The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  Pritchard was more than a little surprised to hear from him after all those years, and even more surprised to hear his request; but Russell spun him a line that he was writing a work of fiction and needed a strong measure of verisimilitude and so could he possibly help him out with the odd word; and Pritchard was full of admiration and only too happy to help.

  Kuchinsky flatly refused to let him make any phone calls at all while he was in the house; he sat over him, watching and wouldn’t even let him text on his iPhone. He was frightened Russell was about to give away his secret. Absurd, obviously, since there was no reason why Russell would not do just that when outside his house. And there was no doubt that Kuchinsky’s hovering, paranoid presence was unsettling. Anyway, Russell just took a note of the words or phrases where he was stuck or unsure and then when he got back home rang Pritchard, who patiently pondered the linguistic puzzles he was giving him.

  Russell soon found he was savoring the challenge of it all. As a child, he had always enjoyed making and breaking codes and all those brain-teasers which involve pitting your wits against a problem. Now he was being given permission once again to play.

  It certainly didn’t feel like work. For the first time in his life, he was actually creating something. What satisfaction it gave him to work out how all the pieces of the puzzle fitted together and to see the shapes and patterns in language that they formed. It was also strangely soothing; the intense concentration took him out of himself as surely as a shot of whisky. Cracking the word codes gave him a feeling of being in control, an antidote to his increasing feeling that his livelihood was sliding away from underneath his feet.

  He would sound out the letters, roll the words around his tongue and hear the music they made; and slowly, word by word, piece by piece, the jigsaw started slotting into place as he tapped it painfully, painstakingly into his laptop.

  * * *

  Eliachim’s story (1)

  I write these words in the stillness of night because I can find no rest in the house that shelters me. My heart will surely burst with grief. My darling, my most precious love, is no more, most cruelly struck down. And I, I am the cause. It is my misdeeds that have brought about this calamity, my transgressions for which I have brought down the terrible wrath of heaven.

  My body shakes continually as if with the ague. I wrap myself in the coverlet but I remain numb as if frozen into stone. Only my fingers still move across this parchment, guided by an unseen hand so that all posterity can know what has happened here. I write in secrecy and in haste, lest my attempt to bear witness to these terrible events be discovered and my testimony be ripped from me along with my life. What have I done! What have I done!

  My name is Eliachim, son of Meshullam ben Moshe, may his beloved soul rest in peace, and I was secretary to the renowned Yosef ben Aaron, also known as Josce of York, may his memory be for a blessing.

  My father was an importer of cloth. I still feel prickling in my nostrils the dry, musty scent of the bales of silks and other rich fabrics that had travelled from the east. How exotic that sounded! As a small child, how I loved to hear my father’s tales of his travels to the strange, far-away lands where they were woven and from which he always brought us sweetmeats or trinkets for our delight.

  My mother Belaset, may her soul be among the angels, who brought to my father a rich dowry on account of her father Yehezkiel ben Salomon who was a trader in spices, was blessed with nine children of whom six lived and of whom I, having lived these fourteen summers, was the youngest.

  It was to my mother that people came from around the town on account of her great learning which was equal to that of any man. It was from her that I was said to have gained my skill at letters which brought me to the service of my master Josce.

  My brothers Menachem and Isaac worked in my father’s trade, my brothers Jechiel and Aharon studied in our great yeshiva while my sister Zipporah had married Eleazar, son of Rabbi Yehudah ben Yisroel the cantor, whose elder daughter Genta of thirteen summers was betrothed to me. I was the most studious of all my family. Like others of our kind, my life was set out for me. I would enter the yeshiva to study and I would marry Genta to whom I had been promised some four summers past. We were due to be married when the omer had been counted, and her bridal garments had already been sewn.

  But my soul was restless. I wanted to sail the seas in search of adventure, to discover new worlds. I was enchanted by the beauty of the universe and I gave expression to it in poetry and song. My mother would clap her hands in praise and delight. But my father disapproved of my enthusiasm. Such activities, he said, were profane and would lead me into grievous error.

  Alas, he spoke more truly than he could have known. For in truth, I wanted to marry for love; and I found it not with Genta but with her younger sister, Duzelina. With what great agony of mind I now write that beloved name. Whereas Genta had sunken eyes and sallow cheeks and was of gloomy disposition, always dissatisfied and complaining about her lot, Duzelina was as sweet and as joyous as her face and form were fair.

  After I walked with Genta, accompanied of course by a chaperone, my head would ache all over from her constant whining. There seemed no end to what she would require of me, in dresses and jewelry and fine furnishings, after we were married. My thoughts would turn instead to Duzelina, to whom my eyes were irresistibly drawn for her beauty and her gaiety. For all her modest demeanor, her eyes would dance with mischief. With her, I knew for certain I would venture into an unexplored domain.

  My heart lifted whenever I saw her. And I was sure my affections were returned. When I stole glances at her, her eyes would raise towards mine as if a silken thread stretched between us and my very soul melted at her shy smile. I knew our fates were intertwined. But I was betrothed to her sister. It was at this time that the thought came into my head that Duzelina and I might run away.

  * * *

  My God, Russell thought, this boy could write. From the very first words, Eliachim of York sprang into life: a boy of 14 in a ferment of love and, for some reason, grief. Russell could smell his urgency and his passion. As the words slowly came into focus, it was as if Eliachim was reaching out from the past and dragging him into his story.

  And what a story it was. A love affair between two children—well, they married young in those days. A tragic love affair, obviously, to judge from Eliachim’s agitation. Why had it ended in tragedy? Almost certainly because the love match was forbidden. Irresistibly, Russell identified with their plight. A love match which pitted children against their fathers, which was forbidden because it transgressed religious codes and which tore families apart—the centuries simply rolled away as, word by word, Russell found himself looking at a version of his own story.

  He was entranced; he drove himself on to find out what had happened that would finally, tragically, thwart these children’s happiness. Steadily he worked on, decoding word after word and watching them form themselves into line after line of narrative on his laptop screen.

  A story was now taking shape that was as unexpected as it was vivid. A whole way of life that he never knew had existed was now being revealed, letter by letter, word by word.

  This was Jewish life in Britain, medieval Britain, where Jews had worked out, through both force of circumstance and their own skill and cunning, how to live and even thrive in the face of primitive hostility and resentment by making themselves indispensable to the king and the nobility.

  How well these Jews had understood the English people. How deeply they had despised them. But what pressure they had lived under. Taxed to within an inch of their lives. The frenzy of the mob always just kept at bay. The murderousness of those early Christians, the boiling, unfathomable hatred. Ah yes, he thought, Christianity. Well, that was religion for you: it turned people into murderous fanatics. It made them crazy.

  But these Jews were also religious, very religious. And what he also saw for the first time
was the amazing richness of their lives; not material wealth—although it seemed that there was indeed plenty of that—but the inner life, the spiritual strength they derived from their relationship with their God.

  And how intimate this relationship was, how everyday, how woven into absolutely everything they did: into how they ate, how they dressed, how they washed, how they loved. This was not religion as Russell knew it, corralled into dead rituals in a formal institution, something you had to make a point of going to and then leaving in order to get on with your life. This was their life; this was what they indivisibly were. They really did walk with their God.

  He found himself envying Eliachim, envying the richness of that inner life. This in turn disconcerted him. Here he was, a highly educated member of an elite and, above all, rational social grouping in the most civilized and materially comfortable society known to man, living exactly as he pleased free of all such oppressive and idiotic constraints on his behavior. Why on earth should he feel the smallest twinge of envy for a pious Jewish youth given to mumbling mumbo-jumbo and living in barbaric times?

  He could not help but marvel, though, at this faith of theirs. These people were hardly ciphers, brainwashed into credulity. They argued with their God, begged and pleaded with him, berated him for hiding from them. But not for one moment did they question that he was actually there. To call it faith was itself to miss the point. It was a living relationship, as real to them as any other.

  What comfort there must be in that, he thought. Not for Eliachim any night sweats over his ultimate extinction.

  But this wasn’t some ascetic abnegation of this world in anticipation of the ecstasies or torments of the afterlife, that dreariness he associated inevitably with religion. No, these people delighted in the physical delights of this world, in the pleasures of eating and drinking, of wearing fine silks and jewelry, of music and dancing.

  And they also loved with all their senses—but with a purity and an innocence that came from tremulous restraint, so that sensuality and spirituality became rolled into one. For Eliachim’s story told of a passion as delicate as it was overwhelming, and whose consummation would be as poignant as a rose whose full bloom signals the point at which it starts to die.

  He was embarrassed to think it, but he was stirred by this in a way he had not felt before. Eliachim’s voice—anguished, desperate—now echoed down the centuries like a reproach. How could he not have known about this?

  But then, what did he know even about his own forbears? His grandparents, his father’s parents who had died when he was a child, had come from Poland at the turn of the 20th century. When he had asked his father about his parents and those who came before them, he got only a shrug and a grimace.

  What did that grimace mean? He had never asked, but he knew that, together with the shrug, it meant: “Who knows, who cares, I don’t want to know because they were foreign and probably backward and would make us ashamed of their lowly station in life, and we want to put all that behind us because that was then and this is now and this is all that matters.”

  Or at least, that’s what Jack would have said had he been able to string two coherent thoughts together.

  And why hadn’t Russell persevered until he had got some kind of answer? Even to know just a few of those names would surely have been something, fragments of debris from the great river of the past to which he could have clung. Except that he hadn’t actually wanted to cling onto anything like that, not until now.

  And he knew why. Because he had been ashamed: ashamed of his father, ashamed of all of them. Just like his father he had not wanted to go there, had flinched from opening that door into the past. Now he was ashamed of having been ashamed. But now it was too late ever to find out.

  He worked steadily on. Sometimes he could only manage to get through a few sentences; sometimes he had a good run and was able to translate several pages at one sitting.

  And, for that matter, what had he known about Judaism anyway? Jack’s parents had come from the harsh bleakness of farm life in Poland. There seemed to have been no education, no culture, no deep Jewish knowledge. A barren, joyless heritage: just the daily struggle to survive punctuated by a few mumbling superstitions. But the life of the Jews of medieval York now shone in Russell’s mind like jewels glowing against velvet. Why had he never been shown such riches?

  So he pondered. He sat back and stared at the hideous Tretchikoff glowing greenly on the wall opposite. Something else was troubling him.

  He certainly was not of Eliachim’s tribe. What was unfolding on his laptop was a way of life which was as exotic and foreign to him as a colony of Indian peafowl. The Jews in twelfth century England were eastern Jews who originated in Africa and the Middle East and came to the west through Spain and France and southern Europe. They were altogether different from the Jews like Russell’s own family who came from Poland, Russia and Eastern Europe—different clothes, different food, different appearance, different customs. And yet despite all these differences Russell felt an affinity, a sense of connection, with Eliachim of York. And suddenly he felt as if the world around him was a picture that was beginning to blur, even to dissolve.

  At work, in the pub, even in the streets, he felt different. Self-conscious. He felt as if he was carrying some kind of mark on his forehead. He looked in the mirror and noted with fresh distaste that fleshy mouth, that bony nose, the deep-set eyes. Unmisbloodytakable. Whom did he think he was kidding?

  Combing the newspapers for ideas, he started to notice the repeated calls for an academic boycott of Israel, the endless stream of protests against the “settlers” or the “apartheid” wall. None of this was new. He had just never before given it a second thought. The Middle East had been as much a matter of indifference to him as, say, Burma or Tibet. There was a whole range of worthy causes, all of which he knew were broadly right and principled even if he knew nothing about them because all of them lay within an implicitly agreed world view. He didn’t even have to think about them. He just knew they had to be right because otherwise they wouldn’t have been part of his world, the assumptions shared between the people with whom he identified. Yet now this one was making him uneasy. Why?

  He had no time for Israel at all, of course; but for the first time, he wondered why there was so much about this and so little—no, nothing at all, he suddenly realized—on the persecution of people in the Arab world. Strange. Anyway, none of that was his concern, thank goodness; he could ignore it, and he put it out of his mind. He had plenty else on his plate. And he certainly had no intention of making himself any different from anyone else. He didn’t want even to feel different. But feel it, to his irritation, he now did.

  He found himself thinking more and more about Eliachim. He became a kind of ghostly companion. How would he have reacted to the boycott motions and the campus demonstrations, he silently asked him. More to the point, how would all the people in Russell’s world have reacted to Eliachim?

  He thought of how the Jews of his time had been forced to outwit religious hatred and bigotry in order to live; and how cleverly they had done so. An absurd train of thought, he told himself. There was absolutely no comparison between then and now. None.

  As he worked steadily through Eliachim’s story, the more sharply he veered between elation and fear. He became increasingly convinced that he had stumbled upon an extraordinary find. This was a rare contemporary account, in the vernacular, of a vanished world of which virtually no firsthand evidence had survived. It must surely be priceless. What’s more, it was in itself a notable piece of literature. Eliachim may have been one of the pious, but for all his religiosity he wrote with a freshness and vividness that suggested a remarkable creative imagination along with high intelligence.

  Yet that made Russell nervous. He was aware that he was far more excited than was prudent. Was he being played for a sucker here? Was this not just too perfect, too sparkling? It could so
easily be a forgery. He couldn’t be sure, since Kuchinsky was making it impossible for him to check it out.

  He was taking this all upon himself, unable to consult or confide in anyone. He was flying blind. Dangerous, far too dangerous. He broke out into a sweat thinking about the risk he was taking. The debacle years earlier over the Hitler diaries, when a distinguished historian had verified what turned out to be a not-even-very-good forgery, preyed upon his mind.

  Kuchinsky would sometimes shuffle over and peer over his shoulder as he worked. He was beginning to get on Russell’s nerves.

  “You know vot these vords say now? Is prayer book, holy book, yes?”

  His rasping breathing emphasized the silence in the room. The sickly aftershave he wore made Russell’s stomach heave.

  “I think it’s some kind of diary or chronicle written by a young Jew hundreds of years ago—a kind of snapshot of the times.”

  Instinctively he downplayed it. Kuchinsky looked disappointed.

  “Don’t tell me is ordinary. This cannot be. Has holy vords in it for sure. The Almighty himself guarded this book, saved it from terrible dangers, saved it for reason. Saved it to send message to us. To us! It was meant that I should meet you, that you do this. Is holy vork, God’s vork.”

  “Oh, but it’s an astounding find, really, a priceless chronicle of the Jews who lived here in England, centuries ago; and it’s also a love story, some kind of tragic, doomed love affair…”

  Kuchinsky waved him away. He didn’t seem interested in what was actually in the book, only in whether Russell could prove that it was the mystical source that Kuchinsky was convinced it was.

  When he wasn’t pressing Russell for evidence of the book’s divine origins, he would hold forth about politics and the state of the nation.