Operation Shylock: A Confession (4 page)

That was the end of the article.

“What swell ideas I have,” I said. “Going to make lots of new pals for me in the Zionist homeland.”

“Anyone who reads this in the Zionist homeland,” said Aharon, “will only think, ‘Another crazy Jew.’”

“I’d much prefer then that in the hotel register he’d sign ‘Another crazy Jew’ and not ‘Philip Roth.’”

“‘Another crazy Jew’ might not be sufficiently crazy to satisfy his
mishigas
.”

When I saw that Claire was no longer reading her paper but listening to what I was saying, I told her, “It’s Aharon. There’s a madman in Israel using my name and going around pretending to be me.” Then to Aharon I said, “I’m telling Claire that there’s a madman in Israel pretending to be me.”

“Yes, and the madman undoubtedly believes that in New York and London and Connecticut there is a madman pretending to be him.”

“Unless he’s not at all mad and knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“Which is what?” asked Aharon.

“I didn’t say I know, I said he knows. So many people in Israel have met me, have seen me—how can this person present himself as Philip Roth to an Israeli journalist and get away with it so easily?”

“I think this is a very young woman who wrote the story—I believe this is a person in her twenties. That’s probably what’s behind it—her inexperience.”

“And the picture?”

“The picture they find in their files.”

“Look, I have to contact her paper before this gets picked up by the wire services.”

“And what can
I
do, Philip? Anything?”

“For the time being, no, nothing. I may want to talk to my lawyer before I even call the paper. I may want her to call the paper.” But looking at my watch I realized that it was much too early to phone New York. “Aharon, just hold tight until I have a chance to think it
through and check out the legal side. I don’t even know what it is an impostor can be charged with. Invasion of privacy? Defamation of character? Reckless conduct? Is impersonation an actionable offense? What exactly has he appropriated that’s against the law and how do I stop him in a country where I’m not even a citizen? I’d actually be dealing with Israeli law, and I’m not yet in Israel. Look, I’ll call you back when I find something out.”

But once off the phone I immediately came up with an explanation not wholly disconnected from what I’d thought the night before in bed. Although the idea probably originated in Aharon’s remark that he felt that he was reading to me out of a story I’d written, it was nonetheless another ridiculously subjective attempt to convert into a mental event of the kind I was professionally all too familiar with what had once again been established as all too objectively real. It’s Zuckerman, I thought, whimsically, stupidly, escapistly, it’s Kepesh, it’s Tarnopol and Portnoy—it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me. In other words, if it’s not Halcion and it’s no dream, then it’s got to be literature—as though there cannot be a life-without ten thousand times more unimaginable than the life-within.

“Well,” I said to Claire, “there’s somebody in Jerusalem attending the Ivan the Terrible trial who’s going around claiming to be me. Calls himself by my name. Gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper—that’s what Aharon was reading to me over the phone.”

“You found this out just now?” she asked.

“No. Aharon phoned me in New York last week. So did my cousin Apter. Apter’s landlady said she’d seen me on TV. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what, if anything, it all amounted to.”

“You’re green, Philip. You’ve turned a frightening color.”

“Have I? I’m tired, that’s all. I was up on and off all night.”

“You’re not taking. …”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Don’t sound resentful. I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Because you
have
turned a terrible color—and you seem … swamped.”

“Do I? Did I? I didn’t think I did. And it’s you who have actually turned colors.”

“I’m worried, that’s why. You seem …”

“What? Seem
what?
What it seems to me I seem to be is someone who has just found out that somebody down in Jerusalem is giving newspaper interviews in his name. You heard what I said to Aharon. As soon as the business day begins in New York, I’m going to call Helene. I think now that the best thing is for
her
to telephone the paper and to get them to print a retraction tomorrow. It’s a start at stopping him. Once their retraction’s out, no other newspaper is going to go near him. That’s step number one.”

“What’s step number two?”

“I don’t know. Maybe step number two won’t be necessary. I don’t know what the law is. Do I slap an injunction on him? In Israel? Maybe what Helene does is to contact a lawyer down there. When I speak to her, I’ll find out.”

“Maybe step number two is not going there right now.”

“That’s ridiculous. Look, I’m
not
swamped. It’s not
my
plans that are going to change—it’s his.”

But by the afternoon I was back again to thinking that it was far more reasonable, sensible, and even, in the long run, more satisfyingly ruthless to do nothing for now. Telling Claire anything, given her continuing apprehension about my well-being, was, of course, a mistake and, had she not been sitting across from me at the breakfast table when Aharon phoned in his latest report, one that I would never have made. And an even bigger mistake, I thought, would be to set lawyers loose now, on two continents no less, who might not effect an outcome any less damaging than I could—if, that is, I could manage to remain something more helpful than volatilely irritated until, eventually, this impostor played out his disaster, all alone, as he must. A retraction was not likely to undo whatever damage had already been done by the newspaper’s original error. The ideas espoused so forcefully by the Philip Roth in that story were mine now and would likely endure as mine even in the recollection of those who’d read the retraction tomorrow. Nonetheless, this was not, I sternly reminded
myself, the worst upheaval of my life, and I was not going to permit myself to behave as though it were. Instead of rushing to mobilize an army of legal defenders, better just to sit comfortably back on the sidelines and watch while he manufactures for the Israeli press and public a version of me so absolutely not-me that it will require nothing, neither judicial intervention nor newspaper retractions, to clear everyone’s mind of confusion and expose him as whatever he is.

After all, despite the temptation to chalk him up to Halcion’s lingering hold on me, he was not my but
his
hallucination, and by January 1988 I’d come to understand that he had more to fear from that than I did. Up against reality I was not quite so outclassed as I’d been up against that sleeping pill; up against reality I had at my disposal the strongest weapon in anyone’s arsenal: my own reality. It wasn’t I who was in danger of being displaced by him but he who had
without question
to be effaced by me—exposed, effaced, and extinguished. It was just a matter of time. Panic characteristically urges, in its quivering, raving, overexcitable way, “Do something before he goes too far!” and is loudly seconded by Powerless Fear. Meanwhile, poised and balanced, Reason, the exalted voice of Reason, counsels, “You have everything on your side, he has nothing on his. Try eradicating him overnight, before he has fully revealed exactly what he’s intent on doing, and he’ll only elude you to pop up elsewhere and start this stuff all over again.
Let
him go too far. There is no more cunning way to shut him down. He can only be defeated.”

Needless to say, had I told Claire that evening that I’d changed my mind since morning and, instead of racing into battle armed with lawyers, proposed now to let him inflate the hoax until it blew up in his face, she would have replied that to do that would only invite trouble potentially more threatening to my newly reconstituted stability than the little that had so far resulted from what was still only a minor, if outlandish, nuisance. She would argue with even more concern than she’d displayed at breakfast—because three months of helplessly watching my collapse up close had deeply scarred her faith in me and hadn’t done much for her own stability either—that I was
nowhere ready for a test as unlikely and puzzling as this one, while I, experiencing all the satisfaction that’s bestowed by a strategy of restraint, exhilarated by the sense of personal freedom that issues from refusing to respond to an emergency other than with a realistic appraisal and levelheaded self-control, was convinced of just the opposite. I felt absolutely rapturous over the decision to take on this impostor by myself, for on my own and by myself was how I’d always preferred to encounter just about everything. My God, I thought, this is me again, finally the much-pined-for natural upsurge of my obstinate, energetic, independent self, zeroed back in on life and brimming with my old resolve, vying once again with an adversary a little less chimerical than sickly, crippling unreality. He was just what the psychopharmacologist ordered! All right, bud, one on one, let’s fight! You can only be defeated.

At dinner that evening, before Claire had a chance to ask me anything, I lied and told her that I had spoken with my lawyer, that from New York she had contacted the Israeli paper, and that a retraction was to be printed there the next day.

“I still don’t like it,” she replied.

“But what more can we do? What more
need
be done?”

“I don’t like the idea of you there alone while this person is on the loose. It’s not a good idea at all. Who knows what he is or who he is or what he’s actually up to? Suppose he’s crazy. You yourself called him a madman this morning. What if this madman is armed?”

“Whatever I may have called him, I happen to know nothing about him.”

“That’s my point.”

“And why should he be armed? You don’t need a pistol to impersonate me.”

“It’s Israel—
everybody’s
armed. Half the people in the street traipsing around carrying guns—I never saw so many guns in my life. Your going there, at a time like this, with everything erupting everywhere, is a terrible, terrible mistake.”

She was referring to the riots that had begun in Gaza and the West Bank the month before and that I’d been following in New York on
the nightly news. A curfew was in effect in East Jerusalem and tourists had been warned away particularly from the Old City because of the stone throwing there and the possibility of violent clashes escalating between the army and the Arab residents. The media had taken to describing these riots, which had become a more or less daily occurrence in the Occupied Territories, as a Palestinian uprising.

“Why can’t you contact the Israeli police?” she asked.

“I think the Israeli police may find themselves facing problems more pressing than mine right now. What would I tell them? Arrest him? Deport him? On what grounds? As far as I know, he hasn’t passed a phony check in my name, he hasn’t been paid for any services in my name—”

“But he must have entered Israel with a phony passport, with
papers
in your name. That’s illegal.”

“But do we know this? We don’t. It’s illegal but not very likely. I suspect that all he’s done in my name is to shoot his mouth off.”

“But there
must
be legal safeguards. A person cannot simply run off to a foreign country and go around pretending to be someone he is not.”

“Happens probably more often than you think. How about some realism? Darling, how about your taking a reasonable perspective?”

“I don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s my reasonable perspective.”

“What ‘happened’ to me happened to me many months ago now.”

“Are you really up to this? I have to ask you, Philip.”

“There’s nothing for me to be ‘up to.’ Did anything like what happened to me ever happen to me before that drug? Has anything like it happened to me since the drug? Tomorrow they’re printing a retraction. They’re faxing Helene a copy. That’s enough for now.”

“Well, I don’t understand this calm of yours—or hers, frankly.”

“Now the calm’s upsetting. This morning it was my chagrin.”

“Yes, well—I don’t believe it.”

“Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“Promise me you won’t do anything ridiculous.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t
know
. Trying to find this person. Trying to
fight
with this person. You have no idea whom you might be dealing with. You must not try to look for him and solve this stupid thing yourself. At least promise that you won’t do that.”

I laughed at the very idea. “My guess,” I said, lying once again, “is that by the time I get to Jerusalem, he won’t be anywhere to be found.”

“You won’t do it.”

“I won’t have to. Look, see it this way, will you? I have everything on my side, he has nothing on his, absolutely nothing.”

“But you’re wrong. You know what he has on his side? It’s clear from every word you speak. He has you.”

___

After our dinner that evening I told Claire that I was going off to my study at the top of the house to sit down again with Aharon’s novels to continue making my notes for the Jerusalem conversation. But no more than five minutes had passed after I’d settled at the desk, when I heard the television set playing below and I picked up the phone and called the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and asked to be put through to 511. To disguise my voice I used a French accent, not the bedroom accent, not the farcical accent, not that French accent descended from Charles Boyer through Danny Kaye to the TV ads for table wines and traveler’s checks, but the accent of highly articulate and cosmopolitan Frenchmen like my friend the writer Philippe Sollers, no “zis,” no “zat,” all initial
h
’s duly aspirated—fluent English simply tinged with the natural inflections and marked by the natural cadences of an intelligent foreigner. It’s an imitation I don’t do badly—once, on the phone, I fooled even mischievous Sollers—and the one I’d decided on even while Claire and I were arguing at the dinner table about the wisdom of my trip, even while, I must admit, the exalted voice of Reason had been counseling me, earlier that day, that doing nothing was the surest way to do him in. By nine o’clock that night, curiosity had all but consumed me, and curiosity is not a very rational whim.