Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Harry Rosetree said:

  “Well, Mr Himmelfarb, it is quite an unexpected visit.”

  The machinery of social intercourse was turning again.

  Where Himmelfarb had felt there would be no need for explanation, he now saw that eventually he must account for his behaviour. But not now. He was, simply, too tired. He only hoped their common knowledge might be shared as an implicit joy.

  “I will sit down. If you don’t mind,” said the unexpected guest.

  And did so suddenly, on a little rosewood stool that Mrs Rosetree had never intended to be sat on. It caused the owner of the stool to stand forth.

  But her husband intervened.

  “You better sit there for a bit, and relax. You are pretty well flogged,” Mr Rosetree said, using a word he did not seem to remember ever having used before.

  But Mrs Rosetree stood forth. Her house-coat, in one of those colours it was sometimes her good fortune to lose her head over, not only concealed her plumpy forms, it created drama, even tragedy. Earlier that afternoon, she had lacquered her nails. Now she remembered again to stand with her fingers stretched stiff, in an attitude of formal guilt. From the very beginning, the tips of her fingers could have been dripping blood.

  “It is a pity my husband did not explain, Mr Himmelfarb,” Mrs Rosetree said.

  The fact that nobody had been introduced to anybody did not seem to matter, because by now everybody had grasped the part that each was intended to play.

  “Did not explain.” Mrs Rosetree proceeded to. “That we had planned to go away. For Easter. After tomorrow is already Good Friday, you must know.”

  Mrs Rosetree smiled to assist, and the wet-looking lipstick with which she had anointed her otherwise naked skin, glittered like an accident.

  “I do not want to appear inhospitable,” she said. “Not to anybody. But you know what it is, Mr Himmelfarb, to shut up the home. All those little things. And the kids. Not even hardly time to open a tin of baked beans. Because I will not stock up with a lot of fresh food, to leave for rats to gorge on, and ourselves perhaps contract the yellow jaundice.”

  Mrs Rosetree’s head was all barbed with little pins, at mercilessly regular intervals, to control the waves that were being moulded on her.

  Harry Rosetree had to admire his wife for an unfailingly ruthless materialism, such as he himself had been able to cultivate for use in business only. But to Shirl, of course, life was a business.

  As he stood looking down upon the crown of the old Jew’s head, he said:

  “We couldn’t run to a pick-me-up, eh, for Himmelfarb, to celebrate an occasion?”

  Mrs Rosetree’s throat began to debate, or grumble.

  “I wouldn’t know about occasions. He better sit still first. It isn’t right for elderly people to go swilling alcohol after they have been exerting themselves. I wouldn’t give it to my own father, for fear it might bring something on.”

  Then, with an air of having laid tribute on an altar, Mrs Rosetree went away, to allow matters to take their course.

  So that Haïm ben Ya’akov was left with the stranger Mordecai on the Seder night.

  In the absence of rejoicing, there was nothing he could offer the guest from his full house. Indeed, it was possible that the house no longer belonged to him, that nothing could belong to a Jew beyond his own skin and certain inherited truths.

  The stranger did not attempt to deny. He sat with his head bent, in a state of apparent exhaustion, or acceptance. He was too passive to imply, yet did.

  So Harry Rosetree, who was, in any case, not a Jew, began to grow impatient, if not actually irritable. Surrounded by veneer, the stranger’s shoes were becoming provokingly meek and dusty.

  Then Himmelfarb looked up, as if realizing the awkward situation in which he had placed his host.

  “It is all right,” he said, and smiled. “I shall be going soon.”

  “Well, Himmelfarb,” Mr Rosetree found it easier to reply, “it was unexpected, to say the least. And life does not stand still. You must excuse me if I leave you for a little. I gotta water a few shrubs before it is dark.”

  Because Mr Rosetree had learnt what was done in the suburb in which he happened to be living for the time being.

  “But,” he added, “you are at liberty to rest here just as long as you feel it is necessary. A man of your age cannot afford to neglect the health.”

  Himmelfarb continued sitting in the Rosetrees’ hall, which was less a room than a means of protecting the owners from the unwanted; their strength could not be questioned while they remained hidden. At that hour the light was failing. Many of the glassy surfaces were already dulled. But the glint of opulence, together with all the mechanical sounds of success, still issued from the house behind.

  Presently a boy appeared. He was already tall, but not yet furnished. In that light the contours of his face shone like yellow wax. He himself could have been holding a taper, if not a scroll.

  The boy frowned, who had not bargained for a visitor.

  Himmelfarb was grateful even for a presence.

  “The Bar Mitzvah boy,” he could not help himself.

  “Eh?” exclaimed the boy, and frowned deeper.

  All of this was part of something he sensed he must resent, but only sensed.

  “You are thirteen,” the stranger remarked with certainty.

  The boy grunted agreement, but full of hate.

  “What is your name?”

  “Steve,” answered the boy.

  He would get out pretty soon.

  “What else?” the man insisted. “Haven’t you a real name?”

  The boy’s throat was working.

  “One of ours?” the stranger persevered.

  The boy was full of disgust, not to say horror. He hated the madman in the hall.

  And went from there without answering, on his rubber soles.

  So that there was nothing with which the stranger might identify himself, and he would have gone if his limbs had allowed him.

  But a girl came. She was looking rather feverish. And thin. Her hair was minced up into little, quivering curls.

  “Good-evening,” he began. “You are the daughter.”

  “Oh, yes,” she admitted, but that was unimportant. “I have been reading the life of the Little Flower,” she said, because she loved to tell about herself. “It is lovely. It is my favourite book. But any saints are interesting.”

  “Have you come across those of Safed and Galicia?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I never heard about them. They wouldn’t be real, not Catholic saints.”

  But even that was unimportant.

  She came closer to him to confess.

  “Do you know, I am going to have a vocation. I am praying for it, and if you pray hard enough, it comes. I am praying that the wounds will open in my hands.”

  In the half-light she was rubbing the thin palms of her hands, and showing.

  But the telephone rang, and the mother came. So the daughter hid her hands.

  Mrs Rosetree, still wearing her house-coat, of which the colour suddenly illuminated in the old man’s mind the whole, exhausting, perennial journey, very carefully disentangled the telephone cord, and carried the instrument round the corner. For privacy. Even so, the corner revealed the burning azure of Mrs Rosetree’s behind.

  “Hello?” answered Mrs Rosetree. “This is JM 3 … Marge! Why, Marge!” Mrs Rosetree cried. “I dunno what’s got hold of this line. Come closer into the ’phone.”

  The daughter made a face.

  “That is Mumma’s friend,” she said. “And she’s a pain.”

  “Why, Marge, I would of rung you,” Mrs Rosetree was protesting, “but went to the hairdresser’s … Yairs, Yairs. That one. I gotta leave him, Marge. His wife is having some trouble. Always the same. Every time …”

  The child pressed against the stranger in the dusk. She had to whisper.

  “You know about St Tereese and the roses? I think I once saw a rose. A wh
ite rose.”

  “Arr, nao, nao, Marge! I would of rung you,” Mrs Rosetree was saying. “But then I went to the pictures … Yairs. Yairs…. It was a love story … Yairs. No story much, but it made you feel good….”

  In the dusk the paper roses twittered round Himmelfarb. The voices of love breathed a synthetic heliotrope.

  “Yes, Marge.” Mrs Rosetree laughed. “I gotta. I gotta have my ration of love.”

  “Why do you tell me all this?” Himmelfarb whispered to the little girl. “The roses, and the wounds?”

  “On Good Friday, after…. Yairs. After the Stations of the Cross … Yairs,” said Mrs Rosetree with great patience. “Well, dear, we have our obligations to the Church. Well, you see, Marge, that is something you will never understand if you are not one yourself.”

  The daughter was sucking her mouth in, and thinking.

  “I like to tell somebody,” she said. “Once in a while. People I won’t ever see again.”

  In fact, she had already dismissed her collaborator.

  But whirled him back for a moment in a gust of her especial hysteria.

  “Besides,” she giggled, “you are sort of spooky!”

  “Nao, Marge,” Mrs Rosetree was insisting. “There is nobody…. Sure… Well, yes, a chap came, but is going…. Nobody … Yes, dear, I tell you, he is go-ing. …”

  With the result that the stranger got up and went. The door had been standing open ever since he came.

  When Mrs Rosetree had finished her conversation, she returned from round the corner with the telephone, and said:

  “Don’t tell me that man has gone! What can you have done to him?”

  Her daughter, who had given up answering her parents, continued to rub her finger round a window that did not open.

  “These old Jews,” Mrs Rosetree explained, “will land on you, and then you have had it.”

  “Was he a Jew?” the child asked.

  “Was he a Jew!”

  Mrs Rosetree spoke and laughed so softly, she could have been referring not to the stranger, but to some part of her own body that was a secret between herself and the doctor – her womb, for instance.

  “Like Our Saviour!” exclaimed the little girl.

  Who began to cry extravagantly. Because she would never experience a miracle. However long she waited for the hands to touch.

  “Arr, now, Rosie,” the mother protested. “I will fetch the milk of magnesia. Cry, cry! Over nothing,”

  “It is the age, perhaps.” The mother sighed.

  And went softly, tenderly, into the kitchen, to heat up some chicken soup with Kneidlach, and to taste that chopped chicken liver she had bullied the daily into pounding up good.

  If her husband did not come – he usually did whenever a smell of food arose – it was because he was still in the bush-house. If he had held no further conversation with the Jew Mordecai before the latter left, it was because the bush-house had prevented him from doing this too. The bush-house – and propagation area – which Mrs Rosetree had wanted so bad until she got it, had fascinated him from the beginning, as well as offering a refuge on occasions, never more needful than that evening, as the familiar stars appeared between the twigs, and the feet of the departing guest were heard on the gravel.

  At one end of the balcony above the narrow street in which they used to live, they would weave a few sticks together, into a rough canopy. At that end the dish-clouts hung at normal times, and even during Succoth there remained the heavy smell of dish-water. Into which they would drag their mattresses, and lie. The whole family. Their blood almost running together. During the festival of Succoth they never seemed to leave their tabernacle, unless the rain came, very unpleasant, causing them to scatter, and the old people to pat one another’s clothes to estimate the dangers. But normally they would lie, all through the nights of Succoth, under the smell of dish-water, the grandfather groaning, and snoring, and breaking wind, the boy Haïm ben Ya’akov looking at those same stars.

  Now Mrs Rosetree called:

  “Har-ry? All this good soup will be getting cold. You don’t wanta be afraid. He’s gone. Tt tt! Har-ry! The night air is gunna play hell with you!”

  By the time Himmelfarb returned along the streets of Paradise East, the ropes of roses had disintegrated. The houses, too, had dissolved, although the windows had set into shapes of solid light, thus proving that something does survive. Filled with such certainty, or an evening feed of steak, the bellies of stockbrokers had risen like gasometers. As the stockbrokers stood, pressing their thumbs over the nozzles of hoses, to make the water squirt better, they discussed the rival merits of thuya orientalis and retinospera pisifera plumosa. All the gardens of Paradise East were planted for posterity. All the homes were architect-planned. From one window, certainly, a voice had begun to scream, strangled, it seemed, by its boa of roses, and so unexpected, the noise could have carried from some more likely suburb.

  Himmelfarb reached the station, and caught the little train. Again it appeared to have been waiting for him, as if by arrangement, to run him back into that country which, for the hostage, there is no escaping.

  He did not complain actively. It was the train. The train rocked and grumbled, and communicated to his still passive body something of the night of desolation. The plastic ladies, of course, had been too pastel to last, and faded out with afternoon. At night it was the men who prevailed and rumbled in the train. The facts they were exchanging might have sounded brutal if they had not already been worn down by the users: by the thin, copper-coloured blokes, and the bluish, pursy ones, bursting with hair like the slashed upholstery in trains. As they rocked, there was a smell of peanuts, and wet paper bags, and beer, and tunnels.

  Here and there, as it lurched, the train threatened to blunder into the private lives of individuals. In the kitchens of many homes, gentlemen in singlets were only now assaulting their plastic sausages, ladies were limply tumbling the spaghetti off the toast on which they had been so careful to put it, daughters daintier than their mums were hurrying to get finished, for ever, but for ever. Over all, the genie of beef dripping still hovered in his blue robe. But magic was lacking. And in narrow rooms, emptied boys, rising from sticky contemplation of some old coloured pin-up, prepared to investigate the dark.

  The train burst across the night where it was suspended, miraculously, over water. In the compartments no one but the Jew appeared to notice they were returning to a state of bondage they had never really left. But the Jew now knew he should not have expected anything else.

  The train was easing through the city which knives had sliced open to serve up with all the juices running – red, and green, and purple. All the syrups of the sundaes oozing into the streets to sweeten. The neon syrup coloured the pools of vomit and the sailors’ piss. By that light, the eyes of the younger, gaberdine men were a blinding, blinder blue, when not actually burnt out. The blue-haired grannies had purpled from the roots of their hair down to the ankles of their pants, not from shame, but neon, as their breasts chafed to escape, from shammy-leather back to youth, or else roundly asserted themselves, like chamberpots in concrete. As for the young women, they were necessary. As they swung along, or hung around a corner, or on an arm, they were the embodiment of thoughts and melons. As if the thoughts of the gaberdine men had risen from the ashes behind their fused eyeballs, and put on flesh at last, of purple, and red, and undulating green. There were the kiddies, too. The kiddies would continue to suck at their slabs of neon, until they had learnt to tell the time, until it was time to mouth other sweets.

  All along the magnesium lines swayed the drunken train. Because the night itself was drunk, the victims it had seemed to invite were forced to follow suit. Himmelfarb was drunk, not to the extent of brutishness; he had not yet fetched up. Released from the purple embrace, sometimes he tottered. Sometimes hurtled. Watching.

  As the darkness spat sparks, and asphalt sinews ran with salt sweat, the fuddled trams would be tunnelling farther into the furr
y air, over the bottle-tops, through the smell of squashed pennies, and not omitting from time to time to tear an arm out of its screeching socket. But would arrive at last under the frangipani, the breezes sucking with the mouths of sponges. Sodom had not been softer, silkier at night than the sea gardens of Sydney. The streets of Nineveh had not clanged with such metal. The waters of Babylon had not sounded sadder than the sea, ending on a crumpled beach, in a scum of French-letters.

  At one point the train in which Himmelfarb huddled on his homeward journey farted extra good. And stopped.

  The man opposite paused in stuffing cold potato-chips into his mouth.

  “Whoa-err, Matilda!” shouted the rather large man, and brayed.

  Through a mash of cold potato.

  But the foreign cove did not understand a joke.

  Or was listening to the radio which had begun to sing in the stationary night. Some song which the potato-eater did not bother to recognize.

  “O city of elastic kisses and retracting dreams!” the psalmist sang;

  “O rivers of vomit, O little hills of concupiscence, O immense plains of complacency!

  “O great, sprawling body, how will you atone, when your soul is a soft peanut with the weevils in it?

  “O city of der-ree. …”

  But the train choked the voice by starting. And continued. And continued. And after much further travel the old Jew found himself descending the lane – or avenue – in which he lived. He was shaking now, and threatened with falling amongst the swathes of paspalum which tried perpetually to mow him down. He was almost crying for all that he had seen and experienced that night, not because it existed in itself, but because he had made it live in his own heart.

  So he reached his door, and felt for the Mezuzzah on the doorpost, to touch, to touch the Sh’ma, not so much in the hope of being rescued, as to drive the hatred out.

  The miracle did, in fact, occur almost at the same moment as he noticed a light approaching, swaying and jumping, as the one who held it negotiated the uneven ground. Distance, shadows, light itself finally made way, and Himmelfarb recognized the figure of Mrs Godbold, carrying an old hurricane-lamp which he had known her take before on missions at night.