“In Brazil, arrived three weeks ago. Sends his best wishes…. Was a changed man before he left, completely changed. I don’t know that much about it … but I do know one thing: the man with the green face appeared to him and told him he was to found a Jewish state in Brazil … and he told him that the Jews were the people chosen to create an international language that would gradually come to be used by all peoples as a means of communication and would bring them closer together … a modernised Hebrew, I assume, I don’t know. Overnight Sephardi was a changed man, had a mission, he said. Anyway, he seems to have hit the jackpot with his Zionist state, almost all the Jews in Holland have followed him … and now thousands of others are arriving from all sorts of places to emigrate to South America, the city’s teeming like an anthill.”
They were separated for a while by a group of caterwauling, hymn-singing women. When Pfeill had used the expression `teeming like an anthill’ Hauberrisser had immediately remembered the strange phenomenon he had seen on his way to the city.
“In the last weeks before he left, Sephardi spent a lot of time with a person called Lazarus Egyolk”, Neill went on. “I’ve got to know him myself - he’s an old Jew, a kind of prophet, in an almost permanent trance - but everything he prophesies comes true, every time! Just recently he predicted that Europe would suffer a terrible catastrophe to prepare for the coming of a new age. He said he is happy that he is going to be destroyed in it, because that means he can lead all the dead who cross over into the realm of abundance. As for the catastrophe, he’s probably not far wrong about that, you can see what’s going on here today. Amsterdam is expecting the flood. Humanity has gone mad, the railways stopped running long ago, or I would have come out to see you out inyourhermitage. Today the unrest seems to have reached its climax. There’s so much I would like to tell you … I wish to God there wasn’t this constant crush around us, you can hardly finish a sentence in peace … so much has happened tome too since we last met.”
“And Swammerdam? How is he?” Hauberrisser had to yell to be heard above a pack of flagellants shuffling along on their knees.
“He sent a messenger to me”, Neill screamed back, “to tell me to come and see him straightaway, and to go and fetch you too. Good that we met on the way. He’s worried about us, the messenger said, he thinks we will only be safe with him. He claims that his inner voice prophesied three things to him; one was that he will outlive St. Nicholas’ Church. He probably takes that as a sign that he will survive the coming catastrophe, and wants us to stay with him in order to keep us safe until the new age has come.”
Those were the last words Hauberrisser could understand. The air was shattered by a sudden, deafening roar, that started in the open square they were heading for and echoed across the roofs from skylight to skylight to the farthest comers of the city, growing louder and louder with shrill cries of “The New Jerusalem has appeared in the sky!” - “A miracle, a miracle!” - “God have mercy on our souls!”
He saw Pfeill’s lips moving, as if he was using every last ounce of his lung-power to scream something to him, but then he felt his feet lifted from the ground by the crowd, whose excitement had now reached fever pitch. It wasuseless to resist, he was swept along by the current into a large square where the people were so tightly packed together that his arms were pressed to his sides and he could hardly move his hands.
Everyone was staring upwards. High in the sky, the battle between those strange, twisting formations like gigantic winged fish, was still going on, but below them snow-capped mountains of cloud had formed, and there, in a valley illuminated by the slanting rays ofthe sun, was the mirage: an exotic, southern city with flat, white roofs and Moorish arches.
Through its clay-coloured streets strode men in flowing burnouses; so close and frighteningly distinct they were, that one could see their eyes move when they turned their heads to cast an indifferent glance, as it seemed, on the terrified throng in Amsterdam. Beyond the ramparts of this celestial city stretched a reddish desert, the edges of which merged into the clouds; a caravan of camels was making its spectral way through the shimmering air.
For a good hour this fats Morgana stood in the sky in all the splendour of its magic colours, then it gradually faded, leaving only one tall, slender minaret, that shone dazzling white for a while, as if it were made of glistening sugar, and then suddenly vanished in the mists.
Hauberrisser was carried inch by inch along the house-fronts by the sea of bodies, and it was late in the afternoon before he found the opportunity of escaping the press over a canal bridge.
It was completely impossible to reach Swammerdam’s house; apart from the many crowded streets, he would have had to cross the square again, so he decided to return to his lonely cottage and try again another day.
Soon he was back in the deathly hush of the polder. The lower sky had become an impenetrable, dusty mass. So deep was the solitude, that the hiss of the withered grass as it was crushed beneath his hurrying feet was like the singing of the blood in his own ears.
Behind him, the black shape of Amsterdam against the red of the setting sun looked like a huge lump of burning pitch.
There was not a breath of air and the ditches reflected the sunset in their glassy surface; only now and then the stillness was broken by a faint splash as a fish jumped.
As the twilight deepened, large, murky grey patches rose from the earth and flitted over the meadows like moving sheets; he saw that it was countless hordes of mice that had come out of their holes and were now scurrying all over each other, squeaking excitedly.
The more the darkness increased, the more uneasy the natural world seemed to become; yet still not a blade of grass moved. The water had turned peaty brown and occasionally small, round craters appeared, although not the slightest breeze had crossed the surface, or a plume of water would splash up, as if an invisible stone had been dropped in, and then immediately disappear without trace.
Hauberrisser had just caught sight of the bare poplar outside his cottage when, suddenly, whitish cylindrical shapes shot up into the sky from the ground before him, blocking his view of the tree.
Like silent ghosts, they came towards him, tearing up the grass where they went, leaving broad, black marks: whirlwinds travelling towards the city. They made not the slightest sound as they passed him, mute, treacherous ghosts of the atmosphere.
Bathed in sweat, Hauberrisser reached his cottage.
The gardener’s wife from the nearby cemetery who looked after him had put his dinner on the table, but in his overwrought state he could not touch it. Plagued by unease, he threw himself fully-clothed onto his bed and lay there, sleepless, awaiting what the coming day would bring.
The hours crept by unbearably slowly, the night seemed unending.
Finally the sun rose; the sky remained inky black, but around the horizon there was a vivid, sulphurous gleam, as if a dark bowl with glowing edges had descended over the earth.
There was an all-pervading, matt half-light; the poplar outside the window, the distant bushes and the towers of Amsterdam were faintly illuminated, as if by dim floodlights. Beneath them lay the plain like a huge, blind mirror.
Hauberrisser scanned the city with his binoculars; in the wan light it stood out from the shadowy background as if frozen in fear and expecting the death-blow at any moment.
A ringing of bells washed over the countryside in tremulous, breathless waves and then came to an abrupt halt; a dull roar filled the air and the poplar was bent groaning to the ground. Gusts of wind swept over the meadows like the crack of a whip, flattening the withered grass and tearing the sparse, low bushes up by the roots.
A few minutes later the whole landscape vanished in an immense dust-cloud, and when it reappeared it was scarcely recognisable: the ditches had been whipped into white foam, the windmills were transformed into blunt stumps squatting on the brown earth, as their torn-off sails whirled through the air high in the sky. The pauses between blasts became shorter and shorter, u
ntil eventually nothing could be heard but the constant roaring of the wind. Its fury redoubled by the second. The wiry poplar was bent at right angles a few feet above the ground; branches gone, it was little more than a smooth stem, fixed motionless in that position by the immense force of the mass of air rushing over it.
Only the apple tree stood still, as if protected by some unseen hand in a haven of stillness, not one single leaf moving.
A never-ending shower of missiles flew past the window: beams and stones, clods of earth and tangles of brushwood, lumps of brickwork, even complete walls.
Then suddenly the sky turned light grey, and the darkness
dissolved into a cold, silvery glitter.
Hauberrisser assumed the fury of the tornado was subsiding, then noticed to his horror that the bark of the poplar was being stripped off in fibrous scraps, which disappeared instantly. The next moment, before he could really grasp what was happening, the tall factory chimneys towering over the south-west part of the docks were snapped off at the roots and transformed into thin spears of white dust which the hurricane carried off at lightning speed. They were followed by one church tower after another. for a second they would appear as black shapes, whirled up in a vortex, the next they were lines on the horizon, then dots, then - nothing.
The vegetation torn up by the storm flew past the window at such a speed that soon all that could be seen through it was a pattern of horizontal lines. Even the graveyard must have been ripped open, for now tombstones, coffins, crosses and gravelamps flew past the house, never deviating, never rising, never falling, always horizontal, as if they were weightless.
Hauberrisser could hearthe cross beams in the roof groaning, every moment he expected it to be torn apart; he was about to nun downstairs to bolt the front door so that it would not be blown off its hinges but, with his hand on the knob of the bedroom door, he stopped, warned by an inner voice that if he opened it the draught would smash the windowpanes, allowing the storm that was sweeping past the front of the house to rush in and transform it into a maelstrom of rubble. It could only avoid destruction as long as the hill behind protected it from the full blast of the hurricane and the rooms remained shut off from each other, like cells in a honeycomb.
The air in the room had turned icy cold and thin, as if in a vacuum; a sheet of paper fluttered round the room, then pressed against the keyhole and stuck there, held fast by the suction.
Haubenisser went back to look out of the window. The gale was blowing the water out of the ditches so that it spattered through the air like fine rain; the meadows gleamed like smooth grey velvet and where the poplar had stood there was now a stump crowned by a flapping shock of splinters.
The roar of the wind was so constant, so deafening, that Hauberrisser began to think that all around was shrouded in a deathly hush. It was only when he went to nail back the trembling shutters, so that they would not be blown against the glass, and found he could not hear the hammering, that he realised how great the din outside must be.
For a long time he did not dare look out again, for fear that he might see that St. Nicholas’ had been blown away, and with it the nearby house on the Zeedijk harbouring Swammerdam and Pfeill; when he did risk a tentative glance, he saw it still towering up undamaged, but it was an island in a sea of rubble: the rest of the frieze of spires, roofs and gables had been almost completely flattened.
`How many cities are there left standing in Europe?’ he wondered with a shudder. `The whole of Amsterdam has been ground to dust like crumbling rock; nothing left of a rotten civilisation but a scatter of rubbish.’ He was gripped with awe as he suddenly comprehended the magnitude of the cataclysm. His experiences the previous day, his exhaustion and the sudden eruption of the stoma had kept him in a state of constant numbness, from which he only now awoke to clear consciousness.
He clutched his forehead. ‘Have I been sleeping?’
His glance fell on the apple tree: as if by a miracle, the splen- dourof its blossom was completely untouched. He remembered that yesterday he had buried the roll of papers by its roots; it seemed as if an eternity had passed since then. Had he not written in them that he had the ability to leave his body? Then why had he not done so - yesterday, through the night or this morning, when the storm had broken?
Why did he not do it now?
For a brief second, he managed it. He saw his body as a foreign, shadowy creature leaning at the window, but in spite of the devastation, the world outside was no longer the dead, ghostly landscape of his previous experiences: a new earth was spread out before him, quivering with life, spring hovered on the air, full of glory, like a visible manifestation of the future, his breast trembled with the presentiment of nameless raptures; the world around seemed to be a vision that was gradually taking on lasting clarity - and the apple tree in blossom, was that not Chidher, the `ever green tree’?
The next moment Hauberrisser was back in his body gazing out on the howling storm, but he knew now that the picture of destruction concealed within it the promise of the new land that he had just seen with the eyes of his soul.
His heart beat in wild, joyous anticipation, he felt that he was on the threshold of the last, highest awakening, that the phoenix within him was stretching its wings for its flight into the ether. His sense of the approach of an event far beyond any earthly experience was so strong, that he almost choked with the intensity of emotion; it was almost the same as in the park in Hilversum, when he had kissed Eva, the same gust of icy air from the wings of the Angel of Death, but now it was permeated with the fragrance of flowers, like a presentiment of the approach of life imperishable. He heard the words of Chidher, “For Eva’s sake I will give you never-ending love”, as if it was the blossoming apple tree that was calling them to him.
He thought of the countless dead who lay beneath the ruins ofthe destroyed city onthehorizon, buthe could not feel sorrow. ‘They will rise again, if in a different form, until they find the last, the highest form, that of the `awakened man’ who will die no more. Nature, too, is ever renewed, like the phoenix.’
He was suddenly gripped by an emotion so powerful, that he felt he must choke; was that not Eva standing close beside him? He had felt a breath on his cheek, and whose heart was beating so close to his, if not hers?
He felt new senses ripening within him to reveal the invisible realm that permeates our earthly world. Any second the last veil that kept it from his eyes might fall.
“Give me a sign that you are near, Eva”, he quietly implored. “Let my faith that you will come to me not be disappointed.”
“It would be a poor love that could not overcome time and space”, he heard her voice whisper, and his scalp tingled at the intensity ofhis emotion. “Here in this room I recovered from the torments of the earth and here I am waiting with you until the hour of your awakening has come.”
A quiet, peaceful calm settled over him. He looked around; the whole room was filled with the same joyful, patient expec tancy, like the half-stifled call of spring; each object seemed about to undergo the miracle of a transformation beyond comprehension.
His heart beat audibly.
The room, the walls, the objects around him were, he sensed, only delusory, external forms for his earthly eyes, projecting into the world of bodies like shadows from an invisible realm; any minute the door might open behind which lay the land ofthe immortals.
He tried to imagine what it would be like when his spiritual senses were awakened. `Will Eva be with me? Will I go to her and see her and talk to her? Will it be just as beings of this earth meet each other? Or will we become formless, colours or sounds that blend together? Will we be surrounded by objects, as we are here, will we be rays of light, soaring through the infinite cosmos, or will the material world be transformed and ourselves transformed along with it?’ He surmised that, although it would be completely new and something he could not at the moment grasp, it would also be a quite natural process, perhaps not unlike the formation of the whirlwi
nds which he had seen yesterday arise from nothing - from thin air - and take on shapes perceptible to all the senses of the body; yet he still had no clear idea of what it involved.
He was quivering with the presentiment of such indescribable rapture that he knew that the reality of the miraculous experience awaiting him would far surpass anything he could imagine.
The hours slipped by.
It seemed to be midday: high in the sky a gleaming disc hung in the haze.
Was the storm still raging?
Hauberrisser listened.
There was nothing by which he might tell: the ditches were empty, blown away; there was no water, no hint of any movement in them; no bushes as far as the eye could see; the grass flattened; not a single cloud crossing the sky - nothing but empty space.
He took the hammer and dropped it, heard it hit the floor with a crash and concluded that it was quiet outside.
Through his binoculars he could see that the city was still suffering the fury of the cyclone; huge blocks of stone were thrown up into the air, waterspouts appeared from the harbour, collapsed, towered up again and danced out towards the open sea.
And there! Was it a delusion? Were not the twin towers of St. Nicholas’ swaying?
One collapsed suddenly; the other whirled up into the air and exploded like a rocket; for a moment the huge bell hovered free between heaven and earth. Then it plunged silently to the ground. Hauberrisser’s heart stopped still. Swammerdam! Pfeill!
No, no, no, nothing could have happened to them. `Chidher, the eternal tree of mankind, will shield them with his branches.’ Had Swammerdam not prophesied he would outlive the church?
And were there not islands, like the blossoming apple tree there in its patch of green grass, where life was kept safe from destruction and preserved for the coming age?
Only now did the thunder from the crash of the bell reach the house. The walls vibrated under the impact of the airwaves on one single, terrifying note, a note so piercing that Hauberrisser felt as if the bones in his body had shattered like glass; for a brief moment he felt consciousness fade.
The Green Face Page 23
