Shylock Is My Name

TWENTY-THREE

Strulovitch had a dream. Jessica and Beatrice, both aged about nine, frolicking in a plastic paddling pool in his garden, splashing water on each other, the sun illuminating their young bodies, not yet sirens, but tadpole girls looking to win the attention of no one, not even their fathers stretched out in deckchairs drinking icy beers. Was there ever such a time of innocence? Yes, in Strulovitch’s dream there was.

Kay was watering the garden with a hose that writhed, on account of the tap being turned full on, like a snake. Leah, standing by her, laughed her long Venetian’s laugh. Strulovitch, not innocent himself, desired them both. Two Jewish wives, two Jewish daughters — no wonder his mother and father playing gin rummy in the shade were pleased with him.

Shylock was asleep. This was Strulovitch’s dream, so Strulovitch could do with Shylock what he chose, and what he chose was to render him unconscious. So was Shylock dreaming too? Two Jewish daughters, two Jewish wives?

Tears flooded ancient Strulovitch’s dream. Molten tears, the colour of gold.

For whom?

It’s hard to tell in dreams.

—

“What news from the Rialto?” D’Anton asks his PA.

The answer never varies. “None.”

The colour rises in D’Anton’s cheeks.

—

Strulovitch asks the same of his. And receives the same answer.

There has been no colour in Strulovitch’s cheeks for several days.

—

Left to his own devices, Shylock wandered the house, looking at Strulovitch’s paintings. He had grown up in a beautiful city but had felt himself excluded from its splendours. Much of the art was housed in churches — indeed much of the art was the churches — and those were not for him to admire. If something he saw out of the corner of his eye struck him as lovely he kept it to himself. He didn’t even mention it to Leah. He wasn’t going to be caught appearing to covet what was not his.

Even here, unwatched in Strulovitch’s house, he felt self-conscious about looking. It compromised his fierce mistrust to be an appreciator. If he were to love what men had made he would next have to love what men were.

So it was with reluctance that he picked out this and that on Strulovitch’s walls. A small Mark Gertler nude, roseate and pert, a Christian body offered to a Jew’s curiosity, but kept just beyond his grasp. Some Bomberg charcoal sketches of war-damaged English churches. A couple of early Lucian Freuds which must still have been worth a pretty penny, cruel-eyed and unforgiving, but showing no Jewish sensibility to Shylock’s sense, the painter, if anything, hobnobbing Freudianly with the English. If these were Jewish painters they were at pains to please Gentile critics.

More to his taste was a trio of densely worked portraits by Frank Auerbach which rendered, in a way that made him marvel, what it is to be inside the knotted matrix of a head, or at least, he thought grimly, clenching his teeth, what it is to be inside mine.

He couldn’t decide what to make of Strulovitch’s collection — not just the individual works but the fact of Strulovitch’s wanting to own them. By religion as well as forced habit he was a word man. Sensual representation worried him. God had spoken the world into existence—“Let it be”—he had not painted it. Had God been a painter the world would have been other than it is. Better or worse? Well, less disputatious and declamatory, which might not have suited Shylock. Would he have known himself in a painted world? He thought in words, argued in words, stood his ground in words. On the other hand he had loved Leah from the moment he set eyes on her, loved the fleshliness of her, loved the atmosphere of her, loved her sleeping no less than waking, loved the silent being of her. When she died their relationship dwindled into talk—dwindled not because the talk was trivial but because talk now became all there was, an unending conversation he could not survive without, but still he misses her beyond bearing, so what he’s lost cannot be her words but the look and smell and feel of her. It is a sacrilege to her to call himself a man of words only.

And it is a sacrilege to him, too, a sacrilege promoted assiduously by the Gentiles. The Jews were a people without sensuous appreciation, they insisted. What they saw they saw second-hand, through the eyes of others. Their natural medium was the law and the law enshrined itself in words. So by words were they made intransigent and cruel. And blind. That was the libel. And Jews — remarkably for an obstinate people (another libel) — acquiesced in it. Yes, you are right, they had told the Gentiles, we are bound by the cold formality of the word and leave all that’s lovely in life to you. We think, and leave you to see. We judge, and leave you to enjoy. Lies, all of it. The word that created the world also created its physical delights. Let there be sea, let there be sky, let there be light, let there be beauty.

The God of the Jews, too, had not made enough of his sensuous side, not wanting to be confused with pagan idols.

Strulovitch, at least in his collecting, had refused the example of the over-particular Jewish God and refuted the libels of the Gentiles.

Shylock wandered between the paintings again, taking his time, noticing a group of portraits by Emmanuel Levy he had missed before, all of anxious and watchful-looking women, painted in a soft and melancholy manner, sensuous without being voluptuous, expressing a sort of love, he thought, whatever the painter’s actual relations to them. And two more, equally fond but if anything more fraught, by Bernard Meninsky. Many of the paintings in Strulovitch’s collection, he began to notice, expressed this keen, compassionate apprehension of the strain of being a woman. Jewish women were they? Burdened with loving Jewish men? He didn’t know, but under their influence he began to relax his initial hostility, liking everything he saw more, this time round, for Leah’s fleshly sake. It was as though he were using faculties he hadn’t known he possessed. If he’d bought Jessica paintings for her room — what then? Could he have kept her by beautifying her surroundings?

Yet why, in that case, hadn’t it worked for Strulovitch? Here was beauty everywhere you looked, but where was Beatrice?

He thought he knew the answer: Strulovitch refused the libel with one part of his mind but accepted it with another. He hung what was forgetfully sensual on his walls and still went on being a man of words, arguing with everyone around him. The art he bought, he bought in order to gain entrance to a world which in his heart he didn’t think by right was his. But he was wrong. He should look at what he owned more, Shylock thought. More often, more intensely, and with more pride. He should drink it in. Revel in it. It was his as much as it was theirs. He hadn’t become one of them by buying art, he had become himself.

Never mind what God had said about graven images. There was another reading of that injunction. It was God, the great separater, keeping ordinance and beauty, religion and art, apart from each other. It was Jewish to obey the law. And it was Jewish to love colour, vitality and gentleness, as he had loved Leah, as he would still love Leah if only he could see her. Or as Jessica, in her desperation, had loved not him.

What wasn’t Jewish was to love both at the same time.

—

“What news,” meanwhile, “from the Rialto?” Strulovitch was asking, and not getting the answer he wanted.

—

After an afternoon of sightseeing in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, Beatrice and Gratan walked arm in arm through the rain in the direction of St. Mark’s Square.

“You’ve had your treat, now I’m having mine,” Beatrice laughed.

Gratan didn’t see how an afternoon of sightseeing in the Ghetto could be called a treat for him.

Beatrice sighed and tried not to miss her father.

Once she’d kissed a boy with sunken cheekbones called Feng. A Chinese boy whose family owned three Chinese supermarkets and two Chinese restaurants in Manchester. She’d tried to captivate him with amusing observations not one of which he found funny.

“Laugh, Feng,” she said, but he seemed not to know how.

It was while she was messing with his mouth, trying to turn the corners of it into a smile and force his lips apart, that she ended up kissing him. At which moment her father came out of the house and accused her of letting Hitler win.

Feng laughed.

So instead of missing her father she decided to miss Feng.

She wondered if there was anyone she didn’t miss, anyone who wouldn’t have been more fun to be with in Venice than Gratan.

“Nobody knows me in this town,” he kept complaining. “I haven’t signed a single autograph.”

“Think of that as a good thing,” she told him. “It means you can concentrate on me.”

They took a seat at Florian’s and listened to the orchestra play. She loved it here. When she’d sat here in the past with her father he’d told her it reminded him of a Viennese café, only outdoors — the best place for being Jewish that had ever been invented. Then Hitler came along and screwed it. “That’s why,” he’d begun…She didn’t bother listening to the rest. That was why he couldn’t let her kiss Feng. But she had felt at one with him here, he pretending to be a Viennese Jew, she pretending to be a good daughter.

It was no place to be with Gratan. “I don’t like this sort of music,” he said. “It’s too sweet. It makes me miserable.”

“It’s meant to make you miserable. Sweetly miserable.”

“It makes me angry miserable.”

“That’s because you’re thinking of something else.”

“Too right I am. I’m thinking of your father castrating me.”

“Just try listening.”

“I don’t like the violins. They sound like sawing.”

She didn’t ask him what music he did like. She knew. Johnny Cash. Bruce Springsteen. Chain-gang music.

She despaired of him.

And he of her. Would she want to take him to hear music like this when they were married? Jews, or at least people with Jewish names, sawing and fiddling.

He grew even angrier when he saw the bill. “We’ve only had coffee,” he said.

“And we’ve listened to Viennese music, and watched the world go by, and been in Venice. Compared to the sums people pay to see you miss penalties and give Nazi salutes I’d say it’s cheap.”

“I’ve stopped giving Nazi salutes,” he said.

—

That night, in the casino, she played roulette, putting her chips again and again on les voisins du zéro, with whom she felt an affinity, and losing eight hundred euros of his money.

“I wouldn’t have minded,” he said, “had they been your father’s.”

“Well in a manner of speaking they were,” she said. “You still haven’t paid for me.” He wasn’t amused.

The following morning, to make it up to him, she bought him a stuffed monkey with her own money. A Venetian Carnival monkey wearing a black pointed mask.

He still wasn’t amused.

—

Shylock wanted to talk to Strulovitch about painting, commend his taste, urge him to stop describing the works he collected as Jewish art since all art was in origin Jewish art, was it not? — let the others make the distinction if they must: call what they did post-Pauline art — but first there was another matter he needed to broach. His exchange with Plurabelle.

He hadn’t hurried to tell Strulovitch about this. He needed to choose his moment. And besides: everyone else was thinking how events would best serve their interests; did he not have the right to wonder what would best serve his?

But he couldn’t keep Plurabelle’s offer to himself for ever.

He went searching for Strulovitch and found him sitting in a deep chair, sunk in black reflection. There was barely an inch of wall that didn’t have a painting on it, but Strulovitch looked at not a one.

“If you want to milk this they will let you,” Shylock said abruptly.

“This?”

“You know what this is.”

“Who’s they?”

“The Madame, the keeper of the bawdy house, or however she styles herself. And, I gather, by implication, D’Anton himself.”

“You gather?”

“I have spoken to her. It was she who hand-delivered the note. I believe I was to understand it as an act of considerable condescension.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I judged you had enough on your plate deciding how to respond to the note itself. In my view, practical arrangements could come later.”

Shylock folded himself deliberately into an armchair next to Strulovitch’s. Both chairs had views of Alderley Edge on which a light snow was falling. Living here was like living in a snow globe, Shylock thought. Art or no art, he suddenly wanted to be gone. He missed the heat and the commotion of the Rialto. The brutality, too. This was no place for Jews. He had said as much to Leah. They live with their nerve-ends exposed in this country, he’d told her. You can maim with a look, in this place. You can kill with a word. Our friend Strulovitch has lost the robustness native to our people. He could be the spinster sister of a country clergyman, he is so sensitive to slights. And as a consequence of that, he cannot judge what’s worth going to war for. So he goes to war, mentally, over everything. He had heard Leah laughing at him. “As though you’re an example of moderation,” she said. And she was right. Jews went to war over everything wherever they washed up. The bellicosity just showed up more obviously here, where the contours of the landscape were gentle, where footfalls in the snow were silent, and where the provocations were more subtle.

Strulovitch sat with his hands over his eyes. He no more wanted to look at Shylock than he wanted to look at the snow. The inside of his hand contained all that he could bear to look at of the physical world.

Shylock wondered whether he was going to be thrown out, snow or no snow. Get thee gone!

In the absence of such an order, he sat quietly, listening to the thump of Strulovitch’s bad thoughts.

“So what’s she like, this Madame?” Strulovitch asked at last. But he couldn’t be bothered to wait for an answer. “And what do you mean when you say I can milk it if I choose?”

“If you want a spectacle they will give you a spectacle. You have not let me into your thoughts about the practicalities of getting the flesh you want, so I am not up to date with your intentions. How it will be done. Where it will be done. Who will do it. Who will weigh it.”

“Its weight is of no interest to me.”

“Symbolically weigh it.”

“Symbols are of no interest to me either. What I ask for is literal to the point of tedium.”

Shylock wasn’t going to argue with that. “How it will be corroborated, then. Do you want an affidavit from a doctor? Or will you be wanting to inspect the offending tissue with your own eyes? I never paused to consider such questions myself. I let the moment take me. I’d advise against that. It is better to be a master of events. In this case you have the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies. They seem to think you might favour a party. Or at least the woman does. She will throw it, she said, in her grounds.”

“Did she say whether there’d be dancing?”

“Whatever you desire. Fireworks, if you wish them. I believe she is in the catering business, so the food should be good. She is also offering a slot on her television programme if that appeals.”

“Stop, stop, stop. Are you saying they want to film the operation?”

“I think more the debate.”

“What debate? A debate implies there is something further to be decided. There isn’t.”

“If I understood what the woman was telling me—”

“I don’t for a moment doubt that you understood her. Tell me something you don’t understand.”

“If I understood her, the question of whether D’Anton should be circumcised in place of Gratan would be put to a public vote.”

“And if the public says yes?”

“We didn’t get that far.”

“And if it says no?”

“We didn’t get that far either. I took the liberty of turning down television. I felt I was empowered to make that decision for you since you seem to think it was I who got you into this.”

“But you said OK to the party?”

“I said I would relay the offer.”

“When it suited you to do so?”

“None of this suits me. I am not here on some whimsical personal errand. Allow me to remind you that it was you who found me in a cemetery and invited me back to your home. For which…”

“I found you? I think you misremember. I had business of the heart in that cemetery. I needed to be there. You have still to tell me what brought you.”

Shylock who never removed his fedora did so now and ran his hand through his hair. He had the look of a man who might just walk out into the snow of his own accord, whatever his host wanted. Walk out and not be seen again. Enough, his expression said. Enough of this.

He will never be my friend, Strulovitch thought. But then I will never be his.

He owed it to his guest, however, to remember his manners. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am grateful for your counsel.”

“Counsel is not what I’d call it.”

“I am grateful for whatever you call it. Your attention. Your time.”

“Then in my judgement,” Shylock answered, “you should accept the invitation, not to please them, but to please yourself. There is much mirth for you here—”

“Mirth!”

“Mirth, if you seize the opportunity to look upon it in the right spirit. Think of it as one for the Jews. View it sardonically as a giant outdoor bris.”

On Alderley Edge, the snow had begun to fall more heavily. Pretty, if you were in the mood. “Won’t it be a bit cold for that?” Strulovitch asked. “For D’Anton, I mean.”

“There will be a marquee. I’d be surprised if it isn’t heated.”

“Are you saying, since you’ve appointed yourself my event-planner, that they’re prepared for the procedure to be witnessed by the guests?”

“That depends on your definition of ‘procedure.’ If you mean the public settling of an argument — the denouement, so to speak, the just distribution of honours and deserts, the mortification of the guilty and the exoneration of the innocent, or vice versa: vice versa being the more usual way of it in my experience — yes. If you mean the removal of D’Anton’s foreskin, I doubt very much that D’Anton would consent to undergoing that before an audience. They are talking of a clinic.”

“The snivelling coward,” Strulovitch said, which was tantamount to an acceptance of Plurabelle’s munificence in all other regards.