The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  It was furnished, he noted, entirely in beige and cream. Beige fitted carpet, cream leather sofas—settees, they called them, just like his parents had done—beige curtains with stiff pleats covering the runners, recessed gas fire shaped around beige pebbles, abstract prints on the walls in beige, black and orange, pieces of black modernist sculpture on the mantelpiece and sideboard. This was considered good taste, he thought, by someone who had no idea what taste was; by playing safe, all that had been produced was a bland negation of personality.

  Although those sculptures definitely had fascist overtones.

  How relieved he was to have escaped all this. He could so easily have been trapped. And yet, remarkably, he still felt a tug somewhere deep inside him. He felt again as he had done as a little boy, before it had all gone so sour. It was, he was embarrassed to admit to himself, a feeling of safety. A feeling of home.

  A steady stream of people shuffled towards them, their faces arranged into a rictus of sympathy. He knew none of them. They murmured a few words of condolence, nodding towards him and glancing quickly at the unresponsive form in the armchair nearby, and then sat or stood and talked to Beverley.

  He tried to tune out but the same repeated words and phrases floated into his hearing.

  “How sad…very sad…a good age…lovely man…sad at any age…did everything you possibly could…how did it, you know, finally…heroic, Beverley dear, heroic…a blessing she doesn’t know…really so sad…”

  As if operating outside his control, his eyes kept turning to the figure in the armchair next to him. Her frame was painfully thin, her head slightly bowed so that she stared at her lap. Her body didn’t move, but her long fingers twisted constantly round each other. Her hair, once so neat and bobbed, had been allowed to grow long and was swept back from her forehead; it was clearly not thought worth the bother any more even to try to give it a style.

  He had hardly recognized her as his mother. He stared at her in horror. He hadn’t seen her since she’d got so bad. She hadn’t recognized him at all.

  His father was no more; but his mother wasn’t here either. This shell, this husk—this wasn’t his mother. Sylvia. He spoke her name clearly. No response.

  He tried to conjure up the mental image of what she had once been, that domineering character who had run the family. How could that possibly be the same person as this shrunken figure? This was why he hadn’t been to see her, he whispered to himself. He had flinched from seeing what he was now being forced to see. And now he couldn’t stop looking at her, and he felt stabbed with a physical pain deep in the very core of his being.

  She hadn’t been taken to the funeral. “No point,” Elliott had said briskly. “Not worth upsetting her. For what?”

  He had lifted his shoulders slightly and spread his hands. Russell had bristled. This was his mother whom Elliott was shrugging off so casually. How dare he. Smug prick.

  At his father’s open grave, he had looked at the plot next to it, the empty patch of earth that was waiting for her, for his mother. He took hold of the shovel and drove it with all his force into the heavy clay; and on hearing the terrible thud as those first clods of earth hit his father’s coffin, he shuddered at the inexorability of it. His father; his mother; himself.

  For twenty-six years they had not spoken. His father’s choice, without a shadow of doubt. Not Russell’s fault. His conscience was clear. He knew who the victim was in this affair and it wasn’t his father, that was for sure. Hadn’t Russell tried to repair the rift in those early years? Hadn’t he done what he could, shouting at his mother down the phone at the nastiness, the narrow-mindedness, the sheer bloody perverse irrationality of it?

  He had expected her to lay down the law to his father as she did a dozen times a day. After all, Sylvia was the one who ran that household, ran her husband. She was the one with the brains, the social class that was a cut above, the ability to get things done. She had never stopped telling him so.

  “You’re such a funny boy, Jacky,” she would cry, applying her fingers to her scalp as if it might lift off under the pressure when Jack dared suggest that perhaps they might take their annual holiday this year in Bournemouth, a destination she considered wholly unsuitable in comparison with Rimini which required the sophistication of air travel.

  She was not complimenting him on his amusing qualities.

  Jack had what would have been called in later decades a phobia about airplane travel. He shook with white-knuckled terror from the moment he was strapped into his seat until the plane touched down. He also avoided traveling on the Tube and going through revolving doors, and refused point-blank to use a lift.

  In any confined space, he was like a trapped animal pleading to be put out of its misery. Attempts to bring the evidence of science and technology to bear on the problem foundered on his unshakeable belief that all human agency was potentially and lethally flawed. “I don’t trust ’em,” he would mumble darkly. For Jack, life was a continuous conspiracy against his safety and security and required permanent vigilance.

  They went to Rimini.

  So when Alice came on the scene, and his father behaved so badly—no, let’s not mince words here, outrageously, despicably—Russell expected that his mother would sort it all out.

  “You’ve broken your father’s heart,” was all she said instead.

  To Russell’s feelings of bewilderment and outrage was added an aesthetic distaste. To speak in such clichés! “Broken his heart”? What, simply by living his own life he was being cast as a villain from a B movie? Wasn’t he entitled to find his own happiness in his own way? Who did his father think he was? Who did she think she was? His father had retreated into some kind of ethnic primitivism, and his mother—normally so quick to slap down the slightest evidence of social or cultural backsliding—was suddenly struck dumb.

  How could they behave like this? This was 1998 Britain, for God’s sake, not some 19th-century Polish shtetl or whichever benighted backwater his father’s family had come from. And his father, of all people, who as Jack Wolfowicz had marched against Mosley’s fascists in the East End in the forties, and leafletted against the National Front in Notting Hill in the fifties, and demonstrated against Enoch Powell in the sixties, and proclaimed his resistance against racial prejudice almost daily—his father refused to have his daughter-in-law’s name mentioned, let alone her presence entertained in his house, because she happened not to have been born a Jew.

  Even when Rosa had been born he had still refused to bend. Sylvia, though, couldn’t resist it, and from time to time she’d turn up by herself. Did she tell him where she was going? Russell didn’t know and he didn’t care. She would coo over Rosa, and bring her silly toys made of garish plastic of which Alice disapproved, since Rosa’s toy cupboard was stacked with improving jigsaws and tasteful wooden railway sets; or she’d buy her dolls, of which Alice disapproved even more. As for Russell, he would retreat to his study while she was there and was relieved when she left. Once or twice, Beverley came with her, but since she and Russell always ended up having a terrible row, she stopped coming.

  It wasn’t even as if religion actually mattered to his parents, he thought furiously, not in any real sense. True, neither Jack nor Sylvia was actually an unbeliever; they had an unthinking, superstitious assumption about some kind of mysterious primal force. “Pfeuh pfeuh pfeuh” went his mother as she threw salt over her shoulder.

  But they were hostile to anyone who advertised a way of life they scorned as primitive and which, since it was one they associated with their own forbears, they feared would tarnish them by association. They both had a horror of the frummers, rolling their eyes whenever they saw the ultra-orthodox in their sidecurls and long gabardines.

  “Just look at that!” said Sylvia one day in horror at the spectacle of a young woman with a tired, pale face, attired in the usual uniform of drab, mid-calf skirt, long, shapeless anorak an
d a snood covering her hair, struggling with a push-chair and seven children under nine, all of whom wore spectacles and four of whom were staggering along with shopping bags suspended from stiffly extended little arms. “In the last century they’re living!” said Jack in deep scorn. “And the men don’t even work,” sniffed Sylvia. “All they ever do is study while the women have to do everything.”

  Despite the socialism and the horror of backwardness and the contempt for actually believing what was written in the five books of Moses, an important part of Russell’s childhood was spent accompanying his father to the synagogue on Saturday mornings for the Sabbath service. Jack, who was fluent in reading Hebrew even though he couldn’t understand a word, read the prayers as his own father, who had taught him, had read them—very fast, always with the same tuneless melodies, with much swaying back and forth and absolutely no comprehension or wish to comprehend other than that this was how it had always been done and always would be done.

  Russell had found the whole business immensely tedious and would sit kicking his heels against the seat and staring vacantly into space, despite his father’s attempts to make him follow the service. “You want Hitler should have his victory after all?” he would hiss into Russell’s ear.

  Neither Sylvia nor Beverley generally accompanied them on these weekly excursions. From the moment they left the house until they returned for lunch, this was the one time when Jack had his son to himself. Because for once he was in charge, he would fuss over Russell’s clothes: press his jacket himself, make sure he was wearing a clean shirt and that his socks were pulled up to his knees.

  Tentatively—because all conversation was normally mediated through Sylvia—he would ask Russell, as they walked along, how his schoolwork was going and what books he was reading. Russell would launch into an animated exposition of set theory or a recitation of Latin third conjugation verbs. “You don’t say!” Jack would whistle, beaming and shaking his head in awe at his son’s accomplishments; Jack who had himself left school at thirteen. “All this he knows already!”

  For his part, Russell would look at his father’s tall, broad-shouldered figure in his fly-fronted navy blue overcoat and the bowler hat Sylvia insisted he wear to make him look like the accountants, opticians and GPs amongst whom he would be sitting, and swelled with happiness that, for this moment at least, he had a father of whom he could be proud.

  It was Sylvia who had insisted that the family change its name from Wolfowitz to Wolfe. (The final “e” was an afterthought, but she thought it a masterstroke of social mobility). This was done when Russell was very small and Beverley wasn’t yet born. Young as he had been, Russell remembered hearing raised voices one night when he was in bed. He heard his father only indistinctly down the hall, but recognized the unmistakable note of cowed inarticulacy in the face of one of Sylvia’s important and unanswerable points. Then his mother’s voice, in the exasperated and weary tone she used whenever one of her important and unanswerable points was meeting incomprehensible resistance:

  “You want he should go through life with this round his neck, like you?”

  So Jack meekly surrendered his name, in the interests of English sensibilities and domestic harmony. Under the covers, Russell pulled his knees up to his chin, the position in which he could keep his fingers wedged in his ears to drown out the sound of his father’s humiliation.

  A young boy of about sixteen now appeared at Sylvia’s side bearing a mug of tea and a plate with two shortbread fingers. He knelt beside her chair so that he could look into her eyes. With her head still bowed and unmoving, her eyes lifted fractionally towards him.

  “Here you are, grandma,” said the boy. “I’ve brought you some tea.”

  Gently and carefully, he lifted the mug to her mouth and she drank. Her eyes never left the boy’s face.

  Russell looked at him with interest. This must be Anthony, Beverley’s youngest. He was very unlike his three elder brothers. They were all beefy and hearty, their voices loud with self-confidence, carrying themselves with a certain swagger even in this shiva house. Anthony was physically different, slight and slender with a shock of untamed dark curls. A certain pre-Raphaelite look, thought Russell.

  With small, delicate actions Anthony gave Sylvia sips of tea. Putting down the mug, he broke off a small piece of shortbread and folded her fingers round it. Slowly, he lifted her hand to her mouth and slid the fragment through her parted lips. With infinite care he removed her spectacles and shook his head.

  “Don’t know how you can see anything at all, grandma, when these are so dirty,” he said cheerfully, as he dipped a napkin in a glass of water and wiped the spectacles clean.

  “Big improvement,” he said with satisfaction as he replaced them on her nose. And he lovingly caressed her hands.

  Russell heaved himself to his feet, mumbling he had to stretch his legs. He stumbled for the door. The boy’s tenderness had touched him deeply. What had gone through him like a knife was the dirt on his mother’s spectacles. Had no one noticed it at the nursing home where she lived? Had no nurse, no doctor, no carer observed that Sylvia’s vision was clouded by a layer of grime? That meant no one was looking after her. Was she even being badly treated? No one knew because she couldn’t tell them. As the shadows deepened around her, his mother was absolutely alone.

  He emerged from the bathroom with reddened eyes and the start of a throbbing head to find himself face to face with the elderly man from the synagogue. He was still wearing the same trilby hat. Russell stared at him. The man put out his hand.

  “I come to wish you long life,” he said. “You and your family. May you know no more sorrow.”

  “Thank you,” said Russell, stiffly.

  They were standing alone in the hall. There was a curious tension around the man, an unease. He stood there staring at Russell. Once again, Russell wondered whether he was quite right in the head. He certainly didn’t want to engage him in conversation. He made as if to go back into the room but the man put his hand on Russell’s arm.

  He put his head closer to Russell as if conspiratorially. There was garlic on his breath and a whiff of something more sour and decaying. “I want to show you something that will interest you wery much,” he whispered. “I show it to nobody else. You clever man. Only you I trust.”

  He put his hand inside his jacket and pulled out a photograph from the inside pocket. It showed what appeared to be the frontispiece of a book, written in Hebrew. It had clearly been taken by an amateur since the page was at an angle.

  “So what you think?”

  Now it was Russell’s turn to stare at him. “Think about what?”

  The man jabbed at the photograph with a stubby finger. “These wery special vords. Holy vords.”

  Russell looked again, baffled. “Well, many Hebrew words are holy words.” What was he getting at?

  “You know Hebrew. So read here. This wery special book.”

  This was getting tiresome. He squinted at the photograph again. The frontispiece featured three Hebrew words and a number, 4940. He tried to decipher the words. For some reason, his brain wouldn’t register them. Laboriously, he spelt out the Hebrew letter by letter, like a small child: le-se-te-oo-air; de-le-ah-chem; de-ah-bo-ra-k.

  It sounded familiar, but at the same time strange. Russell couldn’t quite place it.

  “Wery, wery old. Must be wery waluable, no?”

  He had his face very near Russell’s own and kept jabbing at the photograph.

  He looked at it again. Once more the words meant nothing to him as he spoke them out loud.

  The man suddenly looked sly. “Now I tell you big secret,” he said. The tip of his tongue kept flicking out from between his lips. “This is precious document, has been in my family for generations. Handed down from father to son; kept hidden through pogroms, through Holocaust. And now I am guardian. To me is duty to look after it.”
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br />   “Woah, just a minute,” said Russell. “This is some, ah, very old manuscript? That you have in your house? An original?”

  “Exactly, mister director.”

  “Which no one has ever seen?”

  “No one. I keep it wery safe, oh yes.”

  Russell digested this for a minute. Just how likely was it that such a man, coming out of the ghetto in Poland or wherever, would possess a genuine ancient manuscript? But on the other hand, Jewish families did sometimes possess treasures that had somehow survived centuries of flight and persecution.

  “Uh…so why tell me about it? Why don’t you take it to, I dunno, a medievalist, or the British Museum or something, an expert who can really tell you what the book is about?”

  The man carefully put the photograph back inside his jacket pocket. “All these years I look at it and vonder vot is. My vife said it vos cursed, always brought misery, it vos trash. She wanted me to throw it in fire. But I knew it vos important. This book, it went through many fires. The vords I didn’t understand. But I said to myself if it vos hidden so well all these centuries, something in it vorth hiding. You know vot I’m saying?” The pink tongue flicked out again. “If I take it to authorities they may take it away from me.”

  “Why’d they do that? It belongs to you.”

  The man shook his head. “I not trust authorities. Never they are keeping their vord. Always they have robbed me. Believe me, I know what I’m talking abaht. Everything I lost. Everything.”

  His voice rose, and his face reddened. “Please don’t upset yourself,” Russell said hastily. The last thing he wanted at this moment was a scene from this old man.

  He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “You I trust. You are clever man. You understand old vords. You are not rip-off merchant, make quick buck. Now I come to point. I am now old man. I would like to know, before I die, vot is in this manuscript I have kept safe all these years. I vont to know what it says. I vont to know secret. You help me?”