The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  I look down the endless procession of years and I see only yet more savagery and more infamy. This chronicle which must pass from generation to generation will stand as witness to the infamy of the Christians and their surpassing cruelty towards the children of the covenant.

  As the time of my departure draws near, I am filled with dread and foreboding. My heart knocks, the palms of my hands grow damp and the food burns in my throat. Yet in my anguish I will nevertheless pronounce the blessing before departure and place my faith in the compassion of my creator, that he will preserve me and keep me safe so that I can henceforth carry out His commandments which I have so desecrated.

  May the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, be glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded above and beyond all the blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are uttered in this world. May He who makes peace in His high places grant peace for us and for all the house of Israel. Amen and amen.

  * * *

  32

  RUSSELL SLOWLY CLOSED his laptop. It was done. He felt numb, drained. His mind was in a tumult. He had managed it. Despite everything that had happened, now he had a completed manuscript. He should have felt elated, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Eliachim.

  This was no longer a story of unrequited love. Until then, he had thought of the Crusades as events that happened in Europe and the Middle East. Terrible things had been perpetrated by the knights with their red crosses; but all that had happened a long way away and had nothing to do with him. It had been a fight between Popes and Saracens, right?

  But now, beneath his hovering fingers had unfolded a barbarism that had been unleashed in England—and the victims of these unspeakable acts had been the Jews. Gentle, bovine England had turned into a riot of frenzied psychotics. Yes, he knew the Jews had been thrown out of England in, what, the thirteenth century, wasn’t it. And yes, he knew there had been wars of religion, when people had been burned at the stake. But those had been between Catholics and the Protestants. Yet here Eliachim was describing Jews being burned alive, Jews being disemboweled and Jewish babies impaled on the end of Crusader swords.

  He thought of those warm, sun-dappled summer Sunday afternoons watching the cricket on some green in Datchet or Burnham Beeches, with the Ford Popular parked on the verge and Alan Freeman on the transistor radio playing the top twenty, and with Jack sighing in deep contentment, “Y’know, there isn’t more beautiful countryside anywhere in the world” from all his vast experience of Adriatic seaside resorts. Or stating periodically, shaking his head slowly from side to side with the deep portentousness of the thought he was about to utter, “No doubt about it, England has been very good to us Jews.”

  Which England? The England of all those disembowelers and baby-impalers, who had extorted and butchered his own people? But then Jack would hardly have known about that either. And what had he even known about the Britain in which he had lived, really known? He had been in it, but never of it. He had never been part of any institution, never played the game of social or professional advancement, never read Dickens or George Eliot or Orwell, never gone to a Promenade concert or joined a pub darts team or even adopted that defining characteristic of English society, owning his own house. The most that could be said of that relationship was that England had left him alone.

  So why was it only now, with the revelation that Jews had been slaughtered right here in England simply because they were Jews, that Russell was so horrified? Why had he previously dismissed the wars of religion in Britain as of no interest to him? Was it because he had thought of them as merely between one set of Christians and another—not part of his own story? And so what did that say about what he himself was? Did it mean that, all those years when he had asserted fiercely that no, Jews were bloody well not merely “tolerated” in Britain because they were as British as anyone else, he had after all not felt himself to be, deep down, the thing he had thought he was? And if he wasn’t thoroughly British through and through, then what was he?

  To have done what they did, to have had that degree of faith, that unbreakable commitment to what they were that it superseded life itself; he kept returning to this in his mind.

  He tried to imagine himself on top of that tower, to imagine what it was like to slit the throats of those you loved most, what it would feel like to slice through the soft flesh of your own neck.

  Eliachim had not described terror. He had described horror and guilt. Guilt because he thought he was somehow the cause of the catastrophe; guilt that he couldn’t go through with it because the will to live in him was just too strong. That wasn’t fear. They hadn’t been terrified, he suddenly realized, because, unlike himself, they accepted that death was part of life. They didn’t try to fight it. The fear, Russell now understood, came from the refusal to believe, the attempt to deny the inevitable. The panic came from denial. Their strength was rooted in acceptance.

  And now he saw something else. This apparent act of collective fanaticism was in fact an act of love. To love, you had to be attached, he thought; and to be attached you had to have someone or something to be attached to. He wasn’t attached to anything. He had snapped all his moorings.

  Yes, that act of collective suicide was a horror. But again, he felt a stab of envy mixed in with the revulsion. They had belonged to something that joined them all together, something they treasured beyond life itself. They had been bound by a shared sense of love.

  To whom was he bound by such love, he wondered morosely. His wife, his father, his sister: all estranged. And he could now see that his share in Britain had been conditional all along.

  It wasn’t conditional on his origins being in British culture. It was conditional on his not being a Jew. Because now he understood that to be a Jew was to be part of the Jewish people. And that particular sense of peoplehood was not permitted in Britain. It immediately made you suspect.

  He hadn’t seen it at first because he had never wanted a share in that peoplehood. And he still didn’t want it. But he was saddled with it regardless, because he had stuck up for others who happened to be like him. Out of a sense of simple justice, and a respect for the truth. But if you were a Jew, you weren’t allowed to do that, because it couldn’t be about justice or truth. It meant “you people” were “all sticking together.”

  No other people provoked such a reaction, he thought in wonderment. And it was impossible not to make the connection, not to see the thread linking Eliachim and Michael Waxman and Haia. And his father. For the first time, he felt that thread running through himself. And he knew it could never be snapped, however hard he might try.

  Haia fussed around him. “Poor thing, you’re exhausted,” she exclaimed. “What you need is some R&R. How about giving yourself a day off and I fill in some more of those gaps in your education you’re so worried about. I’ll drive you down to Masada. You’ll really enjoy it, I promise.”

  They drove south into the desert. He had anticipated sand dunes. Instead, rocky cliffs stretched into the distance. Occasionally he glimpsed groups of Bedouin with their camels by the side of the road, waiting for tourists to stop and pose.

  His thoughts returned inexorably to the story he had now completed. He had said nothing about it yet to Haia. He needed first to process it all in his mind.

  He had finished the translation. The book would cause a sensation. He anticipated no problem from Haia about getting it authenticated and published. It was what he had dreamed of for so long now, making his name with a unique contribution to scholarship, to history. He had managed to overcome all the problems and setbacks, the shattering blow about Kuczynski which had almost capsized the entire project, successfully navigating Zofia and Haia. So why didn’t he feel more exhilarated?

  They stopped to stretch their legs and he walked well away from the road, scrambling stiffly over stones and boulders. The earth beneath his feet was almost red. The cliffs towered arou
nd him, gaunt and majestic.

  Despite the heat, he shivered. The silence was profound. The world, it seemed, had altogether retreated. He thought about London, Damia, Beverley. It seemed so far away. In this silent, empty landscape he felt a different world gently enclose him. It was as if a host of shadowy figures were hovering all around him. His breathing slowed and he felt the tension draining out of himself. He felt himself cradled by beauty, and by a deep sense of connection. Reluctantly, he picked his way back to the car.

  They walked up Masada to the fortress at the top. The path was steep and winding, and crowded with tourists. “That’s cheating,” said Haia, cheerfully pointing at the cable car that slowly swung up and down the mountain.

  The sun beat down out of a deep turquoise sky. The path was merely roped off from the precipice and the barrier felt insecure when Russell grasped it. There wasn’t much room in places for people to pass as they came down the mountain. He wiped away the sweat that was pouring off his forehead and neck.

  As they walked up, Haia decided to fill him in on the history. At the beginning of the great revolt against Roman rule, a group of Jews had been besieged in the Masada fortress. This had been built by Herod on no fewer than three rock terraces; an amazing feat of engineering. She pointed these out as they climbed. Russell merely grunted and didn’t look up. He didn’t feel like admiring the feat of engineering. He was concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. He had looked down over the rope barrier and had felt his head sickeningly swim.

  Reaching the top at last, he didn’t feel any better. His head was thumping. He was sweating and shivering at the same time.

  They walked around the summit fortress and admired the remains of the palace, the bathhouse, the mosaics.

  “Of course they were zealots,” said Haia reflectively, “but even so it was quite something for a bunch of Jews to hold out here against the Romans for as long they did. Three years, it was; and then the Romans managed to scale this tremendous height and it was all over. But to kill themselves like that en masse, every single one of them, so as not to be taken alive; unimagineable, isn’t it.”

  This was the example, thought Russell. This was what Eliachim and the Jews of York had all had in the front of their minds when they were huddled on top of Clifford’s Tower. And so the thread of belonging stretched even further back than he had thought. History, this history at any rate, merely repeated itself over and over again. There was no end to it, no break from the terrible past, no possibility that the pattern would fade away. How could this be endured?

  Now he understood how essential it was to remember. It wasn’t people who lived on; it was what they stood for that was eternal. It was the collective memory that had to be preserved and defended against the barbarians scaling the cliff-face. Now he understood the full extent of Eliachim’s anguish. It wasn’t just the horror he had witnessed; it wasn’t even his belief he had somehow been the cause. It was that he had betrayed his tribe.

  “Dad,” he whispered. “Dad, I’m so sorry.”

  He stood near the edge of the fortress under the fierce sun and looked out across the great desert plain that stretched out beneath him. In the far distance, on the other side of a broad river, lay the kingdom of Jordan. The river, the sky and the vast rocky expanse below all seemed to be shimmering in a blue haze. It was so beautiful, he thought. The throbbing in his head was worse. The haze danced in front of his eyes like twinkling blue pinpricks of light. He felt again that terrible compulsion to draw ever nearer to the edge. He swayed a little. Then the ground upended beneath his feet and he was spinning.

  33

  HE WAS AWARE of light, a white light. He opened his eyes a little, but the whiteness was blinding so he closed them. When he opened them again he tried hard to focus. The white light resolved itself into a fluorescent tube in the ceiling. A machine was bleeping next to his ear. Cautiously, he moved his head. The bleeping was coming from a heart monitor. A cannula in the back of his hand attached him through a tube to a drip hanging on a metal stand.

  So it had finally happened, he thought. This time he really was dying. Strangely, he felt very calm.

  He heard nearby the by-now familiar guttural tones of Arabic. In the next bed lay a young Arab. Around him crowded men in Arab headdress and women in full-length chador. One of the women saw him staring. He attempted a smile. She turned her head away.

  A middle-aged Arab man in a white coat and with a neat grey beard came and stood at the end of his bed.

  “So you’ve come back to us,” he said, and smiled. He lifted a clipboard from the end of the bed and thumbed through the notes attached to it.

  “Are you…are you a doctor?” said Russell.

  The man smiled again. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. el Arish. I am a consultant cardiologist.”

  Russell gripped the white cotton blanket covering him. “Have I had a heart attack, then?” he said weakly.

  “No, your heart is absolutely fine,” said the doctor. “Of course, we’ve been monitoring it closely. Good news is, everything else seems okay too. You’re in reasonable shape. Need to lose some weight, but still.”

  “Where am I?” said Russell, confused.

  “You are in Soroka.”

  “Sirocco?” Why was he in an Arab hospital? “Am I in the West Bank?”

  Now the doctor laughed. “You are in Israel, of course.” He separated the second syllable: Isra-el. “You were at Masada, remember? You collapsed there. Soroka is the nearest hospital.”

  An Israeli hospital? With Arab patients, Arab doctors? Russell was bewildered.

  “You’ve been unconscious for several hours. A mystery, really: we can’t find anything wrong with you. We’ll do more tests of course, now that you’re awake.”

  An orderly brought a wheelchair to take him down to X-ray. He was black, with the delicate oval face of an Ethiopian. A small kitted kippah was clipped onto his hair.

  Outside the ward door sat a soldier with a machine gun. The orderly noticed Russell staring at him as they passed.

  “That guy in the bed next to you,” he said, bending down to talk quietly into Russell’s ear as he punched the button for the lift, “He’s Hamas. Was on his way to blow up a kindergarten but the bomb went off early and he blew himself up instead. Lost a leg, apparently.”

  Russell was aghast. A terrorist killer in the next bed! Christ alfuckingmighty. The guard on the door was hardly a reassurance. What the hell was wrong with this country, that it didn’t keep such people separate but instead treated everyone the same?

  Back in the ward, Russell nervously stole another look. The boy, he now saw, was young: around seventeen at most. He was still asleep, his mouth open underneath a faint suggestion of a moustache. Wires and tubes protruded from under his blankets, attached to a battery of bleeping monitors, drips and bottles. Nurses in white smocks and trousers came and went, checking the monitors and reading the printouts that regularly chattered into life.

  There were now only two people by the boy’s bed, both young men, swarthy and unshaven. They stood up to go. As they moved towards the door of the ward, the guard outside swiftly rose and gripped his gun with both hands. They passed through the doorway and disappeared towards the lifts.

  In due course, another doctor appeared at the foot of his bed. He stood flipping through Russell’s notes without saying anything. Then he moved to the head of the bed and produced a medical flashlight. He flashed it in Russell’s eyes and then took his pulse, all still without saying a word. Russell read the tag hanging on a lanyard round his neck: Dr. Mikhail Ostrovsky, Neurology.

  “Turn your head please. Now other way.”

  A thick Russian accent; the voice abrupt, impatient. He wrote busily on the clipboard. Then he started to move away.

  “Er, excuse me…”

  The doctor paused and came back. He frowned down at Ru
ssell.

  “Could you tell me…have you found anything?”

  Dr. Ostrovsky stared at him. “No meningitis or encephalitis. No sign of brain tumor, no evidence of epilepsy.” He shrugged. “A mystery,” he said sarcastically. “Now I have to see patients who really are sick.” He turned and strode out of the ward.

  Russell burned with indignation. The implication he was some kind of malingerer stung. He had apparently been unconscious for hours, for God’s sake. There was clearly something very wrong with him.

  He dozed off uneasily. He felt something brush against his bed and opened his eyes. A young woman was peering down at him. Dr. Noa Ben-Dror, he read on her lanyard.

  “What kind of doctor are you?” asked Russell wearily.

  “General physician,” she replied, smiling. She took his pulse. “How’re you feeling now?”

  Her Israeli-accented voice was soft. She was slim, with full lips and warm brown eyes.

  “Can anyone here tell me what’s wrong with me?” said Russell testily.

  “We’ve found nothing,” she said.

  “How is that possible? I was out cold for hours, apparently.”

  She put her head on one side and looked at him quizzically. “These things happen sometimes. Particularly if you are under a lot of stress. Sometimes the body just needs to take time out and regroup. We’ll keep you in overnight for the final results of all the tests, but if they’re normal you’ll be able to go.” She patted his arm sympathetically.

  The Hamas boy was being moved in his bed out of the ward. They both watched as the guard stood up again, gripping his gun.

  “Is it normal here for terrorists to be treated alongside Israeli patients?”

  Dr. Ben-Dror looked at him coolly. “This is a hospital. We leave politics at the door. If a patient needs treatment, we treat him, we save his life, whatever he has done. Same treatment, same triage system, everyone treated equally according to their level of need. Sometimes we have Arab terrorists lying here alongside their victims. And by the way, some of these terrorists are Israeli Arabs, Israeli citizens. This boy though, he is not. He comes from Gaza.”