Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Of course he should have made every effort to reach a practical solution, if only for his wife’s sake. Cousins had written from Ecuador. Their brother, Ari, he heard, had left for Palestine in charge of a contingent of youths, and was settled on the land. Only Mordecai had received no indication of what his personal role might be, of how long he must suspend the will that was not his to use. Determined not to fear whatever might be in store for his creature flesh, nor even that anguish of spirit which he would probably be called upon to bear, he might have resigned himself indefinitely, if it had not been for the perpetual torment of his wife’s image.

  At one point his colleague Oertel, the mathematician, an Aryan of stature who suffered and died for it finally, came to him and begged to be allowed help his friend leave the country before it was too late.

  Himmelfarb hesitated. Human gestures were so moving in the reign of Sammael, that for one moment he felt weak enough to accept. If only for Reha. Who would not, he realized at once, have left without him.

  “Oertel!” he began. “Oertel!” When he was able to continue, he explained: “The sins of Israel have given Sammael the legs on which he now stands. It is my duty, in some way, to expiate what are, you see, my own sins. But naturally you cannot, you cannot see! You cannot understand!”

  He had become, of course, more than a little crazy, Oertel added in telling of Himmelfarb’s refusal.

  The latter returned to his wife, whom he loved too deeply to mention his colleague’s proposition. They were still allowed to live in the house with the Graeco-German façade. Even after the Professor’s dismissal, of which he soon received notice, they were allowed to continue living in their own house. But precariously. Now that the maids were gone, with regrets, or threats, an old Jewish body helped Frau Himmelfarb with her household duties. They were fortunate in having been people of private means, and could eke out their material substance, at least for a little. Sometimes, too, Frau Himmelfarb, discreetly dressed – she had always been that, if anything rather dowdy – would be seen selling an object of virtu. So they existed. In the still house the rooms were never empty. Thoughts filled them. From the upper windows, the Park never looked quite deserted. The flesh of tuberous begonias lolled on perfect beds, and waited, as if to take part in an exhibition of lust.

  Once Himmelfarb had paid a visit to a former friend, the Oberstleutnant Stauffer who, he had been told, lived only two or three streets away in a state of eccentricity. Celluloid ducks in the bath, it was said.

  The Oberstleutnant had appeared at his own front door in a little apron trimmed with lace.

  “Jürgen!” the visitor began.

  But saw at once that the forest in which they had become separated had grown impenetrable, and that, of the two, Jürgen was the deeper lost.

  The Oberstleutnant’s face, or as much as remained stretched upon the bones, continued a moment to contemplate an abomination that had been conjured up on his doormat for his personal torment.

  “The Herr Oberst is not at home,” he said at last.

  Face, door, words – all flickering slightly.

  “And is not allowed to receive Jews. On any account.”

  So the door was closed on Jürgen Stauffer.

  Again, this time in the street, the past disgorged. It was Konrad, the elder brother, who was by now generally recognized, for one of his novels in particular, which everybody had read, and which dealt, in bitter and audacious style, with the relations between officers and men in wartime. Konrad Stauffer had succeeded in pleasing a cautious public – it was said, even the Regierung-- because he dared and shocked.

  Konrad could afford to know absolutely anybody. Konrad said:

  “Why, Himmelfarb! You have hardly changed! Except that everything is on a larger scale.”

  As he took a valued acquaintance by the elbow.

  His hands were sure. He was freshly, closely shaven, and finished off with a toilet lotion, which caught the morning sunlight, and made the skin look like new. Success had given Konrad Stauffer the shine and smell of expensive, but very tasteful leather. Many people would probably have professed to loathe him if they had dared run the gauntlet of his arrogance.

  “You will pay us a visit, I hope.”

  Nor was he taking a risk.

  “We are quite close.” He gave his address slowly and accurately, with almost deliberate ostentation. “My wife will enjoy meeting you. But soon. We may be going away.”

  There he smiled.

  The phenomenon of Konrad Stauffer left Himmelfarb indifferent. Stauffer must have been aware of it, for he returned immediately after parting. To take the Jew by a waistcoat button. He could have been apologizing for himself.

  “You will come, though?” he coaxed. “You promise?”

  In those times, who made promises? Now it was the Jew’s turn to smile. But together they had generated some kind of warmth.

  Even so, Himmelfarb doubted he would see Konrad Stauffer again. In so far as his will continued to function, it propelled him along the narrow path of existence, not up the side tracks of social intercourse, however attractive those promised to be. Besides, there was his book. Most of his time was taken up with annotations and corrections, for, although he no longer hoped to see it published, it would have pained him to leave it incomplete. In his leisure he walked less than before, not because glances wounded – he had grown impervious – but because he wanted to be parted as little as possible from his wife.

  He could not bring himself to speculate on how dependent that soft and loving, yet secretive and unexpected creature might be. Instead he found himself depending on her. He would touch her sometimes for no immediately apparent reason. If he could not find her, he would go in search of her in the kitchen, where probably she would be doing the work of the almost senile crone who had replaced the cook. Then he would inquire about things with which he had been familiar for years.

  “What is that?” he would ask.

  “That is chopped chicken-liver,” she would reply, in a firm, even voice, to make it seem less odd that he should not recognize the obvious.

  Indeed, she would join him in staring at the common kitchen bowl, as if its contents had been ritually of the greatest importance. Together they would stave off the agonies of mind, and the possibility of separation, by the practice of small, touching rites.

  Then they heard that Dr Herz had disappeared, and Weills, and Neumanns, and Frau Dr Mendelssohn was no longer to be seen at the clinic. It was very quietly communicated, and as the people concerned were but distant acquaintances, and the rigours and monotony of life continued, one would not have noticed they had gone. Only the old woman who helped at Himmelfarb’s became worse than useless. She could not sleep besides. Often in the night Frau Himmelfarb was forced to leave her own bed to comfort her maid.

  But there will come a night when comfort is not to be found. Faith will spill out of the strong like sawdust.

  On an evening in November, Himmelfarb was on his way home. He had just turned into the Friedrichstrasse. When he stopped, He could not go any farther.

  A tram was galloping through the dusk. Along the pavement, the greenish, vegetable faces of pedestrians were trusting to instinct to lead them through a trance of evening. Already in the taverns the shaven heads were arranged at their regular tables. Pickled eggs were being cracked. Mouths were nuzzling the cushions of foam on top of the full stone mugs. There was no reason why one soul should suddenly sense itself caught in the web of darkness, why one man should lose control of his body at the corner of the Friedrichstrasse. Yet Himmelfarb experienced an ungovernable fear. He was actually running. He was running away. He was running and running, released from the moral dignity and physical heaviness of age. Some of the spirits of darkness swore at him as he passed, but he scarcely heard, nor did he suffer from the brutal thumps of collision, of which he was, surprisingly, the cause, in the hitherto normally regulated night.

  Down the Friedrichstrasse he ran, across the Königin
Luise Platz, into Bismarckstrasse, along the Krötengasse. His desperate breath had to sustain him as far as Süd Park. For by this time the condemned felt the need to be received with kindness. To be accepted, rather, by those who stood the right side of the grave.

  The Konrad Stauffers lived in one of the iron-grey apartment houses, severe in form, but stuck at intervals with the garlands and festoons of concrete fruit and flowers which usually accompanied the highest rentals. The visitor appeared to be confirming the number of the house by touching the embossed figures with quite distressing relief. Upstairs on the landing, he began to pull up his socks, as young men do automatically, on finding that, for better or worse, they have arrived. He was grinning most horribly, in his effort to resume the human mask, before ringing his friend’s bell. His friends! His friends! That was the miraculous, solid brass point, the mask considered tremblingly. A friend was safer than one’s own blood, so much better value than the arch-abstraction, God. So the man’s hands trembled in anticipation. He rehearsed the business of social intercourse, of the inevitable cigars and Kognak.

  A figure, possibly of future importance, still rather a blurry white, was opening the apartment door.

  Inside, beneath the orange light from a lantern in the oriental style, Stauffer was replacing the telephone receiver.

  He came at once towards the front door.

  “I am so very, very glad you managed to get here,” Konrad Stauffer was saying.

  “This is my wife, Himmelfarb,” he said, indicating the thin, upright blur of white.

  “So very glad, dear Himmelfarb,” he kept repeating. “We did wonder.”

  “So interested in all that I have always heard,” his wife added appropriately.

  Both the Stauffers were obviously shattered. But after he had fastened the front door with a little chain, Stauffer recovered enough of his balance to lead their guest farther into the interior, into what appeared to be a study, where some oriental rugs, at first entirely sombre, gradually came alive, and smouldered.

  Frau Stauffer went immediately to an inlaid box, and lit herself a cigarette. The way she blew the smoke from her nostrils, she must have been dying for it.

  Then she remembered. She could not offer their guest too much, all in abrupt, though conciliatory, movements.

  “Are you, too, fascinated by these poisonous objects?” she asked, following it up with her exceptionally wide smile.

  She had brought a dish of hastily assembled liqueur chocolates, of an expensive, imported brand, which had disappeared long ago from the lives of despised mortals. In the circumstances the tinsel forms, presented on their silver dish, glittered like baleful jewels.

  And Frau Stauffer herself. In the feverish situation in which they were involved, and at the same time not, Mordecai realized she would probably have excited him in his sensual youth. A raw silk sheath was supported to perfection by a body, of which the bones were just sufficiently visible under brown skin. But tonight, she had a cold, or something. She squeezed herself up against the central heating, in an old cardigan, and even this retained a kind of studied elegance, an accent of Berlin.

  The Stauffers both had expectations of their guest, or so their faces suggested.

  “I came here tonight,” Himmelfarb began, looking, smiling at the little, glowing Kognak, with which his host had provided him as a matter of course.

  “Yes? Yes?”

  Stauffer was too anxious to assist, his wife too nervous. In fact, she went twice to the door, to listen for the maid, although the latter, she explained, had gone in search of a pair of real live jackboots.

  At the same time Himmelfarb realized he could never convey that sudden stampeding of the heart, sickening of the pulses, enmity of familiar streets, the sharp, glandular stench of unreasoning fear. For words are the tools of reason.

  “I,” he was blurting shapelessly.

  He who was nothing.

  So they gave him another Kognak.

  “Yes, yes, we understand,” murmured the sympathetic Stauffers.

  Who remain obsessed with, and perhaps really only understood, an uneasiness of their own.

  In their unhappiness, and to assist their once more becalmed guest, they began to talk about Schönberg, and Paul Klee, and Brecht. As liberal Germans, they offered up their minds for a sacrifice, together with liqueur chocolates, and Kognak, and a genuine Havana. But every gesture they might make, it was felt by all three, could only be dwarfed by those of circumstance.

  Stauffer was slightly drunk. It made him look like a man of action, or at least an amateur of sabotage. Probably he was one of those intellectuals who had discovered the possibilities of action too late in life, perhaps too late in history. He was burning to do something, if not to destroy the whole tree of moral injustice, then, to root out a sucker or two. As he sprawled on the oriental rugs which covered his too opulent divan, the skin had become exposed between the cuffs of his trousers and tops of his socks, which gave him the appearance of being younger, more sincere, if also, ultimately, ineffectual.

  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 over-simplified, over-complicated 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 telephon
e, just as you arrived” – here his voice blared – “they are destroying the properly 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.

  Süd 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, top-coat flapping and streaming, flesh straining. In the Krötengasse 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.