Operation Shylock: A Confession (44 page)

So this explains why I happened to be reading when Smilesburger appeared. The alphabet is all there is to protect me; it’s what I was given instead of a gun.

In September 1979, six years before he was thrown in his wheelchair over the side of the
Achille Lauro
by Palestinian terrorists, Klinghoffer and his wife were on a cruise ship bound for Israel. This is what I read of what he’d written in the leather-bound diary with the rickshaw, the elephant, the camel, the gondola, the airliner, and the passenger ship engraved in gold on its cover.

9/5

Weather clear

Friday. Sunny

Took tour through Greek port of Piraeus and city of Athens. Guide was excellent. The city of Athens is a modern bustling city. Lots of traffic. Went up to the Acropolis and saw all the ancient ruins. It was a well-guided and interesting tour. Got home about 2.30. Quarter of 4 on way to Haifa, Israel. A very interesting afternoon. Tonight was the night. After dinner there was a singer from Israel. Gave a performance. I was one of the judges for queen of the ship. It was all hilarious. What a night. To bed at 12.30.

9/6 Sea calm

Weather good

Another pleasant day. Young Dr. and his wife going to Israel to look into opening a hospital with a group of French Jewish
doctors in a large town in the south of Israel. In case something happens in France they will have a foot in Israel and an investment. Met many people, made a lot of friends in 7 days. They all loved Marilyn. She never looked so rested and pretty. Bed late. Up early. Ship to dock at Haifa tomorrow.

9/7

Haifa

What excitement. Young and old alike. Many away on tours for as long as 40 days. Some longer. Ziv and wife for 3 months singing in America. Others just cruising. What expressions of joy to be home in their country. How they love Israel. Hotel Dan a beautiful place. Accommodations good.

9/8

Haifa to Tel Aviv

The trip from Haifa to Tel Aviv over 1
¹
/2 hours. The roads modern. Traffic some parts heavy. Building going on all over. Houses. Factories. It is astonishing for a country born of war and living a war to be so vibrant. The soldiers all over the place with their full packs and rifles. Girls and boys alike. Booked for tours all over the place. We are tired. Worth the tiredness. Listening to radio in lovely room looking over the blue Mediterranean.

9/8 W. sunny

Tel Aviv

Up at 7. Started to tour. Tel Aviv. Yaffo. Rehovoth. Ashdod. 50 kilometers around Tel Aviv. The activity. The building. The reclaiming of sand dunes and making towns and cities grow is astonishing. The old Arab city of Yaffo is being torn down and instead of slums that have existed for years a new city has been planned and is being erected.

The Agricultural College, the Chaim Weizmann Institute is a garden spot in Rehovoth. Its beautiful buildings, its hall of learning, its surroundings are something to see. A busy delightful educational day and a new respect for the land born of war and still plagued.

9/9 Sunny

Tel Aviv

Up at 5.45 to go to the Dead Sea. Sodom. Beersheba. Over the steep hills and down to the lowest spot on earth. What a day. 12 hours again. Terrific what is going on in this small country. Building. Roads. Irrigation. Planning and fighting. It was a very hard day but a rewarding one. Visited kibbutz at the end of the earth where young married families live in complete loneliness and unfriendly neighbors to build a land. Guts. Plain guts.

9/10

Jerusalem

What a city. What activity. New roads. New factories. New housing. Thousands of tourists from all over. Jew and Gentile alike. Got here at 11 and went on tour. The shrine of the Holocaust. And my Marilyn broke down. I had tears in my eyes also. The city is a series of hills. New and old. The garden where Billy Rose’s art exhibit is. Also the museum is in the most beautiful setting. The museum is large, roomy, and full of art objects. Looking over the city from this site is grand. Supper. Walked the streets. To bed at 10.

9/11 Thursday

Looking at the hills of Jerusalem in the year 1979. It is a beautiful view. The geography is the same but with modern living, good roads, trucks, busses, cars, air conditioning to make life better.
The climate here is cool at night, warm during the day except when the wind blows from the desert.

9/12

Sunny

Went to the Old City of Jerusalem. Wailing Wall. Jesus tomb. David’s. Walked through narrow streets of the Arab quarter. Full of stores which are small stalls. Smells and dirt predominant. Our hotel was the border line between Israel and Jordan. The goings on in front of the W.W. were interesting. The constant praying. Bar Mitzvahs. Weddings. Etc. Got home at 1. Again tired after all touring. 2
¹
/2 hour tour, all walking. No cars in the Old City. Next Hadassah Hospital. The women of America should be proud of what their efforts have done. On the grounds there is a building that is used as a research center and houses pictures of Jews killed in Germany. Horrifying between resentment and tears that well up in your eyes. You wonder how a civilized Christian nation could allow a little pimp to lead them to such atrocities. Then on to where Herzl the founder of Zionism and his family were buried. Also a cemetery built on the hills of men who died in all the wars. Ages ranging from 13 to 79. All soldiers. Then to the Knesset, college, and other important centers of government and learning.

This city is just beautiful. Full of history and wonders. All roads lead to Jerusalem not Rome. I am glad to have the opportunity to get here.

9/13

Shabbas and

Rosh Hoshana

It is 6 o’clock
A.M
. And from our room in the King David Hotel we have the most beautiful view, looking over the hills of Jerusalem. Just 500 yards away from our hotel was the Jordanian border where snipers stood in the ruins of the Old City and shot into the New City. There were 39 houses of worship there and
the Arabs blew them all up in the last War. These people deserve all the help and praise of all of the Diaspora. The defenders of this country are 18 to 25. There are soldiers all over the city but inconspicuous. It is a modern city with all of the old ruins preserved. This is our final day in the city the Jews prayed to come back to for 2000 years and I can now understand why. I hope they never have to leave.

I was reading when Smilesburger came in, and I was also writing, making notes—while I went probingly through each plodding page of the diaries—for the introduction that Supposnik claimed would expedite Klinghoffer’s American and European publication. What else was I to do? What else do I know
how
to do? It was not even in my hands. The thoughts began to drift in a bit at a time and I began groping both to disentangle them and to piece them together—an inherent activity, a perpetual need, especially under the pressure of strong emotions like fear. I wrote not on the back of the American Colony bill, where I’d already recorded the mysterious Hebrew words chalked up on the blackboard, but in the dozen or so unused pages at the tail end of the red diary. I had nothing else on which to record anything of any length, and gradually, when the old habituated state of mind firmly took root and, as a protest perhaps against this inscrutable semicaptivity, I found myself working step by step into the familiar abyss, the initial shock of appending one’s own profane handwriting to the handwriting of a murdered martyr—the transgressive feelings of a good citizen vandalizing, if not exactly a sacred work, certainly a not insignificant archival curio—gave way before an absurdly schoolboyish assessment of my situation: I had been brutally abducted and carted off to this classroom specifically for this purpose and would not be freed until a serious introduction, with the correct Jewish outlook, was satisfactorily composed and handed in.

Here are the impressions I had begun to elaborate when Smilesburger made his wily appearance and loquaciously announced why in fact I was there. As I would learn by the time he was done with me, two thousand words countenancing Klinghoffer’s humanity was the
least
the situation demanded.

The terrific ordinariness of these entries. The very reasonable ordinariness of K. A wife he’s proud of. Friends he loves to be with. A little money in his pocket to take a cruise. To do what he wants to do in his own artless way. The very embodiment, these diaries, of Jewish “normalization.”

An ordinary person who purely by accident gets caught in the historical struggle. A life annotated by history in the last place you expect history to intervene. On a cruise, which is out of history in every way.

The cruise. Nothing could be safer. The floating lockup. You go nowhere. It’s a circle. A lot of movement but no progress. Life suspended. A ritual of in-betweenness. All the time in the world. Insulated, like a moon shot. Travel within their own environment. With old friends. Don’t have to learn any languages. Don’t have to worry about new foods. In neutral territory, the protected trip.
But there is no neutral territory
. “You, Klinghoffer, of the Diaspora,” crows the militant Zionist, “even at the point where you thought you were most safe, you weren’t. You were a Jew: not even on a cruise is a Jew on a cruise.” The Zionist preys on the Jewish urge for normalcy anywhere but in Fortress Israel.

The shrewdness of the PLO: they will always figure out the way to worm their way into the tranquilizing fantasy of the Jew. The PLO too denies the plausibility of Jewish safety other than armed to the teeth.

You read K.’s diaries with the whole design in mind, as you read the diary of A.F. You know he’s going to die and how, and so you read it through the ending back. You know he’s going to be pushed over the side, so all these boring thoughts he has—which are the sum total of everybody’s existence—take on a brutal eloquence and K. is suddenly a living soul whose subject is the bliss of life.

Would Jews without enemies be just as boring as everybody else? These diaries suggest as much. What makes extraordinary all the harmless banality is the bullet in the head.

Without the Gestapo and the PLO, these two Jewish writers (A.F. and L.K.) would be unpublished and unknown; without the Gestapo and the PLO any number of Jewish writers would be, if not necessarily unknown, completely unlike the writers they are.

In idiom, interests, mental rhythms, diaries like K.’s and A.F.’s confirm the same glaring pathos: one, that Jews are ordinary; two, that they are denied ordinary lives. Ordinariness, blessed, humdrum, dazzling ordinariness, it’s there in every observation, every sentiment, every thought. The center of the Jewish dream, what feeds the fervor both of Zionism and Diasporism: the way Jews would be people if they could forget they were Jews. Ordinariness. Blandness. Uneventful monotony. Unembattled existence. The repetitious security of one’s own little cruise. But this is not to be. The incredible drama of being a Jew.

Although I’d only met Smilesburger the day before at lunch, my shock at the sight of him advancing on his crutches through the classroom door was akin to the astonishment of catching sight on the street, after thirty or forty years, of a school friend or a roommate or a lover, a famously unimpaired ingenue whom time has obviously reveled in recasting in the most unbefitting of character roles. Smilesburger might even have been some intimate whom I had thought long dead, so agitatingly eerie was the impact of discovering that it was he and not Pipik into whose custody I had been forcibly taken.

Unless, because of the “stolen” million, he had joined forces with Pipik … unless it was he who had engaged Pipik to entrap me in the first place … unless
I
had somehow ensnared
them
, unless there was something I was doing that I was not aware of doing, that I could not stop doing, that was the very opposite of what I wanted to be doing, and that was making everything that was happening to me seem to be happening to me without my doing anything. But assigning myself a leading role when I couldn’t have felt more like everyone’s puppet was the most debilitating mental development yet, and I fought off the idea with what little rationality I retained after almost three hours
of waiting alone in that room. Blaming myself was only another way of not thinking, the most primitive adaptation imaginable to a chain of unlikely events, a platitudinous, catchall fantasy that told me nothing about what my relations were to whatever was going on here. I had not summoned forth, by some subterranean magic, this cripple who called himself Smilesburger just because I’d imagined that I’d seen him in the refreshment area adjacent to the courtroom when, in fact, taking the cash was an elderly man who, I now realized, bore little resemblance to him at all. I had blundered idiotically and even been half-demented, but I had not myself summoned up
any
of this: it wasn’t my imagination calling the shots but my imagination that was being shattered by theirs, whoever “they” might be.

He was dressed just as he’d been at lunchtime the day before, in the neat blue businessman’s suit, the bow tie, and the cardigan sweater over his starched white shirt, the attire of the fastidious jewelry-store owner; and his strangely grooved skull and scaling skin still suggested that, in handing him problems, life had not settled for half-measures and restricted his experience of loss merely to the use of his legs. His torso swung like a partially filled sandbag between the crutches whose horseshoe-shaped supports cupped his forearms, the burden of ambulation as torturous for him today as it had been yesterday and, more than likely, ever since he’d been impeded by the handicap that gave his face the wasted, worn-down look of someone sentenced to perpetually struggle uphill even when he feels the need of nothing more than a glass of water. And his English was still spoken with the immigrant accent of the tradesmen who sold cotton goods from a pushcart and herring from a barrel in the slum where my grandparents had settled and my father had grown up. What was new since yesterday, when there had appeared to be penned into this body nothing but the most unspeakable experience of life, was the mood of gracious warmth, the keen peal of exhilaration in the raw, rumbling voice, as though he were not ponderously poling himself forward on two sticks but slaloming the slopes at Gstaad. The demonstration of dynamism by this wreck struck me as either self-satire at its most savage or a sign that encaged in this overabundantly beleaguered human frame was nothing but resistance.