“Your contradictions,” I said softly to Smilesburger, “don’t add up to a convincing argument, but then, with me, you don’t believe you need any argument. You’re counting on my secret vice to prevail. The rest is an entertainment, amusing rhetoric, words as bamboozlement, your technique here as it was there. Do you even bother to keep track of your barrage? On the one hand, with this book — the whole of it now, not merely the final chapter — I am, in your certifiably unparanoid view, serving up to the enemy information that could jeopardize the security of your agents and their contacts, information that, from the sound of it, could lay the state of Israel open to God only knows what kind of disaster and compromise the welfare and security of the Jewish people for centuries to come. On the other hand, the book presents such a warped and ignorant misrepresentation of objective reality that to save my literary reputation and protect myself against the ridicule of all the clear-eyed empiricists, or from punishments that you intimate might be far, far worse, I ought to recognize this thing for what it is and publish Operation Shylock as — as what? Subtitled ‘A Fable’?”
“Excellent idea. A subjectivist fable. That solves everything.”
“Except the problem of accuracy.”
“But how could you know that?”
“You mean chained to the wall of my subjectivity and seeing only my shadow? Look, this is all nonsense.” I raised my arm to signal to the waiter for our check and unintentionally caught Ivan Solotaroff’s eye as well. I’d known Ivan since he was an infant back in Chicago in the mid-fifties, when the late George Ziad was there studying Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard and Ivan’s father and I were bristling graduate students teaching freshman composition together at the university. Ivan waved back, pointed out to Ted where I was sitting, and Ted turned and gave a shrug that indicated there could be no place on earth more appropriate than here for us to have run into each other after all our months of trying in vain to arrange to get together for a meal. I realized then the unequivocal way in which to introduce Smilesburger, and this made my heart thump again, only now in triumph.
“Let’s cut it short,” I said to Smilesburger when the check was placed on the table. “I cannot know things-in-themselves, but you can. I cannot transcend myself, but you can. I cannot exist apart from myself, but you can. I know nothing beyond my own existence and my own ideas, my mind determines entirely how reality appears to me, but for you the mind works differently. You know the world as it really is, and I know it only as it appears. Your argument is kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and is too absurd even to oppose.”
“You refuse absolutely.”
“Of course I do.”
“You’ll neither describe your book as what it is not nor censor out what they’re sure not to like.”
“How could I?”
“And if I were to rise above kiddie philosophy and dime-store psychology and invoke the wisdom of the Chofetz Chaim? ‘Grant me that I should say nothing unnecessary. …’ Would I be wasting my breath if, as a final plea, I reminded you of the laws of loshon hora?”
“It would not even help to quote Scripture.”
“Everything must be undertaken alone, out of personal conviction. You’re that sure of yourself. You’re that convinced that only you are right.”
“On this matter? Why not?”
“And the consequences of proceeding uncompromisingly, independent of every judgment but your own — to these consequences you are indifferent?”
“Don’t I have to be?”
“Well,” he said, while I snapped up the check before he could take it and compromisingly charge breakfast to the Mossad, “then that’s that. Too bad.”
Here he turned to the crutches that were balanced behind him on the coatrack. I came around to assist him to his feet, but he was already standing. The disappointment in his face, when his eyes engaged mine, looked as though it couldn’t possibly have been manufactured to deceive. And must there not be a point, even in him, where manipulation stops? It caused a soundless but not inconsiderable emotional upheaval in me to think that he might actually have shed his disguises and come here out of a genuine concern for my welfare, determined to spare me any further misfortune. But even if that was so, was it any reason to cave in and voluntarily give them a pound of my flesh?
“You’ve come a long way from that broken man whom you describe as yourself in the first chapter of this book.” He had somehow gathered up his attaché case along with the crutches and clutched the handle round with what I noticed, for the very first time, were the powerful, tiny, tufted fingers of a primate somewhat down the scale from man, something that could swing through a jungle by its prehensile tail in the time that it would take Smilesburger to get from our table to the street. I assumed that in the attaché case was my manuscript. “All that uncertainty, all that fear and discomposure — it all seems safely behind you now. You are impermeable,” he said. “Mazel tov.”
“For now,” I replied, “for now. Nothing is secure. Man the pillar of instability. Isn’t that the message? The unsureness of everything.”
“The message of your book? I wouldn’t say so. It’s a happy book, as I read it. Happiness radiates from it. There are all kinds of ordeals and trials but it’s about someone who is recovering. There’s so much élan and energy in his encounters with the people he meets along the way that anytime he feels his recovery is slipping and that thing is coming over him again, why, he rights himself and comes through unscathed. It’s a comedy in the classic sense. He comes through it all unscathed.”
“Only up to this point, however.”
“That too is true,” said Smilesburger, nodding sadly.
“But what I meant by ‘the unsureness of everything’ was the message of your work. I meant the inculcation of pervasive uncertainty.”
“That? But that’s a permanent, irrevocable crisis that comes with living, wouldn’t you say?”
This is the Jewish handler who handles me. I could have done worse, I thought. Pollard did. Yes, Smilesburger is my kind of Jew, he is what “Jew” is to me, the best of it to me. Worldly negativity. Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. The this-worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. The malice. The comedy. The endurance. The acting. The injury. The impairment.
I followed behind him until I saw Ted rise to say hello. “Mr. Smilesburger,” I said, “one minute. I want you to meet Mr. Solotaroff, the editor and writer. And this is Ivan Solotaroff. Ivan’s a journalist. Mr. Smilesburger pretends to be a gardener in the desert these days, fulfilling the commandments of our Lord. In fact, he’s an Israeli spy- master, the very handler who handles me. If there is an inmost room in Israel where somebody is able to say, ‘Here lies our advantage,’ then it’s the joy of the Smilesburgers to obtain it. Israel’s enemies would tell you that he is, institutionally, simply the sharp end of national and patriotic and ethnic psychosis. I would say, from my experience, that if there is such a thing in that frenetic state as a central will, it appears to me to be invested in him. He is, to be sure, as befits his occupation, also an enigma. Is he, for instance, assing around on these crutches? Is he actually a great athlete? This too could be. At any rate, he has treated me to some wonderfully confusing adventures, which you will soon be reading about in my book.”