Shylock Is My Name (12 page)

W
hen Strulovitch has things to consider he considers them, if he can, in the presence of Kay.

If he could pretend they were still able to discuss what mattered to them, one of the things he would not have to consider was his part in her disintegration. Never mind that a doctor had told him he was not the cause, he knew he had made life intolerable to her, not just on account of Beatrice, but on account, quite simply of him—who he was, what he was like, what he believed one minute and then disbelieved the next, his inflamed Jewishness that blew hot and cold but was always in the way, like a deranged and disreputable lodger, disturbing their domestic quiet.

Yes, his father had welcomed him back into the fold when he married Kay, but she wasn’t Jewish beneath her fingernails as he was even when he thought he wasn’t being Jewish at all. She taught religious studies in a non-denominational school—respect for other people’s beliefs, respect for yourself, respect for your body, respect for the environment. She happened to be what she was, others happened to be something else. End of story. She didn’t start when she saw an Arab in the street. She didn’t start when she saw a Hassid in the street either. She wasn’t beset by enemies outside the faith or fanatics within it. Strictly speaking she had no faith. Strulovitch—or Strulo as she called him—insisted that he too had no faith. And maybe he was telling the truth. What he had was stronger than any faith she had encountered. He had a madness, a frenzy. Had she been forced to teach what he had she’d have called it Judaeolunacy.

Judaeolunacy for A2 Year students.

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he told her. “I’m indifferent.”

But even his indifference, Kay thought, was a sort of delirium. He didn’t go to synagogue because going to synagogue irked him, but not to go irked him just as much. “Look at them,” he’d say if they happened to be driving past a synagogue on a Saturday morning. “Look at them in their fucking yarmulkes! What are they doing remembering to go every fucking week? Don’t they ever just forget? Don’t they have anything else to think about?”

“Leave them alone,” Kay would tell him. “You don’t want to go to shul, they do. It’s not your business. What do you care?”

“I don’t care.”

“Then why are you swearing?”

“Because they’re praying.”

“So?”

“Being Jewish isn’t just about praying.”

“For you no. For me no. For them yes.”

“It’s not Jewish,” he’d shout, “saying
for me no, for them yes
. That’s Christian talk. We are a people who value x above y because x is true and y isn’t. This is called ethics, Kay. It’s what we’re famed for.
For me no, so for them no!
”

“Strulo, why does it matter to you so much what’s Jewish and what isn’t?”

“It doesn’t. I don’t give a shit about Jews.”

The next day he’d be throwing the
Guardian
in the bin, saying that Jews were on the brink of extermination and it was the
Guardian
’s fault.

Kay wondered why he had never gone to Israel and enlisted with the IDF.

“Israel? What’s Israel got to do with anything?”

“I thought you were a Zionist.”

“A Zionist, me! Are you mad?”

“So why are you burning the
Guardian
?”

“I’m not burning it, I’m binning it. Interesting, though, that you said ‘burning.’ I’d call that a Freudian slip. You’re remembering the ovens. That’s what reading the
Guardian
does to you.”

“Why would reading the
Guardian
make me think of ovens?”

“Because the
Guardian
hates Israel and Israel is the only place that will save us when they start the ovens up again.”

“So you are a Zionist!”

“Only when I read the
Guardian
.”

And then Beatrice came along, Beatrice the child of their early middle age, their belated gift, in Strulovitch’s words, from God. Like Isaac, miraculously born to a laughing, unbelieving Sarah. Isaac—laughter. Beatrice—joy.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Strulo,” Kay said. “It’s not as though we’re both a hundred. Can’t we leave God out of this.”

But she agreed to the child being called Beatrice.

It had been a precarious pregnancy and a difficult birth. Strulovitch saw that it took strength from his wife which she never fully regained. It fell to him, he thought, to keep Beatrice on the straight and narrow, to ensure that the high purpose he discerned in her delivery would be honoured.

Not a Jewish education—heaven forfend!—just a Jewish consciousness, or at least a Jewish consciousness sufficient to a Jewish wedding. And not so much a Jewish wedding as a Jewish lineage. And even that was overstating it. Not a
not
Jewish lineage—that was closer to what Strulovitch meant.

“I agree with you it would be nice if she found a boy we could all approve of,” Kay said. “But beyond that—”

“Beyond that! Beyond that, Kay, is everything that makes us serious.”

“You’re a Judaeolunatic,” she reminded him.

Beatrice, when she was old enough, cheered her mother on. “Tell him, Mummy. The man’s off his rocker.”

“Don’t call him ‘the man,’ darling, he’s your father.”

“Is he? Do you know what he said to me last night? He said I was letting Hitler win.”

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing. Snogging—not even that. Just pecking someone goodnight.”

“Where?”

“Outside our front door.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know his name. Feng, I think. A Chinese boy.”

Aha, Kay thought. Feng not Fishel. She wanted to know if her husband really was telling their daughter that by going out with a Chinese boy she was letting Hitler win. She would divorce him if that were true.

Strulovitch knew to back off. “You should have seen what she was doing…”

“I don’t care what she was doing. Did you say she was letting Hitler win?”

Strulovitch knew to back off even further. “Not exactly
win
. More…”

“More what?”

“Kay, it was in the heat of the moment. You don’t know what it’s like out there. You don’t know who she’s mixing with.”

“I’m prepared to bet Feng isn’t a Nazi stormtrooper.”

“Feng!” Strulovitch wasn’t so sure. He had seen
Bridge on the River Kwai
. But he kept his counsel. Feng was better than Fritz.

Shortly afterwards he dragged Beatrice home by her hair. Shortly after that Kay was felled.

Strulovitch wondered if he should mourn her as one mourns the dead, but knew he had to go on loving her as one loves the living. The trouble was, he couldn’t. Open the heart and it would break. But the forms of a domestic life—the greetings, the expressions of tenderness and concern, the passing on of news—those he thought he could manage. He fell into the habit of talking to her about what bothered him, quietly, without any excitement, much as Shylock talked to Leah, keeping all hint of Judaeolunacy out of his voice, censoring the news. When her face found repose she was still pretty, still recognisably the woman he had loved, the wife who called him Strulo, but ravaged by whatever had struck her down: disruption of the blood supply to her brain, a terrible tiredness, and him.

On this occasion, though, all that bothered him was bound to be disruptive of calm. He had a number of matters to consider but there wasn’t one of them he dared disclose to her, for fear—just in case: for who knew?—she understood. So he sat with her for an hour, holding her hand, wiping her mouth, kissing her cheek, feeling very lonely but trying to imagine how much more lonely she must have been, locked inside wherever it was to which he and fate together had consigned her.

Which left him with a number of matters still to consider, and these he considered in his office, taking time off, occasionally, to look at Solomon Joseph Solomon’s lovely study for
Love’s First Lesson
.

The first and most pressing: whether to let Beatrice go unhindered for the time being, allow her her moment of outrage and then follow her—but follow her where?

The second: whether there was any compromise possible in the matter of circumcision; whether there was such a thing as demi-circumcision, a halfway house acceptable to Jew and Gentile alike.

The third: how brutish was circumcision—no half measures but the whole shebang—anyway? Were Roth and Shylock and the other Jewish sages right, was circumcision an act of the highest human responsibility, a badge not of backwardness but enlightenment?

The fourth: if Shylock was not here to cause him mischief—but had caused it all the same—why was he here?

Unable to decide what to do about Beatrice, since anything further from him would only make things worse, and wanting to clear his head of Shylock, he decided to start with circumcision. Shylock had said it all started with circumcision—“it” being the ancient grudge Jew and Gentile bore each other—but would it all
finish
with circumcision?

“I can’t promise you,” Strulovitch’s first wife, Ophelia-Jane, had told him early in their courtship, “that if we marry and have a son I will be able to consent to your mutilating him.”

It wasn’t so early in their courtship that Strulovitch couldn’t ask her, in return, “Would you call me mutilated?”

“In appearance, do you mean?”

“I mean however you mean. ‘Mutilated’ is your word. But what other yardstick for mutilation is there?”

“There is the yardstick of psychology.”

“You think I might be psychologically mutilated?”

“Well, scarred at least. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.”

“I have a few things to say to that. The first is that ‘scarred’ is not the same as ‘mutilated.’ Do I take it, therefore, that you withdraw the mutilation charge? The second is that ‘how could it be otherwise’ is not an argument in proof of what you say, it’s just another way of saying it. You think I must be scarred because you abominate the ritual. Could it simply be that because you abominate the ritual you
wish
me to be scarred?”

She put both hands to her head and pushed her hair back, as though she needed more brain space to deal with his logic chopping.

“Let’s leave it for now,” she said.

But it was always present between them, like the fear of illness or an unresolved infidelity, and a week before they married she brought it up again.

“I really don’t think I can go along with it,” she said.

“The wedding?”

“The mutilation.”

“Then let’s agree to bring forth girl children only.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We can’t. But we can agree to bring forth neither.”

“Is what I’m asking so much?”

Was it? Wasn’t it? Strulovitch wasn’t sure. Had he known how the birth of a child would affect him—how powerfully he would be struck by the concept of covenant, and even then in relation to a girl, where there was no question of ratifying it with circumcision—he might have decided that what Ophelia-Jane was asking was indeed too much. But he was young and ignorant of the sensations that can assail a father. He didn’t fully know his own mind and suspected that if need be he would always be able to change hers. Besides which, his own father had talked of burying him, which made him not well disposed to the faith his father had talked of burying him in. To hell with the whole business. So no, she wasn’t asking too much.

As it turned out, the god of both their non-faiths smiled on them and engineered their separation before they had time to have a child to mutilate.

But even in the absence of an actual boy child the penis, as a site of ritual disfigurement, had come between them.

“That psychological scarring we once discussed,” she began.

“Whose?”

“Yours.”

“What about it?”

“It’s there every time you make one of your footling, thing-centred jokes.”

“How could the trauma of mutilation turn me into a footler? If I’m the trivial man you accuse me of being it must mean I wasn’t mutilated enough.”

“That’s a naive understanding of cause and effect. You footle to disguise the pain. You cannot bear to accept that was what done to you was bestial in the extreme and so you try to joke it away—the proof of that being that your joking is always phallocentric.”

He felt suddenly very weary. Compound words ending in “centric” had that effect on him. “You’re right,” he said. He couldn’t tell her one more time that joking wasn’t in his nature. Nor could he tell her he neither looked nor felt mutilated. That would sound like empty denial or brute insentience, and both only went to show just how badly mutilated he was.

A question, then, for Shylock:

How merry was your bond? When you set the forfeit at an equal pound of Antonio’s fair flesh, to be cut off and taken from whatever part of his body it pleased you, what intended you by it? What intended you by it in the spirit of jest—that’s to say how far in earnest were you, and how far playing the devil they expected you to be? And what intended you in the matter of anatomy? Did you mean salaciously, flirtatiously even, to designate Antonio’s penis as the part it pleased you to take? Was
that
the pound of his fair flesh—weighing hyperbolically—you originally had your sights set on, before all jests went out of the window with your daughter?

They were sitting in Treviso, one of the Golden Triangle’s best restaurants. Two Michelin stars. Italian regional—to make Shylock feel at home—with the longest wine list in the north of England. “I’m half hoping,” Strulovitch had said when they first sat down, pausing only to ask the sommelier for her bloodiest Nebbiolo, “that Beatrice will walk in on her footballer’s arm. Foolish I know. But you will appreciate my folly.”

“So you haven’t gone after her?”

“I don’t want her to feel she’s on the run. If I let her go quietly there is a good chance she will not go far. I’m told he has a house close by. The natural thing is for her to go there, though I imagine it to be full of memorabilia of previous wives, maybe even full of previous wives themselves, and knowing Beatrice, she won’t fancy that. She was disgusted to discover I still possessed photographs of my first wife. Not just disgusted with me but with her mother for allowing me to keep them. So I guess he’s taken her to a hotel, and that it will be somewhere near. I’ve checked the fixture list and I see he has to turn up to play for Stockport County at the weekend, so he won’t be going far. And as for Beatrice, she won’t want to put too great a distance between her and her mother, no matter that she might not care how many miles she puts between her and me. Fast bind, fast find, didn’t work for you. I will let my maxim be, long rope gives hope.”