Shylock Is My Name

EIGHT

Untrue what Strulovitch said about not exactly tailing his daughter.

It had been going on a long time. She was thirteen when it started. Thirteen in fact, twenty-three in appearance. Luscious. A Levantine princess. A pomegranate. She was luscious to herself, too. He had caught her looking at her reflection in the mirror once, pouting her lips and laughing at her own fullness, smoothing her thighs, pushing out her breasts, amused by the too-muchness but overwhelmed by it at the same time. As though it imposed a responsibility on her. Was this really her? Was this really hers to do with as she chose? He could understand it only too well. When he was thirteen and untouched he felt he had already gone to waste. A great prince in prison lies, he would say as he went alone to bed night after night. And he was no pomegranate. Of course she had to deploy herself. Of course she had to feel her beauty had a purpose beyond her own gaze and, yes — because she knew he tailed her, knew he followed her into her own bedroom even — beyond his.

He got it. He got it all. But he couldn’t allow it. It was the waste he couldn’t bear. The other kind of waste. The waste of his and Kay’s ambitions for her. The waste of their love. The waste of that excitement he’d felt when he saw her for the very first time. The betrayal of the covenant. The waste of her, not as a pomegranate but a promise.

She was throwing that promise away. On boys who were beneath her. On crazes that demeaned her. On drinks and drugs she didn’t need. On music that didn’t merit a second of her attention. She had grown up in a house that was filled with Mozart and Schubert from morning to night. How could she not tell the difference? The first time he tailed her was to a party in a stinking house in Moss Side where a disc jockey scratched records with his dirty fingernails and shouted “Make some noise!” It was that injunction—make some noise—that brute invitation to the inchoate, that enraged him even more than the sight of her sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking weed and stroking the matted hair of a half-conscious troglodyte lying with his head in her lap. “Make some noise,” Strulovitch hissed into her ear as he dragged her down the stairs, “have I brought you up to value noise as an entity — just noise for the sake of it, Beatrice — while some chthonic arsehole fondles your breasts!”

She fought him on the stairs and fought him as he dragged her into the Mercedes while the chauffeur looked on, saying nothing. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s not the music, it’s got nothing to do with music, it’s the fondling. Well no one was fondling me as it so happens. I was fondling him. The only fondling of me that was going on was in your head.”

He slapped her face. You don’t accuse your father of having sexual fantasies about you. She got out of the car. He ran after her. A stranger shouted “Hey!” when he saw them struggling. “Fuck you!” Strulovitch said, “I’m her father.” “Then try behaving like it,” the stranger said. It was a line Beatrice was to borrow. “If you want me to behave like your daughter, try behaving like my father.”

A couple of days later she walked into his study laughing like a witch. “I’ve just remembered your description of the boy fondling me,” she said. “A chthonic arsehole. Congratulations. You make me proud to be your daughter. No other girl has a dad who could come up with a phrase like that.”

Strulovitch felt a twinge of pride. It wasn’t a bad phrase for the spur of the moment. And it had the merit of being deadly accurate. “I’m grateful for your appreciation, Beatrice,” he said. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

“You’re sick,” she said. “Chthonic arsehole. What you really mean is a goy boy. You wouldn’t have minded if he’d been a Jew.”

“Not true.”

“True!”

“All right, I might have minded less. Not on religious grounds, but because a Jew isn’t interested in the idea of making noise.”

She laughed again. “Shows what you know,” she said.

Was she right? Was chthonic arsehole just a euphemism for a non-Jew?

He didn’t think so. When he saw a Christian he didn’t see a creature of the prehistoric dark. That, surely, was more what Christians saw when they saw him. Why, it was sometimes what he saw when he saw himself.

The fact remained that a Christian husband was not what he wanted for his daughter, any more than his father had wanted a Christian wife for him. Yet it was with him exactly as it had been with his father. They both took non-Jews as they found them, enjoyed cordial relations with them, respected them, loved them — his father’s trustiest pal was a chalk-white Methodist from Todmorden; his partner, a man he cherished like a wife, an ultramontanist from Wells — and they both, father and son, reserved their highest admiration for Gentile geniuses — Mozart and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Goya (Goya!), Wordsworth and Shakespeare (whether he was a Shapiro or he wasn’t). With what the Gentiles were in themselves Strulovitch had no quarrel. Only when it came to who his daughter would marry (and maybe sleep with) did he have reservations. Only when he thought of the covenant did a Christian become a troglodyte.

So in the name of that covenant, how many more times did he bundle her into the Mercedes?

He was lucky she never ran away with any of the freaks — he felt he needed another word — who fondled her breasts, even for one night. When he hated her he said that was because she knew which side her bread was buttered, when he loved her he said it was because beneath it all she was a young woman of profound good sense. Either way, he went on tailing her until she grew so accustomed to his presence in the shadows of a car park or at a table in the far corner of a bar wearing dark glasses and reading the Financial Times that she would turn and ask him for a ride home when she felt she’d been out long enough, or a loan when she ran out of cash.

One bank holiday Monday he followed her to the Notting Hill Carnival. She’d said she was going to stay with cousins in Hendon — he’d even put her on the train — but he got wind of her plans. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy finding her in the crowds but went, despite his loathing of street parties, public nudity, jungle music—jungle music? yes, jungle music — drunkenness, and masquerades, fearing the worst. The worst being? A Rasta junked-up to his eyeballs, swathed in a kafia and making noise on a steel drum. In the event it was Beatrice who found him. His anxiety must have lit him like a beacon. Boldly — and ironically because she knew his fears — she introduced him to a white man in a suit, pretty much his age, who shook his hand and said, “An honour to meet you Mr. Strulovitch.”

“Do you know how old my daughter is?” Strulovitch asked him.

“Twenty-four.”

“Is that a guess?”

“It’s what she told me.”

“You don’t ask people of twenty-four what their age is. You guessed, and you guessed wrong. She’s thirteen.”

“Thirteen and seven eighths,” Beatrice corrected him.

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Strulovitch said.

“Jesus!” the man cried, leaping from Beatrice’s side as though he’d just learnt she had leprosy. Strulovitch was half-inclined to feel sorry for him. He nonetheless said, “If I discover you’re still seeing her I’ll cut your heart out.”

For some reason this threat didn’t upset Beatrice. “Well he was hardly what you’d call chthonic,” she said, when Strulovitch got her home. “He’s the deputy mayor of Kensington and Chelsea.”

“Doesn’t stop him being chthonic,” Strulovitch said. “I can name you a dozen chthonic mayors, never mind deputy mayors.”

But the only reason his threat to eviscerate the bastard hadn’t upset her more was that she didn’t love him. Once the loving kicked off in earnest he knew he’d have his work cut out.

And then it did. He recognised the signs. Loss of appetite, absent-mindedness, teeth marks in her neck. One night he followed her to Levenshulme — a suburb no daughter of his should have been seen dead in — kicked down the door of a council flat and began throttling the first person he encountered inside. He was someone’s grandfather, too old to ravish Strulovitch’s daughter, though he might easily have been acting as a lookout while some younger person did. It took five people — one of them the putative ravisher, too puny, in the event, to have ravished a mouse — to pull him off. You were lucky, Beatrice told him, that you didn’t kill him or that no one called the police. “As far as you’re concerned,” he retorted, “I am the police.”

It was at this time — otherwise Beatrice would surely have fled for ever — that Kay had her stroke. One of her doctors was a friend of Strulovitch’s and assured him that while his running battle with his daughter could have contributed, other factors played a more important part in the aetiology of her sickness. She had always been a frail and nervous woman. The stress brought on by the long wait for Beatrice, and then her own anxiety for the girl’s welfare, would also have contributed. Strulovitch knew it. You can want something too much.

But he was a superstitious man. If you do wrong, you suffer — that’s morality. Superstition, which operates on a grander scale, has it that if you do wrong, someone else suffers. Someone you love. Would his wife have been with him still had he allowed Beatrice to throw her life away on whom she chose?

Which he doesn’t doubt she is going to do anyway.

—

Feather-bedded, cocooned in silk, the apricot and indigo of the Chihuly chandelier reflected in his narrowed eyes, Shylock lay awake within the force field of magical influence emanating from Alderley Edge, thinking of Jessica. Wizards or no wizards, he could not unbury her or uncurse her. Nor could he abruptly unfather himself of concern for her. The story ended where the story ended, but while he grasped the finality of that for him, he could not stop himself imagining the misery waiting in store for his daughter.

This much he knew:

Those who hated him so much as to profit from his loss of her and laugh openly at his sorrow would never reconcile themselves to the fact that she was Jewish. Blood would out. She was not daughter to her father’s manners, she said, but Lorenzo, the rascal who pilfered her, along with those who conspired in the misappropriation, could not stop commenting on her difference from the man she was ashamed to call father, her gentler (for which read more Gentile) disposition, her greater chance of making it to heaven, the fairness of her looks — ivory to his jet — and when all you can remark is difference then all you are aware of is similarity. That she came bucketed in his ducats only went to show how present he was in their estimation of her. How long before Lorenzo woke to find his limbs stretched out by Shylock’s?

The naivety of daughters! To think that Lorenzo’s love would make her Christian when nothing in his character or behaviour bore the notation of Christian as a Christian would describe Christianity. Was it Christian to avail himself, without pausing long enough to scratch his backside, of her father’s gold and jewels? Was it Christian to make merry with her betrayal and watch her empty her pockets in a single mad night in Genoa? A subtle gradation of morality attaches to profligacy: to blow a fortune of one’s own is reprehensible, to encourage another to squander hers is iniquitous. Or is that iniquity what Christians mean by virtue? Virtuous to divest another of his worldly goods so long as you deplore the means by which he came by them…?

He remembered her as a child in Leah’s arms and mourned her as he mourned her mother. What had he done to make her hate him? “Hatred” was not too strong a word. The monkey proved that. To buy a monkey with the ring Leah had given him was a profanation of them both. But whatever she had sold to buy it with, a monkey was a profanation of her ancestors and education, everything he and Leah had taught her since she was a child. Not for a wilderness of monkeys would I have sold that ring, he told Tubal, and as he said it he saw the wilderness, the vast expanse of feral nothingness, lawless, godless, governed only by greed, hyenas, and the blind impulse to reproduce.

Was that what Jessica hated, not him or the mother who’d prematurely left her, but the idea that the wilderness should be civilised — the wilderness in her heart and the wilderness that was the company she kept? Christianity, when all was said and done, counted as no more than an interregnum: the only true distinction was between Judaism and paganism, and when a Jew felt the old paganism itching in his blood he had no choice but to reject the interdictions he’d been brought up to listen to. Jessica wasn’t interested in Christians. What she wanted was to be back in the wilderness with the monkeys.

—

Strulovitch found his guest in the garden when he woke. It was still early. And cold. He was wearing his overcoat, with a black scarf around his shoulders — to Strulovitch’s eye not unlike a prayer shawl — and was sitting on his Glyndebourne stool talking to Leah. A few remaining droplets of dew sequinned the lawn, lighting him up from below like footlights.

“So, Leah, it would seem that I am presently to become a Christian,” he’d been saying.

This was a familiar theme between them. He had waited for her, as always, to say something in return. But presumably she was too amused for words. “Some Christian you’ll make!” he knew she was thinking.

He couldn’t resist indulging her sense of humour. “You can just see me, Leah,” he liked to go on, “taking my pew, gowned in white for when the sacred moment of baptism arrives, my head bowed, waiting in beatified gratitude for the sermonising to start. ‘We have in our presence today, by the grace of Jesus Christ, a Jew notorious for…’ ”

He rose from his stool and did a stately dance for her, rubbing his fingers together — the Waltz of the Money-grubbers.

But there it had to come to an end. He sat down again. His conversion to Christianity was the ultima Thule of their graveyard pillow talk. They might approach it forever, nose it like sharks circling the smell of blood, but they would never be able to move in for the final kill. Before Shylock had been able to convert, or pretend to convert, the footlights dimmed.

Had he or hadn’t he?

Well that was simple to answer. He hadn’t.

Hadn’t been given the opportunity.

But would he or wouldn’t he?

Hearing Strulovitch’s soft tread, he stood up quickly and extended a hand. He was impressed by his host’s attire, a dressing gown that might have been painted by Matisse, and crested slippers. A gown and slippers of comparable sumptuousness had been left for him in the guest bathroom, but he was uncomfortable in other men’s clothes. And he didn’t want to look as though he intended to make himself at home. Strulovitch might fear he would never go.

“Shall I leave you?” Strulovitch asked him gently. He felt obscurely honoured — no, not obscurely, simply and deeply honoured — that Shylock felt the presence of his wife in Strulovitch’s garden. It was one thing to accept Shylock’s conviction that there was nowhere on the wheeling planet that Leah wasn’t buried, but for her to be specifically buried here…!

Strulovitch lowered his head. He wasn’t a religious man but he still believed that the beloved dead consecrate.

“We were enjoying a joke,” Shylock said. “We try to keep it light.”

Strulovitch privately hoped he was a better jokesmith with his wife. Poor Leah, otherwise, having to lie there, year after year, feigning amusement.

“May I ask the subject of the joke?” he said. “Not another one about Mr. Grreenberg being unvell, I take it?”

“No, nothing to do vid Grreenberg. We like to speculate on my becoming Christian. The idea entertains my Leah.”

“I’d have thought it would horrify her.”

“Would have horrified her had it come to pass, but time was on our side. It closed its fist before it could fulfil its purpose. We can smile that something was on our side.”

“Do you feel you baulked the Christians of their prize?”

“That presupposes that they knew what their prize was.”

“They sounded sure enough. Get thee gone…”

“Get thee gone, is no proof of anything. Get thee gone is simply what those in power like saying to Jews.”

“But they didn’t only want you gone from their presence, did they? They wanted you gone from yourself, stripped of your faith and your self-worth…”

“And my money, don’t forget my money.”

“So they did know what their prize was.”

“Who can say? What if it wasn’t time alone that closed its fingers before I could be Christianised? What if, having said what they’d said, they were now content themselves? Content to have saved one of their own and be seen to have swindled me out of my money. It was all about appearances, as show trials often are. And make no mistake, no matter how it began, this became a show trial in the end. How to Jew the Jew. And thereafter, what if they didn’t much care whether I followed the conversion procedure or not? Though the order was malignantly meant, once having restored the status quo ante Iudaeus they had other things to think about, honour was satisfied, the merchant had won while briefly enjoying the masochistic ecstasy of losing, and ultimately it was my loss if I stubbornly went about Jewing it as before, hobbled as to cash, humiliated, orphaned either end, and without the intercession of Christian grace to save my soul. You can’t suppose they really cared about the state of my soul.”

Strulovitch thought about it. “They might have cared to the degree that they could boast of having changed its complexion.”

“There you have it! — cared for how it reflected on them. But they’d had their victory. And their own souls were evidently in good shape. They’d spoken of pity and exacted a cruel revenge. Very Christian of them.”

“But would they have believed such a conversion of you, anyway, given the contempt you’d always shown for Christianity?”

“Who can say? On the one hand Christians considered Jews too immured in obstinacy ever to convert, on the other they didn’t see how we could resist the light of Jesus once we beheld it. They were right on the first count about me. I hope I’d have taken a knife to my own throat rather than kneel abjectly in front of a painted mannikin.”

“So when you declared yourself ‘content’ to be converted you didn’t mean it?”

“I was answering a question in the form it was presented to me. ‘Art thou contented, Jew?’ If that was not a sneer, what was it? I had no fight left in me, but my reply—’I am content’—at least returned the compliment.”

“It was never your intention, then?”

“I only say ‘I hope’ I’d have taken a knife to my own throat. I can’t pretend to know what I’d have done had they summoned the energy to do more than congratulate one another and actually drag me off to church. But ‘content’ I would never have been. Do I strike you as a contented man?”

—

Strulovitch was sorry Shylock had not chosen to wear the gown and slippers he’d left him. He would have liked him to feel at home. Stay a while. Try a little of that contentment he scorned. Explore the area. Admire the winter landscape. Exchange reminiscences. Or just go on talking about Jews, a subject of which Strulovitch tired in principle but not in fact. The heat with which Shylock discussed it shocked and fascinated him. I the Jew, they the Christians — no two ways about it, no weasel words. Was it better like that, he wondered. A naked antagonism. No pretending that fences could be mended. An unending, ill-mannered, insoluble contrariety. Did it mean that all parties at least knew where they stood? That at least you knew your enemy. And would go on knowing him until the end of time.

Until the conversion of the Jews.

Such extremity of thought and language. Such eternities of mistrust and hostility. If Shylock does stick around he will need to learn to moderate himself in Beatrice’s company, Strulovitch thinks — Strulovitch a man frightened for and of his daughter.

—

Shylock had gone on a short walk and was looking down at Strulovitch’s fish. “Do you ever eat these?” he asked.

“They’re strictly ornamental,” Strulovitch said. The thought occurred to him that such a concept could be foreign to Shylock. If Strulovitch left him in the house, would he steal one for his lunch? Grab it from the pond with his hairy fingers and stuff it, wriggling, down his throat? I really don’t know who this man is, he thought. He could hear his mother saying “You invited him into your home? Just like that?” His wife, when she had been his wife, the same. And Beatrice. “Who is he, Dad?”

Were men generally more incautious than women when it came to who you let into your house, or was it just him?

“Would you like coffee?” he asked at last

Shylock smiled. “Tea is probably better, thank you, given how you English make coffee.”

“My coffee is good,” Strulovitch said. “I import the beans myself.”

Shylock put his hands together and then opened them. This was not the first time he had struck Strulovitch as making the sign of a man consenting quietly to arrest. “Shall I come in for it?”

“I could set a table out here.”

“Too cold,” Shylock replied, drawing his coat around him as he moved into the house.

The gesture was theatrical, the closing of a scene. Again Strulovitch thought, I do not know this man.

“I’m not sure how you breakfast,” Strulovitch said once they were inside.

“The usual way. At a table, with cutlery.”

“I’ll rephrase. I’m not sure on what you breakfast.”

“Toast will do me,” Shylock told him.

“I should have asked you last night what you would like,” Strulovitch said. “And whether you are…”

“Particular in what I eat? This side obsessiveness, yes I am. You are not, I gather.”

“It is not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man,” Strulovitch said with pomp, “but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

“You consider Jesus the best authority on the subject of kashrut?”

“He lets me off the tedium of observance with a noble sentiment.”

“You think it noble, I find it sophistical. Why cannot we be defiled by what goes out and what comes in?”

“Why do we have to talk of defilement at all?”

“I don’t.”

“Then if there’s no defilement…?”

“Why bother with the distinctions? Because it is always worth distinguishing. Life, to be valued, should not be random and undifferentiated. I no more want to stuff everything down my mouth regardless than I want to experience every sensation. When I fell in love with Leah, I knew I did not want to love another woman. I distinguished her from other women, as she distinguished me from other men. To keep a kosher kitchen is to practise morality in the same way that keeping a faithful marriage is. The habit of conscientiousness in itself ministers to goodness.”

“You are sure you don’t confuse morality with neurosis?”

“There is less neurosis in observing than there is in lapsing. You secular Jews are more punctilious in your non-observance of the law than the Jew of faith is in his performance of it. You have as many things to remember not to do. As many festivals to miss, as many mitzvahs to forget, as many obligations to turn aside from.”

“That assumes I lapse meticulously. I am less deliberate than that. I simply don’t notice.”

“Somewhere along the line you made a choice to lapse. And that’s where your neurosis comes in. That original choice of yours must have been highly principled, whatever you say, because you are, in so many other ways, cut out to be the full Jew. Diet aside, look what a fanatic separater you are. You separate ideas. You separate people. You have separated yourself. You separate your daughter—”

“I try to separate my daughter.”

“You try uncommonly hard. You have a kosher mind. So why jib at a kosher stomach?”

“I jib at making it a reason for offending or inconveniencing others.”

“Does my diet offend or inconvenience you?” Strulovitch laughed. “Me? No. Not yet it doesn’t.”

“I will be happy with toast so long as I am under your roof.”

“I suspect you never said that to the Christians you refused to eat with.”

“Do you think it would have made any difference? Do you think they would have liked me more?”

“They might have disliked you less.”

“Are you speaking now from your own experience of being liked? If so, then tell me: are you the more loved for what you give? For your bequests and benefactions? Or does a still greater repugnancy attach to you on account of your having the wherewithal to make them?”

“Repugnancy?”

I am not you, Strulovitch thought. I don’t arouse such aversion. I am someone else living in another time.

But he almost regretted it were so.

“If the word offends you,” Shylock said, “find another. But they won’t ever forgive you in their hearts. You might as well whet your knife on the sole of your shoe.”

“Is that your advice to me?”

Shylock said nothing.

“Nonetheless,” Strulovitch continued, “you did on occasions eat with them.”

“Yes, and I live to regret having done so. But it wasn’t in order to win their affection that I went. It was to provoke them. I went to make their food taste like ratsbane in their gullets. There has to be some pleasure in life. It can’t all be work and prayer.”

Ah, Strulovitch thought, there’s a provocation I do understand.

—

Silence between them.

Shylock eating dry toast.

Strulovitch wondering if it was true he had a kosher mind.

Beatrice…

Where was Beatrice?

Strulovitch wondered if she could have overheard this conversation. And if so, what would she be thinking — a modern girl who did what she wanted, kissed whom she wanted, ate what she wanted?

“Who is this guy, Dad? What’s he doing here? Is he trying to convert you?”

And what would Shylock’s reaction be when he met her? Would the sight of a living daughter, still at home, break his heart?

“So, your daughter…” Shylock mused into his coffee, his punctuation implying he had been keeping pace with Strulovitch’s thoughts, “is she in residence?”