Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Himmelfarb climbed up out of his dream into the morning. It was already quite light, though early. For some reason, he saw, he had lain down without undressing, no doubt to be prepared, and now, as if in answer to his foresight, the outside world had begun again to impinge on Herrenwaldau. From his table, through the bull’s-eye, between the stone balusters of the parapet, he observed this time a car, followed by a truck, jerking to a stop on the weed-sown gravel.

  This time an officer trod down. His splendour was unmistakable, and as if in answer to it, Ingeborg Stauffer had already come out to do the honours. She was wearing a simple costume of still fabulous cut, but on which Himmelfarb had more than once observed a crust of pollard along a lapel. Now she stood there waiting, in the old gum-boots she wore in winter when going out to feed her ducks.

  It was very quickly revealed to the observer, even at that distance, that he was present on an occasion, certainly not of high history, of vindication, rather, of the individual spirit. The faces of several private soldiers were aware. An NCO had forgotten to give orders. The officer, of course, obeyed all the etiquette of gallantry in carrying out his peculiar duty. Nor did Frau Stauffer forget what she had learnt. Her voice, always lighter when fulfilling its social functions, was carried upward on the frosty air. Naturally, the listener could not hear more than the upward scale of formal laughter. Frau Stauffer was even wearing the bracelet of large golden links, the lumps of unpolished, semi-precious stones, which always conflicted in motion, and would threaten to break up any serious conversation.

  So she had known and was prepared. Certainly there was one moment of intense silence in which Himmelfarb could have sworn he heard a sound of most unearthly breaking, so high, so clear, so agonizing in its swift dwindling. Then Frau Stauffer bowed her head, in agreement it appeared. She got into the car, holding one hand to her breast, not to protect it from the inevitable, but to decorate that inevitable with its measure of grace.

  When the car was turned round, so sharply, convulsively, that the wheels left their furrows in the drive, Himmelfarb did catch a brief glimpse of Ingeborg Stauffer’s face as it looked out at the wilderness of her neglected garden. She, too, no longer in any way belonged, it seemed, to the framework of actuality. So there was no reason why she should protest at being forced so abruptly out of it. As she was driven away, her face was of that perfect emptiness which precedes fulfilment.

  At the same time, the detachment of soldiers, under orders from its NCO, had begun to billet itself on Herrenwaldau. Voices were burring. Equipment clattered.

  Himmelfarb, who had got down again inside his room, was resigned enough on finding that his own turn had come. He did not hurry. When he had prayed, and brushed his overcoat a little with his hand, and packed into the suitcase the meagre sum of his possessions, he descended into the body of the house. Although it was now filled with sounds of what might be considered as activity, boots bludgeoning frail boards, voices flouting the damp silence of antiquity, those of the rooms which he entered or passed remained gently aloof from their fate. Intending to surrender himself to the first person who questioned his presence there. Himmelfarb wound farther down. Several objects that he touched were sadly reminiscent. Yet, it was a distant ceiling encrusted with faded blazonry, which made him wonder whether it might be possible to take one more look at the town in which he had been born.

  In the long saloon which the owners had used as a living-room, and which was not yet empty of their presence, a heap of cats snoozed on a patch of winter sunshine. A radio was shouting of war. Outside, on the terrace, a stocky youth, of country tints, stood holding a gun, and picking his nose. Himmelfarb wondered for a moment whether to address the soldier boy. But smiled instead. The soldier himself wondered whether to challenge the elderly gentleman, so evidently discreet, so obviously stepped out of the life of kindliness which he understood. In the circumstances, his own always dubious authority dwindled. The gun wobbled. He gave a kind of country nod.

  Himmelfarb walked slowly on. He sensed how horribly the boy’s heart must have been beating for the mildness in himself which he had not learnt to overcome.

  But the strange morning was already unfolding, in which any individual might have become exposed to contingency. The evader walked with care, under the naked, cawing elms. It seemed as though he had abandoned the self he had grown to accept in his familiar room. It seemed, also, fitting that it should again be winter when he took the long, undeviating road along which friends had brought him – how long ago, months or years? – to experience silence and waiting. The winter air cleared his head wonderfully with the result that he found himself observing, and becoming engrossed by the least grain of roadside sand. There were occasions when he nodded at some peasant or child, too involved in the living of their daily lives to think of obstructing the stranger. From time to time, he rested, because his legs were proving humanly weak.

  It took the Jew the best part of the day to cover the miles to Holunderthal. The winter evening was drawing in as he approached the darker masses of the town, which had begun already to receive its nightly visitation. The knots and loops, the little, exquisite puffs of white hung on the deepening distances of the sky, all the way to its orange rim. The riot of fireworks was on. Ordinarily solid, black buildings were shown to have other, more transcendental qualities, in that they would open up, disclosing fountains of hidden fire. Much was inverted, that hitherto had been accepted as sound and immutable. Two silver fish were flaming downward, out of their cobalt sea, into the land.

  As Himmelfarb entered the town, he concluded the industrial suburb of Scheidnig was the target for the night. There the panache was gayest, the involvement deepest, although occasionally a bomb would fall wide and casual into the deathly streets through which he walked. There was a sighing of old bricks subsiding, the sound of stone coughing up its guts, and once he himself was flung to the ground, in what could have been a splitting open of the earth, if the paving had not remained, and the hollow clatter of his suitcase spoilt the effects of doom.

  As he walked deeper into the town, a wind got up, tossing the flaps of his coat, twitching at the brim of his hat. In the streets, the vagaries of human behaviour had been almost entirely replaced by an apparent organization of mechanical means, engines roared, bells rang, flak reacted, the hard confetti of shrapnel never ceased to fall, innocent and invisible.

  Through which the Jew walked.

  It did not occur to him to feel afraid. His mechanism could have been responding to control. Once, certainly, compassion flooded his metal limbs, and he stooped to close the eyes of a man who had been rejected by his grave of rubble.

  Then wheels were arriving. Of ambulance? Or fire-engine? The Jew walked on, by supernatural contrivance. For now the wheels were grazing the black shell of the town. The horses were neighing and screaming, as they dared the acid of the green sky. The horses extended their webbing necks, and their nostrils glinted brass in the fiery light. While the amazed Jew walked unharmed beneath the chariot wheels.

  Originally it had been his intention to revisit the house on the Holzgraben, but suddenly he foresaw the vision of desolation, the stucco skin stripped by bombs and human resentment. So he came instead to the police station which he knew so well, at the corner of the Dorotheenstrasse.

  Now, when he went in, the hands of the man on duty were darting back and forth from official paper to official paper. To occupy himself. He was, it seemed, the only one left behind.

  “They are belting hell out of the glove factory,” the man on duty informed the stranger. “For God’s sake! The glove factory!”

  The man’s rather fat hands continued to stray hopefully amongst the official documents. There was a wedding ring on which the flesh was closing. On the plump hand.

  “Who would have thought,” said the man in charge, “that Holunderthal was inflammable! For God’s sake!”

  “I have come,” Himmelfarb began, who was rootling in his wallet for the necessary proof o
f identification; tonight it was particularly important.

  “To give myself up,” he explained.

  “Now there is only disorder!” complained the policeman. “We no longer have the time even to water our flowerpots.”

  His large bursting hands were helpless. And the broad yellow wedding ring.

  If he looked up at all, his mind’s eye remained directed inward.

  “Well?” he asked though. “What do you want?”

  “I am a Jew,” Himmelfarb announced.

  Offering the paper.

  “A Jew, eh?”

  But the policeman was too distracted by his inability to lay his hand on some other document.

  “Well,” he grumbled, “you will have to wait. A Jew!” he complained. “At this time of night! And on my own!”

  So Himmelfarb sat down and waited on a bench against the wall. He saw that it was, in fact, night as the man had said, and heard that a miraculous silence had begun to flood the burning town.

  Somewhere there was a voice, thick with conviction, yet at the same time wavery.

  ‘War and peace come and go,

  Beer and kisses stay. …’

  sang the ageless German voice.

  “Beer and kisses! Piss-pots!” The policeman snorted. “Enough to make a man burst himself! Beer and kisses is for human beings.”

  Then he looked up.

  “A Jew, eh?” he said.

  As the silence seeped in he was again able to recognize his duties.

  Himmelfarb learned that he was being driven to the railway marshalling yards some miles to the south-east of Holunderthal. He had already heard, through Ingeborg Stauffer, that the place had suffered considerable damage as a target of importance in the war effort and national life. Now he gathered that, amongst its other uses, it served as an assembly point for Jews who were being moved to other parts of the country, even to other countries.

  His particulars were taken on arrival, and immediately he was shoved inside one of a number of large sheds. As it was still night, and the shed was kept in total darkness due to the exigencies of war, it was not possible to estimate the number of his fellow occupants, only that the shed contained a solid mass, and that a mass soul suffered and recoiled. Inside the prevailing darkness, worse because it was imposed by man – or could it have been sent by God? – the lost soul mourned, and tried to deduce the reason for the unreasonable. At moments the voice of the mourner sounded like that of a child, but quickly thickened and intensified. Then the aged voice rose, it seemed, out of the depths of history. Crying and lamenting. Sometimes there were blows and kicks as more of the filthy Jews were settled in, and sometimes from the door a torch would reach out, and rend the veil of darkness, revealing patches of yellowish skin, or hands clutching at possessions, as if those were the most they had to lose. The guards might laugh at some indignity glimpsed, but on the whole, at the assembly point, they seemed to prefer a darkness in which to hate in the abstract the whole mass of Jews.

  By morning light, which comes slowly and coldly into a bare shed in winter, Himmelfarb began to distinguish the features of individuals, though the way they huddled, bundled up against cold and misery, these members of his race were presented rather as the dregs. Certainly there were individuals still under the influence of decorum. Here and there a streak of white powder was visible in the grey shadows of an elderly lady’s skin. An old Jew, wrapped in his shawl for warmth as much as worship, dusted its fringes before kissing them. So far the stench had not begun to rise. Except where a child had dirtied himself, and was wiped clean with difficulty. In that corner it was not possible to ignore the smell of shit. Nor the clamour of hopelessness. In the thin light a man’s voice was reciting a prayer for the common good, but the voice of the mother which rose against it no longer believed she might be included in a rescue. The first slime of despair had begun to cling.

  Once, as the Jews bestirred themselves at dusk, changing position, chafing limbs, snuffing at the heavy air after a breath of imagined freshness, tearing precious pieces from the stale loaves several had succeeded in husbanding, in a few cases even trying to improvise little meals on spirit stoves, Himmelfarb thought he saw the figure of the dyer he had known in his youth, and sat up from against the case which was numbing his ribs – to call, to greet, to seize the flying tails of all past experience, and hold them fast, lovingly. But the dyer, he realized, touching his own skin, must have died years ago, probably in peace, and could have bequeathed him, as he remembered, the peculiar duty of loving his children, in the limbo of awfulness to which they had been consigned, until he himself was in turn released.

  So the legatary sat considering his obligations for the future. When an angry woman, the wife of a grocer, accused the gentleman, educated too, of stealing a rind of cheese she had snatched up on leaving, and with which she was preparing to comfort herself. She was quite abusive, until she noticed her property, fallen in the dirt between them.

  The gentleman, a professor or something, smiled at the woman as he handed up the cheese. But she remained hostile to the one who was the cause of her shame.

  There where they sat, amongst the cases and the bundles, the keepsakes and the books, the Wurst and the cooking utensils, Himmelfarb embraced the children of the dyer. Even when they would not have him. On the several occasions when he actually went amongst them, they were ready enough to speak, to exchange the material details of their woe, but grew shy and silent when his attempts at spiritual candour made them suspect an assault on their privacy of soul. Most of those present were still united with family or friends. To that extent, they were safe, they believed. In the circumstances, they were not prepared to give what the stranger merely wished them to accept.

  So he and they continued to sit in the congested shed. At one stage a party of Jews from a nearby camp was herded in. Huddled together in their austere, striped robes, these peoples of shaven heads, receded eyes and skeletal limbs, silently implied that it was no longer their function to speak, or even mix, with their own race, and it became generally accepted that these were the elect of suffering, who should remain apart. But at least the inmates of the shed had their fate in common, and sometimes the voices of all would unite in prayer:

  “May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to conduct us in peace, to direct our steps in peace, to uphold us in peace, and to lead us in life, joy and peace unto the haven of our desire…”

  The voices of the Jews rose together in prayer for the journey as, indeed, they were going on one, if not exactly an excursion to Hildesheim, or visit to relatives at Frankfurt.

  The unintelligible rigmarole made the guards laugh.

  For several days the Jews remained in the sheds at the marshalling yards the other side of Holunderthal. It was difficult to imagine any issue above their own, yet it was fleetingly remembered, a war was raging outside: at night the sky would be criss-crossed as they had once seen it, and the joyless confetti that the flak made would still be falling for the bride of darkness. On the third night, a bomb hit an ammunition train, and the whole of the solid world was rocked. After the sheds which contained the Jews had recovered their normal shape, even after the exploding target, and the sirens and the whistles had exhausted their frenzy, the prisoners lay and listened for something worse to be directed at them personally. They were unable really to believe there might be other objectives.

  Finally, on a morning of iron frost, they were taken out. A little hammer tapping on the cold silence at a distance, might have struck a note of desolation, if the hiss and drizzle of escaping steam had not created an illusion of warmth somewhere close. Men were coming and going on those mysterious errands of the anomalous hours before dawn. A party of shift workers, stamping and chafing themselves as they gathered, shouted at the guards to remind them of a few simple brutalities they might have forgotten. But those who were most intimately connected with the departure of the Jews, and who had only recently torn themselves out of warm bunks and a f
rowst of sleep, needed no spur to their resentment. As they prodded their charges along with the points of their bayonets, the guards worked some of it off in little, provocative stabs. One, surlier, and more sleep-swollen than the rest, inserted the blade between the great buttocks of a fat Jew, just so far, to hear the threatened victim bellow. There was a woman, too, crying for something she had left behind in the shed which had become her home. How she cried for the bare boards, which her mind had transformed, and the loss of one woollen glove.

  Some of the travellers, however, mostly younger people, and an elderly person said to be a university professor, were determined not to be intimidated by the steely face of morning. Whatever might happen next, there was always the possibility that it might not be worse than they had expected. So their eyes would invest the most unpromising forms with hope: the long black centipedes of stationary trains, twisted girders, or just the vast spectacle of landscape as the light disentangled it from the mist. These more fortunate individuals enjoyed at least the protection of their vision, as they continued to stand, on the thin soles of their shoes, above the crunching frost, holding their cheap portmanteaux, briefcases or corded chattels. And waited. Or shuffled. And waited. Or shuffled.

  Until, from the slight intensification of pressure, the throb of emotion and remarks filtering through the mass, it became known that those in front were being induced to mount a train. And soon it appeared that this was, indeed, a train, none of the cattle-trucks of which everyone had heard, but carriages with orthodox compartments, certainly not of the newest – the stuffing was bursting out of many of the arm-rests – yet, a train, a train, of corridors, and windows which opened after a struggle, and white antimaccassars – admittedly a little soiled where other heads had rested – but a train, a real train. So the Jews pushed, and some of them dared joke. At the ends of the corridors there were actually w.c.s, nor was there any thought of complaint amongst the passengers when it was discovered that the basins and lavatories were waterless. They were far too grateful.