The Legacy
Page 13
“When is it not?” said Sternberg morosely.
“Oh come on,” said Sophie. “This is the kind of thing that gives us a bad name! It’s not terrible to be a Jew in Britain today! It’s wonderful! We have everything here we could possibly want!”
Sternberg looked steadily at her. “Except acceptance as Jews,” he said quietly.
“Well, I’m a Jew, and I’m accepted!” said Sophie.
“Jewish kids at my school are being given martial arts training to stop them being beaten up,” said Rosa at the other end of the table.
There was a shocked silence.
“Really? Who is beating them up?” asked another guest in alarm.
“Black kids, mainly. And Muslims,” said Rosa.
There was a sharp intake of breath around the table. Guests looked down at their plates. Russell’s face felt as if it was on fire. He stared at his daughter. What on earth had got into her?
“I’m sorry,” said Sophie, drawing herself up in her chair, “but this is just racism. Sheer, naked racism. And particularly shameful to hear it from one of us.”
“But I’m not actually Jewish,” said Rosa. “Although I’d like to be.”
“Time for some more Shabbos songs, I think,” said Rabbi Daniel.
It was all very strange, thought Russell. First there was Rosa’s behavior, showing a side of her that he had just never seen before. Had it always been there? He stole another look at her. Her habitual sulky pout had vanished. She actually looked happy. He was astonished.
And then there were Rabbi Daniel and Sam. How on earth did they reconcile these two sides of themselves: the rational and the credulous, the educated and the obscurantist, the modern and the primitive?
To Russell, you were either in one camp or in the other. Religion simply repelled reason. But Daniel and Sam sounded like people he knew, people in his own world; they had intelligence, to be sure, but more than that they were demonstrably connected to the wider culture. They were, literally, down to earth.
As if he could read his thoughts, the rabbi interrupted his reverie.
“So Russell,” he said teasingly, “do you find us as weird and Moonie-like as you thought you would?”
Russell blushed deeply. “I’m just a bit amazed, really, how you keep all these balls in the air at the same time.”
“Well, stereotypes rarely bear much relation to reality, do they,” smiled the rabbi.
It was now or never.
“But you do believe, don’t you? In, you know…God.”
“Of course.”
“But you seem so…normal.”
Rabbi Daniel threw back his head and laughed.
“When Sam and I met at Oxford, we weren’t religious at all. Wasn’t how either of us was brought up. At Oxford, I was a rowing blue; and you may find this hard to believe, but in those days Sam ran around in tiny micro-skirts and even hot-pants. I was into heavy metal music…”
“Heavy metal?” Russell was incredulous.
“Sure: that and psychedelic rock, you know, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, all that lot. I played electric bass guitar myself. We had a little band and used to do university gigs. All of that led me to…this.”
“How…”
“Two ways, really. First, what that music did to me was crack the shell around me, open up my emotions. Once your emotions are released—I mean real emotions, not sentimentality—that allows your spiritual imagination to flower. So that was happening, but at the same time, the people I was mixing with in these rock circles, the musicians and the fans alike, they were all heavily into the drug scene. I saw my friends being really messed up, saw the way they were frying their brains, and I just got frightened. Religion was where I went for safety. We both did; Sam was floating around on the fringes of that scene, and, well, she met me and we kind of stared into the void together. The rest, as they say, is history.”
Russell stared at this man in his black silk Sabbath coat, with his dark beard and sidecurls neatly tucked behind his ears. The words just didn’t fit.
“But how could you then start believing in something beyond this world?”
“How could we not believe in it?”
“But it’s just not rational. There’s no more reason to believe in God than in the man in the moon. It’s all based on miracles, on things that just couldn’t happen.”
A pair of warm brown eyes twinkled merrily at him. “Now I’m going to say something that really will annoy you—that’s a very Christian attitude you’ve got there. Christians have this great hang-up about ‘faith.’ We don’t obsess about it like that, we just get on and live it. What’s more, Judaism is actually based on evidence, on what is the least unlikely proposition. You know, I bet I can persuade you!”
“No thanks,” he said quickly. What was he afraid of exactly? He couldn’t really say, when he thought about it. After all, if he really believed it was all total nonsense what possible danger could there be that he might be persuaded it was true? But why on earth was he thinking this way anyway?
Sam collected his plate.
“Rosa is a remarkable young woman, isn’t she: so sharp and yet so soft, and with courage too. You must be very proud of her.”
Russell opened his mouth and shut it again. Truth to tell, he had always been disappointed in her from the moment she had been born. He had been sure it was a boy. But then he had realized, and he was disappointed.
It was a pattern that was to be repeated as Rosa grew up. He assumed that any child of his would be clever, successful, graceful. He had married an English rose and expected his daughter to resemble her mother. As a child, however, she was short and spherical, almost swarthy and with a fine down of dark hair on her upper lip. A regression to that gene pool that he had thought he could obliterate, he thought in disgust. And now just look at her, festooned with piercings and tattoos and all in black, even on her lips.
“The children have really taken a shine to her. We hope we’ll see her again: we have open house here.”
“But Rosa’s lifestyle…we aren’t…I mean, we don’t practice anything.”
“It takes no practice,” said Rabbi Daniel dryly. “Just enjoy it.”
“And Rosa isn’t even…”
“A child with a sad heart is a child with a sad heart. I counsel a lot of young people from every walk of life—orthodox, non-orthodox, religious, non-religious. If they feel they get something from me, that’s great. I’m happy to give it to them.”
When they finally left, the front door shut behind Russell and Rosa and extinguished the radiance of light and warmth in which they had been bathing. Darkness and shadows enveloped them once again.
Rosa hunched into her leather jacket. “How come you don’t even know where my great-grandparents came from?”
“You’ve never asked before.”
“You never told me there was anything to ask about. It’s really cool to know about my family and what happened to them all so many generations ago. And you never told me about any of that.”
She waved her hand at the house they had just left.
“They want me to do some babysitting for them. And Rabbi Daniel says he’ll teach me about kabbalah—real kabbalah! Not that Madonna rubbish. Real mysticism. Not crap magic, spirituality.”
She strode ahead. “They really are getting beaten up, you know,” she flung back over her shoulder. “The Jewish kids. And that’s real racism.”
He stared after her.
12
HE WAS ACUTELY aware he needed to diversify. The gritty social documentaries just weren’t cutting it any more.
“You know, heritage always goes down very well,” said the commissioning editor at Pollyanna Productions.
She was new. Her name was Damia.
“Heritage? You mean history?” he puzzled.
“So
cial history, actually. Things like, oh I don’t know, how the poor lived in the Victorian era, or the English countryside idyll. Smaller-scale, more intimate. Viewers connect.”
He looked at her. Her skin was dark, and her black hair was cut very short, elfin. He guessed Pakistan. Yet she clearly had an instinct for English susceptibilities.
“Immigration?” he ventured.
“Mmn, too angry,” she demurred thoughtfully. “You want to avoid rage. You want people to empathize, identify.”
Instantly, he knew.
“How about a history of the East End?” he said cautiously. “That’s seen waves of immigrants—French, Jews, Asians. You could do it from the perspective of the buildings, the streets. It’s pretty well untouched round there, apart from a bit of gentrification.”
She tapped her teeth with a pencil and inclined her head slightly in acknowledgement.
“That could work well,” she nodded, with a smile. She was slightly built, with high cheekbones. She really was very attractive, he thought. How old? Early forties? But no ring.
“I once saw a play about that, a comedy,” she said. “The writer got into no end of trouble. Accused of racist stereotyping. Utterly ridiculous.”
He adjusted his mental view of her. Clearly, she herself was determined not to be categorized. He wondered about her own background. She had a plummy English accent. Like Alice.
“Well, my father came from round there, actually.”
“Ah! Is there a story to tell about him, maybe? We could do an authored piece, you know, your reminiscences. Oh, but only if you wanted to…” she added hastily when she saw his face.
“He just died,” he said by way of explanation. Which of course, it wasn’t.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said sympathetically. “Were you close?”
Absurdly, he found himself wanting to tell her everything.
“No, not really,” he said.
“How sad,” said Damia. There was a quietness about her, a stillness that he liked. She didn’t seem brittle like most TV types.
“That must be so difficult. I’m still very close to my parents and they’re in Pakistan.”
“My father was a Jew.”
As if that would explain anything! But he felt he needed to say it, to get it out in the open, cards on the table. He held his breath.
“Ah, hence living in the East End,” said Damia. “You know, I’d love to know about Jews and Judaism. I know virtually nothing,” she said apologetically.
He was touched, despite himself, by her artlessness. It was a new experience for him altogether to meet someone who really seemed to have no preconceptions. He felt strange, and he realized with a small shock that he had relaxed. Suddenly he saw for the first time the state of tension under which he normally lived in England. Under which they all lived, the British Jews.
They were always braced, always anticipating, always ready to deal with whatever would be flung at them, from a veiled insult to an actual blow; even when there was nothing at all to cause any alarm, there was always the assumption, the knowledge, the certainty that behind the social pleasantries, friendships even, lay centuries of dislike of the Jew, or worse, that was ineradicably embedded in the social DNA. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Agatha Christie—it was in the English cultural bloodstream. It was the default attitude, and the Jews of Britain had adopted an automatic cringe as a result.
Yet until this moment he had never realized that his own life had been lived in precisely this defensive crouch. He had only seen it now because for the first time he had met someone who really seemed to be totally free of it. Someone from, of all places, Pakistan.
He wondered if he might break his golden rule and ask her out.
13
“DAD,” SAID ROSA, “can I ask you something?”
She was playing Lara Croft GO on her iPhone with her legs draped over the arm of the chair.
Russell looked up from his laptop. Rosa seemed to be spending more time with him these days. This unsettled him. He was glad she wanted to, of course; but she disrupted his world. When she was there he felt obliged to tidy up his flat, pick up his dirty underwear from where he customarily hurled it on the floor. He’d gotten used to being able to slob about without having to think about anyone else. And he always had a nagging suspicion that Alice was using Rosa as a spy.
“Did you ever say to Mum she should convert?”
He stared at her. Why this all of a sudden? And why on earth should Alice ever have done so? It would never have even occurred to him to raise it. The big issue had been whether to get married at all or just stay living together. They had both thought marriage was supremely bourgeois and really quite irrelevant to a relationship, which didn’t need a piece of paper in order to make a solemn commitment to each other; but then Alice had talked to her colleague who did matrimonial at the Law Centre and decided that unless they did get married she would be left without various legal rights if it all went wrong, so they had ended up at Camden Register Office.
“Mum didn’t—doesn’t—believe in anything religious. Nor did I, really. Wouldn’t have felt right.”
“Really?” Where had that come from?
“But then I might have known my granddad. I never even saw him.”
Irritation welled up. Not this again. He’d had a bellyful of this from Beverley. Not from Rosa as well now.
“Well yes, that is sad. But that’s life. These things happen.”
He wondered nevertheless how they would have got on, Rosa and the old man. They had certain things in common. Mulish obstinacy, for starters.
He took a large Tesco’s pizza out of its cardboard box. From the fridge, he extracted a Budweiser and an opened can of Coca Cola. He fished out some knives and forks from the sink, picked off the congealed food, rinsed them and put them on the table. He brushed crumbs onto the floor.
“Why don’t you ever cook real food?”
“No time.”
“Mum doesn’t have time either but she doesn’t eat out of cardboard. At least not all the time. If she’d converted, would you still’ve split up?”
“Wha…you think that…that didn’t have anything to do with it at all. Your mother and I…your Mum just wanted to live in a different kind of way, I suppose. She was very focused on her work.”
“Might’ve made you have more in common, p’raps.”
“We had plenty of things in common. We had you. And we’ve still got you.”
“Maybe you’ll get back together one day?”
She was resolutely looking away from him, her eyes fixed on her plate. But her voice had trembled. Surely, he thought, she couldn’t still be hoping?
“I think she still fancies you.”
“How d’you make that out, then?”
“She’s always sad.”
“So she’s got no one else then.” To his irritation, his heart lifted.
“I never said that.”
He had always known that Alice had never loved him as much as he had loved her. He had been smitten the first time he saw her, taking part in a panel at a conference about miscarriages of justice. She was a young human rights lawyer and had already made a name for herself in some high-profile cases. She was elfin, with porcelain skin. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Russell couldn’t believe his luck when she agreed to go out with him, and pinched himself when they moved in together soon after that. She said she found him exotic, that she’d never met anyone quite like him. She called him her big cuddly bear and said he had a certain smoldering quality. He didn’t think he had ever smoldered but he took it as a compliment.
They moved into a terraced house in Hackney, an area that was scruffier and therefore even more cutting-edge than neighboring Islington where you couldn’t move for politicians, barristers and journalists.
For Russell, Alice had been his passport into the land beyond the rainbow. Through her, he had escaped the drab and vulgar world he had once inhabited. Now embraced by the elect as one of their own, he had been able to forget the humiliating limitations of his former life and assume instead the identity of the English upper-middle class. In this glowing company, with its effortless superiority, witty cleverness and artful elegance, it felt to Russell as if life was just one long mellow party—one that would moreover never end, but was an enchanted land suspended in place and time.
At what point had it all gone so terribly wrong? He really couldn’t pin it down. There had always been a part of her that she seemed to keep hidden from him. She had never quite let down her guard. Sex between them was straightforward and serviceable enough. Afterwards, satisfied, he would fold himself around her back, like spoons in a drawer, and fall asleep straightaway. The fact that she never turned spontaneously to him passed him by.
He put her moodiness down to the fact that she was highly strung. She lived on her nerves, and seemed always to be at the center of some drama or other. Her life was lived at a pitch of intensity that he found simply exhausting. Even on holiday she would tap away at her laptop into the night. He admired her enormously, but he felt rather wistfully that it would be nice if she could just relax.
He himself liked to be cozy, safe, stretched out comfortably in front of the TV of an evening, slippers on, beer to hand, while she was out at meetings or receptions. From time to time, she would pop up on Newsnight or the Today program, her voice trembling with controlled anger as she earnestly explained the unique evil of the latest government initiative designed to deprive terrorists, illegal immigrants or burglars of their rights.