Riders in the Chariot (68 page)

"There, sir," she grunted sturdily. "Not much further now."

Sometimes she stumbled, but would not fall.

Mrs Godbold was quite exalted by the burden it had been given her to bear. Her large breasts were proud inside the washed-out cotton dress, as the procession of faithful staggered at last to a standstill underneath her roof.

Two little solemn girls, whom Himmelfarb connected with pushing and singing, had prepared a bed, as ordered, and were standing by. Mottled green by bruised grass, their arms were glowing golden against the white of sheets. Gold of light and green of vines were tangled together in the window, to make a curtain, of which a reflection hung, shimmering and insubstantial, on the wall above the great bed. Gently and rationally somebody was undressing him. After which, inside the tingling, sun-baked sheets, he might have surrendered completely to the pleasures of unconsciousness, if only the vise of pain had offered him release.

At one point he was almost crushed by it, and opened his eyes, wondering, with the result that several of the watchers recoiled, and two of Mrs Godbold's younger girls, who had dared to peer into depths for which they were not prepared, began to cry.

The mother shushed and shoved.

Then she addressed the patient, saying, "I will send one of them to fetch Dr Herborn."

But the sick man's face rejected her suggestion, so that she decided to humour him, for the moment at least.

Doing as she knew how, she warmed a brick, and put it inside the bed, against his feet. At which he smiled. Or, again, when his lips, dried and cracked by suffering, opened on some request she was unable to interpret, she brought a watery soup made that same day out of a scrag-end of mutton, and tried to tempt him with a little of it. But his expression of nausea restrained her, and immediately she was ashamed for the poorness of her soup, indeed, for her whole house, unworthy even of lesser guests.

Perhaps realizing, he opened his eyes at her, and spoke rather odd.

"I am content, thank you," he said.

Then Mrs Godbold was overwhelmed by that compassion which all suffering roused in her. The sudden pangs forced her to go and put down the cup, which had begun to clatter in its saucer.

During the afternoon, Himmelfarb drifted into a doze. He was swallowed up by the whiteness. He was received, as seldom. Of course there had been other occasions when he might have allowed himself: the hills of Zion, spreading their brown pillows in the evening light, had almost opened; the silence of his last and humblest house had promised frequent ladders of escape; as he knelt on the stones, in his blindness, the flames of Friedensdorf had offered certain release. But the rope-end of dedication had always driven him on. Even now it was torturing his side, although the goat-mask and hair shawl had slipped, leaving him hanging abandoned on a tree. Again, he was the Man Kadmon, descending from the Tree of Light to take the Bride. Trembling with white, holding the cup in her chapped hands, she advanced to stand beneath the
chuppah
_. So they were brought together in the smell of all primordial velvets. This, explained the cousins and aunts, is at last the Shekinah whom you have carried all these years under your left breast. As he received her, she bent and kissed the wound in his hand. Then they were truly one. They did not break the cup, as the wedding guests expected, but took and drank, again and again.

Afterwards Else Godbold straightened his pillows. Else could only improvise little acts to cover up her inexperience. And the sick man was grateful for the touch of balsam, for the almost imperceptible dew brushing the craggy surfaces of pain.

But Else withdrew quickly from what she sensed she, too, must eventually suffer. The iron shed which contained them all had begun to stifle, not to say menace. How she longed to slip outside, and hang about the lane, and feel the moonlight slide along her arms and throat, and return the touch of moonlight, until it became impossible to distinguish intention from intention.

Then Bob Tanner, who had gone out earlier, returned, and told them of the fire which had started at the Jew's--the continued heaping of orange light confirmed--and she saw that for her lover something was happening which would leave him changed. She saw that his rather clumsy, lad's honesty, which she had loved and derided from the start, was setting in a shape that even she would not alter. He realized that his girl was the uglier for pity, and would alter many times yet. Each was choking with discovery. But the lovers were grateful to know they could still recognize each other, and did not doubt they must continue to, whatever the disguise.

Then Else Godbold tore herself out of what was becoming an unbearable embrace of thoughts. She leaned towards the sick man, and said, "Mr Himmelfarb, I wish you would tell me of anything you want, of anything I could do, or bring."

She sounded as though she were threatening him, because, she realized bitterly, she was still too young.

"If I brought cold water," Else suggested desperately, "to sponge your face with? Eh?"

But Himmelfarb had no requests.

When he was not dozing, when he was not removed from the compartment of his body into a freedom of time and space, his expression would appear composed, observant, peering out through the visor of his face, from out of what had by now become the protective armature of pain. Once or twice he glanced towards the window, at the scarcely extraordinary orange light, to follow an event that was taking place, at a distance, but of no concern. In the same way, from under his eyelids, he experienced the apparition of Miss Hare. He was not surprised. Nor did the weight of his faithful disciple weigh heavy on his dead feet.

Miss Hare came in, and even the older children were afraid, who had known this mad woman ever since they could remember, and looked for her at windows, or in and out of the bush, always to be found, like owls in certain trees, or some old possum-inmate of particular shed or chimney. Now this amiable and familiar beast lay whimpering and grunting across the foot of their mother's bed. She smelled still of burning, but fire could have been the least cause of her distress.

The mother, of course, handled this like any other situation. Coming forward, she said, "I was glad you have come, miss. I thought you would. There is perhaps something that only you can do for him."

And touched the scorched shoulder.

But Miss Hare would not answer at first, or would only moan, which could yet have been a manner of communication with some other soul present.

The sick man, however, gave no sign of acknowledgment, but lay with his eyes closed.

"Will you take off your jacket, perhaps?" Mrs Godbold asked of her most recent guest.

But Miss Hare would only moan, not from pain, it seemed, but because she had again succeeded in closing the circle of her happiness. Yet she must have been suffering, for those of the children who had advanced closest saw that the red down was singed close along her chops, and the skin shiny from the basting it had got.

Horrid though her appearance was, all those around her remained rooted in respect. Although the great wicker hat had gone askew, its spokes burnt black, not even Mrs Godbold dared suggest the wearer should remove it. Miss Hare had never been seen without, unless by Mrs Godbold herself, who had nursed her years before in sickness. Nobody else cared to speculate on what might be hidden underneath.

Then Miss Hare sat up, as straight as her fubsy body would allow.

"His feet," she said, "are cold."

For she had stuck her hand under the blanket.

"So very, very cold." Miss Hare's slow words followed her fingers, ending in a shiver.

"Yes." Mrs Godbold could not evade it. "But you shall warm them."

Miss Hare cheered up then, as everybody saw. She sat and chafed her spirits back. Or gradually lolled lower, until her face rested on the forms of feet, printing them on her cheek.

All this time the man's face was breathing gently on the pillow, but the air could have been rarefied.

"Gracie will go for Dr Herborn," Mrs Godbold had at last decided.

But Himmelfarb opened his eyes. He said, "No. No. Not now. Thank you. For the moment I have not the strength to submit to any doctor."

And smiled with the least possible irony, to absolve whoever it had been for conceiving a superfluous idea.

He was as content by now as he would ever have allowed himself to be in life. Children and chairs conversed with him intimately. Thanks to the texture of their skin, the language of animals was no longer a mystery, as, of course, the Baal-shem had always insisted.

So he breathed more gently, and resumed his journey.

So Miss Hare was translated. Her animal body became the least part of her, as breathing thoughts turned to being.

The night rose and fell, to which the dying fire gave its last touch of purple through the frame of vines and window.

Maudie Godbold did think for a moment that she saw a face, but by that hour all the watchers were sleepy, some of them even sleeping.

After leaving the factory on the eve of the holidays for which they had all been longing and waiting, Dubbo went straight to the house where he lodged, on the outskirts of Barranugli. In other years he might have stopped at shops to lay in food against Easter, but now, because something had happened, his sandshoes hurried. Something had happened of extreme importance, but which he would attempt to dismiss. He washed his hands first. He sat for a little on the edge of the bed. He ate some bread, with cold sausage, which tasted of sawdust. He spat it out. But gathered it up at once from the floor. Something he had done contradicted what he had been taught. He sat. In the dusk he washed his hands again. It was so important. He was clean at least by education. He sat in the dusk, and would have liked to look at his few recent paintings, all turned to the wall, but knew he would find them receded into their frames. The disappearing room abandoned him to hopelessness. Shadows would flutter at that hour like insubstantial bats. He remembered his mother had once told him how the spirit of his grandfather was a guardian on whom he might rely, but during one of the many phases of flight, he and his protector had, he suspected, parted company. In any case, for quite some time he had sensed himself to be alone.

Now he began to tremble. The frame of the stretcher creaked, creaked. He was ill, of course. Run down, Mrs Pask would have said, and prescribed a tonic. He coughed for a while, too long, and with such force that the joints of that rickety room were heard to protest wheezily. Again he washed his hands, Mrs Pask breathing approval over his shoulder.

Then he began to cry as he stood propped against the basin, a sick, hollow crying above the basinful of water. There were days when the blood would not stop.

The blood ran down the hands, along the bones of the fingers. The pain was opening again in his side.

In his agony, on his knees, Dubbo saw that he was remembering his Lord Jesus. His own guilt was breaking him. He began to crack his finger-joints, of the fingers that had failed to unknot the ropes, which had tied the body to the tree.

He had not borne witness. But did not love the less. It came pouring out of him, like blood, or paint. In time, when he could muster the strength for such an undertaking, he would touch the tree to life with blue. Nobody knew the secret of the blue that he would use; no one would have suspected such a jewellery of wounds, who had not watched his own blood glitter and dry slowly under sunlight.

Dubbo got up now. He began to move purposefully. He had to put an end to darkness. He switched the light on, and there at least his room was, quite neat, square, and wooden. He changed his singlet, put on best pants, smoothed his rather crinkly hair with water, and went out in the sandshoes which he always wore.

In the steamy, bluish night, he caught the bus for Sarsaparilla. It was an hour when nobody else thought to travel, and the abo had to cling, like a beetle in a lurching tin. Everybody else was already there. All along the road women and girls were entering the brick churches for preliminary Easter services. Without altogether believing they had consented to a murder, the sand-coloured faces saw it would not harm them to be cleared in public. They had dressed themselves nicely for the hearing, all in blameless, pale colours, hats, and so forth. Some of them were wearing jewels of glass.

Dubbo knew these parts by heart, both from looking, and from dreaming. He had drawn the houses of Sarsaparilla, with the mushrooms brooding inside. He had drawn the thick, serge-ridden thighs of numerous gentlemen, many from government departments, some with the ink still wet on them. He had drawn Mrs Khalil's two juicy girls, their mouths burst open like pomegranates, their teeth like the bitter pomegranate seeds. And as the serge gentlemen continued to pulp the luminous flesh, all was disappointment and coronary occlusion. So Dubbo had seen to draw.

Sometimes in his wanderings through Sarsaparilla, the painter had pushed deep into his own true nature, which men had failed to contaminate, and there where the houses stopped, he had found his thoughts snapping again like sticks in silence. But subordinate to silence. For silence is everything. Then he had come back and drawn the arabesques of thinking leaves. He had drawn the fox-coloured woman looking out of a bush, her nose twitching as the wind altered.

He would have liked to draw the touch of air. Once, though, he had attempted, and failed miserably to convey the skin of silence nailed to a tree.

Now, remembering the real purpose of his visit to Sarsaparilla in the night, Dubbo's hands grew slithery on the chromium rail of the empty bus. Ostensibly he was steadying himself. The bus was such a void, the conductor came along at last, and after clearing his throat, condescended to enter into conversation with a black.

The conductor said, extra loud, there had been a fire at Sarsaparilla--some Jew's place.

"Yes?" Dubbo replied.

And smiled.

"Oh, yes!" he repeated, almost eagerly.

"You know about it?" the conductor asked. "Know the bloke perhaps? Worked at Rosetree's."