The Inheritance - Part V
Years ago, I consulted with a local psychic who told me there’d be “problems with an inheritance.” I had no idea what he was talking about and tossed the comment off as random. Little did I know, my ex husband, an eccentric Czech photographer who lived in London, was worth a small fortune. So when he died, I learned that the psychic’s prediction would come true. Because that’s when our family was introduced to a hostile Russian woman named Vera who would harass our family for years.
THIS IS PART 5 of a FIVE-PART STORY
Vera removed my many possessions (some of them valuable) from the small terraced house that was legally mine, and flogged them god knows where. (I’d never made an inventory so I have no idea what she took.) That was pretty shocking, but I forced myself to remain detached – after all, it had been years since I’d lived in the house. What was more shocking, however, was what we learned next: Werner had made a deathbed will, leaving all his worldly goods and all his money to Vera. There was no mention of a daughter (in fact, it emerged that he had no idea he even had a daughter; in his dementia, he’d forgotten all about Jofka). That meant that the two women, Jofka and Vera, would have to hire lawyers and go to court.
The deathbed will, which Werner in his loopiness had signed, was thrown out as invalid. But, on paper at least, Vera had inherited the entire estate. The decision handed down was that the two girls would have to split the not insignificant wealth Werner had accrued during his lifetime. The house was mine, so I received money from its sale outright. The rest would be dealt with in court.
What ensued was an uneasy entanglement between the two girls who would go on to battle over Werner’s photographic archive as well as the rest of the estate. Jofka flew to London for her father’s funeral. There she encountered Vera, veiled from head to toe as if she were in deep mourning. Jofka did her best to ignore her. But there was something of a skirmish over the ashes. Jofka badly wanted them – it was her father, after all. But Vera had possession of Werner’s ashes, and it was rumored that she tossed them in the river. (Whether this is true or not, I will never know.) The upshot of the whole thing was that Jofka and Vera would be stuck together for years. They would have to form a truce of some kind, albeit an uneasy one.
And so, because of a chance encounter in a residential hotel, Jofka lost half her inheritance.
Her father, smitten with a woman who swooped in and installed herself in his life, had forgotten about her existence. He was an old, ailing man who’d gone completely gaga, and no longer was cognizant of his own history. But I knew his history, and I knew that at an advanced age, he’d fallen in love with a young, beautiful woman who’d blurred his senses, and, like a siren, had made him forget all that had come before. In other words, he – and by association, all of us – had been hoodwinked, a story of the ages.