A passive, but possessive heat ushered in the Season of Freedom. The heads of grass were bowed with summer. Limp wigs of willows, black at the seams, yellowing in hanks, were by now the feeblest disguises. Although carpets had been laid on the afternoon of the Seder night, they were of the coarsest, most tarnished yellow that a late-summer light could provide. Mere runners, moreover. But the heavy, felted light did lead, or so it appeared at that hour, over the collapsed grass and tufts of blowsy weed, to the brown house in which the Jew of Sarsaparilla had elected to live. Neighbours were unaware, of course, that peculiar rites might be expected of the owner of the disgraceful, practically derelict house. Nor had the Jew availed himself for some years of the freedom which the season offered, feeling that his solitary trumpet blast might sound thin and poor in a celebration which called for the jubilance of massed brass. Until, at the present time, some welling of the spirit, need to establish identity of soul, foreboding of impending events, made him long to contribute, if only an isolated note. So, in the afternoon, Himmelfarb went about setting the Seder table, as he had seen done. He laid the tablecloth, which his neighbour Mrs Godbold had starched stiff, and ironed flat, and stuck together with its own cleanliness. Moving in a kind of mechanical agitation of recollected gestures, he put the shankbone and the burnt egg. He put the flat _matzoth__, the dish of bitter herbs, and the cup for wine. But was distressed by his own conjuring. The mere recollection of some of the more suggestive wonders would have prevented him performing them. Or the absence of an audience. Or the presence of ghosts: the rows of cousins and aunts, the Cantor Katzmann, the Lady from Czernowitz, the dreadful dyer of his youth-all of them, with the exception of one whom he preferred to leave faceless, expectant of his skill. At that point he remembered the stranger: how they would stand the door open for anyone who chose to walk in. In imitation, he opened his, and put a stone against it. Though he doubted whether he would have dared lift the cup to any stranger's lips, for fear his own emotion might trouble, or even spill the wine. So that he could no longer bear to look at his property table, with its aching folds of buckram, and the papier-mâche symbols of Pesach. It would not have been illogical if, in the course of the farce he was elaborating, a _Hanswurst__ had risen through the floor, and flattened the table with one blow from his bladder. In anticipation, a bird was shrieking out of a bush. Through the open doorway, Himmelfarb saw, the human personality was offered choice of drowning in a grass ocean, or exposure to the great burning-glass of sky. Then the Jew, who had in his day been given to investigating what is above and what is below, took fright at the prospect of what might be in store for him, He began to walk about his house, with little short, quick steps. He was quite boxed. All around him, behind the sticks of trees, were the boxes containing other lives, but involved in their own esoteric rites, or mystical union with banality. He would not have presumed to intrude, yet, it was so very necessary to unite. It was his own open door which finally persuaded that _he__ was the stranger whom some doorway must be waiting to receive. He would walk straight in, into the atmosphere of questions, and cinnamon, and songs. He would sit down without being asked, because he had been expected. It took him seconds to fetch his hat. After first haste, and an episode with the front steps, he settled down quietly enough to the journey. Nor did it disturb him to think he had not locked his house. In Sarsaparilla, Himmelfarb caught the bus. Buses were always amiable enough. It was the trains that still alarmed at times, because of the passengers substituted for those who had started out. But at Barranugli, where the train was waiting for him, he did not experience distress. His tremendous decision to make the journey had restored to the Jew the gentleness of trust. He smiled at faces he had never seen before. With luck, he calculated, he might arrive in time for Kiddush. So they started again. It was the kindest hour of evening, strewing the floors with a light of trodden dandelions. Mostly ladies filled the train. As they sat and talked together, of cakes, and illnesses, and relatives-or just talked-they worked the words inside their mouths like the bread of kindness, or sugared lollies. The mauve plastic of their gums shone. Temporarily the slashes in the train upholstery were concealed by corseted behinds, the brown smells of rotten fruit overcome by the scents of blameless, but synthetic flowers. Himmelfarb the Jew sat and smiled at all faces, even those which saw something to resent. He was delivered by his journey as seldom yet by prayer. Journeys implied a promise, as he had been taught, and known, but never dared accept. A promise that he would not dare, yet, envisage. Only an address, which he had heard discussed at smoke-o, of the Home Beautiful, the promised house. In Persimmon Street, Paradise East. So he clung to that promise. He nursed it all the way in the obviously festive train. Outside, humidity and conformity remained around 93. Round the homes, the dahlias lolled. Who could have told whose were biggest? Who could have told who was who? Not the plastic ladies, many of whom, as they waited to shove chops in front of men, exchanged statements over fences, or sat drooping over magazines, looking for the answers to the questions. By such light, Himmelfarb was persuaded he could have answered many of those. A lady at his side, who, in anticipation of Easter, had pinned kindness to her bosom in letters of glass, told him how she used to bury gramophone needles under hydrangea bushes, when there were gramophone needles, but now there were none. "And here am I," she said, "reared a Congregationalist, but attending the Baptist church, because it pleases my son-in-law. Are you a Baptist, perhaps?" she asked. "I am a Jew," the Jew replied. "Arrrr!" said the lady. She had not heard right, only that it sounded something funny. Her skin closed on itself rather fearfully. All the ladies, it appeared, had paused for a moment in their breathing. They were slavering on their plastic teeth. Before they began to clatter again. Presently they were carried under the city, and many of the ladies, including Himmelfarb's neighbour, were discharged. The train issued lighter out of the earth, with those whose faith drove them on. As they prepared to cross the water, the Jew sat forward on his seat. The sky opened for them, and the bridge put forth its span, and they passed effortlessly over the glittering water. As it had happened before, so it had been arranged again for that day. So the Jew had to give thanks as they mounted the other side, through a consecrated landscape, in which the promised homes began to assemble, in pools of evening and thickets of advanced shrubs. Where Himmelfarb was at last put down, roses met him, and led him all the way. Had he been blind, he could have walked by holding on to ropes of roses. As it was, the rose-light filtering through the nets of leaves intoxicated with its bland liquor. Till the Jew was quite flushed and unsteady from his homecoming. He had grown weak. In fact, on arrival at the gate, he had to get a grip of the post, and ever so slightly bent the metal letter-box, which was in the shape of a little dovecote, empty of doves. It was Shirl Rosetree who looked out of the apricot brick home, and saw. She called at once, "Har-ry! Waddaya know? It is that old Jew. At this hour. Now what the hell? I can't bear it! Do something quick!" "What old Jew?" Harry Rosetree asked. He turned cold. Excitement was bad for him. "Why, the one from over at the factory, of course." "But you never seen him," her husband protested. "I know. But just know. It could only be that one." Even his diversity did not alter the fact that there was only one Jew. It was her father, and her grandmother in a false moustache, and her cousins, and the cousins of cousins. It was the foetus she had dropped years ago, scrambling into the back of a cart, in darkness, to escape from a Polish village. Shulamith Rosenbaum struck herself with the flat of her hand just above her breasts. Too hard. It jarred, and made her cough. "I'm gunna be