Riders in the Chariot (62 page)

The train burst across the night where it was suspended, miraculously, over water. In the compartments no one but the Jew appeared to notice they were returning to a state of bondage they had never really left. But the Jew now knew he should not have expected anything else.

The train was easing through the city which knives had sliced open to serve up with all the juices running--red, and green, and purple. All the syrups of the sundaes oozing into the streets to sweeten. The neon syrup coloured the pools of vomit and the sailors' piss. By that light, the eyes of the younger, gabardine men were a blinding, blinder blue, when not actually burnt out. The blue-haired grannies had purpled from the roots of their hair down to the ankles of their pants, not from shame, but neon, as their breasts chafed to escape from shammy-leather back to youth, or else roundly asserted themselves, like chamberpots in concrete. As for the young women, they were necessary. As they swung along, or hung around a corner, or on an arm, they were the embodiment of thoughts and melons. As if the thoughts of the gabardine men had risen from the ashes behind their fused eyeballs, and put on flesh at last, of purple, and red, and undulating green. There were the kiddies, too. The kiddies would continue to suck at their slabs of neon, until they had learnt to tell the time, until it was time to mouth other sweets.

All along the magnesium lines swayed the drunken train. Because the night itself was drunk, the victims it had seemed to invite were forced to follow suit. Himmelfarb was drunk, not to the extent of brutishness; he had not yet fetched up. Released from the purple embrace, sometimes he tottered. Sometimes hurtled. Watching.

As the darkness spat sparks, and asphalt sinews ran with salt sweat, the fuddled trams would be tunnelling farther into the furry air, over the bottletops, through the smell of squashed pennies, and not omitting from time to time to tear an arm out of its screeching socket. But would arrive at last under the frangipani, the breezes sucking with the mouths of sponges. Sodom had not been softer, silkier at night than the sea gardens of Sydney. The streets of Nineveh had not clanged with such metal. The waters of Babylon had not sounded sadder than the sea, ending on a crumpled beach, in a scum of French letters.

At one point the train in which Himmelfarb huddled on his homeward journey farted extra good. And stopped.

The man opposite paused in stuffing cold potato chips into his mouth.

"Whoa-err, Matilda!" shouted the rather large man, and brayed.

Through a mash of cold potato.

But the foreign cove did not understand a joke.

Or was listening to the radio which had begun to sing in the stationary night. Some song which the potato-eater did not bother to recognize.

"O city of elastic kisses and retracting dreams!"

the psalmist sang; "O rivers of vomit, O little hills of concupiscence, O immense plains of complacency!

O great, sprawling body, how will you atone, when your soul is a soft peanut with the weevils in it?

O city of der-ree..."

But the train choked the voice by starting. And continued. And continued. And after much further travel the old Jew found himself descending the lane--or Avenue--in which he lived. He was shaking now, and threatened with falling amongst the swathes of paspalum which tried perpetually to mow him down. He was almost crying for all that he had seen and experienced that night, not because it existed in itself, but because he had made it live in his own heart.

So he reached his door, and felt for the
mezuzah
_ on the doorpost, to touch, to touch the Shema, not so much in the hope of being rescued, as to drive the hatred out.

The miracle did, in fact, occur almost at the same moment as he noticed a light approaching, swaying and jumping, as the one who held it negotiated the uneven ground. Distance, shadows, light itself finally made way, and Himmelfarb recognized the figure of Mrs Godbold, carrying an old hurricane-lamp which he had known her take before on missions at night.

"I listened for you, sir, and heard you come. I am sorry," she apologized, "if I disturb. But have a reason."

Even so, she remained embarrassed.

And Himmelfarb could have been happier. The love that he should have returned any living creature was still a shabby, tattered one.

Then he noticed that his neighbour was holding a dish, on it something insignificant and black.

Mrs Godbold looked down. She was made immensely solid by that rudimentary light. Yet, a white transparency of light had transfigured her normally opaque skin.

"This is some lamb, sir," she explained, at once heavy and tremulous, "that a lady gives us every year at Easter."

"Lamb?" Himmelfarb repeated, in some desperation, from a fit of nausea, not for present circumstances, but perhaps a past incident, he could not for the moment remember what.

"Yes," she said, and repeated, "For Easter. Have you forgotten? The day after tomorrow--no, tomorrow already is Good Friday. The factory will be closed. You will have to think of how you will be living for quite a number of days."

"Oh," he said. "Yes. It is also Easter."

Mrs Godbold was again confused. She looked down at the still only partly explained object on her dish.

"The lady gives us the leg," she said, and blushed by lantern-light. "But this year the puppy got hold of it. Not all that much. We tidied up the other end for ourselves. And the shank was not touched. I brought it, sir. I thought you might care to make a little celebration."

"For Easter."

Now that his voice had stuck, he could not avoid repeating things.

"That is not the point," Mrs Godbold said, and again she blushed. "Everybody has got to. eat. Whatever the time of year."

Then he took the dish from her. The long, leaping shadows from the jumping lantern made them both look very awkward.

He began talking, in quick, nervous, little stabbing phrases, putting his tongue out a good deal.

"You will be glad. Not that it will be, well," he chose with some care, "a holiday, exactly. For you. I expect. But for what it signifies."

"Oh," she answered, "I am always glad at Eastertide. Because, then, suffering is over. Or so they tell us. For a little."

That she should not appear to have offered a variant of her own, she continued rather quickly.

"It was more of Easter at Home, of course. There was the flowers. The scent of flowers. The narcissies. And the white anemones we would pick if we cut across the woods. Oh, and blackthorn!" she remembered; it was, indeed, a joyful find. "I think I liked the blackthorn best. The flowers were the whitest, on the black sticks. We children would sometimes bring the flowers to decorate our Table. Oh, it would look lovely when they had lit the candles. It would look alive. Then it did seem as though the world was reborn. The mass of blackthorn was like a whole tree flowering on the Table of our church. It was not much of a one, sir, by any great standards. But on Easter Day we would know Our Lord had risen."

Mrs Godbold's trumpet voluntary sounded solitary, but true.

"But, of course," she hastened, "we would have known without all that. All the flowers on earth could wither up, and we would still know."

Then the Jew hung his head.

But she saw, and at once she touched him with her voice, saying, "You must forgive me. I must not waste your time. You will not be up for work. The lamb is nothing, but you are welcome to it--only if you would care."

When she had left, and he had gone inside, and switched the light on, and it had rained down on his almost empty living-room, he realized that he had to face the disaster of his Seder table. Still untouched, the past few hours seemed to have made a sculpture of it, not of rejoicing, but of lament. Here, rather, was the tomb of all those, including himself, who had not survived the return journey, and he, risen from the dead, the keeper of it. That he knew, he knew. He touched the clay of Egypt, which time had turned browner. And herbs, never so bitter as facts. That he knew for certainty.

Then the Jew saw that he was still carrying Mrs Godbold's dish, and that the wretched shankbone which his neighbour had brought as an offering was almost the twin of the one he had laid that afternoon on his own Seder table.

13

BECAUSE the telephone is the darkest, the most sepulchral oracle of all, Mrs Flack would stalk around that instrument for quite a while before she was persuaded to accept the summons. Although a considerable pythoness herself, it might have been that she felt the need for invocation before encounter with superior powers. Or was it, simply, that she feared to hear the voice of doom addressing her personally?

Either way, she would at last be heard.

"Oh? Ah? Yairs. No no!
Yairs
_! Perhaps. Who can tell? I will have to think it over and give you an answer. Well, now! Those who know, need not ask."

As she parried with a shield of wooden words, it would begin to appear as though she had mislaid her matchless sword, and the armour of disbelief, with which she had been careful to gird herself, had turned audibly to buckram.

Mrs Jolley, who enjoyed the gift of being able to overhear without actually listening, had even known her friend reply, "You cannot expect me to be wise to everythink. Can you, now?"

It made Mrs Jolley wonder, but she continued to immerse the dishes, which was one of the duties she performed in return for friendship and a very small remuneration.

Mrs Jolley soon learned that, of all the telephone voices, there was perhaps only one to which Mrs Flack could genuinely respond. On such occasions the true glue of prophecy would be poured back, into the funnel of the telephone, onto the missing questions. Mrs Jolley could tell that her friend's rather dry and freckled hands were moulding the warm Bakélite into an altogether different shape.

Mrs Jolley would hear: "If you was so foolish as to leave off your singlet as well, then what can you expect? Oh, dear, dear! I would advise you to rub your chest before retiring, and see as the blanket is pulled right up, and sweat it out with a couple of aspro, and a drop of somethink. It is you who must answer for your own health, whoever else is willin' to."

On one occasion Mrs Jolley heard: "I do not expect feelin's where feelin's do not exist. But expect them to be respected where they do. Eh? No, you do not understand. You do not understand. No one understands no more, unless it is put in American."

When her friend returned to the kitchen, Mrs Jolley could not resist, "Ah, dear, some people are terrible."

But Mrs Flack did not appear to hear.

"Some young fellers," Mrs Jolley ventured further, "are all for themselves nowadays."

Mrs Flack had risen to the surface, but her thoughts were floating after her.

"That nephew of yours is giving you a lot of trouble," said Mrs Jolley and chipped a plate on the tap.

"There is no trouble," replied Mrs Flack, "where a person's life is his own."

"Oh, no, where a person's life is his own." Mrs Jolley sighed.

She did wonder where.

There was the morning--it was the Thursday of Easter, Mrs Jolley would remember--the telephone had rung that sharp, she broke the little butter-dish with the gum-nuts on it, which she hid behind the dresser to dispose of when convenient.

Mrs Flack answered, as usual, but only after bells had begun to ring at every end of a lady's nerves.

Mrs Jolley heard: "Waddaya know! I would never ever! Golly, I am pleased, Blue! But watch out now, won't you? I am telling you people will act different. People, when they get a smell of someone else's luck, are very, very different. People, at the best of times, are different underneath their clothes. Eh? You know, Blue, I did not suggest. You will never ever find me descending to anything low--thoughts or talk--never low. Because there is so much that is far from nice. Which reminds me, Blue, someone that we know of was visiting last night, so I am told, by lantern-light, a certain person. Yairs, dear. Forgetting, it would seem, the time of year. It was
them
_ that crucified Our Saviour. Tomorrow. Think of it. Tomorrow! Yet, someone that we know of must
consort
_--to put it blunt. Eh? Blue! Blue! I forbid you! Who am I--I would like to know--that you are talking to? Where are you, Blue? I can only think you must be full. In the one across from work? A fat lot of work you'll do this morning, Blue, and what odds!"

Here Mrs Flack laughed like a motor-bike.

"I do not blame you, neither. It is only right that young people in full possession of their health should take their pleasure. And if they come to grief, well, it is the parents will wear the scars. It is not the children on who the sins. Oh, dear, no! Whatever else. Do not think I am bitter, as has sometimes been suggested. I am not. I am realistic, that is all, and must bear the consequences of seeing things as they really are. And suffer every Easter to know the Jews have crucified Our Lord. Again. Blue? Something that the young do not need to understand. Not while they have their lovely bodies. Eh? Blue? Enjoy, boy, enjoy, then! Bust your skin open, if that is what you want! It is only a game to let the blood run when there is plenty of it. And so red. Nothing is cruel if you don't see it that way. Besides, it lets the bad out, too, and I would be the last to deny there is plenty of that waiting to turn to pus in anybody's veins.

"Eh? Blue?" Mrs Flack was calling, it could have been in joy, or desperation.

When she entered the kitchen she was glittering dreadfully.

Mrs Jolley, who had been excited, puzzled, frightened by all that she had overheard, decided to continue looking at the sink.

"Blue," gasped Mrs Flack, "and six workmates"--here she sat hard upon an upright chair--"has gone and won the Lottery. They called the ticket 'Lucky Sevens.' "

Mrs Jolley was looking at the sink, of which the grey water, suddenly so flat and still, continued to conceal a variety of objects.

"You are not pleased," Mrs Flack only dreamily accused.

In her entranced state she did not need to glance. Mrs Jolley would be without her shine. She would be wearing the grey look of mornings of dish-water. It was normal for her now to leave her teeth whole days in the tumbler, beneath the handkerchief, beside her bed.