The Green Face (7 page)

As solemnly as if it were a hymn - tears glistened in the eyes
of the three fat Dutch ladies - the audience joined in:

The programme was a mish-mash of acts, changing constantly like the brightly-coloured patterns in a kaleidoscope:
babyfaced English girls with curly locks and a terrifying innocence, Parisian gangsters with long red scarves, a Syrian
belly-dancer with wobbling intestines, four men imitating bells
and the melodic burping of a Bavarian yodelling song.

This meaningless hodge-podge calmed Hauberrisser’s
nerves with an almost narcotic effect; it was not unlike the
strange magic emanating from children’s toys, which often
exercise a greater healing power over a heart wearied by life
than the most sublime work of art.

Hauberrisser lost all track of time, and when the grand finale
came and the whole company marched off waving the flags of
all nations - presumably symbolising the return of peace - and led by a negro dancing the cakewalk and singing:

he was astonished to find that the audience had disappeared
without his noticing and the room was almost empty.

Even his fourladies had silently vanished, leaving, as a token,
a pink visiting card propped up against his wine-glass. It bore
a picture of two turtle-doves billing and cooing and the address:

MADAME GRISEL HUSSY
open all night
Waterloo Plein No. 21
15 charming ladies
Private entrance

So they were, after all!

“Would sir wish to purchase a continuation ticket?” asked the
waiter in a soft voice as he deftly replaced the yellow tablecloth
with one of white linen, placed a vase of tulips in the middle and
laid the silver.

A huge ventilator began to whirr, sucking out the plebeian air.
Liveried servants sprayed perfume, a tongue of red carpet
unrolled from the door to the stage, leather armchairs were
wheeled in.

A crowd of ladies in elegant evening gowns and men in white
tie and tails poured in; it was the same cosmopolitan would-be
cream of society that Hauberrisser had seen rushing into the
circus tent.

In a few minutes every last seat was taken.

The soft jingle of lorgnon chains, muted laughter, the rustle
of silk skirts, the scent of ladies’ gloves and hyacinths, cascades
of pearls and clusters of diamonds, the fizz of champagne, the dry clink of ice-cubes in the silver buckets, the furious yapping
of a lap-dog, white shoulders with a discreet touch of powder,
foaming lace, the sweet, spicy smell of Russian cigarettes -the
room he had first entered was unrecognisable.

Once more the seats at Hauberrisser’s table were taken by
four ladies - one older with a gold lorgnette and three younger
ones, each more beautiful than the other. They were Russians
with slim, nervous hands, blond hair and dark eyes, which did
not avoid the stares of the men around, yet seemed not to see
them.

A young Englishman, whose faultless evening dress clearly
said Savile Row, came and stood for a while at the table,
exchanging a few friendly words with them. His delicate,
aristocratic features bore a look of immense weariness; the left
sleeve of his coat was empty up to the shoulder and hung down
limply, making the tall, frail figure appear even slimmer, his
monocle seemed to have become part of the bony socket
beneath his eyebrow.

All around were people such as the eternal petty bourgeois of
all lands eyes with the instinctive hatred of the bandy-legged
mongrel for a thoroughbred, beings that will ever remain a
mystery to the masses, arousing both contempt and envy, creatures that can wade through blood without batting an eyelid and
yet swoon at the screech of a fork across a plate, who will pull
out a revolver at the slightest suggestion of a sneer yet calmly
smile when caught cheating at cards, for whom vices, the very
thought of which makes the ordinary citizen shudder, are commonplace and who would rather go thirsty for days than drink
out of a glass another has used, who accept God as a matter of
course and yet shut themselves off from Him because they find
Him boring, who are considered hollow by people who crudely
assume that what, in the course of generations, has become the
essence of such creatures, is mere veneer and outward show;
they are neither hollow nor the opposite, they are beings who
have lost their souls and have therefore become the incarnation
of evil for the multitude which will never possess a soul, they
are aristocrats who would rather die than crawl to anyone, who,
with unerring instinct, spot the plebeian within their fellow-man and place him lower than the animals and yet fall down before
him if he happens to be sitting on the throne, they are lords of
the earth who can become helpless as a child at the slightest
frown on the face of destiny, instruments of the Devil and at the
same time his plaything.

An invisible band had just finished playing the Wedding
March from Lohengrin.

A bell jangled shrilly.

The room grew quiet.

On the wall over the stage appeared, in letters made of tiny
electric lights, the words:

!La force d’imagination!

and out through the curtains stepped a man in a dinner jacket and
white gloves with the look of a French hairdresser sparse,
greasy hair, yellow skin, flabby cheeks, a tiny red rosette in his
buttonhole and dark shadows under his eyes. Without a word he
bowed to the audience and sat down on a chair in the middle of
the stage.

Hauberrisser assumed this would be followed by the usual
more or less risque monologue and turned away in irritation
when the artiste - was it in embarrassment or was it the lead-in
to some smutty joke? - began to finger his flies.

A minute passed and still silence reigned in the auditorium
and on the stage.

Then two muted violins from the band began to play “0 fare
thee well, It was not meant to be”, joined, as if from a great
distance, by the soulful tones of a French horn.

Surprised, Hauberrisser snatched up his opera glasses to peer
at the stage - then almost let them drop in horror. What was
that?! Had he suddenly gone mad? He broke out into a cold
sweat; no doubt about it, he must have gone mad! That obscene
spectacle on the stage could not really be taking place here, here
before hundreds of people, before all these exquisite creatures
who until a few months ago had been the cream of society. In
a harbour tavern on the Nieuwendijk perhaps, or as an anatomical freak demonstrated at medical school, but here??!

Or was he dreaming? Had a miracle taken place and turned
the hands on the clock of time back to the days of Louis XV?

The artiste kept his hands pressed firmly over his eyes, like
a man summoning up all the power of his imagination to see
something as vividly as possible before his inner eye … then
after a few minutes he stood up, sketched a bow and left the
stage.

Hauberrisser glanced at the ladies at his table and the people
in the immediate vicinity; not one of them moved a muscle.
Only one Russian princess was uninhibited enough to applaud.
As if nothing at all had taken place, the assembly resumed its
cheerful chatter.

Hauberrisser felt as if he were surrounded by ghosts; he ran
his fingers overthe tablecloth and sucked in the scent of flowers
and musk; the only result was that the feeling of unreality intensified and turned into one of abject terror.

Once more the bell rang and the room was darkened. Hauberrisser took the opportunity to leave.

Once outside in the street he almost felt ashamed of the way
he had allowed his feelings to get the better of him. What, after
all, had happened? Nothing that did not recur again and again,
and much worse, at intervals in the course of human history: a
mask had been cast aside that had never concealed anything but
intentional or unintentional hypocrisy, lack of vitality posing as
virtue or ascetic monstrosities conceived in the mind of a monk!
For a few centuries a diseased organism, so huge it eventually
came to resemble a temple soaring up into the heavens, had been
taken for culture; now it had collapsed, laying bare the decay
within. Was not the bursting of an ulcer much less terrible than
its constant growth? Only children and fools, who do not realise
that the bright colours of autumn are the colours of decay, complain when it is followed by the deathly cold of November,
instead of the spring they expected.

However hard Hauberrisser tried to regain control over his
emotions by subjecting his hasty instinctive reaction to the cold
light of reason, the feeling of terror was not assuaged by rational
argument, but remained rooted within him, like a rock that
cannot be moved by words because its very being is immobility.

Gradually, as if a whispering voice were letting the words
drop syllable by syllable into his ear, it became clear to him that
this feeling ofterror was none otherthan hisolddull, stifling fear
of some shadowy horror, a sudden recognition of mankind’s
headlong rush towards the abyss.

What sent icy fingers round his heart was the fact that the
audience could accept as perfectly natural a performance which
only yesterday they would have rejected out of hand as the
height of insolence; the world, which normally plodded along
with the gait of a contented carthorse, had suddenly broken into
a wild gallop as if frightened by a ghost popping up by the
roadside.

Hauberrisser felt he had slipped one more step down towards
the eerie realm where the things of this world dissolved more
quickly into shadowy insubstantiality the cruder they were.

He entered one of the two narrow alleys running either side
ofthe music hall and immediately came upon a sortofglassed-in
arcade that seemed familiar. When he turned the comerhe found
himself facing the metal rolling shutter over the door to Chidher
Green’s shop; the inn or theatre he had just left was merely the
rear portion of the strange, flat-roofed, tower-like building in
the Jodenbreetstraat that had attracted his attention that afternoon.

He looked up at the two gloomy windows. Here, too, he was
struck by the same disconcerting sense of unreality: in the darkness the whole building had the look of a monstrous human skull
with the teeth of its upper jaw resting on the pavement.

As he made his way home he was struck by a parallel between
the fantastic tangle of rooms, halls and passageways inside this
brick skull and the muddle of thoughts and ideas within a
person’s mind. He began to feel that behind the dark masonry
of the forehead there must be enigmas sleeping such as Amsterdam had never imagined in its wildest dreams, and once more
the icy forgers clutched at his heart with a premonition of mortal
dangers lurking on the threshold of reality.

Had the vision of the green bronze face in the Hall of Riddles
really been only a dream?

Suddenly in his memory it was the motionless figure of the old Jew at his desk which seemed to become shadowy, hazy, as
if that were the dream and not the bronze face

Had the Jew really had his feet finely on the ground? The
more sharply he tried to focus the image, the more he came to
doubt that that had been the case. He was suddenly certain that
he had been able to see the drawers of the desk clearly through
the caftan.

For a brief moment his mind was illuminated, as if by the
sudden glare of a flashlight, with a flickering spurt of distrust
of the apparent solidity of the world around and of his own five
senses. At the same time he remembered something he had
learnt as a child at school and which now seemed to supply an
explanation forthese mysteries: the light of those inconceivably
distant stars in the Milky Way takes seventy thousand years to
reach the earth, if there were a telescope powerful enough to
bring the surface of one into view, the events we could observe,
however much they appeared to be taking place before our eyes,
would be things that had already been past for seventy thousand
years. The idea that shook him with its terrifying simplicity was
that in the infinite expanse of the universe every event that had
ever occurred must be preserved somewhere, as an image
embalmed in light. `Therefore’, he reasoned, `there must exist
the possibility - even if it is beyond the power of man - of
bringing back the past?’