I was laughing the way people cry at funerals in the countries where they let go and really have at it. They rend their clothes. They rake their faces with their nails. They howl. They swoon. They faint. They grab at the coffin with their twisted hands and fling themselves shrieking into the hole. Well, this is how I was laughing, if you can picture it. To judge from Pipik’s face — our face! — it was something to behold. Why isn’t God Aristophanes? Would we be any further from the truth?
“Surrender yourself to what is real,” were my first words to him when I could talk again. “I speak from experience — surrender to reality, Pipik. There’s nothing in the world quite like it.”
I suppose I should have laughed even more uproariously at what happened next; as a newly anointed convert to the Old Comedy, I should have bounded to my feet, cried aloud, “Hallelujah!” and sung the praises of He Who Created Us, He Who Formed Us from the Mud, the One and Only Comic Almighty, OUR SOVEREIGN REDEEMER, ARISTOPHANES, but for reasons all too profane (total mental paralysis) I could only dumbly gape at the sight of nothing less than the highly entertaining Aristophanic erection that Pipik had produced, as though it were a rabbit, from his fly, an oversized pole right out of Lysistrata that, to my further astonishment, he proceeded to crank in a rotary motion, to position, with one hand cupped over the knobby doll-like head, as if he were moving the floor shift on a prewar car. Then he was lunging with it across the bed.
“There’s reality. Like a rock!”
He was ridiculously light, as though the disease had eaten through his bones, as though inside there was nothing left of him and he was as hollow as Mortimer Snerd. I caught hold of his arm just as he landed, and with a blow between his shoulder blades and another, nastier, at the base of the spine, I spun him out the door (who’d opened it?) and shoved him ass-first into the corridor. Then there was the split second in which, across the threshold, each of us was frozen in place by the reflection of the malformed mistake that was the other. Then the door seemed to spring to life again to assist me — the door was closed and locked but afterward I could have sworn I’d had as little to do with its shutting as with its opening.
“My shoes!”
He was screaming for his shoes just as my phone began to ring. So — we were not alone, this Arab hotel in Arab East Jerusalem had not been emptied of Demjanjuk’s son and Demjanjuk’s lawyers, the place had not been evacuated of all its guests and sealed off by the Jewish authorities so that this struggle for supremacy between Roth and “Roth” could rage on undisturbed until the cataclysmic end — no, a complaint at long last from the outer world about the intemperate acting out of this primordial dream.
His shoes were beside the bed, cordovans with the strap that pulls across the instep, Brooks Brothers shoes of the kind I’d been wearing since I’d first admired them on the feet of a dapperly Princetonian Shakespeare professor at Bucknell. I bent to pick up Pipik’s shoes and saw that, along the back lateral curve, the heels were sharply worn away exactly as were the heels of the pair I had on. I looked at mine, at his, and then opened and shut the door so quickly that all I caught sight of as I hurled his cordovans into the corridor was the part in his hair. I saw the part as he rushed the door, and when the door was locked again I realized that it was on the opposite side from my own. I reached a hand up to my scalp to be certain. He’d modeled himself on my photograph! Then this, I said to myself, is most definitely someone else, and, depleted beyond depletion, I dropped with my arms outspread on the disheveled bed from which he and his erection had just arisen. That man is not me! I am here and I am whole and part what hair I still possess on the right side. Yet in spite of this, and of differences even more telling — our central nervous systems, for example — he’s going to proceed down the stairs and out of the hotel like that, he’s going to parade through the lobby like that, he’s going to walk across Jerusalem like that, and when the police finally run him down and go to take him in for indecent exposure, he’s going to tell them what he tells them all — “I’m in the book. Philip Roth. Come and get me.”
“My glasses!”
The glasses I found right there beside me on the bed. I snapped them in two and hurled the pieces against the wall. Let him be blind!
“They’re broken! Go!”
My phone continued ringing and I was no longer laughing like a good Aristophanian but quivering with irreligious, unenlightened rage.
I picked up the phone and said nothing.
“Philip Roth?”
“Not here.”
“Philip Roth, where was God between 1939 and 1945? I’m sure He was at the Creation. I’m sure He was at Mount Sinai with Moses. My problem is where He was between 1939 and 1945. That was a dereliction of duty for which even He, especially He, cannot ever be forgiven.”
I was being addressed in a thick, grave Old Country accent, a hoarse, rough, emphysemic voice that sounded as though it originated in something massively debilitated.
Meanwhile someone had struck up a light, rhythmic knuckle rapping on my door. Shave and a haircut … two bits. Could it be Pipik on the phone if it was also Pipik at the door? How many of him were there?
“Who is this?” I asked into the phone.
“I spit on this God who was on vacation from 1939 to 1945!”
I hung up.
Shave and a haircut … two bits.
I waited and waited but the rapping would not go away.
“Who is that?” I finally whispered, but so softly that I thought I might not even be heard. I could almost believe I was smart enough not to be asking.
The whisper back seemed to waft through the keyhole, carried on a wire-thin current of cool air. “Want me to blow you?”
“Go away!”
“I’ll blow both of you.”
I am looking down on an open-air hospital ward or public clinic that is set out on a vast playing field that reminds me of School Stadium on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark, where Newark’s rivalrous high schools — the Italian high school, the Irish high school, the Jewish high school, the Negro high school — played football doubleheaders when I was a boy. But this arena is ten times the size of our stadium and the crowd is as huge as the crowd at a bowl game, tens upon tens of thousands of excited fans, snugly layered with clothing and warming their dark insides with steaming containers of coffee. White pennants wave everywhere, rhythmically the crowd takes up the chant, “Give me an M! Give me an E! Give me a T! Give me an E!” while down on the field white-clad doctors glide agilely about in clinical silence — I am able to see through my binoculars their serious, dedicated faces and the faces, too, of those who lie still as stone, each hooked up to an IV drip, their souls draining into the body on the next gurney. And what is horrifying is that the face of every one of them, even of the women and of the little children, is the face of Ivan of Treblinka. From the stands, the cheering fans can see nothing but the balloon of a big, stupid, friendly face swelling out of each of the bodies strapped to the gurneys, but with my binoculars I see concentrated in that emerging face everything in humanity that there is to hate. Yet the electrified crowd seethes with hope. “All will be different from now on! Everybody will be nice from now on! Everybody will belong to a church like Mr. Demjanjuk! Everybody will raise a garden like Mr. Demjanjuk! Everybody will work hard and come home at night to a wonderful family like Mr. Demjanjuk!” I alone have binoculars and am witness to the unfolding catastrophe. “That is Ivan!” But nobody can hear me above the hurrahs and the exuberant cheering. “Give me an O! Give me an S!” I am still shouting that it is Ivan, Ivan from Treblinka, when they pluck me lightly out of my seat and, rolling me down atop the soft tassels of the white woolen caps worn by all the fans, pass my body (swathed now in a white pennant bearing a big blue “M”) over a low brick wall that has painted across it “The Memory Barrier. Players Only,” and into the arms of two waiting doctors, who strap me tightly to a gurney of my own and wheel me out to midfield just as the band strikes up a quick-time march. When the IV needle pierces my wrist, I hear the mighty roar that precedes the big game. “Who’s playing?” I ask the nurse in the white uniform who attends me. She is Jinx, Jinx Possesski. She pats my hand and whispers, “University of Metempsychosis.” I begin to scream, “I don’t want to play!” but Jinx smiles reassuringly and says, “You must — you’re the starting halfback.”