“Not possible. Not possible in any way.”
“Here’s a better suggestion, then. Instead of replacing it with something imaginary, do yourself the biggest favor of your life and just lop off the chapter entirely.”
“Publish the book without its ending.”
“Yes, incomplete, like me. Deformed can be effectual too, in its own unsightly way.”
“Don’t include what I went specifically to Athens to get.”
“Why do you persist in maintaining that you undertook this operation as a writer only, when in your heart you know as well as I now do, having only recently enjoyed all your books, that you undertook and carried it out as a loyal Jew? Why are you so determined to deny the Jewish patriotism, you in whom I realize, from your writings, the Jew is lodged like nothing else except, perhaps, for the male libido? Why camouflage your Jewish motives like this, when you are in fact no less ideologically committed than your fellow patriot Jonathan Pollard was? I, like you, prefer never to do the obvious thing if I can help it, but continuing to pretend that you went to Athens only for the sake of your calling — is this really less compromising to your independence than admitting that you did it because you happen to be Jewish to the core? Being as Jewish as you are is your most secret vice. Any reader of your work knows that. As a Jew you went to Athens and as a Jew you will suppress this chapter. The Jews have suppressed plenty for you. Even you’ll admit that.”
“Yes? Have they? Suppressed what?”
“The very strong desire to pick up a stick and knock your teeth down your throat. Yet in forty years nobody’s done it. Because they are Jews and you are a writer, they give you prizes and honorary degrees instead. Not exactly how his kind have rewarded Rushdie. Just who would you be without the Jews? What would you be without the Jews? All your writing you owe to them, including even that book about baseball and the wandering team without a home. Jewishness is the problem they have set for you — without the Jews driving you crazy with that problem there would be no writer at all. Show some gratitude. You’re almost sixty — best to give while your hand is still warm. I remind you that tithing was once a widespread custom among the Jews as well as the Christians. One tenth of their earnings to support their religion. Can you not cede to the Jews, who have given you everything, one eleventh of this book? A mere one fiftieth, probably, of one percent of all the pages you have ever published, thanks to them? Cede to them chapter 11 and then go overboard and, whether it is true or not, call what remains a work of art. When the newspapers ask, tell them, ‘Smilesburger? That blabbering cripple with the comical accent an Israeli intelligence officer? Figment of my fecund imagination. Moishe Pipik? Wanda Jane? Fooled you again. Could such walking dreams as those two have possibly crossed anyone’s path? Hallucinatory projections, pure delirium — that’s the book’s whole point.’ Say something to them along these lines and you will save yourself a lot of tsuras. I leave the exact wording to you.”
“Yes, Pipik too? Are you finally answering me about who hired Pipik? Are you telling me that Pipik is a product of your fecund imagination? Why? Why? I cannot understand why. To get me to Israel? But I was already coming to Israel to see Aharon Appelfeld. To lure me into conversation with George? But I already knew George. To get me to the Demjanjuk trial? You had to know that I’m interested in those things and would have found it on my own. Why did you need him to get me involved? Because of Jinx? You could have gotten another Jinx. What is the reason from your side for constructing this creature? From the point of view of the Mossad, which is an intelligence operation, goal-oriented, why did you produce this Pipik?”
“And if I had a ready answer, could I in good conscience tell it to a writer with a mouth like yours? Accept my explanation and be done with Pipik, please. Pipik is not the product of Zionism. Pipik is not even the product of Diasporism. Pipik is the product of perhaps the most powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is Pipikism, the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything — farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything — our suffering as Jews not excluded. Enough about Pipik. I’m suggesting to you only how to give coherence to what you tell the newspapers. Keep it simple, they’re only journalists. ‘No exceptions, fellas: hypothetical book from beginning to end.’”
“George Ziad included.”
“George you don’t have to worry about. Didn’t his wife write to you? I would have thought, since you were such friends. … Don’t you know? Then I have to shock you. Your PLO handler is dead.”
“Is this so? Is this fact?”
“A horrible fact. Murdered in Ramallah. He was with his son. Five times he was stabbed by masked men. They didn’t touch the boy. About a year ago. Michael and his mother are living again in Boston.”
Free at last in Boston — and now never to be free — of fealty to the father’s quest. One more accursed son. All the wasted passion that will now be Michael’s dilemma for life! “But why?” I asked. “Murdered for what reason?”
“The Israelis say murdered as a collaborator by Palestinians. They murder one another like this every day. The Palestinians say murdered by Israelis — because Israelis are murderers.”
“And what do you say?”
“I say everything. I say maybe he was a collaborator who was murdered for the Israelis by Palestinians who are also collaborators — and then maybe not. To you who have written this book, I say I don’t know. I say the permutations are infinite in a situation like ours, where the object is to create an atmosphere in which no Arab can feel secure as to who is his enemy and who is his friend. Nothing is secure. This is the message to the Arab population in the territories. Of what is going on all around them, they should know very little and get everything wrong. And they do know very little and they do get everything wrong. And if this is the case with those who live there, then it follows that for someone like you, who lives here, you know even less and get even more wrong. That’s why to describe your book, laid in Jerusalem, as a figment of your imagination might not be as misleading as you fear. It might be altogether accurate to call the entire five hundred and forty-seven pages hypothetical formulation. You think I’m such a deceiver, so let me now be cruelly blunt about his book to a writer whose work I otherwise admire. I am not qualified to judge writing in English, though the writing strikes me as excellent. But as for the content — well, in all candor, I read it and I laughed, and not only when I was supposed to. This is not a report of what happened, because, very simply, you haven’t the slightest idea of what happened. You grasp almost nothing of the objective reality. Its meaning evades you completely. I cannot imagine a more innocent version of what was going on and what it signified. I won’t go so far as to say that this is the reality as a ten-year-old might understand it. I prefer to think of it as subjectivism at its most extreme, a vision of things so specific to the mind of the observer that to publish it as anything other than fiction would be the biggest lie of all. Call it an artistic creation and you will only be calling it what it more or less is anyway.”
We had finished eating a good twenty minutes earlier and the waiter had removed all the dishes except our coffee cups, which he’d already been back to refill several times. I had till then been oblivious to everything but the conversation and only now saw that customers were beginning to drift in for lunch and that among them were my friend Ted Solotaroff and his son Ivan, who were at a table up by the window and hadn’t yet noticed me. Of course I’d known that I wasn’t meeting Smilesburger in the subterranean parking garage where Woodward and Bernstein used to go to commune with Deep Throat, but still, at the sudden sight of someone here I knew, my heart thumped and I felt like a married man who, spotted at a restaurant in ardent conversation with an illicit lover, quickly begins to calculate how best to introduce her.