WHEN THEY were seated, on two stones which could have been put there for them at the roots of the tree, the two people ignored each other for a moment, staring back at the material world as if to take a last look at those familiar forms which further experience might soon remove from their lives. From inside their flowered tent, they could now observe how the masses of the orchard were broken by a hatching in grey wood. Only precariously alive, the trees were the greener for their sickliness, moodily defiant of the strong light, with little, wizened oranges radiating a feverish gold. All was most extraordinarily exposed to mind and view from beneath the plum, and could have appeared to challenge hope, if it had not been for the evidence of continuity: a bird cupped in the grey goblet of her nest, a litter of young rabbits moving by clockwork into grass, the eyelids of a lizard denying petrifaction by the sun. It was perfectly still, except that the branches of the plum tree hummed with life, increasing, and increasing, deafening, swallowing them up. At that point Mary Hare turned to her companion, wondering whether he was the kind of person to whom apologies had to be made. "This," she said, "is what I am really interested in." She wished her hands could have helped her out, but they would not. "All these things, I mean,"-making an awkward motion with her head-"are what I understand." She realized she was at her most hopelessly inadequate. Her tongue was small, and round, and hard. The man nodded, however. She saw he would take her seriously. So she eased her knees, in their ugly brown woollen stockings. "It is still difficult for us to appreciate, except in theory," said the man. "Until so very recently, we were confined within ghettoes. Trees and flowers grew the other side of walls, the other side of our experience, in fact." Miss Hare made rather a face for the difficulties she had begun already to encounter. "I must tell you something," she said. "I did not receive much education. My father was impatient. And then," she confided-it was terribly hard, but necessary-"I was supposed to be simple. Still, there were always a great many things I was able to understand." The man could not have been less surprised, or perhaps he was excessively grave. "I mean," he continued, "I am a Jew, and centuries of history have accustomed one to look inward instead of outward." "Oh," said Miss Hare, "there are others who do that!" And paused. "Sometimes it is quite horrible," she murmured. A prickly stillness had fallen round them. Then she reached forward and jerked off, clumsily but successfully, a twig from her tree. "There," she said, showing him. She was holding the blossom in her blunt grubs of fingers. Would he be disgusted by her as many people were? He bent forward to look at the flower. She had never been so close to a man-even her father's moments of intimacy had been necessarily distant; he had always avoided any gesture that might have developed into an embrace-so, now it was natural that she should observe intently. She was looking into the little whorls of hair on his neck, just above the collar. The confusion and profusion of rather wiry, once-black hair excited her love for all living matter, while she felt as guilty as though she had discovered the secret a respected friend had not attempted to conceal. The man was taking a somewhat exaggerated interest in the plum blossom. "It is almost finished," he was saying. "It is only beginning," she corrected. "After this there will be a period that a lot of people consider dull. Little pin-heads of green fruit. Before the fat, purple, powdered ones. "But the worms come, too," she remembered. "The plums will be full of worms." All the time she was examining the pores of his skin. His ugly face had not yet opened to her, although she could feel there was nothing such a person would willingly hide. His face was stone, but must have possessed the warmth of statues in summer, which retain the heat of the sun after it has withdrawn. She was particularly fascinated by his great nose. It should have been cruel, but, on the contrary, it appeared so gentle she would have liked to touch it. "You investigate nature very thoroughly," the man said, and laughed. "I do not have to investigate," she answered. "By now, I know!" Then she blushed for what Peg might have called a boast. He continued looking at the twig, although each knew the necessity had passed. Her hands took the blossom for granted, while continuing gently to hold, and he was reminded of some animals: dogs that have accepted the good faith of a master, cats resuming their suckling of a litter while a stranger looks on. In their freckled clumsiness, her hands appeared supremely trustful. "I am afraid I did not catch your name," her voice had begun to say, in the accents of another, a mother, perhaps, or governess. "Himmelfarb," he said. "Oh, dear!" she protested. "That is something I shall never learn. Haven't you something easier?" "Mordecai." "Worse!" she cried. "Much worse!" And looked helpless, but pleased. "I have been called by a great variety of names. Many of them in the heat of the moment. But in the end, no name is necessary," he said. "Not even the rightful ones." She looked down into her lap to avoid something she did not fully understand. "Mine are very simple," she ventured, and was almost too ashamed to disclose them. But, when finally she did, he appeared delighted, and asked with some enthusiasm, "Did you realize it is possible to distinguish the figure of a hare if one looks carefully at the moon?" "No. I did not. But I am not at all surprised," she replied earnestly. "The sacrificial animal." "What is that?" she asked, or panted. "In some parts of the world, they believe the hare offers itself for sacrifice." "Oh, no!" she cried. "I do not like to believe that. One meets with too many knives by the way, without going deliberately in search of one." "The concept of the willing hare is surely less painful than that of the scapegoat, dragged out, bleating, by its horns." "Goats? Please, don't tell me! I really do not understand any of these things." His natural and immediate silence calmed her, however, and she said, "I don't think I ever met a Jew. Perhaps one. An old man who was useful to my father. A piano tuner. Are Jews so very different?" "There is all the difference in the world." "Do you like it?" "We have no alternative." "I understand," she said. "I, too, am different." He laughed, and picked up the twig of wilting plum blossom which she had let fall. "That would appear, mathematically and morally, to make us equal," he said. "I am glad." Without irony, though. So that she was glad in turn. This Jew would not be one to go laughing at her. "In the factory where I work," the Jew told her, and he had returned inward, behind walls higher than those he had mentioned, "I am considered the most different of all human beings." "Of course!" she cried. "_They__ always behave like that. What do you make in your factory? Is it close? I cannot imagine it. Tell me," she said. "It is at Barranugli. We do make other things, but our particular item is bicycle lamps." "I should hate that!" she replied with great vehemence. "But do you live close? I do hope." "At Sarsaparilla, " he said. "Yes?" "Below the post-office." "In your own house?" "So to speak." "Yes, yes. I do know a little brown house. Oh, a house is better! One can hide in a house." Until seeming to remember. Then she added, "Up to a point." This mad, botched creature might subject him to thumbscrews, and touch him with feathers, at one and the same time, the Jew suspected. "I have a house," she continued warily. "Down there. Beyond the orchard. Perhaps I shall show you some day. We shall see." Because the Jew must understand the essential mystery and glory which Mrs Jolley and her like could never recognize. Yes, glory, because decay, even the putrid human kind, did not necessarily mean an end. "I am not very often free." The man seemed uneasy. He was not refusing. Rather, he was attempting to resist something which he might have desired. "I know," said Miss Hare. "The factory. But you must breathe sometimes. Even a plant must breathe." Her own breath had begun to sound spasmodic, though triumphant. She had never spoken like this before to any human being. Unexpected seeds of thought were germinating in her mind, and she had the impression she might shortly grasp things which had remained, hitherto, the secrets of others. "Several times I have trespassed in your orchard," the Jew confessed, "and sat beneath your tree." "That is a beginning," the woman suggested gently. As a child she had learnt to help fledglings onto twigs, and maimed or frightened animals to walk. "So you will come here again, won't you?" Now she was pleading, only this time it could have been in her own interests. "I want you to tell me things. About your life. Won't you?" She was quite greedy. Her hands were helping to trap those words which eluded her. "There are a great many details, incidents, which you could not hope to understand," the Jew replied, colder, it sounded. "Naturally." "Oh, yes," she agreed. "There is always so much one does not understand. But it does not matter. Because some little thing, something quite unimportant, will show. So clearly. One is almost blinded by it," she gasped. Suddenly she was choking with ideas and words. She did hope he would not consider her an imbecile. With the result that the Jew was ashamed of the momentary feeling of repulsion she had roused in him. Nor was his remorse unrelated to a sensation experienced on somewhat similar occasions, when, for usually superficial reasons, his own feelings caused him to reject inwardly a member of his race. "It is a long and involved story," he confessed, sinking down against the trunk of the tree, so that the bark scored the back of his neck, without his being aware. "Perhaps I shall tell you some of it," he said. "Another time." But the strange part of it was: he began, there and then, whether he realized or not, and perhaps he did not, until fully launched, in giving the woman the most intimate, sometimes the most horrible details of all that had ever happened to him. But, of course, in that sultry, motionless air, it was like addressing some animal, or not even that. He remembered seeing fungi which suggested existence of the most passive order. And she could become perfectly still. It was only later that he recoiled from such an attitude, as if he had been guilty of treading on life. But now, beneath the tree, booming with bees and silence, he had gone right back, drowsily, painfully, exquisitely, into memory. He had hardly ever allowed himself before. And the woman listened. "Yes?" she would murmur, but only in the beginning; or: "Oh, dear, no! No, no, no!" With her hands she would try to ease the air of some difficulty they were experiencing together, or wrestle with impending terrors.
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.
In the beginning the young people lived with the wife's father, but soon found, and moved into, a small, rather old-fashioned house, with rooms high but too narrow, and a very abrupt staircase. Because it was situated on the outskirts of the town, at least the rental was low, which enabled the tenants to engage an inexperienced girl to help the wife of the _Dozent__, while the _Dozent__ himself gave up smoking, and practised other small economies such as walking to his lectures instead of taking the tram. They were completely happy, the female relatives claimed, and indeed, they were almost so. In their small, closed circle. On the outskirts of the town. Those who look for variety in change and motion, instead of in the variations on recurring events, would have found the life monotonous and restricted. But Himmelfarbs gave no outward sign of wishing to diverge from the path on which their feet had been set. If they left Bienenstadt at all, it was to spend the same month each year in the _Schwarzwald__, at the same reliable pension where it was possible to eat kosher. Although there were also occasions when Dr Himmelfarb had had to absent himself for several days, representing a disinclined professor at conferences in other university towns. And once, after some years, he had returned to Holunderthal, on receiving a telegram announcing the death of his father. Moshe died of his young wife, it was commonly and truthfully said. But repentant. That is easy at the end. And was buried by a priest with a stammer, and an acolyte with a cold. The few friends who attended were sufficiently recent to keep the ceremony superficial in tone. Most of the faces were kindly, curious, reverent, correct, but a few who were bored, or who suffered from bad circulation, took to stamping ostentatiously, or slapping their sides, and one more cynical than the rest reflected how quickly a mild joke can become a stale one. All of these were anxious to get finished. But each clod had to count. As they summoned the Mother of God to the side of an old few, who had not known Her very long, and then, it was suspected, only as a convenience. So the earth was scattered, and water-though not of tears, not even from the son, whose grief was deeper than the gush of tears. The son, who had gone round to the wrong side of the grave, amongst the earth and stones, and who had no idea what to do by way of respect, stood looking yellow in the silver afternoon. Some of the mourners grew quite fascinated, if repelled, by his pronounced Jewish cast. As they watched, Mordecai swayed from time to time. Because the weight was upon him. Because faith is never faith unless it is to be wrestled with. _O perfect Rock, spare and have pity on the parents and the children__…. So Mordecai wrestled with the Rock, and prayed for his parent, that shifting sand, or worldly man, whose moustache had smelt deliciously, and who had never been happier than when presenting a Collected Works in leather. Himmelfarb remained no longer than was necessary in his native town. Fortunately the business had been satisfactorily disposed of a couple of years before. The widow, who was already preparing to forget about that chapter of her life, proposed to look for consolation at a foreign spa. There remained the house on the Holzgraben, which the son inherited, and decided to close until a suitable tenant could be found. He was most anxious to return as quickly as possible to the life he had made, and which his increase in fortune proceeded to alter only in superficial ways, for his wife could never accustom herself to worldly practices, and he remained engrossed in her, his students, and his books. It was not generally known in Bienenstadt that Dr Himmelfarb himself had written and published an admirable and scholarly little monograph on the _Novels of John Oliver Hobbes__. Although the _Frau Doktor__ had made a point of mentioning the fact casually to the ladies of her circle, the information was not absorbed. Why should it have been? The book would remain a scholar's minor achievement, or, at most, an object of interest to some research student exploring the byways of literature. However, his large-scale work, _English Novelists of the Nineteenth Century in Relation to German Literature and Life__, also written during the quiet years at Bienenstadt, was rather a different matter. Himmel-farb's _English Novelists__ attracted a wider academic, not to say public attention, and it was taken for granted that the author would soon be generally accepted as a standard authority. So that, before very long, there was an outbreak of smiling discussion amongst the ladies of the _Frau Doktor's__ circle, of the rumours they had heard: how Dr Himmelfarb was likely to be offered the Chair of English at a certain university-gossip was in disagreement over which; perhaps _Frau Doktor__ Himmelfarb-here the ladies of the circle wreathed themselves in golden smiles-might be able to enlighten them. But, when questioned on that matter of advancement, the _Frau Doktor__ would look rather nervous, as if she had been asked to tamper with the future. She personally preferred to await the logical unfolding of events, which her husband's brilliance must ensure. So she would avoid giving a direct reply. Or she would murmur something of tried banality, such as, "All in good time. Our lives have only just begun." And offer her callers a second slice of _Käsekuchen__. In a sense, no more rational answer could have been found, for, although the _Dozent__ was turning grey-not unnatural in a man of dark pigmentation-and his fine figure had begun to thicken, while his wife had grown undeniably fat, it could have been argued that they were only beginning to mature in the full goodness of their married lives. In the small house on the outskirts of the town. In the shade of an oak, and the lesser shadows of beans, which the industrious country maid had coaxed to climb up sticks in the back garden. Nobody, least of all Himmelfarbs themselves, could really have wished to destroy the impression of peaceful permanence, strongest always in the mornings, when the feather-beds lolled in the sunlight on the upper window-sills. Yet, Frau Himmelfarb began to suffer from breathlessness, which gave her, when off her guard, a slightly strained look, as if her assertion of happiness might be proving too difficult to maintain. Some of her callers, in discussing it, decided it was the proximity of the oak-too many trees round a house used up all the oxygen, causing those spasms which, in the end, might turn to asthma; while other ladies, more daring, were of the opinion that the absence of a family had provoked a nervous condition. One of the latter, a gross creature by intellectual standards, whose husband was a haberdasher in a mean street, and who was received on account of a relationship, knew no better than to say outright, "But, Rehalein, it is time you had a child. Why, the duties of the _rabbanim__ do not begin and end in books. Give me a good, comfortable, family Jew. He may not spell, but he will fill the house with babies." Two other ladies, one of whom was noted for her readings from the _West-Östlicher Diwan__, decided it was time to break off even forced relations with the haberdasher's wife, who was smelling, besides, of perspiration and caraway seeds. While Reha Himmelfarb simply maintained, "Who are we, Rifke, to decide what a man's duties shall be?" And Himmelfarb loved his wife the better for overhearing. They were brought together closer, if anything, in an effort to express that love of which it seemed no lasting evidence might remain. None would know how Himmelfarbs had rejoiced in each other, unless by an echo from a library, from the dedication in a book: _To my Wife, Reha, without whose encouragement and assistance__… But words do not convince the doubting soul like living tokens, as the wife of the haberdasher knew, for all her simplicity, or perhaps because of it. Watching his wife one evening as she lit the Sabbath candles, Himmelfarb would have said: Of all people in this world, Reha is least in doubt. Yet, at that moment, the hands of Reha Himmelfarb, plump and practical by nature, seemed to grow transparent, and flicker in the candle flames. At the same time she gave a little startled cry of pain. "It was the wax from the candles! The hot wax, that fell when I was not expecting." She whispered quickly, and only just distinct, as though she felt her need to explain desecrate a sacred moment. By then the flames of the candles were standing straight and still, but what should have been the lovely, limpid Sabbath light shone wan and almost sickly, and the faces of the two people reflected by the mirrors could have been soft, sweating wax. The obligations of other ceremonies prevented him from commenting there and then, but later he came to her, and said, "Reha, darling, I can tell you are badly disappointed." And took her resisting hand, and put it inside his jacket, so that it was closest to him. "Why?" she cried. "When our life together is so happy? And soon there will be the Chair. Everybody is convinced of that." He was half exasperated, half in love. "But not the babies that your Cousin Rifke advises as the panacea." She would not look at him. She said, "We must expect our lives to be different." "Referring in cold abstractions," he answered, "to matters we do not understand. But for our actual lives-for yours, at least-I would ask all that is comforting and joyous." "Oh, mine!" she protested. "I am nothing. I am your footstool. Or cushion!" She laughed. "Am I not, rather, a cushion?" She did appear her plumpest looking up at him, happy even, but, he suspected, by her own effort. Then she put her arms round his waist, and laid her face against his vest, and said, "I would not alter a single detail of our lives." But at once went on to deliver, in a different voice, what sounded almost a recitative, of the greatest significance and urgency, "On Monday I must start to make the jelly from the apples Mariechen brought from her village. There is an old book my mother used to mention, which gives an infallible method for clarifying jelly. I have the title, I believe, amongst some papers she left. Pass by Rutkowitz's, on your way home, and see whether you can find the book. Will you, Mordecai? He has such a mountain of old stuff, you might come across anything." She looked up, and was in such apparent earnest, he was both moved and pacified. On the Monday, as he was preparing to leave, Reha came with the title of the book. As it happened, he had forgotten. "Don't forget the book!" she kept insisting. "I shall not start the jelly. I shall wait in case you happen to find. At Rutkowitz's. The book!" It was so important, her face implied. Then he left, relieved that his wife was such a simple, loving creature. If her words sometimes hinted at deeper matters, no doubt it was pure chance; she herself remained unaware. Rutkowitz was a quiet, elderly Jew, whose overflowing shop stood in one of the streets which plunged off behind the university at Bienenstadt. Himmelfarb remembered to pass that way before returning home, and rummaged in the stacks and trays for the book his wife so particularly required. Needless to say, he did not succeed in finding it, but discovered other things which amused and interested. "You deal in magic, Rutkowitz, I see!" Deliberately he addressed the grave bookseller with inappropriate levity. The latter shrugged, and answered, very dry, "Some old cabalistic and Hasidic works. They came from a collection in Prague." "And are of value?" "There are some who may value them." The bookseller was a wary man. Himmelfarb warmed to the characters, and the language moved on his tongue, where the Cantor Katzmann had put it in the beginning. He began, inevitably, to read aloud, for the nostalgia of hearing the instrument of his voice do justice to its heritage. And so, he heard: "I set myself the task at night of combining letters with one another, and of meditating on them, and so continued for three nights. On the third occasion, after midnight, I nodded off for a little, quill in hand, paper on my knees. Then I noticed that the candle was about to go out. So I rose and extinguished it, as a person who has been dozing often will. But I soon realized that the light continued. I was greatly astonished, because, after close examination, I saw it was as though the light issued from myself. I said: 'I do not believe it.' I walked to and fro all through the house, and, behold, the light is with me; I lay on a couch and covered myself up, and, behold, the light is with me all the while…." The cautious bookseller was standing a little to one side, the better to disclaim complicity in his customer's private pursuits. "Do you appreciate the physical advantages of mystical ecstasy, Rutkowitz?" Himmelfarb inquired. But although they stood scarcely any distance apart, the bookseller had apparently determined to keep his understanding carefully turned away. He did not answer. Himmelfarb continued to browse amongst the old books and manuscripts. Now he was entranced. The bookseller had left him, or else had ceased to exist. In the stillness of the dusk and the light from one electric bulb, the reader heard himself: "The soul is full of the love of God, and bound with ropes of love, in joy and lightness of heart. Unlike one who serves his master grudgingly, even when most hindered the love of service burns in his heart, and he is glad to fulfil the will of his Creator…. For, when the soul thinks deeply on the fear of God, then the flame of heartfelt love leaps within, and the exultation of subtlest joy fills the heart…. And the lover dreams not of the advantages of this world; he no longer takes undue pleasure in his wife, nor excessive pride in his sons and daughters, but cares only to obey the will of his Creator, to do good unto others, and to keep sanctified the Name of God. All his thoughts burn with the fire of love for Him…." Himmelfarb found the bookseller seated at his desk in the lower shop, as though nothing in particular had happened-and what, indeed, had? After coming to an agreement, the _Dozent__ went home, taking with him several of the more interesting old volumes of Hebrew, and one or two loose, damaged parchments. "Did you find my book?" Reha had appeared in the hall as she heard her husband mounting the stairs. "No luck!" he answered. She did not seem in any way put out, but immediately called back into the kitchen, "Mariechen, we shall start the apple jelly tonight. By the old method. The _Heir Doktor__ did not find the book." Almost as though she were relieved. Her husband continued on his way upstairs. He had debated whether to tell his wife about his purchases, but as she had ignored the books in his arms, he no longer felt he was expected to. Often now, after correcting an accumulation of essays, or on saying good night to students who had come for tuition, he would sit alone in his room with the old books. He would read, or sit, or draw, idly, automatically, or fidget with different objects, or listen to the sound of silence, and was sometimes, it seemed, transported in divers directions. On one occasion his wife interrupted. "I cannot sleep," she explained. She had released her hair, and brushed it out, with the result that she appeared to be standing against a dark and brittle thicket, but one in which a light shone. "I am not disturbing you?" she asked. "I thought I would like to read something." She sighed. "Something short. And musical." "Mörike," he suggested. "Yes," she agreed, absently. "Mörike will be just the thing." As the wind her nightdress made in passing stirred the papers uppermost on her husband's desk, she could not resist asking, "What is that, Mordecai? I did not know you could draw." "I was scribbling," he said. "This, it appears, is the Chariot." "Ah," she exclaimed, softly, withdrawing her glance; she could have lost interest. "Which chariot?" she did certainly ask, but now it might have been to humour him. "That, I am not sure," he replied. "It is difficult to distinguish. Just when I think I have understood, I discover some fresh form-so many-streaming with implications. There is the Throne of God, for instance. That is obvious enough-all gold, and chrysoprase, and jasper. Then there is the Chariot of Redemption, much more shadowy, poignant, personal. And the faces of the riders. I cannot begin to see the expression of the faces." All the time Reha was searching the shelves. "This is in the old books?" she asked. "Some of it," he admitted, "is in some." Reha continued to explore the shelves. She yawned. And laughed softly. "I think I shall probably fall asleep," she said, "before I flnd Mörike." But took a volume. He felt her kiss the back of his head as she left. Or did she remain, to protect him more closely, with some secret part of her being, after the door had closed? He was never certain with Reha: to what extent perception was revealed in her words and her behaviour, or how far she had accompanied him along the inward path. For, by now, Himmelfarb had taken the path of inwardness. He could not resist silence, and became morose on evenings when he was prevented from retreating early to his room. Reha would continue to sew, or mend. Her expression did not protest. She would smile a gentle approval-but of what, it was never made clear. Some of the old books were full of directions which he did not dare follow, and to which he adopted a deliberately sceptical attitude, or, if it was ever necessary, one of crudest cynicism. But he did, at last, unknown, it was to be hoped, to his rational self, begin fitfully to combine and permute the Letters, even to contemplate the Names. It was, however, the driest, the most cerebral approach-when spiritually he longed for the ascent into an ecstasy so cool and green that his own desert would drink the heavenly moisture. Still, his forehead of skin and bone continued to burn with what could have been a circlet of iron. Or sometimes he would become possessed by a rigid coldness of mind, his soul absorbed into the entity of his own upright leather chair, his knuckles carved out of oak. Mostly he remained at a level where, it seemed, he was inacceptable as a vessel of experience, and would fall asleep, and wake at cockcrow. But once he was roused from sleep, during the leaden hours, to identify a face. And got to his feet, to receive the messenger of light, or resist the dark dissembler. When he was transfixed by his own horror. Of his own image, but fluctuating, as though in fire or water. So that the long-awaited moment was reduced to a reflection of the self. In a distorting mirror. Who, then, could hope to be saved? Fortunately, he was prevented from shouting the blasphemies that occurred to him, because his voice had been temporarily removed. Nor could he inflict on the material forms which surrounded him, themselves the cloaks of spiritual deceit, the damage which he felt compelled to do, for his will had become entangled, and his nails were tearing on the shaggy knots. He could only struggle and sway inside the column of his body. Until he toppled forward, and was saved further anguish by hitting his head on the edge of the desk. Reha Himmelfarb discovered her husband early that morning. He was still weak and confused, barely conscious, as if he had had a congestive attack of some kind. After recovering from her fright, during which she had tried to warm his hands with her own, and was repeatedly kissing, and crying, and breathing into his cold lips, she ran and telephoned to Dr Vogel, who decided, after an examination, that the _Herr Dozent__ was suffering from exhaustion as the result of overwork. The doctor ordered his patient to bed, and for a couple of weeks Himmelfarb saw nobody but his devoted wife. It was very delightful. She read him the whole of _Effi Briest__, and he lay with his eyes closed, barely following, yet absorbing the episodes of that touching, though slightly insipid story. Or perhaps it was his wife's voice which he appreciated most, and which, as it joined the words together with a warm and gentle precision, seemed the voice of actuality. A second fortnight's leave, granted for convalescence, was spent at a little resort on the Baltic. Grey light and a shiver in the air would only have intensified for Himmelfarb the idyll of impeccable dunes and white timber houses, if it had not been for an incident which occurred at the hotel. They had come down early the first evening into the empty dining-room, where a disenchanted apprentice-waiter sat them at any table. Soon the company began to gather, all individuals of a certain class, of discreetly interchangeable clothes and faces. The greetings were correct. The silence knew what to expect. When something most unexpected, not to say disturbing, happened. A retired colonel, at whose table the new arrivals had been seated, marched to his usual place, seized the paper envelope in which it was customary for a guest to keep his napkin, and after retreating to the hall, passionately yelled at the reception desk that it was not his habit to sit at table with Jews. Nothing like this had ever happened to Himmelfarbs. They were shaken, trembling even. It was obvious that most of their fellow guests were embarrassed, though one or two had to titter. All necessary apologies were made by the management, but in the circumstances, the newcomers agreed they had no appetite, and left the room after a few spoonfuls of a grey soup. During the night each decided never again to mention the incident to the other, but each was aware that the memory of it would remain. However conciliatory the air of Oststrand became, and however punctiliously, in some cases ostentatiously, the more liberal-minded of their fellow guests bowed to them during the rest of their stay, the little, lapping waves continually revealed a glint of metal, and the cries of sea birds drove the mind into a corner of private melancholy. Yet, the sea air and early hours restored Dr Himmelfarb's health, and he returned to Bienenstadt with all the necessary strength to attack the immediate future. For soon, those who had been whispering about the _Herr Dozent's__ peculiar breakdown were openly discussing his promotion and departure. He was, in fact, called to an interview at Holunderthal, and shortly after, it was announced that he had been offered, and had accepted, the Chair of English at the university of his home town. So the couple had plenty to occupy them. "The books alone are a major undertaking!" Frau Himmelfarb was proud to protest. "I shall look through them," her husband promised, "and expect I shall find a number that I shan't miss if we leave them behind." "Oh, I am not complaining!" his wife insisted. "Then," he replied, with affection rather than in censure, "your intonations do not always convey your feelings." In the end, all was somehow packed. At a last glance, only the wisps of straw and a few sentimental regrets appeared to linger in the house with narrow rooms on the edge of Bienenstadt. Professor Himmelfarb, the son of Moshe the furrier, was by now a man of private means, and might have led a life of pomp, if he had been so inclined. But was prevented by a sense of irony, as much as by lack of enthusiasm. They did, certainly, open up the family house on the Holzgraben. However forbidding the façade, in the Greco-German style, with stucco pediment and caryatids, at least the interior preserved a soft down of memories along with the furrier's opulence of taste. In the beginning the _Frau Professor__ had been somewhat daunted by the total impact of her establishment and surroundings. For, quite apart from the pressure of monumental furniture, the house faced the more formal, or park side of the _Stadtwald__, with the result that the owners, standing at a first-floor window, looked out over shaven lawns and perfectly distributed gravel, across the beds of tuberous begonias and cockscombs, or down a narrowing _Lindenallee__, lined with discreet discus throwers and modest nymphs, to the deep, bulging, indeterminate masses of the _Wald__ proper. The public setting, however incidental, increased the value and importance of the solemn property, and in the years which followed the migration from Bienenstadt, while an illusion of solidity might still be entertained, it was only his sense of irony which saved Professor Himmelfarb from being impressed by his material condition, in particular when, returning from his walks in the _Wald__, he was confronted with the gradually expanding façade of what was apparently his own house, reared like a small caprice of a palace, at the end of the _Lindenallee__. Thus exposed to the danger of complacency, a noise, half ribald, half dismayed, seemed to issue out of the professor's nose, and he would be forced to glance back over his shoulder, embarrassed by the possibility that someone had heard, amused to think that someone might have. In time, and his responsible position, he grew greyer, thicker, deeply scored, until those who watched him on the podium were sometimes less conscious of his words, however subtle and illuminating, than of his rough-hewn, monolithic figure. On his regular walks he took to carrying a stick-it was thought to be an ashplant-for company rather than support, and was always followed by a little, motheaten dog called Teckel, whom he would address at intervals, after turning solemnly round. He dressed usually in a coarse, and if truth were told, rather inferior tweed, but was clothed also in an envelope of something more difficult to assess, protective and provocative at once. Those who passed him would stare, and wonder what it was about the large and ugly Jew. But, of course, there were also many to recognize and greet a person of his standing. Until the decade of discrimination, Germans as well as Jews were pleased to be seen shaking Professor Himmelfarb by the hand, and ladies would colour and show their teeth, no doubt remembering some story of his disreputable youth. As for his wife, the _Frau Professor__ never on any account accompanied him on his walks through the _Wald__, and was only rarely seen strolling with her husband over the red, raked gravel of the park. Her upbringing had not accustomed her to walk, except to the approved shops, where in a light of bronze fish and transparent oils she would celebrate the mysteries of which she was an initiate. In her middle age, she had grown regrettably heavy of body, while preserving a noticeable gaiety of mind. And would lift up many who were cast down. On occasions, for instance, when the women sat and sewed garments for those of them who had been taken too soon, when young girls trembled and pricked their fingers over the _tachriechim__, and older women grew inclined to abuse their memories, it was Reha Himmelfarb who restored their sense of continuity, by some remark, or simply by her presence. That which the women knew, all that was solid and good, might be expected to endure a little longer, in spite of the reminder of the white linen garments in their laps. "Fat people have an advantage over thin; they float more easily," was how the _Frau Professor__ chose to explain her powers. Although her own doubts and fears would sometimes rise, as perhaps her husband alone knew. Returning from a walk he would catch sight of her standing at a first-floor window. Looking. Then she would notice, and lean out, and wave, with her rather dark, plump hand, breathless, it seemed, with happiness and relief that she had not been called away before he had returned. Then, in the distance between the window and the street, their two souls were at their most intimate and loving. "What did you see today?" Frau Himmelfarb would often ask. "Nothing," her husband would usually reply. Though by this time he suspected that she, too, was not deceived by the masks of words. Indeed, all substances, of which words were the most opaque, grew more transparent with the years. As for faces-he was moved, touched, amazed, shamed by what he saw. In all his dealings with his colleagues of the faculty, in the lectures to his students, in the articles he published, and the books he wrote, Professor Himmelfarb appeared a man of straightforward character, of thorough, sometimes niggling intellect, and often epigrammatic wit. Nobody watching him tramp slowly, monotonously, over the fallen leaves of the _Stadtwald__, or along the well-kept pavements of the town, would have suspected him of morbid tendencies and reprehensible ambitions. For he was racked by his persistent longing to exceed the bounds of reason: to gather up the sparks, visible intermittently inside the thick shells of human faces; to break through to the sparks of light imprisoned in the forms of wood and stone. Imperfection in himself had enabled him to recognize the fragmentary nature of things, but at the same time restrained him from undertaking the immense labour of reconstruction. So this imperfect man had remained necessarily tentative. He was forever peering into bushes, or windows, or the holes of eyes, or, with his stick, testing the thickness of a stone, as if in search of further evidence, when he should have been gathering up the infinitesimal kernels of sparks, which he already knew to exist, and planting them again in the bosom of divine fire, from which they had been let fall in the beginning. So he would return home, and, knowing himself to be inadequately equipped, would confess in reply to his wife's inquiries, "Nothing. I have seen, I have done nothing." And she would hang her head, not from annoyance at his concealing something, or because there were matters that she did not understand, but because she sensed the distance between aspiration and the possibility of achievement, and she was unable to do anything to help him. Yet, in their relationship, they shared a perfection probably as great as two human beings are allowed to enjoy together, and would spend whole evenings of contentment in the library of the house on the Holzgraben, while Professor Himmelfarb read, or corrected, inclined at his characteristic angle, and his wife occupied herself with sewing, or knitting, usually for the family of some Jew whose circumstances had been brought to her notice. One evening when they had sat silently absorbed to the extent that the clock had withheld its chiming, Reha Himmelfarb suddenly scratched her head with a knitting needle-an act which many people might have considered coarse, but which her husband found natural-and broke their silence. It was unusual behaviour on her part. "Mordecai," she asked, "what became of the old books?" "Books?" He could have been contemptuous, as he stared back at his wife through the thick glass of his spectacles. "The Judaica." She sounded unnaturally jovial. Like some woman who, for secret reasons, was trying to insinuate herself into her husband's mind by matching his masculinity. "You don't always express yourself, Rehalein." Because, by now, he was annoyed. He did not wish to answer questions. "You know what I mean," Reha Himmelfarb replied. "The old cabalistic volumes and manuscripts in Hebrew, which you found at Rutkowitz's." Professor Himmelfarb put aside the book he had been reading. He was cruelly interrupted. "I left them in Bienenstadt, " he answered. "I had no further use for them." "Such valuable books!" "They had no particular value. They were, at most, intellectual curiosities." Then Reha Himmelfarb surprised her husband. She went so far as to ask, "You do not believe it possible to arrive at truth through revelation?" Himmelfarb's throat had grown dry. "On the contrary," he said. "But I no longer believe in tampering with what is above and what is below. It is a form of egotism." His hands were trembling. "And can lead to disorders of the mind." But his wife, he realized, who had begun in a mood of gentleness and light, had suddenly grown dark and aggressive. "You!" she cried, choking, it seemed, with desperate blood. "Much will be made clear to you! But to us, the ordinary ones?" "There is no distinction finally." He could not bring himself to look at the horrible, erratic movements her hands, the needles, and the wool were making. "When the time comes," her dark lips began to blurt, "you will be able to bear it. Because your eyes can see farther. But what can we others hold in our minds to make the end bearable?" "This table," he replied, touching it gently. Then his wife put down her knitting. "Oh, Mordecai," she whispered, "I am afraid. Tables and chairs will not stand up and save us." "God will," he answered. "God is in this table." She began to cry. "Some have been able to endure the worst tortures by concentrating on the Name," he heard his voice mumble. And it sounded merely sententious. For he knew that he himself could do nothing for the wife he loved. At most, he could cover her with his body.
At that period Professor Himmelfarb was conducting his courses as usual, while working on his book _The Compatibility of Spirit: A Study in the Affinities between Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century English and German Literatures__, a work which some considered would establish the professor's academic fame, but which others feared might not find favour with the existing régime. For events had changed their course by then, and from imperceptible beginnings, had begun to flow deep and fast. Many Germans found themselves, after all, to be Jews. If parents, in the confidence of emancipation, had been able to construe the _galuth__ as a metaphysical idea, their children, it appeared, would have to accept exile as a hard fact. Some did, early enough. They left for the United States, and fell into a nylon dream, of which the transparent folds never quite concealed the evidence of circumcision. These were forever turning uneasily in their sleep. Some returned to Palestine-oh yes, returned, because how else is exile ended? — but were not vouchsafed that personal glimpse of the _Shekinah__ which their sense of atavism demanded. These were perhaps the most deceived. How their soft, particoloured souls lamented! Oh, the evenings at Kempinsky's, oh, the afternoons at Heringsdorf! Others who were thrown upon the stones of Zion, took root eventually and painfully, by law of creation, as it were. Developing tough and bitter stems, they resisted the elements because there, at last, it was natural to do so. There were many, however, in the aching villas, in the thin dwellings of congested alleys, beside the _Gummibaum__ in tasteful, beige apartments, who, for a variety of reasons, could not detach themselves from the ganglion of Europe: their bones protested, or they loved their furniture, or _they__ must surely be overlooked, or they were drunk with kisses, or transfixed by presentiments of immolation, or too diffident to believe they might take their destiny in hand, or of such faith they waited for divine direction. These remained. And the air was tightening. All remarks, even the silent ones, were aimed at them. Their own thoughts suspected doors, flattened themselves against the walls, against the dying paper roses, and pissed down the sides of lavatory bowls, to avoid giving their presence away. During the whole of this period of unreason, Mordecai Himmelfarb's mind no more than fumbled after a rational means of escape. As an officially guilty man he could not function normally, but attempted to, as far as he was allowed. He was not yet actually dismissed from his post, because, it was recorded, Himmelfarb had served in a German war. At this stage, he was merely relieved of some of his duties, eyelids were lowered, backs turned on an embarrassing and difficult situation. He went on foot more often than before, to avoid the unpleasantness of trams and buses, with the result that his clothes began to hang more loosely on the essential bones, and his face presented an archetype that would have shamed his apostate father. In his still regular walks through the _Stadtwald__, he now rested whenever necessary on the yellow bench. Coming and going, early and late, in thin or thickening light, in company with birds and cats, he felt he had got by heart each stone and sorrow of the town in which he had been born, and that he could interpret at last the most obscure meanings of a contorted world. Of course he should have made every effort to reach a practical solution, if only for his wife's sake. Cousins had written from Ecuador. Their brother, Ari, he heard, had left for Palestine in charge of a contingent of youths, and was settled on the land. Only Mordecai had received no indication of what his personal role might be, of how long he must suspend the will that was not his to use. Determined not to fear whatever might be in store for his creature flesh, nor even that anguish of spirit which he would probably be called upon to bear, he might have resigned himself indefinitely, if it had not been for the perpetual torment of his wife's image. At one point his colleague Oertel, the mathematician, an Aryan of stature who suffered and died for it finally, came to him and begged to be allowed to help his friend leave the country before it was too late. Himmelfarb hesitated. Human gestures were so moving in the reign of Sammael, that for one moment he felt weak enough to accept. If only for Reha. Who would not, he realized at once, have left without him. "Oertel!" he began. "Oertel!" When he was able to continue, he explained, "The sins of Israel have given Sammael the legs on which he now stands. It is my duty, in some way, to expiate what are, you see, my own sins. But naturally you cannot, you cannot see! You cannot understand!" He had become, of course, more than a little crazy, Oertel added in telling of Himmelfarb's refusal. The latter returned to his wife, whom he loved too deeply to mention his colleague's proposition. They were still allowed to live in the house with the Greco-German façade. Even after the professor's dismissal, of which he soon received notice, they were allowed to continue living in their own house. But precariously. Now that the maids were gone, with regrets, or threats, an old Jewish body helped Frau Himmelfarb with her household duties. They were fortunate in having been people of private means, and could eke out their material substance, at least for a little. Sometimes, too, Frau Himmelfarb, discreetly dressed-she had always been that, if anything rather dowdy-would be seen selling an object of virtu. So they existed. In the still house the rooms were never empty. Thoughts filled them. From the upper windows, the park never looked quite deserted. The flesh of tuberous begonias lolled on perfect beds, and waited, as if to take part in an exhibition of lust. Once Himmelfarb had paid a visit to a former friend, the _Oberstleutnant__ Stauffer, who, he had been told, lived only two or three streets away in a state of eccentricity. Celluloid ducks in the bath, it was said. The _Oberstleutnant__ had appeared at his own front door in a little apron trimmed with lace. "Jürgen!" the visitor began. But saw at once that the forest in which they had become separated had grown impenetrable, and that, of the two, Jùrgen was the deeper lost. The _Oberstleutnant's__ face, or as much as remained stretched upon the bones, continued a moment to contemplate an abomination that had been conjured up on his doormat for his personal torment. "The _Herr Oberst__ is not at home," he said at last. Face, door, words-all flickering slightly. "And is not allowed to receive Jews. On any account." So the door was closed on Jürgen Stauffer. Again, this time in the street, the past disgorged. It was Konrad, the elder brother, who was by now generally recognized, for one of his novels in particular, which everybody had read, and which dealt, in bitter and audacious style, with the relations between officers and men in wartime. Konrad Stauffer had succeeded in pleasing a cautious public-it was said, even the _Regierung__-because he dared and shocked. Konrad could afford to know absolutely anybody. Konrad said, "Why, Himmelfarb! You have hardly changed! Except that everything is on a larger scale." As he took a valued acquaintance by the elbow. His hands were sure. He was freshly, closely shaven, and finished off with a toilet lotion, which caught the morning sunlight, and made the skin look like new. Success had given Konrad Stauffer the shine and smell of expensive, but very tasteful leather. Many people would probably have professed to loathe him if they had dared run the gauntlet of his arrogance. "You will pay us a visit, I hope." Nor was he taking a risk. "We are quite close." He gave his address slowly and accurately, with almost deliberate ostentation. "My wife will enjoy meeting you. But soon. We may be going away." There he smiled. The phenomenon of Konrad Stauffer left Himmelfarb indifferent. Stauffer must have been aware of it, for he returned immediately after parting. To take the Jew by a waistcoat button. He could have been apologizing for himself. "You will come, though?" he coaxed. "You promise?" In those times, who made promises? Now it was the Jew's turn to smile. But together they had generated some kind of warmth. Even so, Himmelfarb doubted he would see Konrad Stauffer again. In so far as his will continued to function, it propelled him along the narrow path of existence, not up the side tracks of social intercourse, however attractive those promised to be. Besides, there was his book. Most of his time was taken up with annotations and corrections, for, although he no longer hoped to see it published, it would have pained him to leave it incomplete. In his leisure he walked less than before, not because glances wounded-he had grown impervious-but because he wanted to be parted as little as possible from his wife. He could not bring himself to speculate on how dependent that soft and loving, yet secretive and unexpected creature might be. Instead he found himself depending on her. He would touch her sometimes for no immediately apparent reason. If he could not find her, he would go in search of her in the kitchen, where probably she would be doing the work of the almost senile crone who had replaced the cook. Then he would inquire about things with which he had been familiar for years. "What is that?" he would ask. "That is chopped chicken-liver," she would reply, in a firm, even voice, to make it seem less odd that he should not recognize the obvious. Indeed, she would join him in staring at the common kitchen bowl, as if its contents had been ritually of the greatest importance. Together they would stave off the agonies of mind, and the possibility of separation, by the practice of small, touching rites. Then they heard that Dr Herz had disappeared, and Weills, and Neumanns, and Frau Dr Mendelssohn was no longer to be seen at the clinic. It was very quietly communicated, and as the people concerned were but distant acquaintances, and the rigours and monotony of life continued, one would not have noticed they had gone. Only the old woman who helped at Himmelfarbs' became worse than useless. She could not sleep, besides. Often in the night Frau Himmelfarb was forced to leave her own bed to comfort her maid. But there will come a night when comfort is not to be found. Faith will spill out of the strong like sawdust. On an evening in November, Himmelfarb was on his way home. He had just turned into the Friedrichstrasse. When he stopped. He could not go any farther. A tram was galloping through the dusk. Along the pavement, the greenish, vegetable faces of pedestrians were trusting to instinct to lead them through a trance of evening. Already in the taverns the shaven heads were arranged at their regular tables. Pickled eggs were being cracked. Mouths were nuzzling the cushions of foam on top of the full stone mugs. There was no reason why one soul should suddenly sense itself caught in the web of darkness, why one man should lose control of his body at the corner of the Friedrichstrasse. Yet Himmelfarb experienced an ungovernable fear. He was actually running. He was running away. He was running and running, released from the moral dignity and physical heaviness of age. Some of the spirits of darkness swore at him as he passed, but he scarcely heard, nor did he suffer from the brutal thumps of collision, of which he was, surprisingly, the cause, in the hitherto normally regulated night. Down the Friedrichstrasse he ran, across the Kônigin Luise Platz, into Bismarckstrasse, along the Krôtengasse. His desperate breath had to sustain him as far as Sud Park. For by this time the condemned felt the need to be received with kindness. To be _accepted__, rather, by those who stood the right side of the grave. The Konrad Stauffers lived in one of the iron-grey apartment houses, severe in form, but stuck at intervals with the garlands and festoons of concrete fruit and flowers which usually accompanied the highest rentals. Their visitor appeared to be confirming the number of the house by touching the embossed figures with quite distressing relief. Upstairs on the landing, he began to pull up his socks, as young men do automatically, on finding that, for better or worse, they have arrived. He was grinning most horribly, in his effort to resume the human mask, before ringing his friends' bell. His friends! His _fziends__! That was the miraculous, solid brass point, the mask considered tremblingly. A friend was safer than one's own blood, so much better value than the arch-abstraction, God. So the man's hands trembled in anticipation. He rehearsed the business of social intercourse, of the inevitable cigars and _Kognak__. A figure, possibly of future importance, still rather a blurry white, was opening the apartment door. Inside, beneath the orange light from a lantern in the oriental style, Stauffer was replacing the telephone receiver. He came at once towards the front door. "I am so very, very glad you managed to get here," Konrad Stauffer was saying. "This is my wife, Himmelfarb," he said, indicating the thin, upright blur of white. "So very glad, dear Himmelfarb," he kept repeating. "We did wonder." "So interested in all that I have always heard," his wife added appropriately. Both the Stauffers were obviously shattered. But after he had fastened the front door with a little chain, Stauffer recovered enough of his balance to lead their guest farther into the interior, into what appeared to be a study, where some oriental rugs, at first entirely sombre, gradually came alive, and smouldered. Frau Stauffer went immediately to an inlaid box, and lit herself a cigarette. The way she blew the smoke from her nostrils, she must have been dying for it. Then she remembered. She could not offer their guest too much, all in abrupt, though conciliatory movements. "Are you, too, fascinated by these poisonous objects?" she asked, following it up with her exceptionally wide smile. She had brought a dish of hastily assembled liqueur chocolates, of an expensive, imported brand, which had disappeared long ago from the lives of despised mortals. In the circumstances the tinsel forms, presented on their silver dish, glittered like baleful jewels. And Frau Stauffer herself. In the feverish situation in which they were involved, and at the same time not, Mordecai realized she would probably have excited him in his sensual youth. A raw silk sheath was supported to perfection by a body of which the bones were just sufficiently visible under brown skin. But tonight she had a cold, or something. She squeezed herself up against the central heating, in an old cardigan, and even this retained a kind of studied elegance, an accent of Berlin. The Stauffers both had expectations of their guest, or so their faces suggested. "I came here tonight," Himmelfarb began, looking, smiling at the little, glowing _Kognak__, with which his host had provided him as a matter of course. "Yes? Yes?" Stauffer was too anxious to assist, his wife too nervous. In fact, she went twice to the door, to listen for the maid, although the latter, she explained, had gone in search of a pair of real live jackboots. At the same time Himmelfarb realized he could never convey that sudden stampeding of the heart, sickening of the pulses, enmity of familiar streets, the sharp, glandular stench of unreasonable fear. For words are the tools of reason. "I," he was blurting shapelessly. He who was nothing. So they gave him another _Kognak__. "Yes, yes, we understand," murmured the sympathetic Stauffers. Who remained obsessed with, and perhaps really only understood, an uneasiness of their own. In their unhappiness, and to assist their once more becalmed guest, they began to talk about Schönberg, and Paul Klee, and Brecht. As liberal Germans, they offered up their minds for a sacrifice, together with liqueur chocolates, and _Kognak__, and a genuine Havana. But every gesture they might make, it was felt by all three, could only be dwarfed by those of circumstance. Stauffer was slightly drunk. It made him look like a man of action, or at least an amateur of sabotage. Probably he was one of those intellectuals who had discovered the possibilities of action too late in life, perhaps too late in history. He was burning to do something, if not to destroy the whole tree of moral injustice, then to root out a sucker or two. As he sprawled on the oriental rugs which covered his too opulent divan, the skin had become exposed between the cuffs of his trousers and tops of his socks, which gave him the appearance of being younger, more sincere, if also, ultimately, ineffectual. Frau Stauffer was combing the hairless skin of her arm with long, pale nails. Under the film of oil which she affected as a make-up, her long, pointed face understood at least the theory of serenity. Konrad was bandying the names about: Morocco, the Pacific, the Galapagos. But came closer to home, because that was what he knew better. He would know the Riviera best. All of it Himmelfarb heard without relating it to life. "Bern," Konrad was discoursing; at last he had come very close. "A dull, but decent city. Where we could meet for lunch. On Thursday. If you decide, Himmelfarb. I suggest, though, you carry nothing heavier than a toothbrush." A gentle snow could have been falling through the Jew's mind, without, unfortunately, obliterating. Its soft promise was forcing him to stand up. "I must go," he announced. Finally, fatally; all knew. "I must go home to my wife. There is a dog, too. At this time of night, the dog expects to be taken out." "Your wife?" Frau Stauffer's breath was drawn so sharp, she could have been recoiling from a blow. She was wearing a bracelet from which hung big chunks of unpolished, semi-precious stones, which tumbled and jumbled together, in a state of painful conflict. "I did not realize that your wife," Stauffer kept repeating. The Jew was actually laughing. He laughed through fascinating lips, the horrifying, magnified blubber that flesh will become. Because nobody could realize how his wife was present in him, at all times, until for one moment, that evening, when God Himself had contracted into first chaos. "I am afraid," the Jew said, "I may have been guilty tonight of something for which I can never atone. "I am afraid," he was saying, and saying. The crumbled Jew. "No, no!" begged the Stauffers. "It is we! We are the guilty ones!" They could not apologize enough, Konrad Stauffer, the unimportant success, and his oversimplified, overcomplicated wife. "We! We!" insisted the Stauffers. How her bracelet cannoned off itself. The Jew, who was seen to be quite elderly, made his own way to the door. "I dare say there are reasons why _you__ should not be included in a mass sentence," he pronounced gently. "_We__ can never escape a collective judgment. _We__ are one. No particle may fall away without damaging the whole. That, I fear, is what I have done. In a moment of unreason. Tonight." They had reached the hall, and were standing in the orange light from the oriental lantern. "But this is most, most horrible!" Stauffer was almost shouting. He had become personally involved. "We understood, in the beginning, you had come here to take refuge"-his voice was reverberating-"because tonight"-always hesitating, choosing, however loudly, words-"we were told, in fact, by telephone, just as you arrived"-here his voice blared-"they are destroying the property of the Jews!" "_Ach, Konrad__!" His wife moaned, and might have protested more vehemently against the truth. But a fire-engine seemed to confirm what her husband had just told. It shot through the solid silence of the German suburb, leaving behind it a black tunnel of anxiety. Only Himmelfarb did not seem surprised. He was even smiling. Now that everything was explained. Now that contingency had been removed. "When all the time you did not know! Your wife!" By now Stauffer was wrapped, rather, in his own horror. His man's expression had become that of a little boy, round whom the game of pirates had turned real. Frau Stauffer's oiled face was streaming with tears as she held an ash-tray for their guest to stub out his genuine Havana. Then the little, unprotective door-chain grated as it withdrew from its groove. And Himmelfarb was going. He had already gone from that place, forgetful of his truly kind friends, whom he would have remembered with gratitude and love, if there had been room in his mind. Sud Park was still, though attentive. A layer of exquisitely concentrated, excruciating orange was seen separating the darkness from the silhouette of the town. It is seldom possible to resume life where it has been left off, although that appeared to be the intention of the figure hurrying through the streets, topcoat flapping and streaming, flesh straining. In the Krôtengasse groups of Jews stood in a glitter of glass. The voices of women lamenting quickened his pace. In the Bismarckstrasse a man was crying at the top of his lungs, until some of the crowd began to punch him, when the sound went blub blub blub blub, with intervals of bumping silences. Himmelfarb was not quite running. He bent his knees, rather, to move faster, closer to the pavement. His own breathing had ceased to be part of him. He heard it panting alongside, like an unwelcome animal which refused to be shaken off. At the corner of the Königin Luise Platz the flames were leaping luxuriantly. In the Schillerstrasse the synagogue was burning. This more sober. An engine parked against the curb. Several firemen were standing around. What could they do, actually? The rather ugly, squat, practical old building had assumed an incongruous, a Gothic grace in its skyward striving. All could have been atoned now that the voices were finally silenced. As he entered the Holzgraben, the drops were falling from Himmelfarb, heavier than sweat, his neck was extended scraggily, in anticipation of the knife. This was his own street. Still quiet, respectable-German. A power failure, however, caused by the disturbances, had plunged the familiar into a dark dream, through which he approached the house where they had lived, and found what he knew already to expect. Of course the door stood open. It was stirring very slightly, just as it had on those several other occasions when he had found it in his sleep. The house was a hollow shell in which the pretending was over, although he could not yet feel it was empty for the darkness and silence that had silted it up. He went in, feeling with his feet, which were long, and wooden, like his sticks of fingers. In the darkness he stooped down, and touched the body of the little dog, already fixed in time, like the sculpture on a tomb, except that the lips were drawn back from the teeth, denying that peace which is the prerogative of death. Most horrible to touch was what he realized to be the tongue. Then the Jew began to cry out. He called, "Reha! Reha!" And it returned from out of the house. Always he had imagined how, in the worst crisis, she, his saviour, would come to him, and hold his head against her breast. So he went blundering and crying. He called to God, and it went out at the windows, through the bare branches of the trees, so that a party of people a street away burst out laughing, before they took fright. He was mounting interminably through the house. The scent of spices was gone from it forever, and the blessed light of candles, in which even the most stubborn flesh was made transparent. Moonlight shifted and fretted instead, on the carpets of the landings, and in the open jaws of glass. Cold. When the searcher did at last arrive in the upper regions, he found the old servant. She began to cry worse than ever, principally for her own fright, while stifling it for fear of the consequences, since even the furniture had turned hostile. Gradually she told what no longer needed confirming. They had come, they had come for Himmelfarbs. But what could she add that he had not already experienced? So he left her to babble on. He went, whimpering, directionless, somewhere down, into the pit of creaking darkness. Calling the name that had already fulfilled its purpose, it seemed. So he descended, through the house, into darkness. And in darkness he sat down, as much of him as they had left. He sat in darkness.
"THE CHARIOT," Miss Hare dared to disturb the silence which had been lowered purposely, like the thickest curtain, on the performance of a life. She did tremble, though, and pause, sensing she had violated what she had been taught to respect as one of the first principles of conversation: that subjects of personal interest, however vital, are of secondary importance. "You know about the Chariot, then," she could not resist. But whispered. But very slow, and low. It was as eventful as when a prototype has at last identified its kind. Yet, pity restrained her from forcibly distracting attention to her own urgent situation, for her mouth was at the same time almost gummed together by all she had suffered in the course of her companion's life. And so, the word she had dared utter hung trembling on the air, like the vision itself, until, on recognition of that vision by a second mind, the two should be made one. "If we see each other again." The stone man had begun to stir and speak. The knot of her hands and the pulses in her throat rejected any possibility that their meeting might be a casual one. But, of course, she could not explain, nor was her face of any more assistance than her tongue; in fact, as she herself knew, in moments of stress she could resemble a congested turkey. "If we should continue to meet," the Jew was saying, "and I revert to the occasion when I betrayed my wife, and all of us, for that matter, you must forgive me. It is always at the back of my mind. Because a moment can become eternity, depending on what it contains. And so, I still find myself running away, down the street, towards the asylum of my friends' house. I still reject what I do not always have the strength to suffer. When all of them had put their trust in me. It was I, you know, on whom they were depending to redeem their sins." "I do not altogether understand what people mean by sin," Miss Hare had to confess. "We had an old servant who often tried to explain, but I would fail as often to grasp. Peg would insist that she had sinned, but I knew that she had not. Just as I know this tree is good; it cannot be guilty of more than a little bit of wormy fruit. Everything else is imagination. Often I imagine things myself. Oh, yes, I do! And it is good for me; it keeps me within bounds. But is gone by morning. There," she said, indicating the gentle movement of the grass, "how can we look out from under this tree, and not know that all is good?" For the moment she even believed it herself. She was quite idiotic in her desire to console. "Then how do you account for evil?" asked the Jew. Her lips grew drier. "Oh, yes, there is evil!" She hesitated. "People are possessed by it. Some more than others!" she added with force. "But it burns itself out. Some are even destroyed as it does." "Consumed by their own sin!" The Jew laughed. "Oh, you can catch me out!" she shouted. "I am not clever. But do know a certain amount." "And who will save us?" "I know that grass grows again after fire." "That is an earthly consolation." "But the earth is wonderful. It is all we have. It has brought me back when, otherwise, I should have died." The Jew could not hide a look of kindly cunning. "And at the end? When the earth can no longer raise you up?" "I shall sink into it," she said, "and the grass will grow out of me." But she sounded sadder than she should have. "And the Chariot," he asked, "that you wished to discuss at one stage? Will you not admit the possibility of redemption?" "Oh, words, words!" she cried, brushing them off with her freckled hands. "I do not understand what they mean. "But the Chariot," she conceded, "does exist. I have seen it. Even if a certain person likes to hint that it was only because I happened to be sick. I have seen it. And Mrs Godbold has, whom I believe and trust. Even my poor father, whom I did not, and who was bad, _bad__, suspected some such secret was being kept hidden from him. And you, a very learned man, have found the Chariot in books, and understand more than you will tell." "But not the riders! I cannot visualize, I do not understand the riders." "Do you see everything at once? My own house is full of things waiting to be seen. Even quite common objects are shown to us only when it is time for them to be." The Jew was so pleased he wriggled slightly inside his clothes. "It is you who are the hidden _zaddik__!" "The what?" she asked. "In each generation, we say, there are thirty-six hidden _zaddikim__-holy men who go secretly about the world, healing, interpreting, doing their good deeds." She burned, a slow red, but did not speak, because his explanation, in spite of reaching her innermost being, did not altogether explain. "It is even told," continued the Jew, stroking grass, "how the creative light of God poured into the _zaddikim__. That _they__ are the Chariot of God." She looked down, and clenched her hands, for the tide was rising in her. She looked at her white knuckles, and hoped she would not have one of her attacks. Even though she had been lifted highest at such moments, she could not bear to think her physical distress might be witnessed by someone whose respect she wished so very much to keep. "I shall remember this morning," Himmelfarb said, "not only because it was the morning of our meeting." Indeed, looking out from under the tree, it seemed as though light was at work on matter as never before. The molten blue had been poured thickly round the chafing-dish of the world. The languid stalks of grass were engaged in their dance of transparent joyfulness. A plain-song of bees fell in solid drops of gold. All souls might have stood forth to praise, if, at the very moment, such a clattering had not broken out, and shoved them back. "What is that?" Himmelfarb asked. The two people peered out anxiously from beneath the branches. A pillar of black and white had risen in the depths of the abandoned orchard, but moving, and swaying. Silence creaked, and the weed-towers were rendered into nothing. Plumes of dust and seed rose. "Hal-loo? Oo-hoo! Coo-_ee__!" called the voice of conscience. Miss Hare grew paler. "That is a person I shall probably tell you about," she informed her companion. "But not now." Mrs Jolley continued to stamp and call. It seemed doubtful, however, that she would invade territory with which she was not already familiar. "There is one of the evil ones!" Miss Hare decided to reveal just so much, and to point with a finger. "How evil, I am not yet sure. But she has entered into a conspiracy with another devil, and will bring suffering to many before it destroys them both." Himmelfarb could have believed. It was obvious, from the way he was preparing his legs for use, that he had begun to feel he had stayed long enough, although the arch-conspirator had gone. "You will not leave me," Miss Hare begged. "I shall not go in. Not for anyone. Not until dark, perhaps." "There are things I am neglecting," mumbled the Jew. "It is I who shall be neglected if you go," she protested, like a great beauty hung with pearls. "And besides," she added, "you have not finished telling me your life." It made the Jew feel old and feeble. If she was willing him not to go, he wondered whether he had the strength to stay. At least, for that purpose. "I know," she said, gently for her, "I know that, probably, the worst bits are to come. But I shall endure them with you. Two," she said, "are stronger than one." So the Jew subsided, and the tent of the tree contracted round them in the wilderness in which they sat. The lovely branches sent down sheets of iron, which imprisoned their bodies, although their minds were free to be carried into the most distant corners of hell.
HOW LONG Himmelfarb remained in the house on the Holzgraben after they took his wife, he had never been able to calculate. In his state of distress, he was less than ever capable of conceiving what is known as a plan of action. So he lingered on in the deserted, wintry house, even after the old woman, his servant, had left him, to burrow deeper in her fright into the darker, more protected alleys of the town. He would walk from room to room, amongst the violated furniture, over carpets which failed to deaden footsteps. Whenever necessary, he would pick, like a rat, at the food he discovered still lying in saucers and bowls. Much of the time he spent sitting at his manuscript, and once found himself starting to prepare a lecture which, in other circumstances, he should have delivered on a Tuesday to his students at the university. Sometimes he simply sat at his desk, holding in his hand the paper-knife a cousin had brought from Janina. He was fascinated by the silver blade, the sharpness of which had suggested to the girl Reha Liebmann that it was intended for purposes other than those of opening letters and cutting the pages of books. In recollecting, her husband went so far as to explore the interstices of his ribs, and might have driven it into the heart inside, if he had been able to see any purpose in dying twice. So this dead man, or distracted soul, put aside the useless knife. Unable to reason, he would drift for hours in a state between spirit and substance, searching amongst the grey shapes, which just failed to correspond, and returning at last to his own skull and the actual world. During several walks which he took at the time, because, for the moment at least, it did not seem as though they intended to molest the solitary Jew, he continued his search for a solution to the problem of atonement. Nobody, seeing him on the clean gravel of the _Lindenallee__, or the more congruous, because indeterminate paths of the _Stadtwald__, would have suspected him of a preoccupation practically obscene. Nor would they have guessed that the being, in grey topcoat, with stout stick, was not as solid as he appeared, that he had, in fact, reached a state of practical disembodiment, and would enter into the faces that he passed. This became a habit with the obsessed Jew, and he derived considerable comfort from it, particularly after it had occurred to him that, as all rivers must finally mingle with the shapeless sea, so he might receive into his own formlessness the blind souls of men, which lunged and twisted in their efforts to arrive at some unspecified end. Once this insight had been given him, he could not resist smiling, regardless of blood and dogma, into the still unconscious faces, and would not recognize that he was not always acceptable to those he was trying to assist. For the unresponsive souls would rock, and shudder, and recoil from being drawn into the caverns of his eyes. And once somebody had screamed. And once somebody had gone so far as to threaten. But their deliverer was not deterred. He was pervaded as never before by a lovingkindness. Only at dusk, when even human resentment had scuttled from the damp paths, the Jew would begin to suspect the extent of his own powers. Although that winter, of bewilderment and spiritual destruction, the concept of the Chariot drifted back, almost within his actual grasp. In fact, there were evenings when he thought he had succeeded in distinguishing its form, on the black rooftops, barely clearing the skeletons of trees, occasions when he could feel its wind, as it drenched him in departing light. Then, as he stood upon the rotting leaves, and steadied himself against the stream of memory, he would drag his topcoat closer, by tighter, feverish handfuls, to protect his unworthy, shivering sides.
One morning before it was light, Himmelfarb woke, and got immediately out of bed. The cold and dark should have daunted, but his sleep had been so unusually peaceful, he had embraced an experience of such extraordinary tenderness and warmth, that he remained insulated, as it were. Now, as he blundered about in the dark, although he could remember nothing of any dream, he was convinced it had been decided in his sleep that he should prepare to join a cobbler, a humble Jew of his acquaintance, who, he happened to know, was still living in the Krôtengasse. So, he hurried to shave, cutting himself in several places in the excitement of anticipation, and when he had prayed, and dressed, went about putting into a suitcase the few possessions he felt unable to part with: an ivory thimble which had belonged to his wife, the vain bulk of his now unpublishable manuscript, as well as the ironic, but priceless gifts of his apostate father, the _tallith__ and _tephillin__. Then he paused, but only for a little, in the thin light, before the doorbell sounded. Although he had not rung for a taxi, knowing that none would have accepted to come, he went down with his worldly goods, in answer to what seemed like perfect punctuality. "Ah, you are ready, then!" Konrad Stauffer said. Himmelfarb was really not in the least surprised, in spite of the fact that it had already been decided in his mind, or sleep, that he should move to the house of Laser, a Jewish cobbler in the Krôtengasse. Now there was some wrangling for possession of the suitcase, a rather mechanical mingling of his cold fingers with the warmer ones over the disputed handle. "Please let me!" Stauffer begged. Himmelfarb suddenly gave way. Because it seemed natural to do so. His friend was wearing a half-coat of soft leather, which smelled intoxicating besides. Everything invited to a sinking down. The fashionable car had begun to shine in the still hesitating light. Frau Stauffer was standing there, with an expression of having discovered things she had never seen before, holding an anachronistic muff, which only she could have translated into perfect contemporary terms. All three behaved as though they had parted company yesterday. "He was actually waiting for us!" Stauffer announced, and laughed for one of those amiable remarks which can be made to pass as wit. "You must sit at the back, Himmelfarb," he ordained. "Get in, Ingeborg!" he commanded his wife more sternly. She did so, slamming the door in a way which must always have irritated her husband as much as now. But in settling into her seat, she rubbed against him slightly, and there was established a peace which could, of course, have been that of an unclenching winter morning, if Himmelfarb had not remembered, from the previous meeting, occasional glances and certain lingering contacts of skin, which made it obvious that Stauffers still devoured each other in private. They drove through the white streets. "I expect you have not eaten. We also forgot," Frau Stauffer called back to the passenger. "I have a stomach like an acorn. But we shall put the coffee on as soon as we get there." Houses were thinning. Round faces would extend into long blurs. "We are taking you to Herrenwaldau," Stauffer explained. His voice was very grave as he drove. His clipped neck was taut, but, in spite of the wrinkles, had acquired a beauty of concentration above the leather collar. "We have moved out there," he continued, "because nowadays it is more sympathetic, on the whole, to live amongst trees." Herrenwaldau was an estate which Stauffers owned, about seven or eight miles from the town. Himmelfarb remembered hearing several years before how they had bought what some people considered the state should have acquired as a national monument. The original structure, built towards the end of the seventeenth century by a duchess for the purpose of receiving her lovers more conveniently, was something between a miniature palace and a large manor. It had become most dilapidated with the years, although it was understood the actual owners had renovated part of it to live in. Himmelfarb received everything, whether information on his own future, or glimpses of the rushing landscape, with a sensuous acceptance which he might have questioned, if the motion of the car had not precluded shame. As he was rocked, soft and safe, he noticed the upholstery was the colour of Frau Stauffer's skin. Outside, early light had transformed the normally austere landscape, where sky and earth, mist and water, rested together for the present in layers of innocent blue and grey. The soil would have appeared poor if the frost had not superimposed its glitter on the sand. The Stauffers, who were obviously performing a familiar rite, seemed to have forgotten their passenger-they would mumble together occasionally about cheese or paraffin-although Frau Stauffer did at last grunt loud and uglily: "_Na__!" For they were driving between stone gate-posts, under great naked elms, crowned with old, blacker nests, and hung with the last rags of mist. Nothing could disguise for Himmelfarb the coldness and greyness, the detached, dilapidated elegance of this foreign house, until, in a moment of complete loss, while his hosts were rootling in the car, he looked very close, and saw that the stone was infused with a life of lichen: all purples, and greens, and rusty orange-reds, merging and blurring together. Although it was something he had never noticed before, and it did not immediately mean to him all that it might in time, he was smiling when Frau Stauffer turned to him breathlessly and said, "There is nobody here! Nobody, nobody!" Like a little girl who had achieved real freedom after the theory of it. "Ingeborg means," her husband explained, "we have been without servants since the _Regierung__ became obsessed by manpower." He looked the more grimly amused for having bumped his head in retrieving an oil stove from the car. "But," he added, "there is a farmer who rents some of the land, and who repays in kind, and with a certain amount of grudging labour. They feed the fowls, for instance, when we are away, and steal the eggs while we are here. We must devise a routine for you," he concluded, "against the future. To avoid possibly dangerous encounters." Such possibilities were ignored, however, for the time being. The three conspirators were loaded high with parcels, and clowned their way into the house, which smelled in particular of fungus, as well as the general smell of age. They showed Himmelfarb what was to be his room. They had only fairly recently discovered it, Konrad Stauffer told. Disguised from outside by a stone parapet, and from inside by panelling which masked its stairway, the small room could have been intended originally for the greatest convenience of the amorous duchess. The present hosts had furnished it in a hurry for their guest, with a truckle-bed, an old hip-bath in one corner, an austere chest, and the oil stove brought that day. Otherwise the small room was empty, which was how the visitor himself would have had it. As he arranged his insignificant possessions, he realized with sad conviction that the empty room was already his, and might remain so indefinitely. In the house proper, he understood, as he caught sight of himself that evening in one of the long, gilt mirrors, he would never belong. But a congenial meal was eaten off the blemished oak table, on which Ingeborg Stauffer laid her face, after the things had been cleared, and the work finished. "At Herrenwaldau," she said, or foresaw, "I shall never be completely happy. I am always anticipating some event which will destroy perfection. For instance, I am afraid of the house's being requisitioned for I don't know what squalid purpose. I can see some Party leader, of the self-important, local variety, sitting with his feet up on the chairs. I can smell the face-powder, spilt on the dressing tables by the mistresses." "My wife is neurotic," interrupted Konrad, whose back was turned to them, as he did accounts, or looked through letters which had arrived in their absence. "Certainly!" Ingeborg agreed, and laughed. She jumped up, and ran and brought little glasses, from which to drink cheap, fiery _Korn__. At times she could shine with happiness. And play Bach, rather badly, on an indifferent harpsichord. "Between Bach and Hitler," Konrad said, "something went wrong with Germany. We must go back to Bach, sidestepping the twin bogs of Wagner and Nietzsche, with an eye for Weimar, and the Hansa towns, listening to the poets." "You must allow me _Tristan__, though," his wife protested, and went and hung over his shoulder. Her head, with the dankish, nondescript, yet elegant hair, grew dark inside the candlelight. "All right. _Tristan__," he agreed. "Anyway, _Tristan__ is everybody's property." Very gently she bit the gristle in the nape of his neck. And he cried out, laughably. Which seemed to remind them it was time to go to bed. They played this game for several days, while Himmelfarb tentatively explored unopened rooms, and a wilderness of garden, in which undipped box and yew would have disguised his movements, if a scent of thyme run wild had not risen from under his feet. Once or twice only a trembling of greenery separated him from some peasants, daughters of the tenant-farmer, it appeared, who had arrived on an errand, faces mottled and suspicious, knees dimpling milkily above worsted stockings. And once his back had only time to disappear as Frau Stauffer received someone of greater importance. That evening his hosts were more silent and thoughtful. When, of his own accord, he took to descending less often from his room, he knew that he was interpreting their wishes. In fact, Ingeborg Stauffer began, as if by agreement, to bring him his meals. And there were the cans of water. Now there was seldom music at night. Silence had thickened in the house below him. Ingeborg explained at last that Konrad had gone to Berlin. For there had been inquiries by local authorities about the uses to which their house was being put, the number of rooms, their visitors, et cetera. So Konrad had gone to arrange. There was almost nothing that could not be arranged, through the sister, who was a Minister's wife, the friend, it was even said, of a personage. Ingeborg gave her information with an embarrassment which she had decided it was necessary to overcome, and left her guest to contemplate the knifeedge of life on which they were all balanced. Himmelfarb could just remember the thin, burning arms of Mausi Stauffer encircling his waist. Once she had almost destroyed him in the eyes of the world, and was now lifting him up, unconsciously, no doubt, a _dea ex machina__ created for the occasion by her brother. The latter returned, satisfied enough, though ironic. "Sometimes I have to tell myself that success, even of the acceptable, the almost honest kind, was never unaccompanied. Inevitably, it trailed a certain shadow of shame. The favoured one became always just that little bit contaminated," said Konrad, who had climbed to the room beneath the roof, carrying an extra lamp and a bottle of _Kognak__. "I wonder whether the pure aren't those who have tried, but not succeeded. Do you think, Himmelfarb, atonement is possible perhaps only where there has been failure?" "In that case many of us are saved who never suspected it!" the few replied. Konrad was already breathing too heavily, and not from his ascent to the hidden attic. "But you are the man of faith," he mumbled. "I am the eternal beetle, who finds daily that he has slipped back several stages behind where he thought himself to be the night before. And continues to claw. I would only like to think I am the beetle of faith, not of habit." "Better any kind of beetle than a nothing!" Konrad Stauffer was, in fact, the slightest of men, which made his respect the more touching to the object of it. Himmelfarb felt the humbler for his friend's consideration, and would have liked in some way to convey his gratitude, but might never have occasion to. Because Stauffer remained at Herrenwaldau for increasingly brief periods. "Berlin again?" Himmelfarb once asked. "Berlin is only one of many directions," the other replied. And continued to come and go. In the intervals, his wife served their guest with a regularity that was unexpected. Her elegance persisted, though by then shabbier in its expression. She had grown thinner, bonier, from withdrawal into a world where she seemed not to wish to be followed. Himmelfarb was even better able to respect such a wish since his own withdrawal into the empty room. There, in his obscure box, he was rarely unemployed, but had not yet arrived at that state of equanimity, of solitariness, of disinterest, from which, it had been suggested by the dyer, he might illuminate the vaster darkness. Sometimes, competing with his struggle to reach out towards, to reflect upon an unconscious world, he would hear the voice of the radio, announcing, admonishing, clearing its gravelly throat. Or Ingeborg would arrive to complete the sense of what he had suspected. Because, as the chain of events was forged, it became possible to foresee the links. So, Ingeborg only confirmed. One evening Stauffer returned, and Himmelfarb realized that his friend was also his contemporary, if anything older by a couple of years. For that youthful, sensual, forgivably superficial man had suddenly aged, just as his wife's body could no longer conceal its physical shabbiness, which a superficial shabbiness of clothes had hitherto only hinted at. Stauffer announced that the British had declared war on Germany. "Then we are, at last, thank God, wholly committed," he remarked, more to relieve his own feelings. After that, Himmelfarb did not see his friend again, and Ingeborg confirmed his impression that her husband was no longer at Herrenwaldau. "Yes," she repeated with noticeable intensity, "it was best that he should go. And even if he is gone longer than usual, one grows accustomed to being alone; one can make it a habit like anything else." Like the removal of her guest's tray, for instance, an act she had learnt to perform with an obliviousness, a simplicity which moved him every time he watched it happen. "All this that you do for me!" He was forced to try to convey his feelings on one of the occasions when she had poured the steaming water from the waist-high can into the antiquated hip-bath. "Oh," she exclaimed, quickly, still panting from her struggle up the flights of stairs, "don't you understand? We do it also on account of ourselves. It is most, most necessary. For more than ourselves. For all of us." And went away at once, biting her lip, and frowning at her shame. Several times Himmelfarb was tempted to touch on the subject of her husband's employment, but she was gone before he was able to commit any such indelicacy, and afterwards, he was glad. Only, once, she did remark, "You know Konrad will never do anything that _you__ would condemn." She became increasingly, no doubt wilfully, detached. On the night they heard, from their different parts of the house, the hysterical protests of the ground defences, and the cough and groan, the upheaval of prehistoric foundations when the British aeroplanes first dropped their bombs on a neighbouring target, Ingeborg did not appear. But, on the morning after, he noticed she had gathered back her hair so tight, her normally exposed face was even nakeder. Yet, it did not reveal. As she held his empty cup at an angle, and contemplated the grey dregs of ersatz coffee, she announced, "My lovely drake is dead. My big Muscovy. How he would hiss at times, and behave as unpleasantly as any man. But such a strong, splendid bird." Himmelfarb felt he should ask how the drake had died. "Who will ever know?" she answered softly. It was not important, of course, beside the fact of death. There was the night the bombs were dropped so close, the rooms changed shape for a second at Herrenwaldau. The Jew rocked in his attic, but knew himself at that moment to be closer than ever to his God, as his thoughts clung to that with which he was most familiar. As the moonlight filled with the black shadows of wings, and all the evil in the world was aimed at the fragile, lichened roof, he was miraculously transported. Afterwards when he had returned from this most ineffable experience, and the lower house no longer strained or tinkled, and only a recessive throbbing and whirring could be heard, the narrow stairway began to fill with the sound of footsteps, and he saw that Ingeborg Stauffer had come to his room, shielding a little lamp with her long, trembling hand, against what had once been her assured and elegant breast. "I was so terribly afraid," she confessed. "We were their target," he realized, "for some reason only they can know." "So very, very afraid," Ingeborg Stauffer was repeating, and trembling. Fear, he could see, had made her once more human, and for the first time old. She was crying now. So he comforted her, by putting his arms round her almost naked body-she had been preparing herself for bed; he soothed, and caressed, and strengthened. So that she was soon made warm and young again. And some of his own youth and physical strength returned. In the short distance from the spirit to the flesh, he knew he would have been capable of the greatest dishonesty while disguising it as need. Then, by the light of the subdued lamp, he saw their faces in the glass. He saw the expression of Ingeborg Stauffer. Who had woken first. Whose disgust was not less obvious for being expertly concealed. As for his own face, it was that of an old, inept man. Or Jew. "We must try to sleep now," she said. She had never sounded kinder, gentler, than in leaving him. Quite early, it seemed, the following morning, Himmelfarb recognized sounds of approach in the outside world. By climbing on the table, and opening a little bull's-eye, he had found that, after craning out, and peering through a balustrade, he could distinguish below the empty sky a fragment of garden, trees, and gravel drive. Now, on the morning after the misguided raid, a truck drew up in his precious, because so limited, field of vision, and several men-or one of them, perhaps, a sergeant-began to get down. Much later than usual, Frau Stauffer appeared briefly with his coffee, and announced that the Army was in residence. To examine damage and dispose of bombs. Naturally, she would come to him now only when absolutely necessary. That morning the coffee had been almost cold, he realized after drinking it. At the same time, his room became particularly fragile, even, he felt, superfluous. Was he preparing to break his shell? Indeed, the stillness could have been an egg, inside which he had been allowed to grow in strength, until now reminded, by instinct, by men's voices, by the contact of steel with steel, of some unspecified duty to be performed in an outside world. Now, it seemed, the stillness could give him nothing more. So he was walking up and down, restlessly, although, from habit, very softly. And hardly noticed when, after days, his guardian's footsteps again sounded normal on the stairs. "They have gone," she said, but with an imitation of relief. For, in fact, they had not. They would never go now, so her face told, although she had watched, and he had heard them, disappearing down the drive. Himmelfarb sensed that the inmates of Herrenwaldau had merely entered on a fresh phase of spiritual occupation. And soon after, Ingeborg Stauffer came to him to say, "I know now that Konrad will never return." It appeared so obvious when spoken, only it was a conviction that, until then, they had not dared share. "But have you received news?" Himmelfarb was foolish enough to ask. "Not news." She shrugged. "I shall never, never receive news. I shall only ever know that I shall not see Konrad alive." Himmelfarb suspected she would not allow herself to say, _my husband__-it had come so glibly, so extravagantly from her in the past-but now she was not strong enough. In his pity he longed to touch her. Her face had opened a little. She said, "It is less dreadful when one had always known. He himself expected. Oh, I know that Konrad, in spite of his success, was an insubstantial man. We both accepted it. He had very few illusions. 'My books will survive,' he used to say, 'just about as long as I.' " There was an organization, of a secret, an illegal nature, of which she could not tell, of which, in fact, she knew very little. To this, Himmelfarb gathered, Stauffer had belonged. But his actual missions would remain undisclosed. "You understand, in any case," she said, repeating a remark she had made once before, "he will have done nothing that _you__ would ever condemn." Up to this she had been giving information, but now she gathered her elbows. She said, "I loved him! I loved him!" Her ordinarily marble face was mumbling and grunting, like that of some bereaved woman. "_My dearest husband__!" she confided. And went away. Less than ever now Himmelfarb belonged to Herren-waldau. The boards ticked during darkness. In the hours of darkness the dark-red heart swelled enormously beneath the rafters. His iron bed was straiter, crueller to his sides. Then his own wife came and took his hand, and together they stood looking down into the pit of darkness, at the bottom of which was the very faintest phosphorescence of faces. He longed-oh, most intolerably-to look once more at the face of Reha Himmelfarb, but it was as though she were directing his vision towards the other, unknown faces, and might even have become unrecognizable herself. The tears were flowing faster, from the unseen eyes. Of blood, he saw, on the back of his hand. The voices of darkness ever swelling. So that the quicklime of compassion, mounting from the great pit, consumed him where he stood. Quite alone now. For Reha Himmelfarb had withdrawn; she already knew the meaning of what they had just experienced together. Himmelfarb climbed up out of his dream into the morning. It was already quite light, though early. For some reason, he saw, he had lain down without undressing, no doubt to be prepared, and now, as if in answer to his foresight, the outside world had begun again to impinge on Herrenwaldau. From his table, through the bull's-eye, between the stone balusters of the parapet, he observed this time a car, followed by a truck, jerking to a stop on the weed-sown gravel. This time an officer trod down. His splendour was unmistakable, and as if in answer to it, Ingeborg Stauffer had already come out to do the honours. She was wearing a simple costume of still fabulous cut, but on which Himmelfarb had more than once observed a crust of pollard along a lapel. Now she stood there, waiting, in the old gum-boots she wore in winter when going out to feed her ducks. It was very quickly revealed to the observer, even at that distance, that he was present on an occasion, certainly not of high history, of vindication, rather, of the individual spirit. The faces of several private soldiers were aware. An NCO had forgotten to give orders. The officer, of course, obeyed all the etiquette of gallantry in carrying out his peculiar duty. Nor did Frau Stauffer forget what she had learnt. Her voice, always lighter when fulfilling its social functions, was carried upward on the frosty air. Naturally, the listener could not hear more than the upward scale of formal laughter. Frau Stauffer was even wearing the bracelet of large golden links, and lumps of unpolished, semi-precious stones, which always conflicted in motion, and would threaten to break up any serious conversation. So she had known, and was prepared. Certainly there was one moment of intense silence in which Himmelfarb could have sworn he heard a sound of most unearthly breaking, so high, so clear, so agonizing in its swift dwindling. Then Frau Stauffer bowed her head, in agreement, it appeared. She got into the car, holding one hand to her breast, not to protect it from the inevitable, but to decorate that inevitable with its measure of grace. When the car was turned round, so sharply, convulsively, that the wheels left their furrows in the drive, Himmelfarb did catch a brief glimpse of Ingeborg Stauffer's face as it looked out at the wilderness of her neglected garden. She, too, no longer in any way belonged, it seemed, to the framework of actuality. So there was no reason why she should protest at being forced so abruptly out of it. As she was driven away, her face was of that perfect emptiness which precedes fulfilment. At the same time, the detachment of soldiers, under orders from its NCO, had begun to billet itself on Herrenwaldau. Voices were burring. Equipment clattered. Himmelfarb, who had got down again inside his room, was resigned enough on finding that his own turn had come. He did not hurry. When he had prayed, and brushed his overcoat a little with his hand, and packed into the suitcase the meagre sum of his possessions, he descended into the body of the house. Although it was now filled with sounds of what might be considered as activity, boots bludgeoning frail boards, voices flouting the damp silence of antiquity, those of the rooms which he entered or passed remained gently aloof from their fate. Intending to surrender himself to the first person who questioned his presence there, Himmelfarb wound farther down. Several objects that he touched were sadly reminiscent. Yet, it was a distant ceiling encrusted with faded blazonry which made him wonder whether it might be possible to take one more look at the town in which he had been born. In the long saloon which the owners had used as a living room, and which was not yet empty of their presence, a heap of cats snoozed on a patch of winter sunshine. A radio was shouting of war. Outside, on the terrace, a stocky youth, of country tints, stood holding a gun, and picking his nose. Himmelfarb wondered for a moment whether to address the soldier boy. But smiled instead. The soldier himself wondered whether to challenge the elderly gentleman, so evidently discreet, so obviously stepped out of the life of kindliness which he understood. In the circumstances, his own always dubious authority dwindled. The gun wobbled. He gave a kind of country nod. Himmelfarb walked slowly on. He sensed how horribly the boy's heart must have been beating for the mildness in himself which he had not learnt to overcome. But the strange morning was already unfolding, in which any individual might have become exposed to contingency. The evader walked with care, under the naked, cawing elms. It seemed as though he had abandoned the self he had grown to accept in his familiar room. It seemed, also, fitting that it should again be winter when he took the long, undeviating road along which friends had brought him-how long ago, months or years? — to experience silence and waiting. The winter air cleared his head wonderfully, with the result that he found himself observing, and becoming engrossed by the least grain of roadside sand. There were occasions when he nodded at some peasant or child, too involved in the living of their daily lives to think of obstructing the stranger. From time to time, he rested, because his legs were proving humanly weak. It took the Jew the best part of the day to cover the miles to Holunderthal. The winter evening was drawing in as he approached the darker masses of the town, which had begun already to receive its nightly visitation. The knots and loops, the little, exquisite puffs of white hung on the deepening distances of the sky, all the way to its orange rim. The riot of fireworks was on. Ordinarily solid, black buildings were shown to have other, more transcendental qualities, in that they would open up, disclosing fountains of hidden fire. Much was inverted, that hitherto had been accepted as sound and immutable. Two silver fish were flaming downward, out of their cobalt sea, into the land. As Himmelfarb entered the town, he concluded the industrial suburb of Scheidnig was the target for the night. There the panache was gayest, the involvement deepest, although, occasionally, a bomb would fall wide and casual into the deathly streets through which he walked. There was a sighing of old bricks subsiding, the sound of stone coughing up its guts, and once he himself was flung to the ground, in what could have been a splitting open of the earth, if the paving had not remained, and the hollow clatter of his suitcase spoilt the effects of doom. As he walked deeper into the town, a wind got up, tossing the flaps of his coat, twitching at the brim of his hat. In the streets, the vagaries of human behaviour had been almost entirely replaced by an apparent organization of mechanical means: engines roared, bells rang, flak reacted, the hard confetti of shrapnel never ceased to fall, innocent and invisible. Through which the Jew walked. It did not occur to him to feel afraid. His mechanism could have been responding to control. Once, certainly, compassion flooded his metal limbs, and he stooped to close the eyes of a man who had been rejected by his grave of rubble. Then wheels were arriving. Of ambulance? Or fire-engine? The Jew walked on, by supernatural contrivance. For now the wheels were grazing the black shell of the town. The horses were neighing and screaming, as they dared the acid of the green sky. The horses extended their webbing necks, and their nostrils glinted brass in the fiery light. While the amazed Jew walked unharmed beneath the chariot wheels. Originally it had been his intention to revisit the house on the Holzgraben, but suddenly he foresaw the vision of desolation, the stucco skin stripped by bombs and human resentment. So he came instead to the police station which he knew so well, at the corner of the Dorotheenstrasse. Now, when he went in, the hands of the man on duty were darting back and forth from official paper to official paper. To occupy himself. He was, it seemed, the only one left behind. "They are belting hell out of the glove factory," the man on duty informed the stranger. "For God's sake! The glove factory!" The man's rather fat hands continued to stray hopefully amongst the official documents. There was a wedding ring on which the flesh was closing. On the plump hand. "Who would have thought," said the man in charge, "that Holunderthal was inflammable! For God's sake!" "I have come," Himmelfarb began, who was rootling in his wallet for the necessary proof of identification; tonight it was particularly important. "To give myself up," he explained. "Now there is only disorder!" complained the policeman. "We no longer have the time, even, to water our flower-pots." His large, bursting hands were helpless. And the broad, yellow wedding ring. If he looked up at all, his mind's eye remained directed inward. "Well?" he asked, though. "What do you want?" "I am a Jew," Himmelfarb announced. Offering the paper. "A Jew, eh?" But the policeman was too distracted by his inability to lay his hand on some other document. "Well," he grumbled, "you will have to wait. A Jew!" he complained. "At this time of night! And on my own!" So Himmelfarb sat down and waited, on a bench, against the wall. He saw that it was, in fact, night, as the man had said, and heard that a miraculous silence had begun to flood the burning town. Somewhere there was a voice, thick with conviction, yet at the same time wavery. "War and peace come and go, Beer and kisses stay…." sang the ageless German voice. "Beer and kisses! Piss-pots!" The policeman snorted. "Enough to make a man burst himself! Beer and kisses is for human beings." Then he looked up. "A Jew, eh?" he said. As the silence seeped in, he was again able to recognize his duties.
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.
When Himmelfarb was able once more to raise his head, he realized that, for the second time in his life, he had fainted, or God had removed him, mercifully, from his body. Now it was evening, and a strange one. Those objects which had appeared most solid before: the recently built bath-houses, for instance, and the iron towers, were partially dissolved in mist. The well-planned establishment which he had known as Friedensdorf was enclosed in a blood-red blur, or aura, at the centre of which he lay, like a chrysalis swathed in some mysterious supernatural cocoon. Other forms, presumably, though not distinguishably human, moved on transcendental errands within the same shape, no longer that intense crimson, but expanding to a loose orange. Of blue edges. He was reminded suddenly and vividly of the long, blue-grey, tranquil ash of an expensive cigar he had smoked somewhere. Of stubbing out a cigar by the orange light from a little lantern of oriental design. Then, of course, he remembered his friend Konrad Stauffer. When his tardier senses returned. His surroundings exploded into the consciousness of the man who was lying on the ground. What had seemed soothingly immaterial became most searingly concrete. A wound opened in his left hand. The blue-black gusts of smoke rushed in at his eyes and up his nostrils. Men were shouting. He could feel the breath of orange fire. Explosives convulsed the earth beneath his body. Bullets pitted the air, but rarely. It was the fire that predominated. Friedensdorf was burning. It was then that Himmelfarb realized he had lost his spectacles. The discovery was more terrible than fire. Engulfed in his affliction, he began to grope about him, touching stones, a strip of hot metal, a little lake of some liquid stickiness, a twig, a stone, a stone, in that fruitless journey across what must remain an empty desert. As he crawled and searched. Or looked up at the orange blur, which seemed by now to be invading the whole of existence. Somewhere on the left a machine-gun hawked fire. Even his own breath issued from his mouth in a tongue of fire. As he blubbered, and panted. Searching. To focus again the blessed shapes of things. He had covered so much ground, it was unlikely now. Though his hands continued, for employment, to grope, and touch, long after he had strayed beyond reach of possibility. He touched wire. He tore his hands on the barbs of wire. He touched a cotton rag suspended from the same barbs. He was touching air. To the side of the rag, or flag of cotton, his hands suddenly encountered nothing but the soft air. There was, in fact, a small, jagged gap, if not a vast triumphal arch in the peripheral fence. Someone had simply cut the wire. Then the Jew bowed his head, and went out, still upon his knees. He shuffled upon his knees, anywhere, or where it seemed indicated that he should. Over the stones he hobbled, like some deformity. Upon his torn knees. He must get up, he knew, but apart from the stiffness of his limbs, which made of this unnatural position a temporarily natural one, he had not yet crossed, he suspected, the line dividing hell from life. When the barbs entered his forehead, and he was not surprised to put out his hands and grasp a fresh agony of wire. It was, of course, the outer fence. He might have hung there, content just to be ignored by the tormentor's mind, if a moment of lethargy had not forced him to reach out for a fresh hold, to prevent himself from toppling. And for the second time, he found himself touching the mild, unobstructed air. And was goaded into wildest action by that very gentleness. All of him was tearing-flesh, breath, the stuff of his clothes-as he wrenched himself out of the grip of the wire. But got himself free, and manoeuvred through the narrow, the so very narrow rent, made by those who had cut their way out through the second barrier of wire. The air was staggeringly cold that flung against his sweaty, bleeding forehead. Shapes welcomed, whether of men or trees, he had not the strength to wonder, but did at last touch bark. And dragged himself up, onto his feet. He wandered through a forest, from trunk to kindly trunk. The wet needles mingled with his skin, their scent spreading through that second _maze__, his skull, until he was almost drugged with freedom. He walked on, and could have continued gratefully, if he had not come to what was by comparison a clearing, in which stood a band of virgin forms-young birches, they might have been-their skin so smooth and pure, he fell down against them, and lay crying, his mouth upon the wet earth. Some time later, men arrived. Whatever their complexion or beliefs, he could not have moved. They stood around him. Talking. Poles, he reasoned with what was left of his mind. And listened to their silence and their breathing as they carried him through an infinity of trees. On arrival at a stench of pigs and straw, they laid him on the stove of a house to which they had brought him. He had no desire to leave the warmth and darkness. He lay with his head on a kind of hard block, when not actually at rest in the bosom of his Lord. Women came to dress his wounds. They would appear with soup. Thin and watery. A steam of cabbage. Sometimes there were dumplings in the soup, which made it rather more difficult. On the third day, or so he calculated, they brought him somebody, a man of youthful voice, who spoke to him in German, and told him as much as the peasants knew of recent events at Friedensdorf. Those of the prisoners kept alive by the Germans, to empty the gas chambers of corpses, and provide labour for the camp, had decided to mutiny, the Pole related. Weeks had been spent collecting and hiding arms and ammunition, and it was only after the arrival of the last trainload of Jews that the conspirators felt themselves strong enough to act. Then the slaves rose, killed the commandant and a number of the guards, exploded a fuel dump, set fire to part of the establishment, cut the wire, and were at that moment on their way to join the Resistance. "And all those other Jews?" Himmelfarb ventured to ask. The Pole believed most of them had died, some already of the gas fumes, the remainder by the fire which destroyed Friedensdorf. He laughed. "You are the lucky one!" he said. And Himmelfarb, who had re-examined so often the sequence of his escape, could not bring himself to explain how it had been a miracle. When he was rested and recovered, they dressed him and took him by the hand. That half-blind peasant could not have counted the number of hands he touched as he stumbled on his journey eastward. Moving always in the same obliterating, perhaps merciful mist, he learned the smell of wet grass, of warm hay, of bruised turnips, of cows' breath. He grew accustomed to hearing voices he could not understand, except when accompanied by touch, or expressing the emotions of songs. There were many common sounds he felt he had never heard before, and he found himself penetrating to unsuspected layers of silence. Above all, he learned to recognize that state of complete suspension in which men, like animals, wait for danger to pass. It was not until Istanbul that Professor Himmelfarb recovered his sight, and something of his own identity. How the water shimmered, and the leaves of the trees were lifted. As he looked out from behind his brand-new spectacles, he had to lower his eyes, ashamed to accept the extravagant gifts that were offered him.
It was decided, then, that Himmelfarb, unlike many others, should be allowed to reach the Land, although, in the absence of some sure sign, or sanction, his own conscience continued to doubt his worthiness. In the circumstances, he was reluctant to lift up his voice with those of his fellow passengers on the somewhat rusty freighter which carried them down the Turkish coast. The young Jews lounged on the fo'c'sle hatches, with their arms round one another, and sang. All those young people, the thickish, hairy youths and green-skinned girls, germinated in the night-soil of Europe, had come that much closer to fulfilling their destiny. For the Jews were at last returning home. They would recognize the stones they had never seen, and the least stone would be theirs. But the rather remote figure of the elderly man, a professor, it was said, seemed to have no part in it. As he continued to walk the deck, he would hesitate, and turn, carefully, perhaps not yet altogether reconciled to the rather too fashionable, recently gotten second-hand shoes. Certainly there was an immense gap between the age of the preoccupied figure and those of the jubilant younger Jews. Some of the latter called to him, inviting him to participate in their relief and joy, and even made a few harmless, friendly-sounding jokes. They soon gave up, however, averted their eyes, and rummaged for peanuts in the little bags which had been handed to them, together with other comforts, by a charitable local Jewess, on the quay at Istanbul. Voluptuously, they lulled themselves. They began again, mumbling at first, then stirringly, to sing. A number of the older Jews attempted to claim their share of good things, and join in the singing, but found they had not the mind for it. The sea air had given their cheeks a new, a positively healthy tinge, and their eyes were glazed with formal contentment from watching the pattern of crisp little waves repeat itself over and over on the classic waters. But in some of the older faces, the smiles were seen to stick halfway, as if caught up on an obstructing tooth, one of those gold landmarks. And there were individuals who were forced to stop their mouths with handkerchiefs, for fear their joy might get out of hand and not be recognized as such. After all, nobody was used to it yet. They had acquired that new and rather unmanageable emotion along with their new clothes, in many cases ill-fitting, from the organization in Istanbul. The chosen people stood or sat about the decks, or leaned over the rails and watched the quite incredible sea. But Professor Himmelfarb walked, or stalked, between those who finally took him for granted. The relief committee had given a surprising amount of thought to what they had interpreted as the feelings and tastes of the elderly, cultivated refugee, who would no doubt be absorbed into the academic life of the university at Jerusalem. They had fitted him out with clothes which approximated to the kind he must always have worn. The topcoat, for instance, of European cloth and cut, had belonged originally to a doctor of philosophy at Yale. Now, as the present owner walked in the sea breezes on the crowded deck, the dark, capacious, yet somehow oppressive overcoat held plastered awkwardly against his sides, nobody would have questioned the distinguished man's right to it. Unless himself. At the reception centre he had stood too long with the coat in his hands, with the result that the Jewess who was supervising the distribution of clothing had been provoked to ask, "Are you not pleased with your nice new overcoat, Professor Himmelfarb?" The lady, who wore a moustache, and a wrist-watch on a practical strap, had had some experience of kindergarten work. "Yes," he replied. "_Pleased__." But stood. "Then, why don't you take your coat," she suggested kindly, "and go and sit with the others at the tables. Madame Saltiel is going to distribute a few comforts for the voyage. After that, there will be a cup of coffee." She touched him firmly on the elbow. "But it is hardly right," he said, "that I should accept what is not yet my due." "Of course it is your due!" insisted the lady, who was very busy, and who, in spite of her training, could become exasperated. "And it is _our__ duty to make amends to those of our people who have suffered," she tried to explain with gentleness. "It is I who must make amends," insisted her recalcitrant pupil. "I am afraid it may soon be forgotten that our being a people does not relieve us of individual obligations." But the lady propelled him towards the tables where other Jews were awaiting further largesse. "I should take my coat, if I were you," the lady advised, "and worry no more about it." She was too exhausted to respect delicate scruples. The little points of perspiration were clearly visible on the hairs of her moustache. So Himmelfarb took the excellent coat, carrying it unhappily by one of its arms, and had to be reminded that his overcoat was trailing in the dust. It was in the same reluctant frame of mind that he entered, or returned to, Jerusalem-as if he alone must refuse the freedom of that golden city, of which each stone racked him, not to mention the faces in the streets. One evening on a bare hillside, which the wind had treated with silver, he lay down, and it seemed at first as though the earth might open, gently, gently, to receive his body, but his soul would not allow, and dragged him to his feet, and he ran, or stumbled down the hill, his coat-tail flying, so that a couple of Arabs laughed, and a British sergeant grew suspicious. Yet, at the foot of the hill, he was again clothed in dignity, and chose a lane that led through the trapped and tarnished light of evening, back into the city which, it seemed, would never be his. There were many familiar figures on the streets, with greetings which ranged from the expansive to the elaborately judicious. On King George Avenue he ran into Appenzeller, the physicist, of Jena, whom he had known from student days, rather a coarse-skinned, bristly individual, who battered the backs of those he met to gain the advantage over them. Appenzeller did not believe in ghosts. He opened with, "Well, Himmelfarb, I shall not say I am surprised. You were always so substantial. Do you remember how they used to say you would go far? Well, you have arrived, my dear!" How he laughed at his own joke, and the pores round his nostrils oozed. "You have been up to Canopus, of course. Not yet? Well, we shall be expecting you. You will be useful to us," he said. "Everyone has his part to play." Himmelfarb remembered the infallible stupidity of Appenzeller outside the laboratory and lecture theatre. "Later on," was all he could reply, with a reticence which gave his colleague opportunity for contempt. Appenzeller recalled how an almost girlish diffidence would overtake his massive friend at times. The physicist was one of those who automatically interpret reserve as an encouraging sign of moral weakness. "It is fatal to brood, you know," he advised, looking as far as he could into the other's eyes, though not far enough for his own satisfaction; he would have enjoyed dealing some kind of jovial blow. "Besides, it is no longer a luxury when so many others have suffered too." Advice would swim from Appenzeller's skin, of which the pores had always been conspicuously large. "I am about to go down to Haifa," Himmelfarb replied. The physicist was surprised, not to say disappointed, to see that his tentative remark appeared to have left no trace of a wound. Appenzeller's simplicity could perhaps have been explained by the fact that he himself had barely suffered. "Family connections," that dry number Himmelfarb continued. "I am told that I shall find my wife's eldest brother in some _kibbutz__ out near Ramat David." "Ah, family!" Appenzeller smiled. "I am happy to hear it." He coughed, and giggled. "We shall expect you, then, on your return. Refreshed. You will like it here," he added, "if you don't find there are too many Jews." After making his joke, Appenzeller took a friendly leave, and Himmelfarb was glad. The latter did go down to Haifa, by a series of wartime buses and military lorries. He was carried some of the way along the road to Ramat David, but preferred to walk the final stretch before the settlement at which he hoped to find Ari Liebmann, his brother-in-law. He walked along the road which ran between tough little hills, built as battlements, so it appeared, to protect the spreading plain of the _kibbutz__. Once or twice he kicked at the surface of the road. All this was consecrated, he could not quite realize. Once, at the side of the road, he got upon his knees, amongst the stones, in the smell of dust, unable to restrain his longing to touch the earth. At the _kibbutz__ they were all occupied with the business of living. A woman in the office rose from her papers and pointed at a field. Ari Liebmann and his wife, she said, were down there, amongst the tomatoes. Ari, whom he remembered as a youth of mobile face and somewhat mercurial mind, had set in one of the opaque moulds of manhood. He was rather hard, dusty, grizzled. When the two men had embraced, and cried, they went to sit down beneath an olive tree, as the farmer had to admit it was an occasion. "Rahel!" he called out across the sprawling entanglement of tomato bushes. "This is my wife," he explained incidentally. Reluctantly there came a woman, who, Mordecai realized, was something to do with him now. Ari's wife was built in the shape of a cone, and wearing a pair of very tight blue shorts. Her thighs and hips were immense, but her face was not displeasing; it had history in its bones. When all three were seated, Ari decided: "You must come to work with us. You can teach the young ones. You will be far better off out here. A Jew only begins to be a Jew in relation to his own soil." Both Ari and his wife had hard hands. They were stained with the juice from the young tomato shoots they had been engaged in pinching out. "Rahel was born here. She will tell you. She's a _sabra__," Ari explained, and he and his wife laughed. These people are completely fulfilled, Mordecai sensed. They belonged to their surroundings, like the stones, or the olive tree beneath which they were sitting. "There will be Jews enough to exercise their intellects on inessentials. This is what matters," Ari boasted, indicating with his hand all that his community owned. He was dangerously arrogant, Mordecai saw. "Yes, come to us here," Rahel invited. "There will always be plenty for Jerusalem." Then Himmelfarb replied, "If I could feel that God intended me to remain, either in Jerusalem, or in your valley, then you could be sure of my remaining. But He does not." "Ah!" exclaimed Ari. "God!" He began to score the ground with a stick. "How we used to pray!" He sighed, and marvelled. "In Bienenstadt. Under the gables. Good for the soul!" He hunched, and laughed; he could have been trying to rid himself of phlegm. "You, I seem to remember, Reha had decided, were to play the part of a Messiah." If each of the two men had not experienced all that he had, this accusatory remark might have sounded more brutal. As it was, Mordecai made it refer to one of those other, pasteboard selves silhouetted on the past. And at that moment, besides, an olive dropped, green, hard, actual, on the stony soil of Palestine. "What do you believe, Ari?" Mordecai was compelled to ask. "I believe in the Jewish people," his brother-in-law replied. "In establishing the National Home. In defending the Jewish State. In work, as the panacea." "And the soul of the Jewish people?" "Ah, souls!" He was very suspicious, jabbing the earth. "History, if you like." Rahel looked out over the landscape of hills. She could have been bored, or embarrassed. "History," Himmelfarb said, "is the reflection of spirit." Ari was most uneasy in his state of unemployment. He fidgeted about on his broad behind. "Should we continue to sit, then," he asked, showing his short, strong teeth, "and allow history to reflect us? That is what you seem to suggest." "By no means," Mordecai replied. "I would only point out that spiritual faith is also an active force. Which will populate the world after each attempt by the men of action to destroy it." "I did not tell you," Ari interrupted, "but Rahel and I have already made two splendid children." "Yes, Ari." Mordecai sighed. "I can tell that you are both fulfilled. But momentarily. Nothing, alas, is permanent. Not even this valley. Not even our land. The earth is in revolt. It will throw up fresh stones-tonight-tomorrow-always. And you, the chosen, will continue to need your scapegoat, just as some of us do not wait to be dragged out, but continue to offer ourselves." "And where will you pursue this-idealism?" Ari Liebmann asked. Now, it appeared, Himmelfarb was caught. "Well," he began. "For example." He hesitated. "It could be," he said, "in Australia." No thought of that country had ever entered his head before, but now it presented itself, possibly because it was farthest, perhaps also bitterest. "Australia!" his relatives exclaimed-nothing more, as if it were best to ignore the obsessions of the crazed Diaspora. Rahel changed the subject. "You will spend the night with us?" she asked, but at the same time it was obvious she hoped he would decide against it. "No," Himmelfarb said. He had no wish to delay where there was no point in his doing so. They began to walk towards the settlement. "You must eat, at least," they insisted. It was only practical. Although it was not yet mealtime, Rahel foraged in the kitchen, and produced bread, a cup of milk, and a little bowl of shredded carrot, which she put before the traveller, in the long, empty hall. Soon the cold milk was burning in his mouth, while the others sat on the opposite side of the table, tracing their own secret patterns on the surface of American cloth, when they were not watching him, it could have been hoping he would swallow down their guilt, quickly and easily, with the milk. Then Rahel swept the crumbs from the cloth with the flat of her hand. She began to glance at her wrist-watch. The hour was approaching when she would go down to her children at the crèche. Her mouth was growing hungrier. There was, besides, a bus which passed along the road at evening, and to catch that bus the relatives hurried Himmel-farb. His sister-in-law kept looking at her watch. It was natural, of course; she was obviously a practical woman. Then, at last, as they stood in the meagre scrub of what would one day be a copse of pines, dust foreshadowed the approaching bus. "_Mazel tov__!" cried Ari Liebmann, squeezing his brother-in-law's hand too hard. This time the two men shed no tears, for the waters of grief ran deeper, more mysteriously than before. The dust of the land lay around the two Jews. The light was winding them in saffron. Before the bus took Mordecai, and, after the initial travail, flung him upon the next stage of his journey. From then on, how his dreams jolted him as he followed the rivers towards their source. In this journeying, it could not be said that he was ever alone, for his outer man was accompanied by his dedicated spirit, until, on a morning of antipodean summer, it was suggested the official destination had been reached. "This is Sydney," the passengers were told. The party of immigrant Jews looked anxiously for those who must be waiting to receive them. Only the rather peculiar, not exactly difficult, but _different__ passenger, Mr Himmelfarb, in his dark, sweaty, unsuitable clothes, stood, and continued standing, apart. He had, in fact, already been received. As the heat smote the tarmac, there appeared to rise up before him a very definite pillar of fire.
By the time the Jew had finished his story, the day was already relenting. The plum tree, which had, in the beginning, promised protection from the narrative, and finally intensified, if anything, a common agony of mind, began again to demonstrate its natural subtleties of form and sound. The shadows inside its brocaded tent lay curled like heavy animals, spotted and striped with tawny light. Although the blossom had become by now a rather frowzy embroidery against the depths of a whiter sky, an always increasing motion and music freshened the limp folds of branches. For an evening breeze was flowing down across Sarsaparilla to Xanadu, lifting and feathering in its course, trickling through the more suffocating scrub, laving the surfaces of leaves, and at last lapping on the skins of the two survivors seated at the roots of the tree. Miss Hare might have shuddered if her body had not been so recently released from the rack. In the circumstances, the least movement was painful. When she had got to her feet, she mumbled, "I must go home, or a certain person, whose name I shall not mention, will cause a disturbance." The Jew was also struggling awkwardly up, testing his legs to learn whether they were sound. Neither he nor his audience had any apparent intention of referring to what they had experienced together, nor was it suggested they should meet again, though both expected that they would. "I must leave you at once," said the Jew, glancing with some concern at the sun. "It is very, very late." So they parted in the tender light. The smaller their figures grew, the more they appeared pressed. Bobbing and thrashing, they swam against the tide of evening, their movements cruelly hampered by anxiety and grass.