But when I’d come to the end of the manuscript, I found I had reasons of my own for wanting Smilesburger to take a look at it. For one thing, now that all those years had passed since I’d been of service to him, he might possibly be more forthcoming about the several key factors still mystifying me, particularly the question of Pipik’s identity and his role in all of this, which I remained convinced was more fully documented in Smilesburger’s files than in mine. He could also, if he was willing, correct whatever errors had crept into my depiction of the operation, and, if I could persuade him, he might even tell me a little something about his own history before he’d become Smilesburger for me. But mostly, I wanted him to confirm that what I was reporting as having happened had, in fact, taken place. I had extensive journal notes made at the time to authenticate my story; I had memories that had remained all but indelible; yet, odd as it may strike those who haven’t spent a lifetime writing fiction, when I finished chapter 11 and sat down to reread the entire manuscript, I discovered myself strangely uncertain about the book’s verisimilitude. It wasn’t that, after the fact, I could no longer believe that the unlikely had befallen me as easily as it does anyone else; it was that three decades as a novelist had so accustomed me to imagining whatever obstructed my impeded protagonists — even where raw reality had provided the stimulus — that I began to half believe that even if I had not invented Operation Shylock outright, a novelist’s instincts had grossly overdramatized it. I wanted Smilesburger to dispel my own vague dubiousness by corroborating that I was neither imperfectly remembering what had happened nor taking liberties that falsified the reality.
There was no one other than Smilesburger I could look to for this certification. Aharon had been there at lunch when a semidisguised Smilesburger dropped off his check, but he had otherwise witnessed nothing at first hand. A bit exuberantly, I had recounted to Aharon the details of my first meetings in Jerusalem with Pipik and Jinx, but I’d never told him anything more, and afterward I asked him as a friend to treat confidentially what I’d said and to repeat the stories to no one. I even wondered if, when Aharon came to read Operation Shylock, he might not be tempted to think that what he’d actually seen was all there was and that the rest was only a tale, an elaborately rounded out and coherent scenario I had invented as the setting for a tantalizingly suggestive experience that had amounted, in reality, to absolutely nothing, certainly to nothing coherent. I could easily imagine him believing this, because, as I’ve said, on first reading through the finished manuscript even I had begun to wonder if Pipik in Jerusalem could have been any more slippery than I was being in this book about him — a queer, destabilizing thought for anyone other than a novelist to have, a thought of the kind that, when carried far enough, gives rise to a very tenuous and even tortured moral existence.
Soon enough I found myself wondering if it might be best to present the book not as an autobiographical confession that any number of readers, both hostile and sympathetic, might feel impelled to challenge on the grounds of credibility, not as a story whose very point was its improbable reality, but — claiming myself to have imagined what had been munificently provided, free of charge, by superinventive actuality — as fiction, as a conscious dream contrivance, one whose latent content the author had devised as deliberately as he had the baldly manifest. I could even envision Operation Shylock, misleadingly presented as a novel, being understood by an ingenious few as a chronicle of the Halcion hallucination that, momentarily, even I, during one of the more astounding episodes in Jerusalem, almost supposed it might be.
Why not forget Smilesburger? Inasmuch, I told myself, as his existence is now, by my sovereign decree, no more real than is anything else earnestly attested to here, corroboration by him of the book’s factual basis is no longer possible anyway. Publish the manuscript uncut, uncensored, as it stands, only inserting at the front of the book the standard disclaimer, and you will more than likely have neutralized whatever objections Smilesburger might have wished to raise had he been given access to the manuscript. You will also be sidestepping a confrontation with the Mossad that might not have been to your liking. And, best, you will have spontaneously performed on the body of your book the sacrosanct prank of artistic transubstantiation, the changed elements retaining the appearance of autobiography while acquiring the potentialities of the novel. Less than fifty familiar words is all it takes for all your problems to be solved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Yes, those three formulaic sentences placed at the front of the book and I’d not only satisfy Smilesburger but give it to Pipik once and for all. Just wait till that thief opens this book to find that I’ve stolen his act! No revenge could possibly be more sadistically apt! Providing, of course, that Pipik was alive and able to savor sufficiently — and to suffer painfully — how I had swallowed him whole. …
I had no idea what had become of Pipik, and my never having heard from or about him again after those few days in Jerusalem made me wonder if perhaps he had even died. Intermittently I tried to convince myself, on the basis of no evidence other than his absence, that he had indeed been felled by the cancer. I even developed a scenario of the circumstances in which his life had ended that was intended to parallel the flagrantly pathological course of what I surmised about how it had been lived. I pointedly set myself to working up the kind of veiled homicidal daydream that occurs often enough in angry people but that’s generally too blatantly suffused by wishful thinking to afford the assurance that I was groping for. I needed a demise for him neither more nor less incredible than everything else about the lie that he was, needed it so as to proceed as if I had been delivered from his interference for good and it was safe to write truthfully of what had happened, without my having to fear that publishing my book would provoke a visitation a lot more terrible for me than his aborted Jerusalem debut.
I came up with this. I imagined a letter from Jinx turning up in my mailbox, written in a hand so minuscule that I could only decipher it with the aid of the magnifying lens from my two-volume set of the OED. The letter, some seven pages long, had the look of a document smuggled out of a prison, while the calligraphy itself suggested the art of the lacemaker or the microsurgeon. At first glance I found it impossible to attribute this letter to a woman as robustly formed and sensuously supple as Pipik’s buxom Wanda Jane, who had claimed, moreover, to be on such bad terms with the alphabet. How could this exquisite stitching be her handiwork? It wasn’t until I remembered the hippie waif who’d found Jesus, the servile believer whose comfort had come from telling herself, “I’m worthless, I’m nothing, God is everything,” that I could even begin to move beyond my initial incredulity to query the likelihood of the narrative so peepingly revealed there.