Shylock Is My Name (8 page)

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. G
rr
eenberg being unvell, I take it?”

“No, nothing to do vid G
rr
eenberg. 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
dis
liked 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?”

A
mong D’Anton’s more lovable qualities, in Plurabelle’s view—and he was a man made of lovable qualities—was his capacity to listen. Especially to listen to her. She had only to say she wanted a thing—for herself or for a friend—for D’Anton to seek ways to get it.

And so it was with a Jewess for the footballer Gratan Howsome. The minute she learned he had a thing for Jewish women, Plurabelle decreed that they should find him one. And Plurabelle had only to decree—especially in a matter that bore on Gratan’s felicity—for D’Anton to act.

Even as they were speaking he remembered being struck by the appearance of a student he had encountered at the Golden Triangle Academy, an institution on which, in his most princely manner, he bestowed time, delivering occasional public musings on beauty and renunciation. Her looks weren’t pleasing to him personally but, with his gift for altruistically entering into a foreign aesthetic, even a limited foreign aesthetic, he was able see how they could be pleasing to someone else—like Thai scorpion soaked in whisky or black bed linen. Something about her, perhaps even something about her family name, to which he wouldn’t have paid much attention, lodged in his memory. He smiled at Plurabelle’s good-hearted suggestion and tapped his nose. “Leave it with me,” he said, more spiritedly than Plurabelle could remember him having said anything.

Plurabelle liked her from the beginning, immediately forgetting she’d been procured for the footballer. “You remind me of me when I was your age,” she told the girl, in all likelihood remembering the time before she’d had work done on her face.

She loved the idea that the girl was studying with a view eventually to being a performance artist and expressed the hope that she would one day perform at one of her weekends. “We could put a stage up for you,” she said.

Modestly, the girl explained that a performance artist didn’t employ a stage. Hers was, or would be, a different sort of performance, subverting expectations of what performance space was, even violating what people normally thought of as their space. Art should go where it was not normally welcomed, she said.

Plurabelle listened to her in wonderment. So precocious. So lustrous and bejewelled, though the bejewelled part was an effect of her natural beauty only. “Well your art will always be welcome here,” she said. “My house is yours, violate it as much as you like. I will invite some important people to be violated by you.”

“I’m a long way from being ready for that, Plurabelle,” the girl had replied with a becoming blush.

“Call me Plury,” Plury said.

The girl thought the sky above her head would burst, it had so many stars in it.

It was Plurabelle’s suggestion, one evening, that they dress for dinner as boys. The girl was uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure how she’d look. But she went along with it. Plurabelle had wardrobes of dressing-up clothes.

“Suits you,” Plurabelle said scandalously, knotting a scarf around her neck and putting a cap on her head. “I feel we’re brothers.”

Gratan Howsome, who of course was at the table, was smitten at once.

Thereafter, they did this often. It always ended the same way, with Plurabelle smothering the beautiful girl with Levantine lips in rapturous kisses, laughing wildly, and calling her “My little Jewboy.”

And with Gratan burning into her with his eyes.

This was how, unknown to Simon Strulovitch, his daughter Beatrice became an intimate of Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine.