Riders in the Chariot (25 page)

Miss Hare grew paler.

"That is a person I shall probably tell you about," she informed her companion. "But not now."

Mrs Jolley continued to stamp and call. It seemed doubtful, however, that she would invade territory with which she was not already familiar.

"There is one of the evil ones!" Miss Hare decided to reveal just so much, and to point with a finger. "How evil, I am not yet sure. But she has entered into a conspiracy with another devil, and will bring suffering to many before it destroys them both."

Himmelfarb could have believed. It was obvious, from the way he was preparing his legs for use, that he had begun to feel he had stayed long enough, although the arch-conspirator had gone.

"You will not leave me," Miss Hare begged. "I shall not go in. Not for anyone. Not until dark, perhaps."

"There are things I am neglecting," mumbled the Jew.

"It is I who shall be neglected if you go," she protested, like a great beauty hung with pearls. "And besides," she added, "you have not finished telling me your life."

It made the Jew feel old and feeble. If she was willing him not to go, he wondered whether he had the strength to stay. At least, for that purpose.

"I know," she said, gently for her, "I know that, probably, the worst bits are to come. But I shall endure them with you. Two," she said, "are stronger than one."

So the Jew subsided, and the tent of the tree contracted round them in the wilderness in which they sat. The lovely branches sent down sheets of iron, which imprisoned their bodies, although their minds were free to be carried into the most distant corners of hell.

7

HOW LONG Himmelfarb remained in the house on the Holzgraben after they took his wife, he had never been able to calculate. In his state of distress, he was less than ever capable of conceiving what is known as a plan of action. So he lingered on in the deserted, wintry house, even after the old woman, his servant, had left him, to burrow deeper in her fright into the darker, more protected alleys of the town. He would walk from room to room, amongst the violated furniture, over carpets which failed to deaden footsteps. Whenever necessary, he would pick, like a rat, at the food he discovered still lying in saucers and bowls. Much of the time he spent sitting at his manuscript, and once found himself starting to prepare a lecture which, in other circumstances, he should have delivered on a Tuesday to his students at the university.

Sometimes he simply sat at his desk, holding in his hand the paper-knife a cousin had brought from Janina. He was fascinated by the silver blade, the sharpness of which had suggested to the girl Reha Liebmann that it was intended for purposes other than those of opening letters and cutting the pages of books. In recollecting, her husband went so far as to explore the interstices of his ribs, and might have driven it into the heart inside, if he had been able to see any purpose in dying twice.

So this dead man, or distracted soul, put aside the useless knife. Unable to reason, he would drift for hours in a state between spirit and substance, searching amongst the grey shapes, which just failed to correspond, and returning at last to his own skull and the actual world.

During several walks which he took at the time, because, for the moment at least, it did not seem as though they intended to molest the solitary Jew, he continued his search for a solution to the problem of atonement. Nobody, seeing him on the clean gravel of the
Lindenallee
_, or the more congruous, because indeterminate paths of the
Stadtwald
_, would have suspected him of a preoccupation practically obscene. Nor would they have guessed that the being, in grey topcoat, with stout stick, was not as solid as he appeared, that he had, in fact, reached a state of practical disembodiment, and would enter into the faces that he passed.

This became a habit with the obsessed Jew, and he derived considerable comfort from it, particularly after it had occurred to him that, as all rivers must finally mingle with the shapeless sea, so he might receive into his own formlessness the blind souls of men, which lunged and twisted in their efforts to arrive at some unspecified end. Once this insight had been given him, he could not resist smiling, regardless of blood and dogma, into the still unconscious faces, and would not recognize that he was not always acceptable to those he was trying to assist. For the unresponsive souls would rock, and shudder, and recoil from being drawn into the caverns of his eyes. And once somebody had screamed. And once somebody had gone so far as to threaten.

But their deliverer was not deterred. He was pervaded as never before by a lovingkindness. Only at dusk, when even human resentment had scuttled from the damp paths, the Jew would begin to suspect the extent of his own powers. Although that winter, of bewilderment and spiritual destruction, the concept of the Chariot drifted back, almost within his actual grasp. In fact, there were evenings when he thought he had succeeded in distinguishing its form, on the black rooftops, barely clearing the skeletons of trees, occasions when he could feel its wind, as it drenched him in departing light. Then, as he stood upon the rotting leaves, and steadied himself against the stream of memory, he would drag his topcoat closer, by tighter, feverish handfuls, to protect his unworthy, shivering sides.

One morning before it was light, Himmelfarb woke, and got immediately out of bed. The cold and dark should have daunted, but his sleep had been so unusually peaceful, he had embraced an experience of such extraordinary tenderness and warmth, that he remained insulated, as it were. Now, as he blundered about in the dark, although he could remember nothing of any dream, he was convinced it had been decided in his sleep that he should prepare to join a cobbler, a humble Jew of his acquaintance, who, he happened to know, was still living in the Krôtengasse. So, he hurried to shave, cutting himself in several places in the excitement of anticipation, and when he had prayed, and dressed, went about putting into a suitcase the few possessions he felt unable to part with: an ivory thimble which had belonged to his wife, the vain bulk of his now unpublishable manuscript, as well as the ironic, but priceless gifts of his apostate father, the
tallith
_ and
tephillin
_. Then he paused, but only for a little, in the thin light, before the doorbell sounded. Although he had not rung for a taxi, knowing that none would have accepted to come, he went down with his worldly goods, in answer to what seemed like perfect punctuality.

"Ah, you are ready, then!" Konrad Stauffer said.

Himmelfarb was really not in the least surprised, in spite of the fact that it had already been decided in his mind, or sleep, that he should move to the house of Laser, a Jewish cobbler in the Krôtengasse.

Now there was some wrangling for possession of the suitcase, a rather mechanical mingling of his cold fingers with the warmer ones over the disputed handle.

"Please let me!" Stauffer begged.

Himmelfarb suddenly gave way. Because it seemed natural to do so.

His friend was wearing a half-coat of soft leather, which smelled intoxicating besides. Everything invited to a sinking down. The fashionable car had begun to shine in the still hesitating light. Frau Stauffer was standing there, with an expression of having discovered things she had never seen before, holding an anachronistic muff, which only she could have translated into perfect contemporary terms.

All three behaved as though they had parted company yesterday.

"He was actually waiting for us!" Stauffer announced, and laughed for one of those amiable remarks which can be made to pass as wit.

"You must sit at the back, Himmelfarb," he ordained.

"Get in, Ingeborg!" he commanded his wife more sternly.

She did so, slamming the door in a way which must always have irritated her husband as much as now. But in settling into her seat, she rubbed against him slightly, and there was established a peace which could, of course, have been that of an unclenching winter morning, if Himmelfarb had not remembered, from the previous meeting, occasional glances and certain lingering contacts of skin, which made it obvious that Stauffers still devoured each other in private.

They drove through the white streets.

"I expect you have not eaten. We also forgot," Frau Stauffer called back to the passenger. "I have a stomach like an acorn. But we shall put the coffee on as soon as we get there."

Houses were thinning. Round faces would extend into long blurs.

"We are taking you to Herrenwaldau," Stauffer explained.

His voice was very grave as he drove. His clipped neck was taut, but, in spite of the wrinkles, had acquired a beauty of concentration above the leather collar.

"We have moved out there," he continued, "because nowadays it is more sympathetic, on the whole, to live amongst trees."

Herrenwaldau was an estate which Stauffers owned, about seven or eight miles from the town. Himmelfarb remembered hearing several years before how they had bought what some people considered the state should have acquired as a national monument. The original structure, built towards the end of the seventeenth century by a duchess for the purpose of receiving her lovers more conveniently, was something between a miniature palace and a large manor. It had become most dilapidated with the years, although it was understood the actual owners had renovated part of it to live in.

Himmelfarb received everything, whether information on his own future, or glimpses of the rushing landscape, with a sensuous acceptance which he might have questioned, if the motion of the car had not precluded shame. As he was rocked, soft and safe, he noticed the upholstery was the colour of Frau Stauffer's skin. Outside, early light had transformed the normally austere landscape, where sky and earth, mist and water, rested together for the present in layers of innocent blue and grey. The soil would have appeared poor if the frost had not superimposed its glitter on the sand.

The Stauffers, who were obviously performing a familiar rite, seemed to have forgotten their passenger--they would mumble together occasionally about cheese or paraffin--although Frau Stauffer did at last grunt loud and uglily: "
Na
_!"

For they were driving between stone gate-posts, under great naked elms, crowned with old, blacker nests, and hung with the last rags of mist.

Nothing could disguise for Himmelfarb the coldness and greyness, the detached, dilapidated elegance of this foreign house, until, in a moment of complete loss, while his hosts were rootling in the car, he looked very close, and saw that the stone was infused with a life of lichen: all purples, and greens, and rusty orange-reds, merging and blurring together. Although it was something he had never noticed before, and it did not immediately mean to him all that it might in time, he was smiling when Frau Stauffer turned to him breathlessly and said, "There is nobody here! Nobody, nobody!"

Like a little girl who had achieved real freedom after the theory of it.

"Ingeborg means," her husband explained, "we have been without servants since the
Regierung
_ became obsessed by manpower."

He looked the more grimly amused for having bumped his head in retrieving an oil stove from the car.

"But," he added, "there is a farmer who rents some of the land, and who repays in kind, and with a certain amount of grudging labour. They feed the fowls, for instance, when we are away, and steal the eggs while we are here. We must devise a routine for you," he concluded, "against the future. To avoid possibly dangerous encounters."

Such possibilities were ignored, however, for the time being. The three conspirators were loaded high with parcels, and clowned their way into the house, which smelled in particular of fungus, as well as the general smell of age.

They showed Himmelfarb what was to be his room. They had only fairly recently discovered it, Konrad Stauffer told. Disguised from outside by a stone parapet, and from inside by panelling which masked its stairway, the small room could have been intended originally for the greatest convenience of the amorous duchess. The present hosts had furnished it in a hurry for their guest, with a truckle-bed, an old hip-bath in one corner, an austere chest, and the oil stove brought that day. Otherwise the small room was empty, which was how the visitor himself would have had it. As he arranged his insignificant possessions, he realized with sad conviction that the empty room was already his, and might remain so indefinitely.

In the house proper, he understood, as he caught sight of himself that evening in one of the long, gilt mirrors, he would never belong.

But a congenial meal was eaten off the blemished oak table, on which Ingeborg Stauffer laid her face, after the things had been cleared, and the work finished.

"At Herrenwaldau," she said, or foresaw, "I shall never be completely happy. I am always anticipating some event which will destroy perfection. For instance, I am afraid of the house's being requisitioned for I don't know what squalid purpose. I can see some Party leader, of the self-important, local variety, sitting with his feet up on the chairs. I can smell the face-powder, spilt on the dressing tables by the mistresses."

"My wife is neurotic," interrupted Konrad, whose back was turned to them, as he did accounts, or looked through letters which had arrived in their absence.

"Certainly!" Ingeborg agreed, and laughed.

She jumped up, and ran and brought little glasses, from which to drink cheap, fiery
Korn
_. At times she could shine with happiness. And play Bach, rather badly, on an indifferent harpsichord.

"Between Bach and Hitler," Konrad said, "something went wrong with Germany. We must go back to Bach, sidestepping the twin bogs of Wagner and Nietzsche, with an eye for Weimar, and the Hansa towns, listening to the poets."

"You must allow me
Tristan
_, though," his wife protested, and went and hung over his shoulder.

Her head, with the dankish, nondescript, yet elegant hair, grew dark inside the candlelight.

"All right.
Tristan
_," he agreed. "Anyway,
Tristan
_ is everybody's property."