The Green Face (32 page)

He left the house and set off for Amsterdam, but after only a
few steps he abandoned his plan of taking the document back
to his old house in the Hooigracht, turned back and went to fetch
a spade. He felt sure, now, that he was to bury it somewhere
nearby.

But where?

In the graveyard, perhaps? He looked in that direction. No,
not there.

His eye was caught by the blossoming apple tree. He went
over to it, dug a hole and placed the container with the documents in it.

Then, as fast as he could, he hurried across the meadows and
over the footbridges through the half-light towards the city. He had suddenly been gripped by a deep anxiety for his friends, as
if there was some danger threatening them of which he had to
warn them. In spite of the early hour, the air was hot and dry, like
the atmosphere before a storm, and so still it was stifling. There
was something uncanny aboutthe whole landscape, itlay before
him like a huge corpse; the sun, a disc of dull yellow metal, hung
in the sky behind a veil of thick haze; far away in the west, over
the Zuiderzee, a bank of clouds blazed red, as if it were evening
instead of morning.

Fearful, lest he should arrive too late, he took short cuts
wherever possible, through the fields and along the empty
roads, but the city did not seem to come any nearer.

As daylight grew the sky gradually began to change: against
the pallid background, great whorls of whitish cloud twisted and
turned, like gigantic worms whipped to and fro by invisible
eddies, but always remaining above the same spot: a battle of
aerial monsters sent down from space. High up in the air cones
of cloud spun round like immense inverted goblets; the faces of
wild beasts with grinning jaws fell upon each other and wound
themselves into a seething tangle; below, on the ground, was the
same lowering, deathly stillness as before.

As if borne along by the hurricane, a long black triangle
appeared from the south and passed below the sun, blocking out
its light so that for some minutes the land was plunged into night,
before it settled on the ground in the distance: a swarm oflocusts
blown over from the coasts of Africa.

All the time he had been hurrying towards the town Hauberrisser had not met a single living being. Now he caught sight
of a strange, dark figure, larger than man-size, which seemed to
emerge from a clump of gnarled willows at a bend in the road,
head bent low and clothed in a long robe.

At that distance he could not make out its features, but the
dress, posture and outline of the head with the long side
locks immediately told him that it was an old Jew who was
approaching.

The nearer the man came, the less real he seemed to become.
He was at least seven feet tall and did not move his feet at all as
he walked; there was something slack and hazy about his shape. Hauberrisser even thought he saw one or other of his limbs-the
arm or the shoulder - separate from the body, to rejoin it immediately. A few minutes later the Jew had become transparent,
as if his body were not a solid mass, but a sparse collection of
black dots.

Immediately after that, the figure glided silently past him and
Hauberrisser saw that it was a cloud of flying ants which,
remarkably, had taken on the shape of a human body and maintained it, an incomprehensible freak of nature, like the swarm
of bees he had seen so long ago in the convent garden in Amsterdam. Shaking his head in disbelief, he watched the strange
phenomenon for some time as it sped faster and faster towards
the south-west, towards the sea, until it disappeared like a puff
of smoke on the horizon.

He did not know what to make of it. Was it some mysterious
portent or merely a meaningless quirk of nature? It seemed
unlikely to him that Chidher Green would choose to appear in
such a fantastic form.

To get to Sephardi’s house as quickly as possible Hauberrisser, still brooding on what he had seen, cut across the West-
erpark and was heading towards the Damrak when a wild commotion in the distance told him something must have happened
to arouse the crowd. Soon the broad streets were so jam-packed
with a seething mass of excited people that progress was
impossible, he decided to see if he could get round by cutting
through the narrow streets of the Jewish Ghetto.

Hordes of believers from the Salvation Army were milling
about in the squares, praying out loud or bellowing the psalm,
“Mere is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city
of God”; in a frenzy of religious mania, both men and women
were tearing the clothes from each others’ bodies; foaming at
the mouth, they sank to their knees, directing a mixture of obscenities and hallelujahs at the heavens above; amid horrible fits
of hysterical laughter, fanatical monks scourged their bare
backs until the blood ran; here and there epileptics collapsed
with shrill screams and rolled twitching over the cobblestones;
others, followers of some insane creed, `humbled themselves
before the Lord’ by squatting down in the midst of the mesmer ised crowd and hopping around like frogs as they croaked,
“Jesu, Lover of my soul, Let me to thy bosom fly.”

Filled with horror and disgust, Hauberrisser wandered
through a maze of twisting alleyways, constantly forced out of
his way by the throng until he found he was boxed in and could
move neither forwards nor back; he was opposite the skull-like
house in the Jodenbreetstraat.

The blinds were down and the sign announcing the Hall of
Riddles had vanished. In front of the building was a wooden
scaffolding painted gold with a throne on top of it; on the throne,
wearing an ermine cloak and a diadem so thickly encrusted with
diamonds it looked like a halo, sat `Professor’ Arpad Zitter
throwing copper coins with his head on to the ecstatic crowd;
he was also making a speech which, because of the incessant
hallelujahs, was scarcely audible, apart from the repeated
bloodthirsty call to, “Cast the whores into the flames and bring
me their ill-gotten gold.”

With great difficulty Hauberrisser managed to push his way
to a street corner. He was trying to work out where he was, when
someone grasped his ann and pulled him into an entrance. He
recognised Neill. They were immediately separated again by
the milling throng; they shouted to each other over the heads of
the crowd and realised that the same impulse had brought both
of them into the city. “Come to Swammerdam’s”, shouted
Neill.

It was impossible to stand still. Even the tiniest of courtyards
and the narrowest of alleyways was overflowing with people;
occasional gaps in the crowd allowed them to make some progress, but conversation was reduced to hurried scraps. Sometimes next to him, now in front, now behind, now separated by
the crush, Pfeill told Hauberrisser about Zitter, “A monster, that
man… terrible … the police have given up … can’t do anything
about him. … Claims to be the Prophet Elijah; people believe
him and worship him. … Terrible bloodbath in the circus the
other day … he incited them to it. … Mob took over the circus ….
and dragged in some ladies, elegant but demi-monde, of course
… and then set the tigers on them. Megalomania … thinks he’s Nero. … First of all he married Madame Rukstinat and then, to
get at her money, poisoned …”

A procession of robed figures carrying burning torches and
wearing pointed hoods that came down over their faces, like the
judges of the Vehmgericht, came between Pfeill and Hauberrisser, and their muffled, monotone chorale - “0 sanctissima,
o pi—issima, dulcis virgo Maa—rii—aaa” - drowned his last
words.

Neill reappeared, his face blackened by the smoke from the
torches. “… and then he gambled away her money in poker
clubs. After that he was a spiritualist medium forseveral months
… incredibly popular … the whole of Amsterdam flocked to his
seances.”

“What about Sephardi?” Hauberrisser shouted over to him.

“In Brazil, arrived three weeks ago. Sends his best wishes….
Was a changed man before he left, completely changed. I don’t
know that much about it … but I do know one thing: the man with
the green face appeared to him and told him he was to found a
Jewish state in Brazil … and he told him that the Jews were the
people chosen to create an international language that would
gradually come to be used by all peoples as a means of communication and would bring them closer together … a modernised Hebrew, I assume, I don’t know. Overnight Sephardi was
a changed man, had a mission, he said. Anyway, he seems to
have hit the jackpot with his Zionist state, almost all the Jews
in Holland have followed him … and now thousands of others
are arriving from all sorts of places to emigrate to South America, the city’s teeming like an anthill.”

They were separated for a while by a group of caterwauling,
hymn-singing women. When Pfeill had used the expression
`teeming like an anthill’ Hauberrisser had immediately remembered the strange phenomenon he had seen on his way to the
city.

“In the last weeks before he left, Sephardi spent a lot of time
with a person called Lazarus Egyolk”, Neill went on. “I’ve got
to know him myself - he’s an old Jew, a kind of prophet, in an
almost permanent trance - but everything he prophesies comes
true, every time! Just recently he predicted that Europe would suffer a terrible catastrophe to prepare for the coming of a new
age. He said he is happy that he is going to be destroyed in it,
because that means he can lead all the dead who cross over into
the realm of abundance. As for the catastrophe, he’s probably
not far wrong about that, you can see what’s going on here today.
Amsterdam is expecting the flood. Humanity has gone mad, the
railways stopped running long ago, or I would have come out
to see you out inyourhermitage. Today the unrest seems to have
reached its climax. There’s so much I would like to tell you …
I wish to God there wasn’t this constant crush around us, you can
hardly finish a sentence in peace … so much has happened tome
too since we last met.”

“And Swammerdam? How is he?” Hauberrisser had to yell
to be heard above a pack of flagellants shuffling along on their
knees.

“He sent a messenger to me”, Neill screamed back, “to tell
me to come and see him straightaway, and to go and fetch you
too. Good that we met on the way. He’s worried about us, the
messenger said, he thinks we will only be safe with him. He
claims that his inner voice prophesied three things to him; one
was that he will outlive St. Nicholas’ Church. He probably takes
that as a sign that he will survive the coming catastrophe, and
wants us to stay with him in order to keep us safe until the new
age has come.”

Those were the last words Hauberrisser could understand.
The air was shattered by a sudden, deafening roar, that started
in the open square they were heading for and echoed across the
roofs from skylight to skylight to the farthest comers of the city,
growing louder and louder with shrill cries of “The New Jerusalem has appeared in the sky!” - “A miracle, a miracle!” -
“God have mercy on our souls!”

He saw Pfeill’s lips moving, as if he was using every last
ounce of his lung-power to scream something to him, but then
he felt his feet lifted from the ground by the crowd, whose
excitement had now reached fever pitch. It wasuseless to resist,
he was swept along by the current into a large square where the
people were so tightly packed together that his arms were
pressed to his sides and he could hardly move his hands.

Everyone was staring upwards. High in the sky, the battle
between those strange, twisting formations like gigantic winged
fish, was still going on, but below them snow-capped mountains
of cloud had formed, and there, in a valley illuminated by the
slanting rays ofthe sun, was the mirage: an exotic, southern city
with flat, white roofs and Moorish arches.

Through its clay-coloured streets strode men in flowing
burnouses; so close and frighteningly distinct they were, that
one could see their eyes move when they turned their heads to
cast an indifferent glance, as it seemed, on the terrified throng
in Amsterdam. Beyond the ramparts of this celestial city
stretched a reddish desert, the edges of which merged into the
clouds; a caravan of camels was making its spectral way through
the shimmering air.

For a good hour this fats Morgana stood in the sky in all the
splendour of its magic colours, then it gradually faded, leaving
only one tall, slender minaret, that shone dazzling white for a
while, as if it were made of glistening sugar, and then suddenly
vanished in the mists.

Hauberrisser was carried inch by inch along the house-fronts
by the sea of bodies, and it was late in the afternoon before he
found the opportunity of escaping the press over a canal bridge.

It was completely impossible to reach Swammerdam’s
house; apart from the many crowded streets, he would have had
to cross the square again, so he decided to return to his lonely
cottage and try again another day.

Soon he was back in the deathly hush of the polder. The lower
sky had become an impenetrable, dusty mass. So deep was the
solitude, that the hiss of the withered grass as it was crushed
beneath his hurrying feet was like the singing of the blood in his
own ears.

Behind him, the black shape of Amsterdam against the red of
the setting sun looked like a huge lump of burning pitch.

There was not a breath of air and the ditches reflected the
sunset in their glassy surface; only now and then the stillness
was broken by a faint splash as a fish jumped.

As the twilight deepened, large, murky grey patches rose
from the earth and flitted over the meadows like moving sheets; he saw that it was countless hordes of mice that had come out
of their holes and were now scurrying all over each other, squeaking excitedly.

The more the darkness increased, the more uneasy the natural
world seemed to become; yet still not a blade of grass moved.
The water had turned peaty brown and occasionally small,
round craters appeared, although not the slightest breeze had
crossed the surface, or a plume of water would splash up, as if
an invisible stone had been dropped in, and then immediately
disappear without trace.