“Olecloes, olecloes, o-l-ecloes”, roared a kind of Isaiah in a caftan and with snow-white sidelocks whose chosen career was buying and selling old clothes; he waved a pair of trousers with one leg above his head like a victory banner and loudly suggested that Hauberrisser should honour his establishment with a visit, “Come on sir, don’t be shy, see what I give you for that lovely coat.”
From the next side-street came a polyphonic chorus with the most remarkable modulations, “Herrings, lovely fresh he-eerrings”; “Strawberries, sweet strawberries, the best in the town”; “Gherkins, crisp and cheap, ghe-e-erkins”, such appetising music that the cabbie listened with a reverent look on his face, even though he was a captive audience: he could not drive on until the street in front had been cleared of a mountain of stinking rags. Hordes of Jewish rag-and-bone men were piling them up and were still bringing along more bundles; they scorned the usual sacks, rolling the filthy scraps of material into large balls, which they pushed up under their half-opened caftans, clutching them to their bare skins under their armpits. It was a bizarre sight to see them all arrive as roly-poly dumplings and then scamper off, skinny as sewer-rats.
Eventually the street broadened out and Hauberrisser saw the glass veranda of the Hall of Riddles gleaming in the sun.
It was quite some time before the window in the partition was lowered - much less noisily than yesterday, without the same entrepreneurial clatter- to reveal the upper half of the salesgirl.
“Yes?” asked the young lady in strikingly cool tones and with her mind clearly on other things, “What can I do for you, Mijnheer?”
“I would very much like to speak to your boss.”
“I’m afraid Professor Zitter left yesterday on business. He didn’t say when he would be back.” The girl pressed her lips together in a saucy pout and shot Hauberrisser a challenging look.
“You needn’t worry, I didn’t mean the Professor. Iwould just like to have a word with the old gentleman I saw at the desk in there yesterday.”
“Oh, him”, relief appeared on the girl’s face. “That is Herr Pedersen from Hamburg. The one who was looking at the peep-show, you mean?”
“No, I mean the old … Israelite in the office. I thought the business belonged to him.”
“Our business? Our business never belonged to no old Jew, sir. We’re a Christian business, completely Christian.”
“Well that’s your business. But I would still like to speak with the old Jew who was standing at the desk yesterday. You could arrange that for me, couldn’t you?”
“By the Holy Mother of God”, the girl assured him, falling quickly into her most sincere dialect as a sign that she was speaking the truth, “there’s never a Jew allowed in our office, nor was there ever a one in there, as sure as I’m standing here. And specially not yesterday.”
This merely exasperated Hauberrisser, who did not believe one word of it. He searched around for some way to allay her suspicion of him.
“Very well, Miss. But perhaps you could at least tell me who this Chidher Green is on the sign outside?”
“Which sign would that be?”
“But for goodness sake! Your own shop sign outside!”
The salesgirl looked at him, wide-eyed with astonishment. “But our sign says Arpad Zitter”, she said in bewilderment.
In fury Hauberrisser grabbed his hat and rushed outside to make sure. Mirrored in the glass of the door he could see the astonished salesgirl tapping the side of her head. In the street he turned round and looked up at the sign; it said -his heart missed a beat as he read it - Arpad Zitter’s Hall of Riddles.
No mention of Chidher Green at all.
He was so confused and felt so embarrassed that he abandoned his walking stick in the shop and hurried off downthe first alleyway he came to, just to get away from the area as quickly as possible.
He must have wandered round in a daze for a good hour. He drifted through alleys silent as the grave and narrow courtyards where churches dreaming in the hot sunshine suddenly rose up before him; he passed through dark entrances, cool as a cellar, where his footsteps echoed as in a deserted cloister. The houses seemed empty of life, as if no one had lived there for hundreds of years. The only sign of life was an occasional Angora cat on a baroque window-ledge amid pots of gaudy flowers blinking lazily in the golden midday sun; there was not a sound to be heard. Tall elms, theirleaves and branches motionless, towered up from tiny green gardens, surrounded by an admiring crowd of ancient gabled buildings which, with their black facades and bright latticed windows all in their Sunday best, looked like a huddle of kindly old women.
He sauntered beneath flying buttresses where the cobbles had been worn smooth by the passing years, and into winding, twilit passageways, blind alleys hemmed in on either side by high walls with polished heavy oaken doors which were locked and had probably never been opened as long as they had been there. Moss was growing in the cracks between the cobbles, and slabs of reddish marble with weathered inscriptions set in niches in the wall told of a graveyard that might once have occupied the ground.
Then he was following a narrow pavement past plain, whitewashed houses with a stream shooting out from underneath them. From inside came an eerie pounding, booming sound, like the thump of huge stone hearts. The air smelt damp and a clear rivulet flowed quickly along a zigzag course of wooden gutters to fall into a labyrinth of rotting, splintered planks.
Immediately after that the daylight was obliterated by a crooked row of tall, spindly houses; they stooped forward, apparently about to collapse, each supporting the other as if the ground were shaking. Passing a number of bakeries and cheese shops, he came upon the peaty surface of a broad, still canal beneath the bright blue sky. The rows of houses on either bank confronted one another like strangers; on the one side they were low and modest, like humble craftsmen, on the other towering, massive warehouses, aloof and self-confident. There was no bridge between them, only a tree which, growing out of a wooden fence festooned with fishing-lines with floats of red and green feathers hanging down to catch eels, leant its inquisitive trunk across the water and stretched out its branches towards the windows of the rich.
Hauberrisser strolled back in the direction from which he had come and soon found himself back in the middle ages, as if time had stood still for hundreds of years in that part of the city: sundials on the walls above richly-wrought, elaborate coats of arms, gleaming windowpanes, red tiled roofs, tiny chapels sunk in shadow, brass door-knobs reflecting the white, cherubic clouds.
A wrought-iron gate leading into a convent courtyard stood open and he went in. Beneath the drooping branches of a willow he saw abench. The whole area had been taken over by tall grass. There was no sign of a human being anywhere, no faces at the windows. It seemed completely deserted. He sat down on the bench to collect his thoughts. His unrest had vanished, and the worry that reading the wrong name over the shop might be the sign of incipient illness had also long since disappeared. He had come to feel that much stranger than the - admittedly odd - external events was the alien mode of thought into which he had recently fallen.
`How has it come about’, he asked himself, `that I, who am still relatively young, look on life like an old man? People of my age don’t think as I do.’ He went through his memory to try and establish the point at which the change had taken place within him. Like every young person, he assumed, he had been a slave to his passions until he was well over thirty; the only bounds to his search for pleasure had been the limits of his wealth, and his physical and mental endurance. He could not remember having been particularly withdrawn as a child, so where were the roots from which this alien stem had sprung, this flowerless stalk that he called his present self?
`There is a secret, inner growth…’, he suddenly remembered he had read those words only a few hours ago. He took the sheet from the roll of paper out of his pocket and looked for the place.
“… for years it seems impeded and then, unexpectedly, often set off by
something trivial, the veil falls away and there is a branch full of ripe fruit; we had not noticed it flowering, but now we see that without knowing it we had tended a mysterious tree. Oh that I had never allowed myself to be persuaded that any power outside myself could bring forth that tree, how much misery would I have been spared! I was sole lord of my destiny and knew it not! I thought that because I could not alter it by deeds, I was powerless before it. How often did it not occur to me that to be master of one’s own thoughts must also mean to bethe all-powerful controllerofone’s owndestiny. But I always rejected the idea, because my half-hearted attempts never showed immediate results. I underestimated the magical power of thought and fell back into the old error that has plagued mankind since Adam: to take the deed fora giant and the thought for a mere figment. Only when you can command light can you also command the shadow and - destiny; anyone who tries to achieve it by his deeds is only a shadow fighting a vain battle with shadows. But it seems that we must allow life to torture us almost to death before we finally grasp the key. How often have I tried to help others by explaining this to them; they listen and they nod and they believe, but it all goes in at the right ear and comes out at the left. Perhaps the truth is too simple for people to understand it straight away. Or must the `tree’ reach up into the sky before understanding can come? I sometimes fear that the difference between one person and another is greater than that between a person and a stone. The whole purpose of our life is to develop a fine sense for what makes the tree flourish and keeps it from withering. Everything else is merely shovelling dung without knowing the reason why. But how many are there alive today who understand what I mean? They would imagine I was talking in images if I were to tell them. It is the ambiguity of language that separates us. If I were to publish something about `inner growth’, people would interpret it as meaning becoming cleverer or better, just as they take philosophy for a theory and not the practice. Obeying the Commandments alone, even with complete sincerity, is not sufficient to promote inner growth, for it is merely outward form. Breaking the Commandments is often a better hot-bed, but we keep the Commandments when we should break them and break them when we should keep them. Because saints only perform good deeds, people imagine that by performing good deeds they can become saints. They follow that path and believe they will be counted among the just; but they are following a false belief in God and it will lead them to the abyss. They are blinded by mistaken humility, so that they start back in horror, like children at their own image in the mirror, and fear that they are going mad when the time comes when they shall see His face.”
Suddenly Hauberrisser felt himself refreshed by a glimmer of hope that had slept so long within him that it seemed completely new; joy and hope sprang up within him, although he did not know why he should rejoice or what he should hope for - nor, for the moment, did he desire to know. Everything that had happened to him since he had first seen the name Chidher Green no longer seemed the workings of a malevolent fate; he suddenly felt that fortune was smiling on him once again,
Something within him exulted, ‘I should rejoice that such a noble beast from the uncharted forests of the spirit has broken through the fence surrounding the familiar world and come to graze in my garden, rejoice, and not be concerned that a few rotten fence-posts have collapsed.’
He was now convinced that the last lines of the page very probably referred to the face of Chidher Green, and he was burning with impatience to learn more, especially as the last few words suggested that the next page would describe in detail what was meant by ‘magical power over one’s thoughts’. He would have preferred to dash straight home and spend all night poring overthe roll ofpapers, but it was almost fouro’clock, and Pfeill was expecting him.
A humming noise reached his ear and caused him to turn round. He stood up in astonishment at the sight of a man, quite close to the bench, wearing a fencing mask and holding a long pole in his hand. A few feet above him hung a sack-like object that swayed back and forth, then caught one comer on a branch of the tree and hung there, bouncing up and down.
Suddenly the man went after it with the stick and caught it by the point, or rather, by a small net that was attached to it, shouldered the pole with the strange sack attached and climbed, with a satisfied grunt, up the fire-escape of the house, disappearing along the flat part of the roof.
“It’s the convent beekeeper”, said an old woman, appearing from behind a water-pump and noticing Hauberrisser’s bewildered expression. `“They swarmed and he has just caught the queen.”
Hauberrisser went out and after following a few twisting alleyways came to a square where he found a taxi-cab to take him to Mill’s country-house near Hilversum.
There were thousands of cyclists along the broad, straight road. The car sailed along through a sea of heads and shining pedals, but Hauberrisser ignored them for the whole of the hour the journey took. The landscape flew past unnoticed; his eyes were fixed on the image he had just seen: the man with the mask and the swarm of bees, huddled round their queen as if they could not live without her.
Nature, which had said her silent farewell to him on his last journey out into the country, had now turned a new face towards him, and he felt he could read the words she was forming with her lips.
The man catching the queen, and with her the whole swarm, seemed like a symbolic image to Hauberrisser.
`What else is my body than a teeming army of living cells’, he said to himself, `revolving round a hidden centre according to a habit that has been handed down over the millennia?’
He suspected there was some mysterious connection between what he had just seen and the laws of physical and spiritual nature, and he realised how the world would glow anew with a magical radiance if he should ever manage to see all the things that habit and routine had robbed of speech in a fresh light.
At Hilversum the car turned off the main road and glided up the avenue of limes through the park surrounding Pfeill’s villa, Sans Souci, which was glowing white in the afternoon sun.
Pfeill was standing atthe topofthe outside staircase andcame down with a cry of pleasure when he saw Hauberrisser arrive.
“It’s marvellous that you could come, you old stork. I was beginning to fear that my telegram hadn’t reached you in your lair. Has something happened? You look so pensive. By the way, may God reward you for sending that superb Count Ciechonski; he’s a real tonic in these depressing times.” Hauberrisser wanted to protest and explain that he was nothing more than a confidence trickster but Pfeill was in full swing and would not let him get a word in. “He came to visit this morning and I naturally invited him for lunch. I think three pairs of silver spoons have disappeared already. He introduced himself as -“
“a godson of Napoleon the Fourth?”
“Yes. Of course. But he also dropped your name.”
“He had the effrontery!” said the furious Hauberrisser. “He needs a good box round the ears; that would teach him to stick his brass neck out!”
“But why? All he wants is entry to a gentleman’s gambling club. Why not let him have his way? Liberty consists in doing what one desires. If he’s determined to ruin himself, why not let him?”
“He won’t. He’s a professional card-sharp”, Hauberrisser interjected.
Mill looked at him pityingly. “You think he would get away with that in these modem poker-clubs? They all cheat. He’d lose his shirt. By the way, have you seen his watch?”
Hauberrisser laughed.
“If you love me”, Weill said, “buy it from him and give it me for Christmas.” He crept up quietly to one of the windows opening onto the veranda, signalled to his friend and pointed inside - “Look, isn’t that marvellous?”
`Professor’ Zitter, in spite of the hour wearing tails with a hyacinth in the buttonhole, shoes as yellow as an egg-yolk and a black tie, was sitting in a cosy tete-A tgte with a middle-aged lady who was so excited at finally having captured a man again that she had red blotches on her cheeks and wa
s making a rosebud mouth.
“Do you recognise her?” whispered Neill. “It’s Madame Rukstinat; God rest her soul - as soon as possible. Look! He’s showing her the watch. I would like to bet that he’ll try to charm her by showing her the mechanical couple behind the dial. He’s a real ladykiller, there’s no doubt about that.”
“It was a christening present from Eugene-Louis-JeanJoseph”, they heard the `Count’ say, his voice trembling with emotion.
“Oh Vladdymeersh!” lisped the lady.
“By Jove, she’s already calling him by his first name!” Pfeill whistled through his teeth and drew his friend away with him. “Quick, off we go; we are de trop here. Pity the sun’s shining, otherwise I would switch off the light - out of pity for Ciechonski. No, not in there!” He pulled Hauberrisser back as he was about to go through a door the servant was holding open. “There’s politics a-brewing in there.” He had a brief view of a large gathering assembled round a bald-headed speaker with a full beard who was standing in an eloquent pose with his fingers spread out on the table in an imperious gesture. “Let’s go to the Jellyfish Room.”
As he sank into the soft beige chamois-leather of the club chair Hauberrisser looked round in astonishment: the walls and ceiling were covered with sheets of smooth cork that had been so skilfully hung that the joins were invisible; the windows were made of curved glass and the furniture, the comers where the walls joined, even the door standards were all gently rounded; there was not a straight edge anywhere, the carpet was so fluffy it was like walking ankle-deep in sand, and everywhere was the same soft, matt, light-brown colour.
“I eventually realised”, explained Baron Pfeill, “that anyone who is condemned to live in Europe needs a padded cell more than anything else. Even just an hour in a room like this is enough to transform the most neurotic fidget into a gentle mollusc for quite some time. I assure you, at times when I have so many demands made on me they’re coming out of my ears, the mere thought of this soft room is enough to send all my good intentions floating away, like fleas from a fox when it’s bathed in milk. Thanks to this sensible arrangement I can, whenever I like, avoid even the most pressing duties completely without regret.”
The Green Face Page 10
