Shylock Is My Name

THIRTEEN

D’Anton decided it was best all round, if he were to have any hope of getting the Solomon Joseph Solomon for his downcast friend, to write formally to the person who had it.

But the moment he took off his jacket, sat at his desk and, with his usual methodicalness, began to move books and papers around, he realised how difficult this task — no, this sacred obligation — was going to be. His stationery drawer refused to open. The ink dried in his pen. In his mind’s eye he saw Strulovitch delightedly refusing his request, perhaps setting the paper it was written on alight, perhaps doing something even worse with it, whereupon his soul withered.

“It isn’t proving as easy as I’d hoped it would,” he said to Barnaby, conscious of a little lie in that he had hardly as yet tried moving mountains.

Barnaby threw him one of the most beseeching looks in his collection. “My heart is set on it, D’Anton,” he said.

Ah, the potency of punctuation. Barnaby knew his friend was powerless to resist him when he finished a sentence something something something comma, D’Anton. The full stop taking an eternity to arrive, the name—D’Anton—lingering it seemed forever in his mouth.

And D’Anton knew that Barnaby knew it. But that made him no more proof against its influence. “I see that, Barnaby,” he said, lingering over the other’s name himself, “but could we not pay a further visit to the auction house and see what else they have? Love’s First Lesson can’t be the only artwork in the world you like.”

“Well there’s still The Singing Butler,” Barnaby said pettishly. “And anyway it’s not a matter of what I like, it’s what Plury would like. The naked Venus is so her, D’Anton, I swear to you she could have posed for it…Could she have posed for it?”

“Only if she’d been born a hundred and fifty years ago.” If Barnaby thought he detected an unaccustomed testiness in his friend he was right. For all the love he bore him — indeed, perhaps, because of it — D’Anton couldn’t but think that Barnaby might have met him halfway on this, agreed to try at least to see if there was another picture that might catch his fancy, or show some sign of understanding the enormity of what he asked, no matter that it was D’Anton who’d originally proposed it. But he would not have dreamed of endeavouring to dissuade him further. His friend had set his heart on Love’s First Lesson—again Barnaby repeated that very phrase: “My heart is set on it, D’Anton”—and what was close to Barnaby’s heart was close to D’Anton’s. His purse, his person, his extremest means lay all unlocked to his young friend’s occasions.

So again, after pouring himself a large brandy, he sat down at his desk, extracted from his drawer a sheet of headed writing paper, handmade for him in an alleyway few visitors to Venice ever find, and, in the smallest of hands and with the finest of nibs, wrote:

Dear Simon Strulovitch,

Please grant me a moment of your time. Albeit I am not customarily a favour-seeker, I have a favour to ask of you.

I write to you on behalf of a friend — or rather, I am acting on behalf of a friend in the name of whose disappointment I make this appeal to you. We recently attended, he and I, an art auction in Manchester at which you were astute enough to buy an early study by Solomon J. Solomon for his painting Love’s First Lesson. It is an exquisite cartoon, lacking none of the grace of the finished painting. I commend your good fortune and your taste. I also commend your punctuality. We alas, who would have bid against you for the Solomon, were late. Our fault. But here’s the favour I would beg of you. Might you consider parting with it? I make no mention of the price. Add what commission you please.

It is, I repeat, not for me that you would be doing this, but for a young and impressionable friend who has his heart set on giving the painting as a token of his devotion to a woman who, I can assure you, will cherish the work every bit as much as we would wish her to.

When love calls, my dear Strulovitch, can any of us turn a deaf ear?

I await your response with keen anticipation.

Yours very respectfully,

— and signed it with a flourish designed to conceal nothing of the openness of the writer’s own heart.

—

“So how did that go?” Shylock wondered.

Strulovitch was surprised Shylock had the nerve to ask. “I think we could both have anticipated how it would go.”

“The footballer keeps his foreskin?”

“Correct. And I lose a daughter.”

“You broached the matter in her presence?”

“No. But he was bound to go straight to her and tell her what I’d asked. ‘Obviously,’ he told me, ‘I’ll have to think about this.’ Which meant ‘Obviously, I’ll need to speak to Beatrice,’ who obviously was horrified.”

“She told you so?”

“She didn’t have to.”

“And she’s gone already?”

“Can’t you hear her seething around the house? I’ve been divorced — I know the sound of resolute packing. Not the banging — that means they’re not really going. Throwing stuff around means they’re giving you a chance to stop them. It’s the quiet folding of garments you have to fear. The measure of Beatrice’s rage is that she hasn’t banged a wardrobe door or said a word to me. But I know anyway what that word would have been had she said it.”

“Savage?”

“Since that’s the word that occurs to you, I wonder you didn’t think of it earlier.”

“Or you, since you’re thinking of it now.”

“I’m thinking what Beatrice might be thinking.”

“You’re thinking it because you fear it might be true.”

“And isn’t it?”

“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking it makes so. Our greatest weakness as Jews is forever to be thinking the worst of ourselves. What if we’ve fallen short, what if we are a light unto nobody, what if we’re barbarians at heart. Our eternal refrain: what if we’re not what we claim to be.”

“Why shouldn’t we ask ourselves that? Isn’t periodically wondering if we’re savages what keeps us civilised?”

“That depends on what you mean by periodically. Every five hundred years — fine. Every time a Jew asserts himself or acts in self-defence — that’s something else.”

“It’s the self-defence part that’s controversial.”

“There is nothing controversial about protecting your daughter.”

“I know all this.”

“Then why are you having second thoughts?”

“Because I cannot be said to have protected her if she runs away.”

“Then stop her. Explain your motives.”

“I behave like a barbarian, Beatrice, because I love you?”

“You are still seeing with her eyes, when you should have the courage to see with your own. You have seen more of the world than she has. You have more understanding. Have you explained to her just what the rite of circumcision is? What it stands for? What it portends? How it’s the very rejection of barbarism? Why it’s a passage out of savagery into refinement?”

“That takes some explaining to a child.”

“Everything serious takes some explaining to a child. Try sitting her down and reading to her.”

“She doesn’t go a bundle on Maimonides.”

“It doesn’t have to be Maimonides. Do you have any Roth on your shelves?”

“Joseph, Cecil, Henry, Philip? I have walls of Roth.”

“Philip will do. Do you have the one where everyone is leading someone else’s life?”

“That’s all of them.”

“A shame Leah isn’t here. She’d know which I’m thinking of. It’s the one where Roth lets the anti-circumcisionists have it with both barrels. Circumcision, he or someone like him argues, was conceived to refute the pastoral.”

“Christ! And you think that would make it all right with my daughter? What in God’s name does refuting the pastoral mean?”

“You ask me that! You who venture into your own garden as though it’s snake-infested. Do you even own wellingtons? My friend, you are a walking refutation of the pastoral.”

“And that’s because I’m circumcised?”

“You were circumcised in order that you shouldn’t, in the first days of your life, when you were still in a womb-swoon, mistake life for an idyll.”

“Then it’s worked. In fact I’d say it’s worked too well.”

“You’re bound to think that. It’s what you were circumcised to think. The heavy hand of human values, in our friend Roth’s words, descended on you early. As it should.”

“That’s not going to convince anyone who sees precisely those values as inhuman.”

“Those who are sentimental about being human will never be convinced.”

“Worse and worse, Shylock.”

“Look. The mohel’s knife acts mercifully, to save the boy from the vagaries of nature. I don’t just mean the monkeys. I mean ignorance, the absence of God, the refusal of allegiance to a people or an idea — especially the idea that life is an obligation as well as a gift. We are not born free of loyalties and oaths. The mohel’s knife symbolises what we owe.”

“Subdues us, in other words.”

“Is that so terrible if the alternative is running lawless in the wilderness?”

Strulovitch was the wrong one to ask. What struck him as terrible one day, didn’t strike him as all that terrible the next.

“We can’t be saved from nature a little bit,” Shylock went on. “It’s all or nothing, it’s human values or the monkeys.”

Strulovitch’s mind turned from abstractions of duty to the living daughter in whom, at the hour of her birth, he’d glimpsed the meaning of covenant. “Well that might fix it for the boys,” he said, as though Shylock had both won and lost the argument, “but what help is there for the girls? There’s no mohel’s knife to subdue a daughter. Not in the civilised world, there isn’t. In the civilised world, men who talk of subduing daughters are stoned to death.”

“And that,” said Shylock, in a tone of steely quiet, “is why daughters are a byword for disloyalty.”

Were they a byword for disloyalty? I used to think I was an extremist, Strulovitch thought.

Shylock read his reservations. “You wouldn’t anyway dispute,” he said, much calmer now, “that it’s because her footballer is a ‘natural’ man that Beatrice loves him. At least if you have described him to me correctly.”

“He is not the question. She is. Does she love him? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure she’ll give it a good try now. And my telling her that life isn’t meant to be a womb-swoon won’t deter her.”

“She’s a bright young woman.”

“She’s sixteen! That’s too young to be giving up on life as an idyll.”

“Then it’s too young to be Jewish.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you gleefully proposed this course of action.”

“Did I propose a course of action?”

“In a dumbshow, yes.”

“I mustn’t have realised you were so impressionable.”

“As to take you at your word?”

“I uttered no word.”

“Call it what you will. But I must ask you what you meant by it.”

“Mischief.”

“Is that what you’re here to cause me?”

“Cause you? No. The very opposite. But all isn’t yet lost. By your own account, if you can hear her silence, she hasn’t gone.”

“And what do you propose I do to keep her?” He chanced a long look into Shylock’s covert eyes. “Bar the doors?”

He let his words hang in the air, let the shutters to Shylock’s windows swing open, let the sweet disgusting smell of goats and monkeys enter.

Two could play at mischief.

—

But he didn’t bar his own door.