Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  As his self-appointed guide was sucked back into the crowd and lost, Himmelfarb accepted that the crippled dyer, who had come even to the wedding with the lines of his hands marked clearly in purple, was one from whom he would never escape. He had learnt the shape of the unshapely body, the texture of the unchanging coat; mirrors had taught him, long before their meeting, the expression of the eyes. Now, in the moment of perception, all the inklings were married together: the dyer’s image was with him for always, like his new wife, or his own fate. Now he was committed. So he continued to answer distractedly the questions of the wedding guests, while trying to reconcile in his mind what his wife had taught him of love, with what had hitherto been the disgust he had felt for the dyer. In the light of the one, he must discover and gather up the sparks of love hidden in the other. Or deny his own purpose, as well as the existence of the race.

  In the circumstances he was amazed nobody realized the answers they were receiving to their questions were no answers, or that his wife Reha should look up at him with an expression of implicit confidence.

  In the beginning the young people lived with the wife’s father, but soon found, and moved into, a small, rather old-fashioned house, with rooms high but too narrow and a very abrupt staircase. Because it was situated on the outskirts of the town, at least the rental was low, which enabled the tenants to engage an inexperienced girl to help the wife of the Dozent, while the Dozent himself gave up smoking, and practised other small economies such as walking to his lectures instead of taking the tram. They were completely happy, the female relatives claimed, and indeed, they were almost so. In their small, closed circle. On the outskirts of the town. Those who look for variety in change and motion, instead of in the variations on recurring events, would have found the life monotonous and restricted. But Himmelfarbs gave no outward sign of wishing to diverge from the path on which their feet had been set. If they left Bienenstadt at all, it was to spend the same month each year in the Schwarzwald, at the same reliable pension where it was possible to eat kosher. Although there were also occasions when Dr Himmelfarb had had to absent himself for several days, representing a disinclined Professor at conferences in other university towns. And once, after some years, he had returned to Holunderthal, on receiving a telegram announcing the death of his father.

  Moshe died of his young wife, it was commonly and truthfully said. But repentant. That is easy at the end. And was buried by a priest with a stammer, and an acolyte with a cold. The few friends who attended were sufficiently recent to keep the ceremony superficial in tone. Most of the faces were kindly, curious, reverent, correct, but a few who were bored, or who suffered from bad circulation, took to stamping ostentatiously, or slapping their sides, and one more cynical than the rest reflected how quickly a mild joke can become a stale one. All of these were anxious to get finished. But each clod had to count. As they summoned the Mother of God to the side of the old Jew, who had not known Her very long, and then, it was suspected, only as a convenience. So the earth was scattered, and water – though not of tears, not even from the son, whose grief was deeper than the gush of tears.

  The son, who had gone round to the wrong side of the grave, amongst the earth and stones, and who had no idea what to do by way of respect, stood looking yellow in the silver afternoon. Some of the mourners grew quite fascinated, if repelled, by his pronounced Jewish cast.

  As they watched, Mordecai swayed from time to time. Because the weight was upon him. Because faith is never faith unless it is to be wrestled with. O perfect Rock, spare and have pity on the parents and the children. … So Mordecai wrestled with the Rock, and prayed for his parent, that shifting sand, or worldly man, whose moustache had smelt deliciously and who had never been happier than when presenting a Collected Works in leather.

  Himmelfarb remained no longer than was necessary in his native town. Fortunately the business had been satisfactorily disposed of a couple of years before. The widow, who was already preparing to forget about that chapter of her life, proposed to look for consolation at a foreign spa. There remained the house on the Holzgraben, which the son inherited, and decided to close until a suitable tenant could be found. He was most anxious to return as quickly as possible to the life he had made and which his increase in fortune proceeded to alter only in superficial ways, for his wife could never accustom herself to worldly practices and he remained engrossed in her, his students and his books.

  It was not generally known in Bienenstadt that Dr Himmelfarb himself had written and published an admirable and scholarly little monograph on the Novels of John Oliver Hobbes. Although the Frau Doktor had made a point of mentioning the fact casually to the ladies of her circle, the information was not absorbed. Why should it have been? The book would remain a scholar’s minor achievement or at most, an object of interest to some research student exploring the by-ways of literature. However, his large-scale work English Novelists of the Nineteenth Century in Relation to German Literature and Life, also written during the quiet years at Bienenstadt, was rather a different matter. Himmelfarb’s English Novelists attracted a wider academic, not to say public attention, and it was taken for granted that the author would soon be generally accepted as a standard authority. So that, before very long, there was an outbreak of smiling discussion amongst the ladies of the Frau Doktor’s circle, of the rumours they had heard: how Dr Himmelfarb was likely to be offered the Chair of English at a certain university – gossip was in disagreement over which; perhaps Frau Doktor Himmelfarb – here the ladies of the circle wreathed themselves in golden smiles – might be able to enlighten them. But, when questioned on that matter of advancement, the Frau Doktor would look rather nervous, as if she had been asked to tamper with the future. She personally preferred to await the logical unfolding of events, which her husband’s brilliance must ensure.

  So she would avoid giving a direct reply. Or she would murmur something of tried banality, such as:

  “All in good time. Our lives have only just begun.”

  And offer her callers a second slice of Käsekuchen.

  In a sense, no more rational answer could have been found, for, although the Dozent was turning grey – not unnatural in a man of dark pigmentation – and his fine figure had begun to thicken, while his wife had grown undeniably fat, it could have been argued that they were only beginning to mature in the full goodness of their married lives. In the small house on the outskirts of the town. In the shade of an oak, and the lesser shadows of beans, which the industrious country maid had coaxed to climb up sticks in the back garden. Nobody, least of all Himmelfarbs themselves, could really have wished to destroy the impression of peaceful permanence, strongest always in the mornings, when the feather beds lolled in the sunlight on the upper window sills.

  Yet, Frau Himmelfarb began to suffer from breathlessness, which gave her, when off her guard, a slightly strained look, as if her assertion of happiness might be proving too difficult to maintain. Some of her callers, in discussing it, decided it was the proximity of the oak – too many trees round a house used up all the oxygen, causing those spasms which, in the end, might turn to asthma; while other ladies, more daring, were of the opinion that the absence of a family had provoked a nervous condition.

  One of the latter, a gross creature by intellectual standards, whose husband was a haberdasher in a mean street, and who was received on account of a relationship, knew no better than to say outright:

  “But, Rehalein, it is time you had a child. Why, the duties of the Rabbanim do not begin and end in books. Give me a good, comfortable, family Jew. He may not spell, but he will fill the house with babies.”

  Two other ladies, one of whom was noted for her readings from the West-Östlicher Divan, decided it was time to break off even forced relations with the haberdasher’s wife, who was smelling, besides, of perspiration and carraway seeds.

  While Reha Himmelfarb simply maintained:

  “Who are we, Rifke, to decide what a man’s duties shall be?”


  And Himmelfarb loved his wife the better for overhearing.

  They were brought together closer, if anything, in an effort to express that love of which it seemed no lasting evidence might remain. None would know how Himmelfarbs had rejoiced in each other, unless by an echo from a library, from the dedication in a book: To my wife, Reha, without whose encouragement and assistance. … But words do not convince the doubting soul like living tokens, as the wife of the haberdasher knew, for all her simplicity, or perhaps because of it.

  Watching his wife one evening as she lit the Sabbath candles, Himmelfarb would have said: Of all people in this world, Reha is least in doubt. Yet, at that moment, the hands of Reha Himmelfarb, plump and practical by nature, seemed to grow transparent and flicker in the candle flames.

  At the same time she gave a little startled cry of pain.

  “It was the wax from the candles! The hot wax, that fell when I was not expecting.”

  She whispered quickly, and only just distinct, as though she felt her need to explain desecrate a sacred moment.

  By then the flames of the candles were standing straight and still, but what should have been the lovely, limpid Sabbath light shone wan and almost sickly and the faces of the two people reflected by the mirrors could have been soft, sweating wax.

  The obligations of other ceremonies prevented him from commenting there and then, but later he came to her, and said:

  “Reha, darling, I can tell you are badly disappointed.”

  And took her resisting hand, and put it inside his jacket, so that it was closest to him.

  “Why?” she cried. “When our life together is so happy? And soon there will be the Chair. Everybody is convinced of that.”

  He was half-exasperated, half in love.

  “But not the babies that your Cousin Rifke advises as the panacea.”

  She would not look at him. She said:

  “We must expect our lives to be different.”

  “Referring in cold abstractions,” he answered, “to matters we do not understand. But for our actual lives – for yours, at least, I would ask all that is comforting and joyous.”

  “Oh, mine!” she protested. “I am nothing. I am your footstool. Or cushion!” She laughed. “Am I not, rather, a cushion?”

  She did appear her plumpest looking up at him, happy even, but, he suspected, by her own effort.

  Then she put her arms round his waist, and laid her face against his vest, and said:

  “I would not alter a single detail of our lives.”

  But at once went on to deliver, in a different voice, what sounded almost a recitative, of the greatest significance and urgency:

  “On Monday I must start to make the jelly from the apples Mariechen brought from her village. There is an old book my mother used to mention which gives an infallible method for clarifying jelly. I have the title, I believe, amongst some papers she left. Pass by Rutkowitz’s on your way home and see whether you can find the book. Will you, Mordecai? He has such a mountain of old stuff, you might come across anything.”

  She looked up, and was in such apparent earnest, he was both moved and pacified.

  On the Monday, as he was preparing to leave, Reha came with the title of the book. As it happened, he had forgotten.

  “Don’t forget the book!” she kept insisting. “I shall not start the jelly. I shall wait in case you happen to find, at Rutkowitz’s, the book!”

  It was so important her face implied.

  Then he left, relieved that his wife was such a simple, loving creature. If her words sometimes hinted at deeper matters, no doubt it was pure chance; she herself remained unaware.

  Rutkowitz was a quiet, elderly Jew, whose overflowing shop stood in one of the streets which plunged off behind the university at Bienenstadt. Himmelfarb remembered to pass that way before returning home, and rummaged in the stacks and trays for the book his wife so particularly required. Needless to say, he did not succeed in finding it, but discovered other things which amused and interested.

  “You deal in magic, Rutkowitz, I see!”

  Deliberately he addressed the grave bookseller with inappropriate levity.

  The latter shrugged, and answered, very dry:

  “Some old Kabbalistic and Hasidic works. They came from a collection in Prague.”

  “And are of value?”

  “There are some who may value them.”

  The bookseller was a wary man.

  Himmelfarb warmed to the characters, and the language moved on his tongue, where the Cantor Katzmann had put it in the beginning. He began, inevitably, to read aloud, for the nostalgia of hearing the instrument of his voice do justice to its heritage.

  And so, he heard:

  “I set myself the task at night of combining letters with one another, and of meditating on them, and so continued for three nights. On the third occasion, after midnight, I nodded off for a little, quill in hand, paper on my knees. Then I noticed that the candle was about to go out. So I rose and extinguished it, as a person who has been dozing often will. But I soon realized that the light continued. I was greatly astonished, because, after close examination, I saw it was as though the light issued from myself. I said: ‘I do not believe it.’ I walked to and fro all through the house, and, behold, the light is with me; I lay on a couch and covered myself up, and behold, the light is with me all the while….”

  The cautious bookseller was standing a little to one side, the better to disclaim complicity in his customer’s private pursuits.

  “Do you appreciate the physical advantages of mystical ecstasy, Rutkowitz?” Himmelfarb inquired.

  But although they stood scarcely any distance apart, the bookseller had apparently determined to keep his understanding carefully turned away. He did not answer.

  Himmelfarb continued to browse amongst the old books and manuscripts. Now he was entranced. The bookseller had left him, or else had ceased to exist. In the stillness of the dusk and the light from one electric bulb, the reader heard himself:

  “The soul is full of the love of God, and bound with ropes of love, in joy and lightness of heart. Unlike one who serves his master grudgingly, even when most hindered the love of service burns in his heart, and he is glad to fulfil the will of his Creator. … For, when the soul thinks deeply on the fear of God, then the flame of heartfelt love leaps within, and the exultation of subtlest joy fills the heart. … And the lover dreams not of the advantages of this world; he no longer takes undue pleasure in his wife, nor excessive pride in his sons and daughters, but cares only to obey the will of his Creator, to do good unto others, and to keep sanctified the Name of God. All his thoughts burn with the fire of love for Him. …”

  Himmelfarb found the bookseller seated at his desk in the lower shop, as though nothing in particular had happened – and what, indeed, had? After coming to an agreement, the Dozent went home, taking with him several of the more interesting old volumes of Hebrew, and one or two loose, damaged parchments.

  “Did you find my book?”

  Reha had appeared in the hall as she heard her husband mounting the stairs.

  “No luck!” he answered.

  She did not seem in any way put out, but immediately called back into the kitchen:

  “Mariechen, we shall start the apple jelly tonight. By the old method. The Herr Doktor did not find the book.”

  Almost as though she were relieved.

  Her husband continued on his way upstairs. He had debated whether to tell his wife about his purchases, but as she had ignored the books in his arms, he no longer felt he was expected to.

  Often now, after correcting an accumulation of essays, or on saying goodnight to students who had come for tuition, he would sit alone in his room with the old books. He would read, or sit, or draw, idly, automatically, or fidget with different objects, or listen to the sound of silence, and was sometimes, it seemed, transported in divers directions.

  On one occasion his wife interrupted.

  �
�I cannot sleep,” she explained.

  She had released her hair, and brushed it out, with the result that she appeared to be standing against a dark and brittle thicket, but one in which a light shone.

  “I am not disturbing you?” she asked. “I thought I would like to read something.” She sighed. “Something short. And musical.”

  “Mörike,” he suggested.

  “Yes,” she agreed, absently. “Mörike will be just the thing.”

  As the wind her nightdress made in passing stirred the papers uppermost on her husband’s desk, she could not resist asking:

  “What is that, Mordecai? I did not know you could draw.”

  “I was scribbling,” he said. “This, it appears, is the Chariot.”

  “Ah,” she exclaimed, softly, withdrawing her glance; she could have lost interest. “Which chariot?” she did certainly ask, but now it might have been to humour him.

  “That, I am not sure,” he replied. “It is difficult to distinguish. Just when I think I have understood, I discover some fresh form – so many – streaming with implications. There is the Throne of God, for instance. That is obvious enough – all gold, and chrysoprase, and jasper. Then there is the Chariot of Redemption, much more shadowy, poignant, personal. And the faces of the riders. I cannot begin to see the expression of the faces.”

  All the time Reha was searching the shelves.

  “This is in the old books?” she asked.

  “Some of it,” he admitted, “is in some.”

  Reha continued to explore the shelves.

  She yawned. And laughed softly.

  “I think I shall probably fall asleep,” she said, “before I find Mörike.”

  But took a volume.

  He felt her kiss the back of his head as she left.

  Or did she remain, to protect him more closely, with some secret part of her being, after the door had closed? He was never certain with Reha: to what extent perception was revealed in her words and her behaviour, or how far she had accompanied him along the inward path.

  For, by now, Himmelfarb had taken the path of inwardness. He could not resist silence, and became morose on evenings when he was prevented from retreating early to his room. Reha would continue to sew, or mend. Her expression did not protest. She would smile a gentle approval – but of what, it was never made clear.