“For TV?”
“Mnn, no, leave it vague; and that her mother told you about this book which sounded as if it would help your research, te tum te tum, and of course you don’t let on that you’ve already read half of it but it would be so helpful if you could borrow it to study it; and well, after that you just play it by ear.”
“I promised the mother I wouldn’t let on to Haia about Joszef.”
“You don’t have to say anything about him at all. Put him out of your mind. For now, all that’s happened is that you’re doing research and you met Zofia and the sister. Your sole focus is that book.”
He felt a wave of relief. For the first time that he could remember, he felt looked after.
“You’re very good at this,” he said admiringly.
She came and sat on his lap, and put her arms round his neck. “And well done you,” she said softly, “for finding out about the book in the first place and working out what it says. No small achievement.”
Absurdly, he felt as elated as if he had won a prize.
26
THE PHONE RANG in the middle of the night. In his sleep-befuddled state Russell heard Alice’s panicked voice.
“It’s Rosa. She’s in the hospital. Overdose.”
“What! How, what happened? How is she?”
“She’s okay, she’s fine, they pumped out her stomach, I got to her in time, she made sure I noticed, left the empty pill bottles where I was bound to see them, she wasn’t serious, just another bloody cry for attention…”
“Jesus, Alice, she’s fifteen years old and she took an overdose and you’re trying to minimize…”
“I’m not minimizing anything!” Alice’s voice rose and she started to wail. “You just don’t know what it’s like trying to manage her, all on my own…”
And whose fucking fault is that, he thought furiously.
In her hospital bed, his daughter looked like a little Gothic wraith. Pinioned beneath a white cotton blanket, with her black hair startling against the crisp white pillow, her face was almost as pale as the bed linen. He pulled up a chair beside her bed. She looked at him and started to cry. He put his arm round her and she clung to him with surprising force.
“Don’t give up on me! I don’t want you to leave me again!”
He was perplexed.
“Hey, I’m not leaving you. What makes you think I am?”
He could hardly hear her between sobs.
“She’s gonna stop me seeing you.”
“What, Mum? She can’t do that. Anyway, why would she want to after all this time?”
“She’s gonna take you to court…”
“What?”
“…and say you’re an unsuitable parent and can’t be trusted to be with me. Says it’s child abuse.”
He was startled. Despite everything, Alice had never used that trick of making false allegations of sexual abuse against him in order to deny him contact with Rosa.
“Says you’re a bad influence, that you’ve helped me get brainwashed by Rabbi Daniel and she’s stopped me seeing him and Udi and now she’s saying I can’t change my name and it’s all your fault because you’re harming my human rights…”
“What rights?”
“…my right not to be brainwashed by religious nutjobs which is what she calls them.”
Russell was almost speechless. It was hard to say which was the greater, Alice’s stupidity or her wickedness.
“But Udi’s not even religious. Is he?”
“She says he’s a child-killing apartheid Nazi. ’Cos he’s Israeli.”
“But isn’t he still at school?”
“William Ellis.”
“Is all this why you…?”
She nodded imperceptibly.
“Dad, I hate her, she’s crazy, I wanna live with you. Can she do it? Can she get a judge to stop me seeing you?”
There was a fresh burst of sobs.
He hesitated. The truth was, he just didn’t know what she was capable of doing. In any sane world she wouldn’t be given the time of day. But then he thought about Michael Waxman and his assault.
There was something else he had to tell Rosa. He sat on her bed and took her gently by the shoulders.
“Now listen to me, munchkin. Your mother is not going to stop you seeing me.”
She brightened. “Promise?”
He took a deep breath.
“Promise. I just won’t let her do it. This whole thing is ridiculous. I will put a stop to it as soon as I can. But first I have to go on a trip.”
“A trip? Where? How long?” Rosa became alarmed.
“Israel. A few days, maybe a few weeks. I’m not sure.”
“Take me with you! Please, please!”
Of course he had been expecting that.
“Can’t do that, munchkin. I’ve got a job to do. And you’ve got to get back to school. But I will bring you back something nice from there, if you promise me you won’t do anything like this ever again. Because if you do, then we really won’t be able be together, will we. And when I come back, I’ll settle all this nonsense once and for all. Deal?”
Rosa hesitated. She looked at him. Then she made a face and put up the palm of her hand.
“Deal,” she said.
They smacked palms together.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“You haven’t called me munchkin since I was, like, five. Before…before everything went bad.”
He stroked her hair. “But I’ve never stopped thinking of you like that.”
She smiled sleepily.
When he left her, he sat for a long time in the reception area. He stared unseeing at the melee of visitors and patients coming and going. Then he took out his phone and punched in a number.
“It’s me,” he said. “For once, just shut the fuck up and listen to what I am about to say. I have just visited our daughter. It is clear to me that you drove her to try to take her own life. If I hear that you have forbidden her to see anyone or change her name, or if I hear you have either taken action to stop her seeing me or threatened her that you will do so, I will personally ensure that you are publicly exposed for the child abuser that you are so that no human rights litigant will henceforth touch you with a ten-foot pole. As no decent person should. Unfortunately, you happen to be our daughter’s mother. For once in your selfish, narcissistic life, behave like one.”
Next, he called another number.
“Of course we’ll keep an eye on her while you’re away,” said Rabbi Daniel. “Sam will visit her this afternoon.”
He punched in another number.
“Hold on, I’m coming straight round,” said Damia to the weeping man at the end of the phone.
27
IT WAS THE quality of the light that first struck him, as if a grey film had been lifted from his eyes. The blue of the sky, the green of the leaves, the white stone of the unexpectedly attractive airport, all seemed to possess an incandescent clarity that for some reason made him suddenly, inexplicably cheerful.
The flight to Israel had not been an altogether comfortable experience. He had thought he was safe enough travelling British Airways. The first shock was the number of Hassidic Jews on the plane. A group of them, in prayer shawls and with tefillin strapped to their foreheads and arms, were even praying and swaying at the departure gate. The desk staff were paying them no attention. Russell stared at the scene in squirming embarrassment.
On the plane, he watched uneasily as more and more Hassids poured on board, trailed forlornly by dowdy wives in ill-fitting wigs and long skirts, staggering under the weight of babies and surrounded by pale, whiny, bespectacled children.
The men uploaded oversized wheelie bags and outsized hatboxes containing shtreimels, their furred Shabbat headgear, into the overhea
d luggage bins. These unsurprisingly very soon filled up, causing harassed flight attendants to first suggest and then insist that cabin bags had to be moved into the hold. Luggage duly piled up in the narrow aisles waiting to be moved, blocking the passengers still streaming on board from getting to their seats. Voices were raised.
Russell observed this growing mayhem with a grim sense of validation. You see! You see! This is what you have to expect, he told himself.
The rest of the plane seemed to consist solely of people speaking in the adenoidal tones that grated so badly, further blocking the aisles as they greeted friends and family with whom they felt the need to share lengthy news bulletins trumpeted at ear-splitting volume. Russell looked round desperately. My God, he thought, I am completely surrounded.
Sitting next to him was a young woman, engrossed already in a book. Gradually Russell became aware of an extra commotion. A Hassid was standing truculently next to the third and empty seat at the end of the row. A flight attendant was quietly asking various passengers if they would mind moving. The answer was obviously in the negative.
“I’m afraid I can’t find anyone sitting next to a man who is willing to swap,” she said to the Hassid, flustered. The Hassid remained immobile, impassive.
Russell couldn’t believe his ears. What, refusing to sit next to a woman? No!
The plane was ready to depart. The Hassid remained standing in the aisle. “You’ll have to sit down now, sir,” said the flight attendant, indicating the seat next to the young woman. He didn’t move. Another flight attendant appeared. “Sir, the captain will not take off until you sit down,” he said in a loud voice. “If you don’t do so immediately you will be removed from this plane.”
Finally roused from her book, the young woman glanced up, startled. The Hassid still didn’t move. Another flight attendant appeared; there were now three of them staring at him. The passengers fell silent at the drama. Suddenly a young man approached. “I don’t mind swapping,” he said, “and there’s a man sitting next to me.”
“That was very nice of you,” said the young woman as the boy sat down. He shrugged and smiled.
“It was really no problem. Live and let live?”
He looked like a student, in jeans and a T-shirt.
“You’d think I had leprosy or something,” said the girl with a sniff.
“Disgraceful,” said a woman in a cut-glass English accent from a seat behind him. “They should have thrown him off the plane. Behaving like that! Gives us all a bad name!”
Russell shrank into his corner. He stared sightlessly out of the window and hoped everyone could see that he was absolutely not a part of any of this. Hideous! And they hadn’t yet even left Heathrow. If it was this bad on the plane, what was Israel going to be like?
He soon had his answer. He had been advised to take a sherut, or shared taxi, from the airport to his hotel in Jerusalem. It turned out to be a ten-seater van around which milled a great crowd of people with mountains of suitcases. A man who seemed to be in charge barked something at him he didn’t understand. He stared back helplessly.
“Where you go?” shouted the man.
“Jerusalem,” said Russell. “Where in Jerusalem?” shouted the man more loudly, exasperated by such an imbecile.
He gave the name and address of his hotel. The man jerked his thumb at the van, snatched up his suitcase and hurled it into the back. Russell climbed in and found a seat, sweating. Were they all on such a short fuse here?
It appeared they were. An argument broke out between the driver and a knot of people trying to get into the van. Shouting ensued. Suddenly, the group moved like an amoeba on speed towards a second sherut that had pulled up behind the first.
Russell was wedged in between an overweight sweaty man and a woman with a carrier bag on her lap digging into his ribs. The last seat was finally filled, the driver climbed into his cab and the van set off.
The woman called out a question in Hebrew to the driver. He responded sharply and with another question. An argument developed. The woman started shouting and waved her arm angrily at the driver, clipping Russell round the ear. The driver jammed on his brakes, reversed the van through the terminal approaches all the way back to the taxi stand and gestured to the woman to get out. She screamed back; he shouted louder. Finally, she left. A young backpacker got on and took her place. They set off once again.
The other passengers excitedly discussed the drama. The non-Hebrew speakers wanted to know what had happened. “She wanted to be dropped at the entrance to the city and was insisting on a reduction in the fare,” said an elderly man near the front. There was much shaking of heads.
Clearly, they were all quite unhinged in this country, Russell concluded.
The driver turned up the radio at deafening volume. It was a news bulletin. The sherut fell silent. The Israeli passengers listened intently; the others listened uneasily to the Israelis listening. There was an almost audible sigh of relief when the driver turned the radio back to the music that had been playing.
Russell gazed out of the window. They were beginning to climb towards Jerusalem. Flat, neatly ploughed fields gave way to majestic hills dotted with white stone and terraced with bushes and trees. At one point along the roadside he saw what looked like the skeletons of old army vehicles.
“Look,” said an American passenger to his wife, “these are from ’48 when the Arabs cut off this road. In those days it was the only way in and out of Jerusalem. There were battles here, massacres of Jews.”
“Nothing changes, does it,” said the wife with a sigh.
The hills rose steeply on either side of the road. The phrase “sitting ducks” lodged itself uncomfortably in Russell’s mind and wouldn’t fade.
They rounded another bend and suddenly there it was ahead of them, on top of a distant hill: the city itself. Russell gasped. He was unprepared for the sight. The sun was setting, and the pale stone of the distant city seemed to be glowing like pink gold. A long, white jagged column slanting upwards on the horizon pointed like a crooked finger towards the sky.
The sherut wound its way through one Jerusalem neighborhood after another, depositing passengers at their various destinations. Every few minutes there was yet another breathtaking view, with golden pink villages glimmering atop the undulating, white and green Judean hills.
There were new neighborhoods with pristine, red-roofed houses in creamy stone; there were many poorer areas where shabby apartment blocks had washing draped over rickety balconies along with the occasional blue and white Israeli flag. Everywhere the houses and apartment blocks were jammed up against each other. The city seemed to have no room to breathe, Russell thought; it felt as if it were being stifled. And in these shabby neighborhoods, the streets teemed with the black hats and long skirts of the ultra-orthodox and their myriad children. My God, he thought, they are absolutely everywhere.
The stone finger pointing skywards turned out to be the pillar of a futuristic bridge strung like a giant harp. Underneath and beside this soaring statement of purpose and optimism, the city sprawled restlessly in a perpetual motion of scurrying black hats and perpetually hooting cars.
To his relief his hotel, in the center of the city, seemed full of normal people. It was a small, boutique hotel with pleasant young staff and modern fittings. For the first time in ages he slept a deep, dreamless sleep. In the morning he filled his breakfast plate with fresh bread and pastries, eggs, smoked fish and fruits from the ample buffet and ate in the hotel’s tiny patio garden.
Apartment blocks hemmed it in but here a small oasis had been carefully and lovingly created. Lemon and clementine trees were in sweet, fragrant flower. Tame sparrows hopped hopefully near his chair; a tortoiseshell cat sat in the early morning sun washing herself. It was quiet in the garden; he heard birds calling to each other in the trees. He breathed the soft, scented air. A deep tranquility stole over him.
Haia lived on a moshav, a collective industrial farm, in the Judean hills. The taxi-driver who he flagged down outside his hotel eyed him in his mirror as they set off.
“American?”
“Er, British.”
“Ah, Britain! Liverpool football club! What a team! What I give to go to England to see them play! You see them play?”
There was a flash of white teeth in the mirror. His skin was like brown leather; he might have been an Arab but for the small black skullcap perched on his shining bald head.
“Well, er, no…”
“No? You live London? London not far from Liverpool! You don’t go Liverpool football club?”
Russell wished the driver would stop engaging with his rearview mirror. Cars seemed to be coming straight at them while the driver conversed with his reflection and waved his hands around.
“Don’t people ever, uh, slow down here?” said Russell faintly after a four-by-four coming the other way seemed to have narrowly missed shaving off the door where he was sitting.
“Ach, this is Israel, you just stick to the middle of the road and eventually the other fellow gives way,” said the driver, taking both his hands off the wheel now in an expressive shrug.
The taxi suddenly emerged from a tunnel into sunlight so dazzling it seemed to explode onto his retina as the hills and valleys rolled away below and beyond them into a shimmering distant horizon.
The beauty of it almost took his breath away. There was something poignant about these hills, with their white stone and terraces of olive trees and the occasional simple village clinging to their slopes. He thought of England, its soft, rolling landscape clothed in carpets of green dotted with cows and sheep. But these stony, thorny outcrops seemed somehow exposed and vulnerable, as if bared to their fundamentals and open under the sky.
The house was up a dirt path. The car bumped along past a sign with a picture of horses and stopped outside a jumble of buildings. The driver jerked his thumb in their direction.
The Legacy Page 22
