The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  A look of intense irritation crossed her face, and she set the tray down so hard the cups tinkled in the saucers. She was a small woman, thin and wiry, with a sharp nose and chin and untidy brown hair. She took the plate from him and put it back in the cupboard, without even looking at him. She detached the menorah from Kuchinsky’s hands, stored it and the goblets in the cupboard and locked it carefully, feeling for the key on his belt. Then she led him to the sofa and sat him down while she remained standing.

  “You promised you wouldn’t do that,” she said coldly. “You mustn’t upset yourself. You know what the doctor said.”

  Kuchinsky didn’t move, but sat slumped on the sofa.

  “I’ve made you your tea, like you asked,” she said. She had the faint trace of an Irish accent. There was a pause.

  “That’s very kind. Thank you,” Russell said, to break the silence. “I’m very sorry if I…I had no idea…”

  This time there was no getting away from it. She was deliberately ignoring him.

  “So I’m away to the hairdresser,” she said to Kuchinsky. “I’ll be back in an hour. You’ll be okay now.”

  It was not a question, but a statement. She was dressed drably: brown trousers and a shapeless grey cardigan over a black jumper. She seemed on edge and yet at the same time reluctant to go. She stood staring at him. Eventually, she clicked her tongue in annoyance and abruptly left the room. The front door banged.

  Russell poured the tea. The cups had fussy little handles that you couldn’t get your fingers through. Eventually Kuchinsky roused himself.

  “My vife, she doesn’t understand.” He shook his head. “No one who vosn’t there can understand. No one.”

  “I understand. That we can’t understand, I mean,” said Russell hastily. “You met here in London?”

  “She vos my presser.” He made an ironing motion with his arm. “She vos lonely. I vos lonely. So ve got married.”

  In the silence, Russell heard a clock ticking. Kuchinsky’s unhappiness hung like a pall between them.

  “I don’t think my ex and I ever understood each other. But then, she wasn’t Jewish and that does make things more complicated.”

  Russell couldn’t believe what he had just said. Of course it wasn’t true at all. The fact that Alice wasn’t Jewish had had nothing to do with it. They were just incompatible. No, they became incompatible. No again—she made herself incompatible with him. So why had he said such a thing? The words had floated into his brain and then onto his tongue like a bubble and before he could stop them had popped into the air.

  Clearly, he had only uttered them because he was so embarrassed that he had managed to revive such unbearable memories for this poor old soul, for whom thinking about his family’s religious heirlooms had not surprisingly revived the agony of the carnage in Poland. He had instinctively blurted out something to indicate his solidarity and sympathy with him, to show that he was not alone and that Russell knew from personal experience what it was like to go through life with a soul mate who wasn’t a Jew. Because Russell was pretty sure, having seen his wife, that she wasn’t.

  On second thoughts, however, maybe it wasn’t so tactful considering he and Alice had actually got divorced. Maybe he had merely made things even worse.

  Anxiously, he eyed Kuchinsky over the teapot. To his relief, he appeared untroubled by what Russell had just said and did not betray by so much as a flicker of the eyes that Russell had indeed rightly assessed the ethnic composition of the Kuchinsky marital ménage. Clearly, this was an area of his life that, for the time being at least, was to remain off limits.

  Kuchinsky pushed his cup away, wiped his hands on his immaculate white handkerchief, shot his cuffs and drew the cardboard box to him. “Now you see what you come to see,” he said. “Now you see jewel in crown.”

  He opened the box and withdrew something wrapped in a grubby blanket. He peeled off the blanket to reveal an object wrapped in a piece of deep blue velvet, embroidered round the edge with silver flowers and leaves. It looked like the kind of fabric often used to clothe the Torah scrolls in synagogues.

  Carefully, he unwrapped the velvet to reveal a book. It was about as tall as a modern hardback, but a bit wider. Russell picked it up gingerly. Its front and back covers were made of wood, and the pages between them had been sewn onto bands running horizontally across where the spine would normally be. The whole effect reminded him, incongruously, of the ice-cream bricks between two wafers he used to consume as a child.

  Russell opened the cover. The pages were hard and crackly, brown and discolored in places. Every page was covered on both sides, in two columns, with regular black rows of script. The pages had been neatly ruled in brown ink, with margins down the sides. Every so often, words were crossed out and another, different hand had written above them. Some of the pages seemed to have tears that had been sewn up; others had small holes with stitch marks round the edges.

  The writing was for some reason difficult to read. In front of the book was what seemed to be an inscription, the words Kuchinsky had photographed, with that number, 4940.

  Russell sounded out the Hebrew letters again. Li-se-te-oo-air; de-le-a-chem; de-ah-bo-ra-k. Part of the second word looked familiar. The letters were dalet, aleph, lammed, yod, samech. Russell tried the previous word, listooar. Lammed, shin, taf, vav, aleph, raysh. Russell spoke it aloud. Listooar.

  It almost sounded French, he thought. Wait a minute, though—listooar deliachim. He spoke it to himself several times. Supposing it was French—but in Hebrew characters? L’histoire d’Eliachim. The story of Eliachim. The next word was de-ah-bo-ra-k. If the first Hebrew letter dalet actually stood for the French de, it would be “the story of Eliachim of Aborak”—whatever that was. Could that be it? That would explain why it was so difficult to read. And if so, well then could 4940 be the Hebrew year? What was the Hebrew year now, for heaven’s sake? He had noticed it on the front page of Beverley’s Jewish Chronicle. It was 577 something or other. He did a rough calculation. That would make 4940 somewhere around the 12th century AD.

  Could this really be a French manuscript of some kind written in Hebrew characters by some medieval character called Eliachim of Aborak?

  Kuchinsky was watching him closely. His tongue flickered out from between his teeth. “You never seen book like this before, mister director. This one in million. You think it priceless?”

  He leered greedily.

  Russell was stunned. Okay, he had been curious to know just what he’d got, but Russell didn’t really think he actually possessed a valuable antiquity. Of course, the thing could still turn out to be totally worthless, a piece of junk, a forgery, a fake. But as Russell turned it over in his hands, and looked through the pages again, and then picked up the blue velvet cloth and examined that, and then looked through the parchment pages again, he was suddenly possessed of a deep certainty that he was holding something unique and extraordinary. Was it really possible that this man Kuchinsky was sitting on a priceless relic of Jewish history? Stranger things had been known. But what was it? Russell had to find out.

  “How did you come by this?”

  “It was hidden good.”

  He stamped his foot on the floor.

  “Under the floorboards?”

  He nodded. “Kept secret in family for generations. Survived centuries of persecution, pogroms, killings. Somehow it vos kept safe, thank God. All those years he vos looking after it. Is holy book, yes?”

  “Well no, I don’t think it’s religious. Could be some kind of journal, or history.’”

  “Not holy book? But must be wery wery special, to surwive such terrible things—God himself protected it. So must be wery important book, sacred.”

  “It looks like this might have been written by someone called Eliachim of Aborak. Was this one of your ancestors, perhaps?” What Russell didn’t understand was how a book written by some
medieval French Jew could have ended up on a farm in pre-war Poland.

  Kuchinsky shrugged. “Who knew? All ve knew vos surwiving. No one knew vot vos in book.”

  “But there must have been someone in your family who knew something about it, how it had got there. I mean, they knew it was valuable enough to hide, to pass on from generation to generation in who knows what conditions…”

  Kuchinsky brought his hand down hard on the coffee table.

  “Enough with these questions! I did not inwite you to my house to ask all these things abaht family!” He snatched the book from him and, with his hands trembling, wrapped it again in the blue cloth and then in the blanket.

  “You don’t believe? You think I don’t say truth? Is enough the book is here. If you are interested, that’s good. If not interested, you go away.”

  As soon as he took it from him, Russell had an overwhelming desire to look at it again. He found that he was intensely curious and, to his slight embarrassment, more than a little excited. He had to find out whether this was the genuine article or not. He hadn’t come all this way, given up his afternoon and endured the maunderings of a dry cleaner with an obsession in a hideous suburban semi in order to depart with the question unresolved of whether he did or did not have in his possession a manuscript of historical significance.

  “I’m very sorry,” Russell said humbly. “Of course I believe you. Of course I do. I wasn’t trying to pry. I know how difficult this must be for you.”

  “This vos period of life I never talk about. Ever.” The look on his face suddenly made Russell’s blood run cold. For a brief moment, Kuchinsky’s eyes registered a hardness, a blankness, that Russell had not seen before.

  “Of course I understand.” Russell was anxious not to upset him again. He did understand that what Kuchinsky had been through was beyond anything that could be grasped; that he had stood at the very heart of the European darkness, had experienced the most inhuman extremities of behavior with which survivors could only cope by blanking them out of their minds altogether.

  “May I see the book again?”

  Kuchinsky was hugging it to his chest inside its blanket.

  “You translate it now?”

  “Well not now, you must understand, these things take time, a lot of time; it’s not an easy job, even for me…”

  Even. How easy it was to slip into the wishful thinking that someone else creates. Russell had no qualifications whatever to decipher such a document. Ok, so he had done French and German as his first degree, but medieval texts like this were above his pay grade. All he could bring to this was a certain linguistic skill and his native intelligence. A small voice inside him warned that he was getting into something that was way over his head. Was this really something that he could in all honesty undertake?

  Kuchinsky unwrapped the book again and gave it to him. Russell turned it over and over, looked through the pages again. It looked real enough, had the smell and feel of the genuine article. But who was to know? Not him, that was for sure.

  “You need to get this looked at by someone who can verify it as authentic. Tell us exactly when it was written. Date the parchment, the script, that kind of thing.”

  “This is real ancient book! Kuchinsky tell you truth!”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure you are, but the trouble is no one else might believe you and if you want people to read this, if it’s going to be published…”

  Russell was obviously running way ahead of Kuchinsky. “Not published! No one to see this book! No one come here to see it! No experts, no dating of any parchment, nothing, nothing!”

  He was wheezing more heavily now, and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Russell was perplexed.

  “Look, if you don’t want it published why do you want me to translate it at all?”

  Kuchinsky took from his breast pocket a paisley handkerchief and wiped his face.

  “I am 93 years old,” he said. “All my life I want to know what this book said. In every generation people risked their lives to hide it. So Kuchinsky say to himself, must be for reason. Its pages must be blessed by Almighty himself to keep it safe. So I ask, vot are these vords here that have power to cheat death itself? I would like to know this before I die, to answer qvestion. I vont you to give me answer. Only me. You must promise—no experts, no publishing, no TV, no one must see it. It must not leave this house. This you must promise.”

  Not take it out of the house! That would mean Russell couldn’t take it to a library but would have to decipher it by bringing in dictionaries, grammars and what have you. And at the end of the whole process he would have to walk away from it without finding out precisely what this manuscript was and whether or not it was valuable. Of course it was valuable; he knew it in his bones. And he had to confess that this was an important factor to him. To stumble across a historical find like this, a possibly priceless contribution to scholarship that might unlock knowledge of an obscure period in history.

  And what might follow from that, for him? For sure, it would transform his life, his reputation, his career. He would stop being a run-of-the-mill television producer and would move into a different league altogether.

  No longer would he be merely a vessel for the ideas of others. He would himself become an opener-up of worlds. He would become a Columbus of scholarship. He would create something unique. No more derivative trawling through the ramblings of pretentious intellectuals. No more scrabbling for advantage amongst shallow TV production companies. He would turn into an original, just like the manuscript itself. He would bask in its reflected glory.

  A happy daydream engulfed him. He would make a prestige show for the BBC, bypassing altogether its byzantine labyrinth of supercilious commissioning editors and program controllers to get a personal stamp of approval from the Director-General himself. On the back of that he would publish the manuscript, jetting from one prestigious international conference to another to discuss its meaning and significance.

  Of course, the problem of Kuchinsky’s refusal even to entertain the thought of publication would have to be overcome. But having thought himself into this happy frame of mind Russell was quietly confident that, when it came to it, Kuchinsky would offer no objection. He was agitated now because he didn’t know whether Russell could be trusted. Hardly surprising, after all, given the way this book had been hidden for so long. But once they had worked together for a while and he came to have confidence in him it would be a different story altogether.

  There remained the question of whether Russell could actually do the translation. It would be tricky, no doubt about that, particularly with the restrictions Kuchinsky was imposing. But with a bit of boning up and the purchase of some decent medieval lexicons, Russell should be able to cope. The image in his mind of the finished translation, artfully packaged inside an exquisitely illustrated jacket and on prominent display in the front window of a discerning bookshop to the admiration of one and all, overcame any qualms he felt about his ability.

  Inside him a small voice said, Wait! Wait! What if this is a fake? How would you find this out? You could end up like that history don who made a complete idiot of himself over the so-called Hitler diaries.

  Russell told this voice to pack it in. As he worked on the translation, he would surely be able to sniff out any telltale inconsistencies; and he could always take discreet soundings about what it was that he was working on. No doubt he could eventually persuade Kuchinsky to let him take the book to someone for them to look at. If he came with him, what objections could he possibly have, once he had come to know Russell and trust him?

  Anyway, Russell was fed up with being predictable. Time to branch out, to live a bit dangerously.

  He felt a buzz of energy of a kind he hadn’t known for years.

  When can I make a start?” he said.

  5

  AS SOON AS Russell got back home, he sat do
wn at his computer and Googled Aborak. If it was indeed a place, the net would surely tell him where it was. He was so fired up by what he had seen that he didn’t even notice that his iPhone was registering four missed calls.

  In response to Aborak, up came a series of Google references to pesticides, Italian psychoanalysis, comic books and stuff in Czech and Cyrillic. No joy there. He tapped in instead “Aborak place name” and hit the bullseye.

  Up popped a genealogical site that revealed that Eborak had founded the city of York. He Googled York, and discovered that the Romans had named it Eboracum and that medieval Jews had transliterated this into Hebrew as Eborak. York! His hunch had been correct. Kuchinsky’s manuscript had been written by someone called Eliachim of York. He wasn’t French at all. He was a medieval English Jew.

  Of course! In medieval times, English people had used French interchangeably with English. Jews would not have used Hebrew, the sacred language of the Torah, for everyday use—but they would have used Hebrew letters to transliterate the language of everyday, which happened to be French. That was why the words were written in Hebrew letters but didn’t look like Hebrew words; that was why Kuchinsky didn’t even have any idea what this book was, let alone understand what was in it.

  Russell sat back in his chair and tried to contain his excitement. If it was indeed a medieval English Hebrew manuscript, some kind of medieval Jewish traveler’s tale perhaps, it must be extremely rare. Medieval manuscripts by European Jews were themselves few and far between, but how many secular accounts by medieval English Jews had ever seen the light of day? He couldn’t think of any. Had he stumbled upon a priceless treasure?