“To the gas,” the fellow explained, in decent friendly tones.
But ghostly. Himmelfarb remembered, fleetingly, a colleague who had been dying of cancer of the throat.
“Yes,” whispered his new friend. “The gas will be pouring soon. When it is over, we shall drag the bodies to the pits.”
It suggested a harvest ritual rather than the conventions of hell.
But just then the door of the women’s bath-house burst open, by terrible misadventure, and there, for ever to haunt, staggered the Lady from Czernowitz.
How the hands of the old, helpless, and furthermore intellectual Jew, her friend, went out to her.
“God show us!” shrieked the lady from Czernowitz. “Just this once! At least!”
In that long, leathern voice.
She stood there for an instant in the doorway, and might have fallen if allowed to remain longer. Her scalp was grey stubble where the reddish hair had been. Her one dug hung down beside the ancient scar which represented the second. Her belly sloped away from the hillock of her navel. Her thighs were particularly poor. But it was her voice which lingered. Stripped. Calling to him from out of the dark of history, ageless, ageless, and interminable.
Then the man her counterpart, brought to his knees by sudden weakness, tearing them furiously, willingly, on the pebbles, calling to her across the same gulf, shouted through the stiff slot of his mouth:
“The Name! Remember they cannot take the Name! When they have torn off our skins, that will clothe. Save. At last.”
Before she was snatched back.
And he felt himself falling, falling, the human part of him. As his cheek encountered the stones, the funnels of a thousand mouths were directed upon him, and poured out over his body a substance he failed to identify.
When Himmelfarb was able once more to raise his head, he realized that, for the second time in his life, he had fainted, or God had removed him, mercifully, from his body. Now it was evening, and a strange one. Those objects which had appeared most solid before: the recently-built bath-houses, for instance, and the iron towers, were partially dissolved in mist. The well-planned establishment which he had known as Friedensdorf was enclosed in a blood-red blur, or aura, at the centre of which he lay, like a chrysalis swathed in some mysterious, supernatural cocoon. Other forms, presumably, though not distinguishably human, moved on transcendental errands within the same shape, no longer that intense crimson, but expanding to a loose orange. Of blue edges. He was reminded suddenly and vividly of the long, blue-grey, tranquil ash of an expensive cigar he had smoked somewhere. Of stubbing out a cigar by the orange light from a little lantern of oriental design. Then, of course, he remembered his friend Konrad Stauffer.
When his tardier senses returned.
His surroundings exploded into the consciousness of the man who was lying on the ground. What had seemed soothingly immaterial became most searingly concrete. A wound opened in his left hand. The blue-black gusts of smoke rushed in at his eyes and up his nostrils. Men were shouting. He could feel the breath of orange fire. Explosives convulsed the earth beneath his body. Bullets pitted the air, but rarely. It was the fire that predominated. Friedensdorf was burning.
It was then that Himmelfarb realized he had lost his spectacles. The discovery was more terrible than fire. Engulfed in his affliction, he began to grope about him, touching stones, a strip of hot metal, a little lake of some liquid stickiness, a twig, a stone, a stone, in that fruitless journey across what must remain an empty desert.
As he crawled and searched.
Or looked up at the orange blur, which seemed by now to be invading the whole of existence. Somewhere on the left a machine-gun hawked fire. Even his own breath issued from his mouth in a tongue of fire. As he blubbered, and panted. Searching. To focus again the blessed shapes of things.
He had covered so much ground, it was unlikely now. Though his hands continued for employment, to grope, and touch, long after he had strayed beyond reach of possibility. He touched wire. He tore his hands on the barbs of wire. He touched a cotton rag suspended from the same barbs. He was touching air. To the side of the rag, or flag of cotton, his hands suddenly encountered nothing but the soft air. There was, in fact, a small jagged gap, if not a vast triumphal arch in the peripheral fence. Someone had simply cut the wire.
Then the Jew bowed his head, and went out, still upon his knees. He shuffled upon his knees anywhere, or where it seemed indicated that he should. Over the stones he hobbled, like some deformity. Upon his torn knees. He must get up, he knew, but apart from the stiffness of his limbs, which made of this unnatural position a temporarily natural one, he had not yet crossed, he suspected, the line dividing hell from life. When the barbs entered his forehead, and he was not surprised to put out his hands and grasp a fresh agony of wire. It was, of course, the outer fence.
He might have hung there, content just to be ignored by the tormentor’s mind, if a moment of lethargy had not forced him to reach out for a fresh hold, to prevent himself from toppling. And for the second time, he found himself touching the mild, unobstructed air. And was goaded into wildest action by that very gentleness. All of him was tearing – flesh, breath, the stuff of his clothes – as he wrenched himself out of the grip of the wire. But got himself free, and manoeuvred through the narrow, the so very narrow rent, made by those who had cut their way out through the second barrier of wire.
The air was staggeringly cold that flung against his sweaty, bleeding forehead. Shapes welcomed, whether of men or trees, he had not the strength to wonder, but did at last touch bark. And dragged himself up, on to his feet. He wandered through a forest, from trunk to kindly trunk. The wet needles mingled with his skin, their scent spreading through that second maze, his skull, until he was almost drugged with freedom.
He walked on, and could have continued gratefully, if he had not come to what was by comparison a clearing, in which stood a band of virgin forms – young birches, they might have been – their skin so smooth and pure, he fell down against them, and lay crying, his mouth upon the wet earth.
Some time later men arrived. Whatever their complexion or beliefs, he could not have moved. They stood around him. Talking. Poles, he reasoned with what was left of his mind. And listened to their silence and their breathing as they carried him through an infinity of trees.
On arrival at a stench of pigs and straw, they laid him on the stove of a house to which they had brought him. He had no desire to leave the warmth and darkness. He lay with his head on a kind of hard block, when not actually at rest in the bosom of his Lord. Women came to dress his wounds. They would appear with soup. Thin and watery. A steam of cabbage. Sometimes there were dumplings in the soup, which made it rather more difficult.
On the third day, or so he calculated, they brought him somebody, a man of youthful voice, who spoke to him in German, and told him as much as the peasants knew of recent events at Friedensdorf.
Those of the prisoners kept alive by the Germans, to empty the gas chambers of corpses, and provide labour for the camp, had decided to mutiny, the Pole related. Weeks had been spent collecting and hiding arms and ammunition, and it was only after the arrival of the last train-load of Jews that the conspirators felt themselves strong enough to act. Then the slaves rose, killed the commandant and a number of the guards, exploded a fuel dump, set fire to part of the establishment, cut the wire, and were at that moment on their way to join the Resistance.
“And all those other Jews?” Himmelfarb ventured to ask.
The Pole believed most of them had died, some already of the gas fumes, the remainder by the fire which destroyed Friedensdorf.
He laughed.
“You are the lucky one!” he said.
And Himmelfarb, who had re-examined so often the sequence of his escape, could not bring himself to explain how it had been a miracle.
When he was rested and recovered, they dressed him and took him by the hand. That half-blind peasant could not have counted the num
ber of hands he touched as he stumbled on his journey eastward. Moving always in the same obliterating, perhaps merciful mist, he learned the smell of wet grass, of warm hay, of bruised turnips, of cows’ breath. He grew accustomed to hearing voices he could not understand, except when accompanied by touch, or expressing the emotions of songs. There were many common sounds he felt he had never heard before, and he found himself penetrating to unsuspected layers of silence. Above all, he learned to recognize that state of complete suspension in which men, like animals, wait for danger to pass.
It was not until Istanbul that Professor Himmelfarb recovered his sight, and something of his own identity. How the water shimmered, and the leaves of the trees were lifted. As he looked out from behind his brand-new spectacles, he had to lower his eyes, ashamed to accept the extravagant gifts that were offered him.
It was decided, then, that Himmelfarb, unlike many others, should be allowed to reach the Land, although, in the absence of some sure sign, or sanction, his own conscience continued to doubt his worthiness.
In the circumstances, he was reluctant to lift up his voice with those of his fellow passengers on the somewhat rusty freighter which carried them down the Turkish coast. The young Jews lounged on the fo’c’sle hatches, with their arms round one another and sang. All those young people, the thickish, hairy youths and green-skinned girls, germinated in the night-soil of Europe, had come that much closer to fulfilling their destiny. For the Jews were at last returning home. They would recognize the stones they had never seen, and the least stone would be theirs.
But the rather remote figure of the elderly man, a professor, it was said, seemed to have no part in it. As he continued to walk the deck, he would hesitate, and turn, carefully, perhaps not yet altogether reconciled to the rather-too-fashionable, recently-gotten, second-hand shoes. Certainly there was an immense gap between the age of the preoccupied figure and those of the jubilant younger Jews. Some of the latter called to him, inviting him to participate in their relief and joy, and even made a few harmless, friendly-sounding jokes. They soon gave up, however, averted their eyes and rummaged for peanuts in the little bags, which had been handed to them, together with other comforts, by a charitable local Jewess on the quay at Istanbul. Voluptuously, they lulled themselves. They began again, mumbling at first, then stirringly, to sing.
A number of the older Jews attempted to claim their share of good things, and join in the singing, but found they had not the mind for it. The sea air had given their cheeks a new, a positively healthy tinge, and their eyes were glazed with formal contentment from watching the pattern of crisp little waves repeat itself over and over on the classic waters. But in some of the older faces, the smiles were seen to stick halfway, as if caught up on an obstructing tooth, one of those gold landmarks. And there were individuals who were forced to stop their mouths with handkerchiefs, for fear their joy might get out of hand and not be recognized as such. After all, nobody was used to it yet. They had acquired that new and rather unmanageable emotion along with their new clothes, in many cases ill-fitting, from the organization in Istanbul.
The chosen people stood or sat about the decks, or leaned over the rails and watched the quite incredible sea. But Professor Himmelfarb walked, or stalked, between those who finally took him for granted. The relief committee had given a surprising amount of thought to what they had interpreted as the feelings and tastes of the elderly, cultivated refugee, who would no doubt be absorbed into the academic life of the university at Jerusalem. They had fitted him out with clothes which approximated to the kind he must always have worn. The top-coat, for instance, of European cloth and cut, had belonged originally to a Doctor of Philosophy at Yale. Now, as the present owner walked in the sea breezes on the crowded deck, the dark, capacious, yet somehow oppressive overcoat held plastered awkwardly against his sides, nobody would have questioned the distinguished man’s right to it. Unless himself.
At the reception centre he had stood too long with the coat in his hands, with the result that the Jewess who was supervising the distribution of clothing had been provoked to ask:
“Are you not pleased with your nice new overcoat, Professor Himmelfarb?”
The lady, who wore a moustache, and a wristwatch on a practical strap, had had some experience of kindergarten work.
“Yes,” he replied. “Pleased.”
But stood.
“Then, why don’t you take your coat,” she suggested kindly, “and go and sit with the others at the tables. Madame Saltiel is going to distribute a few comforts for the voyage. After that, there will be a cup of coffee.”
She touched him firmly on the elbow.
“But it is hardly right,” he said, “that I should accept what is not yet my due.”
“Of course it is your due!” insisted the lady, who was very busy, and who, in spite of her training, could become exasperated. “And it is our duty to make amends to those of our people who have suffered,” she tried to explain with gentleness.
“It is I who must make amends,” insisted her recalcitrant pupil. “I am afraid it may soon be forgotten that our being a people does not relieve us of individual obligations.”
But the lady propelled him towards the tables where other Jews were awaiting further largesse.
“I should take my coat, if I were you,” the lady advised, “and worry no more about it.”
She was too exhausted to respect delicate scruples. The little points of perspiration were clearly visible on the hairs of her moustache.
So Himmelfarb took the excellent coat, carrying it unhappily by one of its arms, and had to be reminded that his overcoat was trailing in the dust.
It was in the same reluctant frame of mind that he entered, or returned, to Jerusalem – as if he alone must refuse the freedom of that golden city, of which each stone racked him, not to mention the faces in the streets. One evening on a bare hillside, which the wind had treated with silver, he lay down, and it seemed at first as though the earth might open, gently, gently, to receive his body, but his soul would not allow, and dragged him to his feet, and he ran, or stumbled, down the hill, his coat-tail flying, so that a couple of Arabs laughed, and a British sergeant grew suspicious. Yet, at the foot of the hill, he was again clothed in dignity, and chose a lane that led through the trapped and tarnished light of evening, back into the city which, it seemed, would never be his.
There were many familiar figures on the streets, with greetings which ranged from the expansive to the elaborately judicious. On King George Avenue he ran into Appenzeller, the physicist, of Jena, whom he had known from student days, rather a coarse-skinned, bristly individual, who battered the backs of those he met to gain the advantage over them.
Appenzeller did not believe in ghosts. He opened with:
“Well, Himmelfarb, I shall not say I am surprised. You were always so substantial. Do you remember how they used to say you would go far? Well, you have arrived, my dear!” How he laughed at his own joke, and the pores round his nostrils oozed. “You have been up to Canopus, of course. Not yet? Well, we shall be expecting you. You will be useful to me,” he said. “Everyone has his part to play.”
Himmelfarb remembered the infallible stupidity of Appenzeller outside the laboratory and lecture theatre.
“Later on,” was all he could reply, with a reticence which gave his colleague opportunity for contempt.
Appenzeller recalled how an almost girlish diffidence would overtake his massive friend at times. The physicist was one of those who automatically interpret reserve as an encouraging sign of moral weakness.
“It is fatal to brood, you know,” he advised, looking as far as he could into the other’s eyes, though not far enough for his own satisfaction; he would have enjoyed dealing some kind of jovial blow. “Besides, it is no longer a luxury when so many others have suffered too.”
Advice would swim from Appenzeller’s skin, of which the pores had always been conspicuously large.
“I am about to go down
to Haifa,” Himmelfarb replied.
The physicist was surprised, not to say disappointed, to see that his tentative remark appeared to have left no trace of a wound. Appenzeller’s simplicity could perhaps have been explained by the fact that he himself had barely suffered.
“Family connections,” that dry number Himmelfarb continued. “I am told that I shall find my wife’s eldest brother in some kibbutz out near Ramat David.”
“Ah, family!” Appenzeller smiled. “I am happy to hear it.”
He coughed and giggled.
“We shall expect you, then, on your return. Refreshed. You will like it here,” he added, “if you don’t find there are too many Jews.”
After making his joke, Appenzeller took a friendly leave, and Himmelfarb was glad.
The latter did go down to Haifa, by a series of wartime buses and military lorries. He was carried some of the way along the road to Ramat David, but preferred to walk the final stretch before the settlement at which he hoped to find Ari Liebmann, his brother-in-law. He walked along the road which ran between tough little hills, built as battlements, so it appeared, to protect the spreading plain of the kibbutz. Once or twice he kicked at the surface of the road. All this was consecrated, he could not quite realize. Once, at the side of the road, he got upon his knees, amongst the stones, in the smell of dust, unable to restrain his longing to touch the earth.
At the kibbutz they were all occupied with the business of living. A woman in the office rose from her papers, and pointed at a field. Ari Liebmann and his wife, she said, were down there, amongst the tomatoes.
Ari, whom he remembered as a youth of mobile face and somewhat mercurial mind, had set in one of the opaque moulds of manhood. He was rather hard, dusty, grizzled. When the two men had embraced, and cried, they went to sit down beneath an olive tree, as the farmer had to admit it was an occasion.
“Rahel!” he called out across the sprawling entanglement of tomato bushes.
“This is my wife,” he explained incidentally.
Riders In the Chariot Page 24