Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Happy are the men who are able to tread transitional paths, scarcely looking to left or to right and without distinguishing an end. Moshe Himmelfarb was one of them. If he had seldom been the object of direct criticism, except in trivial, family matters, it was because he had always taken care not to offer himself as a target. Unlike certain fanatics, he recognized his obligations to the community in which he lived, while observing the ceremony of his own. Mordecai remembered the silk hats in which his father presented himself, on civic and religious occasions alike. Ordered from an English hatter, Moshe’s hats reflected that nice perfection which may be attained by the reasonable man. For Moshe Himmelfarb was nothing less. If he was also nothing more, that was after other, exacting, not to say reactionary standards, by which such lustrous hats could only be judged vain, hollow and lamentably fragile.

  Yet, along with his shortcomings, and his acquaintances, many of them men of similar mould, smelling of prosperity and cigars, and filled with every decent intention, Moshe continued to attend the synagogue in the Schillerstrasse. That they did not grow haggard, like some, from obeying the dictates of religion, was because they were reasonable, respectful, rather than religious men, and might have pointed out, if they had been openly accused, and if they had dared, that the Jewish soul was at last set free. The walls were down, the suffocating rooms were burst open, the chains of observance had been loosed.

  They would still sway, however, all those worldly Jews of the synagogue in the Schillerstrasse, when the wind of prayer smote them. Standing beside his father, the little boy would watch and wait to be carried in the same direction. He would stroke fringes of his father’s Tallith, or bury his face in the soft folds. He would wait for his father to beat his breast for all the sins that were shut up inside. Then he himself would overflow with a melancholy joy that all was right in the forest of Jews in which he stood. All the necks were so softly swathed in wool, that, however fat and purple some of them looked, he was comforted, and would glance up, towards the gallery directly opposite, where he knew his mother to be. But behind the lattice. The boy would not see her, except in his mind’s eye, where she sat very still and clear.

  For Mordecai the man, his mother remained a sculptured figure. Whether, in fact, life and fashion had influenced her sufficiently to create a continuously evolving series of identities, his memory presented her as a single image: black dress; the high collar of net and whalebone, relieved by a little, seemly frill; the broad, yellowish forehead, marked with the scars of compassionate thought; eyes in which the deceits of this world were regretfully, but gently drowned; the mouth that overcame secret ailments, religious doubts, and all but one bitterness.

  It was evident from the beginning that the boy was closer to the mother, although it was only much later established that she had given him her character. To casual acquaintances it was surprising that the father, so agreeable, so kind, so generous, did not have a greater influence. By contrast the mother made rather a sombre impression, stiff and given to surrounding herself with certain dark, uncouth, fanatically orthodox Jews, usually her relatives. Of course, the boy loved and honoured his good father, and would laugh and chatter with him as required, or listen gravely as the beauties of Goethe or the other poets were pointed out. So that Moshe was delighted with his son, and would bring expensive presents: a watch or a brass telescope, or collected works bound in leather. But it was out of the mother’s silence and solitude of soul that the rather studious, though normal, laughing, sometimes too high-spirited little boy had been created.

  Frau Himmelfarb had never become reconciled to the well-ordered, too specious life of the North German town. As she walked with her child against the painted drop of Renaissance houses, or formal magnificence of Biedermeier mansions, her incredulous eyes would reject the evidence that men had thus confined the infinite. Only in certain dark medieval streets, Mordecai remembered, did his mother seem to escape from the oppression of her material surroundings. She herself would blur, as strange, apparently inexpressible words came struggling softly out of her mouth, and her feet would almost dance as she hurried over the uneven cobbles, skipping the puddles of dirty water, very light. She would visit numbers of the rather smelly, frightening houses and bring presents and examine children, whether for ailments or their knowledge of God, and even hitch up her skirt over her petticoat, before going down on her knees to scrub a floor neglected by the sick. Along the airless alleys, in the dark houses of the Jewish poor, his mother’s Galician spirit was released – which, in his memory, had seldom happened anywhere else, unless during the visit of her cousin, the destitute rabbi, in their own ante-room, or while writing letters to her many other relatives.

  The mother was one of a scattered family. It was her sorrow and pride. She liked to bring her writing things as though she had been a visitor and sit at the round table, with its cloth of crimson plush, in preference to the ormolu desk on which Moshe had lovingly insisted. Then the little boy would play with the plush pompons and occasionally glance at the letters as they grew, and shuffle the used envelopes, from which she would allow him later to soak the stamps. He had known his mother, on a single rainy afternoon, seal envelopes for Poland, Rumania, the United States, even China and Ecuador. Until, finally, there was nothing of her left to give.

  He realized only very much later the important part her dispersed family had played in his mother’s secret life: how, in her mind, their omnipresence might have ensured and hastened redemption for the whole world. Such a conviction, implied, though certainly never expressed, gave her a kind of distinction amongst the numerous pious ladies who were always in transit through her house, eating Streuselkuchen and drinking coffee, organizing charitable projects, announcing births, marriages and deaths, daring sometimes even to indulge, in the presence of their hostess, in bursts of frivolous, not to say unseemly chat. But always returning to one point. The women clung together like a ball of brown bees, driven by the instinct of their faith, intoxicated with the honey of their God.

  The presence of that God amongst the walnut furniture of the sumptuous house – for Himmelfarbs had moved from above the shop before Mordecai was able to remember-was unquestioned by the worldly, but prudently respectful Moshe, taken for granted by the little boy, even by the confident young man whom the latter eventually became, and who turned sceptical, not of his religion, rather, of his own need for it. Religion, like a winter overcoat, grew oppressive and superfluous as spring developed into summer, and the natural sources of warmth were gradually revealed. But there was no mistaking the love and respect the young man kept for the enduring qualities of his old, discarded coat. In the solstice of his self-love, in the heat of physical ardour, he would melt with nostalgia at the thought of it.

  In the meantime, however, the little boy remained wrapped in the warm reality of the garment they had given him to wear.

  When he was only six, the mother remarked with the casualness she always adopted for important matters:

  “Do you realize, Moshe, it is time the child began to receive instruction?”

  “Yoÿ!” The father, who loved his own joke, winced to express horror. “Do you want to load the boy already? And worst of all, with Hebrew?”

  “Yes,” she answered seriously. “It is our own tongue.”

  Moshe was often inclined to wonder how he had come to marry his wife. Whom he loved, however. So it was agreed.

  It was usual for the boys of their acquaintance to attend the classes of Herr Ephraim Glück, the Melamed, but because of some special confidence the mother had, the Cantor Katzmann was engaged to teach her son the alphabet. Which the latter mastered at astonishing speed. And began shortly to write phrases, and recite prayers. And grew vain. He would turn his head aside, and mumble what he already knew too well, or declaim too loudly, with a shameful spiritual arrogance.

  On one occasion the Cantor was forced to mention:

  “If a Jew is proud, Mordecai, it is all the harder when he biters the dust.
As he certainly will.”

  The Cantor himself was a humble man, with several squint-eyed children, and a wife who nagged. His voice was his only glory. When it had been poured out to the dregs, he would appear emptied indeed, falling back upon his chair with a smile of deathly content. Mordecai remembered him especially after the climax of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when it could have been the Cantor had attempted the impossible. The white, closed eyelids would not so much as flutter, as he sat and smiled faintly from behind them. He was a small man and his pupil loved him in memory, more than he had respected him in life.

  At the age often 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 Käppchen. 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 Malice’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 Mizvah 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 Jürgen laughed.

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

  “Ach, Gott!” Jürgen 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.

&n
bsp; “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.