Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Yet the young man had lived long enough, if only by one day, to embrace his father on retiring the following night. For a moment he had stood behind the chair. There was the scraggy, reprehensible neck. Would he plunge his knife, which he had learnt to use with the skill of any Schochet? Then the thought began to tremble in him: that reason is far too imperfect a weapon. So he had bent forward instead and Moshe interpreted what he received as an expression of gratitude, not of pity. The old Jew was at once brimming over with pride for the grateful son who appreciated all that was being done for him.

  Very soon after, Mordecai left for Oxford. Although in those days the talk was of war, the Kaiser’s unpredictable temper, and the refusal of the French nation to respect German ideals, it seemed most unlikely to the young man that an international situation would ignore the crucial stage in his career. Dressed in a top-coat of excellent, sober cloth and cut, and a travelling cap in tartan tweed, the kind thought of one of his aunts, he presented a fine figure as they stamped about the railway platform. They were all there. Moshe had fallen in love with the new leather, monogrammed luggage, with which he had provided his son. But the mother could have been dazed by the appearances of a material world, of which she had only been allowed glimpses hitherto, and her clothes, as always on occasions of importance and splendour, looked as though they had been brought down from an attic. As for the son, he was only too relieved at the thought of relinquishing the identity with which his parents were convinced they had endowed him. And at last the train did pull out. And later in the day the boat sailed in into the fog.

  At Oxford Himmelfarb continued to distinguish himself scholastically. Determined at the beginning to restrict himself to books, he soon discovered he was an influence on the lives of human beings. He was very prepossessing in his Semitic way. He developed an ease of manner. Men hoped for his respect, women competed for his heart, and he would always allow them to believe they had succeeded.

  There was perhaps one young woman who roused and sustained his passionate interest. The young people went so far as to discuss marriage during their attachment, though neither thought to ask a parent’s advice on the desirability of the match. Catherine was the daughter of a reprobate earl. The father’s pursuit of pleasure and the mother’s early death had allowed the girl more freedom than was customary. Frail and pale, simple in almost all her tastes and of exquisitely pure expression, Catherine could have passed for an angel if she had chosen discretion. But Catherine did not choose. And her behaviour was frequently discussed, in raffish circles with knowledge and appreciation, in polite ones with imagination and distaste. Fortified by birth and fortune, Catherine herself was able to ignore opinion up to a point, and seemed to rise from each debauch purer and whiter than before.

  Their refinements of sensuality persuaded the young Jew that he loved the girl. Each was perhaps a little dazzled by the incandescence they achieved together and the lover naturally wounded when, at what might have been thought the height of the affair, his mistress was discovered in a hotel bedroom with an Indian prince. For the first time Catherine must have sensed the narrowness of the plank she was treading, for it became known almost at once that she had gone abroad, for an indefinite period, with an aunt.

  Her lover did receive a letter from Florence:

  My darling M.,

  I wonder whether you will ever be able to forgive me the shattering mistake I caused you to make. I do not expect it. I expect very little of anyone, realizing how little may be expected of myself. But would like to act sentimental, on such a wet night, in this stuffy little town, full of English Ladies Living Abroad. I might feel desperate if I had not learnt you off by heart, and were not still able to bring you close, in spite of the revulsion I know the actuality would produce in you …

  The letter continued in somewhat literary strain, about the “little green hills of Tuscany, with their exciting undertones of sensuous brown”, but he had no inclination to read any farther. He tossed the ball into the basket, and loosened his tie. He did not see Catherine again, although from time to time he read about her. She continued to lead a life in accordance with the conventions of her temperament: in her maturity she was almost strangled by a boxer in a mews in Pimlico, and died old, during a bombing raid of the Second War, in a home for inebriates at Putney.

  As for Mordecai, he now returned to his studies, with a rage that belonged to youth and an austerity that he had inherited from his mother, until, shortly after destroying the distasteful letter from his mistress, he received another, of a far more disturbing nature, from his father:

  My dear son,

  I can no longer postpone informing you of the momentous decision I have been forced to make. To come at once to the point: I had been receiving instruction for some time past from a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and was baptised, I am happy to be able to tell you, last Thursday afternoon. A weight is lifted off my mind. For the first time in my life, I feel myself truly to be free. I am a Christian!

  After a lifetime spent studying the Jewish problem, it seems to me that this is the only solution of it. I hardly like to write practical solution, but that is the word which came into my mind. To give so little and receive so much! Because it must be obvious to all but fools that the advantages of every kind are enormous. However, as one who has the fate of our people sincerely at heart, I do not wish to stress those advantages, only to pray that many more of us repent of our stubborn, fruitless ways.

  You, Martin, I have felt for some time, are undergoing a crisis in faith. All the more likely, then, that reason may lead you into the right and safe path, when you are ready to decide. It is your dear mother for whom I fear there is little hope. She will choose to remain caught for ever in the thicket of Jewish self-righteousness, and the reasonable step I have taken will only continue to cause her pain. Still, I shall pray that some miracle will unite our two souls at last.

  I will not trouble you with details of our business house – it is, besides, the summer season – nor shall I introduce comments on the international situation into a communication which is probably in itself a source of surprise and, possibly, dear boy, distress.

  I shall remain always

  Your affectionate father…

  Mordecai had never felt emptier than on finishing reading his father’s letter. If he himself had dried up, there had always been the host of others, and particularly parents, who remained filled with the oil and spices of tradition. And now his father’s phial was broken; all the goodness was run out. One corner of memory might never be revisited.

  All through this phase of private desolation, the young Jew forced himself to go about his business, although his associates frequently suspected him of watching somebody else, who stood unseen behind their backs. Of the letters he composed to his apostate father, he sent the one that least conveyed his feelings and must have caused a pang of disappointment in the recipient. For the letter was indifferent, not to say feeble, in the reactions it expressed.

  Of his mother, Mordecai did not dare think, nor did he mention his father’s act in the letter he immediately wrote to her.

  It did seem for the first time that his own brilliantly inviolable destiny was threatened, by an increased shrivelling of the spirit in himself, as well as by the actions of those whom he had considered almost as statues in a familiar park. Now the statues had begun to move. Great fissures were beginning to appear, besides, in what he had assumed to be the solid mass of history. Time was no longer congealed, but flowing. Some of the young man’s acquaintances had already packed their bags. They reminded him that war must come and that, as a German, it was his duty to return with them before it was too late, to serve the Fatherland.

  Scarcely Jew and scarcely German, Himmelfarb was still debating when he received the letter from his mother:

  My dearest Mordecai,

  Your father will have written you some account of what I cannot bring myself to mention. You will see that I am at present with my siste
rs, where I shall remain until I have recovered from my loss. They are very kind, considerate, more than I deserve.

  Oh, Mordecai, I can only think I have failed him in some way and dread that I may also fail my son.

  Mordecai averted his face. He could not bear to see his mother. It was as though she had not survived the rending of the garment.

  The letter did, at least, release her son from the doldrums of indecision. Very soon Mordecai found himself adrift on the North Sea. Ostensibly he was returning home. So far his will had supported him, but only so far. That which his pride had begun to represent as a steel cable, was, in fact, a thread which other people cruelly jerked, tangled with their clumsy fingers and even threatened to break. So the sea air wandered in and out of that insubstantial cabin formed by the young man’s bones. His once handsome skin had lost its tones of ivory to a dirty yellow-grey. Those of his fellow passengers who addressed him, soon moved away across the deck, sensing a situation with which their own mediocrity could not deal, of hallucination, or perhaps even madness. A few, however, plumped for a simpler explanation: the damned Jew was drunk.

  Drunk or sober he arrived at Holunderthal with admirable punctuality. Inside the skeleton of the station, the faces of strangers appeared convinced of their timelessness. Only his father, in his dark, correct coat, admitted age. His moustache was fumbling with a welcome. Or some undue perplexity. The young man’s Aunt Zipporah, his mother’s sister, a woman he had always disliked, for a certain smell of poverty and association with disaster, spoke to him out of a strained throat.

  The aunt and the father were making way for each other.

  “Yes,” said Mordecai. “We had the kind of crossing one expects.”

  And waited.

  “Tell me,” he said, finally. “It is my mother.”

  And listened.

  The aunt began to cry like a rat that has been caught at last. Trapped inside the girders of Holunderthal Hauptbahnhof, it sounded awful. Inquisitive passers-by slowed down and waited for a revelation to dictate their proper attitude.

  “Yes!” cried his Aunt Zipporah. “Your mother. On Saturday night. But over quickly, Mordecai.”

  His father had begun to nail him with his voice.

  “It appears there was some internal malady she had been hiding from us, Mordecai.”

  The aunt’s grief gushed afresh.

  “Oÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ! Moshe! There was no malignancy. I have it from Dr Ehrenzweig. Not the least trace of a malignancy.”

  Such luxuriant grief made that of her brother-in-law sound mercilessly arid. But his desperation was of a different kind.

  “Dr Ehrenzweig assures me,” he insisted, “that she did not suffer. No pain, Mordecai. Up to the end.”

  “Did not suffer! Did not suffer!” The aunt’s voice blew and flapped. “There are different ways of suffering! Dr Ehrenzweig was responsible only for his patient’s body.”

  The father had seized his son by an elbow.

  “This woman is vindictive, because, naturally, she is biased!” Moshe shouted.

  The fact was, Mordecai knew, his mother had, simply, died.

  So they walked on, and into a Droschke, over the heads of half a dozen carnations, which some other traveller had discarded on finding them, perhaps, unbearable.

  For the few weeks before the outbreak of war, young Himmelfarb remained in his father’s house. The father brought presents to lay at his son’s feet, without, however, finding forgiveness. The son resumed relations with relations, with the community who had received him at Bar Mitzvah, for, officially, he was still a Jew. But the voices of the elders would threaten to dry up as he approached, and upon his entering a room, young, modest girls would lower their eyes and blush. He accepted that he was an outcast. He only failed to realize that neither his father’s apostasy, nor his own spiritual withdrawal, was the true cause of their suspicion, and that almost every soul must endure the same period of probation before receiving orders.

  Of gentile friendships, none remained. Jürgen Stauffer was reined in somewhere, waiting to ride across Europe; nor did Martin-Mordecai care to visualize his friend’s face, its adolescence pared away to the bones of manhood, the chivalry of minnesinger translated into Wille zur Macht in the expression of the mackerel eyes. Stauffer the publisher had died of a heart, Mordecai was told; his wife had become involved in a prolonged and unpredictable middle-age. Only the elder son appeared once, briefly, under a hat, in the doorway of a tram. It was obvious Konrad Stauffer did not remember, or else he had decided not to. The face had adopted an expression of deliberate boorishness, which did not altogether convince. Himmelfarb had heard that Stauffer was the author of a volume of poems, which nobody had read, and that he was now writing destructive reviews and articles for a radical newspaper in their home town.

  But soon the image of Stauffer was swallowed up, together with the past, and that part of his life which Himmelfarb had dared to call his own. War did not come as a surprise, to him or anyone, that is, it did not erupt in the manner of volcanoes, it seeped over and into them. Some were appalled at the prospect of their becoming involved, but many sang, as if welcoming a lover, one who might certainly crack their ribs and bruise their flesh, but whose saliva intoxicated as it poisoned and whose passion liberated their more inadmissible desires.

  Because the sequence of events in his personal life had left him sceptical and cold, war, his first too, affected Himmelfarb less than might have been expected. At the height of its folly, he was ashamed to realize, it was taking place only on the edge of his consciousness. However, as a good German, he had volunteered and was accepted to serve in the infantry. He was wounded twice. He even won a medal.

  Once, in the mud and rain of a ruined French village, he enjoyed the half-pleasure of encountering his former friend Jürgen Stauffer. The shining lieutenant embraced the rather scruffy Jewish private – the sun was setting, there was nobody about – and with only a little encouragement, would have risked creating a duet for opera out of their innocent situation.

  “Ach, Gott!” cried the Herr Leutnant. “Martin! Of all men, my old, my dearest Martin! At sunset! In Treilles! At the end of our victorious advance!”

  The Jew wondered how he might clamber after, if only just a little of the way.

  “It is heart-warming,” – the Herr Leutnant could not sing enough – “to renew valued friendships in unexpected places.”

  Something, certainly, whether skill or conviction, had caused the Heldentenor to glow. Cut out of felt and cardboard, his golden skin streaming with last light, he maintained the correct; position, as they stood together in the shambles of a street. He smelled, moreover, his tired inferior realized, of boot polish and toilet soap.

  “But how are you, Martin? You don’t tell me,” the officer complained in different key.

  The approach of caution had caused him to moisten unnecessarily his glistening lips.

  “I am well,” answered the Jew. “That is, my arches have fallen.”

  How Jürgen Stauffer roared. His teeth were perfect.

  “Still a joker! My good Martin! But keep your health. We are almost there.”

  “Where?” asked the Jew.

  The officer waved his hand. His brilliance could make allowances for the impudence of simplicity. So he forgave, still laughingly, still glancing back, over his shoulder as well as into the past, at some extraordinary misjudgment on his own part, as he walked away through the mud to rejoin a general who depended on his company.

  Peace is sometimes more explosive than war. So it seemed to many of those who lived through what followed: rootling after sausage-ends and the heads of sour herrings, expressing in their songs a joy they no longer possessed, forced by hunger and the need for warmth into erotic situations their parents would not have guessed at.

  Swimming and sinking, trampling and trampled, the rout of men-animals was carried along, and with them the Jew Himmelfarb. If he ever experienced the will to resist, he never exercised it, and e
ven derived comfort from the friction of similar bristles on his own. During the first weeks of release, strange embraces, a delirium of experience, prevented him from returning to the bed that was, of course, waiting for him in his father’s house. Besides, in those surroundings he might have laughed too loud, or farted in the dining-room, or done something of an irrational nature. For Moshe had re-married. He had taken a young woman called Christel Schmidt, with hair as heavy and yellow in its snood, as horses’ dung, and the necklace of Venus on her neck. Trotzdem, nett und tüchtig. And of no further significance. The lovers had met after mass. The girl consented, partly out of curiosity, but more especially because she could not bear to feel hungry. As for the old man, any flicker of prudence was probably extinguished by visions of a last frenzy of consenting flesh.

  Mordecai and his practically innocent stepmother were both relieved to put an end to an ironic situation when, after months, the former was appointed to a readership in English at the University of Bienenstadt. Dr Himmelfarb departed, with the tentative blessings of his old father and an inkling that he had been directed to this far from lucrative post at a minor university for reasons still obscure. Several homely Jews insisted on offering him introductions to others, probably of their own kind, which he accepted with amused gratitude, and on a street corner, the disgusting dyer of his youth clawed at his arm, and repeated, it seemed, endlessly:

  “There is a good man at Bienenstadt, a printer, a cousin of my late wife’s brother-in-law. This man will receive you with loving-kindness, such as you were accustomed to in childhood, I need not remind you, Herr Mordecai. I recommend him to you with all my heart. His name is Liebmann.”