Free Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson Page B

the subject could not have been more prompt with his reply. “Both,” he said. “After so many years of being told what Gentiles see when they look at us it’s hardly a surprise that we end up seeing something similar. That’s how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor.
If that’s how I look, that’s what I must be
.”
    “Well, if they must see us as something depraved it accords better with our own instinct for self-mockery that they see us as masturbators. Better that than misers.”
    “There’s no difference. Jews hunched over their private parts, Jews hunched over their money. In the eyes of Gentiles it’s one vast fevered panorama of degenerate self-interest. We spend as we hoard, exclusively, keeping our sperm and money out of general circulation. They claim their hatred of us has economic justification but if you ask me the genitalia are the root of it. They haven’t been able to draw their imaginations from us sexually for centuries. You know they used to believe we bled like women, then they accused us of castrating Christian children. Even just thinking about us dirtied their minds. It’s a mix of ignorance and dread that goes back to circumcision. If we would do that to ourselves, what might we not do to them?”
    A gentle knock at the living-room door roused Strulovitch from the dark trance of thought into which these words had plunged him. It was his wife’s night-time carer. Could Mr. Strulovitch spare a minute? Mrs. Strulovitch was asking for him.
    “My wife wants me,” he said, rising. He had intended the subject of his ailing wife to go largely unspoken between them. Sympathy was not what he was looking for. And Shylock, anyway, did not strike him as the man to give it. “I’ll be back presently,” he said, making everything sound as ordinary as possible.
    But his heart was thumping. Could Kay have compounded all that was not ordinary about the day by actually calling for him by name?
    The answer to that was no. The carer was worried about Kay, that was all. She had heard noises in the house and seemed more than usually distressed. But by the time Strulovitch got to her she was asleep in her chair, her head lolling to one side, no word for Strulovitch on her nerveless lips. He straightened her up, kissed her brow, and went downstairs again. He wondered whether Shylock would still be there. Or whether he had ever been there at all.
    “So where were we?” he asked, finding him as he’d left him, folded tight in his chair, all light excluded from his face.
    Shylock shrugged.
    Did that mean he was tiring? Strulovitch would have sat with him, swirling liquid in his glass, enjoying the dark quiet, but the longer he didn’t speak the more he thought about Kay.
    “And now?” he asked, after as prolonged a silence as he could bear.
    “And now what do the Gentiles think? I’d be surprised if they’re not thinking what they’ve always thought. Certainly their minds are no cleaner.”
    “No, I meant what now for you?”
    “Me personally?”
    Strulovitch decided to risk the other’s wrath. He had invited Shylock into his stricken home. Now Shylock had to invite Strulovitch into his.
    “Yes, you personally.”
    Shylock rubbed his face with his hands. Would it still be there when he took his hands away? His fingers, Strulovitch noted, were coated with a dark fur. Is he closer to the apes than I am, he wondered.
    “For me
personally,
” Shylock said, charging the word with all its long history of insolence and obloquy, “there is no now. I live when I lived. I have told you: where the story stopped, I stop. But sometimes, for the hellish pleasure of it, I roll the exit line of another dupe of fools around my tongue. I hanker, as you will easily imagine, for a resounding exit line.”
    Strulovitch made as though to rack his brain for the exit line in question. But it was late for tests.
    “
I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,
” Shylock said