Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

Mordecai Himmelfarb was born in the North German town of Holunderthal, to a family of well-to-do merchants, some time during the eighteen-eighties. Moshe, the father, was a dealer in furs, through connections in Russia, many of whom crossed Germany while Mordecai was still a child. The reason for their move had been discussed, mostly behind closed doors, by uncles and aunts, accompanied by the little moans of distress with which his mother received any report of injustice to their race. If Moshe the father remained the wrong side of the door, preferring to stroke his son's head, or even to take a beer at the _Stübchen__, it was not from lack of sympathy, but because he was a sensitive man. Any such crisis disturbed him so severely, he preferred to believe it had not occurred. Mordecai the child observed the stream of relatives which poured in suddenly, and away: the cousins from Moscow and Petersburg, no longer quite so rich or so glossy; their headachy, emotional wives, clinging to the remnants of panache, and still able to produce surprises, little objects in cloisonné and brilliants, out of the secret pocket in a muff. The whole of this colourful rout was sailing, they told him, for America, to liberty, justice, and the future. He watched them go, through the wrought-iron grille, from his own safe, German hall. There were the humbler Russians, too: people in darker, dustier clothes, who had suffered the same indignities, whom his mother received with reverent affection, his father with an increase in his usual joviality. There was, in particular, the Galician rabbi, whose face Mordecai could never after visualize, but remembered, rather, as a presence and a touch of hands. Pogroms had reduced this distant cousin of his mother's to the clothes he wore and the faith he lived. Whatever his destination, he had paused for a moment at the house on the Holzgraben in Holunderthal, where his cousin had taken him into the small, rather dark room which she used for calls of a private nature, and the visits of embarrassed relatives. The mother sat, dressed as always by then, in black, smoothing her child's hair. But without looking at him, the little boy saw. In the obscure room, talking to the foreign rabbi, for the greater part in a language the boy himself had still to get, his mother had grown quite luminous. He would have liked to continue watching the lamp that had been lit in her, but from some impulse of delicacy decided, instead, to lower his eyes. And then he had become, he realized, the object of attention. His mother was drawing him forward, towards the centre of the geometric carpet. And the rabbi was touching him. The rabbi, of almost womanly hands, was searching his forehead for some sign. He was laying his hands on the diffident child's damp hair. Talking all the time with his cousin in the foreign tongue. While the boy, inwardly resisting less, was bathed in the stream of words, suspended in a cloud of awe. Finally, his father had come in, more than ever jovial, shooting his shiny cuffs, and arranging his already immaculate moustache, with its distinct hairs and lovely, lingering scent of pomade. Laughing, of course-because Moshe did laugh a lot, sometimes spontaneously sometimes also when at a loss-he joined his wife and her cousin in their conversation, though he altered the complexion of it. And said at last, in German, not exactly his own, "Well, Mordecai, quite the little _zaddik__!" And continued laughing, not out of malice-he was too agreeable for that. If his wife forgave him his lapse in taste, it was because he had often been proved a good man at heart. Moshe Himmelfarb was a worldly Jew of liberal tastes. Success led him by a manicured hand, and continued to dress him with discretion. Nothing excessive about Moshe, unless it was his phiz, which would suddenly jar on those tolerant souls who collected Jews, and make them wonder at their own eccentricity. Not that relations were thereby impaired. Moshe, in deep appreciation of the liberation, and truly genuine affection for the _goyim__, would not allow that. And he was right, of course. All those emancipated Jews of his acquaintance were ready to support him in his claim that the age of enlightenment and universal brotherhood had dawned at last in Western Europe. Jews and _goyim__ were taking one another-intermittently, at least-moist-eyed to their breasts. The old, dark days were done. Certainly there remained the problem of Eastern Europe, and deplorable incidents often occurred. Everybody knew that, and had been personally affected, but the whole house could not be swept clean at once. In the meantime, money was raised by Western Jewry to assist the victims, and to all such funds Moshe was always the first to subscribe. He loved to give, whether noticeably generous sums to numerous religious missions, the works of the German poets to his son, or presents of wine and cigars to those gentiles who allowed themselves to be cultivated, and with whom he was so deeply, so gratefully in love. Happy are the men who are able to tread transitional paths, scarcely looking to left or to right, and without distinguishing an end. Moshe Himmelfarb was one of them. If he had seldom been the object of direct criticism, except in trivial, family matters, it was because he had always taken care not to offer himself as a target. Unlike certain fanatics, he recognized his obligations to the community in which he lived, while observing the ceremony of his own. Mordecai remembered the silk hats in which his father presented himself, on civic and religious occasions alike. Ordered from an English hatter, Moshe's hats reflected that nice perfection which may be attained by the reasonable man. For Moshe Himmelfarb was nothing less. If he was also nothing more, that was after other, exacting, not to say reactionary standards, by which such lustrous hats could only be judged vain, hollow, and lamentably fragile. Yet, along with his shortcomings, and his acquaintances, many of them men of similar mould, smelling of prosperity and cigars, and filled with every decent intention, Moshe continued to attend the synagogue in the Schillerstrasse. That they did not grow haggard, like some, from obeying the dictates of religion, was because they were reasonable, respectful, rather than religious men, and might have pointed out, if they had been openly accused, and if they had dared, that the Jewish soul was at last set free. The walls were down, the suffocating rooms were burst open, the chains of observance had been loosed. They would still sway, however, all those worldly Jews of the synagogue in the Schillerstrasse, when the wind of prayer smote them. Standing beside his father, the little boy would watch, and wait to be carried in the same direction. He would stroke the fringes of his father's _tallith__, or bury his face in the soft folds. He would wait for his father to beat his breast for all the sins that were shut up inside. Then he himself would overflow with a melancholy joy that all was right in the forest of Jews in which he stood. All the necks were so softly swathed in wool, that, however fat and purple some of them looked, he was comforted, and would glance up, towards the gallery directly opposite, where he knew his mother to be. But behind the lattice. The boy would not see her, except in his mind's eye, where she sat very still and clear. For Mordecai the man, his mother remained a sculptured figure. Whether, in fact, life and fashion had influenced her sufficiently to create a continuously evolving series of identities, his memory presented her as a single image: black dress; the high collar of net and whalebone, relieved by a little, seemly frill; the broad, yellowish forehead, marked with the scars of compassionate thought; eyes in which the deceits of this world were regretfully, but gently drowned; the mouth that overcame secret ailments, religious doubts, and all but one bitterness. It was evident from the beginning that the boy was closer to the mother, although it was only much later established that she had given him her character. To casual acquaintances it was surprising that the father, so agreeable, so kind, so generous, did not have a greater influence. By contrast the mother made rather a sombre impression, stiff, and given to surrounding herself with certain dark, uncouth, fanatically orthodox Jews, usually her relatives. Of course, the boy loved and honoured his good father, and would laugh and chatter with him as required, or listen gravely as the beauties of Goethe or the other poets were pointed out. So that Moshe was delighted with his son, and would bring expensive presents: a watch, or a brass telescope, or collected works bound in leather. But it was out of the mother's silence and solitude of soul that the rather studious, though normal, laughing, sometimes too high-spirited little boy had been created. Frau Himmelfarb had never become reconciled to the well-ordered, too specious life of the North German town. As she walked with her child against the painted drop of Renaissance houses, or formal magnificence of Biedermeier mansions, her incredulous eyes would reject the evidence that men had thus confined the infinite. Only in certain dark mediaeval streets, Mordecai remembered, did his mother seem to escape from the oppression of her material surroundings. She herself would blur, as strange, apparently inexpressible words came struggling softly out of her mouth, and her feet would almost dance as she hurried over the uneven cobbles, skipping the puddles of dirty water, very light. She would visit numbers of the rather smelly, frightening houses, and bring presents, and examine children, whether for ailments, or their knowledge of God, and even hitch up her skirt over her petticoat, before going down on her knees to scrub a floor neglected by the sick. Along the airless alleys, in the dark houses of the Jewish poor, his mother's Galician spirit was released-which, in his memory, had seldom happened anywhere else, unless during the visit of her cousin, the destitute rabbi, in their own anteroom, or while writing letters to her many other relatives. The mother was one of a scattered family. It was her sorrow, and pride. She liked to bring her writing things, as though she had been a visitor, and sit at the round table, with its cloth of crimson plush, in preference to the ormolu desk on which Moshe had lovingly insisted. Then the little boy would play with the plush pompons, and occasionally glance at the letters as they grew, and shuffle the used envelopes, from which she would allow him later to soak the stamps. He had known his mother, on a single rainy afternoon, seal envelopes for Poland, Rumania, the United States, even China and Ecuador. Until, finally, there was nothing of her left to give. He realized only very much later the important part her dispersed family had played in his mother's secret life: how, in her mind, their omnipresence might have ensured and hastened redemption for the whole world. Such a conviction, implied, though certainly never expressed, gave her a kind of distinction amongst the numerous pious ladies who were always in transit through her house, eating _Streuselkuchen__ and drinking coffee, organizing charitable projects, announcing births, marriages, and deaths, daring sometimes even to indulge, in the presence of their hostess, in bursts of frivolous, not to say unseemly chat. But always returning to one point. The women clung together like a ball of brown bees, driven by the instinct of their faith, intoxicated with the honey of their God. The presence of that God amongst the walnut furniture of the sumptuous house-for Himmelfarbs had moved from above the shop before Mordecai was able to remember-was unquestioned by the worldly, but prudently respectful Moshe, taken for granted by the little boy, even by the confident young man who the latter eventually became, and who turned sceptical not of his religion, rather, of his own need for it. Religion, like a winter overcoat, grew oppressive and superfluous as spring developed into summer, and the natural sources of warmth were gradually revealed. But there was no mistaking the love and respect the young man kept for the enduring qualities of his old, discarded coat. In the solstice of his self-love, in the heat of physical ardour, he would melt with nostalgia at the thought of it. In the meantime, however, the little boy remained wrapped in the warm reality of the garment they had given him to wear. When he was only six, the mother remarked with the casualness she always adopted for important matters, "Do you realize, Moshe, it is time the child began to receive instruction?" "Yoy!" The father, who loved his own joke, winced to express horror. "Do you want to load the boy already? And worst of all, with Hebrew?" "Yes," she answered, seriously. "It is our own tongue." Moshe was often inclined to wonder how he had come to marry his wife. Whom he loved, however. So it was agreed. It was usual for the boys of their acquaintance to attend the classes of Herr Ephraim Gluck, the _melamed__, but because of some special confidence the mother had, the Cantor Katzmann was engaged to teach her son the alphabet. Which the latter mastered at astonishing speed. And began shortly to write phrases, and recite prayers. And grew vain. He would turn his head aside, and mumble what he already knew too well, or declaim too loudly, with a shameful spiritual arrogance. On one occasion the Cantor was forced to mention, "If a Jew is proud, Mordecai, it is all the harder when he bites the dust. As he certainly will." The Cantor himself was a humble man, with several squint-eyed children, and a wife who nagged. His voice was his only glory. When it had been poured out to the dregs, he would appear emptied indeed, falling back upon his chair with a smile of deathly content. Mordecai remembered him especially after the climax of Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, when, it could have been, the Cantor had attempted the impossible. The white closed eyelids would not so much as flutter, as he sat and smiled faintly from behind them. He was a small man, and his pupil loved him in memory, more than he had respected him in life. At the age of ten, the boy entered the Gymnasium. Already before _bar mitzvah__, he had embarked on Greek, Latin, French, with English for preference. He had begun to carry off the prizes. Sources, both informed and uninformed, insisted that Mordecai ben Moshe was exceptionally brilliant. "You see, Malke," the father remarked, preparing in his mind an additional, expensive prize, "our Martin is surely intended to become a man of some importance." Because he had developed the ridiculous and distasteful habit of calling their son by a German name, his wife would pinch her eyebrows together as if suffering physical pain, although she would let it be known that, in spite of her expression of torture, she was grateful for the boy's success. "_Ach__," she exclaimed. "Yes," she said, and found she had a cough. "We have known from the beginning he was no fool." How her cough continued to rack her. "But," she was able at last to resume, "all that is by the way. I only ask that Mordecai shall be remembered as a man of faith." So that the father's pleasure was cut by his wife's stern consistency, and in time he ceased to love, while continuing to honour. In his casual, but always amiable way, he allowed her to bear many of the burdens, because he saw she was suited to it, and she succeeded manfully, for, inside her rather delicate body, she had considerable strength of mind. Alone with her son, she would often unbend, even after he was grown. She would become quite skittish in her private joy, with the result that the boy was sometimes ashamed for what appeared unnecessary, not to say unnatural, in one of natural dignity. "Mordecai ben Moshe!" she would refer to him half aloud, half laughing. To establish, as it were, an unmistakable identity. She had the habit of forming in his presence a suggestion of ideas, sometimes in German, more often in Yiddish, and as he learnt to follow her murmur, he forged a chain out of it. There were many tales, too, of relatives and saints. She could become inspired. Her Seder table was the materialization of simple dogma. For the rites of the Sabbath she had a particular genius, and, watching the candles increase in light and stature as her hands coaxed, her husband was again convinced of his own genuine desire to worship. By far the most agreeable of all the feast days observed by the family on the Holzgraben was that of Succoth, for it made the least spiritual demands on the father, or so the son began to sense. Ignoring, for some atavistic reason, the considerable triangular garden, with its smell of toadstools and damp leaves, they improvised their tabernacle beneath the lattice on the balcony. The meals could not appear too often or too soon, which they ate beneath the stars at Succoth, above the _Stadtwald__ at Holunderthal. The symbols of citron and palm flourished happily in the father's somewhat shallow mind. Because, by now it had been made clear, the bleak heights of Atonement were not for Moshe, only the foothills of Thanksgiving. In the circumstances, the additional duty laid upon the mother was a source of embarrassment to the parents, also in time, the father suspected, to the son. On returning home from the synagogue, after the travail and exhaustion of Yom Kippur, he might pinch the boy's cheek, and look into his eyes, and wonder to which side Mordecai was going to be drawn. As his hopes conflicted with his fears, Moshe would sigh, and again, more loudly, when the first mouthful of reviving coffee passed his lips. The hopes of all converged upon _bar mitzvah__. The candidate approached the ceremony with a dangerous amount of confidence. He received the phylacteries and the shawl, together with many desirable presents from parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. He delivered ringingly, and with a sculptural logic, his discourse on the chosen subject, with the result that aunts turned to congratulate one another long before he had finished. They could have devoured the feverish face-to some extent a replica of each of theirs-underneath the plastered hair and pretty _Kàppchen__. Mordecai was entranced, and did not listen continuously to anybody's voice, unless it was his own. Somewhere behind him on the platform wandered the father who was relinquishing, not without a hint of tears, spiritual responsibility. There were some amongst Frau Himmelfarb's relatives who could not contain their ironic smiles on noticing poor Malke's Moshe. But were immediately recalled to a state of adequate reverence by a flash of silver from the Scrolls. After the ceremony, there was a delicious meal, at which the formally dedicated boy was caressed and flattered. His triumph made him proud, shy, exalted, indifferent, explosively hilarious, and uncommunicative of his true feelings-if he was conscious of what they were. Who, indeed, could tell which way the _bar mitzvah__ boy would go? Certainly not the self-congratulating father, perhaps the mother, through the tips of her fingers, or subtler colloquy of souls. In the comfortable, but ugly house, in the closed circle of relatives and friends, protected by the wings of angels, illuminated by the love of God, Mordecai accepted the pattern which his race, his religion, and his parents had ordained. But there was, in addition, an outside world, which his mother feared, for which his father yearned, and of which Mordecai became increasingly aware. There the little waxen, silent boy grew into a bony, rasping youth, the dark down straggling like an indecision on his upper lip, the lips themselves blooming far too soon, the great nose assuming manifest importance. It was the age of mirrors, and in their surfaces Mordecai attempted regularly to solve the mystery of himself. He was growing muscular, sensual, yellow: hideous to some, provocative to others. What else, nobody was yet allowed to see. "Tell me, you ugly Jew, what it feels like to be one?" his friend Jürgen Stauffer asked. In fun, of course. Friendship and laughter still prevailed. The forest flecked the boys' skins, as they rubbed along, elbow to elbow, the soles of their boots made slippery by thicknesses of fallen leaves. "Tell me!" Jürgen laughed, and insisted. He was of that distinctive tint of German gold, affection showing in the shallows of his mackerel eyes. "Oh, like something that runs on a hundred legs," Himmel-farb replied. "Or no legs at all. A snake, for instance. Or scorpion. Anyway, specially created to be the death of gentiles." Then they laughed louder, and together. Sundays had become warmer than the Sabbath for the young Jew, when he walked with his friend, Jürgen Stauffer, on the wilder side of the _Stadtwald__ at Holunderthal. "Tell me," Jürgen asked, "about the Passover sacrifice." "When we kill the Christian child?" "So it seems!" How Jùrgen laughed. "And cut him up, and drink the blood, and put slices in a _Biötchen__ to send the parents?" Mordecai had learnt how to play. "_Ach, Gott__!" Jùrgen Stauffer laughed. How his teeth glistened. "Old Himmelfurz!" he cried. "_Du liebes Rindvieh__!" Then they were hitting each other, and grunting. Their skins were melting together. They could not wrestle enough on the beds of leaves. Afterwards they lay panting, and looked up through the exhausted green, to discuss a future still incalculable, except for the sustaining thread of friendship. In the silences they would sigh beneath the weight of their affection for each other. "But when I become a cavalry officer-and there is no question of anything else, because of Uncle Max-and you are the professor of languages, it is not very likely we shall ever see each other again," Jürgen Stauffer reasoned. "Then you must arrange to ride your horses," Mordecai suggested, "round and round whichever university I honour with my presence." "It is a vice, Martin, never to be serious. A hopeless, hopeless, vicious vice!" From where he lay, Jürgen Stauffer thumped his friend. "You are the hopeless one, not to choose a more civilized career." "But I like horses," Jürgen protested. "And then I am also a bit stupid." Himmelfarb could have kissed his friend. "Stupid? You are the original ass!" If they had not tired themselves out, they might have wrestled some more, but instead they lay and listened to the blaze of summer and their own contentment. Occasionally the young Jew was invited to his friend's house, for the parents' liberal attitude allowed them to receive regardless of race. Gerhard Stauffer, the father, was, of course, the publisher. He even loved books, and an undeserved failure would make him suffer more than an obvious success would cause him to rejoice. His wife, a minor actress in her youth, had retired into life and marriage equipped with a technique for theatre. Frau Stauffer was able to convince a guest that the scene they had just enacted together contributed immensely to the play's success. "Martin shall sit beside _me__," Frau Stauffer would emphasize, patting the place on the sofa with the touch the situation required. "Now that we are _comfortable__," she would decide, while inclining just that little in the direction of her guest, "you must tell me what you have been _doing__. Provided it has been _dis-reputable__. I refuse to listen to anything else. On such a _damp__ afternoon, you must _curdle__ my blood with indiscretions." Then Frau Stauffer smiled that deliberate smile. She had remained of the opinion that any line may be "improved," and that every scene needed "lifting up." But the boy was conscious of his lack of talent. Seated beside his hostess on her cloud, he remained the victim of his awkward body. Or, advancing from an opposite direction, the host would court their unimportant guest, inviting him to give his point of view, showering newspaper articles and books. "Have you discovered Dehmel?" Herr Stauffer might inquire, or: "What do you think, Martin, of Wedekind? I would be most interested to hear your honest opinion." As if it mattered to that grave man. The embarrassed boy was gratified, but could not escape too soon, back to his friend. The attention of the parents flattered more in retrospect. "You see," said Jürgen, without envy, "you are the respected intellectual. I am the German stable-boy." But it could have been for some such reason that the young Jew admired his friend. There was the elder brother, too, who would emerge mysteriously from his room, suffering from acne and a slight astigmatism, and eating a slice of buttered bread. Konrad has outgrown his strength, and must fortify himself, Frau Stauffer explained. Konrad came and went, ignoring whatever existed outside the orbit of his own ego. He seemed to despise in particular all younger boys-or was it only the Jewish ones? — that was not yet made clear. "What does he do all the time in his room?" Mordecai asked the younger brother. "He is studying," replied the latter, with the air of one who could not be expected to take further interest. "He is all right," he said. "Only a bit stuck-up." On that occasion Konrad Stauffer came out of his room chewing at a _Brötchen__ with caraway seeds on top. "What," he said to Mordecai, "you here again! Are you perhaps _en pension__?" As everybody else was embarrassed, he laughed a little for his own joke. There was the sister, Mausi, still a little girl. Her plaits glistened like the tails of certain animals. Once she threw her arms round the Jew's waist, and pressed against him with all her strength, and tried to throw him. "I am stronger than you!" she claimed. But neither proved, nor provoked. She stood laughing into the bosom of his shirt. Her breath burned where the V opened on his bare skin. Best and most alarming of all were evenings in the big salon, when girls came in bows and sashes, their necks smelling of _kölnisches Wasser__. There were girls already corseted stiff, and a few real young men, often the sons of cavalry officers. These absolute phenomena, themselves cadets, always knew what to do, with the result that younger boys would listen humiliated to their own crude, breaking voices, and mirrors reminded them that the pimples were still lurking in their tufts of down. One evening, after their elders had withdrawn to the library to amuse themselves at cards, somebody of real daring devised the most scandalous game. "Which person in the room do you like best?" it was asked of each in turn. "Why?" The next impossible question followed, and others, all headed in the inevitable, and most personal direction. Giggles, and the braying of the adolescent jackass, widened the circles of embarrassment. "Whom do you like, Mausi Stauffer?" finally it had to be asked. Mausi Stauffer did not hesitate. "Martin Himmelfarb," she said. Some of the young ladies might have burst, if their whalebone had not contained them. In the circumstances, they rocked and wheezed. "Why, Mausi?" asked Cousin Fritz, the son of Uncle Max. The scar across his left cheek appeared unnaturally distinct. "Because," said Mausi. "Because he is interesting, I suppose." "Come, now!" complained an upright young woman in steel spectacles, with a pale, flat rosette of a mouth. "That is a weak answer. You may have to pay a forfeit. Fifty strokes on the palm of your hand from the edge of a ruler." Mausi screamed. She could not have borne it. "We want to give you another chance," said Cousin Fritz, so beautiful and hateful in his cadet's uniform. "_Why__ does this Himmelfarb appeal to you?" He made the name sound particularly exotic and ridiculous. Mausi screamed. She tossed her plaits into the air. "Because," she cried, and snickered, and wound her thin legs together, and perspired in her crushed muslin. "Because," she screeched, in a voice they were dragging out of her, "he is like"-she still hesitated-"a kind of black _buck__!" The bronzes might have tumbled from their pedestals, if, at that moment, a spinster lady devoted to the family had not returned in search of her scarf, and decided instinctively to remain. In that same moment, Mordecai made down the passage for the lavatory. As he came out again, Konrad Stauffer was trying the door. "Oh!" exclaimed Konrad, mostly with his stomach, and recoiled. He looked quite pale, and blank, but could have been rehearsing a speech. "Just a lot of stupid Germans," he managed to utter breathily. "Germans are all animals." "Aren't we also Germans?" Mordecai suggested. "Those who pass judgment always exclude themselves," the spotty young man replied, and laughed. "Haven't you found that out? Oh, dear!" He sighed. "I don't propose to get involved in anything else tonight. I am going up to my room." Mordecai did not know what to make of Konrad. Nor did he see him again for years. One result of the evening was that Frau Stauffer apparently decided to bring down the curtain on the comedy they had been enacting in their relationship with the young Jew. Jürgen grew increasingly elusive. Attempts at even indirect inquiry would start him kicking holes in the ground, or else he would mumble, and fix his eyes on some point which, he let it be understood, lay outside his friend's field of vision. Often in this suffocating situation, Mordecai would struggle for breath. Then his mother, noticing his dark eyelids, and the colour of his skin, prescribed a tonic, and after only half a bottle he slept with a whore called Marianne, who lived beneath a gable in one of the older streets of the town. His body was flooded with a new, though at first dreadful, relief. "You Jews!" Marianne remarked, looking him over during a pause, for which she was sufficiently generous not to charge. "The little bit they snip off only seems to make you hotter." As for her client, he stared exhausted at her enormous beige nipples, and wondered whether his instincts would know how to navigate the frail craft in which he had embarked alone. Thus committed to the flesh, the ceremonies of his parents' house soon became intolerable. The Sabbath, for instance, all through his boyhood a trance of innocent perfection, in which he would not have been surprised to see the Bride herself cross the threshold, was now transformed into a wilderness of hours, where good aunts and all those ugly girl cousins were continually setting traps of questions to catch his guilt. Prayers and food choked him equally as he waited for sunset and the scent of spices to wake him from his nightmare. Lovingly. And he, in turn, loved all that he was rejecting, not so much by choice, it seemed to him at first in moments of self-exoneration, but by arrangement between unknown persons who controlled his future. The severest torture remained the trial by charity. There were the humble, sometimes even ragged, unwashed individuals, whom his father, from sense of duty, or the need for self-congratulation, collected at the synagogue, and brought home to the Sabbath table, where Martin-Mordecai would exert himself to offer friendly words and recommend the most delicious dishes, to atone for the disgust the visitors roused in him. There was one creature in particular: a little dyer, whose skin was bathed in indigo; the palms of his hands were mapped indelibly in purple. This man's material affliction impressed itself on his conscience the evening the dyer slipped while crossing one of Moshe's handsome rugs. The boy felt himself to be in a way responsible. As his hands slithered on the old Jew's greasy coat, he grabbed hold of what seemed a handful of rag, and just prevented the guest from falling. But his own fright and nausea were in his mouth; he might have been the one who had all but suffered a serious fall, whereas the old man grew servile with gratitude for what he called a gentlemanly act, was moved to caress every inch of his saviour's back, and to bestow pretentious titles such as Crutch of the Infirm, and Protector of the Poor. After Mordecai had escaped from the room, and was washing himself, his mother came and stood in the doorway, to say in her driest voice, which tender feelings would force her to adopt, "You are upset, my dear boy, and have not yet experienced the hundredth part." She watched her son thoughtfully. "Dry your hands quickly now," she coaxed, gentler, "and come on back to us. We must not allow that poor man to guess." She would have liked to use her compassion to comfort those nearest to her, but the loving woman was unable to. More often than not, she saw her words salt the wounds. The house was full of twilight situations, and shaken attitudes. The son became amused. He would raise one shoulder and compose his mouth, as the Kiddush introduced the Sabbath. He would barb the words of prayers with mockery, to aim at innocent targets. Even though he failed to destroy what he had loved most, his perversity had developed to the point where the attempt remained his painful substitute for ritual. Then, as soon as his duties had been at least outwardly discharged, he would rush out. He would roam the streets, looking into lit windows, brush against passers-by, and apologize with an effusiveness which could only be interpreted as insolence. Now that he was filled with a rage to live, the scents of the streets maddened him. He would try the breasts of the whores, propped on cushions, on their window-sills. He had an insatiable appetite for white flesh, of pale complaisant German girls, pressed against stucco, or writhing in the undergrowth of parks, beside stagnant water, in a smell of green decay. If he had not hardened quickly, he might have been consumed by his own disgust. But he grew steely. He plastered down his winged hair. He wore a moustache. And studied. All through the period of his worst disintegration, Mor-decai remained, to the innocent and unaware, dedicated solely to his books. He did, in fact, cling to them, like fingers to a raft. And what more solid and reasonable than words as such? It was only in the permutations and combinations that they dissolved into that same current which threatened to suck down the whole boiling, grinning crew of desperate, drowning souls. At the university the young man's intellectual activities were narrowed down to the study of his preferred language-English. Its bland and rather bread-like texture became his manna. But, in opposition to his will and intentions, he would find his mind hankering after the obdurate tongue he had got as a boy from the Cantor Katzmann. His proficiency in Hebrew had grown with intermittent attention, and he would often read, late at night, both for instruction, and for the bitter pleasure of it. In the second decade of the century Mordecai Himmelfarb received his doctorate in English, and shortly after, was informed that he would be permitted to continue his studies at the University of Oxford. Moshe was overjoyed, not only for the impression the event would make on his acquaintances, but because of his admiration for the English, for the excellent quality of their cloth, boots, and the silk hats he liked to wear on formal occasions. If he also sensed the distance which separated the English temperamentally from himself, that added, if anything, to their fascination. And now his own son was to be removed to the side of the elect. The gap in their relationship, already wide, would necessarily widen. Already the old man visualized himself, the self-sacrificing Jewish father, standing on railway platforms in the steam from trains. The joyous, painful tears spurted in anticipation. For that which moved and charmed Moshe most, was that which receded irretrievably: departing trains, the faces of the _goyim__, the relationship with his own son, and, if he had dared to think, let alone whisper-he who contributed so generously to the Zionist movement-the redemption of Israel as a possible event. It was Moshe who broke the news to the boy's mother, and in that way, perhaps, less pain was caused. Frau Himmelfarb, who was darning a sock, did not at first answer. She continued looking at the sock with the rather myopic patience characteristic of her. "I did expect, Malke, that you would grasp," her husband had begun to emphasize, "the immense advantage it will give the boy if he decides on an academic career." His wife was looking closely at the sock. "Well?" he asked, and reasonably, but was immediately driven to support his argument, not exactly by ranting, but almost: "It is time we Jews recognized the world has changed!" Here Moshe actually trembled. "All the opportunities that are open to us now!" "Ah, Moshe! Moshe!" sighed the woman, in the way that had always irritated him most. "That is not an answer!" he protested. "However you and others may transform him," his wife replied, "I pray that God will recognize a good Jew." "It is of more importance today," said the father, "that the world should recognize a good man." All of which was heard, as it happened, by their son, who had come in, and was listening with that cynical, yet affectionate amusement with which he now received any idea that originated in his parents. "Ah, Moshe"-his mother sighed again-"you forget that when both kinds are divided up into good, bad, and indifferent, the Jews will remain distinct from men." "There you are!" fumed the father, realizing at last that his son was present. "I make the simple announcement that you will be going to Oxford, and your mother embarks on a philosophical, not to say racial argument. Of Jews and men! I hope I am a man! What are you?" "I would like to think I am both," the young fellow replied, "but sometimes wonder whether I am anything at all." Because this was nothing like what he had intended to say, Mordecai smiled. "Then it has come to that!" cried the mother. "There, Moshe! Where can it all end?" In her distress she kept on turning and stretching the meticulously darned sock. "That does not mean you may expect me to cut my throat!" the son continued, laughing, jerking up his chin, and baring his teeth in what had, this time, only the rudiments of a smile. "It is terrible to see one's best intentions completely misinterpreted!" The father felt himself justified in moaning. "Oh, but I do appreciate them!" the son answered with dutiful alacrity. "All you have ever done. All the kindnesses. You have been a good father. And you need not doubt I shall try to repay you." Moshe Himmelfarb began to cry. "And Mother," the son almost shouted, because of his father's emotion, and because the mere mention of his mother involved him more deeply than ever in the metaphysical thicket from which he was hoping to tear himself free. "Whose guidance," he babbled, his voice carrying him to a crescendo of melodrama of which he himself was most aware, "whose example and deeds, might well redeem the whole race. Excepting one who is beyond redemption!" "We must certainly pray for you," Malke Himmelfarb remarked gently, hanging her head above the now crumpled and rejected sock. "My poor son!" Long after he had rushed from the room, Mordecai continued to visualize the situation: the black hairs on his father's elegant, but frail and ineffectual wrist; the pulse, actual or imagined, in his mother's yellow temple; and the ornate, heartrending furniture, of which he had explored every grain, every crack and blemish, under cover of conversation, daydream, and prayer. Now he would have prayed, but could not. He was suffering, and indeed continued to suffer from a kind of spiritual amnesia. Remembering an incident in the examination room, in which, at the end of an agonizing hour, the Italian language had flooded back into his mind, he hoped that some such release would take place on the present occasion-or he could have waited, weeks, if necessary, or even months. But it did not. At most, an occasional onset of compassion would deflect the blade of his cynicism, as on the evening when he watched his own father leave a fairground on the outskirts of the town, accompanied by a brewer's clerk named Goltz, known to him by sight and repute, and two anonymous girls of unmistakable occupation. As the young man watched from the shelter of a clump of pollarded trees, the bluish-white glimmer from the flares sluiced the faces of the three unsteady gentiles and their Jewish clown. The action of the flickering light made the unnatural abandon of the elderly, respectable Jew appear quite maniacal. He, too, was flickering and fluctuating as he led the way through the hubbub of shouting and jerky music. His companions seemed to have reached the stage where only the conventions of revelry are obeyed. The clerk stopped for a moment, and stuck his head inside a bush, to vomit. The mouths of the others opened from habit in the dreadful dough of their faces to emit song or wind. Or an arm attempted to return the imagined pressure of an arm. Or lips sucked the air in imitation of a kiss. So the revellers advanced, and almost brushed against their judge in passing. Without moving, the latter continued to watch, and was able to distinguish the pores of their skins, the roots of their hair, the specks of gold flashing in their teeth. If he did not catch their words, it was because those were drowned in the tumult of his distress, which continued long after the ridiculous old satyr, who was also his father, had disappeared. That his own desires were similar, that he had breathed on similar smeary faces, of similar sweaty girls, and fumbled at the scenty dresses, made the incident too familiar, and more intolerable. Yet, the young man had lived long enough, if only by one day, to embrace his father on retiring the following night. For a moment he had stood behind the chair. There was the scraggy, reprehensible neck. Would he plunge his knife, which he had learnt to use with the skill of any _shohet__? Then the thought began to tremble in him: that reason is far too imperfect a weapon. So he had bent forward instead, and Moshe interpreted what he received as an expression of gratitude, not of pity. The old Jew was at once brimming over with pride, for the grateful son who appreciated all that was being done for him. Very soon after, Mordecai left for Oxford. Although in those days the talk was of war, the Kaiser's unpredictable temper, and the refusal of the French nation to respect German ideals, it seemed most unlikely to the young man that an international situation would ignore the crucial stage in his career. Dressed in a topcoat of excellent, sober cloth and cut, and a travelling cap in tartan tweed, the kind thought of one of his aunts, he presented a fine figure as they stamped about the railway platform. They were all there. Moshe had fallen in love with the new leather monogrammed luggage, with which he had provided his son. But the mother could have been dazed by the appearances of a material world, of which she had only been allowed glimpses hitherto, and her clothes, as always on occasions of importance and splendour, looked as though they had been brought down from an attic. As for the son, he was only too relieved at the thought of relinquishing the identity with which his parents were convinced they had endowed him. And at last the train did pull out. And later in the day, the boat sailed into the fog. At Oxford Himmelfarb continued to distinguish himself scholastically. Determined at the beginning to restrict himself to books, he soon discovered he was an influence on the lives of human beings. He was very prepossessing in his Semitic way. He developed an ease of manner. Men hoped for his respect, women competed for his heart, and he would always allow them to believe they had succeeded. There was perhaps one young woman who roused and sustained his passionate interest. The young people went so far as to discuss marriage during their attachment, though neither thought to ask a parent's advice on the desirability of the match. Catherine was the daughter of a reprobate earl. The father's pursuit of pleasure and the mother's early death had allowed the girl more freedom than was customary. Frail and pale, simple in almost all her tastes, and of exquisitely pure expression, Catherine could have passed for an angel if she had chosen discretion. But Catherine did not choose. And her behaviour was frequently discussed, in raffish circles with knowledge and appreciation, in polite ones with imagination and distaste. Fortified by birth and fortune, Catherine herself was able to ignore opinion up to a point, and seemed to rise from each debauch purer and whiter than before. Their refinements of sensuality persuaded the young Jew that he loved the girl. Each was perhaps a little dazzled by the incandescence they achieved together, and the lover naturally wounded when, at what might have been thought the height of the affair, his mistress was discovered in a hotel bedroom with an Indian prince. For the first time Catherine must have sensed the narrowness of the plank she was treading, for it became known almost at once that she had gone abroad, for an indefinite period, with an aunt. Her lover did receive a letter from Florence: My darling M., I wonder whether you will ever be able to forgive me the shattering mistake I caused you to make. I do not expect it. I expect very little of anyone, realizing how little may be expected of myself. But would like to act sentimental, on such a wet night, in this stuffy little town, full of English Ladies Living Abroad. I might feel desperate, if I had not learnt you off by heart, and were not still able to bring you close, in spite of the revulsion I know the actuality would produce in you…. The letter continued in somewhat literary strain, about the "little green hills of Tuscany, with their exciting undertones of sensuous brown," but he had no inclination to read any farther. He tossed the ball into the basket and loosened his tie. He did not see Catherine again, although from time to time he read about her. She continued to lead a life in accordance with the conventions of her temperament: in her maturity she was almost strangled by a boxer in a mews in Pimlico, and died old, during a bombing raid of the Second War, in a home for inebriates at Putney. As for Mordecai, he now returned to his studies, with a rage that belonged to youth, and an austerity that he had inherited from his mother, until, shortly after destroying the distasteful letter from his mistress, he received another, of a far more disturbing nature, from his father: My dear son, I can no longer postpone informing you of the momentous decision I have been forced to make. To come at once to the point: I had been receiving instruction for some time past from a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and was baptized, I am happy to be able to tell you, last Thursday afternoon. A weight is lifted off my mind. For the first time in my life, I feel myself truly to be free. _I am a Christian__! After a lifetime spent studying the Jewish problem, it seems to me that this is the only solution of it. I hardly like to write _practical__ solution, but that is the word which came into my mind. To give so little, and receive so much! Because it must be obvious to all but fools that the advantages of every kind are enormous. However, as one who has the fate of our people sincerely at heart, I do not wish to stress those advantages, only to pray that many more of us repent of our stubborn, fruitless ways. You, Martin, I have felt for some time, are undergoing a crisis in faith. All the more likely, then, that reason may lead you into the right and safe path, when you are ready to decide. It is your dear mother for whom I fear there is little hope. She will choose to remain caught forever in the thicket of Jewish self-righteousness, and the reasonable step I have taken will only continue to cause her pain. Still, I shall pray that some miracle will unite our two souls at last. I will not trouble you with details of our business house-it is, besides, the summer season-nor shall I introduce comments on the international situation into a communication which is probably, in itself, a source of surprise, and, possibly, dear boy, distress. I shall remain always Your affectionate father… Mordecai had never felt emptier than on finishing reading his father's letter. If he himself had dried up, there had always been the host of others, and particularly parents, who remained filled with the oil and spices of tradition. And now his father's phial was broken; all the goodness was run out. One corner of memory might never be revisited. All through this phase of private desolation, the young Jew forced himself to go about his business, although his associates frequently suspected him of watching somebody else, who stood unseen behind their backs. Of the letters he composed to his apostate father, he sent the one that least conveyed his feelings, and must have caused a pang of disappointment in the recipient. For the letter was indifferent, not to say feeble, in the reactions it expressed. Of his mother, Mordecai did not dare think, nor did he mention his father's act in the letter he immediately wrote to her. It did seem for the first time that his own brilliantly inviolable destiny was threatened, by an increased shrivelling of the spirit in himself, as well as by the actions of those whom he had considered almost as statues in a familiar park. Now the statues had begun to move. Great fissures were beginning to appear, besides, in what he had assumed to be the solid mass of history. Time was no longer congealed, but flowing. Some of the young man's acquaintances had already packed their bags. They reminded him that war must come, and that, as a German, it was his duty to return with them before it was too late, to serve the Fatherland. Scarcely Jew, and scarcely German, Himmelfarb was still debating when he received the letter from his mother: My dearest Mordecai, Your father will have written you some account of what I cannot bring myself to mention. You will see that I am at present with my sisters, where I shall remain until I have recovered from my loss. They are very kind, considerate, more than I deserve. Oh, Mordecai, I can only think I have failed him in some way, and dread that I may also fail my son. Mordecai averted his face. He could not bear to see his mother. It was as though she had not survived the rending of the garment. The letter did, at least, release her son from the doldrums of indecision. Very soon Mordecai found himself adrift on the North Sea. Ostensibly he was returning home. So far his will had supported him, but only so far. That which his pride had begun to represent as a steel cable, was, in fact, a thread, which other people cruelly jerked, tangled with their clumsy fingers, and even threatened to break. So the sea air wandered in and out of that insubstantial cabin formed by the young man's bones. His once handsome skin had lost its tone of ivory to a dirty yellow-grey. Those of his fellow passengers who addressed him soon moved away across the deck, sensing a situation with which their own mediocrity could not deal, of hallucination, or perhaps even madness. A few, however, plumped for a simpler explanation: the damned Jew was drunk. Drunk or sober, he arrived at Holunderthal with admirable punctuality. Inside the skeleton of the station, the faces of strangers appeared convinced of their timelessness. Only his father, in his dark, correct coat, admitted age. His moustache was fumbling with a welcome. Or some undue perplexity. The young man's Aunt Zipporah, his mother's sister, a woman he had always disliked, for a certain smell of poverty, and association with disaster, spoke to him out of a strained throat. The aunt and the father were making way for each other. "Yes," said Mordecai. "We had the kind of crossing one expects." And waited. "Tell me," he said finally. "It is my mother." And listened. The aunt began to cry, like a rat that has been caught at last. Trapped inside the girders of Holunderthal _Hauptbahnhof__, it sounded awful. Inquisitive passers-by slowed down, and waited for a revelation to dictate their proper attitude. "Yes!" cried his Aunt Zipporah. "Your mother. On Saturday night. But over quickly, Mordecai." His father had begun to nail him with his voice. "It appears there was some internal malady she had been hiding from us, Mordecai." The aunt's grief gushed afresh. " Oy-yoy-yoy! Moshe! There was no malignancy. I have it from Dr Ehrenzweig. Not the least trace of a malignancy." Such luxuriant grief made that of her brother-in-law sound mercilessly arid. But his desperation was of a different kind. "Dr Ehrenzweig assures me," he insisted, "that she did not suffer. No pain, Mordecai. Up to the end." "Did not suffer! Did not suffer!" The aunt's voice blew and flapped. "There are different ways of suffering! Dr Ehrenzweig was responsible only for his patient's body." The father had seized his son by an elbow. "This woman is vindictive, because, naturally, she is biased!" Moshe shouted. The fact was, Mordecai knew, his mother had, simply, died. So they walked on, and into a _Droschke__, over the heads of half-a-dozen carnations, which some other traveller had discarded, on finding them, perhaps, unbearable. For the few weeks before the outbreak of war, young Himmel-farb remained in his father's house. The father brought presents to lay at his son's feet, without, however, finding forgiveness. The son resumed relations with relations, with the community who had received him at _bar mitzvah__, for, officially, he was still a Jew. But the voices of the elders would threaten to dry up as he approached, and upon his entering a room, young, modest girls would lower their eyes and blush. He accepted that he was an outcast. He only failed to realize that neither his father's apostasy nor his own spiritual withdrawal was the true cause of their suspicion, and that almost every soul must endure the same period of probation before receiving orders. Of gentile friendships, none remained. Jürgen Stauffer was reined in somewhere, waiting to ride across Europe; nor did Martin-Mordecai care to visualize his friend's face, its adolescence pared away to the bones of manhood, the chivalry of _Minnesinger__ translated into _Wille zur Macht__ in the expression of the mackerel eyes. Stauffer the publisher had died of a heart, Mordecai was told; his wife had become involved in a prolonged and unpredictable middle age. Only the elder son appeared once, briefly, under a hat, in the doorway of a tram. It was obvious Konrad Stauffer did not remember, or else he had decided not to. The face had adopted an expression of deliberate boorishness, which did not altogether convince. Himmelfarb had heard that Stauffer was the author of a volume of poems, which nobody had read, and that he was now writing destructive reviews and articles for a radical newspaper in their home town. But soon the image of Stauffer was swallowed up, together with the past, and that part of his life which Himmelfarb had dared to call his own. War did not come as a surprise, to him, or anyone, that is, it did not erupt in the manner of volcanoes, it seeped over and into them. Some were appalled at the prospect of their becoming involved, but many sang, as if welcoming a lover, one who might certainly crack their ribs and bruise their flesh, but whose saliva intoxicated as it poisoned, and whose passion liberated their more inadmissible desires. Because the sequence of events in his personal life had left him sceptical and cold, war, his first too, affected Himmelfarb less than might have been expected. At the height of its folly, he was ashamed to realize, it was taking place only on the edge of his consciousness. However, as a good German, he had volunteered, and was accepted to serve in the infantry. He was wounded twice. He even won a medal. Once, in the mud and rain of a ruined French village, he enjoyed the half-pleasure of encountering his former friend Jürgen Stauffer. The shining lieutenant embraced the rather scruffy Jewish private-the sun was setting, there was nobody about-and, with only a little encouragement, would have risked creating a duet for opera out of their innocent situation. "_Ach, Gott__!" cried the _Herr Leutnant__. "Martin! Of all men, my old, my dearest Martin! At sunset! In Treilles! At the end of our victorious advance!" The Jew wondered how he might clamber after, if only just a little of the way. "It is heart-warming"-the _Heir Leutnant__ could not sing enough-"to renew valued friendships in unexpected places." Something, certainly, whether skill or conviction, had caused the _Heldentenor__ to glow. Cut out of felt and cardboard, his golden skin streaming with last light, he maintained the correct position, as they stood together in the shambles of a street. He smelled, moreover, his tired inferior realized, of boot polish and toilet soap. "But how are you, Martin? You don't tell me," the officer complained in different key. The approach of caution had caused him to moisten unnecessarily his glistening lips. "I am well," answered the Jew. "That is, my arches have fallen." How Jürgen Stauffer roared. His teeth were perfect. "Still a joker! My good Martin! But keep your health. We are almost there." "Where?" asked the Jew. The officer waved his hand. His brilliance could make allowances for the impudence of simplicity. So he forgave, still laughingly, still glancing back, over his shoulder as well as into the past, at some extraordinary misjudgment on his own part, as he walked away through the mud to rejoin a general who depended on his company. Peace is sometimes more explosive than war. So it seemed to many of those who lived through what followed: rootling after sausage-ends and the heads of sour herrings, expressing in their songs a joy they no longer possessed, forced by hunger and the need for warmth into erotic situations their parents would not have guessed at. Swimming and sinking, trampling and trampled, the rout of men-animals was carried along, and with them the few Himmelfarb. If he ever experienced the will to resist, he never exercised it, and even derived comfort from the friction of similar bristles on his own. During the first weeks of release, strange embraces, a delirium of experience, prevented him from returning to the bed that was, of course, waiting for him in his father's house. Besides, in those surroundings he might have laughed too loud, or farted in the dining-room, or done something of an irrational nature. For Moshe had remarried. He had taken a young woman called Christel Schmidt, with hair as heavy and yellow in its snood as horses' dung, and the necklace of Venus on her neck. _Trotzdem, nett und tüchtig__. And of no further significance. The lovers had met after mass. The girl consented, partly out of curiosity, but more especially because she could not bear to feel hungry. As for the old man, any flicker of prudence was probably extinguished by visions of a last frenzy of consenting flesh. Mordecai and his practically innocent stepmother were both relieved to put an end to an ironic situation when, after months, the former was appointed to a readership in English at the University of Bienenstadt. Dr Himmelfarb departed, with the tentative blessings of his old father, and an inkling that he had been directed to this far from lucrative post at a minor university for reasons still obscure. Several homely Jews insisted on offering him introductions to others, probably of their own kind, which he accepted with amused gratitude, and on a street corner, the disgusting dyer of his youth clawed at his arm and repeated, it seemed, endlessly: "There is a good man at Bienenstadt, a printer, a cousin of my late wife's brother-in-law. This man will receive you with lovingkindness, such as you were accustomed to in childhood, I need not remind you, Herr Mordecai. I recommend him to you with all my heart. His name is Liebmann." Dr Himmelfarb could not escape quickly enough from the grip of the dyer, who continued to call after him, "An excellent man! _Lieb-mann__ is the name!" He might have begun to spell it out, if somebody impatient had not pushed him into the gutter. Soon after, Himmelfarb left for Bienenstadt. The town itself was in many ways similar to the one in which he had been born, smaller certainly, but illuminated by the same brush. Its blue and grey, and flecks of weathered gilding, swam together in a midday sleep. Words trickled from the mouths of the inhabitants in an untainted stream. Faces dimpled with a professional friendliness, and a conviction that only they could ever be right. Yet, at Bienenstadt, Himmelfarb was soothed by the drone of days, even by the tone of its hypocrisies. Of his students, most obeyed his commands with the respect of earnest youth; a few, even, seemed of the opinion that he had more than knowledge to offer, and would loiter in hot silence, when lectures were done, as if hoping for some revelation of a personal kind. It was not that he was loved, exactly, but he could have been, if he had not withdrawn for the moment too far into himself to be reached. He had torn up all those introductions forced on him by acquaintances before his departure from Holunderthal, for he felt that to use them might have proved laughable or boring. He kept to his room a good deal, and read Spengler late at night. Months had passed before he began to be tormented by a name, for which he could not at first account. It became a source of irritation, like somebody tapping out the same phrase repeatedly on a buzzer. He would even find the name on his tongue. Then he remembered: it was that of the dreadful dyer's Bienenstadt relative. Which made the whole business more ridiculous and irritating than before. He had no intention of forming any such connection. As soon as he was aware of its origin, he laughed the smoke out of his lungs whenever the name recurred. He would light a fresh cigarette. His fingers, he noticed, were growing stained. And trembled slightly. Then quite suddenly, on a certain afternoon, he stood up knowing that he must go in search of Liebmann the printer. He could not have been more relieved, not to say elated, as he heard his feet clatter on the cobbles in the older part of the town. His winged hair, too luxuriant by standards of elegance and worldliness, floated in the light breeze. So he arrived at the house. He had chosen an hour, towards evening, when the printer's business affairs would surely have released him. Certainly the ground floor was still, deserted, padlocked. In a lane at the side he discovered a door, which could have communicated with the actual dwelling. Yes, said the between-age girl who came; but her father was not yet back from the synagogue. After a pause for her instincts to debate, she told him he should come in, and led him by the stairs to where the family lived above the press. He was brought into a room in which the shutters had been pushed back, and a young woman was examining what appeared to be a paper-knife, which she had just unwrapped from a parcel. "Oh, yes! Israel!" she said, and laughed, after the visitor left by her sister had made some reference to the dyer. "We have not seen him for years. I cannot remember when." She might have made a face, if kindness had not prevented her. Instead, she showed him the paper-knife she had just received. "From a cousin," she explained, "who has returned from Janina. But I shall have no uses for it," she regretted, and now she did make the face, and it looked most comical. "Who but a stage duchess ever used a real paper-knife to cut books or open letters?" Their combined laughter was unnaturally loud. "Surely there are other uses?" suggested the visitor, still laughing. "Oh, yes. Undoubtedly," agreed the girl. "It is so _sharp__!" With the point of the knife she pricked the ball of one of her thumbs, which grew quite white, and caused them to laugh more brilliantly than ever. Then they were both ashamed, because they had never behaved like this before. It was unnatural to both of them. But exhilarating. Each was breathless. The girl began to talk again. "Yes, my father will come soon," she said, but incidentally. "Then we shall have some coffee. I am the eldest. I am Reha." After which, she reeled off the names of several brothers and sisters. "Didn't Israel tell you about the family? Of course, he scarcely knows us. No, my mother is dead." It was a big, old-fashioned room in one of the gabled houses. "You will think I am an awful chatterbox," she said, pushing back some hair. "The others always shout me down. Do you like it here? I mean, at Bienenstadt?" "Yes," he said. "I suppose I like it." "Tell me what you do," she invited. So he did, altogether naturally now. Reha was a plump and rather dowdy girl. It was already evident how comfortable she would eventually become, and happy, if it were to be permitted. In looking at her, Himmel-farb was compelled to hold his head on one side, in a manner quite new to him, an attempt at delicacy perhaps. She did not invite attentions, let alone courtship, and had that rather homely face, yet he found himself trying to please, without expecting rewards, continually anxious lest some too florid gesture, or elaboration of thought, might convey pretentiousness where sincerity had been intended. "English," she murmured, frowningly. "My vocabulary was always weak. I did not force myself to read enough." "I shall lend you books," he promised. Each was conscious of the classic obviousness of their remarks, but it did not seem to matter. The father came in. He was a thin, small old Jew, with a game leg, and perhaps some secret ailment, or it could have been that he had never fully recovered from the death of his wife. When he heard how the visitor was sent, he came out of himself, however, and repeated several times, "Poor Israel! Poor Israel!" In a tone of voice which suggested that the hopelessness of his relative's case might have endowed him with a virtue. "In spite of his name, I must tell you, Israel is childless. Some early misfortune," the printer continued, without stopping to consider how well informed his visitor might be. "But has devoted himself to other matters. The seed can be sown, you know, in many ways." It was clear the printer would have preferred to withdraw again into himself, but he remarked quite spontaneously, and with a dry courtesy, "I hope you will always come to us on the Sabbath, sir. Make this your home. There are passages in the Books I would like to discuss with you. I would like to hear your opinion of the general situation." However formally the suggestion was presented, the printer's yellow skin remained tinged with the faint glow of lovingkindness. The eyes were too innocent to avoid entering those of his fellow men, with the result that Himmelfarb was forced to lower his own, while hoping that his host's goodness might prevent him from recognizing the disorder which prevailed within. The printer was saying, "There are many problems that you may illuminate for us, Dr Himmelfarb. We live inside a closed circle. That is our great weakness." If the visitor had not contracted the muscles of his throat with all his strength, he might have startled his grave host by shouting a denial. That, at least, was prevented. After some further conversation, he saw that Reha had returned with coffee. She was standing looking in distress and surprise at what, he realized, was the knot of his hands. But he released them quickly. The white vanished from his knuckles. And at once she made it appear doubtful whether she had noticed. She was pouring the coffee, inclining and smiling in the slight steam. It certainly smelled of real, prewar coffee. And there were wedges of _Käsekuchen__ besides. Himmelfarb went to Liebmanns' on the Sabbath, as had been suggested. He was diffident about it at first, but longing supported him, and soon it became a habit. As the whole family appeared to take his presence for granted, it seemed at last, to him too, perfectly natural. When they handed him the Sabbath dishes at table, or expected him to join in their songs, it was assumed that his life as a Jew had never been interrupted. Sometimes his happiness was an embarrassment to him. But nobody noticed, unless Ari. Ari, the eldest boy, was probably a specialist in scenting out other people's secrets, certainly their weaknesses. Bullet-headed in his _Käppchen__, he had whorls of dark hair along his cheekbones. He would mumble a grace through his broad, goat's teeth, eyes half-closed, almost smiling. In the synagogue Ari once turned to Mordecai, and did not even bother to whisper. "See that fellow over there? The one with the locks. He is so simple-that is to say, he is such a _good Jew__ that, if his grandfather stuck on a mask, and told Abram he was Elijah the Prophet, he would believe it." Ari did not expect Mordecai to laugh, but laughed for himself. He was perfectly detached. But he was not a bad lad. He would go off tramping and singing across the _Heide__ with other young Jews, members of an organization to which he belonged. He loved his family, too, and would sit at table with his arms round his sisters' necks. Mordecai believed that, in time, he might even love Ari. Of the Sabbath table, he loved the crusts. The crumbs beneath his fingers humbled him. "What is it?" Reha might ask. "Don't you like the carp? Or is it, perhaps, the _Biersosse__?" In the silence after his reassurance, she would fidget with her plate. And look for something. Like his mother, she was myopic. In the beginning Reha had not been able to resist joking with their guest about the blind leading the blind, for Himmelfarb, as it turned out, had inherited indifferent sight, and shortly before his arrival at Bienenstadt, had been forced to take to spectacles. These sat somewhat oddly on his face, and might have weakened its natural defences if they had not been reinforced by an expression of increasing certainty. For the young man who was no longer a stranger, the Sabbath became a steadfast joy, whether sitting in the twilight of the printer's house, or, at the synagogue, touching elbows with his friend Liebmann, as they stood wrapped in their trailing shawls. As the coverings of the Ark were changed, in accordance with the feasts of the year, so his soul would put on different colours. He was again furnished with his faith. To touch the fringes of his shawl with his lips, was to drink pure joy. In autumn, when the heat had passed, he sometimes persuaded Reha Liebmann, who was secretly appalled by open spaces, to go walking with him through the barren heathland which stretched to the north of Bienenstadt, and, on a Sunday in October, as they sat and rested in a sandy, slightly more protected hollow, he suggested she should become his wife. She would not answer at first, by any word, but was separating the grains of sand, and could have been sad, or bitter. To tell the truth, it surprised the vanity in him, but only for a moment. She did begin, very slowly, very softly. "Yes," she said. "Yes, Mordecai. I had been hoping. From the beginning I had been hoping. But knew, too, of course." If her words had lacked simplicity, such candour might have sounded complacent, or even immodest. "Oh, dear!" She began to cry. "I must try very hard. Forgive me," she cried. "That I should behave like this. Just now. I am afraid I may fail you also in other ways." "Reha, darling!" he answered rather lightly. "In the eyes of the world a provincial intellectual is a _comic__ figure." "Ah, but you do not understand," she managed with difficulty. "Not yet. And I cannot express myself. But we-some of us-although we have not spoken-know that you will bring us honour." She took his fingers, and was looking absently, again almost sadly, at their roots. She stroked the veins in the backs of his hands. "You make me ashamed," he protested. Because he was astounded. "You will see," she said. "I am convinced." And looked up, smiling confidently now. So that he wanted to kiss her-she was so good and tangible-but at the same time he was determined to forget the strange, rather hysterical assertions his proposal had inspired. "Reha! Reha! If you only knew!" he insisted. "I am the lowest of human beings!" But it did not deter her from taking his head in her arms. It was as though she would possess it for as long as one is allowed to possess anything in this world. Yet she did so with humility, conscious of the minor part she would be given to play. When at last they got to their feet, after comforting each other by words and touch, they were amazed and shy. The bronze trumpets were calling their names, in that remote and rather sour hollow of the _Heide__, as evening fell. Soon the days were tumbling over one another, babbling in the accents of old women, younger sisters and girl cousins, until the bridegroom was standing beneath the _chuppah__, waiting for his bride. She came very softly, as might have been expected, like a breath. Then the two were standing together, but no longer bound by their awkward bodies, under the canopy of stuffy velvet, in the particular smell of sanctity and scouring of the old synagogue at Bienenstadt, in an assembly of tradesmen and small shopkeepers, who were the seed of Israel fallen on that corner of Germany. The miraculous, encrusted _chuppah__ did actually open for the chosen couple; they were sucked out of themselves into an infinity of blue, and their souls were flapping together, diffidently at first, as two handkerchiefs will flutter and dispute each other's form and direction in a wind, until, reconciled by nature to the truth of the situation, they reach out, wrapped together, straining always higher, in one strong, white tongue. So the souls of the united couple temporarily abandoned their surroundings, while the bodies of bridegroom and bride continued to stand beneath the canopy, enacting the touching and simple ceremonies in which the congregation might participate. How the old men and women craned to distinguish the gold circlet that the young man was slipping on the bride's finger. The old, dusty men and women were again encircled by love and history. Their own lips tasted joyful wine, and trembled to forestall the breaking of the cup. For the bridegroom had taken the glass, as no happiness can be repeated, all must be relived, resanctifled. So the bridegroom stood with the glass poised. It was unbearably perfect, immaculate, but fragile. It was already breaking-breaking-broken. During a second of silence, its splinters glittered on the brick floor. There were, of course, a few present who had broken into tears for the destruction of the glass, but even they joined with the congregation in shouting with joy, all, out of the depths of their hearts. They were truly overjoyed by that which they had just enacted together. Hope was renewed in everybody. "_Mazel tov__!" cried the toothless mouths of the old people, and the red, shrilly voices of the young girls vibrated with hysteria and anticipation. Only the bridegroom seemed to have entered on another phase. He appeared almost morose, as he stood fidgeting beneath the now grotesque and brooding _chuppah__. Time had, in fact, carried him too far too fast, with the result that the beard had sprouted again on his shaven jaw, and as he dipped his chin, thoughtful and frowning, the neck of the white _kittel__ which protruded unevenly above his wedding jacket was chafing against the bristles of incipient beard. So he frowned, and bit one end of his moustache, and heard the first delicately staged message of falling earth which precedes the final avalanche of mortality. Afterwards, at the house of the father-in-law, Mordecai was whirled around and around so often, to receive embraces or advice, that the thinking man succumbed temporarily to the sensual one. Without listening to much of what he was told, he laughed back out of his parted, swelling lips, quite unlike himself. And rubbed his eyes occasionally to rid them of the blur of candles. Always laughing rather than replying. The air, besides, was unctuous with a smell of goose fat and the steam from golden soup. In the mood of relaxed sensuality which the wedding feast had induced, it did not strike him as tragic that there were none of his own present. Tactfully, his father had developed a severe chill, which kept him confined to his bed. His aunts, self-engrossed and ailing women, had never really recovered from the circumstances of their sister's death. But one figure did emerge from the past, and when he had put his arms round the bridegroom, Mordecai recognized the dyer from Holunderthal. "I did not doubt you would see what was indicated," slobbered the awful man into the bridegroom's ear. "And know you will justify our expectations. Because your heart has been touched and changed." The guests were swarming around, and jostling them, so that Mordecai only succeeded with difficulty in holding the dyer off by handfuls of the latter's scurfy coat. "Touched and changed?" He laughed back, and heard it sound faintly stupid. "I am, as always, myself, I regret to tell you!" "That is so, and that is why!" the dyer replied. Pressed together as they were, Mordecai realized that the man's hitherto sickly body had a warmth and strength he would never have suspected. Nor was he himself half as disgusted as he had been on previous occasions, though now, of course, he had taken several glasses of wine. "But you are all riddles-secrets!" In spite of their proximity it was necessary to shout to be heard above the noise. "There is no secret," the dyer appeared to be saying, or shouting back. "Equanimity is no secret. Solitariness is no secret. True solitariness is only possible where equanimity exists. An unquiet spirit can introduce distractions into the best-prepared mind." "But this is immoral!" Mordecai protested, shouting. "And on such an occasion! It is a denial of community. Man is not a hermit." "Depending on the man, he is a light that will reflect out over the community-all the brighter from a bare room." As they were practically bellowing at each other, nobody else had heard, which was perhaps just as well, and at that moment they were separated by the printer, who wanted to display his son-in-law to some acquaintance or relative. As his self-appointed guide was sucked back into the crowd and lost, Himmelfarb accepted that the crippled dyer, who had come even to the wedding with the lines of his hands marked clearly in purple, was one from whom he would never escape. He had learnt the shape of the unshapely body, the texture of the unchanging coat; mirrors had taught him, long before their meeting, the expression of the eyes. Now, in the moment of perception, all the inklings were married together: the dyer's image was with him for always, like his new wife, or his own fate. Now he was committed. So he continued to answer distractedly the questions of the wedding guests, while trying to reconcile in his mind what his wife had taught him of love, with what had hitherto been the disgust he had felt for the dyer. In the light of the one, he must discover and gather up the sparks of love hidden in the other. Or deny his own purpose, as well as the existence of the race. In the circumstances, he was amazed nobody realized the answers they were receiving to their questions were no answers, or that his wife Reha should look up at him with an expression of implicit confidence.