Then the pain began to course through Himmelfarb. For a moment he feared his workmate might address him for the first time, and that he would not be able to answer, except in the words of common exchange.
But was saved. Or cheated.
For the black was going, discarding some vision still only half crystallized, retreating from a step he did not know how to, or would not yet allow himself to take.
The blackfellow had, in fact, gone, and Himmelfarb, after wrapping an almost clean handkerchief round his left hand, returned to his drill for what remained of the working day.
That night his dreams were by turns bland and fiery. His wife Reha was offering, first the dish of most delicious cinnamon apple, then the dish of bitter herbs. Neither of which he could quite reach. Nor was her smile intended for him, in that state of veiled bliss which he remembered. Finally she turned and gave the apple to a third person, who, it was her apparent intention, should hand the dish.
But he awoke in a sweat of morning, less comforted by his dead wife’s presence, than frustrated by his failure to receive the dish.
He rose groggily, but prepared as usual to say his prayers, arranging the shawl, not the blue-striped Bar Mitzvah Tallith – that had been destroyed at Friedensdorf – but the one he had received with fervour in Jerusalem, and worn henceforth, touching its black veins in remembrance of things experienced. But when it came to the laying on of the phylacteries, that which should have wound down along his left arm, caused him such pain, he could hardly bear it. But did. He said the prayers, he said the Eighteen Benedictions, because how else would it have been possible to face the day? Then, after packing the Tallith and Tefillin – they were those few possessions he could not entrust to empty houses – into the fibre case, together with a crust of bread and slice of cheese, he caught the bus for Barranugli, and was soon rocked upon his way, amongst the goyim, on a sea of conversation dealing exclusively with the weather.
That morning the shed almost burst open, with sound, and heat, and activity.
Until Ernie Theobalds approached.
“What’s up, Mick?” asked the foreman.
“Nothing,” the Jew replied.
Then he raised his hand.
“See,” he said. “It is only this. But will pass.”
When Mr Theobalds had examined the wound – he was a decent bloke, as well as practical – he became rather thoughtful.
“You go home, Mick,” he advised at last. “You got a bad hand. You see the doc up at Sarsaparilla. See what he says. You’ll get compo, of course.”
“You never know,” said Ernie Theobalds afterwards to the boss, “when one of these buggers will turn around and sue you.”
Himmelfarb took his fibre case, and went, as he had been told. He saw Dr Herborn, who treated him according to the book, and told him to lay off.
Every day he went to the surgery for his needle. For the rest, he sat surrounded by the green peace of willows, and that alone was exquisitely kind.
Gruelled by his throbbing hand, exalted by the waves of fever, he began again to doubt whether he was worthy of those favours of which he was the object, and in his uncertainty imposed upon himself greater tests of humility, in themselves negligible, even ludicrous, but it became most necessary that his mind should not accept as unconditional that which his weaker body urged him to. For instance, he set himself to scrub out his almost empty house, which he did accomplish, if awkwardly. With less success, he made himself wash dirty linen rather than allow it to accumulate. As he paddled the clothes with one hand and the tips of his excruciating fingers, he was almost overcome by his limitations, but somehow got his washing pegged out on the line.
There he was one day. The sky had been widened by afternoon. A cold wind from out of the south slapped his face with wet shirt; inseparable, cold folds of cotton clung to his shoulder.
When a person came through the grass, and stood behind him.
He looked round, and saw it was a woman.
Respect for his dignity seemed to prevent her breaking the silence immediately.
“I could have done that,” she said at last, after she had stretched the possibilities of discretion to their utmost. “Any little bits that you have. If you would give them.”
She blushed red, all over her thick, creamy skin. It could have been blotting paper.
“Oh, no,” he replied. “It is done.” And laughed, idiotically. “It is nothing. Always I do a little. As it comes.”
He had grown quite frail on the windy hillside, like some miserable, scrubby tree unable to control its branches. He was clattering. Whereas the thick woman, with all her shortcomings of speech and behaviour, was a rock immovable in the grass. As they stood for that moment, the wind seemed to cut through the man, but was split open on the woman’s form.
Then Himmelfarb was truly humbled. He began to walk towards the house. He was rather shambly. His head was bumpy on his shoulders.
“Why should you offer, I wonder, to me?”
Was this, perhaps, a luxury he was begging to enjoy? But he had to.
“It is only natural,” she said, following. “I would offer to do it for anyone.”
“But I am different. I am a Jew,” he replied, from behind his back.
“So they say,” she said.
In the silence, as they walked, one behind the other, he could hear her breathing. He could hear the motion of the grass.
When she said:
“I do not know Jews, except what we are told, and of course the Bible; there is that.” She paused because it was difficult for her. “But I know people,” she said, “and there is no difference between them, excepting there is good and bad.”
“Then you, too, have faith?”
“Eh?”
Almost at once she corrected herself, and continued very quickly:
“Oh, yes, I believe. I believe in Jesus. I was brought up chapel, like. At Home. We all believe.” But added: “That is, the children do.”
It was very awkward at times for the two people, who were by now standing in the bare house.
“So this is the Jew’s house,” she could not help remarking.
Her eyes shone, as if with the emotions occasioned by a great adventure. She had to look about, at the few pieces of furniture, and through a doorway, at the small fibre suitcase under a bed.
“Sir,” she apologized at last, “I am sticking my nose into your business. Excuse me,” she said. “I will come again, just passing, and take any things you may have for the wash.”
Then she went, quickly and quietly, lowering her head, as if that might have been necessary to pass through the doorway.
“Oh,” she remembered, when she had already reached the step, “I forgot to say. My name is Mrs Godbold, and I live with my husband and family in that shed.”
She pointed.
“And I am Himmelfarb,” replied the Jew, with dignity equal to the occasion.
“Yes,” she answered, softly.
She would not allow herself to appear frightened of a name, but smiled, and went away.
Two days later she returned, very early, when, through the window, the Jew was at his prayers. She saw with amazement the striped shawl, the phylactery on his forehead, and that which wound down along his arm as far as his bandaged hand. She was too stunned at first to move, but watched the prayers as they came out from between the Jew’s lips. Through the window, and at that distance, the words appeared solid. When the intruder forced herself to leave, it did not occur to her to walk in any other way than with her head inclined, out of the presence of the worshipper.
Nor had it occurred to him to interrupt his worship. Never before, it seemed, as he stood exposed to the gentle morning, was he carried deeper into the bosom of his God.
Afterwards, when he went outside, he found a loaf of bread, recently risen, still warm and floury, that the woman must have baked, and wrapped in a cloth, and left lying on the edge of the veranda.
Mrs Godbold did not dare
immediately to come again, but in the afternoon six girls appeared, of various sizes, some walking with a first appearance of grace, some struggling, one carried. There was a puppy, too, wearing a collar which could have been a piece of salvaged harness. As the children approached, they had been indulging in argument and giggles, Himmelfarb suspected, for some of the younger girls appeared mysteriously congested, and the eldest, who had reached the age where shame is easily roused, was rather primly disapproving.
It could have been the middle child who presented the Jew with a bunch of green.
“Silly thing!” hissed the eldest.
Then they all waited, silent, but explosive.
“For me?” asked the Jew. “That is kind. What is it?”
“Cow-itch,” replied the child who had made the presentation.
Then, with the exception of the eldest, who began to blush and slap, all burst. The baby hid her face.
“T’is-urn’t! It’s cobblers’-pegs!” shrieked one.
“It’s whatever you want it to be,” shouted the official donor. “Lay off, Else! You kill me! Why do you always pick on me?”
“Silly old weeds!”
There were times when Else could hate her sisters.
“I am honoured and touched by your recognition,” Himmelfarb replied truthfully.
“Next time we’ll bring flowers,” yelled a small and rather runny girl.
“Where from?” shouted another.
“We’ll steal ’em over some fence.”
“Grac-ie!” moaned the unhappy Else.
“We ain’t got a warden at home,” somebody explained.
“Mum’s too busy.”
“And Dad’s too drunk.”
“When he’s there.”
Else had begun to cry a little, but said, very quick and determined:
“Me mother said if you have any things for the wash to give them to us she will do them early and return tomorrow afternoon if it don’t rain and probably it won’t.”
She was a slender girl, whose hair could not be relied on to stay where it had been so recently put.
In the circumstances, Himmelfarb could only go to fetch his dirty linen, and while he rummaged, the Godbold children began a kind of ritual dance, forging chains of girls round the rotten veranda-posts, shoving one another by force into fresh extravagancies of position, shouting, of course, always, and laughing. Only Else stood apart, opening seed-pods, examining leaves and secrets. Once she threw up her head, on its long and slender neck, and looked between the bushes at a face she could almost visualize. Once Maudie, of the cow-itch, paused in the frenzy of the dance, and stuck out her tongue at the eldest sister.
“Soppy cow!” Maudie shrieked.
“Luv-a luv-a luv-a,
Who’s a lovesick plover?”
chanted Kate.
Which was so unjust, because untrue. Else Godbold bit her lips. She was not in love, but would have liked to be.
When, at last, Himmelfarb produced the bundle of clothes, and his visitors had departed, the air remained turbulent. Physical forms, when they have existed with any intensity, leave their imprint for a little on the surroundings they have relinquished. So the golden chains continued to unwind, the golden circles to revolve, the dust of secrecy to settle. Himmelfarb was glad even for his wilting bunch of lush, yellow-green weeds.
It did seem as though goodness had been sown around the brown house below the post office, and might grow, provided the forces of evil did not stamp it flat. The Godbold children would come, in twos or threes, en masse, but never singly; whether by instinct, upbringing or agreement, was never made clear. Yet, the mother would allow herself the luxury of an unaccompanied visit to her neighbour, as if, perhaps, nothing worse could befall one of her experience. Or, it could have been, she enjoyed protection.
She had come on such a visit the evening Mrs Flack and her familiar, Mrs Jolley, were passing judgment from the blackberry bush. She had helped dress her neighbour’s improving hand, very competently, binding it up with a rag she had washed so clean it was positively stiff. She had conducted a consoling conversation on several small subjects, including that of laundry soap.
“During the war,” she said, with that dreaminess for past events, “I would boil the soap up myself. In big tins. And cut it into bars.”
How Himmelfarb immediately became convinced of the importance and virtues of yellow soap, really did not puzzle him.
“You know,” he could even joke, “we Jews are suspicious of such crude soap since we were rendered down.”
But Mrs Godbold did not seem to hear, or the matter to which he referred was too distant and improbable to grasp. It could have been, within her scheme, that evil was only evil when she bore the brunt of it herself; she alone must, and would deflect, receiving the fist, if necessary, between the eyes. He rather sensed this, but could not accuse her innocence. Besides, he suspected it of being a vice common to Christians.
They had come out by then on to the front veranda, and were suddenly faced with assault by the setting sun. Digging in their heels, so to speak, to resist, they frowned and laughed.
“Tonight,” she mentioned, “we are having corned breast of mutton. It is what my husband likes best. He will be home tonight,” she said.
And made a little noise as though to apologize for some untidiness of life.
“I cannot imagine your husband,” he had to confess. “You do not speak about him.”
“Oh,” she laughed, after a pause. “He is dark. Tom was good-looking. He is jack-of-all-trades, I suppose you might say. He was an ice-man when we met.”
The two people, standing on the front steps, were helpless in the solid amber of the evening light. The woman had perhaps reached that point where the obsessed are wholly their obsession.
“Tom,” she said, managing the thick words, “I must tell you, although I do not like to, sir – our business is not yours – well, Tom, I must admit, has never been saved.”
So that the Jew remembered, in a cold gust, the several frontiers he had almost failed to cross.
“Of course,” she said, wetting her lips against difficulties to come, “I will not let him down. I am myself only on sufferance.” Then she added, more for her own consolation: “It could be that some are forgiven for something we ourselves have forgotten.”
But continued to search with her inward eye for that most elusive needle of salvation.
Until the Jew, whose own future was still obscure, deliberately brought her back.
“At least, Mrs Godbold,” he suggested, “you have possibly saved my left hand by your great kindness and attention.”
She had to laugh. They both did. So complete was their momentary liberation, something of their simple joy shot up glistening out of them, to the complete bafflement of those who were watching from behind the blackberry bush.
Mrs Jolley saw her friend Mrs Flack, as they had expected, that Sunday after church, but such occasions are never for confidences, nor is it possible, desirable, after a service, to peel right down to the last and most revealing skin of that doubtful onion – truth. So the friends chose to wait.
It was not until several days later that Mrs Jolley had the opportunity for looking in. If to look in suggests a casualness that one does not associate with such a delicate operation as the tidying-up of truth, it must be remembered that ladies of refinement go scavenging rather in the manner of crabs – sideways. So Mrs Jolley was wearing her second-best. She was carrying, only carrying her gloves, because there was something accidental about her being there at all. Nor was she made up – not that Mrs Jolley ever made up to the extent of acquiring the patent-leather look – but she had at least licked the end of a lipstick, ice-cream-wise, before setting out.
There she was then.
Mrs Flack professed to be surprised.
“I only looked in,” Mrs Jolley apologized, but smiled.
Mrs Flack closed the kitchen door, and stood across it, in the hall. Mrs Jolly realiz
ed there was some reason for doing so.
“Well, now,” said Mrs Flack, so dry.
Mrs Jolley smiled, some for friendship, but more for what she did not know was happening beyond the kitchen door.
“Did you have your tea, then?” she had to ask, in the name of conversation.
“You know I never take nothing substantial of an evening,” replied the offended Mrs Flack. “My stomach would create on retiring. But I have, I must admit, just finished a weak cup.”
“I am sorry if I have come inconvenient,” Mrs Jolley smiled. “You have a visit. A relative, perhaps.”
“That is nothing,” protested Mrs Flack, walking her friend towards the lounge. “A young man has come, who sometimes looks in, and I will give him a bite of tea. Young people are casual about their insides.”
“I dare say you have known him since he was a kiddy,” Mrs Jolley assisted.
“That is correct. Since a kiddy,” Mrs Flack replied. “As a matter of fact, he is my nephew.”
By this time they were in the lounge, seated on the petty point, beside the window. Today Mrs Jolley failed to notice the two plaster pixies, normally inescapable, and of which their owner was so very proud.
“Ah,” said Mrs Jolley, climbing stairs, as it were, scuttling down the corridors of memory at such a pace, her words could only issue breathless. “A nephew,” she said. “I understood, Mrs Flack, seeing how you told, that you was quite without encumbrances.”
Then Mrs Flack sat and looked, calmly enough, out of her yellow face, only for rather a long time.
“It must have escaped my mind,” she said at last, with equanimity. “It is liable to happen to anyone. Although a nephew,” she said, “who is no closer than a nice piece of steak makes him, cannot strictly be called an encumbrance. As I see it, anyway.”
Mrs Jolley sympathized.
“It is only a kindness that I sometimes do,” Mrs Flack set the seal.
“Of course, you are very kind,” Mrs Jolley admitted.
Then they sat, and waited for the furniture to give the cue.
Riders In the Chariot Page 28
