Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Himmelfarb was not quite running. He bent his knees, rather, to move faster, closer to the pavement. His own breathing had ceased to be part of him. He heard it panting alongside, like an unwelcome animal which refused to be shaken off. At the corner of the Königin Luise Platz the flames were leaping luxuriantly. In the Schillerstrasse the synagogue was burning. This more sober. An engine parked against the kerb. Several firemen were standing around. What could they do, actually? The rather ugly, squat, practical old building had assumed an incongruous, a Gothic grace in its skyward striving. All could have been atoned now that the voices were finally silenced.

  As he entered the Holzgraben, the drops were falling from Himmelfarb, heavier than sweat, his neck was extended scraggily, in anticipation of the knife. This was his own street. Still quiet, respectable – German. A power failure, however, caused by the disturbances, had plunged the familiar into a dark dream, through which he approached the house where they had lived, and found what he knew already to expect.

  Of course the door stood open. It was stirring very slightly, just as it had on those several other occasions when he had found it in his sleep.

  The house was a hollow shell in which the pretending was over, although he could not yet feel it was empty for the darkness and silence that had silted it up.

  He went in, feeling with his feet, which were long and wooden, like his sticks of fingers. In the darkness he stooped down and touched the body of the little dog, already fixed in time, like the sculpture on a tomb, except that the lips were drawn back from the teeth, denying that peace which is the prerogative of death. Most horrible to touch was what he realized to be the tongue.

  Then the Jew began to cry out.

  He called:

  “Reha! Reha!”

  And it returned from out of the house.

  Always he had imagined how, in the worst crisis, she, his saviour, would come to him, and hold his head against her breast.

  But she did not.

  So he went blundering and crying.

  He called to God, and it went out at the windows, through the bare branches of the trees, so that a party of people a street away burst out laughing, before they took fright.

  He was mounting interminably through the house. The scent of spices was gone from it for ever, and the blessed light of candles, in which even the most stubborn flesh was made transparent. Moonlight shifted and fretted instead, on the carpets of the landings, and in the open jaws of glass. Cold.

  When the searcher did at last arrive in the upper regions, he found the old servant. She began to cry worse than ever, principally for her own fright, while stifling it for fear of the consequences, since even the furniture had turned hostile.

  Gradually she told what no longer needed confirming.

  They had come, they had come for Himmelfarb.

  But what could she add that he had not already experienced?

  So he left her to babble on.

  He went, whimpering, directionless, somewhere down into the pit of creaking darkness. Calling the name that had already fulfilled its purpose, it seemed. So he descended, through the house, into darkness. And in darkness he sat down, as much of him as they had left. He sat in darkness.

  VI

  “The Chariot,” Miss Hare dared to disturb the silence which had been lowered purposely, like the thickest curtain, on the performance of a life.

  She did tremble though, and pause, sensing she had violated what she had been taught to respect as one of the first principles of conversation: that subjects of personal interest, however vital, are of secondary importance.

  “You know about the Chariot then,” she could not resist.

  But whispered. But very slow and low.

  It was as eventful as when a prototype has at last identified its kind. Yet pity restrained her from forcibly distracting attention to her own urgent situation, for her mouth was at the same time almost gummed together by all she had suffered in the course of her companion’s life. And so, the word she had dared utter hung trembling on the air, like the vision itself, until, on recognition of that vision by a second mind, the two should be made one.

  “If we see each other again.” The stone man had begun to stir and speak.

  The knot of her hands and the pulses in her throat rejected any possibility that their meeting might be a casual one. But, of course, she could not explain, nor was her face of any more assistance than her tongue; in fact, as she herself knew, in moments of stress she could resemble a congested turkey.

  “If we should continue to meet,” the Jew was saying, “and I revert to the occasion when I betrayed my wife, and all of us, for that matter, you must forgive me. It is always at the back of my mind. Because a moment can become eternity, depending on what it contains. And so I still find myself running away, down the street, towards the asylum of my friends’ house. I still reject what I do not always have the strength to suffer. When all of them had put their trust in me. It was I, you know, on whom they were depending to redeem their sins.”

  “I do not altogether understand what people mean by sin,” Miss Hare had to confess. “We had an old servant who often tried to explain, but I would fail as often to grasp. Peg would insist that she had sinned, but I knew that she had not. Just as I know this tree is good; it cannot be guilty of more than a little bit of wormy fruit. Everything else is imagination. Often I imagine things myself. Oh, yes, I do! And it is good for me; it keeps me within bounds. But is gone by morning. There,” she said, indicating the gentle movement of the grass, “how can we look out from under this tree, and not know that all is good?”

  For the moment she even believed it herself. She was quite idiotic in her desire to console.

  “Then how do you account for evil?” asked the Jew.

  Her lips grew drier.

  “Oh, yes, there is evil!” She hesitated. “People are possessed by it. Some more than others!” she added with force. “But it burns itself out. Some are even destroyed as it does.”

  “Consumed by their own sin!” The Jew laughed.

  “Oh, you can catch me out!” she shouted. “I am not clever. But do know a certain amount.”

  “And who will save us?”

  “I know that grass grows again after fire.”

  “That is an earthly consolation.”

  “But the earth is wonderful. It is all we have. It has brought me back when, otherwise, I should have died.”

  The Jew could not hide a look of kindly cunning.

  “And at the end? When the earth can no longer raise you up?”

  “I shall sink into it,” she said, “and the grass will grow out of me.”

  But she sounded sadder than she should have.

  “And the Chariot,” he asked, “that you wished to discuss at one stage? Will you not admit the possibility of redemption?”

  “Oh, words, words!” she cried, brushing them off with her freckled hands. “I do not understand what they mean.”

  “But the Chariot,” she conceded, “does exist. I have seen it. Even if a certain person likes to hint that it was only because I happened to be sick. I have seen it. And Mrs Godbold has, whom I believe and trust. Even my poor father, whom I did not, and who was bad, bad, suspected some such secret was being kept hidden from him. And you, a very learned man, have found the Chariot in books, and understand more than you will tell.”

  “But not the riders! I cannot visualize, I do not understand the riders!”

  “Do you see everything at once? My own house is full of things waiting to be seen. Even quite common objects are shown to us only when it is time for them to be.”

  The Jew was so pleased he wriggled slightly inside his clothes.

  “It is you who are the hidden zaddik!”

  “The what?” she asked.

  “In each generation, we say, there are thirty-six hidden zaddikim – holy men who go secretly about the world, healing, interpreting, doing their good deeds.”

  She burned, a slow red,
but did not speak, because his explanation, in spite of reaching her innermost being, did not altogether explain.

  “It is even told,” continued the Jew, stroking grass, “how the creative light of God poured into the zaddikim. That they are the Chariot of God.”

  She looked down, and clenched her hands, for the tide was rising in her. She looked at her white knuckles, and hoped she would not have one of her attacks. Even though she had been lifted highest at such moments, she could not bear to think her physical distress might be witnessed by someone whose respect she wished so very much to keep.

  “I shall remember this morning,” Himmelfarb said, “not only because it was the morning of our meeting.”

  Indeed, looking out from under the tree, it seemed as though light was at work on matter as never before. The molten blue had been poured thickly round the chafing-dish of the world. The languid stalks of grass were engaged in their dance of transparent joyfulness. A plain-song of bees fell in solid drops of gold. All souls might have stood forth to praise if, at the very moment, such a clattering had not broken out, and shoved them back.

  “What is that?” Himmelfarb asked.

  The two people peered out anxiously from beneath the branches.

  A pillar of black and white had risen in the depths of the abandoned orchard, but moving and swaying. Silence creaked, and the weed towers were rendered into nothing. Plumes of dust and seed rose.

  “Hal-loo? Oo-hoo! Coo-ee!” called the voice of conscience.

  Miss Hare grew paler.

  “That is a person I shall probably tell you about,” she informed her companion. “But not now.”

  Mrs Jolley continued to stamp and call. It seemed doubtful, however, that she would invade territory with which she was not already familiar.

  “There is one of the evil ones!” Miss Hare decided to reveal just so much, and to point with a finger. “How evil, I am not yet sure. But she has entered into a conspiracy with another devil, and will bring suffering to many before it destroys them both.”

  Himmelfarb could have believed. It was obvious, from the way he was preparing his legs for use, that he had begun to feel he had stayed long enough, although the Arch-conspirator had gone.

  “You will not leave me,” Miss Hare begged. “I shall not go in. Not for anyone. Not until dark, perhaps.”

  “There are things I am neglecting,” mumbled the Jew.

  “It is I who shall be neglected if you go,” she protested, like a great beauty hung with pearls. “And besides,” she added, “you have not finished telling me your life.”

  It made the Jew feel old and feeble. If she was willing him not to go, he wondered whether he had the strength to stay. At least, for that purpose.

  “I know,” she said, gently for her, “I know that, probably, the worst bits are to come. But I shall endure them with you. Two,” she said, “are stronger than one.”

  So the Jew subsided, and the tent of the tree contracted round them in the wilderness in which they sat. The lovely branches sent down sheets of iron, which imprisoned their bodies, although their minds were free to be carried into the most distant corners of hell.

  VII

  How long Himmelfarb remained in the house on the Holzgraben after they took his wife, he had never been able to calculate. In his state of distress he was less than ever capable of conceiving what is known as a plan of action. So he lingered on in the deserted, wintry house, even after the old woman, his servant had left him, to burrow deeper in her fright into the darker, more protected alleys of the town. He would walk from room to room, amongst the violated furniture, over carpets which failed to deaden footsteps. Whenever necessary, he would pick, like a rat, at the food he discovered still lying in saucers and bowls. Much of the time he spent sitting at his manuscript, and once found himself starting to prepare a lecture which, in other circumstances, he should have delivered on a Tuesday to his students at the University.

  Sometimes he simply sat at his desk, holding in his hand the paper-knife a cousin had brought from Jannina. He was fascinated by the silver blade, the sharpness of which had suggested to the girl Reha Liebmann, that it was intended for purposes other than those of opening letters and cutting the pages of books. In recollecting, her husband went so far as to explore the interstices of his ribs, and might have driven it into the heart inside, if he had been able to see any purpose in dying twice.

  So this dead man, or distracted soul, put aside the useless knife. Unable to reason, he would drift for hours in a state between spirit and substance, searching amongst the grey shapes, which just failed to correspond, and returning at last to his own skull and the actual world.

  During several walks which he took at the time, because, for the moment at least, it did not seem as though they intended to molest the solitary Jew, he continued his search for a solution to the problem of atonement. Nobody, seeing him on the clean gravel of the Lindenallee, or the more congruous, because indeterminate paths of the Stadtwald, would have suspected him of a preoccupation practically obscene. Nor would they have guessed that the being, in grey top-coat, with stout stick, was not as solid as he appeared, that he had, in fact, reached a state of practical disembodiment, and would enter into the faces that he passed.

  This became a habit with the obsessed Jew, and he derived considerable comfort from it, particularly after it had occurred to him that, as all rivers must finally mingle with the shapeless sea, so he might receive into his own formlessness, the blind souls of men, which lunged and twisted in their efforts to arrive at some unspecified end. Once this insight had been given him, he could not resist smiling, regardless of blood and dogma, into the still unconscious faces, and would not recognize that he was not always acceptable to those he was trying to assist. For the unresponsive souls would rock, and shudder, and recoil from being drawn into the caverns of his eyes. And once somebody had screamed. And once somebody had gone so far as to threaten.

  But their deliverer was not deterred. He was pervaded as never before by a lovingkindness. Only at dusk, when even human resentment had scuttled from the damp paths, the Jew would begin to suspect the extent of his own powers. Although that winter, of bewilderment and spiritual destruction, the concept of the Chariot drifted back, almost within his actual grasp. In fact, there were evenings when he thought he had succeeded in distinguishing its form on the black rooftops, barely clearing the skeletons of trees, occasions when he could feel its wind as it drenched him in departing light. Then, as he stood upon the rotting leaves and steadied himself against the stream of memory, he would drag his top-coat closer, by tighter, feverish handfuls, to protect his unworthy, shivering sides. One morning before it was light, Himmelfarb woke and got immediately out of bed. The cold and dark should have daunted, but his sleep had been so unusually peaceful, he had embraced an experience of such extraordinary tenderness and warmth, that he remained insulated, as it were. Now, as he blundered about in the dark, although he could remember nothing of any dream, he was convinced it had been decided in his sleep that he should prepare to join a cobbler, a humble Jew of his acquaintance, who, he happened to know, was still living in the Krötengasse. So he hurried to shave, cutting himself in several places in the excitement of anticipation, and when he had prayed, and dressed, went about putting into a suitcase the few possessions he felt unable to part with: an ivory thimble which had belonged to his wife, the vain bulk of his now unpublishable manuscript, as well as the ironic, but priceless gifts of his apostate father, the Tallith and Tephillin. Then he paused, but only for a little, in the thin light, before the door-bell sounded. Although he had not rung for a taxi, knowing that none would have accepted to come, he went down with his worldly goods, in answer to what seemed like perfect punctuality.

  “Ah, you are ready then!” Konrad Stauffer said.

  Himmelfarb was really not in the least surprised, in spite of the fact that it had already been decided in his mind, or sleep, that he should move to the house of Laser, a Jewish cobbler in t
he Krötengasse.

  Now there was some wrangling for possession of the suitcase, a rather mechanical mingling of his cold fingers with the warmer ones over the disputed handle.

  “Please let me!” Stauffer begged.

  Himmelfarb suddenly gave way. Because it seemed natural to do so.

  His friend was wearing a half-coat of soft leather, which smelled intoxicating besides. Everything invited to a sinking down. The fashionable car had begun to shine in the still hesitating light. Frau Stauffer was standing there, with an expression of having discovered things she had never seen before, holding an anachronistic muff, which only she could have translated into perfect contemporary terms.

  All three behaved as though they had parted company yesterday.

  “He was actually waiting for us!” Stauffer announced, and laughed for one of those amiable remarks which can be made to pass as wit.

  “You must sit at the back, Himmelfarb,” he ordained.

  “Get in, Ingeborg!” he commanded his wife more sternly.

  She did so, slamming the door in a way which must always have irritated her husband as much as now. But in settling into her seat, she rubbed against him slightly, and there was established a peace which could, of course, have been that of an unclenching winter morning, if Himmelfarb had not remembered, from the previous meeting, occasional glances and certain lingering contacts of skin, which made it obvious that Stauffers still devoured each other in private.

  They drove through the white streets.

  “I expect you have not eaten. We also forgot,” Frau Stauffer called back to the passenger. “I have a stomach like an acorn. But we shall put the coffee on as soon as we get there.”

  Houses were thinning. Round faces would extend into long blurs.

  “We are taking you to Herrenwaldau,” Stauffer explained.

  His voice was very grave as he drove. His clipped neck was taut, but in spite of the wrinkles, had acquired a beauty of concentration above the leather collar.