Riders in the Chariot (24 page)

Frau Stauffer was combing the hairless skin of her arm with long, pale nails. Under the film of oil which she affected as a make-up, her long, pointed face understood at least the theory of serenity.

Konrad was bandying the names about: Morocco, the Pacific, the Galapagos. But came closer to home, because that was what he knew better. He would know the Riviera best. All of it Himmelfarb heard without relating it to life.

"Bern," Konrad was discoursing; at last he had come very close. "A dull, but decent city. Where we could meet for lunch. On Thursday. If you decide, Himmelfarb. I suggest, though, you carry nothing heavier than a toothbrush."

A gentle snow could have been falling through the Jew's mind, without, unfortunately, obliterating.

Its soft promise was forcing him to stand up.

"I must go," he announced.

Finally, fatally; all knew.

"I must go home to my wife. There is a dog, too. At this time of night, the dog expects to be taken out."

"Your wife?" Frau Stauffer's breath was drawn so sharp, she could have been recoiling from a blow.

She was wearing a bracelet from which hung big chunks of unpolished, semi-precious stones, which tumbled and jumbled together, in a state of painful conflict.

"I did not realize that your wife," Stauffer kept repeating.

The Jew was actually laughing.

He laughed through fascinating lips, the horrifying, magnified blubber that flesh will become. Because nobody could realize how his wife was present in him, at all times, until for one moment, that evening, when God Himself had contracted into first chaos.

"I am afraid," the Jew said, "I may have been guilty tonight of something for which I can never atone.

"I am afraid," he was saying, and saying.

The crumbled Jew.

"No, no!" begged the Stauffers. "It is we! We are the guilty ones!"

They could not apologize enough, Konrad Stauffer, the unimportant success, and his oversimplified, overcomplicated wife.

"We! We!" insisted the Stauffers.

How her bracelet cannoned off itself.

The Jew, who was seen to be quite elderly, made his own way to the door.

"I dare say there are reasons why
you
_ should not be included in a mass sentence," he pronounced gently. "
We
_ can never escape a collective judgment.
We
_ are one. No particle may fall away without damaging the whole. That, I fear, is what I have done. In a moment of unreason. Tonight."

They had reached the hall, and were standing in the orange light from the oriental lantern.

"But this is most, most horrible!" Stauffer was almost shouting.

He had become personally involved.

"We understood, in the beginning, you had come here to take refuge"--his voice was reverberating--"because tonight"--always hesitating, choosing, however loudly, words--"we were told, in fact, by telephone, just as you arrived"--here his voice blared--"they are destroying the property of the Jews!"

"
Ach, Konrad
_!" His wife moaned, and might have protested more vehemently against the truth.

But a fire-engine seemed to confirm what her husband had just told. It shot through the solid silence of the German suburb, leaving behind it a black tunnel of anxiety.

Only Himmelfarb did not seem surprised. He was even smiling. Now that everything was explained. Now that contingency had been removed.

"When all the time you did not know! Your wife!"

By now Stauffer was wrapped, rather, in his own horror. His man's expression had become that of a little boy, round whom the game of pirates had turned real.

Frau Stauffer's oiled face was streaming with tears as she held an ashtray for their guest to stub out his genuine Havana.

Then the little, unprotective door-chain grated as it withdrew from its groove.

And Himmelfarb was going.

He had already gone from that place, forgetful of his truly kind friends, whom he would have remembered with gratitude and love, if there had been room in his mind.

Sud Park was still, though attentive. A layer of exquisitely concentrated, excruciating orange was seen separating the darkness from the silhouette of the town. It is seldom possible to resume life where it has been left off, although that appeared to be the intention of the figure hurrying through the streets, topcoat flapping and streaming, flesh straining. In the Krôtengasse groups of Jews stood in a glitter of glass. The voices of women lamenting quickened his pace. In the Bismarckstrasse a man was crying at the top of his lungs, until some of the crowd began to punch him, when the sound went blub blub blub blub, with intervals of bumping silences.

Himmelfarb was not quite running. He bent his knees, rather, to move faster, closer to the pavement. His own breathing had ceased to be part of him. He heard it panting alongside, like an unwelcome animal which refused to be shaken off. At the corner of the Königin Luise Platz the flames were leaping luxuriantly. In the Schillerstrasse the synagogue was burning. This more sober. An engine parked against the curb. Several firemen were standing around. What could they do, actually? The rather ugly, squat, practical old building had assumed an incongruous, a Gothic grace in its skyward striving. All could have been atoned now that the voices were finally silenced.

As he entered the Holzgraben, the drops were falling from Himmelfarb, heavier than sweat, his neck was extended scraggily, in anticipation of the knife. This was his own street. Still quiet, respectable--German. A power failure, however, caused by the disturbances, had plunged the familiar into a dark dream, through which he approached the house where they had lived, and found what he knew already to expect.

Of course the door stood open. It was stirring very slightly, just as it had on those several other occasions when he had found it in his sleep.

The house was a hollow shell in which the pretending was over, although he could not yet feel it was empty for the darkness and silence that had silted it up.

He went in, feeling with his feet, which were long, and wooden, like his sticks of fingers. In the darkness he stooped down, and touched the body of the little dog, already fixed in time, like the sculpture on a tomb, except that the lips were drawn back from the teeth, denying that peace which is the prerogative of death. Most horrible to touch was what he realized to be the tongue.

Then the Jew began to cry out.

He called, "Reha! Reha!"

And it returned from out of the house.

Always he had imagined how, in the worst crisis, she, his saviour, would come to him, and hold his head against her breast.

So he went blundering and crying.

He called to God, and it went out at the windows, through the bare branches of the trees, so that a party of people a street away burst out laughing, before they took fright.

He was mounting interminably through the house. The scent of spices was gone from it forever, and the blessed light of candles, in which even the most stubborn flesh was made transparent. Moonlight shifted and fretted instead, on the carpets of the landings, and in the open jaws of glass. Cold.

When the searcher did at last arrive in the upper regions, he found the old servant. She began to cry worse than ever, principally for her own fright, while stifling it for fear of the consequences, since even the furniture had turned hostile.

Gradually she told what no longer needed confirming.

They had come, they had come for Himmelfarbs.

But what could she add that he had not already experienced?

So he left her to babble on.

He went, whimpering, directionless, somewhere down, into the pit of creaking darkness. Calling the name that had already fulfilled its purpose, it seemed. So he descended, through the house, into darkness. And in darkness he sat down, as much of him as they had left. He sat in darkness.

6

"THE CHARIOT," Miss Hare dared to disturb the silence which had been lowered purposely, like the thickest curtain, on the performance of a life.

She did tremble, though, and pause, sensing she had violated what she had been taught to respect as one of the first principles of conversation: that subjects of personal interest, however vital, are of secondary importance.

"You know about the Chariot, then," she could not resist.

But whispered. But very slow, and low.

It was as eventful as when a prototype has at last identified its kind. Yet, pity restrained her from forcibly distracting attention to her own urgent situation, for her mouth was at the same time almost gummed together by all she had suffered in the course of her companion's life. And so, the word she had dared utter hung trembling on the air, like the vision itself, until, on recognition of that vision by a second mind, the two should be made one.

"If we see each other again." The stone man had begun to stir and speak.

The knot of her hands and the pulses in her throat rejected any possibility that their meeting might be a casual one. But, of course, she could not explain, nor was her face of any more assistance than her tongue; in fact, as she herself knew, in moments of stress she could resemble a congested turkey.

"If we should continue to meet," the Jew was saying, "and I revert to the occasion when I betrayed my wife, and all of us, for that matter, you must forgive me. It is always at the back of my mind. Because a moment can become eternity, depending on what it contains. And so, I still find myself running away, down the street, towards the asylum of my friends' house. I still reject what I do not always have the strength to suffer. When all of them had put their trust in me. It was I, you know, on whom they were depending to redeem their sins."

"I do not altogether understand what people mean by sin," Miss Hare had to confess. "We had an old servant who often tried to explain, but I would fail as often to grasp. Peg would insist that she had sinned, but I knew that she had not. Just as I know this tree is good; it cannot be guilty of more than a little bit of wormy fruit. Everything else is imagination. Often I imagine things myself. Oh, yes, I do! And it is good for me; it keeps me within bounds. But is gone by morning. There," she said, indicating the gentle movement of the grass, "how can we look out from under this tree, and not know that all is good?"

For the moment she even believed it herself. She was quite idiotic in her desire to console.

"Then how do you account for evil?" asked the Jew.

Her lips grew drier.

"Oh, yes, there is evil!" She hesitated. "People are possessed by it. Some more than others!" she added with force. "But it burns itself out. Some are even destroyed as it does."

"Consumed by their own sin!" The Jew laughed.

"Oh, you can catch me out!" she shouted. "I am not clever. But do know a certain amount."

"And who will save us?"

"I know that grass grows again after fire."

"That is an earthly consolation."

"But the earth is wonderful. It is all we have. It has brought me back when, otherwise, I should have died."

The Jew could not hide a look of kindly cunning.

"And at the end? When the earth can no longer raise you up?"

"I shall sink into it," she said, "and the grass will grow out of me."

But she sounded sadder than she should have.

"And the Chariot," he asked, "that you wished to discuss at one stage? Will you not admit the possibility of redemption?"

"Oh, words, words!" she cried, brushing them off with her freckled hands. "I do not understand what they mean.

"But the Chariot," she conceded, "does exist. I have seen it. Even if a certain person likes to hint that it was only because I happened to be sick. I have seen it. And Mrs Godbold has, whom I believe and trust. Even my poor father, whom I did not, and who was bad,
bad
_, suspected some such secret was being kept hidden from him. And you, a very learned man, have found the Chariot in books, and understand more than you will tell."

"But not the riders! I cannot visualize, I do not understand the riders."

"Do you see everything at once? My own house is full of things waiting to be seen. Even quite common objects are shown to us only when it is time for them to be."

The Jew was so pleased he wriggled slightly inside his clothes.

"It is you who are the hidden
zaddik
_!"

"The what?" she asked.

"In each generation, we say, there are thirty-six hidden
zaddikim
_--holy men who go secretly about the world, healing, interpreting, doing their good deeds."

She burned, a slow red, but did not speak, because his explanation, in spite of reaching her innermost being, did not altogether explain.

"It is even told," continued the Jew, stroking grass, "how the creative light of God poured into the
zaddikim
_. That
they
_ are the Chariot of God."

She looked down, and clenched her hands, for the tide was rising in her. She looked at her white knuckles, and hoped she would not have one of her attacks. Even though she had been lifted highest at such moments, she could not bear to think her physical distress might be witnessed by someone whose respect she wished so very much to keep.

"I shall remember this morning," Himmelfarb said, "not only because it was the morning of our meeting."

Indeed, looking out from under the tree, it seemed as though light was at work on matter as never before. The molten blue had been poured thickly round the chafing-dish of the world. The languid stalks of grass were engaged in their dance of transparent joyfulness. A plain-song of bees fell in solid drops of gold. All souls might have stood forth to praise, if, at the very moment, such a clattering had not broken out, and shoved them back.

"What is that?" Himmelfarb asked.

The two people peered out anxiously from beneath the branches.

A pillar of black and white had risen in the depths of the abandoned orchard, but moving, and swaying. Silence creaked, and the weed-towers were rendered into nothing. Plumes of dust and seed rose.

"Hal-loo? Oo-hoo! Coo-_ee__!" called the voice of conscience.