The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  His father’s face loomed up in his mind. He dreamed about him; twice he was sure he had seen him in the street. He had a deep yearning to talk to him. But of course it was all now too late. There was so much he didn’t know about his father, about his family, he thought to himself, stricken. If he went back to those mean East End streets where Jack had lived as a boy, maybe he could fill in some of those gaps in the picture, connect himself to his father, close up that enormous gap in which there was only silence, anger and rejection.

  But the East End had changed.

  It was still dingy, dirty, poor. But the streets were now full of men in long jubba coats and galabiyya tunics, women in every kind of veil, hijab, niqab, burqa, and of course the ubiquitous shalwar kameez. There were Bengalis, Pakistanis, Indians, Turks, Somalis; the shops had signs in Arabic; racks of cheap clothes and stalls selling fruit and vegetables and household goods spilled all over the pavements; snatches of Punjabi and other languages he didn’t recognize floated in the air as he passed by.

  “It really is a different country,” Russell thought, and immediately felt guilty. How could he of all people have had such a thought? He detested with all his being that crabbed, sour, intolerant attitude that saw multiculturalism as a threat. Hadn’t his father fought that very attitude all his life, first in Cable Street and then in Notting Hill?

  What would his father himself have thought of these changes in his old stamping ground? Well of course he would have welcomed them. How could he not have done? After all, weren’t these latest arrivals following exactly the same trajectory as the Jews of Eastern Europe who had preceded them, and the Irish and the Huguenots before them? Didn’t people like his grandparents and great-grandparents themselves wear strange and even outlandish clothing, and weren’t they too treated with disdain and dislike; didn’t his own grandmother wear a headscarf and speak no English? Weren’t these veiled women exactly the same?

  This fear of the other, he mused as he walked through Spitalfields market, this suspicion of the stranger, the outsider, just because they were outsiders, yes, that really was the most pernicious thing.

  His phone buzzed. Text from Alice. What now?

  Govt ever more shitty, prisoner torture, racist immig plcies. Am being lined up for imptnt role advising Labour P on creeping fascism. R involved unsuitable boy

  Unsuitable how? he tapped out in dread. Drugs, maybe? Police record?

  Israeli wrong sort

  She meant he was not a post-Zionist, an Israeli who hated his own country. He knew that because that’s how he also would have thought, not that long ago. He deleted the text in irritation without bothering to reply.

  He found himself in Henriques Street, gazing up at a building called Bernhard Baron House. Suddenly he had a clear memory of his father talking animatedly about the Oxford and St. George’s boys’ club to which he had belonged, and which had been housed here.

  “They taught me to box, to use my fists to defend myself,” his father had said, “but they also taught us something else, us poor Jews from the East End. The club was divided up into four houses, just like the public schools. We were Britons, Danes, Normans and Saxons. Saxons! Can you believe it! This maybe was to make us feel we weren’t only Jews, but Englishmen.”

  And how proud his father had been to become one, thought Russell. He had forgotten this memory until this very moment. He had boxed; he had used his fists. It had never before occurred to Russell that this hardly fitted the timid, terrified father he had known. Whenever his father had talked about this club, Russell had rolled his eyes. Boxing! How primitive. And he had dismissed it with a shudder.

  But now he saw it differently. His father had been tough. He had learned how to stand up for himself. He must also have been physically nimble, adroit. And brave too. How he wished he’d know all that. How he wished he’d been a different person back then, to have been able to be proud of his father for the boxing instead of always feeling so ashamed.

  He felt a great weight of sadness descend on him. Come on, he thought, no point in wallowing. But the melancholy persisted. He turned a corner and came across a church, its whiteness shocking against the surrounding drabness; somehow incongruous, as out of place as a lily in a coal hole. Its solidity comforted him. He went inside.

  It was a beautiful church, light and airy, with a magnificent ceiling picked out in gold offsetting the poignant simplicity of its cream walls and magnificent, tall, clear-glass windows. A workman was busy with the thick wooden front door, apparently sanding it down. Russell walked round the church, lost in thought.

  “Nice, ain’t it.”

  Russell turned his head. The workman had come inside and was messing about with buckets and sprays.

  “Beautiful. And so tranquil. A real oasis.”

  “You can say that again, mate.” The man jerked his thumb back towards the door. “Wicked, what some people do, i’n’t it.”

  Russell looked. Now he saw the door had been defaced. “Christian scum” had been scrawled on it in black paint.

  “Terrible. Anyone know who did it?”

  “Youths,” said the man, darkly. “Thass all we’re allowed to say, isn’t it. Youths. Prob’ly the same youths what smashed up the gravestones out there a few months ago. And maybe the same youths what smashed up the vicar a year or so back.”

  “Lot of vandalism round here, then?”

  The workman straightened up and wiped his hands. He gave Russell a steady look. “Well, less put it this way. These ’ere youths what smashed up the graves painted on ’em ‘death to infidels,’ yeah? Another church round ’ere, what got a brick through the winder, people heard these youths screaming ‘shouldn’t be a church, should be a mosque.’ And these youths what beat up the vicar ’ere, who kicked and punched ’im in the ’ead, they shouted ‘effing priest’ as they did it. Those ones, they got caught but they were let off, weren’t they, ’cos the prosecution, like, they said it wasn’t racially or religiously motivated. And the vicar himself, he said it was only stupid drunken youths, and that community cohesion was very important round ’ere. Well, something missing ’ere, if you ask me, and it ain’t no community effing cohesion.

  “Now the vicar, ’e’s a good Christian gentleman, like. But there’s attacks going on round ’ere all the time. They want to force us out, to make everything so shit we’ll just give up and leave. They’re even attacking them Asians as well. And the police they don’t do nothing about it. There’s Muslim women working in shops what’ve been threatened if they just show their hair. There’s white girls being sworn at and set upon, knowwhattamean, just for wearing a mini-skirt. And there’s these gay people being beaten up just for being what they are. One young guy drinking at one o’them gay pubs or what’aveyou down the road from ’ere, he was left paralyzed he was so badly hurt. Now don’t get me wrong, they’re not my cuppa tea, but they should be able to have a drink without getting beaten up, like. But all we’re told is, it’s youths. No one’s joining up the dots, knowwhattamean?”

  Russell finally got away. Useful, he ruminated. Nothing to beat getting this kind of feedback. To hear such attitudes from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, in all its exaggerated…well, yes, sheer bigotry, of course, it really was so valuable. Maybe Damia would rush a camera crew down here to film this? Then again, probably not. It would only detract.

  Nevertheless, as he resumed his walk he began to notice things he had not noticed before. A sticker on a lamppost depicting a rainbow-colored band inside a black circle with black line across it proclaiming “gay free zone”; a billboard with a model in underwear advertising a deodorant, over whose torso black paint had been smeared; the girls’ school he passed at going-home time, with crowds of young girls in veils spilling into the street but where one young girl tore off her black face-covering as she turned the corner out of sight of the school.

  He had been walking a long time and had a r
aging thirst. Too early to go for a pint, so he nipped into a small grocery store and bought a bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap and took a long swig. He walked on and came to Fieldgate Street. Fieldgate Street! He was sure that was where his father said he had gone as a boy. Was the synagogue still there?

  The whole street, the whole block, seemed to be filled by an enormous mosque, all red brick and large white dome and minaret; and there, alongside this vast and domineering edifice, stood the fragile, tiny synagogue now closed down but still bearing its name and a Hebrew inscription carved in to the stone above the door, the only sign of what it had been below the two stories of flats above.

  It seemed to tremble alongside the mosque like a mouse in a lion’s paws.

  Russell took another swig of his beer as he stood looking at its blue door and inscription. There was a shout from down the road.

  “Hey man! No alcohol!”

  Three young men in hoodies were looking at him, pointing and gesticulating angrily.

  “This is Muslim area! No alcohol! Respect, man! This is a mosque! Is against Islam!”

  The three started to run towards him. There was a glint of a blade. Russell turned and fled. He ran down a side road and kept going, across one road and then another. Then he got to a junction with a bigger road, and ran down that.

  It was only when he eventually stopped running that he realized he had been running away down Cable Street.

  16

  “SO, NO MAN in your life, then?”

  They sat companionably over coffee and a fragrant Muscat. She had attacked her treacle tart and cinnamon ice-cream with a childlike concentration.

  “Mnn, nursery puddings,” she had sighed in artless satisfaction as she finally put down her spoon.

  It was very easy between them. Russell felt as relaxed as if he’d known her forever. Yet he didn’t know the first thing about her.

  She lived in Stockwell, it turned out, with two cats called Beatrice and Benedick.

  “Why…?”

  “Because they’re always teasing each other.”

  He looked blank.

  “As You Like It?”

  “Ah…”

  She was that into Shakespeare? He adjusted his view of her once more.

  “But they love each other really. At least, I hope they do. You can never be sure, can you?”

  He was disconcerted by her direct stare.

  They had agreed to meet in the National Theatre restaurant, which seemed a reasonable halfway point between them.

  Now she pouted coquettishly. “Does there have to be a man?”

  “You’re not…”

  “No, no,” she laughed, “I’m just pretty self-contained I suppose. And you?”

  Once again she held his gaze. With her almond-shaped eyes, he thought she had a look of a cat herself.

  “Was married but it didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry. And you weren’t close to your father?”

  “No, there were…well, issues.”

  “Sad. My family’s very close. I thought Jews were close?”

  He bridled, despite himself. She looked at him thoughtfully, her head on one side.

  “You know, I really liked your East End proposal. It’s…it’s really quite moving.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure. The father you never really knew, the vanished world in which he grew up, all that, it really makes it all come alive, you know. Draws the viewer in. Makes me want to know more about you, about your background.”

  He shifted in his chair. Was this a come-on, he wondered. She steadily held his gaze. No giveaway there.

  “Well it feels a bit, you know, solipsistic.”

  “No, viewers really love this, to get a little glimpse of what’s burning away behind the presenter’s mask.”

  “Not sure anything’s burning,” he said uneasily.

  “Oooh, I’m getting a whiff of scorch marks,” she said softly.

  He stared out of the picture windows. White fairy lights were strung out along the river, their reflection twinkling in the black water. He wondered what she would say if he told her about the boys outside the mosque.

  “I went into a church there. It was beautiful, but it had been vandalized. There was graffiti saying ‘Christian scum.’”

  “How awful. Do they know who did it?”

  “Just youths. Apparently.”

  “Ah.”

  She looked down at the table. There was a pause.

  “Apparently the vicar was beaten up too.”

  She shook her head.

  “I think we want this film to be very positive, don’t we. We want to create…a certain atmosphere. Poignant buildings, streets of memories, nostalgia for transient worlds, that kind of thing. We don’t want to get sidetracked.”

  “Absolutely not,” he said fervently. He decided not to tell her about the beer and those other youths.

  “Hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but, well, can you tell me about Judaism? I’ve always wanted to find out.”

  He was taken aback.

  “What do you know?” he parried.

  “Well nothing at all, actually. I’ve never met a Jewish person, you know, that I could actually speak to about it. Where I came from in Pakistan there just weren’t any. Now I hear them talked about all the time. I just wonder why, and why it’s so difficult to get any of them to talk about it. And now there’s you.”

  It turned out she had been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Bristol University. Her parents had sent her to Britain when she was eight.

  “They sent you here alone?”

  “They admired Britain, wanted me to have a British education. They’re very open-minded. They’ve had to be. My mum is Hindu, my dad’s a Muslim.”

  Was such a thing possible in Pakistan, he wondered.

  “Sounds very dangerous for them. How come they’re still there, that they’ve survived at all?”

  She shrugged.

  “They’ve always had periodic attacks and scares. My dad was beaten up; they’ve been threatened many times. But they’re very obstinate. They love Pakistan, it’s home to both of them and they don’t see why they should be driven out by fanatics. They’ve had to move around a bit, but basically they were determined to stay put. For me, though, they wanted something different. They wanted me to look outwards, not in.”

  He thought of his own wedding with Alice, that cursory, slightly shamefaced affair in a drab register office. As if a camera had clicked, he saw a clear image of his father’s face. To his shock, he saw him weeping. No, that didn’t happen. Couldn’t have.

  “So how did this work between your parents?”

  “Wasn’t a problem. Dad practiced his Muslim stuff and she did her Hindu thing. They are very respectful and tolerant of each other. I grew up with both traditions.”

  “So what does that make you?”

  When she laughed, her whole face lit up.

  “Well nothing, really. I don’t think I believe in anything, not in the religious way. But I suppose it’s why I’m interested in religion. It doesn’t have to divide people, and yet it does.”

  She twirled her spoon thoughtfully.

  “What’s now called Pakistan was once the center of the ancient Vedic civilization. That turned into Hinduism. Now it’s a Muslim country. That doesn’t bother me in the slightest. What bothers me is that people kill each other over it.”

  “Well you’re a long way away from all that now.”

  She waved her spoon at the restaurant. It had been empty when they arrived, but had now filled up with people spilling out from seeing the plays, clutching their programs and talking quietly to each other. The women had stylishly bobbed hair, much of it unselfconsciously grey or white, and had clearly dressed up.
Most of the men were wearing ties, although there were some corduroy trousers and a certain amount of tweed.

  “This is what I love,” she said quietly. “The English middle class. Order, tolerance, self-restraint. No hysteria, no extremism, no violence. People like you take all this for granted. But for me, well, it’s precious beyond price.”

  It was true he had taken it for granted, even despised it as the mark of a privileged establishment. But that was before Eliachim of York had come into his life, before he had begun to see that for the Jews of Britain nothing could be taken for granted. Before he had begun to feel different from the rest.

  “But is it home?” he asked. “Is it where you feel you belong? Or is that still Pakistan?”

  He had never wondered about such a thing before. She looked at him keenly.

  “Home? I just don’t think about it. Pakistan is where my family still is. Here is where my life is. The word doesn’t really mean anything to me. What does it matter, anyway? I suppose I feel myself to be a citizen of the world. Home is where I feel comfortable, where my friends and loved ones are. But that can be different places at the same time, can’t it?”

  He stared at her as if she had just performed a magic trick. What, indeed, did it matter? There was no reason at all why it should. He could slough off his past, the stuff with his father, all the baggage about where he belonged. Damia was offering him nothing less than his freedom.

  He realized he fancied her rotten.

  “I really like you, you know,” he said to her as they emerged onto Waterloo Bridge. She reached up and kissed him on both cheeks. He pulled her closer and kissed her deeply on the mouth.

  “When can I see you again?” he said thickly.

  “New Broadcasting House, three o’clock tomorrow to discuss the East End idea, remember?” she said gaily. “I’ve got a really good feeling about this proposal. I think they’re going to absolutely love it.”