The Green Face (6 page)

Spectres, monstrous yet without form and only discernible
through the devastation they wrought, had been called up by
faceless and power-hungry bureaucrats in their secret seances
and had devoured millions of innocent victims before returning
to the sleep from which they had been roused. But there was
another phantom, still more horrible, that had long since caught
the foul stench of a decaying civilisation in its gaping nostrils
and now raised its snake-wreathed countenance from the abyss
where it had lain, to mock humanity with the realisation that the
juggernaut they had driven for the last four years in the belief
it would clear the world for a new generation of free men was
a treadmill in which they were trapped for all time.

During the last few weeks Hauberrisser had managed to turn
a blind eye to his world-weariness. Against all appearances he
had convinced himself he could live the life of a hermit, of an
uninvolved bystander, here, in the middle of a city which almost
overnight the pressure of events had transformed from a centre
of international trade into the place where deranged minds from
all over the world gathered to give free rein to their wildest
fantasies. He had even succeeded in carrying out his plan to a
certain extent but then, triggered off by some slight circumstance, the old tiredness had descended on him once again, more
stifling than before; the sight of the giddy crowds around him
whirling their senseless way through life only served to increase
his weariness.

His eyes were suddenly opened to the shock of the distorted
expressions on the faces crowding round him. Those were not
the expressions he remembered, the expressions of people in
pursuit of pleasure, hurrying to forget their troubles at some
entertainment. Their faces were already irrevocably marked by
a sense of dislocation.

The struggle for existence carves different lines and furrows
on the face of mankind. These reminded him of the old woodcuts depicting frenzied dances in times of plague, and then,
again, of flocks of birds which, sensing a coming earthquake,
fly round and round in silent, instinctive fear.

Car after car screeched to a halt outside the circus, and the
occupants scurried into the tent as if it were a matter of life and death: bejewelled ladies with delicate features; French baronesses who had become flues de joie; slim, refined Englishwomen, the creme de la creme and now arm-in-arm with some
hyena from the stock-market who had m ade a fortune overnight;
and Russian princesses, every fibre of their bodies twitching
with nervous exhaustion: all trace of aristocratic sangfroid had
disappeared, washed away by the waves of a cultural deluge.

Like the portent of the approach of an age of doom, there
came at intervals from the interior of the tent, sometimes fearfully close and loud, sometimes stifled by heavy curtains, the
harsh, long-drawn-out bellowing of wild beasts, whilst an acrid
stench of big cats, perfume, raw flesh and horse sweat wafted
out onto the street.

A contrasting image was released from Hauberrisser’s memory and appeared before his inner eye: a bear behind the bars of
a travelling menagerie, chained by the left paw, the embodiment
of utter desperation as it danced from one leg to the other, constantly, day after day, month after month - even year after year
as Hauberrisser saw when he came across the menagerie in a
fairground years later.

`Why didn’t you buy its freedom!’ The thought reverberated
through his brain, a thought he had ignored a hundred times
already, but which still ambushed him, still burnt in his mind
with a fire of self-reproach as intense and unquenchable as when
it first appeared; it was a dwarf of a thought, tiny and insignificant compared with the gigantic sins of omission that form an
unbroken chain through a man’s life, and yet it was the only one
that time could not subdue.

`The shades of all tortured and murdered creatures have
cursed us, their blood cries out for revenge.’ For a heartbeat
Hauberrisser’s mind was filled with a confused vision, `Woe to
mankind if, on Judgment Day, there is the soul of one single
horse among the council of the accusers: why did I not set it
free?’ How often had he not bitterly reproached himself for it,
and how often had he not stifled the reproach with the argument
that the liberation of the bear would have been as inconsequential as the fall of one grain of sand in the desert. But - he
quickly surveyed his past life - had he ever done anything that was of more consequence? He had spent his youth not in the
sunshine, but in colleges and libraries, learning how to build
machines, and he had spent his manhood building machines that
had long since rusted away, instead of helping others to enjoy
the sunshine; he had made his own contribution to the pointlessness of existence.

He fought his way through the jostling throng until he came
to a less crowded square where he called a cab and asked to be
driven out into the country.

He suddenly felt a thirst for all the summer days he had
wasted.

How slowly the wheels rumbled over the cobbles! And the
sun was already beginning to go down! His impatience to reach
the open countryside merely made him more irritated.

There, at last, was the rich green of the fields, cut up as far as
the eye could see into a chequerboard by the grid of brown
drainage ditches, and on the green squares thousands of speckled cows with a rug on their backs to protect them against the
cool of the evening, and among them the Dutch dairymaids with
their white caps fastened to their hair by brass spirals and their
gleaming pails; when the scene was finally before his eyes it was
like the image on a huge, pale-blue soap-bubble, and all the
windmills with their sails were like the first black crosses signifying the coming of eternal night.

He wandered along narrow pathways beside the meadows,
always separated from them by a strip of water glowing red in
the setting sun, and they seemed to him like the dream vision of
a land he was destined never to set foot in.

His unrest was calmed by the scent of water and grass, but
only to be replaced by a feeling of melancholy and desolation.

Then, as the meadows darkened and a silvery mist rose from
the ground so that the cattle seemed to be wreathed in smoke,
he began to feel as if his skull were a prison cell and he himself
were sitting in it looking out through his eyes on a free world for
the last time.

The twilight was thickening as he reached the first houses of
the city and the air trembled with the echoing boom of the numberless bells in their bizarrely shaped towers.

He paid off the cabbie and set out in the direction of his
apartment, down narrow alleyways, along canals with clumsy
black barges floating on the motionless water, through a flood
of rotten apples and decaying rubbish, beneath protruding gables with the iron arms of the hoists reflected in the canal.
Outside the doors men in wide blue trousers and red smocks and
women mending nets sat gossiping on chairs they had brought
out from their houses while hordes of children played in the
streets.

He hurried past the open doors, which exhaled a smell of fish,
sweat and poverty, and across squares with waffle-stands in the
comers, filling all the narrow alleyways with the reek of burnt
fat.

The dreariness of the Dutch port settled over him like a peasouper: the scrubbed pavements and filthy canals, the taciturn
inhabitants, the tall, pigeon-chested buildings with their pallid
chequerboard pattern of flat sash windows, the narrow-fronted
cheese and pickled-herring shops with their smoky paraffin
lamps, and the reddish-black gable roofs.

Fora moment he was struck by a longing to leave this gloomy
city that had turned its back on lightheartedness and return to
one of the brighter ones he had known in earlier, happier days.
Life there suddenly seemed desirable again, just as everything
that lies in the past seems better and more beautiful than the
present. But the gentle upsurge of homesickness was immediately stifled by the final memories he had come away with, bitter
memories of physical and moral decay, of irreversible decline.

He took a short cut over an iron bridge leading to the fashionable part of the city, crossed a brightly-lit and crowded street
with shop windows full of elegant goods, and found himself a
few steps later- as if the cityhad done a lightning-quick. change
- back in a pitch-dark alley: the `Nes’, the notorious street of
pimps and prostitutes in old Amsterdam that had been torn down
years ago had reappeared in another part of the town, like a new
outbreak of some insidious disease. It was the same yet not the
same, it was less coarse, less brutal, but far more terrible.

The dregs of Paris and London, of the cities of Belgium and Russia, fleeing in panic the revolutions that had broken out in
their own countries, had settled in these `exclusive’ establishments. As Hauberrisser walked past, silent, robot-like commissionaires in long blue coats and three-cornered hats with
brass-mounted staffs in their hands flung open the padded doors
and then closed them again with a flourish. Each time a blinding
shaft of garish light fell across the pavement, and for a second
the air was tom by the wild scream of a jazz trumpet, the crash
of cymbals or the sob of gypsy violins.

There was a different kind of life lurking behind the red
curtains of the upper stories of the houses: the brief staccato
drumming of fingers on the windowpanes, furtive whisperings,
grunts and stifled cries - in all languages of the world and yet
immediately comprehensible; a female body in a white slip, the
head invisible in the darkness, as if it had been cut off, leaving
a torso with waving arms; and then again, empty windows,
pitch-black, silent as the tomb, as if death dwelt in those rooms.

The comer house at the end of the alley seemed relatively
innocuous, a mixture of music-hall and restaurant, to go by the
posters on the walls.

Hauberrisser went in; a room packed with people eating and
drinking at round tables with yellow tablecloths met his eye.

At the back was a stage where a dozen or so artistes - singers
and comics - were sitting in a semicircle waiting until it was
time for their number.

An old man with a spherical belly, a pair of false goggle-eyes,
a white handlebar moustache and his incredibly thin legs encased in green tights with webbed feet was sitting, casually waggling his toes, in apparently serious conversation with a French
chanteuse in the extravagant costume of the Directoire. The
audience, meanwhile, was listening in mute incomprehension
to a German monologue delivered by a character actor dressed
as a Polish Jew in caftan and high boots. Brandishing a small
glass syringe for rinsing out the ears such as can be bought at any
chemist’s, he declaimed his interminable poem, breaking into
a grotesque jig between each verse, to which he sang in a nasal
voice:

Hauberrisser looked round for an empty seat; everywhere the
diners - they mostly seemed to be respectable locals - were
packed tight; only one table in the middle of the room stood out
by having a few empty chairs leant against it. Three corpulent
ladies of mature years and one old one with an austere look and
horn-rimmed spectacles perched on her aquiline nose were
sitting around a coffee-pot sporting a gaily-coloured woollen
cosy, busily knitting socks, an island of domestic calm amid all
the noise and bustle.

With friendly nods the four ladies granted Haubenisser permission to sit at the table.

His first thought had been that it must be a mother with her
widowed daughters, but a second glance told him that they could
hardly be related. Although they did not look alike, the three
younger ones were similar in that they were all of the Dutch type
- roughly forty-five years old, blonde, fat and of a bovine stolidity - whilst the white-haired matron clearly came from the
South.

The waiter set his steak in front of him with a half-concealed
grin, and the people at the tables around were casting covert
glances at the table, grinning and exchanging quiet remarks:
what did it all mean? Hauberrisser was completely baffled; he
gave the four ladies a quick scrutiny -no, impossible, they were
very pillars of society. Their age alone almost guaranteed their
respectability.

Up on the stage a scrawny, redbearded man with a starspangled top hat, tight, blue and white striped trousers, an
alarm-clock dangling from his green and yellow checked waistcoat and a strangled goose in his coat pocket, had just split open
the skull of the ancient frog-man to the ringing tones of `Yankee
doodle’, and now a rag-and-bone couple from Rotterdam were singing - “with piano accompaniment” - the melancholy song
of the vanished `Zandstraat’: