Riders in the Chariot (15 page)

But now, beneath the tree, booming with bees and silence, he had gone right back, drowsily, painfully, exquisitely, into memory. He had hardly ever allowed himself before.

And the woman listened.

"Yes?" she would murmur, but only in the beginning; or: "Oh, dear, no! No, no, no!"

With her hands she would try to ease the air of some difficulty they were experiencing together, or wrestle with impending terrors.

Mordecai Himmelfarb was born in the North German town of Holunderthal, to a family of well-to-do merchants, some time during the eighteen-eighties. Moshe, the father, was a dealer in furs, through connections in Russia, many of whom crossed Germany while Mordecai was still a child. The reason for their move had been discussed, mostly behind closed doors, by uncles and aunts, accompanied by the little moans of distress with which his mother received any report of injustice to their race. If Moshe the father remained the wrong side of the door, preferring to stroke his son's head, or even to take a beer at the _Stübchen__, it was not from lack of sympathy, but because he was a sensitive man. Any such crisis disturbed him so severely, he preferred to believe it had not occurred.

Mordecai the child observed the stream of relatives which poured in suddenly, and away: the cousins from Moscow and Petersburg, no longer quite so rich or so glossy; their headachy, emotional wives, clinging to the remnants of panache, and still able to produce surprises, little objects in cloisonné and brilliants, out of the secret pocket in a muff. The whole of this colourful rout was sailing, they told him, for America, to liberty, justice, and the future. He watched them go, through the wrought-iron grille, from his own safe, German hall.

There were the humbler Russians, too: people in darker, dustier clothes, who had suffered the same indignities, whom his mother received with reverent affection, his father with an increase in his usual joviality. There was, in particular, the Galician rabbi, whose face Mordecai could never after visualize, but remembered, rather, as a presence and a touch of hands.

Pogroms had reduced this distant cousin of his mother's to the clothes he wore and the faith he lived. Whatever his destination, he had paused for a moment at the house on the Holzgraben in Holunderthal, where his cousin had taken him into the small, rather dark room which she used for calls of a private nature, and the visits of embarrassed relatives. The mother sat, dressed as always by then, in black, smoothing her child's hair. But without looking at him, the little boy saw. In the obscure room, talking to the foreign rabbi, for the greater part in a language the boy himself had still to get, his mother had grown quite luminous. He would have liked to continue watching the lamp that had been lit in her, but from some impulse of delicacy decided, instead, to lower his eyes. And then he had become, he realized, the object of attention. His mother was drawing him forward, towards the centre of the geometric carpet. And the rabbi was touching him. The rabbi, of almost womanly hands, was searching his forehead for some sign. He was laying his hands on the diffident child's damp hair. Talking all the time with his cousin in the foreign tongue. While the boy, inwardly resisting less, was bathed in the stream of words, suspended in a cloud of awe.

Finally, his father had come in, more than ever jovial, shooting his shiny cuffs, and arranging his already immaculate moustache, with its distinct hairs and lovely, lingering scent of pomade. Laughing, of course--because Moshe did laugh a lot, sometimes spontaneously sometimes also when at a loss--he joined his wife and her cousin in their conversation, though he altered the complexion of it.

And said at last, in German, not exactly his own, "Well, Mordecai, quite the little
zaddik
_!"

And continued laughing, not out of malice--he was too agreeable for that. If his wife forgave him his lapse in taste, it was because he had often been proved a good man at heart.

Moshe Himmelfarb was a worldly Jew of liberal tastes. Success led him by a manicured hand, and continued to dress him with discretion. Nothing excessive about Moshe, unless it was his phiz, which would suddenly jar on those tolerant souls who collected Jews, and make them wonder at their own eccentricity. Not that relations were thereby impaired. Moshe, in deep appreciation of the liberation, and truly genuine affection for the
goyim
_, would not allow that. And he was right, of course. All those emancipated Jews of his acquaintance were ready to support him in his claim that the age of enlightenment and universal brotherhood had dawned at last in Western Europe. Jews and
goyim
_ were taking one another--intermittently, at least--moist-eyed to their breasts. The old, dark days were done. Certainly there remained the problem of Eastern Europe, and deplorable incidents often occurred. Everybody knew that, and had been personally affected, but the whole house could not be swept clean at once. In the meantime, money was raised by Western Jewry to assist the victims, and to all such funds Moshe was always the first to subscribe. He loved to give, whether noticeably generous sums to numerous religious missions, the works of the German poets to his son, or presents of wine and cigars to those gentiles who allowed themselves to be cultivated, and with whom he was so deeply, so gratefully in love.

Happy are the men who are able to tread transitional paths, scarcely looking to left or to right, and without distinguishing an end. Moshe Himmelfarb was one of them. If he had seldom been the object of direct criticism, except in trivial, family matters, it was because he had always taken care not to offer himself as a target. Unlike certain fanatics, he recognized his obligations to the community in which he lived, while observing the ceremony of his own. Mordecai remembered the silk hats in which his father presented himself, on civic and religious occasions alike. Ordered from an English hatter, Moshe's hats reflected that nice perfection which may be attained by the reasonable man. For Moshe Himmelfarb was nothing less. If he was also nothing more, that was after other, exacting, not to say reactionary standards, by which such lustrous hats could only be judged vain, hollow, and lamentably fragile.

Yet, along with his shortcomings, and his acquaintances, many of them men of similar mould, smelling of prosperity and cigars, and filled with every decent intention, Moshe continued to attend the synagogue in the Schillerstrasse. That they did not grow haggard, like some, from obeying the dictates of religion, was because they were reasonable, respectful, rather than religious men, and might have pointed out, if they had been openly accused, and if they had dared, that the Jewish soul was at last set free. The walls were down, the suffocating rooms were burst open, the chains of observance had been loosed.

They would still sway, however, all those worldly Jews of the synagogue in the Schillerstrasse, when the wind of prayer smote them. Standing beside his father, the little boy would watch, and wait to be carried in the same direction. He would stroke the fringes of his father's
tallith
_, or bury his face in the soft folds. He would wait for his father to beat his breast for all the sins that were shut up inside. Then he himself would overflow with a melancholy joy that all was right in the forest of Jews in which he stood. All the necks were so softly swathed in wool, that, however fat and purple some of them looked, he was comforted, and would glance up, towards the gallery directly opposite, where he knew his mother to be. But behind the lattice. The boy would not see her, except in his mind's eye, where she sat very still and clear.

For Mordecai the man, his mother remained a sculptured figure. Whether, in fact, life and fashion had influenced her sufficiently to create a continuously evolving series of identities, his memory presented her as a single image: black dress; the high collar of net and whalebone, relieved by a little, seemly frill; the broad, yellowish forehead, marked with the scars of compassionate thought; eyes in which the deceits of this world were regretfully, but gently drowned; the mouth that overcame secret ailments, religious doubts, and all but one bitterness.

It was evident from the beginning that the boy was closer to the mother, although it was only much later established that she had given him her character. To casual acquaintances it was surprising that the father, so agreeable, so kind, so generous, did not have a greater influence. By contrast the mother made rather a sombre impression, stiff, and given to surrounding herself with certain dark, uncouth, fanatically orthodox Jews, usually her relatives. Of course, the boy loved and honoured his good father, and would laugh and chatter with him as required, or listen gravely as the beauties of Goethe or the other poets were pointed out. So that Moshe was delighted with his son, and would bring expensive presents: a watch, or a brass telescope, or collected works bound in leather. But it was out of the mother's silence and solitude of soul that the rather studious, though normal, laughing, sometimes too high-spirited little boy had been created.

Frau Himmelfarb had never become reconciled to the well-ordered, too specious life of the North German town. As she walked with her child against the painted drop of Renaissance houses, or formal magnificence of Biedermeier mansions, her incredulous eyes would reject the evidence that men had thus confined the infinite. Only in certain dark mediaeval streets, Mordecai remembered, did his mother seem to escape from the oppression of her material surroundings. She herself would blur, as strange, apparently inexpressible words came struggling softly out of her mouth, and her feet would almost dance as she hurried over the uneven cobbles, skipping the puddles of dirty water, very light. She would visit numbers of the rather smelly, frightening houses, and bring presents, and examine children, whether for ailments, or their knowledge of God, and even hitch up her skirt over her petticoat, before going down on her knees to scrub a floor neglected by the sick. Along the airless alleys, in the dark houses of the Jewish poor, his mother's Galician spirit was released--which, in his memory, had seldom happened anywhere else, unless during the visit of her cousin, the destitute rabbi, in their own anteroom, or while writing letters to her many other relatives.

The mother was one of a scattered family. It was her sorrow, and pride. She liked to bring her writing things, as though she had been a visitor, and sit at the round table, with its cloth of crimson plush, in preference to the ormolu desk on which Moshe had lovingly insisted. Then the little boy would play with the plush pompons, and occasionally glance at the letters as they grew, and shuffle the used envelopes, from which she would allow him later to soak the stamps. He had known his mother, on a single rainy afternoon, seal envelopes for Poland, Rumania, the United States, even China and Ecuador. Until, finally, there was nothing of her left to give.

He realized only very much later the important part her dispersed family had played in his mother's secret life: how, in her mind, their omnipresence might have ensured and hastened redemption for the whole world. Such a conviction, implied, though certainly never expressed, gave her a kind of distinction amongst the numerous pious ladies who were always in transit through her house, eating
Streuselkuchen
_ and drinking coffee, organizing charitable projects, announcing births, marriages, and deaths, daring sometimes even to indulge, in the presence of their hostess, in bursts of frivolous, not to say unseemly chat. But always returning to one point. The women clung together like a ball of brown bees, driven by the instinct of their faith, intoxicated with the honey of their God.

The presence of that God amongst the walnut furniture of the sumptuous house--for Himmelfarbs had moved from above the shop before Mordecai was able to remember--was unquestioned by the worldly, but prudently respectful Moshe, taken for granted by the little boy, even by the confident young man who the latter eventually became, and who turned sceptical not of his religion, rather, of his own need for it. Religion, like a winter overcoat, grew oppressive and superfluous as spring developed into summer, and the natural sources of warmth were gradually revealed. But there was no mistaking the love and respect the young man kept for the enduring qualities of his old, discarded coat. In the solstice of his self-love, in the heat of physical ardour, he would melt with nostalgia at the thought of it.

In the meantime, however, the little boy remained wrapped in the warm reality of the garment they had given him to wear.

When he was only six, the mother remarked with the casualness she always adopted for important matters, "Do you realize, Moshe, it is time the child began to receive instruction?"

"Yoy!" The father, who loved his own joke, winced to express horror. "Do you want to load the boy already? And worst of all, with Hebrew?"

"Yes," she answered, seriously. "It is our own tongue."

Moshe was often inclined to wonder how he had come to marry his wife. Whom he loved, however. So it was agreed.

It was usual for the boys of their acquaintance to attend the classes of Herr Ephraim Gluck, the
melamed
_, but because of some special confidence the mother had, the Cantor Katzmann was engaged to teach her son the alphabet. Which the latter mastered at astonishing speed. And began shortly to write phrases, and recite prayers. And grew vain. He would turn his head aside, and mumble what he already knew too well, or declaim too loudly, with a shameful spiritual arrogance.

On one occasion the Cantor was forced to mention, "If a Jew is proud, Mordecai, it is all the harder when he bites the dust. As he certainly will."

The Cantor himself was a humble man, with several squint-eyed children, and a wife who nagged. His voice was his only glory. When it had been poured out to the dregs, he would appear emptied indeed, falling back upon his chair with a smile of deathly content. Mordecai remembered him especially after the climax of Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, when, it could have been, the Cantor had attempted the impossible. The white closed eyelids would not so much as flutter, as he sat and smiled faintly from behind them. He was a small man, and his pupil loved him in memory, more than he had respected him in life.