The Counterlife (27 page)

“No!” he howled.

He took Jimmy's press statement out of his pants pocket again and after glancing over it, reading some of it, he said, “Shut down the Holocaust Museum because it upsets the goyim? You really believe that or are you just trying to have a little more fun, Jim? You really think they dislike Jews because the Jew is
judge?
Is that all that's been bothering them? Jim, that's not a hard question—answer me. The hard question is how anybody boarding at Tel Aviv could bring on board with him all this hardware. We're going to swing you by the ears to get the answer to that one, but that's not what I'm asking right now. We're not just going to work on your little pecker, we're going to work on your eyeballs, we're going to work on your gums and your knees, we're going to work you all over the secret parts of your body to get the answer to that, but now all I'm asking, for my own edification, for the education of a Cleveland grease monkey with a strong and irrepressible id, is if these are really things you honestly believe. Don't get tongue-tied—the rough stuff's later, in the lavatory, you and me squeezed up in there, alone with the secret parts of your body. This is just curiosity now. This is me at my most refined. I'll tell you what I think, Jim—I think this is another of those self-delusions you Jews have, thinking you are some kind of judge to them. Isn't that right, Nathan—that you high-minded Jews have serious self-delusions?”

“I would think so,” I said.

He smiled benignly. “I do too, Nate. Oh, sure, you may find the occasional masochist Gentile who has meek little thoughts about morally superior Jews, but basically, Jim, I must tell you, they don't really see it that way. Most of them, confronted with the Holocaust, don't really give a shit. We don't have to shut down Yad Vashem to help them forget—they forgot. Frankly, I don't think the Gentiles feel quite as bad about this whole business as you, me, and Nathan would like them to. I think frankly that what they mostly think is not that we are their judge but that we get too much of the cake—we're there too often, we don't stop, and we get too goddamn much of the cake. You put yourselves in the hands of the Jews, with this conspiracy they've got all over the place, and you're finished. That's what they think. The Jewish conspiracy isn't a conspiracy of judges—it's a conspiracy of Begins! He's arrogant, he's ugly, he is uncompromising—he talks in such a way as to shut your mouth all the time. He's Satan. Satan shuts your mouth. Satan won't let the good out, everybody's a Billy Budd, and then there's this guy Begin, who's shutting your mouth all the time and won't even let you
talk.
Because
he's
got the answer! You couldn't ask for anybody who better epitomizes the Jewish duplicity than this Menachem Begin. He's a master of it. He tells the goyim how bad they are, so
he
can turn and be bad! You think it's the Jewish superego they hate?
They hate the Jewish id!
What right do these Jews have to
have
an id? The Holocaust should have taught them never to have an id
again.
That's what got them into trouble in the first place! You think because of the Holocaust they think we're better? I hate to tell you, Jim, but the most they think on that score is that maybe the Germans went a little too far—they think, ‘Even if they were Jews, they weren't as bad as all
that.
' The fellows who say to you, ‘I expect more of the Jew,' don't believe them.
They expect less.
What they're saying really is, ‘Okay, we know you're a bunch of ravenous bastards, and given half the chance you'd eat up half the world, let alone poor Palestine. We know all these things about you, and so we're going to get you now. And how? Every time you make a move, we're going to say, “But we expect
more
of Jews, Jews are supposed to behave
better.
”'
Jews
are supposed to behave better? After all that's happened? Being only a thick-headed grease monkey, I would have thought that it was the
non-Jews
whose behavior could stand a little improvement. Why are
we
the only people who belong to this wonderful exclusive moral club that's behaving badly? But the truth is that they never thought we were so good, you know, even before we had a Holocaust. Is that what T. S. Eliot thought? I won't even mention Hitler. It didn't just start in Hitler's little brain. Who's the guy in T. S. Eliot's poem, the little Jew with the cigar? Tell us, Nathan—if you wrote a book, if you're ‘quite well known' and ‘properly terrified,' you ought to be able to answer that one. Who's the little Jew with a cigar in T. S. Eliot's wonderful poem?”

“Bleistein,” I said.

“Bleistein! What brilliant poetry that T. S. Eliot came up with! Bleistein—great! T. S. Eliot had higher expectations for Jews, Jim? No!
Lower!
That was what was in the air
all the time:
the Jew with a cigar, stepping on everybody all the time and chomping his Jew lips on an expensive cigar! What they hate? Not the Jewish superego, dummy—not, ‘Don't do that, it's wrong!' No, they hate the Jewish
id,
saying ‘I want it! I take it,' saying ‘I suck away on a fat cigar and just like you I transgress!' Ah, but you
cannot
transgress—you are a Jew and a Jew is supposed to be
better!
But you know what I tell them about being better? I say, ‘A bit late for that, don't you think? You put Jewish babies into furnaces, you bashed their heads against the rocks, you threw them like shit into ditches—and the
Jew
is supposed to be better?' What is it they want to know, Jim—how long are these Jews going to go wailing on about their little Holocaust? How long are
they
going to go on about their fucking Crucifixion! Ask T. S. Eliot
that.
This didn't happen to one poor little saint two thousand years ago—
this happened to six million living people only the other day!
Bleistein with a cigar! Oh, Nathan,” he said, looking with kindly humor down upon me, “if only we had T. S. Eliot on board today. I'd teach him about cigars. And you'd help, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you, a literary figure like yourself, help me educate the great poet about Jewish cigars?”

“If necessary,” I said.

“Study current events, Jim,” the hustler told him, satisfied with my tractability and returning to his in-flight educational program for the misguided author of “
FORGET REMEMBERING
!” “Up to the year 1967 the Jew didn't bother them that much down in his little homeland. Up till then it was all these strange Arabs wanting to wipe away little Israel that everybody had been so magnanimous about. They'd given the Jews this little thing you could hardly find on the map—out of the goodness of their hearts, a little real estate to assuage their guilt—and everybody wanted to destroy it. Everybody thought they were poor helpless shnooks and had to be supported, and that was just fine. The weak little shnook Jew was fine, the Jewish hick with his tractor and his short pants, who could he trick, who could he screw? But suddenly, these duplicitous Jews, these sneaky Jewish fuckers, defeat their three worst enemies, wallop the shit out of them in six fucking days, take over the entire this and the whole of that, and what a shock! Who the hell have they been
kidding
for eighteen years? We were worried about
them?
We were feeling magnanimous about
them?
Oh, my God, they tricked us again! They told us they were weak! We gave them a fucking state! And here they are as powerful as all hell! Trampling over everything! And meanwhile back home, the shnook Jewish general was feeling his oats. The Jewish shnook general was saying to himself, ‘Well, now the goyim will accept us because now they see we're as strong as they are.'
ONLY THE OPPOSITE WAS TRUE—JUST THE FUCKING OPPOSITE
! Because all over the world they said, ‘Of course—it's the same old Jew!'
The Jew who is too strong! Who tricks you! Who gets too much of the pie!
He's organized, he takes advantage, he's arrogant, he doesn't respect anything, he's all over the goddamn place, connections
everywhere.
And that's what the whole world cannot forgive, cannot abide, never would, never will—Bleistein! A powerful Jew with a Jewish id, smoking his big fat cigar!
Real Jewish might!”

But the foe of the Jewish superego was totally out of it now and looked more than likely to be bleeding to death, despite the shot they'd given him. Consequently, as the steep descent into Israel began, it was I alone, returning to the Promised Land with all my clothing peeled away and shackled to God's bird, the El Al plane, who was being lectured on the universal loathing of the Jewish id, and the goy's half-hidden, justifiable fear of wild, belated Jewish justice.

4. Gloucestershire

A YEAR AFTER being put on the drugs, still alive and feeling fit, no longer plagued by cartoon visions of male erections and ejaculations, when I have begun to contain the loss by forcing myself to understand that this is not the worst deprivation, not at my age and after my experience, just as I've begun to accept the only real wisdom—to live without what I no longer have—a temptress appears to test to the utmost this tenuous “adjustment.” If for Henry there's Wendy, who is there for me? As I haven't had to endure his marriage or suffer his late sexual start, a vampire-seductress won't really do to lure me to destruction. It can't be for more of what I've tasted that I risk my life, but for what's unknown, a temptation by which I've never before been engulfed, a yearning mysteriously kindled by the wound itself. If the uxorious husband and devoted paterfamilias dies for clandestine erotic fervor, then I shall turn the moral tables: I die for family life, for fatherhood.

I'm over the worst of my fear and bewilderment, able again to engage men and women in ordinary social conversation without thinking bitterly all the while how unfit I am for sexual contention, when into the duplex at the top of the brownstone moves just the woman to do me in. She's twenty-seven, younger than I am by seventeen years. There is a husband and a child. Since the child's birth over a year ago, the husband has grown estranged from his pretty wife and the hours they used to pass in bed they now spend in acrimonious discussion. “The first months after I'd had the baby he was monstrous. So cold. He would come in and ask, ‘Where's the baby?' I didn't exist. It's odd that I can't keep his attention any longer, but I can't. I feel quite lonely. My husband, when he even deigns to speak, tells me it's the human condition.” “When I found you,” I say to her, “you were hanging ripe, ready for plucking.” “No,” she replies, “I was already on the ground, rotting at the foot of the tree.”

She speaks in the most mesmeric tones, and it's the voice that does the seducing, it's the voice that I have to caress me, the voice of the body I can't possess. A tall, charming, physically inaccessible Maria, with curling dark hair, a smallish oval face, elongated dark eyes, and those caressing tones, those gently inflected English ups and downs, a shy Maria who seems to me beautiful but considers herself “at best a near-miss,” a Maria I love more each time we meet to speak, until at last the end is ordained and I go to meet my brother's fate. And whether in the service of flagrant unreality, who will ever know?

“Your beauty is dazzling.” “No,” she says. “It's dazzled me.” “It can't, really.” “It does.” “I don't have admirers anymore, you know.” “How can that be?” I ask. “Must you believe that all your women are beautiful?” “You are.” “No, no. You're just overwrought.” Even more fencing when I tell her I love her. “Stop saying that,” she says. “Why?” “It's too alarming. And probably it's not true.” “You think I'm deliberately deceiving you?” “It's not me you've deceived. I think you're lonely. I think you're unhappy. You're not in love. You're desperate and want a miracle to happen.” “And you?” I say. “Don't ask questions like that.” “Why won't you ever call me by my name?” I ask. “Because,” she says, “I talk in my sleep.” “What are you doing with me?” I ask her, “—would you prefer not to have to come here?” “‘Have to'? I don't have to. I'll carry on as I have.” “But you didn't expect after the rush I gave you, for things to develop like this. Right now we should be in a torrid embrace.” “There are no shoulds. I expect things to go in all kinds of ways. They usually do. I don't have job-lot expectations.” “Well, you have the right expectations at twenty-seven and I have the wrong ones at forty-four. I
want
you.” I have only my shirt off while she lies enticingly unclothed on the bed. When the nanny takes the child out in the stroller, and Maria comes down in the elevator to see me, this is the scene that I sometimes ask her to play. I tell my temptress that her breasts are beautiful, and she replies, “You're flattering me again. They were all right before the baby, but no, not now.” Invariably she asks if I really want to be doing this, and invariably I don't know. It's true that bringing her to a climax while dressed in my trousers doesn't much alleviate my longing—better than nothing on some afternoons, but on others far worse. The fact is that though we may sneak around the brownstone like a pair of sex criminals, most of our time is passed in my study, where I light a fire and we sit and talk. We drink coffee, we listen to music, and we talk. We never stop talking. How many hundreds of hours of talk will it take to inure us to what's missing? I expose myself to her voice as though it were her body, draining from it my every drop of sensual satisfaction. There's to be no exquisite pleasure here that cannot be derived from words. My carnality is now
really
a fiction and, revenge of revenge, language and only language must provide the means for the release of everything. Maria's voice, her talking tongue, is the sole erotic implement. The one-sidedness of our affair is excruciating.