Shylock Is My Name (11 page)

“I
’m not,” the footballer said, “before you ask, what you think I am.”

“A Nazi?”

“I’m not.”

“So why did you bring it up?”

“Because I know it’s what you’re thinking.”

“Why do you think it’s what I’m thinking?”

“Because it’s what everybody’s thinking.”

“And why is everybody thinking it?”

“Because I gave a Nazi salute.”

“So easy to be misconstrued,” Strulovitch said with a sigh but, before he could say more, Beatrice interposed her presence between the two men. “Correction,” she said, tapping Howsome’s wrist, as though with an imaginary fan, “because you gave a
parody
of a Nazi salute.”

“Right,” Howsome said. “Plus I didn’t know it was a Nazi salute.”

“Then how,” Strulovitch patiently pursued, “could you have been parodying it?”

Again Beatrice saw this as something she was better equipped to answer than her boyfriend. “Come on, Daddy,” she said, “you know as well as anyone how ironic referencing works.”

Howsome smiled at her in pride and nodded. This was what he’d fallen in love with the first time he heard her speak.

Strulovitch, too, was proud. He suppressed a pang for poor Kay, missing out on these flashes of smartness from a daughter who most of the time played dumb. So was it the smart Beatrice or the dumb Beatrice who had fallen for Howsome? He was surprised not to be more appalled by the footballer. He could half see what Beatrice saw in him. A sort of chthonic innocence, was it? He didn’t look like a Nazi. But then one never really knew what a Nazi looked like until it was too late. He was touched by something in him, anyway. Maybe it was the sight of so much muscle constrained by an expensive suit made to look cheap by so much muscle. He sat on the edge of the sofa like a boy dressed up to meet his grandparents. His tie, with its big, perfectly triangular knot, had him uncomfortably by the throat. A tattooed green and scarlet dragon also had him by the throat. It was a wonder he could breathe. Though brought up to be a wearer of ties himself—“A tie shows respect,” his father, who wouldn’t ever wear a skullcap, used to say—Strulovitch forsook them when he became an art collector. He had thought about digging one up for this occasion but decided against, whatever its formality. There was no fine point of etiquette that said a father interviewing an accidental Nazi sympathiser who wanted to sleep with his daughter had to wear a tie. Should carry a pistol or brandish a horsewhip, but no mention of a tie. So he wore his customary black suit and a white shirt with long, soft, pointed collars buttoned at the neck. I hope he sees a connoisseur, he thought. A connoisseur of art, and men. I hope he sees how much I see and how little impressed I am by empty assurances. Or by tattoos, come to that.

For some reason or clutch of reasons he was not sure he wanted to investigate he had asked Shylock to make himself scarce while the interview was in train. Maybe stay in his room. Maybe not sing along to George Formby.

“Are you frightened I will put the wind up him?” Shylock wondered.

“Of course not.”

But then what was he frightened of?

“Just call me if you need me,” Shylock said, as much to help Strulovitch out of his embarrassment as anything else.

“Why would I need you?”

“Should he turn violent…”

“It’s more likely to be Beatrice who turns violent.”

“Ah, well then I’ll be no use to you at all.”

They laughed together—Strulovitch’s laughter a bitter jeer, Shylock’s a death rattle from the back of his throat—at what wasn’t funny.

Unworthy daughters betrayed unworthy fathers. Where was the joke in that?

“What, Jessica? Why, Jessica, I say?”

He would never forget his last words to her. Do as I bid you. Shut all doors after you. Don’t thrust your head into the street.

Was that really so much to ask?

He knew he should not have left his house. He could go on blaming her through all eternity, but he should have stayed home. There was some ill towards him brewing. He’d smelt it.

What news on the Rialto?

Why so jumpy? And if so jumpy, why go out?

I am right loath to go
. Then don’t.

Drawn to danger, like a cat, he went anyway, to eat a supper he didn’t relish, in company he hated. There was, though, more than one kind of dining. Admit it, admit it to yourself, you went for the pure malicious fun of it, to dine on Christians. To feed, like a cannibal, your ancient grudge.

And while you were out…

And while he was out they fed on him.

Who, as a matter of dramatic interest, hated whom the more?

Not a wafer’s thickness between them—

You called me dog…

I am as like to call thee so again…

But since I am a dog, beware my fangs…

They couldn’t tear themselves apart from each other. A bond of mutual fascination. The magnetic force of indurated revulsion. Money the pretext. This one lent at interest; that one would do no such thing—although I neither lend nor borrow by taking nor by giving of excess, yet on this occasion—for someone else, a person dear to me—I will break my custom. Called having your cake and eating it, Shylock thought, remembering the fathomless impertinence of Antonio’s “yet.” As though he were doing Shylock a favour by asking. O father Abram, what these Christians are!

But if money was the battlefield on which they fought their ancient grudges, it was not the origin of their war.

Who, as a matter of historical interest, hated whom the more? A chicken-and-egg question. Attend that word “ancient.” The villainy each saw in the other—the proud exclusiveness on this side, the proud pretence of loving kindness on that—pre-dated the rise of capitalism and usury. What movement of men and ideas, you might ask, didn’t it pre-date? The divisive words of Paul the Apostle, maybe. Before Paul, peace. But then before Paul there were no Christians for Jews to hate or be hated by.

Well, if villainy was all the Gentiles saw, villainy would be what he’d show them more of.

And they? They would show him villainous mercy, dropping like poison rain, in return.

Does that mean he was ironic-referencing villainy?

And does that mean they were ironic-referencing mercy?

One thing he knew: they hadn’t ironic-referenced stealing his daughter.

“I love Beatrice,” Howsome said, tightening and then loosening his tie. Beneath his collar the green and scarlet dragon writhed.

“She’s sixteen.”

“Like that’s some big deal,” Beatrice said.

Howsome looked from one to the other, wanting to agree with both.

“
Sixteen
!” Strulovitch repeated.

“Play another tune, Daddy,” Beatrice said, “you’ve been harping on about how old I am since I was born.
She’s thirteen. She’s fourteen. She’s fifteen
. You’ll still be saying it when I’m sixty.”

“At sixty you’ll have seen something of the world, and I won’t be here.”

“Me neither,” Howsome said, which Beatrice’s expression told him was ill-advised. You don’t stress age difference when you’re trying to prise a daughter from a parent.

It’s time, Strulovitch thought, I spoke to my daughter’s suitor in the old way—without the daughter present.

“Beatrice, you are making both of us uncomfortable,” he told her. “Why don’t you leave us for a little while. I promise I won’t offer Mr. Howsome money to disappear from the country.”

Which only went to show he’d thought of doing precisely that.

“There is no sum of money that would make me part with Beatrice, sir,” Howsome said.

Beatrice rose and smiled at him. Good boy. Good answer. She could see her father thought so too. “I’ll make tea then,” she said, feeling confident. “And don’t be horrible to him in other ways either, Daddy.”

Such as what? Strulovitch thought.

“I want my daughter,” he said, when Beatrice had left them, “to finish her education.”

What he really meant was I want my daughter to
start
her education, but now was not the time to be discussing the merits of performance art.

“I want the same for her,” Howsome said.

Strulovitch nodded. Good answer again. He could see what his daughter liked in the man. He was compliant. He made good use of the few words he possessed. He had a gentle smile, despite his bulk. And even his bulk—at least as he had disposed it among the soft fabrics of Strulovitch’s sofa—was more protective than aggressive. What else she saw in him—whether or not he was sexually attractive—was a question that exceeded Strulovitch’s fatherly brief. A man should not put his mind to what arouses his daughter, no matter that Strulovitch had put his mind to little else since Beatrice turned whatever age it was when he first knew her to be in danger.

Now sixteen, she was old enough—not legally, no, but in society’s eyes, and certainly in her own—to decide for herself. But he’d got her to this age without serious mishap, hadn’t he? He’d navigated the dangers for her. Maybe she was secretly grateful to him for that. Maybe it wasn’t only to avoid upsetting her poor vegetating mother that she didn’t just up and go. Maybe she loved him too, and wanted his love in return. But since she had stayed, and was suddenly playing at being an old-fashioned daughter, wanting Daddy’s blessing, he would go on playing the old-fashioned father.

“What else do you want for her?” he continued, looking hard into the footballer’s swimming eyes.

Howsome was puzzled, on the lookout for trick questions. Daddy’s devious, Beatrice had warned him. Be careful.

“In what sense?” he asked. “Do you mean like children?”

“Good God, no. Not yet. She’s sixteen for Christ’s sake. But you want her to be happy, I presume.”

“Obviously.”

It was a footballer’s word. “Obviously.” At the end of the day. At the end of the day, obviously, I want your daughter to be happy in the back of the net.

“And you want her to make her parents happy?”

That was less obvious, but Howsome acceded to it anyway. “Obviously,” he said. He even nodded, Strulovitch thought, upstairs in the direction of poor Kay, as though he knew what had befallen her and where she was kept. And therefore as though he knew that this imposed a still greater obligation on him to look after Beatrice.

“You will understand then that the fact you’ve been married several times before doesn’t make us entirely happy. In fact it makes us anxious.”

He was glad Beatrice had left them. Who’s this
us
suddenly, he could imagine her thinking.

“I made some silly errors,” Howsome admitted. “I was young and had more money than sense. I am a different man now. In fact I’m a man now, full stop. I was a boy then.”

Strulovitch nodded, not listening. He was preparing the only question that mattered. “You know, of course,” he said, taking his time, “that ours is a Jewish family.”

“I love Jews,” Howsome said, bringing his body to the edge of the sofa. He loved Jews so much he was prepared to fall at their feet. “In fact…”

He stopped. He was about to say that the proof of his love of Jews was his having already married one, but decided in the nick of time not to. Jews appreciate being liked, but not collected, Beatrice had explained when he’d first tried wooing her with the line that she was not the first Jew he’d loved.

“…in fact,” he went on, “I’ve read many books on the subject.”

Remembering the Nazi salute, Strulovitch tried not to picture the contents of Howsome’s bookshelves.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
?
Der ewige Jude
? Bound copies of the
Guardian
?

“We make interesting reading,” he allowed.

Howsome wanted to go further than that. “The Jews are wonderful people.”

“Some of us,” Strulovitch agreed.

Howsome had the look of one who had said all he had to say, had conclusively proved his suitability, and now awaited the go-ahead to carry Beatrice off to his bed.

But Strulovitch was not quite finished. “Since you know so much about us,” he said, “you will know that we worry when our children fly the coop. I don’t just mean leave home but, you know, leave the…clan.”

A funny word “clan,” but he couldn’t say religion. Religion wasn’t what he meant. It hadn’t been in the name of religion that his father had buried him when he married out. What was it then? Faith? No, not that. And he couldn’t say tribe. He’d heard Shylock fulminating against tribe. Culture? Too secular. If culture was all it was about, why the worry? So he let “clan” hang there, a poor substitute for a word he couldn’t find.

Too late he remembered covenant.

“I so respect that,” Howsome said. “And obviously I wouldn’t expect Beatrice to stop being Jewish.”

“That’s good of you,” Strulovitch said sarcastically. He marvelled at the magnanimity of his prospective son-in-law, a man who was happy to take Jewish women as he found them. “If nothing else, young man,” Strulovitch thought about saying, “it sits smiling to my heart to know that the future of the Jewish people is secure in your benign consideration.” But he held back. Why waste irony? Howsome was doing his best, considering the circles he’d been known to move in.

“If you eventually give your permission she can even keep her name,” Howsome said.

“Beatrice?”

“No, her other name.”

“Again that’s good of you,” Strulovitch said. “I think she’ll be relieved to know that. But this isn’t quite what I’ve been getting at.”

The footballer apologised. “I’m sorry, I thought that was what you wanted to hear.”

“It is. Indeed it is. But when I say I don’t want my daughter to leave, I mean I don’t want her to have a husband who isn’t himself Jewish.”

Howsome looked nonplussed. He opened the palms of his big hands piteously. I am who I am, his gesture said. I cannot be what I am not.

It was then that Strulovitch explained how he could be made what he was not.

D
’Anton decided it was best all round, if he were to have any hope of getting the Solomon Joseph Solomon for his downcast friend, to write formally to the person who had it.

But the moment he took off his jacket, sat at his desk and, with his usual methodicalness, began to move books and papers around, he realised how difficult this task—no, this sacred obligation—was going to be. His stationery drawer refused to open. The ink dried in his pen. In his mind’s eye he saw Strulovitch delightedly refusing his request, perhaps setting the paper it was written on alight, perhaps doing something even worse with it, whereupon his soul withered.

“It isn’t proving as easy as I’d hoped it would,” he said to Barnaby, conscious of a little lie in that he had hardly as yet tried moving mountains.

Barnaby threw him one of the most beseeching looks in his collection. “My heart is set on it, D’Anton,” he said.

Ah, the potency of punctuation. Barnaby knew his friend was powerless to resist him when he finished a sentence
something something something comma, D’Anton.
The full stop taking an eternity to arrive, the name—
D’Anton
—lingering it seemed forever in his mouth.

And D’Anton knew that Barnaby knew it. But that made him no more proof against its influence. “I see that, Barnaby,” he said, lingering over the other’s name himself, “but could we not pay a further visit to the auction house and see what else they have?
Love’s First Lesson
can’t be the only artwork in the world you like.”

“Well there’s still
The Singing Butler,
” Barnaby said pettishly. “And anyway it’s not a matter of what I like, it’s what Plury would like. The naked Venus is
so
her, D’Anton, I swear to you she could have posed for it…
Could
she have posed for it?”

“Only if she’d been born a hundred and fifty years ago.” If Barnaby thought he detected an unaccustomed testiness in his friend he was right. For all the love he bore him—indeed, perhaps, because of it—D’Anton couldn’t but think that Barnaby might have met him halfway on this, agreed to try at least to see if there was another picture that might catch his fancy, or show some sign of understanding the enormity of what he asked, no matter that it was D’Anton who’d originally proposed it. But he would not have dreamed of endeavouring to dissuade him further. His friend had set his heart on
Love’s First Lesson
—again Barnaby repeated that very phrase: “My heart is set on it, D’Anton”—and what was close to Barnaby’s heart was close to D’Anton’s. His purse, his person, his extremest means lay all unlocked to his young friend’s occasions.

So again, after pouring himself a large brandy, he sat down at his desk, extracted from his drawer a sheet of headed writing paper, handmade for him in an alleyway few visitors to Venice ever find, and, in the smallest of hands and with the finest of nibs, wrote:

Dear Simon Strulovitch,

Please grant me a moment of your time. Albeit I am not customarily a favour-seeker, I have a favour to ask of you.

I write to you on behalf of a friend—or rather, I am acting on behalf of a friend in the name of whose disappointment I make this appeal to you. We recently attended, he and I, an art auction in Manchester at which you were astute enough to buy an early study by Solomon J. Solomon for his painting
Love’s First Lesson.
It is an exquisite cartoon, lacking none of the grace of the finished painting. I commend your good fortune and your taste. I also commend your punctuality. We alas, who would have bid against you for the Solomon, were late. Our fault. But here’s the favour I would beg of you. Might you consider parting with it? I make no mention of the price. Add what commission you please.

It is, I repeat, not for me that you would be doing this, but for a young and impressionable friend who has his heart set on giving the painting as a token of his devotion to a woman who, I can assure you, will cherish the work every bit as much as we would wish her to.

When love calls, my dear Strulovitch, can any of us turn a deaf ear?

I await your response with keen anticipation.

Yours very respectfully,

—and signed it with a flourish designed to conceal nothing of the openness of the writer’s own heart.

“So how did that go?” Shylock wondered.

Strulovitch was surprised Shylock had the nerve to ask. “I think we could both have anticipated how it would go.”

“The footballer keeps his foreskin?”

“Correct. And I lose a daughter.”

“You broached the matter in her presence?”

“No. But he was bound to go straight to her and tell her what I’d asked. ‘Obviously,’ he told me, ‘I’ll have to think about this.’ Which meant ‘Obviously, I’ll need to speak to Beatrice,’ who obviously was horrified.”

“She told you so?”

“She didn’t have to.”

“And she’s gone already?”

“Can’t you hear her seething around the house? I’ve been divorced—I know the sound of resolute packing. Not the banging—that means they’re not really going. Throwing stuff around means they’re giving you a chance to stop them. It’s the quiet folding of garments you have to fear. The measure of Beatrice’s rage is that she hasn’t banged a wardrobe door or said a word to me. But I know anyway what that word would have been had she said it.”

“Savage?”

“Since that’s the word that occurs to you, I wonder you didn’t think of it earlier.”

“Or you, since you’re thinking of it now.”

“I’m thinking what Beatrice might be thinking.”

“You’re thinking it because you fear it might be true.”

“And isn’t it?”

“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking it makes so. Our greatest weakness as Jews is forever to be thinking the worst of ourselves. What if we’ve fallen short, what if we are a light unto nobody, what if we’re barbarians at heart. Our eternal refrain: what if we’re not what we claim to be.”

“Why shouldn’t we ask ourselves that? Isn’t periodically wondering if we’re savages what keeps us civilised?”

“That depends on what you mean by periodically. Every five hundred years—fine. Every time a Jew asserts himself or acts in self-defence—that’s something else.”

“It’s the self-defence part that’s controversial.”

“There is nothing controversial about protecting your daughter.”

“I know all this.”

“Then why are you having second thoughts?”

“Because I cannot be said to have protected her if she runs away.”

“Then stop her. Explain your motives.”

“
I behave like a barbarian, Beatrice, because I love you
?”

“You are still seeing with her eyes, when you should have the courage to see with your own. You have seen more of the world than she has. You have more understanding. Have you explained to her just what the rite of circumcision is? What it stands for? What it portends? How it’s the very rejection of barbarism? Why it’s a passage out of savagery into refinement?”

“That takes some explaining to a child.”

“Everything serious takes some explaining to a child. Try sitting her down and reading to her.”

“She doesn’t go a bundle on Maimonides.”

“It doesn’t have to be Maimonides. Do you have any Roth on your shelves?”

“Joseph, Cecil, Henry, Philip? I have walls of Roth.”

“Philip will do. Do you have the one where everyone is leading someone else’s life?”

“That’s all of them.”

“A shame Leah isn’t here. She’d know which I’m thinking of. It’s the one where Roth lets the anti-circumcisionists have it with both barrels. Circumcision, he or someone like him argues, was conceived to refute the pastoral.”

“Christ! And you think that would make it all right with my daughter? What in God’s name does refuting the pastoral mean?”

“You ask me that! You who venture into your own garden as though it’s snake-infested. Do you even own wellingtons? My friend, you are a walking refutation of the pastoral.”

“And that’s because I’m circumcised?”

“You were circumcised in order that you shouldn’t, in the first days of your life, when you were still in a womb-swoon, mistake life for an idyll.”

“Then it’s worked. In fact I’d say it’s worked too well.”

“You’re bound to think that. It’s what you were circumcised to think. The heavy hand of human values, in our friend Roth’s words, descended on you early. As it should.”

“That’s not going to convince anyone who sees precisely those values as inhuman.”

“Those who are sentimental about being human will never be convinced.”

“Worse and worse, Shylock.”

“Look. The mohel’s knife acts mercifully, to save the boy from the vagaries of nature. I don’t just mean the monkeys. I mean ignorance, the absence of God, the refusal of allegiance to a people or an idea—especially the idea that life is an obligation as well as a gift. We are not born free of loyalties and oaths. The mohel’s knife symbolises what we owe.”

“Subdues us, in other words.”

“Is that so terrible if the alternative is running lawless in the wilderness?”

Strulovitch was the wrong one to ask. What struck him as terrible one day, didn’t strike him as all
that
terrible the next.

“We can’t be saved from nature a little bit,” Shylock went on. “It’s all or nothing, it’s human values or the monkeys.”

Strulovitch’s mind turned from abstractions of duty to the living daughter in whom, at the hour of her birth, he’d glimpsed the meaning of covenant. “Well that might fix it for the boys,” he said, as though Shylock had both won and lost the argument, “but what help is there for the girls? There’s no mohel’s knife to subdue a daughter. Not in the civilised world, there isn’t. In the civilised world, men who talk of subduing daughters are stoned to death.”

“And that,” said Shylock, in a tone of steely quiet, “is why daughters are a byword for disloyalty.”

Were
they a byword for disloyalty? I used to think
I
was an extremist, Strulovitch thought.

Shylock read his reservations. “You wouldn’t anyway dispute,” he said, much calmer now, “that it’s because her footballer is a ‘natural’ man that Beatrice loves him. At least if you have described him to me correctly.”

“He is not the question.
She
is. Does she love him? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure she’ll give it a good try now. And my telling her that life isn’t meant to be a womb-swoon won’t deter her.”

“She’s a bright young woman.”

“She’s sixteen! That’s too young to be giving up on life as an idyll.”

“Then it’s too young to be Jewish.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you gleefully proposed this course of action.”

“Did I propose a course of action?”

“In a dumbshow, yes.”

“I mustn’t have realised you were so impressionable.”

“As to take you at your word?”

“I uttered no word.”

“Call it what you will. But I must ask you what you meant by it.”

“Mischief.”

“Is that what you’re here to cause me?”

“Cause you? No. The very opposite. But all isn’t yet lost. By your own account, if you can hear her silence, she hasn’t gone.”

“And what do you propose I do to keep her?” He chanced a long look into Shylock’s covert eyes. “Bar the doors?”

He let his words hang in the air, let the shutters to Shylock’s windows swing open, let the sweet disgusting smell of goats and monkeys enter.

Two could play at mischief.

But he didn’t bar his own door.