RUSSELL SLOWLY CLOSED his laptop. It was done. He felt numb, drained. His mind was in a tumult. He had managed it. Despite everything that had happened, now he had a completed manuscript. He should have felt elated, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Eliachim.
This was no longer a story of unrequited love. Until then, he had thought of the Crusades as events that happened in Europe and the Middle East. Terrible things had been perpetrated by the knights with their red crosses; but all that had happened a long way away and had nothing to do with him. It had been a fight between Popes and Saracens, right?
But now, beneath his hovering fingers had unfolded a barbarism that had been unleashed in England—and the victims of these unspeakable acts had been the Jews. Gentle, bovine England had turned into a riot of frenzied psychotics. Yes, he knew the Jews had been thrown out of England in, what, the thirteenth century, wasn’t it. And yes, he knew there had been wars of religion, when people had been burned at the stake. But those had been between Catholics and the Protestants. Yet here Eliachim was describing Jews being burned alive, Jews being disemboweled and Jewish babies impaled on the end of Crusader swords.
He thought of those warm, sun-dappled summer Sunday afternoons watching the cricket on some green in Datchet or Burnham Beeches, with the Ford Popular parked on the verge and Alan Freeman on the transistor radio playing the top twenty, and with Jack sighing in deep contentment, “Y’know, there isn’t more beautiful countryside anywhere in the world” from all his vast experience of Adriatic seaside resorts. Or stating periodically, shaking his head slowly from side to side with the deep portentousness of the thought he was about to utter, “No doubt about it, England has been very good to us Jews.”
Which England? The England of all those disembowelers and baby-impalers, who had extorted and butchered his own people? But then Jack would hardly have known about that either. And what had he even known about the Britain in which he had lived, really known? He had been in it, but never of it. He had never been part of any institution, never played the game of social or professional advancement, never read Dickens or George Eliot or Orwell, never gone to a Promenade concert or joined a pub darts team or even adopted that defining characteristic of English society, owning his own house. The most that could be said of that relationship was that England had left him alone.
So why was it only now, with the revelation that Jews had been slaughtered right here in England simply because they were Jews, that Russell was so horrified? Why had he previously dismissed the wars of religion in Britain as of no interest to him? Was it because he had thought of them as merely between one set of Christians and another—not part of his own story? And so what did that say about what he himself was? Did it mean that, all those years when he had asserted fiercely that no, Jews were bloody well not merely “tolerated” in Britain because they were as British as anyone else, he had after all not felt himself to be, deep down, the thing he had thought he was? And if he wasn’t thoroughly British through and through, then what was he?
To have done what they did, to have had that degree of faith, that unbreakable commitment to what they were that it superseded life itself; he kept returning to this in his mind.
He tried to imagine himself on top of that tower, to imagine what it was like to slit the throats of those you loved most, what it would feel like to slice through the soft flesh of your own neck.
Eliachim had not described terror. He had described horror and guilt. Guilt because he thought he was somehow the cause of the catastrophe; guilt that he couldn’t go through with it because the will to live in him was just too strong. That wasn’t fear. They hadn’t been terrified, he suddenly realized, because, unlike himself, they accepted that death was part of life. They didn’t try to fight it. The fear, Russell now understood, came from the refusal to believe, the attempt to deny the inevitable. The panic came from denial. Their strength was rooted in acceptance.
And now he saw something else. This apparent act of collective fanaticism was in fact an act of love. To love, you had to be attached, he thought; and to be attached you had to have someone or something to be attached to. He wasn’t attached to anything. He had snapped all his moorings.
Yes, that act of collective suicide was a horror. But again, he felt a stab of envy mixed in with the revulsion. They had belonged to something that joined them all together, something they treasured beyond life itself. They had been bound by a shared sense of love.
To whom was he bound by such love, he wondered morosely. His wife, his father, his sister: all estranged. And he could now see that his share in Britain had been conditional all along.
It wasn’t conditional on his origins being in British culture. It was conditional on his not being a Jew. Because now he understood that to be a Jew was to be part of the Jewish people. And that particular sense of peoplehood was not permitted in Britain. It immediately made you suspect.
He hadn’t seen it at first because he had never wanted a share in that peoplehood. And he still didn’t want it. But he was saddled with it regardless, because he had stuck up for others who happened to be like him. Out of a sense of simple justice, and a respect for the truth. But if you were a Jew, you weren’t allowed to do that, because it couldn’t be about justice or truth. It meant “you people” were “all sticking together.”
No other people provoked such a reaction, he thought in wonderment. And it was impossible not to make the connection, not to see the thread linking Eliachim and Michael Waxman and Haia. And his father. For the first time, he felt that thread running through himself. And he knew it could never be snapped, however hard he might try.
Haia fussed around him. “Poor thing, you’re exhausted,” she exclaimed. “What you need is some R&R. How about giving yourself a day off and I fill in some more of those gaps in your education you’re so worried about. I’ll drive you down to Masada. You’ll really enjoy it, I promise.”
They drove south into the desert. He had anticipated sand dunes. Instead, rocky cliffs stretched into the distance. Occasionally he glimpsed groups of Bedouin with their camels by the side of the road, waiting for tourists to stop and pose.
His thoughts returned inexorably to the story he had now completed. He had said nothing about it yet to Haia. He needed first to process it all in his mind.
He had finished the translation. The book would cause a sensation. He anticipated no problem from Haia about getting it authenticated and published. It was what he had dreamed of for so long now, making his name with a unique contribution to scholarship, to history. He had managed to overcome all the problems and setbacks, the shattering blow about Kuczynski which had almost capsized the entire project, successfully navigating Zofia and Haia. So why didn’t he feel more exhilarated?
They stopped to stretch their legs and he walked well away from the road, scrambling stiffly over stones and boulders. The earth beneath his feet was almost red. The cliffs towered around him, gaunt and majestic.
Despite the heat, he shivered. The silence was profound. The world, it seemed, had altogether retreated. He thought about London, Damia, Beverley. It seemed so far away. In this silent, empty landscape he felt a different world gently enclose him. It was as if a host of shadowy figures were hovering all around him. His breathing slowed and he felt the tension draining out of himself. He felt himself cradled by beauty, and by a deep sense of connection. Reluctantly, he picked his way back to the car.
They walked up Masada to the fortress at the top. The path was steep and winding, and crowded with tourists. “That’s cheating,” said Haia, cheerfully pointing at the cable car that slowly swung up and down the mountain.
The sun beat down out of a deep turquoise sky. The path was merely roped off from the precipice and the barrier felt insecure when Russell grasped it. There wasn’t much room in places for people to pass as they came down the mountain. He wiped away the sweat that was pouring off his forehead and neck.
As they walked up, Haia decided to fill him in on the history. At the beginning of the great revolt against Roman rule, a group of Jews had been besieged in the Masada fortress. This had been built by Herod on no fewer than three rock terraces; an amazing feat of engineering. She pointed these out as they climbed. Russell merely grunted and didn’t look up. He didn’t feel like admiring the feat of engineering. He was concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. He had looked down over the rope barrier and had felt his head sickeningly swim.
Reaching the top at last, he didn’t feel any better. His head was thumping. He was sweating and shivering at the same time.
They walked around the summit fortress and admired the remains of the palace, the bathhouse, the mosaics.
“Of course they were zealots,” said Haia reflectively, “but even so it was quite something for a bunch of Jews to hold out here against the Romans for as long they did. Three years, it was; and then the Romans managed to scale this tremendous height and it was all over. But to kill themselves like that en masse, every single one of them, so as not to be taken alive; unimagineable, isn’t it.”
This was the example, thought Russell. This was what Eliachim and the Jews of York had all had in the front of their minds when they were huddled on top of Clifford’s Tower. And so the thread of belonging stretched even further back than he had thought. History, this history at any rate, merely repeated itself over and over again. There was no end to it, no break from the terrible past, no possibility that the pattern would fade away. How could this be endured?
Now he understood how essential it was to remember. It wasn’t people who lived on; it was what they stood for that was eternal. It was the collective memory that had to be preserved and defended against the barbarians scaling the cliff-face. Now he understood the full extent of Eliachim’s anguish. It wasn’t just the horror he had witnessed; it wasn’t even his belief he had somehow been the cause. It was that he had betrayed his tribe.
“Dad,” he whispered. “Dad, I’m so sorry.”
He stood near the edge of the fortress under the fierce sun and looked out across the great desert plain that stretched out beneath him. In the far distance, on the other side of a broad river, lay the kingdom of Jordan. The river, the sky and the vast rocky expanse below all seemed to be shimmering in a blue haze. It was so beautiful, he thought. The throbbing in his head was worse. The haze danced in front of his eyes like twinkling blue pinpricks of light. He felt again that terrible compulsion to draw ever nearer to the edge. He swayed a little. Then the ground upended beneath his feet and he was spinning.