THEY WERE TO meet at the Wigmore Hall for a concert. Beethoven and Schubert, Damia had told him, but the real draw was that the performers were the latest sensation on the classical music scene: a string quartet that had been winning international prizes and rave reviews even though all four members were still in their twenties.
He hadn’t paid much attention to the details. He was just savoring the fact that she had agreed to go out with him again. Walking down from Cavendish Square, he saw some kind of commotion outside the concert hall. It seemed to be a demonstration. There was a lot of shouting and chanting and waving of placards.
Oh shit, he thought. The placards read “DEATH TO ZIONISM,” “ISRAEL APARTHEID” and “NO PLATFORM FOR CHILD-KILLERS.” One depicted the Israeli flag with the Star of David replaced by the Nazi swastika.
“What the…” Then he saw the billboard outside the concert hall. The string quartet was Israeli.
No, no, no! he shouted inwardly. Irritation rose up in his gorge like acid reflux. Couldn’t he even take a woman out on a date without bloody Israel forcing itself into the picture? Couldn’t they have found another orchestra from anywhere else in the entire world for this, the first concert he had chosen to attend for more years than he cared to remember?
Other concert-goers, he noted, were having to run a gauntlet of jeers and abuse as the police cleared a path for them through the shouting protesters. He didn’t fancy that at all. More to the point, wouldn’t this be tantamount to supporting Israel? Might there be someone out there who would spot him doing so?
He badly wanted to turn round and walk away. But of course there was Damia. Was she inside already, perhaps? Had she not yet arrived?
Anxiously he scanned the crowd. Then he realized there wasn’t just one demonstration. There was a counter-demonstration as well, and both were being held back by rows of police.
The other one was smaller, comprising a few ragged protesters. These were waving Israeli flags and placards reading “NO PLATFORM FOR GENOCIDE,” “STOP PALESTINIAN KILLERS” and “PEACE NOT HATE.” One of these protesters had a megaphone through which he was chanting Hebrew slogans. Russell looked more closely, and saw the unmistakable figure of Michael Waxman.
Oh no, he thought.
The larger group was mainly but not entirely comprised of Asian and Arab youths. They were punching their fists into the air and chanting something unintelligible in Arabic. Some wore green bandannas round their heads; others had their heads wrapped in Palestinian keffiyehs covering everything but their eyes.
As if in slow motion, Russell watched one of the bandanna-ed youths, a tall, muscular boy, dodge through the police lines and punch Waxman’s megaphone out of his hand. He lunged towards Waxman and there was a scream.
“Stand back! Stand back now!” shouted the police as the green bandannas surged. Through the melee, Russell watched as Waxman staggered backwards clutching the side of his head.
Waxman sank to the ground and Russell hurried towards him. A policeman got there first and pulled Waxman upright with what Russell thought was inappropriate roughness. The police had struggled to reform their lines and were pushing the two groups apart again. To his horror, Russell saw that the hand Waxman was holding to the side of his head was covered in blood.
“Michael, you’re hurt,” said Russell in horror. “We need to get you seen to.”
“Tell that to this cretin,” said Waxman.
“Any more talk like that and I’ll book you for insulting a police officer as well,” said the policeman.
“As well as what?” asked Russell.
“He says he’s going to charge me with assault,” said Waxman weakly. He looked as if he were about to faint.
“Death to Israel!” screamed the green bandannas. “Fuck the Zios! Nuke Tel Aviv!”
“Charge you? But you were attacked! I saw it! I saw it happen!”
“Move along now, sir,” said the policeman.
“I saw him being attacked, officer, I saw who did it. It was that guy over there. Aren’t you going to arrest him?”
‘There’s no justice anymore in Britain,” said Waxman, and passed out.
Russell and the policeman both caught him as he crumpled. Someone brought water.
“No platform for hate speech! Zios out!”
“Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”
“Hear what they’re shouting? It’s incitement to murder!” Russell couldn’t believe his ears. “Why don’t you stop them instead of picking on this guy who’s been attacked?”
“I’m asking you again, sir, for the last time, to step away now, please.”
Waxman, who was half sitting, half lying, suddenly moaned and threw up.
“He needs treatment, he needs to be taken to hospital,” said Russell.
“Shut it or I’m booking you for obstruction…”
“Fucking police state!”
“…and insulting a police officer. Any more lip and you’ll be down the cells with him.”
“Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away,” said Russell furiously.
He felt a tug on his arm. Half pulling him, Damia propelled him towards the entrance to the concert hall.
“We’re not going to be pushed out by these thugs,” she said fiercely. Her face was set as she steered him by the elbow through the police corridor between the screaming demonstrators. He kept his head down as if he were some kind of criminal.
Inside, the audience was fluttering with dismay. The Israeli musicians walked calmly onto the stage. The audience applauded them with feeling. The quartet played serenely and sublimely as if nothing untoward had happened. In the interludes between movements, Russell could faintly hear the chanting from the street outside.
At the end of their advertised program, without preamble, the musicians stood and started playing Israel’s national anthem. A few people at first and then the entire audience rose to their feet and stood silently as the poignant melody swelled round the hall. Slowly and reluctantly, Russell heaved himself up. When the last notes had died away, there was a second or two of total silence. Then the audience erupted into a storm of applause and cheers.
Damia blew her nose and turned a tearful face towards him. “You see,” she said, “they’re still here. They still exist. They haven’t all died out.”
“Who?”
“The people who believe in decency and tolerance and fair play: all the things that make Britain so special to someone like me. And to you…”
Was that a question? He didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. He felt confused.
He looked at the wildly applauding audience. They weren’t neocons. They weren’t American evangelicals. They didn’t come from Golders Green. They were the kind of people he knew well: the cultured English middle class, the listeners to BBC Radio Three and Four, the stalwarts of Lord’s cricket ground and the Women’s Institute. The kind of people who would give to Christian charities, who cared about animal welfare and would campaign against ritual slaughter and the circumcision of baby boys.
He would have assumed that they would find Jews distasteful and Israelis at best uncouth and at worst belligerent and ruthless in trampling down all who opposed them. Yet here they were, these circumspect, buttoned-up, very proper English, clapping and cheering approval of these Israelis because they were under attack.
“I thought you didn’t approve of national divisions?” he said later, stroking her hair.
She rolled over to face him. Her skin gleamed like warm honey against the rumpled pale blue bedclothes.
“I don’t.”
“Yet you take the part of Israel. And you identify with the über-English.”
She propped her chin on her hand and gazed at him. Her hair swung softly against her bare shoulders. He wanted her again. Her sweetness had been overpowering. He wanted again to lose himself inside it, to erase everything but this moment, this now, this consolation.
“The über-English?” she repeated wonderingly. “But it’s not a bad thing to be able to identify with others who share your own culture and traditions. It’s everyone’s right, surely. I know what division really looks like. I know what it’s like to be the object of fanatical hatred. I lived with that in Pakistan all the time. I saw the unbelievable savagery, Muslim on Hindu, Hindu on Muslim.”
“Exactly. So you’d surely want to minimize differences between people. Otherwise you just get more hatred, more war.”
“What, like Gandhi, you mean? Like his pacifism meant cozying up to Hitler and Mussolini? Sometimes you just have to stand up against bad people.”
“But that’s a recipe for more aggression, more war. Things are never so black and white. There’s got be room for compromise.”
“Hey, that’s not the man I saw earlier on wading in to defend his friend. Wasn’t much room for compromise there. You were very upset by what happened. Hardly surprising. You must feel it more than most, all this bigotry against Jewish people.”
“Well it’s actually against Israel…”
“Really? I can’t see the difference. Why are they all so obsessed by Israel? Why do they pick on it all the time? It seems quite mad to me. I mean, spin the globe and all the murder and mayhem going on has diddly squat to do with Israel. Why aren’t people demonstrating against the killing of Christians or Hindus and Sikhs in Africa or Indonesia, or Saudi Arabia or Iran torturing and killing women and dissidents, or making my mum and dad’s life hell in Pakistan? I can tell you, back in their village we could have done with a bit of what Israel has when people were being disemboweled and having their heads sliced off.”
“Well, two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said, but he knew it was lame. There was a good reason for the difference in reaction. But what was it?
In truth, he was deeply unsettled. It wasn’t just the injustice of what he had seen happen to Waxman. After all, he hardly needed telling that the police were often out of control.
No, what was nagging at him was that he had found himself on both sides of the barricades at the same time. Damia was identifying the Israelis as victims. But Israelis couldn’t be victims. That was just Waxman talk. The Palestinians were the victims in the Middle East. Israel had nukes, for God’s sake. Yet he had watched those green bandannas attack without provocation. Yet again, though, if he had been amongst the demonstrators he would have been with the bandannas, not Waxman.
So what did that make Russell: victim or victimizer? Of course, Damia was starting from the wrong premise, wasn’t she?
“It’s bullying, that’s all it is, and I can’t stand bullying,” she said. “The English can’t stand it either, and that’s what I love about them, don’t you? I loved the way you stood up to that policeman.”
Yes, but it had had absolutely nothing to do with Waxman’s cause, he thought fiercely.
“I just thought it was outrageous picking on someone like that who’d been attacked and was obviously hurt.”
“Just like they do with Israel,” said Damia.
He stared at her.
“It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Beating up on the victim. And if other people take the part of the beater, then the victim just doesn’t stand a chance. It’s so clear, isn’t it? Isn’t that why Jews defend Israel?”
“Well…it’s not quite that simple. Jews are in fact pretty complicated. You said you wanted to know about them…”
“Not now,” she smiled as she rolled on top of him and pulled the duvet over both their heads.
Rosa rang. She was being bullied at school. No one liked her. Her teachers were crap. She wanted to join the Israeli army. All this in a jumble of tearful half-sentences.
Waxman rang. He’d been in the hospital overnight; they’d patched him up and sent him home with a fractured cheekbone, bruising and shock. He was going to plead not guilty to charges of affray and assault. He assumed Russell would give evidence on his behalf. And how about a first-person account of what had happened as part of a documentary about antisemitic violence on the streets of London?
Beverley rang to say her emails to him had been bouncing back. Upon investigation, he discovered that his computer had been corrupted by a spam attack and was now unusable.
The six o’clock radio news reported the arrest of a Nazi war criminal who had been living unnoticed in London for more than seventy years. His name was Joszef Kuczynski.