Riders in the Chariot (59 page)

12

PASSOVER and Easter would fall early that year. The heavy days were still being piled up, and no sign of relief for those who were buried inside. Little wonder that the soul hesitated to prepare itself, whether for deliverance from its perennial Egypt, or redemption through the blood of its Saviour, when the body remained immured in its pyramid of days. Miss Hare burrowed deep, but uselessly, along the tunnels of escape which radiated from Xanadu, and parted the green, her skin palpitating for the moment that did not, would not come. Mrs Godbold, standing in the steam of sheets, awaited the shrill winds of Easter, which sometimes even now would sweep across her memory, out of the fens, rattling the white cherry boughs, and causing the lines of hymns to waver behind shaken panes. But this year, did not blow. For Mrs Flack and Mrs Jolley, mopping themselves amongst the dahlias at Karma, it was easier, of course, to invoke an Easter that was their due, as regular communicants, and members of the Ladies' Guild. For Harry Rosetree, however, in his cardboard office at the factory, the season always brought confusion. Which he overcame by overwork, by blasphemy, and by tearing at his groin. There the pants would ruck up regularly, causing him endless discomfort during rush orders and humid weather.

"For Chrissake," Harry Rosetree bellowed, as he thumped and bumped, and eased that unhappy crotch, in his revolving, tillable, chromium-plated chair, "what for is Easter this year so demmed early? A man cannot fulfil his orders."

In the outer office Miss Whibley, the plumper of the two ladies who were dashing away at their typewriters, sucked her teeth just enough to censure.

Miss Mudge, on the other hand, sniggered, because it was the boss.

"Can you tell me, please, Miss Whibley?"

Mr Rosetree would insist. He could become intolerable, but paid well for it.

"Because it is a movable feast," Miss Whibley replied.

She thought perhaps her answer had sounded clever without being altogether rude. Miss Whibley was an adept at remaining the right side of insolence.

"Well, move it, move it, or see that it is moved, Miss Whibley, please," Mr Rosetree insisted, plodding through the wads of paper, "next year, well forward, Miss Whibley, please."

Miss Mudge sniggered, and wiped her arms on her personal towel. The boss would start to get funny, and keep it up during whole afternoons. Miss Mudge approved, guiltily, of jolly men. She lived with a widowed, invalid, pensioned sister, whose excessive misfortune had sapped them both.

"Because I will not rupture myself for any Easter, Miss Whibley, movable or fixed."

Mr Rosetree had to kill somebody with his wit.

Miss Whibley sucked her teeth harder.

"Dear, dear, Mr Rosetree, it is a good thing neether of us is religious. Miss Mudge is even less than I."

Miss Mudge blushed, and mumbled something about liking a decent hymn provided nobody expected her to join in.

"I am religious." Mr Rosetree slapped the papers.

"I am religious! I am religious!" Mr Rosetree sang.

Indeed, he attended the church of Saint Aloysius at Paradise East, on Sundays, and at all important feasts, and would stuff notes into the hands of nuns, with a lack of discretion which made them lower their eyes, as if they had been a party to some indecent act.

"You gotta be religious, Miss Whibley." Mr Rosetree laughed. "Otherwise you will go to hell, and how will you like that?"

Now it was Miss Whibley's turn to blush. Her necklaces of flesh turned their deepest mauve, and she took out a little compact, and began to powder herself, from her forehead down to the yoke of her dress, with the thorough motions of a cat.

"Well, I am not at all religious," she said, wetting her lips ever so slightly. "I suppose it is because my friend is a dialectical materialist."

Mr Rosetree laughed more than ever. He could not resist: "And what is that?"

He was quite unreasonably happy that afternoon.

"I cannot be expected to explain
every-
_thing!" Miss Whibley sulked.

"Ah, you intellectuals!" Mr Rosetree sighed.

Miss Mudge coughed, and shifted her lozenge. She loved to listen to other people, and to watch. In that way, she who had never thought what she might contribute to life, did seem to participate. Now she observed that her colleague was becoming annoyed. Miss Mudge could feel the heartburn rise in sympathy in her own somewhat stringy throat.

"My friend is a civil servant," Miss Whibley was saying. "In the Taxation Office. He is considered an expert on provisional tax."

Then she added, rather irrelevantly, only she had been saving it up for some time as a kind of experiment, "My friend is also a quarter Jewish."

Mr Rosetree was disengaging the wads of paper, which could only be prized apart, it seemed, at that season. Miss Whibley did not watch, but sensed.

"A quarter Jew? So! A quarter Jew! I am a quarter shoe-fetichist, Miss Whibley, if that is what you wish to know. And five-eighths manic-depressive. That leaves still some small fraction to be accounted for. So we cannot yet work it out what I am."

Miss Whibley flung her typewriter carriage as far as it would go. Miss Mudge did not understand, but Miss Whibley knew that she should take offence. And she did, with professional efficiency.

"A quarter Jew!" chanted Mr Rosetree.

But Miss Whibley would not hear. She lowered her head to study her shorthand notes, though inwardly she had crossed the line which divides reality from resentment.

Presently it was time for the ladies to leave. They went out most conspicuously on that afternoon. In the workshop the men were knocking off. Some had begun to move towards the bus-stop, others towards the paddockful of ramshackle cars. Whether they marched, carrying prim-looking ports, or gangled leisurely, with sugar-bags slung by cords across the shoulders, no other act performed by the men during the day so clearly proclaimed their independence. Only a boss, it was implied, would presume that their going out was inevitably linked to their coming in.

Although the boss should have left, now that the walls no longer shook, and silence was flowing back into the shed which ostensibly he owned, Harry Rosetree continued to sit. Because he had decided to work on. But did not, in fact. The silence was so impressive he became convinced he was its creator, along with the Brighta Lamps, the Boronia Geometry Sets, the Flannel-Flower Bobby-Pins, and My Own Butterfly Clips. Of course, if he had not been possessed by his irrational joy long before the factory had begun to empty, the illusion might not have endured; he would most probably have been caught out by that same silence which now increased his sense of power and freedom. But his joy, which had made him so distasteful during the afternoon to the ladies he employed, was too rubbery and aggressive to allow itself to be bounced aside. Nor could he have restrained it, any more than he could have halted time, which went ticking on through the last week before the Easter closure, and the most formidable silence of all, when the soul is reborn.

Not that Rosetrees were all that observant. But Harry Rosetree was an honest man. If you signed a contract, you had to abide by the clauses. And religion was like any other business. Rosetrees were Christians now; they would do the necessary. Shirl complained, but of course she was a woman. Shirl said she had been brought up to stay at home, to stuff the fish and knead the dumplings, not to pray along with the men. She did not go much on early mass, but Harry would sometimes persuade, with a bottle of French perfume or pair of stockings. Then Shirl would get herself up in the gold chains which were such a handy investment, and derive quite a lot from the subdued and reverential atmosphere--it was lovely, the elevation of the Host--and the wives of upper-bracket executives in their expensive clothes.

But that Easter they had made their reservations at My Blue Mountain Home. It was all very well to be Christians, Shirl said, but surely to God they were Australians too. So they were going to sing "The Little Brown Jug," and "Waltzing Matilda," and "Pack Up Your Troubles," after tea. Along with a lot of bloody reffos, Harry said. What he understood best, usually he suspected most.

So that it was not altogether the sweet scent of Easter which had flooded Harry Rosetree's soul, as he worked on, or sat in his office, in the brassy light of late afternoon. As he drifted, he was uplifted, but by something faintly anomalous. Until finally he was stunned. It could only be the cinnamon. It was Miss Mudge: my chest, sir, if I do not take precautions in humid weather, hope you do not object to such a penetrating odour. It smelled, all right. Even now that she was gone, it shrieked down the passages of memory, right to the innermost chamber.

They were again seated in the long, but very narrow, dark parlour, raising the mess of brown apples to their lips. The mother had arranged special cushions, on which the father was reclining, or lolling, rather. Such an excess of blood-red plush, with the nap beginning to wear off, filled the chair and made for discomfort. It was the occasion that mattered, and the father throve on occasions. Whatever the state of their fortunes, whatever the temper of the
goyim
_, the father would deliver much the same homily: our history is all we have, Haïm, and the peaceful joys of the Sabbath and feast days, the flavour of cinnamon and the scent of spices, the wisdom of Torah and the teaching of the Talmud.

What had been the living words of the father would crackle like parchment whenever Haïm ben Ya'akov allowed himself to remember. Or worse, he would see them, written in columns, on scrolls of human skin.

But now it was the
scent
_ of words that pervaded. Whatever the occasion--and how many there had been--the father wore the
yarmulka
_. And the wart with the four little black bristles to the side of the right nostril. At Pesach the father would explain: this, Haïm, is the apple of remembrance, of the brown clay of Egypt, so you must eat up, eat, the taste of cinnamon is good. Haïm Rosenbaum, the boy, had never cared for the stuff, but long after he had become a man, even after he was supposed, officially, to have stripped the Ark of its Passover trappings, and dressed his hopes in the white robe of Easter, the scent of cinnamon remained connected with the deep joy of Pesach.

Now as the molten light was poured into the office where Harry Rosetree sat, the two eyes which were watching him seemed to be set at discrepant angles, which, together with the presentation of the facial planes, suggested that here were two, or even more, distinct faces. Yet, on closer examination, all the versions that evolved, all the lines of vision that could be traced from the discrepant eyes, fell into focus. All those features which had appeared wilfully distorted and unrelated, added up quite naturally to make the one great archetypal face. It was most disturbing, exhilarating, not to say frightening.

Until Mr Rosetree realized the old Jew he had employed for some time, that Himmelfarb, that Mordecai, had approached along the passage without his having heard, and was glancing in through a hatchway. Passing, passing, but hesitating. So the moment fixed in the hatchway suggested. It was one of these instants that will break with the ease of cotton threads.

Mr Rosetree was trembling, whether from anger--he had never been able to stand the face of that old, too humble Jew--or from joy at discovering familiar features transferred from memory to the office hatchway, he would not have been the one to decide.

Although his dry throat was compelled, still tremblingly enough. He was forced to mumble, while his joy and relief, fear and anger, swayed and tittupped in the balance, "
Shalom! Shalom, Mordecai
_!"

The face of the Jew Himmelfarb immediately appeared to brim with light. The windows, of course, were blazing with it at that hour.

"
Shalom, Herr Rosenbaum
_!" the Jew Mordecai replied.

But immediately Mr Rosetree cleared his throat of anything that might have threatened his position.

"Why the hell," he asked, "don't you knock off along with other peoples?"

He had got up. He was walking about, balanced on the balls of his small feet, rubbery and angry.

"Do you want to make trouble with the union?" Mr Rosetree asked.

"I am late," Himmelfarb explained, "because I could not find this case."

He produced a small fibre case, of the type carried by schoolchildren and, occasionally, workmen, and laid it as concrete evidence on the hatchway shelf.

Mr Rosetree was furious, but fascinated by the miserable object, which had already begun to assume a kind of monstrous importance.

"How," he exploded, "you could not find this case?"

He might have hit, if he would not have loathed so much as to touch it.

"It was mislaid," the old Jew answered very quietly. "Perhaps even hidden. As a joke, of course."

"Which men would play such a wretched joke?"

"Oh," said Himmelfarb, "a young man."

"Which?"

The room was shuddering.

"Oh," said Himmelfarb, "I cannot say I know his name. Only that they call him Blue."

The incident was, of course, ludicrous, but Mr Rosetree had become obsessed by it.

"For Chrissake," he asked, "what for do you need this demmed case?"

How repellent he found all miserable reffo Jews. And this one in particular, the owner of the cheap, dented case.

Then the old Jew looked down his cheekbones. He took a key from an inner pocket. The case sprang tinnily, almost indecently open.

"I do not care to leave them at home," Himmelfarb explained.

Harry Rosetree held his breath. There was no avoiding it; he would have to look inside the case. And did. Briefly. He saw, indeed, what he had feared: the fringes of the
tallith
_, the black thongs of the
tephillin
_, wound round and round the Name.

Mr Rosetree could have been in some agony.

"Put it away, then!" He trembled. "All this
Quatsch
_! Will you Jews never learn that you will be made to suffer for the next time also?"

"If it has to be," Himmelfarb replied, manipulating the catches of his case.