Operation Shylock: A Confession (7 page)

“Yes, exclusively, totally, incessantly,
irreducibly
. That you continue to struggle so to deny it is for me the ultimate proof.”

“Against such reasoning,” I said, “there is no defense.”

He laughed quietly. “Good.”

“And tell me, do
you
believe this Catholic professor’s fantasy of herself?”

“What I believe is not what concerns me.”

“Then what
about
what she believes? Doesn’t it occur to the professor that she may have been left in a churchyard precisely because she was
not
Jewish? And that her sense of apartness originates not in her having been born a Jew but in her having been orphaned and raised by people other than her natural parents? Besides, would a Jewish mother be likely to abandon her infant on the very eve of the liberation, when the chances for Jewish survival couldn’t have been better? No, no, to have been found when she was found makes Jewish parentage for this woman the
least
likely possibility.”

“But a possibility no less. Even if the Allies were to liberate them in only a matter of days, they had still to survive those days in hiding. And to survive in hiding with a crying infant might not have been feasible.”

“This is what she thinks.”

“It’s one thing she thinks.”

“Yes, a person can, of course, think absolutely anything. …”And I, of course, was thinking about the man who wanted people to think that he was me—did
he
think that he was me as well?

“You look tired,” Aharon said. “You look upset. You’re not yourself tonight.”

“Don’t have to be. Got someone else to do it for me.”

“But nothing is in the papers, nothing more that I have seen.”

“Oh, but he’s still at it, I’m sure. What’s to stop him? Certainly not me. And shouldn’t I at least try? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone in his right mind?” It was Claire’s position I heard myself taking up now that she was gone. “Shouldn’t I place an ad in
The Jerusalem Post
informing the citizens of Israel that there is this impostor about, an ad disassociating myself from whatever he says or does in my name? A full-page ad would end this overnight. I could appear on television. Better, I could simply go and talk to the police, because more than likely he’s traveling with false documents. I know he’s got to be breaking some kind of law.”

“But instead you do nothing.”

“Well, I
have
done something. Since I spoke with you I phoned him. At the King David. I interviewed him on the phone from London, posing as a journalist.”

“Yes, and you look pleased with that—
now
you look like yourself.”

“Well, it wasn’t entirely unenjoyable. But, Aharon, what
am
I to do? It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous. And it’s activating—
re
activating—the very state of mind that I’ve been working for months now to shake off. You know what’s at the heart of the misery of a breakdown? Me-itis. Microcosmosis. Drowning in the tiny tub of yourself. Coming here I had it all figured out: desubjectified in Jerusalem, subsumed in Appelfeld, swimming in the sea of the other self—the other self being yours. Instead there is this me to plague and preoccupy me, a me who is not even me to obsess me day and night—the me who’s not me encamped boldly in Jewish Jerusalem while I go underground with the Arabs.”

“So that’s why you’re staying over there.”

“Yes—because I’m not here for him, I’m here for
you
. That was the idea and, Aharon, it’s
still
the idea. Look”—and from my jacket pocket I took the sheet of paper on which I’d typed out for him my opening question—“let’s start,” I said. “The hell with him. Read this.”

I’d written: I find echoes in your fiction of two Middle European writers of a previous generation—Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jew who wrote in Polish and was shot and killed at fifty by the Nazis in Drogobych, the heavily Jewish Galician city where he taught high school
and lived at home with his family, and Kafka, the Prague Jew who wrote in German and also lived, according to Max Brod, “spellbound in the family circle” for most of his forty-one years. Tell me, how pertinent to your imagination do you consider Schulz and Kafka to be?

Over tea then, we talked about neither me nor not-me but, somewhat more productively, about Schulz and Kafka until finally we grew tired and it was time to go home. Yes, I thought, this is how to prevail—forget this shadow and stick to the task. Of all the people who had assisted me in recovering my strength—among others, Claire, Bernie, the psychopharmacologist—I had chosen Aharon and talking to him as the final way out, the means by which to repossess that part of myself that I thought was lost, the part that was able to discourse and to think and that had simply ceased to exist in the midst of the Halcion wipeout when I was sure that I’d never be able to use my mind again. Halcion had destroyed not merely my ordinary existence, which was bad enough, but whatever was special to me as well, and what Aharon represented was someone whose maturation had been convulsed by the worst possible cruelty and who had managed nonetheless to reclaim his ordinariness
through
his extraordinariness, someone whose conquest of futility and chaos and whose rebirth as a harmonious human being and a superior writer constituted an achievement that, to me, bordered on the miraculous, all the more so because it arose from a force in him utterly invisible to the naked eye.

Later in the evening, before he went to bed, Aharon reformulated what he’d explained at the restaurant and typed out an answer in Hebrew to give to the translator the next day. Speaking of Kafka and himself, he said, “Kafka emerges from an inner world and tries to get some grip on reality, and I came from a world of detailed, empirical reality, the camps and the forests. My real world was far beyond the power of imagination, and my task as an artist was not to develop my imagination but to restrain it, and even then it seemed impossible to me, because everything was so unbelievable that one seemed oneself to be fictional. … At first I tried to run away from myself and from
my memories, to live a life that was not my own and to write about a life that was not my own. But a hidden feeling told me that I was not allowed to flee from myself and that if I denied the experience of my childhood in the Holocaust I would be spiritually deformed.…”

___

My tiny cousin Apter, the unborn adult, earns his living painting scenes of the Holy Land for the tourist trade. He sells them from a little workshop—squeezed between a souvenir stall and a pastry counter—that he shares with a leather craftsman in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. Tourists who ask his prices are answered in their native tongues, for Apter, however underdeveloped as a man, happens to be someone whose past has left him fluent in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and German. He even knows some Ukrainian, the language he calls Goyish. What the tourists are told when they ask Apter’s prices is, “This is not for me to decide”—a sentiment that, unfortunately, is not humbly feigned: Apter is too cultivated to think well of his pictures. “I, who love Cézanne, who weep and pray before his paintings, I paint like a philistine without any ideals.” “Of their kind,” I tell him, “they’re perfectly all right.” “Why such terrible pictures?” he asks—“Is this too Hitler’s fault?” “If it’s any comfort to you, Hitler painted worse.” “No,” says Apter, “I’ve seen his pictures. Even Hitler painted better than I do.”

In any one week Apter might be paid as much as a hundred dollars or as little as five for one of his three-by-four-foot landscapes. A philanthropic English Jew, a Manchester manufacturer who owns a high-rise condo in Jerusalem and who somehow came to know Apter’s biography, once gave my cousin a thousand-pound check for a single painting and, ever since, has made of Apter something of a ward, sending a minion around once a year to purchase more or less the same painting for the same outlandish price. On the other hand, an elderly American woman once walked off with a picture without giving Apter anything, or so Apter says—it was one of those dozen he paints every week depicting the Jerusalem animal market near St. Stephen’s gate. The theft had left him sobbing in the street. “Police!”
he shouted. “Help me! Someone help me!” But when no one came to his assistance, he raced after her himself and soon chased her down in the next turning, where she was resting against a wall, the stolen painting at her feet. “I am not a greedy man,” he said to her, “but, madam, please, I must eat.” As Apter recounted the story, she insisted to the small crowd that quickly formed around the weeping artist with his beggarly hands outstretched that she had already paid him a penny, which for such a painting was more than enough. Indignantly she screamed in Yiddish, “Look at his pocket! He’s lying!” “The twisted ogre mouth,” Apter told me, “the terrible, horrible shriek—Cousin Philip, I understood what I was up against. I said to her, ‘Madam, which camp?’ ‘All of them!’ she cried, and then she spat in my face.”

In Apter’s stories, people steal from him, spit at him, defraud and insult and humiliate him virtually every day and, more often than not, these people who victimize my cousin are survivors of the camps. Are his stories accurate and true? I myself never inquire about their veracity. I think of them instead as fiction that, like so much of fiction, provides the storyteller with the lie through which to expose his unspeakable truth. I treat the stories rather the way Aharon has chosen to understand the story concocted by his Catholic “Jew.”

I had every intention, the morning after my dinner with Aharon, of taking a taxi directly from the hotel up to Apter’s cubbyhole workshop in the old Jewish quarter and of spending a couple of hours with him before meeting once again with Aharon to resume our conversation over lunch. Instead, I went off in the taxi to the morning session of the Demjanjuk trial—to face down my impostor. If he wasn’t there, I’d go on to the King David Hotel. I had to: twenty-four more hours of doing nothing and I’d be able to think of nothing else. As it was, I had been sleepless most of the night, up just about hourly to double-check that my door was locked, and then back to bed, waiting for him to appear above the footboard, Magrittishly suspended in midair, as though the footboard were a footstone, the hotel room a graveyard, and one or the other of us the ghost. And my dreams—rocketing clusters of terrible forebodings too sinister even
to be named—I awakened from them with a ruthless determination to murder the bastard with my own two hands. Yes, by morning it was clear even to me that by doing nothing I was only exaggerating everything, and yet
still
I wavered, and it wasn’t until the taxi was pulling up at the gate to the Jewish quarter that I finally told the driver to turn around and gave him the address of the convention center at the other end of the city, out beyond the Knesset and the museum, where, in a hall ordinarily used for lectures and movies, Demjanjuk had been on trial now for eleven months. At breakfast I’d copied the address out of the paper and heavily circled the spot on my Jerusalem street map.
No more wavering
.

Outside the doorway to the hall four armed Israeli soldiers were standing about chattering together next to a booth bearing a handwritten sign that read, in Hebrew and in English, “Check Your Weapons Here.” I walked by them unnoticed and into an outer lobby where I had only to show my passport to a young policewoman and write my name in a register at her desk to be allowed to proceed on through the metal detector to the inner lobby. I took my time signing in, looking up and down the page to see if my name had been written there already. Failing to find it proved nothing, of course—the court had been in session for an hour by then and there were scores of names recorded in the ledger’s pages. What’s more, I thought, the passport he held was more likely in his name than in mine. (But without a passport in my name how had he registered as me at his hotel?)

Inside the lobby I had to hand over the passport again, this time as security for an audio headset. The soldier on duty there, another young woman, showed me how I could tune it to a simultaneous English translation of the Hebrew proceedings. I waited for her to recognize me as someone who’d been to the trial before, but once she’d done her job she went back to reading her magazine.

When I entered the courtroom and saw, from behind the last row of spectators, what exactly was going on, I forgot completely why I had come; when, after sorting out the dozen or so figures on the raised platform at the front of the courtroom, I realized which one
was the accused, not only did my double cease to exist, but, for the time being, so did I.

There he was.
There he was
. Once upon a time, drove two, three hundred of them into a room barely big enough for fifty, wedged them in every which way, bolted the doors shut, and started up the engine. Pumped out carbon monoxide for half an hour, waited to hear the screams die down, then sent in the live ones to pry out the dead ones and clean up the place for the next big load. “Get that shit out of there,” he told them. Back when the transports were really rolling, did this ten, fifteen times a day, sometimes sober, sometimes not, but always with plenty of gusto. Vigorous, healthy boy. Good worker. Never sick. Not even drink slowed him down. Just the opposite. Bludgeoned the bastards with an iron pipe, tore open the pregnant women with his sword, gouged out their eyes, whipped their flesh, drove nails through their ears, once took a drill and bored a hole right in someone’s buttocks—felt like it that day, so he did it. Screaming in Ukrainian, shouting in Ukrainian, and when they didn’t understand Ukrainian, shot them in the head. What a time! Nothing like it ever again! A mere twenty-two and he owned the place—could do to any of them whatever he wished. To wield a whip and a pistol and a sword and a club, to be young and healthy and strong and drunk and powerful,
boundlessly
powerful, like a god! Nearly a million of them, a
million
, and on every one a Jewish face in which he could read the terror. Of him.
Of him!
Of a peasant boy of twenty-two! In the history of this entire world, had the opportunity ever been given to anyone anywhere to kill so many people all by himself, one by one? What a job! A sensational blowout every day! One continuous party! Blood! Vodka! Women! Death! Power! And the screams! Those unending screams! And all of it
work
, good, hard work and yet wild, wild, untainted joy—the joy most people only get to dream of, nothing short of ecstasy! A year, a year and a half of that is just about enough to satisfy a man forever; after that a man need never complain that life had passed him by; after that anyone could be content with a routine, regular nine-to-five job where no blood ever really flowed except, on rare occasions, as a result of an accident
on the factory floor. Nine to five, then home to dinner with the wife and kids—that’s all you needed after that. At twenty-two he’d seen all that anyone could ever hope to see. Great while it lasted, stupendous while you were young and fearless and on a tear, running over with animal zest for just about everything, but the sort of thing you outgrow eventually, as indeed he had. You have to know when to quit with a job like that and, luckily, he was one who did.