Riders in the Chariot (23 page)

During the whole of this period of unreason, Mordecai Himmelfarb's mind no more than fumbled after a rational means of escape. As an officially guilty man he could not function normally, but attempted to, as far as he was allowed. He was not yet actually dismissed from his post, because, it was recorded, Himmelfarb had served in a German war. At this stage, he was merely relieved of some of his duties, eyelids were lowered, backs turned on an embarrassing and difficult situation. He went on foot more often than before, to avoid the unpleasantness of trams and buses, with the result that his clothes began to hang more loosely on the essential bones, and his face presented an archetype that would have shamed his apostate father. In his still regular walks through the
Stadtwald
_, he now rested whenever necessary on the yellow bench. Coming and going, early and late, in thin or thickening light, in company with birds and cats, he felt he had got by heart each stone and sorrow of the town in which he had been born, and that he could interpret at last the most obscure meanings of a contorted world.

Of course he should have made every effort to reach a practical solution, if only for his wife's sake. Cousins had written from Ecuador. Their brother, Ari, he heard, had left for Palestine in charge of a contingent of youths, and was settled on the land. Only Mordecai had received no indication of what his personal role might be, of how long he must suspend the will that was not his to use. Determined not to fear whatever might be in store for his creature flesh, nor even that anguish of spirit which he would probably be called upon to bear, he might have resigned himself indefinitely, if it had not been for the perpetual torment of his wife's image.

At one point his colleague Oertel, the mathematician, an Aryan of stature who suffered and died for it finally, came to him and begged to be allowed to help his friend leave the country before it was too late.

Himmelfarb hesitated. Human gestures were so moving in the reign of Sammael, that for one moment he felt weak enough to accept. If only for Reha. Who would not, he realized at once, have left without him.

"Oertel!" he began. "Oertel!" When he was able to continue, he explained, "The sins of Israel have given Sammael the legs on which he now stands. It is my duty, in some way, to expiate what are, you see, my own sins. But naturally you cannot, you cannot see! You cannot understand!"

He had become, of course, more than a little crazy, Oertel added in telling of Himmelfarb's refusal.

The latter returned to his wife, whom he loved too deeply to mention his colleague's proposition. They were still allowed to live in the house with the Greco-German façade. Even after the professor's dismissal, of which he soon received notice, they were allowed to continue living in their own house. But precariously. Now that the maids were gone, with regrets, or threats, an old Jewish body helped Frau Himmelfarb with her household duties. They were fortunate in having been people of private means, and could eke out their material substance, at least for a little. Sometimes, too, Frau Himmelfarb, discreetly dressed--she had always been that, if anything rather dowdy--would be seen selling an object of virtu. So they existed. In the still house the rooms were never empty. Thoughts filled them. From the upper windows, the park never looked quite deserted. The flesh of tuberous begonias lolled on perfect beds, and waited, as if to take part in an exhibition of lust.

Once Himmelfarb had paid a visit to a former friend, the
Oberstleutnant
_ Stauffer, who, he had been told, lived only two or three streets away in a state of eccentricity. Celluloid ducks in the bath, it was said.

The
Oberstleutnant
_ had appeared at his own front door in a little apron trimmed with lace.

"Jürgen!" the visitor began.

But saw at once that the forest in which they had become separated had grown impenetrable, and that, of the two, Jùrgen was the deeper lost.

The
Oberstleutnant's
_ face, or as much as remained stretched upon the bones, continued a moment to contemplate an abomination that had been conjured up on his doormat for his personal torment.

"The
Herr Oberst
_ is not at home," he said at last.

Face, door, words--all flickering slightly.

"And is not allowed to receive Jews. On any account."

So the door was closed on Jürgen Stauffer.

Again, this time in the street, the past disgorged. It was Konrad, the elder brother, who was by now generally recognized, for one of his novels in particular, which everybody had read, and which dealt, in bitter and audacious style, with the relations between officers and men in wartime. Konrad Stauffer had succeeded in pleasing a cautious public--it was said, even the
Regierung
_--because he dared and shocked.

Konrad could afford to know absolutely anybody. Konrad said, "Why, Himmelfarb! You have hardly changed! Except that everything is on a larger scale."

As he took a valued acquaintance by the elbow.

His hands were sure. He was freshly, closely shaven, and finished off with a toilet lotion, which caught the morning sunlight, and made the skin look like new. Success had given Konrad Stauffer the shine and smell of expensive, but very tasteful leather. Many people would probably have professed to loathe him if they had dared run the gauntlet of his arrogance.

"You will pay us a visit, I hope."

Nor was he taking a risk.

"We are quite close." He gave his address slowly and accurately, with almost deliberate ostentation. "My wife will enjoy meeting you. But soon. We may be going away."

There he smiled.

The phenomenon of Konrad Stauffer left Himmelfarb indifferent. Stauffer must have been aware of it, for he returned immediately after parting. To take the Jew by a waistcoat button. He could have been apologizing for himself.

"You will come, though?" he coaxed. "You promise?"

In those times, who made promises? Now it was the Jew's turn to smile. But together they had generated some kind of warmth.

Even so, Himmelfarb doubted he would see Konrad Stauffer again. In so far as his will continued to function, it propelled him along the narrow path of existence, not up the side tracks of social intercourse, however attractive those promised to be. Besides, there was his book. Most of his time was taken up with annotations and corrections, for, although he no longer hoped to see it published, it would have pained him to leave it incomplete. In his leisure he walked less than before, not because glances wounded--he had grown impervious--but because he wanted to be parted as little as possible from his wife.

He could not bring himself to speculate on how dependent that soft and loving, yet secretive and unexpected creature might be. Instead he found himself depending on her. He would touch her sometimes for no immediately apparent reason. If he could not find her, he would go in search of her in the kitchen, where probably she would be doing the work of the almost senile crone who had replaced the cook. Then he would inquire about things with which he had been familiar for years.

"What is that?" he would ask.

"That is chopped chicken-liver," she would reply, in a firm, even voice, to make it seem less odd that he should not recognize the obvious.

Indeed, she would join him in staring at the common kitchen bowl, as if its contents had been ritually of the greatest importance. Together they would stave off the agonies of mind, and the possibility of separation, by the practice of small, touching rites.

Then they heard that Dr Herz had disappeared, and Weills, and Neumanns, and Frau Dr Mendelssohn was no longer to be seen at the clinic. It was very quietly communicated, and as the people concerned were but distant acquaintances, and the rigours and monotony of life continued, one would not have noticed they had gone. Only the old woman who helped at Himmelfarbs' became worse than useless. She could not sleep, besides. Often in the night Frau Himmelfarb was forced to leave her own bed to comfort her maid.

But there will come a night when comfort is not to be found. Faith will spill out of the strong like sawdust.

On an evening in November, Himmelfarb was on his way home. He had just turned into the Friedrichstrasse. When he stopped. He could not go any farther.

A tram was galloping through the dusk. Along the pavement, the greenish, vegetable faces of pedestrians were trusting to instinct to lead them through a trance of evening. Already in the taverns the shaven heads were arranged at their regular tables. Pickled eggs were being cracked. Mouths were nuzzling the cushions of foam on top of the full stone mugs. There was no reason why one soul should suddenly sense itself caught in the web of darkness, why one man should lose control of his body at the corner of the Friedrichstrasse. Yet Himmelfarb experienced an ungovernable fear. He was actually running. He was running away. He was running and running, released from the moral dignity and physical heaviness of age. Some of the spirits of darkness swore at him as he passed, but he scarcely heard, nor did he suffer from the brutal thumps of collision, of which he was, surprisingly, the cause, in the hitherto normally regulated night.

Down the Friedrichstrasse he ran, across the Kônigin Luise Platz, into Bismarckstrasse, along the Krôtengasse. His desperate breath had to sustain him as far as Sud Park. For by this time the condemned felt the need to be received with kindness. To be
accepted
_, rather, by those who stood the right side of the grave.

The Konrad Stauffers lived in one of the iron-grey apartment houses, severe in form, but stuck at intervals with the garlands and festoons of concrete fruit and flowers which usually accompanied the highest rentals. Their visitor appeared to be confirming the number of the house by touching the embossed figures with quite distressing relief. Upstairs on the landing, he began to pull up his socks, as young men do automatically, on finding that, for better or worse, they have arrived. He was grinning most horribly, in his effort to resume the human mask, before ringing his friends' bell. His friends! His
fziends
_! That was the miraculous, solid brass point, the mask considered tremblingly. A friend was safer than one's own blood, so much better value than the arch-abstraction, God. So the man's hands trembled in anticipation. He rehearsed the business of social intercourse, of the inevitable cigars and
Kognak
_.

A figure, possibly of future importance, still rather a blurry white, was opening the apartment door.

Inside, beneath the orange light from a lantern in the oriental style, Stauffer was replacing the telephone receiver.

He came at once towards the front door.

"I am so very, very glad you managed to get here," Konrad Stauffer was saying.

"This is my wife, Himmelfarb," he said, indicating the thin, upright blur of white.

"So very glad, dear Himmelfarb," he kept repeating. "We did wonder."

"So interested in all that I have always heard," his wife added appropriately.

Both the Stauffers were obviously shattered. But after he had fastened the front door with a little chain, Stauffer recovered enough of his balance to lead their guest farther into the interior, into what appeared to be a study, where some oriental rugs, at first entirely sombre, gradually came alive, and smouldered.

Frau Stauffer went immediately to an inlaid box, and lit herself a cigarette. The way she blew the smoke from her nostrils, she must have been dying for it.

Then she remembered. She could not offer their guest too much, all in abrupt, though conciliatory movements.

"Are you, too, fascinated by these poisonous objects?" she asked, following it up with her exceptionally wide smile.

She had brought a dish of hastily assembled liqueur chocolates, of an expensive, imported brand, which had disappeared long ago from the lives of despised mortals. In the circumstances the tinsel forms, presented on their silver dish, glittered like baleful jewels.

And Frau Stauffer herself. In the feverish situation in which they were involved, and at the same time not, Mordecai realized she would probably have excited him in his sensual youth. A raw silk sheath was supported to perfection by a body of which the bones were just sufficiently visible under brown skin. But tonight she had a cold, or something. She squeezed herself up against the central heating, in an old cardigan, and even this retained a kind of studied elegance, an accent of Berlin.

The Stauffers both had expectations of their guest, or so their faces suggested.

"I came here tonight," Himmelfarb began, looking, smiling at the little, glowing
Kognak
_, with which his host had provided him as a matter of course.

"Yes? Yes?"

Stauffer was too anxious to assist, his wife too nervous. In fact, she went twice to the door, to listen for the maid, although the latter, she explained, had gone in search of a pair of real live jackboots.

At the same time Himmelfarb realized he could never convey that sudden stampeding of the heart, sickening of the pulses, enmity of familiar streets, the sharp, glandular stench of unreasonable fear. For words are the tools of reason.

"I," he was blurting shapelessly.

He who was nothing.

So they gave him another
Kognak
_.

"Yes, yes, we understand," murmured the sympathetic Stauffers.

Who remained obsessed with, and perhaps really only understood, an uneasiness of their own.

In their unhappiness, and to assist their once more becalmed guest, they began to talk about Schönberg, and Paul Klee, and Brecht. As liberal Germans, they offered up their minds for a sacrifice, together with liqueur chocolates, and
Kognak
_, and a genuine Havana. But every gesture they might make, it was felt by all three, could only be dwarfed by those of circumstance.

Stauffer was slightly drunk. It made him look like a man of action, or at least an amateur of sabotage. Probably he was one of those intellectuals who had discovered the possibilities of action too late in life, perhaps too late in history. He was burning to do something, if not to destroy the whole tree of moral injustice, then to root out a sucker or two. As he sprawled on the oriental rugs which covered his too opulent divan, the skin had become exposed between the cuffs of his trousers and tops of his socks, which gave him the appearance of being younger, more sincere, if also, ultimately, ineffectual.