Shylock Is My Name

SIX

The chauffeur drove them — somewhat surlily, Strulovitch thought — to the Strulovitch home in Mottram St. Andrew, the eastern apex of Cheshire’s Golden Triangle. It had been his parents’ last house, as unlike the houses they’d grown up in in Salford, where their parents had kept chickens in the yards and prayed in Yiddish to the Almighty, as was possible to imagine. All this in one generation — from a stable in a Mancunian shtetl to a baronial hall with a drive big enough to take a dozen Mercedes, a lake for rare fish and a view of Alderley Edge. A piece of purple-hazed, grassy England, holding Stone Age mysteries, theirs to look at and even feel proprietorial about, all thanks to car parts. Strulovitch liked his own house in Hampstead better — he preferred older money to new, even when the new was his own — but there were strong arguments for keeping Mottram St. Andrew. He had professional interests in the north, he had a daughter doing performance studies at the Golden Triangle Academy (latterly the North Cheshire Institute, renamed to remove all associations with poor-schools) — an arts-based independent college for the privileged of all ages, where Strulovitch, as a benefactor, was able to pull strings — and he believed the country air would be good for poor Kay. His mother, too, had wanted to go on living there, and would have been happy, in her own words, “to die in a shed in the garden,” but Strulovitch had insisted on building her an extension big enough to house her carers. “Must I have so many people around me, Simon?” she asked. “You can’t have too many,” he told her. “You might slip in the bath, you might fall coming down the stairs. There’s always an accident waiting to happen when you live on your own.” Ironical that it was to Kay, a woman half her age and with a husband and a daughter in attendance, that the accident waiting to happen happened.

His mother slipped all right — but quietly, without a sound, slipped out of life under the kind supervision of a host of carers.

Strulovitch inadequately mourned her. He had loved her but his affections were becalmed. If you can’t love your wife — daren’t love your wife without howling for the loss of her — who can you love?

Your daughter.

Somewhere in the house, when she wasn’t gallivanting, Beatrice lived. She was too young, in Strulovitch’s view, to be sharing a place with other students of the performing arts who might be twice her age. Though in her own view she lived at home out of deference to her mother. She was not particularly good with her mother. She was afraid of her illness and impatient with the rituals of communication — who had time to wait for words that might or might not make sense to dribble out of the side of her mouth or appear illegibly on a chalkboard? But she was also ashamed of herself on these very counts and knew it was incumbent on her, at least, never to be too far away. Dreading what would happen to her if she went to college in London, dreading who she’d meet, who she’d fall in love with, and what they’d tell her, dreading her coming home one afternoon with a kafia round her throat, Strulovitch stoked her guilt. Yes — he commended her on her decision — it was a good idea to stay in the north and live at home. He knew her mother would be relieved, whether she’d be able to show it or not. In reality, the geography of Beatrice’s education made no difference; they’d stuff her with the latest foie gras of anti-Jew psychosis and tell her that the sickness was her father’s wherever she went. He wanted not to be too far away from her, though, in case…well, just in case. Which didn’t mean he was tailing her. If she sometimes saw him flitting in or out of one of the art rooms, inspecting students’ work, that was because he had suggestions to make and promises to honour. That was the price a daughter paid for having a father who ran the Strulovitch Foundation. Whichever institution she’d attended would have wanted something he had, the offices of a philanthropist, of no matter what religion, being always in demand.

“Don’t use yourself up,” his mother used to warn him. “There’s only one of you.”

It was only as he was getting out of the car — again conscious of something not quite right in Brendan’s demeanour, not quite what one expected of a chauffeur — that he realised he had again not attended her grave.

The day had held too much excitement. And as his mother said, there was only one of him.

But there was always an excuse.

So what was Brendan’s? He hadn’t been behaving rudely exactly. He hadn’t driven too fast, or cornered aggressively. He hadn’t been slow or resentful in opening the doors for his passengers. But he seemed ruffled. So who or what had ruffled him? The presence of Shylock, was it? The Christian-baiting? The Jew-talk?

Strulovitch wondered how his dogs would react. But they took no notice when he let himself and his guest in. They didn’t even look up.

—

He suggested a drink and maybe something light to eat before bed. But he didn’t want it to sound as though he couldn’t bear to be left alone. Needy was he? He had just come, in a manner of speaking, from burying his mother. He had no wife he could talk to. He had no daughter he could trust. He had scores to settle — some social, some religious, some metaphysical — never mind what scores, just scores. Of course he was needy.

Shylock declined food, but found the idea of a drink agreeable. Strulovitch offered him grappa. He shook his head. Kümmel, perhaps. Strulovitch didn’t have kümmel. Slivovitz, then? Strulovitch didn’t have slivovitz. Shylock shrugged. Amaretto? Strulovitch thought he had amaretto somewhere. Shylock didn’t want to put him to trouble. I’ll have water, he said. Or cognac. Strulovitch had cognac. Shylock was in no hurry to retire. He didn’t sleep much, hadn’t slept much for a long time. And he seemed to be stimulated by Strulovitch’s furniture — the leather and steel armchairs, the art deco rugs, the prints of resurrections on the walls, the uncannily lifelike clay sculpture of a half-naked couple wrapped around each other in a death embrace.

“Is it permissible to sit in this room?” he asked. “Or should I be standing to inspect its contents?”

“Sit, sit,” Strulovitch said, ushering his guest into a chair. Had Shylock been in such a house before, he wondered. It must have been this thought that led him to say something stupid about the changes he must have seen.

“Yes,” said Shylock. “I’ve seen a few.”

Strulovitch opened his eyes wide. “Such as?” he still more inanely said.

“You don’t have the time,” Shylock told him.

“And you presumably don’t remember.”

“On the contrary I remember everything.”

“So go on, humour me, what’s the biggest change?” Shylock closed his eyes and pretended to take something — a straw, a raffle ticket — from an imaginary hat. “They used to spit on me, now they tell me Jewish jokes.”

“Good jokes?”

“Not the way they tell them.”

“But kindly meant, presumably.”

“Tell me a joke that’s kindly meant.”

Strulovitch didn’t try, but made a weighing motion with his hands. “Well, on balance I’d say joking, kindly or otherwise, has to beat spitting.”

Shylock peered deep into his glass. When he concentrated, his eyes seemed to recede and close over as though they contained more of darkness than of light. Strulovitch knew he could appear stern himself, but the deep shadows cast by Shylock’s eyes unnerved even him. Was this look another of his reprimands, he wondered. Have I trespassed in some way? Is it for me to decide for him whether joking beats spitting?

“What strikes me as more interesting,” Shylock said peremptorily, as though to make it clear to Strulovitch that he was not keeping up conversationally, “is that they can’t see a Jew without thinking they have to tell him a joke. Do they sing ‘Suwannee’ every time they meet a black man?”

Strulovitch wished he knew the answer to that. “They might under their breath. But I take a joke to one’s face to be the equivalent of a little white flag. Look, we come in peace.”

“And when they joke about my unbending, mercenary nature?” He was evidently unmoved by Strulovitch’s pacifism. “When they finger banknotes in my face, when they jeer at my separatism, wondering that I consider myself favoured when everything about my existence declares the opposite, when they question my morality — though until we taught them they didn’t know morality existed — when they dispute the principles by which I live, the things I believe, the food I put in my mouth, and when they expound their theories on where, given my faith, I should be living — are they still waving a little white flag?”

Strulovitch remembered boys at school making fun of his name — Strudelbum — and telling him to go back to where he came from. Where did they think that was? Ur of the Chaldees?

“So where are they sending you?” he asked.

“To hell, eventually. But in the meantime to nowhere in particular — that’s their point. We had a chance at a Homeland and we blew it. Belonging was never what we were good at anyway. Being a stranger is what we do. It’s the diaspora, they are at pains to assure me, that brings out the best in us. Which neatly sidesteps the question of what brings out the best in them. But they feel no embarrassment in proclaiming that the proper Jew is a wandering Jew. Citizens of everywhere and nowhere, dandified tramps subsisting wherever we can squeeze ourselves in, at the edges and in the crevices. Precarious but urbane, like flâneurs clinging to a rock face, expressing our marvellously creative marginality.”

“My daughter thinks the same.”

“I could speak to her…”

Strulovitch risked an ironic expression.

Shylock’s face gave nothing away. His olive skin was polished to a mirrored bleakness, reflecting all that there was of sorrow. “Who’s to say I won’t make a better job of speaking to yours?” he said. “Since I’m here I might as well give you the benefit of my experience.”

“That ’s why you’re here?”

“I’m here because I’m here. What other explanation could satisfy an unbeliever such as you?”

—

The men sit in silence for half an hour, neither looking at the other. Finally, Strulovitch does the unhostly thing and rubs his eyes.

“You can choose any bedroom you fancy,” he says. “But the best are at the back of the house looking out over the Edge. If you stay up late or wake early you might see one of the wizards come tobogganing down.”

“Ah, so it’s a magic place,” Shylock says, sniffing paganism.

Strulovitch remembers the sketch in which the Italian comedian Dario Fo attempts to eat himself. Shylock looks as though he means to eat Alderley Edge.

Strulovitch laughs with deep appreciation. Nothing beats my people’s disdain for folklore.

He regrets he doesn’t have more Jewish friends with whom he can exchange black thoughts and scoff at nature.

This pang of cultural loneliness might explain why he suddenly asks what book Shylock was reading to his wife earlier in the day. One last convivial conversation about literature before sleep.

“You should be able to guess,” Shylock says.

“It looked well worn. If it’s the Bible, I’d be honoured if you’d read to her from one of mine. I have a Geneva Bible that’s beautiful to hold and opens easily.”

“Thank you. But we are giving the Bible a rest. We fear we have exhausted Jacob and his sheep. And besides, these days Leah prefers a novel. Last week we finished Crime and Punishment for the second time. I’ve promised her Karamazov. But for the moment she is disposed to laugh, and takes heart from hearing me read to her from Portnoy’s Complaint. Some of the chapters are embarrassing but I feel it would be wrong to leave them out.”

—

Needy or not, Strulovitch would have liked those to be the last words exchanged between them for the night. He felt he could sleep soundly on them. Sad, that he had no wife capable of taking heart from what he read to her. But sometimes it’s possible to feel pleased for the hearts of other people.

Shylock, however, showed no signs of wanting to retire. Strulovitch was beginning to feel crowded by him. He was a guest one needed all one’s energy for. Though his eyes leaked no light, and his mouth was resolutely unplayful, he still suggested a sort of irascible sociability, as though conversation, however desolate, were his medium and he dreaded its cessation. Or was it just sleep he dreaded? Did he ever turn in, Strulovitch wondered. Was this to be the price of having him here — that there would be no more sleep for him either? Only talk of daughters and identity, anger, betrayal, monkeys…?

To keep himself awake, he asked if Shylock could remember the last joke the Gentiles had told him.

“Do you want it how I tell it or how they tell it?”

“How you tell it.”

“Then I’ll tell it how they tell it. ‘Grreenberg goes to the doctor because he’s not feeling vell…’ As a matter of interest have you ever met anyone who talks like that?”

“No…except maybe the occasional rabbi.”

“It seems more likely that they’re aping what frightens them.”

“Let me tell you that no one’s frightened of us any more.”

“You must speak for yourself. I can still scare dogs.” Strulovitch didn’t say that his own dogs hadn’t been scared. But then they were used to keeping company with an inordinate Jew.

“I don’t doubt,” he said, “that you, personally, still have the power to terrify. I meant ‘us’ collectively.”

“I’m not sure that the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘us’ quite works. The individual Jew brings the collective Jew with him into any room. It’s the collective Jew that Christians see. Person to person, I grant you, they can be very nice. I have received proposals of marriage from Christians sincerely wanting to make amends. I’ve had my portrait sympathetically painted. A German apologised to me in a cemetery once. But when I extended my hand he seemed afraid to take it. Why? Because at that moment it wasn’t the individual Shylock’s hands, it was the hand of the collective Jew. And collectively, we still connect to the uncanny.”

Strulovitch felt the surge of dark forgotten powers. The uncanny…If only.

“Shall I go on with the joke?” Shylock said.

Strulovitch remembered his manners. “Yes, please. Grreenberg’s at the doctor’s…”

“ ‘Grreenberg,’ says the doctor, ‘you’re going to have to stop masturbating.’ ‘Stop masturbating!’ exclaims Grreenberg, ‘Vy is that?’ ‘In order,’ says the doctor, ‘that I can examine you.’ ”

Strulovitch laughed. It was one of his favourite jokes but he wouldn’t have got it if he hadn’t known it already. He had never heard it told so badly. Job could have told it better. Maybe that was Shylock’s point. Telling it how they told it. He knew Shylock to be a man of savage humour. The fact of his never smiling was the irrefragable proof of that. Perhaps he was one of those who had to write his own material. And write it out of extremity — at the edge, or in the crevices. No wonder people couldn’t always tell for sure when he was jesting and when he wasn’t.

“I love that joke,” Strulovitch told him, remembering the consternation it had caused Ophelia-Jane.

“You should have stopped me if you knew it.”

“I wouldn’t have stopped you for the world. But now you tell me something — why are there are so many stories about Jews masturbating? Onan, Leopold Bloom, your Alexander Portnoy, Grreenberg. Is that how Gentiles see us? Or is it how we see ourselves?”

He expected Shylock to take his time replying. But a scholar who had written a neglected paper on the subject could not have been more prompt with his reply. “Both,” he said. “After so many years of being told what Gentiles see when they look at us it’s hardly a surprise that we end up seeing something similar. That’s how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor. If that’s how I look, that’s what I must be.”

“Well, if they must see us as something depraved it accords better with our own instinct for self-mockery that they see us as masturbators. Better that than misers.”

“There’s no difference. Jews hunched over their private parts, Jews hunched over their money. In the eyes of Gentiles it’s one vast fevered panorama of degenerate self-interest. We spend as we hoard, exclusively, keeping our sperm and money out of general circulation. They claim their hatred of us has economic justification but if you ask me the genitalia are the root of it. They haven’t been able to draw their imaginations from us sexually for centuries. You know they used to believe we bled like women, then they accused us of castrating Christian children. Even just thinking about us dirtied their minds. It’s a mix of ignorance and dread that goes back to circumcision. If we would do that to ourselves, what might we not do to them?”

A gentle knock at the living-room door roused Strulovitch from the dark trance of thought into which these words had plunged him. It was his wife’s night-time carer. Could Mr. Strulovitch spare a minute? Mrs. Strulovitch was asking for him.

“My wife wants me,” he said, rising. He had intended the subject of his ailing wife to go largely unspoken between them. Sympathy was not what he was looking for. And Shylock, anyway, did not strike him as the man to give it. “I’ll be back presently,” he said, making everything sound as ordinary as possible.

But his heart was thumping. Could Kay have compounded all that was not ordinary about the day by actually calling for him by name?

The answer to that was no. The carer was worried about Kay, that was all. She had heard noises in the house and seemed more than usually distressed. But by the time Strulovitch got to her she was asleep in her chair, her head lolling to one side, no word for Strulovitch on her nerveless lips. He straightened her up, kissed her brow, and went downstairs again. He wondered whether Shylock would still be there. Or whether he had ever been there at all.

“So where were we?” he asked, finding him as he’d left him, folded tight in his chair, all light excluded from his face.

Shylock shrugged.

Did that mean he was tiring? Strulovitch would have sat with him, swirling liquid in his glass, enjoying the dark quiet, but the longer he didn’t speak the more he thought about Kay.

“And now?” he asked, after as prolonged a silence as he could bear.

“And now what do the Gentiles think? I’d be surprised if they’re not thinking what they’ve always thought. Certainly their minds are no cleaner.”

“No, I meant what now for you?”

“Me personally?”

Strulovitch decided to risk the other’s wrath. He had invited Shylock into his stricken home. Now Shylock had to invite Strulovitch into his.

“Yes, you personally.”

Shylock rubbed his face with his hands. Would it still be there when he took his hands away? His fingers, Strulovitch noted, were coated with a dark fur. Is he closer to the apes than I am, he wondered.

“For me personally,” Shylock said, charging the word with all its long history of insolence and obloquy, “there is no now. I live when I lived. I have told you: where the story stopped, I stop. But sometimes, for the hellish pleasure of it, I roll the exit line of another dupe of fools around my tongue. I hanker, as you will easily imagine, for a resounding exit line.”

Strulovitch made as though to rack his brain for the exit line in question. But it was late for tests.

“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,” Shylock said impatiently. How long did Strulovitch need? “I have always had a soft spot for Puritans,” he explained. “Which I suppose is not surprising since they have a soft spot for us. We return each other’s compliments. I like the idea that I, a heartless Jew, should be fortified in my unforgivingness by a Puritan.”

“I’m surprised,” Strulovitch said, displeased to have been found wanting, “that you take hellish pleasure in those words. They sound feeble to me, like an old man wagging his finger at small children.”

“That’s because you know they can’t be acted upon. Malvolio, too, stops where the story stopped. He won’t ever enjoy that revenge. But the intention echoes onwards through time. He has finally tasted blood. Until now he has only played at being a moralist, his Puritanism the stuff of pantomime. We are all the stuff of pantomime until we run up against reality. Now he knows whereof the little jesting world of men and women is really made.”

For a man who reined in his agitation, Shylock had grown excited. Deep grooves appeared, like brackets — bracketing all that had not been and never would be said — about his sunken eyes.

Strulovitch looked at him warily. “You aren’t, I hope, intending violence.”

“That would depend…”

“On what?”

“Your definition of violence.”