Riders in the Chariot (32 page)

Himmelfarb began to realize that the plumper of the two typists was trying to attract his attention. While remaining seated in the office, she was, it seemed, calling to him.

"Mr Rosetree," she was saying, "is free now, to see you."

Both the typewriters were still. The thinner of the two ladies was smiling at the keys of hers, as she hitched up the ribbon of a private garment which had fallen in a loop over her white, pulled, permanently goosey biceps.

Fascinated by all he saw, the applicant had failed to move.

"Mr Rosetree," repeated the plumper lady louder, the way one did for foreigners, "is disengaged. Mr Himmelferp, " she added, and would have liked to laugh.

Her companion did snicker, but quickly began to rearrange her daintily embroidered personal towel, which was hanging over the back of a chair.

"If you will pass this way," almost shouted the plump goddess, perspiring on her foam rubber.

She feared the situation was making her conspicuous.

"Thank you," Himmelfarb replied, and smiled at the hand which indicated doors.

She did not rise, of course, having reduced her obligations at the salary received. But let her hand fall.

Himmelfarb went into Mr Rosetree's sanctum.

"Good day, Mr Himmelfarb," Mr Rosetree said. "Make yourself comfortable," he invited, without troubling to consider whether that might be possible.

He himself was comfortable enough. Formally, he was a series of spheres. His whole appearance suggested rubber, a relaxed springiness, though his texture was perhaps closer to that of
Delikatessen
_, of the blander, shinier variety--_Bratwurst__, for instance. Now he might just have finished buffing his nails, and forgotten to put away his dimpled hands, while his lower lip reached out after some problem he would have to solve in the immediate future.

There was no indication Himmelfarb was that problem, but the applicant suspected he was the cause of a bad taste which Mr Rosetree, it became obvious, would have liked to spit out of his mouth.

"Any experience? No? No matter. Experience is not essential. Willingness is what counts." Mr Rosetree asked and answered in the tone of voice he kept for minor emergencies.

"Only the remuneration," he said, "will be less. In the beginning. On account of you are lacking in skill."

He dropped a rubber into a little Bakélite tray, where it plunked rather unpleasantly.

"That is understandable," Himmelfarb replied, and smiled.

For some reason he was feeling happy.

Is this one clever, or just stupid? Mr Rosetree debated. In the one case he would have reacted with anger, in the other, merely with contempt. But now he was in doubt. And suddenly he would have liked to revolt passionately, against that, and all doubts. The air grew quite sultry with displeasure.

Himmelfarb was inwardly so glad he remained unconscious of the change of climate.

"You are not from here?" he had to ask, but very, very cautiously, for he himself had worn disguises.

"I am an Australian," Mr Rosetree said.

But saw fit to rearrange several objects on his desk.

"Ah," sighed Himmelfarb. "It only occurred. Excuse me, won't you?"

"But will not deny I came here for personal reasons. For personal reasons of my own." Mr Rosetree tossed the rubber up, and attempted to catch it, but he didn't.

"I do not wish to appear inquisitive, but thought perhaps you were from Poland."

Mr Rosetree frowned, and bent the nasty rubber double.

"Well," he said. "Shall we call it Vienna?"

"
Also, sprechen wir zusammen Deutsch
_?"

"Not on the premises. Not on no account," Mr Rosetree hastily replied. "We are Australians now."

He would have flung the situation off, only it stuck to him, like discarded chewing-gum. For Himmelfarb was plunging deeper into a conspiracy.

The latter lowered his voice, and leant forward. He was tired, but had arrived, as he very softly asked, "Surely you are one of us?"

"Eh?"

Mr Rosetree was not only mentally distressed, he was also physically uncomfortable; he could not detach the pants from around his groin, where they had rucked up, it seemed, and were giving him hell.

"Yes," Himmelfarb persisted. "I took it for granted you were one of us."

Then Mr Rosetree tore something free, whether material or not. He said, "If it is religion you mean, after so much beating in the bush--and religion in these countries, Mr Himmelfarb, is not an issue of first importance--I can plainly tell you I attend the Catholic Church of Saint Aloysius."

Nobody was going to threaten Mr Rosetree.

"The Catholic Church," he emphasized, "at Paradise East."

"Ah!" Himmelfarb yielded. He sat back.

Just then there came into the room a gentleman in his singlet. He was of such proportions that the cardboard walls appeared to expand in order to accommodate him fully.

"There ain't no 22-gauge, Harry," the gentleman announced. "Not a bloody skerrick of it."

"No 22-gauge?"

Here at last Mr Rosetree was given the opportunity to explode.

"That is correct," said the gentleman of the singlet, who was mild enough once he had established himself; he stood there twiddling the hairs of his left armpit, and breathing through his mouth.

"No 22-gauge!" screamed Harry Rosetree. "But this cheppie which I told you of, has promised already for yesterday!"

"This cheppie has dumped us in the shit," the mild gentleman suggested.

For want of other employment, Himmelfarb sat and observed the belly inside the cotton singlet. There are times when the position of the human navel appears almost perfectly logical.

"What do I do to peoples? I would really like somebody to tell me!" Mr Rosetree begged.

His mouth had grown quite watery. He had taken the telephone book, and was picking up the pages by handfuls, in ugly lumps.

"Peoples are that way from the start. Take it from me, mate," the foreman consoled.

At that point, the plumper of the two ladies in the outer office stuck her head in at the door. Her necklaces of flesh were turning mauve.

"Mr Rosetree--excuse me, please--Mrs Rosetree is on the phone."

"For Chrisake! Mrs Rosetree?"

"Shall I switch her through, Mr Rosetree?"

"For Chrisake, Miss Whibley! Didn't Mrs Rosetree let you know?"

Mr Rosetree, it was obvious, would favour jokes about Men and Women.

Now he took the phone. He said, "Yes, dear. Sure. And how! No, dear, I am never all that busy. Yup. Yup. Yup. What! You have decided for the epple pie? But I wish the
Torte
_! Not for Arch, nor Marge, nor anybody else, will I never assimilate the epple pie. Arrange it for me, Shirl. Sure. I have business now."

The pitching of his stick of gelignite into the domestic works made him look pleased, until he began to remember there was something else, there was, indeed, the treachery of all individuals connected with supply, but something, he suspected, more elusive. There was this fellow, Himmelfarb.

Then Harry Rosetree knew that a latent misery of his own, of which he had never been quite able to dispose, had begun to pile up in the fragile, but hitherto protected office, assuming vast proportions, like a heap of naked, suppurating corpses. He could have spewed up there and then, because the stench was so great, and his considerable business acumen would never rid him of the heap of bodies.

So he said thickly to the applicant, "Come along Monday. You better start then. But it will be monotonous. I warn you. Bloody monotonous. It will kill you."

"I have been killed several times already," Himmelfarb replied. "Probably more painfully."

And got up.

These Jewish intellectuals, Harry Rosetree despised the bloody lot of them. Freud, and Mozart, and all that
Kaffee-quatsch
_! If he did not hate as well, not only a class, but a whole race, it was because he was essentially a loving man, and still longed to be loved in a way that can happen only in the beginning. But there, his childhood was burnt down, not a trace of it left, except that the voices of the dark women continued to vibrate inside him.

"What's up, Harry?" asked the foreman, whose name was Ernie Theobalds. "Done something to your leg? Never noticed it was crook before."

"I done nothink."

"You was limpin'."

"It has these needles."

And Harry Rosetree stamped to bear it out.

How the two ladies in the outer office were bashing into their typewriters now.

The bloke Himmelfarb had gone out, and was walking alongside the green river, where nobody had ever been seen to walk. The river glistened for him. The birds flew low, swallows probably, almost on the surface of the water, and he held out his hand to them. They did not come to him, of course, but he touched the glistening arcs of flight. It seemed as though the strings of flight were suspended from his fingers, and that he controlled the whirring birds.

Presently he remembered he had forgotten to ask his future employer about the money. But his omission did not disturb him, not in that green effulgence, which emanated from, as much as it enveloped him. The water flowed, the light smote the ragged bushes. Nothing disturbed, except that for a choking moment he wondered whether he had dared assume powers to which he had no right, whether he might even accept, in his very humblest capacity, the benedictions of light and water.

Himmelfarb went on the Monday. He took his lunch with him in a brown fibre case, together with one or two articles of value he would not have liked to leave at home; a fire could have broken out. He caught the bus to Barranugli, and was put down before reaching the town, at Rosetree's, on the river bank. They sat him at a drill, with which he was expected to bore a hole in a circular steel plate, over, and over, and over. Ernie Theobalds, the foreman, showed him how, and made one or two accommodating jokes. They gave him his union card, and that was that.

Each morning Himmelfarb took the bus to Barranugli, until the Sabbath, when the factory did not open--as on Sunday, of course. He became quite skilful at his unskilled job; there was a certain way of whipping off the steel plate. As he sat endlessly at his drill, it pained him to recall certain attitudes and episodes of his former life, which hitherto he had accepted as natural. There was, for instance, the arrogance of opinion and style of the monograph on an obscure English novelist, indeed, of his critical works in general. Many phrases of many prayers that he had mumbled down in his presumptuous youth, came to life at last upon his tongue. Most often he remembered those people he had failed: his wife Reha, the dreadful dyer, the Lady from Czernowitz, to name a few. Sometimes as he bored the hole, the drill grazed his flesh, and he accepted it.

A few of his workmates might have joked with him, offering some of the worn remarks that were currency on the floor, but refrained on perceiving something strange. Nothing like his face had ever been seen by many of them. To enter in search of what it might contain, was an expedition nobody cared to undertake. If sometimes the foreigner found it necessary to speak, it was as though something preposterous had taken place: as though a fish had opened its mouth the other side of a glass wall, and brought forth faintly intelligible words instead of normally transparent bubbles.

So the plastic ladies and the pursy men bent their heads above their benches. Toothless lads hawked up a mirthless laughter, while the faces of the girls let it be understood that nobody would take advantage of them.

Once or twice the blackfellow paused in his rounds of sweeping, on coming level with the Jew's drill.

Then Himmelfarb decided: Eventually, perhaps, I shall speak, but it is not yet the appropriate occasion.

Not that there was reason to suspect affinity of any kind, except that the black would establish a certain warmth of presence before moving on.

After one such
rapprochement
_, a blue-haired granny left off assembling Brighta Lamps. She threw up her hands, and had to shout to the foreigner, "Dirty! Dirty!"

As the machinery belted away.

"No good blackfeller! Sick!" she shrieked.

Even if the object of her contempt had missed hearing, or had closed his ears permanently to censure, Himmelfarb was made uncomfortable, when he should have returned some suitable joke.

Mistaking embarrassment for failure to understand, a bloke approached, and whispered in the foreigner's ear, "She means he has every disease a man can get. From the bollocks up."

As Himmelfarb still did not answer, his workmate went away. Foreigners, in any case, filled the latter with disgust.

And the machinery belted on.

Sometimes Mr Rosetree's shoes trod along the gangway, and appeared to hesitate beside the drill, but only hesitate, before continuing. Himmelfarb did not take it amiss that his employer had not spoken since the morning of the interview. It was only to be expected in a businessman of some importance, a husband, and a father, with a lovely home. For the ladies at the benches would often openly discuss their boss. Without having been there themselves, they seemed to know by heart the desirable contents of the rooms. Nor did they envy, except intermittently, perhaps when having a monthly, or payment on the washing-machine was overdue. On the whole, they admired the signs of material wealth in others.

So, Mr Rosetree shone.

Sometimes he would come out of his office, and stand upon a ramp, and scrutinize the rows of workers, and rackety, spasmodic machines. Then the ladies would tilt their heads, looking personally involved, and even those of the men who were the worst grumblers would aim shafts of such harmlessly blunt brutality as to cause only superficial wounds if they had ever reached their target. Good money had made the most sardonic amongst them sentimentally possessive of that harmless poor coot, their boss.

As for Himmelfarb seated at his drill, he would at once grow conscious of his employer's presence on the ramp, though he had not raised his eyes to look in that direction.

Rosetrees lived at 15 Persimmon Street, Paradise East, in a texture-brick home--city water, no sewerage, but their own septic. Telephone, of course. Who could get through the morning without the telephone? It was already quite a good address, and would improve, but then Rosetrees would probably move on, to realize on the land. Because, what was land--such nasty, sandy, scrubby stuff--if not an investment? All around the texture-brick home, Mrs Rosetree listened mornings to the gumtrees thudding down. And all around, the homes were going up. The brick homes.