Riders in the Chariot (30 page)

He laughed.

"You are the lucky one!" he said.

And Himmelfarb, who had re-examined so often the sequence of his escape, could not bring himself to explain how it had been a miracle.

When he was rested and recovered, they dressed him and took him by the hand. That half-blind peasant could not have counted the number of hands he touched as he stumbled on his journey eastward. Moving always in the same obliterating, perhaps merciful mist, he learned the smell of wet grass, of warm hay, of bruised turnips, of cows' breath. He grew accustomed to hearing voices he could not understand, except when accompanied by touch, or expressing the emotions of songs. There were many common sounds he felt he had never heard before, and he found himself penetrating to unsuspected layers of silence. Above all, he learned to recognize that state of complete suspension in which men, like animals, wait for danger to pass.

It was not until Istanbul that Professor Himmelfarb recovered his sight, and something of his own identity. How the water shimmered, and the leaves of the trees were lifted. As he looked out from behind his brand-new spectacles, he had to lower his eyes, ashamed to accept the extravagant gifts that were offered him.

It was decided, then, that Himmelfarb, unlike many others, should be allowed to reach the Land, although, in the absence of some sure sign, or sanction, his own conscience continued to doubt his worthiness.

In the circumstances, he was reluctant to lift up his voice with those of his fellow passengers on the somewhat rusty freighter which carried them down the Turkish coast. The young Jews lounged on the fo'c'sle hatches, with their arms round one another, and sang. All those young people, the thickish, hairy youths and green-skinned girls, germinated in the night-soil of Europe, had come that much closer to fulfilling their destiny. For the Jews were at last returning home. They would recognize the stones they had never seen, and the least stone would be theirs.

But the rather remote figure of the elderly man, a professor, it was said, seemed to have no part in it. As he continued to walk the deck, he would hesitate, and turn, carefully, perhaps not yet altogether reconciled to the rather too fashionable, recently gotten second-hand shoes. Certainly there was an immense gap between the age of the preoccupied figure and those of the jubilant younger Jews. Some of the latter called to him, inviting him to participate in their relief and joy, and even made a few harmless, friendly-sounding jokes. They soon gave up, however, averted their eyes, and rummaged for peanuts in the little bags which had been handed to them, together with other comforts, by a charitable local Jewess, on the quay at Istanbul. Voluptuously, they lulled themselves. They began again, mumbling at first, then stirringly, to sing.

A number of the older Jews attempted to claim their share of good things, and join in the singing, but found they had not the mind for it. The sea air had given their cheeks a new, a positively healthy tinge, and their eyes were glazed with formal contentment from watching the pattern of crisp little waves repeat itself over and over on the classic waters. But in some of the older faces, the smiles were seen to stick halfway, as if caught up on an obstructing tooth, one of those gold landmarks. And there were individuals who were forced to stop their mouths with handkerchiefs, for fear their joy might get out of hand and not be recognized as such. After all, nobody was used to it yet. They had acquired that new and rather unmanageable emotion along with their new clothes, in many cases ill-fitting, from the organization in Istanbul.

The chosen people stood or sat about the decks, or leaned over the rails and watched the quite incredible sea. But Professor Himmelfarb walked, or stalked, between those who finally took him for granted. The relief committee had given a surprising amount of thought to what they had interpreted as the feelings and tastes of the elderly, cultivated refugee, who would no doubt be absorbed into the academic life of the university at Jerusalem. They had fitted him out with clothes which approximated to the kind he must always have worn. The topcoat, for instance, of European cloth and cut, had belonged originally to a doctor of philosophy at Yale. Now, as the present owner walked in the sea breezes on the crowded deck, the dark, capacious, yet somehow oppressive overcoat held plastered awkwardly against his sides, nobody would have questioned the distinguished man's right to it. Unless himself.

At the reception centre he had stood too long with the coat in his hands, with the result that the Jewess who was supervising the distribution of clothing had been provoked to ask, "Are you not pleased with your nice new overcoat, Professor Himmelfarb?"

The lady, who wore a moustache, and a wrist-watch on a practical strap, had had some experience of kindergarten work.

"Yes," he replied. "
Pleased
_."

But stood.

"Then, why don't you take your coat," she suggested kindly, "and go and sit with the others at the tables. Madame Saltiel is going to distribute a few comforts for the voyage. After that, there will be a cup of coffee."

She touched him firmly on the elbow.

"But it is hardly right," he said, "that I should accept what is not yet my due."

"Of course it is your due!" insisted the lady, who was very busy, and who, in spite of her training, could become exasperated. "And it is
our
_ duty to make amends to those of our people who have suffered," she tried to explain with gentleness.

"It is I who must make amends," insisted her recalcitrant pupil.

"I am afraid it may soon be forgotten that our being a people does not relieve us of individual obligations."

But the lady propelled him towards the tables where other Jews were awaiting further largesse.

"I should take my coat, if I were you," the lady advised, "and worry no more about it."

She was too exhausted to respect delicate scruples. The little points of perspiration were clearly visible on the hairs of her moustache.

So Himmelfarb took the excellent coat, carrying it unhappily by one of its arms, and had to be reminded that his overcoat was trailing in the dust.

It was in the same reluctant frame of mind that he entered, or returned to, Jerusalem--as if he alone must refuse the freedom of that golden city, of which each stone racked him, not to mention the faces in the streets. One evening on a bare hillside, which the wind had treated with silver, he lay down, and it seemed at first as though the earth might open, gently, gently, to receive his body, but his soul would not allow, and dragged him to his feet, and he ran, or stumbled down the hill, his coat-tail flying, so that a couple of Arabs laughed, and a British sergeant grew suspicious. Yet, at the foot of the hill, he was again clothed in dignity, and chose a lane that led through the trapped and tarnished light of evening, back into the city which, it seemed, would never be his.

There were many familiar figures on the streets, with greetings which ranged from the expansive to the elaborately judicious. On King George Avenue he ran into Appenzeller, the physicist, of Jena, whom he had known from student days, rather a coarse-skinned, bristly individual, who battered the backs of those he met to gain the advantage over them.

Appenzeller did not believe in ghosts. He opened with, "Well, Himmelfarb, I shall not say I am surprised. You were always so substantial. Do you remember how they used to say you would go far? Well, you have arrived, my dear!" How he laughed at his own joke, and the pores round his nostrils oozed. "You have been up to Canopus, of course. Not yet? Well, we shall be expecting you. You will be useful to us," he said. "Everyone has his part to play."

Himmelfarb remembered the infallible stupidity of Appenzeller outside the laboratory and lecture theatre.

"Later on," was all he could reply, with a reticence which gave his colleague opportunity for contempt.

Appenzeller recalled how an almost girlish diffidence would overtake his massive friend at times. The physicist was one of those who automatically interpret reserve as an encouraging sign of moral weakness.

"It is fatal to brood, you know," he advised, looking as far as he could into the other's eyes, though not far enough for his own satisfaction; he would have enjoyed dealing some kind of jovial blow. "Besides, it is no longer a luxury when so many others have suffered too."

Advice would swim from Appenzeller's skin, of which the pores had always been conspicuously large.

"I am about to go down to Haifa," Himmelfarb replied.

The physicist was surprised, not to say disappointed, to see that his tentative remark appeared to have left no trace of a wound. Appenzeller's simplicity could perhaps have been explained by the fact that he himself had barely suffered.

"Family connections," that dry number Himmelfarb continued. "I am told that I shall find my wife's eldest brother in some
kibbutz
_ out near Ramat David."

"Ah, family!" Appenzeller smiled. "I am happy to hear it."

He coughed, and giggled.

"We shall expect you, then, on your return. Refreshed. You will like it here," he added, "if you don't find there are too many Jews."

After making his joke, Appenzeller took a friendly leave, and Himmelfarb was glad.

The latter did go down to Haifa, by a series of wartime buses and military lorries. He was carried some of the way along the road to Ramat David, but preferred to walk the final stretch before the settlement at which he hoped to find Ari Liebmann, his brother-in-law. He walked along the road which ran between tough little hills, built as battlements, so it appeared, to protect the spreading plain of the
kibbutz
_. Once or twice he kicked at the surface of the road. All this was consecrated, he could not quite realize. Once, at the side of the road, he got upon his knees, amongst the stones, in the smell of dust, unable to restrain his longing to touch the earth.

At the
kibbutz
_ they were all occupied with the business of living. A woman in the office rose from her papers and pointed at a field. Ari Liebmann and his wife, she said, were down there, amongst the tomatoes.

Ari, whom he remembered as a youth of mobile face and somewhat mercurial mind, had set in one of the opaque moulds of manhood. He was rather hard, dusty, grizzled. When the two men had embraced, and cried, they went to sit down beneath an olive tree, as the farmer had to admit it was an occasion.

"Rahel!" he called out across the sprawling entanglement of tomato bushes.

"This is my wife," he explained incidentally.

Reluctantly there came a woman, who, Mordecai realized, was something to do with him now. Ari's wife was built in the shape of a cone, and wearing a pair of very tight blue shorts. Her thighs and hips were immense, but her face was not displeasing; it had history in its bones.

When all three were seated, Ari decided: "You must come to work with us. You can teach the young ones. You will be far better off out here. A Jew only begins to be a Jew in relation to his own soil."

Both Ari and his wife had hard hands. They were stained with the juice from the young tomato shoots they had been engaged in pinching out.

"Rahel was born here. She will tell you. She's a
sabra
_," Ari explained, and he and his wife laughed.

These people are completely fulfilled, Mordecai sensed. They belonged to their surroundings, like the stones, or the olive tree beneath which they were sitting.

"There will be Jews enough to exercise their intellects on inessentials. This is what matters," Ari boasted, indicating with his hand all that his community owned.

He was dangerously arrogant, Mordecai saw.

"Yes, come to us here," Rahel invited. "There will always be plenty for Jerusalem."

Then Himmelfarb replied, "If I could feel that God intended me to remain, either in Jerusalem, or in your valley, then you could be sure of my remaining. But He does not."

"Ah!" exclaimed Ari. "God!"

He began to score the ground with a stick.

"How we used to pray!" He sighed, and marvelled. "In Bienenstadt. Under the gables. Good for the soul!" He hunched, and laughed; he could have been trying to rid himself of phlegm. "You, I seem to remember, Reha had decided, were to play the part of a Messiah."

If each of the two men had not experienced all that he had, this accusatory remark might have sounded more brutal. As it was, Mordecai made it refer to one of those other, pasteboard selves silhouetted on the past.

And at that moment, besides, an olive dropped, green, hard, actual, on the stony soil of Palestine.

"What do you believe, Ari?" Mordecai was compelled to ask.

"I believe in the Jewish people," his brother-in-law replied. "In establishing the National Home. In defending the Jewish State. In work, as the panacea."

"And the soul of the Jewish people?"

"Ah, souls!" He was very suspicious, jabbing the earth. "History, if you like."

Rahel looked out over the landscape of hills. She could have been bored, or embarrassed.

"History," Himmelfarb said, "is the reflection of spirit."

Ari was most uneasy in his state of unemployment. He fidgeted about on his broad behind.

"Should we continue to sit, then," he asked, showing his short, strong teeth, "and allow history to reflect us? That is what you seem to suggest."

"By no means," Mordecai replied. "I would only point out that spiritual faith is also an active force. Which will populate the world after each attempt by the men of action to destroy it."

"I did not tell you," Ari interrupted, "but Rahel and I have already made two splendid children."

"Yes, Ari." Mordecai sighed. "I can tell that you are both fulfilled. But momentarily. Nothing, alas, is permanent. Not even this valley. Not even our land. The earth is in revolt. It will throw up fresh stones--tonight--tomorrow--always. And you, the chosen, will continue to need your scapegoat, just as some of us do not wait to be dragged out, but continue to offer ourselves."

"And where will you pursue this--idealism?" Ari Liebmann asked.

Now, it appeared, Himmelfarb was caught.