Operation Shylock: A Confession (48 page)

“Limousine!” It was Uri back at the door of the classroom, the smiling muscleman, mockingly unantagonistic, a creature who clearly didn’t share my rationalized conception of life. His was a presence I couldn’t seem to adapt to, one of those powerfully packaged little five-footers who have organized just a bit too skillfully everything that’s disparate and fluctuating in the rest of us. The eloquence of all that sinewy tissue unimpaired by intellect made me feel, despite the considerable advantage of my height, like a very small and helpless boy. Back when the battlers settled everything and anything that was in dispute, the whole male half of the human species must have looked more or less like Uri, beasts of prey camouflaged as men, men who didn’t need to be drafted into armies and put through specialized training in order to learn how to kill.

“Go,” said Smilesburger. “Go to Appelfeld. Go to New York. Go to Ramallah. Go to the American Embassy. You are free to indulge your virtue freely. Go to wherever you feel most blissfully unblamable. That is the delightful luxury of the utterly transformed American Jew. Enjoy it. You are that marvelous, unlikely, most magnificent phenomenon, the truly liberated Jew. The Jew who is not accountable. The Jew who finds the world perfectly to his liking. The
comfortable
Jew. The
happy
Jew. Go. Choose. Take. Have. You are the blessed Jew condemned to nothing, least of all to our historical struggle.”

“No,” I said, “not a hundred percent true. I am a happy Jew condemned to nothing who is condemned, however, from time to time to listen to superior Jewish windbags reveling in how they are condemned to everything. Is this show finally over? All rhetorical strategies exhausted? No means of persuasion left? What about turning loose your panther now that nothing else has shattered my nerves? He can tear open my throat, for a start!”

I was shouting.

Here the old cripple swung up onto his crutches and poled himself to the blackboard, where he half effaced with his open palm the scriptural admonitions he’d written there in English, while the Hebrew words that someone else had written he let stand untouched. “Class dismissed,” he informed Uri and then, turning back to me, said,
disappointedly, “Outraged
still
at having been ‘abducted’?”—and at that moment he resembled almost exactly the sickly and vanquished old man, speaking a rather more meager and circumscribed English, whom he had impersonated at lunch the day before, blasted-looking suddenly, like someone bested by life long ago. But
I
hadn’t bested him, that was for sure. Perhaps it had just been a very long day of thinking up ways of trapping rich Jews who weren’t giving money to the UJA. “Mr. Roth Number One—use your good Jewish brain. How better to mislead your Palestinian admirers than to let them observe us forcibly abducting their treasured anti-Zionist celebrity Jew?”

With that, even I had heard enough, and after close to five hours as Smilesburger’s captive I finally worked up the courage to leave through the door. I might be risking my life but I simply could not listen any longer to how nicely it fit in with their phantasmagoria to do with me whatever they liked.

And nobody did anything to stop me. Uri, happy-go-lucky Uri, pushed the door open all the way and then, clownishly standing at rigid attention like the lackey he was not, pressed himself against the wall to allow maximum passageway for my exit.

I was out in the foyer at the top of the landing when I heard Smilesburger call out, “You forgot something.”

“Oh no I didn’t,” I called back, but Uri was already beside me, holding the little red book that I had been reading earlier to try to concentrate my forces.

“Beside your chair,” Smilesburger answered, “you left one of Klinghoffer’s diaries.”

I took the diary from Uri just as Smilesburger appeared in the classroom door. “We are lucky, for an embattled little country. There are many talented Jews like yourself out in our far-flung Diaspora. I myself happened to have had the privilege of recruiting the distinguished colleague of yours who created these diaries for us. It was a task that he came to enjoy. At first he declined—he said, ‘Why not Roth? It’s right up his alley.’ But I told him, ‘We have something else in mind for Mr. Roth.’”

I
have elected to delete my final chapter, twelve thousand words describing the people I convened with in Athens, the circumstances that brought us together, and the subsequent expedition, to a second European capital, that developed out of that educational Athens weekend. Of this entire book, whose completed manuscript Smilesburger had asked to inspect, only the contents of chapter 11, “Operation Shylock,” were deemed by him to contain information too seriously detrimental to his agency’s interests and to the Israeli government to be published in English, let alone in some fifteen other languages. I was, of course, no more obliged to him, his agency, or the state of Israel to suppress those forty-odd pages than I was to submit the entire manuscript or any part of it for a prepublication reading. I had signed no statement beforehand promising to refrain from publishing anything about my mission or to seek clearance for publication from them, nor had this subject been discussed during the briefings that took place in Tel Aviv on the two days after my abduction. This was a potentially disruptive issue which neither party
had wished to raise, at least for the time being, my handlers because they must have believed that it was not so much the good Jew in me as the ambitious writer in me consenting, finally, to gather intelligence for them about “Jewish anti-Zionist elements threatening the security of Israel” and I because I had concluded that the best way to serve my professional interest was to act as though it were nothing
but
the good Jew, rising to the call of duty, who was signing on as an Israeli operative.

But why
did
I do it—given all the risks and uncertainties that exceeded by far the dangers of the unknown that adhere to writing—and enter into that reality where the brutal forces were in combat and something serious was at stake? Under the enchantment of these alluringly effervescent characters with their deluge of dangerous talk, spinning inside the whirlpool of their contradictory views—and without the least control over this narrative Ping-Pong in which I appear as the little white ball—was I simply susceptible as never before to a new intensification of the excitement? Had my arresting walk through the wilderness of this world—the one that began with Halcion, that Slough of Despond, and after the battle with Pipik, King of the Bottomless Pit, concluded in the dungeon of the Giant Mossad—germinated a new logic for my Jewish pilgrimage? Or, rather than betraying my old nature, was I succumbing at long last to a basic law of my existence, to the instinct for impersonation by which I had so far enacted and energized my contradictions solely within the realm of fiction? I really couldn’t see what was behind what I was doing, and that too may have accounted for why I was doing it: I was enlivened by its imbecilic side—maybe
nothing
was behind it. To do something
without
clarity, an inexplicable act, something unknowable even to oneself, to step outside responsibility and give way fully to a very great curiosity, to be appropriated unresistingly by the strangeness, by the dislocation of the unforeseen … No, I could not name for myself what it was that drew me in or understand whether what was impinging on this decision was absolutely everything or absolutely nothing, and yet, lacking the professional’s ideology to fire my fanaticism—or fueled perhaps by the ideology of the professionally
unideological like myself—I undertook to give the most extreme performance of my life and seriously to mislead others in something more drastic than a mere book.

Smilesburger’s private request that he have the opportunity, before publication, to read about whatever aspect of the operation I might “see fit to exploit someday for a best-selling book” was made some two and a half years before I even decided to embark on this nonfictional treatment rather than to plumb the idea in the context, say, of a Zuckerman sequel to
The Counterlife
. Since, once the job for him was completed, I never heard from Smilesburger again, it shouldn’t have been difficult by the time I got around to finishing the eleventh chapter of
Operation Shylock
nearly five years later to pretend to have forgotten his request—irritatingly tendered, at our parting, with that trademark taunting facetiousness—or to simply disregard it and proceed, for good or bad, to publish the whole of this book as I had its predecessors: as an unconstrained writer independent of any interference from apprehensive outside parties eager to encroach on the text.

But when I’d come to the end of the manuscript, I found I had reasons of my own for wanting Smilesburger to take a look at it. For one thing, now that all those years had passed since I’d been of service to him, he might possibly be more forthcoming about the several key factors still mystifying me, particularly the question of Pipik’s identity and his role in all of this, which I remained convinced was more fully documented in Smilesburger’s files than in mine. He could also, if he was willing, correct whatever errors had crept into my depiction of the operation, and, if I could persuade him, he might even tell me a little something about his own history before he’d become Smilesburger for me. But mostly, I wanted him to confirm that what I was reporting as having happened had, in fact, taken place. I had extensive journal notes made at the time to authenticate my story; I had memories that had remained all but indelible; yet, odd as it may strike those who haven’t spent a lifetime writing fiction, when I finished chapter 11 and sat down to reread the entire manuscript, I discovered myself strangely uncertain about the book’s verisimilitude.
It wasn’t that, after the fact, I could no longer believe that the unlikely had befallen me as easily as it does anyone else; it was that three decades as a novelist had so accustomed me to
imagining
whatever obstructed my impeded protagonists—even where raw reality had provided the stimulus—that I began to half believe that even if I had not invented
Operation Shylock
outright, a novelist’s instincts had grossly overdramatized it. I wanted Smilesburger to dispel my own vague dubiousness by corroborating that I was neither imperfectly remembering what had happened nor taking liberties that falsified the reality.

There was no one other than Smilesburger I could look to for this certification. Aharon had been there at lunch when a semidisguised Smilesburger dropped off his check, but he had otherwise witnessed nothing at first hand. A bit exuberantly, I had recounted to Aharon the details of my first meetings in Jerusalem with Pipik and Jinx, but I’d never told him anything more, and afterward I asked him as a friend to treat confidentially what I’d said and to repeat the stories to no one. I even wondered if, when Aharon came to read
Operation Shylock
, he might not be tempted to think that what he’d actually seen was all there was and that the rest was only a tale, an elaborately rounded out and coherent scenario I had invented as the setting for a tantalizingly suggestive experience that had amounted, in reality, to absolutely nothing, certainly to nothing coherent. I could easily imagine him believing this, because, as I’ve said, on first reading through the finished manuscript even I had begun to wonder if Pipik in Jerusalem could have been any more slippery than I was being in this book about him—a queer, destabilizing thought for anyone other than a novelist to have, a thought of the kind that, when carried far enough, gives rise to a very tenuous and even tortured moral existence.

Soon enough I found myself wondering if it might be
best
to present the book not as an autobiographical confession that any number of readers, both hostile
and
sympathetic, might feel impelled to challenge on the grounds of credibility, not as a story whose very
point
was its improbable reality, but—claiming myself to have imagined
what had been munificently provided, free of charge, by superinventive actuality—as fiction, as a conscious dream contrivance, one whose latent content the author had devised as deliberately as he had the baldly manifest. I could even envision
Operation Shylock
, misleadingly presented as a novel, being understood by an ingenious few as a chronicle of the Halcion hallucination that, momentarily, even I, during one of the more astounding episodes in Jerusalem, almost supposed it might be.

Why not
forget
Smilesburger? Inasmuch, I told myself, as his existence is now, by my sovereign decree, no more real than is anything else earnestly attested to here, corroboration by him of the book’s factual basis is no longer possible anyway. Publish the manuscript uncut, uncensored, as it stands, only inserting at the front of the book the standard disclaimer, and you will more than likely have neutralized whatever objections Smilesburger might have wished to raise had he been given access to the manuscript. You will also be sidestepping a confrontation with the Mossad that might not have been to your liking. And, best, you will have spontaneously performed on the body of your book the sacrosanct prank of artistic transubstantiation, the changed elements retaining the appearance of autobiography while acquiring the potentialities of the novel. Less than fifty familiar words is all it takes for all your problems to be solved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Yes, those three formulaic sentences placed at the front of the book and I’d not only satisfy Smilesburger but give it to Pipik once and for all. Just wait till that thief opens this book to find that I’ve stolen his act! No revenge could possibly be more sadistically apt! Providing, of course, that Pipik was alive and able to savor sufficiently—and to suffer painfully—how I had swallowed him whole. …