“You want to see sights, you call me, ok?” He thrust a card at Russell. “I drive you, cheap price, I take you everywhere, I show you off beaten track, anywhere you want. You want?”
He finally roared off in a cloud of dust.
28
AT THE END of the jumble of buildings stood a low, shabby house. As Russell approached, he heard the sound of a cello; Schubert, he thought.
He knew it was Haia as soon as she opened the door. The likeness was quite shocking: the same large-boned, peasant face—and yes, the same dimple in the chin. But the eyes were from somewhere else: huge, dark velvet pools. He stared at her in the doorway, momentarily paralyzed by the burden of the secret he now carried.
“You are Mr. Wolfe?” she said, and extended her hand. “You are welcome. My sister has told me all about you.”
She smiled warmly, and then he saw it—something sparkling, vivacious, even teasing. “So full of gaiety,” Zofia had said. He caught his breath. She was plump, with full, glossy lips and snowy white hair pinned into a tight plait on the back of her head. Her skin was smooth, remarkably unlined for a woman in her seventies. She was wearing a full-length embroidered kaftan and gaudy plastic earrings in the shape of fruit.
A cello was propped against a grand piano. Paintings were crammed onto every wall. The house was dark and full of bric-a-brac. She saw him looking.
“My late husband and I collected art. Whatever we could afford, you know. Come! Let me show you.”
She led him through the house, into rooms and up and down stairs, all the time delivering a breathless running commentary on the pictures. “My late husband had an eye for artistic talent, well he was very talented himself, he wrote poetry, he would spot these wonderful artists when they were just starting out so of course their work was very cheap back then, well who knows what all this is worth nowadays.”
She served coffee, black and in eastern-style tea glasses. He choked on a mouthful of grounds.
“It’s Turkish; you are not used to it.”
It was a judgment. He waved away her concern with what he hoped was sufficient insouciance as he spat out the grounds into a paper napkin.
“You play?” He motioned to the cello and piano in order to regain the initiative.
“A family trio: my grandson on piano, my daughter on flute.”
He was confused. “I thought you ran a riding stables…?”
“Oh I do, well I did, I started it, you see, I trained as a psychologist and of course I rode, back in Virginia, and I realized that riding was excellent therapy for trauma or depression. So I started my riding school for children with these difficulties. Now my daughter runs it; I’m not quite as spry around horses as I used to be. But I also realized that music is therapy too. So we take our trio to play to communities where there’s a lot of trauma. There’s no shortage of that round here, I’m afraid.”
He found himself under a sharp quizzical gaze from those dark pools. “You know Israel well?”
“Uh…first time here, actually.”
“Ah! You are not Jewish?”
“Um, well, yes, yes I am. Sort of.”
“Ah!!” There was a pause. Her eyes asked a question which he had no intention of answering. He looked down at his knees.
“Your research must be very important to you then, to have brought you all this way.”
Her gaze had not left him.
“What did you say your field was, exactly?”
Look up, he told himself, look into those pools openly and frankly.
“The culture of pre-war Polish Jewry,” he said firmly, assuming an earnest and, he hoped, suitably scholarly expression. “Your mother thought that a book she had sent you would be of use to me. But I’m only a lowly researcher, really. Grateful for anything that comes my way.”
“I’m surprised she has any idea what it is,” said Haia. “Frankly, I don’t really know why she sent it. She said she had been clearing out her cupboard and came across it at the bottom of a trunk. She’s not actually my mother, by the way, she’s my adoptive mother. Said the book had belonged to my parents, she hadn’t realized it was there, didn’t want to throw it away and thought I should have it. But it just seems to be some broken-backed old thing; I can’t even read what’s in it. Seems to be in Hebrew but I can’t make head nor tail of it. All very strange. I do hope this behavior doesn’t mean she’s dying.”
Russell hastened to assure her that Zofia had been in very good health when he saw her. He had also been very pleased to meet her sister. To his surprise, Haia rolled her eyes.
“The Christian visionary. Thinks I’m going to have a ringside seat at the Second Coming.”
He was puzzled. “You’re not…I thought you were brought up as part of the family, same as everyone else?”
She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, I am a Jew, a Jew from birth. My parents were murdered in Poland during the Shoah.”
He struggled to keep his expression neutral.
“My adoptive mother knew my parents. Apparently she was quite friendly with my real mother. When my parents were murdered she managed somehow to smuggle me out of Poland to America. She was an atheist, although my adoptive father was a Christian, and she was determined to bring me up to know about my Jewish identity. She was very passionate about that, remarkably so.”
“Did she tell you much about your…your parents? About what happened?” he asked cautiously.
She shook her head sadly. “She told me a little about my mother, that she was a great beauty, apparently, and very musical. But she didn’t like to talk about it and, well, I knew the memories were just too painful so I never asked. I think they were both taken away, to one of the camps, but I just don’t know. I think my mother—my adoptive mother, Zofia—just wanted to forget Poland, even the fact she was Polish. She wanted to make herself into an American, become a new person altogether.”
“The past is a big gap for me too,” he said. “My grandparents were also from Poland but I don’t even know from where. My father never spoke to me about any of that. Well, to be frank I never spoke to him about anything very much.”
She nodded sympathetically. He forgot, for the moment, why he had come there. He found himself telling her how little he knew about what he was supposed to belong to. He told her about Alice, about the rupture with his father.
She put her head on one side and gave him a long, appraising look. “That can be very difficult,” she said softly. She sighed deeply and poured some more coffee. “For a long time,” she said eventually, “I didn’t know what I was. I just always knew what I wasn’t. Zofia was very determined that I should know my ‘identity’.”
She made quote marks in the air with her fingers.
“She told me all the time that I was a Jewish child, that I was very special and that I should never forget what I was. But I didn’t know what I was. All I knew was that I was apparently not really American. I wasn’t like my adoptive parents, my sister. Certainly not like my sister. She got religion very badly when she was a teenager. Did she try to convert you? She tries to convert everyone. When she tried to convert me, that’s when I decided what I was. That was when I decided to go to Israel.”
“So…so are you religious? Jewishly, I mean.”
Clumsy! he winced.
“Good heavens no,” she laughed. “Not in the slightest. Although my daughter is. Where she got that from I really don’t know. Maybe it’s in the genes.”
In the genes. He decided to risk probing a bit further. There was something he suddenly wanted to know, and she could tell him.
“My daughter likewise,” he said slowly. “But with her it’s even more curious, being the child of a mixed marriage. What makes a child identify with one parent rather than another?”
Her face assumed a professional expression. “No simple answer to that, really,”
she said thoughtfully. “Depends on so many different factors. Push as well as pull. Some kids react against one or the other parent, and so despise what they are; for others, the parent is a role model and so what they are shapes the kid.
“For me, in a way, history was destiny. I was brought up to identify with my people, with their ancient story. My family, my real family had been destroyed. So I came to live here, to be with my wider family. For me, history didn’t end with the horror that killed my parents. To be where my people are even today still fighting for their right to exist, surrounded by madmen just like in the 1930s—that has given my life meaning.”
He blinked away sudden unexpected tears.
“To be honest, I never knew much about my family, nor about Judaism, I’m ashamed to say.”
“It’s never too late to find out,” she said. There was a distinct gleam in her eye. “You have biography but no history. I have history but no biography. We’re a good match, aren’t we?”
She left the room and returned with a cardboard box. She opened it and lifted out an object wrapped in blue velvet.
“Is this the kind of thing you are looking for?”
She held it out to him. He could hardly breathe, his heart was pounding so hard. Carefully, he unwrapped the velvet. He felt beneath his fingers the familiar roughness of the book’s end-boards. He saw that she saw his hands were trembling.
“Could be,” he said casually, as he gently opened its pages.
“What do you think it might be?”
He pursed his lips and funneled a long breath. “Well, could be a kind of diary, or travelogue maybe, of the kind that was not uncommon in earlier times…”
“Really? How much earlier? How old might this be?”
“Ooooh…well now, possibly…well, really quite old.”
“So might it be valuable?”
Here we go again, he thought. But he couldn’t mislead. He was already entangled enough by secrets. Yes, he said, it might be really quite valuable. Then again, it might not.
“How extraordinary. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But how do you know this, so quickly?”
Again, that piercing stare.
“I’ve, ah, made quite a study of the kind of books Jews either write or possessed in Europe, some of them going back a very long way. And I can see immediately…”
He swallowed hard. “…I can see immediately why you didn’t understand the Hebrew. Because although the letters are Hebrew, the words are French. Norman French. It’s a transliteration.”
“French!” she said in amazement.
Now, he thought, right now.
“Very common in the medieval period,” he said in his most confident voice. “Jews of that time would never write in the language of holiness. So they used the demotic vocabulary of the time. I…I have experience translating such texts. If you like, I can do that with this. If you’re interested, of course.”
He showed her the frontispiece and translated for her, Eliachim of York. He could see she was taken aback.
The door opened and into the room burst a young couple, laughing together as they entered. They stopped uncertainly when they saw Russell and drew back.
“My granddaughter, Shira,” said Haia, recollecting herself. “And this is her partner, Ido. This is Mr. Wolfe from London, who’s going to make us all rich.”
Russell winced. The young people looked bemused. Haia explained.
“An heirloom!” said Shira. “From family you never even knew, savta. That’s so spooky! Like a voice from history.”
She was wearing jeans patterned with metal studs, high wedge-heeled red sandals and a black sleeveless top with straps that crossed over at the back. Hooped silver earrings dangled below fashionably cut straight dark hair. There was a dimple in her chin.
Shira and Ido were from Tel Aviv. Shira was an interior designer; Ido was in high-tech. It appeared they visited Haia quite frequently in order to go riding.
“How’s this gonna make you rich?” asked Ido in disbelief. He was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans. His clear plastic-rimmed spectacles, which had thick silvery metal arms that stuck out straight behind his ears, perched below a skull that was closely shaved. He stood, chewing gum, his head tipped sideways looking at the book, his thumbs in the back pocket of his jeans.
“I don’t think Ido can relate to anything that’s not online,” teased Haia, “let alone something that may be centuries old.”
“Yeah, but how you gonna monetize this?” persisted Ido. “I mean, you gonna sell it? What’s it worth?”
This last inquiry was directed at Russell. He spread his hands helplessly.
“Sell it?” exclaimed Shira. “But it’s an heirloom! It’s the only thing that connects savta to her family!”
There was a silence. Haia flapped her hands dismissively.
“This is all putting carts way before horses. First we have to know what the book actually says. Which Mr. Wolfe is going to help us do.”
He breathed out slowly. So at least that hurdle was now overcome.
The sun was going down. Haia opened a bottle of cold Chardonnay. Shira brought in olives, dishes of avocado dip and hummus, and delicious little nutty crackers. Russell began to feel a lot better.
Ido flopped down in an armchair, draping one leg over an arm.
“You come from London? I’d love to go to London,” he said wistfully. “Camden Market! English pubs!”
“Princess Kate!” said Shira. “What’s she really like? Have you met her? Why’s she so thin? Does she have an eating disorder?”
“Now, Ido,” said Haia severely. This was obviously an all-too familiar refrain. “You know right here is where there are the opportunities for you. It’s the high-tech capital of the world.”
“We’re being stifled here,” said Shira. “So claustrophobic. You feel you’re going to go mad unless you get out.”
Haia clucked disapprovingly. “But you’re in Tel Aviv. You have the sea there, you have young people, you have culture.”
“But it’s hopeless,” Ido said in sudden passion. “The government is terrible. No one’s got any money, the country is owned by a handful of oligarchs, you have to go to Cyprus to get married if you want to escape the clutches of the rabbis…”
“But you don’t want to get married. You have chosen to live together,” objected Haia.
Ido ignored this.
“Nothing moves, nothing changes. Month after month, year after year, no solution in sight. No one wants to do it, to make the peace, to make the compromises. We just get by from day to day hoping for some…miracle. As if! Are we going to have war forever?”
“The settlers are untouchable,” said Shira. “Okay, I know, I know; Aunty Yael. Even so. While the settlers are there, nothing will be solved.”
“The Prime Minister is definitely the problem,” said Ido. “He’s so hardline! Someone has to take the initiative here! We can’t carry on just doing nothing. We have to come out of the territories. We can’t rule over the Arabs like this. What we’re doing to them is terrible, the suffering at the checkpoints. Pregnant women, old people, forced to wait for hours in the heat. We keep building in the territories, no wonder the world hates us. Soon they’ll boycott us, isolate us. In London, don’t they already hate us?”
‘There is, certainly,” said Russell cautiously, “a lot of feeling that Israel killed so many children in Gaza, that it was out of all proportion considering that hardly any Israelis were killed. That’s why some people say Israel committed genocide.”
Shira and Ido both looked at him in astonishment.
“They say that? But that’s obscene, ridiculous! How can they possibly say such a thing?”
“This was war, a totally justified war, not genocide! Genocide is what they’re trying to do to us! They fired thousands of rockets at us!�
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“In Tel Aviv we were in shelters all the time. That’s why we don’t have more casualties, because we have shelters to go to! In Gaza they don’t build shelters but put their children on top of the building so they’ll get killed!”
“Gaza is completely different to the West Bank! We left Gaza years ago, every last Israeli settler was dragged out of there. They’re just trying to kill us because they want us dead. They built tunnels so they could get into kindergartens and kill little kids!”
“Are people in Britain really saying we mustn’t defend ourselves? Would they just sit there and do nothing if London was being rocketed? What do they say about the thousands of rockets fired at us? About the fact that now we’re being stabbed and shot every day, just because they want to kill Jews?”
“Erm, well none of that is actually reported,” said Russell.
Their mouths dropped open.
Russell felt confused. Hadn’t they just been denouncing their government as the problem?
“The young here have been brought up to think Israel is just another country like any other,” said Haia, refilling Russell’s glass. “They’re all on social media, they’re plugged into Western music, watch Western movies. They think of themselves as just like young people in the West. They expect Israel to be treated exactly the same as any other country. They have never been taught that Israel can never be like any other country.”
Shira and Ido both looked at her in horror.
* * *
Eliachim’s story (3)
But look now upon those Gentiles who call themselves Christians. They are ignorant even of their own language, being unable to read the simplest document or write their own name. They do not follow the laws of reason but place their faith instead in devils and witches, in necromancers and conjurers.
Yet they treat us as their slaves for we are not free men. They milk us for our money like the cows in the barn. And then when the time comes for them to honor their debts they turn upon us for the manner of our faith. They whip us like dogs and slaughter us because we refuse to worship their idol. They tell us most falsely that we killed their god. Yet they do not scorn to take our gold, and then they blame us for the debt which they tell us brings them fast to ruin and shows the evil and avarice of our race.
The Legacy Page 23
