“I am not now, nor was I ever, an employee of yours.”
“Theirs.”
“I was offered no compensation, and I asked for none.”
“No more or less than Jews all around the world who volunteer their services where their expertise can make a difference. Diaspora Jews constitute a pool of foreign nationals such as no other intelligence agency in the world can call on for loyal service. This is an immeasurable asset. The security demands of this tiny state are so great that, without these Jews to help, it would be in a very bad way. People who do work of the kind you did find compensation not in financial payment and not in exploiting their knowledge elsewhere for personal gain but in fostering the security and welfare of the Jewish state. They find their compensation, all of it, in having fulfilled a Jewish duty.”
“Well, I didn’t see it that way then and I don’t now.”
Here our food arrived, and for the next few minutes, as we began to eat, Smilesburger pedantically discussed the ingredients of his late beloved mother’s chopped herring with the young Indian waiter: her proportion of herring to vinegar, vinegar to sugar, chopped egg to chopped onion, etc. “This meets the highest specifications for chopped herring,” he told him. To me he said, “You didn’t give me a bum steer.”
“Why would I?”
“Because I don’t think you’ve come to like me as much as I’ve come to like you.”
“I probably have,” I replied. “As much exactly.”
“At what point in the life of a negative cynic does this yearning for the flavors of innocent childhood reassert itself? And may I tell the joke, now that the sugared herring is running in your blood? A man comes into a Jewish restaurant like this one. He sits at a table and picks up the menu and he looks it over and decides what he’s going to eat and when he looks up again there is the waiter and he’s Chinese. The waiter says, ‘vos vilt ihr essen?’ In perfect Yiddish, the Chinese waiter asks him, ‘What do you want to eat?’ The customer is astonished but he goes ahead and orders and, with each course that arrives, the Chinese waiter says here is your this and I hope you enjoyed that, and all of it in perfect Yiddish. When the meal’s over, the customer picks up the check and goes to the cash register, where the owner is sitting, exactly as that heavyset fellow in the apron is sitting at the register over there. In a funny accent much like my own, the owner says to the customer, ‘Everything was all right? Everything was okay?’ And the customer is ecstatic. ‘It was perfect, ’he tells him, ‘everything was great. And the waiter — this is the most amazing thing — the waiter is Chinese and yet he speaks absolutely perfect Yiddish.’ ‘Shah, shhh,’ says the owner, ‘not so loud — he thinks he’s learning English.’”
I began to laugh, and he said, smiling, “Never heard that before?”
“You would think by now I’d have heard all the jokes there are about Jews and Chinese waiters, but no, not that one.”
“And it’s an old one.”
“I never heard it.”
I wondered while we ate in silence if there could be any truth in this man at all, if anything could exist more passionately in him than did the instinct for maneuver, contrivance, and manipulation. Pipik should have studied under him. Maybe he had.
“Tell me,” I suddenly said. “Who hired Moishe Pipik? It’s time I was told.”
“That’s paranoia asking, if I may say so, and not you — the organizing preconception of the shallow mind faced with chaotic phenomena, the unthinking man’s intellectual life, and the everyday occupational hazard of our work. It’s a paranoid universe but don’t overdo it. Who hired Pipik? Life hired Pipik. If all the intelligence agencies in the world were abolished overnight, there would still be Pipiks aplenty to complicate and wreck people’s orderly lives. Self- employed, nonessential nudniks whose purpose is simply balagan, meaningless mayhem, a mess, are probably rooted more deeply in reality than are those who are only dedicated, as you and I are, to coherent, essential, and lofty goals. Let’s not waste any more frenzied dreaming on the mystery of irrationality. It needs no explanation. There is something frighteningly absent from life. One gets from someone like your Moishe Pipik a faint idea of all that’s missing. This revelation one must learn to endure without venerating it with fantasy. Let us move on. Let us be serious. Listen to me. I am here at my own expense. I am here, on my own, as a friend. I am here because of you. You may not feel responsible to me, but I happen to feel responsible to you. I am responsible to you. Jonathan Pollard will never forgive his handlers for abandoning him in his hour of need. When the FBI closed in on Pollard, Mr. Yagur and Mr. Eitan left him utterly on his own to fend for himself. So did Mr. Peres and Mr. Shamir. They did not, in Pollard’s words, ‘take the minimum precaution with my personal security,’ and now Pollard is incarcerated for life in the worst maximum-security prison in America.”
“The cases are somewhat dissimilar.”
“And that’s what I’m pointing out. I recruited you, perhaps even with a false enticement, and now I will do everything to prevent your exposing yourself to the difficulties that the publication of this last chapter could cause for a very long time to come.”
“Be explicit.”
“I can’t be explicit, because I am no longer a member of the club. I only can tell you, from past experience, that when someone causes the kind of consternation that is going to be caused by publishing this chapter as it now stands, indifference is never the result. If anyone should think that you have jeopardized the security of a single agent, a single contact —”
“In short, I am being threatened by you.”
“A retired functionary like me is in no position to threaten anyone. Don’t mistake a warning for a threat. I came to New York because I couldn’t possibly have communicated to you on the phone or through the mail the seriousness of your indiscretion. Please listen to me. In the Negev now, I have begun to catch up on my reading after many years. I started out by reading all of your books. Even the book about baseball, which, you have to understand, for someone of my background was a bit like reading Finnegans Wake.”
“You wanted to see if I was worth saving.”
“No, I wanted to have a good time. And I did. I like you, Philip, whether you believe me or not. First through our work together and then through your books, I have come to have considerable respect for you. Even, quite unprofessionally, something like familial affection. You are a fine man, and I don’t wish to see you being harmed by those who will want to discredit you and to smear your name or perhaps to do even worse.”
“Well, you still give a beguiling performance, retired or not. You are a highly entertaining deceiver altogether. But I don’t think that it’s a sense of responsibility to me that’s operating here. You have come on behalf of your people to intimidate me into shutting my mouth.”
“I come quite on my own, at substantial personal expense actually, to ask you, for your own good, here at the end of this book, to do nothing more than you have been doing as a writer all your life. A little imagination, please — it won’t kill you. To the contrary.”
“If I were to do as you ask, the whole book would be specious. Calling fiction fact would undermine everything.”
“Then call it fiction instead. Append a note: ‘I made this up.’ Then you will be guilty of betraying no one — not yourself, your readers, or those whom, so far, you have served faultlessly.”