The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  She swayed in her chair with her eyes closed. He thought, maybe he should call a halt. He could scarcely bear to listen. But now she drove herself on, her voice flattened into a kind of relentless drone.

  “During that day I heard terrible screaming from next door. I made myself look out of the window. I saw them dragging off the Ajzensztejns: Boruch, Symma, Blume. They may already have killed them, they were being dragged along, they looked bloody and lifeless. I have always hoped, given what was ahead of them, that they were already dead.”

  He recoiled. “The barn?”

  “They went to the Jews’ houses and dragged out the babies and the sick and threw them into that inferno. They roped some children together, stuck them on pitchforks and threw them onto smoldering coals. At the end of that day, no Jews were left in the town.”

  She stopped talking and sat very still. The silence reverberated in his head. He wished he could go and lie down. When he spoke, he found his voice was trembling.

  “And when your brother came back? What happened then?”

  In the silence, the ticking of the clock sounded very loud. She sighed very deeply.

  “I said the Ajzensztejns had been very good to us. We were often in their house. They invited us to share their table on Friday evenings. Then they would bring out their best china and cutlery, it was gold plate I think, and some beautiful silver things, goblets and candlesticks, a spice box and other things they used for their rituals. These were very fine, quite intricately carved with filigree and what have you, and old, they were heirlooms handed down through generations.

  “Joszef used to say, bet they’re worth something, all those things; that always made me feel uncomfortable, the way he said it. Calculating. The Ajzensztejns also had a lot of books, religious books; Boruch was quite learned in that way, and I think Symma knew a lot too. This seemed to worry my brother for some reason; maybe he was jealous, but he seemed to think there was something troubling about the fact that they were so learned, that they knew so much.

  “One Friday evening, Boruch showed us a book that was very old indeed, so old it was kept in a special cloth. He didn’t open it, showed it to us inside its cover and then put it away. Boruch told us this was a very precious book, it had been in his family hundreds of years and had survived even through terrible times when the family had been attacked or had to flee.

  “My brother pestered Boruch to show him this book, to tell him what was in it, but all Boruch would tell him was that it was about a faraway land. This made Joszef even more curious. He wouldn’t stop talking about it, about what was in it, what faraway land. I said to him, it’s just an old book, what interest can there be in that? But he thought it was like a kind of talisman, that it had some kind of magic that would keep safe anyone who owned it.”

  Russell thought his heart might jump out of his body, it was thumping so hard.

  “That terrible day, when Joszef burst through our door, he was dragging a sack. Inside were all the Ajzensztejns’ valuables, the silver candlesticks and goblets, the gold-plated cutlery. And the book. He waved that book in the air. That’s why he was so triumphant. He had gone back to their house and looted it. Well everyone was doing it. Everyone was looting the Jews’ houses because they assumed they were all of them as good as dead.”

  There was clearly something else. He waited.

  “I said by the end of that day no Jews were left. Well, that wasn’t quite true. That morning, when the attacks had already started, there was a knock on my door. Blume was standing there with a baby in her arms, wrapped in a shawl. She held the baby out to me; I never want to see again such desperation, such anguish. ‘There is no time,’ she said urgently. ‘Please take her. Take my baby. Please, please.’

  “I was stupefied but I took the bundle. ‘Her name is Haia,’ she said. ‘She is your niece.’ She kissed the baby’s head, so tenderly it broke my heart, and then she threw her arms around me. I felt her whole body shuddering. Then she was gone.”

  His mind flew back to that morning in the synagogue, when Joszef had silently wept.

  “Did Joszef know?”

  “Of course he knew. And when he came back and looted the house, he looked for the baby. To kill her too. He burst through that door like a creature possessed. His face at that moment will stay with me until the end of my days. I looked into his eyes and saw the devil himself.

  “I screamed at him to get out. I picked up a carving knife and ran towards him. I swear I would have run it through him. I had a strength at that moment, I cannot say where from. I tried to fight him but he was too strong; he clubbed the knife out of my hand. Next thing I knew I was on the floor, my head all bloody, and he had gone.”

  “With the sack?”

  “With what he’d looted, yes. But I’d hidden the baby in the well, the same well where Joszef and I had hidden from the Soviets. I climbed in and got her out, put her in a basket and ran from the house. There was a family across the fields—good, decent people I knew—who took us in. But it was too dangerous to stay, too dangerous for them. Poles who hid Jews were being betrayed by other Poles, murdered. And I knew my brother would come looking for me. And for the baby.

  “We were smuggled out in a hay cart and then passed from one member of the Polish resistance to another until we were put on a boat to Sweden. From there we made it to America.

  “From that day to this I have never been back to Poland. I made a new life here. I had an American husband, American children, grandchildren. You can’t ever forget; but you can lock all the memories away, grow a new skin. When I was told Joszef was alive after all this time, it as if someone had ripped that skin off my body.”

  She sat quietly now, looking out of the window as if lost in a memory. The sun, now low in the sky, streamed in. Dust motes danced in its rays.

  “My son-in-law is a veterinarian,” she said, with her gaze still fixed on the window. “He makes a good living. He is a decent person. I have wanted for nothing, and I’m grateful. Grateful to America. Here a person lives free from fear. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  No, he had to admit to himself, he had never known that kind of terror, what it felt like to be hunted. Yet fear was his constant companion. But fear of what? He thought of his father, spending his whole life in terror although he lived all that life in the safety of Britain. Terror of other people, terror of new experiences, terror of disease.

  Russell stared at his crumpled paper napkin. He was once again sitting at his parents’ plain, dour, wooden fifties’ dining table, with the food sticking in his throat and the fork slipping through his fingers as he surreptitiously eyed his father toying with his dinner.

  His father thought he was dying. He had been diagnosed with a chronic bowel disease but he was convinced he had been lied to and that he had cancer. His terror had been infectious. His mother seemed paralyzed by it, and Russell was miserable with fear.

  His father’s moods had affected him badly. But Jack had lived until he was 80, and so what had so frightened Russell as a child had been fear itself. The fear that his father’s nightmares would become real and smash Russell’s world. His demons had been phantoms, he thought; but still, he had run away from them, taken refuge in a different world. He felt embarrassed and ashamed.

  “We brought up Haia as our own daughter.”

  He looked involuntarily towards the closed door. She shook her head. “Stacey is her sister. Her adoptive sister.”

  She was certainly still sharp. Her gaze, now upon him again, was fierce.

  “Haia knows nothing about what I have just told you. Nothing. She has no knowledge of who her father was. And she must never know.”

  Was that directed at him? Would she now fill in the final piece of the puzzle?

  “Of course. An amazing story. I’m sure that I…that I wouldn’t have had the courage. And Haia is now…where, exactly?”

>   The silence hung between them.

  “And your brother? Did he…does he now know about Haia?”

  Zofia’s eyes remained closed.

  “I had no interest in ever contacting him.”

  He thought about that for a moment.

  “Did he ever try to get in touch with you? Through the comrades?”

  She stiffened slightly. He held his breath.

  She was weary now. When she spoke again her eyes remained closed, almost as if she was speaking mechanically, as if no longer possessing the strength to keep hold of what she knew.

  “I heard nothing from him until a few weeks ago. Out of the blue, I received a parcel. It was the book, the old book he had stolen from the Aizjensteins, the one that had so obsessed him, why, I have no idea to this day. He had kept it all this time. Now, after he was arrested, he sent it to me with a letter. Not a word asking how I was, or regret about the past, or any curiosity about my life; nothing. Just a final act of malice.”

  “Malice?”

  “The book had brought him bad luck, he said; now you can have it. That was all he wrote.”

  “I see. So…so you’ve got this book now?”

  She looked at him steadily. Oh God, he groaned inwardly, had his tone given something away?

  “I’m, er…my research…I’m particularly interested in lost Hebrew literature…”

  Zofia grasped her walking frame and hauled herself painfully to her feet.

  “I am tired now,” she said, and turned slowly towards the door. He watched in despair as she shuffled across the carpet. No! So close!

  The door clicked shut behind her. He heard a murmuring outside, her daughter exclaiming about helping her to her room and Zofia sounding irritable. In a few minutes, Stacey reappeared through the door. He stood up awkwardly.

  “Well, you had a nice long chat with Mum, didn’t you,” she said brightly. “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Get…?”

  “Was she useful, did she give you the information you need for your research?”

  “Oh…Yes, yes indeed. Really helpful, and totally fascinating.”

  “You did well. She doesn’t really talk about…about those times. Not surprising, is it. What she went through hardly bears thinking about, does it.”

  How much did she know?

  “She was obviously very brave. She told me a little about what happened, about your sister…”

  “Haia? Yes, quite a story isn’t it? Rescuing a Jewish baby like that and then escaping with her in a hay cart across the border; well you just can’t imagine it, can you. Not your own mother.”

  “A…a Jewish baby?”

  “Yes of course, didn’t she explain? She knew this Jewish family, and there was some kind of terrible attack in which they were all killed, but Mum was able to rescue the baby and escape with her, something about hiding in a well; and that was Haia. Look: this is her, and this, obviously when she was much younger.”

  He looked at the photographs. There was one of the whole family, with five tow-haired, freckle-faced, laughing children, and a slightly older teenager wearing glasses and with her long dark hair in a ponytail, smiling shyly. The next was of the same girl, now in her twenties, he guessed, with her face framed by dark tumbling curls.

  “What a beauty,” he said softly, as if to himself.

  “Oh yes, she had all the boys after her, for sure, back then,” said Stacey with a slightly grim little laugh.

  “And so where does she live nowadays?”

  “Nowadays? Oh, in the holy land!” Stacey’s voice dropped respectfully.

  “The…what, Israel?”

  This he had not expected at all.

  “Wonderful, isn’t it! I’m so jealous! It’s where Our Lord will return at the end of days, which is why it’s so precious to us because that is where all the unbelievers will be converted to the one true faith and then there will be peace all over the earth. So Haia is doing holy work. And of course, she herself is one of the chosen. So she is really special.”

  Jesus, he thought. That’s all he needed, Christian fundamentalist wackos.

  “Keep in touch much, do you?”

  “Quite a bit. We do FaceTime now, which helps. She has two children; her husband passed some years back. I miss her. And I think she misses all the things we have here that we take for granted. I’m always sending her bits and pieces—she loves to read American magazines. My mother sent her a book only the other day.”

  A book. He thought quickly. He had one final card. He couldn’t afford to drop it.

  “You know, I’m really very interested in your homeschooling idea. I think it’s got a lot going for it. I’d love to test the water for it back in Britain.”

  She clapped her hands into a steeple and pressed her fingertips to her mouth in excitement.

  “You really think there’d be some interest? Gee, that would be just wonderful! What we need, what would make such a difference, is for a school to give us its backing. That would sure make all the folks who say we’re just some kinda weird nutjobs brainwashing our kids with creationism and suchlike to pipe down! D’ya think you might get some school interested? Oh, I’m so excited! Here, why don’t you sit down and I’ll make some more tea and tell you some more about it.”

  Half an hour later, after he had enthusiastically accepted a pile of books about homeschooling to show to his contacts in the university world, he started gathering his things together in order finally to take his leave. He was so thrilled to have met Stacey as well as her remarkable mother, he told her earnestly. They had so much in common and he had learned so much.

  And of course, he said as casually as he could, he’d see what he could do about homeschooling, but Stacey had to understand that it wasn’t his area of expertise, which was really a very narrow aspect of East European history, specifically standards of literacy and education amongst the pre-war Jewish community in Poland, the kind of books they read, that sort of thing.

  “Well, how funny you should say that,” smiled Stacey as she helped him on with his coat, “because that book I told you my mother sent Haia the other day? Well, apparently that had belonged to Haia’s parents but my mother only unearthed it recently; apparently she had forgotten she had it, and so she sent it straight on. Can’t think why, though; it looked pretty old and tatty.”

  He almost stopped breathing. His heart was pounding fit to burst.

  “Really? Well, I’d love to take a peek at that; sounds like it might be just the thing to fill in a few crucial details in my research. You know, just so happens that I’m due to be visiting Israel very soon. Maybe I might visit Haia? I’d love to meet her, having heard so much about her.”

  “You are? Why, sure thing! She runs a riding school for disabled children. Somewhere in the Judean hills. Just how romantic does that sound?”

  She reached for a pad and wrote an address. “I’ll tell her you’re coming. I just wish I was going with you to that blessed land. You’ll have such a great time.”

  Halfway out of the front door, he said: “Well, what a stroke of good fortune that we met.”

  Stacey gasped his free hand and stared into his eyes. “Not good fortune at all. It was God’s work that brought you to us.”

  He fled.

  25

  “OOH, I’D LOVE to come with,” said Damia.

  They were sitting cozily in the flat in Stockwell. She had cooked a vegetable biryani that was now steaming in its dish on the table. There were bright rugs on the floor and gaily colored cushions on the sofa. Jazz played softly in the background. Outside, the rain streamed down.

  It was remarkable, he thought wonderingly as he opened a bottle of red wine, how quickly his life had settled into such a comfortable pattern. It felt as if he had been with Damia forever. Emboldened by the ease between them, he had taken a
deep breath when he returned from Virginia and told her everything; all about meeting Kuczynski, about Eliachim of York, and about the shattering news of Kuczynski’s real identity and what his sister Zofia had told him.

  When he had finished he looked at her timidly, braced for her scorn. She sat staring at him for a while, her expression inscrutable. Then she threw back her head and burst out laughing.

  “That was some mistake you made!”

  For a second, he felt offended. Then something in him relaxed. He started to laugh too. He felt all the shame and anxiety drain away. It was going to be all right.

  “But my God, Russell, what a fantastic story! Eliachim and Duzelina! It sounds like a fairy story, and yet it’s all true!”

  “I just feel such a total fool.”

  “Mmn, no; not total.” She caught his eye and they both started laughing all over again.

  She was very practical and direct, he was discovering; she didn’t waste time on what wasn’t useful.

  “We have to work out how you’re going to approach the daughter, this Haia,” she said as she ladled out the food onto his plate. “It’s a delicate situation.”

  “We?” Did she think she was coming too?

  “I think I have to go there alone, you know.”

  She nodded. “Sure, but we have to have a strategy. You’ve just got to get hold of that book again. You’re right, it would make a fantastic story. A dead cert for BBC2, I’d say. Lots of historic pictures, and you walking round York telling the story, and we’d have actors silently representing Eliachim and Duzelina, all lit like a medieval painting. It will be fabulous. So what will you tell Haia to win her trust?”

  He hadn’t got a clue, he thought. But her enthusiasm had fired him up for the challenge. She chewed thoughtfully for a while.

  “You tell her the truth,” she said finally, waving her fork in the air; “but not the whole truth. You tell her that you’re researching Jewish cultural life in pre-war Poland…”