Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

Himmelfarb learned that he was being driven to the railway marshalling yards some miles to the southeast of Holunderthal. He had already heard, through Ingeborg Stauffer, that the place had suffered considerable damage as a target of importance in the war effort and national life. Now he gathered that, amongst its other uses, it served as an assembly point for Jews who were being moved to other parts of the country, even to other countries. His particulars were taken on arrival, and immediately he was shoved inside one of a number of large sheds. As it was still night, and the shed was kept in total darkness due to the exigencies of war, it was not possible to estimate the number of his fellow occupants, only that the shed contained a solid mass, and that a mass soul suffered and recoiled. Inside the prevailing darkness, worse because it was imposed by man-or could it have been sent by God? — the lost soul mourned, and tried to deduce the reason for the unreasonable. At moments the voice of the mourner sounded like that of a child, but quickly thickened and intensified. Then the agèd voice rose, it seemed, out of the depths of history. Crying and lamenting. Sometimes there were blows and kicks as more of the filthy Jews were settled in, and sometimes from the door a torch would reach out, and rend the veil of darkness, revealing patches of yellowish skin, or hands clutching at possessions, as if those were the most they had to lose. The guards might laugh at some indignity glimpsed, but on the whole, at the assembly point, they seemed to prefer a darkness in which to hate in the abstract the whole mass of Jews. By morning light, which comes slowly and coldly into a bare shed in winter, Himmelfarb began to distinguish the features of individuals, though the way they huddled, bundled up against cold and misery, these members of his race were presented, rather, as the dregs. Certainly there were individuals still under the influence of decorum. Here and there a streak of white powder was visible in the grey shadows of an elderly lady's skin. An old Jew, wrapped in his shawl, for warmth as much as worship, dusted its fringes before kissing them. So far the stench had not begun to rise. Except where a child had dirtied himself, and was wiped clean with difficulty. In that corner it was not possible to ignore the smell of shit. Nor the clamour of hopelessness. In the thin light a man's voice was reciting a prayer for the common good, but the voice of the mother which rose against it no longer believed she might be included in a rescue. The first slime of despair had begun to cling. Once, as the Jews bestirred themselves at dusk, changing position, chafing limbs, snuffing at the heavy air after a breath of imagined freshness, tearing precious pieces from the stale loaves several had succeeded in husbanding, in a few cases even trying to improvise little meals on spirit stoves, Himmelfarb thought he saw the figure of the dyer he had known in his youth, and sat up from against the case which was numbing his ribs-to call, to greet, to seize the flying tails of all past experience, and hold them fast, lovingly. But the dyer, he realized, touching his own skin, must have died years ago, probably in peace, and could have bequeathed him, as he remembered, the peculiar duty of loving his children, in the limbo of awfulness to which they had been consigned, until he himself was in turn released. So the legatary sat considering his obligations for the future. When an angry woman, the wife of a grocer, accused the gentleman, educated too, of stealing a rind of cheese she had snatched up on leaving, and with which she was preparing to comfort herself. She was quite abusive, until she noticed her property, fallen in the dirt between them. The gentleman, a professor or something, smiled at the woman as he handed up the cheese. But she remained hostile to the one who was the cause of her shame. There where they sat, amongst the cases and the bundles, the keepsakes and the books, the _Wurst__ and the cooking utensils, Himmelfarb embraced the children of the dyer. Even when they would not have him. On the several occasions when he actually went amongst them, they were ready enough to speak, to exchange the material details of their woe, but grew shy and silent when his attempts at spiritual candour made them suspect an assault on their privacy of soul. Most of those present were still united with family or friends. To that extent, they were safe, they believed. In the circumstances, they were not prepared to give what the stranger merely wished them to accept. So he and they continued to sit in the congested shed. At one stage a party of Jews from a nearby camp was herded in. Huddled together in their austere, striped robes, these people of shaven heads, receded eyes, and skeletal limbs, silently implied that it was no longer their function to speak, or even mix, with their own race, and it became generally accepted that these were the elect of suffering, who should remain apart. But at least the inmates of the shed had their fate in common, and sometimes the voices of all would unite in prayer: "May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to conduct us in peace, to direct our steps in peace, to uphold us in peace, and to lead us in life, joy and peace unto the haven of our desire…." The voices of the Jews rose together in prayer for the journey, as, indeed, they were going on one, if not exactly an excursion to Hildesheim, or visit to relatives at Frankfurt. The unintelligible rigmarole made the guards laugh. For several days the Jews remained in the sheds at the marshalling yards the other side of Holunderthal. It was difficult to imagine any issue above their own, yet, it was fleetingly remembered, a war was raging outside: at night the sky would be crisscrossed as they had once seen it, and the joyless confetti that the flak made would still be falling for the bride of darkness. On the third night, a bomb hit an ammunition train, and the whole of the solid world was rocked. After the sheds which contained the Jews had recovered their normal shape, even after the exploding target, and the sirens and the whistles had exhausted their frenzy, the prisoners lay and listened for something worse to be directed at them personally. They were unable really to believe there might be other objectives. Finally, on a morning of iron frost they were taken out. A little hammer tapping on the cold silence at a distance, might have struck a note of desolation, if the hiss and drizzle of escaping steam had not created an illusion of warmth somewhere close. Men were coming and going on those mysterious errands of the anomalous hours before dawn. A party of shift workers, stamping, and chafing themselves as they gathered, shouted at the guards to remind them of a few simple brutalities they might have forgotten. But those who were most intimately connected with the departure of the Jews, and who had only recently torn themselves out of warm bunks and a frowst of sleep, needed no spur to their resentment. As they prodded their charges along with the points of their bayonets, the guards worked some of it off in little, provocative stabs. One, surlier, and more sleep-swollen than the rest, inserted the blade between the great buttocks of a fat Jew, just so far, to hear the threatened victim bellow. There was a woman, too, crying for something she had left behind in the shed which had become her home. How she cried for the bare boards, which her mind had transformed, and the loss of one woollen glove. Some of the travellers, however, mostly younger people, and an elderly person said to be a university professor, were determined not to be intimidated by the steely face of morning. Whatever might happen next, there was always the possibility that it might not be worse than they had expected. So their eyes would invest the most unpromising forms with hope: the long black centipedes of stationary trains, twisted girders, or just the vast spectacle of landscape as the light disentangled it from the mist. These more fortunate individuals enjoyed at least the protection of their vision, as they continued to stand, on the thin soles of their shoes, above the crunching frost, holding their cheap portmanteaux, briefcases, or corded chattels. And waited. Or shuffled. And waited. Or shuffled. Until, from the slight intensification of pressure, the throb of emotion, and remarks filtering through the mass, it became known that those in front were being induced to mount a train. And soon it appeared that this was, indeed, a train, none of the cattle-trucks of which everyone had heard, but carriages with orthodox compartments, certainly not of the newest-the stuffing was bursting out of many of the arm-rests-yet, a train, a train, of corridors, and windows which opened after a struggle, and white antimacassars-admittedly a little soiled where other heads had rested-but a train, a real train. So the Jews pushed, and some of them dared joke. At the ends of the corridors there were actually WCs, nor was there any thought of complaint amongst the passengers when it was discovered that the basins and lavatories were waterless. They were far too grateful. What could have happened? they asked one another as they sat, still panting, still in heaps, still trickling with sweat inside their winter clothes. Nobody bothered yet to answer, only to ask. The pale light of morning was filled with a wonderful flashing of eyes, for the fire of all those people, so recently threatened with extinction, was suddenly rekindled. As the train jolted slowly into motion, and the couplings wrestled to establish a grip, throwing the passengers together, a lady whose face had not yet formed behind its veil, offered the university professor a _Brötchen__, filled with the most delicate shavings of _Wurst__, and explained in the voice of one who knew, that the policy towards the Jews had definitely changed. So she had heard, the lady insisted, holding her head at a knowing angle, but whether the information had come to her by word of mouth, or intuition, she did not seem prepared to reveal. Nor was her news less joyous because necessity had made it believable. The compartment hummed with surmise, and the lady herself threw back her veil, to prepare for cultivated conversation in refined company. The professor, however, chewed greedily away. "It could be so," he breathed, and made it clear he did not wish to elaborate. For he was so happy to munch, his eyes bulging like those of any abandoned dog bolting down its find of offal. He masticated, and ignored the fact that the exquisite wafers of _Wurst__ stank, and that the elegant little varnished roll was by then practically petrified. There were others in the compartment, of course. To tell the truth, it was rather tightly packed. There was a mother, whose sick child dirtied himself repeatedly, and could not be treated without the requisite drugs. There was a widower in a stiff black hat, the father of two little boys, who owned between them a wooden horse. There were a young man and a young woman, who plaited their hands together from the beginning, and would not have been parted, least of all by death. And two individuals so insignificant, Himmelfarb never after succeeded in reconstructing their faces, however hard he tried. So the train drew out, across Germany, it could have been across Europe. And the numb landscape actually thawed. The naked branches of the beeches appeared to stream like soft hair, when their steely whips should have stung. The fields and copses were delivered temporarily from the grip of winter. Black water flowed between the dirtied cushions of the snow. Such a miraculous release. Some peasants in a yard stood and laughed round a heap of smoking dung. A little girl, as pale as sprouting cress, danced in a meadow, holding out her apron to catch what even she might not have been able to tell. As the train lurched always deeper into Europe, the lady of the _Brötchen__ wound round a black-kid finger the tendrils of her hair. Of quite a lively red. She was a native of Czernowitz, she was kind enough to inform, of inherited means, and her own talents. Circumstances, alas, had carried her from the scenes of her glory, into Northern Germany. The little boys looked up, jointly holding their painted horse. "_Na, ja__," sighed the father in the stiff black hat. He had a long, drooping, doubting lip. And the landscape flowed. The sky showed, not the full splendour of sky, but intimations of it, through rents in the cloud. For Himmelfarb, who had closed his eyes behind his spectacles-from accumulation rather than exhaustion-it was enough. After the days of darkness, too much had been revealed too soon. He was filled with it. As he drowsed, and woke, and drowsed, the train rocked, smelling of other trains. The sick baby slept, whom the mother had managed to clean after a fashion. It _was__ the change in policy, insisted the Lady from Czernowitz, who had returned from the waterless WC. She had spoken to a rabbi, of Magdeburg, and been convinced. The trainload of Jews was the first to be carried into Eastern Europe. In future, all Central European Jews would be assisted to reach Bucharest, to make their connections for Istanbul, where they would embark for Palestine. Neutral powers had interceded. Certainly, whenever it halted, laughter sounded from farther down the train, and songs of rejoicing in the corridor, so choked with bodies and baskets that joy alone could have leavened such a mass. The Lady from Czernowitz shone with her own information, and the anonymous souls had to praise God. Only the wooden father of the two little boys no more than stared, and breathed. Dusk had begun to powder the Lady from Czernowitz, laying the grey upon the white; a woman of less indefatigable mystery might have looked smudged. But she herself was quick to take advantage of the hour. She anointed herself from a little phial, and tried out a bar or two, in the middle register, on the evening star. Her voice, she explained, had received its training from only the best teachers in Vienna. Her _Freischütz__ had been praised at Constantsa, and as for her _Fledermaus__ at Graz! Recently, she had agreed to accept pupils, but only a few, and those exceptional. She had accompanied a young princess to Bled, and spent an agreeable season, of pleasure and instruction. Ah, the charm and distinction of the Princess Elena Ghika! Ah, the _Kastanientotten__ beside the lake at Bled! The younger of the little boys began to cry. He had never felt emptier. Only the landscape filled. Darkness seeped along the valleys and clotted in the clefts of the hills. Its black, treacly consistency arrived on the window-panes of the train. Certainly it was sadder at night. A man died on the train, in the night, and was dragged off, into a village to which he had never belonged. They watched his heels disappear with a jerk. Death irritated the guards, particularly since the frost had set in again, and the dead man's metal heels caught in transit in other metal. Later in the journey, but by daylight, several other people died, and remained in the compartments, in the very positions in which their souls had abandoned them. Had the _Regierung__ overlooked the dead in revising its Jewish policy? asked the mother whose sick baby was by then stinking terribly. But the Lady from Czernowitz averted her face. It was her habit to ignore the insinuations of common persons. And how was _she__ responsible for official omissions? Dedicated to music and conversation, all else bored her, frankly. Indeed, her skin looked quite fatigued. One would, perhaps, be better dead, mused the mother of the sick child. "Death!" The Lady from Czernowitz laughed, and announced, not to the rather common woman who had suggested it, nor yet to the compartment at large, but to some abstraction of a perfectly refined relationship: "Oh, yes! Death! If I had not suspected it involved _des ennuis énormes__, I might have used my precious little cyanide. Oh, yes! Long ago! Long ago! Which, I must admit, I never move one step without." And glanced down into her floury breasts. And patted herself. And laughed-or ejected an appearance of mirth out of her deathly face. So she continued to crumble. Oh, the aching, and the rocking, and the questions. For they had begun again to ask one another: Why the train? Why the train? Why not the cattle-trucks? Until the father in the stiff hat could bear it no longer, and had to shout, "The train-don't you see? — was all they had. The trucks were bombed. And so many Jews on their hands. There was no alternative." But solutions do not always console. Ah, if they could have opened something, and found the truth inside. Like the two lovers, at least, whose faces were cupboards containing antidotes, but only efficacious on each other. There was the professor, too, who had withdrawn farther than anyone else could follow. Himmelfarb, the guilty, would return at intervals, to observe that the faces of those he truly loved had grown resentful, and might in time begin to hate, in the manner of men. So the trainload of Jews continued to lurch across Europe. The minutes gnawed at the bellies of the hungry, but the hours finally stuffed them with a solid emptiness. As they sat, the crumbs of dignity and stale bread littered the floor around their feet. Once or twice air raids occurred. Then the train would lie up in darkness, alongside some placid field. In the darkened, reverberating boxes, many of the human beings no longer bothered to crouch, as if worse could not possibly happen to them. Their skins had become hides, rubbing on the napless plush, or against the greasy antimacassars, which was all that survived of _Mitteleuropa__. And then, on a morning of deeper, dripping green, of blander blue, the train, which had drawn slower, silenter, far more purposeful, since a certain seemingly important junction, with its ganglion of silver, slithery lines, stopped ever so gradually at a little clean siding, paved with sparkling flints, and aggressive in its new paint, if it had not been so peaceful. On either hand, the forest rose, green to black. The siding was named FRIEDENSDORF, the sign proclaimed. Yet, they must be in Poland, insisted the Lady from Czernowitz, who had overheard at the junction a few phrases in the Polish tongue, of which she had acquired a smattering, for amusement's sake, let it be understood, or as an intellectual exercise. The train continued to stand, in the dripping forests, at the siding of Friedensdorf. And German voices came. The doors were wrenched open. There was a crunching of boots on flints, and much official instruction. "Welcome! Welcome!" announced the official voice, magnified, though muffled. "Welcome to Friedensdorf!" There was even music. Towers of music rose above the pointed firs. The giddier waltzes revolved glassily on discs, or alternately, invisible folk dancers would tread their wooden round, with the result that the seed was in many cases sown, of credulity, in innocence. See, some of the passengers were prepared to believe, and amongst them the Lady from Czernowitz, this was a kind of transit camp, for those who were taking part in the organized migration to the Land. Here they would be fed and rested, while awaiting trains from the other end. Whatever the explanation, the passengers were soon brought tumbling out, and again there were those more timid souls who regretted their late home in the dilapidated train, just as they had protested earlier at eviction from a railway shed. But there they were, standing on the platform, in the damp, outside air, assaulted by a scent of pine needles, the waves of which, at the best of times, will float their victims back into the intolerable caverns of nostalgia. Already it was apparent that some of the older people, weakened enough by hunger and the privations of the journey, would not be able to endure much more, and those nearest to them were preparing to catch them if they fell. To say nothing of sick, or young children. To judge by the expressions on the hatched-bird faces, these had suddenly recalled the experience of former lives. Unlike most of the adults, who had had time to forget, they enjoyed the doubtful benefit of insight, with the result that many of them walked as though they suspected the crust of yellow excrement coating the earth had still to harden. Nervous children of this kind were jollied by the adults. Or the guards. Some of the latter were so good. Himmelfarb could remember cracking peasant jokes with the honest German faces, in forest clearing, and village street. Their voices expressed the good, rasping crudity of earth and apples. Now, as they marshalled the new arrivals, their teeth were as white as split apples, their mouths running with the juices of persuasion. Though, of course, the bestial moments occurred too. There is always the beast lurking, who will come up, booted, bristling, his genitals bursting from the cloth which barely contains them. Some of the guards, by their behaviour, made the passengers remember other incidents they would have preferred to forget. But all were soon ready to advance, and did, though the ones behind were the more willing. Beneath the streamers of music, through the wet, cajoling pines, the party moved. It could have been a tattered, a lamentable sight. So amorphous, in spite of official attempts, and the baritone voice of an iron tower, which urged order and cleanliness on the guests of Friedensdorf. But here came the sick, the aged, the untouchables-the Jews: old women pick-a-back on their sons, stiff legs stuck out in spiralled stockings; grandfathers trailing _tallithim__ and the smell of years; desperate husbands protecting their wives' bellies from the crush; bourgeois with briefcases and identical hats. So they arrived, and the precautionary gates were closed upon them. The mesh of tingling, spangled wire subsided. "_Ach__, look now! I have torn my veil!" The Lady from Czernowitz was inclined to whimper, but after a very brief contact between her black kid glove and her companion's arm, was able to continue. "I am assured," she informed, "that we shall be treated with the greatest consideration during our short stay. And shall reach Constantsa unharmed. Or is it Istanbul? But to return, Professor, to our conversation, I must tell you the walks were magnificent in the forests of Bukhovina, where we would pick the little wild strawberries, and eat them with the finest sugar and faintly sour cream." More than a little disarranged, her flesh turned mauve beneath the last vestiges of powder, the Lady from Czernowitz was still able to glitter from behind the kohl. It was also perhaps the music. She appeared to react more feverishly to music, and now a hand had released something by Lehar, the frills of which fluttered from the iron tower. "_Achtung! Achtung__!" interrupted the official voice, that rather warm baritone. All new arrivals would proceed to the bath-houses. Men to the left, women to the right. All would take baths. Baths. Men to the left. To ensure absolute cleanliness, passengers would have to submit to a routine disinfection. Women to the right. Through the palpitating air of the false thaw fell the cries of parting. It was most unreasonable, the official voice grumbled. But who had not been deceived by reason before? So the bodies of the unreasonable locked themselves together in a last, long attempt to merge. And, in many cases, were only prised apart by force, carrying with them into segregation convulsed handfuls of clothing and hair. "Do you suppose, Professor," cried the Lady from Czernowitz, "do you suppose we shall be expected to undress in public?" "Let us not be ashamed of our nakedness," Himmelfarb advised. But the Lady from Czernowitz suddenly screamed. "I cannot bear it!" she shrieked. "I cannot bear it! Oh, no! No! No! No!" "I shall pray for us!" he called after her. "For all of us!" His hands dangling uselessly in the vacant air. Nor did she hear his man's voice attempting to grapple with a situation which might have tested the prophets themselves, for she was borne away, in a wind, and stuffed inside the bath-house, in case her hysteria should inspire those who were obedient, duller, or of colder blood. The last Himmel-farb saw of his companion, at that stage, was the black and disordered bundle of her tearing clothes. For the men were also pressed back, by ropes of arms and, in certain cases, by naked steel. It seemed as though the sexes would never again meet, at the prospect of which, some of the women screamed, and one young man, remembering tender intimacies, rasped and ranted, until almost choked by his own tongue. "_Achtung! Achtung__!" the official voice prepared to inform, or admonish. "After disrobing, guests are requested to hang their clothing on the numbered hooks, and to pile any other belongings tidily on the benches beneath. Everything will be returned aft-" But there the system failed. "_Achtung! Acht__… on numbered hooks… will be return.. _Put.. ftt__…" Now Himmelfarb, who had been pressed inside the door of the men's bath-house, gave himself into the hands of God. His own were on his necktie. Most of his companions, on whom the virtue of discipline had been impressed by the country of their birth or election, were instinctively doing as they had been asked. One big fat fellow had entered so far into the spirit of the dream that his shirt was halfway over his head. Himmelfarb himself was still only watching the dreadful dream-motions. "Into Your hands, O Lord," his lips were committing him afresh. When something happened. A guard came pushing through the mass of bodies, one of the big, healthy, biddable blond children, choosing here and there with a kind of lazy, lingering discrimination. "You will remain dressed," he ordered Himmelfarb, "and report with me outside for camp duties." It seemed quite capricious that the guard should have picked on this elderly man, although there might have been an official reason for his doing so. Certainly Himmelfarb was still impressive. In height and breadth he was the guard's equal, but his eyes entered deeper than those of his superior, whose shallow blue did flicker for an instant. It could have been, then, that the physically luxuriant youth was deliberately wooing into his secret depths what he sensed to be a superior spirit. Or he could, simply, have been directed without knowing. Several other Jews, of various ages and muscular build, were following the guard, stupefied. Outside, the sanded yard appalled by its comparative emptiness, as well as by its chill, for mists were issuing out from the trees, to creep between the sweaty layers of clothes. The favoured stood around, fluctuating uneasily inside the cages of their ribs. Then they began to notice that a number of other individuals, all obviously of slave status, dressed in miscellaneous garments, were assembled in a kind of informal formation. One of them spoke to his neighbour, who happened to be Himmelfarb. "The women will soon be going in," the stranger informed, in faltering, faulty German. "The women usually go in first." It was doubtful to what race the man belonged. He could have been a darker Slav, a Pole perhaps, or of Mediterranean stock, but there was no mistaking the evidence of inferior blood. "'Going in'?" asked Himmelfarb. "What do you mean by 'going in'?" "To the gas," the fellow explained, in decent, friendly tones. But ghostly. Himmelfarb remembered, fleetingly, a colleague who had been dying of cancer of the throat. "Yes," whispered his new friend. "The gas will be pouring soon. When it is over, we shall drag the bodies to the pits." It suggested a harvest ritual rather than the conventions of hell. But just then, the door of the women's bath-house burst open, by terrible misadventure, and there, forever to haunt, staggered the Lady from Czernowitz. How the hands of the old, helpless, and furthermore, intellectual Jew, her friend, went out to her. "God show us!" shrieked the Lady from Czernowitz. "Just this once! At least!" In that long, leathern voice. She stood there for an instant in the doorway, and might have fallen if allowed to remain longer. Her scalp was grey stubble where the reddish hair had been. Her one dug hung down beside the ancient scar which represented the second. Her belly sloped away from the hillock of her navel. Her thighs were particularly poor. But it was her voice which lingered. Stripped. Calling to him from out of the dark of history, ageless, ageless, and interminable. Then the man her counterpart, brought to his knees by sudden weakness, tearing them furiously, willingly, on the pebbles, calling to her across the same gulf, shouted through the stiff slot of his mouth, "The Name! Remember they cannot take the Name! When they have torn off our skins, that will clothe. Save. At last." Before she was snatched back. And he felt himself falling, falling, the human part of him. As his cheek encountered the stones, the funnels of a thousand mouths were directed upon him and poured out over his body a substance he failed to identify.