Shylock Is My Name

SEVENTEEN

What chance that in two locations in the Golden Triangle, no more than a mile or so apart, two conversations about St. Paul’s views on circumcision of the heart should have been taking place at the very same hour?

It was enough to make a visitor from another planet believe he’d dropped in on a Christian country.

Perhaps to describe what passed between D’Anton and his sentimental beneficiary Gratan Howsome as a “conversation” is an exaggeration. What passed between Strulovitch and Shylock ditto. Though it wasn’t unevenness in the matter of comprehension that made this latter conversation not really a conversation at all. Rather it was that neither man spoke what he was thinking, though each knew the other was thinking it. A silent conversation, then. Or at least a conversation in which what was conversed was not what the conversation was actually about.

Not finding Beatrice waiting for him when he got back from the restaurant, Strulovitch fell into a despondency that even D’Anton might have envied. Whatever Howsome had been doing out on his own, it didn’t signify what he’d hoped it signified. He slumped into a chair with a bottle of whisky and pointed Shylock to the drinks cabinet. “Get drunk with me, please,” he said.

“I’m not able to get drunk,” Shylock said. “I was never drunk then so I can never be drunk now. It’s one of the disadvantages.”

“Then just have the odd one and sit with me.”

Shylock did as was requested of him.

They sat, looking at one another’s extended feet, for upwards of an hour. Then Shylock asked if he could ask something.

“You’ve just asked it.”

“Something else. The bris…”

“The bris!”

“The circumcision ritual.”

“I know what a fucking bris is. I thought that word applied only to eight-day-old babies.”

“And the footballer is what age again?”

Strulovitch laughed an ill-natured laugh. He would miss Shylock when he went. He needed a black-hearted friend. Jews had grown so careful now. If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? No, we shall not. We shall take it on the chin and be grateful. Unless we’re in Judea and Samaria, where we’re accused of being Nazis. Cowards or Nazis — which was it to be? The Rialto was not Samaria, but it too had bred a tougher Jew, Strulovitch thought. If he had, on pain of death, to be a Jew in Samaria, the Rialto or the Golden Triangle, he wouldn’t have chosen the Golden Triangle.

Then he remembered that Shylock had not even met Gratan. “Are you psychic as well as everything else?” he asked.

“A little,” Shylock said. “I enjoy a broad overview. But I also listen to what you tell me. And I did manage to grab a look at him as he was leaving the restaurant. Cavernicolo.”

Strulovitch shook his head from side to side as though wanting to rid his brain of all memory of that savage exchange of glances. Why hadn’t he gone over and collared him after all? “OK,” he said. “So what about the bris?”

“Have you been having second thoughts?”

“If you’re psychic you should know.”

“I see you’re blaming me. That’s your prerogative. But you could always change the situation yourself by changing your mind. Let him off if your heart’s no longer in it. Give Beatrice your blessing.”

“She’s sixteen!”

“As you keep telling me. But she’s a very mature sixteen.”

“That’s the problem.”

“How old do you think Jessica was?”

“It has never occurred to me to wonder.”

“Precisely. Age isn’t the issue.”

“So what is?”

“Well answer me this: if you got the footballer to agree to your bloody terms—”

“Hold on a minute. Bloody terms coming from you—”

“No, you hang on a minute. I’m a guest in your house, so I ask you to forgive my rudeness. But you cannot presume to know how bloody or not I was prepared to be. You can guess, but you cannot know…”

“Do you know yourself?”

“Leave me out of this and let’s go back to what I was saying. If you got the footballer to agree to your terms, however you describe them, would you be happy? Or do you expect him—want him — to reject them and leave your daughter alone?”

“Both. I want him to leave my daughter alone, and I want him to be circumcised, so long as…”

“So long as what? Why do you hesitate?”

“So long as I can be the one who wields the knife.”

“I think you’re fooling yourself. I don’t think you could do it. You are not capable of that.”

“Now it’s my turn to ask how you can presume to know what I am capable of. You have only known me a matter of days.”

“And how long do you suppose it takes? Mr. Strulovitch, I have known you forever.”

“Do you know how insulting that is?”

“I don’t mean it to be so. But let me ask you a question. How many brises have you been to?”

“You’re psychic. You tell me.”

“None. First, because you have no son. Second, because you scorn religious ceremony. But the real reason you haven’t seen a bris is that you know you would faint. Many men do. Many fathers, uncles, brothers. It is an upsetting sight. A knife taken to an eight-day-old baby.”

“Howsome is a mite older.”

“Which would make it even more gory. And besides, what makes you think you want to see his penis, let alone take a slice of it? How many Gentile penises have you seen? How many have you held between your fingers?”

“I don’t have to answer that.”

“But you’re confident you want to touch his?”

“I’ll wear gloves…”

“Hold it, wound it, make it bleed, hear him scream? This is all bravado and you know it. You’d run a mile.”

Strulovitch puts up a hand. “Just a minute,” he says. “Just a minute.”

Shylock puts up two hands as though he knows he might have gone too far.

“Can you tell me how,” Strulovitch wants to know, “we have proceeded from metaphor to literalism? All this begins when I ask a Gentile who’s been sleeping with my daughter to prove his good intentions. The next thing, under your tutelage, I’m slicing off his penis.”

“Welcome to my world,” says Shylock.

“So you, too, meant your pound of flesh metaphorically to begin with?”

Shylock makes his eyes droop in weary distaste. “Not that again.”

“I’d stop asking that question if you’d answer it.”

“Then ask it with more subtlety. Every transaction between Jew and Gentile is metaphorical. It’s the only way we don’t kill one another. But if you’re asking me if I meant it jestingly then yes, partly.”

“That’s not quite the same thing.”

“No, but there are degrees of earnest.”

“Then let me ask you: did you hope that Antonio would fail to meet his bond so you could harm him?”

“At the very moment of the jest, maybe not.”

“Then when?”

“As the tale unfolds, so does intention.”

“And when was that intention firm?”

“I could say after Jessica was taken from me. After Leah’s ring was stolen. After others thought they could renege on the bond for him. After they thought me manipulable. After I was backed into a corner. After I was left with no alternative…”

“So which?”

“All of them and none of them. I still don’t know how firm my intention was. The story stopped…What didn’t occur, didn’t occur. Anything further belongs to speculation not philosophy or psychology. And not to theology either.”

“But before it stopped…there was, there must have been, intention.”

“Intention, well…What is intention? Whatever his intention, would Abraham have gone on to kill Isaac? I don’t dwell in the Old Testament any more than you do, but I have, as you might imagine, a special interest in that story.”

“The world has a special interest in that story.”

“The world did. I doubt it has any more.”

“That’s as maybe. But the question has still to be asked. Would Abraham have gone on and killed his son?”

“Did Abraham ultimately have it in him to commit a murder? That too is an illegitimate line of enquiry.”

“Illegitimate or unanswerable?”

“Both. It’s the ‘ultimately’ we can’t know about.”

“So what is it legitimate to ask?”

“Whether anything in Abraham’s character until that point would lead one to think of him as a child killer.”

“The answer being no?”

“Exactly. No. And in mine neither. Was there anything in my personal history — mine specifically; mine as they knew of me, not mine as a member of a feared and hated race — to suggest I had a taste for blood? If there had been the slightest suspicion of such propensities the Gentiles would surely have kept their distance. But it was they who complained that I avoided them. Ask yourself this: would you agree a binding contract with a man who would cut your heart out if you reneged on it? Would you dare to steal from such a man? Take his jewels? Rob him of his daughter? Spit on him in the street? A man suspected of being free with his knife commands more respect than I did. More dread, too. Until I stood firm upon my bond they believed a few ducats’ reparation would quiet my temper. In their contempt and confidence you can discern my innocence of violent reputation.”

“They called you a cur and thought you wolfish.”

“They thought Jews wolfish — not me in particular, Jews—but in reality they barely believed their own libels. In the eyes of Christians and Muslims we have never been warlike enough. We are emasculated men who bleed like women. That’s what makes it so hard for them to forgive us when we do strike tellingly back. To lose to Jews is to lose to half-men.”

“Wasn’t there something of the warrior about Abraham?”

“Something, yes. But by the standards of the time he was a pussy cat.”

“So if he had so little violence in him, how do you understand his readiness to kill Isaac?”

“By not calling it a readiness. A particular precipitating circumstance led him so far on the road to murder, is all one can say. But did he have murder in his heart, even then? We cannot know. He did not know himself. The story stops, and will remain stopped for all eternity.”

“Abraham’s precipitating circumstance was God. What was yours?”

“The same.”

—

But Strulovitch couldn’t leave the matter alone. A chance comes along, you take it. And Shylock was looking more relaxed than he’d seen him, sitting in the half-dark with his legs outstretched, listening to the silence whenever Strulovitch allowed it to be silent. A man easy to ambush.

“Not for the first time,” Strulovitch resumed, “you elude my questions with the story stopping. Yes, the story stopped, but you haven’t. You are here. You have had time enough to reflect.”

“Reflect! I do nothing but reflect. But reflection is not action. It is not even knowledge of action. I don’t have the answer to your question. I don’t know if I would have gone ahead and taken flesh from around his heart — or, even, since you have asked me this before, how the heart suddenly became the site of my revenge.”

“Aha! You call it your revenge.”

“I do, and willingly. I had much to avenge. My daughter, my wealth, my reputation…”

“And a bloodthirst to slake?”

“Now you sound like them.”

“Then show me where I’m wrong. Do you wish you’d not been stopped?”

“Stopped?” Shylock narrowed his gaze. Suddenly he did not look as relaxed as he had been. “I wish, for all the good it does me, that I had not been thwarted.”

“From taking his heart?”

“From finding out whether or not I could have done it.”

“So you wish you had?”

“That is not quite the same thing. Had I done so they would not have hesitated to take mine.”

Strulovitch waved that consideration away. He wasn’t interested in consequences; he knew all about what they did to Jews; what intrigued him was what a Jew might do to them. “Let me trespass on your good nature one more time,” he pressed. “Would you have done it?”

“And one more time — I don’t know. I have no more taste for blood than you do. Those men, I mentioned, who faint during a bris—well I am one of them. Twice I’ve fainted. It was that or cry louder than the baby. Like you, I’m made of the softest stuff and equally hate the sight and smell and even thought of blood. But understand — my own blood was up. My hatred for that superior, all-suffering, all-sorrowing, sanctimonious man boiled in my veins. There was, I believed, as he no doubt believed of me, no room in this world for both of us. We denied each other. He could not allow me to transact my way and I could not allow him to transact his. I stood for order, he for chaos. We both, of necessity, dealt in obligation. To be in business imposes obligation. And to be a husband, a father, a lover, imposes obligation too. I dealt in true obligation — I gave and I took. A quid pro quo that was agreed to on all sides and left nothing to doubt or misunderstanding. He dealt in false obligation. He could bear only to give. He would not profit financially or emotionally. So he must always be sacrificial, disappointed and alone. Which imposed a hidden but constant obligation on those he gave to. I could not function in a universe as raw and haphazard as his. And he could not function in a world as rational as mine. My legalistic rigidity, as he considered it, cancelled him out. His emotional coercion cancelled me. Which is why one of us has always to kill the other. So yes, it’s possible — all right, more than possible — that in that fuming rage I would have found the wherewithal, the joy, the obligation — as though answering a commandment from a furious God — and as a long-owed return on those centuries of despising, as a requital of the slander, and as a perfectly ironic eventuation of all their baseless fears, yes, it’s more than possible that I’d have found what was necessary — call it the heroic strength, call it the bliss, call it if you will the villainousness — to take what by any reasonable computation was owing to me…I felt myself to be, I won’t pretend otherwise, the instrument of justice. By the measure I was used, would it be measured to them. And there’s no violence a man is not capable of when he believes he is acting as God would have him act. And before you say anything, I am as aware as you of the blasphemy of claiming such entitlement. Let’s include that, then, in what I might have been on the point of summoning up, the blasphemy of taking life, had it come to that, in God’s name, except that it didn’t come to that. So I am sorry, I cannot tell you what the act of murder feels like and whether, at the point of a knife, I would have gone ahead and done it. But I can tell you how it is to be brought to the threshold of murder and to wish, with every part of oneself that ministers to resolution, to cross over. Does that go any way to answering your question?”

But Strulovitch is asleep in his chair, worn out by too much anger and frustration, too much alcohol, and not impossibly too many questions.

Shylock, though, has another explanation.

This Strulovitch has a profound moral reluctance to stay awake, he thinks.

This Strulovitch asks but he doesn’t want to know the answer.

Jews are sentimental about themselves, and this Strulovitch, though he can’t decide if he’s a Jew or not, is no different. A Jew, by his understanding, is not capable of what non-Jews are capable of. A Jew does not take life. I am a hero to him by virtue of what I permitted to be done to me, not by what I did or might have done. Good Jew — kicked. Bad Jew — kicks.

If you prick us do we not bleed, but if we prick back do we not shed blood? — he would rather not know.

These famous ethics of ours have landed us in a fine mess, Shylock would like to say to his wife. If we cannot accept that we might murder as other men murder, we are not enhanced, but diminished.

Do you agree with me Leah, my love?

But it’s too late, and too cold to go outside. Always cold where she resides.

And anyway, he knows that Leah will point out the sophistry in the account of himself he has just offered Strulovitch. Antonio had been his to kill. “The law allows it, and the court awards it,” the little lawyer with the squeaky voice had told him. That was the moment when history was his to make, and never mind “I cannot tell you what the act of murder feels like because it didn’t come to that”: it didn’t come to that because he didn’t let it. Give me my money and I’ll go, he’d said instead.

Cowardice, was it? Or a pious adherence to Jewish law? The Almighty had fixed his canon against self-slaughter and self-slaughter it would assuredly have been had he shed a drop of Antonio’s blood.

Either way — faint-heartedness or piety — does this mark the limit beyond which a Jew, with all his brave talk of vengeance, dare not go?

No wonder Strulovitch, otherwise so eager to keep him to the mark, has chosen to fall asleep.

Despite the lateness of the hour and the cold, he goes outside to face Leah’s reproach after all. He had chosen to stay alive when there was nothing left for him to stay alive for. He could have killed his enemy and joined his wife. So why hadn’t he?