The Legacy

1

THE PLATFORM AT Swiss Cottage tube was crowded. It wasn’t quite rush hour, but there hadn’t been a train for more than five minutes. Through a crackle of static, a disembodied voice announced that this was due to an earlier passenger incident at Baker Street.

It was hot in the station as more and more people shuffled onto the platform. Russell eyed them uneasily. Would there be room? He had a horror of confined spaces. The Hillsborough football stadium disaster swam into his mind. He had produced a documentary on it for Channel Four, watched over and over again that awful footage of the fatal crush.

He imagined what it must have felt like to be pushed over and then trampled underfoot as the panicking crowd surged forward. How would you die? Would your ribs be crushed, or your skull, or your spine snapped by the stamping feet above? Would you simply suffocate, gasping for breath as the terrible press of bodies shut off the air altogether?

But this was worse. He was underground here, entombed. Ironic, since he was on his way to a funeral.

In extremis, he was often wry. An affectation, it also served as his armor.

He pushed his way to the end of the platform where there were fewer people, for the time being at least. He looked at the arrivals screen. Still blank: no train was yet showing.

The monotonously repeated announcement about a passenger incident grated. It was a coy euphemism that fooled no one. Everyone knew that yet another person had gone under a train. Deliberately, he hoped, looking warily at the heaving crush on the platform. What a way to die, though, he thought. I mean, why would you throw yourself under a train when all you had to do was take a handful of pills?

Morbid. Stop it. Not surprising though, given what had happened recently. He looked at his watch. Christ, he was pushing it. Eleven stops to Stanmore, and then he’d have to get a taxi to the cemetery. Did they even have taxis in Stanmore, he wondered.

He began to feel dizzy. Apprehensively, he moved his eyes fractionally sideways. What would happen, he wondered, if he should collapse with a heart attack, right there? Could they get an ambulance crew through? After all, he had been under a lot of stress, he said to himself, well before the events of the past few days.

It didn’t help that he had no one to confide in, no one who was that close to him anymore. He wanted someone to reassure him that what he felt was happening was not in fact happening: that his world wasn’t falling away beneath him.

Why was it all going wrong? He blamed the BBC. That’s where the rot had set in. When it had decided to stop being a national institution and turned itself instead into a free-market enterprise.

Now producers like him had to fight for every commission. His last three ideas for shows had been turned down. Bastards. Of course standards had slid. The cutting-edge journalism he’d specialized in had given way to reality TV. He’d turned up his nose at that cooking show idea. For God’s sake, who was to know how many ratings there were in Victoria sponge cake?

And now this. He could really do without it.

He felt the stirrings of a breeze. He looked up. The screen announced a Stanmore train in one minute. The breeze gained force and became a warm wind. A distant rumble grew louder from deep within the tunnel as the train approached.

Russell was near the platform edge. A Tube worker in a hi-viz jacket intoned metallically that passengers should stand back behind the yellow line as the train approached. Russell looked towards the rumble that was rising in volume; he stared into the sooty blackness. He saw the faint flicker of reflected light as the train approached the bend in the tunnel; with a roar it burst into sight as it raced towards the station.

And then he had the strangest sensation, as strong as it was terrifying, of being drawn to jump in front of the train. It wasn’t a desire to kill himself, of course not—he of all people. It was a compulsion, as if some force was actively pulling him towards and over the edge.

The platform started tipping up. The ground started to dissolve. He swayed on his feet. A hand roughly grasped his arm.

You all right, mate?

A black youth in a hoodie was looking at him in concern. He kept hold of Russell’s arm and helped him into the carriage. Bit too crowded, yeah?

A Sikh passenger who noticed stood up and Russell sank gratefully into his seat.

There you go. Okay now? No worries.

And the ordeal ahead of him, Russell thought drearily as he wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and neck, hadn’t even started.

2

THREE DAYS LATER, after seeing his father into the clay-clogged earth with what seemed to him indecent haste and absence of due ceremony, Russell Wolfe sat inside a synagogue for the first time in forty years with hatred in his heart.

He hated his sister, Beverley, for making him feel it was all his fault. He hated the synagogue for its rigid complacency. He hated his fellow Jews for making him despise them. He hated himself for having needlessly exposed himself to this irritation.

Most of all, he hated his father for dying.

He had no business dying when he did. There were unfinished matters to attend to. Now they would never be put right.

It was stifling inside the synagogue. He looked around with distaste. Nothing, absolutely bloody nothing had changed. It even had that smell that brought it all back: musty books with cracked spines, cloying perfume and, faintly, fishballs.

The same dreary architecture that managed to convey both grandiose pomposity and a total absence of the sublime. The same drone of background chatter punctuated by sibilant hushing from officious types on the platform where the rabbi, who was reading from the scrolls of the law, stopped from time to time and momentarily silenced the hubbub with a look of pained weariness.

He felt the life draining out of him at the dreariness of it all.

A tiny child rolled around underneath the table that was supporting the scrolls, plaiting and unplaiting the fringes of the heavy, embroidered table-covering hanging down.

Russell’s head swam as he swung the prayer shawl over his shoulders and automatically held it over his eyes to pronounce the blessing. Oh God, not here. Not another dizzy spell, not in front of all these people. The words dried in his mouth. Feeling he was being watched, he looked cautiously sideways. Heads swiveled imperceptibly, and bespectacled eyes appraised him up and down before dropping again towards the books bobbing beneath the soft folds of the shawls.

In a sea of Marks & Spencer navy blue suiting, Russell felt as if his trademark black leather jacket was burning a hole in his shoulders. His gorge rose in irritation. After all, he had taken the trouble to put on a tie. A black one.

He had done his best to make it clear to anyone who might have got the wrong impression that, whatever points of genetic continuity or physiological resemblance there may have been between himself and his devotional companions, he was very definitely not of their tribe. Accordingly, he was wearing a black shirt with his black leather jacket, the one he’d picked up in Portobello Road when he and Alice had lived in that flat in Notting Hill. Oh, and a tiny diamond stud in his left ear. Beverley’s jaw dropped when she saw him, which was very satisfactory.

That shirt, Russell! You can’t wear that.

I’m in mourning. It seems entirely suitable.

But Dad marched against them, for God’s sake.

Well, you could see her point. But at least it marked him out as having absolutely nothing to do with his brother-in-law Elliott, sitting in pompous seclusion in the synagogue wardens’ box and looking forward to his ritual Saturday lunch and the ritual Saturday afternoon sleep he would have straight afterwards. Prat.

Russell looked upwards to the gallery. Yes, there were the women, even today penned in like a flock of brightly jeweled birds, pecking and preening in their elevated enclosure. Excluded from participation in the proceedings, no wonder they chattered and gossiped throughout. Plump, lip-glossed lips glistened below placid eyes that showed no glimmer of rebellion or even awareness of this demeaning ostracism.

How astonishing it was, thought Russell, that outside these doors modern women—even, probably, many of these comically behatted ones perched above—were daily asserting their equal rights as workers, citizens, voters; and yet in here they took their places docilely and unquestioningly in this cage of decorative uselessness.

Some of them, though, he had to admit, were nevertheless quite fanciable. But how many, he wondered, would be up for it?

They were easily led. After all, the kind of person you found in such a place was…well, not to put too fine a point on it, not the brightest bulb in the box. He knew the type so well. Were not his sister Beverley and her absurd husband Elliott among its members? Small-minded, parochial, above all stultifyingly suburban. Oh yes, they were what demographers would call the professional classes all right, the ABC-1s as the statisticians would describe them; but they were estate agents, high-street lawyers, dentists. Not the kind of world he came from, the intelligentsia.

There really was no comparison. Their world was tiny, introverted, incestuous. Its central artery was the North Circular Road; venturing south of it required major preparation for an expedition into hostile territory, preceded by anxious conversations of cartographical illiteracy with others of similar territorial scope, and producing the kind of travelers’ tales upon arrival in Hammersmith or Clapham commensurate with surviving a journey of epic peril.

Russell’s life was filled with many causes, testimony to a wide-ranging appetite for ideas—tackling global warming, ending Third World debt and of course fighting racism. They only had one cause. Israel.

It was truly an obsession, positively pathological. They believed with iron certainty that the smallest criticism of that tiresome country would leave them one gasp away from the gas chambers. He, by contrast, placed the whole of the Middle East in its geopolitical, socio-psycho-historical context and so took the more sophisticated view that Israel was merely a byproduct of a discredited colonialism.

His was the world of books and bicycles, of polished wooden floors, of holidays in French self-catering gîtes and good conversation over several bottles of decent claret. Theirs was the world of fitted carpets and velveteen lounge suites, in which social gatherings were called functions, and where the women still had their hair done in rollers at hairdressers’ salons with fey French names in suburban parades.

It had been Alice who had pointed out that last observation to him, snorting with derisive laughter after she had got lost in Edgware on her way to meet a client. She’d never imagined that such a place was actually part of London, she declared, shaking her head in mock wonderment. So unutterably dreary! So hideously lower-middle-class! He hadn’t felt like telling her that this was precisely the kind of place where he had been brought up.

That was when they were still together, of course. Before she had so bafflingly packed her things one day and left.

What in God’s name, thought Russell, was he now doing here. But of course, he knew. He really had no choice. Even before the day he’d gazed flinching upon his father’s body stretched out, still on his side of the bed even though he had been alone these past two years, Russell had always known that if he observed nothing else he must say the kaddish, the prayer for the dead, when his father died.

Not to do so would be to abandon him, as he himself had been so painfully abandoned. It would have been a form of revenge. God only knew he was angry enough. But he realized he wouldn’t have been able to stand the guilt. He weighed up the options: to dip back into this world he had rejected and subject himself to these gruesome people and their ridiculous behavior; or stay true to himself, turn his back on all this and suffer the pangs of conscience forever.

Put like that, it was a no-brainer.

But when it was time to stand and say this prayer, this kaddish, he found to his embarrassment that he stumbled over the words. It wasn’t just rustiness, but a welling up within him of an emotion for which he was entirely unprepared that made breathing difficult and his head again start to swim.

Swaying slightly, he started to sweat and to panic. He stopped and bent all but double. The men around him gently repeated the words he was supposed to say. He looked up, and saw them turned towards him in a gesture of solidarity. In their black and white striped prayer shawls, they looked like a herd of zebra shielding an injured foal. He swallowed hard and falteringly continued. The men murmured more strongly in response, and when after an eternity he got to the end they turned away immediately as if to indicate tactfully that nothing untoward had occurred. Discomfited, Russell found his eyes were hot and damp.

He wiped his face. A feeling stole over him that he was being watched. He looked along the pew. There was an elderly man at the end in a trilby hat. As soon as Russell caught his eye, he looked quickly away.

Russell noted his black-rimmed spectacles, curiously old-fashioned, and the absence of a prayer shawl; and the way the man’s hands gripped the back of the seat in front so tightly that even from that distance the knuckles gleamed white. Physical frailty, maybe, he thought—but then the man, although old, didn’t look fragile; quite the contrary. He was a big man, still powerfully built, with a thick neck and a dimple like a cleft in his chin; and those hands were broad. Peasants’ hands.

An unwelcome picture slotted into Russell’s mind: a woman in a drab council flat, her mouth a toothless grimace of permanent discontent, her enormous hands pressing down heavily on each of her splayed knees under the floral overall that crossed over and tied at the back; the sort of overall that cleaners used to wear. His grandmother. Yes, he knew those hands. Shtetl hands.

The voice of the rabbi cut into his reverie. He was delivering a sermon about the binding of Isaac, when Abraham had prepared to offer up his only son as a human sacrifice. To Russell, the story was both repulsive and incredible. If it was supposed to be true—of course Russell assumed it was a deep-seated cultural myth, although in the spirit of open inquiry on which he prided himself he kept all options open, theoretically speaking, just in case—but if by any chance this story did indeed have a historical basis, then either Abraham had a heart of stone or the prevailing ethos of those times viewed children on roughly the same level as animals.

Russell considered that this was probably the most likely explanation for the whole distasteful tale. Tender concern for one’s children was, after all, a recent development associated with advanced civilization. Paternal love, a social construct, was a modern invention.

But then again, he thought in a spasm of fury, it wasn’t only in antiquity that parents saw their children principally in terms of productivity or the perpetuation of the tribe. He saw once again Alice’s face, washed first by incredulity and then, as the realization sank in, disgust. As if I’m something to be ashamed of, she had said bitterly. And in that moment he had known he hated her, even as he knew that through the choice he had made for her he would finally break with his father.

Dismayed by the direction in which his thoughts had led, he tried again to concentrate on the sermon. It appeared that Abraham had been set a supreme test which he had passed with flying colors because he had not questioned it but simply set about lashing Isaac to the pyre. Russell stifled a yawn.

The small child who had been rolling around now emerged from behind the lectern and started pulling at the rabbi’s prayer shawl, which promptly fell off. Everyone laughed. The rabbi scooped her up and stroked her hair. What greater joy do we have than our children? he said. They are our lives, they are our future, they are our purpose on this earth. What more appalling test could there be than to kill your own child? Of course, the very thought fills us with horror. What parent would not die himself rather than have his child come to any harm, God forbid?

Oh for heaven’s sake, thought Russell; spare me.

The old man at the end of the row blew his nose loudly and wiped his face with his handkerchief.

Russell felt in his pocket for his iPhone and turned it over in his fingers like a comforter. He hoped he had remembered to turn the ringtone to silent.

So what should we conclude, said the rabbi, that Abraham was a callous parent, unfeeling, inhuman, a forerunner of those Palestinian parents today who send their children to be suicide bombers?

Russell looked up, startled. A stillness descended upon the congregation as if it had temporarily forgotten to breathe. Some appeared to be asleep. Others looked shocked. The young suddenly seemed to be paying close attention.

The rabbi shook his head. The mistake, he said, is to assume that he intended to sacrifice Isaac. Look at the words. They don’t say that. They just say he must take Isaac and prepare a sacrifice. He had perfect faith that the holy one would provide the animal to be slaughtered. Which is of course what happened. Abraham trusted he would not be required to kill Isaac. He had unshakeable faith. That’s the point. That’s why he passed the test.

Despite himself, Russell was impressed. A clever argument, he had to give him that. Not the usual banal and absurd pieties. Russell looked more closely at the rabbi. He wasn’t old, beneath that beard, late thirties, early forties—younger than himself, certainly. There was a brain there, no question, possibly even quite a good one. Yet he had suspended his intellect to believe in fairy stories. As for the Palestinian jibe…well, no surprise there of course.

Not for the first time, Russell despaired of his fellow man.

When he had approached his bar mitzvah, Russell was sent to Rabbi Levene for tuition. This sage appeared to him to be an ancient; but since he was to live for another forty-five years this impression must have been caused by his chest-length beard along with forests of hair sprouting from ear and nostril, not to mention the persistent food stains on his shabby cardigan or waistcoat.

Russell had a good ear and equally good memory, and found it relatively painless to learn the Hebrew passages he had to sing aloud. What he found more difficult was the exposition of religious thought that he was also expected to prepare for his bar mitzvah test.

So what about Charles Darwin? he asked Rabbi Levene.

What about him? said Rabbi Levene warily.

Well, how could God have made the world in six days when there was the evolution of species?

And why not? The rabbi had this irritating habit of answering a question with another question.

Because the universe is billions of years old.

Here you have missed the point, said Rabbi Levene, plucking loose hairs from his beard. A common mistake. Look at the order of creation in Genesis: light at the beginning, mankind at the very end and fish and fowl in the middle. Just like Darwin says! Uncanny!

Russell tried another tack. So what about the dinosaurs, then?

So what about them?

Well, they don’t even appear in Genesis.

Ah, said Rabbi Levene, leaning forward so that Russell could smell the onion on his breath, that’s because before the holy one made the world, he made another world first…

Uhh?

…and that was the world with the dinosaurs, which was quite different from the second world which is our world, the one with Adam and Eve, and that first world was destroyed before he made our world, which is why the dinosaurs died out.

Russell wrote in his draft exposition: My view of Judaism is that there’s a lot in it that doesn’t really add up but somehow it manages to find ways of explaining all this away.

If you were to apply yourself properly to the study of Torah, said Rabbi Levene sternly when he read this, "you would find that everything miraculously does add up and that there is no limit to what you cannot understand."

Russell changed his exposition to say: My view of Judaism is that there’s a lot in it which doesn’t seem to add up, but the more you study the more you understand. At his bar mitzvah, he was word-perfect and sang beautifully (Like a choirboy! said poor Auntie Evie, who was promptly sat upon) while his real, secret voice deep inside him repeated ever more loudly, over and over again, God does not exist.

And yet, four decades on, he had come to say a prayer in a language he could barely read anymore from lack of use to a deity in whose non-existence he would still have believed as firmly as that boy of thirteen, were it not that after much mature reflection he had concluded that this, too, was a kind of faith which as a man of reason he could not in any sense endorse.

Whatever was he doing there that day, in a synagogue of all places, forty years after he had served divorce papers upon God? And why did he now feel, absurdly, bereft and wounded, as if he had been robbed?

His father had been but a shadowy presence during his childhood and had then shut him out of his life. He had surely done Russell a favor; he didn’t want to be part of that life anyway. But now Dad was dead, he wanted him back. He wanted, finally, to win the argument with him, to hear him admit he had been wrong. That he, Russell, had been wronged. He wanted his father to ask him about his life, to be proud of him again. He wanted to give him another chance to be his father, before it was too late.

But now it was too late, and he was furious.

At the kiddush—the reception following the service—he stood in a crowded hall holding a thimbleful of sickly sweet wine and a piece of bright pink herring on a cocktail stick, feeling conspicuous and uncomfortable as the crowd flowed around him. Elliott, thank God, was on the other side of the room, holding court.

Russell overheard snatches of conversation. The rabbi, it seemed, did not command universal admiration.

A load of mumbo-jumbo! God this and God that. You’d never think this was the 21st century.

Well, what do you expect? He’s very black. And his poor wife! Looks like she’s pregnant again!

Is it her own hair, d’you think?

Course not!

Well, it looks so real.

The better ones are made of actual hair, you know. Cost an absolute arm and a leg.

It’s the children I feel sorry for.

One a year from teenage to the menopause. Poor thing!

What did they mean, black? The rabbi’s skin seemed to be as pasty as anyone else’s—beneath the beard, paler, in fact, than the perma-tans on display. Was it his hair that was black? His soul? Russell felt his head begin to swim again.

Two men started a mild argument over the Palestinian reference.

He shouldn’t’ve said it. Too political.

But true.

"Tsk, so unnecessary. He’s just going to offend people, divide the community. Should’ve stuck to the Almighty."

"But it’s what actually happens. They do turn their children into bombs. They are inhuman. He’s a rabbi. He tells it as it is."

"Tscha, you can’t go round calling people inhuman. We know where that kind of talk leads. He’s been warned before to keep shtum about politics. A lot of people here will just leave. We have to keep the community together."

You mean pipple here actually support Palestinian pipple against Israel?

It was the old man in the trilby from the end of the row. He had an Eastern European accent of some kind. He sounded incredulous. The other two looked at him. One paused with a glass of whisky halfway to his lips. Then they looked at their feet.

Well, er…

Look, it happens. The man with the whisky lowered his voice. His shoulders rose in a shrug as he spread his arms as if helplessly. Even here.

"Can’t have gone down very well with you." They both laughed uneasily. Russell realized with a start that they must be addressing him. He looked uneasily from one to the other. They were looking at him sideways, eyes bright with curiosity and, he thought, a hint of malice. My God, he thought, do they all know who I am?

You like Palestinians? You no think they terrorists?

The elderly man with the trilby was now gazing at him intently. All three waited expectantly. Russell groaned inwardly. He really didn’t expect to have this conversation here, of all places.

"Well, um, I do think they, ah, have a case," he said cautiously.

The two men exchanged glances and slid away, leaving him alone with the elderly fellow. Russell swallowed his irritation at having been accosted by the kind of person he was doing his best to avoid and tried to look agreeable. The man was continuing to stare at him.

"This case they have, he said. This case include wiolence?"

He couldn’t pronounce the letter v. Like his grandmother, Russell thought. Polish, then, probably.

Of course not, said Russell, affronted. "It’s their cause that I support. Only a few of them use violence. I think it’s wrong to judge people as if they’re all the same. People here may think they’re all murderers, but many Palestinians are victims."

To his surprise, the man nodded slowly. His eyes never left Russell’s face.

This something pipple don’t understand. You wery unusual young man. Wrong to judge everyone as if all same, as if all equally bad.

He was disconcertingly intense. But why did a man like this not damn all Palestinians? Maybe this was what the other two had been getting at, that there were indeed divisions in the community over the issue. If so, that would indeed be a level of sophistication he hadn’t expected.

Are there many here who don’t unquestioningly support Israel?

To tell truth, the old fellow said ponderously, his tongue peeping out pinkly as he paused, don’t usually talk to many pipple here. Is hard for me. My vife… he gave a little shrug, my vife not come. Everyone here is in family. So is hard for me to make friends here.

Russell felt a twinge of sympathy. To be honest, I don’t come much either, he said.

We both strangers in Egypt, no? said the old fellow, and gave an odd kind of leer. His eyes behind his spectacles roved restlessly round the room as if he was searching for someone. He had piled a plate high