Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Now as the molten light was poured into the office where Harry Rosetree sat, the two eyes which were watching him seemed to be set at discrepant angles, which, together with the presentation of the facial planes, suggested that here were two, or even more, distinct faces. Yet, on closer examination, all the versions that evolved, all the lines of vision that could be traced from the discrepant eyes, fell into focus. All those features which had appeared wilfully distorted and unrelated, added up quite naturally to make the one great archetypal face. It was most disturbing, exhilarating, not to say frightening.

  Until Mr Rosetree realized the old Jew he had employed for some time, that Himmelfarb, that Mordecai, had approached along the passage without his having heard, and was glancing in through a hatchway. Passing, passing, but hesitating. So the moment fixed in the hatchway suggested. It was one of those instants that will break with the ease of cotton threads.

  Mr Rosetree was trembling, whether from anger – he had never been able to stand the face of that old, too humble Jew – or from joy at discovering familiar features transferred from memory to the office hatchway, he would not have been the one to decide.

  Although his dry throat was compelled, still tremblingly enough. He was forced to mumble, while his joy and relief, fear and anger, swayed and tittupped in the balance:

  “Shalom! Shalom! Mordecai!”

  The face of the Jew Himmelfarb immediately appeared to brim with light. The windows, of course, were blazing with it at that hour.

  “Shalom, Herr Rosenbaum!” the Jew Mordecai replied.

  But immediately Mr Rosetree cleared his throat of anything that might have threatened his position.

  “Why the hell,” he asked, “don’t you knock off along with other peoples?”

  He had got up. He was walking about, balanced on the balls of his small feet, rubbery and angry.

  “Do you want to make trouble with the union?” Mr Rosetree asked.

  “I am late,” Himmelfarb explained, “because I could not find this case.”

  He produced a small, fibre case, of the type carried by schoolchildren and, occasionally, workmen, and laid it as concrete evidence on the hatchway shelf.

  Mr Rosetree was furious, but fascinated by the miserable object, which had already begun to assume a kind of monstrous importance.

  “How,” he exploded, “you could not find this case?”

  He might have hit, if he would not have loathed so much as to touch it.

  “It was mislaid,” the old Jew answered very quietly. “Perhaps even hidden. As a joke, of course.”

  “Which men would play such a wretched joke?”

  “Oh,” said Himmelfarb, “a young man.”

  “Which?”

  The room was shuddering.

  “Oh,” said Himmelfarb, “I cannot say I know his name. Only that they call him Blue.”

  The incident was, of course, ludicrous, but Mr Rosetree had become obsessed by it.

  “For Chrissake,” he asked, “what for do you need this demmed case?”

  How repellent he found all miserable reffo Jews. And this one in particular, the owner of the cheap, dented case.

  Then the old Jew looked down his cheekbones. He took a key from an inner pocket. The case sprang tinnily, almost indecently open.

  “I do not care to leave them at home,” Himmelfarb explained.

  Harry Rosetree held his breath. There was no avoiding it; he would have to look inside the case. And did. Briefly. He saw, indeed, what he had feared: the fringes of the Tallith, the black thongs of the Tephillin, wound round and round the Name.

  Mr Rosetree could have been in some agony.

  “Put it away, then!” He trembled. “All this Quatsch! Will you Jews never learn that you will be made to suffer for the next time also?”

  “If it has to be,” Himmelfarb replied, manipulating the catches of his case.

  “A lot of Quatsch!” Mr Rosetree repeated.

  That intolerable humid weather had the worst effect on him. As his face showed.

  The wretched Jew had begun to go.

  “Himmelfarb!” Mr Rosetree called, through rubbery, almost unmanageable lips. “You better take the two days,” he ordered, “for the Seder business. But keep it quiet, the reason why. For all anyone will know,” here he became hatefully congested, “you could have gone …” but still choked, with some disgust for phlegm or words.

  His veins were protesting, too, to say nothing of his purple skin.

  “… SICK,” he succeeded finally in shouting.

  The employee inclined his head with such discretion, the favour could have been his due. As for the employer, he might have taken further offence, but was a fleshy man, suffering from blood pressure, and already emotionally exhausted.

  “Who will decide,” he sighed, “what forms sickness takes?”

  But very soft. And was in no way comforted.

  “Hier! Himmelfarb!” he bawled, as his inferior was preparing for the second time to leave.

  Mr Rosetree had just the strength to remember something, however embarrassing the thought. And was floundering around in his breast pocket. He was flapping a wallet.

  “Für Pessach,” Mr Rosetree grunted.

  The old Jew was rather startled. His employer was dangling what appeared to be a five-pound note.

  “Nehmen Sie! Nehmen Sie!” Mr Rosetree threatened. “Himmelfarb! Für Pessach!”

  Harry Rosetree was not so innocent he did not believe a man might pay for his sins. Yet, an abominable innocence seemed to have washed the face of Himmelfarb quite, quite clean of any such suspicion.

  He had come back. He said:

  “I would ask you, Mr Rosetree, to give it, rather, to somebody in need.”

  With that sweetness of innocence which is bitterest to those who taste it.

  Then Mr Rosetree grew real angry. He began to curse all demmed Jews. He cursed himself for his foolishness. He dared to curse his own father’s loins.

  “This is where I will give these few demmed quids!” Harry Rosetree shouted.

  As he crumpled up the note. And worried it apart. He did not tear it, exactly, because his fury could not rise to an act of such precision.

  “So!”

  Revenge made him sound hoarse.

  If he had been able to atone in any way for the burst of destruction he had inspired, Himmelfarb would have done so, but for the moment that was impossible. Because, whatever the hatchway suggested, the wall prevented. He could not even have picked up the irregular pieces, which, he saw, had settled round his employer’s feet.

  So he had to say:

  “I am sorry to have caused you such distress.”

  Aware that humility can appear, at times, more offensive than arrogance itself, he tried to soften the blow by adding:

  “Shalom, Herr Rosenbaum!”

  And went.

  A passive, but possessive heat ushered in the Season of Freedom. The heads of grass were bowed with summer. Limp wigs of willows, black at the seams, yellowing in hanks, were by now the feeblest disguises. Although carpets had been laid on the afternoon of the Seder night, they were of the coarsest, most tarnished yellow that a late-summer light could provide. Mere runners, moreover. But the heavy, felted light did lead, or so it appeared at that hour, over the collapsed grass and tufts of blowsy weed, to the brown house in which the Jew of Sarsaparilla had elected to live.

  Neighbours were unaware, of course, that peculiar rites might be expected of the owner of the disgraceful, practically derelict house. Nor had the Jew availed himself for some years of the freedom which the season offered, feeling that his solitary trumpet blast might sound thin and poor in a celebration which called for the jubilance of massed brass. Until, at the present time, some welling of the spirit, need to establish identity of soul, foreboding of impending events, made him long to contribute, if only an isolated note.

  So, in the afternoon, Himmelfarb went about setting the Seder table, as he had seen clone. He layed
the tablecloth which his neighbour Mrs Godbold had starched stiff, and ironed flat, and stuck together with its own cleanliness. Moving in a kind of mechanical agitation of recollected gestures, he put the shankbone and the burnt egg. He put the flat Matsah, the dish of bitter herbs, and the cup for wine. But was distressed by his own conjuring. The mere recollection of some of the more suggestive wonders would have prevented him performing them. Or the absence of an audience. Or the presence of ghosts: the rows of cousins and aunts, the Cantor Katzmann, the Lady from Czernowitz, the dreadful dyer of his youth – all of them, with the exception of one whom he preferred to leave faceless, expectant of his skill.

  At that point he remembered the stranger: how they would stand the door open for anyone who chose to walk in. In imitation, he opened his, and put a stone against it. Though he doubted whether he would have dared lift the cup to any stranger’s lips, for fear his own emotion might trouble, or even spill the wine. So that he could no longer bear to look at his property table, with its aching folds of buckram, and the papier mâché symbols of Pessach. It would not have leen illogical if, in the course of the farce he was elaborating, a Hanswurst had risen through the floor, and flattened the table with one blow from his bladder. In anticipation, a bird was shrieking out of a bush. Through the open doorway, Himmelfarb saw, the human personality was offered choice of drowning in a grass ocean, or exposure to the great burning-glass of sky.

  Then the Jew, who had in his day been given to investigating what is above and what is below, took fright at the prospect of what might be in store for him. He began to walk about his house, with little, short, quick steps. He was quite boxed. All around him, behind the sticks of trees, were the boxes containing other lives, but involved in their own esoteric rites, or mystical union with banality. He would not have presumed to intrude, yet, it was so very necessary to unite.

  It was his own open door which finally persuaded that he was the stranger whom some doorway must be waiting to receive. He would walk straight in, into the atmosphere of questions, and cinnamon, and songs. He would sit down without being asked, because he had been expected.

  It took him seconds to fetch his hat. After first haste, and an episode with the front steps, he settled down quietly enough to the journey. Nor did it disturb him to think he had not locked his house.

  In Sarsaparilla, Himmelfarb caught the bus. Buses were always amiable enough. It was the trains that still alarmed at times, because of the passengers substituted for those who had started out. But at Barranugli, where the train was waiting for him, he did not experience distress. His tremendous decision to make the journey had restored to the Jew the gentleness of trust. He smiled at faces he had never seen before. With luck, he calculated, he might arrive in time for Kiddush.

  So they started again.

  It was the kindest hour of evening, strewing the floors with a light of trodden dandelions. Mostly ladies filled the train. As they sat and talked together, of cakes, and illnesses, and relatives – or just talked, they worked the words inside their mouths like the bread of kindness, or sugared lollies. The mauve plastic of their gums shone. Temporarily the slashes in the train upholstery were concealed by corsetted behinds, the brown smells of rotten fruit overcome by the scents of blameless, but synthetic flowers.

  Himmelfarb the Jew sat and smiled at all faces, even those which saw something to resent. He was delivered by his journey as seldom yet by prayer. Journeys implied a promise, as he had been taught, and known, but never dared accept. A promise that he would not dare, yet, envisage. Only an address, which he had heard discussed at smoke-o, of the Home Beautiful, the promised house. In Persimmon Street, Paradise East. So he clung to that promise. He nursed it all the way in the obviously festive train.

  Outside, humidity and conformity remained around ninety-three, Round the homes, the dahlias lolled. Who could have told whose were biggest? Who could have told who was who? Not the plastic ladies, many of whom, as they waited to shove chops in front of men, exchanged statements over fences, or sat drooping over magazines, looking for the answers to the questions.

  By such light, Himmelfarb was persuaded he could have answered many of those.

  A lady at his side, who, in anticipation of Easter, had pinned kindness to her bosom in letters of glass, told him how she used to bury gramophone needles under hydrangea bushes, when there were gramophone needles, but now there were none.

  “And here am I,” she said, “reared a Congregationalist, but attending the Baptist Church, because it pleases my son-in-law. Are you a Baptist, perhaps,” she asked.

  “I am a Jew,” the Jew replied.

  “Arrrr!” said the lady.

  She had not heard right, only that it sounded something funny. Her skin closed on itself rather fearfully.

  All the ladies, it appeared, had paused for a moment in their breathing. They were slavering on their plastic teeth. Before they began to clatter again.

  Presently they were carried under the city, and many of the ladies, including Himmelfarb’s neighbour, were discharged. The train issued lighter out of the earth, with those whose faith drove them on. As they prepared to cross the water, the Jew sat forward on his seat. The sky opened for them, and the bridge put forth its span, and they passed effortlessly over the glittering water. As it had happened before, so it had been arranged again for that day.

  So the Jew had to give thanks as they mounted the other side, through a consecrated landscape, in which the promised homes began to assemble, in pools of evening, and thickets of advanced shrubs.

  Where Himmelfarb was at last put down, roses met him, and led him all the way. Had he been blind, he could have walked by holding on to ropes of roses. As it was, the roselight filtering through the nets of leaves intoxicated with its bland liquor. Till the Jew was quite flushed and unsteady from his homecoming. He had grown weak. In fact, on arrival at the gate, he had to get a grip of the post, and ever so slightly bent the metal letter-box, which was in the shape of a little dovecote, empty of doves.

  It was Shirl Rosetree who looked out of the apricot brick home, and saw.

  She called at once:

  “Har-ry! Waddaya know? It is that old Jew. At this hour. Now what the hell? I can’t bear it! Do something quick!”

  “What old Jew?” Harry Rosetree asked.

  He turned cold. Excitement was bad for him.

  “Why, the one from over at the factory, of course.”

  “But you never seen him,” her husband protested.

  “I know. But just know. It could only be that one.”

  Even his diversity did not alter the fact that there was only one Jew. It was her father, and her grandmother in a false moustache, and her cousins, and the cousins of cousins. It was the foetus she had dropped years ago, scrambling into the back of a cart, in darkness, to escape from a Polish village.

  Shulamith Rosenbaum struck herself with the flat of her hand just above her breasts. Too hard. It jarred, and made her cough.

  “I’m gunna be sick, Harry, if you don’t do something about that man.”

  Because she had learnt to suffer from various women’s ailments, she added:

  “I’m not gunna get mixed up in any Jews’ arguments. It does things to me. And packing still to finish. I will not be persecuted. First it was the goy, now it is the Jew. All I want is peace, and a nice home.”

  She would have liked to look frail, but a grievance always made her swell.

  “Orright, orright!” Harry Rosetree said. “For what reasons, Shirl, are you getting hysterical?”

  He himself was flickering, for the Jew Mordecai had begun to advance up the gravel drive. If the visitor’s pace appeared shambly, his head suggested that he was possessed of a certain strength.

  “For what reason?” Mrs Rosetree slashed. “Because I know me own husband!”

  “For Chrissake!” The husband laughed, or flickered.

  “And is he soft!” Shirl Rosetree shouted. “Lets himself be bounced by any Jew because
it is the Seder night. And who will have to bounce the Jew?”

  “Orright, Shirl,” her husband said, making it of minor importance. “We will simply tell him we are packing for our journey.”

  “We!” Shirl Rosetree laughed. “Jew or Christian, I am the one that has to tell. Because, Haïm, you do not like to. It is easiest to pour the chicken soup into everyone that comes. My chicken soup, gefüllter Fisch, Latkes, and what have you! You are the big noise, the generous man. Well, I will tell this old bludge there is nothing doing here tonight. We do not know what he even means. We are booked at My Blue Mountain Home for Easter, leaving Good Friday, in our own car, after the Stations of the Cross.”

  If she stopped there, it was because she could have shocked herself. They stood looking at each other, but so immersed in the lower depths of the situation, they did not observe that the sweat was streaming from every exposed pore of their skins. They had turned yellow, too.

  “We was told at the convent we was never on no account to lose our tempers,” Rosie Rosetree said, who had come into the hall.

  She was growing up a thin child.

  “They better learn you not to be bold,” her mother said. “Nobody was losing their tempers.”

  “A gentleman has just come,” her father added.

  “What gentleman?” Rosie wondered, squinting through the pastel-blue venetians.

  She was not interested in people.

  “You may well ask!” her mother could not resist.

  And laughed, opening a vein of jolly, objective bitterness.

  The father was making noises which did not in any way explain.

  The child’s face had approached close to that of the stranger, the other side of the intervening blind. She squinted up and down through the slats, to look him right over.

  “His clothes are awful,” Rose Rosetree announced.

  Then she went away, for she had completely lost interest. Charity was an abstraction, or at most a virtue she had not seen reason to adopt. It was something lovely, but superfluous, talked about by nuns.

  Yet, her father was a good man.

  Now he had opened the door. He sounded funny-loud, but indistinct.