The Counterlife (19 page)

“I only pray,” said Buki, “that the Jew senses in time that such a catastrophe is on its way. Because if he does, then the ships will come again. In America there are young religious people, even secular people like your brother, who are tired of purposeless living. Here in Judea there is a purpose and a meaning, so they come. Here there is a God who is present in our lives. But the mass of Jews in America, they will not come, never, unless there is a crisis. But whatever the crisis, however it begins, the ships will sail again, and we will not just be three million. Then we will be ten million and the situation will be a little corrected. Three million the Arabs think they can kill. But they cannot kill ten million so easily.”

“And where,” I asked all of them, “will you put ten million?”

Lippman's answer was ecstatic. “Judea! Samaria! Gaza! In the Land of Israel given by God to the Jewish people!”

“You really believe,” I asked, “that this will happen? American Jews sailing by the millions to escape persecution resulting from a Hispanic invasion of the U.S.A.? Because of a black uprising, urged on and abetted by the white officials, to eliminate the Jews?”

“Not today,” said Buki, “not tomorrow, but yes, I am afraid it will happen. If not for Hitler we would be ten million already. We would have the offspring of the six million. But Hitler succeeded. I only pray that the Jews will leave America before a second Hitler succeeds.”

I turned to Henry, eating as silently as the two Lippman children. “Is that what you felt living in America? That such a catastrophe is in the offing?”

“Well, no,” he said shyly. “Not really … But what did I know? What did I see?”

“You weren't born in a bomb shelter,” I replied impatiently. “You didn't make your life in a hole in the ground.”

“Didn't I?” he said, flushing, “—don't be so sure,” but then would say no more.

I realized that he was leaving me to them. I thought, Is this the role he has decided to play—the good Jew to my bad Jew? Well, if so, he's found the right supporting cast.

I said to Buki, “You describe the situation of the Jew in America as though we were living under a volcano. To me it seems you feel so strongly the need for so many million more Jews that you're inclined to imagine this mass emigration pretty unrealistically. When were you last in America?”

“Daphna was raised in New Rochelle,” he said, motioning to his wife.

“And when you looked up in New Rochelle,” I asked her, “you saw a volcano?”

Unlike Henry, she wasn't reluctant to have her say; she'd been waiting her turn, her eyes on me, ever since I'd silently sat there while they'd sung in the Sabbath. Hers was the only animus I felt. The others were educating a fool—she was confronting an enemy, like young Jerry, who'd given it to me at the ulpan that morning.

“Let me ask you a question,” said Daphna, replying to mine. “You are a friend of Norman Mailer?”

“Both of us write books.”

“Let me ask you a question about your colleague Mailer. Why is he so interested in murder and criminals and killing? When I was at Barnard, our English professor assigned those books to read—books by a Jew who cannot stop thinking about murder and criminals and killing. Sometimes when I think back to the innocence of that class and the idiotic nonsense that they said there, I think, Why didn't I ask, ‘If this Jew is so exhilarated by violence, why doesn't he go to Israel?' Why doesn't he, Mr. Zuzkerman? If he wants to understand the experience of killing, why doesn't he come here and be like my husband? My husband has killed people in four wars, but not because he thinks murder is an exciting idea. He thinks it is a horrible idea. It is not even an
idea.
He kills to protect a tiny country, to defend an embattled nation—he kills so that perhaps his children may grow up one day to lead a peaceful life. He does not have a brilliant genius's intellectually wicked adventures of killing imaginary people inside his head—he has a decent man's dreadful experience of killing real people in Sinai and in the Golan and on the Jordanian border! Not to gain personal fame by writing bestselling books but to prevent the destruction of Jewish people!”

“And what do you want to ask me?” I said.

“I am asking you why is this genius's sick Diaspora rage celebrated in
Time
magazine while our refusal to be obliterated by our enemies in our own homeland is called in the same magazine monstrous Jewish aggression! That's what I'm asking!”

“I'm not here on behalf of
Time
or anyone else. I'm visiting Henry.”

“But you are not nobody,” she sarcastically replied. “You are a famous novelist, too—a novelist, what's more, who has written
about
Jews.”

“It would be hard to believe, sitting at this table, in this settlement, that there's anything else a novelist
could
write about,” I said. “Look, imagining violence and the release of the brute, imagining the individuals engaged in it, doesn't necessitate embracing it. There's no retreat or hypocrisy in a writer who doesn't go out and do what he may have thought about doing in every gory, horrifying detail. The only retreat is retreating from what you know.”

“So,” said Lippman, “what you are telling us is that we are not so nice as you American-Jewish writers.”

“That's not at all what I'm telling you.”

“But it's true,” he said, smiling.

“I'm telling you that to see fiction as Daphna does is to see it from a highly specialized point of view. I'm telling you that it isn't obligatory for a novelist to go around personally exhibiting his themes. I'm not talking about who's nicer—niceness is even more deadly in writers than it is in other people. I'm only responding to a very crude observation.”

“Crude? Yes, that is true. We are not like the intellectual goodies and the humane niceys who have the galut mentality. We are not polished people and we are terrible at the polite smile. All Daphna is saying is that we do not have the luxury you American-Jewish writers have of indulging in fantasies of violence and force. The Jew who drives the school bus past the Arabs throwing stones at his windscreen, he does not
dream
of violence—he
faces
violence, he
fights
violence. We do not
dream
about force—we
are
force. We are not afraid to rule in order to survive, and to put it again as unpalatably as possible,
we are not afraid to be masters.
We do not wish to crush the Arab—we simply will not allow him to crush
us.
Unlike the niceys and the goodies who live in Tel Aviv, I have no phobia of Arabs. I can live alongside him, and I do. I can even speak to him in his own tongue. But if he rolls a hand grenade into the house where my child is sleeping, I do not retaliate with a
fantasy
of violence of the kind everybody loves in the novels and the movies. I am not someone sitting in a cozy cinema; I am not someone playing a role in a Hollywood movie; I am not an American-Jewish novelist who steps back and from a distance appropriates the reality for his literary purposes. No! I am somebody who meets the enemy's real violence with my real violence, and I don't worry about the approval of
Time
magazine. The journalists, you know, got tired of the Jew making the desert bloom; it became
boring
to them. They got
tired
of the Jews being attacked by surprise and still winning all the wars. That too became
boring.
They prefer now the greedy, grasping Jew who oversteps his bounds—the Arab as Noble Savage versus the degenerate, colonialist, capitalist Jew. Now the journalist gets excited when the Arab terrorist takes him to his refugee camp and, displaying the gracious Arab hospitality, graciously pours him a cup of coffee with all the freedom fighters looking on—he thinks he is living dangerously drinking coffee with a gracious revolutionary who flashes his black eyes at him, and drinks his coffee with him, and assures him that his brave guerrilla heroes will drive the thieving Zionists into the sea. Much more thrilling than drinking borscht with a big-nosed Jew.”

“Bad Jews,” said Daphna, “make better copy. But I don't have to tell that to Nathan Zuckerman and Norman Mailer. Bad Jews sell newspapers just the way they sell books.”

She's a honey, I thought, but ignored her, leaving Mailer to protect Mailer and figuring that I'd already sufficiently defended myself on that issue elsewhere.

“Tell me,” Lippman said, “can the Jew do
anything
that doesn't stink to high heaven of his Jewishness? There are the goyim to whom we stink because they look down on us, and there are the goyim to whom we stink because they look up to us. Then there are the goyim who look both down
and
up at us—they are
really
angry. There is no end to it. First it was Jewish clannishness that was repellent, then what was preposterous was the ridiculous phenomenon of Jewish assimilation, now it is Jewish independence that is unacceptable and unjustified. First it was Jewish passivity that was disgusting, the meek Jew, the accommodating Jew, the Jew who walked like a sheep to his own slaughter—now what is worse than disgusting, outright
wicked,
is Jewish strength and militancy. First it was the Jewish sickliness that was abhorrent to all the robust Aryans, frail Jewish men with weak Jewish bodies lending money and studying books—now what is disgusting are strong Jewish men who know how to use force and are not afraid of power. First it was homeless Jewish cosmopolites that were strange and alien and not to be trusted—now what is alien are Jews with the arrogance to believe that they can determine their destiny like anybody else in a homeland of their own. Look, the Arab can remain here and I can remain here and together we can live in harmony. He can have any experience he likes, live here however he chooses and have everything he desires—except for the experience of statehood. If he wants that, if he cannot endure without that, then he can move to an Arab state and have the experience of statehood there. There are fifteen Arab states for him to pick from, most of them not even an hour away by car. The Arab homeland is vast, it is enormous, while the State of Israel is no more than a speck on the map of the world. You can put the State of Israel
seven times
into the state of Illinois, but it is the only place on this entire planet where a
Jew
can have the experience of statehood, and that is why
we do not give ground
!”

Dinner was over.

*   *   *

Henry guided me along one of their two long residential streets to where I was to sleep, the house of a settlement couple who had gone to spend the Sabbath in Jerusalem with family. Down in the Arab village a few lights were still burning, and on a distant hill, like an unblinking red eye, something that would once have been understood here as auguring the wrath of Almighty God, was the steady radar beacon of a missile-launching site. One of the missiles, heroically angled in firing position, was undisguised and plainly visible when we'd driven by on our way to Hebron. “The next war,” Henry had said, pointing to the base up on the hilltop, “will take five minutes.” The Israeli missile we saw was aimed at downtown Damascus to dissuade the Syrians, he told me, from launching their missile targeted for downtown Haifa. Except for that red omen, the distant blackness was so vast that I thought of Agor as a minute, floodlit earth-colony, the vanguard of a brave new Jewish civilization evolving in outer space, with Tel Aviv and all the decadent niceys and goodies as far off as the dimmest star.

If I had nothing to say to Henry right off it was because, following Lippman's seminar, language didn't really seem my domain any longer. I wasn't exactly a stranger to disputation, but never in my life had I felt so enclosed by a world so contentious, where the argument is enormous and constant and everything turns out to be pro or con, positions taken, positions argued, and everything italicized by indignation and rage.

Nor had my word-whipping ended with dinner. For two hours more, while I sat squeezed in beside Lippman's German editions of the European masterpieces and was graciously served tea and cake by contented Ronit, Lippman continued to flog away. I tried to ascertain whether his rhetoric wasn't perhaps being fomented a little by my questionable position among the Jews—by my reputedly equivocal position
about
Jews, which Daphna had indignantly alluded to—or whether he was deliberately playing it a bit broader at this performance to give me a taste of what had confounded my brother, particularly if I had any idea of abducting back into the Diaspora his prize dental surgeon, a paragon of worldly, assimilationist success, for whom he and the Deity had other plans. From time to time I'd thought, “Fuck it, Zuckerman, why don't you say what you think—all these bastards are saying what
they
think.” But my way of handling Lippman had been by being practically mute. If that's handling. After dinner I may have looked to him as though I was sitting there in his living room saving myself up like some noble silent person, but the simple truth is I was outclassed.

Henry had nothing to say either. At first I thought it was because Lippman, along with Buki and Daphna, had left him feeling vindicated and without any inclination to soften the blow. But then I wondered if my presence might not have forced him, maybe for the first time since succumbing to Lippman's conviction, to evaluate his bulldozing mentor from a perspective somewhat alien to Agor's ethos. That might even have been why he'd clammed up like a child when I'd turned to ask if
he
had been living under a volcano in the U.S.A. Perhaps by then he was quietly wondering about what Muhammad Ali confessed had crossed the mind of even a man as courageous as he in the thirteenth round of that terrible third fight with Frazier: “What am I doing here?”