Operation Shylock: A Confession (52 page)

“More than adequately. Your modesty is glaring. You performed it expertly. It’s one thing to be an extremist with your mouth. And even that is risky for writers. To then go and do what you did—there was nothing in your life to prepare you for this, nothing. I knew you could think. I knew you could write. I knew you could do things in your head. I didn’t know you could do something as large in reality. I don’t imagine that you knew it either. Of course you feel proud of your accomplishment. Of course you want to broadcast your daring to the whole world. I would too if I were you.”

When I looked up at the young waiter who was pouring coffee into our cups, I saw, as did Smilesburger, that he was either Indian or Pakistani.

After he moved off, having left behind our menus, Smilesburger asked, “Who will fall captive to whom in this city? The Indian to the Jew, the Jew to the Indian, or both to the Latino? Yesterday I made my way to Seventy-second Street. All along Broadway blacks eating bagels baked by Puerto Ricans, sold by Koreans. … You know the old joke about a Jewish restaurant like this one?”

“Do I? Probably.”

“About the Chinese waiter in the Jewish restaurant. Who speaks perfect Yiddish.”

“I was sufficiently entertained in Jerusalem with the Chofetz Chaim—you don’t have to tell me Jewish jokes in New York. We’re talking about my book. Nothing was said beforehand, not one word, about what I might or might not write afterward. You yourself drew my attention to the professional possibilities the operation offered. As an enticement, if you recall. ‘I see quite a book coming out of this,’ you told me. An even better book if I went on to Athens for you than if I didn’t. And that was before the book had even entered my mind.”

“Hard to believe,” he responded mildly, “but if you say so.”

“It was what you said that put it
into
my mind. And now that I’ve written that book you’ve changed your mind and decided that what would truly make it a better book, for your purposes if not mine, would be if I were to leave Athens out entirely.”

“I haven’t said that or anything like it.”

“Mr. Smilesburger, there’s no advantage to be gained by the old- geezer act.”

“Well”—shrugging his shoulders, grinning, offering it for whatever an old geezer’s opinion was worth—“if you fictionalized a little, well, no, I suppose it might not hurt.”

“But it’s not a book of fiction. And ‘a little’ fictionalization isn’t what you’re talking about. You want me to invent another operation entirely.”

“I want?” he said. “I want only what is best for you.”

The Indian waiter was back and waiting to take the order.

“What do you eat here?” Smilesburger asked me. “What do you like?” So insipid a man in retirement that he wouldn’t dare order without my help.

“The chopped-herring salad on a lightly toasted onion bagel,” I said to the waiter. “Tomato on the side. And bring me a glass of orange juice.”

“Me too,” said Smilesburger. “The same exactly.”

“You are here,” I said to Smilesburger, “to give me a hundred other ideas, just as good and just as true to life. You can find me a story even more wonderful than this one. Together we can come up with something even more exciting and interesting for my readers than what happened to have happened that weekend in Athens. Only I don’t want something else. Is that clear?”

“Of course you don’t. This is the richest material you have ever gotten firsthand. You couldn’t be clearer or more disagreeable.”

“Good,” I said. “I went where I went, did what I did, met whom I met, saw what I saw, learned what I learned—and nothing that occurred in Athens, absolutely nothing, is interchangeable with something else. The implications of these events are intrinsic to these events and to none other.”

“Makes sense.”

“I didn’t go looking for this job. This job came looking for me, and with a vengeance. I have adhered to every condition agreed on between us, including sending a copy of the manuscript to you well before publication. In fact, you’re the first person to have read it. Nothing was forcing me to do this. I am back in America. I’m no longer recovering from that Halcion madness. This is the fourth book I’ve written since then. I’m myself again, solidly back on my own ground. Yet I did do it: you asked to see it, and you’ve seen it.”

“And it was a good idea to show it. Better me now than someone less well disposed to you later.”

“Yes? What are you trying to tell me? Will the Mossad put a contract out on me the way the Ayatollah did with Rushdie?”

“I can only tell you that this last chapter will not go unnoticed.”

“Well, if anyone should come complaining to me, I’ll direct them to your garden in the Negev.”

“It won’t help. They’ll assume that, no matter what ‘enticement’ I offered back then, no matter how irresistible an adventure it may be for you to write about and to crow about, you should know by now how detrimental your publishing this could be to the interests of the state. They’ll maintain that confidence was placed in your loyalty and that with this chapter you have betrayed that confidence.”

“I am not now, nor was I ever, an employee of yours.”

“Theirs.”

“I was offered no compensation, and I asked for none.”

“No more or less than Jews all around the world who volunteer their services where their expertise can make a difference. Diaspora Jews constitute a pool of foreign nationals such as no other intelligence agency in the world can call on for loyal service. This is an immeasurable asset. The security demands of this tiny state are so great that, without these Jews to help, it would be in a very bad way. People who do work of the kind you did find compensation not in financial payment and not in exploiting their knowledge elsewhere for personal gain but in fostering the security and welfare of the Jewish state. They find their compensation,
all of it
, in having fulfilled a Jewish duty.”

“Well, I didn’t see it that way then and I don’t now.”

Here our food arrived, and for the next few minutes, as we began to eat, Smilesburger pedantically discussed the ingredients of his late beloved mother’s chopped herring with the young Indian waiter: her proportion of herring to vinegar, vinegar to sugar, chopped egg to chopped onion, etc. “This meets the highest specifications for chopped herring,” he told him. To me he said, “You didn’t give me a bum steer.”

“Why would I?”

“Because I don’t think you’ve come to like me as much as I’ve come to like you.”

“I probably have,” I replied. “As much exactly.”

“At what point in the life of a negative cynic does this yearning for
the flavors of innocent childhood reassert itself? And may I tell the joke, now that the sugared herring is running in your blood? A man comes into a Jewish restaurant like this one. He sits at a table and picks up the menu and he looks it over and decides what he’s going to eat and when he looks up again there is the waiter and he’s Chinese. The waiter says,
‘vos vilt ihr essen?’
In perfect Yiddish, the Chinese waiter asks him, ‘What do you want to eat?’ The customer is astonished but he goes ahead and orders and, with each course that arrives, the Chinese waiter says here is your this and I hope you enjoyed that, and all of it in perfect Yiddish. When the meal’s over, the customer picks up the check and goes to the cash register, where the owner is sitting, exactly as that heavyset fellow in the apron is sitting at the register over there. In a funny accent much like my own, the owner says to the customer, ‘Everything was all right? Everything was okay?’ And the customer is ecstatic. ‘It was perfect, ’he tells him, ‘everything was great. And the waiter—this is the most amazing thing—the waiter is Chinese and yet he speaks
absolutely perfect Yiddish.’ ‘Shah
, shhh,’ says the owner, ‘not so loud—he thinks he’s learning English.’”

I began to laugh, and he said, smiling, “Never heard that before?”

“You would think by now I’d have heard all the jokes there are about Jews and Chinese waiters, but no, not that one.”

“And it’s an old one.”

“I never heard it.”

I wondered while we ate in silence if there could be any truth in this man at all, if anything could exist more passionately in him than did the instinct for maneuver, contrivance, and manipulation. Pipik should have studied under him. Maybe he had.

“Tell me,” I suddenly said. “Who hired Moishe Pipik? It’s time I was told.”

“That’s paranoia asking, if I may say so, and not you—the organizing preconception of the shallow mind faced with chaotic phenomena, the unthinking man’s intellectual life, and the everyday occupational hazard of our work. It’s a paranoid universe but don’t overdo it. Who hired Pipik? Life hired Pipik. If all the intelligence
agencies in the world were abolished overnight, there would still be Pipiks aplenty to complicate and wreck people’s orderly lives. Self- employed, nonessential nudniks whose purpose is simply
balagan
, meaningless mayhem, a mess, are probably rooted more deeply in reality than are those who are only dedicated, as you and I are, to coherent, essential, and lofty goals. Let’s not waste any more frenzied dreaming on the mystery of irrationality. It needs no explanation. There is something frighteningly absent from life. One gets from someone like your Moishe Pipik a faint idea of all that’s missing. This revelation one must learn to endure without venerating it with fantasy. Let us move on. Let us be serious. Listen to me. I am here at my own expense. I am here, on my own, as a friend. I am here because of you. You may not feel responsible to me, but I happen to feel responsible to you. I
am
responsible to you. Jonathan Pollard will never forgive his handlers for abandoning him in his hour of need. When the FBI closed in on Pollard, Mr. Yagur and Mr. Eitan left him utterly on his own to fend for himself. So did Mr. Peres and Mr. Shamir. They did not, in Pollard’s words, ‘take the minimum precaution with my personal security,’ and now Pollard is incarcerated for life in the worst maximum-security prison in America.”

“The cases are somewhat dissimilar.”

“And that’s what I’m pointing out. I recruited you, perhaps even with a false enticement, and now I will do
everything
to prevent your exposing yourself to the difficulties that the publication of this last chapter could cause for a very long time to come.”

“Be explicit.”

“I can’t be explicit, because I am no longer a member of the club. I only can tell you, from past experience, that when someone causes the kind of consternation that is going to be caused by publishing this chapter as it now stands, indifference is never the result. If anyone should think that you have jeopardized the security of a single agent, a single contact—”

“In short, I am being threatened by you.”

“A retired functionary like me is in no position to threaten anyone. Don’t mistake a warning for a threat. I came to New York because I
couldn’t possibly have communicated to you on the phone or through the mail the seriousness of your indiscretion.
Please
listen to me. In the Negev now, I have begun to catch up on my reading after many years. I started out by reading all of your books. Even the book about baseball, which, you have to understand, for someone of my background was a bit like reading
Finnegans Wake.”

“You wanted to see if I was worth saving.”

“No, I wanted to have a good time. And I did. I like you, Philip, whether you believe me or not. First through our work together and then through your books, I have come to have considerable respect for you. Even, quite unprofessionally, something like familial affection. You are a fine man, and I don’t wish to see you being harmed by those who will want to discredit you and to smear your name or perhaps to do even worse.”

“Well, you still give a beguiling performance, retired or not. You are a highly entertaining deceiver altogether. But I don’t think that it’s a sense of responsibility to me that’s operating here. You have come on behalf of your people to intimidate me into shutting my mouth.”

“I come quite on my own, at substantial personal expense actually, to ask you, for your own good, here at the end of this book, to do nothing more than you have been doing as a writer all your life. A little imagination, please—it won’t kill you. To the contrary.”

“If I were to do as you ask, the whole book would be specious. Calling fiction fact would undermine everything.”

“Then call it fiction instead. Append a note: ‘I made this up.’ Then you will be guilty of betraying no one—not yourself, your readers, or those whom, so far, you have served faultlessly.”

“Not possible. Not possible in any way.”

“Here’s a better suggestion, then. Instead of replacing it with something imaginary, do yourself the biggest favor of your life and just lop off the chapter entirely.”

“Publish the book without its ending.”

“Yes, incomplete, like me. Deformed can be effectual too, in its own unsightly way.”

“Don’t include what I went specifically to Athens to get.”

“Why do you persist in maintaining that you undertook this operation as a writer only, when in your heart you know as well as I now do, having only recently enjoyed all your books, that you undertook and carried it out as a loyal Jew? Why are you so determined to deny the Jewish patriotism, you in whom I realize, from your writings, the Jew is lodged like nothing else except, perhaps, for the male libido? Why camouflage your Jewish motives like this, when you are in fact no less ideologically committed than your fellow patriot Jonathan Pollard was? I, like you, prefer never to do the obvious thing if I can help it, but continuing to pretend that you went to Athens only for the sake of your calling—is this really less compromising to your independence than admitting that you did it because you happen to be Jewish to the core? Being as Jewish as you are is your most secret vice. Any reader of your work knows that. As a Jew you went to Athens and as a Jew you will suppress this chapter. The Jews have suppressed plenty for you. Even you’ll admit that.”

“Yes? Have they? Suppressed what?”

“The very strong desire to pick up a stick and knock your teeth down your throat. Yet in forty years nobody’s done it. Because they are Jews and you are a writer, they give you prizes and honorary degrees instead. Not exactly how his kind have rewarded Rushdie. Just who would you be without the Jews?
What
would you be without the Jews? All your writing you owe to them, including even that book about baseball and the wandering team without a home. Jewishness is the problem they have set for you—without the Jews driving you crazy with that problem there would be no writer at all. Show some gratitude. You’re almost sixty—best to give while your hand is still warm. I remind you that tithing was once a widespread custom among the Jews as well as the Christians. One tenth of their earnings to support their religion. Can you not cede to the Jews, who have given you
everything
, one eleventh of this book? A mere one fiftieth, probably, of one percent of all the pages you have ever published,
thanks to them?
Cede to them chapter 11 and then go overboard and, whether it is true or not, call what remains a work of art. When
the newspapers ask, tell them, ‘Smilesburger? That blabbering cripple with the comical accent an Israeli intelligence officer? Figment of my fecund imagination. Moishe Pipik? Wanda Jane? Fooled you again. Could such walking dreams as those two have possibly crossed
anyone’s
path? Hallucinatory projections, pure delirium—that’s the book’s whole point.’ Say something to them along these lines and you will save yourself a lot of
tsuras
. I leave the exact wording to you.”