The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  She presented herself as a freedom fighter for the wretched: if not of the world, at least of North London; and her weapon was the law. “No one is above the law,” she would harangue some cowering politician in a TV studio, “because the law is made by Parliament and Parliament is the voice of the people.” She was the people’s tribune, thought Russell in admiration as he crumpled further into the sofa watching these performances; he was all too aware (not least because she occasionally told him) that, in the war in which they were both fighting, she was the active combat unit while he was merely an armchair general.

  He was, however, proud to be her husband, enjoying the reflected glory in which he could bathe as they both systematically worked the room in the fashionable salons to which her stellar reputation gave them automatic access. They complemented each other, he thought; he found her slightly terrifying and ultimately a mystery, but there was no doubt that they made a terrific team.

  So it came as a shock when one day she said she wanted out. To be more precise, she wanted him out. He must have realized, she said, that things just weren’t working between them anymore. No, there wasn’t anyone else, she said. She just felt stifled. She needed more personal space.

  “I’ve never stopped you from doing anything,” he said, winded.

  She sighed.

  “I’m shocked when I look back and realize how much of myself I have had to suppress in our relationship,” she said, nodding her head slowly to indicate the significance of the discovery.

  Something rose up inside him in revolt.

  “And what about Rosa? Have you thought about what this will do to her?”

  “Just too boring if you’re going to get emotional. We need to discuss this reasonably, as adults.”

  “What, you’re reasonably throwing me out?”

  “Well let’s face it, Russell, you wouldn’t have had any of this if it hadn’t been for me.”

  She swept her arm in the direction of the rest of the house.

  “I just can’t believe this. Don’t you feel anything for me anymore?” he said. The pain was unbearable.

  She scuffed her toe uncomfortably against the parquet floor. “Look, I’m not blaming you. I’m just in a different place from you, that’s all. Shit happens,” she shrugged.

  So she shrugged him off, and he found himself in a different place. She never made it difficult for him to see Rosa; on the contrary, periodically he would open his door to find the child deposited there like a parcel because Alice had to fly abroad as a matter of urgency to lecture on human rights.

  She hadn’t been altogether upfront about one thing, though. A few days after he moved out, he read in The Guardian diary that she and an actor with floppy hair and a louche reputation were now an item. Too late, he realized that his real crime had been to be dull.

  Russell and Rosa chewed their way through the pizza.

  “How’s school?”

  “It sucks. I wanna leave. The teachers treat you like shit. All we do is play games and tick stupid boxes. They treat us all as if we’re thick.”

  “We got you a tutor, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, but she’s boring. It’s like jumping through hoops. Just to get through GCSEs.”

  “Well, you’ve got to pass your exams if you’re going to university.”

  “But university is crap. You say so yourself. All those thickos who’re ‘only there to get them off the unemployment register’—that TV show you did, remember?”

  “Come on, you’d go to a…”

  He stopped himself. Rosa narrowed her eyes and sat up.

  “You were gonna say ‘real university’, weren’t you. Such as Oxford, I suppose, just like you went to. God, Dad, what a fucking snob.”

  “But you need qualifications to get a good job, to fulfill yourself. And don’t swear.”

  “ ’Spointless. All jobs are just a grind. Most people, doctors or lawyers or…or whatever, like they’re all just trying to get through the day, get through to the weekend, have a laugh just like everyone else.”

  He couldn’t resist it. “Like your mother?”

  He regretted the words as they left his mouth. She turned her face away from him, but not before he saw the look of…disgust, he thought; but afterwards, turning it over in his mind, he decided it was pain.

  “Don’t want a career,” she mumbled. “Just want a job, like in a bank, or something.”

  It turned out that Sam had been as good as her word, and Rosa had indeed been doing some babysitting for the rabbi’s children.

  “Rabbi Daniel’s going to see the head to see if he can stop these attacks on the Jewish kids at school,” she said as she demolished the remains of the tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice-cream that she had dug out from where it had become jammed into a small glacier of nameless brown gunge at the back of the freezer compartment.

  “How’s he going to do that, then?”

  “He wants to talk to the school about what being Jewish means.”

  Good luck with that, thought Russell.

  “Don’t you think it’s terrible that these kids’re getting beaten up? In broad daylight too.”

  “Well of course all violence is wrong…but it’s more important to understand this kind of behavior than just mindlessly condemn it.”

  She stared at him, a spoonful of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice-cream suspended halfway to her mouth.

  “You kidding me or something? This is, you know, like real antisemitism, Dad!”

  He winced. That word. Uttered only by the truly paranoid, the undereducated and the suburban. So simplistic. So overused, as if the entire world was against them. Of course Waxman used it all the time, totally failing to understand that it was so very stupid to use it at all because it was the one thing you just never, ever accused someone of, because it was obviously so insulting to them, unless of course they were right-wing.

  “Were you ever attacked because you were Jewish?”

  He poured milk into his coffee; whitish, curdled lumps immediately formed on the surface. He smelled the milk and gagged before pouring it down the sink. Shit. He desperately wanted some whisky, but thought he’d better not in front of Rosa. He sighed.

  “Loads of people have something horrible done to them—if you’ve got red hair, or speak with the wrong kind of accent. There’s nothing special about attacks on Jews. Blacks and Asians have it much worse.”

  “That’s what mum says. She says the Jews are always whining about the Holocaust, as if they’re the only people in the world who ever suffered. And now they’re doing the same thing to the Palestinians, keeping them locked up like what happened in the Warsaw ghetto.”

  “She…er…um, your mother said that? About doing the same thing? And that comparison with the ghetto?”

  “Yeah. We had like a totally major row about it.”

  He was startled. Reversing the roles of Israel and Nazi Germany was precisely the kind of claim that he knew characterized far-right websites. How could Alice, of all people, possibly be spewing far-right poison?

  Now other memories swam into his consciousness through the sluice that he had kept shut but which Waxman had opened. The playground taunts of “Jew-boy” and “You killed Jesus.” Being called to the front of the class to explain Fagin when they were doing Oliver Twist. The history master describing Disraeli to the class as being “of the Mosaic persuasion” and to the 14-year-old Russell as “one of your brethren.” Being hauled before the headmaster at age 15 for having stood silently during the Lord’s Prayer in assembly because he considered himself to be an atheist, only to be told there was no justification for any Jew not saying the Lord’s Prayer since it did not actually mention Jesus. And that Saturday lunchtime when, as he and his father walked back from the synagogue, a man yelling at them from across the street:

  “Go back wher
e you came from!”

  “Don’t look, keep your head down,” his father had hissed at him as they had hurried away.

  To all such incidents, his mother had merely sighed and then shrugged. “What do such people know? Nothing. Just ignore them. It’s just something we have to put up with.”

  But she closed the curtains when the Sabbath candles were lit so they couldn’t be seen from the street.

  Why, though, brooded Russell, was there always this awful thing, this visceral dislike, which never seemed to have any explanation, nor any end to it, but which they were expected always just to accept as a fact of life? It must be because, he eventually decided, Jews went out of their way to make themselves different from everyone else. This made people suspicious and resentful. And who could blame them? So the way to avoid this dislike was obvious. It was to be the same as everyone else. So simple! And so perverse not to be!

  “I read this book about Anne Frank,” said Rosa. “I’d like to go and see her house in Amsterdam where they all hid in the secret room.”

  “Our family also had relatives who were murdered by the Nazis,” he said.

  Rosa’s eyes widened.

  “Another thing you didn’t tell me!”

  He had known this, somehow, all his life, although it had never been talked about at home. His father’s family, lost in the hell that had been visited on Poland’s Jews. Who, precisely? Uncles? Cousins? Great-aunts? He didn’t know even that, let alone their names. Jack had never wanted to talk about it, for obvious reasons, and Sylvia had had no interest in drawing attention to the primitive stock from which her husband had sprung.

  But in recent years, he had been proud to feel connected to that great, defining tragedy of the Jewish people. Those Jews who had died in the Holocaust were pure and noble, innocent victims of the monstrosity of fascism. They had never oppressed or killed anyone. Their culture that had been erased, the shtetls and shtiebels of Eastern Europe, could now be viewed through the retrospective soft-focus of history as quaint and picturesque.

  Moreover, since the Nazi genocide had been directed at the Jews as a race rather than as a religion, Russell could safely bypass Moses altogether and feel himself to be linked instead, through his exterminated if unknown relatives, to a persecuted ethnic minority, thus securing him instant access to the protected and coveted status of a Victim Group. Indeed, the Victim Group.

  This status helpfully served as a suit of invincible armor.

  14

  DESPITE HIMSELF, RUSSELL found he was thinking about that Friday night meal at Rabbi Daniel’s house more than he cared to admit. He had to acknowledge that, to his astonishment, he had actually enjoyed it; more than that, he had been touched by it. Something in him had stirred that evening, something that had lain so dormant he had never suspected it was there. When he thought about that evening, he found he was actually smiling.

  What he brooded about most was something that had struck him in that house like a stray shaft of sunlight. It was a quality of what could only be described as innocence.

  There was an openness about Rabbi Daniel and Sam, an artlessness. It was certainly not stupidity—far from it. But their attitude towards the world brought him up short. What they were was out in the open; nothing was hidden. This was the source of their calm, the fact that they were solid and sure inside their own skins. And they displayed the same expectation of others, that they too were assumed to be straightforward and essentially benign.

  What these two radiated, in other words, was trust and hope. They believed the best of other people and of the world, until and unless they had evidence to the contrary. Russell could see why Rosa had in effect fallen in love with them. They made those around them feel better about themselves.

  And Russell found he himself was looking at his own world through different eyes. Suddenly, the people in it looked mean-spirited and dismal. Their carefully affected cynicism, which they adopted reflexively in order to make themselves appear smart and sophisticated, was actually based, he now saw, upon a deeply sour and distrustful view of human nature.

  They instinctively believed not in the good in people but the bad. Accordingly, their habitual position was defensiveness. What he had assumed was sophistication was in fact nothing less than an ingrained belief in the worst about others.

  He thought about himself, about his work, about his life. How callow it all now seemed. He had thought he had stood on the side of open-heartedness, of generosity of spirit, of making a better world. But now it was as if the people with whom he was associated, his colleagues, his comrades in this great endeavor, were frozen, atrophied, petty.

  Yes, yes, that was it—petty. How trivial they suddenly seemed. How small their preoccupations, how limited their horizons. Now he saw it all so clearly. How could he ever have thought he really was like them? How could he have thought any of that actually mattered? To his horror he saw how second-rate it all was, how derivative.

  He could so easily have just slipped into the easy assumption that this was all there was to life. But now he realized that he was cut out for so much more. He had the wherewithal to make a true mark, to register an impact upon history itself with a unique and original discovery. And he owed it to society to do this. In the unprepossessing person of Joe Kuchinsky, he felt that destiny had tapped him on the shoulder. Yes, he owed it to scholarship, to history, to…to Rosa to bring to light the story of Eliachim of York.

  Ah, Rosa. He hadn’t been a good enough father, he knew that. What he had seen at Rabbi Daniel’s table was another side to her, one he had never suspected. It had stung him, her reproach. Why had he never shown her any of this, her own ancestry? Because he himself had never known it, he thought morosely.

  Well now he had a chance to make good all of that. Now he had a chance not just to pass on that knowledge but actually to expand it. He would not just be recycling ancient myths and the wisdom of sages—he would himself be adding to it. At a stroke he would redeem his own ignorance, his own marginalization. He’d like to see Elliott’s face when he triumphantly unveiled Eliachim of York. That’d show him.

  He was aware of a new unease when thinking about the book: his book. He hadn’t actually been at the house to work on it for a while. Time had run away with him; it must be, what, three weeks now. Too long.

  He had called Kuchinsky a couple of times but had gotten no reply; he hadn’t thought much about that. But now he thought of the last time he’d been at the house. Kuchinsky had been even more nervy than usual. At one point he had gone to the window and twitched a curtain.

  “Is car parked a few doors down. It comes now twice, three times. Two men inside it, just watching.”

  “So what? Could be anyone. Not likely to be a burglar.” Russell had tried to be reassuring, but he had probably sounded a bit too irritated. Kuchinsky’s paranoia was getting to him.

  Kuchinsky had made no reply but just stood there by the curtain, totally still, looking through the crack.

  Since then, there had been no contact. Now who’s being paranoid, he thought. He tried to shake off the unease.

  15

  THE HOUSE WAS not as he had imagined it.

  He fumbled in his satchel and checked a crumpled bit of paper on which he had scribbled the address. Yes, this was it: Folgate Street, number 12. Where his father had said he lived.

  But this couldn’t be it, surely. This was an expensive street. Although the terrace looked a bit crooked and rickety, these were still grand houses with fine tall windows. They boasted well-kept wooden window shutters, carefully chosen to be in keeping with the age of the houses, some of them painted in tasteful colors.

  A buried fact swam into focus: ah yes, these were the famous Huguenot houses, which had first accommodated French weavers in the 18th century and then waves of immigrants after that.

  Nowadays they’d be worth, what, one point five minimum? M
ore, even. But his father had never said anything about Huguenots or historic houses. All Jack had told him about where he had been born and spent his early years was that it was in a slum in London’s East End, where his parents and he and five siblings had been crammed into a couple of rooms in some hovel with a privy in the back yard and a tin bath in the kitchen.

  “That landlord, what a swine,” he would say. “The place should’ve been firebombed as a health hazard.”

  Jack had never even known that the place had a history, let alone any innate grace. If he saw it today, he would be astounded. But then, he was a fool when it came to money.

  Time changes things out of all recognition, thought Russell, as he wandered through the neighboring streets. Signs of gentrification were all around: here was a little coffee shop displaying French Poilâne loaves and cupcakes with brightly colored fondant icing and cherries on the top; there was a tiny chic boutique selling expensive leather goods. But he hadn’t come here to enjoy such yuppie delights.

  He had come to scout out the East End in order to work up his proposal to submit to Damia. Of course it was personal: she had been right. It wasn’t just an interest in social history. It was a desire to connect for the first time to the nearest thing to a history that he himself had. To go back to where his father had come from, to anchor himself in that reality.

  He had never paid it the slightest attention in the past; he had never asked about it, never wanted to know. Now he was frantically scrabbling in his memory for the shards of information lodged there from Jack’s often maudlin reminiscences about his childhood.

  Maudlin, but also bitter. Was that just because of the poverty, or had there been some deeper misery? Was it because he had been so ill, because of his breakdown? He had presumably come back to these streets a different person altogether from when he had left them. What had he been like before, when he’d been a character who would run headfirst into danger in order to save an injured comrade? Had he then, in these streets, been seen as a leader of men, as a man who would inspire followers? Russell would never know. And now he wanted to know.