Operation Shylock

6 HIS STORY

When I went up to the desk for the key to my room, the young clerk smiled and said, “But you have it, sir.”

“If I had it I wouldn’t be asking for it.”

“Earlier, when you came out of the bar, I gave it to you, sir.”

“I haven’t been in the bar. I’ve been everywhere in Israel but the bar. Look, I’m thirsty. I’m hungry. I’m dirty and I need a bath. I’m out on my feet. The key.”

“Yes, a key!” he chirped, pretending to laugh at his own stupidity, and turned away to find one for me while slowly I caught up with the meaning of what I had just heard.

I sat with my key in one of the wicker chairs in the corner of the lobby. The desk clerk by whom I’d first been confused tiptoed up to me after about twenty minutes and asked in a quiet voice whether I needed assistance to my room; worried that I might be ill, he had brought, on a tray, a bottle of mineral water and a glass. I took the water and drank it all down, and then, when he remained at my side, looking concerned, I assured him that I was all right and could make my way to my room alone.

It was almost eleven. If I waited another hour, might he not leave on his own — or would he just get into my pajamas and go to bed? Perhaps the solution was to take a taxi over to the King David Hotel and ask for his key as casually as he, apparently, had walked off with mine. Yes, go there and sleep there. With her. And tomorrow he meets with Aharon to complete our conversation while she and I get on with the promotion of the cause. I just pick up where I left off in the jeep.

I remained half dozing in that corner chair, groggily thinking that this was still last summer and that everything I took to be actuality — the Jewish courtroom in Ramallah, George’s desperate wife and child, my impersonating Moishe Pipik for them, the farcical taxi ride with the shitting driver, my alarming run-in with the Israeli army, my impersonating Moishe Pipik for Gal — was all a Halcion hallucination. Moishe Pipik was himself a Halcion hallucination; as was Jinx Possesski; as was this Arab hotel; as was the city of Jerusalem. If this were Jerusalem I’d be where I always stay, the municipal guest house, Mishkenot Sha’ananim. I would have seen Apter and all my friends here. …

With a start, I surfaced, and there to either side of me was a large potted fern; there too was the kind clerk, offering water again and asking if I was sure I didn’t need help. I saw by my watch that it was half past eleven. “Tell me please, the day, the month, and the year.”

“Tuesday, January 26, 1988. In thirty minutes, sir, it will be the twenty-seventh.”

“And this is Jerusalem.”

He smiled. “Yes, sir.”

“Thank you. That’s all.”

I put my hand in my inside jacket pocket. Had that been a Halcion hallucination as well, the cashier’s check for a million dollars? Must have been. The envelope was gone.

Instead of telling the clerk to get the manager or the security officer and advising them that an intruder posing as me and probably crazy and maybe even armed had gained access to my room, I got up and went across the lobby and into the restaurant to find out if it was possible at this late hour to get something to eat. I stopped first in the doorway to see if Pipik and Jinx might be dining there; she could very well have been with him when he’d come out of the bar earlier to get my key from the front desk — perhaps they were not yet up fucking together in my room but down here eating together at my expense. Why not that, too?

But except for a party of four men lingering over coffee at a round table in the furthest corner of the restaurant, the place was empty even of waiters. The four seemed to be having a good time, quietly laughing over something together, and only when one of them came to his feet did I recognize that he was Demjanjuk’s son and that the late diners with him were his father’s legal team, Chumak the Canadian, Gill the American, and Sheftel the Israeli. Probably they’d been working out the next day’s strategy over dinner and now they were bidding good night to John junior. He was no longer in the neat dark suit he’d been wearing in the courtroom but dressed casually in slacks and a sports shirt, and when I saw that he was carrying a plastic bottle of water in one hand, I remembered reading in my clipping file that except for Sheftel, whose home and office were forty-five minutes away, in Tel Aviv, the lawyers and the Demjanjuk family members were staying at the American Colony; he must be taking the water to his room.

Leaving the dining room, young Demjanjuk passed directly beside me and, as though it were he for whom I’d been waiting there, I turned and followed after him, thinking exactly as I had the day before when I’d seen him headed from the courtroom for the street: Should this boy be unprotected? Isn’t there a single survivor of the camps whose children or sister or brother or parents or husband or wife had been murdered there, someone who had been mutilated there or maddened for life, ready to take vengeance on Demjanjuk senior through Demjanjuk junior? Isn’t there anyone prepared to hold the son hostage until the father confesses? It was difficult to account for what was keeping him alive and safe in this country, populated as it was by the last of the generation to whose decimation his namesake stood accused of having made such a wholehearted contribution. Isn’t there one Jack Ruby in all of Israel?

And then it occurred to me: How about you?

Lagging only some four or five feet behind him, I followed young Demjanjuk through the lobby and up the stairs, suppressing the impulse to stop him and say, “Look, I for one don’t hold it against you that you believe your father is being framed. How could you believe otherwise and be the good American son that you are? Your belief in your father does not make you my enemy. But some people here may see it differently. You’re taking an awfully big chance walking around like this. You, your sisters, and your mother have suffered enough already. But so too, remember, have a lot of Jews. You’ll never recover from this no matter how you may delude yourself, but then neither have a lot of Jews quite recuperated yet from what they and their families have been through. You might really be asking a little too much of them to go walking around here in a nice sports shirt and a clean pair of slacks, with a full bottle of mineral water in your hand. … Innocuous enough from your point of view, I’m sure: what’s the water have to do with anything? But don’t provoke memories unnecessarily, don’t tempt some enraged and broken soul to lose control and do something regrettable. …”

When my quarry turned into the corridor off the landing I proceeded on up the stairs to the hotel’s top floor, where my room was situated midway down the hall. I moved as quietly as I could to the door of my room and listened there for sounds from within, while back by the staircase someone was standing and looking my way — someone who had been following only steps behind me while I had been following Demjanjuk’s son. A plainclothesman, of course! Stationed here by the police and watching out for John junior’s safety. Or is this the plainclothesman shadowing me, imagining that I’m Moishe Pipik? Or is he stalking Pipik, thinking that Pipik is me? Or is he here to investigate why we are two and what we two are conspiring to do?

Though nothing could be heard from within the room and though he had perhaps come and gone, having already stolen or destroyed whatever he was after, I was convinced that even if there was only the remotest chance that he was inside, it would still be foolish to enter alone and so I turned and started back toward the staircase just as the door to my room opened a ways and there, peering out of it, was Moishe Pipik’s head. I was actually hastening in double time along the corridor by then, but because I didn’t want him to know how afraid of him I had become, I stopped and even took a few slow steps back toward where he was standing now, half in and half out of the room. And what I saw, as I stepped closer, so shocked me that I had all I could do not to turn and run full speed for help. His face was the face I remembered seeing in the mirror during the months when I was breaking down. His glasses were off, and I saw in his eyes my own dreadful panic of the summer before, my eyes at their most fearful, back when I could think of little other than how to kill myself. He wore on his face what had so terrified Claire: my look of perpetual grief.

“You,” he said. That was all. But for him that was the accusation: I who was I.

“Come in,” he said, weakly.

“No, you come out. Get your shoes” — he was in his stocking feet and his shirt was hanging out of his trousers — “get whatever is yours, hand over the key, and get out of here.”

Without even bothering to answer he turned back into the room. I approached as far as the door and looked inside to see if Jinx was with him. But he was stretched diagonally across the bed, all alone and looking sorrowfully at the whitewashed, vaulted ceiling. The pillows were wadded up by the headboard, and the spread was turned back and dragged down onto the tile floor, and beside him on the bed was an opened book, my copy of Aharon Appelfeld’s novel Tzili. In the small room nothing else appeared to have been disarranged; I am orderly with my things, even in a hotel room, and everything of mine looked to me as I’d left it. I hadn’t had much with me to begin with: on the little desk by the large, arched window was the folder containing the notes of my conversations with Aharon, the three tapes Aharon and I had made so far, and Aharon’s books in English translation. Because my tape recorder was in my one suitcase and the suitcase locked inside the closet, whose key was in my wallet, he couldn’t have listened to the tapes; perhaps he’d rifled through the shirts and socks and underwear laid out in the middle bureau drawer, perhaps I’d find later that he’d even defiled them in some way, but so long as he hadn’t sacrificed a goat in the bathtub, I knew enough to consider myself lucky.

“Look,” I said to him from the doorway, “I’m going to get the house detective. He’s going to call the police. You’ve broken into my room. You’ve trespassed on my property. I don’t know what you may have taken —”

“What I’ve taken?” And saying this, he swung about and sat himself up on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his hands so that for the moment I couldn’t see the grief-stricken face and the resemblance to my own, by which I was still transfixed and horrified. Nor could he see me and the resemblance to which he had succumbed out of a motive that was still anything but clear in its personal particulars. I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life. It wasn’t even that Pipik had gone further than most — he was, in the mirror, improbably evolved into somebody else already; there was very little more for him to imitate or fantasize. I could understand the temptation to quash oneself and become imperfect and a sham in entertainingly new ways — I had succumbed too, and not just a few hours earlier with the Ziads and then with Gal, but more sweepingly even than that in my books: looking like myself, sounding like myself, even laying claim to convenient scraps of my biography, and yet, beneath the disguise of me, someone entirely other.

But this was no book, and it wouldn’t do. “Get off my bed,” I told him, “get out!”

But he had picked up Aharon’s Tzili and was showing me how far he’d got in reading it. “This stuff is real poison,” he said. “Everything Diasporism fights against. Why do you think highly of this guy when he is the last thing we need? He will never relinquish anti-Semitism. It’s the rock he builds his whole world on. Eternal and unshakable anti-Semitism. The man is irreparably damaged by the Holocaust — why do you want to encourage people to read this fear-ridden stuff?”

“You miss the point — I want only to encourage you to leave.”

“It astonishes me that you, of all people, after all that you have written, should want to reinforce the stereotype of the Jewish victim. I read your dialogue with Primo Levi last year in the Times. I heard you had a breakdown after he killed himself.”

“Who’d you hear it from? Walesa?”

“From your brother. From Sandy.”

“You’re in touch with my brother, too? He’s never mentioned it.”

“Come in. Close the door. We have a lot to talk about. We have been intertwined for decades in a thousand different ways. You don’t want to know how uncanny this whole thing is, do you? All you want is to get rid of it. But it goes back, Philip, all the way back to Chancellor Avenue School.”

“Yes, you went to Chancellor?”

He began quietly to sing, in a soft baritone voice — a singing voice chillingly familiar to me — a few bars of the Chancellor Avenue School song, words that had been set, early in the thirties, to the tune of “On Wisconsin.” “… We will do our best … try to always be victorious … put us through the test, rah-rah-rah …” He smiled at me wanly with the grief-stricken face. “Remember the cop who crossed you at the corner of Chancellor and Summit? Nineteen thirty-eight — the year you started kindergarten. Remember his name?”

While he spoke I glanced back toward the staircase, and there, to my relief, I saw just the person I was looking for. He paused at the landing, a short, stocky man in shirtsleeves, with closely cropped black hair and a masklike, inexpressive face, or so the face appeared from that distance. He looked toward me now without any attempt to disguise the fact that he was there and that he too sensed that something suspicious was going on. It was the plainclothesman.

“Al,” Pipik was saying once again, his head falling back on the pillows. “Al the Cop,” he repeated wistfully.

While Pipik babbled on from the bed, the plainclothesman, without my even signaling him, started along the corridor toward where I was waiting in the open doorway.

“You used to jump up to touch his arms,” Pipik was reminding me. “He’d hold his arms straight out to stop the traffic, and you little kids would jump up and touch his arms as you crossed the street. Every morning, ‘Hi, Al!’ and jump up and touch his arms. Nineteen thirty-eight. Remember?”

“Sure,” I said, and as the plainclothesman approached, I smiled to let him know that, although he was needed, the situation was not yet out of control. He leaned close to my ear and mumbled something. He spoke in English but because of his accent the softly uttered words were unintelligible at first.

“What?” I whispered.

“Want me to blow you?” he whispered back.

“Oh, no — thanks, no. My mistake.” And I stepped into the room and pulled the door firmly shut.

“Pardon the intrusion,” I said.

“Remember Al?”

I sat down in the easy chair by the window, not quite knowing what else to do now that I was locked in with him. “You don’t look so hot, Pipik.”

“Pardon?”

“You look awful. You look physically ill. This business is not doing you a world of good — you look like somebody in very serious trouble.”

“Pipik?” He was sitting up now on the bed. Contemptuously he asked, “You call me Pipik?”

“Don’t take it so hard. What else should I call you?”

“Cut the shit — I came for the check.”

“What check?”

“My check!”

“Yours? Please. Did anyone ever tell you about my great-aunt who lived in Danbury, Pipik? My grandfather’s older sister on my father’s side. Nobody tell you yet about our Meema Gitcha?”

“I want that check.”

“You found out about Al the Cop, somebody taught you all the words to the Chancellor song, so now perhaps it’s time you learned about Meema Gitcha, the family ancient, and how we would visit her and the phone calls we made to her when we got home from her house, safe and sound. You’re so interested in 1938 — this is about 1940.”

“You’re not stealing from me stealing that check, you’re not stealing from Smilesburger — you’re stealing from the Jewish people.”

“Please. Please. Enough. Meema Gitcha was also a Jewish person, you know — listen to me.” I can’t say that I had any idea of what I was doing but I told myself that if I just took charge and kept talking I could wear him down to nothing and then proceed from there … But to do what? “Meema Gitcha — a very foreign-looking Old Country woman, big and bossy and bustling, and she wore a wig and shawls and long dark dresses, and going to visit her in Danbury was a terrific outing, almost like leaving America.”

“I want that check. Now.”

“Pipik, pipe down.”

“Cut the Pipik crap!”

“Then listen. This is interesting. Once every six months or so we went out in two carloads to visit Meema Gitcha for the weekend. Her husband had been a hatter in Danbury. He used to work at Fishman’s in Newark with my grandfather, who was also a hatter for a while, but when the hat factories left for Connecticut, Gitcha and her family moved up with them to Danbury. About ten years later, Gitcha’s husband, working in off-hours, taking a stock of finished hats to the shipping room, was trapped and died in an accident in the elevator. Gitcha was on her own and so two, three times a year, we all went north to see her. A five-hour car ride in those days. Aunts, uncles, cousins, my grandmother, all packed in together, coming and going. It was somehow the most Jewishy-Yiddishy event of my childhood — we could have been driving all the way back to the folkland of Galicia traveling up to Danbury on those trips. Meema Gitcha’s was a household with a lot of melancholy and confusion — poor lighting, food always cooking, illness in the wings, some new tragedy always imminent — relatives very different from the lively, healthy, Americanized contingent stuffed into the new Studebakers. Meema Gitcha never got over her husband’s accident. She was always sure we were going to be killed in a car crash on the way up, and when we weren’t, she was sure we would be killed in a crash on the way down, and so the custom was that as soon as we got home on Sunday night, the very moment we stepped through the door, before anybody even went to the bathroom or got out of his coat, Meema Gitcha had to be phoned and reassured that we were still alive. But, of course, in those days, in our world, a long-distance phone call was unheard of — other than in an emergency, nobody would dream of making one. Nonetheless, when we got home from Meema Gitcha’s, no matter how late it was, my mother got on the phone and, as though what she was doing was entirely on the up and up, dialed the operator and asked to place a long-distance call to Meema Gitcha’s Connecticut number and to speak there person-to-person with Moishe Pipik. Even while my mother was holding the phone, my brother and I used to put our ears up next to hers on the receiver because it was tremendously exciting to hear the goyisch operator trying to get her tongue around ‘Moishe Pipik.’ She always got it wrong, and my mother, who was wonderful at this and celebrated for it in the family, my mother very calmly, very precisely, would say, ‘No, operator, no — person-to-person to Moí-she … Pí-pik. Mr. Moishe … Pipik.’ And when finally the operator got it marginally right, we would hear the voice of Meema Gitcha jumping in at the other end — ‘Moishe Pipik? He’s not here! He left half an hour ago!’ and immediately, bang, she’d hang up before the phone company caught on to what we were doing and threw the whole bunch of us in jail.”

Something about the story — could just have been its length — seemed to have sedated him a little, and he lay there on the bed as though for the moment he were no threat to anyone, including even himself. His eyes were closed when he said, very wearily, “What does this have to do with what you have done to me? Anything? Have you no imagination for what you did to me today?”

I thought then that he was like some errant son of mine, like the child I’d never had, some ne’er-do-well infantile grown-up who bears the family name and the facial features of a larger-than-life dad and doesn’t much like feeling suffocated by him and has gone everywhere to learn to breathe and, after decades on his motorcycle, having succeeded at nothing but strumming on an electric guitar, appears at the doorstep of the old manse to vent the impotence of a lifetime and then, following twenty-four hours of frenzied indictment and frightening tears, ends up back in his boyhood bedroom, momentarily drained of recrimination, while the father sits kindly beside him, mentally ticking off all his offspring’s deficiencies, thinking, “At your age I had already…,” and aloud, trying in vain, with funny stories, to amuse this beast of prey into a change of heart, at least until he’ll accept the check he came for and go away to some place where he can repair automobiles.

The check. The check was no hallucination and the check was gone. It was all no hallucination. This is worse than Halcion — this is happening.

“You’re thinking Pipik was our fall guy,” I said, “the scapegoat’s scapegoat — but, no, Pipik was protean, a hundred different things. Very human in that regard. Moishe Pipik was someone who didn’t exist and couldn’t possibly exist, and yet we were claiming he was so real he could answer the telephone. To a seven-year-old child this was all hilarious. But then Meema Gitcha would say, ‘He left half an hour ago,’ and I was suddenly as stupid as the operator and I believed her. I could see him leaving. He wanted to stay and talk more with Meema Gitcha. Going to visit her reassured him of something. That he wasn’t entirely alone, I suppose. There weren’t that many Jews in Danbury. How had poor little Moishe Pipik got there in the first place? Oddly, Gitcha could be a very reassuring bulk of a person for all that there was nothing that didn’t worry her. But the worries she attacked like a dragon slayer — maybe that was it. I imagined them speaking in Yiddish, Meema Gitcha and Moishe Pipik. He was a refugee boy who wore an Old Country refugee cap, and she gave him food to eat out of the cooking pots and her dead husband’s old coat to wear. Sometimes she slipped him a dollar. But whenever he happened to come around to see her after the New Jersey relatives had been visiting for the weekend, and he sat at the table telling her his problems, she would sit there eyeing the kitchen clock, and then suddenly she would jump up and say, ‘Go, Moishe! Look at the time! God forbid you should be here when they call!’ And in the midst of everything, in mitn drinen, you know, he grabbed his cap and he ran. Pipik ran and he ran and he ran and he never stopped running until fifty years later he finally reached Jerusalem and all that running had made him so tired and so lonely that all he could do when he got to Jerusalem was to find a bed, any bed, even somebody else’s bed. …”

I had put my sonny boy to sleep, with my story anesthetized him. I remained in the chair by the window wishing that it had killed him. When I was younger my Jewish betters used to accuse me of writing short stories that endangered Jewish lives — would that I could! A narrative as deadly as a gun!

I took a look at him, a good long hungry look of the kind I hadn’t quite been able to take while he was looking back at me. Poor bastard. The resemblance was striking. As his trousers were gathered up on his legs because of the way he had fallen to sleep, I could see that he even had my spindly ankles — or I his. The minutes passed quietly. I’d done it. Worn him down. Knocked him out. It was the first peaceful moment I’d known all day. So this, I thought, is what I look like sleeping. I hadn’t seen myself as quite so long in a bed though maybe it was just that this bed was short. Anyway, this is what the women see when they awaken to contemplate the wisdom of what they have done and with whom. This is what I would look like if I were to die tonight in that bed. This is my corpse. I am sitting here alive even though I am dead. I am sitting here after my death. Maybe it’s before my birth. I am sitting here and, like Meema Gitcha’s Moishe Pipik, I do not exist. I left half an hour ago. I am here sitting shivah for myself.

This is stranger even than I thought.

No, not that tack. No, just a different person similarly embodied, the physical analogue to what in poetry would be a near rhyme. Nothing more revelatory than that.

I lifted the phone on the table beside me and very, very quietly asked the switchboard operator to get me the King David Hotel.

“Philip Roth, please,” I said, when the operator came on at the King David.

The phone in their room was answered by Jinx.

I whispered her name.

“Honey! Where are you? I’m going crazy!”

Weakly I replied, “Still here.”

“Where?”

“His room.”

“God! Didn’t you find it?”

“Nowhere.”

“Then that’s it — leave!”

“I’m waiting for him.”

“Don’t! No!”

“My million, damn it!”

“But you sound awful — you sound worse. You took too much again. You can’t take that much.”

“I took what it takes.”

“But it’s too much. How bad is it? Is it very bad?”

“I’m resting.”

“You sound ghastly! You’re in pain! Come back! Philip, come back! He’ll turn everything around! It’ll be you who stole from him! He’s a vicious, ruthless egomaniac who’ll say anything to win!”

This deserved a laugh. “Him? Frighten me?”

“He frightens me! Come back!”

“Him? He’s shitting his pants with fear of me. He thinks it’s all a dream. I’ll show him what a dream is. He won’t know what hit him when I’ve finished scrambling his fucking brains.”

“Hon, this is suicide.”

“I love you, Jinx.”

“Really? Am I anything at all to you anymore?”

“What are you wearing?” I whispered, keeping my eye on the bed.

“What?”

“What do you have on?”

“Just my jeans. My bra.”

“The jeans.”

“Not now.”

“The jeans.”

“This is crazy. If he comes back …”

“The jeans.”

“They are. They are.”

“Off?”

“I’m pulling them off.”

“Around your ankles. Leave them around your ankles.”

“They are.”

“The panties.”

“You too.”

“Yes,” I said, “oh, yes.”

“Yes? Is it out?”

“I’m on his bed.”

“You crazy man.”

“On his bed. I’ve got it out. Oh, it’s out, all right.”

“Is it big?”

“It’s big.”

“Very big?”

“Very big.”

“My nipples are hard as a fucking rock. My tits are spilling out. Oh, hon, they’re spilling over —”

“All of it. Say all of it.”

“I’m nobody’s cunt but your cunt —”

“Ever?”

“Nobody’s.”

“All of it.”

“I worship your stiff cock.”

“All of it.”

“My lips around your stiff stiff cock —”

On the bed Pipik had opened his eyes and I hung up the phone.

“Feel better?” I asked.

He looked at me as if a man deep in a coma and, seemingly seeing nothing, closed his eyes again.

“Too much medication,” I said.

I decided not to call Jinx back and finish off the job. I’d got the idea.

When he came around next there was a mask of perspiration clinging to his forehead and his cheeks.

“Shall I get a doctor?” I asked. “Do you want me to call Miss Possesski?”

“I just want you, I just want you …” But tears appeared in his eyes and he couldn’t go on.

“What do you want?”

“What you stole.”

“Look, you’re a sick man. You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you? You’re taking painkilling drugs that are bending your mind. You’re taking tremendous doses of those drugs, that’s the story, isn’t it? I know from experience what that’s like. I know how they can make you behave. Look, I don’t particularly want to send a Demerol addict to jail. But if that’s what it takes to get you to leave me alone, I don’t care how sick you are or how much pain you’re in or how loony the drugs are making you act, I will take it as my business to see that that happens. I’ll be absolutely merciless with you if I find that I have to be. But do I have to be? How much do you need to get out of here and to go somewhere with Miss Possesski and try to get some peace and quiet? Because this other thing is a stupid farce, it means nothing, it can come to nothing, you’re bound to fail. It’s very likely to end for you two in a stupid catastrophe brought on by yourselves. I’m willing to pay your way to wherever you want to go. Two round-trip first-class airplane tickets to anyplace your two hearts desire. Something toward expenses too, to tide you over until you sort things out. Doesn’t that seem reasonable? I press no charges. You go away. Please, let’s negotiate a settlement and put an end to this.”

“Easy as that.” He didn’t seem quite as bleary now as when he’d first come round, but there was still perspiration beading his upper lip and no color at all in his face. “‘Moishe Pipik Gets Paid Off. NBA Winner Wins Again.’”

“Would the Jewish police be a more humane solution? A payoff isn’t always without dignity in a mess like this. I’ll give you ten thousand bucks. That’s a lot of money. I have a publisher here” — and why hadn’t I thought of calling him! — “and I’ll arrange to have ten thousand dollars in cash in your hands by noon tomorrow —”

“‘Providing you are out of Jerusalem by nightfall.’”

“By nightfall tomorrow, yes.”

“I get ten and you get the balance.”

“There is no balance. That’s it.”

“No balance?” He began to laugh. “No balance?” All at once he was sitting up straight and seemed entirely resuscitated. Either the drugs had suddenly worn off or they had suddenly kicked in, but Pipik was himself again (whoever that might be). “You who studied arithmetic with Miss Duchin at Chancellor Avenue School, you tell me there is no balance when” — and here he began gesturing as though he were a Jewish comic, his two hands to the left, his two hands to the right, distinguishing this from that, that from this — “when the subtrahend is ten thousand and the minuend is one million? You got B’s in arithmetic all through Chancellor. Subtraction is one of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic. Let me refresh your recollection. It is the inverse of addition. The result of subtracting one number from another is called the difference. The symbol for this operation is our friend the minus sign. Any of this ring a bell? As in addition, only like qualities can be subtracted. Dollars from dollars, for instance, work very nicely. Dollars from dollars, Phil, is what subtraction was made for.”

What was he? Was he fifty-one percent smart or was he fifty-one percent stupid? Was he fifty-one percent crazy or was he fifty-one percent sane? Was he fifty-one percent reckless or was he fifty-one percent cunning? In every case it was a very close call.

“Miss Duchin. I must confess,” I said, “I’d forgotten Miss Duchin.”

“You played Columbus for Hana Duchin in the Columbus Day play. Fourth grade. She adored you. Best Columbus she ever had. They all adored you. Your mother, your Aunt Mim, your Aunt Honey, your Grandma Finkel — when you were a tot they used to stand around the crib, and when your mother changed your diaper, they used to take turns kissing your tuchas. Women have been lining up to kiss your tuchas ever since.”

Well, we were both laughing now. “What are you, Pipik? What’s your game? You have this amusing side to you, don’t you? You’re obviously much more than just a fool, you have a stunning companion who is full of life, you don’t lack for audacity or daring, you even have some brains. I hate to be the one to say it but the vehemence and intelligence of your criticism of Israel makes you into something more than just a crackpot. Is this just a malicious comedy about convictions? The argument for Diasporism isn’t always as farcical as you make it sound. There’s a mad plausibility about it. There’s more than a grain of truth in recognizing and acknowledging the Euro-centrism of Judaism, of the Judaism that gave birth to Zionism, and so forth. Yet it also strikes me, I’m afraid, like the voice of puerile wishful thinking. Tell me, please, what is this really all about? Identity theft? It’s the stupidest con going. You’ve got to get caught. Who are you? Tell me what you do for a living when you aren’t doing this. As far as I know — though correct me if I’m wrong — you’ve never plugged into my American Express card. So on what do you survive? Your wits alone?”

“Guess.” Oh, he was very bright and sparkly now, practically flirtatious. Guess. Don’t tell me he’s bisexual! Don’t tell me this is more of the guy in the hallway! Don’t tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I’m afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me.

“I can’t guess. You’re a blank to me,” I said. “I even get the feeling that without me around you’re a blank to yourself. A little urbane, a little intelligent, a little self-confident, maybe even a little fascinating — Jinx-like creatures don’t just drop from the sky — but mostly somebody who never arrived at a clear idea of what his life was for, mostly uncohesive, disappointed, a very shadowy, formless, fragmented thing. A kind of wildly delineated nothing. What enkindles you when I’m not here? Under ‘me’ isn’t there at least a little you? What do you aim for in life other than getting people to think that you are somebody else?”

“What do you aim for other than that?”

“Yes, I take your point, but the question asked of you has a broader meaning, no? Pipik, what do you do for a real life?”

“I’m a licensed law-enforcement official,” he said. “How’s that grab you? I’m a private investigator. Here.”

His ID. Could have been a bad picture of me. License No. 7794. Date of Expiration 06/01/90. “… A duly licensed private investigator … and is vested with all the authorities allowed him by law.” And his signature. My signature.

“I run an agency in Chicago,” he said. “Three guys and me. That’s all. Small agency. We list what most everybody else lists — thefts, white-and blue-collar crime, missing persons, matrimonial surveillance. We do lie detection. Narcotics. We do murders. I do all the missing-persons cases. Missing persons is what Philip Roth is known for throughout the Midwest. I’ve been as far as Mexico and Alaska. Twenty-one years and I found everybody I was ever contracted to find. I also handle all the murders.”

I gave back the ID card and watched him return it to his wallet. Were there a hundred more phony cards in there, all of them bearing that name? I didn’t think it wise to ask just then — he’d caught me up short with “I handle all the murders.”

“You like the dangerous assignments,” I said.

“I have to be challenged twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I like to live on the edge, always up — it keeps my adrenaline going. Anything other than that I consider boring.”

“Well, I’m stunned.”

“I see that.”

“I had you figured for an adrenaline freak but it wasn’t exactly a law enforcer that I would have thought to call you.”

“It’s impossible for a Jew to be a private detective?”

“No.”

“It’s impossible for a detective to look like me? Or like you?”

“No, it’s not even that.”

“You just think I’m a liar. It’s a cozy universe you’ve got going — you’re the truth-telling Philip and I’m the lying Philip, you’re the honest Philip and I’m the dishonest Philip, you’re the reasonable Philip and I’m the manic psychopath.”

“I like the missing-persons bit. I like that that’s your specialty. Very witty in the circumstances. And what got you into detective work? Tell me that, while we’re at it.”

“I was always the type of person who wanted to help other people. Since I was a kid I couldn’t stand injustice. It drove me crazy. It still does. It always will. Injustice is my obsession. I think it has to do with being a Jewish kid growing up in the war era. America wasn’t always fair to Jews in those days. Beaten up in high school. Just like Jonathan Pollard. I could even have gone in the same direction as Pollard. Acting out of my love of Jews, I could have done it. I had the Pollard fantasies, volunteering for Israel, working for the Mossad. At home, FBI, CIA, they both turned me down. Never found out why. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t because of you, because they thought it was just too much bother, a guy who was a veritable duplicate of somebody in the public eye. But I’ll never know. I used to draw a cartoon strip for myself when I was a kid. ‘A Jew in the FBI.’ Pollard is very important to me. What the Dreyfus case was to Herzl, the Pollard case is to me. Through my PI contacts I’ve heard that the FBI attached Pollard to a polygraph machine, gave him lists of prominent American Jews, and told him to identify the other spies. He wouldn’t do it. Everything about the guy repels me except that. I live in dread of a second Pollard. I live in dread of what that will mean.”

“So, is what I’m supposed to gather from all this that you became a detective to help Jews?”

“Look, you tell me you know nothing about me and you’re at a disadvantage because I know so much about you. I’m explaining to you that it’s my profession to know as much as I know, not just about you but about everyone. You ask me to level with you. That’s what I’m trying to do. Except all I meet with is a barrage of disbelief. You want me to take a polygraph? I could pass it with flying colors. Okay, I haven’t been calm and collected with you. It surprises me, too. I wrote and apologized for that. Some people blitz you, no matter who you are. I have to tell you that you are only the second person in my life to blitz me like this. In my line of work I’m hardened to everything and I see everything and I have to learn to handle everything. The only other time it happened before, that I was blitzed anything like this, was in 1963, when I met the president. He came to Chicago. I was doing some bodyguard work then. Usually I was employed by a private contractor, but at this time I was employed by the public sector, too. It was the mayor’s office. I couldn’t speak when he shook my hand. The words wouldn’t come out. That doesn’t usually happen. Words are a large part of my business and account for ninety percent of my success. Words and brains. It was probably because I was having masturbatory fantasies in those days about his wife on her water skis and I felt guilty. Do you know what the president said to me? He said, ‘I know your friend Styron. You’ve got to come down to Washington and have dinner with us and the Styrons some night.’ Then he said, ‘I’m a great admirer of Letting Go.’ That was in August 1963. Three months later he was shot.”

“Kennedy mixed you up with me. The president of the United States thought a bodyguard in the mayor’s office was a novelist on the side.”

“The guy shook a million hands a day. He took me for another dignitary. It wasn’t hard — there was my name, my looks, and besides, people are always taking a bodyguard for somebody else. That’s part of the job. Somebody desires protection. Somebody like you, say, who might be feeling threatened. You ride around with them. You pretend you’re a friend or something. Sure, some guys tell you they want to make it obvious that you’re a bodyguard, so you play that part. Nice dark suit, the sunglasses, you carry a gun. The goon outfit. That’s what they want, you do it. They want it obvious — they like the flash, the glitter of it. I had one client I worked with all the time in Chicago, a big contractor and developer, lots of money, and a lot of people who might be after him, and he loved the show. I’d go to Vegas with him. Him and his limousine and his friends — they wanted it always to be a big thing. I had to watch the women when they went to the bathroom. I had to go into the bathroom with them without their knowing it.”

“Difficult?”

“I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I managed it. Things have changed now but at this time I was the only Jewish bodyguard in the whole Midwest. I broke ground out there. The other Jewish boys were all in law school. That was what the families wanted. Didn’t your old man want you to go to law school instead of to Chicago to become an English teacher?”

“Who told you that?”

“Clive Cummis, your brother’s friend. Big New Jersey attorney now. Before you went out to graduate school to study literature, your father asked Clive to take you aside to plead with you to go to law school instead.”

“I don’t myself remember that happening.”

“Sure. Clive took you into the bedroom on Leslie Street. He said you’d never make a living teaching English. But you told him you weren’t having any of that stuff and to forget it.”

“Well, that’s an incident that slips my mind.”

“Clive remembers it.”

“You see Clive Cummis, too?”

“I get business from lawyers all over the country. I have a lot of law firms we work very closely with. We are exclusive agents for them. They’ll turn over all the cases to us where they need an investigator in Chicago. We’ll turn cases over to them, they’ll turn cases over to us. I’ve got a great working relationship with about two hundred police departments, basically in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. We have a great relationship with the county police, tremendous arrest record with the counties. I brought in a lot of people for them.”

I have to tell you that I was beginning to believe him.

“Look, I never ever wanted to do the Jewish thing,” he said. “That always seemed to me to be our big mistake. Law school to me was just another ghetto. So was what you did, the writing, the books, the schools, all that scorn for the material world. Books to me were too Jewish, just another way to hide from fear of the goyim. You see, I was having Diasporist thoughts even then. It was crude, it wasn’t formulated, but the instinct was there from the start. These people here call it ‘assimilation’ in order to disparage it — I called it living like a man. I joined the army to go to Korea. I wanted to fight the Communists. I never got sent. They made me an MP at Fort Benning. I built my body in the gym there. I learned to direct traffic. I became a pistol expert. I fell in love with weapons. I studied the martial arts. You quit ROTC because you were against the military establishment at Bucknell, and I became the best fucking MP they ever saw in Georgia. I showed the fucking rednecks. Don’t be afraid, I told myself, don’t run away — beat them at their fucking game. And through this technique I developed a tremendous sense of self-worth.”

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“Please, don’t insult me too much. I don’t carry a gun, the cancer has knocked the shit out of my body, the drugs, you’re right, they’re no good for the brain, they fuck up your nature, and, on top of everything, I am in awe of you — that’s true and always will be. It’s as it should be. I know my place vis-à-vis you. I’m willing to take shit from you that I never took before in my life. I’m a little powerless where you’re concerned. But I happen also to understand your predicament better than you give me credit for. You’re blitzed too, Phil, this isn’t the easiest situation for a classic Jewish paranoid to handle. That’s what I’m trying to address right now — your paranoid response. That’s why I’m explaining to you who I am and where I’m coming from. I’m not an alien from outer space. I’m not a schizoid delusion. And however much fun it is for you to think so, I’m not Meema Gitcha’s Moishe Pipik, either. Far from it. I’m Philip Roth. I’m a Jewish private detective from Chicago who has got cancer and is doomed to die of it, but not before he makes his contribution. I am not ashamed of what I have done for people up until now. I am not ashamed of being a bodyguard for people who needed a bodyguard. A bodyguard is a piece of meat, but I never gave anybody less than the best. I did matrimonial surveillance for years. I know it’s the comic-relief end of the business, catching people with their pants down, I know it’s not being a novelist who wins prizes for excellence — but that’s not the Philip Roth who I was. I was the Philip Roth who went up to the desk manager at the Palmer House and showed him my badge or gave him some other pretense so I could get to the registration book to see that they had actually signed in and what room they were in. I am the Philip Roth who in order to get up there would say I was a floral-delivery person and I gotta be sure this is personally done because the guy gave me a hundred dollars to get it up there. I am the Philip Roth who would get the maid and make up a story for her: ‘I forgot my key, this is my room, you can check downstairs that this is my room.’ I am the Philip Roth who could always get a key, who could always get in the room — always.”

“Just like here,” I said, but that didn’t stop him.

“I am the Philip Roth who rushes into the room with his Minolta and gets his pictures before they know what’s happened. Nobody gives you awards for this, but I was never ashamed, I put in my years, and when I finally had the money, I opened my own agency. And the rest is history. People are missing and Philip Roth finds them. I’m the Philip Roth who is dealing with desperate people all the time, and not just in some book. Crime is desperate. The person who reported them is desperate and the person who is on the lam is desperate, and so desperation is my life, day and night. Kids run away from home and I find them. They run away and they get pulled into the world of people who are scum. They need a place to stay, and so the people take advantage of that. My last case, before I got cancer, was a fifteen-year-old girl from Highland Park. Her mother came to me, she was a mess, a lot of tears and screaming. Donna registered for her high school class in September, went for the first two days, and then disappeared. She winds up with a known felon, warrants for his arrest, a bad guy. A Dominican. I found this apartment building in Calumet City where his grandmother lived, and I staked it out. It was all I had to go on. I staked it out for days. I sat upwards of twenty-six hours once without relief. With nothing happening. You have to have patience, tremendous patience. Even reading the newspapers is chancy because something could happen in a split second and you might miss it. There for hours and you have to be inventive. You hide in the vehicle, you sit low in the vehicle, you pretend you’re just hanging out like anybody else in the vehicle. Sometimes you go to the bathroom in the vehicle — you can’t help it. And meanwhile I am always putting myself in the criminal’s mind, how he’s going to react and what he’s going to do. Every criminal is different and every scenario I come up with is different. When you’re a criminal and you’re stupid, you don’t think, but if you’re a detective you have to be intelligent enough to not-think in the way this guy doesn’t think. Well, he turns up at the grandmother’s finally. I follow him on foot when he comes out. He goes to make a drug purchase. Then he comes back to the car. I make a pass by the car and there she is — I make a positive identification that it is Donna. It turned out later that he was doing drugs in the car himself. To shorten a long story, the car chase lasted twenty-five minutes. We’re driving about eighty miles an hour down side roads through four Indiana towns. The guy is charged with sixteen different counts. Eluding police, resisting arrest, kidnapping — he’s in deep shit. I interrogated the girl. I said, ‘How you doin’, Donna?’ She says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, my name is Pepper. I’m from California. I’ve been in town a week.’ This nice Highland Park high school girl of fifteen has the intelligence of a hardened con and her story is perfect. She’s been gone eleven months, and she had a fake birth certificate, a driver’s license, a whole bunch of fake IDs. Her behavior indicated to me that this guy was using her for prostitution. We found condoms in her pocketbook, sexual devices in the car and things.”

I thought, He’s got it all down pat from TV. If only I’d watched more “L.A. Law” and read less Dostoyevsky I’d know what’s going on here, I’d know in two minutes what show it is exactly. Maybe motifs from fifteen shows, with a dozen detective movies thrown in. The joke is that more than likely there’s a terrifically popular network program that everyone stays home for on Friday nights, and not only is it about a private investigator who specializes in missing kids but it’s a Jewish private investigator, and the episode about the high school girl (sweet cheerleader, square parents, mind of her own) and the addict-pimp abductor (dirty dancer, folkloric grandmother, pitted skin) was probably the last one seen by Pipik before he’d hopped on the plane for Tel Aviv to play me. Maybe it was the in-flight movie on El Al. Probably everybody in America over three years of age knows about how detectives shit in their cars and call the cars vehicles, probably everybody over three in America knows exactly what is meant by a sexual device and only the aging author of Portnoy’s Complaint has to ask. What fun it must be for him putting me on like this. But is the masquerading relentless for the sake of the shakedown, or is the shakedown a pretext for the performance and all the real fun in the act? What if this isn’t simply a con but his parody of my vocation, what’s now known to mankind as a “roast.” Yes, suppose this Pipik of mine is none other than the Satiric Spirit in the flesh, and the whole thing a send-up, a satire of authorship! How could I have missed it? Yes, yes, the Spirit of Satire is of course who he is, here to poke fun at me and other outmoded devotees of what is important and what is real, here to divert us all from the Jewish savagery that doesn’t bear thinking about, come with his road show to Jerusalem to make everyone miserable laugh.

“What are the sexual devices?” I asked him.

“She had a vibrator. There was a blackjack in the car. I forget what else we had.”

“What’s the blackjack, a kind of dildo? 1 suppose dildos are a dime a dozen on prime time by now. What the Hula-Hoop used to be.”

“They use blackjacks for S & M. For beating and punishing and things like that.”

“What happened to Donna? Is she white? I didn’t catch this show. Who plays you? Ron Liebman or George Segal? Or is it you playing them for me?”

“I don’t know many writers,” he replied. “Is this the way they all think? That out there everybody is playing? Man! You listened too religiously to that kiddie program when you were a little boy — you and Sandy may have loved it too much. Saturday mornings. Remember? Nineteen forty also. Eleven a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Da-dum-da-dadada, dum-da-dadada, dum-dada-da-dum.”

He was humming the tune that used to introduce “Let’s Pretend,” a fairy-tale half hour that little unmediaized American children adored back in the thirties and forties, my brother and I but two of the millions.

“Maybe,” he said, “your perception of reality got arrested at the ‘Let’s Pretend’ level.”

To this I did not even bother to reply.

“Oh, that’s a cliché, is it? Am I boring you? Well,” he said, “now that you’re pushing sixty and ‘Let’s Pretend’ isn’t on the air anymore, someone should bore you long enough to explain that, one, the world is real, two, the stakes are high, and, three, nobody is pretending anymore except you. I have been inside your head for so long now and yet not until this moment have I understood what a writer is all about: you guys think it’s all make-believe.”

“I don’t think any of it is make-believe, Pipik. I think — I know — that you are a real liar and a real fake. It’s the stories that purport to be about ‘it,’ it’s the struggle to describe ‘it,’ where the make-believe comes in. Five-year-old children may take the stories for real, but by the time you’re pushing sixty, deciphering the pathology of story making comes to be just another middle-age specialty. By the time you’re pushing sixty, the representations of ‘it’ are ‘it.’ They’re everything. Follow me?”

“Nothing hard to follow except your relevance. Cynicism increases with age because the bullshit piles up on your head. What’s that got to do with us?”

I heard myself ask aloud, “Am I conversing with this person, am I truly trying to make sense with him? Why?”

“Why not! Why should you converse with Aharon Appelfeld,” he said, holding up and shaking Aharon’s book, “and not with me!”

“A thousand reasons.”

He was all at once in a jealous rage because I talked seriously to Aharon but not to him. “Name one!” he cried.

Because, I thought, of Aharon’s and my distinctly radical twoness, a condition with which you appear to have no affinity at all; because we are anything but the duplicates that everyone is supposed to believe you and me to be; because Aharon and I each embody the reverse of the other’s experience; because each recognizes in the other the Jewish man he is not; because of the all but incompatible orientations that shape our very different lives and very different books and that result from antithetical twentieth-century Jewish biographies; because we are the heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy — because of the sum of all these Jewish antinomies, yes, we have much to talk about and are intimate friends.

“Name one!” he challenged for a second time but on this subject I simply remained silent and, sensibly for a change, kept my thinking to myself. “You recognize Appelfeld for the person he claims to be; why do you refuse that with me? All you do is resist me. Resist me, ignore me, insult me, defame me, rant and rave at me — and steal from me. Why must there be this bad blood? Why you should see me as a rival — I cannot understand it. Why is this relationship so belligerent from your end? Why must it be destructive when together we could achieve so much? We could have a creative relationship, we could be partners — copersonalities working in tandem rather than stupidly divided in two!”

“Look, I’ve got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many. This is the end of the line. I don’t want to go into business with you. I just want you to go away.”

“We could at least be friends.”

He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. “Never. Profound, unbridgeable, unmistakable differences that far outweigh the superficial similarity — no, we can’t be friends, either. This is it.”

He looked, to my astonishment, about to burst into tears because of what I’d said. Or maybe it was just the ebb tide of those drugs. “Look, you never told me what happened to Donna,” I said. “Entertain us a little more, and then, what do you say, let’s bring this little error to an end. What became of Highland Park High’s fifteen-year- old dominatrix? How’d that show wind up?”

But this, of course, riled him again.

“Shows! You really think I watch PI shows? There isn’t one that depicts what’s real, not one. If I had a choice between watching “Magnum, P.I.” and “Sixty Minutes,” I’d watch “Sixty Minutes” any time. Shall I tell you something? Donna turned out to be Jewish. Her mother, I found out later, was the reason why she left. I won’t go into that, you don’t care. But I did, I got involved in those cases — they were my life before I got sick. I would try to find out what the reasons were they left and try to get them to stay. I would try to help them. That was very rewarding. Unfortunately this Dominican with Donna — his name was Hector — Donna had a problem with him —”

“He had this power over her,” I said, “and to this day she’s trying to contact him.”

“That happens to be the case. That’s true. She was charged with receiving stolen property, resisting arrest, eluding police too — she’s in a detention center.”

“And the day she’s released from the detention center, she’ll run away again,” I said. “Great story. Everybody can identify, as they say. Beginning with you. She doesn’t want to be Dr. and Mrs. Jew’s Donna anymore, she wants to be Hector’s Dominican Pepper. All this autobiographical fantasy, is it nationwide? Is it worldwide? Maybe this stuff everybody is watching has inspired half the human population with the yearning for a massive transfer of souls, maybe that’s what you embody — the longings for metempsychosis inspired in mankind by all those TV shows.”

“Idiot!” he shouted. “It’s staring you right in the face what I embody!”

It is, I thought: exactly nothing. There is no meaning here at all. That’s the meaning. I can stop there. I could have started there. Nothing could look more like it meant something than this, and nothing could mean less.

“So, what happened finally to Hector?” I asked him, hoping now that if I could lead him to the end of something, of anything, it might present an opportunity to get him up from my bed and out of the room without my having to call down to the desk for assistance. I never felt less inclined than at that moment to see this poor possessed scoundrel wind up in trouble. Not only was he meaningless but, having observed him for nearly an hour, I was hard-pressed to believe any longer that he was violent. In this way we weren’t dissimilar: the violence was all verbal. I had, in fact, actively to prevent myself from despising him less than was warranted, given the maddening mix-up he’d made of my life and the repercussions of this encounter, which I was sure were going to dog me in unpleasant ways in the future.

“Hector?” he said. “Hector made bail, he’s out on bail.” Unexpectedly he began to laugh, but a laugh that was as hopeless and weary as any sound emitted by him yet. “You and Hector. I never saw the parallel till now. As if I don’t have enough grief from you, with all the ways you want to fuck me over, I’ve got Hector waiting in the wings. He called me, he spoke to me, he threatened my life — Hector told me he was going to kill me. This is just before I went into the hospital. I’ve arrested a lot of people, you realize, put a lot of people in prison. They phone me, they track me down, and I don’t hide. If somebody wants to get even with me, there’s nothing I can do. But I don’t look over my shoulder. I told Hector what I tell them all. ‘I’m listed in the book, man. Philip Roth. Come and get me.’”

With this I raised my arms over my head, I howled, I clapped my hands together, once, then again, until I found myself applauding him. “Bravo! You’re wonderful! What a finish! What a flourish! On the phone, the dedicated Jewish savior, the Jewish statesman, Theodor Herzl turned inside out. Then face-to-face outside the trial, a zany fan blushing with adoration. And now this, the masterstroke — the detective who doesn’t look over his shoulder. ‘I’m in the book, man. Philip Roth. Come and get me.’ The book!” From out of my depths roared all the laughter that I should have been laughing from the day I first heard that this preposterous mouthpiece claimed to exist.

But he was suddenly screaming from the bed, “I want the check! I want my check! You’ve stolen a million dollars!”

“I lost it, Pipik. I lost it on the highway from Ramallah. The check is gone.”

Aghast, he stared straight at me, at the person in all the world who most reminded him of himself, the person he saw as the rest of him, the completion of him, the one who’d come to be his very reason for being, his mirror image, his meal ticket, his hidden potential, his public persona, his alibi, his future, the one in whom he sought refuge from himself, the other whom he called himself, the person in whose service he had repudiated his own identity, the breakthrough to the other half of his life … and he saw instead, laughing at him uncontrollably from behind the mask of his very own face, his worst enemy, the one to whom the only bond is hatred. But how could Pipik have failed to know that I would have to hate him no less than he hated me? Did he honestly expect that when we met I’d fall in love and set up shop and have a creative relationship with him like Macbeth and his wife?

“I lost it. It’s a great story, too, nearly rivals yours for unbelievability. The check is gone,” I told him again. “A million bucks blowing away across the desert sands, probably halfway down to Mecca by now. And with that million you could have convened that first Diasporist Congress in Basel. You could have shipped the first lucky Jews back to Poland. You could have established a chapter of A-S.A. right in Vatican City. Meetings in the basement of St. Peter’s Church. Full house every night. ‘My name is Eugenio Pacelli. I’m a recovering anti-Semite.’ Pipik, who sent you to me in my hour of need? Who made me this wonderful gift? Know what Heine liked to say? There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes. You prove it. It’s Aristophanes they should be worshiping over at the Wailing Wall — if he were the God of Israel I’d be in shul three times a day!”

I was laughing the way people cry at funerals in the countries where they let go and really have at it. They rend their clothes. They rake their faces with their nails. They howl. They swoon. They faint. They grab at the coffin with their twisted hands and fling themselves shrieking into the hole. Well, this is how I was laughing, if you can picture it. To judge from Pipik’s face — our face! — it was something to behold. Why isn’t God Aristophanes? Would we be any further from the truth?

“Surrender yourself to what is real,” were my first words to him when I could talk again. “I speak from experience — surrender to reality, Pipik. There’s nothing in the world quite like it.”

I suppose I should have laughed even more uproariously at what happened next; as a newly anointed convert to the Old Comedy, I should have bounded to my feet, cried aloud, “Hallelujah!” and sung the praises of He Who Created Us, He Who Formed Us from the Mud, the One and Only Comic Almighty, OUR SOVEREIGN REDEEMER, ARISTOPHANES, but for reasons all too profane (total mental paralysis) I could only dumbly gape at the sight of nothing less than the highly entertaining Aristophanic erection that Pipik had produced, as though it were a rabbit, from his fly, an oversized pole right out of Lysistrata that, to my further astonishment, he proceeded to crank in a rotary motion, to position, with one hand cupped over the knobby doll-like head, as if he were moving the floor shift on a prewar car. Then he was lunging with it across the bed.

“There’s reality. Like a rock!”

He was ridiculously light, as though the disease had eaten through his bones, as though inside there was nothing left of him and he was as hollow as Mortimer Snerd. I caught hold of his arm just as he landed, and with a blow between his shoulder blades and another, nastier, at the base of the spine, I spun him out the door (who’d opened it?) and shoved him ass-first into the corridor. Then there was the split second in which, across the threshold, each of us was frozen in place by the reflection of the malformed mistake that was the other. Then the door seemed to spring to life again to assist me — the door was closed and locked but afterward I could have sworn I’d had as little to do with its shutting as with its opening.

“My shoes!”

He was screaming for his shoes just as my phone began to ring. So — we were not alone, this Arab hotel in Arab East Jerusalem had not been emptied of Demjanjuk’s son and Demjanjuk’s lawyers, the place had not been evacuated of all its guests and sealed off by the Jewish authorities so that this struggle for supremacy between Roth and “Roth” could rage on undisturbed until the cataclysmic end — no, a complaint at long last from the outer world about the intemperate acting out of this primordial dream.

His shoes were beside the bed, cordovans with the strap that pulls across the instep, Brooks Brothers shoes of the kind I’d been wearing since I’d first admired them on the feet of a dapperly Princetonian Shakespeare professor at Bucknell. I bent to pick up Pipik’s shoes and saw that, along the back lateral curve, the heels were sharply worn away exactly as were the heels of the pair I had on. I looked at mine, at his, and then opened and shut the door so quickly that all I caught sight of as I hurled his cordovans into the corridor was the part in his hair. I saw the part as he rushed the door, and when the door was locked again I realized that it was on the opposite side from my own. I reached a hand up to my scalp to be certain. He’d modeled himself on my photograph! Then this, I said to myself, is most definitely someone else, and, depleted beyond depletion, I dropped with my arms outspread on the disheveled bed from which he and his erection had just arisen. That man is not me! I am here and I am whole and part what hair I still possess on the right side. Yet in spite of this, and of differences even more telling — our central nervous systems, for example — he’s going to proceed down the stairs and out of the hotel like that, he’s going to parade through the lobby like that, he’s going to walk across Jerusalem like that, and when the police finally run him down and go to take him in for indecent exposure, he’s going to tell them what he tells them all — “I’m in the book. Philip Roth. Come and get me.”

“My glasses!”

The glasses I found right there beside me on the bed. I snapped them in two and hurled the pieces against the wall. Let him be blind!

“They’re broken! Go!”

My phone continued ringing and I was no longer laughing like a good Aristophanian but quivering with irreligious, unenlightened rage.

I picked up the phone and said nothing.

“Philip Roth?”

“Not here.”

“Philip Roth, where was God between 1939 and 1945? I’m sure He was at the Creation. I’m sure He was at Mount Sinai with Moses. My problem is where He was between 1939 and 1945. That was a dereliction of duty for which even He, especially He, cannot ever be forgiven.”

I was being addressed in a thick, grave Old Country accent, a hoarse, rough, emphysemic voice that sounded as though it originated in something massively debilitated.

Meanwhile someone had struck up a light, rhythmic knuckle rapping on my door. Shave and a haircut … two bits. Could it be Pipik on the phone if it was also Pipik at the door? How many of him were there?

“Who is this?” I asked into the phone.

“I spit on this God who was on vacation from 1939 to 1945!”

I hung up.

Shave and a haircut … two bits.

I waited and waited but the rapping would not go away.

“Who is that?” I finally whispered, but so softly that I thought I might not even be heard. I could almost believe I was smart enough not to be asking.

The whisper back seemed to waft through the keyhole, carried on a wire-thin current of cool air. “Want me to blow you?”

“Go away!”

“I’ll blow both of you.”

I am looking down on an open-air hospital ward or public clinic that is set out on a vast playing field that reminds me of School Stadium on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark, where Newark’s rivalrous high schools — the Italian high school, the Irish high school, the Jewish high school, the Negro high school — played football doubleheaders when I was a boy. But this arena is ten times the size of our stadium and the crowd is as huge as the crowd at a bowl game, tens upon tens of thousands of excited fans, snugly layered with clothing and warming their dark insides with steaming containers of coffee. White pennants wave everywhere, rhythmically the crowd takes up the chant, “Give me an M! Give me an E! Give me a T! Give me an E!” while down on the field white-clad doctors glide agilely about in clinical silence — I am able to see through my binoculars their serious, dedicated faces and the faces, too, of those who lie still as stone, each hooked up to an IV drip, their souls draining into the body on the next gurney. And what is horrifying is that the face of every one of them, even of the women and of the little children, is the face of Ivan of Treblinka. From the stands, the cheering fans can see nothing but the balloon of a big, stupid, friendly face swelling out of each of the bodies strapped to the gurneys, but with my binoculars I see concentrated in that emerging face everything in humanity that there is to hate. Yet the electrified crowd seethes with hope. “All will be different from now on! Everybody will be nice from now on! Everybody will belong to a church like Mr. Demjanjuk! Everybody will raise a garden like Mr. Demjanjuk! Everybody will work hard and come home at night to a wonderful family like Mr. Demjanjuk!” I alone have binoculars and am witness to the unfolding catastrophe. “That is Ivan!” But nobody can hear me above the hurrahs and the exuberant cheering. “Give me an O! Give me an S!” I am still shouting that it is Ivan, Ivan from Treblinka, when they pluck me lightly out of my seat and, rolling me down atop the soft tassels of the white woolen caps worn by all the fans, pass my body (swathed now in a white pennant bearing a big blue “M”) over a low brick wall that has painted across it “The Memory Barrier. Players Only,” and into the arms of two waiting doctors, who strap me tightly to a gurney of my own and wheel me out to midfield just as the band strikes up a quick-time march. When the IV needle pierces my wrist, I hear the mighty roar that precedes the big game. “Who’s playing?” I ask the nurse in the white uniform who attends me. She is Jinx, Jinx Possesski. She pats my hand and whispers, “University of Metempsychosis.” I begin to scream, “I don’t want to play!” but Jinx smiles reassuringly and says, “You must — you’re the starting halfback.”

“HALF BACK” was sounding the alarm in my ear when I scrambled upright in the bed with no idea in what dimensionless black room I had awakened. I concluded at first that it was the previous summer and that I needed a light to find the pillbox beside the bed. I need half of a second Halcion to get me through the rest of the night. But I’m reluctant to turn on the light for fear of finding paw prints not just on the bedsheets and the pillowcases but climbing the walls and crossing the ceiling. Then my phone begins to ring again. “What is the real life of man?” I am asked this by the emphysemic old Jew with the tired voice and the heavy accent. “I give up. What is the real life of man?” “There is none. There is only the urge to attain a real life. Everything that is not real is the real life of man.” “Okay. I’ve got one for you. Tell me the meaning of today.” “Error. Error upon error. Error, misprision, fakery, fantasy, ignorance, falsification, and mischief, of course, irrepressible mischief. An ordinary day in the life of anyone.” “Where is the error?” In his bed, I think, and, dreaming on, I am in the bed of someone who has just died of a highly contagious disease, and then I am dying myself. For locking myself into this little room with him, for ridiculing and chastising him from only an arm’s length away, for telling this ego-blank megalomaniacal pseudo-being that he is no more to me than a mere Moishe Pipik, for my failing to understand that he is not a joke, Moishe Pipik murders me and there I expire, emptied of all my blood, until I am ejected like a pilot from the burning cockpit into the discovery that I have had a wet dream for the first time in twenty-five years.

Fully awake, I left the bed at long last and, in the dark, crossed to the arched window in front of the desk to see if I could spot him keeping a lookout on my room from the street below, and what I saw, not in the narrow street bordering this side of the hotel but two streets beyond, was a convoy of buses under the glow of the lamps and several hundred soldiers, each with a rifle slung over his shoulder, waiting to board them. I couldn’t even hear the boots striking against the pavement, so easily did the soldiers amble along, one by one, once the signal to move out had been given. There was a high wall running the length of the far side of the street and on the near side was a block-long stone structure with a corrugated iron roof that must have been a garage or a warehouse, an L-shaped building that made the street a hidden cul-de-sac. There were six buses, and I stood there watching until the last soldier climbed aboard with his weapon and the buses began to roll away, heading out more than likely for the West Bank, replacement troops to put down the riots, armed Jews, what Pipik maintains makes a second Holocaust imminent, what Pipik claims he can render unnecessary through the benevolent agency of A-S.A. …

I decided then — it was a little after two — to leave Jerusalem. If I got to it immediately, I’d have time enough to compose another three or four questions to round out the interview. Aharon’s house was in a development village some twenty minutes due west of Jerusalem, just off the road to the airport. At dawn I’d have the taxi stop there briefly so that I could give to Aharon those last questions and then proceed on to the airport and London.

Why didn’t you just pretend to be his partner? Your error was derision. You’ll pay plenty for breaking those glasses.

By two that night I was so done in by the unsurpassable confusion of the day before, so unable any longer to assess the truth of anything amid all this turmoil, that these three sentences, softly uttered aloud by me while beginning to prepare for my dawn departure, I took to be spoken by Pipik from the other side of the door. The lunatic is back! He’s armed! And it was no less astonishing — and in its way more frightening — when, in the next instant, I understood that it was my own voice that I had heard and mistaken for his, that it was only me talking to myself as might any lonely traveler who’d found himself wide awake, far from home, in a strange hotel in the middle of the night.

I was suddenly in a terrible state. All that I had struggled to retrieve since the breakdown of the previous summer rapidly began to give way before an onslaught of overpowering dread. I was all at once terrified that I did not have the strength to hold myself together very much longer and that I would be carried off into some new nightmare of disintegration unless I could forcibly stop this unraveling with my few remaining ounces of self-control.

What I did was to move the bureau in front of the door, not so much anticipating that he would return and dare to use again the key to my room that was still in his pocket, but for fear that I might find myself volunteering to open the door to allow him to make some last proposal for a rapprochement. Watching out for my bad back, I slowly dragged the bureau away from where it was positioned opposite the bed and, turning back the oriental rug in the center of the room, edged it as noiselessly as I could along the tiles until it obstructed access to the door. Now I couldn’t possibly let him have at me, however entertaining, intimidating, or heartfelt his petition to reenter. Using the bureau to block the door was the second-best precaution I could think to take against my own stupidity; the first was flight, getting myself a thousand miles away from him and my demonstrable incapacity to contend on my own with the mesmeric craziness of this provocation. But for now, I thought, sit it out, barricaded in. Until the light came up and the hotel reawakened to life and I could leave the room accompanied by a bellhop and make my departure in a taxi drawn right up in front of the entrance, I would sit it out right there.

For the next two hours I remained at the desk in front of the window, fully aware of just how visible I was to anyone lurking in the street below. I did not bother to pull the curtains, since a piece of fabric is no protection against a well-aimed rifle shot. I could have pushed the desk away from the window and along the adjacent wall, but sanity balked here and simply would not permit a further rearrangement of the furniture. I could have sat up on the bed and composed from there my remaining questions for Aharon, but instead, to safeguard what little equilibrium I still possessed, I chose to sit as I have been sitting all my life, in a chair, at a desk, under a lamp, substantiating my peculiar existence in the most consolidating way I know, taming temporarily with a string of words the unruly tyranny of my incoherence.

Here, succumbing finally to my anxiety, I turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark. And soon I could see into the street below. And someone was there! A figure, a man, running across the dimly lit pavement not twenty-five feet from my window. He ran crouching over but I recognized him anyway.

I stood at the desk. “Pipik!” I shouted, flinging open the window. “Moishe Pipik, you son of a bitch!”

He turned to look toward the open window and I saw that in either hand he held a large rock. He raised the rocks over his head and shouted back at me. He was masked. He was shouting in Arabic. Then he ran on. Then a second figure was running by, then a third, then a fourth, each of them carrying a rock in either hand and all their faces hidden by ski masks. Their source of supply was a pyramid-shaped rock pile, a rock pile that resembled a memorial cairn and that stood just inside an alleyway across from the hotel. The four ran up and down the street with their rocks until the cairn was gone. Then the street was empty again and I shut the window and went back to work.

7 HER STORY

He’d taken nothing. Not even a sock was missing from the bureau drawer where I’d laid my loose clothing, and, in searching for the check that meant everything to him, he hadn’t disarranged a thing. He’d borrowed Tzili to read while waiting on the bed for my return but that seemed to have been the only possession of mine — my identity aside — that he had dared to touch. I began to doubt, while I packed my bag to go, if he actually had searched the room and, disturbingly for a moment, even to wonder if he had ever been here. But if he hadn’t come to claim the check as his, why had he risked my wrath (and perhaps worse) by breaking in?

I had my jacket on and my bag packed. I was only waiting for dawn. I had but one goal and that was to disappear. The rest I’d puzzle out or not when I’d successfully accomplished an escape. And don’t write about it afterward, I told myself. Even the gullible now have contempt for the idea of objectivity; the latest thing they’ve swallowed whole is that it’s impossible to report anything faithfully other than one’s own temperature; everything is allegory — so what possible chance would I have to persuade anyone of a reality like this one? Ask Aharon, when you say goodbye to him, please to be silent and forget it. Even in London, when Claire returns and asks what happened, tell her all is well. “Nothing happened, he never turned up.” Otherwise you can explain these two days for the rest of your life and no one will ever believe your version to be anything other than your version.

Folded in thirds in the inside pocket of my jacket were the fresh sheets of hotel stationery onto which I’d copied, in legible block letters, my remaining questions for Aharon. In my bag I had all our other questions and answers and all the tapes. I had managed despite everything to do the job, maybe not as I’d looked forward to doing it back in New York … I remembered Apter suddenly. Could I catch him at his rooming house on my way out of Jerusalem? Or would I find Pipik already waiting there, Pipik pretending to poor Apter that he’s me!

The lights were off in my room. I’d been sitting in the dark for half an hour, waiting at the little desk by the large window with my fully packed bag up against my leg and watching the masked men who had resumed their rock conveying directly below, as though for my singular edification, as though daring me to pick up the phone to notify the army or the police. These are rocks, I thought, to split open the heads of Jews, but I also thought, I belong elsewhere, this struggle is over territory that is not mine … I counted the number of rocks they were moving. When I reached a hundred I could stand it no longer, and I called the desk and asked to be put through to the police. I was told that the line was engaged. “It’s an emergency,” I replied. “Is something wrong? Are you ill, sir?” “Please, I want to report something to the police.” “As soon as I get a free line, sir. The police are very busy tonight. You lost something, Mr. Roth?”

A woman spoke from the other side of the door just as I was hanging up. “Let me in,” she whispered, “it’s Jinx Possesski. Something terrible is happening.”

I pretended not to be there, but she began rapping lightly on the door — she must have overheard me on the phone.

“He’s going to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son.”

But I had only my one objective and didn’t bother to answer her. You can’t make a mistake doing nothing.

“They’re plotting right this minute to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son!”

Outside the door Pipik’s Possesski, below the window the Arabs in ski masks running rocks — I closed my eyes to compose in my head a last question to leave with Aharon before I flew off. Living in this society, you are bombarded by news and political disputation. Yet, as a novelist, you have, by and large, pushed aside the Israeli daily turbulence —

“Mr. Roth, they intend to do it!”

— in order to contemplate markedly different Jewish predicaments. What does this turbulence mean to a novelist like yourself? How does being a citizen of —

Jinx was softly sobbing now. “He wears this. Walesa gave it to him. Mr. Roth, you’ve got to help …”

— of this self-revealing, self-asserting, self-challenging, self-legendizing society affect your writing life? Does this news-producing reality ever tempt your imagination?

“This will be the end of him.”

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn’t restrain myself and spoke my mind. “Good!”

“It’ll destroy everything he’s done.”

“Perfect!”

“You must take some responsibility.”

“None!”

Meanwhile I had got down on my hands and knees and was trying to reach under the bureau to see what she had pushed beneath the door. I was able, finally, to fish it out with my shoe.

A jagged piece of fabric about the size of my hand and as weightless as a swatch of gauze — a cloth Star of David, something I’d only seen before in those photographs of pedestrians on the streets of occupied Europe, Jews tagged as Jews with a bit of yellow material. This surprise shouldn’t have exasperated me more than anything else issuing from Pipik’s excesses but it did, it exasperated me violently. Stop. Breathe. Think. His pathology is his, not yours. Treat it with realistic humor — and go! But instead I gave way to my feelings. Hold off, hold off, but I couldn’t — there seemed no way for me to treat the appearance of this tragic memento as just a harmless amusement. There was absolutely nothing he wouldn’t turn into a farce. A blasphemer even of this. I cannot endure him.

“Who is this madman! Tell me who this madman is!”

“I will! Let me in!”

“Everything! The truth!”

“All I know! I will!”

“You’re alone?”

“All alone. I am. I swear to you I am.”

“Wait.”

Stop. Breathe. Think. But I did instead what I’d decided not to do until it was time to make a safe exit. I edged the big bureau away from the door just enough to open it, and then I unlocked the door and let squeeze into the room the coconspirator he had sent to entice me, dressed for those pickup bars where the oncology nurses used to go to irrigate themselves of all that death and dying back when Jinx Possesski was still a full-fledged, unreclaimed hater of Jews. Big dark glasses covered half her face, and the black dress she was wearing couldn’t have made her look any shapelier. She couldn’t have looked any shapelier without it. It was a great cheap dress. Lots of lipstick, the unkempt pale pile of Polish cornsilk, and enough of her protruding for me to conclude not only that she was up to no good but that it may not have been my terrible temper alone that had enjoined me from stopping and breathing and thinking, that I had let Jinx past my barricade because I was up to no good myself and had been for some time now. It occurred to me, friends, when she wriggled through the door and then turned the key to lock us in — and him out? — that I should never have left the front stoop in Newark. I never longed so passionately, not for her, not that quite yet, but for my life before impersonation and imitation and twofoldedness set in, life before self- mockery and self-idealization (and the idealization of the mockery; and the mockery of the idealization; and the idealization of the idealization; and the mockery of the mockery), before the alternating exaltations of hyperobjectivity and hypersubjectivity (and the hyper- objectivity about the hypersubjectivity; and the hypersubjectivity about the hyperobjectivity), back when what was outside was outside and what was inside was inside, when everything still divided cleanly and nothing happened that couldn’t be explained. I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, had been the same since.

I didn’t want this temptress, I wanted to be ten; despite a lifelong determinedly antinostalgic stance, I wanted to be ten and back in the neighborhood when life was not yet a blind passage out but still like baseball, where you came home, and when the voluptuous earthliness of women other than my mamma was nothing I yet wished to gorge myself on.

“Mr. Roth, he’s waiting to hear from Meir Kahane. They’re going to do it. Somebody has to stop them!”

“Why did you bring this?” I said, angrily thrusting the yellow star in her face.

“I told you. Walesa gave it to him. In Gdansk. Philip wept. Now he wears it under his shirt.”

“The truth! The truth! Why at three in the morning do you come with this star and this story? How did you get this far anyway? How did you pass the desk downstairs? How do you get across Jerusalem at this hour, with all this danger and dressed like fucking Jezebel? This is a city seething with hatred, the violence will be terrible, it’s dreadful already, and look at how he sent you here! Look at how he’s fitted you out in this femme fatale Bond movie get-up! The man has got the instincts of a pimp! Forget the crazy Arabs — a crazy pack of pious Jews could have stoned you to death in this dress!”

“But they are going to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son and send him back piece by piece until Demjanjuk confesses! They’re writing Demjanjuk’s confession right now. They say to Philip, You, writer — do it good!’ Toe by toe, finger by finger, eyeball by eyeball, until his father speaks the truth, they are going to torture the son. Religious people in skullcaps, and you should hear what they are saying — and Philip sits there writing the confession! Kahane! Philip is anti-Kahane, calls him a savage, and he’s sitting there waiting for a phone call from the savage fanatic he hates most in the world!”

“Answer me please with the truth. Why did he send you here in this dress? With this star? How does a person like him come about? The chicanery is inexhaustible.”

“I ran! I told him, ‘I cannot listen anymore. I cannot watch you destroy everything!’ I ran away!”

“To me.”

“You must give him back the check!”

“I lost the check. I don’t have the check. I told him that. Something untoward happened. Certainly the girlfriend of your boyfriend can understand that. The check is gone.”

“But your keeping the money is what’s making him wild! Why did you accept Mr. Smilesburger’s money when you knew it wasn’t meant for you!”

I pushed the cloth star into her hand. “Take this with you and get out of here.”

“But Demjanjuk’s son!”

“Miss, I was not born to Bess and Herman Roth in Newark’s Beth Israel Hospital to protect this man Demjanjuk’s son.”

“Then protect Philip!”

“That is what I’m doing.”

“But it’s to prove himself to you that he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s out of his mind for your admiration. You are the hero, like it or not!”

“Please, with a dick like his he doesn’t need me for a hero. He was nice enough to come here to show it to me. Did you know that? He’s not particularly pestered by inhibitions, is he?”

“No,” she muttered, “oh, no,” and here she caved in and dropped to the edge of the bed in tears.

“Nope,” I said, “uh-uh, you two aren’t taking turns — get up and get out.”

But she was crying so pathetically that all I could do was to return to the easy chair by the window and sit there until she had exhausted herself on my pillow. That she was clutching that cloth star while she wept disgusted and infuriated me.

Down in the street the masked Arabs were gone. I didn’t seem to have been born to stop them either.

When I couldn’t any longer stand the sight of her with the star, I came over to the bed and pulled it out of her hands, and then I unzipped my suitcase and shoved it in with my things. I still have it. I am looking at it while I write.

“It’s an implant,” she said.

“What is? What are you saying?”

“It isn’t ‘his.’ It’s a plastic implant.”

“Oh? Tell me more.”

“Everything’s been cut out of him. He couldn’t stand how it left him. So he had the procedure. Plastic rods are in there. Inside the penis is a penile implant. Why do you laugh? How can you laugh! You’re laughing at somebody’s terrible suffering!”

“I’m not at all — I’m laughing at all the lies. Poland, Walesa, Kahane, even the cancer’s a lie — Demjanjuk’s son is a lie. And this prick he’s so proud of, come clean, in what Amsterdam doodad shop did you two find that nutty joke? It’s Hellzapoppin’ with Possesski and Pipik, it’s a gag a minute with you two madcap kids — who wouldn’t laugh? The prick was great, I have to admit, but I think I’ll always love best the Poles at the Warsaw railroad station ecstatically welcoming back their Jews. Diasporism! Diasporism is a plot for a Marx Brothers movie — Groucho selling Jews to Chancellor Kohl! I lived eleven years in London — not in bigoted, backwater, pope-ridden Poland but in civilized, secularized, worldly-wise England. When the first hundred thousand Jews come rolling into Waterloo Station with all their belongings in tow, I really want to be there to see it. Invite me, won’t you? When the first hundred thousand Diasporist evacuees voluntarily surrender their criminal Zionist homeland to the suffering Palestinians and disembark on England’s green and pleasant land, I want to see with my very own eyes the welcoming committee of English goyim waiting on the platform with their champagne. ‘They’re here! More Jews! Jolly good!’ No, fewer Jews is my sense of how Europe prefers things, as few of them as possible. Diasporism, my dear, seriously misses the point about the depths of the antipathy. But then, that shouldn’t come as news to a charter member of A-S.A. That poor old Smilesburger was nearly suckered by Diasporism’s founding father out of a million bucks — Well, I don’t think this Smilesburger is all there either.”

“What Mr. Smilesburger does with his money,” she shot back, her face rapidly melting down into the defeated grimace of a thwarted child, “is up to Mr. Smilesburger!”

“Then tell Mr. Smilesburger to stop the check, why don’t you? Go play the interceding woman with him. It’s not going to work here, so go try it with him. Tell him he gave the check to the wrong Philip Roth.”

“I’m crashing,” she moaned, “damn it, I’m crashing” and she grabbed the phone from the tin-topped table squeezed in by the wall at the inside corner of the bed and asked the clerk at the hotel switchboard for the King David Hotel. All roads lead back to him. I decided too late to wrestle the phone away from her. Among all the other things contributing to the disorganization of my thinking was the immediacy of her sensuality on that bed.

“It’s me,” she said when the connection was made. “… With him. … Yes I am. … His room! … No! … No! Not with them! … I can’t go on, Phil. I’m on the damn brink. Kahane is crazy, you said so, not me. … No! … I am crashing, Philip, I am going to crash!” Here she thrust the phone at me. “You stop him! You must!”

Because for some reason the phone was wired into the wall furthest from the door, the cord had to be pulled across the width of the bed and I had to lean directly across her to speak into the mouthpiece. Maybe that was why I spoke into the mouthpiece. There could be no other reason. To anyone watching us through that one big window, it would have been she and I who looked like coconspirators now. Propinquity and piquancy seemed as if one word derived from the single explosive root syllable Jinx.

“On to yet another hilarious idea, I hear,” said I into the telephone.

The reply was calm, amused, his voice my own restrained mild voice! “Of yours,” he said.

“Repeat that.”

“Your idea,” he said, and I hung up.

But no sooner was I off the phone than it was ringing again.

“Let it be,” I told her.

“Okay, that’s it,” she said, “that’s gotta be it.”

“Right. Just let it ring.”

The return trip to the chair beside the desk was one long temptation-ridden journey, rich with pleas to the baser yearnings for caution and common sense, a great deal of convulsive conflict compressed into a very short space, a kind of synthesis of my whole adult life. Seating myself as far as I could get in that room from this rash, precipitate complicity of ours, I said, “Leaving aside for the moment who you are, who is this antic fellow who goes around as me?” I signaled with a finger that she was not to touch the ringing phone. “Concentrate on my question. Answer me. Who is he?”

“My patient. I told you that.”

“Another lie.”

“Everything can’t be a lie. Stop saying that. It doesn’t help anyone. You protect yourself from the truth by calling everything you won’t believe a lie. Everything that’s too much for you, you say, ‘That’s a lie.’ But that’s denial, Mr. Roth, of what living is! These lies of yours are my damn life! The phone is no lie!” And she lifted the phone and cried into the mouthpiece, “I won’t! It’s over! I’m not coming back!” But what she heard through the receiver sucked the angry blood engorging her face all the way back down to her feet as though she’d been upended and “hourglass” were no mere metaphor with which to describe her shape. Very meekly she offered me the phone.

“The police,” she said, horrified and uttering “police” as she must once have heard patients freshly apprised of their chances repeat the oncologist’s “terminal.” “Don’t,” she begged me, “he won’t survive it!”

The Jerusalem police were responding to my call. Because the rock runners were gone I had now been put through to them — or maybe all phone lines had indeed been tied up earlier, unlikely as that still seemed to me. I described to the police what I’d seen from my window. They asked me to describe what was going on there now. I told them that the street was empty. They asked my name and I gave it to them. I gave them my U.S. passport number. I did not go on to tell them that someone bearing a duplicate passport, a counterfeit of mine, was at that very moment conspiring at the King David Hotel to kidnap and torture John Demjanjuk’s son. Let him try it, I thought. If she’s not lying, if he’s resolved, like his antihero Jonathan Pollard, to be a Jewish savior regardless of the cost — or even if the motive is merely personal, if he’s just determined to take a leading role in my life like the boy who shot Reagan to wow Jodie Foster — let the fantasies evolve grandiosely without my interference, this time let him overstep something more than just my boundaries and collide head- on with the Jerusalem police. I could not myself arrange a more satisfying conclusion to this stupid drama of no importance. Two minutes into it they’ll nab him in his bid for historical significance and that will be the end of Moishe Pipik.

She had closed her eyes and crossed her arms and laid them protectively over her breasts while I hung just inches above her talking to the police. And she remained like that, absolutely mummified, while I traversed the room and sat back down in my chair once again, thinking, as I looked at the bed, that she could have been waiting to be removed by the undertaker. And that made me think of my first wife, who, some twenty years earlier, at just about Jinx’s age, had been killed in a car crash in New York. We had embarked on a disastrous three-year marriage after she had falsified the results of a pregnancy test in the aftermath of our lurid love affair and then threatened suicide if I didn’t marry her. Six years after my leaving the marriage against her will, I’d still been unable to win her consent to a divorce, and when she was abruptly killed in 1968, I wandered around Central Park, the site of her fatal accident, reciting to myself a ferociously apt little couplet by John Dryden, the one that goes, “Here lies my wife: here let her lie!/Now she’s at rest; and so am I.”

Jinx was taller than her by half a foot and substantial physically in a rather more riveting way, but seeing her laid out in repose, as though for burial, I was struck by a racial resemblance to the square- headed northern good looks of my long-dead enemy. What if it was she risen from the dead to take her revenge … if she was the master-mind who’d trained and disguised him, taught him my mannerisms and how I speak … plotted out the intricacies of the identity theft with the same demoniacal resolve with which she’d dished up to the Second Avenue pharmacist that false urine specimen. … These were the thoughts lapping at the semiconscious brain of a fitfully dozing man struggling still to remain alert. The woman in the black dress stretched across the bed was no more the ghost of my first wife’s corpse than Pipik was the ghost of me, yet there was now a dreamlike distortion muddling my mind against which I was only intermittently able to mobilize my rational defenses. I felt drugged by too many incomprehensible events and, after twenty-four hours of going without sleep, I was shadowboxing none too deftly with an inchoate, dimming consciousness.

“Wanda Jane ‘Jinx’ Possesski — open your eyes, Wanda Jane, and tell me the truth. It is time.”

“You’re going?”

“Open your eyes.”

“Put me in your bag and take me with you,” she moaned. “Get me out of here.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, you know,” she said wearily, her eyes still closed, “the fucked-up shiksa. Nothing new.”

I waited to hear more. She wasn’t laughing when she said, once again, “Take me with you, Philip Roth.”

It is my first wife. I must be saved and you must save me. I am drowning and you did it. I am the fucked-up shiksa. Take me with you.

We slept this time round for more than just a few minutes, she in the bed, I in the chair, arguing as of old with the resurrected wife. “Can’t you even return from death without screaming about the morality of your position versus the immorality of mine? Is alimony all you think about even there? What is the source of the eternal claim on my income? On what possible grounds did you conclude that somebody owed you his life?”

Then I was put ashore again in the tangible world where she wasn’t, back with my flesh and Wanda Jane’s in the fairy tale of material existence.

“Wake up.”

“Oh, yes … I’m here.”

“Fucked-up how?”

“How else? Family.” She opened her eyes. “Low-class. Beer-drinking. Fighting. Stupid people.” Dreamily she said, “I didn’t like them.”

Neither did she. Hated them. I was the last best chance. Take me with you, I’m pregnant, you must.

“Raised Catholic,” I said.

She positioned herself up on her elbows and melodramatically blinked. “My God,” she asked, “which one are you?”

“The only one.”

“Wanna put your million on it?”

“I want to know who you are. I want to know finally what is going on — I want the truth!”

“Father Polish,” she said lightly, ticking off the facts, “mother Irish, Irish grandmother a real doozy, Catholic schools — church until I was probably twelve years old.”

“Then?”

She smiled at the earnest “Then,” an intimate smile that was no more, really, than a slow curling at the corner of the mouth, something that could only be measured in millimeters but that was, in my book, the very epitome of sexual magic.

I ignored it, if you can describe failing still to get up and leave as ignoring anything.

“‘Then?’ Then I learned how to roll a joint,” she said. “I ran away from home to California. I got involved with drugs and all that hippie stuff. Fourteen. Hitchhiked. It wasn’t uncommon.”

“And then?”

“‘And then?’ Well, out there I remember going through a Hare Krishna event in San Francisco. I liked that a lot. It was very passionate. People were dancing. People were very taken over by the emotion of it. I didn’t get involved in that. I got involved with the Jesus people. Just before that I had been going back to Mass. I guess I was interested in getting involved in some sort of religion. What exactly are you trying to figure out again?”

“What do you think I’m trying to figure out? Him.”

“Gee, and I thought you were interested in little me.”

“The Jesus people. You got involved.”

“Well …”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, there was a pastor, a very passionate little guy. … There was always a passionate guy. … I looked like a waif, I guess. I was dressed like a hippie. I guess I was wearing a long skirt, I had long hair. Little peasant outfit. You’ve seen ’em. Well, this guy gave an altar call at the end of the service, the first one I ever went to, and he asked whoever wanted to accept Jesus into his heart to stand up. The spiel is if you want peace, if you want happiness, accept Jesus into your heart as your personal savior. I was sitting in the front row with my girlfriend. I stood up. Halfway through standing, I realized that I was the only one standing. He came down from the altar and prayed over me that I would receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Looking back on it, I think I just hyperventilated. But I had some sort of rush, some sort of profound feeling. And I did begin to speak in some sort of language. I’m sure it was made up. It’s supposed to be communication with God. Without bothering with language. Your eyes are closed. I did feel a tingling. Sort of detached from what was going on around me. In my own world. Being able to forget who I was and what I was doing. And just do this. It went on for a couple of minutes. He put his hand on my head and I was thrilled. I think I was just vulnerable to anything.”

“Why?”

“Usual reasons. Everybody’s reason. Because of who my parents were. I got very little attention at home. None. So walking into a place where suddenly I’m a star, everybody loves me and wants me, how could I resist? I was a Christian for twelve years. Age of fifteen to the age of twenty-seven. One of those hippies who found the Lord. It became my life. I hadn’t been going to school. I had dropped out of school, and actually I went back to grammar school, I finished grammar school at sixteen in San Francisco. I had these breasts even back then and there I was with them, sitting at a grammar school desk next to all those little kids.”

“Your cross,” I said, “carried before instead of aft.”

“Sometimes it sure seems that way. The doctors were always rubbing up against me when we worked together. Anyway, I’d failed all my life in school and suddenly, tits and all, I started doing okay. And I read the Bible. I liked all that death-to-self stuff. I felt like shit already and it sort of confirmed my feeling of shit. I’m worthless, I’m nothing. God is Everything. It can be very passionate. Just imagine that somebody loved you enough to die for you. That’s big-time love.”

“You took it personally.”

“Oh, absolutely. That’s me all over. Yes, yes. I loved to pray. I would be very passionate and I would pray and I would love God and I would be ecstatic. I remember training myself not to look at anything when I was walking on the street. I would only look straight ahead. I didn’t want to be distracted from contemplating God. But that can’t last. It’s too hard. That would sort of dissipate — then I’d be overcome with guilt.”

Where had she disposed of all the “like”s and the “okay”s and the “you know”s? Where was the tarty, tough-talking nurse from the day before? Her tones were as soft now as those of a well-behaved ten- year-old child, the pitter-patter, innocent treble of a sweet and intelligent little ten-year-old who has just discovered the pleasures of being informative. She might have weighed seventy pounds, a freshly eloquent prepubescent, home helping her mother bake a cake, so unjaded was the voice with which she’d warmed to all this attention. She might have been chattering away while helping her father wash the car on a Sunday afternoon. I supposed I was hearing the voice of the abundantly breasted hippie at the grammar school desk who’d found Jesus.

“Why guilt?” I asked her.

“Because I wasn’t being as in love with God as He deserved. My guilt was that I was interested in things of this world. Especially as I got older.”

I saw the two of us drying the dishes in Youngstown, Ohio. Was she my daughter or my wife? This was now the nonsensical background to the ambiguous foreground. My mind, at this stage, was an uncontrollable thing, but then it was a marvel to me that I could continue to remain awake and that she and I — and he — could still be at it at four a.m. the next day — a marvel too that, listening to this lengthy story that couldn’t make a scrap of difference, I was only plunging further under their spell.

“Which things?” I asked her. “Which things of this world?”

“My appearance. Trivial things. My friends. Entertainment. Vanity. Myself. I was not supposed to be interested in myself. That’s how I decided to go into nursing. I didn’t want to go into nursing, but nursing was selfless, something I could do for other people and forget about what I looked like. I could serve Christ through being a nurse. This way I would still be in good with God. I moved back to the Midwest and I joined a new church in Chicago. A New Testament church. All of us attempting to follow Christ’s recommendations for living on earth. Love one another and be involved in one another’s lives. Take care of your brothers and sisters. It was total bullshit. None of it actually happened, it was just a lot of talk. Some people tried. But they never succeeded.”

“So what brought the Christianity to an end?”

“Well, I was working in a hospital and I started getting more involved with people I was working with. I loved people to take an interest in me because I was a waif. But twenty-five! I was getting old to be a waif. And then a guy I got involved with, a guy named Walter Sweeney, he died. He was thirty-four years old. Very young. Very passionate. Always that. And he decided that God wanted him to go on a fast. Suffering is very big, you see, a certain brand of Christian believes that God allows us to suffer to make us better servants of Him. Getting rid of the dross they call it. Well, Walter Sweeney got rid of the dross, all right. Went on a fast to purify himself. So that he could be closer to God. And he died. I found him in his apartment on his knees. And that always stayed with me, and that became the whole experience for me. Dying on his knees. Fuck that.”

“You slept with Walter Sweeney.”

“Yep. First one. I was chaste from about fifteen to twenty-five. I wasn’t a virgin at fifteen, but from fifteen to twenty-five, I didn’t even have a date. I got involved with Sweeney, then he died, and I got involved with another guy, a married man in the church. That had a lot to do with it too. Especially because his wife was a good friend of mine. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t face God anymore, so I stopped praying. It wasn’t long, maybe a couple of months, but long enough to lose fifteen pounds. I tortured myself about it. I liked the idea of sex. I never could figure out the prohibition on sex. I still can’t figure it out. What’s the big deal? Who cares? It was senseless to me. I went to a therapist. Because I was suicidal. But he was no good. Christian Interpersonal Therapy Workshop. Guy named Rodney.”

“What’s Christian Interpersonal Therapy?”

“Oh, it’s just Rodney talking to people. More bullshit. But then I met a guy who wasn’t a Christian and I got involved with him. And it was gradual. I don’t know how to make it any more clear. I grew out of it. In every sense.”

“So it’s sex that got you out of the church. Men.”

“It’s probably what got me in and, yeah, probably it helped to get me out.”

“You left the world of men and then you came back to the world of men. That’s the story you tell, anyway.”

“Well, that was certainly part of the world I left. I also left the world of my dismal family and the world of living chaotically. And then when I was strong enough, I was able to do things on my own. I went to nursing school. That was a big move for me away from Christianity. Part of what Christianity was about for me was about not thinking. About being able to go to the elders and ask them what I should do. And going to God. In my twenties I realized that God doesn’t answer. And that the elders are no smarter than I am. That I could think for myself. Still, Christianity saved me from a lot of craziness. It got me back to school, stopped me from doing drugs, from being promiscuous. Who knows where I could have ended up?”

“Here,” I said. “Here is where you could have ended up — where you ended up. With him. Living chaotically with him.”

You are not here to help her understand herself. Go no further. You are not the Jewish Interpersonal Therapy Workshop. It only looks that way tonight. One patient shows up, spends his hour telling you his favorite lies, then he exits, after exposing himself, and another materializes, takes possession of the pillow, and begins telling her favorite lies. The storification of everyday life, the poetry you hear on the Phil Donahue show, stuff she probably hears on the Donahue show, and I sit here as if I hadn’t heard the fucked-up-shiksa story from the Scheherazade of fucked-up shiksas; as if I hadn’t got myself morbidly enfolded in its pathos over thirty years ago, I sit and I listen as though to do so is my fate. In the face of a story, any story, I sit captivated. Either I am listening to them or I am telling them. Everything originates there.

“Christianity saved me from a lot of craziness,” she said, “but not from anti-Semitism. I think I really got into hating Jews when I was a Christian. Before, it was just my family’s stupid thing. Know why I started hating Jews? Because they didn’t have to put up with any of this Christian nonsense. Death to self, you have to kill yourself, suffering makes you a better servant of Him — and they laughed at all our suffering. Only allow God to live through you so that you become nothing more than a vessel. So I became nothing more than a vessel while the Jews became doctors and lawyers and rich. They laughed at our suffering, they laughed at His suffering. Look, don’t get me wrong, I loved being nothing. I mean I loved it and I hated it. I could be what I believed I was, a piece of shit, and get praised for it. I wore little plaid skirts, wore my hair in a ponytail, didn’t fuck, and meanwhile the Jews were all smart, they were middle class, they were fucking, they were educated, they were down in the Caribbean at Christmastime, and I hated them. That started when I was a Christian, and it just kept growing at the hospital. Now, from A-S.A., I understand why else I hated them. Their cohesiveness, I hated that. Their superiority, what the Gentiles call greed, I hated that. Their paranoia and their defensiveness, always being strategic and careful, always clever — the Jews drove me crazy just by being Jews. Anyway, that was my legacy from Jesus. Until Philip.”

“From Jesus to Philip.”

“Yeah, looks that way. Done it all over again, haven’t I? With him.” She sounded amazed. An amazing experience and it was hers.

And mine? From Jesus to Philip — to Philip. From Jesus to Walter Sweeney to Rodney to Philip to Philip. I am the next apocalyptic solution.

“And it’s only just dawning on you here,” I asked, “that he might constitute a bit of a relapse?”

“I was coasting along, you see, winging along there, being a nurse, seven years — I told you about all that, I told you about killing somebody —”

“Yes, you did.”

“But with him I didn’t know how to get out. I never know how to get out. One guy is battier than the other and I don’t know how to get out. My trouble is I get very passionate and ecstatic. It takes me a long time to get disillusioned with the whole unreality of everything. I guess I was still loving people taking an interest in me the way he took an interest in my anti-Semitism. Yeah, he did take over from Jesus. He was going to purify me like the church. I need it black and white, I guess. There’s really very little that is black and white, and I realize that the whole world is nothing but gray areas, but these mad dogmatic people, they’re kind of protection, you know?”

“Who is he? Who is this mad dogmatic person?”

“He’s not a crook, he’s not a fake, you’re all wrong thinking that. His whole life is the Jews.”

“Who is he, Wanda Jane?”

“Yeah, Wanda Jane. That’s me. Perfect little Wanda Jane, who has to be invisible and a servant. Jinx the Battler, Jinx the Amazon, Jinx who thinks for herself, who answers for herself, who makes decisions for herself and stands up for herself, Jinx who holds the dying in her arms and watches every kind of suffering a human being can suffer, Jinx Possesski who’s afraid of nothing and is like an Earth Mother to her dying people, and Wanda Jane who is nothing and is afraid of everything. Don’t call me Wanda Jane. It’s not funny. It reminds me of those people I once lived with in Ohio. You know who I always hated more than the Jews? Want to know my secret? I hated the fucking Christians. I ran and ran and ran until all I did was circle back. Is that what everybody does or just me? Catholicism goes very deep. And the craziness and the stupidity goes very deep. God! Jesus! Judaism makes my third great religion and I’m still not even thirty-five. I got a ways to go yet with God. I ought to sashay over tomorrow to the Muhammadans and sign on with them. They sound like they got it all together. Great on women. The Bible. I didn’t read the Bible — I would open the Bible and point, and whatever phrase I was pointing at would give me an answer. An answer! It was games. The whole thing is lunatic games. Yet I freed myself. I did it. I got better. I got born again as an atheist. Hallelujah. So life isn’t perfect and I was an anti-Semite. If that was the worst that I wound up, given where I began, that was a victory, for God’s sake. Who doesn’t have something they hate? Who was I harming? A nurse who shot off her mouth about Jews. So what. Live with it. But, no, still couldn’t bear being their offspring, still couldn’t stand anything if it came from Ohio, and this is how I got involved with Philip and A-S.A. I’ve just spent a year with a lunatic Jew. And didn’t know it. Wanda Jane didn’t know it until he got on the phone one hour ago and put in a call to Meir Kahane, to the absolute king of religious nuts, to the Jewish Avenger himself. I’m sitting in Jerusalem, in a hotel room, with three crazy bastards in skullcaps screaming all at once for Philip to write down Demjanjuk’s confession, screaming where they are going to take Demjanjuk’s son and how they are going to cut him up into little pieces and mail him back to his dad, and still I don’t understand. Not until he puts in that call to Kahane’s number does it dawn on me that I am living an anti-Semite’s nightmare. Everything I learned at A-S.A., right down the tube. A roomful of screaming Jews plotting to murder a Gentile child — my Polish grandfather who drove the tractor used to tell me that that’s what they did all the time back in Poland! Maybe you intellectuals can turn your noses up at this stuff and think that it’s all beneath you, but all this crazy stuff you think is trashy lies is just more life to me. Crazy stuff’s what most people I’ve known live with every day. It’s Walter Sweeney all over again. Dying on his knees — and I found him there. Imagine what that was like. You know what my Philip said when I told him about finding Walter Sweeney praying on his knees and dead of starvation? ‘Christianity,’ he said, ‘goyische nachis,’ and he spat. I just go from one to the next. Rodney. Want to know what it was, Rodney’s Christian Interpersonal Therapy? A guy who hadn’t even graduated high school, and Wanda Jane goes to him for therapy. Well, I got therapy, all right. Yeah, you guessed it. Don’t talk to me about that penile implant. Don’t make me talk about that.”

When she said “implant,” I thought of the way an explorer, concluding his epochal voyage, claims all the land he sees for the crown by implanting the royal flag — before they send him back in chains and he is beheaded for treason. “You might as well tell me everything,” I said.

“But you think everything is lies when it’s true, so terribly, terribly, terribly true.”

“Tell me about the implant.”

“He got it for me.”

“That I can believe.”

She was crying now. Rolling down her cheeks were plump tears that had all the fullness of her own beautifully upholstered frame, an embattled child’s enormous outpouring of pent-up tears, attesting to a tender nature that was simply indisputable now even to me. This raving madman had somehow got himself a wonderful woman, an out-and-out saint with a wonderful heart whose selfless life had gone monstrously wrong.

“He was afraid,” she said. “He wept and wept. It was so awful. He was going to lose me to some other man, a man who could still do it. He was going to lose me, he said. I would leave him all alone to die in agony with the cancer — and how could I say no? How can Wanda Jane say no when someone is suffering like that? How can a nurse who has seen all I’ve seen say no to a penile implant if that is going to give him the strength to fight on? Sometimes I think that I am the only one who follows the teachings of our Lord. That’s what I sometimes think when I feel him pushing that thing inside me.”

“And who is he? Tell me who he is.”

“Another fucked-up Jewish boy. The fucked-up shiksa’s fucked-up Jewish boyfriend, a wild, hysterical animal, that’s who he is. That’s who I am. That’s who we are. Everything’s about his mother.”

“Not really.”

“His mother didn’t love him enough.”

“But that’s out of my book, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I wrote a book, a hundred years ago.”

“I know that. But I don’t read. He gave it to me but I didn’t read it. I have to hear the words. That was the hardest part of school, the reading. I have a lot of trouble with my d’s and b’s.”

“As in ‘double.’”

“I’m dyslexic.”

“You’ve had a lot to overcome, haven’t you?”

“You can say that again.”

“Tell me about his mother.”

“She used to lock him out of the house. On the landing outside their apartment. He was all of five years old. ‘You don’t live here anymore.’ That’s what she would tell him. ‘You are not our little boy. You belong to somebody else.’”

“Where was this? In what city? Where was the father in all this?”

“Don’t know, he doesn’t say anything about the father. All he ever says is that he was always locked out by the mother.”

“But what had he done?”

“Who knows? Assault. Armed robbery. Murder. Crimes beyond description. I guess the mother knew. He used to set his jaw and wait on the landing for her to open up. But she was as stubborn as he was and wouldn’t give in. A little five-year-old boy was not going to be in charge of her. A sad story, isn’t it? Then it got dark. That’s when he folded. He’d start to whimper like a dog and beg for his dinner. She’d say, ‘Get dinner from the people you belong to.’ Then he’d beg to be forgiven six or seven times more and she would figure he was broken enough and open up the door. Philip’s whole childhood is about that door.”

“So this is what made the outlaw.”

“Is it? I thought it’s what made the detective.”

“Might be what made both. The angry boy outside the door, overcome by helplessness. Unjust persecution. What a rage must have boiled up in that five-year-old child. What defiance must have been born in him out there on that landing. The thing excluded. Cast out. Banished. The family monster. I am alone and despicable. No, that’s not my book, I don’t go anywhere like that far. I believe he got that from another book. The infant put out by his parents to perish. Ever hear of Oedipus Rex?”

Can I help it if I felt tickled with adoration for this beguiling woman on my bed when she said to me, gaily, with the Mae West slyness in her voice of the woman rich with amorous surprises, “Honey, even us dyslexies know about Oedipus Rex.”

“I don’t know what to make of you,” I said, truthfully.

“It’s not easy to know what to make of you, either.”

A pause followed, filled with fantasies of our future together. A long, long pause and a long, long look, from the chair to the bed and back.

“So. How did he settle on me?” I asked.

“How?” She laughed. “You’re joking.”

“Yes, how?” I was laughing now too.

“Look in the mirror someday. Who else was he going to settle on, Michael Jackson? I can’t believe you two. I see you guys coming and going. Look, don’t think this has been easy for me. It’s totally weird. I think I’m dreaming.”

“Well, not totally. It took some doing on his part.”

“Well, not much.” And that’s when I got that particular smile again, that slow curling upward at the corner of the mouth that was to me the epitome of sexual magic, as I’ve said. It has to be clear even to a small child reading this confession that from the moment I’d pushed back the bureau and let her slip into my room in that dress, I had been struggling to neutralize her erotic attraction and to eradicate the carnal thoughts aroused in me by the desperate, disheveled look of her recumbent on my bed. Don’t think it’d been easy for me, honey, when she’d moaned in a whisper, “Put me in your bag and take me with you.” But while drinking in the roman-fleuve of her baffled quest for guardianship (among the Protestants, the Catholics, and the Jews), I had maintained as best I could the maximum skepticism. Charm there was, admittedly, but her verbal authority was really not great, and I told myself that, in any circumstance less drastic than this (if, say, I’d sidled up to her at one of those Chicago singles bars when she was a nurse hanging out), after five minutes of listening I would have been hard put not to try my luck with someone who wasn’t being endlessly reborn. Yet, all this said, the effect of her smile was to make me tumescent.

I didn’t know what to make of her. A woman forged by the commonplace at its most cruelly ridiculous smiles up from a hotel bed at a man who has every reason in the world to be nowhere near her, a man to whom she is the mate in no way whatsoever, and the man is underground with Persephone. You are in awe of eros’s mythological depths when something like that happens to you. What Jung calls “the uncontrollability of real things,” what a registered nurse just calls “life.”

“We aren’t indistinguishable, you know.”

“That word. That’s the word. He uses it a hundred times a day. ‘We’re indistinguishable.’ He’s looking in the mirror and that’s what he says — ‘We’re indistinguishable.’”

“Well, we’re not,” I informed her, “not by a long shot.”

“No? What is it then, you’ve got a different Life line? I do palmistry. I learned it once, hitchhiking. I read palms instead of books.”

And I did next the stupidest thing I’d yet done in Jerusalem and perhaps in my entire life. I got up from the chair by the window and stepped across to the bed and took hold of the hand that she was extending. I placed my hand in hers, in the nurse’s hand that had been everywhere, the nurse’s tabooless, transgressive hand, and she ran her thumb lightly along my palm and then palpated in turn each of its cushioned corners. For at least a full minute she said only, “Ummm … ummm …,” all the while carefully studying my hand. “It’s not surprising,” she finally told me very, very quietly, as though not to awaken a third person in the bed, “that the Head line is surprisingly long and deep. Your Head line is the strongest line in the hand. It’s a Head line dominated by imagination rather than by money or heart or reason or intellect. There’s a strong warlike component to your Fate line. Your Fate line sort of rises in the Mount of Mars. You actually have three Fate lines. Which is very unusual. Most people don’t have any.”

“How many does your boyfriend have?”

“Only one.”

And I was thinking, If you want to get killed, if you are determined to die on your knees like Walter Sweeney, then this is the way to get the job done. This palm reader is his treasure. This recovering anti-Semite fingering your Fate line is that madman’s prize!

“All of these lines from the Mount of Venus into your Life line indicate how deeply you’re ruled by your passions. The deep, deep clear lines on this part of the hand — see? — intersect with the Life line. They actually aren’t crossed, which means that rather than passion bringing you misfortune, it doesn’t. If they were crossed, I’d say that in you sexual appetite leads to decadence and corruption. But that’s not true. Your sexual appetite is quite pure.”

“What do you know,” I replied, thinking, Do this and he will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and kill you. You should have fled. You didn’t need her answers to all your questions. Her answers are as useless to you if they are true as they are if they are false. This is his trap, I thought, just as she looked up into my face with that smile that was her Fate line and said, “It’s all such complete bullshit but it’s sort of fun — you know?” Stop. Breathe. Think. She believes you are in possession of Smilesburger’s million and is simply changing sides. Anything could be happening and you’d be the last to know.

“It’s sort of the hand of a … I mean if I didn’t know anything about you, if I were reading the hands of a stranger and didn’t know who you were, I would say it’s sort of the hand of a … of a great leader.”

I should have fled. Instead I implanted myself and then I fled. I penetrated her and I ran. Both. Talk about the commonplace at its most ridiculous.

8 THE UNCONTROLLABILITY OF REAL THINGS

Here is the Pipik plot so far.

A middle-aged American Jew settles into a suite at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel and proposes publicly that Israeli Jews of Ashkenazi descent, who make up the more influential half of the country’s population and who constituted the original cadre that settled the state, return to their countries of origin to resurrect the European Jewish life that Hitler all but annihilated between 1939 and 1945. He argues that this post-Zionist political program, which he has called “Diasporism,” is the only means by which to avert a “second Holocaust,” in which either the three million Jews of Israel will be massacred by their Arab enemies or the enemies will be decimated by Israeli nuclear weapons, a victory that, like a defeat, would destroy the moral foundations of Jewish life for good. He believes that, with assistance from traditional Jewish philanthropic sources, he can raise the money and marshal the political will of influential Jews everywhere to institute and realize this program by the year 2000. He justifies his hopefulness by alluding to the history of Zionism and comparing his supposedly unattainable dream to the Herzlian plan for a Jewish state, which, in its own time, struck Herzl’s numerous Jewish critics as contemptibly ludicrous, if not insane. He concedes the troubling persistence of a substantial anti-Semitic European population but proposes to implement a massive recovery program that will rehabilitate those several tens of millions still powerless before the temptations of traditional anti-Semitism and enable them to learn to control their antipathy to their Jewish compatriots once the Jews have been re-rooted in Europe. He calls the organization that will implement this program Anti-Semites Anonymous and is accompanied on his proselytizing fund-raising travels by a member of the charter chapter of A-S.A., an American nurse of Polish and Irish Catholic extraction, who identifies herself as a “recovering anti-Semite” and who came to be influenced by his ideology when he was her cancer patient in the Chicago hospital where she worked.

The champion of Diasporism and founder of A-S.A. turns out to have had a prior career as a private detective, running his own small agency in Chicago, which specialized in missing-persons cases. His involvement with political ideas and his concern for the survival of the Jews and of Jewish ideals seems to date from the cancer battle, when he felt himself summoned to dedicate to a higher calling whatever life remained to him. (In addition, the conviction of the American Jew Jonathan Pollard as an Israeli spy sensitively positioned within the U.S. defense establishment — and Pollard’s coldhearted abandonment by his Israeli Secret Service handlers the moment his operation was compromised — seems to have had a strong effect on the formulation of his ideas, consolidating his fears for Diaspora Jewry so long as they are an expendable, exploitable resource to a Jewish state that, as he sees it, Machiavellianly exacts from them unquestioning loyalty.) Little is known of his earlier life other than that, as a young man, he conscientiously set out to disassociate himself from any social or vocational role that might mark him as a Jew. His acolyte mistress has spoken of a mother who disciplined him pitilessly as a small child, but otherwise his biography is a blank and, even in its sketchy outline, seems a story patched together by the same unhis torical imagination that dreamed up the improbabilities and exaggerations of Diasporism.

Now it so happens that this man bears a decided physical resemblance to the American writer Philip Roth, claims that Philip Roth is his name as well, and is not averse to playing upon this unaccountable, if not utterly fantastical, coincidence to foster the belief that he is the author and thus to advance the cause of Diasporism. Through this subterfuge he is able to convince Louis B. Smilesburger, an elderly, disabled Holocaust victim who has retired unhappily to Jerusalem after having made his fortune as a New York jeweler, to contribute to him one million dollars. But, when Smilesburger sets out to deliver the check personally to the Diasporist Philip Roth, who should he come upon but the writer Philip Roth, who had arrived in Jerusalem just two days earlier to interview the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. The writer is having lunch with Appelfeld at a Jerusalem café when Smilesburger locates him there and, mistakenly imagining that the writer and the Diasporist are one, approaches the wrong man with the check.

By this time the paths of the two look-alikes have already crossed not far from the Jerusalem courtroom where John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian American autoworker extradited to Israel from Cleveland by the U.S. Department of Justice, is on trial, accused of being the sadistic Treblinka guard and mass murderer of Jews known to his victims as Ivan the Terrible. This trial and the uprising against the Israeli government by the Arabs in the Occupied Territories — both events the subject of worldwide media coverage — constitute the turbulent backdrop against which the pair enact their hostile encounters, the first of which results in the writer Roth warning the Diasporist Roth that unless the impostor immediately repudiates his false identity he will be brought before the authorities on criminal charges.

The writer, still smarting from the inflammatory meeting with the Diasporist when Mr. Smilesburger appears at the café, impulsively pretends to be who he has been taken to be (himself!) and accepts Mr. Smilesburger’s envelope without, of course, realizing when he does so the improbable size of the donation. Later that day, following a perturbing visit, with a Palestinian friend from his graduate school days, to an Israeli court in occupied Ramallah (where the writer is again mistaken for the Diasporist and, to his own astonished dismay, not only allows the error to go unnoted for a second time but, afterward, at his friend’s home, fortifies it with an implausible lecture extolling Diasporism), he, the writer, loses the Smilesburger check (or it is confiscated) when a platoon of Israeli soldiers conducts a frightening search of the writer and his Arab driver as they are headed erratically back in a taxicab along the road from Ramallah to Jerusalem early that evening.

The writer, who some seven months earlier had suffered a frightening nervous breakdown presumably generated by a hazardous sleeping medication prescribed in the aftermath of a botched-up minor surgical procedure, is so perplexed by all these events and by his own incongruously self-subverting behavior in response to them that he begins to fear that he is headed for a relapse. The implausibility of so much that is happening even causes him, in an extreme moment of disorientation, to ask himself if any of it is happening and if he is not in his rural Connecticut home living through one of those hallucinatory episodes whose unimpeachable persuasiveness had brought him close to committing suicide the summer before. His control over himself begins to seem nearly as tenuous to him as his influence over the other Philip Roth, whom, in fact, he refuses to think of as “the other Philip Roth” or the “impostor” or his “double” but instead takes to calling Moishe Pipik, a benignly deflating Yiddish nickname out of the daily comedy of his humble childhood world that translates literally to Moses Bellybutton and that he hopes will at least serve to curb his own perhaps paranoid assessment of the other one’s dangerousness and power.

On the road from Ramallah, the writer is rescued from the soldiers’ hair-raising ambush by a young officer in charge of the platoon, who has recognized him as the author of a book he happened to have been reading that very day. To make amends to the writer for the unwarranted assault, Gal, the lieutenant, personally drives him by jeep back to his hotel in the Arab quarter of East Jerusalem, voluntarily confessing along the way — to one he clearly holds in high esteem — his own grave qualms about his unconscionable position as an instrument of Israeli military policy. In response, the writer launches into a renewed exposition of Diasporism, which strikes him as no less ludicrous than the lecture he gave in Ramallah but which he delivers in the jeep with undiminished fervor.

At the hotel the writer discovers that Moishe Pipik, having easily misled the desk clerk into thinking that he is Philip Roth, has gained access to his room and is waiting there for him on his bed. Pipik demands that Roth hand over to him the Smilesburger check. An agitated exchange follows; there is a calm, deceptively friendly, even intimate, interlude, during which Pipik discloses his adventures as a Chicago private detective, but Pipik’s anger erupts once again when the writer reiterates that the Smilesburger check is lost, and the episode concludes with Pipik, seething with rage and overcome by hysteria, exposing his erection to the writer as he is pushed and pummeled out of the room and into the hotel corridor.

So overwrought is the writer by this burgeoning chaos that he decides to flee Israel on the morning plane to London and, after barricading his door as much against his ineptitude in the face of Pipik’s provocations as against Pipik’s return, he sits down at the desk by the window of his room to compose a few final questions for the Appelfeld interview, which he plans to leave with Appelfeld when he departs at dawn for the airport. From the window he is able to observe several hundred Israeli soldiers, in a nearby cul-de-sac, boarding buses that will transport them to the rioting West Bank towns. Directly below the hotel, he sees half a dozen masked Arab men stealthily racing back and forth, moving rocks from one end of the street to the other; after completing his questions for Appelfeld, he decides that he must report this rock running to the Israeli authorities.

However, no sooner does he attempt, without success, to place a call to the police than he hears Pipik’s consort whispering tearfully to him from the other side of his barricaded door, explaining that Pipik, whom she gallingiy persists in calling Philip, is back at the King David Hotel plotting with Orthodox Jewish militants to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son and to hold him and mutilate him until Demjanjuk confesses to being Ivan the Terrible. She slides beneath the door a cloth star of the kind European Jews were forced to wear for identification during the war years, and when she tells the writer that Moishe Pipik has worn the star beneath his clothes ever since it was given to him as a present by Lech Walesa in Gdansk, the writer is so affronted that he loses emotional control and once again finds himself swallowed up in the very madness from which he had determined to disengage himself by running away.

On the condition that she disclose to him Moishe Pipik’s true identity, he unbarricades the door and lets her slip into the room. It turns out that she is herself in flight from Pipik and has crossed Jerusalem to call on the writer not so much in the expectation of recovering Smilesburger’s check, although she at first makes a feeble attempt at just that, or of persuading the writer to prevent the kidnapping of young Demjanjuk but in the hope of finding asylum from the “anti-Semite’s nightmare” in which, paradoxically, she has been ensnared by the zealot she cannot stop nursing. Tantalizingly stretched (outstretched, stretched out, sprawled, surrendered) across the writer’s hotel bed — hers now the second unlikely head to seek restitution on his pillow that night — and wearing a low-fashion dress that makes the writer as uncertain of her motives as of his own, she spins a tale of lifelong servitude and serial transformations: from the unloved Catholic child of bigoted ignoramuses into the mindless promiscuous hippie waif, from the mindless promiscuous hippie waif into the chaste fundamentalist stupefyingly subjugated to Jesus, from the chaste fundamentalist stupefyingly subjugated to Jesus into a death-poisoned Jew-hating oncology nurse, from a death-poisoned Jew- hating oncology nurse into an obedient recovering anti-Semite … and from this last way station on the journey out of Ohio, from this to what new self-mortification? What metamorphosis next for Wanda Jane “Jinx” Possesski and, too, for the mentally woozy, emotionally depleted, nutrient-deprived, erotically bedazzled writer who, having most rashly implanted himself inside her, discovers himself, even more perilously, half in love with her?

This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective. As if the look-alike at the story’s storm center isn’t farfetched enough, there is the capricious loss of the Smilesburger check (there is the fortuitous appearance of the Smilesburger check; there is Louis B. Smilesburger himself, Borscht Belt deus ex machina), which sets the action on its unconvincing course and serves to reinforce the writer’s sense that the story has been intentionally conceived as a prank, and a nasty prank at that, considering the struggles of Jewish existence that are said to be at issue by his antagonist.

And what, if anything, is there of consequence about the antagonist who has conceived it? What in his self-presentation warrants his consideration as a figure of depth or dimension? The macho livelihood. The penile implant. The ridiculously transparent impersonation. The grandiose rationale. The labile personality. The hysterical monomania. The chicanery, the anguish, the nurse, the creepy pride in being “indistinguishable” — all of it adding up to someone trying to be real without any idea of how to go about it, someone who knows neither how to be fictitious — and persuasively pass himself off as someone he is not — nor how to actualize himself in life as he is. He can no more portray himself as a whole, harmonious character or establish himself as a perplexing, indecipherable puzzle or even simply exist as an unpredictable satiric force than he can generate a plot of sequential integrity that an adult reader can contemplate seriously. His being as an antagonist, his being altogether, is wholly dependent on the writer, from whom he parasitically pirates what meager selfhood he is able to make even faintly credible.

But why, in exchange, does the writer pirate from him? This is the question plaguing the writer as his taxi carries him safely through Jerusalem’s western hills and onto the highway for the airport. It would be comforting for him to believe that his impersonation of his impersonator springs from an aesthetic impulse to intensify the being of this hollow antagonist and apprehend him imaginatively, to make the objective subjective and the subjective objective, which is, after all, no more than what writers are paid to do. It would be comforting to understand his performances in Ramallah with George and in the jeep with Gal — as well as the passionate session locked up with the nurse, culminating in that wordless vocal obbligato with which she’d flung herself upon the floodtide of her pleasure, the streaming throaty rising and falling, at once husky and murmurous, somewhere between the trilling of a tree toad and the purring of a cat, that luxuriantly articulated the blissful climax and that still sounded sirenishly in his ears all those hours later — as the triumph of a plucky, spontaneous, audacious vitality over paranoia and fear, as a heartening manifestation of an artist’s inexhaustible playfulness and of an irrepressibly comic fitness for life. It would be comforting to think that those episodes encapsulate whatever true freedom of spirit is his, that embodied in the impersonation is the distinctively personal form that his fortitude takes and that he has no reason at this stage of life to be bewildered by or ashamed of. It would be comforting to think that, far from having pathologically toyed with an explosive situation (with George, Gal, or Jinx) or having been polluted by an infusion of the very extremism by which he feels so menaced and from which he is now in flight, he has answered the challenge of Moishe Pipik with exactly the parodie defiance it warrants. It would be comforting to think that, within the confines of a plot over which he’s had no authorial control, he has not demeaned or disgraced himself unduly and that his serious blunders and miscalculations have resulted largely from a sentimental excess of compassion for his enemy’s ailments rather than from a mind (his own) too unhinged by the paranoid threat to be able to think out an effective counterplot in which to subsume the Pipikesque imbecility. It would be comforting, it would be only natural, to assume that in a narrative contest (in the realistic mode) with this impostor, the real writer would easily emerge as inventive champion, scoring overwhelming victories in Sophistication of Means, Subtlety of Effects, Cunningness of Structure, Ironic Complexity, Intellectual Interest, Psychological Credibility, Verbal Precision, and Overall Verisimilitude; but instead the Jerusalem Gold Medal for Vivid Realism has gone to a narrative klutz who takes the cake for wholesale indifference to the traditional criteria for judgment in every category of the competition. His artifice is phony to the core, a hysterical caricature of the art of illusion, hyperbole fueled by perversity (and perhaps even insanity), exaggeration as the principle of invention, everything progressively overdrawn, super-simplified, divorced from the concrete evidence of the mind and the senses — and yet he wins! Well, let him. See him not as a terrifying incubus insufficiently existent who manufactures his being cannibalistically, not as a demoniacal amnesiac who is hiding from himself in you and can only experience himself if he experiences himself as someone else, not as something half-born or half-dead or half-crazed or half-charlatan/half-psychopath — see this bisected thing as the achievement that he is and grant him the victory graciously. The plot that prevails is Pipik’s. He wins, you lose, go home — better to relinquish the Medal for Vivid Realism, however unjustly, to fifty percent of a man than to be defeated in the struggle for recovery of your own stability and to wind up again fifty percent of yourself. Demjanjuk’s son will or will not be kidnapped and tortured through Pipik’s plotting whether you remain in Jerusalem or are back in London. Should it happen while you’re here, the newspaper stories will bear not only your name as the perpetrator but your picture and your bio in a sidebar; if you are not here, however, if you are there, then there will be a minimum of confusion all around when he is tracked to his Dead Sea cave and caught with the captive and with his bearded accomplices. That he is determined to actualize a thought that merely passed through your mind when you first saw young Demjanjuk unprotected cannot possibly impute culpability to you, however strenuously he attributes to you the prize-winning plot and claims, once his interrogation begins, merely to be the Chicago hired gun, the private detective engaged for a fee to enact, as stand-in, as Stuntman, your drastic self-intoxicated melodrama of justice and revenge. Of course, there will be those who will be only too thrilled to believe him. It won’t be hard for them either: they’ll blame it (compassionately, no doubt) on your Halcion madness the way Jekyll blamed Hyde on his drugs; they’ll say, “He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown — not even he was that dreadful a novelist.”

But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising — didn’t make it to the airport, didn’t even get as far as Aharon’s house — and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I’d seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. This cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel. I thought, When he starts slicing off the boy’s toes and mailing them one at a time to Demjanjuk’s cell, the Guardian will have a field day. Demjanjuk’s lawyers had already challenged the integrity of the proceedings publicly, daring to announce to three Jewish judges in a Jewish courtroom that the prosecution of John Demjanjuk for crimes committed at Treblinka had the characteristics of nothing less than the Dreyfus trial. Wouldn’t the kidnapping dramatically underscore this claim as it was even less delicately made by Demjanjuk’s Ukrainian supporters in America and Canada and by his defenders, left- and right-wing, in the Western press — namely that it was impossible for anyone with a name suffixed juk to receive justice from Jews, that Demjanjuk was the Jews’ scapegoat, that the Jewish state was a lawless state, that the “show trial” convened in Jerusalem was intended to perpetuate the self-justifying Jewish myth of victimization, that revenge alone was the Jews’ objective? To drum up world sympathy for their client and to bolster their allegations of bias and prejudgment, Demjanjuk’s supporters could not themselves have hit on a publicity stunt more brilliant than the one that Moishe Pipik was planning to perform in order to vent his rage with me.

If it hadn’t been so infuriatingly clear that it was I who was the challenge he meant to defy, that this crazy kidnapping, potentially damaging to a cause perhaps even more poignant than his own, originated in his single-minded fixation on me, I might have told the driver to take me not to the King David Hotel but directly to the Jerusalem police. If it hadn’t seemed to me that I had been humiliatingly outfoxed at every turn by an adversary who was in no way my equal and that I had compounded my ineptness by unthinkingly accepting Smilesburger’s check — and subsequently elaborated on that error by failing to grasp the scale of the West Bank conflict and getting myself caught after dark on the Ramallah road by an Israeli patrol in no mood to observe the niceties of a legal search — I might not have felt that it was now incumbent on me, and on me alone, to face down this bastard once and for all. This is as far as his pathology goes. As far as mine goes. I’d overmagnified the menace of him from the start. You don’t have to call out the Israeli marines, I told myself, to put an end to Moishe Pipik. He’s got a foot in the grave already. All he needs is a little push. It’s simple: crush him.

Crush him. I was indignant enough to think that I could. I certainly knew that I should. Our moment had arrived, the face-to-face showdown between just the two of us: the genuine versus the fake, the responsible versus the reckless, the serious versus the superficial, the resilient versus the ravaged, the multiform versus the monomaniacal, the accomplished versus the unfulfilled, the imaginative versus the escapist, the literate versus the unschooled, the judicious versus the fanatic, the essential versus the superfluous, the constructive versus the useless. …

The taxi waited for me in the circular drive outside the King David Hotel while, at this early hour, the armed security guard at the hotel door accompanied me to the front desk. I repeated to the desk clerk what I’d told the guard: Mr. Roth was expecting me.

The clerk smiled. “Your brother.”

I nodded.

“Twin.”

I nodded again. Why not?

“He is gone. No longer with us.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Your brother left half an hour ago.”

Meema Gitcha’s words exactly!

“They all left?” I asked. “Our Orthodox cousins, too?”

“He was alone, sir.”

“No. Couldn’t be. I was to meet him here with our cousins. Three bearded men in yarmulkes.”

“Not tonight, Mr. Roth.”

“They didn’t show up,” I said.

“I don’t believe so, sir.”

“And he’s gone. At four-thirty. And not coming back. No message for me.”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“I believe to Romania.”

“At four-thirty in the morning. Of course. And did Meir Kahane visit my brother tonight, by any chance? You know who I mean? Rabbi Meir Kahane?”

“I know who Rabbi Kahane is, sir. Rabbi Kahane was not in the hotel.”

I asked if I might use the pay phone across the lobby. I dialed the American Colony and asked for my old room. I had told the clerk there, after paying the bill, that my wife was asleep and would be leaving in the morning. But it turned out that she had left already.

“You’re sure?” I asked him.

“Mister and Missus. They’re both gone.”

I hung up, waited a minute, and phoned the hotel again.

“Mr. Demjanjuk’s room,” I said.

“Who is calling, please?”

“This is the jail calling.”

A moment later I heard an anxious, sharp “Hello?”

“You all right?” I asked.

“Hello? Who is this? Who is this?”

He was there, I was here, they were gone. I hung up. They were gone, he was safe. They’d fled their own plot!

And that plot’s purpose? Only larceny? Or was the whole hoax merely that, a hoax, two crazy X’s off on a lark?

Standing at the phone and thinking that this entire mishap might just have come to a sudden end, I was more mystified than ever, wondering if these were two X’s who were themselves escaping the world or two X’s whom the world itself was escaping or two X’s who’d only been falsifying everything so as to befuddle me … though why that should be a goal of anyone’s was the most mystifying question of all. And it looked now as though I’d probably never know the answer — and as though what had enthralled me from the start was the question! Had they wanted only me to think that all their falseness was real, or had they themselves imagined it to be real, or was their excitement in creating the Pirandellian effect by derealizing everything and everyone, beginning with themselves? Some hoax that was!

I returned to the front desk. “I’ll take my brother’s room.”

“Let me give you a room that has not been occupied, sir.”

I pulled a fifty-dollar bill from my wallet. “His will be just fine.”

“Your passport, please, Mr. Roth.”

“Our parents liked the name so much,” I explained, passing it across the counter with the fifty, “that they gave it to both of us.”

I waited while he examined my photograph and recorded the passport number in the registration book. He handed the passport back to me without any comment. I then filled out the registration card and received the key to suite 511. The security guard had meanwhile returned to the front door of the hotel. I gave him twenty dollars to pay the taxi driver and told him to keep the change for himself.

For the next half hour, until it was dawn, I searched Pipik’s room and found nothing in any of the drawers, nothing on the desk, no notes on the notepad, no magazines or newspapers left behind, nothing beneath the bed, nothing behind the cushions of the armchair, nothing hanging in the closet or lying on the closet floor. When I peeled back the bedspread and the blanket, the sheets and pillow-cases were freshly ironed and smelled still of the laundry. No one had slept there since housekeeping had made up the room the previous morning. The towels in the bathroom were also fresh. Only when I lifted the toilet seat did I find a trace of his occupancy. A kinked spiral of dark pubic hair about the size of a fourteen-point ampersand adhered to the enamel rim of the bowl. I tweezed it loose between two fingernails and deposited it into a hotel envelope from the stationery drawer of the desk. I searched the bathroom floor for a strand of her hair, an eyelash, a snippet of toenail, but the tiles had been swept spotlessly clean — nothing there either. I got up off my knees to wash my hands in the sink, and it was there that I discovered along the lip of the basin, just beneath the hot-water tap, the minute filings of a man’s beard. I blotted them carefully into a square of toilet tissue — a scattering of maybe ten filings in all — folded the tissue in quarters, and put it into a second envelope. The filings could, of course, have been anyone’s — they could even have been my own; he could have found them when he was snooping around my hotel bathroom and, to seal our oneness, transferred them here to his. Having done everything else he’d done, why not that too? Perhaps even the pubic hair was mine. It certainly could have passed for mine, but then, with coils of stray pubic hair, it’s difficult often, using just the naked eye, to distinguish exactly whose is whose. Still, I took it — if he could disguise himself as the writer, I could pretend to be the detective.

These two envelopes, along with the cloth star and his handwritten “Ten Tenets of A-S.A.,” are beside me on the desk as I write, here to attest to the tangibility of a visitation that even I must be continually reassured was only cloaked in the appearance of a nonsensical, crude, phantasmagorical farce. These envelopes and their contents remind me that the spectral, half-demented appearance was, in fact, the very earmark of its indisputable lifelike realness and that, when life looks least like what it’s supposed to look like, it may then be most like whatever it is.

I also have here the audiotape cassette that, to my astonishment, I found when I went to play one of Aharon Appelfeld’s taped conversations with me on my return to London. It had been inserted in the very tape recorder that I’d locked away in the hotel closet at the American Colony and that I hadn’t opened or used since I’d stolen with my bag out of that room, leaving Jinx asleep in the bed. There is no way for me to explain how the cassette had got placed into my machine before I’d returned to the room other than to think that Pipik had picked the closet lock using the skills he had acquired as a tracer of missing persons. The handwriting on the label that looks so like mine is, of course, his; so is the voice babbling the toxic babble of the people who destroyed almost everything, the maddening, diseased, murderous arraignment that only sounds unreal. The label reads: “A-S.A. Workout Tape #2. ‘Did the Six Million Really Die?’ Copyright Anti-Semites Anonymous, 1988. All rights reserved.”

I leave it to readers of this confession to conjecture about his purpose and, in this way perhaps, to share something of the confusion of that week in Jerusalem, the extravagant confusion aroused in me by this “Philip Roth” by whom I was beset, someone about whom (as this recording confirms) it was impossible ever to say just how much of a charlatan he really was.

Here he is, the ritual impersonator, the mask modeled with my features and conveying the general idea of me — here he is, once again, exulting in being somebody else. Within that mouth, how many tongues? Within the man, how many men? How many wounds? How many unendurable wounds!

When my phone rang at almost eight a.m. I had been asleep in the chair beside it since I’d last checked on Demjanjuk’s son at about five-thirty. I had dreamed that I owed $128 million on my water bill. That was what my mind came up with after all I’d just been through.

On awakening I smelled something enormous putrefying. I smelled must and feces. I smelled the walls of a damp old chimney. I smelled the fermenting smell of sperm. I smelled her asleep in my trousers — she was that heavy, clinging, muttony stench and she was also that pleasingly unpleasing brackishness on the middle fingers of the hand that picked up the receiver of the ringing phone. My unwashed face was rank with her. Dipped in her. In everyone. I smelled of them all. The shitting driver. The fat lawyer. Pipik. He was the smell of incense and old, dried blood. I smelled of every second of every minute of my last twenty-four hours, smelled like the container of something forgotten in the refrigerator whose lid you pop open after three weeks. Not until I decompose in my coffin will I ever be so immensely pungent again.

The phone was ringing in a hotel room where nobody I knew knew that I was.

A man said, “Roth?” Again a man with an accent. “Roth? You there?”

“Who …?”

“The office of Rabbi Meir Kahane.”

“Wants Roth?”

“This Roth? I am the press secretary. Why do you call the rabbi?”

“Pipik!” I cried.

“Hello? This is the Roth, the self-hating Jewish assimilationist?”

“Pipik, where are you?”

“And fuck you too.”

I bathe.

Two words.

I dress in clean clothes.

Five words.

I no longer smell.

Four words.

Eleven words, and I no longer know if I ever did smell like my corpse.

And this, I thought, my mind already, first thing, careening around its densely overstocked little store of concerns, this is how Demjanjuk does it. Everything putrid in the past just snaps off and falls away. Only America happened. Only the children and the friends and the church and the garden and the job have happened. The accusations? Well, they might as well charge him with owing $128 million on the water bill. Even if they had his signature on the water bill, even if they had his photograph on the water bill, how could it possibly be his water bill? How could anyone use that much water? Admittedly he bathed, sprinkled the lawn, wet down the garden, washed the car, there was a washer-dryer, an automatic dishwasher, there was water for cooking, there were houseplants to water, there were floors to wash every week, they were a family of five, and five people use water — but does that add up to $128 million worth of water? You sent me the bill for the city of Cleveland. You sent me the bill for the state of Ohio. You sent me the bill for the whole fucking world! Look at me in this courtroom, under all this, and still at the end of the day all I have sipped from my glass is maybe three or four ounces of water. I’m not saying that I don’t take a drink of water when I’m thirsty, of course I do, and in the summertime I drink my fill after going out and weeding the garden. But do I look to you like somebody who could be wasteful of water to the tune of $128 million? Do I strike you as somebody who, twenty-four hours a day, thirty days a month, twelve months a year, year in and year out, is thinking about water and nothing else? Is water running out of my nose and my mouth? Are my clothes sopping wet? Is there a puddle where I walk, is there water under the chair where I sit? Pardon me, but you’ve got the wrong man. Some Jew, if I may say so, stuck six zeros on my bill just because I am Ukrainian and supposed to be stupid. But I am not so stupid that I don’t know my own water bill. My bill is one hundred and twenty-eight dollars — one — two — eight! There has been a mistake. I am just an average suburban consumer of water and I should not be on trial for this gigantic bill!

As I was leaving the room on my way to get something to eat before racing off to the trial, I suddenly remembered Apter, and the thought of him wondering if I had abandoned him, the thought of his vulnerability, of his lonely, fear-ridden, fragile existence, sent me back into the room to phone him, at least to assure him that he hadn’t been forgotten and that as soon as I possibly could, I would come to see him … but it turned out that I had seen him. It turned out that I’d had lunch with him just the day before: while Aharon and I had been eating together at the Ticho House, Apter and I had been eating together only a few blocks away at a vegetarian restaurant off Ethiopia Street where we’d always gone in the past for our meal together. It turned out that while Smilesburger was presenting me with his staggering contribution, Apter had been telling me again that he was afraid to go to his stall in the Old City for fear that the Arabs there would kill him with their knives. He was afraid now even to leave his room. And even in his bed, he lay awake, watchful all night long, afraid that if he were to so much as blink his eyes, they would steal through his window and devour him. He had cried and begged me to take him back with me to America, he had lost control of himself completely, bawling and shrieking that he was powerless and that only I could save him.

And I had acceded. At lunch with him I had agreed. He was to come to live in my barn in Connecticut. I had told him that I would build a big new room for him in the unused barn, fix up a room with a skylight and a bed and whitewashed walls, where he could live securely and paint his landscapes and never again have to worry about being eaten alive while he slept.

On the phone he wept with gratitude even as he reminded me of all that I had promised the day before … and so how could I tell him that it hadn’t been me? And was I even certain that it had been Pipik? It couldn’t be! It had to be Apter dreaming aloud, under the pressure of the Arab uprising; it had to be the eruption of the hysteria of a resourceless, deformed, infolded spirit on whom the grip of a horrible past was never relaxed, someone who, even without an insurrection in progress, hourly awaited his execution. It had to be Apter pining for that restful safety he could never possibly know, longing for the lost family and the stolen life; it had to be the unreality of the hysteria of this little blank-faced man shut off and in dread of everything, whose whole existence was shrinking; it had to be withdrawal and longing and fear — because if it wasn’t that and had indeed been Pipik conscientiously back at work pretending he was me, if it wasn’t either Apter cut loose from his tiny anchor to life and fantastically deluded or Apter openly lying, Apter simulating Apter so as to alarm me into understanding how fantastically deluded existing as Apter required him to be, if Pipik had really made it his business to hunt him down and take him to lunch and toy like this with Apter’s ruined life, then I’d been exaggerating nothing, then I was up against a purpose that was as diabolical as it was intangible, I was up against someone wearing my mask who wasn’t human at all, someone who could get up to anything in order to make things into what they were not. Which does Pipik despise more, reality or me?

“I won’t be a small boy — don’t worry, Cousin Philip. I’ll just be in the barn, that’s all.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and this was the only thing I was able to say.

“I’ll be no bother. I won’t bother anyone. I need nothing at all,” Apter assured me. “I’ll paint. I’ll paint the American countryside. I’ll paint the stone walls you told me about. I’ll paint the big maple trees. I’ll paint pictures of the barns and of the banks of the river.”

On he went, the whole load of his life falling away as he gave free rein, at fifty-four, to his naked need and the fairy tale it engendered of the perfect refuge. I wanted to ask, “Did this happen, Apter? Did he take you to lunch and tell you about the stone walls? Or has the violence so filled you with terror that, whether you know it or not, you are making all this up?” But even as Apter fell deeper and deeper under the spell of the dream of the unhaunted life, I heard myself asking Pipik, “Did you really do this to him? Did you really excite in this banished being who can barely maintain his equilibrium this beautiful vision of an American Gan Eden where he will be saved from the blight and din of his past? Answer me, Pipik!” Whereupon Pipik replied, “I couldn’t resist, I couldn’t do otherwise, neither as a Diasporist nor as a human being. Every word he spoke was filled with his fears. How could I deny him what he’s craved all his life? Why are you so outraged? What have I done that’s so awful? No more than any Jew would do for a frightened Jewish relative in trouble.” “And now you are my conscience, too?” I cried. “You, you are going to instruct me in matters of decency, responsibility, and ethical obligation? Is there nothing that you will not pollute with your mouth? I want a serious answer! Is there nothing that you will not befoul? Is there anyone you will not mislead? What joy do you take in raising false hopes and sowing all this confusion?”

I want a serious answer. From Moishe Pipik. And after that, how about peace on earth and goodwill among men? I want a serious answer — as who doesn’t?

“Apter,” I wanted to say, “you are out of contact with reality. I did not take you to lunch yesterday. I had lunch with Aharon Appelfeld, I took him to lunch. If you had this conversation at lunch yesterday, it was not with me. Either it was with that man who is in Jerusalem pretending to be me or it was perhaps a conversation with yourself — is it possibly an exchange you imagined?”

But every word he spoke was so filled with fear that I did not have the heart to do anything other than repeat “Yes” to it all. I would leave him to awaken by himself from this delusion … and if it was no delusion? I imagined myself ripping the tongue out of Pipik’s mouth with my own two hands. I imagined myself … but I could not give any more thought to the possibility that this was other than a delusion of Apter’s for the simple reason that I would have exploded.

That morning’s Jerusalem Post was outside my door when I left the room, and I picked it up and quickly scanned the front page. The first lead story was about the 1988 Israeli budget — “Worry over Exports Casts Shadow on New State Budget.” The second lead story concerned three judges who were to be put on trial and three others who were facing disciplinary action on charges of corruption. Situated between these stories was a photograph of the defense minister visiting the wall that George had tried to take me to see the day before, and beneath that were three stories about the West Bank violence, one datelined Ramallah and headed, “Rabin Inspects Wall of Bloody Beatings.” On the lower half of the page I spotted the words “PLO” and “Hezbollah” and “Mubarak” and “Washington” but nowhere the name “Demjanjuk.” Nor did I find my name. I ran quickly over the paper’s remaining nine pages while going down in the elevator. The only mention of the trial I could find was under the television listings. “Israel Channel 2. 8.30 Demjanjuk trial — live broadcast.” And further on, “20.00 Demjanjuk trial roundup.” That was all. Nothing calamitous was reported to have happened to any Demjanjuk in the night.

Nonetheless, I decided to skip breakfast at the hotel and to proceed immediately to the courtroom to be sure that Pipik was not there. I’d had no food at all since lunch with Aharon the previous noon, but I could pick up something at the coffee bar just off the entrance hall to the courtroom, and that would replenish me for now. I realized from the TV listings that the trial began much earlier in the day than I had thought, and I had to be there from the very first moment — I was bent on ousting him today, on supplanting him and taking charge completely; if necessary, I would sit in that courtroom through both the morning and the afternoon sessions so as to avert, before it could even get going, anything that he might still be plotting. Today Moishe Pipik was to be obliterated (if, by any chance, he hadn’t already been the night before). Today was the end of it: Wednesday, January 27, 1988 Shevat 8, 5748 Jomada Tani 9, 1408.

Those were the dates printed in a row beneath the logo of the Post. 1988. 5748. 1408. Agreement on nothing but the last digit, dissension over everything, beginning with where to begin. It’s no wonder “Rabin Inspects Wall of Bloody Beatings” when the discrepancy between 5478 and 1408 is a matter not of decades or even of a few little centuries but of four thousand three hundred and forty years. The father is superseded by the rivalrous, triumphant firstborn — rejected, suppressed, persecuted, expelled, shunned, terrorized by the firstborn and reviled as the enemy — and then, having barely escaped extinction for the crime of being the father, resuscitates himself, revives and rises up to struggle bloodily over property rights with the second-born, who is raging with envy and the grievances of usurpation, neglect, and ravaged pride. 1988. 5748. 1408. The tragic story’s all in the numbers, the successor monotheists’ implacable feud with the ancient progenitor whose crime it is, whose sin it is, to have endured the most unspeakable devastation and still, somehow, to be in the way.

The Jews are in the way.

The moment I stepped out of the elevator, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, jumped up from where they were sitting in the lobby and came toward me, calling my name. The girl was redheaded, freckled, on the dumpy side, and she smiled shyly as she approached; the boy was my height, a skinny, very serious, oldish-seeming boy, cavern-faced and scholarly-looking, who, in his awkwardness, seemed to be climbing over a series of low fences to reach me. “Mr. Roth!” He spoke out in a strong voice a little loud for the lobby. “Mr. Roth! We are two students in the eleventh grade of Liyad Ha-nahar High School in the Jordan Valley. I am Tal.° This is Deborah.°”

“Yes?”

Deborah then stepped forward to greet me, speaking as though she were beginning a public address. “We are a group of high school students that has found your stories very provocative in our English class. We read ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ and ‘Defender of the Faith.’ Both created question marks about the state of the American Jew. We wonder if it would be possible for you to visit us. Here is a letter to you from our teacher.”

“I’m in a hurry right now,” I said, accepting the envelope she handed me, which I saw was addressed in Hebrew. “I’ll read this and answer it as soon as I can.”

“Our class sent you last week, all the students, each one, a letter to the hotel,” Deborah said. “When we received no answer the class voted to send Tal and me on the bus to make our offer directly. We’ll be delighted if you accept our class’s offer.”

“I never got your class’s letters.” Because he had gotten them. Of course! I wondered what could possibly have constrained him from going out to their school and answering questions about his provocative stories. Too busy elsewhere? It horrified me to think about the invitations to speak he had received and accepted here if this was one he considered too inconsequential even to bother to decline. Schoolkids weren’t his style. No headlines in schoolkids. And no money. The schoolkids he left to me. I could hear him calming me down. “I wouldn’t dare to interfere in literary matters. I respect you too much as a writer for that.” And I needed calming down when I thought about him getting and opening the mail people thought they were addressing to me.

“First of all,” Tal was saying to me, “we would like to know how you live as a Jew in America, and how you have solved the conflicts you brought up in your stories. What’s with the ‘American dream’? From the story ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ it seems like the only way of being a Jew in America is being a fanatic. Is it the only way? What about making aliyah? In Israel, in our society, the religious fanatics are seen in a negative way. You talk about suffering —”

Deborah saw my impatience with Tal’s on-the-spot inquiry and interrupted to tell me, softly now, quite charmingly in that very faintly off-ish English, “We have a beautiful school, near the Kinneret Lake, with a lot of trees, grass, and flowers. It’s a very beautiful place, under the Golan mountains. It is so beautiful it is considered to be Paradise. I think you would enjoy it.”

“We were impressed,” Tal continued, “by the beautiful style of literature you write, but still not all of the problems were solved in our mind. The conflict between the Jewish identity and being a part of another nation, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, and the problem of double loyalty as in the Pollard case and its influence on the American Jewish community —”

I put a hand up to stop him. “I appreciate your interest. Right now I’ve got to be somewhere else. I’ll write your teacher.”

But the boy had come from the Jordan Valley on a very early bus to Jerusalem and had waited nervously in the lobby for me to wake up and get started, and he wasn’t prepared, having gotten up his head of steam, to back off yet. “What comes first,” he asked me, “nationality or Jewish identity? Tell us about your identity crisis.”

“Not right now.”

“In Israel,” he said, “many youngsters have an identity crisis and make hozer b’tshuva without knowing what they are getting into —”

A rather stern-looking, unsmiling man, very decorously — and, in this country, uncharacteristically — dressed in a dark double-breasted suit and tie, had been watching from a sofa only a few feet away as I tried to extricate myself and be on my way. He was seated with a briefcase in his lap, and now he came to his feet and, as he approached, addressed a few words to Deborah and Tal. I was surprised that he spoke Hebrew. From his looks as well as his dress I would have taken him for a northern European, a German, a Dutchman, a Dane. He spoke quietly but very authoritatively to the two teenagers, and when Tal responded, intemperately, in Hebrew, he listened without flinching until the boy was finished and only then did he turn his cast-iron face to me, to say, in English, and in an English accent, “Please, forgive their audacity and accept them and their questions as a token of the tremendous esteem in which you are held here. I am David Supposnik,° an antiquarian. My office is in Tel Aviv. I too have come to bother you.” He handed me a card that identified him as a dealer in old and rare books, German, English, Hebrew, and Yiddish.

“The annual teaching of your story ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ is always an experience for the high school students,” Supposnik said. “Our pupils are mesmerized by Eli’s plight and identify wholly with his dilemma despite their innate contempt for all things fanatically religious.”

“Yes,” agreed Deborah while Tal, resentful, remained silent.

“Nothing would give the students greater pleasure than a visit from you. But they know it is unlikely and that is why this young man has seized the opportunity to interrogate you here and now.”

“It’s not been the worst interrogation of my life,” I replied, “but I’m in a rush this morning.”

“I’m sure that, if you could see your way, in response to his questions, to sending a collective reply to all the students in the class, that would be sufficient and they would be extremely flattered and grateful.”

Deborah spoke up, obviously feeling as bullied as Tal did by the outsider’s unsought intervention. “But,” she said to me, pleadingly, “they would still prefer if you came.”

“He has explained to you,” said Supposnik, no less brusque now with the girl than he’d been with the boy, “that he has business in Jerusalem. That is quite enough. A man cannot be in two places at one time.”

“Goodbye,” I said, extending my hand, and it was shaken first by Deborah, then reluctantly by Tal before, finally, they turned and left.

Who can’t be in two places at one time? Me? And who is this Supposnik and why has he forced those youngsters out of my life if not to force himself in?

What I saw was a man with a long head, deep-set, smallish light-colored eyes, and a strongly molded forehead from which his light brown hair was combed straight back close to the skull — an officer type, a colonial officer who might have trained at Sandhurst and served here with the British during the Mandate. I would never have had him pegged as a dealer in rare Yiddish books.

Crisply, reading my mind, Supposnik said, “Who I am and what I want.”

“Quickly, yes, if you don’t mind.”

“In just fifteen minutes I can make everything clear.”

“I don’t have fifteen minutes.”

“Mr. Roth, I wish to enlist your talent in the struggle against anti-Semitism, a struggle to which I know you are not indifferent. The Demjanjuk trial is not irrelevant to my purpose. Is that not where you are hurrying off to?”

“Is it?”

“Sir, everybody in Israel knows what you are doing here.”

Just then I saw George Ziad walk into the hotel and approach the front desk.

“Please,” I said to Supposnik, “one moment.”

At the desk, where George embraced me, I found he was at the same pitch of emotion as when I’d left him the evening before.

“You’re all right,” he whispered. “I thought the worst.”

“I’m fine.”

He would not let me free myself. “They detained you? They questioned you? Did they beat you?”

“They never detained me. Beat me? Of course not. It was all a big mistake. George, relax,” I told him but was only able to secure my release by pressing my fists against his shoulders until we were finally an arm’s length apart.

The desk clerk, a young man who hadn’t been on duty when I’d checked in, said to me, “Good morning, Mr. Roth. How are things this morning?” Very jovially, he said to George, “This is no longer the lobby of the King David Hotel, it’s the rabbinical court of Rabbi Roth. All his fans won’t leave him alone. Every morning, they are lining up, the schoolchildren, the journalists, the politicians — we have had nothing like it,” he said, with a laugh, “since Sammy Davis, Jr., came to pray at the Wailing Wall.”

“The comparison is too flattering,” I said. “You exaggerate my importance.”

“Everyone in Israel wants to meet Mr. Roth,” the clerk said.

Hooking my arm in his, I led George away from the desk and the desk clerk. “Is this the best place for you to be, this hotel?”

“I had to come. The phone is no use here. Everything is tapped and taped and will turn up either at my trial or at yours.”

“George, come off it. Nobody’s putting me on trial. Nobody beat me. That’s all ridiculous.”

“This is a military state, established by force, maintained by force, committed to force and repression.”

“Please, I don’t see it that way. Stop. Not now. No slogans. I’m your friend.”

“Slogans? They didn’t demonstrate to you last night that this is a police state? They could have shot you, Philip, then and there, and blamed the Arab driver. These are the great specialists in assassination. That is no slogan, that is the truth. They train assassins for fascist governments all over the world. They have no compunctions about whom they murder. Opposition from a Jew is intolerable to them. They can murder a Jew they don’t like as easily as they murder one of us. They can and they do.”

“Zee, Zee, you’re way over the top, man. The trouble last night was the driver, stopping and starting his car, flashing his light — it was a comedy of errors. The guy had to take a shit. He aroused the suspicion of this patrol. It all meant nothing, means nothing, was nothing.”

“In Prague it means something to you, in Warsaw it means something to you — only here you, even you, fail to understand what it means. They are out to frighten you, Philip. They are out to scare you to death. What you are preaching here is anathema to them — you are challenging them at the very heart of their Zionist lie. You are the opposition. And the opposition they ‘neutralize.’”

“Look,” I said, “talk coherently to me. This is not making sense. Let me get rid of this guy and then you and I will have to have a talk.”

“Which guy? Who is he?”

“An antiquarian from Tel Aviv. A rare-book dealer.”

“You know him?”

“No. He came here to see me.”

All the while I explained, George looked boldly across the lobby to where Supposnik had taken a seat on the sofa, waiting for me to return.

“He’s the police. He’s Shin Bet.”

“George, you’re in a bad way. You’re overwrought and you’re going to explode. This is not the police.”

“Philip, you are an innocent! I won’t have them brutalizing you, not you too!”

“But I’m fine. Stop this, please. Look, this is the texture of things over here. I don’t have to tell you that. There is rough stuff on the roads. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is a mix-up, all right, but that’s between you and me, I’m afraid. You are not responsible. If anyone is responsible, I am responsible. You and I have to have a talk. You’re confused about why I’m here. Something most unusual has been happening and I haven’t been at all clever dealing with it. I confused you and Anna yesterday — I acted very stupidly at your house. Unforgivably so. Let’s not talk now. You’ll come with me — I have to be at the Demjanjuk trial, you’ll come with me and in the taxi I’ll explain everything. This has all gotten out of hand and the fault is largely mine.”

“Philip, while this court for Demjanjuk is carefully weighing evidence for the benefit of the world press, scrutinizing meticulously, with all kinds of experts, the handwriting and the photograph and the imprint of the paper clip and the age of the ink and the paper stock, while this charade of Israeli justice is being played out on the radio and the television and in the world press, the death penalty is being enacted all over the West Bank. Without experts. Without trials. Without justice. With live bullets. Against innocent people. Philip,” he said, speaking very quietly now, “there is somebody for you to talk to in Athens. There is somebody in Athens who believes in what you believe in and what you want to do. Somebody with money who believes in Diasporism for the Jews and justice for the Palestinians. There are people who can help you in Athens. They are Jews but they are our friends. We can arrange a meeting.”

I am being recruited, I thought, recruited by George Ziad for the PLO.

“Wait. Wait here,” I said. “We have to talk. Is it better for you to wait here or outside?”

“No, here,” he said, smiling ruefully, “here it is positively ideal for me. They wouldn’t dare to beat an Arab in the lobby of the King David Hotel, not in front of all the liberal American Jews whose money props up their fascist regime. No, here I’m much safer than in my house in Ramallah.”

I made the mistake then of returning to explain politely to Supposnik that he and I would not be able to continue our conversation. He did not give me a chance, however, to say even one word, but for ten minutes stood barely half a foot from my chest delivering his lecture entitled “Who I Am.” Each time I retreated an inch, preparatory to ducking away, he drew an inch closer to me, and I realized that short of shouting at him or striking him or streaking out of the lobby as fast as I could, I would have to hear him out. There was a commanding incongruousness about this Teutonically handsome Tel Aviv Jew who’d taught himself to speak English in the impeccable accent of the educated English upper class, and something also touchingly absurd about the bookish erudition of his hotel-lobby lecture and the pedantic donnish air with which it was so beautifully articulated. If I hadn’t felt that I was needed urgently elsewhere, I might have been more entertained than I was; in the circumstances, I was, in fact, far more entertained than I should have been, but this is a professional weakness and accounts for any number of my mistakes. I am a relentless collector of scripts. I stand around half-amazed by these audacious perspectives, I stand there excited, almost erotically, by these stories so unlike my own, I stand listening like a five-year-old to some stranger’s most fantastic tale as though it were the news of the week in review, stupidly I stand there enjoying all the pleasures of gullibility while I ought instead to be either wielding my great skepticism or running for my life. Half-amazed with Pipik, half-amazed with Jinx, and now this Shylock specialist whom half-amazing George Ziad had identified for me as a member of the Israeli secret police.

“Who I am. I am one of the children, like your friend Appelfeld,” Supposnik told me. “We were one hundred thousand Jewish children in Europe, wandering. Who would take us in? Nobody. America? England? No one. After the Holocaust and the wandering, I decided to become a Jew. The ones who harmed me were the non-Jews, and the ones who helped me were the Jews. After this I loved the Jew and developed a hatred for the non-Jew. Who I am. Someone who has collected books in four languages for three decades now and who has read all his life the greatest of all English writers. Particularly when I was a young student at the Hebrew University, I studied the Shakespeare play that is second only to Hamlet in the number of times it has been performed on the London stage in the first half of the twentieth century. And in the very first line, the opening line of the third scene of the very first act, I came with a shock upon the three words with which Shylock introduced himself onto the world stage nearly four hundred years ago. Yes, for four hundred years now, Jewish people have lived in the shadow of this Shylock. In the modern world, the Jew has been perpetually on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli — and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock. To the audiences of the world Shylock is the embodiment of the Jew in the way that Uncle Sam embodies for them the spirit of the United States. Only, in Shylock’s case, there is an overwhelming Shakespearean reality, a terrifying Shakespearean aliveness that your pasteboard Uncle Sam cannot begin to possess. I studied those three words by which the savage, repellent, and villainous Jew, deformed by hatred and revenge, entered as our doppelgänger into the consciousness of the enlightened West. Three words encompassing all that is hateful in the Jew, three words that have stigmatized the Jew through two Christian millennia and that determine the Jewish fate until this very day, and that only the greatest English writer of them all could have had the prescience to isolate and dramatize as he did. You remember Shylock’s opening line? You remember the three words? What Jew can forget them? What Christian can forgive them? ‘Three thousand ducats.’ Five blunt, unbeautiful English syllables and the stage Jew is elevated to its apogee by a genius, catapulted into eternal notoriety by ‘Three thousand ducats.’ The English actor who performed as Shylock for fifty years during the eighteenth century, the Shylock of his day, was a Mr. Charles Macklin. We are told that Mr. Macklin would mouth the two th’s and the two s’s in ‘Three thousand ducats’ with such oiliness that he instantaneously aroused, with just those three words, all of the audience’s hatred of Shylock’s race. ‘Th-th-th-three th-th-th-thous-s-s-sand ducats-s-s.’ When Mr. Macklin whetted his knife to carve from Antonio’s chest his pound of flesh, people in the pit fell unconscious — and this at the zenith of the Age of Reason. Admirable Macklin! The Victorian conception of Shylock, however — Shylock as a wronged Jew rightfully vengeful — the portrayal that descends through the Keans to Irving and into our century, is a vulgar sentimental offense not only against the genuine abhorrence of the Jew that animated Shakespeare and his era but to the long illustrious chronicle of European Jew-baiting. The hateful, hateable Jew whose artistic roots extend back to the Crucifixion pageants at York, whose endurance as the villain of history no less than of drama is unparalleled, the hook-nosed moneylender, the miserly, money-maddened, egotistical degenerate, the Jew who goes to synagogue to plan the murder of the virtuous Christian — this is Europe’s Jew, the Jew expelled in 1290 by the English, the Jew banished in 1492 by the Spanish, the Jew terrorized by Poles, butchered by Russians, incinerated by Germans, spurned by the British and the Americans while the furnaces roared at Treblinka. The vile Victorian varnish that sought to humanize the Jew, to dignify the Jew, has never deceived the enlightened European mind about the three thousand ducats, never has and never will. Who I am, Mr. Roth, is an antiquarian bookseller dwelling in the Mediterranean’s tiniest country — still considered too large by all the world — a bookish shopkeeper, a retiring bibliophile, nobody from nowhere, really, who has dreamed nonetheless, since his student days, an impresario’s dreams, at night in his bed envisioning himself impresario, producer, director, leading actor of Supposnik’s Anti-Semitic Theater Company. I dream of full houses and standing ovations, and of myself, hungry, dirty little Supposnik, one of the hundred thousand wandering children, enacting, in the unsentimental manner of Macklin, in the true spirit of Shakespeare, that chilling and ferocious Jew whose villainy flows inexorably from the innate corruption of his religion. Every winter touring the capitals of the civilized world with his Anti-Semitic Drama Festival, performing in repertory the great Jew-hating dramas of Europe, night after night the Austrian plays, the German plays, Marlowe and the other Elizabethans, and concluding always as star of the masterpiece that was to prophesy, in the expulsion of the unregenerate Jew Shylock from the harmonious universe of the angelic Christian Portia, the Hitlerian dream of a Judenrein Europe. Today a Shylockless Venice, tomorrow a Shylockless world. As the stage direction so succinctly puts it after Shylock has been robbed of his daughter, stripped of his wealth, and compelled to convert by his Christian betters: Exit Jew. This is who I am. Now for what I want. Here.”

I took from him what he handed me, two notebooks bound in imitation leather, each about the size of a billfold. One was red, and impressed on its cover, in white cursive script, were the words “My Trip.” The other, whose brown cover was a bit scratched and mildewed, was identified as “Travels Abroad” in gold letters that were stylized to look exotically non-Occidental. Engraved in a semicircular constellation around those words were postage-stamp-sized representations of the varied forms of locomotion that the intrepid wayfarer would encounter on his journey — a ship sailing along on the wavy waves, an airliner, a rickshaw pulled by a pigtailed coolie, bearing a woman with a parasol, an elephant with a driver perched atop his head and a passenger seated in an awninged cabinet on his back, a camel ridden by a robed Arabian, and, at the bottom edge of the cover, the most elaborately detailed of the six engraved images: a full moon, a starry sky, a serene lagoon, a gondola, a gondolier. …

“Nothing like this,” said Supposnik, “has turned up since the discovery at the end of the war of the diary of Anne Frank.”

“Whose are they?” I asked.

“Open them,” he said. “Read.”

I opened the red book. At the top of the entry I’d turned to, where there were lines provided for “Date,” “Place,” and “Weather,” I read “2-2-76,” “Mexico,” and “Good.” The entry itself, in legible largish handwriting inscribed with a fountain pen in blue ink, began, “Beautiful flight. A little rough. Arrived on time. Mexico City has a population of 5,000,000 people. Our guide took us through some sections of the city. We went to a residential section that was built on lava. The homes ranged from $30,000 to $160,000. They were very modern and beautiful. The flowers were very colorful.” I skipped ahead. “Wed. 2-14-76. San Huso De Puria. We had an early lunch and then went into the pool. There are 4 of them here. Each is supposed to have curative waters. Then we went to the Spa building. The girls had a mud pack on their faces and then we went into the mikva or baths. Marilyn and I shared one. It is called a family bath. It was the most delightful experience. All my friends should visit this place. Even some of my enemies. It is great.”

“Well,” I said to Supposnik, “they’re not André Gide’s.”

“It’s written whose they are — at the beginning.”

I turned to the beginning. There was a page titled “Time Keeping at Sea,” a page about “Changing the Clock,” information about “Latitude and Longitude,” “Miles and Knots,” “The Barometer,” “The Tides,” “Ocean Lanes and Distances,” “Port and Starboard,” a full page explaining “Conversion from US-$ into Foreign Currencies,” and then the page headed “Identification,” where all but a few of the blanks had been filled in by the same diarist with the same fountain pen.

“Now you see,” said Supposnik gravely.

“I do,” I said, “yes,” and opened the brown diary he’d given me. “9-3-79. Naples. Weather cloudy. Breakfast. Took tour to Pompeii again. Very interesting. Hot. Back to ship. Wrote cards. Had drink. Met 2 nice young people from London. Barbara and Lawrence. Safety drill. Weather turned nice. Going to Captain’s cocktail party in the swank [illegible] Room.”

“This is the Klinghoffer?” I asked. “From the Achille Lauro hijacking?”

“The Klinghoffer they killed, yes. The defenseless Jew crippled in a wheelchair that the brave Palestinian freedom fighters shot in the head and threw into the Mediterranean Sea. These are his travel diaries.”

“From that trip?”

“No, from happier trips. The diary from that trip has disappeared. Perhaps it was in his pocket when they tossed him overboard. Perhaps the brave freedom fighters used it for paper to cleanse their heroic Palestinian behinds. No, these are from the pleasant trips he made with his wife and his friends in the years before. They’ve come to me through the Klinghoffer daughters. I heard about the diaries. I contacted the daughters. I flew to New York to meet with them. Two specialists here in Israel, one of them associated with the forensic investigation unit of the attorney general’s office, have assured me that the handwriting is Klinghoffer’s. I brought back with me documents and letters from his business office files — the handwriting there corresponds to the diary handwriting in every last particular. The pen, the ink, the manufacturing date of the diaries themselves — I have expert documentation for their authenticity. The daughters have asked me to act as their representative to help them find an Israeli publisher for their late father’s diaries. They want to publish them here as a memorial to him and as a token of the devotion that he felt to Israel. They have asked for the proceeds to be donated to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, a favorite charity of their father’s. I told these two young women that when Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam from the camps after the war and found the diary kept by his little daughter while the Frank family hid from the Nazis in their attic, he too wanted it only to be published privately, as a memorial to her for a small group of Dutch friends. And as you well know, having yourself made Anne Frank into the heroine of a literary work, that was the modest, unassuming way in which the Anne Frank diary first appeared. I of course will follow the wishes of the Klinghoffer daughters. But I happen also to know that, like the diary of little Anne Frank, The Travel Diaries of Leon Klinghoffer are destined to reach a far wider audience, a worldwide audience — if, that is, I can secure the assistance of Philip Roth. Mr. Roth, the introduction to the first American publication of The Diary of Anne Frank was written by Eleanor Roosevelt, the much-esteemed widow of your wartime president. A few hundred words from Mrs. Roosevelt and Anne Frank’s words became a moving entry in the history of Jewish suffering and Jewish survival. Philip Roth can do the same for the martyred Klinghoffer.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.” However, when I made to hand back the two volumes, he wouldn’t accept them.

“Read them through,” Supposnik said. “I’ll leave them for you to read through.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t be responsible. Here.”

But again he refused to take them. “Leon Klinghoffer,” he said, “could very easily have been a man out of one of your books. He’s no stranger to you. Neither is the idiom in which he expresses here, simply, awkwardly, sincerely, his delight in living, his love for his wife, his pride in his children, his devotion to his fellow Jews, his love for Israel. I know the feeling you have for the achievement that these men, burdened by all the limitations of their immigrant family backgrounds, nonetheless made of their American lives. They are the fathers of your heroes. You know them, you understand them; without sentimentalizing them, you respect them. Only you can bring to these two little travel diaries the compassionate knowledge that will reveal to the world exactly who it was and what it was that was murdered on the cruise ship Achille Lauro on October 8, 1985. No other writer writes about these Jewish men in the way that you do. I’ll return tomorrow morning.”

“It’s not likely I’ll be here tomorrow morning. Look,” I said angrily, “you cannot leave these things with me.”

“I cannot think of anyone more reliable to entrust them to.” And with that he turned and left me there holding the two diaries.

The Smilesburger million-dollar check. The Lech Walesa six-pointed star. Now the Leon Klinghoffer travel diaries. What next, the false nose worn by the admirable Macklin? Whatever Jewish treasure isn’t nailed down comes flying straight into my face! I went immediately to the front desk and asked for an envelope large enough to hold the two diaries and wrote Supposnik’s name across it and my own in the upper left-hand corner. “When the gentleman returns,” I said to the clerk, “give him this package, will you?”

He nodded to assure me that he would, but no sooner had he turned to place the envelope in my room’s pigeonhole than I imagined Pipik popping up to claim the package for his own the moment after I’d departed for the courtroom. However much evidence there was that I had finally prevailed and that the two of them had abandoned the hoax and taken flight, I still couldn’t convince myself that he wasn’t lurking nearby, fully aware of everything that had just transpired, any more than I could be one hundred percent certain that he wasn’t already at the courtroom with his Orthodox coconspirators, poised to undertake the folly of kidnapping Demjanjuk’s son. If Pipik returns to steal these … well, that’s Supposnik’s hard luck, not mine!

Nonetheless I turned back to the desk from which I’d turned away and asked the clerk to hand me the package that I had only just deposited with him. While he watched with a barely discernible smirk suggesting that he, rather like me, saw in this scene great untapped comic potential, I tore it open, put the red diary (“My Trip”) into one of my jacket pockets and the brown diary (“Travels Abroad”) into the other, and then quickly left the hotel with George, who all this while, submerged in his malice, racked by God only knew what unendurable fantasies of restitution and revenge, had sat in a chair close by the door smoking cigarette after cigarette, observing the brisk stirrings of another busy day in the sedate, attractive lobby of a four-star Jewish hotel whose prosperous guests and resourceful staff were, of course, utterly indifferent to the misery caused him by their matter-of-factly manageable existence.

As we stepped into the bright sunlight, I surveyed the cars parked along the street to see if Pipik might be in one of them, hiding the way he’d hidden in his “vehicle” as a Chicago detective. I saw a figure standing on the roof of the YMCA building across the street from the hotel. It could be him, he could be anywhere — and for a moment I saw him everywhere. Now that she’s told him how I seduced her, I thought, he’s my terrorist for life. I’ll be sighting him on rooftops for years to come, just as he’ll be seeing me, sighted in the cross hairs of his rage.

9 FORGERY, PARANOIA, DISINFORMATION, LIES

Before stepping into the taxi I quickly checked out the driver, a tiny Turkish-looking Jew a foot and a half shorter than Pipik or me and crowned with ten times more wiry black hair than the two of us possessed together. His English was less than rudimentary, and once we were in the cab George had to repeat our destination to him in Hebrew. We were as good as alone in that cab, and so between the hotel and the courtroom, I told George Ziad everything that I should have told him the day before. He listened silently and, to my astonishment, did not seem startled or at all incredulous to learn that there had been another “me” in Jerusalem all the while he’d assumed that there was only the one with whom he had been to graduate school three decades earlier. He wasn’t even ruffled (he who enjoyed so few moments without his veins and arteries visibly vibrating) when I tried to diagnose for him the perverse impulse that had led me to masquerade before his wife and his son as the Diasporist fanatic tendering manic homage to Irving Berlin.

“No apologies necessary,” he replied in a calmly cutting voice.

“You are still who you were. Always on the stage. How could I have failed to remember? You’re an actor, an amusing actor performing endlessly for the admiration of his friends. You’re a satirist, always looking for the laugh, and how can a satirist be expected to suppress himself with a raving, ranting, slobbering Arab?”

“I don’t know these days what I am,” I said. “What I did was stupid — stupid and inexplicable — and I’m sorry. It was the last thing Anna and Michael needed.”

“But what about what you needed? Your comic fix. What do an oppressed people’s problems matter to a great comic artist like you? The show must go on. Say no more. You’re a very amusing performer — and a moral idiot!”

So no more was said by either of us during the remaining few minutes before we reached the courtroom, and whether George was a deluded madman or a cunning liar — or a great comic artist in his own right — or whether the network of intrigue he claimed to represent existed (and whether a man so out of control and continually at the breaking point could be its representative) I had no way now of finding out. There is somebody for you to talk to in Athens. There are people who can help you there. They are Jews but they are also our friends. … Jews bankrolling the PLO? Is that what he’d been telling me?

At the courthouse, when George hopped out of his side of the taxi before I even had a chance to pay the driver, I believed I’d never see him again. Yet there he was, already at the back of the courtroom, when I slipped inside a minute or two later. Quickly catching hold of my hand, he whispered, “You’re the Dostoyevsky of disinformation,” and only then proceeded past me to look for a seat by himself.

The courtroom that morning was less than half full. According to The Jerusalem Post, all the witnesses had been heard and this was to be the third day of the summing up. I could see clearly down to where Demjanjuk’s son was sitting in the second row, just to the left of the center of the hall and directly in line with the chair on the stage where his father was seated between his two guards and back of the defense counsel’s table. When I saw that in the row behind Demjanjuk junior nearly all the chairs were unoccupied, I made my way there and quickly sat down, as the court was already in session.

I’d got a set of earphones at the desk by the entrance door and, slipping them over my head, turned the dial to the channel for the English translation of the proceedings. It was a minute or two, however, before I could take in what one of the judges — the chief judge, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Levin — was saying to the witness on the stand. He was the first witness of the day, a compactly built, sturdy-looking Jewish man in his late sixties, whose substantial head — a weighty boulder onto which a pair of thick spectacles had incongruously been set — was stacked squarely atop a torso of cement building blocks. He wore slacks and a surprisingly sporty red and black pullover sweater, something in which a clean-cut young athlete might show up for a date, and his hands, a laborer’s hands, a dock- worker’s hands, hands that looked hard as nails, were fastened to the lip of the lectern with the impassioned, bottled-up nervous ferocity of a heavyweight bursting to catapult into battle at the sound of the bell.

His name was Eliahu Rosenberg and this was not his first round in court with Demjanjuk, as I knew from a startling photograph in the Demjanjuk clipping file that had caught my attention the day I’d arrived, one in which a friendly, grinning Demjanjuk is warmly offering Rosenberg his hand to shake. The photograph had been taken about a year before, on the seventh day of the trial, when Rosenberg was asked by the prosecution to leave the witness stand and step up to the defendant’s chair, some twenty feet away, to make his identification. Rosenberg had been called to testify as one of seven prosecution witnesses who claimed to recognize John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio, as the Ivan the Terrible they had known while they were prisoners at Treblinka. According to Rosenberg, he and Ivan, both men then in their early twenties, had worked in close proximity every day for nearly a year, Ivan as the guard who operated the gas chamber and supervised the detail of Jewish prisoners, the “death commandos,” whose job was to empty the gas chamber of corpses, to clean it of urine and excrement so as to make it ready for the gassing of the next shipment of Jews, and to whitewash the walls, outside as well as inside, so as to cover over the bloodstains (for Ivan and the other guards oftentimes drew blood while driving the Jews into the gas with knives and clubs and iron pipes). Twenty-one-year-old Eliahu Rosenberg, recently of Warsaw, was one of the death commandos, those thirty or so living Jews whose other job, after each gassing, was carrying on stretchers — running all the while at top speed — the naked corpses of the freshly killed Jews to the open-air “roast” where, after their gold teeth were extracted for the German state treasury by the prisoner “dentist,” the bodies were skillfully piled to be incinerated, children and women at the bottom for kindling, and men at the top, where they ignited more easily.

Now, eleven months later, Rosenberg had been surprisingly recalled, this time by the defense, in the midst of its summing up. The judge was telling Rosenberg, “You will listen carefully to the questions put to you and you will reply and confine yourself to the questions put to you. You will not enter into polemics nor will you lose your self-control as, unfortunately, happened more than once in the course of your testimony —”

But, as I have said, during my first few minutes inside the courtroom, I could not focus on the English translation coming through my headphones, not with young Demjanjuk in the row before me, mine to maintain surveillance over, mine to sit by and protect — if protection was indeed warranted — from the machinating Moishe Pipik, and not with these two diaries filling my pockets. Were they the diaries of Leon Klinghoffer? Unobtrusively as I could, I lifted them out of either pocket and turned them over and over in my hands; I even put them up to my nose, quickly one and then the other, to sniff their papery odor, that pleasant moldering smell that faintly perfumes old library stacks. Holding the red diary open in my lap, I read for a moment from a page midway through. “Thurs. 9/23/78. On way to Yugoslavia. Du Brovnik. Went past Messina and Straits. Reminded us of 1969 trip to city of Messina. New crowd got aboard at Genoa. Show tonight was great. Everyone has coughing spells. I don’t know why, weather is perfect.”

That comma setting off “why” from “weather” — is it likely, I asked myself, that a man in the appliance business in Queens would have deftly dropped a comma in there? In jottings as rudimentary as these should I be finding any punctuation at all? And no spelling errors anywhere other than in the writing of an unfamiliar place name? New crowd got aboard at Genoa. Deliberately planted there, that item? There perhaps to presage what would happen seven years hence, when, in the new crowd that boarded the Achille Lauro at some Italian port or other — maybe it was even at Genoa — were hidden the three Palestinian terrorists who would kill this very same diarist? Or was that simply a report of what had happened on their cruise of September 1978 — a new crowd had boarded at Genoa and, for the Klinghoffers, nothing horrible ensued.

But distracted as I was from following the judge’s opening remarks by the presence, in the seat before me, of young Demjanjuk, not yet kidnapped and still unharmed; distracted as I was by the diaries that had been forced on me by Supposnik — wondering whether they were forged, wondering whether Supposnik was a charlatan who was a party to the forgery or a passionate Jewish survivor who was its unsuspecting victim, wondering whether the diaries were exactly what he’d said they were, and, if so, wondering whether it really was somehow my Jewish duty to write the introduction that might then elicit publishing interest in them other than just in Israel — I was still further disconcerted by trying to puzzle out why everything I’d truthfully told George Ziad in the taxi could have been assumed by him to be, of all things, “disinformation.”

It must be because he assumed, first off, that, like the antiquarian bookseller Supposnik, our tiny taxi driver was another of those Israeli secret police men that he’d been directing my attention to everywhere we met; it must be that he assumed not only that we two were under close surveillance but that I had surmised this upon getting into the cab and had then, ingeniously, come up with the story of the second Philip Roth in order to jam the interloper’s circuits with so much cuckoo nonsense. Otherwise I didn’t know what to make of this word “disinformation” or of the affectionate grip in which he’d taken my hand only minutes after angrily informing me that I was a moral idiot.

Admittedly, the story of my double was difficult to accept at face value. The story of anyone’s double would be. It was my own difficulty accepting it that largely accounted for why I had so mismanaged just about everything having to do with Pipik and was probably mismanaging it still. But however hard it was to swallow the existence of a character as audaciously fraudulent as Moishe Pipik or to imagine him meeting with any success whatsoever, I’d have thought it still easier for George to accept this double’s unlikely existence than to believe that (1) I could seriously be the proponent of a political scheme as antihistorically harebrained as Diasporism or that (2) Diasporism could possibly constitute a source of hope for the Palestinian national movement, especially one worthy of financial backing. No, only the insane desperation of a zealot who knew himself to be powerless and who had lived too long in behalf of a cause on the brink of total failure could lead someone as intelligent as George Ziad to seize with such reckless enthusiasm on an idea so spurious. And yet if George were that blinded, that defeated by suffering, that disfigured by impotent rage, then surely he would have disqualified himself long ago from anything like the position of influence that he claimed enabled him to come to see me, as he had this morning, to make arrangements for the secret Athens meeting. On the other hand, perhaps by now the mind of my old Chicago friend was so savagely unhinged by despair that he had taken to living in a dream of his own devising, “Athens” his Palestinian Xanadu and those rich Jewish backers of the PLO no more real than the imaginary friends of a lonely child.

It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just too insipid a conclusion. Not everybody was crazy. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous — this is not to be crazy. Not even fanatically held illusions are crazy, and deceit certainly isn’t crazy — deceit, deviousness, cunning, cynicism, all of that is far from crazy … and there, that, deceit, there was the key to my confusion! Of course! It wasn’t I who’d been deceiving George, it was George who was deceiving me! I had been suckered by the tragic melodrama of the pitiful victim who is driven nearly insane by injustice and exile. George’s madness was Hamlet’s — an act.

Yes, here’s an explanation to it all! Eminent Jewish writer shows up in Jerusalem espousing a massive transfer of Israel’s Ashkenazi population back to their European countries of origin. The idea may appear as grossly unrealistic to a Palestinian militant as to Menachem Begin, but that an eminent writer should come up with such an idea might not seem unrealistic to either; no, nothing peculiar to them about an eminent writer who imagines there is some correlation between his own feverish, ignorant apocalyptic fantasies and the way that struggles between contending political forces are won and lost in actuality. Of course, politically speaking, the eminent writer is a joke; of course nothing the man thinks moves anyone in Israel or anywhere else to act one way or another, but he’s a cultural celebrity, he commands column inches all over the world, and consequently the eminent writer who thinks that the Jews should get the hell out of Palestine is not to be ignored or ridiculed but to be encouraged and exploited. George knows him. He’s an old American buddy of George’s. Seduce him, George, with our suffering. Between books all these eminent writers love five or six days in a good hotel, enmeshed in the turbulent tragedies of the heroically oppressed. Track him down. Find him. Tell him how they torture us — it’s the ones who stay in the best hotels who are, understandably, particularly sensitized to the horrors of injustice. If a dirty fork on the breakfast tray elicits an angry protest to room service, imagine their outrage over the cattle prod. Rant, rave, display your wounds, give him the Celebrity Tour — the military courtrooms, the bloodstained walls — tell him that you’ll take him to talk with Father Arafat himself. Let’s see what kind of coverage George can whip up for Mr. Roth’s little publicity stunt. Let’s put this megalomaniac Jew on the cover of Time!

But what then of the other Jew, the megalomaniac double? All these suppositions might explain why George Ziad had damned me in the taxicab as a moral idiot and then, only minutes later, in a whispered aside at the rear of the courtroom, lauded me as the Dostoyevsky of disinformation. This spy story I’d been spinning out could indeed provide the key to George’s ostensibly haywire behavior, to his so fortuitously stumbling on me in the marketplace, to his following me and pursuing me and taking me dead seriously no matter how bizarre my own performance, except for one formidable impediment to its logic: the ubiquitous Moishe Pipik. Everything that George had appeared to discount as concocted by me to confound the Israeli intelligence agent driving our cab, local Palestinian intelligence — had it taken the slightest interest in me — would already have known to be the truth through its contacts at the two hotels where Pipik and I were each openly registered in my name. And if the higher-ups in Palestinian intelligence were well aware that the Diasporist and the novelist were different people, that the King David P.R. was an impostor and the American Colony P.R. the real thing, why then would they — more precisely, why then would their agent, George Ziad — pretend to me to think that the two were identical? Particularly when they knew that I knew as well as they did of the existence of the other one!

No, Moishe Pipik’s existence argued too powerfully against the plausibility of the story with which I was trying to convince myself that George Ziad was something other than insane and that there was a meaning more humanly interesting than that lurking beneath all this confusion. Unless, of course, they’d planted Pipik in the first place — unless, as I’d all but doped out the very first time I made contact with Pipik and interviewed him from London as Pierre Roget, unless Pipik had been working for them from the start. Of course! That’s what intelligence agencies do all the time. They’d stumbled accidentally on my look-alike, who might actually be, for all I knew, in the seedy end of the detective business, and, for a fee, they had put him up to some propagandistc mischief — to spouting to whoever would listen all this thinly camouflaged anti-Zionist crap that called itself Diasporism. He was being run by my old friend George Ziad, George his coach, his contact, his brains. The last thing they’d expected was that, in the midst of it all, I would turn up in Jerusalem too. Or maybe that was what they’d planned. They had set Pipik out as the bait. But to lure me into doing what?

Why, exactly what I was doing. Exactly what I had done! Exactly what I was going to do. They’re not just running him, they’re running me without my knowing it! They have been since I got here!

I stopped myself right there. Everything I had been thinking — and, what’s worse, eagerly believing — shocked me and frightened me. What I was elaborating so thoroughly as a rational explanation of reality was infused with just the sort of rationality that the psychiatrists regularly hear from the most far-gone paranoid on the schizophrenic ward. I stopped myself and stepped back in alarm from the hole where I was blindly headed, realizing that in order to make George Ziad “more humanly interesting” than someone simply nuts and out of control, I was making myself nuts. Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one’s life to be indecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make causal sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We’ve all heard that one before.

Mr. Rosenberg had been recalled to be questioned about a sixty- eight-page document that only now, in the closing hours of the yearlong trial, had been discovered by the defense at a Warsaw historical institute. It was a 1945 report about Treblinka and the fate of the Jews there, written in Eliahu Rosenberg’s own hand and in Yiddish, his first language, nearly thirty months after his escape from Treblinka, while he was a soldier in the Polish army. Encouraged to recount the story of the death camp by some Poles in Cracow, where he was then billeted, Rosenberg had spent two days writing down his memories and then gave the manuscript to a Cracow landlady, a Mrs. Wasser, to pass on to the appropriate institution for whatever historical usefulness it might have. He had not seen his Treblinka memoir again until on that morning a photocopy of the original was handed to him on the witness stand and he was asked by defense counsel Chumak to examine the signature and to tell the court if it was his own.

Rosenberg said it was, and when there was no objection from the prosecution, the 1945 memoir was admitted into evidence “for the purposes,” said Justice Levin, “of questioning the witness in conjunction with what it states in same on the events of the uprising at Treblinka on the second of August, 1943. And specifically,” Levin continued, “on the subject of the death of Ivan as written down in said statement.”

The death of Ivan? At the sound of those four words coming through the earphones in English translation, young Demjanjuk, seated directly in front of me, began to nod his head vigorously, but otherwise there wasn’t a movement to be discerned in the courtroom, not a sound was to be heard until Chumak, with his confident matter-of-factness, set out in his Canadian-accented English to review with Rosenberg the relevant pages of this memoir, in which, apparently just months after the end of the European war, Rosenberg had written of the death of the very man into whose “murderous eyes” he had gazed with such horror and revulsion back on the seventh day of the trial, or so he had sworn.

“I would like to go directly to the relevant portion with Mr. Rosenberg, where you wrote, ‘After a few days, the date for the uprising was set for the second day of the eighth month with no excuse’ — can you find that on page sixty-six of the document?”

Chumak then took him through his description of the heat in the middle of the day of August 2, 1943, a heat so fierce that the “boys,” as Rosenberg had described his fellow death commandos, who had been working since four a.m., sobbed from pain and fell down with the stretchers while transferring exhumed corpses to be incinerated. The revolt had been set for four p.m., but fifteen minutes before, there was a hand-grenade explosion and several shots rang out, signaling that the uprising had begun. Rosenberg read aloud the Yiddish text and then translated into Hebrew a description of how one of the boys, Shmuel, was the first to run out of the barracks, loudly shouting the uprising’s passwords, “Revolution in Berlin! There is a revolt in Berlin!” and how Mendel and Chaim, two other boys, then jumped the Ukrainian barracks guard and took the rifle from his hands.

“Now you wrote these lines, sir, and they are correct,” said Chumak. “That’s what happened at the time, is that correct?”

“If it pleases the court,” said Rosenberg, “I think I have to explain. Because what I say here, I had heard. I hadn’t seen it. There’s a big difference between the two.”

“But what you just read to us, sir, that Shmuel was the first to leave the barracks. Did you see him leave the barracks?”

Rosenberg said that no, he hadn’t seen it himself, and that in much of what he’d written he had been reporting what others had seen and what they had told one another once they had gotten over all the fences and safely escaped into the forest.

“So,” said Chumak, who was not about to let him be on this subject, “you don’t write in your document that they told us about it in the forest later, you are writing it as it is happening in the document, which you have admitted your memory was better in ’45 than it is today. And I put it to you that if you wrote this, you must have seen it.”

Again Rosenberg set out to clarify that what he’d written was based, of necessity, on what he had been able to observe as a participant in the uprising and on what all the others had told him afterward, in the forest, about their involvement and what they had seen and done.

Zvi Tal, the bearded judge in the skullcap, stereotypically judicious-looking with his glasses set halfway down his nose, finally interrupted the repetitious duologue between Chumak and Rosenberg and asked the witness, “Why didn’t you point out later, in the forest, I saw, I heard such and such — why did you write it as though you saw it yourself?”

“Perhaps it was a mistake on my part,” replied Rosenberg. “Perhaps I should have noted it, but the fact of the matter is that I did hear all of this, and I have always said that in the course of the uprising, I didn’t see what was happening all around me because the bullets were shrieking all around us and I just wanted to get away as quickly as possible from that inferno.”

“Naturally,” said Chumak, “everyone would want to get away as quickly as possible from that inferno, but if I could proceed, did you see this guard being strangled by everybody and thrown into the well — did you see that?”

“No,” said Rosenberg, “it was told to me in the forest, not just to me, everyone heard about it, and there were many versions, not only that one.…”

Justice Levin asked the witness, “You were inclined to believe what people told you, people who had escaped as you did, to freedom from the camp?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Rosenberg. “It was a symbol of our great success, the very fact that we heard what had been done to those Vachmanns, for us it was a wish come true. Of course I believed that they had been killed and that they had been strangled — it was a success for us. Can you imagine, sir, such a success, this wish come true, where people succeeded in killing their assassins, their killers? Did I have to doubt it? I believed it with my whole heart. And would that it had been true. I hoped it was true.”

All of this having been explained yet again, Chumak nonetheless resumed questioning Rosenberg along the very same lines — “Didn’t you see all of these events, sir, that I have read out to you?” — until finally the chief prosecutor rose to object.

“I believe,” the prosecutor said, “that the witness has already replied to this question several times.”

The bench, however, allowed Chumak to continue and even Judge Tal intervened again, more or less along the line of what he had asked Rosenberg only minutes before. “Do you agree,” he said to the witness, “that it emerges from what you wrote down, if one just reads what you wrote down — that one simply cannot tell what you actually saw for yourself and what you heard about later? In other words, anyone reading this would be inclined to think that you saw everything. Do you agree?”

While the questioning dragged on about the method by which Rosenberg had composed his memoir, I thought, Why is his technique so hard to understand? The man is not a skilled verbalist, he was never a historian, a reporter, or a writer of any kind, nor was he, in 1945, a university student who knew from studying the critical prefaces of Henry James all there is to know about the dramatization of conflicting points of view and the ironic uses of contradictory testimony. He was a meagerly educated twenty-three-year-old Polish Jewish survivor of a Nazi death camp who had been given paper and a pen and then placed for some fifteen or twenty hours at a table in a Cracow rooming house, where he had written not the story, strictly told, of his own singular experience at Treblinka but rather what he had been asked to write: a memoir of Treblinka life, a collective memoir in which he simply, probably without giving the matter a moment’s thought, subsumed the experiences of the others and became the choral voice for them all, moving throughout from the first-person plural to the third-person plural, sometimes from one to the other within the very same sentence. That such a person’s handwritten memoir, written straight out in a couple of sittings, should lack the thoughtful discriminations of self-conscious narration did not strike me, for one, as surprising.

“Now,” Chumak was saying, “now this is really the heart of the whole exercise, Mr. Rosenberg — the next line of what you wrote in December of 1945.” He asked Rosenberg to read aloud what came next.

“‘We then went into the engine room, to Ivan, he — who was sleeping there — ’” Rosenberg slowly translated from the Yiddish in a forceful voice, “‘and Gustav hit him with a shovel on the head. And he remained lying down for keeps.’”

“In other words, he was dead?” Chumak asked.

“Yes, correct.”

“Sir, on December 20, 1945, in your handwriting?”

“Correct.”

“And I suppose this would be one very important piece of information in your document, sir, would it not be?”

“Of course it would be a very important piece of information,” Rosenberg replied, “if it were the truth.”

“Well, when I asked you about the whole document, sir, the sixty- eight pages — I asked you whether you made an accurate and correct version or recital of what occurred at Treblinka. You said, at the very beginning of my cross-examination —”

“I say again yes. But there are things which I heard.”

In front of me young Demjanjuk was shaking his head in disbelief at Rosenberg’s contention that eyewitness testimony recorded in 1945 could be based on unreliable evidence. Rosenberg was lying and, thought the son of the accused, lying because of his own unappeasable guilt. Because of how he had managed to live while all the others died. Because of what the Nazis had ordered him to do with the bodies of his fellow Jews and what he obediently had done, loathsome as it was for him to do it. Because to survive not only was it necessary to steal, which he did, which of course they all did all the time — from the dead, from the dying, from the living, from the ill, from one another and everyone — but also it was necessary to bribe their torturers, to betray their friends, to lie to everyone, to take every humiliation in silence, like a whipped and broken animal. He was lying because he was worse than an animal, because he’d become a monster who had burned the little bodies of Jewish children, thousands upon thousands of them burned by him for kindling, and the only means he has to justify becoming a monster is to lay his sins on my father’s head. My innocent father is the scapegoat not merely for those millions who died but for all the Rosenbergs who did the monstrous things they did to survive and now cannot live with their monstrous guilt. The other one is the monster, says Rosenberg, Demjanjuk is the monster. I am the one who catches the monster, who identifies the monster and sees that he is slain. There, in the flesh, is the criminal monster, John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio, and I, Eliahu Rosenberg of Treblinka, am cleansed.

Or were these not at all like young Demjanjuk’s thoughts? Why is Rosenberg lying? Because he is a Jew who hates Ukrainians. Because the Jews are out to get the Ukrainians. Because this is a plot, a conspiracy by all these Jews to put all Ukrainians on trial and vilify them before the world.

Or were these nothing like John junior’s thoughts either? Why is this Rosenberg lying about my father? Because he is a publicity hound, a crazy egomaniac who wants to see his picture in the paper and to be their great Jewish hero. Rosenberg thinks, When I finish with this stupid Ukrainian, they’ll put my picture on a postage stamp.

Why does Rosenberg lie about my father? Because he is a liar. The man in the dock is my father, so he must be truthful, and the man in the witness box is somebody else’s father, so he must be lying. Perhaps it was as simple for the son as that: John Demjanjuk is my father, any father of mine is innocent, therefore John Demjanjuk is innocent — maybe nothing more need be thought beyond the childish pathos of this filial logic.

And in a row somewhere behind me, what was George Ziad thinking? Two words: public relations. Rosenberg is their Holocaust PR man. The smoke from the incinerators of Treblinka … behind the darkness of that darkness they still contrive to hide from the world their dark and evil deeds. The cynicism of it! To exploit with shameless flamboyance the smoke from the burning bodies of their own martyred dead!

Why is he lying? Because that’s what public relations is — for a weekly paycheck they lie. They call it image making: whatever works, whatever suits the need of the client, whatever serves the propaganda machine. Marlboro has the Marlboro Man, Israel has its Holocaust Man. Why does he say what he says? Ask why the ad agencies say what they say. FOR THE SMOKESCREEN THAT HIDES EVERYTHING, SMOKE HOLOCAUST.

Or was George thinking about me and my usefulness, about making me into his PR man? Maybe without me to intimidate with all that righteous rage, he was taking a quiet philosophical break and thinking to himself only this: Yes, it’s all a battle for TV time and column inches. Who controls the Nielsen ratings controls the world. It’s all publicity, a matter of which of us comes up with the more spectacular drama to popularize his claim. Treblinka is theirs, the uprising is ours — may the best propaganda machine win.

Or maybe he was thinking, wistfully, sinisterly, utterly realistically, If only we had the corpses. Yes, I thought, maybe it’s a pathologically desperate desire for bloody mayhem that lies behind this uprising, their need for a massacre, for piles of slaughtered corpses that will dramatize conclusively for worldwide TV just who are the victims this time round. Maybe that’s why the children are in the first wave, why, instead of fighting against the enemy with grown men, they are dispatching children, armed only with stones, to provoke the firepower of the Israeli army. Yes, to make the networks forget their Holocaust we will stage our Holocaust. On the bodies of our children the Jews will perpetrate a Holocaust, and at last the TV audience will understand our plight. Send in the children and then summon the networks — we’ll beat the Holocaust-mongers at their own game!

And what was I thinking? I was thinking, What are they thinking? I was thinking about Moishe Pipik and what he was thinking. And wondering every second where he was. Even as I continued to follow the courtroom proceedings I looked around me for some sign of his presence. I remembered the balcony. What if he was up with the journalists and the TV crews, sighting down on me from there?

I turned but from my seat could see nothing beyond the balcony railing. If he’s up there, I thought, he is thinking, What is Roth thinking? What is Roth doing? How do we kidnap the monster’s son if Roth is in the way?

There were uniformed policemen in the four corners of the courtroom and plainclothesmen, with walkie-talkies, standing at the back of the courtroom and regularly moving up and down the aisles — shouldn’t I get hold of one and take him with me up to the balcony to apprehend Moishe Pipik? But Pipik’s gone, I thought, it’s over.…

This is what I was thinking when I was not thinking the opposite and everything else.

As to what the accused was thinking while Rosenberg explained to the court why the Treblinka memoir was erroneous, the person who best knew that sat at the defense table, the Israeli lawyer, Sheftel, to whom Demjanjuk had been passing note after note throughout Chumak’s examination of Rosenberg, notes written, I supposed, in the defendant’s weak English. Demjanjuk scribbled feverishly away, but after he’d passed each note to Sheftel over the lawyer’s shoulder, it did not look to me as though Sheftel gave more than a cursory glance to it before setting it down atop the others on the table[1]. In the Ukrainian American community, I was thinking, these notes, if they were ever to be collected and published, would have an impact on Demjanjuk’s landsmen something like that of those famous prison letters written in immigrantese by Sacco and Vanzetti. Or the impact on the conscience of the civilized world that Supposnik immoderately posits for Klinghoffer’s travel diaries should they ever be graced by an introduction by me.

All this writing by nonwriters, I thought, all these diaries, memoirs, and notes written clumsily with the most minimal skill, employing one one-thousandth of the resources of a written language, and yet the testimony they bear is no less persuasive for that, is in fact that much more searing precisely because the expressive powers are so blunt and primitive.

Chumak was now asking Rosenberg, “So how can you possibly come to this court and point your finger at this gentleman when you wrote in 1945 that Ivan was killed by Gustav?”

“Mr. Chumak,” he quickly replied, “did I say that I saw him kill him?”

“Don’t answer with another question,” Justice Levin cautioned Rosenberg.

“He didn’t come back from the dead, Mr. Rosenberg,” Chumak continued.

“I did not say so. I did not say so. I personally did not say that I saw him being killed,” said Rosenberg. “But, Mr. Chumak, I would like to see him — I did not — but I did not see him. It was my fondest wish. I was in Paradise when I heard — not only Gustav but also others told me — I wanted, I wanted to believe, Mr. Chumak. I wanted to believe that this creature does not exist. Is not alive any longer. But, unfortunately, to my great sorrow, I would have liked to see him torn apart as he had torn apart our people. And I believed with all my heart that he had been liquidated. Can you understand, Mr. Chumak? It was their fondest wish. It was our dream to finish him off, together with others. But he had managed to get out, get away, survive — what luck he had!”

“Sir, you wrote in your handwriting, in Yiddish — not in German, not in Polish, not in English, but in your own language — you wrote that he was hit on the head by Gustav with a spade, leaving him lying there for keeps. You wrote that. And you told us that you wrote the truth when you made these statements in 1945. Are you saying that’s not true?”

“No, it is true, this is the truth what it says here — but what the boys told us was not the truth. They wanted to boast. They were lending expression to their dream. They aspired to, their fondest wish was, to kill this person — but they hadn’t.”

“Why didn’t you write then,” Chumak asked him, “it was the boys’ fondest wish to kill this man and I heard later in the forest that he was killed in such and such a way — or in another way. Why didn’t you write it all down, all these versions?”

Rosenberg replied, “I preferred to write this particular version.”

“Who was present with you when this version was given, this version about the boys wanting to kill him, and everyone wanting to be a hero, and killing this awful man?”

“In the forest, when they told this version there were a great many around, and we sat around for some hours before we went our own way. And there, sir, they were sitting down and each was telling his version and I took it in. And this is what I remember, I took this in and I really wanted to believe firmly that this is what had happened. But it had not come about.”

When I looked at Demjanjuk I saw him smiling directly back, not at me, of course, but at his loyal son, seated in the chair in front of me. Demjanjuk was amused by the absurdity of the testimony, tremendously amused by it, even triumphant-looking because of it, as though Rosenberg’s claim that he had reported accurately in 1945 what his sources, unbeknownst to him, had themselves reported inaccurately was all the exculpation necessary and he was as good as free. Was he dim-witted enough to believe that? Why was he smiling? To raise the spirits of his son and supporters? To register for the audience his contempt? The smile was eerie and mystifying and, to Rosenberg, as anyone could see, as odious as the hand of friendship and the warm “Shalom” that had been tendered him by Demjanjuk the year before. Had Rosenberg’s hatred been combustible and had a match been struck anywhere near the witness stand, the entire courtroom would have gone up in flames. Rosenberg’s dockworker’s fingers bit into the lectern and his jaw was locked as though to suppress a roar.

“Now,” Chumak continued, “based on the Version’ as you now call it, this version of Ivan being killed, he was struck in the head with a spade. Would you therefore expect, sir, the man who was struck with the spade to have a scar or a fractured skull or some serious injury to his head? If that happened to Ivan in the engine room?”

“Of course,” replied Rosenberg, “if I were sure he had been hit and in accordance with the version I wrote down, he was then dead — where is the scar? But he wasn’t there. And he wasn’t there — because he wasn’t there.” Rosenberg looked beyond Chumak now and, pointing at Demjanjuk, addressed him directly. “And if he had been there, he would not be sitting across from me. This hero is grinning!” Rosenberg cried in disgust.

But Demjanjuk was no longer merely grinning, he was laughing, laughing aloud at Rosenberg’s words, at Rosenberg’s rage, laughing at the court, laughing at the trial, laughing at the absurdity of these monstrous charges, at the outrageousness of a family man from a Cleveland suburb, a Ford factory employee, a church member, prized by his friends, trusted by his neighbors, adored by his family, of such a man as this being mistaken for the psychotic ghoul who prowled the Polish forests forty-five years ago as Ivan the Terrible, the vicious, sadistic murderer of innocent Jews. Either he was laughing because a man wholly innocent of any such crimes had no choice but to laugh after a year of these nightmarish courtroom shenanigans and all that the judiciary of the state of Israel had put him and his poor family through or he was laughing because he was guilty of these crimes, because he was Ivan the Terrible, and Ivan the Terrible was not simply a psychotic ghoul but the devil himself. Because, if Demjanjuk was not innocent, who but the devil could have laughed aloud like that at Rosenberg?

Still laughing, Demjanjuk rose suddenly from his chair, and, speaking toward the open microphone on the defense lawyers’ table, he shouted at Rosenberg, “Atah shakran!” and laughed even louder.

Demjanjuk had spoken in Hebrew — for the second time the man accused of being Ivan the Terrible had addressed this Treblinka Jew who claimed to be his victim in the language of the Jews.

Justice Levin spoke next, also in Hebrew. On my headphones I heard the translation. “The accused’s words,” Justice Levin noted, “which have been placed on record — which were, ‘you are a liar!’ — have been — have gone on record.”

Only minutes later, Chumak concluded his examination of Rosenberg, and Justice Levin declared a recess until eleven. I left the courtroom as quickly as I could, feeling bereft and spent and uncomprehending, as numb as though I were walking away from the funeral of someone I dearly loved. Never before had I witnessed an encounter so charged with pain and savagery as that frightful face-off between Demjanjuk and Rosenberg, a collision of two lives as immensely inimical as any two substances could be even on this rift-ravaged planet. Perhaps because of everything abominable in all I’d just seen or simply because of the unintended fast I’d been on now for almost twenty- four hours, as I tried to hold my place amid the spectators pushing toward the coffee machine in the snack bar off the lobby, there was a ragged overlay of words and pictures disturbingly adhering together in my mind, a grating collage consisting of what Rosenberg should have said to clarify himself and of the gold teeth being pulled from the gassed Jews’ mouths for the German treasury and of a Hebrew- English primer, the book from which Demjanjuk had studiously taught himself, in his cell, to say correctly, “You’re a liar.” Interlaced with You’re a liar were the words Three thousand ducats. I could hear distinctly the admirable Macklin oleaginously enunciating “Three thousand ducats” as I handed across my shekels to the old man taking the money at the snack bar, who, to my astonishment, was the crippled old survivor, Smilesburger, the man whose million dollar check I’d “stolen” from Pipik and then lost. The crowd was so tightly packed behind me that no sooner had I paid for coffee and a bun than I was forced aside and had all I could do to keep the coffee in the container as I pressed toward the open lobby facing outdoors.

So now I was seeing things too. Working the cash register from atop a stool in the snack bar was just another old man with a bald head and a scaling skull, who could not possibly have been the retired New York jeweler disenchanted with Israel. I’m seeing double, I thought, doubles, I thought, but because of not eating, because of barely getting any sleep, or because I’m coming apart again for the second time in a year? How could I have convinced myself that I alone am personally responsible for overseeing the safety of Demjanjuk’s son if I weren’t coming apart? In the aftermath of that testimony, in the aftermath of Demjanjuk’s laughter and Rosenberg’s rage, how could the asinine clowning of that nonsensical Pipik continue to make a claim on my life?

But just then I heard shouting outside the building and, through the glass doors, saw two soldiers armed with rifles running at full speed toward the parking lot. I ran out of the lobby after them, toward where some twenty or thirty people had now gathered to encircle whatever disturbance was transpiring. And when I heard from within that circle a voice loudly shouting in English, I knew for sure that he was here and the worst had happened. The all-out paranoid who I had by now become was asserting his panicked confidence in the unstoppable unraveling of the disaster; our mutual outrage with each other had been churned into a real catastrophe by that octopus of paranoia that, interlinked, the two of us had become.

But the man who was shouting looked to be nearly seven feet tall, taller by far than either Pipik or me, a treelike person, a gigantic redheaded creature with an amazing chin the shape of a boxing glove. His big bowl of a forehead was flushed with his fury, and the hands he waved about high in the air looked to be as large as cymbals — you wouldn’t want your two little ears caught between the clanging of those two huge hands.

In either hand he clutched a white pamphlet, which he fluttered violently over the heads of the onlookers. Although a few in the crowd held copies of the pamphlet and were flipping through its pages, mostly the pamphlets were strewn on the pavement underfoot. The Jewish giant’s English was limited, but his voice was a large, cascading thing, every inch of him in that swelling voice, and when he spoke the effect was of someone sounding an organ. He was the biggest and the loudest Jew that I had ever seen and he was booming down at a priest, an elderly, round-faced Catholic priest, who, though of medium height and rather stoutly built, looked, by comparison, like a little, shatterable statuette of a Catholic priest. He stood very rigidly, holding his ground, doing his best not to be intimidated by this gigantic Jew.

I stooped to pick up one of the pamphlets. In the center of the white cover was a blue trident whose middle prong was in the shape of the Cross; the pamphlet, a dozen or so pages long, bore the English title “Millennium of Christianity in Ukraine.” The priest must have been distributing the pamphlets to those who’d left the courtroom and come outside for air. I read the first sentence of the pamphlet’s first page. “1988 is a significant year for Ukrainian Christians throughout the world — it is the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to the land called Ukraine.”

The crowd, mostly Israelis, seemed to understand neither the pamphlet’s contents nor what the dispute was about, and because his English was so poor, it was a moment before what the Jewish giant was shouting was intelligible even to me and I understood that he was assaulting the priest with the names of Ukrainians whom he identified as the instigators of violent pogroms. The one name I recognized was Chmielnicki, who I seemed to recall was a national hero on the order of Jan Hus or Garibaldi. I had lived among working-class Ukrainians on the Lower East Side when I’d first come to New York in the mid-fifties and remembered vaguely the annual block parties where dozens of little children danced around the streets dressed in folk costumes. There were speeches from an outdoor stage denouncing Communism and the Soviet Union, and the names Chmielnicki and Saint Volodymyr showed up on the crayoned signs in the local shop windows and outside the Orthodox Ukrainian church just around the corner from my basement apartment.

“Where murderer Chmielnicki in book!” were the words that I finally understood the giant Jew to be shouting. “Where murderer Bandera in book! Where murderer Petlura son of bitch! Killer! Murderer! All Ukrainian anti-Semite!”

Defiantly cocking his head, the priest snapped back, “Petlura, if you knew anything, was himself murdered. Martyred. In Paris. By Soviet agents.” He was an American, as it turned out, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest who, from the sound of his voice, was more than likely a New Yorker and who seemed to have come to Jerusalem all the way from New York, perhaps even from Second Avenue and Eighth Street, specifically to distribute his pamphlets celebrating the thousand years of Ukrainian Christianity to the Jews attending the Demjanjuk trial. Wasn’t he in his right mind, either?

And then I realized that I was the one who had to be out of his mind to be taking him for a priest and that this was more of the masquerade, a performance designed to create a disturbance, to distract the police and soldiers, to draw away the crowd … I could no more free myself of the thought that Pipik was behind it all than Pipik could free himself of the thought that I was perpetually behind him. This priest is Pipik’s decoy and part of Pipik’s plot.

“No!” the Jewish giant was shouting. “Petlura murdered, yes — by Jew! For killing Jew! By brave Jew!”

“Please,” said the priest, “you have had your say, you have spoken. Everybody can hear you from here to Canarsie — allow me, will you, please, to address those good people here who might like to listen to somebody else for a change.” And turning away from the Jewish giant, he resumed the lecture he’d apparently been delivering before their ruckus had begun. As he spoke, the crowd grew larger, just as Pipik had anticipated “Around the year 860,” the priest was telling them, “two blood brothers, Cyril and Methodius, left their monastery in Greece to preach Christianity among the Slavic people. Our forefathers had no alphabet and no written language. These brothers created for us an alphabet called the Cyrillic alphabet, after the name of one of the brothers —”

But again the Jewish giant interposed himself between the onlookers and the priest, and again he began to shout at him in that astoundingly large voice. “Hitler and Ukrainian! Two brother! One thing! Kill Jew! I know! Mother! Sister! Everybody! Ukrainian kill!”

“Listen, bud,” said the priest, his fingers whitening around the thick stack of pamphlets that he was still clutching to his chest, “Hitler, for your information, was no friend of the Ukrainian people. Hitler gave away half of my country to Nazified Poland, in case you haven’t heard. Hitler gave Bukovina to Fascist Romania, Hitler gave Bessarabia —”

“No! Shut up! Hitler give you big present! Hitler give you big, big present! Hitler,” he boomed, “give you Jew to kill!”

“Cyril and Methodius,” the priest resumed, again bravely turning his back on the giant to address the crowd, “translated the Bible and the Holy Mass into Slavonic, as the language was called. They set out to Rome, to obtain permission from Pope Adrian II to say Mass in the language they had translated. Pope Adrian approved it and our Slavonic Mass, or Ukrainian liturgy, was celebrated —”

That was as much about the brothers Cyril and Methodius as the giant Jew could bear to hear. He reached out for the priest with his two giant’s hands and I saw him suddenly as created not by a malfunctioning pituitary gland but by a thousand years of Jewish dreaming. Our final solution to the Ukrainian Christianity problem. Not Zionism, not Diasporism, but Gigantism — Golemism! The five soldiers looking on with their rifles from the edge of the crowd surged forward to intervene and protect the priest, but what happened happened so quickly that before the soldiers could stop anything, everything was over and everyone was laughing and already walking away — laughing not because the priest from New York City had been lifted into the air and smashed to the ground and dispatched from this life into the next by the enormous muddy boots on the giant’s two feet but because a couple of hundred pamphlets went sailing up over our heads and that was the end of that. The giant had yanked from the priest’s hands all of his pamphlets, hurled them as high as he could, and with that the incident was over.

As the crowd dispersed to return to the courtroom, I stood there watching the priest set out to recover his pamphlets, some of which were scattered as far as fifty feet away. And I saw the giant, still shouting, moving off alone toward the street, where buses were running and traffic was flowing as though it was what indeed it was, in Jerusalem as everywhere else: just another day. A sunny, pleasant day at that. The priest, of course, had nothing at all to do with Pipik, and the plot that I had resolved to foil existed nowhere other than in my head. Whatever I thought or did was wrong and for the simple reason that there was, I now realized, no right thing for someone whose double in this world was Mr. Moishe Pipik — so long as he and I both lived, this mental chaos would prevail. I’ll never again know what’s really going on or whether my thoughts are nonsense or not; everything I can’t immediately understand will have for me a bizarre significance and, even if I have no idea where he is and never hear tell of him again, so long as he goes about, as he does, giving my life its shallowest meaning, I’ll never be free of exaggerated thoughts or these insufferable sieges of confusion. Even worse than never being free of him, I’ll never again be free of myself; and nobody can know any better than I do that this is a punishment without limits. Pipik will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of Ambiguity forever.

The priest continued to gather up the pamphlets one by one, and because he was much older than I’d realized when he was defiantly standing up to the giant, the effort was not easy for him. He was a very weak, very stout old man, and although the encounter had not ended violently, it seemed to have left him as enfeebled as if he had in fact received a terrible blow. Maybe bending over picking up the pamphlets was making him dizzy, because he didn’t look at all well. He was terrifyingly ashen, whereas facing down the giant, he had been a pluckier, much more vivid shade.

“Why,” I said to him, “why, in all of this world, do you come here with those pamphlets on a day like this one?”

He’d fallen to his knees to gather together the pamphlets more easily, and from his knees he answered me. “To save Jews.” A little of his strength seemed to return when he repeated to me, “To save you Jews.”

“You might do better to worry about yourself.” Although this had not been my intention, I stepped forward to offer him my hand; I didn’t see how else he could get back on his feet. Two bystanders, two young men in jeans, two very tough customers indeed, young and lithe and scornful, were watching us from only a few feet away. The rest of the crowd had all moved off.

“If they convict an innocent man,” the priest said as I tried to remember where I’d seen these two in jeans before, “this will have the same result as the Crucifixion of Jesus.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, not that old chestnut, Father. Not the Crucifixion of Christ again!” I said, steadying him now that he was standing erect.

His voice shook when he replied, not because he was winded but because my angry response had left him incensed. “Through two thousand years, Jewish people paid for that — rightly or wrongly, they paid for the Crucifixion. I don’t want the conviction of Johnny to have similar results!”

And it was just here that I felt myself leaving the ground. I was being removed from where I was to somewhere else. I did not know what was happening but I felt as though a pipe were digging into either side of me and on these pipes I was being hoisted and carried away. My feet were cycling in the air, and then they met the ground and I saw that the two pipes were arms belonging to the two men in jeans.

“Don’t shout,” one of them said.

“Don’t struggle,” the other said.

“Do nothing,” the first one said.

“But —” I began.

“Don’t speak.”

“You speak too much.”

“You speak to everyone.”

“You speak speak speak.”

“Speak speak speak speak speak speak —”

They put me into a car, and someone drove us away. Roughly the two men patted me all over to see if I was carrying a weapon.

“You have the wrong man,” I said.

The driver laughed loudly. “Good. We want the wrong man.”

“Oh,” I heard myself asking through a great fog of terror, “is this going to be a humorous experience?”

“For us,” replied the driver, “or for you?”

“Who are you?” I cried. “Palestinians? Jews?”

“Why,” said the driver, “that’s the very question we want to ask you.”

I thought it best to say no more, though “thought” does not describe in any way the process by which my mind was now operating. I began to vomit, which did not endear me to my captors.

I was driven to a stone building in a decaying neighborhood just back of the central market, not far from where I’d run into George the day before and somewhere very near where Apter lived. There were some six or seven tiny Orthodox children, their skulls crystalline, playing a game in the street, strikingly transparent little things, whose youngish mothers, most of them pregnant, stood not far away, holding bags of groceries from their shopping expeditions and animatedly gossiping together. Huddling close to the women were three pigtailed little girls wearing long white stockings and they alone blandly looked my way as I was propelled past them into a narrow alleyway and back through to where freshly washed undergarments were strung up on lines crisscrossing a small courtyard. We turned into a stone stairway, a door was unlocked, and we entered the rear foyer of what looked to me to be a very shabby dentist’s or doctor’s office. I saw a table littered with Hebrew magazines, there was a woman receptionist speaking on the phone, and then I was through another door and into a tiny bathroom, where a light was flipped on and I was told to wash.

I was a long time soaking my face and my clothes and repeatedly rinsing out my mouth. That they allowed me to be alone like this, that apparently they didn’t want me to be left disgustingly smelly, that I had not been gagged or blindfolded, that nobody was banging on the door of the cubicle with the butt of a pistol telling me to hurry up — all this provided my first tinge of hope and suggested to me that these were not Palestinians but Pipik’s Jews, the Orthodox coconspirators whom he had double-crossed by ducking out and who now had me confused with him.

Once I was clean I was led, and now without too much force from behind, out of the washroom and down the corridor to a narrow staircase whose twenty-three shallow steps took us to a second story, where four classrooms angled off of a central landing. Overhead there was a skylight, opaque with soot, and the floorboards beneath my shoes were badly scuffed and worn. The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke, a smell that carried me back some forty-five years, to the little Talmud Torah, one flight above our local synagogue, where I went unenthusiastically with my friends to study Hebrew for an hour in the late afternoons three days a week in the early 1940s. The rabbi who ran the show there had been a heavy smoker and, as best I could remember it, that second floor of the synagogue back in Newark, aside from smelling exactly the same, hadn’t looked too unlike this place either — shabby, dreary, just a little disagreeably slummy.

They put me in one of the classrooms and closed the door. I was alone again. Nobody had kicked me or slapped me or tied my hands or shackled my legs. On the blackboard I saw something written in Hebrew. Nine words. I couldn’t read one of them. Four decades after those three years of afternoon classes at the Hebrew school, I could no longer even identify the letters of the alphabet. There was a nondescript wooden table at the front of the classroom, and in back of it a slatted chair for the teacher. On the table was a TV set. That we did not have in 1943, nor did we sit on these movable molded-plastic student chairs but on long benches nailed to the floor before sloped wooden desks on which we wrote our lessons from right to left. For one hour a day, three days a week, fresh from six and a half hours of public school, we sat there and learned to write backwards, to write as though the sun rose in the west and the leaves fell in the spring, as though Canada lay to the south, Mexico to the north, and we put our shoes on before our socks; then we escaped back into our cozy American world, aligned just the other way around, where all that was plausible, recognizable, predictable, reasonable, intelligible, and useful unfolded its meaning to us from left to right, and the only place we proceeded in reverse, where it was natural, logical, in the very nature of things, the singular and unchallengeable exception, was on the sandlot diamond. In the early 1940s, reading and writing from right to left made about as much sense to me as belting the ball over the outfielder’s head and expecting to be credited with a triple for running from third to second to first.

I hadn’t heard a bolt turn in the door, and when I hurried over to the windows I found not only that they were unlocked but that one was open at the bottom. I had merely to push it up all the way to be able to crawl out, hang full length from the sill, and then drop from the window the ten or twelve feet to the courtyard below. I could then race the twenty yards down the alleyway and, once out into the street, start shouting for help — or make directly for Apter’s. Only what if they opened fire? What if I hurt myself jumping and they caught me and dragged me back inside? Because I still didn’t know who my captors were, I couldn’t decide which was the bigger risk: to escape or not to try to escape. That they hadn’t chained me to the wall of a windowless dungeon didn’t necessarily mean that they were nice fellows or that they would take lightly any failure to cooperate. But to cooperate with what? Hang around, I thought, and you’ll find out.

I soundlessly opened the window all the way, but when I peered out to gauge the drop, a pain went jaggedly crackling through the left hemisphere of my head and whatever can pulsate in a man began to pulsate in me. I wasn’t a man, I was now an engine being revved up by something beyond my control. I pulled the window down as soundlessly as I’d pulled it open, leaving it ajar at the bottom precisely as I’d found it, and, crossing to the center of the room, like the eager student who arrives first in the class, I took a seat in front of the blackboard, two rows from the teacher’s table and the TV set, convinced that I had no need to jump, because I had nothing to fear from Jews, and simultaneously stunned by my childish ingenuousness. Jews couldn’t beat me, starve me, torture me? No Jew could kill me?

Again I went over to the window, although this time all I did was look out into the courtyard, hoping that someone looking in would see me and understand from whatever I was able silently to signal that I was here against my will. And I was thinking that whatever it was that was happening to me and had been happening now for three days, it had all begun back when I’d first taken my seat in that small, ill-ventilated classroom that was the Newark original of this makeshift Jerusalem replica, during those darkening hours when I could barely bring myself to pay attention after a full day in the school where my heart was somehow always light, the public school from which I understood clearly, every day in a thousand ways, my real future was to arise. But how could anything come of going to Hebrew school? The teachers were lonely foreigners, poorly paid refugees, and the students — the best among us along with the worst — were bored, restless American kids, ten, eleven, twelve years old, resentful of being cooped up like this year after year, through the fall, winter, and spring, when everything seasonal was exciting the senses and beckoning us to partake freely of all our American delights. Hebrew school wasn’t school at all but a part of the deal that our parents had cut with their parents, the sop to pacify the old generation — who wanted the grandchildren to be Jews the way that they were Jews, bound as they were to the old millennial ways — and, at the same time, the leash to restrain the breakaway young, who had it in their heads to be Jews in a way no one had ever dared to be a Jew in our three-thousand-year history: speaking and thinking American English, only American English, with all the apostasy that was bound to beget. Our put-upon parents were simply middlemen in the classic American squeeze, negotiating between the shtetl-born and the Newark-born and taking blows from either side, telling the old ones, “Listen, it’s a new world — the kids have to make their way here,” while sternly rebuking the young ones, “You must, you have to, you cannot turn your back on everything!” What a compromise! What could possibly come of those three or four hundred hours of the worst possible teaching in the worst possible atmosphere for learning? Why, everything — what came of it was everything! That cryptography whose signification I could no longer decode had marked me indelibly four decades ago; out of the inscrutable words written on this blackboard had evolved every English word I had ever written. Yes, all and everything had originated there, including Moishe Pipik.

I began to make a plan. I would tell them the story of Moishe Pipik. I would differentiate for them between what he was up to and what I was up to. I would answer any questions they had about George Ziad — I had nothing to hide about our meetings and conversations or even about my own Diaspora diatribes. I would tell them about Jinx, describe every last thing that they wanted to know. “I am guilty of nothing,” I would tell them, “except perhaps failing to notify the police about Pipik’s threat to kidnap young Demjanjuk, and even that I can explain. I can explain everything. I came only to interview Aharon Appelfeld.” But if the people holding me here are indeed Pipik’s coconspirators, and if they have gotten me out of the way like this precisely now to go ahead and abduct young Demjanjuk, then that is the last thing I should say!

Exactly what justification should I offer — and who will swallow it anyway? Who that comes to interrogate me will believe that there is no conspiracy to which I am a party, no plot in which I have had a hand, that there is no collusion here, no secret machinations between Moishe Pipik and me or between George Ziad and me, that I have not put anyone up to anything for any personal, political, or propagandistic reason whatsoever, that I have devised no strategy to assist Palestinians or to compromise Jews or to intervene in this struggle in any way? How can I convince them that there is nothing artful here, no subtle aim or hidden plan undergirding everything, that these events are nonsensical and empty of meaning, that there is no pattern or sequence arising from some dark or sinister motive of mine or any motive of mine at all, that this is in no way an imaginative creation accessible to an interpretive critique but simply a muddle, a mix-up, and a silly fucking mess!

I remembered how, in the mid-sixties, a Professor Popkin had come forward with a carefully argued theory that there was not just a single Lee Harvey Oswald involved in killing Kennedy on November 22, 1963, but a second Oswald, a double of Oswald, who had been deliberately conspicuous around Dallas during the weeks before the assassination. The Warren Commission had dismissed these sightings of a second Oswald — at times when Oswald himself could be proved to have been elsewhere — as a case of mistaken identification, but Popkin argued that the instances of duplication were too frequent and the reports too well founded to be discounted, especially the reports of those episodes in which the look-alike had been seen shopping in a gun store and flamboyantly firing weapons at a local rifle range. The second Oswald was a real person, Popkin concluded, one of the assassins in a conspiracy in which the first Oswald played the role of a decoy or perhaps, unwittingly, of a patsy.

And it’s this, I thought, that I’m about to go up against, some conspiracy genius for whom it’s unimaginable that anyone like me or Lee Harvey Oswald could be out there plotless and on his own. My Pipik will father my Popkin, and the patsy this time will be me.

I spent nearly three hours alone in that classroom. Instead of jumping from the window into the courtyard and making a run for it, instead of opening the room’s unlocked door to see if it was possible simply to walk out the way I’d come in, I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I’ve done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright ridiculous, story and, next, how, after telling it, to fortify and defend myself from the affronted who read into the story an intention having perhaps to do less with the author’s perversity than with their own. Fellow writers will understand when I say that, excepting the difference in what might be at stake here and the dreadful imaginings that this fomented, preparing myself in that room to tell my story to my interrogator struck me as being not unlike waiting to see the review of your new book by the dumbest, clumsiest, shallowest, most thick-witted, wrongheaded, tone-deaf, tin- eared, insensate, and cliché-recycling book-reviewing dolt in the business. There’s not much hope of getting through. Who wouldn’t consider jumping out the window instead?

About midway through my second hour, when no one had as yet appeared to tie me up or beat me up or put a pistol to my head and begin to ask me my opinions, I began to wonder if I might not be the victim of a practical joke and nothing more perilous than that. Three thugs and their car had been hired by Pipik to scare the life out of me — it could have cost him as little as two hundred bucks and, who knows, maybe not even half that much. They’d swept me up, dumped me off, and then gone on their merry way, nothing worse to show for their half hour’s work than my vomit on the tips of their shoes. It was pure Pipik, a brainstorm bearing all the earmarks of the putative private eye whose capacity for ostentatious provocation appeared to me inexhaustible. For all I knew, there was a peephole somewhere in this very room from behind which he was now watching me disgracefully being held prisoner by no one but myself. His revenge for my stealing his million dollars. His mockery for my stealing his Wanda Jane. The payoff for my breaking his glasses. Maybe she’s with him, pantyless on his lap, heroically planted on his implant and conscientiously feeding his excitement by peeping at me too. I am their peep show. I have been all along. The inventiveness of this nemesis is abysmal and bottomless.

But I drove this possibility out of my mind by studying the nine words on the blackboard, focusing on each character as though if I looked long and hard enough I might unexpectedly regain possession of my lost tongue and a secret message would be revealed to me. But no foreign language could have been any more foreign. The only feature of Hebrew that I could remember was that the lower dots and dashes were vowels and the upper markings generally consonants. Otherwise all memory of it had been extinguished.

Obeying an impulse nearly as old as I was, I took out my pen, and, on the back of my bill from the American Colony, I slowly copied down the words written on the blackboard. Perhaps they weren’t even words. I would have been no less stupid copying Chinese. All those hundreds of hours spent drawing these letters had disappeared without a trace, those hours might just as well have been a dream, and yet a dream in which I discovered everything that was forever thereafter to obsess my consciousness however much I might wish it otherwise.

This is what I painstakingly copied down, thinking that afterward, if there was an afterward, these markings might provide the clue to exactly where I’d been held captive and by whom.

I startled myself then by speaking out loud. I had been trying to convince myself that not everything sensible in me had as yet been stultified by fear, that I had strength enough left in me to sit tight and wait to see who and what I was truly up against, but instead I heard myself saying to an empty classroom, “Pipik, I know you are there,” the first words I’d uttered since in the car I’d asked my captors if they were Palestinians or Jews. “Abduction on top of identity theft. Pipik, the case against you gets worse by the hour. It’s still possible, if you want it, to negotiate a truce. I don’t press charges and you leave me alone. Speak and tell me that you are there.”

But no one spoke other than me.

I approached him next more practically. “How much would it take for you to leave me alone? Name a figure.”

Although an all but irrefutable argument could have been made at that moment — and was, by me — that he did not answer because he had nothing to do with my abduction, was nowhere nearby, and more than likely had left Jerusalem the night before, the long silence that once again followed my calling out to him simultaneously intensified my belief that he was there and that he did not respond either because I had not as yet found the formula that would provoke a response or because he was enjoying this spectacle far too much to intervene or interrupt and intended to hide the face that he went around Jerusalem advertising as my own until I had reached the uttermost limits of mortification and was contritely begging on my knees for mercy. Of course I knew how pathetically ridiculous I must appear if the abduction that bore all the clownish signs of Pipik’s authorship was the handiwork of someone else entirely, someone not at all clownish who constituted an even more drastic threat to me than he did and who was in fact monitoring me now, someone who far from conniving a singularly intimate, uncanny affiliation with me, one that might make him at least a little susceptible to my tender supplications, was beyond the reach of any appeal or offer or entreaty I might make. Because I feared that scrutinizing me in my molded-plastic student chair there might well be a surveillant even more alien than Pipik, lethally indifferent to my every need, to whom my name and my face could not have meant less, I discovered myself desperate to hear the voice of Moishe Pipik echoing mine. The plot that I had set out to flee at dawn on the grounds of its general implausibility, its total lack of gravity, its reliance on unlikely coincidence, the absence of inner coherence and of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose, that outlandish plot of Pipik’s that had disgusted me as much by its puerility as by its treachery and deceitfulness, now seemed to be my only hope. Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book!

“Pipik, are you with me, are you here? Is this or is this not your stinking idea? If it is, tell me so. Speak. I never was your enemy. Think back on what’s happened, review all the details, will you, please? Have I no right to claim that I have been provoked? Are you blameless entirely? Whatever pain my public standing may have caused you in those years before we met — well, how can I be responsible for that? And was it that injurious? Was the resemblance to me ever really much more than what most people would think of as a nuisance? It’s not I who told you to come to Jerusalem and pretend that we two were one — I cannot, in all fairness, be saddled with that. Do you hear me? Yes, you hear me — you don’t answer because that’s not what you hold against me. My offense is that I did not treat you with respect. I was not willing to entertain your proposal that we set up shop as partners. I was rude and caustic. I was dismissive and contemptuous. I was furious and threatening from the moment I saw you and, even before that, when I laid a trap on the phone as Pierre Roget. Look, that there is room for improvement I admit. Next time I will try harder to see your side of things before I take aim and fire. ‘Stop, breathe, think,’ instead of ‘Ready, aim, fire’ — I’m trying hard to learn. Perhaps I was too antagonistic — perhaps. I don’t really know. I am not out to bullshit you, Pipik. You would despise me even more than you do already if, because you have the upper hand, I started kowtowing and kissing your ass. I am simply trying to explain that my response on meeting you, however offensive, was well within the range of what you might have expected from anyone in my position. But your grievance is deeper even than that. The million bucks. That’s a lot of money. Never mind that you extorted it by passing yourself off as me. Maybe you’re right and that’s not my business. Why should I care? Especially if it’s money in behalf of a good cause — and if you see it that way and say that it is, who am I to say it isn’t? I’m willing to believe that that was all between Smilesburger and you. Caveat emptor, Mr. Smilesburger. Though that’s not my crime either, is it? My crime is that it was I posing as you rather than you posing as me who extorted the money under false pretenses — by pretending to be you, I took what was not mine. In your eyes this amounts to grand larceny. You make the deal, I reap the harvest. Well, if it makes you feel better, I haven’t come away with a red cent. I haven’t got the check. I’m in your custody here, the boys who picked me up are your boys — you’re in charge in every way, and so I’m not about to lie to you. The check was lost. I lost it. You may or may not know this but I haven’t been contending here solely with you. The story is too long to tell, and you wouldn’t believe it anyway, so suffice it to say that the check disappeared in a situation where I was utterly powerless. Can’t we now go together to Mr. Smilesburger and explain to him his confusion? Get him to stop the old check and issue a new one? I would bet another million that the first check isn’t in anyone’s pocket but either got blown away by the wind or was trampled into the ground when some soldiers roughed me up on the road from Ramallah. That’s the story you won’t believe, though you ought to, really — it’s not a lot stranger than yours. I got caught in the crossfire of the fight being fought here, and that’s when your check disappeared. We’ll get you another one. I’ll help you get it. I’ll do everything I can in your behalf. Isn’t that what you’ve been asking from the start? My cooperation? Well, you’ve got it. This does it. I’m on your side. We’ll get you your million bucks back.”

I waited in vain for him to speak, but either he believed that I was lying and holding out on him, that his million was already in my account, or he wanted even more, or he wasn’t there.

“And I apologize,” I said, “about Jinx. Wanda Jane. For a man who’s gone through and survived the physical anguish that you’ve suffered, of course that’s bitterly infuriating. This probably has incensed you even more than the money. I don’t expect that you would believe me if I were to tell you that to pierce your heart was not my motive or intention. You think otherwise, of course. You think I meant to punish and humiliate you. You think I mean to steal what you prize most. You think I mean to strike a blow where you are most vulnerable. It won’t do me any good to try to tell you that you’re wrong. Particularly as you could be partially right. Human psychology being what it is, you could even be entirely right. But since the truth is the truth, let me add insult to insult and injury to injury — I did not do what I did without some feeling. For her, I mean. I mean that muzzling a virile response to her kind of magnetism has turned out to be no easier for me than it is for you. There’s yet another resemblance between us. I realize this was never the kind of partnership you had in mind but … But nothing. Enough. Wrong tack. I did it. I did it and in similar circumstances I would probably try to do it again. But there will be no such circumstances, that I promise you. The incident will never be repeated. I only ask you now to accept that by having been abducted and detained like this, by tasting all the terror that goes with sitting in this room not knowing what’s in store for me, I have been sufficiently disciplined for trespassing against you as I have.”

I waited for an answer. This was never the kind of partnership you had in mind. I needn’t have said that, but otherwise, I thought, in a predicament as ambiguously menacing as this, no one could have spoken much more adroitly. Nor had I been craven. I had said more or less what he wanted me to say while still saying what was more or less true.

But when still no answer was forthcoming, I all at once lost whatever adroitness I may have had and announced in a voice no longer calm and steady, “Pipik, if you cannot forgive me, give me a sign that you’re there, that you’re here, that you hear me, that I am not talking to a wall!” Or, I thought, to someone even less forgiving than you and capable of a rebuke sterner even than your silence. “What do you require, burnt offerings? I will never again go near your girl, we’ll get you back your goddamn money — now say something! Speak!”

And only then did I understand what he did require of me, not to mention understanding finally just how very maladroit I was with him and had been from the start, how unforgivably self-damaging a miscalculation it had been to deny this impostor the thing that any impostor covets and can least do without and that only I could meaningfully anoint him with. Only when I spoke my name as though I believed it was his name as well, only then would Pipik reveal himself and negotiations commence to propitiate his rage.

“Philip,” I said.

He did not answer.

“Philip,” I said again, “I am not your enemy. I don’t want to be your enemy. I would like to establish cordial relations. I am nearly overcome by how this has turned out and, if it’s not too late, I’d like to be your friend.”

Nothing. No one.

“I was sardonic and unfeeling and I’m chastened,” I said. “It was not right to exalt myself and denigrate you by addressing you as I have. I should have called you by your name as you called me by mine. And from now on I will. I will. I am Philip Roth and you are Philip Roth, I am like you and you are like me, in name and not only in name. …”

But he wasn’t buying it or else he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there. An hour later the door opened and into the classroom hobbled Smilesburger.

“Good of you to wait,” he said. “Terribly sorry, but I was detained.”

10 YOU SHALL NOT HATE YOUR BROTHER IN YOUR HEART

I was reading when he came in. To make it appear to whoever might be observing me that I was not yet incapacitated by fear or running wild with hallucination, that I was waiting as though for nothing more than my turn in the dental chair or at the barbershop, to force my attention to something other than the timorousness that kept me nailed warily to my seat — even more urgently, to focus on something other than the overbold boldness insistently charging me now to jump out the window — I had removed from my pockets the purported diaries of Leon Klinghoffer and shunted myself, with a huge mental effort, onto the verbal track.

How pleased my teachers would be, I thought — reading, even here! But then this was not the first time, or the last, when, powerless before the uncertainty at hand, I looked to print to subjugate my fears and keep the world from coming apart. In 1960, not a hundred yards from the Vatican walls, I had sat one evening in the empty waiting room of an unknown Italian doctor’s office reading a novel of Edith Wharton’s, while on the far side of the doctor’s door, my then wife underwent an illegal abortion. Once on a plane with a badly smoking engine, I had heard the pilot’s horrifyingly calm announcement as to how and where he planned to set down and had quickly told myself, “You just concentrate on Conrad,” and continued my reading of Nostromo, mordantly keeping at the back of my mind the thought that at least I would die as I’d lived. And two years after escaping Jerusalem unharmed, when I wound up one night an emergency patient in the coronary unit of New York Hospital, an oxygen tube in my nose and an array of doctors and nurses fastidiously monitoring my vital signs, I waited for a decision to be made about operating on my obstructed arteries while reading, not without some pleasure, the jokes in Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection. The book you clutch while awaiting the worst is a book you may never be capable of summarizing coherently but whose clutching you never forget.

When I was a small boy in my first classroom — I remembered this, sitting obediently as a middle-aged man in what I could not help thinking might be my last classroom — I had been transfixed by the alphabet as it appeared in white on a black frieze some six inches high that extended horizontally atop the blackboard, “Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee,” each letter exhibited there twice, in cursive script, parent and child, object and shadow, sound and echo, etc., etc. The twenty-six asymmetrical pairings suggested to an intelligent five-year-old every duality and correspondence a little mind could possibly conceive. Each was so variously interlocked and at odds, any two taken together so tantalizing in their faintly unharmonious apposition that, even if viewed as I, for one, first apprehended the alphabet frieze — as figures in profile, the way Nineveh’s low-relief sculptors depicted the royal lion hunt in 1000 B.C. — the procession marching immobilely toward the classroom door constituted an associative grab bag of inexhaustible proportions. And when it registered on me that the couples in this configuration — whose pictorial properties alone furnished such pure Rorschachish delight — each had a name of its own, mental delirium of the sweetest sort set in, as it might in anyone of any age. It only remained for me to be instructed in the secret of how these letters could be inveigled to become words for the ecstasy to be complete. There had been no pleasure so fortifying and none that so dynamically expanded the scope of consciousness since I’d learned to walk some fifteen hundred days before; and there would be nothing as remotely inspirational again until a stimulant no less potent than the force of language — the hazardous allurements of the flesh and the pecker’s irrepressible urge to squirt — overturned angelic childhood.

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.

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.

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.

“Good of you to wait,” he said, swinging to within inches of my chair. “Terribly sorry, but I was detained. At least you brought something to read. Why didn’t you turn on the television? Mr. Shaked is summing up.” Spinning himself about with three little hops, virtually pirouetting on his crutches, he advanced to the teacher’s table at the front of the classroom and pressed the button that brought the trial to life on the screen. There, indeed, was Michael Shaked, addressing the three judges in Hebrew. “This has made him a sex symbol — all the women in Israel are now in love with the prosecutor. They didn’t open a window? So stuffy here! Have you eaten? Nothing to eat? No lunch? Soup? Some salads? Broiled chicken? To drink — a beer? A soda? Tell me what you like. Uri! °” he called. Into the open doorway stepped one of that pair of bejeaned abductors who had looked vaguely familiar to me out in the parking lot where my last act as a free man was to lend a helping hand to an anti-Semitic priest. “Why no lunch, Uri? Why are the windows shut? No one turns on television for him? Nobody does anything! Smell it! They play cards and they smoke cigarettes. Occasionally they kill someone — and they think this is the whole job. Lunch for Mr. Roth!”

Uri laughed and left the room, pulling the classroom door shut behind him.

Lunch for Mr. Roth? Meaning what? The improbable fluency of that heavily accented English, the gracious amiability, the edge of paternal tenderness in that deeply masculine voice … all of it meaning what?

“He would have torn to pieces anyone who came within an inch of you,” Smilesburger said. “A more ferocious watchdog than Uri I could not have found for you. What is the book?”

But it was not for me to explain anything, even what I was reading. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t even know what to ask — all I could think to do was to start shouting, and I was too frightened for that.

Maneuvering his carcass into the chair, Smilesburger said, “No one told you? They told you nothing? Inexcusable. No one told you I was coming? No one told you you could go? No one came to explain that I would be late?”

No reply necessary to sadistic baiting. Don’t tell them again that they’ve got the wrong man. Nothing you say can make anything better; all you’ve said so far in Jerusalem has only made things worse.

“Why are Jews so thoughtless with one another? To keep you sitting here in the dark like this,” said Smilesburger ruefully, “without even offering a cup of coffee. It persists and persists and I do not understand. Why are the Jews so lacking in the fundamental courtesies of social intercourse even between themselves? Why must every affront be magnified? Why must every provocation initiate a feud?”

I had affronted no one. I had provoked no one. I could explain that million dollars. But to his satisfaction? Without Uri reappearing to feed me my lunch? I didn’t answer.

“The Jew’s lack of love for his fellow Jew,” Smilesburger said, “is the cause of much suffering among our people. The animosity, the ridicule, the sheer hatred of one Jew for another — why? Where is our forbearance and forgiveness of our neighbor? Why is there such divi- siveness among Jews? It isn’t only in Jerusalem in 1988 that there is suddenly this discord — it was in the ghetto, God knows, a hundred years ago; it was at the destruction of the Second Temple two thousand years ago. Why was the Second Temple destroyed? Because of this hatred of one Jew for another. Why has the Messiah not come? Because of the angry hatred of one Jew for another. We not only need Anti-Semites Anonymous for the goy — we need it for the Jew himself. Angry disputes, verbal abuse, malicious backbiting, mocking gossip, scoffing, faultfinding, complaining, condemning, insulting — the blackest mark against our people is not the eating of pork, it is not even marrying with the non-Jew: worse than both is the sin of Jewish speech. We talk too much, we say too much, and we do not know when to stop. Part of the Jewish problem is that they never know what voice to speak in. Refined? Rabbinical? Hysterical? Ironical? Part of the Jewish problem is that the voice is too loud. Too insistent. Too aggressive. No matter what he says or how he says it, it’s inappropriate. Inappropriateness is the Jewish style. Awful. ‘For each and every moment that a person remains silent, he earns a reward too great to be conceived of by any created being.’ This is the Vilna Gaon quoting from the Midrash. ‘What should a person’s job be in this world? To make himself like a mute.’ This is from the Sages. As one of our most revered rabbinical scholars has beautifully expressed it in an admirably simple sentence not ten syllables long, ‘Words generally only spoil things.’ You do not wish to speak? Good. When a Jew is as angry as you are, there is almost nothing harder for him than to control his speech. You are a heroic Jew. On the day of reckoning, the account of Philip Roth will be credited with merits for the restraint he has displayed here by remaining silent. Where did the Jew get it in his head that he has always to be talking, to be shouting, to be telling jokes at somebody’s expense, to be analyzing over the telephone for a whole evening the terrible faults of his dearest friend? ‘You shall not go about as a tale bearer among your people.’ This is what is written. You shall not! It is forbidden! This is law! ‘Grant me that I should say nothing that is unnecessary. …’ This is from the prayer of the Chofetz Chaim. I am a disciple of the Chofetz Chaim. No Jew had more love for his fellow Jews than the Chofetz Chaim. You don’t know the teachings of the Chofetz Chaim? A great man, a humble scholar, a revered rabbi from Radin, in Poland, he devoted his long life to trying to get Jews to shut up. He died at ninety-three in Poland the year that you were born in America. It is he who formulated the detailed laws of speech for our people and tried to cure them of the bad habits of centuries. The Chofetz Chaim formulated the laws of evil speech, or loshon hora, the laws that forbid Jews’ making derogatory or damaging remarks about their fellow Jews, even if they are true. If they are false, of course it’s worse. It is forbidden to speak loshon hora and it is forbidden to listen to loshon hora, even if you don’t believe it. In his old age, the Chofetz Chaim extolled his deafness because it prevented him from hearing loshon hora. You can imagine how bad it had to have been for a great conversationalist like the Chofetz Chaim to say a thing like that. There is nothing about loshon hora that the Chofetz Chaim did not clarify and regulate: loshon hora said in jest, loshon hora without mentioning names, loshon hora that is common knowledge, loshon hora about relatives, about in-laws, about children, about the dead, about heretics and ignoramuses and known transgressors, even about merchandise — all forbidden. Even if someone has spoken loshon hora about you, you cannot speak loshon hora about him. Even if you are falsely accused of having committed a crime, you are forbidden to say who did do the crime. You cannot say ‘He did it,’ because that is loshon hora. You can only say ‘I didn’t do it.’ Does it give you an idea of what the Chofetz Chaim was up against if he had to go that far to stop Jewish people’s blaming and accusing their neighbors of everything and anything? Can you imagine the animosity he witnessed? Everyone feeling wronged, being hurt, bristling at insults and slights; everything everybody says taken as a personal affront and a deliberate attack; everyone saying something derogatory about everyone else. Anti-Semitism on the one side, loshon hora on the other, and in between, being squeezed to death, the beautiful soul of the Jewish people! The poor Chofetz Chaim was an Anti-Defamation League unto himself — only to get Jews to stop defaming one another. Someone else with his sensitivity to loshon hora would have become a murderer. But he loved his people and could not bear to see them brought low by their chattering mouths. He could not stand their quarreling, and so he set himself the impossible task of promoting Jewish harmony and Jewish unity instead of bitter Jewish divisiveness. Why couldn’t the Jews be one people? Why must Jews be in conflict with one another? Why must they be in conflict with themselves? Because the divisiveness is not just between Jew and Jew — it is within the individual Jew. Is there a more manifold personality in all the world? I don’t say divided. Divided is nothing. Even the goyim are divided. But inside every Jew there is a mob of Jews. The good Jew, the bad Jew. The new Jew, the old Jew. The lover of Jews, the hater of Jews. The friend of the goy, the enemy of the goy. The arrogant Jew, the wounded Jew. The pious Jew, the rascal Jew. The coarse Jew, the gentle Jew. The defiant Jew, the appeasing Jew. The Jewish Jew, the de-Jewed Jew. Shall I go on? Do I have to expound upon the Jew as a three-thousand-year amassment of mirrored fragments to one who has made his fortune as a leading Jewologist of international literature? Is it any wonder that the Jew is always disputing? He is a dispute, incarnate! Is it any wonder that he is always talking, that he talks imprudently and impulsively and thoughtlessly and embarrassingly and clownishly and that he cannot purify his speech of ridicule and insult and accusation and anger? Our poor Chofetz Chaim! He prayed to God, ‘Grant me that I should say nothing that is unnecessary and that all my speech should be for the sake of Heaven,’ and meanwhile his Jews were speaking everywhere simply for the sake of speaking. All the time! Couldn’t stop! Why? Because inside each Jew were so many speakers. Shut up one and the other talks. Shut him up, and there is a third, a fourth, a fifth Jew with something more to say. The Chofetz Chaim prayed, ‘I will be careful not to speak about individuals,’ and meanwhile individuals were all his beloved Jews could talk about day and night. For Freud in Vienna life was simpler, believe me, than it was for the Chofetz Chaim in Radin. They came to Freud, the talking Jews, and what did Freud tell them? Keep talking. Say everything. No word is forbidden. The more loshon hora the better. To Freud a silent Jew was the worst thing imaginable — to him a silent Jew was bad for the Jew and bad for business. A Jew who will not speak evil? A Jew who will not get enraged? A Jew with no ill word for anyone? A Jew who will not feud with his neighbor, his boss, his wife, his child, his parents? A Jew who refuses to make any remark that could possibly hurt someone else? A Jew who says only what is strictly permissible? A world of such Jews as the Chofetz Chaim dreamed of, and Sigmund Freud will starve to death and take all the other psychoanalysts with him. But Freud was no fool and he knew his Jews, knew them better, I am sad to say, than his Jewish contemporary, the Jewish heads to his Jewish tails, our beloved Chofetz Chaim. To Freud they flocked, the Jews who couldn’t stop talking, and to Freud they spoke such loshon hora as was never heard from the mouths of Jews since the destruction of the Second Temple. The result? Freud became Freud because he let them say everything, and the Chofetz Chaim, who told them to refrain from saying practically everything they wanted to say, who told them they must spit the loshon hora out of their mouths the way they would spit out of their mouths a piece of pork that they had inadvertently begun to eat, with the same disgust and nausea and contempt, who told them that unless they were one hundred percent certain that a remark was NOT loshon hora, they must suppose that it was and shut up — the Chofetz Chaim did not become popular among the Jewish people like Dr. Sigmund Freud. Now, it can be argued, cynically, that speaking loshon hora is what makes Jews Jews and that there was nothing more Jewishly Jewish to be conceived of than what Freud prescribed in his office for his Jewish patients. Take away from the Jews their loshon hora, and what do you have left? You have nice goyim. But this statement is itself loshon hora, the worst loshon hora there is, because to speak loshon hora about the Jewish people as a whole is the gravest sin of all. To berate the Jewish people for speaking loshon hora, as I do, is itself to commit loshon hora Yet I not only speak the worst loshon hora but compound my sin by forcing you to sit here and listen to it. I am the very Jew I am berating. I am worse than that Jew. That Jew is too stupid to know what he is doing, while I am a disciple of the Chofetz Chaim, who knows that, so long as there is all this loshon hora, the Messiah will never come to save us — and still I speak loshon hora as I just this moment did when I called this other Jew stupid. What hope is there then for the dream of the Chofetz Chaim? Perhaps if all the pious Jews who do not eat on Yom Kippur were instead to give up for one day speaking loshon hora … if, for one moment in time, there were not a single word of loshon hora spoken by a single Jew … if together all the Jews on the face of the earth would simply shut up for one second. … But as even a second of Jewish silence is an impossibility, what hope can there be for our people? I personally believe that why the Jews left those villages in Galicia like Radin and ran to America and came to Palestine was, as much as anything, to escape their own loshon hora If it drove crazy a saint of forbearance and great conversationalist like the Chofetz Chaim, who was even glad to go deaf so as to hear no more of it, one can only imagine what it did to the mind of the average nervous Jew. The early Zionists never said so, but privately more than one of them had to have been thinking, I will even go to Palestine, where there is typhoid, yellow fever, malaria, where there are temperatures of over a hundred degrees, so as never again to have to hear this terrible loshon hora! Yes, in the Land of Israel, away from the goyim, who hate us and thwart us and mock us, away from their persecution and all the chaos this causes within us, away from their loathing and all the anxiety and uncertainty and frustration and anger this engenders in every last Jewish soul, away from the indignity of being locked up by them and shut out by them, we will make a country of our own, where we are free and where we belong, where we will not insult one another and maliciously speak behind one another’s backs, where the Jew, no longer awash with all his inner turmoil, will not defame and derogate his fellow Jews. Well, I can testify to it — I am, unfortunately, an example of it — the loshon hora in Eretz Yisroel is a hundred times worse, a thousand times worse, than it ever was in Poland in the lifetime of the Chofetz Chaim. Here there is nothing we will not say. Here there is such divisiveness that there is no restraint whatsoever. In Poland there was the anti-Semitism, which at least made you silent about the faults of your fellow Jews in the presence of the goyim. But here, with no goyim to worry about, the sky is the limit; here no one has the least idea that, even without goyim to be ashamed in front of, there are still things you cannot and you must not say and that maybe a Jewish person should think twice before he opens wide a Jewish mouth and announces proudly, as Sigmund Freud urged him to, the worst thoughts about people he has in his head. A statement that will cause hatred — they say it. A statement that will cause resentment — they make it. A malicious joke at somebody’s expense — they tell it, they print it, they broadcast it over the nightly news. Read the Israeli press and you will read worse things said about us there than a hundred George Ziads are able to say. When it comes to defaming Jews, the Palestinians are pisherkehs next to Ha’aretz. Even at that we are better than they are! Now, once again it can be cynically argued that in this phenomenon lies the very triumph and glory of Zionism, that what we have achieved in the Land of Israel that we could never hope to attain with the goyim listening is the full flowering of the Jewish genius for loshon hora. Delivered at last from our long subjugation to the Gentiles’ ears, we have been able to evolve and bring to perfection in less than half a century what the Chofetz Chaim most dreaded to behold: a shameless Jew who will say anything.”

And what, I was frantically asking myself, is this overelaborated outpouring leading us on to? I could not fathom the subject here. Was this some shadowy bill of attainder condemning me for my language sins? What’s any of it got to do with the missing money? His extravagant lamentation for this Chofetz Chaim was merely self-entertainment, brutishly spun out to pass the time until Uri arrived with my lunch and the real sadistic fun began — this was my best and most horrifying guess. Assaulted and battered by yet another tyrannical talker whose weapon of revenge is his unloosened mouth, somebody whose purposes lurk hidden, ready to spring, behind the foliage of tens of thousands of words — another unbridled performer, another coldly calculating actor, who, for all I knew, wasn’t even crippled but only crashed about on a couple of crutches the better to enact his bitterness. This is the hater who invented loshon hora, the unshockable one, the unillusioned one, pretending to be shocked by the human disgrace, the misanthrope whose misanthropic delight is to claim loudly and tearfully that it’s hatred he most hates. I am in the custody of a mocker who despises everything.

“It’s said,” Smilesburger resumed, “that only one law of loshon hora remained unclear to the Chofetz Chaim. Yes, a Jew could not, under any circumstances, defame and denigrate a fellow Jew, but was it also forbidden to say something damaging about, to denigrate and to belittle, oneself? About this the Chofetz Chaim remained uncertain for years. Only in his very old age did something happen that made up his mind for him on this troublesome point. Traveling away from Radin in a coach one day, he found himself seated beside another Jew, whom he soon engaged in a friendly conversation. He asked the Jew who he was and where he was going. With excitement the Jew told the old man that he was going to hear the Chofetz Chaim. The Jew did not know that the old man he was addressing happened to be the Chofetz Chaim himself and began to heap praise on the sage he was on his way to hear give a speech. The Chofetz Chaim listened quietly to this glorification of himself. Then he said to the Jew, ‘He’s really not such hot stuff, you know.’ The Jew was stunned at what the old man had dared to say to him. ‘Do you know who you are talking about? Do you realize what you are saying?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the Chofetz Chaim, ‘I realize very well what I am saying. I happen to know the Chofetz Chaim, and he really isn’t all he’s cracked up to be.’ Back and forth went the conversation, the Chofetz Chaim repeating and elaborating his reservations about himself and the Jew growing angrier by the moment. At last the Jew couldn’t stand this scandalous talk any longer and he slapped the old man’s face. The coach by then had rolled up to its stop in the next town. The streets all around were jammed with followers of the Chofetz Chaim excitedly awaiting his arrival. He disembarked, a roar went up, and only then did the Jew in the coach understand whom he had slapped. Imagine the poor man’s mortification. And imagine the impression that his mortification made on as loving and gentle a soul as the Chofetz Chaim. From that moment onward, the Chofetz Chaim decreed that a person must not utter loshon hora even about himself.”

He had charmingly recounted the story, expertly, wittily, so very graceful in his speech despite his heavy accent, his tone mellifluous and quite spellbinding, as though with a treasured folktale he were coaxing a little grandchild to sleep. I wanted to say, “Why do you entertain me, in preparation for what? Why am I here? Who exactly are you? Who are these others? What is Pipik’s place in all of this?” I suddenly wanted so much to speak — to shout for help, to cry out in distress, to demand from him some explanation — that I felt ready to jump not from the window but from my own skin. Yet by this time the wordlessness that had begun as something closely resembling hysterical aphonia had become the bedrock on which I was building my self-defense. Silence had settled in now like a tactic, albeit a tactic that even I recognized he — Uri — they — whoever — wouldn’t have much trouble negating.

“Where is Uri now?” Smilesburger asked, looking down at his watch. “The man is half a man and half a panther. If on the way to the restaurant there is a pretty soldier girl … But this is the price you pay for a specimen like Uri. Again I apologize. It’s days since you’ve eaten a nutritious meal. Someone else might not be so gracious about this terrible situation. Another man of your eminence reeling with hunger might not be so civil and restrained. Henry Kissinger would be screaming at the top of his lungs had he been made to wait alone in a stuffy room like this for the likes of a crippled old nobody like me. A Henry Kissinger would have got up and stormed out of here hours ago, would have hit the ceiling, and I wouldn’t blame him. But you, your even temper, your self-possession, your cool head …” Hoisting himself up on his feet, he hobbled to the blackboard, where, with a stump of chalk he wrote in English, “YOU SHALL NOT HATE YOUR BROTHER IN YOUR HEART.’’ Beneath that he wrote, “YOU SHALL NOT TAKE VENGEANCE OR BEAR ANY GRUDGE AGAINST THE CHILDREN OF YOUR PEOPLE.” “But then maybe secretly,” he said while he wrote, “you are amused and this explains your patient composure. You have one of those Jewish intellects that seize naturally on the comical side of things. Maybe everything is a joke to you. Is it? Is he a joke?” Having finished at the blackboard, he was gesturing to the TV screen, where the camera had momentarily focused on Demjanjuk as he scribbled a note for his defense attorney. “In the beginning he used to nudge Sheftel all the time. Sheftel must have told him, ‘John, don’t nudge me, write me notes,’ so now he writes notes that Sheftel doesn’t read. And why is his alibi so hopeless? Doesn’t that surprise you? Why such a contradictory jumble of places and dates that any first-year law student could discredit? Demjanjuk’s not intelligent but I thought at least he was cunning. You would think he would have got someone long ago at least to help him with the alibi. But then this would entail telling someone the truth, and that he has been too cunning for. I doubt if even the wife knows. The friends don’t. The poor son doesn’t. Your friend Mr. Ziad calls it a ‘show trial.’ Ten years of hearings in America by American immigration and the American courts. A trial in Jerusalem before three distinguished judges and under the scrutiny of the entire world press already going on for over a year. A trial where nearly two days are taken up with arguing over the paper clip on the identity card to establish if the paper clip is authentic or not. Mr. Ziad must be making a joke. So many jokes. Too many jokes. Do you know what it amuses some people to say? That it’s a Jew who runs the PLO. That surrounded by a circle of henchmen as inept as he is, Arafat could not himself, without at least some Jewish assistance, administer a multinational racket with ten billion dollars in assets. People say that, if there is not a Jew to whom Arafat reports, there must be a Jew in charge of the money. Who but a Jew could rescue this organization from all the mismanagement and corruption? When the bottom fell out of the Lebanese pound, who but a Jew prevented the PLO from taking a bath at the Beirut banks? Who now manages the capital outlay for this rebellion that is their latest futile public-relations stunt? Look, look at Sheftel,” he said, drawing my attention once again to the TV set. Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer had just risen to raise an objection to some remark of the prosecutors. “When he was in law school here and the government had canceled Meyer Lansky’s entry visa, Sheftel became chairman of Students for Meyer Lansky. Later he became Lansky’s lawyer and got Lansky a visa to come. Sheftel calls this American Jewish gangster the most brilliant man he ever met. ‘If Lansky had been in Treblinka,’ Sheftel says, ‘the Ukrainians and the Nazis wouldn’t have lasted three months.’ Does Sheftel believe Demjanjuk? That isn’t the point. It’s more that Sheftel can never believe the state. He would rather defend the accused war criminal and the renowned gangster than side with the Israeli establishment. But even this is still a very long way from a Jew who manages the PLO portfolio, let alone a Jew who makes them charitable contributions. Do you know what Demjanjuk said to Sheftel after the Jews had fired the Irishman O’Connor and put Sheftel in charge of the case? Demjanjuk told Sheftel, ‘If I’d had a Jewish lawyer to begin with, I’d never be in this trouble now.’ A joke? Apparently not. The man who sits accused of being Ivan the Terrible is reported to have said it: ‘If only I’d had a Jewish lawyer. …’ So I ask once again, is it necessarily a joke, and only a joke, that the sound investments in stocks, in bonds, in real estate, in motels and currency and radio stations that have given the PLO some financial independence from their Arab brothers are said to have been made for them by Jewish advisers? But just who are these Jews, if they really exist? What is their motive, if they really exist? Is this only stupid Arab propaganda, designed to try to embarrass the Jews, or is it true and truly embarrassing? I can more readily sympathize with the motives of a traitorous Jew like Mr. Vanunu, who gives to the British press our nuclear secrets, than the motives of a rich Jew who gives his money to the PLO. I wonder if even the Chofetz Chaim could find it in his heart to forgive a Jew so defiant of the Torah prohibition that tells us we must not take vengeance against the children of our people. What is the worst loshon hora compared to putting Jewish money in the pockets of Arab terrorists who machine-gun our youngsters while they play on the beaches? True, it is told to us by the Chofetz Chaim that the only money you can take with you when you die is what you spent here in charity — but charity to the PLO? That is surely not the way to amass treasures in Heaven. You shall not hate your brother in your heart, you shall not follow a multitude to do evil, and you shall not write checks to terrorists who kill Jews. I would like to know the names that are signed on those checks. I would like to have a chance to talk to these people and to ask what they think they are doing. But first I must find out if they truly exist other than in the hate-filled imagination of this mischievous friend of yours, so bursting with troublemaking tricks and lies. I never know whether George Ziad is completely crazy, completely devious, or completely both. But then this is the problem we have with the people in this region. Are there really in Athens rich Jews waiting to meet you who support our worst enemy, Jews ready to put their wealth at the disposal of those who have wished to destroy us from the moment that this country first drew breath? Suppose for the sake of argument that there are five of them. Suppose there are ten of them. How much can they contribute — a million apiece? Inconsequential beside what’s given to Arafat every year by a single corrupt little Arabian sheikh. Is it worth tracking them down for a measly ten million? Can you just go around killing rich Jews because you don’t like the people they give their money to? On the other hand, can you reason with them instead, people so poisoned with perversity to begin with? Probably it is best to forget about them and leave them to their everlasting shame. And yet I can’t. I am obsessed by them, these seemingly responsible members of the community, these two-faced fifth-column Jews. All I want to do is to converse with one of them, if such a one exists, the way I am conversing with you. Am I misguided in my Jewish zeal? Am I being made a fool of by an Arab liar? The Chofetz Chaim reminds us, and I believe it, that ‘the world rests on those who silence themselves during an argument.’ But perhaps the world will not cave in immediately if you should dare now to say a few words. Should such Jews prey on my mind like this? What is your opinion? With all the work still to be done for the Jews of the Soviet Union, with all the problems of security that beset our tiny state, why devote one’s precious energy to hunting down a few self-hating Jews in order to discover what makes them tick? About these Jews who defame the Jewish people, the Chofetz Chaim has told us everything anyway. They are driven by loshon hora, and like all who are driven by loshon hora, they will be punished in the world to come. And so why, in our world, should I pursue them? That is the first question I have for you. The second is this: If I do, can I count on Philip Roth to assist me?”

As though at last the cue had been uttered for which he’d been waiting, Uri entered the classroom.

“Lunch,” said Smilesburger, smiling warmly.

The dishes were crammed onto a cafeteria tray. Uri set the tray beside the TV set, and Smilesburger invited me to pull up my chair and begin to eat.

The soup wasn’t plastic, the bread was not cardboard, the potato was a potato and not a rock. Everything was what it was supposed to be. Nothing as clear as this lunch had happened to me in days.

It was only with the food passing into my gullet that I remembered I’d first seen Uri the day before. Two young men in jeans and sweatshirts who had looked to me to be produce workers had been identified by George Ziad as Israeli secret police. Uri was one of them. The other, I now realized, was the guy at the hotel who’d offered to blow me and Pipik. As for this classroom, I thought, they’d just borrowed it, maybe because they figured, not so stupidly, that it would be a particularly effective place to lock me in. They’d gone to the principal and said, “You were in the army, we know about you, we’ve read your file, you’re a patriotic guy. Get everybody the fuck out of your school after one this afternoon. This afternoon the kids are off.” And probably he never complained. In this country, the secret police get everything they want.

At the conclusion of my lunch, Smilesburger handed me, for the second time, the envelope with the million-dollar check. “You dropped this last night,” he said, “on your way back from Ramallah.”

Of the questions I asked Smilesburger that afternoon, the ones to which I could least believe I was being given a straight answer had to do with Moishe Pipik. Smilesburger claimed that they had no better idea than I did of where this double of mine had emerged from, of who he was or whom he might be working for — he certainly wasn’t working for them. “The God of Chance delivered him,” Smilesburger explained to me. “It is with intelligence agencies as it is with novelists — the God of Chance creates in us. First the fake one came along. Then the real one came along. Last the enterprising Ziad came along. From this we improvise.”

“You’re telling me that he’s nothing but a crackpot con man.”

“To you there must be more, to you this must be a singular occurrence rich with paranoidal meaning. But charlatans like him? The airlines offer them special rates. They spend their lives crisscrossing the globe. Yours took the morning flight to New York. He is back in America.”

“You made no effort to stop him.”

“To the contrary. Every effort was made to help him on his way.”

“And the woman?”

“I know nothing about the woman. After last night, I would think that you know more than anyone does. The woman, I suppose, is one of those women for whom adventure with a crook is irresistible. Phallika, the Goddess of Male Desire. Am I mistaken?”

“They are both gone.”

“Yes. We are down to just one of you, the one not a crackpot, not a charlatan, not a fool or a weakling either, the one who knows how to be silent, to be patient, to be cautious, how to remain unprovoked in the most unsettling circumstances. You have received high grades. All instincts excellent. Never mind how you quaked inside or even that you vomited — you did not shit yourself or take a wrong step. The God of Chance could not have presented a better Jew for the job.”

But I was not taking the job. I had not been extricated from one implausible plot of someone else’s devising to be intimidated into being an actor in yet another. The more Smilesburger explained about the intelligence operation for which he bore the code name “Smilesburger” and for which he proposed I volunteer, the more infuriated I became, not merely because his overbearing playfulness was no longer a bewildering puzzle that kept me stunned and on my guard, but because, once I had finally eaten something and begun to calm down, it registered on me just how cruelly misused I had been by these phenomenally high-handed Israelis playing an espionage game that seemed to me to have at the heart of it a fantasy forged in the misguided brain of no less a talent than Oliver North. My initial gratitude toward the putative captors who had been kind enough to feed me a piece of cold chicken after having forcibly abducted me and then held me prisoner here against my will so as to see how well I might hold up on a mission for them — the gratitude gave way, now that I felt liberated, to outrage. The magnitude of my indignation alarmed even me, yet I could do nothing to control the eruption once it had begun. And Uri’s brutish, contemptuous stare — he’d returned with a Silex to pour me a fresh cup of coffee — enraged me still more, especially after Smilesburger told me that this subordinate of his who’d fetched my lunch had been following me everywhere. “The ambush out on the Ramallah road?” Uri, I learned, had been there for that, too. They had been running me like a rat through a maze without my knowledge or consent and, from everything I could gather, with no precise idea of what, if any, the payoff for them might be. Smilesburger had been operating on no more than a hunch, inspired by the presence in Jerusalem of Pipik — whom an informant had identified as an impostor only hours after he’d been ushered through immigration with the phony passport identifying him as me — and then by my arrival a week later. How could Smilesburger call himself professional if a coincidence so fraught with the potential for creative subterfuge had failed to ignite his curiosity? Surely a novelist could understand what it meant to be confronted with a situation so evocative. Yes, he was like a writer, a very lucky writer, he explained, warming sardonically to the comparison, who had fallen upon his own true subject in all its complex purity. That his art was aesthetically impure, a decidedly lesser form of contrivance owing to its gross utilitarian function, Smilesburger was willing to grant — but still the puzzle presented to him was exactly the writer’s: there is the dense kernel, the compacted core, and how to set loose the chain reaction is the question that tantalizes, how to produce the illuminating explosion without, in the process, mutilating oneself. You do as the writer does, Smilesburger told me: you begin to speculate, and to speculate with any scope requires a principled disregard for the confining conventions, a gambler’s taste for running a risk, a daring to tamper with the taboo, which, he added flatteringly, had always marked my own best work. His work too was guesswork, morally speaking. You try your luck, he told me. You make mistakes. You overdo and underdo and doggedly follow an imaginative line that yields nothing. Then something creeps in, an arguably stupid detail, a ridiculous gag, an embarrassingly bald ploy, and this opens out into the significant action that makes the mess an operation, rounded, pointed, structured, yet projecting the illusion of having been as spontaneously generated, as coincidental, untidy, and improbably probable, as life. “Who knows where Athens might lead? Go, for George Ziad, to Athens, and if you convincingly play your role there, then this meeting he dangled before you, the introduction, in Tunis, to Arafat, could well come to pass. Such things do happen. For you this would be a great adventure, and for us, of course, having you in Tunis would be no small achievement. I myself once spent a week with Arafat. Yasir is good for a laugh. He has a wonderful twinkle. He’s a showman. Very, very demonstrative. In his outward behavior, he’s a terrific charmer. You’d enjoy him.”

In response I shook in his face the embarrassingly bald ploy itself, the ridiculous gag, the stupid detail that was his million-dollar check. “I am an American citizen,” I said. “I am here on a journalistic assignment for an American newspaper. I am not a Jewish soldier of fortune. I am not a Jewish undercover agent. I am not a Jonathan Pollard, nor do I wish to assassinate Yasir Arafat. I am here to interview another writer. I am here to talk to him about his books. You have followed me and bugged me and baited me, you have physically manhandled me, psychologically abused me, maneuvered me about like your toy for whatever reason suited you, and now you have the audacity —”

Uri had taken a seat on the windowsill and was grinning at me while I unleashed all my contempt for these unforgivable excesses and the wanton indecency with which I had been so misused.

“You are free to leave,” said Smilesburger.

“I am also free to bring an action. This is actionable,” I told him, remembering all the good it had done me to make the same claim to Pipik at our first face-to-face encounter. ‘You have held me here for hours on end without giving me any idea of where I was or who you were or what might be going to happen to me. And all in behalf of some trivial scheme so ridiculous that I can hardly believe my ears when you associate it with the word ‘intelligence.’ These absurdities you concoct without the slightest regard for my rights or my privacy or my safety — this is intelligence?”

“Perhaps we were also protecting you.”

“Who asked you to? On the Ramallah road you were protecting me? I could have been beaten to death out there. I could have been shot.”

“Yet you were not even bruised.”

“The experience was nonetheless most unpleasant.”

“Uri will chauffeur you to the American Embassy, where you can lodge a complaint with your ambassador.”

“Just call a taxi. I’ve had enough Uri.”

“Do as he says,” Smilesburger told Uri.

“And where am I? Where exactly?” I asked, after Uri had left the room. “What is this place?”

“It’s not a prison, clearly. You haven’t been chained to a pipe in a windowless room with a blindfold around your eyes and a gag in your mouth.”

“Don’t tell me how lucky I am that this isn’t Beirut. Tell me something useful — tell me who this impostor is.”

“You might do better to ask George Ziad. Perhaps you have been even more misused by your Palestinian friends than by me.”

“Is this so? This is something you know?”

“Would you believe me if I said yes? I think you will have to gather your information from someone more trustworthy as I will have to gather mine with the assistance of someone a little less easily affronted. Ambassador Pickering will contact whom he sees fit to about my conduct, and, whatever the consequences, I will live with them as best I can. I cannot believe, however, that this has been an ordeal that will scar you forever. You may even be grateful someday for whatever my contribution may have been to the book that emerges. It may not be all that such a book might be if you chose to proceed a bit further with us, but then you know just how little adventure a talent like yours requires. And in the end no intelligence agency, however reckless, can rival a novelist’s fantastical creations. You can get on now, without interference from all this crude reality, creating for yourself characters more meaningful than a simple thug like Uri or a tryingly facetious thug like me. Who is the impostor? Your novelist’s imagination will come up with something far more seductive than whatever may be the ridiculous and trivial truth. Who is George Ziad, what is his game? He too will become a problem more complexly resonant than whatever the puerile truth may be. Reality. So banal, so foolish, so incoherent — such a baffling and disappointing nuisance. Not like being in that study in Connecticut, where the only thing that’s real is you.”

Uri poked his head into the room. “Taxi!”

“Good,” said Smilesburger, flipping off the TV set. “Here begins your journey back to everything that is self-willed.”

But could I be sure this taxi was going to turn out to be a taxi, when I was increasingly uncertain that these people had any affiliation whatsoever with Israeli intelligence? What proof was there? The profound illogic of it all — was that the proof? At the thought of that “taxi,” I suddenly felt endangered more by leaving than by staying and listening for as long as it took to figure out the safest possible means of extricating myself.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Who assigned you to me?”

“Don’t worry about that. Represent me in your book however you like. Do you prefer to romanticize me or to demonize me? Do you wish to heroize me or do you want instead to make jokes? Suit yourself.”

“Suppose there are ten rich Jews who give their money to the Palestinians. Tell me why that is your business.”

“Do you want to take the taxi to the American Embassy to lodge your complaint or do you want to continue to listen to someone you cannot believe? The taxi will not wait. For waiting you need a limousine.”

“A limousine then.”

“Do as he says,” Smilesburger said to Uri.

“Cash or credit card?” Uri replied in perfect English, laughing loudly as he went off.

“Why does he stupidly laugh all the time?”

“This is how he pretends not to have a sense of humor. It’s meant to frighten you. But you have held up admirably. You are doing wonderfully. Continue.”

“These Jews who may or may not be contributing money to the PLO, why haven’t they a perfect right to do with their money whatever they wish without interference from the likes of you?”

“Not only do they have a right as Jews, they have an inescapable moral duty as Jews, to make reparations to the Palestinians in whatever form they choose. What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have displaced them and we have oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history — we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of their human status. Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty. To me the horror is not that a handful of rich Jews make large financial contributions to the PLO but that every last Jew in the world does not have it in his heart to contribute as well.”

“The line two minutes ago was somewhat at variance with this one.”

“You think I say these things cynically.”

“You say everything cynically.”

“I speak sincerely. They are innocent, we are guilty; they are right, we are wrong; they are the violated, we the violators. I am a ruthless man working in a ruthless job for a ruthless country and I am ruthless knowingly and voluntarily. If someday there is a Palestinian victory and if there is then a war-crimes trial here in Jerusalem, held, say, in the very hall where they now try Mr. Demjanjuk, and if at this trial there are not just big shots in the dock but minor functionaries like me as well, I will have no defense to make for myself in the face of the Palestinian accusation. Indeed, those Jews who contributed freely to the PLO will be held up to me as people of conscience, as people of Jewish conscience, who, despite every Jewish pressure to collaborate in the oppression of the Palestinians, chose instead to remain at one with the spiritual and moral heritage of their own long-suffering people. My brutality will be measured against their righteousness and I shall hang by my neck until I am dead. And what will I say to the court, after I have been judged and found guilty by my enemy? Will I invoke as my justification the millennial history of degrading, humiliating, terrifying, savage, murderous anti-Semitism? Will I repeat the story of our claim on this land, the millennial history of Jewish settlement here? Will I invoke the horrors of the Holocaust? Absolutely not. I don’t justify myself in this way now and I will not stoop to doing it then. I will not plead the simple truth: ‘I am tribesman who stood with his tribe,’ nor will I plead the complex truth: ‘Born as a Jew where and when I was, I am, I always have been, whichever way I turn, condemned.’ I will offer no stirring rhetoric when I am asked by the court to speak my last words but will tell my judges only this: ‘I did what I did to you because I did what I did to you.’ And if that is not the truth, it’s as close as I know how to come to it. ‘I do what I do because I do what I do.’ And your last words to the judges? You will hide behind Aharon Appelfeld. You do it now and you will do it then. You will say, ‘I did not approve of Sharon, I did not approve of Shamir, and my conscience was confused and troubled when I saw the suffering of my friend George Ziad and how this injustice had made him crazy with hatred.’ You will say, ‘I did not approve of Gush Emunim and I did not approve of the West Bank settlements, and the bombing of Beirut filled me with horror.’ You will demonstrate in a thousand ways what a humane, compassionate fellow you are, and then they will ask you, ‘But did you approve of Israel and the existence of Israel, did you approve of the imperialist, colonialist theft that was the state of Israel?’ And that’s when you will hide behind Appelfeld. And the Palestinians will hang you, too, as indeed they should. For what justification is Mr. Appelfeld from Csernowitz, Bukovina, for the theft from them of Haifa and Jaffa? They will hang you right alongside me, unless, of course, they mistake you for the other Philip Roth. If they take you for him, you will at least have a chance. For that Philip Roth, who campaigned for Europe’s Jews to vacate the property they had stolen, to return to Europe and to the European Diaspora where they belonged, that Philip Roth was their friend, their ally, their Jewish hero. And that Philip Roth is your only hope. This man, your monster, is, in fact, your salvation — the impostor is your innocence. Pretend at your trial to be him and not yourself, trick them with all your wiles into believing you two are one and the same. Otherwise you will be judged a Jew just as hateful as Smilesburger. More hateful, for hiding from the truth the way you do.”

“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.’”