Operation Shylock: A Confession (38 page)

He nodded to assure me that he would, but no sooner had he turned to place the envelope in my room’s pigeonhole than I imagined Pipik popping up to claim the package for his own the moment after I’d departed for the courtroom. However much evidence there was that I had finally prevailed and that the two of them had abandoned the hoax and taken flight, I still couldn’t convince myself that he wasn’t lurking nearby, fully aware of everything that had just transpired, any more than I could be one hundred percent certain that he wasn’t already at the courtroom with his Orthodox coconspirators, poised to undertake the folly of kidnapping Demjanjuk’s son. If Pipik returns to steal these … well, that’s Supposnik’s hard luck, not mine!

Nonetheless I turned back to the desk from which I’d turned away and asked the clerk to hand me the package that I had only just deposited with him. While he watched with a barely discernible smirk suggesting that he, rather like me, saw in this scene great untapped comic potential, I tore it open, put the red diary (“My Trip”) into one of my jacket pockets and the brown diary (“Travels Abroad”) into the other, and then quickly left the hotel with George, who all this while, submerged in his malice, racked by God only knew what unendurable fantasies of restitution and revenge, had sat in a chair close by the door smoking cigarette after cigarette, observing the brisk stirrings of another busy day in the sedate, attractive lobby
of a four-star Jewish hotel whose prosperous guests and resourceful staff were, of course, utterly indifferent to the misery caused him by their matter-of-factly manageable existence.

As we stepped into the bright sunlight, I surveyed the cars parked along the street to see if Pipik might be in one of them, hiding the way he’d hidden in his “vehicle” as a Chicago detective. I saw a figure standing on the roof of the YMCA building across the street from the hotel. It could be him, he could be anywhere—and for a moment I
saw
him everywhere. Now that she’s told him how I seduced her, I thought, he’s my terrorist for life. I’ll be sighting him on rooftops for years to come, just as he’ll be seeing me, sighted in the cross hairs of his rage.

9

Forgery, Paranoia,
Disinformation,
Lies

B
efore stepping into the taxi I quickly checked out the driver, a tiny Turkish-looking Jew a foot and a half shorter than Pipik or me and crowned with ten times more wiry black hair than the two of us possessed together. His English was less than rudimentary, and once we were in the cab George had to repeat our destination to him in Hebrew. We were as good as alone in that cab, and so between the hotel and the courtroom, I told George Ziad everything that I should have told him the day before. He listened silently and, to my astonishment, did not seem startled or at all incredulous to learn that there had been another “me” in Jerusalem all the while he’d assumed that there was only the one with whom he had been to graduate school three decades earlier. He wasn’t even ruffled (he who enjoyed so few moments without his veins and arteries visibly vibrating) when I tried to diagnose for him the perverse impulse that had led me to masquerade before his wife and his son as the Diasporist fanatic tendering manic homage to Irving Berlin.

“No apologies necessary,” he replied in a calmly cutting voice.

“You are still who you were. Always on the stage. How could I have failed to remember? You’re an actor, an amusing actor performing endlessly for the admiration of his friends. You’re a satirist, always looking for the laugh, and how can a satirist be expected to suppress himself with a raving, ranting, slobbering Arab?”

“I don’t know these days what I am,” I said. “What I did was stupid—stupid and inexplicable—and I’m sorry. It was the last thing Anna and Michael needed.”

“But what about what
you
needed? Your comic fix. What do an oppressed people’s problems matter to a great comic artist like you? The show must go on. Say no more. You’re a very amusing performer—and a moral idiot!”

So no more was said by either of us during the remaining few minutes before we reached the courtroom, and whether George was a deluded madman or a cunning liar—or a great comic artist in his own right—or whether the network of intrigue he claimed to represent existed (and whether a man so out of control and continually at the breaking point could be its representative) I had no way now of finding out.
There is somebody for you to talk to in Athens. There are people who can help you there. They are Jews but they are also our friends
. … Jews bankrolling the PLO? Is
that
what he’d been telling me?

At the courthouse, when George hopped out of his side of the taxi before I even had a chance to pay the driver, I believed I’d never see him again. Yet there he was, already at the back of the courtroom, when I slipped inside a minute or two later. Quickly catching hold of my hand, he whispered, “You’re the Dostoyevsky of disinformation,” and only then proceeded past me to look for a seat by himself.

The courtroom that morning was less than half full. According to
The Jerusalem Post
, all the witnesses had been heard and this was to be the third day of the summing up. I could see clearly down to where Demjanjuk’s son was sitting in the second row, just to the left of the center of the hall and directly in line with the chair on the stage where his father was seated between his two guards and back of the defense counsel’s table. When I saw that in the row behind
Demjanjuk junior nearly all the chairs were unoccupied, I made my way there and quickly sat down, as the court was already in session.

I’d got a set of earphones at the desk by the entrance door and, slipping them over my head, turned the dial to the channel for the English translation of the proceedings. It was a minute or two, however, before I could take in what one of the judges—the chief judge, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Levin—was saying to the witness on the stand. He was the first witness of the day, a compactly built, sturdy-looking Jewish man in his late sixties, whose substantial head—a weighty boulder onto which a pair of thick spectacles had incongruously been set—was stacked squarely atop a torso of cement building blocks. He wore slacks and a surprisingly sporty red and black pullover sweater, something in which a clean-cut young athlete might show up for a date, and his hands, a laborer’s hands, a dock- worker’s hands, hands that looked hard as nails, were fastened to the lip of the lectern with the impassioned, bottled-up nervous ferocity of a heavyweight bursting to catapult into battle at the sound of the bell.

His name was Eliahu Rosenberg and this was not his first round in court with Demjanjuk, as I knew from a startling photograph in the Demjanjuk clipping file that had caught my attention the day I’d arrived, one in which a friendly, grinning Demjanjuk is warmly offering Rosenberg his hand to shake. The photograph had been taken about a year before, on the seventh day of the trial, when Rosenberg was asked by the prosecution to leave the witness stand and step up to the defendant’s chair, some twenty feet away, to make his identification. Rosenberg had been called to testify as one of seven prosecution witnesses who claimed to recognize John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio, as the Ivan the Terrible they had known while they were prisoners at Treblinka. According to Rosenberg, he and Ivan, both men then in their early twenties, had worked in close proximity every day for nearly a year, Ivan as the guard who operated the gas chamber and supervised the detail of Jewish prisoners, the “death commandos,” whose job was to empty the gas chamber of corpses, to clean it of urine and excrement so as to make it ready for the
gassing of the next shipment of Jews, and to whitewash the walls, outside as well as inside, so as to cover over the bloodstains (for Ivan and the other guards oftentimes drew blood while driving the Jews into the gas with knives and clubs and iron pipes). Twenty-one-year-old Eliahu Rosenberg, recently of Warsaw, was one of the death commandos, those thirty or so living Jews whose other job, after each gassing, was carrying on stretchers—running all the while at top speed—the naked corpses of the freshly killed Jews to the open-air “roast” where, after their gold teeth were extracted for the German state treasury by the prisoner “dentist,” the bodies were skillfully piled to be incinerated, children and women at the bottom for kindling, and men at the top, where they ignited more easily.

Now, eleven months later, Rosenberg had been surprisingly recalled, this time by the defense, in the midst of its summing up. The judge was telling Rosenberg, “You will listen carefully to the questions put to you and you will reply and confine yourself to the questions put to you. You will not enter into polemics nor will you lose your self-control as, unfortunately, happened more than once in the course of your testimony—”

But, as I have said, during my first few minutes inside the courtroom, I could not focus on the English translation coming through my headphones, not with young Demjanjuk in the row before me, mine to maintain surveillance over, mine to sit by and protect—if protection was indeed warranted—from the machinating Moishe Pipik, and not with these two diaries filling my pockets.
Were
they the diaries of Leon Klinghoffer? Unobtrusively as I could, I lifted them out of either pocket and turned them over and over in my hands; I even put them up to my nose, quickly one and then the other, to sniff their papery odor, that pleasant moldering smell that faintly perfumes old library stacks. Holding the red diary open in my lap, I read for a moment from a page midway through. “Thurs. 9/23/78. On way to Yugoslavia. Du Brovnik. Went past Messina and Straits. Reminded us of 1969 trip to city of Messina. New crowd got aboard at Genoa. Show tonight was great. Everyone has coughing spells. I don’t know why, weather is perfect.”

That comma setting off “why” from “weather”—is it likely, I asked myself, that a man in the appliance business in Queens would have deftly dropped a comma in there? In jottings as rudimentary as these should I be finding any punctuation at all? And no spelling errors anywhere other than in the writing of an unfamiliar place name?
New crowd got aboard at Genoa
. Deliberately planted there, that item? There perhaps to presage what would happen seven years hence, when, in the new crowd that boarded the
Achille Lauro
at some Italian port or other—maybe it was even at Genoa—were hidden the three Palestinian terrorists who would kill this very same diarist? Or was that simply a report of what had happened on their cruise of September 1978—a new crowd had boarded at Genoa and, for the Klinghoffers, nothing horrible ensued.

But distracted as I was from following the judge’s opening remarks by the presence, in the seat before me, of young Demjanjuk, not yet kidnapped and still unharmed; distracted as I was by the diaries that had been forced on me by Supposnik—wondering whether they were forged, wondering whether Supposnik was a charlatan who was a party to the forgery or a passionate Jewish survivor who was its unsuspecting victim, wondering whether the diaries were exactly what he’d said they were, and, if so, wondering whether it really was somehow my Jewish duty to write the introduction that might then elicit publishing interest in them other than just in Israel—I was still further disconcerted by trying to puzzle out why everything I’d truthfully told George Ziad in the taxi could have been assumed by him to be, of all things, “disinformation.”

It must be because he assumed, first off, that, like the antiquarian bookseller Supposnik, our tiny taxi driver was another of those Israeli secret police men that he’d been directing my attention to everywhere we met; it must be that he assumed not only that we two were under close surveillance but that I had surmised this upon getting into the cab and had then, ingeniously, come up with the story of the second Philip Roth in order to jam the interloper’s circuits with so much cuckoo nonsense. Otherwise I didn’t know what to make of this word “disinformation” or of the affectionate grip in which he’d
taken my hand only minutes after angrily informing me that I was a moral idiot.

Admittedly, the story of my double was difficult to accept at face value. The story of anyone’s double would be. It was my own difficulty accepting it that largely accounted for why I had so mismanaged just about everything having to do with Pipik and was probably mismanaging it still. But however hard it was to swallow the existence of a character as audaciously fraudulent as Moishe Pipik or to imagine him meeting with any success whatsoever, I’d have thought it still easier for George to accept this double’s unlikely existence than to believe that (1) I could seriously be the proponent of a political scheme as antihistorically harebrained as Diasporism or that (2) Diasporism could possibly constitute a source of hope for the Palestinian national movement, especially one worthy of financial backing. No, only the insane desperation of a zealot who knew himself to be powerless and who had lived too long in behalf of a cause on the brink of total failure could lead someone as intelligent as George Ziad to seize with such reckless enthusiasm on an idea so spurious. And yet if George were that blinded, that defeated by suffering, that disfigured by impotent rage, then surely he would have disqualified himself long ago from anything like the position of influence that he claimed enabled him to come to see me, as he had this morning, to make arrangements for the secret Athens meeting. On the other hand, perhaps by now the mind of my old Chicago friend was so savagely unhinged by despair that he had taken to living in a dream of his own devising, “Athens” his Palestinian Xanadu and those rich Jewish backers of the PLO no more real than the imaginary friends of a lonely child.

It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just too insipid a conclusion. Not everybody was crazy. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous—this is not to be crazy. Not even fanatically held illusions are crazy, and deceit certainly isn’t crazy—deceit, deviousness, cunning, cynicism,
all of that is far from crazy … and there, that,
deceit
, there was the key to my confusion! Of course! It wasn’t I who’d been deceiving George, it was George who was deceiving me! I had been suckered by the tragic melodrama of the pitiful victim who is driven nearly insane by injustice and exile. George’s madness was Hamlet’s—
an act
.