Operation Shylock: A Confession Read Online Free PDF Page A

the kind I was professionally all too familiar with what had once again been established as all too objectively real. It’s Zuckerman, I thought, whimsically, stupidly, escapistly, it’s Kepesh, it’s Tarnopol and Portnoy—it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me. In other words, if it’s not Halcion and it’s no dream, then it’s got to be literature—as though there cannot be a life-without ten thousand times more unimaginable than the life-within.
    “Well,” I said to Claire, “there’s somebody in Jerusalem attending the Ivan the Terrible trial who’s going around claiming to be me. Calls himself by my name. Gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper—that’s what Aharon was reading to me over the phone.”
    “You found this out just now?” she asked.
    “No. Aharon phoned me in New York last week. So did my cousin Apter. Apter’s landlady said she’d seen me on TV. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what, if anything, it all amounted to.”
    “You’re green, Philip. You’ve turned a frightening color.”
    “Have I? I’m tired, that’s all. I was up on and off all night.”
    “You’re not taking. …”
    “You can’t be serious.”
    “Don’t sound resentful. I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Because you
have
turned a terrible color—and you seem … swamped.”
    “Do I? Did I? I didn’t think I did. And it’s you who have actually turned colors.”
    “I’m worried, that’s why. You seem …”
    “What? Seem
what?
What it seems to me I seem to be is someone who has just found out that somebody down in Jerusalem is giving newspaper interviews in his name. You heard what I said to Aharon. As soon as the business day begins in New York, I’m going to call Helene. I think now that the best thing is for
her
to telephone the paper and to get them to print a retraction tomorrow. It’s a start at stopping him. Once their retraction’s out, no other newspaper is going to go near him. That’s step number one.”
    “What’s step number two?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe step number two won’t be necessary. I don’t know what the law is. Do I slap an injunction on him? In Israel? Maybe what Helene does is to contact a lawyer down there. When I speak to her, I’ll find out.”
    “Maybe step number two is not going there right now.”
    “That’s ridiculous. Look, I’m
not
swamped. It’s not
my
plans that are going to change—it’s his.”
    But by the afternoon I was back again to thinking that it was far more reasonable, sensible, and even, in the long run, more satisfyingly ruthless to do nothing for now. Telling Claire anything, given her continuing apprehension about my well-being, was, of course, a mistake and, had she not been sitting across from me at the breakfast table when Aharon phoned in his latest report, one that I would never have made. And an even bigger mistake, I thought, would be to set lawyers loose now, on two continents no less, who might not effect an outcome any less damaging than I could—if, that is, I could manage to remain something more helpful than volatilely irritated until, eventually, this impostor played out his disaster, all alone, as he must. A retraction was not likely to undo whatever damage had already been done by the newspaper’s original error. The ideas espoused so forcefully by the Philip Roth in that story were mine now and would likely endure as mine even in the recollection of those who’d read the retraction tomorrow. Nonetheless, this was not, I sternly remindedmyself, the worst upheaval of my life, and I was not going to permit myself to behave as though it were. Instead of rushing to mobilize an army of legal defenders, better just to sit comfortably back on the sidelines and watch while he manufactures for the Israeli press and public a version of me so absolutely not-me that it will require nothing, neither judicial intervention nor