Operation Shylock: A Confession (34 page)

___

But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising—didn’t make it to the airport, didn’t even get as far as Aharon’s house—and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I’d seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. This cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel. I thought, When he starts slicing off the boy’s toes and mailing them one at a time to Demjanjuk’s cell, the
Guardian
will have a field day. Demjanjuk’s lawyers had already challenged the integrity of the proceedings publicly, daring to announce to three Jewish judges in a Jewish courtroom that the prosecution of John Demjanjuk for crimes committed at Treblinka had the characteristics of nothing less than the Dreyfus trial. Wouldn’t the kidnapping dramatically underscore this claim as it was even less delicately made by Demjanjuk’s Ukrainian supporters in America and Canada and by his defenders, left- and right-wing, in the Western press—namely that it was impossible for anyone with a name suffixed
juk
to receive justice
from Jews, that Demjanjuk was the Jews’ scapegoat, that the Jewish state was a lawless state, that the “show trial” convened in Jerusalem was intended to perpetuate the self-justifying Jewish myth of victimization, that revenge alone was the Jews’ objective? To drum up world sympathy for their client and to bolster their allegations of bias and prejudgment, Demjanjuk’s supporters could not themselves have hit on a publicity stunt more brilliant than the one that Moishe Pipik was planning to perform in order to vent his rage with me.

If it hadn’t been so infuriatingly clear that it was I who was the challenge he meant to defy, that this crazy kidnapping, potentially damaging to a cause perhaps even more poignant than his own, originated in his single-minded fixation on me, I might have told the driver to take me not to the King David Hotel but directly to the Jerusalem police. If it hadn’t seemed to me that I had been humiliatingly outfoxed at every turn by an adversary who was in no way my equal and that I had compounded my ineptness by unthinkingly accepting Smilesburger’s check—and subsequently elaborated on that error by failing to grasp the scale of the West Bank conflict and getting myself caught after dark on the Ramallah road by an Israeli patrol in no mood to observe the niceties of a legal search—I might not have felt that it was now incumbent on me, and on me alone, to face down this bastard once and for all. This is as far as his pathology goes. As far as
mine
goes. I’d overmagnified the menace of him from the start. You don’t have to call out the Israeli marines, I told myself, to put an end to Moishe Pipik. He’s got a foot in the grave already. All he needs is a little push. It’s simple: crush him.

Crush him. I was indignant enough to think that I could. I certainly knew that I should. Our moment had arrived, the face-to-face showdown between just the two of us: the genuine versus the fake, the responsible versus the reckless, the serious versus the superficial, the resilient versus the ravaged, the multiform versus the monomaniacal, the accomplished versus the unfulfilled, the imaginative versus the escapist, the literate versus the unschooled, the judicious versus the fanatic, the essential versus the superfluous, the constructive versus the useless. …

The taxi waited for me in the circular drive outside the King David Hotel while, at this early hour, the armed security guard at the hotel door accompanied me to the front desk. I repeated to the desk clerk what I’d told the guard: Mr. Roth was expecting me.

The clerk smiled. “Your brother.”

I nodded.

“Twin.”

I nodded again. Why not?

“He is gone. No longer with us.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Your brother left half an hour ago.”

Meema Gitcha’s words exactly!

“They all left?” I asked. “Our Orthodox cousins, too?”

“He was alone, sir.”

“No. Couldn’t be. I was to meet him here with our cousins. Three bearded men in yarmulkes.”

“Not tonight, Mr. Roth.”

“They didn’t show up,” I said.

“I don’t believe so, sir.”

“And he’s gone. At four-thirty. And not coming back. No message for me.”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“I believe to Romania.”

“At four-thirty in the morning. Of course. And did Meir Kahane visit my brother tonight, by any chance? You know who I mean? Rabbi Meir Kahane?”

“I know who Rabbi Kahane is, sir. Rabbi Kahane was not in the hotel.”

I asked if I might use the pay phone across the lobby. I dialed the American Colony and asked for my old room. I had told the clerk there, after paying the bill, that my wife was asleep and would be leaving in the morning. But it turned out that she had left already.

“You’re sure?” I asked him.

“Mister and Missus. They’re both gone.”

I hung up, waited a minute, and phoned the hotel again.

“Mr. Demjanjuk’s room,” I said.

“Who is calling, please?”

“This is the jail calling.”

A moment later I heard an anxious, sharp “Hello?”

“You all right?” I asked.

“Hello? Who is this? Who
is
this?”

He was there, I was here, they were gone. I hung up. They were gone, he was safe. They’d fled their
own
plot!

And that plot’s purpose? Only larceny? Or was the whole hoax merely that, a hoax, two crazy X’s off on a lark?

Standing at the phone and thinking that this entire mishap might just have come to a sudden end, I was more mystified than ever, wondering if these were two X’s who were themselves escaping the world or two X’s whom the world itself was escaping or two X’s who’d only been falsifying everything so as to befuddle me … though why that should be a goal of anyone’s was the most mystifying question of all. And it looked now as though I’d probably never know the answer—and as though what had enthralled me from the start was the question! Had they wanted only me to think that all their falseness was real, or had they themselves imagined it to be real, or was their excitement in creating the Pirandellian effect by derealizing everything and everyone, beginning with themselves? Some hoax
that
was!

I returned to the front desk. “I’ll take my brother’s room.”

“Let me give you a room that has not been occupied, sir.”

I pulled a fifty-dollar bill from my wallet. “His will be just fine.”

“Your passport, please, Mr. Roth.”

“Our parents liked the name so much,” I explained, passing it across the counter with the fifty, “that they gave it to both of us.”

I waited while he examined my photograph and recorded the passport number in the registration book. He handed the passport back to me without any comment. I then filled out the registration card and received the key to suite 511. The security guard had meanwhile returned to the front door of the hotel. I gave him twenty dollars to pay the taxi driver and told him to keep the change for himself.

For the next half hour, until it was dawn, I searched Pipik’s room
and found nothing in any of the drawers, nothing on the desk, no notes on the notepad, no magazines or newspapers left behind, nothing beneath the bed, nothing behind the cushions of the armchair, nothing hanging in the closet or lying on the closet floor. When I peeled back the bedspread and the blanket, the sheets and pillow-cases were freshly ironed and smelled still of the laundry. No one had slept there since housekeeping had made up the room the previous morning. The towels in the bathroom were also fresh. Only when I lifted the toilet seat did I find a trace of his occupancy. A kinked spiral of dark pubic hair about the size of a fourteen-point ampersand adhered to the enamel rim of the bowl. I tweezed it loose between two fingernails and deposited it into a hotel envelope from the stationery drawer of the desk. I searched the bathroom floor for a strand of her hair, an eyelash, a snippet of toenail, but the tiles had been swept spotlessly clean—nothing there either. I got up off my knees to wash my hands in the sink, and it was there that I discovered along the lip of the basin, just beneath the hot-water tap, the minute filings of a man’s beard. I blotted them carefully into a square of toilet tissue—a scattering of maybe ten filings in all—folded the tissue in quarters, and put it into a second envelope. The filings could, of course, have been anyone’s—they could even have been my own; he could have found them when
he
was snooping around
my
hotel bathroom and, to
seal
our oneness, transferred them here to his. Having done everything else he’d done, why not that too? Perhaps even the pubic hair was mine. It certainly could have passed for mine, but then, with coils of stray pubic hair, it’s difficult often, using just the naked eye, to distinguish exactly whose is whose. Still, I took it—if he could disguise himself as the writer, I could pretend to be the detective.

These two envelopes, along with the cloth star and his handwritten “Ten Tenets of A-S.A.,” are beside me on the desk as I write, here to attest to the tangibility of a visitation that even I must be continually reassured was only cloaked in the appearance of a nonsensical, crude, phantasmagorical farce. These envelopes and their contents remind me that the spectral, half-demented
appearance
was, in fact, the very earmark of its indisputable lifelike realness and that, when life looks
least like what it’s supposed to look like, it may then be most like whatever it is.

I also have here the audiotape cassette that, to my astonishment, I found when I went to play one of Aharon Appelfeld’s taped conversations with me on my return to London. It had been inserted in the very tape recorder that I’d locked away in the hotel closet at the American Colony and that I hadn’t opened or used since I’d stolen with my bag out of that room, leaving Jinx asleep in the bed. There is no way for me to explain how the cassette had got placed into my machine before I’d returned to the room other than to think that Pipik had picked the closet lock using the skills he had acquired as a tracer of missing persons. The handwriting on the label that looks so like mine is, of course, his; so is the voice babbling the toxic babble of the people who destroyed almost everything, the maddening, diseased, murderous arraignment that only
sounds
unreal. The label reads: “A-S.A. Workout Tape #2. ‘Did the Six Million Really Die?’ Copyright Anti-Semites Anonymous, 1988. All rights reserved.”

I leave it to readers of this confession to conjecture about his purpose and, in this way perhaps, to share something of the confusion of that week in Jerusalem, the extravagant confusion aroused in me by this “Philip Roth” by whom I was beset, someone about whom (as this recording confirms) it was impossible ever to say just how much of a charlatan he really was.

Here he is, the ritual impersonator, the mask modeled with my features and conveying the general idea of me—here he is, once again, exulting in being somebody else. Within that mouth, how many tongues? Within the man, how many men? How many wounds? How many unendurable wounds!

Did six million really die? Come off it. The Jews pulled a fast one on us again, keeping alive their new religion, Holocaustomania. Read the revisionists. What it really comes down to is
there were no gas chambers
. Jews love numbers. They love to manipulate numbers. Six million. They’re not talking about the six million anymore, are they? Auschwitz was mainly a plant to
produce synthetic rubber. And that’s why it was so evil-smelling. They didn’t send them to the gas chamber, they sent them there to work. Because there were no gas chambers, as we now found out. From chemistry. Which is hard science. Freud. That was soft science. Masson over at Berkeley has now proved that Freud’s basic research was false because he did not believe these women when they talked about how they were abused. Sexually abused. Because he said society wouldn’t accept it. So he changed it to child sexuality. That Siggy. The whole basis of psychoanalysis is false. You can forget that. Einstein, of course, he’s been called the bomb father. He and Oppenheimer. Now they’re ranting and raving against them—why did you create
that?
So you can forget about Einstein. Marx [
chuckle
], well, you know what happened to Marx. Elie Wiesel. Another Jewish genius. Only no one likes Elie Wiesel. Just like they don’t like Saul Bellow. I’ll give you five thousand dollars if you find someone around here, in the Chicago area, who likes Saul Bellow. Something wrong with that guy. They know he made a lot of money in real estate. Chicago has the biggest Polish population outside of Warsaw. The Poles are united by three things. The Roman Catholic Church. Fear of Russia. And hatred of the Jews. Why do they hate Jews? The Russian czars constantly sent their bad-ass Jews into Poland and they were money changers, ghetto dwellers. Jews are very ugly people. The nose doctors, etc. Notice the Jew, notice the Jew from the hips down, especially below the knees, they’re all fucked up, big, long flat feet, and they have twisted feet and are bowlegged—that’s a lot the part of inbreeding. The Jews don’t have any friends at all. Even niggers hate Jews. The blacks growing up in the projects see five white people in their life. The Irish or Italian cop—that’s changing—they see the Jewish landlord, the Jewish grocer, the Jewish schoolteacher, and the Jewish social worker. Well, of course, their landlord now is the federal government. But they feel the Jews have made a great deal of money from the blacks, but they’ve never given them anything but a lot of hot air. The niggers turn against Jews,
everyone
turns against Jews. Jews suffer from something called Paget’s disease. People don’t know
about that. Look at Ted Koppel. Look at the other ones. Woody Allen, little dork asshole. Mike Wallace. The bone thickens and their legs get bowed. The women get what is called the Hebrew hump. Their nails get very hard. Hard as rocks. They have a slack in their lower jaw. You notice the Jewesses who are older, they have that slack look in the jaws as if they’re a dimwit. That’s why they hate us, because we don’t have that. Because we remain firm. We might get a little fat. But we remain firm. You know what a Jew is. A Jew’s an Arab who was born in Poland. They get heavy. Kissinger. He’s got that heavy look. Heavy nose. Heavy features. And that’s why they dislike us. Look at Philip Roth, for God’s sake. A real ugly buggy. A real asshole. I stopped reading him when he talked about that thing in
My Life as a Man
, when he was just a neurotic fucked-up graduate student at the U. of C.—oh, Jesus, are they ever! Dirty, oh Christ, you see them. He was so hot for shiksas that he grabbed a waitress, a mental case, a divorcée with a couple of kids, he thought this was great. Nitwit. Now he’s coming back into the Jewish fold again because he wants to win the Nobel Prize. Jews obviously know how to get it, they got it for Wiesel, Singer, and Bellow. Graham Greene, of course, never got it. Isaac Stern—Mozart, Schubert, Stern just can’t cut it. Doesn’t understand it. Well, anyway … where were we? Hitler had no plan to exterminate the Jews. The Wannsee conference. A. J. P. Taylor’s done a lot of work on this, the British historian. He says that the documents don’t exist. Hilberg, who is a real Jewish creep, says I can read documents and I know code words—oh, go fuck yourself. [
Chuckle
.] Of course, they’re great for code words, symbolisms, numerology—Jewish girls are into numerology, stars, all this other stuff, futurology, they’re all screwed up. By the way, the Germans do have the capacity to exterminate people. They didn’t have to. They wanted to work the Jews. I would say the Germans do have a cruel streak, but so do we. We exterminated the Indians. But what happened was, they worked them—there were no gas chambers. Six million didn’t die. There weren’t six million Jews
in
Europe. That’s one of the reasons people attack the six million figure. Now it’s down to a hundred and fifty to
three hundred thousand, and the reason they died was because of the breakdown of the German supply system at the end of the war and because scurvy, typhus just rampaged through the camps. You and I know the State Department didn’t want them
here
. No one wanted them
anywhere
. They would appear at the Dutch border, at the Swiss border, they were turned away. No one wanted Jews in their country. Why? The Jew has a tendency—as I say, even niggers hate Jews—the Jew has a tendency to alienate every other group within society. Then when he gets in trouble, he asks people for help. Why should they give it? The Jew came out of the ghetto in eastern Europe during Napoleon’s time, he was liberated, and, Christ, he ran rampant. Once they get a lock on things, they keep it. The Jews got a lock on music with Schoenberg. They haven’t produced any fuckin’ music worth a shit. Hollywood. It’s a piece of shit. Why is it? They got a lock on it. We hear about how the Jews created Hollywood. Jews aren’t creative. What have they created? Nothing. Painting. Pissarro. Did you ever read Richard Wagner on the Jews? Superficiality. That’s why all their art fails. They will not assimilate with the culture in the nation in which they reside. They have superficial popularity, someone like Herman Wouk or that other guy who writes dirty books, that dopey-looking jerk, Mailer, but it doesn’t last, because it’s not tied to the cultural roots of the society. Saul Bellow is their nominee. Jesus Christ, he’s a sad sack, right? [
Chuckle
.] He was wearing his hat—covering his bald head and also to show the world he was a kike [
chuckle
]—when he had the press conference when he won the Nobel Prize. Roth. Roth is just a fuckin’ masturbator, a wanker, man, in the john, whackin’ off. Arthur Miller. Doesn’t he look like a fuckin’ junkman, like a fuckin’ junkyard owner? Their fuckin’ looks go, man, they really look bad. He always had that big, long look, goofy-lookin’ jerk, you know, he’ll
defend your right
, whatever the fuck that means. The cultural output from the Jews has been very, very low. Very low and very poor. Well, and of course Wall Street. You know, the arrest of Boesky and the rest of them is a goy plot to discredit the wonderful Jew who has given us our prosperity. It’s bullshit. They haven’t given us our
prosperity. They only exist in a society that’s on the brink of having inflation. All their deals are predicated on inflation coming about. If you don’t have inflation, if you have deflation, they are fucked. Cultural? Bullshit. They might
own
the cultural institutions but they can’t produce anything. Take a look at the shit. Anything vulgar on TV, a Jewish name is on it. Norman Lear, he’s one. Hides behind a Gentile name, but there’s another one with the bowed legs and the whole gig. Guy I know at the NIH did a study on a whole group of rabbis. About twenty, twenty-five years ago. Said they had specific Jewish diseases. Inbreeding caused these diseases, they’ve been inbred too much. Nine specific Jewish diseases that hit children—Down’s syndrome is one of them. They always hide people like that. Because, you know, Jews are all geniuses. They’re all violin players. Nuclear physicists. And of course Wall Street geniuses like Ivan Boesky. [
Snicker, chuckle
.] You know, you never hear about the idiots, which is really because of inbreeding. They’re
all
nuts. They continually have children among themselves. But of course Kissinger and so many others, they get married, have two kids, then get rid of her, then they go after their ugly shiksa bookkeeper. [
Sneering chuckle
.] Poor fuckin’ sad assholes. Right? Jesus Christ, all the big dough they pay hookers. Well, let’s just jump on. First of all, there’s a Jewish Mafia. Try to explain to people Jacob Rubinstein, you know him as Jack Ruby, the guy who offed Oswald—well, he was a member of the Jewish Mafia, on the West Side of Chicago. Arthur Miller. He made money off of Marilyn Monroe, he and Billy Wilder, and, who’s that other one, Tony Curtis, dragged her into that movie,
Some Like It Hot
, I believe when she was pregnant, and she lost the baby. Watch that movie, she’s frankly pregnant. But, of course, Miller had a piece of the film—a real fuckin’ scumbag
defending your right
. Really a sea-dwelling slug. The Jews who marry Gentiles are always telling them they’re stupid. Had a girlfriend who was married to a Jew. The most anti-Semitic people I’ve ever met are people who have been married to Jews. They tell you they’re fuckin’ neurotic, man. I know a broad who lived with a Jew for eight or nine years. She said only ten or fifteen times did
he relax and we had good sex. He was so aware of his Jewishness and he’s fuckin’ a shiksa. You should see the way his parents treated her, just like she was dogshit. Jesus, these Jews, they have all kinds of trouble. All they fuckin’ do is whine. Jonathan Pollard. I knew a guy who went to high school with the fucking guy. Pollard says that when he went to high school in South Bend, Indiana—his father was a professor at Notre Dame, Notre Dame Medical School—the gangs used to lay in wait and beat him up. It’s all bullshit, man. His old man had lots of dough and he got him a scholarship at Stanford—typical Jew shit, you know, probably said he had no money. Went down to Stanford, went to Washington, he was
crazy
. The Israelis thought he was crazy, he was a fuckin’ walk-in. They treated him well, this guy’s giving us some information, but the guy’s a fuckin’ nut case. But, anyway, where were we? The Jew always whines, he always brings up anti-Semitism. I’ve never seen an article about a Jew, a Hollywood star, a politician, or anyone, for Christ’s sake, he could sell hot dogs, where he doesn’t talk about how, in high school, when he was going for his violin lesson, the gangs laid in wait to beat him up. And how he experienced anti-Semitism when he went to the hot-dog college and he got summa cum laude in hot-dogology and he couldn’t get a job at the hot-dog place, and all the bullshit, of course. And, of course, now we found out about those SAT tests, that the rabbis who run schools in Brooklyn and in other Jewish communities are selling the SAT things, that’s why these Jews are such fucking geniuses and getting into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and all these schools. I’ve worked with them, you know. Christ, you never get any fuckin’ work out of them, always around the phone, they know about networking, man, they
never
do any fucking work. [
Chuckle
.] Christ, they’re neurotic. They have millions and millions of dollars to fight anti-Semitism. So anti-Semitism has gone underground. Most of these screwball KKK, Nazis, etc., are plants. They’re Jewish plants, they’re set up. Friend of mine attended one of these things at the temple. They get ’em in and show them pictures of the Holocaust, you know, the bodies, then they see a picture [
laughing
] of some guy down South,
screaming, with his Nazi uniform—he’s a Jewish stooge. Yeah, it’s for the temple. If I got in a Nazi uniform and started to yell, they would come around with pictures and photographs and all the other stuff, and then they would run it in every temple and make the old pitch for the money. Jesus Christ, you ever talk to a Farrakhan guy? What they say about the Jews is beyond belief. That we’re controlled by the Jews. We’re not
that
controlled by the Jews. We’re controlled by their publicity, but when the numbers come out, you’d rather have the money made by Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson than by Streisand. Streisand.
She’s
got the look. Friend of mine in California is very close to the film industry [
cackle
], he’s not so happy with the Jews. You know, there is a little Gentile remnant there. Disney used to be their home. But it’s all been taken over. They’ll tell you that any business the Jew is in is filled with kickbacks, payoffs, trading off, networking, but networking fucks you. They got to hire the nitwit brother-in-law. Why? Because the father-in-law has invested in the business, and, Jesus, they shake their head, but of course you can’t fire him. So he just sits at a desk or takes long lunches, you hope. But if he gets actively involved, he fucks up everything. Jews don’t put trust in the bank, they have private trusts. I know from my business experience. Jesus Christ, I dealt with so many Jews in my time. All of them have Jewish attorneys, all of them sharp dealers, all of them this, all of them that, right? My boss knows how to treat ’em, he says this is the price, fuck you. He treats them like
shit
. [
Laughter
.] He treats them like shit right away, when they come in. I wondered why he did it. He says, I used to be nice to these fucking people but you can’t be nice to them. He makes them write letters, which they don’t like. They
love
that fuckin’ telephone. Because if they bid on something, well, I’ll pay three hundred and forty thousand for it, then they come in and say, well, you know I told you three twenty on the phone, they like to fuck over your head, and with their sharp business practices they create enemies. They know they’re disliked. Why? It’s because of
what
they
do!
But still you can’t say anything against Ivan Boesky or any of these other people. If you say anything about them you are
therefore [
whispering
]
an anti-Semite
. No wonder anti-Semitism has gone underground—it
has
to. Man, how can you
not