The Opal, and Other Stories Read online

  I never trust mere appearance - one’s senses offer such an insecure guarantee of abstract perception - but the invalid is certainly genuine.

  I have had him photographed.

  With an iron hook the old warrior lifts up a few bleached looking objects from the ground [author's note: without doubt they are white dog-turds] and transfers them with a triumphant flourish to a sack half full of similar items, which he carries at his right side, to balance the array of campaign medals pinned to his left. There is something diabolical about the way in which these pale objects are always to be found at the same spot - the very one that has just been vacated by the blistered Thing.

  There is indubitably some kind of ghostly connection. If it were a case of any poor fellow being responsible for picking up these pallid substances, the matter would hardly be worth noticing. One would naturally think they had no more than a slight value, and could claim no more than a subsidiary role in nature’s housekeeping. But here?

  To have old soldiers collecting them?

  Does not the fatherland with its bountiful hands heap honour and riches upon such people, in consciousness of our gratitude for their blood which was shed, and limbs which were shattered, in sacrifice for us?

  What are they doing chasing after waste matter?

  There’s a double bottom to the case here!

  These bleached objects must have some kind of special status. I realised this a good twelve months ago. But when one morning I read in the paper that they had found an old veteran of the Italian Campaign dead in his room, with nothing to his name but an iron poker and a sack of white dog excrement, I was overcome with a kind of fear, an awful need, to investigate the riddle as far as was remotely possible.

  Of course there are plenty of doom-merchants who would say that disabled soldiers are poor. Their evil intention however is only too obvious. It’s clear after all, that if the Fatherland were really not to give them support, then the Emperor himself would gladly step in. For in truth, a spirit of sacrifice for the Fatherland does not go unrewarded: our ‘true’ poets have always advocated such a stance.

  Yet another old soldier, and yet another sack of a certain sort! And what had become of all his accumulated wealth, eh? He must have thought very little of it, I felt - ‘What do I care about that, so long as I have the sack,’ he must have said to himself.

  And I remembered the Tale of the Dervish in the Arabian Nights, who forced his way into the Treasure House, only to leave all the jewels lying there untouched, taking with him only a little box of ointment which when applied to a man’s eyes had the magic property of conferring absolute power on him.

  Colossal value - the key to unheard-of pleasures must reside, I concluded, in these pale objects, if it were precisely these capricious veteran soldiers, indulged as heroes at every turn by a grateful public, who were prepared to ignore all the hardships of inclement weather, and to search round, leaving no stone unturned, to gain possession of them.

  I rushed off straight away to the police. The iron poker was still there but the sack - the sack had vanished! And nobody knew what had become of it. Well now!

  Someone or other must evidently have risked everything to get hold of it! And to have snatched it from the very jaws of the police at the last minute, with such unimaginable boldness!

  And what is the use of white dog dirt?’ I asked myself. ‘What is the use?’

  I looked up the encyclopedia under D for dirt, under W for white, under S, under E - nothing.

  To try to find the whereabouts of my old soldier would have been absurd. He least of all would have been prepared to betray his secret to me.

  So I wrote to the Ministry of Education.

  I received no reply.

  I went to a presentation given by a well-known name in the entertainment world, where the audience wrote questions on little cards for him to answer. I added mine, but when he came to it he tore it up and walked out indignantly.

  At the town hall I couldn't find the right office, and they wouldn’t let me in to see the mayor.

  ‘It’s stuck on the ceilings of public rooms in government buildings as ornamentation,’ suggested a cynic in a mocking tone. ‘That’s why they call it ‘stucco’.’

  ‘It is pathos among equals, it is an end in itself,’ mused the poet Peter Altenberg.

  An eminent academic on the other hand icily dismissed the whole thing, adding the stern advice: ‘In polite company such things do not pass one’s lips; they are in any case a sign of serious digestive problems, and they serve (and here his eyes flashed a rebuke) they serve as a warning to the well-to-do layman always to follow the advice of a competent medical professional in questions concerning the conduct of his life.’

  By contrast, a workman whom I consulted said nothing at all, but gave me a box on the ear instead.

  I followed other lines of enquiry. I accosted people in the street who had a furtive look to them, and asked them the question straight out, hoping to take them by surprise. Short, clear and to the point.

  They took a step backwards in surprise and ran off, with every indication of fright!

  So I decided to delve into the depths of the mystery all by myself, and to do some chemical experiments of my own, as well as to go hunting for the things on my own account.

  But as if some dark power was making fun of me, the very spot under my elder tree stayed empty day after day and, strange to relate, the thing with the excrescence on its neck seemed to have disappeared.

  I can’t even think about it without a shudder.

  I spent a whole week searching along deserted walls. I left no monument unvisited. All to no purpose!

  And when at last Lady Luck smiled at me and I had laid hands on some of the precious stuff and placed it securely in a phial, a dreadful fear suddenly overcame me. What if I were to faint suddenly now, or to be seized with apoplexy? They would find the stuff on me, they would say, ‘he had a bad soul, he was altogether perverse, the dirty pig’. And that would destroy my family’s peace of mind for ever! And those army officers to whom I am allied by unbreakable bonds of the

  deepest fellow-feeling would turn their noses up, saying: ‘I knew it all along: he was altogether a thoroughly rum fellow!

  And the evangelical boys’ club would fold their hands together and dance a Protestant Enlightenment fandango on my grave.

  So I threw the phial away.

  The next thing I did was to immerse myself in the study of the history of secret societies. There can’t be a single fraternity left that I haven’t joined, and if I were to go through all the profoundly meaningful secret signs and emergency signals that I learned one after the other, I’d be carted off to the asylum for sure, suspected of having contracted St. Vitus’ dance.

  But I’m not going to give up.

  I must find out what function ‘it’ has.

  Somewhere, every fibre of my being tells me, there is a fearsome Order, a silent assembly of men, for whom bolts and bars are as nothing, who are immune from the arrows of fortune and who have the world tamed in leading-strings. All power on earth is theirs, and they use it in order to engage unpunished in the most horrific orgies!

  What else were the mediaeval Stercatorists, who always boasted that they were the only ones among all the alchemists to possess the true ‘materia’, than adherents of this sect?

  The old forgotten Ancient Order of Pugs, for instance - what other purpose can it have had?

  And the grasp of the ‘Brotherhood’ reaches right into our own days!

  Who is their Master? Where is the centre of their activities?

  The sinister Ohlendorff, Hamburg’s uncrowned guano-king must have been their last Grandmaster, I suppose, but who is it today?

  What a mystery these veterans are!

  Treasure upon treasure is piling up, raked together with their iron claws - and then, woe betide us!

  I look into the future with great trepidation. Days pass, but nobody offers me a solution to my question
: what use, what use is ‘it’ actually?

  And dawn cracks open, the cock crows in apprehension of the tardy day, and there I lie, unable to sleep, while outside under the elder tree the phantom with its swollen neck is perhaps already going about its business.

  In a half-daze I can visualize regiments of old soldiers hung about with medals striding onward to the Blocksberg. And I toss and turn in torment, groaning and sighing: What, oh what is the use of white dog shit?!

  Author’s postscript:

  I refuse to accept explanations sent to me by members of the public of the sort: This mysterious material is used in the tanning process, to dress gloves.'

  Humming in the Ears

  In the old city of Prague, in the district called the Kleinseite, there stands an old house that has always been inhabited by discontented people. Everyone who enters it is struck by an excruciatingly uncomfortable sensation - a gloomy thing, buried up to its belly in the ground.

  There is an iron trapdoor in the cellar. If you lift it up you can see a dark and narrow shaft descending coldly into the earth, its walls oozing with moisture. Many people have in the past let down torches tied on a line. Right down into the darkness, the light becoming weaker and smokier, until it goes out altogether, and the people have said:

  There is no more air.

  So nobody knows where the shaft goes.

  But he who has eyes to see can see without light, even in the darkness, when others are asleep.

  When people lie open to the night, and consciousness faints, then the soul of greed abandons the regular beat of the heart - it looks greenish in the haze, it takes on loose and shapeless forms, and is hideous, for there is no love in the hearts of men.

  Exhausted by their daily labour, which they call their duty, they seek a renewal of strength in sleep, in order to destroy their brothers’ fortune or to plan new murders to perpetrate in the coming sunlit hours.

  And they sleep and snore.

  It is then that the phantoms of greed slip lightly through the joints of doors and walls out into the open, into the attentive night; and slumbering beasts whimper and wince as they sense the presence of their executioners.

  They slither and slide sidling into the gloomy old house, and down to the musty cellar with its iron trap. The metal weighs as nothing as the souls’ hands slip round it. The shaft yawns wider deep below, and there the shadows gather.

  They make no sign to each other, neither greeting nor question. There is nothing that the one might need to know from another.

  In the middle of this space a grey whetstone disk spins dizzily, whirring at a prodigious rate. Thousands of years ago, long before

  Prague was built, it was tempered in the fire of hatred by the epitome of evil.

  Against its whirling rim the phantoms sharpen their claws of greed, claws that have been scratched blunt on the daylight men. Sparks fly from these onyx claws of lust and from the steely spurs of rapaciousness.

  They all, all are thus made razor-sharp once more, for the Prince of Evil has need of ever-renewed wounds.

  If the man in his sleep wants to stretch his fingers, his phantom must return to its shell: for the claws must stay curled just so, that the hands cannot be clasped in prayer.

  Satan’s whetstone whirls on, unceasingly, day and night.

  If you stop your ears, you can hear it, humming away inside you.

  Bal Macabre

  Lord Hopeless had graciously invited me to join him at his table, and he introduced me to the other gentlemen.

  It was well past midnight, and I didn’t catch most of the names.

  I knew Dr. Trembler already.

  ‘It’s a shame, you’re always on your own,’ he said, as he shook me by the hand, ‘why do you always sit alone?'

  I know that we had not drunk all that much, and yet we had that slight, barely perceptible sense of intoxication where words seem to float in from a distance, that is characteristic of the small hours when one is bathed in a heady mixture of cigarette smoke, feminine laughter and inconsequential music.

  Are you surprised that an atmosphere such as this, made up in equal measure of gipsy melodies, cake-walk and champagne should give rise to a conversation about the occult? Lord Hopeless was talking.

  About a brotherhood of people - or rather, of the dead or seeming-dead, that in all seriousness really does exist. People of the most respectable sort, who are known by the living to have died long since, who even have gravestones and tombs with their names and dates of death carved on them, but who actually survive instead lying year after year in a state of suspended animation concealed in some antiquated property in the town, hidden in a drawer, without sensation and secure from decay, and watched over by a crookbacked ministrant in buckled shoes and powdered wig who goes by the name (if I heard right) of Spotted Aaron. On certain nights a dull, phosphorescent glow appears about their lips, an indication to the old cripple that it is time to engage in a certain abstruse manipulation of the cervical vertebrae of these apparent corpses. So he said.

  This operation completed, their souls could float unhindered, free of the body for a space, to give themselves up to all the vice of the city with an urgency and intensity unthinkable even for the most depraved.

  One feature was the way in which these vampires would fasten themselves like ticks to the living as they stumbled from one iniquity to the next, stealing and drawing sustenance from the nervous stimulation of the crowd. This club (it bore the curious name Amanita) even held meetings, with rules and statutes and strict requirements for the admission of new members. Yet over all there lay an impenetrable veil of secrecy.

  I couldn’t hear the final words of Lord Hopeless’ disquisition, as they were drowned out by the band playing the latest popular hit:

  ‘Oh, oh Sue,

  You’re so true,

  Trala trala trala Tra - lalala - la’

  The extraordinary contortions of a couple of mulattoes dancing a kind of nigger cancan added a silent reinforcement to the depressing effect the story had on me.

  In this night-tavern, among the painted street-walkers, the bril-liantined waiters and the diamond-heeled pimps the whole scene rang hollow and grotesque, collapsing into horrible caricature, only half alive.

  As if time, in an unguarded moment, has taken a sudden, silent step, the hours burn away to seconds in our alcoholic daze, blazing like sparks in our soul to illuminate a morbid braid of singular and reckless dreams of past and future, woven out of all sorts of ideas mixed together.

  And so I can still hear, from the darkness of recollection, a voice saying: ‘We ought to write the Amanita Club a card.’

  I realise now that the conversation must have kept coming back to the same topic.

  Other fragments of consciousness gleam in my recollection at intervals: a wineglass smashing, a whistle, a French tart coming to sit on my knee, kissing me, blowing cigarette smoke into my mouth and putting her tongue in my ear. Later someone pushed a very elaborate card under my nose, and I was told to sign it. I dropped the pencil. A second attempt was no good either: the girl tipped a glass of champagne all over my cuff.

  I do know quite clearly that we all suddenly sobered up when Lord

  Hopeless demanded to have the card back, and we turned out our pockets and searched high and low, on the table and under it, to no avail. It had vanished without trace.

  ‘Oh, oh Sue,

  You’re so true ...’

  screeched the violins as they struck up the chorus, drowning out our awareness of the situation over and over again.

  If you closed your eyes you could imagine you were lying on a deep, black velvet rug, dotted with a few ruby-red flowers.

  ‘I want something to eat,’ I heard someone say. ‘What? - What? -caviare? - don’t be stupid. I want - I want - I know, bring me some pickled mushrooms.’

  And we all ate some mushrooms and some kind of heavily seasoned cabbage floating in a stringy, watery liquid.

  ‘Oh, oh Sue, />
  You’re so true,

  Trala - trala - trala Tra - lalala - la.’

  Suddenly, an odd-looking acrobat in a sagging leotard appeared sitting at the table. To his right was a masked hunchback wearing a white flaxen wig. Beside him, a woman; and they were all laughing.

  How did he get in, with them? And I turned round: we were the last people left in the room.

  Of course, I thought to myself, there wouldn’t be anyone else.

  It was a very long table we were sitting at, and most of the cloth, clear of plates and glasses, gleamed white.

  ‘Monsieur Phalloides, do give us a dance’ said one of the gentlemen, clapping the acrobat on the shoulder.

  They know one another, I thought, hauling my imagination back to reality. True, he’s probably been sitting there for some time, the - the leotard.

  And then I looked at the hunchback next to him, and his eye caught mine. He was wearing a painted white mask and a faded, light green doublet, quite tattered and full of mended patches.

  Straight off the street!

  His laugh, was a hoarse, wheezing rattle. ‘Crotalus - Crotalus hor-ridus’: the words came to me out of my schooldays; I could no longer remember what they meant, but I shuddered as I repeated them quietly to myself.

  I felt the streetwalker’s fingers on my knee under the table.

  ‘My name’s Albine Veratrine,’ she whispered hesitantly, as if betraying a secret, as I grasped at her hand. She moved closer to me, and I vaguely remembered that she it was who had tipped a glass of champagne over my wrist. Her clothing had such a pungent smell you were almost obliged to sneeze whenever she moved.

  ‘She’s called Yeasty of course - Miss Yeasty, you know,’ said Dr. Trembler out loud.

  The acrobat laughed abruptly, looked at her and shrugged his shoulders as if waiting to make some excuse. I found him repellent: he had a deformity of the skin on his neck like a turkey’s wattle, about a hand’s-breadth across, all round, and of a pale colour.

  His dull flesh-coloured costume hung loose on him, he was so thin and pigeon-chested. He was wearing a flat green cap dotted with white spots and bumps. He had got to his feet and was dancing with someone wearing a necklace of speckled berries.