“What you are saying there is a complete mysteryto me”, Hauberrisser broke in. “How can repeating a word constantly to oneself determine or change a person’s fate?”
“Why ever not? The threads that guide a man’s actions are exceedingly delicate. What is said in the Book of Genesis about the change of name from Abram to Abraham and from Sarai to Sarah is connected with the Cabbala, or rather, with other, much deeper mysteries. I have come across a certain amount of evidence which suggests that it is wrong to speak secret names aloud, as they did in Klinkherbogk’s group. As you perhaps know, every letter in the Hebrew alphabet also stands for a number. For example, S = 300, M = 40, N = 50 etc. It is possible, therefore, to turn names into numbers and to construct geometrical figures in our imagination from the relationships between the numbers, a cube, a pyramid and so on. And these geometrical shapes can become the axis round which our inner life, which until then has been completely formless, rotates, so to speak, if we imagine it in the right way and with the necessary force. When we do this we turn our soul - I have no other word for it - into a crystalline structure from which it derives its eternal laws. The Egyptians imagined a soul that had reached perfection in the form of a sphere.”
“But what”, mused Baron Weill, “in your opinion, assuming the poor shoemaker really did kill his granddaughter, was wrong with his `practice’? Is the name Abram so very different from Abra-ham?”
“It was Klinkherbogk who gave himself the name of Abram. It rose from his subconscious and that is what led to the disaster. What it lacked was what we Jews call the ‘Neshamah’, the spiritual breath of the deity descending from above, in this particular case the syllable ‘ha’. In the Bible it was Abra-ham who was spared from having to sacrifice Isaac; Abram would have become a murderer, just as Klinkherbogk has. In his thirst for eternal life, Klinkherbogk called down his own death. I said before, whoever is weak should not take the path of strength. The path of weakness, of waiting, was Klinkherbogk’s path and he departed from it.”
“But something must be done for poor Egyolk!” exclaimed Eva. “Are we to stand around idly whilst he is tried and sentenced?”
“It takes longer than that to sentence a man”, said Sephardi soothingly. “romorrow morning I will go and speak to the police psychiatrist, de Brouwer, I know him from the University.
“And you’ll look after the poor old butterfly-man as well, won’t you and write and tell me how he is getting on?” asked Eva, standing up and shaking hands with Pfeill and Sephardi as she made to leave. “Goodbye; I trust we shall meet again in the not-too-distant future.”
Hauberrisser realised straight away that she wanted him to accompany her, and helped her on with her coat, which the servant had brought in.
As they walked through the park the cool of the evening lay damp upon the redolent lime trees. Greek statues shimmered palely in the darkness of tree-lined arcades, dreaming in the splash ofthe fountains which glistened silver in stray light from the lamps outside the castle.
“Might I not visit you occasionally in Antwerp, Eva?” asked Hauberrisser in a choking, almost shy voice. “You ask me to wait until time should bring us together. Do you really think it would be better to do it by writing rather than by seeing each other? We both have a different view of life from the masses, why put a screen between us that can only separate us?”
“No, Eva”, Hauberrisser broke in quickly, “you are wrong. I know what you are afraid I might say. You don’t want to hear me tell you what my feelings for you are, and I am not going to mention them. In spite of the fact that what Doctor Sephardi said was said in all honesty, and in spite of the fact that I hope with all my heart that it will come to pass, yet it has still raised an almost insurmountable barrier between us, of which I am painfully aware. If we do not put all our effort into tearing it down it will stand between us for ever. And yet I am filled with an inner sense of joy that it has happened in this way. I think neither of us need fear a calculated marriage. The danger that was threatening us - please excuse me, Eva, when I use the words `we’ and ‘us’ in this way - was that it would be love and desire alone that brought us together. Doctor Sephardi was right when he said the meaning of marriage had been lost to mankind.”
“But that is what torments me”, said Eva. “Life seems tome a dreadful, devouring monster and I feel at a complete loss as to how to deal with it. Everything is stale or threadbare. Every word we use has become dry as dust. I feel like a child who is looking forward to being transported into a fairytale world and then goes to the theatre and sees actors dripping with greasepaint. Marriage has become an ugly institution which robs love of its bloom and reduces men and women to mere functions. It is like slowly sinking into the desert sand. Why can’t we be like mayflies?” She stood still and cast longing glances at a floodlit fountain enveloped in a golden haze of fluttering moths. “They spend years as grubs, crawling overthe earth, preparing fortheir wedding as for something sacred, to celebrate one short day of love before they die.” She stopped with a shudder of horror.
Her eyes had darkened, and Hauberrisser could see she was in the grip of some deep emotion. He raised her hand to his lips. For a while they stood there motionless then slowly, as if half asleep, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“When will you become my wife? Life is so short, Eva.”
She gave no answer, and without a word they walked together towards the open wrought-iron gate where Baron Mill’s car was waiting to take Eva home. Hauberrisser wanted to repeat his question before she said goodbye, but she was the first to speak, snuggling up against him.
“I long for you as I long for death”, she said softly. “I will be your lover, of that I am sure; but we will be spared what people call marriage.”
He scarcely grasped the meaning of her words, he was numb with the joy of holding her in his anus. Then he responded to the shudder of horror still within her and felt his hair stand on end as an icy breath enveloped both of them, as if the angel of death were taking them under his wings and carrying them far away from the earth to a realm of eternal bliss.
As he awoke from the trance, the strange, rapturous ecstasy of dying that had seemed to consume all his senses, slowly left him and was replaced, as he watched the car take Eva away from him, by the gnawing torment of the fear that somehow he was destined never to see her again.
Eva had intended to visit her aunt early the next day, to give her what comfort she could, and then take the morning express to Antwerp, but she changed her mind when she arrived at the hotel to find a hastily-scribbled note, smudged with tears.
The terrible events on the Zeedijk appeared to have put the old lady in a state of shock, for she wrote that she had resolved not to set foot outside the Convent until she felt sufficiently recovered from the distress they had caused her to concern herself once more with what she insisted on calling the hurlyburly of the modem world. Her final sentence, however, culminating in the lament that a horrid migraine made it impossible for her to receive visits from anyone at all, suggested that serious concern about the old lady’s mental health was unnecessary.
Eva did not hesitate, but sent her luggage to the station straight away. The porter recommended she take the midnight train to Belgium, as there were usually many free seats on it.
It took her some time to overcome the feeling of disgust the letter had left in her. Was that what the female heart had come to? Eva had been afraid that `Gabriela’ would never recover from the blow and what did she find - a headache! ‘We women have lost our sense of greatness’, she complained to herself bitterly. `Our grandmothers took it all and embroidered it into their wretched samplers.’ It was a young girl’s fear that made her press her head between her hands. `And am Ito become like that, too? It is humiliating to be a woman.’
The loving thoughts, which had accompanied her all the way from Hilversum back into the city, tried to reassert their power. The whole room seemed to fill with the scent of the flowering limes,
but Eva tore herself away and went out to sit on the balcony, gazing up at the star-bright sky. As a child she had often found comfort in the idea that up there was a Creator who looked down on her insignificance; now she felt humiliated by her insignificance. She had a profound distaste for all the attempts by women to rival men in public life, but to have nothing to give the man she loved but her beauty seemed a poor, miserable offering, seemed to be making much ado about a matter of course.
Sephardi’s words, that there was a hidden, royal way along which a woman could be more to her husband than a mere provider of earthly pleasure, brought her a faint ray of hope. But where did that path begin?
Tentatively, timidly, she made a start, trying through the exercise of reason to work out what she would need to do to find such a path. But she soon sensed that it was nothing more than a vain, feeble begging for light from the powers above the stars, instead of the vigorous struggle for illumination which she knew a man would have been capable of. She felt miserable, her heart consumed by the most delicate and yet deepest sorrow a young woman can know: to appear before her beloved emptyhanded and yet to be overflowing with longing to give him a whole world of joy.
No sacrifice would have been too great; she would have made it gladly for his sake. With the instinct of her sex, she knew that the most a woman could do was to sacrifice herself, but whatever course of action she thought of, it seemed fleeting, paltry, childish, compared with the intensity of her love.
To subordinate herself to him in all things, to relieve him of care, to anticipate his every wish: how easy that must be, but would it make him happy? It was nothing more than what millions of women did, but she longed to be able to give him something beyond what was humanly possible.
She had long sensed within her the deep bitterness of being as rich as a king in her desire to give, yet as poor as a beggar in the gifts she could offer, it now manifested itself with a crystal clarity that made her shudder, as the saints before her had shuddered as they had trodden the path of martyrdom through the scorn and derision of the mob.
Overwhelmed by the torment, she rested her forehead on the balcony rail and, her lips pressed tight together, screamed a silent, inward prayer that the very least among the host of those who had crossed the river of death for the sake of love might appear and reveal to her how to find the mysterious crown of life, that she might take it, and give it away.
She looked up, as if she had felt the touch of a hand on her head, and saw that the sky had suddenly changed. Across it ran an oblique slash of pale light and the stars were pouring into it like a swarm of glittering mayflies blown by a stormwind. Then it opened up to reveal a hall with ancient greybeards in flowing robes sitting at along table; theireyes were fixed on heras ifthey were ready to hear her declaration. The features of the chief among them were foreign, between his brows he bore a shining mark, and from his temples rose two blinding rays, like the horns of Moses.
Eva knew that she should swear an oath, but she could not find the words. She wanted to beseech them to hear her prayer, but she could not lift up her voice, the words stuck in her throat then piled up in her mouth.
Slowly the tear in the sky began to close up again and, as the hall and the table gradually faded, the Milky Way spread over it like a glowing scar. Only the man with the blazing mark on his forehead was still visible. In despair Eva stretched her arms out to him, mutely pleading with him to stay and hear her out, but the face made to turn away. Then she saw a man on a white horse dash in a wild gallop up through the air from the earth; and she saw that it was Swammerdam.
He dismounted, walked up to the man, screamed at him and then grabbed him angrily by the breast.
With a commanding gesture he pointed down at Eva.
She knew what he was saying. In her heart the words from the Bible rang out, that the Kingdom of Heaven shall be taken by force. Her supplicant tone evaporated like a summer mist and, confident in her eternal right to self-determination, she commanded, as Swammerdam had taught her, those who guide destiny to drive her onward towards the highest goal a woman can achieve; to drive her ever onwards, faster than time itself, without pity, deaf to her pleading should she weaken, bypassing pleasure and happiness, without pause for breath, even if she should die a thousand times in the attempt.
She realised that she would have to die, for the radiant sign on the man’s forehead was uncovered and when she commanded him it shone with such a blinding light that it burnt into her mind, her thoughts; but her heart rejoiced, she would live, since she had seen his countenance at the same time. She trembled under the immense pressure from the power that was released within her and burst open the prison gate of slavery; she felt the ground tremble beneath her feet, she felt a swoon coming over her, but still her lips murmured the same command, over and over again, even when the face in the sky had long since disappeared.
Slowly, very slowly, awareness of who she was and where she was returned.
She knew that she intended to go to the station, remembered that she had sent her luggage on ahead, saw the letter to her aunt lying on the table, picked it up and tore it to shreds. Everything that she did, she did as naturally as she had done before, and yet everything seemed new and unaccustomed, as if her hands, her eyes, her whole body were now mere implements that were no longer directly connected to her inner being. She felt as if at the same time, in some distant cornerof the cosmos, she were living a second life as a child that had only just been born and had not yet awoken to full consciousness. The objects around her in the room no longer seemed essentially different from her own organs, both were utensils for her will and nothing more.
The evening in the park in Hilversum was like a fond memory from her childhood, from which she was now separated by long years; she thought of it with tenderness and joy, but she was also aware of its insignificance compared with the ineffable bliss a time still to come would bring. She felt like a blind girl who had known nothing but pitch-blackness and for whom all the joys she had so far experienced paled in the light of the certainty that the hour would come, perhaps only after long and painful sufferings, when she would be able to see.
She tried to settle in her own mind whether it was merely the great difference between what she had just experienced and earthly things that made the physical world suddenly seem so insignificant; she found that everything she perceived through her senses floated past her almost like a dream which, pleasant or unpleasant, is only a phantasm without deeper significance for the awakened soul.
When she looked into the mirror as she was putting on her coat she found there was a mild strangeness in her own features; it was as if her memory at first only tentatively recognised the image as herself. In all that she did there was an almost deathly calm. The future appeared to her as impenetrable darkness and yet she confronted it with serenity, like someone who knows that the ship bearing them on life’s voyage is firmly anchored and can look forward with composure to the following day, whatever storms the night may bring.
It occurred to her that it must be time to go to the station, but a presentiment that she would never see Antwerp again stopped her from leaving. She took out paper and ink to write a letter to her beloved, but stopped after the first line. All initiative was paralysed by the inner certainty that anything she might now do of her own will was in vain and that it would be easier to stop a bullet in its flight than to try to steer the mysterious power, into whose hands she had put her destiny.
The murmur of a voice from the next room that had been audible through the wall without Eva having paid any attention to it, stopped all at once, leaving behind a silence which gave her the sensation of suddenly having become deaf to physical sounds. Instead she thought after a while that she could hear, deep within her ear, as if it came from another land, an insistent whispering that gradually swelled into the muffled guttural sounds of an alien, barbaric language. She could not understand the words. It wasjust the irresistible compulsion to stand up and go to the door that t
old her that they expressed an order which she could not resist.
At the top of the stairs she remembered that she had forgotten her gloves, but, scarcely had the thought occurred to her than her attempt to turn round was brushed aside by a power which seemed alien and malevolent and yet, in its deepest roots, her own.
With swift and yet unhurried steps she went through the town, not knowing whether at the next comer she should go straight on or not, and yet certain that when the moment to choose came there would be no doubt as to the direction she should take.
Her every limb was trembling. She knew that it was from fear of death, but herheartwas unaffected by it. She was impervious to the fear her body felt, stood apartfrom it, as if hernerves were those of another.
When she reached an open square, with the dark, massive block of the Stock Exchange in the background, she thought for a moment that it had all been an illusion and that she was on her way to the station after all, but suddenly she was dragged off to the right through narrow twisting alleyways.
The few figures she passed stopped and she could feel them looking back at her.
With a new power of inner vision, that she had never before realised she possessed, she found she could guess whatever it was that most worried each individual she met. Some seemed to exude concern, like a mental current of deep pity that was directed at her; and yet she knew that these people had not the least idea of what was going on inside themselves, that they were completely unaware of why they tamed to look at her, and had they been asked, they would have said they did it out of curiosity or some such similar motive.
The Green Face Page 13
