“You too,” I said.
He clapped his hands together with relish. “Retired,” he replied. “Eighteen months ago, freed of it all, of everything vile and sinister. Deceptions. Disinformation. Fakery. ‘Our revels now are ended, … melted into air, into thin air.’”
This was strange news in the light of why we were meeting, and I wondered if he wasn’t simply attempting to gain his customary inquisitorial upper hand here at the very outset, by misleading me once again, this time, for a change, by encouraging me to believe that my situation was in no way threatening and that I couldn’t possibly be shanghaied into anything but a game of checkers by a happy-go-lucky senior citizen like him, a pensioner wittily quoting Prospero, wandless old Prospero, bereft of magical power and casting a gentle sunset glow over a career of godlike treachery. Of course, I told myself, there’s no apartment just around the corner where he’s staying with a daughter-in-law who’d spotted me eating here before; and the chocolaty tan that had led to a dramatic improvement of his skin condition and that gave an embalmed-looking glow of life to that heavily lined, cadaverous face stemmed, more than likely, from a round of ultraviolet therapy administered by a dermatologist rather than from retirement to the Negev. But the story I got was that, in a desert development community, he and his wife were now happily gardening together only a mile down the road from where his daughter, her husband, and their three adolescent children had been living since the son-in-law had moved his textile business to Beersheba. The decision to fly to America to see me, and, while here, to spend a few days with his two American grandchildren, had been made wholly on his own. My manuscript had been forwarded to him from his old office, where he hadn’t set foot since his retirement; as far as he could tell, no one had opened the sealed envelope and read the manuscript, although it wouldn’t be difficult for either of us, he said, to imagine the response there if anyone had.
“Same as yours,” I offered.
“No. Not so considered as mine.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that. And nothing they can do about it.”
“And, on your part, no responsibility.”
“Look, I’ve been around this track as a writer before. My failed ‘responsibility’ has been the leitmotif of my career with the Jews. We signed no contract. I made no promises. I performed a service for you — I believe I performed it adequately.”
“More than adequately. Your modesty is glaring. You performed it expertly. It’s one thing to be an extremist with your mouth. And even that is risky for writers. To then go and do what you did — there was nothing in your life to prepare you for this, nothing. I knew you could think. I knew you could write. I knew you could do things in your head. I didn’t know you could do something as large in reality. I don’t imagine that you knew it either. Of course you feel proud of your accomplishment. Of course you want to broadcast your daring to the whole world. I would too if I were you.”
When I looked up at the young waiter who was pouring coffee into our cups, I saw, as did Smilesburger, that he was either Indian or Pakistani.
After he moved off, having left behind our menus, Smilesburger asked, “Who will fall captive to whom in this city? The Indian to the Jew, the Jew to the Indian, or both to the Latino? Yesterday I made my way to Seventy-second Street. All along Broadway blacks eating bagels baked by Puerto Ricans, sold by Koreans. … You know the old joke about a Jewish restaurant like this one?”
“Do I? Probably.”
“About the Chinese waiter in the Jewish restaurant. Who speaks perfect Yiddish.”
“I was sufficiently entertained in Jerusalem with the Chofetz Chaim — you don’t have to tell me Jewish jokes in New York. We’re talking about my book. Nothing was said beforehand, not one word, about what I might or might not write afterward. You yourself drew my attention to the professional possibilities the operation offered. As an enticement, if you recall. ‘I see quite a book coming out of this,’ you told me. An even better book if I went on to Athens for you than if I didn’t. And that was before the book had even entered my mind.”
“Hard to believe,” he responded mildly, “but if you say so.”
“It was what you said that put it into my mind. And now that I’ve written that book you’ve changed your mind and decided that what would truly make it a better book, for your purposes if not mine, would be if I were to leave Athens out entirely.”
“I haven’t said that or anything like it.”
“Mr. Smilesburger, there’s no advantage to be gained by the old- geezer act.”
“Well” — shrugging his shoulders, grinning, offering it for whatever an old geezer’s opinion was worth — “if you fictionalized a little, well, no, I suppose it might not hurt.”
“But it’s not a book of fiction. And ‘a little’ fictionalization isn’t what you’re talking about. You want me to invent another operation entirely.”
“I want?” he said. “I want only what is best for you.”
The Indian waiter was back and waiting to take the order.
“What do you eat here?” Smilesburger asked me. “What do you like?” So insipid a man in retirement that he wouldn’t dare order without my help.
“The chopped-herring salad on a lightly toasted onion bagel,” I said to the waiter. “Tomato on the side. And bring me a glass of orange juice.”
“Me too,” said Smilesburger. “The same exactly.”
“You are here,” I said to Smilesburger, “to give me a hundred other ideas, just as good and just as true to life. You can find me a story even more wonderful than this one. Together we can come up with something even more exciting and interesting for my readers than what happened to have happened that weekend in Athens. Only I don’t want something else. Is that clear?”
“Of course you don’t. This is the richest material you have ever gotten firsthand. You couldn’t be clearer or more disagreeable.”
“Good,” I said. “I went where I went, did what I did, met whom I met, saw what I saw, learned what I learned — and nothing that occurred in Athens, absolutely nothing, is interchangeable with something else. The implications of these events are intrinsic to these events and to none other.”
“Makes sense.”
“I didn’t go looking for this job. This job came looking for me, and with a vengeance. I have adhered to every condition agreed on between us, including sending a copy of the manuscript to you well before publication. In fact, you’re the first person to have read it. Nothing was forcing me to do this. I am back in America. I’m no longer recovering from that Halcion madness. This is the fourth book I’ve written since then. I’m myself again, solidly back on my own ground. Yet I did do it: you asked to see it, and you’ve seen it.”
“And it was a good idea to show it. Better me now than someone less well disposed to you later.”
“Yes? What are you trying to tell me? Will the Mossad put a contract out on me the way the Ayatollah did with Rushdie?”
“I can only tell you that this last chapter will not go unnoticed.”
“Well, if anyone should come complaining to me, I’ll direct them to your garden in the Negev.”
“It won’t help. They’ll assume that, no matter what ‘enticement’ I offered back then, no matter how irresistible an adventure it may be for you to write about and to crow about, you should know by now how detrimental your publishing this could be to the interests of the state. They’ll maintain that confidence was placed in your loyalty and that with this chapter you have betrayed that confidence.”