The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  “And his family who were here, also from Gaza? They’re allowed into Israel too?”

  She raised an ironic eyebrow. “Sure. Unless they’re not allowed; if the crossing is closed because of the terror. Crazy country, this.”

  “There was a heart doctor who did some tests on me…el Arish or something…”

  “Yes, what about him?”

  “He’s an Arab, right?”

  “Of course. We have many Arab doctors here, many very distinguished ones including professors and heads of department. You have a problem with that?”

  She had drawn back.

  “No no no no no, not at all, quite the contrary…”

  “You are surprised? You didn’t think Arabs work alongside Jews here? Ah, you come from England, yes?”

  She looked at him now as if light had suddenly dawned.

  “Mahmoud el Arish is a terrific person, a really nice guy. You should talk to him about it, he won’t mind at all.”

  The next morning, the Hamas boy still hadn’t come back. Dr. el Arish materialized soon after breakfast.

  “Good news,” he said, smiling. “You’re all clear. We found nothing at all. Just watch those stress levels.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re carrying way too much anxiety. Not for me to pry, but you need to find ways of losing it somehow. Believe me, we have a lot of experience of that here.”

  “What’s happened to him?” asked Russell, motioning to the empty space next to his bed.

  “He’s been moved to intensive care.” The doctor dropped his eyes discreetly. A vein throbbed in his temple. There was a pause.

  “Whereabouts do you come from?” Russell hoped his tone was as neutral and conversational as possible.

  “Kalandiya. A so-called refugee camp. Near Jerusalem. That’s where I was born and grew up.”

  “So-called?”

  He shrugged. “Look, I got out. It’s a terrible place, a place for losers. It suits certain people to keep us permanently as losers. I was very fortunate. I managed to get an education. I studied in Cairo and then in Prague. It opened my eyes. I learned a number of things I wouldn’t otherwise have known. I learned how to think.

  “And now I work here where I’m just a regular guy. An Israeli Arab. Actually, you know, these days I prefer just to call myself an Israeli. I look at these guys who are brought in here, kids like this, I listen to the way their minds have been twisted, and then I look at the rest of the Arab world and I give thanks to God that I am here in Israel and not there. These people who hate the Israelis, they have no idea what real oppression is.”

  “This boy…” Russell gestured to the empty space, “he’s very young to have done what he did.”

  The doctor slowly shook his head. Now Russell saw that his eyes were unfathomably sad.

  “Many of them are much younger. They’re taught from the cradle to kill: to kill Jews. I should know: I was taught like this. We’re dealing with a complete madness, total evil. I can hardly bear to think about it. That’s why what we do here is so good. We don’t think about what our patients may have done. We don’t think about anything except treating their wounds or diseases and making them better. We bring a little bit of goodness into the world, all of us here, Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian, Druze and Kurd, everyone. This is what co-existence looks like. This is what sanity looks like.”

  He had to ask.

  “What do your friends, your family make of you working here? Do they also think like you do?”

  He flinched at the doctor’s answer. “They call me a traitor to my people. They have disowned me.”

  “So where do you feel you now belong?”

  Dr. el Arish shook his head sadly and sighed.

  34

  BACK IN HIS hotel in Jerusalem, he texted Damia.

  Eliachim now finished story spectacular am totally exhausted

  Brilliant well done excited to read it have you got agreement to bring it to London

  Gathering nerve to broach it

  Say you need to authenticate and there’s money in it

  Tried that once before with less than total success

  Be brave

  When he turned up again at Haia’s house, she gave him a long hug. “You gave us a bit of a fright, didn’t you. So glad you’re ok, after all. I would’ve stayed at the hospital, but they kept me informed by phone.”

  He gazed at her. She had cared about him.

  “We have much to discuss,” he said. “I’ve finished the translation.”

  She inclined her head in a gesture of congratulation. “Well done! We must celebrate your achievement.”

  She busied herself with getting out glasses and opening a bottle of wine. “So now you’ll publish it?”

  “It’s not quite so simple. I need to get it authenticated by experts who will confirm that it really is a manuscript from the 12th century. That means people need to come and look at it here…”

  “…or you need to take it back with you to England.” She finished the sentence for him. “That’s okay.” She nodded at him benignly.

  He stared at her again. She showed no more than sympathetic interest, as if what he was proposing was nothing to do with her.

  “It’s a really amazing story,” he said. “It was written by a young boy who witnessed the mass suicide of medieval English Jews who were being besieged by Christian fanatical killers. Very much like what happened at Masada. I think it’s a really important manuscript. It will cause a sensation.”

  “I’m very happy for you,” she said. “I’m happy that the world will see it. It’s an important contribution to scholarship.”

  He was bewildered. “This is a joint project, of course, you and me together. The book belongs to you, after all. I’ll send you the translation for you to read. You’ll see then how powerful this is.”

  She left the room and returned with the book. She drew it out of its velvet cover and softly turned it over in her hands.

  “This book was in my family for hundreds of years,” she said reflectively. “Maybe they knew the story it told; maybe they didn’t. We’ll never know now how they came to possess it; we’ll never know the story behind the story now, will we. They’re all dead. Everyone is dead.”

  “It will probably make you—and me—quite a lot of money. There’ll be a lot of media excitement over it.” Maybe that was what was troubling her.

  She was quiet for a few minutes, looking at the book. Then she gently folded it back into its velvet cover. “My life here is very settled,” she said finally. “I know what I am here. To a large extent I have constructed it myself. I have only the fuzziest picture of what came before. Some of that picture is made up of images I have had to invent for myself. I don’t want to see them dissolve, to find that I have to look at a whole new set of images by poking around in the past. I’d rather leave it alone.”

  She looked at him steadily. What was she trying to tell him? She took the book and handed it to him.

  “Take it. I’ll read about it with enormous interest when you place it in some university library, when you make this great contribution to knowledge. Who knows, maybe I’ll even read the story itself one day.”

  “But it’s yours,” he stammered.

  “No it’s not. It belongs to the ghosts of the past. Let them rest in peace. You’ve done all this work on it; you deserve to get some benefit from it.”

  He took the book from her. His taxi was waiting outside. She walked with him to the door, and as he turned to say goodbye she gripped both his arms below his shoulders.

  “Let him go,” she said softly. He hung his head and she pulled it towards her. He buried it in her shoulder.

  He got into the taxi and drove off, his mind in a tumult. He had done it. He had pulled it off. He had got what he wanted, and on
better terms than he could ever have imagined. He would get the manuscript authenticated, of that he had no doubt. Damia would get its story told on TV. It would make him some money, maybe quite a lot of money. More important, it would make his name. Rosa would be proud of him. Alice would be dumbfounded. He would become a sought-after commodity. It was all now working out just as he had dreamed.

  So why did he feel so wretched?

  As if someone else was speaking, he heard himself say, “Stop the car. Go back.”

  After a lot of exclamation and hand waving by the driver, and not before Russell had to pass over a wad of shekels, the car turned back. Haia opened the door and look at him quizzically. Gently but firmly, he pressed the book into her hands.

  “Whatever you choose to do with it,” he said, “even if you never read what it says, it belongs here with you.”

  Then he turned abruptly and left, before he had the chance to lose his nerve.

  35

  HE LOOKED OUT of the aircraft window as the white skyscrapers of Tel Aviv fell away beneath. The city got smaller and smaller and then there was only the sea and the sky.

  Home. He was going home. He felt relieved and strangely bereft at the same time.

  It was as if he had stumbled into an enchanted kingdom. It had been magical, mysterious, spellbinding. But it hadn’t been real. He wasn’t part of that, and could never be so. He had not been amongst his own. How could he have been? It was all so deeply foreign to him. The high emotion, the black and white view of the world, the naive unsophistication of the people, the sheer Middle Eastern-ness of it: life as a bazaar, always ducking and weaving, every transaction a bargain, all sharp elbows and patronage.

  He thought, once again, of his father. He was certain Jack would have hated it, and for the same reasons. The in-your-face rudeness, the indiscipline on the roads, the sheer incomprehension of the very concept of the queue. It was all the opposite of what his father had most loved about England: the restraint and the stoicism, the formal manners, above all the bloody miserable grey dampness of the place. That was what had made him feel safe. That was the England to which Russell knew he too belonged. It was part of him; it had formed his character. He could no more renounce it than sever one of his own limbs.

  And yet he felt nevertheless that he had indeed left his heart behind. He had been deeply touched in places inside himself he never suspected even existed.

  To live permanently in the shadow of war, to endure the relentless attacks and the murder of loved ones—it didn’t alter what he thought about the politics of the place, not at all, but the human side had brought him up short. He had been moved above all, he realized, by the everyday and the mundane. The things he found so tedious in England now took on a heroic dimension. Day by day they managed somehow: loving, working, squabbling—my God, how they all argued—bringing up their children, dealing with the terrible shocks life delivered them but finding consolation and purpose in everyday things.

  And now he saw something else too. He saw his father in a different light. Indeed, he was now able to think about his father without flinching. It was enough that he had survived as an ordinary man. He didn’t have to be heroic. He had endured. He had taken the knocks and had just carried on, without fuss. His life had not needed noisy purpose to have meaning.

  He thought of all the dramas of his own life and felt ashamed. His reputation had meant so much to him. Now he saw it as an empty vessel. He had wanted to leave Eliachim’s story as his memorial, his legacy. Foolish, he thought. Books had no intrinsic value. Books could be burned. It was people in whom ideas lived on; other people. Rosa. And he knew now that his father lived on in him.

  He felt bereft at having left Eliachim’s manuscript behind, but not because he regretted the decision. He felt he had lost a friend, a companion who had accompanied him for so long and who had reached out his hand through the centuries to usher Russell into a world to which he had never known he belonged.

  Now he was unsettled and he knew he would remain so. He was going home, but what did that mean? Where did he now fit in? Not in Israel, that was for sure; but did he fit in England anymore?

  He heard Yael’s voice, mocking and bitter about Britain; he thought of Kuczynski and Eliachim and the boys who had chased him down the street and Waxman being attacked by the green bandannas, and he recognized with a panicky dread that he had crossed over some kind of line.

  How comforting it would be, he thought as the plane crossed the Channel, just to turn his back on it, to move to the society he had just left, which, for all its many perils and irritations, would take him in without any questions, accept him unconditionally. How easy it would be to sink into it gratefully, to accept an uncomplicated identity, to give himself up to the intoxication, the tremendous romance of a history reclaimed and redeemed.

  Easy; but for him, impossible. Everything would work out all right in Britain. It had to.

  Nothing had really changed, had it. The Kuczynski thing had been unfortunate, but anyone could make a mistake. Those Muslim boys had been upset because, well, it had probably been tactless of him to have been drinking in the street. Waxman had really been asking for it; he couldn’t have been more provocative.

  Good God, he thought, he’d been beginning to think like a right-winger himself. Having Islamophobic thoughts, and letting Yael get under his skin like that! A settler! He had been carried away by emotionalism, by sheer human sympathy, but she was just defending the indefensible.

  Yet images kept flooding his mind. The young Israelis dancing in the street. The Arab children at Yael’s riding school. The teenage soldier Amitai praying alone in the garden with his gun propped against the tree.

  Eliachim in torment, about to flee to France and then to who knew where.

  He got down his bag from the overhead locker to put things away before landing. He fingered the gifts he had bought for Rosa: a volume of poems by Yehuda Amichai, a book of photographs of Jerusalem and an Israel Defense Force T-shirt. The books had been recommended by Rabbi Daniel. The T-shirt had been Russell’s own impulse. He had smiled in amazement as he found himself buying it. Rosa. She would come and live with him. He wanted her near him now.

  The plane dipped over the Thames. He pressed his face to the window and looked down upon the great, familiar landmarks of his life, now so small and diminished. He gazed at the brown river snaking below; he spotted the Dome and Canary Wharf and Tower Bridge, and the wide green spaces of Richmond Park and the tower blocks at Roehampton; he observed tiny cars streaming along ribbon-like roads, oblivious of their insignificance; and then he saw the houses and gardens of English suburbia, rushing up to meet him.

  36

  “AFTER ALL THAT effort. So why on earth did you go back?”

  She was put out, Russell knew. Well you could hardly blame her.

  “I can’t really explain. It just felt wrong to take it from her. Even though she was alright about my taking it. It still felt…somehow exploitative.”

  Damia chewed pensively on a fingernail. “Do you think she knew?”

  “About her father? Not specifically, no. But she knows something isn’t quite right about her story. She didn’t want to find out. She didn’t want to disturb the ghosts. I think I was worried that’s what I would somehow do.”

  The unquiet ghosts, though, were in his mind. He was restless and couldn’t settle down to anything.

  Abandoning the book had left him with an alarming gap in his life. He had been banking on it to release him from the trap in which he had somehow got himself snared. Now that route was closed off because of the whole damn Nazi thing.

  “We’ve been given a transmission date for the East End program,” said Damia brightly. Even that couldn’t shake his mood. “We’ve got to map out your script,” she said. But he wasn’t interested in the East End anymore.

  “You need closure,” said Damia o
ne evening, finding him sitting staring into space.

  He realized she was right. It wasn’t actually the book, though, that was making him so unsettled. It was Kuczynski. He needed to speak to him again. He needed to confront him with what Zofia had said.

  “I’m going back to see him.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said. “Moral support. You’ll need it.

  37

  THIS TIME HE only had to bang on the door once before it opened. He was shocked at Kuczynski’s appearance. Gone were the dapper blazer and cravat. He was disheveled and unshaven, in a grubby polo shirt.

  There was no sign of Veronica. Kuczynski shuffled wordlessly into the front room where Russell had spent so many hours working on the manuscript. Russell was shocked again. The room was in a state of disarray. Dirty plates and cups were stacked up chaotically, on the table, on the footstool, on the shelves. Rumpled clothes were strewn on the floor along with packaging that had been ripped open, newspapers, plastic rubbish bags full to bursting. A mattress and bedding were also on the floor near the door. It looked as if Kuczynski was barricading himself into this room every night.

  There was a rank smell that turned Russell’s stomach. Damia perched on the sofa and opened her bag. She took out a handkerchief and kept it pressed to her nose. Kuczynski looked her up and down with a sneer. Russell knew what he was thinking. His blood boiled.

  “You lied to me. How many Jews did you kill that day in Jedwabne?”

  “I didn’t kill no one, vos Germans, Nazis, vos war, vos all madness.”

  “Don’t give me any more of this rubbish. You were going to kill your own daughter, your baby girl. You stole from the Ajzensztejns and then you tried to kill your own child. What kind of monster are you?”