Riders in the Chariot (16 page)

At the age of ten, the boy entered the Gymnasium. Already before
bar mitzvah
_, he had embarked on Greek, Latin, French, with English for preference. He had begun to carry off the prizes. Sources, both informed and uninformed, insisted that Mordecai ben Moshe was exceptionally brilliant.

"You see, Malke," the father remarked, preparing in his mind an additional, expensive prize, "our Martin is surely intended to become a man of some importance."

Because he had developed the ridiculous and distasteful habit of calling their son by a German name, his wife would pinch her eyebrows together as if suffering physical pain, although she would let it be known that, in spite of her expression of torture, she was grateful for the boy's success.

"
Ach
_," she exclaimed. "Yes," she said, and found she had a cough. "We have known from the beginning he was no fool."

How her cough continued to rack her.

"But," she was able at last to resume, "all that is by the way. I only ask that Mordecai shall be remembered as a man of faith."

So that the father's pleasure was cut by his wife's stern consistency, and in time he ceased to love, while continuing to honour. In his casual, but always amiable way, he allowed her to bear many of the burdens, because he saw she was suited to it, and she succeeded manfully, for, inside her rather delicate body, she had considerable strength of mind.

Alone with her son, she would often unbend, even after he was grown. She would become quite skittish in her private joy, with the result that the boy was sometimes ashamed for what appeared unnecessary, not to say unnatural, in one of natural dignity.

"Mordecai ben Moshe!" she would refer to him half aloud, half laughing.

To establish, as it were, an unmistakable identity.

She had the habit of forming in his presence a suggestion of ideas, sometimes in German, more often in Yiddish, and as he learnt to follow her murmur, he forged a chain out of it. There were many tales, too, of relatives and saints. She could become inspired. Her Seder table was the materialization of simple dogma. For the rites of the Sabbath she had a particular genius, and, watching the candles increase in light and stature as her hands coaxed, her husband was again convinced of his own genuine desire to worship.

By far the most agreeable of all the feast days observed by the family on the Holzgraben was that of Succoth, for it made the least spiritual demands on the father, or so the son began to sense. Ignoring, for some atavistic reason, the considerable triangular garden, with its smell of toadstools and damp leaves, they improvised their tabernacle beneath the lattice on the balcony. The meals could not appear too often or too soon, which they ate beneath the stars at Succoth, above the
Stadtwald
_ at Holunderthal. The symbols of citron and palm flourished happily in the father's somewhat shallow mind. Because, by now it had been made clear, the bleak heights of Atonement were not for Moshe, only the foothills of Thanksgiving. In the circumstances, the additional duty laid upon the mother was a source of embarrassment to the parents, also in time, the father suspected, to the son. On returning home from the synagogue, after the travail and exhaustion of Yom Kippur, he might pinch the boy's cheek, and look into his eyes, and wonder to which side Mordecai was going to be drawn. As his hopes conflicted with his fears, Moshe would sigh, and again, more loudly, when the first mouthful of reviving coffee passed his lips.

The hopes of all converged upon
bar mitzvah
_. The candidate approached the ceremony with a dangerous amount of confidence. He received the phylacteries and the shawl, together with many desirable presents from parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. He delivered ringingly, and with a sculptural logic, his discourse on the chosen subject, with the result that aunts turned to congratulate one another long before he had finished. They could have devoured the feverish face--to some extent a replica of each of theirs--underneath the plastered hair and pretty _Kàppchen__. Mordecai was entranced, and did not listen continuously to anybody's voice, unless it was his own. Somewhere behind him on the platform wandered the father who was relinquishing, not without a hint of tears, spiritual responsibility. There were some amongst Frau Himmelfarb's relatives who could not contain their ironic smiles on noticing poor Malke's Moshe. But were immediately recalled to a state of adequate reverence by a flash of silver from the Scrolls. After the ceremony, there was a delicious meal, at which the formally dedicated boy was caressed and flattered. His triumph made him proud, shy, exalted, indifferent, explosively hilarious, and uncommunicative of his true feelings--if he was conscious of what they were.

Who, indeed, could tell which way the
bar mitzvah
_ boy would go? Certainly not the self-congratulating father, perhaps the mother, through the tips of her fingers, or subtler colloquy of souls.

In the comfortable, but ugly house, in the closed circle of relatives and friends, protected by the wings of angels, illuminated by the love of God, Mordecai accepted the pattern which his race, his religion, and his parents had ordained. But there was, in addition, an outside world, which his mother feared, for which his father yearned, and of which Mordecai became increasingly aware. There the little waxen, silent boy grew into a bony, rasping youth, the dark down straggling like an indecision on his upper lip, the lips themselves blooming far too soon, the great nose assuming manifest importance. It was the age of mirrors, and in their surfaces Mordecai attempted regularly to solve the mystery of himself. He was growing muscular, sensual, yellow: hideous to some, provocative to others. What else, nobody was yet allowed to see.

"Tell me, you ugly Jew, what it feels like to be one?" his friend Jürgen Stauffer asked.

In fun, of course. Friendship and laughter still prevailed. The forest flecked the boys' skins, as they rubbed along, elbow to elbow, the soles of their boots made slippery by thicknesses of fallen leaves.

"Tell me!" Jürgen laughed, and insisted.

He was of that distinctive tint of German gold, affection showing in the shallows of his mackerel eyes.

"Oh, like something that runs on a hundred legs," Himmelfarb replied. "Or no legs at all. A snake, for instance. Or scorpion. Anyway, specially created to be the death of gentiles."

Then they laughed louder, and together. Sundays had become warmer than the Sabbath for the young Jew, when he walked with his friend, Jürgen Stauffer, on the wilder side of the
Stadtwald
_ at Holunderthal.

"Tell me," Jürgen asked, "about the Passover sacrifice."

"When we kill the Christian child?"

"So it seems!"

How Jùrgen laughed.

"And cut him up, and drink the blood, and put slices in a _Biötchen__ to send the parents?" Mordecai had learnt how to play.

"
Ach, Gott
_!" Jùrgen Stauffer laughed.

How his teeth glistened.

"Old Himmelfurz!" he cried. "
Du liebes Rindvieh
_!"

Then they were hitting each other, and grunting. Their skins were melting together. They could not wrestle enough on the beds of leaves. Afterwards they lay panting, and looked up through the exhausted green, to discuss a future still incalculable, except for the sustaining thread of friendship. In the silences they would sigh beneath the weight of their affection for each other.

"But when I become a cavalry officer--and there is no question of anything else, because of Uncle Max--and you are the professor of languages, it is not very likely we shall ever see each other again," Jürgen Stauffer reasoned.

"Then you must arrange to ride your horses," Mordecai suggested, "round and round whichever university I honour with my presence."

"It is a vice, Martin, never to be serious. A hopeless, hopeless, vicious vice!"

From where he lay, Jürgen Stauffer thumped his friend.

"You are the hopeless one, not to choose a more civilized career."

"But I like horses," Jürgen protested. "And then I am also a bit stupid."

Himmelfarb could have kissed his friend.

"Stupid? You are the original ass!"

If they had not tired themselves out, they might have wrestled some more, but instead they lay and listened to the blaze of summer and their own contentment.

Occasionally the young Jew was invited to his friend's house, for the parents' liberal attitude allowed them to receive regardless of race. Gerhard Stauffer, the father, was, of course, the publisher. He even loved books, and an undeserved failure would make him suffer more than an obvious success would cause him to rejoice. His wife, a minor actress in her youth, had retired into life and marriage equipped with a technique for theatre. Frau Stauffer was able to convince a guest that the scene they had just enacted together contributed immensely to the play's success.

"Martin shall sit beside
me
_," Frau Stauffer would emphasize, patting the place on the sofa with the touch the situation required. "Now that we are
comfortable
_," she would decide, while inclining just that little in the direction of her guest, "you must tell me what you have been
doing
_. Provided it has been
disreputable
_. I refuse to listen to anything else. On such a
damp
_ afternoon, you must
curdle
_ my blood with indiscretions."

Then Frau Stauffer smiled that deliberate smile. She had remained of the opinion that any line may be "improved," and that every scene needed "lifting up."

But the boy was conscious of his lack of talent. Seated beside his hostess on her cloud, he remained the victim of his awkward body.

Or, advancing from an opposite direction, the host would court their unimportant guest, inviting him to give his point of view, showering newspaper articles and books.

"Have you discovered Dehmel?" Herr Stauffer might inquire, or: "What do you think, Martin, of Wedekind? I would be most interested to hear your honest opinion."

As if it mattered to that grave man.

The embarrassed boy was gratified, but could not escape too soon, back to his friend. The attention of the parents flattered more in retrospect.

"You see," said Jürgen, without envy, "you are the respected intellectual. I am the German stable-boy."

But it could have been for some such reason that the young Jew admired his friend.

There was the elder brother, too, who would emerge mysteriously from his room, suffering from acne and a slight astigmatism, and eating a slice of buttered bread. Konrad has outgrown his strength, and must fortify himself, Frau Stauffer explained. Konrad came and went, ignoring whatever existed outside the orbit of his own ego. He seemed to despise in particular all younger boys--or was it only the Jewish ones?--that was not yet made clear.

"What does he do all the time in his room?" Mordecai asked the younger brother.

"He is studying," replied the latter, with the air of one who could not be expected to take further interest. "He is all right," he said. "Only a bit stuck-up."

On that occasion Konrad Stauffer came out of his room chewing at a _Brötchen__ with caraway seeds on top.

"What," he said to Mordecai, "you here again! Are you perhaps
en pension
_?"

As everybody else was embarrassed, he laughed a little for his own joke.

There was the sister, Mausi, still a little girl. Her plaits glistened like the tails of certain animals. Once she threw her arms round the Jew's waist, and pressed against him with all her strength, and tried to throw him.

"I am stronger than you!" she claimed.

But neither proved, nor provoked.

She stood laughing into the bosom of his shirt. Her breath burned where the V opened on his bare skin.

Best and most alarming of all were evenings in the big salon, when girls came in bows and sashes, their necks smelling of _kölnisches Wasser__. There were girls already corseted stiff, and a few real young men, often the sons of cavalry officers. These absolute phenomena, themselves cadets, always knew what to do, with the result that younger boys would listen humiliated to their own crude, breaking voices, and mirrors reminded them that the pimples were still lurking in their tufts of down.

One evening, after their elders had withdrawn to the library to amuse themselves at cards, somebody of real daring devised the most scandalous game.

"Which person in the room do you like best?" it was asked of each in turn. "Why?" The next impossible question followed, and others, all headed in the inevitable, and most personal direction.

Giggles, and the braying of the adolescent jackass, widened the circles of embarrassment.

"Whom do you like, Mausi Stauffer?" finally it had to be asked.

Mausi Stauffer did not hesitate.

"Martin Himmelfarb," she said.

Some of the young ladies might have burst, if their whalebone had not contained them. In the circumstances, they rocked and wheezed.

"Why, Mausi?" asked Cousin Fritz, the son of Uncle Max.

The scar across his left cheek appeared unnaturally distinct.

"Because," said Mausi. "Because he is interesting, I suppose."

"Come, now!" complained an upright young woman in steel spectacles, with a pale, flat rosette of a mouth. "That is a weak answer. You may have to pay a forfeit. Fifty strokes on the palm of your hand from the edge of a ruler."

Mausi screamed. She could not have borne it.

"We want to give you another chance," said Cousin Fritz, so beautiful and hateful in his cadet's uniform. "
Why
_ does this Himmelfarb appeal to you?"

He made the name sound particularly exotic and ridiculous.

Mausi screamed. She tossed her plaits into the air.

"Because," she cried, and snickered, and wound her thin legs together, and perspired in her crushed muslin. "Because," she screeched, in a voice they were dragging out of her, "he is like"--she still hesitated--"a kind of black
buck
_!"

The bronzes might have tumbled from their pedestals, if, at that moment, a spinster lady devoted to the family had not returned in search of her scarf, and decided instinctively to remain.