The Green Face (3 page)

Nothing is so soporific as the sound of whispering voices
when you cannot make out what is being said. The soft and
hurried conversation between the Balkan gentleman and the
Zulu behind the curtain hypnotised the foreigner with its
unceasing monotony so that for a moment he fell into a deep
sleep.

When, a second later, he jerked back awake he had the feeling
that he had been granted an amazing number of insights, but all
that remained lodged in his consciousness was one meagre
sentence, a fantastic hodgepodge of recent impressions and the
continued thread of his philosophising, ‘It is more difficult to
master the eternal smile than to find the skull that one bore on
one’s neck in a previous existence from among the millions of
graves on earth; we will have to cry the eyes out of our heads
before we can look on the world with new eyes and a smile.’

`However difficult it is, I will seek out that skull!’ The foreigner continued to worry at the idea that had come to him in his
dream, firmly convinced that he was wide awake, whilst in fact
he had dropped off again. ‘I will force things to speak clearly to
me and reveal their tnie meaning, I will force them to speak in
a new language instead of whispering in my ear old chestnuts
such as: Look, a medicament! Take this to make you well again
when you have overindulged; or. See! a delicacy; now you can
overindulge and take your medicine again. - I have just seen the
point of my old friend Pfeill’s saying that everything chases its
own tail, and if life has nothing better to teach me, I will go into
the desert to eat locusts and clothe myself in wild honey.’

“You want to go into the desert and learn higher magic, nebbich, when you are stupid enough to pay good silver for a silly
trick with corks, cannot distinguish a Hall of Riddles from the
real world and do not even suspect that the books of life contain
something other than what is written on the spine? It is you that
should be called `Green’, not me.” -The foreigner suddenly
heard a deep, tremulous voice answering his reflections and, on
looking up, he saw before him the old Jew, the owner of the
shop, standing there and staring at him.

The foreigner stared back in horror, the face before him was
like nothing he had ever seen before. It was smooth, with a black
strip of cloth tied over its forehead, and yet it was deeply furrowed, like the sea, that can have tall waves but not a wrinkle
on its surface. The eyes were like dark chasms and yet they were
the eyes of a human being and not empty sockets. The skin was
a greenish olive colour and looked as if it were made of bronze,
such as the races of ancient times may have had of whom it is
said they were like dark-green gold.

“I have been on earth”, continued the old Jew, “ever since the
moon, the wanderer of the skies, has been circling the heavens.
I have seen men who looked like apes and carried stone axes in
their hands; they came from wood and” - he hesitated for a
second - “returned to wood, from the cradle to the coffin. They
are still like apes, and they still carry axes in their hands. Their
eyes are cast downwards; they want to fathom the infinity that
lies concealed in small things.

They have discovered that in the stomachs of worms there are
millions of tiny creatures living and further billions within
these, but they still have not realised that there is no end in that
direction. I cast my eyes downwards, but I also cast them
upwards; I have forgotten how to cry, but I have not yet learnt
how to smile. My feet were soaked by the waters of the flood,
but I have still not met anyone who had reason to smile. Perhaps
I did not notice him and went by on the other side.

Now my feet are threatened by a sea of blood and someone
appears who thinks he might smile? I doubt it. I shall probably
have to wait until the sea turns to fire.”

The foreigner pulled his top hat down over his eyes, so as to
blot out the sight of the awful face that was etching itself onto
his senses and making him catch his breath, and so he did not
see that the Jew had returned to his accounts and the salesgirl had
tiptoed to his place, taken a papier-machd skull, similar to the
one in the window, out of the cupboard and put it on a stool.

When the foreigner’s hat suddenly slipped off his head and
fell to the floor, she scooped it up like lightning, before its owner
could put out a hand for it, and began her patter:

“Here, sir, you can see the so-called Oracle of Delphi.
Through it we can at any time see into the future and even
receive answers to questions that lie deep in our hearts;” - for
some reason she squinted down into her cleavage - “please
think of a question, sir.”

“Yes, yes, all right”, grunted the foreigner, still quite confused.

“You see, the skull is already moving.”

Slowly the skull opened its j aws, chewed a few times and then
spat out a roll of paper which the young lady quickly snatched
up and unrolled, then blew out a sigh of relief.

was written on it in red ink - or was it blood?

`Pity I can’t remember what the question was’, thought the
foreigner. “It costs?”

“Twenty guilders, sir.”

“All right. Please will …”, the foreigner was wondering
whether to take the skull with him. ‘No, impossible, they would
take me for Hamlet out in the streets’, he said to himself. “Send
it to my apartment, please; here is the money.”

He glanced involuntarily at the office by the window. The old
Jew was standing at his desk, motionless, suspiciously motionless, as if he had spent the whole time doing nothing but write
entries in his ledger. Then the foreigner wrote his name and
address on the piece of paper the girl handed to him:

Fortunatus Hauberrisser

(Engineer)

47 Hooigracht

and, still somewhat dazed, left the Hall of Riddles.

For months now Holland had been flooded with people of all
nations. Since the war had ended, giving way to growing inner
political conflicts, they had left their homes, some to seek permanent refuge in the Netherlands, others to stay there temporarily whilst they made up theirminds about which cornerof the
earth to choose for their future home.

The common forecast that the end of the European war would
produce a stream of refugees from the poorer sections of the
population of the worst-hit areas had proved completely mistaken. Even if all available ships to Brazil and other parts of the
earth considered fertile were full to overflowing with steerage
passengers, the outflow of those who earned their living by the
sweat of their brow was infinitesimal compared to the number
of wealthy people who were tired of seeing their fortunes
squeezed by the pressure of higher and higher taxes: the socalled materialists. They were joined by members of the intelligentsia, whose professions, since the enormous rises in the
cost of living, no longer brought in enough to keep body and soul
together.

Even in the far-off days of the horrors of peace, the income
of a master chimney-sweeper or a pork-butcher had far outstripped that of a university professor. Now, however, European
society had reached that glorious stage where the old curse, ‘In
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ was to be understood literally and not just metaphorically. Those whose sweat
appeared behind, rather than on their brows fell into penury and
starved to death.

Muscle-power reached for the crown, whilst the products of
the human brain were trodden underfoot. Mammon still sat on
his throne, but with a look of uncertainty on his ugly face: the
piles of dirty money building up around him offended his aesthetic sense.

And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep, only the spirit of the travelling salesman could no longer move on the face of the waters as it had
done before.

And so it came to pass that the great mass of European intellectuals were on the move, crowding the harbours of those
countries that had been more or less spared by the war, gazing
westwards, like Tom Thumb climbing a tall tree to spy out the
fire from a hearth far away.

In Amsterdam and Rotterdam the old hotels were full to the
very last attic, and every day new ones were being built; the
streets of the more respectable districts resounded to apotpourri
of languages. Special trains were arriving hourly at the Hague,
filled with stony-broke or stony-hearted politicians of all races
who were determined to say their immortal piece at the permanent peace conference which was discussing the securest way
to bar the stable door now that the horse had bolted for good.

In the better restaurants and chocolate houses people sat
shoulder to shoulder reading overseas newspapers - the local
ones were still wallowing in officially-prescribed enthusiasm
for the current situation - but even the overseas ones contained
nothing that did not boil down to the old adage, ‘I know that I
know nothing, and I’m not even sure of that’.

“Baron Pfeill still not here?”, the middle-aged lady snapped
furiously at the waiter in’The Gilded Turk’, a dark, smoky cafe,
full of odd little nooks and crannies, hidden away from the
traffic in the Kruiskade. With her sharp features, wet hair,
pinched lips and pale, nervous eyes she was a perfect example
of a certain kind of woman you find without a man; at forty-five
they start to resemble their bad-tempered pugs and at fifty they
are already yapping at the rest ofhumanity. “A scandal foralady
to have to sit all by herself in a filthy tavern like this, exposed
to the stares of all these men.”

“Baron Pfeill? I’m afraid I don’t know the name. What does
he look like, Mevrouw?” asked the waiter, unmoved.

“Clean-shaven, naturally. Forty to forty-five. Or forty-eight.
Not sure. Didn’t ask to see his birth certificate. Tall. Slim.
Aquiline nose. Straw hat. Brown hair.”

“But he’s been sitting outside for ages, Mevrouw”, the waiter
extended a languid arm towards the open door, through which one could see out onto the terrace between the street and the cafe
with its ivied trellis and sooty oleanders.

“Prawns, lovely prawns”, droned the bass of a crab-seller
passing the window; “Bananas, ripe bananas” screeched a
female descant.

“Nonsense. He’s blond. And a moustache. Top hat, too.
Nonsense.” The lady became angrier and angrier.

“I mean the gentleman next to him, Mevrouw; you can’t see
him from here.”

The lady descended on the two gentlemen like a vulture,
loosing a storm of reproaches at B aron Pfeill, who stood up with
an embarrassed look and introduced his friend Fortunatus
Hauberrisser. She insisted she had rung him up at least a dozen
times and had eventually had to go round to his apartment,
without finding him in, and all this trouble because-“a scandal”
- he had, of course, been out once again. “I would have thought
that at a time when everyone has his hands full consolidating the
peace, advising President Taft, persuading refugees to return to
their places of work, trying to get rid of international prostitution and put a stop to the white slave trade, giving the weak
inspirit some moral support and organising a collection of bottle
tops for the war-wounded of all nations” - in her indignation she
tore open her reticule and then throttled it with its silken string
- “I would have thought one would stay at home instead of…
instead of drinking spirits.” She shot a venomous glance at the
two slim glass tubes on the table full of a rainbow mixture of
liqueurs.

“Madame Germaine Rukstinat, widow of Consul Rukstinat,
is interested in doing … good”, explained Baron Pfeill to his
friend, concealing the ambiguity of his words behind an apparently clumsy manner of expression, “and the good that she does
shall live after her … as Shakespeare has it.”

“How can she not notice?” wondered Hauberrisser, shooting
a covert glance at the Fury, but to his surprise she was giving a
mollified smile. “My friend Pfeill is all too right. The plebs
revere Shakespeare but do not truly know him. The more he is
misquoted, the more they feel they understand him.”