hair-clip to the top of his head—as though it had been designed for him by a Paris milliner. He was in his mid-twenties, a very tall, dark-haired, boyishly handsome young American in a gray cotton jogging suit, red running shoes, and the embroidered kipa. He danced in place even as he spoke, bouncing up on his toes, his arms jiggling like a boxer’s before the bell to round one. I didn’t know what to make of him.

  “So you’re a West Orange Lustig,” I said.

  “I’m Jimmy Ben-Joseph, Nathan! You look great! Those pictures on your books don’t do you justice! You’re a good-looking guy! You just got married! You have a new wife! Numero four! Let’s hope this time it works!”

  I began laughing myself. “Why do you know all this?”

  “I’m your greatest fan. I know everything about you. I write too. I wrote the Five Books of Jimmy!”

  “Haven’t read them.”

  “They haven’t been published yet. What are you doing here, Nathan?”

  “Seeing the sights. What are you doing?”

  “I was praying for you to come! I’ve been here at the Wailing Wall praying for you to come—and you came!”