The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “How do you spell it? I really had Nathan Zuckerman goin’, didn’t I? Wow. For a few minutes there you really thought, ‘Some Jewish pothead from suburban West Orange has got nothing to do better than hijack an El Al 747. As if Israel doesn’t have enough troubles with Arafat and that shmatta on his head, now they got Jimmy and his hand grenade.’ I know your generous heart. When you thought about the worldwide headlines, you must have felt really sick to your stomach for your fellow Jews.”

  “What is that in your pocket?”

  “Oh, that?” He reached in absently to show me. “It’s a hand grenade.”

  The last time I’d seen a live hand grenade was when I’d been taught to throw one in basic training at Fort Dix in August 1954. What Jimmy was holding up looked like the real thing.

  “See?” Jimmy said. “The famous pin. Makes people shit-scared, this pin. Pull this pin and everything’s just about over on ill-fated Flight 315 from Tel Aviv to London. You really didn’t believe me, did you? Gee, that’s a disappointment. Here, shmuck, I’ll show you something else you didn’t believe.”

  It was the pistol, Henry’s first-act pistol. This then must be the third act in which it is fired. “Forget Remembering” is the title of the play and the assassin is the self-appointed son who learned all he knows at my great feet. Farce is the genre, climaxing in blood.

  But before Jimmy had even drawn the gun half out of his briefcase, someone came leaping up over the back of his seat and had hold of his head. Then from out in the aisle a body hurled across mine—it was the businessman in the tinted glasses and the sharp beige suit who tore from Jimmy’s hand the pistol and the hand grenade. Whoever had come upon Jimmy from behind had nearly put him out. Blood was pouring from his nose and he lay tipped over in his seat, his head fallen lifelessly against the side of the plane. Then a hand came down from behind and I heard the thud of an appalling body blow. Jimmy began to vomit just as I, to my astonishment, was lifted bodily from where I sat and a pair of handcuffs snapped around my wrists. As they dragged me up the aisle, people were standing on the seats and some were screaming, “Kill him!”

  * * *

  The three first-class passengers were cleared out of their seats and Jimmy and I were dragged into the empty cabin by the two security guards. After being roughly frisked and having my pockets emptied, I was gagged and slammed into an aisle seat, and then Jimmy was stripped and his clothes torn apart to be searched. Viciously they pulled off his beard, as though they hoped it were real and coming out by the roots. Then they doubled him over a seat, and the man in the beige suit snapped on a plastic glove and drove a finger up his ass, investigating, I suppose, for explosives. When they were sure that he’d been carrying no other weapons, that he wasn’t wired up in any way or carrying some hidden device, they dropped him into the seat next to me, where he was handcuffed and shackled. I was then yanked to my feet, able barely to control my terror by thinking that if they believed me to be in any way involved, they would have badly disabled me already. I told myself, “They’re simply taking no chances”—though, on the other hand, maybe the sharp kick in the balls was about to come.

  The man in the beige suit and the tinted glasses said, “You know what the Russians did last month with a couple of guys who were trying to hijack an Aleutian plane? Two Arabs they were, going out of somewhere in the Middle East. The Russians don’t give a shit about Arabs, you know, no more than about anybody else. They emptied the first class,” he said, gesturing around the cabin, “took the boys in there, tied towels around their necks, slit their throats, and landed them dead.” His accent was American, which I hoped might help.

  “My name is Nathan Zuckerman,” I said when the gag had been removed, but he gave no sign of absolution. If anything, I’d inspired still more contempt. “I’m an American writer. It’s all in my passport.”

  “Lie to me and I slit you open.”

  “I understand that,” I replied.

  His bright, sporty clothes, the tinted glasses, the tough-guy American English all suggested to me an old-time Broadway con artist. The man didn’t move, he darted; he didn’t speak, he assaulted; and in the highly freckled skin and thinning orangey hair I half sensed something illusionary, as though perhaps he was wigged and completely made-up and underneath was a colorless albino. I was under the impression that it was all a performance and nonetheless was terrified out of my wits.

  His bearded sidekick was large and dark and sullen, a very frightening type who didn’t speak at all, and so I could not tell if he was American-born too. He was the one who had broken Jimmy’s nose and then struck the hammer-blow to his body. Earlier, when we were all still passengers in the economy-class cabin, he’d been wearing the long black coat over the corduroy trousers and heavy wool sweater. He was rid of the coat now and standing a little gigantically directly over me, poring through my notebook. Despite everything to which I was being crudely and needlessly subjected, I was nonetheless grateful to the two of them for how we’d all been saved—in something like fifteen seconds, these brutes had broken up a hijacking and saved hundreds of lives.

  The one who’d been about to blow us all up seemed to have less to be thankful for. From the look of the plastic glove lying in the aisle beside the false beard, Jimmy was bleeding not only from the face but internally because of that body blow. I wondered if they intended to land before we got to London in order to get him to a hospital. It didn’t occur to me that under instructions from Israeli Security, the plane had circled round and was returning to Tel Aviv.

  I was not spared the rectal investigation, though during the eternity that I was made to bend over, handcuffed and totally undefended, nothing that I was dreading happened. Staring into space through my watery eyes, I saw our clothes strewn all over the cabin, my tan suit, Jimmy’s black one, his hat, my shoes—and then the gloved finger was withdrawn and I was thrown back into the seat, wearing only my socks.

  The silent sidekick took my billfold and my notebook up to the cockpit, and the Broadway hustler removed what looked like a jewelry case from his inside pocket, a long black velvet case which he then laid unopened atop the seat back in front of me. Beside me Jimmy wasn’t yet comatose but he wasn’t completely alive either. The fabric on which he was sitting was stained with his blood and his smell made me gag. His face by now was badly distorted by the swelling and half of it had turned blue.

  “We’re going to ask you to give an account of yourself,” the Broadway hustler said to me. “An account that we can believe.”

  “I can do that. I’m on your side.”

  “Oh, are you? Isn’t that nice. How many more of you boys we got on board today?”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone. I don’t think he’s a terrorist—he’s just psychotic.”

  “But you were with him. So what are you?”

  “My name is Nathan Zuckerman. I’m an American, a writer. I was in Israel visiting my brother. Henry Zuckerman. Hanoch. He’s at an ulpan in the West Bank.”

  “The West what? If that’s the West Bank, where’s the East Bank? Why do you speak in Arab political nomenclature about a ‘West Bank’?”

  “I don’t. I was visiting my brother and now I’m going back to London, where I live.”

  “Why do you live in London? London is like fucking Cairo. In the hotels the Arabs shit in the swimming pools. Why do you live there?”

  “I’m married to an English woman.”

  “I thought you were American.”

  “I am. I’m a writer. I wrote a book called Carnovsky. I’m quite well known, if that’s any help.”

  “If you’re so well known, why are you so thick with a psychotic? Give me an account of yourself that I can believe. What were you doing with him?”

  “I met him once before. I met him in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall. Coincidentally he turned up on this plane.”

  “Who helped him get the hardware on board?”

  “Not me. Listen—it wasn’t me!”

  �
�Then why did you change your seat to be next to him? Why were you talking together so much?”

  “He told me he was going to hijack the plane. He showed me the statement for the press. He said he had a grenade and a gun and that he wanted me to help. I thought he was just a crackpot until he held up the grenade. He’d disguised himself as a rabbi. I thought the whole thing was an act. I was wrong.”

  “You’re awfully cool, Nathan.”

  “I assure you, I’m properly terrified. I don’t like this at all. I do know, however, that I have nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing.” I suggested to him then that in order to verify my identity they radio Tel Aviv and have Tel Aviv contact my brother at Agor.

  “What’s Agor?”

  “A settlement,” I said, “in Judea.”

  “Now it’s Judea, before it was the West Bank. You think I’m an asshole?”

  “Please—contact them. It’ll settle everything.”

  “You settle it for me, fella—who are you?”

  This went on for at least an hour: who are you, who is he, what did you talk about, where’s he been, why were you in Israel, do you want to get your throat slit, who did you meet, why do you live with the Arabs in London, how many of you bastards are on board today?

  When the other security man came back from the cockpit, he was carrying an attaché case out of which he took a hypodermic. At the sight of that I lost control and began shouting, “Check me out! Radio London! Radio Washington! Everybody will tell you who I am!”

  “But we know who you are,” the hustler said, just as the syringe slid into Jimmy’s thigh. “The author. Calm down. You’re the author of this,” he said, and showed me “FORGET REMEMBERING!”

  “I am not the author of that! He is! I couldn’t begin to write that crap! This has nothing to do with what I write!”

  “But these are your ideas.”

  “In no conceivable way are those my ideas. He’s latched onto me the way he’s latched onto Israel—with his fucking craziness! I write fiction!”

  Here he touched Jimmy on the shoulder. “Wake up, sweetheart, get up—” and gently shook him until Jimmy opened his eyes.

  “Don’t hit me,” he whimpered.

  “Hit you?” said the hustler. “Look around, moron. You’re flying first class. We upgraded your ticket.”

  When Jimmy’s head fell my way, he realized for the first time that I was there too. “Poppa,” he said weakly.

  “Speak up, Jim,” the hustler said. “Is this your old man?”

  “I was only having fun,” Jimmy said.

  “With your dad here?” the hustler asked him.

  “I am not his father!” I protested. “I have no children!”

  But by now Jimmy had begun weeping in earnest. “Nathan said—said to me, ‘Take this,’ so I did, took it on board. He is a father to me—that’s why I did it.”

  Quietly as I could, I said, “I am no such thing.”

  Here the hustler lifted the black velvet case from the seat back in front of me. “See this, Jim? It’s what they gave me when I graduated antiterrorist school. A beautiful old Jewish artifact that they award to the first in the class.” The reverence with which he opened the box was almost wholly unsatiric. Inside was a knife, a slender amber handle about five inches long ending in a fine steel blade curved like a thumb. “Comes from old Galicia, Jim, a ghetto remnant that’s survived the cruel ages. Just like you, me, and Nathan. What they used back then to make little Jews out of our newborn boys. In recognition of his steady hand and his steely nerves, the prize for our class valedictorian. Our best mohels today are trained killers—it works out better for us this way. What if we loan this to your dad and see if he’s got it in him to make the big biblical sacrifice?”

  Jimmy screamed as the hustler sliced the air into bits just above his head.

  “Cold steel up against the nuts,” he said, “oldest polygraph known to man.”

  “I take it back!”

  “Take what back?”

  “Everything!”

  “Good,” the hustler said quietly. He placed the antique scalpel in its velvet case, and laid it carefully atop the seat should it be necessary to show it to Jimmy again. “I’m a very simple guy, Jim, basically uneducated. Worked in gasoline stations in Cleveland before I made aliyah. I never belonged to the country-club set. Shined windows and greased cars and fixed tires. I got the rim off the tire and that kind of stuff. A grease monkey, a garage man. I am a very crude guy with an underdeveloped intellect but a very strong and irrepressible id. You know what that is, you heard of that, the strong and irrepressible id? I don’t even bother like Begin to point the accusing finger to justify what I do. I just do it. I say, ‘That’s what I want, I’m entitled,’ and I act. You wouldn’t want to be the first hijacker whose dick I made a souvenir because he handed me a load of shit.”

  “No!” he howled.

  He took Jimmy’s press statement out of his pants pocket again and after glancing over it, reading some of it, he said, “Shut down the Holocaust Museum because it upsets the goyim? You really believe that or are you just trying to have a little more fun, Jim? You really think they dislike Jews because the Jew is judge? Is that all that’s been bothering them? Jim, that’s not a hard question—answer me. The hard question is how anybody boarding at Tel Aviv could bring on board with him all this hardware. We’re going to swing you by the ears to get the answer to that one, but that’s not what I’m asking right now. We’re not just going to work on your little pecker, we’re going to work on your eyeballs, we’re going to work on your gums and your knees, we’re going to work you all over the secret parts of your body to get the answer to that, but now all I’m asking, for my own edification, for the education of a Cleveland grease monkey with a strong and irrepressible id, is if these are really things you honestly believe. Don’t get tongue-tied—the rough stuff’s later, in the lavatory, you and me squeezed up in there, alone with the secret parts of your body. This is just curiosity now. This is me at my most refined. I’ll tell you what I think, Jim—I think this is another of those self-delusions you Jews have, thinking you are some kind of judge to them. Isn’t that right, Nathan—that you high-minded Jews have serious self-delusions?”

  “I would think so,” I said.

  He smiled benignly. “I do too, Nate. Oh, sure, you may find the occasional masochist Gentile who has meek little thoughts about morally superior Jews, but basically, Jim, I must tell you, they don’t really see it that way. Most of them, confronted with the Holocaust, don’t really give a shit. We don’t have to shut down Yad Vashem to help them forget—they forgot. Frankly, I don’t think the Gentiles feel quite as bad about this whole business as you, me, and Nathan would like them to. I think frankly that what they mostly think is not that we are their judge but that we get too much of the cake—we’re there too often, we don’t stop, and we get too goddamn much of the cake. You put yourselves in the hands of the Jews, with this conspiracy they’ve got all over the place, and you’re finished. That’s what they think. The Jewish conspiracy isn’t a conspiracy of judges—it’s a conspiracy of Begins! He’s arrogant, he’s ugly, he is uncompromising—he talks in such a way as to shut your mouth all the time. He’s Satan. Satan shuts your mouth. Satan won’t let the good out, everybody’s a Billy Budd, and then there’s this guy Begin, who’s shutting your mouth all the time and won’t even let you talk. Because he’s got the answer! You couldn’t ask for anybody who better epitomizes the Jewish duplicity than this Menachem Begin. He’s a master of it. He tells the goyim how bad they are, so he can turn and be bad! You think it’s the Jewish superego they hate? They hate the Jewish id! What right do these Jews have to have an id? The Holocaust should have taught them never to have an id again. That’s what got them into trouble in the first place! You think because of the Holocaust they think we’re better? I hate to tell you, Jim, but the most they think on that score is that maybe the Germans went a little too far—they think, ‘Even if they were Je
ws, they weren’t as bad as all that.’ The fellows who say to you, ‘I expect more of the Jew,’ don’t believe them. They expect less. What they’re saying really is, ‘Okay, we know you’re a bunch of ravenous bastards, and given half the chance you’d eat up half the world, let alone poor Palestine. We know all these things about you, and so we’re going to get you now. And how? Every time you make a move, we’re going to say, “But we expect more of Jews, Jews are supposed to behave better.”’ Jews are supposed to behave better? After all that’s happened? Being only a thick-headed grease monkey, I would have thought that it was the non-Jews whose behavior could stand a little improvement. Why are we the only people who belong to this wonderful exclusive moral club that’s behaving badly? But the truth is that they never thought we were so good, you know, even before we had a Holocaust. Is that what T. S. Eliot thought? I won’t even mention Hitler. It didn’t just start in Hitler’s little brain. Who’s the guy in T. S. Eliot’s poem, the little Jew with the cigar? Tell us, Nathan—if you wrote a book, if you’re ‘quite well known’ and ‘properly terrified,’ you ought to be able to answer that one. Who’s the little Jew with a cigar in T. S. Eliot’s wonderful poem?”

  “Bleistein,” I said.

  “Bleistein! What brilliant poetry that T. S. Eliot came up with! Bleistein—great! T. S. Eliot had higher expectations for Jews, Jim? No! Lower! That was what was in the air all the time: the Jew with a cigar, stepping on everybody all the time and chomping his Jew lips on an expensive cigar! What they hate? Not the Jewish superego, dummy—not, ‘Don’t do that, it’s wrong!’ No, they hate the Jewish id, saying ‘I want it! I take it,’ saying ‘I suck away on a fat cigar and just like you I transgress!’ Ah, but you cannot transgress—you are a Jew and a Jew is supposed to be better! But you know what I tell them about being better? I say, ‘A bit late for that, don’t you think? You put Jewish babies into furnaces, you bashed their heads against the rocks, you threw them like shit into ditches—and the Jew is supposed to be better?’ What is it they want to know, Jim—how long are these Jews going to go wailing on about their little Holocaust? How long are they going to go on about their fucking Crucifixion! Ask T. S. Eliot that. This didn’t happen to one poor little saint two thousand years ago—this happened to six million living people only the other day! Bleistein with a cigar! Oh, Nathan,” he said, looking with kindly humor down upon me, “if only we had T. S. Eliot on board today. I’d teach him about cigars. And you’d help, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, a literary figure like yourself, help me educate the great poet about Jewish cigars?”