The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  Oh for heaven’s sake, thought Russell; spare me.

  The old man at the end of the row blew his nose loudly and wiped his face with his handkerchief.

  Russell felt in his pocket for his iPhone and turned it over in his fingers like a comforter. He hoped he had remembered to turn the ringtone to silent.

  “So what should we conclude,” said the rabbi, “that Abraham was a callous parent, unfeeling, inhuman, a forerunner of those Palestinian parents today who send their children to be suicide bombers?”

  Russell looked up, startled. A stillness descended upon the congregation as if it had temporarily forgotten to breathe. Some appeared to be asleep. Others looked shocked. The young suddenly seemed to be paying close attention.

  The rabbi shook his head. “The mistake,” he said, “is to assume that he intended to sacrifice Isaac. Look at the words. They don’t say that. They just say he must take Isaac and prepare a sacrifice. He had perfect faith that the holy one would provide the animal to be slaughtered. Which is of course what happened. Abraham trusted he would not be required to kill Isaac. He had unshakeable faith. That’s the point. That’s why he passed the test.”

  Despite himself, Russell was impressed. A clever argument, he had to give him that. Not the usual banal and absurd pieties. Russell looked more closely at the rabbi. He wasn’t old, beneath that beard, late thirties, early forties—younger than himself, certainly. There was a brain there, no question, possibly even quite a good one. Yet he had suspended his intellect to believe in fairy stories. As for the Palestinian jibe…well, no surprise there of course.

  Not for the first time, Russell despaired of his fellow man.

  When he had approached his bar mitzvah, Russell was sent to Rabbi Levene for tuition. This sage appeared to him to be an ancient; but since he was to live for another forty-five years this impression must have been caused by his chest-length beard along with forests of hair sprouting from ear and nostril, not to mention the persistent food stains on his shabby cardigan or waistcoat.

  Russell had a good ear and equally good memory, and found it relatively painless to learn the Hebrew passages he had to sing aloud. What he found more difficult was the exposition of religious thought that he was also expected to prepare for his bar mitzvah test.

  “So what about Charles Darwin?” he asked Rabbi Levene.

  “What about him?” said Rabbi Levene warily.

  “Well, how could God have made the world in six days when there was the evolution of species?”

  “And why not?” The rabbi had this irritating habit of answering a question with another question.

  “Because the universe is billions of years old.”

  “Here you have missed the point,” said Rabbi Levene, plucking loose hairs from his beard. “A common mistake. Look at the order of creation in Genesis: light at the beginning, mankind at the very end and fish and fowl in the middle. Just like Darwin says! Uncanny!”

  Russell tried another tack. “So what about the dinosaurs, then?”

  “So what about them?”

  “Well, they don’t even appear in Genesis.”

  “Ah,” said Rabbi Levene, leaning forward so that Russell could smell the onion on his breath, “that’s because before the holy one made the world, he made another world first…”

  “Uhh?”

  “…and that was the world with the dinosaurs, which was quite different from the second world which is our world, the one with Adam and Eve, and that first world was destroyed before he made our world, which is why the dinosaurs died out.”

  Russell wrote in his draft exposition: “My view of Judaism is that there’s a lot in it that doesn’t really add up but somehow it manages to find ways of explaining all this away.”

  “If you were to apply yourself properly to the study of Torah,” said Rabbi Levene sternly when he read this, “you would find that everything miraculously does add up and that there is no limit to what you cannot understand.”

  Russell changed his exposition to say: “My view of Judaism is that there’s a lot in it which doesn’t seem to add up, but the more you study the more you understand.” At his bar mitzvah, he was word-perfect and sang beautifully (“Like a choirboy!” said poor Auntie Evie, who was promptly sat upon) while his real, secret voice deep inside him repeated ever more loudly, over and over again, “God does not exist.”

  And yet, four decades on, he had come to say a prayer in a language he could barely read anymore from lack of use to a deity in whose non-existence he would still have believed as firmly as that boy of thirteen, were it not that after much mature reflection he had concluded that this, too, was a kind of faith which as a man of reason he could not in any sense endorse.

  Whatever was he doing there that day, in a synagogue of all places, forty years after he had served divorce papers upon God? And why did he now feel, absurdly, bereft and wounded, as if he had been robbed?

  His father had been but a shadowy presence during his childhood and had then shut him out of his life. He had surely done Russell a favor; he didn’t want to be part of that life anyway. But now Dad was dead, he wanted him back. He wanted, finally, to win the argument with him, to hear him admit he had been wrong. That he, Russell, had been wronged. He wanted his father to ask him about his life, to be proud of him again. He wanted to give him another chance to be his father, before it was too late.

  But now it was too late, and he was furious.

  At the kiddush—the reception following the service—he stood in a crowded hall holding a thimbleful of sickly sweet wine and a piece of bright pink herring on a cocktail stick, feeling conspicuous and uncomfortable as the crowd flowed around him. Elliott, thank God, was on the other side of the room, holding court.

  Russell overheard snatches of conversation. The rabbi, it seemed, did not command universal admiration.

  “A load of mumbo-jumbo! God this and God that. You’d never think this was the 21st century.”

  “Well, what do you expect? He’s very black. And his poor wife! Looks like she’s pregnant again!”

  “Is it her own hair, d’you think?”

  “Course not!”

  “Well, it looks so real.”

  “The better ones are made of actual hair, you know. Cost an absolute arm and a leg.”

  “It’s the children I feel sorry for.”

  “One a year from teenage to the menopause. Poor thing!”

  What did they mean, “black”? The rabbi’s skin seemed to be as pasty as anyone else’s—beneath the beard, paler, in fact, than the perma-tans on display. Was it his hair that was black? His soul? Russell felt his head begin to swim again.

  Two men started a mild argument over the Palestinian reference.

  “He shouldn’t’ve said it. Too political.”

  “But true.”

  “Tsk, so unnecessary. He’s just going to offend people, divide the community. Should’ve stuck to the Almighty.”

  “But it’s what actually happens. They do turn their children into bombs. They are inhuman. He’s a rabbi. He tells it as it is.”

  “Tscha, you can’t go round calling people inhuman. We know where that kind of talk leads. He’s been warned before to keep shtum about politics. A lot of people here will just leave. We have to keep the community together.”

  “You mean pipple here actually support Palestinian pipple against Israel?”

  It was the old man in the trilby from the end of the row. He had an Eastern European accent of some kind. He sounded incredulous. The other two looked at him. One paused with a glass of whisky halfway to his lips. Then they looked at their feet.

  “Well, er…”

  “Look, it happens.” The man with the whisky lowered his voice. His shoulders rose in a shrug as he spread his arms as if helplessly. “Even here.”

  “Can’t have gone down very wel
l with you.” They both laughed uneasily. Russell realized with a start that they must be addressing him. He looked uneasily from one to the other. They were looking at him sideways, eyes bright with curiosity and, he thought, a hint of malice. My God, he thought, do they all know who I am?

  “You like Palestinians? You no think they terrorists?”

  The elderly man with the trilby was now gazing at him intently. All three waited expectantly. Russell groaned inwardly. He really didn’t expect to have this conversation here, of all places.

  “Well, um, I do think they, ah, have a case,” he said cautiously.

  The two men exchanged glances and slid away, leaving him alone with the elderly fellow. Russell swallowed his irritation at having been accosted by the kind of person he was doing his best to avoid and tried to look agreeable. The man was continuing to stare at him.

  “This case they have,” he said. “This case include wiolence?”

  He couldn’t pronounce the letter v. Like his grandmother, Russell thought. Polish, then, probably.

  “Of course not,” said Russell, affronted. “It’s their cause that I support. Only a few of them use violence. I think it’s wrong to judge people as if they’re all the same. People here may think they’re all murderers, but many Palestinians are victims.”

  To his surprise, the man nodded slowly. His eyes never left Russell’s face.

  “This something pipple don’t understand. You wery unusual young man. Wrong to judge everyone as if all same, as if all equally bad.”

  He was disconcertingly intense. But why did a man like this not damn all Palestinians? Maybe this was what the other two had been getting at, that there were indeed divisions in the community over the issue. If so, that would indeed be a level of sophistication he hadn’t expected.

  “Are there many here who don’t unquestioningly support Israel?”

  “To tell truth,” the old fellow said ponderously, his tongue peeping out pinkly as he paused, “don’t usually talk to many pipple here. Is hard for me. My vife…” he gave a little shrug, “my vife not come. Everyone here is in family. So is hard for me to make friends here.”

  Russell felt a twinge of sympathy. “To be honest, I don’t come much either,” he said.

  “We both strangers in Egypt, no?” said the old fellow, and gave an odd kind of leer. His eyes behind his spectacles roved restlessly round the room as if he was searching for someone. He had piled a plate high with the bits and pieces you get at a kiddush—fishballs, crisps, that dreadful pink herring again, crackers—and was tucking in at speed.

  He seemed really quite agitated. Russell wondered if he might have one of those weird neurological problems written about by Oliver Sacks, who said he spotted evidence of them all around him every day in the street; not that Russell could say he had ever spotted any, which was a bit of a worry since he was supposed to be a close observer of social phenomena.

  “Everyone here is blessed accountant or lawyer! You are accountant, lawyer?”

  Russell ground his teeth.

  “I’m a TV producer.”

  The man put down his plate and looked at him. His eyes were watery behind the glasses, and little veins on his nose and cheeks were broken.

  “Ach, Bake-Off! This wery good. Mary Berry! Her I like. She remind me of Mrs. Tetcher! You work on Bake-Off?”

  “Er no, I do documentaries mainly…”

  “Ach, BBC! You work for BBC? You think is bias? I think is wery bias. I think is communist.”

  Russell recoiled.

  “They think only black pipple, brown pipple have suffering. We all have suffering. We all have tragedy. No one have monopoly. Me, sure, my family have suffered. Many, many of them dead. Mother, father, brother. Bad times in past. We all wictims. We all suffer.”

  Russell badly wanted to move away, but such was the crush it was difficult. The last thing he needed right now was to be cornered by a Holocaust obsessive, and a bigot to boot.

  Apparent salvation arrived in the unlikely form of a woman in a navy blue suit with white edging, matched with navy and white shoes. Perched upon her hair was what appeared to be a lace doily. She was bearing a tray of cake, from which the doily had surely escaped, and an expression of professional sympathy.

  “Such a shame about your father. A lovely man. Such a mensch. So quiet and unassuming. You couldn’t help but want to look after him. Go on, take two slices. But so independent—well, what can you do? Beverley was marvelous, of course. Nothing too much trouble. What a heroine, don’t you think? Still, that’s how it goes. You must be so proud of her.”

  Russell backed away, but in the process trod heavily on a foot, which turned out to belong to the rabbi.

  “My condolences,” said the rabbi, wincing.

  “I must congratulate you,” said the old man, who was now ploughing through a plate of cake, “on your address. Beautiful vords. A pleasure to hear educated man.”

  The rabbi paused and inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement.

  “Too much complaining these days. Everyone wants it easy. Who knows today abaht hardship? Understand me? Not like in old days, eh. But now everyone says what hard life they had. Blame, blame; all they do is say is other fellow’s blessed fault. But we all to blame! Know what I’m saying?”

  The rabbi rocked back and forth on his heels. “Well, sometimes some of us are maybe a bit more to blame than others, Joe,” he said laughing, and patted the old man on the arm. “I’m really very sorry about your father,” he said to Russell. “I know you’re not a habitual visitor, but if there’s anything I can do…”

  “Not a habitual visitor…” He could just imagine the conversation he would have had with Beverley. “My brother the heathen,” she would have said. “The heathen nebbish TV producer.” And they would have smirked together in a conspiracy of small minds.

  “Maybe you’d like to come for a meal? We always have visitors; you might be interested. I’m Daniel, by the way.”

  These people! They never missed an opportunity.

  “Of course, Elliott and Beverley are mainstays of our community. Trojans, nothing too much trouble. We are so fond of them. We were all so fond of your late father, alav hashalom, and of course your mother too is always in our thoughts. And we go back a long way. You know I knew Elliott at Oxford. We shared law tutorials for a while. I was at Balliol. After your time, I’m afraid.”

  Balliol! Russell gaped at him. “You’re a lawyer?”

  “Well, only first degree; never actually practiced. Then I did an MBA at the London Business School, but that seemed very dull; bit of a gadfly, I’m afraid. My doctorate was a little more rigorous: philosophy. Nietzsche, to be precise. Smart guy. Just a bit nuts! Great training for rabbinical exposition.”

  He laughed again. Russell wondered uneasily if he was being sent up. He thought again about the sermon the rabbi had just delivered. He looked at him again, and noticed now the steady brightness of his gaze.

  “I saw the TV documentary you did on ancient Mesopotamia. Fascinating! I admired the way you unearthed so much that was new from the distant past. New to me, anyway.”

  “Well, it was all in published sources,” said Russell modestly.

  “Even so, the skill lies in extracting what’s important from the historical documents. The language issue must’ve been a bit of a challenge. Although I gather you’re a bit of a whizz at languages yourself.”

  Russell’s eyes widened. “Medieval French and German aren’t quite the same as Sumerian cuneiform script,” he said. “We used translators and academics, of course.”

  He was taken aback. How did the rabbi know what he had studied at Oxford? It could only have been Beverley. How much else would she have told him about her errant brother?

  “And the photography was simply glorious, of course. My congratulations on a terrific show. I wish you long life.”
With the customary words of condolence, he shook Russell’s hand and plunged back into the crowd.

  “You do research into the past?”

  To Russell’s intense irritation, the old man was still standing there. But now there was a slight change in his demeanor. He was a little more upright, more alert. Now he was staring at Russell.

  “Sometimes. For documentaries, if there’s an appetite.”

  In fact, historical subjects were the one thing TV program controllers couldn’t seem to get enough of.

  The man was looking down at the floor, obviously thinking. Why did this guy find him so fascinating, wondered Russell. He badly wanted to get away. He knew this type well enough, those with some bee or other in their bonnet. Once they fixated on you, there was no escape.

  “You know Hebrew? You study writings of great rabbis, Jewish thinkers?”

  Russell felt as irritated as he was embarrassed. He didn’t want to confess his inadequate knowledge. Why should he, anyway, to this stranger? He’d had enough of this.

  “Sure,” he said breezily. “Although I haven’t yet made a program about any of that.”

  The man nodded slowly and looked up. He smiled as if he was now satisfied; but there was something else in his expression, something unsettling that Russell couldn’t quite place.

  “Wery good,” he said.

  For a moment, Russell thought he saw calculation. No, he must have imagined it, he decided, and dismissed it from his mind.

  3

  RUSSELL SHIFTED IN the hard, low little chair. It was hideously uncomfortable.

  The physical discomfort, though, was hardly the worst of it. His sister Beverley was wedged into an identical little chair next to his. She seemed to be radiating waves of silent fury in his direction.

  They were sitting shiva, the customary week after the funeral when mourners sitting on low chairs are comforted by visitors, in Beverley and Elliott’s front room—or, as they would call it, Russell registered with a shudder, the thru-lounge.