Shylock Is My Name

FIVE

“I have to take this,” Strulovitch said, reaching for his phone.

“It’s your daughter, of course you do,” Shylock told him.

“How do you know it’s my daughter?”

“I recognise the ring,” Shylock said.

The two men were strolling with a forced companionability out of the cemetery towards the car park. Strulovitch had invited Shylock home — get out of the cold, have a bath, drink Scotch, stay the night — and Shylock had accepted with a rough alacrity that surprised and flattered Strulovitch. Despite his wealth and influence, Strulovitch was a man of modest origins and expected his invitations to be turned down. People surely had better things to do with their time than spend it with him. “Good, good, very good,” he’d said, with something too like a bow. And Shylock — a man vexed in the matter of giving and receiving hospitality himself — had patted his shoulder. It was as though — without strong instincts for such a thing on either side — they felt they needed to accelerate the process of friendship.

Quite why, Strulovitch would have been unable to say. He was not a man who made friends easily with other men. A mother, a wife, a daughter — these were the loadstones of his life. Possibly, then, he missed what he had never had. As for Shylock — Strulovitch would not have dared ask what he missed.

He liked it that Shylock took his arm, even though the grip was fierce. The gesture made him feel European. He hoped an observer would have taken them for professors of fine art at the University of Bologna, discussing how to improve the architecture of Jewish cemeteries.

“It’s evident you spoil her,” Shylock said, when Strulovitch rang off.

Strulovitch detected emotion in the other man’s voice. How could it be otherwise? But which emotion — sorrow, envy, bitterness?

Did each of them envy the other?

Or was it just his own fatherly pride and sentimentality he was listening to?

“Her mother is too sick a woman to care for her as a mother should,” he said. “The responsibility for her falls to me. It’s not something for which I’m suited.”

“Is any man?” Shylock interposed.

“Without a wife — probably not. So yes, I spoil her — spoil and deprive her in equal measure.”

“That too I understand.”

“I praise her and then I castigate her. What I give with my left hand I take with my right. It’s all indulgence followed by exasperation followed by remorse. I feel as though I’m confined in a small space with her — impeding her movements one minute, too intimately aware of her presence the next. And then I punish her for feeling what I feel. I can’t find any equilibrium in my love for her.”

Shylock tightened his grip on Strulovitch’s arm. Through the taut fingers Strulovitch could feel memory vibrating.

“Your words are daggers,” Shylock said. “But so they would be to any father. It’s an invariable law that fathers love their daughters immoderately.”

He made it sound like a terrible duty enjoined by a God who’d done no better bringing up his own children. An exaction of affection more than a bestowal of it. To be loved by Shylock, Strulovitch saw, would be an arduous experience. But his words consoled as well as frightened him. So he wasn’t the only one. The universe decreed that fathers should love their daughters not wisely but too well. And that daughters should hate them for it.

“I want to let her alone but I can’t,” he said. “I fear for her. I wish she would go to sleep and wake up ten years older. A daughter studying at college is a living torture. She comes home addled.”

Shylock could barely wait for him to finish. “You think it would be any different if she never left the house? A daughter doesn’t have to have an education to be taught how to hate her father. She can learn rebellion through an open window. It’s in the nature of a daughter.”

“It’s in the nature of an open window.”

“It’s in the nature of nature.”

“Then I am not for nature.”

Shylock made a noise in the back of his throat that sounded like a laugh dying. “I wish you luck with that,” he said, slowing their pace and looking beyond Strulovitch as though to be sure nature wasn’t following them. “We’ve been battling nature a long time. How many jungle Jews do you know?”

Offhand, Strulovitch could only think of Johnny Weissmuller.

Shylock slapped the air, as if he meant to swat away a fly. “Him I can’t comment on, but Tarzan, let me tell you, wasn’t one of us. We don’t hang out with apes. It’s the gibbering of primates or it’s the law. We chose the law. You read Stefan Zweig? Of course you do. There’s a story that when he was a young man he used to expose himself to women by the monkey house in the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna. So why did he choose the monkey house? To deride the sexual imperative to which he was enslaved. I am no better than a monkey, he was saying. He grew out of it. That’s the whole story of the Jews. We grew out of it. You have to draw a line under where you’ve been. Christians like to think they’ve drawn a line under us.”

“We aren’t monkeys.”

“In their eyes we are. Apes, curs, wolves.”

“That’s nothing more than invective. Their real argument with us is that we drew the line too strictly under nature.”

“Their argument with us is whatever will serve their purpose at any given moment. They don’t know what it is they can’t abide, only that they can’t. I am more precise when it comes to what I can’t abide about them. We lack charity, they say, but when I ran out on to the streets calling for Jessica children jeered at my distress. No charitable Christian parent dragged them home and admonished them for their cruelty.”

Christ, Strulovitch thought admiringly, he doesn’t lack outrage or intransigence, or come to that celerity, my new friend.

Then again, though he didn’t mean to be critical so early in their acquaintance, wasn’t it reported that Shylock ran out on to those very streets calling at the same time for his ducats? Strulovitch knew never to trust what was reported, but what if, in this instance, it were true?

He wanted to be fair. It was, after all, as an object of material worth that Shylock’s daughter had been stolen. But you can’t — can you? — put everything down to the prevailing mercantilism of your society. Strulovitch lived in a wealth-crazed world himself; he hoped, however, that he knew the difference between his daughter and his bank account. Yet this, too, he understood — that in the outrage of loss, objects and people lose their delineation. The robbed commonly speak of violation, feeling the theft of things as keenly as an attack on their person. He couldn’t say he would feel the same, neither could he say he wouldn’t. But he wondered if he cut a similar figure as a father. Obsessed. Wolf-like. Enraged into possessive befuddlement. Was it just as arduous to be loved by him? Was he just as laughable a father in the cruel eyes of Christians?

“I can read what you’re thinking,” Shylock said. “All very well drawing a line under where we’ve been, but how do you draw a line under where your daughter wants to go? The answer is you can’t.”

Both men paused and looked down into the cold grey sludge they’d been sploshing through. They could have been back in the cemetery, hanging their heads in sorrow over the graves that contained people they loved.

They resumed a normal speed for a minute or two, until Shylock slowed them down again. “You know,” he said, as though they’d been discussing such things for weeks, and only this minute had a new thought come to him, “it wasn’t just to spite me that Jessica bought the monkey…” They were at a standstill now, close to the chapel with its Star of David over the door. It was in here that the young rabbi officiating at Strulovitch’s mother’s burial had mispronounced her name and Strulovitch had vowed never again to attend an event, solemn or light, at which a rabbi officiated.

“So why did she buy the monkey?”

“Excuse me, we wash our hands here,” Shylock said. Strulovitch stood his ground, perhaps a little too obdurately. Shylock went over to the washbasins at the rear of the building and poured water over his hands from a tin cup. Strulovitch knew the meaning of the custom. With water did you wash away the foul impurities of death. It made sense whether you were religious or not. But to Strulovitch it still smacked of fanaticism.

He had the grace to laugh at himself — Strulovitch the moderate.

Shylock picked up the conversation where they’d left it. “You were asking me why Jessica bought the monkey…”

“Yes.”

“To disavow the Jew in herself. I do well not to say ‘cursed be her name.’ ”

You are dead to me.

Dead at my foot.

“A lost daughter doesn’t have to be a dead daughter,” Strulovitch said. Wasn’t he a lost son who’d been found again?

Shylock dug his fingers into Strulovitch’s arm. “May you never come to understand the wrongness of those words. The loss I suffered I wouldn’t wish on my enemies.”

Strulovitch rode the rebuke. But he knew Shylock was lying. He would wish such a loss on his enemies.

He felt he’d joined his dad’s old club. The Rot-in-Hell Jewish Fathers’ Society. Much as he welcomed and was flattered by Shylock’s companionship, he wondered how much of this naked wrathfulness he could take. Back in the days when she had words, Kay would accuse him of bringing ancient theological disputation into the house. Ironical that he wanted to say to Shylock what she had said to him. Lighten up, Shylock.

—

They walked the rest of the short distance to Strulovitch’s hearse-like black Mercedes in silence. “Ah! I’m surprised,” Shylock commented when he saw it.

A black chauffeur was holding the door open for them. Strulovitch handed him Shylock’s Glyndebourne stool. “In the boot, Brendan,” he said.

To Shylock he said, “Surprised by what? That I have a driver?”

“That you have a German car.”

“I thought you believe we have to draw a line.”

“That’s another sort of line.”

“A line’s a line. We must let bygones be bygones.”

“I’m surprised you believe that.”

“I don’t.”

—

And so, sitting side by side in the back seat of the unexpected Mercedes, they’d dropped into the usual pattern of conversation between fathers on the pains of bringing up a family, especially fathers on whom the burden of bringing up a daughter had exclusively fallen.

“This may surprise you,” Shylock said, “but I half expect to hear from my too dear daughter every hour. I buried her in my heart the day she left, but a daughter doesn’t stay buried. Even a daughter that steals her father’s most precious possession…apart, that is, from herself.”

Strulovitch felt it behoved him not to present himself too alacritously as an equal in distress. Beatrice was giving him trouble but she hadn’t yet bunked off through a window with a thieving lout. “You haven’t heard anything so far then?” was the best he could think of saying.

Then he heard how ludicrous it sounded. So far!

“I say I half expect,” Shylock went on, staring beyond him as he spoke, looking but not looking at the Cheshire countryside, “but I confess there’s no volition in it. That’s simply a description of the state I’ve been left in. I am in expectation because that’s what follows when nothing does. But hope is idle because the story ends where the story ends. She could be on her way to me today, she could be knocking at my door this hour, but that’s a disallowable supposition. Today is always yesterday. There’s no Act Six. For me there wasn’t even an Act Five. But at least no resolution means no final rejection. Anything could be. There’s no knowing. Wounding doubt wounds not as fatally as wounding certainty. I am toyed with but I breathe.”

“So there is no looking forward?”

“None.”

“Are you telling me you don’t ever wonder how she is?”

“I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t wonder that. Some days I think I only want her to be happy. Some days I don’t. But it’s vain. There is no ‘is.’ Her story, too, stopped when it stopped. She and the vile layabout she ran off with — and for all I know their monkey — inherit my wealth, but they won’t ever see it. That’s some consolation. But I can’t help myself. I imagine her remorse. I am ashamed to say I pray for her to suffer agonies of remorse. I picture it. I see her ravaged face. But that’s to ask for something that can’t eventuate — might never have been, and certainly won’t ever be now.”

Strulovitch shook his head. “There must have been the seeds of remorse in her actions even as she took them. Who can set out on any journey without at the same time wishing they’d stayed at home? She must at times have looked back longingly.”

“Those are Old Testament misgivings.”

“Well who’s to say Jessica didn’t give in to them the minute she left the house?”

“The minute she left the house she bought a monkey.”

“That’s a sort of looking back.”

“Yes, but not a looking back to me. The monkey once and for all made her not my daughter. She found living in a Jewish house something worse than prison. But yes, yes, it’s always possible she didn’t like what she had become when she became it and experienced, if not remorse exactly, then something like the regret you speak of, if only for her dear mother’s sake. But I mustn’t give in to fancy. She grew to hate me and I dare say her mother too for dying. It’s crossed my mind to wonder whether the manner of her leaving was meant to mimic the manner of her mother’s — for she died abruptly, my beloved Leah. As was done to Jessica, in her perception, so Jessica did. Certainly the manner in which she eloped was cruel to the highest degree. Cruel, disdainful and blasphemous. Had she wished to show me how badly she’d fared without a mother, or a father who could better play the mother — how inconsiderate she’d grown under my tutelage and example, how brutal even — she could not have made a better job of it. My hope now is that the ill treatment she’s receiving makes her see things differently, though I will never know if it does or doesn’t. But this is not what a father should want — for his daughter to suffer so that she should understand how much suffering she has caused. I should wish her happiness, should I not?”

“You should. But now you are asking too much of yourself. No father can completely want his daughter to be happy.”

Shylock sucked air in through his teeth. “That’s harsh philosophy.”

“No, it’s harsh psychology.”

Shylock eyed Strulovitch stealthily, as a snake might. I have shocked him, Strulovitch thought. Good. I have shocked myself.

He asked Brendan to open the car windows briefly. He wanted to feel an invigorating air blow in off the fields, even if it was only Cheshire out there. It is civilised to accept the violence of our natures, he thought. It is justice that makes us human, not forgiveness. We are things of blood, not things of milk.

Then he asked for the windows to be closed again.

“I am complimented to be thought too harsh by you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be,” Shylock said. “It does no good to confirm Christians in their suspicions that we are lost to loving-kindness.”

Strulovitch took the liberty of tapping Shylock’s knee. He nodded in the direction of the chauffeur. Was Shylock up to date enough to know that a black man could be a Christian? Strulovitch hoped his expression told the story and served to warn him. In front of a Christian of whatever colour we should not talk slightingly of Christians.

Shylock apologised. “I am not accustomed,” he said under his breath, “to minding my ps and qs. I am used to abusing in the spirit I’m abused. The times have grown nice.”

“Appearances,” Strulovitch said in a whisper, “can be deceptive.”