The Green Face Read online

  “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.”

  “I’m afraid, Mevrouw”, Pfeill turned to the lady again, “that in your circles my alltootruism is exaggerated. My supply of bottle tops, which the war-wounded so urgently need, is considerably smaller than would appear. Even if I did once - unknowingly, I assure you - affiliate to a charitable association which brought me the odium of public Samaritanism, yet I fear my moral backbone is insufficiently steely to cut off international prostitution from its source of revenue; perhaps I might remind you ofthe well-known saying, Yoni soitqui mal ypense. And as for putting a stop to the white slave trade, I’m afraid I haven contacts at all withthe captains ofthis industry, norhave I had the opportunity to become intimately acquainted with senior officers of foreign vice squads.”

  “But youmusthave some useless articles forthe warorphans, mustn’t you, my dear Baron?”

  “Is there such a great demand for useless articles among the war orphans, madame?”

  Madame did not notice the ironic question, or ignored it. “But my dear Baron, you must take a few tickets for the grand charity ball we are organising in the autumn. The net proceeds, which will be distributed in the spring, will go to support all those who have suffered through the war. It will be a sensation: the ladies will all be masked and any gentleman who has bought more than five tickets will be decorated with the Order of Charity of the Duchesse de Lusignan.”

  “Such a grand ball has many attractions indeed”, admitted Baron Pfeill reflectively, “especially as at such charitable functions the commandment to love thy neighbour is often interpreted in such a liberal manner that thy left hand knows not what thy right hand doeth. And it must give the rich great pleasure to know that the poor will benefit from the great distribution -eventually. On the other hand, I am not enough of an exhibitionist to go round with the evidence of my quintuple charity hanging from my buttonhole. Of course, if you insist, madame

  “So I can put you down for five tickets?”

  “Only four, if you please, Mevrouw.”

  “Sir, sir, Baron, sir”, breathed a voice, and agrubby little hand tugged shyly at Pfeill’s sleeve. When he turned round he saw a shabbily-dressed girl with sunken cheeks and white lips thathad squeezed her way between the oleander tubs to us and held out aletterto him. He immediately fumbled in his pocket fora coin.

  “Grandfather says to tell you -“

  “Who are you, my child?” asked Pfeill in a low voice.

  “Grandfather, Klinkherbogk the cobbler, says to tell you I am his little girl” - the girl was mixing up her answer and the message she was to deliver- “that you made a mistake, Baron, sir. Instead of the ten guilders forthe last pair of shoes therewere a thousand -“

  Neill turned bright red, tapped somewhat violently on the table with his silver cigarette case to drown the girl’s words and said in a loud, brusque voice, “There you are, there’s twenty cents for your trouble”, and added in softer tones that it was all in order, she should go home and not lose the letter on the way.

  As if to explain that the girl had not come alone, but for safety’s sake had been accompanied by her grandfather so that she would not lose the envelope with the banknote on her way to the coffee house, for a second between the ivy bushes there appeared the face of an old man. It was deathly pale, for he had obviously heard what Pfeill had just said and was so moved that he was incapable of saying a word; his tongue was paralysed and his jaw trembling, and all that came out was a babbling wheeze.

  Without paying any attention at all to the little scene, the charitable lady noted down the four tickets in her little book and took her leave with a few polite words of farewell.

  For a while the two men sat in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes and drumming with their fingers on the arms of their chairs now and then.

  Hauberrisser knew his friend only too well not to sense that to ask what the story with the shoemaker was would have so embarrassed Neill that he would have let his imagination run riot to invent some story, any story, to allay the suspicion that he had helped a poor cobbler in great need. He was therefore racking his brain to find some topic of conversation that - naturally - would have nothing to do with charity or a shoemaker, but on the other hand, did not sound too far-fetched.

  It seemed an easy enough task, but as the minutes passed, it became more and more difficult.

  `Coming up with an idea is a confounded thing’, he thought to himself. `We think our brain produces them, but in reality they do what they like with our brain and are more unbiddable than any living creature.’ He pulled himself together. “Tell me Neill”, (the face he had seen in his dream in the Hall of Riddles had suddenly come back to mind) “tell me, you spend so much time reading, doesn’t the legend of the Wandering Jew have its origin in Holland?”

  Pfeill gave him a suspicious look, “You mean because he was a cobbler?”

  “Cobbler? What do you mean?”

  “Well, the story goes that the Wandering Jew was originally a cobbler called Ahashverosh from Jerusalem who, when Jesus wanted to rest by his workshop on his road to Golgotha - the Place of a Skull - drove him away in anger. Since then he has had to wander the face of the earth and cannot die till Christ should return.” When Pfeill saw the surprised look on Hauberrisser’s face, he hastily continued his explanation so as to get away from the theme of the cobbler as quickly as possible, “In the thirteenth century an English bishop claimed to have met a Jew called Cartaphilus in Armenia who told him that at certain phases of the moon his body rejuvenated itself, and that for a while he had been John the Evangelist, of whom it was well known that Christ had said he should not taste of death till he saw the Son of Man coming into his kingdom. In Holland the Wandering Jew is called Isaac Laquedem. There was a man of that name who was presumed to be Ahasuerus because he stood looking at a head of Christ in stone and then cried out, “That is he, that is he, that is what he looked like!“The museums of Basle and Berne even exhibit a shoe - one right and one left - strange things, made up of various pieces of leather, three feet long an
d weighing a stone, which were found in different places in the mountain passes of the frontier between Italy and Switzerland and, because they are so inexplicable, were connected with the Wandering Jew. As a matter of fact -“

  Pfeill lit a cigarette.

  “As a matter of fact, it’s odd you should think of asking me about the Wandering Jew just at this moment. Only a few minutes ago I was most vividly reminded of a picture that I once saw many years ago in a private collection in Leyden. It is by an unknown master and represents Ahasuerus: an extremely frightening face of an olive bronze colour, a black cloth round its forehead and the eyes without whites and withoutpupils, like - how shall I put it? - like chasms almost. For a long time it haunted my dreams.”

  Hauberrisser started, but Pfeill did not notice and continued,

  ‘The black cloth round his forehead: I read somewhere later on that in the Near East that is considered a sure sign of the Wandering Jew. It is said he uses it to conceal a blazing cross which etches itself on his forehead: every time the skin grows back the cross eats it away again. Scholars maintain these things are merely references to cosmic events involving the moon and for that reason the Wandering Jew is also referred to as Chidher, that is, the Green One - but to my mind that’s all nonsense.

  This mania of interpreting anything inexplicable from antiquity in terms of the Signs of the Zodiac is becoming widespread again today. It’s spread was halted for a while after a witty Frenchman wrote a satire on it: Napoleon never actually existed, he too was an astral myth; in reality he was the Sun God Apollo and his twelve generals represented the twelve signs of the Zodiac.