The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  “Too many immigrants! I go out to blessed shops or on underground, is not Britain any longer! I think I am in foreign country, in blessed Pakistan, Saudi Arabia! Politicians—ach, always they make promises, out of both sides of their mouth…”—here he would point to each side of his own mouth; he also had a habit of touching it with the tips of his fingers to signal the importance of the point he was about to make, almost as if he was telling the other person to keep it secret—“…no one speaks God’s honest truth, no one stands and fights for vot he believes, all they want is to get power, all the time they tell us nonsenses, vot, they think ve children? Now Mrs. Tetcher, ach, there vos woman, there vos leader. None of this rubbish she would say. You know she vos only one viz balls in government!”

  He would wait for a suitable reception for this original sally. Russell’s toes curled inside his shoes. This hero-worship of Thatcher was really quite pitiful. Why were so many Jews so right-wing? And why were so many of them so embarrassingly naive?

  “You know, we really must get this book properly examined and dated.”

  Kuchinsky’s face darkened.

  “No one is to see this. Never.”

  “But if no one sees it, I won’t be able to tell you whether this is genuine or not. And then you won’t be able to publish it.”

  “I tell you already, is not going to be published! No one else will know! No one else’s business!”

  Well, that seemed to rule out his being a bounty-hunter, at least. And clearly there was no way Kuchinsky could have forged it, no way he could have constructed this elaborate linguistic puzzle. But someone else might have done so. Someone else could have forged it and then played Kuchinsky for a sucker—or traded on his own willingness to believe. Just like that middleman in the Hitler diaries fiasco.

  He tried again to find out about how Kuchinsky had come by the book.

  “You see, we need to find out for sure whether this really is authentic, whether it really is as old as we think it is. For all we know, it might be a forgery.”

  “Not forgery! This special book, protected by God. Believe me.”

  “But how can you be sure? You need to tell me this. I need to know.”

  Kuchinsky rolled a cigarette between thick fingers stained yellow. His hands shook slightly.

  Russell worried that he would start crying again, or worse still have a heart attack.

  Once, Russell opened the door to go to the lavatory and heard whispering. A woman’s whispered words.

  “More quickly…taking too long.”

  And then raised voices, and some hushing, and a door clicking shut.

  He rarely saw Kuchinsky’s wife and felt sure she was avoiding him. When he did encounter her moving from room to room in the house, she dropped her eyes and scurried away.

  He could feel the hostility lying thick in the air.

  “Your wife…she doesn’t seem to like my coming here, is that right?” he said to Kuchinsky one day. She had just left the house abruptly and Kuchinsky had run after her; when he returned a few minutes later, his face was set and closed.

  Kuchinsky sighed deeply and took a moment to reply.

  “My vife…she wery vorried about this book. She wery religious. She think it bring bad luck. She think it cursed. She vant me to burn it. I say to her no, no, is good book, is holy book. Will bring us good things.”

  Ah, that was the difference between a Jew and a Christian, thought Russell. The Jew worships the book; the Christian wants to burn it.

  There was something else. Kuchinsky had not lifted his eyes off the floor. Now he put his face in his hands and hid it completely.

  “My vife…my vife, she also think you bring us bad luck.”

  “Me? Why? How?”

  “She think you might steal book, or…or tell people, tell museum or government abaht it, and then there will be big commotion and it will be taken away from us.”

  Russell pondered this. Kuchinsky still had his face buried in his hands. What he had just said made no sense. If the wife was so terrified by the malign forces she thought resided in the book, why would she care if Russell or anyone else made off with it? Clearly, that last bit was not her own fear but Kuchinsky’s. But she clearly didn’t want him in the house, of that there was no doubt.

  He felt uncomfortable and that made him nervous. He wanted to believe that his find was genuine, but Kuchinsky was making it as difficult as possible. And all this whispering and the wife’s silences hardly helped inspire confidence. There was something else behind the wife’s hostility. She had taken against him from the start—and he just didn’t buy the idea that she thought he was an emissary from Satan.

  Back in his flat, he poured himself a large Jack Daniels—and managed to smash the ice cubes so that they spilled off the draining board and rolled around the floor while the argument raged back and forth in his head.

  It was all too risky. The vibes from Kuchinsky’s wife were making him feel jumpy. Kuchinsky himself was clearly an obsessive and possibly a little cracked. On the other hand, the book looked genuine, smelt and felt genuine. No one, surely, would have gone to such elaborate lengths to forge such a thing.

  But he was out on a limb on his own. His head was aching again. Why was he getting all these headaches? Perhaps a brain tumor?

  He went into his bathroom and gazed morosely at himself in the mirror. Tired, heavy-lidded eyes stared back. God, he was looking old. His hair, a thinning nimbus of wiry strands, framed a fleshy face with a mouth whose corners seemed to suffer from a permanent droop. And his chin seemed to have multiplied. He stuck out his tongue and observed to his alarm a grey-greenish coating. Maybe it was a virus rather than a brain tumor. He opened the bathroom cabinet and a small avalanche of pill packets and bottles fell out. He extricated some painkillers and stuffed the packets and bottles back.

  He poured some more whisky to wash down the tablets. He had to do something to take his mind off this or else he would go crazy. His eye fell on a box of stuff he had retrieved from his father’s flat. He picked up a scrapbook and started leafing through it. It contained apparently random items pasted onto its pages: odd newspaper articles, mostly, some stamps with hinges on the back that looked like a collection had been started and then abandoned; some loose photographs.

  A letter fell out, without an envelope. It was folded around a small photograph of two young men in uniform. Russell unfolded the letter. It was dated June 4, 1956, and it was from someone called Bob Falkner who lived in Peterborough. The handwriting, looped and extravagant, was strong and clear. Russell read the letter in growing puzzlement.

  Dear Jacky,

  Thought you’d like to see this snap from happier times!!! Wondering how you’ve been keeping after all these years; heard you hadn’t been too grand. But gather you’re now spliced and with a couple of sprogs! Hope things are easier for you now. You were the best, you know. Wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for you. Well, got to run now but if you’re ever in Peterborough do look me up and we’ll sink a jar or two for old times’ sake. Best regards and do look after yourself.

  Your old chum, Bob

  Russell looked closely at the photograph. One of the men in uniform was his father; he recognized his younger self from the Biarritz holiday photos. The other he assumed, was this Bob Falkner. He thought hard. His father had never talked about the war. He and Sylvia had both given the impression that Jack had been unable to do his military service because of some unnamed physical weakness. Yet here he was in army uniform, with this man Bob Falkner suggesting he had behaved in some kind of admirable fashion. No one had ever suggested his father had ever done anything admirable or memorable in his entire life.

  There was a telephone number under the address. Of course, this man might not still be alive. But Russell resolved nevertheless to ring the number.

  He went to bed and dreamed a recurring dr
eam; he was wandering through a railway terminus desperately searching for the right train, and when he finally got on one he found he had no idea where it was going.

  8

  “WELL, NEITHER OF us looks a day older,” said Waxman.

  Russell’s heart sank. Stupid of him to have imagined that Waxman would have changed. Still speaking in clichés. He had certainly acquired a veneer, though. That non-stop loquaciousness now gave him a plausible social patter doubtless designed when pitching for business to put employers at their ease.

  They had met in a coffee shop near his office. Waxman had talked a bit about his family and some of his insights into workplace psychology. He didn’t seem very interested in Russell’s life over the preceding twenty-five years. He had an agenda.

  “So, what’s it like in the media these days?”

  Russell sifted through the daily trials of his working life, wondering how best to present his own achievements in the least negative light. It was, however, a question that Waxman was himself intending to answer.

  “The bias against Israel is shocking. I’ve got lots of stuff that would make a great TV show—really wake everyone up.”

  It turned out that Waxman spent much of his free time attending anti-Israel demonstrations and meetings on university campuses and elsewhere, filming them and asking provocative questions until he was thrown out.

  Russell looked at him in astonishment. Waxman occupied a senior position in a large management consultancy. Yet here he was boasting of being a troublemaker.

  “Isn’t all that a bit, you know, dangerous?”

  “Well I’ve had my camera smashed a couple of times by these thugs. But these people are getting away with murder. They’re spouting lie after lie about Israel, spreading hatred, inciting violence. People need to know what’s going on here. Taxpayers’ money, after all. Here, this will amaze you.”

  Waxman tapped at his phone and swiveled it round on the table so that Russell could see. There were photographs of an exhibition, posters and placards mounted on easels in what looked like a foyer. There were close-ups of these posters under the rubric of a London university Palestine society. One carried a long list of Arab names. There were pictures of Arab families weeping over the bodies of young men and children. On one easel, a placard announced that these were events that were happening in Palestine, where dozens of Palestinians had been killed in their “resistance to Israeli occupation.” Another poster proclaimed: “Today we commemorate you: we stand shoulder to shoulder with your resistance.”

  Russell looked at Waxman, baffled.

  “You know who all these names are?” said Waxman. “‘Resistance my foot. They’re all Jew-killers. This is a list of the terrorists who for months now have been stabbing Israelis or shooting them or driving trucks into them at bus-stops or throwing rocks at their cars to kill them. Women, children, tourists being picked off for slaughter every day. And here’s a university hosting an exhibition that glorifies and sanitizes such mass murder!”

  He jabbed at the phone as he spoke. He trembled with intensity. Russell recoiled.

  Waxman scrolled along the upside-down phone. A video sprang into tinny life. Students dressed in Israeli army fatigues and toting outsized cardboard replica machine guns were stopping other students as they went into a building, shouting abuse and pretending to shoot them. Some of the students running this gauntlet looked shocked and frightened. Others ignored it.

  “See, this is supposed to replicate an Israeli checkpoint. But some of these students being harassed by these idiots are Jews. Charming, eh? Of course, any truthful replica would have kitted out the supposed Palestinians with knives and suicide bomb belts. Instead the defenders of the innocent are portrayed as monsters.”

  Waxman looked at Russell expectantly.

  “Exactly where do I fit into all this?” asked Russell cautiously.

  Of course it was obvious.

  “The university should be prosecuted for permitting this incitement. Here’s the evidence. I want you to put it on TV, nail these bastards to the floor.”

  The sheer impossibility of bridging the chasm between Waxman’s agenda and the reality of the world beyond him left Russell opening and closing his mouth like a stranded fish.

  “That’s just not going to work,” he eventually managed.

  “I’ve got loads more footage like this,” said Waxman eagerly. “A real gold-mine of incriminating material. Some of the stuff that’s being said, the open antisemitism, the lies and intimidation, you just wouldn’t believe. No one else has got any of this. It’s a unique archive.”

  Russell needed no convincing that this was so. He took a deep breath.

  “I’m afraid there’s really just no appetite for this kind of thing.”

  “You mean the bias? But you’re in a position to make a difference. You could get a TV channel interested.”

  Suicidal vets, thought Russell.

  “It’s all a bit…well, niche, frankly, for your average channel controller.”

  “Niche? This is incitement against Jews. It’s the medieval blood libels all over again. It’s open antisemitism. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Waxman sounded shocked and upset. Russell looked at him in dismay. The years rolled away. He saw again that look of mute perplexity in the face of unfathomable prejudice, the expression he had seen on the face of the bullied boy of twelve when Waxman was called a filthy kike and beaten to the ground. And Russell watched himself once again slink away.

  “Criticizing Israel isn’t the same thing,” he countered.

  “Criticize? These are the new Nazis,” Waxman fumed.

  Russell shook his head, more in sorrow than anger.

  “You destroy your own case by making such a ludicrous comparison,” he said.

  Waxman’s eyes narrowed.

  “And the difference is…? Look, the Palestinians use Nazi images of diabolical blood-sucking Jews. What, Israel shouldn’t defend its people against being wiped out by the same bastards? Turn the other cheek, I don’t think! Well sorry, we’re never going to lie down and be slaughtered again.”

  He looked crestfallen, and Russell couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable. Waxman was up against forces he had no chance whatsoever of defeating, just as he had been at school; and he was displaying the same combination of mulish obstinacy and being pathetically outclassed and outnumbered.

  It had been Waxman’s own fault, after all, for being so bloody stupid, for not taking proper precautions with his own safety, for making himself the victim. And yet Russell felt guilty. He could have stepped in. He could have helped stop the bullying. But he had kept his own head right down, hadn’t he. He had tried to pretend there was no connection between them. But there was.

  Later, he looked up Waxman on the internet. He seemed to be all over it. He featured on YouTube, on anti-Israel blogs, on the Jewish Chronicle website.

  He appeared to regard himself as a kind of one-man instant rebuttal unit. He appeared at the anti-Israel demonstrations outside Marks & Spencer or the Israel embassy, standing behind placards announcing “Peace not hate” and bellowing through a megaphone about “Fascist fellow travelers!” and “Apologists for genocide!” Clearly, he was in a state of permanently boiling rage. He even appeared to be in trouble with his fellow Jews, who regularly denounced him as a dangerous extremist and even a lunatic.

  So Russell was on safe ground, he told himself, in keeping Waxman at more than arm’s length. The man was clearly unhinged.

  Yet Russell found his mind returning to the pictures on Waxman’s phone and the video he had shot. Was it really true that all those Palestinians on that list had murdered innocent people in cold blood, including women and children? If so, why hadn’t that even been acknowledged on those posters? Could it really be the case that the university authorities permitted an exhibition glorifying terroris
m? Could anything excuse such savagery?

  This was just too troubling, and so Russell put it firmly out of his mind. But his father’s severe face, most annoyingly, kept floating into it.

  9

  HE FOUND HIMSELF back at his father’s flat. To general bemusement, Jack’s will had listed certain items that were to be given to Russell: some religious books, the tefillin that observant men wear during morning prayers, some vinyl LPs of dance-band music in faded, dog-eared sleeves. It all sat on the kitchen table in a forlorn and poignant pile.

  “I can’t think why he wanted you to have these,” said Beverley, fingering the phylacteries. “They would have done very nicely for one of our lot. And you’re hardly going to use them, are you.”

  “I’m surprised these hadn’t already been shoveled into the bin bags with all the rest of the junk,” said Russell lightly.

  She bridled. “I started with the stuff that it was obvious no one would want. And I actually don’t see any of it as junk. I treated it all with great respect. More respect than you showed him while he was alive, I have to say.”

  She was obviously still steaming with rage. She stood leaning against the kitchen cabinet, arms folded.

  He picked up the largest book, a chumash containing the five books of Moses. The spine cracked as he opened the stiff cover. Inside was written in a flowery, looping hand: “To our beloved son Jacky on his bar mitzvah, from his devoted parents, August 1931”—and then in Yiddish, “zol zayyin mit mazel!”

  Russell sat down heavily on the plastic-seated chair. Zol zayyin mit mazel roughly translated, meant “have a lucky life.” His father had hardly had a life marked by luck, he thought.

  A picture swam into his mind: he and his father together filling in the football pools coupon. Football was Jack’s passion, and he shared it with Russell. They both supported Tottenham Hotspur; on a Saturday they would come home for a quick lunch after the synagogue service and then, if their team were playing at home, go off on the Tube to the Spurs ground in White Hart Lane.