Operation Shylock

EPILOGUE

Words

Generally

Only Spoil Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had no idea what had become of Pipik, and my never having heard from or about him again after those few days in Jerusalem made me wonder if perhaps he had even died. Intermittently I tried to convince myself, on the basis of no evidence other than his absence, that he had indeed been felled by the cancer. I even developed a scenario of the circumstances in which his life had ended that was intended to parallel the flagrantly pathological course of what I surmised about how it had been lived. I pointedly set myself to working up the kind of veiled homicidal daydream that occurs often enough in angry people but that’s generally too blatantly suffused by wishful thinking to afford the assurance that I was groping for. I needed a demise for him neither more nor less incredible than everything else about the lie that he was, needed it so as to proceed as if I had been delivered from his interference for good and it was safe to write truthfully of what had happened, without my having to fear that publishing my book would provoke a visitation a lot more terrible for me than his aborted Jerusalem debut.

I came up with this. I imagined a letter from Jinx turning up in my mailbox, written in a hand so minuscule that I could only decipher it with the aid of the magnifying lens from my two-volume set of the OED. The letter, some seven pages long, had the look of a document smuggled out of a prison, while the calligraphy itself suggested the art of the lacemaker or the microsurgeon. At first glance I found it impossible to attribute this letter to a woman as robustly formed and sensuously supple as Pipik’s buxom Wanda Jane, who had claimed, moreover, to be on such bad terms with the alphabet. How could this exquisite stitching be her handiwork? It wasn’t until I remembered the hippie waif who’d found Jesus, the servile believer whose comfort had come from telling herself, “I’m worthless, I’m nothing, God is everything,” that I could even begin to move beyond my initial incredulity to query the likelihood of the narrative so peepingly revealed there.

As it happened, there was nothing I read in that letter, extreme though it was, that I couldn’t bring myself to believe about him. However, what made me more suspicious than even the handwriting was the alarming confession, halfway through, that Wanda Jane made about herself. It was simply too shocking to believe that the woman whom Smilesburger labeled “Phallika” in deference to her natural juiciness had performed the act of necrophilia that she reported almost as blithely as if she were remembering her first French kiss at the age of thirteen. His maniacal power over her couldn’t possibly have been so grotesque as that. Surely what I was reading was a description not of something she had done but of something that he wanted me to think she had done, a fantasy specifically devised to inform his eternal rival of just how dazzlingly unbreakable a hammer-lock he had on her life — intended, moreover, to so contaminate her memory for me as to render her eternally taboo. It was malicious pornography and could not have happened. What she had inscribed here, as though with the point of a pin, attesting to his hold on her and to her worshipful, ghoulish adoration of him, was what her dictator had dictated in the hope of keeping her and me from ever coupling again, not merely after his death but during his life, which — as I was forced to deduce from this quintessentially Pipikish ploy — had by no means come to its sorry end.

So he lived — he was back. Far from assuring me that he was gone, never again to return to plague me, this letter — admittedly, as perhaps only I would interpret it — proclaimed with his usual sadistic ingenuity the resurgence of Pipik’s powers and the resumption of his role as my succubus. He and no one else had written this letter to plunge me back into that paranoiac no-man’s-land where there is no demarcation between improbability and certainty and where the reality of what menaces you is all the more portentous for being inestimable and obscure. He had imagined her here as he would have her be: a ministering instrument serving him in extremis and, after his death, worshiping his virility in a most unimaginable way. I could even explain the unvarnished self-portrait he presented of a dying man perpetually on the verge of all-out insanity as the most conclusive evidence he could think to offer of the miraculous devotion he could inspire in her regardless of how fiendishly he might behave. No, it didn’t surprise me that he would make not the slightest effort to conceal the depths of his untruthfulness or to disguise or soften in any way the vulgar, terrifying charlatan to whom she was enslaved. To the contrary, why should he not exaggerate his awfulness, misrepresent himself as even more monstrous than he was, if his intention was to frighten me off her forever?

And I was frightened. I had almost forgotten how readily I could be undone by the bold audacity of his lies until that letter arrived, ostensibly from Wanda Jane, asking me to believe that my all too indestructible nemesis was no more. What better measure of my dread of his reappearing than the masochistic perversity with which I quickly transformed the welcome news of his death into the confirmation of his continued existence? Why not take a cue instead from what had happened in Jerusalem and recognize in everything hyperbolical the most telling proof of the letter’s authenticity? Of course she’s telling the truth — there is nothing here at all inconsistent with what you already know of them, least of all what is most repugnant. And why go to the trouble even to imagine a letter like this if, instead of taking heart from the news of having outlasted him, instead of being fortified by your victory over him, you self-destructively build into the letter egregious ambiguities that you then exploit to undermine the very equanimity you are out to achieve?

Answer: Because what I have learned from what I’ve gone through with them — and with George, with Smilesburger, with Supposnik, with all of them — is that any letter less dismayingly ambiguous (or any more easily decipherable) that failed to belie itself in even the minutest way, any letter whose message inspired my wholehearted belief and purged, if only temporarily, the uncertainties most bedeviling to me, wouldn’t convince me of anything other than the power over my imagination of that altogether human desire to be convinced by lies.

So here then is the substance of the letter I came up with to spur me on to tell the whole of this story, as I have, without the fear of being impeded by his reprisal. Someone else might have found a more effective way to quiet his own anxiety. But, Moishe Pipik’s dissent notwithstanding, I am not someone else.

When it became apparent that Philip had probably less than a year to live, they had moved up from Mexico — where, in desperation, he had imprudently put his faith in a last-ditch course of drug therapy outlawed in the United States — and sublet a furnished little house in Hackensack, New Jersey, half an hour north of my hometown of Newark. That was another catastrophe, and six months later they had moved on to the Berkshires, only some forty miles north of where I have been living for the last twenty years. In a small farmhouse they rented on a remote dirt road halfway up a wooded mountainside, he set about, with his waning strength, to dictate into a tape recorder what was to have been his grand treatise on Diasporism, while Wanda Jane got work as an emergency-room nurse in a nearby hospital. And it was here that they found some respite at last from the melodrama that had forged their indissoluble union. Life became calm. Harmony was restored. Love was rekindled. A miracle.

Death came suddenly four months later, on Thursday, January17, 1991, just hours after the first Iraqi Scud missiles exploded in residential Tel Aviv. Ever since he’d been working with the tapes, his physical degeneration had become all but imperceptible, and to Wanda it had seemed as though the cancer might once again have gone into remission, perhaps even as a consequence of the progress that he made each day on the book and that he talked about so hopefully each evening when she came home from the hospital to bathe him and make dinner. But when the pictures flashed over CNN of the wounded on stretchers being hurriedly carried from the badly damaged apartment buildings, he was beyond consoling. The shock of the bombardment made him cry like a child. It was too late now, he told her, for Diasporism to save the Jews. He could bear neither to witness the slaughter of Tel Aviv’s Jews nor to contemplate the consequences of the nuclear counterattack that he was certain the Israelis would launch before dawn, and, brokenhearted, Philip died that night.

For two days, wearing her nightgown and watching CNN, Wanda remained beside the body in the bed. She comforted him with the news that no Israeli strike of any sort was going to be launched in retaliation; she told him about the Patriot missile installations, manned by American servicemen, protecting the Israelis against renewed attacks; she described to him the precautions that the Israelis were taking against the threat of Iraqi germ warfare — “They are not slaughtering Jews,” she assured him, “they’re going to be all right!” But no encouragement she was able to offer could bring him back to life. In the hope that it might resuscitate the rest of him, she made love to his penile implant. Oddly enough, it was the one bodily part, she wrote to me, “that looked alive and felt like him.” She confessed without so much as a trace of shame that the erection that had outlived him had given her solace for two days and two nights. “We fucked and we talked and we watched TV. It was like the good old days.” And then she added, “Anybody who thinks that was wrong doesn’t know what real love is. I was far nuttier as a little Catholic taking Communion than having sex with my dead Jew.”

Her sole regret was having failed to relinquish him to the Jews to bury like a Jew within twenty-four hours of his death. That was wrong, sinfully wrong, particularly for him. But caring for Philip as if for her own sick little boy in the isolation of that quiet little mountainside house, she had fallen more deeply in love with him than ever before and as a result had been unable to let him go without reenacting, in that posthumous honeymoon, the passion and the intimacy of their “good old days.” In her defense she could only say that once she understood — and she was herself so far gone that the realization had been awfully slow in coming — that no amount of sexual excitement could ever resurrect his corpse, she had acted with dispatch and had had him promptly buried, with traditional Jewish rites, in a local cemetery dating back to pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts. He had chosen the plot there himself. To be surrounded in death by all these old Yankee families, with their prototypical Yankee names, had seemed to him exactly as it should be for the man whose gravestone was to bear beneath his name the just, if forlorn, epithet “The Father of Diasporism.”

His aversion to me — or was it to my shadow? — had apparently reached its maniacal crescendo some months earlier, when they were living in New Jersey. After Mexico, she wrote, he had decided they would make their home there while he set to work on His Way, the scandalous exposé of me whose writing had taken possession of him and whose publication as a full-length book was to reveal me to the public as a sham and a charlatan. They took pointless drives around blighted Newark, where he was determined to unearth “documentation” that would disclose how I was not at all the person I pretended to be. Sitting with him in their car across the street from the hospital where I was born, and where drug-dealers now congregated not two minutes away, she wept and begged him to come to his senses while he fulminated for hours about my lies. One morning, as they ate breakfast in the kitchen of their Hackensack house, he explained that he had restrained himself long enough and that, against the opponent I had revealed myself to be in Jerusalem, he could be bridled no longer by the rules of fair play. He had made up his mind to confront my aged father that very day with “the truth about his fraudulent son.” “What truth?” she had cried. “The truth! That everything about him is a lie! That his success in life is based on a lie! That the role he plays in life is a lie! That misleading people about who he is is the only talent the little shit has! He’s the fake, that’s the irony — he’s the fucking double, a dishonest impostor and fucking hypocritical fake, and I intend to tell the world, starting today with his stupid old man!” And when she then refused to drive him to my father’s Elizabeth address (which he’d written on a piece of paper he’d kept in his wallet since their return from Mexico), he lunged at her with his fork, sharply stabbing the back of the hand that, just in the nick of time, she had thrown out to protect her eyes.

Now, not a day had passed since they’d moved to New Jersey — some days, not even an hour — when she had not plotted running away from him. But even when she looked down at the holes punched into her skin by the tines of his fork and at her blood seeping out of them, even then she could find neither the strength nor the weakness to abandon him to his illness and run for her life. Instead she began to scream at him that what was enraging him was the failure of the Mexican cure — the charlatan was the phony doctor in Mexico, all of whose claims had been filthy lies. At the root of his rage was the cancer. And that was when he told her that it was the writer who had given him the cancer — contending for three decades with the treachery of that writer was what had brought him, at only fifty-eight, face-to-face with death. And that was when even the self- sacrificing devotion of Nurse Possesski gave way and she announced that she could no longer live with someone who was out of his mind — she was leaving!

“For him!” he exclaimed in a triumphant voice, as though it were the cure for his cancer that she had finally revealed. “Leaving the one who loves you for that lying son of a bitch who fucks you every which way and then disappears!”

She said no, but of course it was true — the dream of being rescued was of being rescued by me; it was the very dream she’d enacted on the night she’d pushed Walesa’s six-pointed star beneath the door of my hotel room in Arab Jerusalem and pleaded to be given refuge by the original whose existence so inflamed the duplicate.

“I’m going! I’m getting out of here, Philip, before something worse happens! I cannot live with a savage child!”

But when she rose from the breakfast table, at long last primed to break the bonds of this inexplicable martyrdom, he sobbed hysterically, “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry,” and tumbled to his knees on the kitchen floor. Pressing her bleeding hand against his mouth, he told her, “Forgive me — I promise I’ll never stab you again!” And then this man who was all malaise, this unshameable, intemperate, conniving madman driven as recklessly by ungovernable compulsion as by meticulous, minute-by-minute miscalculation, this mutilated victim who was all incompleteness and deficiency, whose every scheme was a fiasco and against whose hyperbole she was, as always, undefended, began to lick the wound he had inflicted. Grunting with contrition, growling showily with remorse, he lapped thirstily away at her with his tongue as though the blood oozing out of this woman’s veins were the very elixir for which he’d been searching to prolong the calamity that was his life.

Because by this time he didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, it wasn’t that difficult for someone with her strength to lift him off the floor and virtually carry him in her arms up the stairs to the bed. And while she sat beside him there, holding his trembling hands in hers, he revealed where he really came from and who he really was, a story irreconcilable with everything he had told her before. She refused to believe him and, in her letter to me, would not repeat even one detail of the things to which he pleaded guilty. He had to have been delirious, she wrote, because, if he wasn’t, then she would have had to have him either arrested or institutionalized. When, at last, there was nothing disgraceful that a man could do that was left for him to confess to, darkness had enveloped their street and it was time to feed him dinner with her throbbing bandaged hand. But first, using a sponge and a basin of warm water, she gently bathed him right there in the bed and, as she did every night, massaged his legs until he purred. What did it matter in the end who he was and what he had done, or who he thought he was and what he thought he had done or was capable of doing or was emboldened enough to have done or was ill enough to have imagined he had done or imagined he must have done to have made himself fatally ill? Pure or depraved, harmless or ruthless, would-be Jewish savior or thrill-seeking, duplicitous, perverted betrayer, he was suffering, and she was there to assuage that suffering as she had been from the start. This woman whom he had stabbed in the hand at breakfast (while aiming for her face) put him to sleep — without his even having to ask — with a sweetly milking, all-consuming blow job that blotted out all his words, or so she said, or so said whoever had told her what to say in that letter in order to warn me off ever writing a single sentence for publication about these coarse, barbaric irrationalists of mine, these two catastrophists sustained by their demonic conflict and the theatrical, maddening trivia of psychosis. Her letter’s message to me was this: Find your comedy elsewhere. You bow out, and we’ll bow out. He’ll be as good as dead. But dare to ridicule either one of us in a book, and we’ll never leave you alone again. You have met your match in Pipik and Jinx, both of whom are alive and well. And this message, of course, was the very antithesis of the assurance that the letter had been conceived to provide.

The morning after the reconciliation, everything that worked to drain away her courage started up once again, even though it seemed at first that the shock even to him of the savagery with that fork might have at last reined in his desperation. He addressed her, on that morning after, “in a soothing voice like yours,” she wrote, a voice contained, modulated, expressive of all that she longed for and sometimes secretly dreamed of finding by taking the unthinkable revenge of fleeing to the sanctuary of me.

He informed her that they were leaving New Jersey. She was to go out to the backyard and burn in the barbecue pit the four first-draft chapters of His Way. That abhorrent obsession was over. They were going.

She was ecstatic — now she could stay on at her task of keeping him alive (as if, she admitted, she could ever have left him to die in agony by himself). Making a life with his namesake was a fairy tale anyway. I, as he’d reminded her, had wanted her “only for sex” while what he wanted from her, with all the scorching intensity that only the dying can feel, alone and resourceless on their island of fear, was “everything,” she wrote, “everything” that she had in her to give to a patient.

They were leaving New Jersey to move to the Berkshires, where he would write the book on Diasporism that would be his legacy to the Jews.

Since dyslexic Wanda had never read a page I or any other novelist had written, it wasn’t until they’d settled down in western Massachusetts that she learned it was where I’d located the home of the wearily heroic E. I. Lonoff, whose example of Flaubertian anchoritism confirms the highest literary ideals of writer-worshiping Nathan Zuckerman, the young novice of The Ghost Writer. However, if she could not understand how, having begun by stealing my identity, Pipik was now bent on further compounding the theft by turning into parody (his way) the self-obliterating dedication of the selfless Lonoff, she did know that I made my home less than an hour south, in Connecticut’s northwestern hills. And the provocation my proximity was bound to be was enough to reawaken her dread, and with that, of course, the inextinguishable fantasies of breaking free that the edifying encounter with me had inspired. (I should never have found her irresistible, I thought. It didn’t take a genius to foresee this.)

“Oh, darling,” she cried, “forget him, I beg you. We’ll burn His Way and forget he ever existed! You can’t leave where he was born to go to live where he’s living now! You can’t keep following him like this! Our time together is too precious for that! Being anywhere near this man drives you nuts! You’ll only fill up with poison again! Being there will just make you crazy again!”

“Being near him now can only make me sane,” he told her, as senseless on the subject as ever. “Being near him can only make me strong. Being near him is the antidote — it’s how I am going to beat this thing. Being near him is the cure.”

“As far from him as we can!” she pleaded.

“As close to him as we can,” he replied.

“Tempting fate!” she cried.

“Not at all,” he answered. “See him if you want to.”

“I didn’t mean me and fate — I meant you. First you tell me he gave you the cancer, now you tell me he’s the cure! But he has nothing to do with it either way. Forget him! Forgive him!”

“But I do forgive him. I forgive him for who he is, I forgive myself for who I am, I even forgive you for who you are. I repeat to you — see him if you wish. See him again, seduce him again —”

“I don’t want to! You’re my man, Philip, my only man! I wouldn’t be here otherwise!”

“Did you say — did I hear you right? Did you actually say ‘You’re my Manson, Philip’?”

“My man! Man! You’re my M-A-N!”

“No. You said ‘Manson.’ Why did you say Manson?”

“I did not say Manson.”

“You said I was your Charles Manson, and I would like to know why.”

“But I didn’t!”

“Didn’t what? Say Charles or say Manson? If you didn’t say Charles but only Manson, did you mean merely to say man-son, did you only mean I was your infantile, helpless creep, your ‘savage child,’ as you told me yesterday, did you mean only to insult me like that again first thing today, or did you mean what you meant — that you live with me like those zombie girls who worshiped Manson’s tattooed dick? Do I terrorize you like Charles Manson? Do I Svengali you and enslave you and scare you into submission — is that the reason you remain loyal to a man who is already half a corpse?”

“But that’s what’s doing this to you — death!”

“It’s you who’s doing this to me. You said I was your Charles Manson!”

And here she screamed, “You are! Yesterday! All those horrible, horrible stories! You are! You’re worse!”

“I see,” he replied in my soothing voice, the voice that only minutes earlier had awakened so much hope in her. “So this is what comes of the fork. You haven’t forgiven me at all. You ask me to forgive him for his diabolical hatred of me, and I do, but you cannot find it in your heart to forgive four little pinpricks on the back of your hand. I tell horrible stories, horrible, horrible stories, and you believe me.”

“I didn’t believe you! I definitely did not believe you.”

“So, you don’t believe me. But you never believe me. I can’t win, even with you. I tell you the truth and you don’t believe me, I tell you lies and you do believe me —”

“Oh, death is doing this, death — this isn’t you!”

“Oops — not me? Who then? Shall I guess? Can’t you think for one single moment about anybody but him? Is looking at me and thinking of him what gets you through our awful life? Is that what you imagine in the bed, is that how you are able, without vomiting, to satisfy my repellent desires — by pretending you’re in Jerusalem satisfying his? What’s the stumbling block? That his is real and mine is fake? That he is healthy and I am sick? That I will die and disappear and he will live on forever through all those wonderful books?”

Later in the morning, while he was sleeping off that tirade in their bed, she did as he had instructed and, in the barbecue pit on the back lawn, destroyed the unfinished manuscript of His Way. She knew that even if he awakened he was far too depleted to haul himself over to the window to watch her, and so, before dumping the contents of his briefcase straight into the flames, she quickly looked to read what she could of his exposé of me. Only there was nothing there. All the pages were blank.

And so too were the tapes on which he’d claimed to have been recording his Diasporism book while she was off working her hospital shift during those last months of his life in the Berkshires. Six weeks after his death, though she still feared that hearing his disembodied voice might unleash those paroxysms of grief that had nearly killed her in the days after she’d relinquished his body to be buried by the Jews, she found herself one night yearning so for his presence that she had sat down with the tape recorder at the kitchen table and discovered that the tapes were blank as well. Alone in that remote little mountainside house, vainly listening for his voice on one tape after another, sitting all night and into the morning playing side after side and hearing absolutely nothing — and remembering too those mystifyingly empty pages that she had burned to cinders that awful morning in New Jersey — she understood, as people will often fully perceive the suffering of their loved ones only after they are gone, that I was the barrier to everything. He had not been lying about that. I was the obstacle to the fulfillment of his most altruistic dreams, choking off the torrent of all the potential originally his. At the end of his life, despite everything that he had been ordained to tell the Jews to prevent their destruction, the thought of my implacable hostility had impeded him from telling them anything, just as the menace of his Mansonish hatred (if I understood this letter correctly) was now supposed to stifle me.

It was only a week after I’d sent a copy of my final manuscript to his office that Smilesburger phoned from Kennedy Airport. He had received the book and read it. Should he come to Connecticut for us to talk it over, or would I prefer to meet in Manhattan? He was staying with his son and his daughter-in-law on the Upper West Side.

The moment I heard the resonating deep rumble of that Old Country voice — or rather, heard in response the note of respectful compliance in my own, disquieted though I was by his abrupt and irritating materialization — I realized how specious were my reasons for getting myself to do as he’d asked. What with the journals I’d kept and the imprint of the experience on my memory, it was transparently ridiculous to have convinced myself that I needed Smilesburger to corroborate my facts or to confirm the accuracy of what I’d written, as ridiculous as it was to believe that I had undertaken that operation for him solely to serve my own professional interests. I had done what I’d done because he had wanted me to do it; I’d obeyed him just as any other of his subordinates would have — I might as well have been Uri, and I couldn’t explain to myself why.

Never in my life had I submitted a manuscript to any inspector anywhere for this sort of scrutiny. To do so ran counter to all the inclinations of one whose independence as a writer, whose counter- suggestiveness as a writer, was simply second nature and had contributed as much to his limitations and his miscalculations as to his durability. To be degenerating into an acquiescent Jewish boy pleasing his law-giving elders when, whether I liked it or not, I had myself acquired all the markings of a Jewish elder was more than a little regressive. Jews who found me guilty of the crime of “informing” had been calling for me to be “responsible” from the time I began publishing in my middle twenties, but my youthful scorn had been plentiful and so were my untested artistic convictions, and, though not as untrammeled by the assault as I pretended, I had been able to hold my ground. I hadn’t chosen to be a writer, I announced, only to be told by others what was permissible to write. The writer redefined the permissible. That was the responsibility. Nothing need hide itself in fiction. And so on.

And yet there I was, more than twice the age of the redefining young writer who’d spontaneously taken “Stand Alone!” as his defiant credo, driving the hundred miles down to New York early the next morning to learn from Smilesburger what he wanted removed from my book. Nothing need hide itself in fiction but are there no limits where there’s no disguise? The Mossad was going to tell me.

Why am I a sucker for him? Is it just what happens between two men, one being susceptible to the manipulations of the other who feels to him more powerful? Is his that brand of authoritative manhood that is able to persuade me to do its bidding? Or is there something in my sense of his worldliness that I just don’t feel I measure up to, because he’s swimming in the abrasive tragedies of life and I’m only swimming in art? Is there something in that big, tough — almost romantically tough — mind at work that I am intellectually vulnerable to and that makes me trust in his judgment more than in my own, something perhaps about his moving the pieces on the chessboard the way Jews always wished their fathers could so no one would pull those emblematic beards? There’s something in Smilesburger that evokes not my real father but my fantastic one — that takes over, that takes charge of me. I vanquish the bogus Philip Roth and Smilesburger vanquishes the real one! I push against him, I argue against him, and always in the end I do what he wants — in the end I give in and do everything he says!

Well, not this time. This time the terms are mine.

Smilesburger had chosen as the site for our editorial meeting a Jewish food store on Amsterdam Avenue, specializing in smoked fish, that served breakfast and lunch on a dozen Formica-topped tables in a room adjacent to the bagel and bialy counter and that looked as though, years back, when someone got the bright idea to “modernize,” the attempt at redecoration had been sensibly curtailed halfway through. The place reminded me of the humble street-level living quarters of some of my boyhood friends, whose parents would hurriedly eat their meals in a closet-sized storeroom just behind the shop to keep an eye on the register and the help. In Newark, back in the forties, we used to buy, for our household’s special Sunday breakfasts, silky slices of precious lox, shining fat little chubs, chunks of pale, meaty carp and paprikaed sable, all double-wrapped in heavy wax paper, at a family-run store around the corner that looked and smelled pretty much as this one did — the tiled floor sprinkled with sawdust, the shelves stacked with fish canned in sauces and oils, up by the cash register a prodigious loaf of halvah soon to be sawed into crumbly slabs, and, wafting up from behind the showcase running the length of the serving counter, the bitter fragrance of vinegar, of onions, of whitefish and red herring, of everything pickled, peppered, salted, smoked, soaked, stewed, marinated, and dried, smells with a lineage that, like these stores themselves, more than likely led straight back through the shtetl to the medieval ghetto and the nutrients of those who lived frugally and could not afford to dine à la mode, the diet of sailors and common folk, for whom the flavor of the ancient preservatives was life. And the neighborhood delicatessen restaurants where we extravagantly ate “out” as a treat once a month bore the same stamp of provisional homeliness, that hallmark look of something that hadn’t quite been transformed out of the eyesore it used to be into the eyesore it aspired to become. Nothing distracted the eye, the mind, or the ear from what was sitting on the plate. Satisfying folk cuisine eaten in simple surroundings, on tables, to be sure, and without people spitting in their plates, but otherwise earthly sustenance partaken in an environment just about as unsumptuous as a feasting place can get, gourmandizing at its most commonplace, the other end of the spectrum of Jewish culinary establishments from the commodiously chandeliered dining salon at Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau. Barley, eggs, onions, soups of cabbage, of beets, inexpensive everyday dishes prepared in the old style and devoured happily, without much fuss, off of bargain-basement crockery.

By now, of course, what was once the ordinary fare of the Jewish masses had become an exotic stimulant for Upper West Siders two and three generations removed from the great immigration and just getting by as professionals in Manhattan on annual salaries that, a century earlier, would have provided daily banquets all year long for every last Jew in Galicia. I’d see these people — among them, sometimes, lawyers, journalists, or editors I knew — taking pleasure, mouthful by mouthful, in their kasha varnishkas and their gefilte fish (and riveted, all the while they unstintingly ate, to the pages of one, two, or even three daily papers) on those occasions when I came down to Manhattan from Connecticut and took an hour off from whatever else I was doing to satisfy my own inextinguishable appetite for the chopped-herring salad as it was unceremoniously served up (that was the ceremony) at one of those very same tables, facing onto the trucks, taxis, and fire engines streaming north, where Smilesburger had suggested that we meet for breakfast at ten a.m. to discuss my book.

After shaking Smilesburger’s hand and sitting down directly across from him and the coatrack against which his forearm crutches were leaning, I told him how I rarely came to New York without stopping off here for either a breakfast or a lunch, and he answered that he knew all about that. “My daughter-in-law spotted you a couple of times. She lives just around the corner.”

“What does she do?”

“Art historian. Tenured professor.”

“And your son?”

“International entrepreneur.”

“And his name?”

“Definitely not ‘Smilesburger,’” he said, smiling kindly. And then, with an open, appealing, spirited warmth that I was unprepared for from this master of derisive artifice and that, despite its disarming depth of realness, couldn’t possibly have been purged of all his callous shrewdness, he carried me almost to the edge of gullibility by saying, “And so how are you, Philip? You had heart surgery. Your father died. I read Patrimony. Warmhearted but tough. You’ve been through the wringer. Yet you look wonderful. Younger even than when I saw you last.”

“You too,” I said.

He clapped his hands together with relish. “Retired,” he replied. “Eighteen months ago, freed of it all, of everything vile and sinister. Deceptions. Disinformation. Fakery. ‘Our revels now are ended, … melted into air, into thin air.’”

This was strange news in the light of why we were meeting, and I wondered if he wasn’t simply attempting to gain his customary inquisitorial upper hand here at the very outset, by misleading me once again, this time, for a change, by encouraging me to believe that my situation was in no way threatening and that I couldn’t possibly be shanghaied into anything but a game of checkers by a happy-go-lucky senior citizen like him, a pensioner wittily quoting Prospero, wandless old Prospero, bereft of magical power and casting a gentle sunset glow over a career of godlike treachery. Of course, I told myself, there’s no apartment just around the corner where he’s staying with a daughter-in-law who’d spotted me eating here before; and the chocolaty tan that had led to a dramatic improvement of his skin condition and that gave an embalmed-looking glow of life to that heavily lined, cadaverous face stemmed, more than likely, from a round of ultraviolet therapy administered by a dermatologist rather than from retirement to the Negev. But the story I got was that, in a desert development community, he and his wife were now happily gardening together only a mile down the road from where his daughter, her husband, and their three adolescent children had been living since the son-in-law had moved his textile business to Beersheba. The decision to fly to America to see me, and, while here, to spend a few days with his two American grandchildren, had been made wholly on his own. My manuscript had been forwarded to him from his old office, where he hadn’t set foot since his retirement; as far as he could tell, no one had opened the sealed envelope and read the manuscript, although it wouldn’t be difficult for either of us, he said, to imagine the response there if anyone had.

“Same as yours,” I offered.

“No. Not so considered as mine.”

“There’s nothing I can do about that. And nothing they can do about it.”

“And, on your part, no responsibility.”

“Look, I’ve been around this track as a writer before. My failed ‘responsibility’ has been the leitmotif of my career with the Jews. We signed no contract. I made no promises. I performed a service for you — I believe I performed it adequately.”

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

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

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

“Do I? Probably.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Makes sense.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Theirs.”

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

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

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

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

“Why would I?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And it’s an old one.”

“I never heard it.”

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

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

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

“The cases are somewhat dissimilar.”

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

“Be explicit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not possible. Not possible in any way.”

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

“Publish the book without its ending.”

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

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

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

“Yes? Have they? Suppressed what?”

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

“Yes, Pipik too? Are you finally answering me about who hired Pipik? Are you telling me that Pipik is a product of your fecund imagination? Why? Why? I cannot understand why. To get me to Israel? But I was already coming to Israel to see Aharon Appelfeld. To lure me into conversation with George? But I already knew George. To get me to the Demjanjuk trial? You had to know that I’m interested in those things and would have found it on my own. Why did you need him to get me involved? Because of Jinx? You could have gotten another Jinx. What is the reason from your side for constructing this creature? From the point of view of the Mossad, which is an intelligence operation, goal-oriented, why did you produce this Pipik?”

“And if I had a ready answer, could I in good conscience tell it to a writer with a mouth like yours? Accept my explanation and be done with Pipik, please. Pipik is not the product of Zionism. Pipik is not even the product of Diasporism. Pipik is the product of perhaps the most powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is Pipikism, the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything — farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything — our suffering as Jews not excluded. Enough about Pipik. I’m suggesting to you only how to give coherence to what you tell the newspapers. Keep it simple, they’re only journalists. ‘No exceptions, fellas: hypothetical book from beginning to end.’”

“George Ziad included.”

“George you don’t have to worry about. Didn’t his wife write to you? I would have thought, since you were such friends. … Don’t you know? Then I have to shock you. Your PLO handler is dead.”

“Is this so? Is this fact?”

“A horrible fact. Murdered in Ramallah. He was with his son. Five times he was stabbed by masked men. They didn’t touch the boy. About a year ago. Michael and his mother are living again in Boston.”

Free at last in Boston — and now never to be free — of fealty to the father’s quest. One more accursed son. All the wasted passion that will now be Michael’s dilemma for life! “But why?” I asked. “Murdered for what reason?”

“The Israelis say murdered as a collaborator by Palestinians. They murder one another like this every day. The Palestinians say murdered by Israelis — because Israelis are murderers.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say everything. I say maybe he was a collaborator who was murdered for the Israelis by Palestinians who are also collaborators — and then maybe not. To you who have written this book, I say I don’t know. I say the permutations are infinite in a situation like ours, where the object is to create an atmosphere in which no Arab can feel secure as to who is his enemy and who is his friend. Nothing is secure. This is the message to the Arab population in the territories. Of what is going on all around them, they should know very little and get everything wrong. And they do know very little and they do get everything wrong. And if this is the case with those who live there, then it follows that for someone like you, who lives here, you know even less and get even more wrong. That’s why to describe your book, laid in Jerusalem, as a figment of your imagination might not be as misleading as you fear. It might be altogether accurate to call the entire five hundred and forty-seven pages hypothetical formulation. You think I’m such a deceiver, so let me now be cruelly blunt about his book to a writer whose work I otherwise admire. I am not qualified to judge writing in English, though the writing strikes me as excellent. But as for the content — well, in all candor, I read it and I laughed, and not only when I was supposed to. This is not a report of what happened, because, very simply, you haven’t the slightest idea of what happened. You grasp almost nothing of the objective reality. Its meaning evades you completely. I cannot imagine a more innocent version of what was going on and what it signified. I won’t go so far as to say that this is the reality as a ten-year-old might understand it. I prefer to think of it as subjectivism at its most extreme, a vision of things so specific to the mind of the observer that to publish it as anything other than fiction would be the biggest lie of all. Call it an artistic creation and you will only be calling it what it more or less is anyway.”

We had finished eating a good twenty minutes earlier and the waiter had removed all the dishes except our coffee cups, which he’d already been back to refill several times. I had till then been oblivious to everything but the conversation and only now saw that customers were beginning to drift in for lunch and that among them were my friend Ted Solotaroff and his son Ivan, who were at a table up by the window and hadn’t yet noticed me. Of course I’d known that I wasn’t meeting Smilesburger in the subterranean parking garage where Woodward and Bernstein used to go to commune with Deep Throat, but still, at the sudden sight of someone here I knew, my heart thumped and I felt like a married man who, spotted at a restaurant in ardent conversation with an illicit lover, quickly begins to calculate how best to introduce her.

“Your contradictions,” I said softly to Smilesburger, “don’t add up to a convincing argument, but then, with me, you don’t believe you need any argument. You’re counting on my secret vice to prevail. The rest is an entertainment, amusing rhetoric, words as bamboozlement, your technique here as it was there. Do you even bother to keep track of your barrage? On the one hand, with this book — the whole of it now, not merely the final chapter — I am, in your certifiably unparanoid view, serving up to the enemy information that could jeopardize the security of your agents and their contacts, information that, from the sound of it, could lay the state of Israel open to God only knows what kind of disaster and compromise the welfare and security of the Jewish people for centuries to come. On the other hand, the book presents such a warped and ignorant misrepresentation of objective reality that to save my literary reputation and protect myself against the ridicule of all the clear-eyed empiricists, or from punishments that you intimate might be far, far worse, I ought to recognize this thing for what it is and publish Operation Shylock as — as what? Subtitled ‘A Fable’?”

“Excellent idea. A subjectivist fable. That solves everything.”

“Except the problem of accuracy.”

“But how could you know that?”

“You mean chained to the wall of my subjectivity and seeing only my shadow? Look, this is all nonsense.” I raised my arm to signal to the waiter for our check and unintentionally caught Ivan Solotaroff’s eye as well. I’d known Ivan since he was an infant back in Chicago in the mid-fifties, when the late George Ziad was there studying Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard and Ivan’s father and I were bristling graduate students teaching freshman composition together at the university. Ivan waved back, pointed out to Ted where I was sitting, and Ted turned and gave a shrug that indicated there could be no place on earth more appropriate than here for us to have run into each other after all our months of trying in vain to arrange to get together for a meal. I realized then the unequivocal way in which to introduce Smilesburger, and this made my heart thump again, only now in triumph.

“Let’s cut it short,” I said to Smilesburger when the check was placed on the table. “I cannot know things-in-themselves, but you can. I cannot transcend myself, but you can. I cannot exist apart from myself, but you can. I know nothing beyond my own existence and my own ideas, my mind determines entirely how reality appears to me, but for you the mind works differently. You know the world as it really is, and I know it only as it appears. Your argument is kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and is too absurd even to oppose.”

“You refuse absolutely.”

“Of course I do.”

“You’ll neither describe your book as what it is not nor censor out what they’re sure not to like.”

“How could I?”

“And if I were to rise above kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and invoke the wisdom of the Chofetz Chaim? ‘Grant me that I should say nothing unnecessary. …’ Would I be wasting my breath if, as a final plea, I reminded you of the laws of loshon hora?”

“It would not even help to quote Scripture.”

“Everything must be undertaken alone, out of personal conviction. You’re that sure of yourself. You’re that convinced that only you are right.”

“On this matter? Why not?”

“And the consequences of proceeding uncompromisingly, independent of every judgment but your own — to these consequences you are indifferent?”

“Don’t I have to be?”

“Well,” he said, while I snapped up the check before he could take it and compromisingly charge breakfast to the Mossad, “then that’s that. Too bad.”

Here he turned to the crutches that were balanced behind him on the coatrack. I came around to assist him to his feet, but he was already standing. The disappointment in his face, when his eyes engaged mine, looked as though it couldn’t possibly have been manufactured to deceive. And must there not be a point, even in him, where manipulation stops? It caused a soundless but not inconsiderable emotional upheaval in me to think that he might actually have shed his disguises and come here out of a genuine concern for my welfare, determined to spare me any further misfortune. But even if that was so, was it any reason to cave in and voluntarily give them a pound of my flesh?

“You’ve come a long way from that broken man whom you describe as yourself in the first chapter of this book.” He had somehow gathered up his attaché case along with the crutches and clutched the handle round with what I noticed, for the very first time, were the powerful, tiny, tufted fingers of a primate somewhat down the scale from man, something that could swing through a jungle by its prehensile tail in the time that it would take Smilesburger to get from our table to the street. I assumed that in the attaché case was my manuscript. “All that uncertainty, all that fear and discomposure — it all seems safely behind you now. You are impermeable,” he said. “Mazel tov.”

“For now,” I replied, “for now. Nothing is secure. Man the pillar of instability. Isn’t that the message? The unsureness of everything.”

“The message of your book? I wouldn’t say so. It’s a happy book, as I read it. Happiness radiates from it. There are all kinds of ordeals and trials but it’s about someone who is recovering. There’s so much élan and energy in his encounters with the people he meets along the way that anytime he feels his recovery is slipping and that thing is coming over him again, why, he rights himself and comes through unscathed. It’s a comedy in the classic sense. He comes through it all unscathed.”

“Only up to this point, however.”

“That too is true,” said Smilesburger, nodding sadly.

“But what I meant by ‘the unsureness of everything’ was the message of your work. I meant the inculcation of pervasive uncertainty.”

“That? But that’s a permanent, irrevocable crisis that comes with living, wouldn’t you say?”

This is the Jewish handler who handles me. I could have done worse, I thought. Pollard did. Yes, Smilesburger is my kind of Jew, he is what “Jew” is to me, the best of it to me. Worldly negativity. Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. The this-worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. The malice. The comedy. The endurance. The acting. The injury. The impairment.

I followed behind him until I saw Ted rise to say hello. “Mr. Smilesburger,” I said, “one minute. I want you to meet Mr. Solotaroff, the editor and writer. And this is Ivan Solotaroff. Ivan’s a journalist. Mr. Smilesburger pretends to be a gardener in the desert these days, fulfilling the commandments of our Lord. In fact, he’s an Israeli spy- master, the very handler who handles me. If there is an inmost room in Israel where somebody is able to say, ‘Here lies our advantage,’ then it’s the joy of the Smilesburgers to obtain it. Israel’s enemies would tell you that he is, institutionally, simply the sharp end of national and patriotic and ethnic psychosis. I would say, from my experience, that if there is such a thing in that frenetic state as a central will, it appears to me to be invested in him. He is, to be sure, as befits his occupation, also an enigma. Is he, for instance, assing around on these crutches? Is he actually a great athlete? This too could be. At any rate, he has treated me to some wonderfully confusing adventures, which you will soon be reading about in my book.”

Smiling almost sheepishly, Smilesburger shook hands first with the father and then with the son.

“Spying for Jews?” Ivan asked me, amused. “I thought you made a living spying on them.”

“A distinction, in this case, without a difference — and a source of contention between Mr. Smilesburger and me.”

“Your friend,” said Smilesburger to Ted, “is impatient to construct his own disaster. Has he always been in this hurry to overdo things?”

“Ted, I’ll call you,” I said, even while Ted stood towering above Smilesburger, puzzling over what sort of connection we might have other than the one I had so deliberately and loquaciously delineated. “Ivan, good to see you. So long!”

Softly Ted said to Smilesburger, “Take care now,” and together my handler and I made our way to the register, where I paid the bill, and then we were out of the store and into the street.

On the corner of West Eighty-sixth Street, only a few feet from the steps of a church where a destitute black couple slept beneath a filthy blanket as the midday traffic rolled noisily by, Smilesburger offered me his attaché case and asked me to open it for him. I found inside the photocopied pages of the original eleven chapters of this book, still in the large manila envelope in which I’d initially mailed them to him, and beneath that, a second, smaller envelope, thick and oblong, just about the size and shape of a brick, my name written boldly across the face of it.

“What’s this?” I asked. But I had only to heft the envelope in my hand to realize what it contained. “Whose idea is this?”

“Not mine.”

“How much is in here?”

“I don’t know. I would think quite a lot.”

I had a violent urge to heave the envelope as far as I could out into the street, but then I saw the shopping cart crammed with all the worldly goods belonging to the black couple on the steps of the church and thought to just go over and drop it in there. “Three thousand ducats,” I said to Smilesburger, repeating aloud for the first time since Athens the identifying code words that I’d been given to use by him before leaving on the mission purportedly for George.

“However much it is,” he said, “it’s yours.”

“For what? For services already rendered or for what I’m now being advised to do?”

“I found it in my briefcase when I got off the plane. Nobody has told me anything. I opened the briefcase on the way in from Kennedy. There it was.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I shouted at him. “This is what they did to Pollard — shtupped the poor schnuk with money until he was compromised up to his ears!”

“Philip, I don’t want what doesn’t belong to me. I don’t wish to be accused of stealing what isn’t mine. I ask you please to take this off my hands before I am the one who is compromised in the middle of an affair where I no longer play any role. Look, you never put in for your Athens expenses. You charged the hotel to American Express and even got stuck with a big restaurant bill. Here. To cover the costs you incurred spying at the fountainhead of Western civilization.”

“I was thinking, just before, that I could have done much worse than you,” I said. “Now it’s hard to imagine how.” I held the envelope containing my manuscript under my arm while placing the envelope full of money back in the attaché case. “Here,” I said, snapping the case shut and offering it to Smilesburger, but he held tightly to his crutches, refusing to accept it back. “All right,” I said and, seeing that the woman who’d been sleeping beside her companion on the church steps was awake now and cautiously watching the two of us, I set the case down on the pavement before Smilesburger’s feet. “The Mossad Fund for Homeless Non-Jews.”

“No jokes, please — pick up the case,” he said, “and take it. You don’t know what could be in store for you otherwise. Take the money and do what they want. Ruining reputations is no less serious an intelligence operation than destroying nuclear reactors. When they are out to silence a voice they don’t like, they know how to accomplish it without the blundering of our Islamic brothers. They don’t issue a stupid, barbaric fatwa that makes a martyred hero out of the author of a book that nobody can read — they quietly go to work on the reputation instead. And I don’t mean halfheartedly, as they did in the past with you, turning loose the intellectual stooges at their magazine. I mean hardball — loshon hora: the whispering campaign that cannot be stopped, rumors that it’s impossible to quash, besmirchment from which you will never be cleansed, slanderous stories to belittle your professional qualifications, derisive reports of your business deceptions and your perverse aberrations, outraged polemics denouncing your moral failings, misdeeds, and faulty character traits — your shallowness, your vulgarity, your cowardice, your avarice, your indecency, your falseness, your selfishness, your treachery. Derogatory information. Defamatory statements. Insulting witticisms. Disparaging anecdotes. Idle mockery. Bitchy chatter. Malicious absurdities. Galling wisecracks. Fantastic lies. Loshon hora of such spectacular dimensions that it is guaranteed not only to bring on fear, distress, disease, spiritual isolation, and financial loss but to significantly shorten a life. They will make a shambles of the position that you have worked nearly sixty years to achieve. No area of your life will go uncontaminated. And if you think this is an exaggeration you really are deficient in a sense of reality. Nobody can ever say of a secret service, ‘That’s something they don’t do.’ Knowledge is too dispersed for that conclusion to be drawn. They can only say, ‘Within my experience, it wasn’t done. And beyond that again, there’s always a first time.’ Philip, remember what happened to your friend Kosinski! The Chofetz Chaim wasn’t just whistling Dixie: there is no verbal excess, no angry word, no evil speech that is unutterable to a Jew with an unguarded tongue. You are not Jonathan Pollard — you are being neither abandoned nor disowned. Instead you are being given the benefit of a lifetime’s experience by someone who has developed the highest regard for you and cannot sit by and watch you destroyed. The consequences of what you’ve written are simply beyond calculation. I fear for you. Name a raw nerve and you recruit it. It is not a quiet book you’ve written — it is a suicidal book, even within the extremely Jewish stance you assume. Take the money, please. I beg you. I beg you. Otherwise the misery you suffered from Moishe Pipik will seem like a drop in the bucket of humiliation and shame. They will turn you into a walking joke beside which Moishe Pipik will look like Elie Wiesel, speaking words that are only holy and pure. You’ll yearn for the indignities of a double like Pipik; when they get done desecrating you and your name, Pipik will seem the personification of modesty, dignity, and the passion for truth. Lead them not into temptation, because their creativity knows no bounds when the job is to assassinate the character even of a tzaddik like you. A righteous person, a man of moral rectitude, that is what I have come to understand you to be — and against the disgrace of such a person it is my human obligation to cry out! Philip, pick up the attaché case, take it home, and put the money in your mattress. Nobody will ever know.”

“And in return?”

“Let your Jewish conscience be your guide.”