Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  “Martin shall sit beside me,” Frau Stauffer would emphasize, patting the place on the sofa with the touch the situation required. “Now that we are comfortable,” she would decide, while inclining just that little in the direction of her guest, “you must tell me what you have been doing. Provided it has been dis-reputable. I refuse to listen to anything else. On such a damp afternoon, you must curdle my blood with indiscretions.”

  Then Frau Stauffer smiled that deliberate smile. She had remained of the opinion that any line may be “improved”, and that every scene needed “lifting up.”

  But the boy was conscious of his lack of talent. Seated beside his hostess on her cloud, he remained the victim of his awkward body.

  Or, advancing from an opposite direction, the host would court their unimportant guest, inviting him to give his point of view, showering newspaper articles and books.

  “Have you discovered Dehmel?” Herr Stauffer might inquire, or: “What do you think, Martin, of Wedekind? I would be most interested to hear your honest opinion.”

  As if it mattered to that grave man.

  The embarrassed boy was gratified, but could not escape too soon, back to his friend. The attentions of the parents flattered more in retrospect.

  “You see,” said Jürgen, without envy, “you are the respected intellectual. I am the German stable boy.”

  But it could have been for some such reason that the young Jew admired his friend.

  There was the elder brother, too, who would emerge mysteriously from his room, suffering from acne and a slight astigmatism and eating a slice of buttered bread. Konrad has outgrown his strength and must fortify himself, Frau Stauffer explained. Konrad came and went, ignoring whatever existed outside the orbit of his own ego. He seemed to despise in particular all younger boys – or was it only the Jewish ones? – that was not yet made clear.

  “What does he do all the time in his room?” Mordecai asked the younger brother.

  “He is studying,” replied the latter, with the air of one who could not be expected to take further interest. “He is all right,” he said. “Only a bit stuck-up.”

  On that occasion Konrad Stauffer came out of his room chewing at a Brötchen with caraway seeds on top.

  “What,” he said to Mordecai, “you here again! Are you perhaps en pension?”

  As everybody else was embarrassed, he laughed a little for his own joke.

  There was the sister, Mausi, still a little girl. Her plaits glistened like the tails of certain animals. Once she threw her arms round the Jew’s waist and pressed against him with all her strength and tried to throw him.

  “I am stronger than you!” she claimed.

  But neither proved nor provoked.

  She stood laughing into the bosom of his shirt. Her breath burned where the V opened on his bare skin.

  Best and most alarming of all were evenings in the big salon, when girls came in bows and sashes, their necks smelling of kölnisches Wasser. There were girls already corsetted stiff and a few real young men, often the sons of cavalry officers. These absolute phenomena, themselves cadets, always knew what to do, with the result that younger boys would listen humiliated to their own, crude, breaking voices, and mirrors reminded them that the pimples were still lurking in their tufts of down.

  One evening, after their elders had withdrawn to the library to amuse themselves at cards, somebody of real daring devised the most scandalous game.

  “Which person in the room do you like best?” it was asked of each in turn. “Why?” The next impossible question followed, and others, all headed in the inevitable and most personal direction.

  Giggles and the braying of the adolescent jackass, widened the circles of embarrassment.

  “Whom do you like, Mausi Stauffer?” finally it had to be asked.

  Mausi Stauffer did not hesitate.

  “Martin Himmelfarb,” she said.

  Some of the young ladies might have burst, if their whalebone had not contained them. In the circumstances, they rocked and wheezed.

  “Why, Mausi?” asked Cousin Fritz, the son of Uncle Max.

  The scar across his left cheek appeared unnaturally distinct.

  “Because,” said Mausi. “Because he is interesting, I suppose.”

  “Come, now!” complained an upright young woman in steel spectacles, with a pale, flat rosette of a mouth. “That is a weak answer. You may have to pay a forfeit. Fifty strokes on the palm of your hand from the edge of a ruler.”

  Mausi screamed. She could not have borne it.

  “We want to give you another chance,” said Cousin Fritz, so beautiful and hateful in his cadet’s uniform. “Why does this Himmelfarb appeal to you?”

  He made the name sound particularly exotic and ridiculous.

  Mausi screamed. She tossed her plaits into the air.

  “Because,” she cried and snickered and wound her thin legs together, and perspired in her crushed muslin. “Because,” she screeched, in a voice they were dragging out of her, “he is like,” she still hesitated, “a kind of black buck!”

  The bronzes might have tumbled from their pedestals, if, at that moment, a spinster lady devoted to the family, had not returned in search of her scarf, and decided instinctively to remain.

  In that same moment, Mordecai made down the passage for the lavatory.

  As he came out again, Konrad Stauffer was trying the door.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Konrad, mostly with his stomach, and recoiled.

  He looked quite pale and blank, but could have been rehearsing a speech.

  “Just a lot of stupid Germans,” he managed to utter breathily. “Germans are all animals.”

  “Aren’t we also Germans?” Mordecai suggested.

  “Those who pass judgment always exclude themselves,” the spotty young man replied and laughed. “Haven’t you found that out? Oh, dear!” He sighed. “I don’t propose to get involved in anything else tonight. I am going up to my room.”

  Mordecai did not know what to make of Konrad.

  Nor did he see him again for years. One result of the evening was that Frau Stauffer apparently decided to bring down the curtain on the comedy they had been enacting in their relationship with the young Jew. Jürgen grew increasingly elusive. Attempts at even indirect inquiry would start him kicking holes in the ground, or else he would mumble and fix his eyes on some point, which, he let it be understood, lay outside his friend’s field of vision.

  Often in this suffocating situation, Mordecai would struggle for breath. Then his mother, noticing his dark eyelids and the colour of his skin, prescribed a tonic and after only half a bottle, he slept with a whore called Marianne, who lived beneath a gable in one of the older streets of the town. His body was flooded with a new, though at first dreadful, relief.

  “You Jews!” Marianne remarked, looking him over during a pause, for which she was sufficiently generous not to charge. “The little bit they snip off only seems to make you hotter.”

  As for her client, he stared exhausted at her enormous beige nipples, and wondered whether his instincts would know how to navigate the frail craft in which he had embarked alone.

  Thus committed to the flesh, the ceremonies of his parents’ house soon became intolerable. The Sabbath, for instance, all through his boyhood a trance of innocent perfection, in which he would not have been surprised to see the Bride herself cross the threshold, was now transformed into a wilderness of hours, where good aunts and all those ugly girl cousins were continually setting traps of questions to catch his guilt. Prayers and food choked him equally as he waited for sunset and the scent of spices to wake him from his nightmare. Lovingly. And he, in turn, loved all that he was rejecting, not so much by choice, it seemed to him at first in moments of self-exoneration, but by arrangement between unknown persons who controlled his future.

  The severest torture remained the trial by charity. There were the humble, sometimes even ragged, unwashed individuals, whom his father, from sense of duty, or the n
eed for self-congratulation, collected at the synagogue and brought home to the Sabbath table, where Martin-Mordecai would exert himself to offer friendly words, and recommend the most delicious dishes, to atone for the disgust the visitors roused in him. There was one creature in particular: a little dyer, whose skin was bathed in indigo; the palms of his hands were mapped indelibly in purple. This man’s material affliction impressed itself on his conscience the evening the dyer slipped while crossing one of Moshe’s handsome rugs. The boy felt himself to be in a way responsible. As his hands slithered on the old Jew’s greasy coat, he grabbed hold of what seemed a handful of rag, and just prevented the guest from falling. But his own fright and nausea were in his mouth; he might have been the one who had all but suffered a serious fall, whereas the old man grew servile with gratitude for what he called a gentlemanly act, was moved to caress every inch of his saviour’s back, and to bestow pretentious titles such as Crutch of the Infirm, and Protector of the Poor.

  After Mordecai had escaped from the room and was washing himself, his mother came and stood in the doorway, to say in her driest voice, which tender feelings would force her to adopt:

  “You are upset, my dear boy, and have not yet experienced the hundredth part.”

  She watched her son thoughtfully.

  “Dry your hands quickly now,” she coaxed, gentler, “and come on back to us. We must not allow that poor man to guess.”

  She would have liked to use her compassion to comfort those nearest to her, but the loving woman was unable to. More often than not, she saw her words salt the wounds.

  The house was full of twilight situations and shaken attitudes. The son became amused. He would raise one shoulder and compose his mouth as the Kiddush introduced the Sabbath. He would barb the words of prayers with mockery, to aim at innocent targets. Even though he failed to destroy what he had loved most, his perversity had developed to the point where the attempt remained his painful substitute for ritual.

  Then, as soon as his duties had been at least outwardly discharged, he would rush out. He would roam the streets, looking into lit windows, brush against passers-by and apologize with an effusiveness which could only be interpreted as insolence. Now that he was filled with a rage to live, the scents of the streets maddened him. He would try the breasts of the whores, propped on cushions, on their window-sills. He had an insatiable appetite for white flesh, of pale complaisant German girls, pressed against stucco, or writhing in the undergrowth of parks, beside stagnant water in a smell of green decay.

  If he had not hardened quickly, he might have been consumed by his own disgust.

  But he grew steely. He plastered down his wingèd hair. He wore a moustache. And studied.

  All through the period of his worst disintegration, Mordecai remained, to the innocent and unaware, dedicated solely to his books. He did, in fact, cling to them, like fingers to a raft. And what more solid and reasonable than words as such? It was only in the permutations and combinations that they dissolved into that same current which threatened to suck down the whole, boiling, grinning crew of desperate, drowning souls.

  At the university the young man’s intellectual activities were narrowed down to the study of his preferred language – English. Its bland and rather bread-like texture became his manna. But, in opposition to his will and intentions, he would find his mind hankering after the obdurate tongue he had got as a boy from the Cantor Katzmann. His proficiency in Hebrew had grown with intermittent attention, and he would often read, late at night, both for instruction, and for the bitter pleasure of it.

  In the second decade of the century Mordecai Himmelfarb received his Doctorate in English, and shortly after was informed that he would be permitted to continue his studies at the University of Oxford.

  Moshe was overjoyed, not only for the impression the event would make on his acquaintances, but because of his admiration for the English, for the excellent quality of their cloth, boots, and the silk hats he liked to wear on formal occasions. If he also sensed the distance which separated the English temperamentally from himself, that added, if anything, to their fascination. And now his own son was to be removed to the side of the elect. The gap in their relationship, already wide, would necessarily widen. Already the old man visualized himself, the self-sacrificing Jewish father, standing on railway platforms in the steam from trains. The joyous, painful tears spurted in anticipation. For, that which moved and charmed Moshe most, was that which receded irretrievably: departing trains, the faces of the goyim, the relationship with his own son and, if he had dared to think, let alone whisper – he who contributed so generously to the Zionist Movement – the redemption of Israel as a possible event.

  It was Moshe who broke the news to the boy’s mother, and in that way, perhaps less pain was caused.

  Frau Himmelfarb, who was darning a sock, did not at first answer. She continued looking at the sock with the rather myopic patience characteristic of her.

  “I did expect, Malke, that you would grasp,” her husband had begun to emphasize, “the immense advantage it will give the boy if he decides on an academic career.”

  His wife was looking closely at the sock.

  “Well?” he asked, and reasonably, but was immediately driven to support his argument, not exactly by ranting, but almost: “It is time we Jews recognized the world has changed!” Here Moshe actually trembled. “All the opportunities that are open to us now!”

  “Ah, Moshe! Moshe!” sighed the woman, in the way that had always irritated him most.

  “That is not an answer!” he protested.

  “However you and others may transform him,” his wife replied, “I pray that God will recognize a good Jew.”

  “It is of more importance today,” said the father, “that the world should recognize a good man.”

  All of which was heard, as it happened, by their son, who had come in, and was listening with that cynical, yet affectionate amusement with which he now received any idea that originated in his parents.

  “Ah, Moshe,” – his mother sighed again – “you forget that when both kinds are divided up into good, bad and indifferent, the Jews will remain distinct from men.”

  “There you are!” fumed the father, realizing at last that his son was present. “I make the simple announcement that you will be going to Oxford, and your mother embarks on a philosophical, not to say racial argument. Of Jews and men! I hope I am a man! What are you?”

  “I would like to think I am both,” the young fellow replied, “but sometimes wonder whether I am anything at all.”

  Because this was nothing like what he had intended to say, Mordecai smiled.

  “Then it has come to that!” cried the mother. “There, Moshe! Where can it all end?”

  In her distress she kept on turning and stretching the meticulously darned sock.

  “That does not mean you may expect me to cut my throat!” the son continued, laughing, jerking up his chin and baring his teeth in what had, this time, only the rudiments of a smile.

  “It is terrible to see one’s best intentions completely misinterpreted.” The father felt himself justified in moaning.

  “Oh, but I do appreciate them!” the son answered with dutiful alacrity. “All you have ever done. All the kindnesses. You have been a good father. And you need not doubt I shall try to repay you.”

  Moshe Himmelfarb began to cry.

  “And mother,” the son almost shouted, because of his father’s emotion, and because the mere mention of his mother involved him more deeply than ever in the metaphysical thicket from which he was hoping to tear himself free. “Whose guidance,” he babbled, his voice carrying him to a crescendo of melodrama of which he himself was most aware, “whose example and deeds, might well redeem the whole race. Excepting one who is beyond redemption!”

  “We must certainly pray for you,” Malke Himmelfarb remarked gently, hanging her head above the now crumpled and rejected sock. “My poor son!”

  Long after he had rushed
from the room, Mordecai continued to visualize the situation: the black hairs on his father’s elegant, but frail and ineffectual wrist; the pulse, actual or imagined, in his mother’s yellow temple; and the ornate, heartrending furniture, of which he had explored every grain, every crack and blemish, under cover of conversation, day-dream and prayer.

  Now he would have prayed, but could not. He was suffering and indeed continued to suffer from a kind of spiritual amnesia. Remembering an incident in the examination room, in which, at the end of an agonizing hour, the Italian language had flooded back into his mind, he hoped that some such release would take place on the present occasion – or he could have waited, weeks, if necessary, or even months.

  But it did not.

  At most, an occasional onset of compassion would deflect the blade of his cynicism, as on the evening when he watched his own father leave a fairground on the outskirts of the town, accompanied by a brewer’s clerk named Goltz, known to him by sight and repute, and two anonymous girls of unmistakable occupation. As the young man watched from the shelter of a clump of pollarded trees, the bluish-white glimmer from the flares sluiced the faces of the three unsteady Gentiles and their Jewish clown. The action of the flickering light made the unnatural abandon of the elderly, respectable Jew appear quite maniacal. He, too, was flickering and fluctuating as he led the way through the hubbub of shouting and jerky music. His companions seemed to have reached the stage where only the conventions of revelry are obeyed. The clerk stopped for a moment and stuck his head inside a bush to vomit. The mouths of the others opened from habit in the dreadful dough of their faces to emit song or wind. Or an arm attempted to return the imagined pressure of an arm. Or lips sucked the air in imitation of a kiss. So the revellers advanced and almost brushed against their judge in passing. Without moving, the latter continued to watch, and was able to distinguish the pores of their skins, the roots of their hair, the specks of gold flashing in their teeth. If he did not catch their words, it was because those were drowned in the tumult of his distress, which continued long after the ridiculous old satyr, who was also his father, had disappeared. That his own desires were similar, that he had breathed on similar smeary faces, of similar sweaty girls and fumbled at the scenty dresses, made the incident too familiar and more intolerable.