“I listened for you, sir, and heard you come. I am sorry,” she apologized, “if I disturb. But have a reason.”
Even so, she remained embarrassed.
And Himmelfarb could have been happier. The love that he should have returned any living creature was still a shabby, tattered one.
Then he noticed that his neighbour was holding a dish, on it something insignificant and black.
Mrs Godbold looked down. She was made immensely solid by that rudimentary light. Yet, a white transparency of light had transfigured her normally opaque skin.
“This is some lamb, sir,” she explained, at once heavy and tremulous, “that a lady gives us every year at Easter.”
“Lamb?” Himmelfarb repeated, in some desperation, from a fit of nausea, not for present circumstances, but perhaps a past incident, he could not for the moment remember what.
“Yes,” she said, and repeated: “For Easter. Have you forgotten? The day after tomorrow – no, tomorrow already is Good Friday. The factory will be closed. You will have to think of how you will be living for quite a number of days.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. It is also Easter.”
Mrs Godbold was again confused. She looked down at the still only partly explained object on her dish.
“The lady gives us the leg,” she said, and blushed by lantern-light. “But this year the puppy got hold of it. Not all that much. We tidied up the other end for ourselves. And the shank was not touched. I brought it, sir. I thought you might care to make a little celebration.”
“For Easter.”
Now that his voice had stuck, he could not avoid repeating things.
“That is not the point,” Mrs Godbold said, and again she blushed. “Everybody has got to eat. Whatever the time of year.”
Then he took the dish from her. The long, leaping shadows from the jumping lantern made them both look very awkward.
He began talking, in quick, nervous, little, stabbing phrases, putting his tongue out a good deal.
“You will be glad. Not that it will be, well,” he chose with some care, “a holiday, exactly. For you. I expect. But for what it signifies.”
“Oh,” she answered, “I am always glad at Eastertide. Because, then, suffering is over. Or so they tell us. For a little.”
That she should not appear to have offered a variant of her own, she continued rather quickly:
“It was more of Easter at Home, of course. There was the flowers. The scent of flowers. The narcissies. And the white anemones we would pick if we cut across the woods. Oh, and blackthorn!” she remembered; it was, indeed, a joyful find. “I think I liked the blackthorn best. The flowers were the whitest, on the black sticks. We children would sometimes bring the flowers to decorate our Table. Oh, it would look lovely when they had lit the candles. It would look alive. Then it did seem as though the world was re-born. The mass of blackthorn was like a whole tree flowering on the Table of our church. It was not much of a one, sir, by any great standards. But on Easter Day we would know Our Lord had risen.”
Mrs Godbold’s trumpet voluntary sounded solitary, but true.
“But, of course,” she hastened, “we would have known without all that. All the flowers on earth could wither up, and we would still know.”
Then the Jew hung his head.
But she saw, and at once she touched him with her voice, saying:
“You must forgive me. I must not waste your time. You will not be up for work. The lamb is nothing, but you are welcome to it – only if you would care.”
When she had left, and he had gone inside, and switched the light on, and it had rained down on his almost empty living-room, he realized that he had to face the disaster of his Seder table. Still untouched, the past few hours seemed to have made a sculpture of it, not of rejoicing, but of lament. Here, rather, was the tomb of all those, including himself, who had not survived the return journey, and he, risen from the dead, the keeper of it. That he knew, he knew. He touched the clay of Egypt, which time had turned browner. And herbs, never so bitter as facts. That he knew for certainty.
Then the Jew saw that he was still carrying Mrs Godbold’s dish, and that the wretched shankbone which his neighbour had brought as an offering was almost the twin of the one he had laid that afternoon on his own Seder table.
XIII
Because the telephone is the darkest, the most sepulchral oracle of all, Mrs Flack would stalk around that instrument for quite a while before she was persuaded to accept the summons. Although a considerable pythoness herself, it might have been that she felt the need for invocation before encounter with superior powers. Or was it, simply, that she feared to hear the voice of doom addressing her personally?
Either way, she would at last be heard:
“Oh? Ah? Yairs. No. No! Yairs! Perhaps. Who can tell? I will have to think it over and give you an answer. Well, now! Those who know, need not ask.”
As she parried with a shield of wooden words, it would begin to appear as though she had mislaid her matchless sword, and the armour of disbelief, with which she had been careful to gird herself, had turned audibly to buckram.
Mrs Jolley, who enjoyed the gift of being able to overhear without actually listening, had even known her friend reply:
“You cannot expect me to be wise to everythink. Can you, now?”
It made Mrs Jolley wonder, but she continued to immerse the dishes, which was one of the duties she performed in return for friendship and a very small remuneration.
Mrs Jolley soon learned that, of all the telephone voices, there was perhaps only one to which Mrs Flack could genuinely respond. On such occasions the true glue of prophecy would be poured back, into the funnel of the telephone, on to the missing questions. Mrs Jolley could tell that her friend’s rather dry and freckled hands were moulding the warm bakelite into an altogether different shape.
Mrs Jolley would hear:
“If you was so foolish as to leave off your singlet as well, then what can you expect? Oh, dear, dear! I would advise you to rub your chest before retiring, and see as the blanket is pulled right up, and sweat it out with a couple of aspro, and a drop of somethink. It is you who must answer for your own health, whoever else is willin’ to.”
On one occasion Mrs Jolley heard:
“I do not expect feelin’s where feelin’s do not exist. But expect them to be respected where they do. Eh? No, you do not understand. You do not understand. No one understands no more, unless it is put in American.”
When her friend returned to the kitchen, Mrs Jolley could not resist:
“Ah, dear, some people are terrible.”
But Mrs Flack did not appear to hear.
“Some young fellers,” Mrs Jolley ventured further, “are all for themselves nowadays.”
Mrs Flack had risen to the surface, but her thoughts were floating after her.
“That nephew of yours is giving you a lot of trouble,” said Mrs Jolley, and chipped a plate on the tap.
“There is no trouble,” replied Mrs Flack, “where a person’s life is his own.”
“Oh, no, where a person’s life is his own.” Mrs Jolley sighed.
She did wonder where.
There was the morning – it was the Thursday of Easter, Mrs Jolley would remember – the telephone had rung that sharp, she broke the little butter-dish with the gum-nuts on it, which she hid behind the dresser to dispose of when convenient.
Mrs Flack answered, as usual, but only after bells had begun to ring at every end of a lady’s nerves.
Mrs Jolley heard:
“Waddaya know! I would never ever! Golly, I am pleased Blue! But watch out now, won’t you? I am telling you people will act different. People, when they get a smell of someone else’s luck, are very, very different. People, at the best of times, are different underneath their clothes. Eh? You know, Blue, I did not suggest. You will never ever find me descending to anything low – thoughts or talk – never low. Because there is so much that is far from nice. Whi
ch reminds me, Blue, someone that we know of was visiting last night, so I am told, by lantern-light, a certain person. Yairs, dear. Forgetting, it would seem, the time of year. It was them that crucified Our Saviour. Tomorrow. Think of it. Tomorrow! Yet, someone that we know of must consort – to put it blunt. Eh? Blue! Blue! I forbid you! Who am I – I would like to know – that you are talking to? Where are you, Blue? I can only think you must be full. In the one across from work? A fat lot of work you’ll do this morning, Blue, and what odds!”
Here Mrs Flack laughed like a motor-bike.
“I do not blame you, neither. It is only right that young people in full possession of their health should take their pleasure. And if they come to grief, well, it is the parents will wear the scars. It is not the children on who the sins. Oh, dear, no! Whatever else. Do not think I am bitter, as has sometimes been suggested. I am not. I am realistic, that is all, and must bear the consequences of seeing things as they really are. And suffer every Easter to know the Jews have crucified Our Lord. Again. Blue? Something that the young do not need to understand. Not while they have their lovely bodies. Eh? Blue? Enjoy, boy, enjoy, then! Bust your skin open, if that is what you want! It is only a game to let the blood run when there is plenty of it. And so red. Nothing is cruel if you don’t see it that way. Besides, it lets the bad out, too, and I would be the last to deny there is plenty of that waiting to turn to pus in anybody’s veins.”
“Eh? Blue?” Mrs Flack was calling, it could have been in joy, or desperation.
When she entered the kitchen she was glittering dreadfully.
Mrs Jolley, who had been excited, puzzled, frightened by all that she had overheard, decided to continue looking at the sink.
“Blue,” gasped Mrs Flack, “and six workmates” – here she sat hard upon an upright chair – “has gone and won the Lottery. They called the ticket Lucky Sevens.”
Mrs Jolley was looking at the sink, of which the grey water, suddenly so flat and still, continued to conceal a variety of objects.
“You are not pleased,” Mrs Flack only dreamily accused.
In her entranced state she did not need to glance. Mrs Jolley would be without her shine. She would be wearing the grey look of mornings of dishwater. It was normal for her now to leave her teeth whole days in the tumbler, beneath the handkerchief, beside her bed.
“Some people,” said Mrs Flack, “do not like to hear the good.”
Mrs Jolley stroked the water.
“I was only thinking,” said Mrs Jolley.
She was not all that grey.
“I was thinking of his poor mother,” she said.
Nor was she reproachful, only sympathetic.
“What was the name,” she asked, “of your sister, Mrs Flack, that passed on?”
Mrs Flack grew dreamier.
“Eh?” she said. “My sister. My sister Daisy. Daisy,” she said.
“I was thinking,” said Mrs Jolley, “it will be lovely for your sister to know as her boy has struck lucky.”
Usually when others expressed suitable sentiments, Mrs Flack would be at a loss how to bridge the gap. If she were unable to prevent the moment occurring, she would find herself, as now, squinting down her front into – nothing.
On that most brilliant of mornings Mrs Jolley had elected for darkness. Her friend suspected she might even be concealing some long-range plan for breaking open safes, and thieving old letters and deeds.
So Mrs Flack arranged her spotless front, and waited.
“I bet your hubby, too, was fond of such a sturdy boy. As much an uncle as you an aunt.”
“Will?” Mrs Flack answered from very far. “Will died when Blue was still a little kiddy.”
Mrs Jolley sucked her gums.
“It was not my intention,” she said, “to bring it up. And such a dreadful end.”
But Mrs Flack could not in every way agree; death is so practical.
“I will not deny,” she said, “that the manner of it was unexpected, Will being so well-thought-of in the trade, so well-remunerated, a first-class tiler. But, it is not the manner of it, Mrs Jolley, that matters – whether a man slips off the roof, or snuffs out in ’is own lounge-room, in an easy chair. The end, why, the end is the same.”
Mrs Jolley began to see plainly there might be no escaping from out of that cube of kitchen.
“Well,” she cried, “are we a pair of crows!”
“It was not me that chose to enter into morbid speculation,” said Mrs Flack, loftier.
Mrs Jolley struck the surface of the water with her hand.
“And on such a day!” she shrieked, looking at the clock. “I bet that nephew of yours will be full as a piss-ant by eleven!”
“Blue is a good boy,” claimed Mrs Flack.
“No one ever,” conceded Mrs Jolley.
“Blue never got into trouble. Or not much.”
“I do not know what I do not know!” Mrs Jolley laughed.
“Blue never killed a soul,” said Mrs Flack.
“Who killed who?” asked Mrs Jolley, her neck turning on a steel spring.
“It happens every day. A person has only to read the papers.”
“You cannot take the papers for true.”
“Only a person can know the truth, and then not always.”
There the two ladies were caught up in the morning. Their actions were no longer their own because severed from their bodies by thought and light.
Himmelfarb, who had retired late, rose early on that day. Whatever its conditions were to be, he refused, as always, to allow himself to speculate before he had laid the phylacteries on. Only when he was girt with the Word, and the shawl, covering his shoulders, excluded with its fringes those other desires of heart and eyes, had his own day begun, or was again created, sanctified, and praised. As he stood, reciting the Sh’ma and Benedictions, from behind closed lids, from the innermost part of him, the face began again to appear in the divine likeness, in the clouds of the little mirror, offering itself for an approval that might always remain withheld.
But the Jew prayed:
“Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast given to the cock intelligence to distinguish between day and night. …”
And the light was poured into the four corners of the room, though silently at Sarsaparilla, for man had known better than God or Levite, and had operated on the cock. But the purest leaf touched the Jew’s eyelids; his lids were shaped in gold. His veins were lapis lazuli in a sea of gold, the thongs of the phylacteries were turned to onyx, but the words that fell from his mouth were leaping crystals, each reflecting to infinity the words contained within the words.
The Jew prayed, and the statue which had been broken off the pediment of time, and set down on the edge of the morning, became a man. The rather chapped lips were forming words of their own flesh:
“Let us obtain this day and every day, grace, favour, and mercy in thine eyes, and in the eyes of all who behold us, and bestow lovingkindnesses upon us. Blessed art thou, O Lord. …”
And the light which, until now, had been of a mineral order, a matter of crumbling gold, together with the cold slips of elusive feldspar, forming upon the deposits of porphyry and agate with which the solid firmament was streaked, dissolved at last into a sea of moving crimson. The crimson sea lapped at the skin of the man as he stood at prayer, the tips of his ears and the hollows of his temples grew transparent, his cheeks were flushed with crimson, or the intensity of his petition.
The Jew affirmed:
“I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming. For thy salvation I hope, O Lord! I hope, O Lord, for thy salvation! O Lord, for thy salvation I hope!”
And the shawl fell back from his shoulders in the moment of complete union, and the breeze from the window twitched at the corner of his old robe, showing him to be, indeed, a man, made to suffer the torments and indignities. The hair lay in thin, grizzled wisps in the hollo
w between his breasts; the thongs of veins which bound his scraggy legs, from the ankles to the knees, were most arbitrarily, if not viciously entangled.
When he had finished praying, Himmelfarb looked out of the window of his fragile house. Because he had not slept, each act that he observed was of the most innocent, each line the cleanest, each form the simplest. On a ridge the other side of the street, white hens were already picking amongst the black trunks of the wattles. In the street itself, an old man, after unfolding his newspaper, was preparing to read with unconcern of the worst that could have happened. The stream of milk was transfixed between the milkman’s measure and the billy-cans. The Jew stood rubbing the stubble on his cheek. Since all was obviously logical, now he could only be prepared.
And went about getting himself ready. He could not prevent his hands fumbling and trembling at times, not only because he was moved by the purity of certain objects which he had to touch, but because these were attached by strings of memory to incidents experienced. He did, however, attempt to eat. He drank part of a cupful of coffee, which on that morning tasted peculiarly bitter in his mouth. From the wreckage of his Seder table he tasted a little of the bitter parsley. He pulled splinters from each of the identical shankbones. Only after they had been chewed, moistened in humility and longing, did the splinters begin to suggest meat. Then he had to swallow the fragments in great, hot, sounding lumps.
At the usual hour, he packed the Tallith and Tephillin into his small fibre case. Although officially excused by Herr Rosenbaum from appearing during Pessach, he knew, of course, that his attendance was virtually expected. By others. Even, perhaps, by Rosenbaums. Himmelfarb would not allow himself to remember the threatened expression of his employer’s eyes, but walked up the hill, in the shadow of the grey paling fences, to catch the bus for Barranugli.
The morning soon turned grey and resistant, movement rubbery, either slack and disinclined, or taut and desperate. At Rosetree’s the machines were already limber. As they ran, they sucked and breathed, but grudgingly. Ladies at their trays were mopping themselves with complaints. One was showing how the night had bruised her. All was as usual. Except everybody knew that this morning would be different.
Riders In the Chariot Page 50