Riders in the Chariot (31 page)

"Well," he began. "For example." He hesitated. "It could be," he said, "in Australia."

No thought of that country had ever entered his head before, but now it presented itself, possibly because it was farthest, perhaps also bitterest.

"Australia!" his relatives exclaimed--nothing more, as if it were best to ignore the obsessions of the crazed Diaspora.

Rahel changed the subject.

"You will spend the night with us?" she asked, but at the same time it was obvious she hoped he would decide against it.

"No," Himmelfarb said.

He had no wish to delay where there was no point in his doing so.

They began to walk towards the settlement.

"You must eat, at least," they insisted.

It was only practical.

Although it was not yet mealtime, Rahel foraged in the kitchen, and produced bread, a cup of milk, and a little bowl of shredded carrot, which she put before the traveller, in the long, empty hall. Soon the cold milk was burning in his mouth, while the others sat on the opposite side of the table, tracing their own secret patterns on the surface of American cloth, when they were not watching him, it could have been hoping he would swallow down their guilt, quickly and easily, with the milk.

Then Rahel swept the crumbs from the cloth with the flat of her hand. She began to glance at her wrist-watch. The hour was approaching when she would go down to her children at the crèche. Her mouth was growing hungrier.

There was, besides, a bus which passed along the road at evening, and to catch that bus the relatives hurried Himmelfarb. His sister-in-law kept looking at her watch. It was natural, of course; she was obviously a practical woman.

Then, at last, as they stood in the meagre scrub of what would one day be a copse of pines, dust foreshadowed the approaching bus.

"
Mazel tov
_!" cried Ari Liebmann, squeezing his brother-in-law's hand too hard.

This time the two men shed no tears, for the waters of grief ran deeper, more mysteriously than before. The dust of the land lay around the two Jews. The light was winding them in saffron. Before the bus took Mordecai, and, after the initial travail, flung him upon the next stage of his journey.

From then on, how his dreams jolted him as he followed the rivers towards their source. In this journeying, it could not be said that he was ever alone, for his outer man was accompanied by his dedicated spirit, until, on a morning of antipodean summer, it was suggested the official destination had been reached.

"This is Sydney," the passengers were told.

The party of immigrant Jews looked anxiously for those who must be waiting to receive them. Only the rather peculiar, not exactly difficult, but
different
_ passenger, Mr Himmelfarb, in his dark, sweaty, unsuitable clothes, stood, and continued standing, apart. He had, in fact, already been received. As the heat smote the tarmac, there appeared to rise up before him a very definite pillar of fire.

By the time the Jew had finished his story, the day was already relenting. The plum tree, which had, in the beginning, promised protection from the narrative, and finally intensified, if anything, a common agony of mind, began again to demonstrate its natural subtleties of form and sound. The shadows inside its brocaded tent lay curled like heavy animals, spotted and striped with tawny light. Although the blossom had become by now a rather frowzy embroidery against the depths of a whiter sky, an always increasing motion and music freshened the limp folds of branches. For an evening breeze was flowing down across Sarsaparilla to Xanadu, lifting and feathering in its course, trickling through the more suffocating scrub, laving the surfaces of leaves, and at last lapping on the skins of the two survivors seated at the roots of the tree.

Miss Hare might have shuddered if her body had not been so recently released from the rack. In the circumstances, the least movement was painful.

When she had got to her feet, she mumbled, "I must go home, or a certain person, whose name I shall not mention, will cause a disturbance."

The Jew was also struggling awkwardly up, testing his legs to learn whether they were sound. Neither he nor his audience had any apparent intention of referring to what they had experienced together, nor was it suggested they should meet again, though both expected that they would.

"I must leave you at once," said the Jew, glancing with some concern at the sun. "It is very, very late."

So they parted in the tender light. The smaller their figures grew, the more they appeared pressed. Bobbing and thrashing, they swam against the tide of evening, their movements cruelly hampered by anxiety and grass.

8

THE HOUSE at Sarsaparilla to which Himmelfarb now returned did offer advantages, but of its own, and not all of them obvious. Certainly its boards held together, and resisted the inquiring eye. There were the willows, too, which stood around, lovely when their wire cages first began to melt in spring, more beautiful perhaps in winter, their steel matching the more austere moods of thought. Otherwise there was little to enhance the small house, nothing that could have been called a garden. To plant one would not have occurred to the actual owner, who, in his state of complete disinterest, was unable to conceive of any hierarchy of natural growth. So, at evening, when he was not otherwise employed, he would sit on his veranda, at the very edge, as if it did not belong to him, gratefully breathing the rank scent of weeds. He would sit, and at a certain point in light, as the green leaped up against the dusk, the pallor of his face appeared to form the core of some darker, greener flame.

Now, on the evening of his parting from Miss Hare, the Jew was hurrying to reach his house. Dust floated, seed exploded. The backs of his hands met the thrust of thorn and nettle. Stones scuttled. Yet, his breathing had grown oppressed, and, in spite of his positive, not to say triumphant advance, began to rattle as he climbed the slope.

When he arrived.

When he touched the mezuzah on the doorpost.

Then, when the Shema was moving on his lips, he was again admitted. He went in, not only through the worm-eaten doorway of his worldly house, but on through the inner, secret door.

Silence was never silence in the Jew's house. Speculation alternated with faintest scratching of boughs on timber. Nor were the rooms bare which he had furnished with the utmost simplicity of worship. Now he moved in a wind of purpose over the dry, yielding boards, as far as the cell where necessity had bullied him into putting several sadly material objects: a bed, a chair, the pegs for clothes, and a washstand such as those which clutter country auction-rooms with yellow deal and white, sculptural china. There was nothing else. Except that one wall included a window, opening on green tunnels, and the obscurer avenues of contemplation.

Arriving in this room, and centre of his being, the Jew appeared to hesitate, his hands and lips searching for some degree of humility which always had eluded him, and perhaps always would. There he stood on the faded flags of light, his knees still trembling from their recent haste, and in the absence of that desired, but unattainable perfection, began at last to make his customary offering: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe..."

He flung his rope into the dusk.

"... who at Thy word bringest on the evening twilight, with wisdom openest the gates of the heavens, and with understanding changest times and variest the seasons, and arrangest the stars in their watches in the sky, according to Thy will..."

So he twined and plaited the words until his ladder held firm.

"With everlasting love Thou hast loved the house of Israel..."

So he added, breath by breath, to the rungs of faith.

"... and mayest Thou never take away Thy love from us. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who lovest Thy people Israel."

By the time night had fallen, dissolving chair and bed in the fragile box in which they had stood, the man himself was so dispersed by his devotions, only the Word remained as testimony of substance.

On arrival in the country of his choice, Himmelfarb had shocked those of his sponsors and advisers who took it for granted that a university professor would apply for a post equal to his intellectual gifts. Whether he would have received one was a doubtful matter, but refusal would at least have provided him, and them, with that wartime luxury, an opportunity to grouse.

Himmelfarb, however, had no intention of applying. His explanation was a simple one: "The intellect has failed us."

Those of his own race found his apostasy of mind and rank most eccentric, not to say contemptible. To anyone else, it was not of sufficient interest that an elderly, refined Jew should allow himself to be drafted without protest as a wartime body; he was, in any case, a blasted foreigner, and bloody reffo, and should have been glad he was allowed to exist at all. He was, exceedingly, and did not complain when told to report at a piggery. There, he became attached to those cheerful, extrovert beasts, enough to experience distress as it was slowly proved he no longer had the strength for all that was expected of him.

At the end of an illness, he was put to polishing floors in the same hospital where he had been a patient. He washed dishes for a time, in a military canteen. He cleaned public lavatories.

And was grateful for such mercies.

The reason the peace found him at Barranugli, employed in the factory for Brighta Bicycle Lamps, might be considered a shameful one. This man of ascetic and selfless aspirations had so far diverged from his ideals as to hanker after physical seclusion. He had taken to wandering at week-ends round the fringes of the city, and on his wanderings had come across the small brown house, standing empty in the grass, at Sarsaparilla. As soon as he discovered that white ant, borer, dry rot, inadequate plumbing and a leaky roof had reduced the value of the wretched cottage, and brought it within reach of his means, then his carefully damped desires burst into full blaze, quite consuming his strength of mind. He could only think of
his
_ house, and was always returning there, afraid that its desirability might occur to someone else. He grew sallower, bonier, more cavernous than before. Until, finally, spirit was seduced by matter to the extent that he rushed and paid a deposit. He had to buy the derelict house.

Installed at Sarsaparilla, he promised himself treasures of peace, and when he had collected such sticks of furniture as he considered necessary, and his joy and excitement had subsided by several days, he went in search of employment in the neighbouring town of Barranugli.

It cannot be said he chose the job with Brighta Bicycle Lamps. Truthfully, it was chosen for him.

"This Brighta Bicycle Lamps," said the official gentleman in the employment bureau, "is a new, but expanding business, like. There's other metal lines besides: geometry boxes, and bobby-pins. Several unskilled positions vacant. And let me
see
_, I have an
idea
_, I'm pretty sure the proprietor is a foreign gentleman of sorts. Mr Rosetree. Yes. Now, if you don't mind my
saying
_, that is just the job for you. Kinda Continental."

"Mr Rosetree," Himmelfarb repeated.

Then, indeed, the Jew's eyes grew moist with longing. Then the Kiddush rose above the wall at sunset.

"Very well thought of," continued the official voice. "Have any trouble with your English, well, there is Mr Rosetree on the spot. You will not find another place anywhere around that's made for you personally."

Himmelfarb agreed the position could be most suitable, and allowed himself to be directed. To abandon self, is, after all, to accept the course that offers.

So he presented himself at Brighta Bicycle Lamps, which functioned in a shed, on the outskirts of the town, beside a green river.

Here, on arriving for his interview, he was told to sit, and was ignored for an appropriate length of time, because it was necessary that the expanding business should impress, and as the applicant was stationed right at the centre of Mr Rosetree's universe, impress it did. For, through one door, Himmelfarb could watch two ladies, so upright, so superior, so united in purpose, one plump and the other thin, dashing off the Rosetree correspondence with a minimum of touch, and through another door he could look down into the infernal pit in which the Brighta Lamps were cut out and put together with an excessive casualness and the maximum of noise. The machinery was going round and round, and in and out, and up and down, with such a battering and nattering, though in one corner it slugged and glugged with a kind of oily guile, and through a doorway which opened onto a small, wet, concrete yard, in which an almost naked youth in rubber boots officiated with contempt, it hissed and pissed at times with an intensity that conveyed hatred through the whole shuddering establishment. There was music, however, to sweeten the proceedings. There was the radio, in which for the moment a mossy contralto voice was singing fit to burst the box. "I'm looking for my speshul speshurrll," sang the voice, nor did it spare the farthest corner. Ladies sat at their assembly trays, and repeated with dainty skill the single act they would be called upon to perform. Or eased their plastic teeth. Or shifted gum. Or patted the metal clips with which their heads were stuck for Friday night. There were girls, too, their studied eyebrows sulking over what they had to suffer. And gentlemen in singlets, who stood with their hands on their hips, or rolled limp-looking cigarettes, or consulted the sporting page, and even, when it was absolutely necessary, condescended to lean forward and take part in some mechanical ritual which still demanded their presence.

Bending down in the centre of the floor was a dark-skinned individual, Himmelfarb observed, whose temporary position made his vertebrae protrude in knobs, and who, when straightened up, appeared to be composed of bones, veins, and thin strips of elastic muscle, the whole dominated by the oblivious expression of the dark face. The blackfellow, or half-caste, he could have been, resumed possession of his broom, and pushed it ahead of him as he walked backwards and forwards between the benches. Some of the women lowered their eyes as he passed, others smiled knowingly, though not exactly at him. But the black man, involved in some incident of the inner life, ignored even the mechanical gestures of his own sweeping. But swept, and swept. As oil reveals secret lights, so did the skin stretched on the framework of his naked ribs. As he continued sweeping. It was an occupation to be endured, so his heavy head, and the rather arrogant Adam's apple seemed to imply.