The Green Face (2 page)

A dark-skinned gentleman, close-shaven, purple jowled and
hair glistening with oil, was sitting in an armchair in the corner,
one foot in an ornately-patterned patent leather shoe resting on
his knee. The characteristically Balkan features looked up from
the paper they were immersed in and shot the foreigner a razorsharp glance of appraisal. At the same time a window, notunlike
those in railway carriages, clattered down in the head-high
partition separating the customers from the interior of the shop,
and in the opening there appeared the upper portion of a young
lady in a low-cut dress with a blond page-boy hairstyle and
provocative light-blue eyes.

It took her no time at all to realise from his accent and halting
Dutch - “Buy, some thing, not matter what” - that she was
dealing with an Austrian, a fellow-countryman, and she spoke
in German as she began her explanation of a conjuring trick
involving three corks which she had immediately produced. As
she did so she brought the whole range of a practised feminine
charm into play, from the breasts deliberately displayed to the
male, to the discreet, almost telepathic scent given off by her
skin which she intensified by occasionally lifting her arm to
send a supplementary blast from the armpit.

“You see the three corks here, sir? I put one and then a second
in my right hand, which I close. So. The third I put” - she smiled
and blushed - “into my pocket. How many are there in my
hand?”

“Two.”

“No. Three.”

Three it was.

“The trick is called `The Flying Corks’ and only costs two
guilders, sir.”

“Fine. Show me how the trick is done.”

“Could I ask for the money first, please? It’s our normal
practice. “

The foreigner handed over two guilders and was treated to a
demonstration of the trick, which was merely a matter of sleight
of hand, plus several further waves of feminine scent and, finally, given four corks, which he pocketed with admiration for
the commercial acumen of the firm of Chidher Green and the
absolute conviction that he would never be able to do the trick
himself.

“Here you see three iron curtain rings, sir”, the young girl
began again. “I put the first…” - her demonstration was interrupted by loud drunken bawling from the street mixed with
shrill whistling; at the same time the shop door was violently
opened and then flung to with a crash.

The foreigner started and, turning round, saw a figure whose
bizarre attire astonished him.

It was a gigantic Zulu with thick lips and a dark, curly beard,
dressed only in a check raincoat and a red ring around his neck. His hair dripped with mutton-fat and had been brushed up in an
extravagant style, so that he looked as if he was carrying an
ebony bowl on top of his head.

In his hand he held a spear.

Immediately the Balkan gentleman leapt up out of his armchair, gave the savage a deep bow and insisted on taking the
spear from him and putting it in an umbrella-stand. Then, pulling aside a curtain with an obsequious gesture, he ushered him
into an adjoining room with many polite How-goes-it-sir’s and
If-you-please-Mijnheer’s.

“Perhaps you, too, would like to come in and sit down for a
while?“The young lady turned back to the foreigner and opened
the door in the partition. “At least until the crowd has quietened
down a little.” She hurried to the glass door and, with a flood of
Dutch oaths - “Stik, verreck, god verdomme, val dood, steek de
moord” - pushed a burly fellow, who was standing in the doorway spitting in a broad arc into the shop, out into the street and
bolted the door.

The interior, which the foreignerhad entered meanwhile, was
divided into sections by cupboards and bead curtains, with
chairs and stools in the corners and a round table in the middle
at which two portly old gentlemen, to all appearances merchants
from Hamburg or Holland, were sitting by the light of an oriental lamp staring intently into peepshows, small cinematographic machines, by the humming sound that came from them.

Through a passage between shelves filled with goods one
could see into a small office with windows of frosted glass
giving onto the side street. There an old Jew, looking like an Old
Testament prophet with his caftan, long white beard and ringlets, a round silk cap on his head and his face hidden in the
shadows, was standing motionless at a high desk making entries
in a ledger.

“Tell me, Fraulein, who was that strange negro just now?”
asked the foreigner when the shop assistant returned to continue
her demonstration of a trick with the three curtain rings.

“Him? Oh, he goes by the name of Mister Usibepu. He’s an
artiste, one of the troupe of Zulus that’s appearing at the Carr
Circus just now. A fine figure of a man”, she added, her eyes shining. “In his own country he’s a doctor of medicine.”

“Oh, I see, a medicine man.”

“Yes, a medicine man. And he’s over here to learn from us,
so that when he returns home he will be able to impress his
fellow-countrymen and maybe win himself a throne. Professor
Arpad Zitter from Bratislava, Professor of Pneumatism, is
teaching him at the moment”-with two fingers she pushed apart
a slit in the curtain and let the foreigner look into a closet that
was papered with playing cards.

With two daggers sticking crosswise through his throat, so
that the points protruded at the back, and a blood-stained axe
deep in a gaping wound in his head, the Balkan gentleman was
just swallowing an egg whole, which he proceeded to take out
of the ear of the astonished Zulu, who, having taken off his coat,
was dressed only in a leopardskin.

The foreigner would have liked to have seen more, but the girl
quickly let the curtain fall when the Professor shot her a reproachful glance. A shrill ringing sent her rushing to the telephone.

`Strange how colourful life can be if you take the trouble to
look at it from close to and turn your back on the so-called
important things, which only bring vexation and suffering’, the
foreigner mused to himself. From a shelf with all sorts of cheap
toys he took down a little open box and gave it an absent-minded
sniff. It was full of tiny carved cows and trees, whose foliage
was made of green-painted wood shavings.

For a moment he was overwhelmed by the evocative smell
of resin and paint-Christmas! Childhood! Waiting breathlessly
at a keyhole, sitting on a wobbly chair upholstered in red cotton
rep with a greasy stain on it; the Pomeranian - Durudelbutt, yes,
that was his name - was under the sofa growling and bit the
mechanical sentry in the leg and then came crawling along to
him, one eye half-closed and somewhat annoyed: the spring of
the clockwork motor had come loose and smacked him in the
face; the crunch of pine needles and the long drips of wax on the
red candles burning on the tree …

There is nothing that can revive the past so quickly as the
smell of paint on wooden Nuremberg toys. The foreigner shook himself free from the spell. ‘Nothing good comes from memory: Life starts sweetly enough, then suddenly one day it is
looking at you over a headmaster’s spectacles and it ends up as
a gargoyle dripping with blood … No, no, I refuse to be drawn
back.’ He turned to the revolving bookcase next to him.
‘Nothing but books with gilt edging?’ With a shake of the head
he deciphered the strange titles on the spines, not at all appropriate to the surroundings: Leidinger G. History of the Bonn
University Choral Union, Aken F. An Outline of the Study of
Tense and Mood in Greek, Neunauge R.W. The Treatment of
Haemorrhoids in Classical Antiquity - ‘Well, at least there
seems to be nothing on politics’ - and he took out Aalke Pott On
the Growing Popularity of Cod Liver Oil, vol 3 and leafed
through it.

The poor paper and wretched print were a bewildering contrast to the expensive binding. `I must be mistaken? It doesn’t
look like a hymn to rancid oil?’ The foreigner found the title
page and was amused to read:

Sodom and Gomorrha Series
A Collection for the Discerning Bachelor

(Jubilee Edition)

Confessions of a Depraved Schoolgirl

Second part of the celebrated work The Purple Snail

‘Really, isn’t that just the twentieth century in a nutshell: all
scientific mumbo-jumbo on the outside and inside: money and
sex’, muttered the foreigner to himself in a gratified tone and
then laughed out loud.

One of the two stout businessmen (not the Dutchman, he was
unmoved) looked up apprehensively and, muttering a few
embarrassed words about `marvellous views of historic cities’,
tried to make his escape. He was endeavouring to bring his facial expression, which the visual delights he had just enjoyed had
given a somewhat swinish look, back under control, and resume
the demeanour of the solid businessman with nothing on his
mind but the blameless pleasures of double-entry bookkeeping.
But the demon who leads the sober-minded astray had not finished with him. It was just an unfortunate little accident, a
chance occurrence, but it laid bare the soul of the respectable
member of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce and trumpeted
abroad the dubious nature of the establishment he had allowed
himself to be enticed into.

The worthy merchant was in such a hurry to put his coat on
that he knocked against the pendulum of a large clock hanging
on the wall, setting it in motion. Immediately the door, decorated with scenes of family life, flew open and instead of the
expected cuckoo there appeared a scantily dressed woman with
an extremely saucy expression on her wax face. As the chimes
solemnly struck twelve she sang in a husky voice:

“John Cooper was boring

A great piece of timber.

He bored and he bored

But his tool was too limber -

Limber, limber, limber -” it suddenly repeated, changing to
a croaking bass. Either the demon had relented or a hair was
stuck in the gramophone mechanism.

Determined no longer to suffer the teasing of the impudent
sprite, the captain of industry squawked, “Disgusting!” and
fled.

Although he had come across the moral strictness of the
Northern races before, the foreigner still found it difficult to
explain the extreme embarrassment of the old gentleman until
it began to dawn on him that he must have met him somewhere
before and had probably been introduced to him in rather different company. A fleeting memory of an elderly lady with sad,
delicate features and a beautiful young girl seemed to confirm
his suspicion, but he could bring neither name nor place back to
mind.

There was no help from the face of the Dutchman who stood
up now, looked him over contemptuously from head to toe with his cold, watery blue eyes and then waddled slowly out. That
cocksure, brutal face was completely unknown to him.

The assistant was still on the telephone. To go by her answers,
it must be a large order for a stag night.

‘I could go now, the foreigner thought to himself; `what am
I waiting for?’

He suddenly felt weary, yawned and collapsed in an armchair. A thought wormed its way into his mind, `With all the
mad things destiny leaves lying around, it’s a surprise your head
doesn’t sometimes explode, or something like that! And why
should you feel sick in the pit of your stomach when your eyes
devour something ugly?! What has that to do with the digestive
system, for God’s sake? - No, it’s not the ugliness that does it,
he span out the thread of his thought, `you can get a sudden
attack of nausea by staying too long in an art gallery as well. It
must be some kind of illness - museumitis - unknown to medical science. Or could it be the air of death surrounding all things
man-made, whether beautiful or ugly? There must be something
in it, I cannot remember ever having been made to feel sick by
the sight of even the most desolate landscape. Everything that
bears the sign `man-made’ has ataste of tinned food: it gives you
scurvy.’ He gave an involuntary laugh at the sudden memory of
a rather baroque reflection of his friend, Baron Pfeill, who had
invited him that afternoon to the cafes `The Gilded Turk’, and
had a deep hatred of anything to do with perspective in painting:
“The Fall did not begin with eating the apple, that is base
superstition. It was hanging pictures in houses that did it! Scarcely has the plasterer made the wall sheer and smooth than the
Devil appears in the guise of an “artist” and paints you a “hole”
in it with a view into the distance. From there it’s only one step
to the bottomless pit where you’re hanging in full fish and soup
on the dining-room wall yourself next to Isidor the Handsome
or some other crowned idiot with a pear-shaped head and a
Cro-Magnon jaw, watching yourself eat.” - `Well, yes’, the
foreigner continued his musing, `you have to be able to laugh
at anything and everything. The statues of the Buddha all smile,
and not without reason, whilst the Christian saints are all bathed
in tears. Ifpeople would smile more often, there would probably be fewer wars. I’ve been wandering round Amsterdam for three
weeks now, deliberately ignoring all the street names, never
asking what this or that building is, where this or that ship is
coming from or heading for, I’ve not read any newspapers:
there’s no point in having the same thing served up as the latest
news as has been going on for donkey’s years; I’m living in a
house where every single object is foreign to me - I’ll soon be
the only ‘private’ person left that I know; whenever I come
across something new I no longer ask what it does, nothing does
anything any more, everything has something done to it! And
why am I doing all this? Because I am fed up with playing my
part in the old game of civilisation: first peace to prepare for war
and then war to win back peace etc., etc.; because I want to see
a fresh, unknown world, I want a new sense of wonder such as
must strike an infant if he were to become a grown man overnight; because I want to be a full-stop rather than eternally a
comma in the punctuation of time. I’d quite happily relinquish
the `tradition’ of my ancestors which subjected them to the state;
I want to learn to see old forms with new eyes rather than, as up
to now, seeing new forms with old eyes - perhaps it will give
them eternal youth! I have started well; now all I have to do is
to learn to smile at everything instead of gawping in astonishment.’