Shylock Is My Name (22 page)

“I have chanced my child to the world,” Strulovitch said, “and the world has undone her. I have struck a bargain which won’t bring her back, but a bargain is a bargain. This gentleman is by repute—certainly by his own repute—a man of honour. By that honour he owes me the little I have left to ask.”

“It is not a little to him,” Plurabelle said.

Strulovitch coughed, looking to Shylock for corroboration of the infelicity, before remembering that Shylock wasn’t a corroborating man. Without his hat he looked a more genial figure. Unamused but lenitive. The headmaster of a progressive, but not too progressive, secondary school.

“This is an operation,” Plurabelle continued, “that can go terribly wrong. You mean it as a humiliation, and a humiliation it most certainly is. Do you also mean it as a fatal injury? You think I exaggerate but I have details here”—she brought from her pocket a computer printout bearing, Strulovitch noticed, the Wikipedia logo—“of accidents and, yes, fatalities that must surely make you think again. I am your daughter’s friend. I believed myself to be her protector. As such I plead with you, by your own faith and hers, to spare a man who would not intentionally have hurt a hair on her head.”

She seemed to be speaking by rote, not even looking into the eyes of the person she was trying to persuade.

“It’s too late for any of this,” Strulovitch said. “We have struck our deal. Let’s get it over with. So that we can be done with one another for all time. The car, I believe, is waiting.”

He made a courtly motion with his hand to D’Anton. After you.

The men made to go but were again halted.

“Tarry a moment. A word before you leave.”

Strulovitch turned in surprise. The speaker this time was Shylock who, until that moment, had been holding himself theatrically aloof, a man worthy of notice for his lack of interest in the day’s events or any of the parties to them. Shylock bored. Shylock somewhere else. But that was then. Now, as though snapped into action by some external agency, he was another man. Shylock urgent. Shylock here. Conciliatory in tone, gently spoken, hatless, avuncular, but insistent on being heard.

“What’s this?” Strulovitch said.

“A moment of your time,” Shylock said. “No more.”

“It’s all been said.”

“Not all.”

“Have I forgotten something?” Strulovitch asked. “Or have you?”

“Forgotten something? I, no.” Shylock paused as though the matter of their being different men with different memories merited careful thought. “But you, yes, you have forgotten something.”

The banal sky felt thundery all of a sudden. Shylock could do that; he could affect the atmospheric pressure, perturb the weather with whatever was perturbing him. Strulovitch looked up, saw the future and the past. The weariness of the prophets descended on him.

“I have no time for this triteness,” he said. “I am not in need of a lesson. The matter is agreed.” Here he inclined his head to D’Anton who was resigned to his fate, whatever the meaning of Shylock’s intervention.

But Shylock hadn’t finished yet. “You accept the terms?” he asked, looking into D’Anton’s face for the first time.

D’Anton’s eyelids dropped like heavy curtains. “Fully,” he said.

“You allow them to be just?”

“Just? Does justice enter into this?”

“If you think it does not, then you cannot accept the terms.”

“I accept the terms because I have to.”

“By what reasoning?”

“I have no option.”

“You could refuse.”

“If I refuse, those I love will suffer consequences.”

“And you? Will you suffer consequences?”

“I don’t count what happens to myself.”

“You are a willing sacrifice?”

“I am.”

“Therefore by this action both sides will achieve the thing they seek. I call that just.”

D’Anton nodded his head.

“So I ask again: You allow these terms to be just?”

“Cruel, but just.”

“But just?” It is like extracting teeth, Shylock thought.

“Yes,” D’Anton conceded. “Just.” He smiled faintly at his own joke. “Just just.”

Shylock, unamused, nodded and turned his face back to Strulovitch’s. “Then,” he said, “must the Jew be merciful…”

Strulovitch knew exactly what he had to say in return. You don’t always have a choice.

“On what compulsion must I?” he asked.

Whereupon Shylock said what he too had to say. “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…”

Strulovitch owned an etching by an unknown nineteenth-century artist that showed Ulysses lashed to the mast of his ship to protect him from the treacherous mellifluence of the sirens. The sirens themselves were a touch too Rubensesque for Strulovitch’s taste but he liked the way their songs were drawn as musical notations that flew towards Ulysses like birds, assailing all his senses. Struggling against his bonds, his eyes popping out of his head, Ulysses clearly regretted his decision to be restrained. But what about the sailors whose ears were stopped with wax? Did a single flying melody get through to them as they laboured at their oars? Or was there just a wall of yammering and the mermaids miming?

Having no wax to din out Shylock, Strulovitch deafened himself, instead, by act of will, stringing a procession of black thoughts, like funeral bunting if such a thing existed, from ear to ear. Everything he could recall that had ever made him angry, every slight, every exclusion, every bad thing done to him and every bad thing he had done. It was more than a match, in its malignancy, for Shylock’s honeyed peroration.

This, had he listened—but had he listened he would only have heard what he knew he was going to hear—was what Shylock said:

“The quality of mercy is not strained…You ask on what compulsion you should be merciful, you who have received no mercy yourself from him I ask you to show mercy to—you ask why you should requite what you have not received—and I say to you: Be an exemplary of mercy; give not in expectation of receiving mercy back—for mercy is not a transaction—but give it for what it constitutes in itself. Show pity for pity’s sake and not the profit of your soul. Eyes without pity will become blind, but it is not only in order that you may see that you should practise it. Pity is not compromised by profit or deserts, it does not minister to self-love, it is not a substitute for forgiveness, but builds its modest house wherever there is need of it. And what need is there of it here, you ask, where justice alone cries out for what is owing to it. The need is this: God asks it. What pertains to him, must pertain to you, otherwise you cannot claim that you are acting justly in His name. And will God love the sinner more than the sinned against? No, he will love you equally. No man can love as God loves, and it is profane of any man to try. But you can act in the spirit of God’s love, show charity, give though it is gall and wormwood to you to give, spare the undeserving, love those that do not love you—for where is the virtue merely in returning love?—give to those who would take from you and, where they have taken, do not recompense them in kind, for the greater the offence the greater the merit in refusing to be offended. Who shows
rachmones
does not diminish justice. Who shows
rachmones
acknowledges the just but exacting law under which we were created. And so worships God.”

Though he wouldn’t attend, Strulovitch waited. Manners too are a species of that compassion Jews call
rachmones
.

“You are finished?” he asked at last.

Shylock signalled to those who had applauded him that such an ovation was unnecessary. “Yes I am finished,” he said.

“Then I and my co-signatory will proceed to the clinic as agreed,” Strulovitch said.

Shylock bowed to him. He seemed to expect nothing else.

But Strulovitch wanted a quiet word before leaving. “Was it for this, then, that you came?” he asked in his lowest voice. What business remained between them was theirs alone.

“I’d prefer to think,” Shylock replied in kind, “that this was why you found me.”

Strulovitch swam in the unexpected blue of Shylock’s eyes. When had they changed colour?

“Who did the finding and who the being found is not a matter that will easily be settled between us.”

“No.”

“I too admired your performance.”

“You weren’t listening.”

“I got the gist of it.”

Shylock lowered his head. His hair was thinner than Strulovitch had noticed before, but then he had not seen him without his hat. A sentimentalist when it came to men—especially to fathers—he was half-inclined to kiss Shylock where the hair was thinnest.

Shylock read his mind. “I am not in search of a son,” he said.

“And I have had my fill of fathers,” Strulovitch said. “I hope I can admire your theatricality for itself. But you couldn’t really have believed that it would sway me.”

Shylock laughed. A shy catch of the breath. When had he started to laugh? “Not for a moment,” he said. “Affecting your resolution was the last thing on my mind. Not everything is about you.”

When Strulovitch swept out of Plurabelle’s drive with D’Anton at his shoulder, Plurabelle did not even see them go. She had eyes only for Shylock. God, I love this man, she thought. I fucking love him.

She was glad Barney was not here. It had been inspired of her to get rid of him though she hadn’t really known why she’d done it at the time. Now she could only hope he’d lost his way and would never come back. Let him stay in Chester Zoo.

She approached the new man in her life and laid a hand on his arm, surprised by how hard it felt. “That was awe-inspiring,” she said.

Shylock’s eyes had reverted to their gunmetal grey. “But it didn’t work,” he said. “Mercy has not been shown.”

“Oh, that needn’t matter.”

“Needn’t it?”

“How do we ever measure what works anyway,” she said, looking up at him with her swollen lips. “I can only tell you that it worked for me.”

“I’m pleased to hear that. To whom are you showing mercy?”

“I will show it you if you wish me to.”

“I am not in need of it.”

“What are you in need of ?”

He paused, as though expecting something else. “And?” he said.

She was disconcerted. “I don’t understand.”

“I am waiting for what follows. Don’t you usually have a riddle for those you think want something from you?”

She shook her hair as though wishing to rid her head of what he’d just said. “I have no riddle for you,” she said. “With you, I feel at last that I can be direct. I know there is nothing you want. But is there anything I can give you?”

He wondered if she was about to offer to make him famous. I am too old for this, he thought. “Peace and quiet,” he said. “Peace and quiet are all I am in need of.”

She took that to be further encouragement. Peace and quiet she could give him. “You are not what I thought you were,” she persisted.

“And what did you think I was?”

“I don’t know, but I would never have imagined…” Whatever it was she would never have imagined she couldn’t for the moment find the words for it.

Shylock helped her out. “That a Jew could be so Christian?”

She felt that he almost spat the words at her.

“No, no, that wasn’t what I intended to say. What I mean is that you looked so forbidding when you opened the door to me at Simon Strulovitch’s I didn’t dream you could be capable of such humanity.”

“That’s just another way of saying the same thing. You saw a Jew and expected nothing of him but cruelty.”

“I didn’t see
a Jew
. I don’t go around
seeing Jews
.”

“All right—you saw cruelty and gave it a Jewish face.”

“I’m only saying you are not what you seem. I am not a Christian. I haven’t been to church since I was a little girl. But I know what Christian sentiments are. Is it so wrong to be surprised by the eloquent expression of sentiments one normally hears from the pulpit by a man who scowls?”

“You mean a Jew who scowls.”

“I mean what I say I mean.”

“Then I will answer you in that spirit. Yes, it is wrong to be surprised. It is wrong not to know where you got your sweet Christian sentiments from. It is morally and historically wrong not to know that Jesus was a Jewish thinker and that when you quote him against us you are talking vicious nonsense. Charity is a Jewish concept. So is mercy. You took them from us, that is all. You appropriated them. They were given freely, but still you had to steal them.”

“I?”

“It shocks you to exemplify? It must. It shocked me. I was made to crawl for what I exemplified. So yes,
you
. You say my humanity surprises you. What was it you expected? And whose humanity is it that you think you see in me now? Your own! How dare you think you can teach me what I already know, or set me the example I long ago set you? It is a breathtaking insolence, an immemorial act of theft from which nothing but sorrow has ever flowed. There is blood on your insolence.”

Plurabelle looked as though she were about to cry. She put a hand on her chest. “I feel you’ve laid a curse on me,” she said.

“Well now you know the sensation from the other end,” Shylock said.

And this time Plurabelle could have sworn he
did
spit on her.

“That’s what you call telling them,” Leah said.

Shylock pulled his coat around him. “It was not without a long premeditation,” he admitted.

“It was none the worse for that,” she said.

“A long premeditation invites anticlimax,” he said. “One can think
too
long. What I said was musty. It could have been better.”

“It was good enough.”

“Is that all?”

“Good enough is good enough. You don’t, I hope, think you are going to change history.”

“I can hope.”

“You’d be unwise to do so.”

“You wish then that I’d stayed silent?”

“I haven’t said that. Though I wish you’d shown a little of your
rachmones
to that poor girl.”

“Ach, I wouldn’t worry for her. She fucking loves me.”

“Then maybe I should worry for you.”