s 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 sick, Harry, if you don't do something about that man." Because she had learnt to suffer from various women's ailments, she added, "I'm not gunna get mixed up in any Jews' arguments. It does things to me. And packing still to finish. I will not be persecuted. First it was the _goy__, now it is the Jew. All I want is peace, and a nice home." She would have liked to look frail, but a grievance always made her swell. "Orright, orright!" Harry Rosetree said. "For what reason, Shirl, are you getting hysterical?" He himself was flickering, for the Jew Mordecai had begun to advance up the gravel drive. If the visitor's pace appeared shambly, his head suggested that he was possessed of a certain strength. "For what reason?" Mrs Rosetree slashed. "Because I know me own husband!" "For Chrissake!" The husband laughed, or flickered. "And is he _soft__!" Shirl Rosetree shouted. "Lets himself be bounced by any Jew because it is the Seder night. And who will have to bounce the Jew?" "Orright, Shirl," her husband said, making it of minor importance. "We will simply tell him we are packing for our journey." "_We__!" Shirl Rosetree laughed. "Jew or Christian, I am the one that has to tell. Because, Haïm, you do not like to. It is easiest to pour the chicken soup into everyone that comes. _My__ chicken soup, gefüllte fish, _Latkes__, and what have you! You are the big noise, the generous man. Well, I will tell this old bludge there is nothing doing here tonight. We do not know what he even means. We are booked at My Blue Mountain Home for Easter, leaving Good Friday, in our own car, after the Stations of the Cross." If she stopped there, it was because she could have shocked herself. They stood looking at each other, but so immersed in the lower depths of the situation, they did not observe that the sweat was streaming from every exposed pore of their skins. They had turned yellow, too. "We was told at the convent we was never on no account to lose our tempers," Rosie Rosetree said, who had come into the hall. She was growing up a thin child. "They better learn you not to be bold," her mother said. "Nobody was losing their tempers." "A gentleman has just come," her father added. "What gentleman?" Rosie wondered, squinting through the pastel-blue Venetians. She was not interested in people. "You may well ask!" her mother could not resist. And laughed, opening a vein of jolly, objective bitterness. The father was making noises which did not in any way explain. The child's face had approached close to that of the stranger, the other side of the intervening blind. She squinted up and down through the slats, to look him right over. "His clothes are awful," Rosie Rosetree announced. Then she went away, for she had completely lost interest. Charity was an abstraction, or at most a virtue she had not seen reason to adopt. It was something lovely, but superfluous, talked about by nuns. Yet, her father was a good man. Now he had opened the door. He sounded funny-loud, but indistinct. Harry Rosetree said, "Well, Mr Himmelfarb, it is quite an unexpected visit." The machinery of social intercourse was turning again. Where Himmelfarb had felt there would be no need for explanation, he now saw that eventually he must account for his behaviour. But not now. He was, simply, too tired. He only hoped their common knowledge might be shared as an implicit joy. "I will sit down. If you don't mind," said the unexpected guest. And did so suddenly, on a little rosewood stool that Mrs Rosetree had never intended to be sat on. It caused the owner of the stool to stand forth. But her husband intervened. "You better sit there for a bit, and relax. You are pretty well flogged," Mr Rosetree said, using a word he did not seem to remember ever having used before. But Mrs Rosetree stood forth. Her housecoat, in one of those colours it was sometimes her good fortune to lose her head over, not only concealed her plumpy forms, it created drama, even tragedy. Earlier that afternoon, she had lacquered her nails. Now she remembered again to stand with her fingers stretched stiff, in an attitude of formal guilt. From the very beginning, the tips of her fingers could have been dripping blood. "It is a pity my husband did not explain, Mr Himmelfarb," Mrs Rosetree said. The fact that nobody had been introduced to anybody did not seem to matter, because by now everybody had grasped the part that each was intended to play. "Did not explain." Mrs Rosetree proceeded to. "That we had planned to go away. For Easter. After tomorrow is already Good Friday, you must know." Mrs Rosetree smiled to assist, and the wet-looking lipstick with which she had anointed her otherwise naked skin, glittered like an accident. "I do not want to appear inhospitable," she said. "Not to anybody. But you know what it is, Mr Himmelfarb, to shut up the home. All those little things. And the kids. Not even hardly time to open a tin of baked beans. Because I will not stock up with a lot of fresh food, to leave for rats to gorge on, and ourselves perhaps contract the yellow jaundice." Mrs Rosetree's head was all barbed with little pins, at mercilessly regular intervals, to control the waves that were being moulded on her. Harry Rosetree had to admire his wife for an unfailingly ruthless materialism, such as he himself had been able to cultivate for use in business only. But to Shirl, of course, life was a business. As he stood looking down upon the crown of the old Jew's head, he said, "We couldn't run to a pick-me-up, eh, for Himmelfarb, to celebrate an occasion?" Mrs Rosetree's throat began to debate, or grumble. "I wouldn't know about occasions. He better sit still first. It isn't right for elderly people to go swilling alcohol after they have been exerting themselves. I wouldn't give it to my own father, for fear it might bring something on." Then, with an air of having laid tribute on an altar, Mrs Rosetree went away, to allow matters to take their course. So that Haïm ben Ya'akov was left with the stranger Mordecai on the Seder night. In the absence of rejoicing, there was nothing he could offer the guest from his full house. Indeed, it was possible that the house no longer belonged to him, that nothing could belong to a Jew beyond his own skin and certain inherited truths. The stranger did not attempt to deny. He sat with his head bent, in a state of apparent exhaustion, or acceptance. He was too passive to imply, yet did. So Harry Rosetree, who was, in any case, not a Jew, began to grow impatient, if not actually irritable. Surrounded by veneer, the stranger's shoes were becoming provokingly meek and dusty. Then Himmelfarb looked up, as if realizing the awkward situation in which he had placed his host. "It is all right," he said, and smiled. "I shall be going soon." "Well, Himmelfarb," Mr Rosetree found it easier to reply, "it was unexpected to say the least. And life does not stand still. You must excuse me if I leave you for a little. I gotta water a few shrubs before it is dark." Because Mr Rosetree had learnt what was done in the suburb in which he happened to be living for the time being. "But," he added, "you are at liberty to rest here just as long as you feel it is necessary. A man of your age cannot afford to neglect the health." Himmelfarb continued sitting in the Rosetrees' hall, which was less a room than a means of protecting the owners from the unwanted; their strength could not be questioned while they remained hidden. At that hour the light was failing. Many of the glassy surfaces were already dulled. But the glint of opulence, together with all the mechanical sounds of success, still issued from the house behind. Presently a boy appeared. He was already tall, but not yet furnished. In that light the contours of his face shone like yellow wax. He himself could have been holding a taper, if not a scroll. The boy frowned, who had not bargained for a visitor. Himmelfarb was grateful even for a presence. "The _bar mitzvah__ boy," he could not help himself. "Eh?" exclaimed the boy, and frowned deeper. All of this was part of something he sensed he must resent, but only sensed. "You are thirteen," the stranger remarked with certainty. The boy grunted agreement, but full of hate. "What is your name?" "Steve," answered the boy. He would get out pretty soon. "What else?" the man insisted. "Haven't you a real name?"