Operation Shylock: A Confession (47 page)

“You’re telling me that he’s nothing but a crackpot con man.”

“To you there must be more, to you this must be a singular occurrence rich with paranoidal meaning. But charlatans like him? The airlines offer them special rates. They spend their lives crisscrossing the globe. Yours took the morning flight to New York. He is back in America.”

“You made no effort to stop him.”

“To the contrary. Every effort was made to help him on his way.”

“And the woman?”

“I know nothing about the woman. After last night, I would think that you know more than anyone does. The woman, I suppose, is one of those women for whom adventure with a crook is irresistible. Phallika, the Goddess of Male Desire. Am I mistaken?”

“They are both gone.”

“Yes. We are down to just one of you, the one not a crackpot, not a charlatan, not a fool or a weakling either, the one who knows how to be silent, to be patient, to be cautious, how to remain unprovoked in the most unsettling circumstances. You have received high grades. All instincts excellent. Never mind how you quaked inside or even that you vomited—you did not shit yourself or take a wrong step. The God of Chance could not have presented a better Jew for the job.”

But I was not taking the job. I had not been extricated from one implausible plot of someone else’s devising to be intimidated into being an actor in yet another. The more Smilesburger explained about the intelligence operation for which he bore the code name “Smilesburger” and for which he proposed I volunteer, the more infuriated I became, not merely because his overbearing playfulness was no longer a bewildering puzzle that kept me stunned and on my guard, but because, once I had finally eaten something and begun to calm down, it registered on me just how cruelly misused I had been by these phenomenally high-handed Israelis playing an espionage game that seemed to me to have at the heart of it a fantasy forged in the misguided brain of no less a talent than Oliver North. My initial gratitude toward the putative captors who had been kind enough to feed me a piece of cold chicken after having forcibly abducted me and then held me prisoner here against my will so as to see how well I might hold up on a mission for
them
—the gratitude gave way, now that I felt liberated, to outrage. The magnitude of my indignation alarmed even me, yet I could do nothing to control the eruption once it had begun. And Uri’s brutish, contemptuous stare—he’d returned with a Silex to pour me a fresh cup of coffee—enraged me still more, especially after Smilesburger told me that this subordinate of his who’d fetched my lunch had been following me everywhere. “The ambush out on the Ramallah road?” Uri, I learned, had been there for that, too. They had been running me like a rat through a maze without my knowledge or consent and, from everything I could gather, with no precise idea of what, if any, the payoff for them might be. Smilesburger had been operating on no more than a hunch, inspired
by the presence in Jerusalem of Pipik—whom an informant had identified as an impostor only hours after he’d been ushered through immigration with the phony passport identifying him as me—and then by my arrival a week later. How could Smilesburger call himself professional if a coincidence so fraught with the potential for creative subterfuge had failed to ignite his curiosity? Surely a novelist could understand what it meant to be confronted with a situation so evocative. Yes, he was like a writer, a very lucky writer, he explained, warming sardonically to the comparison, who had fallen upon his own true subject in all its complex purity. That his art was aesthetically impure, a decidedly lesser form of contrivance owing to its gross utilitarian function, Smilesburger was willing to grant—but still the puzzle presented to him was exactly the writer’s: there is the dense kernel, the compacted core, and how to set loose the chain reaction is the question that tantalizes, how to produce the illuminating explosion without, in the process, mutilating oneself. You do as the writer does, Smilesburger told me: you begin to speculate, and to speculate with any scope requires a principled disregard for the confining conventions, a gambler’s taste for running a risk, a daring to tamper with the taboo, which, he added flatteringly, had always marked my own best work. His work too was guesswork, morally speaking. You try your luck, he told me. You make mistakes. You overdo and underdo and doggedly follow an imaginative line that yields nothing. Then something creeps in, an arguably stupid detail, a ridiculous gag, an embarrassingly bald ploy, and this opens out into the significant action that makes the mess an
operation
, rounded, pointed, structured, yet projecting the illusion of having been as spontaneously generated, as coincidental, untidy, and improbably probable, as life. “Who knows where Athens might lead? Go, for George Ziad, to Athens, and if you convincingly play your role there, then this meeting he dangled before you, the introduction, in Tunis, to Arafat, could well come to pass. Such things do happen. For you this would be a great adventure, and for us, of course, having you in Tunis would be no small achievement. I myself once spent a week with Arafat. Yasir is good for a laugh. He has a wonderful twinkle. He’s a showman. Very, very demonstrative.
In his outward behavior, he’s a terrific charmer. You’d enjoy him.”

In response I shook in his face the embarrassingly bald ploy itself, the ridiculous gag, the stupid detail that was his million-dollar check. “I am an American citizen,” I said. “I am here on a journalistic assignment for an American newspaper. I am not a Jewish soldier of fortune. I am not a Jewish undercover agent. I am not a Jonathan Pollard, nor do I wish to assassinate Yasir Arafat. I am here to interview another writer. I am here to talk to him about his books. You have followed me and bugged me and baited me, you have physically manhandled me, psychologically abused me, maneuvered me about like your toy for whatever reason suited you, and now you have the audacity—”

Uri had taken a seat on the windowsill and was grinning at me while I unleashed all my contempt for these unforgivable excesses and the wanton indecency with which I had been so misused.

“You are free to leave,” said Smilesburger.

“I am also free to bring an action. This is actionable,” I told him, remembering all the good it had done me to make the same claim to Pipik at our first face-to-face encounter. ‘You have held me here for hours on end without giving me any idea of where I was or who you were or what might be going to happen to me. And all in behalf of some trivial scheme so ridiculous that I can hardly believe my ears when you associate it with the word ‘intelligence.’ These absurdities you concoct without the slightest regard for my rights or my privacy or my safety—this is intelligence?”

“Perhaps we were also protecting you.”

“Who asked you to? On the Ramallah road you were protecting me? I could have been beaten to death out there. I could have been shot.”

“Yet you were not even bruised.”

“The experience was nonetheless most unpleasant.”

“Uri will chauffeur you to the American Embassy, where you can lodge a complaint with your ambassador.”

“Just call a taxi. I’ve had enough Uri.”

“Do as he says,” Smilesburger told Uri.

“And where am I? Where exactly?” I asked, after Uri had left the room. “What is this place?”

“It’s not a prison, clearly. You haven’t been chained to a pipe in a windowless room with a blindfold around your eyes and a gag in your mouth.”

“Don’t tell me how lucky I am that this isn’t Beirut. Tell me something useful—tell me who this impostor is.”

“You might do better to ask George Ziad. Perhaps you have been even more misused by your Palestinian friends than by me.”

“Is this so? This is something you
know?”

“Would you believe me if I said yes? I think you will have to gather your information from someone more trustworthy as I will have to gather mine with the assistance of someone a little less easily affronted. Ambassador Pickering will contact whom he sees fit to about my conduct, and, whatever the consequences, I will live with them as best I can. I cannot believe, however, that this has been an ordeal that will scar you forever. You may even be grateful someday for whatever my contribution may have been to the book that emerges. It may not be all that such a book might be if you chose to proceed a bit further with us, but then you know just how little adventure a talent like yours requires. And in the end no intelligence agency, however reckless, can rival a novelist’s fantastical creations. You can get on now, without interference from all this crude reality, creating for yourself characters more meaningful than a simple thug like Uri or a tryingly facetious thug like me. Who is the impostor? Your novelist’s imagination will come up with something far more seductive than whatever may be the ridiculous and trivial truth. Who is George Ziad, what is
his
game? He too will become a problem more complexly resonant than whatever the puerile truth may be. Reality. So banal, so foolish, so
incoherent
—such a baffling and disappointing nuisance. Not like being in that study in Connecticut, where the only thing that’s real is you.”

Uri poked his head into the room. “Taxi!”

“Good,” said Smilesburger, flipping off the TV set. “Here begins your journey back to everything that is self-willed.”

But could I be sure this taxi was going to turn out to be a taxi, when I was increasingly uncertain that these people had any affiliation whatsoever with Israeli intelligence? What proof
was
there? The profound illogic of it all—was
that
the proof? At the thought of that “taxi,” I suddenly felt endangered more by leaving than by staying and listening for as long as it took to figure out the safest possible means of extricating myself.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Who assigned you to me?”

“Don’t worry about that. Represent me in your book however you like. Do you prefer to romanticize me or to demonize me? Do you wish to heroize me or do you want instead to make jokes? Suit yourself.”

“Suppose there
are
ten rich Jews who give their money to the Palestinians. Tell me why that is your business.”

“Do you want to take the taxi to the American Embassy to lodge your complaint or do you want to continue to listen to someone you cannot believe? The taxi will not wait. For waiting you need a limousine.”

“A limousine then.”

“Do as he says,” Smilesburger said to Uri.

“Cash or credit card?” Uri replied in perfect English, laughing loudly as he went off.

“Why does he stupidly laugh all the time?”

“This is how he pretends not to have a sense of humor. It’s meant to frighten you. But you have held up admirably. You are doing wonderfully. Continue.”

“These Jews who may or may not be contributing money to the PLO, why haven’t they a perfect right to do with their money whatever they wish without interference from the likes of you?”

“Not only do they have a right as Jews, they have an inescapable moral duty as Jews, to make reparations to the Palestinians in whatever form they choose. What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have displaced them and we have oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated
to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history—we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of their human status. Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty. To me the horror is not that a handful of rich Jews make large financial contributions to the PLO but that every last Jew in the world does not have it in his heart to contribute as well.”

“The line two minutes ago was somewhat at variance with this one.”

“You think I say these things cynically.”

“You say everything cynically.”

“I speak sincerely. They are innocent, we are guilty; they are right, we are wrong; they are the violated, we the violators. I am a ruthless man working in a ruthless job for a ruthless country and I am ruthless knowingly and voluntarily. If someday there is a Palestinian victory and if there is then a war-crimes trial here in Jerusalem, held, say, in the very hall where they now try Mr. Demjanjuk, and if at this trial there are not just big shots in the dock but minor functionaries like me as well, I will have no defense to make for myself in the face of the Palestinian accusation. Indeed, those Jews who contributed freely to the PLO will be held up to me as people of conscience, as people of
Jewish
conscience, who, despite every Jewish pressure to collaborate in the oppression of the Palestinians, chose instead to remain at one with the spiritual and moral heritage of their own long-suffering people. My brutality will be measured against their righteousness and I shall hang by my neck until I am dead. And what will I say to the court, after I have been judged and found guilty by my enemy? Will I invoke as my justification the millennial history of degrading, humiliating, terrifying, savage, murderous anti-Semitism? Will I repeat the story of our claim on this land, the millennial history of Jewish settlement
here? Will I invoke the horrors of the Holocaust? Absolutely not. I don’t justify myself in this way now and I will not stoop to doing it then. I will not plead the simple truth: ‘I am tribesman who stood with his tribe,’ nor will I plead the complex truth: ‘Born as a Jew where and when I was, I am, I always have been, whichever way I turn, condemned.’ I will offer no stirring rhetoric when I am asked by the court to speak my last words but will tell my judges only this: ‘I did what I did to you because I did what I did to you.’ And if that is not the truth, it’s as close as I know how to come to it. ‘I do what I do because I do what I do.’ And your last words to the judges? You will hide behind Aharon Appelfeld. You do it now and you will do it then. You will say, ‘I did not approve of Sharon, I did not approve of Shamir, and my conscience was confused and troubled when I saw the suffering of my friend George Ziad and how this injustice had made him crazy with hatred.’ You will say, ‘I did not approve of Gush Emunim and I did not approve of the West Bank settlements, and the bombing of Beirut filled me with horror.’ You will demonstrate in a thousand ways what a humane, compassionate fellow you are, and then they will ask you, ‘But did you approve of Israel and the existence of Israel, did you approve of the imperialist, colonialist theft that
was
the state of Israel?’ And that’s when you will hide behind Appelfeld. And the Palestinians will hang you, too, as indeed they should. For what justification is Mr. Appelfeld from Csernowitz, Bukovina, for the theft from them of Haifa and Jaffa? They will hang you right alongside me, unless, of course, they mistake you for the other Philip Roth. If they take you for him, you will at least have a chance. For that Philip Roth, who campaigned for Europe’s Jews to vacate the property they had stolen, to return to Europe and to the European Diaspora where they belonged,
that
Philip Roth was their friend, their ally, their Jewish hero. And that Philip Roth is your only hope. This man, your monster, is, in fact, your salvation—
the impostor is your innocence
. Pretend at your trial to be him and not yourself, trick them with all your wiles into believing you two are one and the same. Otherwise you will be judged a Jew just as hateful as Smilesburger.
More
hateful, for hiding from the truth the way you do.”