Riders in the Chariot (64 page)

As the circus returned to the patch of dead grass where some had observed it pitched the night before, fevers that had never been diagnosed sweated their way into the hands and faces of many of the spectators: to see the white bellies of the girls through the fringes of their satins, or to smell the smell of monkeys. A fellow on a skewbald nag could have been anybody's almost extinguished dream, the way he drew a match along the tight flank of his pants, and almost glanced up, out of his burnt-out eyes.

Most comical was one of the clowns who pretended to enact a public hanging on the platform of a lorry. Nothing but the jolting and his own skill prevented him from adapting his neck to the noose. He would totter, and fall--wide. Yet, it was suggested, as good as strangled by the air. His tongue would loll outside his mouth, before licking up those invisible fragments which restore to life.

"They will kill the silly bugger yet!" screamed one of the grannies of Rosetree's Brighta Bicycle Lamps. "Look! What did I tell yez? And spoil 'is Easter!"

It did seem as though the clown's act had been played out at last for a second procession, longer, smoother, less amorphous, had united precipitately with the first. Between the jolting and the screams, flowers were falling, as the second procession was seen to be that of an actual funeral, so well-attended, so black, clothes of such good quality, and faces of such a doubtful cast, it could only have been an alderman that they were putting down quick before the holidays set in.

As the clown spun at the end of his rope, and the little property coffin hesitated on the brink of the lorry, and confusion carried voices, brakes, horses' wind into the upper register, a woman rose in the first funeral car, or stuffed herself, rather, in the widow: a large, white woman--could have been the widow--pointing, as if she had recognized at last in the effigy of the clown the depth, and duration, and truth of grief, which she had failed to grasp in connection with that exacting male her now dead husband. The woman was screeching dry screams. A monumental marble could have been clearing its throat of dust, and would not stop since it had learnt.

It had not been established whether the clown was dead, or again shamming, when the interlocked processions dragged each other round the corner and out of sight. Those who had longed for a show wondered whether they were appeased, for the clown was surely more or less a puppet, when they had been hoping for a man. On the other hand, the eyes of some of the more thoughtful had receded into their heads as the hands of the controversial clown seemed to jerk at a curtain in their minds.

It occurred to these that their boss had remained stranded with the Jew down at the far end of the shed, and that the soundless attitudes of the two men had nothing and everything to do with events.

Harry Rosetree's hands were trying to part the air, so that he might come closer to the core of it.

He had, in fact, just said, "I must ask you, I must order you to leave!"

Of course the vibration of the machinery was enough to dash the words out of anybody's mouth.

"It could be for your own good," Mr Rosetree threatened.

But the few smiled sadly. He was not so sure.

"At once. Before." The boss was booming, and exuding.

The shaped, but silent words bounced like blown eggshells.

The Jew had replied, in his own vein of sad irony, "You will not be blamed."

Sometimes the velvet belting of machinery actually soothed.

"Nobody but myself," Himmelfarb could have been saying, "will be held to blame for anything that may happen. You are doubly insured."

The strangeness of the situation, the employer trying to extract something from the air, and offer it in the shape of a secret message to one of the least skilled of his employees, would have roused curiosity, if it had not disturbed. Those who noticed averted their eyes.

Fortunately there were other things happening. It was just on smoke-o. The machines were easing. Workers were descending from the scaffolding of tables from which they had been employed enjoying the spectacle of the processions. It was now time to relax.

When the Lucky Sevens returned from the pub across the street, and the incident of the hanging clown. There was Blue at last, whom many had not seen, let alone congratulated, on the morning of his good fortune. A number of his workmates, noticeably those of the female sex, were rushing to touch, to kiss, to associate, while the shyer waited for him to identify himself in some way, although he had got full enough, to show.

Blue was shickered all right. The beer was running out of his navel.

The partners in chance advanced. All were clothed, conventionally, in singlets and slacks, with the exception of their leader, who wore the gum-boots in which he was accustomed to wade through the acid of the plating-shop, and the pair of old shorts stained beyond recognition as a fabric, resembling, rather, something sloughed by nature. Blue had always been primarily a torso, an Antinous of the suburbs, breasts emphatically divided on unfeeling marble, or Roman sandstone. Somebody had battered the head, or else the sculptor had recoiled before giving precise form to a vision of which he was ashamed. Whether damaged, or unfinished, the head was infallibly suggestive. Out of the impervious eyes, which should have conveyed at most the finite beauty of stone, filtered glimpses of an infinite squalor: slops of the saloon, the dissolving cigarette butts, reflections of the grey monotonies, the greenish lusts. The mouth was a means of devouring. If ever it opened on words--for it was sometimes necessary to communicate--these issued bound with the brass of beer, from between rotting stumps of teeth.

Now Blue called to the surge of his admirers, not with any indication of caring, "Hayadoin?"

Notwithstanding, the ladies were lapping him up with the same thirst as she who was closest to him by blood. His rudimentary mouth was soon smeared with red.

"Goodonya, mate!" called the heartier of the females, perhaps under the impression that manliness might succeed where femininity had failed.

But he laughed from between his stumps, and pushed the ladies aside, leaving them to trample on one another.

There was no doubt the Lucky Sevens now predominated on the work-floor. Drink had made them gigantic, or so it appeared to Haïm Rosenbaum, in whose past the gestures and faces of the crowd had often assumed alarming proportions. Now he remembered a telephone call he had promised to make weeks ago.

"Take it easy, Blue!" Mr Rosetree called in passing.

As everyone had forgotten the boss, some did pause to wonder at the significance of the remark.

Mr Rosetree continued up the stairs, inadequately protected by the knowledge that he had done his best. If there was an enemy of reason, it was the damned Jew Himmelfarb, who must now accept the consequences.

The latter had just picked up his case, and was about to cross the yard, making for the washroom, which in the past had provided a certain sanctuary for the spirit.

Haïm ben Ya'akov looked back. Had he graduated, by some miracle, from the rank of actor to that of spectator? Then renewed panic carried him on, and, clearing the remainder of the steps, he reached his office.

Himmelfarb was walking rather slowly. Although aged by circumstances or the weather, he too had increased in stature, to match those figures with whom he was slowly, slowly becoming involved. That much was evident to the abo at least, whose instincts informed his stomach with a sickening certainty.

While standing on the flat floor, Alf Dubbo was stationed as if upon an eminence, watching what he alone was gifted or fated enough to see. Neither the actor nor the spectator, he was that most miserable of human beings, the artist. All aspects, all possibilities were already splintering, forming in him. His thin belly was in revolt.

Himmelfarb could have touched the nearest of the Lucky Sevens by raising an elbow. But went out. And began to cross the yard. Nobody but the abo had begun yet to attach significance to the Jew of lolling head.

Then Blue, who was hanging his, began to feel lonely, began to feel sad. He could have laid his head on a certain thin bosom, from which the vitriol would spurt in little jets. At the same time he was trying to remember--always a difficult matter where moral problems were concerned. His ear was aching with the effort as it pressed against the telephone of memory. But did at last distinguish the faintest:...
suffer every Easter to know the Jews have crucified Our Lord
_. All the sadness pressing, pressing on a certain nerve.
It was Them, Blue
_. All the injustices to which he had ever been subjected grew appreciably sadder. But for all the injustices he had committed, somebody had committed worse. Not to say the worst, so he had been told, the very worst. And must not go unpunished.

"Hey, Mick!" Blue called.

Now several of the Sevens realized what a very scraggy, funny, despicable sight the Jew-cove presented. One, who suspected that a joke was being prepared, laughed quite short and high, but another, who had the wind, belched, and hated.

The Jew had turned.

"I beg your pardon. Did you speak?" he asked.

Though it was hardly necessary. He did not appear anything but fully informed.

Blue, who always had to rootle around in his mind before he could find a reason, was not quick enough in finding one now. He knew, though. Reasons which originate in the blood, the belly, or the loins solicit most persistently. And looking at the Jew, Blue experienced the authentic spasm.

"We gotta have a talk," he said, "about something that happened."

Touching a button on the Jew's shirt, but lightly, even whimsically.

Because Blue the vindicator was also Blue the mate. It was possible to practise all manner of cruelties provided the majority might laugh them off as practical jokes. And there is almost no tragedy which cannot be given a red nose. Blue perhaps sensed this as he lightly touched the shirt-button, or remembered some wowser of a parson who had failed to keep it serious as he droned on against the blowflies.

"I got a bone to pick," said Blue.

Already some of his confederates were bending their elbows in support of whatever situation their leader might choose to develop.

"So the parson tells me," Blue pursued. "Or someone." He frowned, and faltered. "Or me auntie," he added, brighter.

Indeed, that rekindled a fire which might otherwise have died. Now it flickered afresh with a greenish, acid flame.

And Blue began to laugh. He was all gums, and the muscles in his throat.

"You bloody buggers!" Blue laughed. "You black bastards!"

The Jew's shirt surrendered up, most comically, a long, un-protesting strip.

Dubbo looked into his hands. They were weaponless, and without weapons he felt badly afraid. Officially, of course, he was not a man, but a blackfellow. He could have cried for all his failures, but most of all this one.

Left with the strip of shirt in his hand, Blue had not yet thought what to do with it.

Then the Sevens began to move. It was their simultaneous intention to go into action against the offending Jew, although, for a start, they appeared to be pushing one another around. Their elephant-phalanx rubbed and cannoned. It was in earnest, though. If one or two half sniggered, it was to clear their mouths of phlegm, or something. They were in earnest all right.

"Christ!" Even if somebody had to laugh, that seemed to hit right home.

It struck Dubbo. Sounds transposed into tones of fear and horror, both personal and limitless, began to pour out over the yard, on the edge of which the struggle was taking place. If it could be called that. For the Jew did not resist. There was, on one side, the milling of the righteous, even to their own detriment. On the other, the Jew, who did not flinch, except that he was jostled. His expression remained one almost of contentment.

As Dubbo watched, himself a thinking stick, twitched and tossed, the mob surged out across the yard, over the lavings from the plating-shop. Some were giggling and chanting. Of those who hung back or protested, none was willing as yet to forgo a disgraceful spectacle, but would
grizzle
_ at their own lack of decision, in bass undertone.

"Go home! Go home!" giggled and chanted the young girls.

"Go home to Germany!" sang the older women.

There was a clapping and a stamping as the men's chorus interpolated, "Go home! Go home! Go home to hell!"

With a joyful, brassy resonance, because the puppet in their lives had been replaced at last by a man of flesh and blood.

In the yard, Dubbo realized, there was that old jacaranda, which they had lopped back before its season of blue, perhaps for the very purpose of preventing it. But, however they had mangled its form, the painter was made to visualize the divine tree in its intensity of blue, wrapped in shawls of it, standing in pools of it. Towards the present travesty of tree, its mutilated limbs patched with lichens of a dead stone-colour, with nails, protruding in places from the trunk, together with a segment of now rusted tin, which somebody had hammered in for reasons unknown, it was agreed by consent of instinct to push the victim. Harder now. Indeed, at one point, the Jew went down. And got trampled for a while. At the risk of spoiling it, some of the rout could not resist trying the resilience of the mushroom that they longed to pick, and one man, braver than the rest, suddenly became aware of the dreadful frailty of the human body as he kicked at the fallen victim's ribs.

Then Blue reached down and yanked the Jew up. The latter had begun to bleed from above his left eye, which appeared to the mass of the spectators both repulsive and rewarding.

Never more plastic than now, Blue was glittering with sweat. Several of the young girls and married women consigned their souls willingly to the bonfire as they surrendered themselves to his image. Some of the men would have taken a hammer, or plunged a knife, if either weapon had been at hand. Into the Jew, of course.

Nor would the latter have protested. That was what maddened the crowd. His mouth was not even set to endure suffering, but was ever so slightly open, as if to receive any further bitterness.