Shylock Is My Name (3 page)

“We?”

“Us. You and I. People of our sort. The advantaged.”

“But
are
we the advantaged?” D’Anton asked. “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

“That’s so beautiful,” Plurabelle said. “And so true. It makes me want to cry. Paulo Coelho often makes me want to cry.”

“A greater man than Paulo Coelho said that,” D’Anton surprised her by saying. She didn’t know there was a greater man than Paulo Coelho.

“Nelson Mandela?”

“St. Paul.”

“So would we be less pierced with sorrows if we gave all we have to the poor?”

He didn’t know but said he sometimes asked himself whether the sadness problem, for him anyway, wasn’t money but modernity. “Do you never feel,” he asked her, “that you are too modern?”

Plurabelle liked that idea. “
Too modern—
yes, you’re right,” she said. “Too modern. I have often felt that, yes I have, though until now I didn’t know I’d felt it. Too modern—yes, of course.” Then she had a thought. “But that doesn’t explain,” she said, “why Aborigines and American Indians always look sad on the Discovery Channel. They can hardly be called modern.”

“No, but that’s a different kind of sadness, isn’t it. The cause of their sadness is that they have been made abject. It’s been done to them. They are sad because they’re victims.”

Plurabelle remembered seeing photographs of South American tribesmen in colour supplements. They looked thousands of years old. Maoris too. And Pygmies. And Pashtun tribesmen. Why were they all sad, she wondered.

“Again, they have been exploited and made abject.”

“And Jews? They’re old.”

He was less comfortable about Jews. But offered to put his mind, or at least St. Paul’s mind (for he was a confirmed Paulinist), to their sadness. “I’d say they are made abject by their own will,” he declared at last. “They are neither modern nor victims. They have chosen to look the way they do.”

“Why have they done that?”

“Whether it’s a flaw or a stratagem I cannot say, but they have always put themselves at the centre of every drama, human or theological. I think of it as a political sadness. The glue of self-pity is very strong. As is emotional blackmail.”

Plurabelle furrowed her lovely brow. She wanted this conversation never to stop, testing as it was. “So they don’t count, is what you’re saying?”

“In my view they don’t, no.”

Plurabelle’s expression was suddenly relieved of its customary dejection. “Oh yes they do,” she laughed. “That’s
all
they do. They just sit and count…and count…and count…”

She was so pleased by this that she skipped like a little girl.

“I hope you don’t think I mean anything unpleasant,” she remembered to say.

D’Anton assured her that he didn’t.

She clapped her small hands in relief.

He thought how pretty she was when she was skittish. Inflamed around the mouth, as though she had a perpetual cold sore, and disconcertingly wide-eyed, which made it difficult for her to look straight ahead, but that could be said of all the women in the Golden Triangle. And she had a girlish expectancy which they didn’t. A desire for happiness shot through with an expectancy that she would never find it. He almost wished he could feel romantically about her.

She thought the same about him. Such a pity.

But the absence of romantic feeling made it possible for them to talk freely to each other, or at least for her to talk freely to him. She told him, with clever illustrative imitations of their mannerisms, about the would-be lovers who came and went in her real life, as opposed to those who were found for her by the production company to appear with her on television. Oh God, they wearied her, each thinking that the way to reach her was to spoil her or to flatter her, this one bringing her a Hermès Birkin bag the colour of the lipstick he’d been told she always wore, that one bearing a Guerlain lipstick case made of Swarovski crystals and a solitary diamond, the lipstick itself the colour of what researchers had told him was her favourite handbag. Did they think she was an object to be won by empty words and cash? She even showed him the handbag and the lipstick. What did he think?

He said he thought she should wear them together.

She told him that she’d come to that same conclusion herself.

They both laughed.

“But this isn’t who I am,” she said.

They both laughed again.

He became installed in her house, like a steward or confessor. When he wasn’t popping over to Japan to look at paperweights he didn’t seem to have much to do. “I pay people,” he explained. There was a prematurely retired air about him. On occasions, she would have friends around to listen to him talk about the exquisite things he imported and about beauty in general. In no time at all he was indispensable to her—handsome, sad, chivalric, unavailable, and somehow uncontaminated. It was as though he made clean every space he walked through, just by walking through it.

H
ow long will a man lie i’ th’ earth ere he rot?

And a woman? Will she not rot even sooner?

Shylock, broken-hearted, beloved husband of Leah, feared so. The skin so much finer, the bones so much more fragile.

It was in order to delay the process, to keep her alive to herself as well as to him, that he visited her grave every morning, taking her violets or forget-me-nots, talking to her, listening to her, exactly as he had when she’d lived. He breakfasted in her company, a flask of Turkish coffee—she loved the smell of coffee—and a cheese panino wrapped in a linen handkerchief. He wasn’t careful to avoid crumbs falling on to her. It was almost like feeding her. And he did feed her, in another sense, selective gossip about the goings-on of their friends, sustaining her with news of Jessica. The latter more selective still: only the best things, how womanly she was becoming, how like her mother. Some mornings, when he thought it advisable to spare her the details of his business affairs altogether—the catastrophe in waiting, the threat of destitution hanging over him—he read to her. Not about Jacob and his sheep, nor about Laban and Hagar and the prophet Daniel. Those references he reserved for the Gentiles, knowing how troubling they found Bible stories issuing from the mouth of a Jew. Their actual reading, and they had read together most evenings, was much wider. They too could quote Virgil and Ovid, knew who Scylla and Charybdis were, and discussed Pythagoras’ philosophy of the soul. To prevent Leah from freezing over he read Petrarch to her, and Boccaccio. Also, as time went by, Philip Sidney’s
Arcadia,
Thomas Nashe’s
The Unfortunate Traveller
, as well as Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion.” Eventually he would progress to Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Dickens, Dostoevsky, the great novelists of the fag-end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ditto of the American. It was important he kept Leah informed and didn’t allow her to grow bored. She too had always had a taste for the lyrical, the sarcastic, and some days even the preposterous. “Read me the comedy about the person who’s made to think he’s vermin,” she’d say. “Do you mean
Metamorphosis
?” “No, my love,
Mein Kampf
.” And they would laugh together like demons.

To those in his community who thought his devotion morbid he argued that the opposite was the case, that it was only Leah’s company that kept him from falling into that dejection of spirits that was such a common affliction of the times and to which he had more reason than most to be susceptible. This one unaccountably sad, that one inexplicably weary—well, he had his own thoughts about the roots of so much fashionable moping, but for him, and he could speak for no one else, life would have been unbearable had he allowed himself to forget, even for the smallest particle of time, the woman he had loved from the moment he first saw her. You made your vows and you stuck to them. There had been no one else and there would be no one else. If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?

And if this mourning without end put intolerable pressure on his daughter Jessica?

He denied that he was in mourning. Quite the contrary. Spending so much of his time with Leah meant there was no reason to mourn. He was celebrating his marriage, not lamenting it. Where was the sackcloth? Where the ashes? Didn’t he go to the cemetery every morning as spruce as a bridegroom?

But this, as he knew well, was ultimately an evasion. Jessica was, as he told Leah proudly, growing up. Sometimes when he passed her on the stairs he even mistook her for his wife. She had the right to be the giver and the recipient of just such an adoration as her parents had enjoyed, and were still—no doubt unnaturally to her—enjoying. It was her turn.

He would look away when this matter was raised. Even when he raised it with himself he would look away, into another corner of his conscience.
Her turn
! What father wanted to think of his daughter enjoying
her turn
?

And with whom?

She should, by the logic of their society, have been safe. The daughter of a repugnant Jew!—why, with such blood in her veins the problem should have been to find her suitors, not protect her from them. Who wanted what appertained to Shylock? Yet just as they would take his money, no matter what they thought of him, so they would take his daughter. Did commerce wash the obloquy away? Did desire?

Or was the obloquy the very thing that added savour to what they desired and borrowed or, where they couldn’t borrow, stole?

His daughter was a fine-looking girl. She would assuredly have attracted admirers on her own behalf in a less envious and grasping society, where every man not already married to a rich wife was on the make. He intended no disrespect to her by suspecting the motives of those who wooed her. Quite the opposite: it was because he loved her and saw—often much to his embarrassment—what others saw in her, that he stood guard over her happiness. It was his appreciation of her, as much as anything else, that made him clumsy. A mother would have known better how to do it, but Jessica had no mother. Yes, she deserved to be wooed. But a Jewess was a commodity, the times were acquisitive, and these people were collectors.

Well, the moral confusion was theirs, not his. It went with their religion and they were welcome to stew in it. But his contempt for the prevarications of Christians who professed one thing and did another didn’t help him when it came to working out what to say to Leah. He couldn’t tell her that Jessica had left. That she had become a turncoat, a liar and a thief. Least of all could he tell her what it was that Jessica had stolen.

It was an agony to him—keener than any knife-wound— to be keeping secrets from his wife, whatever the damp was doing to her flesh. It felt like a betrayal of the heart.

And still she doesn’t know.

A mercy, Shylock believes. A mercy she got away when she did.

Simon Strulovitch’s daughter had not got away. Not yet. Unless you call college getting away. Otherwise, he was similarly situated. He too fretted about the value placed on her as an exotic, feared the strength of the avidity she inspired, and the effect of the flattery on her. Added to this was his reputation as a wealthy connoisseur, a donor to elitist institutions and, for no reason other than that he’d visited Israel and given artworks to some of its universities, a Zionist—all in all a reputation he was vain enough to see as an inducement beyond Beatrice’s charms. It wasn’t theft he feared—Beatrice did not have the key to his vaults—it was the view of him as a bogeyman on all counts that she was bound to encounter at college, and the added value which that view of him lent her as a prize. She was worth turning, that was what it came to. The histories of terrorism and brigandage, of revolution and sedition, bulged with the apostate daughters of rich men with unacceptable convictions. A girl who would sleep with her father’s enemies was of a succulence beyond description, plunder that exceeded in value even Simon Strulovitch’s rubies and turquoises.

Strulovitch resembled Shylock in another way as well. He, too, was denied the opportunity to raise the matter with the girl’s mother.

The stroke she suffered on Beatrice’s fourteenth birthday felt too horribly symbolic to be any such thing. It was the cruellest misfortune, no more. Fate stuck out his hand and idly struck. It could have been any woman on any day. Hold on to that, Strulovitch told himself. Embrace the arbitrary. Otherwise the blaming would start and of blaming there is no end.

Little by little Kay had recovered words—not actual utterances but the will to move her lips and shape a silent sound, and this was enough to make him feel that someone he knew was still in there. They never approached—in dumbshow or any other way—what had befallen her. She lived in bed now—her own bed—needed to be helped to bathe and eat, and couldn’t always make herself intelligible—beyond that, the pretence went, things were as they’d always been. About Beatrice he was careful to say little, and about his fears for her he said nothing at all. He was reluctant to put any pressures on her. Let Kay decide what subjects she wanted to approach by whatever means were available to her. Beatrice’s presence cheered her, but she seemed to wish to see her only on her own, as though they were separate families, individual spokes of a wheel that had fallen off.

Strulovitch looked past her when he was in her presence. Beyond her, as in a broken mirror, he sometimes saw the wife he’d known but it felt like an infidelity to smile across the room at her. Better, in the presence of a ruined memory to remember nothing oneself. So they sat silently together, he in a chair by her bed, holding her hand, she looking into nothing, the two of them possessed of no before, and certainly no after, in a perfect harmony of unbeing. So unalive to sensation they could have been the first man and woman, waiting to be breathed into, poised for creation to begin.

Strulovitch had never been more thankful for the fortune built on car-parts he had inherited. His relations with his father were repaired. The burial had been only temporary: with his divorce from Ophelia-Jane Smythson came reconciliation, and with his marriage to Kay Kominsky came an inundation of fatherly love strong enough to knock him off his feet. A marriage in instead of a marriage out: it seemed that that was all his father—a man in every other way a heathen—had ever lived for. Keep it in the family. Just that. Fine by Strulovitch. He was re-inherited. And now that Kay was ill he understood how important it was to have money. You needed to be rich. Assuredly he appeared richer than one needed to be—which was why he gave so much away, endowing lectureships, providing music rooms and extending libraries, helping to buy works of art that would otherwise leave the country—yet you needed to be nearly as rich as he was just to live. By which he meant to reside in a house big enough to show art and shelve books, to travel in comfort, to have suits made by Italian tailors, to have a chauffeur, to send one’s daughter to be schooled, and to afford round-the-clock care for one’s wife. He had his own working definition of poverty as well as wealth. Whoever couldn’t afford to make provision for carers and nurses, whether they were necessary now or would be necessary in the future, was dirt poor. To avoid falling into the hands of the state was reason in itself for making money. One worked and earned in order not to die disgracefully. You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live…and the means whereby I hope to die as well.

And then, of course—talking of dying—there was the money needed to escape in a hurry when the hour came, scooping what was left of his family into his arms and never stopping to look back. Even the Jewishly on-again off-again Strulovitch was never Jewishly off-again when it came to believing this: safety was not to be taken for granted, the danger hour always came around.

In the meantime, knowing each morning that his wife would be washed, that his daughter would be educated, and that his money would be there when he needed it for bribing officials at borders, or just for carers of his own, left him free to pursue his interests. And pursuing his interests kept him from bewailing the ruins of his wife. There was a great deal to be said, Strulovitch believed, for keeping busy, the other word for which—as Beatrice’s teachers were surely telling her with relish—was capitalism.

But he didn’t revel in wealth. He revelled—in so far as he could be called a reveller at all—in the world he could see. I already am spiritual, he would have said to anyone who tried to remind him of all that wasn’t worldly—I am spiritual to the degree that I think the material world is infused with the divine.

And love?

He didn’t understand how anyone could love what wasn’t visible.

This didn’t mean he didn’t love his daughter when he didn’t see her. But then when didn’t he see her? Worry is a way of keeping an image close and safe, and from the moment of his wife’s stroke—no, further back than that—he had worried about his daughter constantly.

They had waited a long time for their only child—a wait more agonising for Kay, who spoke conventionally of hearing her clock ticking and dreaded running out of time altogether. He hadn’t especially wanted children and suspected other men of exaggerating when they said their hearts burst at the sight of their first child, but his own heart did exactly that. Partly this was on behalf of Kay. A vicarious joy compounded by relief and terror—for to want something as much as she had was surely an invitation to disappointment or worse. Doubly fragile and precious is that child whose conception relies on miracle. And there was the usual selfishness, too. When he looked at the baby Beatrice he saw himself projected into the future. But he gave in momentarily to the “clouds of glory” experience as well, imagining her as an emissary from God, fancying that her eyes were still closed against the brightness of the effulgence she had witnessed before coming here. And that in its turn raised the question of which God that was, and what message Beatrice was bringing from Him. Was this a religious moment for Strulovitch? He didn’t think so. He didn’t do religion. He didn’t pray. He didn’t bind his arm or cover his head. Devotionally he did so little he might as well have been a pagan. And the moment itself, however one described it, didn’t last long enough to effect a transformation. But he would have admitted, if pressed, that the God whose glory he imagined his baby daughter squinting against was the Jewish God not the Christian, a being too serious and majestic ever to have taken human form. Nothing more. The beginning and the end of Strulovitch’s seeing into the heart of things, but it was enough to determine the course of his preferences for Beatrice once and for all. She should have a Jewish husband, not because he looked down on non-Jews, or wanted his Jewish line to continue, but because her life had started seriously, in a sort of pain of remembered solemnity and anticipated grief that could not be thrown away on merely arbitrary affection and wilfulness—on whim or spite or capricious apostasy, or even haphazard love, however deeply felt—but owed, and was owed in return, an obligation of honour and loyalty, no matter that he was damned if he knew loyalty to what. Something that wasn’t just hers to determine—was that it? A covenant. Something that would have found tangible expression in circumcision had she been a boy. Something in the nature of an oath of allegiance, never mind that she was not in any position, as someone born only an hour before, to swear it on her own behalf. And wasn’t that the reason why he, as her father, was obliged by all he understood as holy, to swear it for her?