The Green Face (27 page)

No one can say whether, after such a long spiritual journey,
you will be granted miraculous powers, such as the prophets of
antiquity possessed, or whether you will be allowed to enter into
eternal peace.

Such powers are the free gift of those who guard the keys to
these mysteries. If they become yours to use, then it is only for
the sake of humanity, which stands in need of such signs.

Our path leads finally to the journey; if you reach that stage,
then you are worthy to receive that gift. Will it be granted you?
I do not know.

But however that might be, you will have become a phoenix;
it is in your power to enforce that.

Before I take my leave of you, there is one more thing you
should learn: the signs by which you shall know, when the time
of the ‘great equinox’ is come, whether you have been called to
receive the gift of miraculous powers, or not.

One ofthose who guard the keys to the mysteries of magic has
remained on earth, to seek and gather together the elect. He
cannot die, just as the legend surrounding him cannot die.

Some say he is the ‘Wandering Jew’; others call him Elijah;
the gnostics maintain he is John the Evangelist; but each one
who claims to have seen him, gives a different description of his appearance. Do not let yourself be disconcerted if, in the burgeoning days of the future, you should meet some who talk of
him in this manner. It is only natural that each person should see
him differently. A being such as he, who has transformed his
body into spirit, cannot be bound to a single fixed form.

One example will suffice to show you that his form and his
face can only be images, ghostly reflections of his true essence,
so to speak.

Let us assume he appears to you as being of a green colour.
Although you can see it, green is not a real colour, it arises from
a mixture of blue and yellow; if you thoroughly combine blue
and yellow, you will get green.

Every painter knows that; but few people realise that the
world we live in stands likewise under the sign of green and thus
does not reveal its true nature, namely blue and yellow.

From this example you can see that if he should appear to you
as aman with a green face, his true countenance has stillnotbeen
made manifest.

But if you should see him in his true form, as a geometrical
sign, as a seal in the sky which only you and no other can see,
then know: you have been called to work miracles.

I met him in physical form, as a man, and it was allowed me
to thrust my hand into his side.

His name was…”

Hauberrisser guessed the name. It was on the slip ofpaperhe
always carried with him. It was the name that constantly leapt
out at him:

Chidher Green.

A breath of decay in the air, the stifling heat of dying days,
the chill of misty nights; spider webs like patches of mould on
the rotting grass in the early morning light; the purplish-brown
clods of earth around dull, cold puddles that keep out of the way
of the sun; straw-coloured flowers that lack the strength to raise
their faces towards the glassy sky; tumbling butterflies with
ragged wings that have lost their bloom; the harsh rustle of
brittle-stemmed leaves in the avenues of the city …

Like a fading beauty trying to hide her age beneath a welter
of bright cosmetics, nature was flaunting her autumn colours.

Amsterdam had long forgotten the name Eva van Druysen.
Baron Pfeill assumed she was dead; Sephardi mourned for her.
Hauberrisser alone kept her image alive; but he did not talk of
her when his friends or Swammerdam occasionally came to
visit him. He did not breathe a word of the cocoon of hope he
was wrapping himself up in; he still believed he would find her,
and the belief grew stronger with every day, but he felt that to
mention it might tear a delicate web. To Swammerdam alone he
hinted at this feeling, though not with words.

Since he had finished reading the roll of papers a transformation had taken place within him which he hardly comprehended himself. First of all he had practised sitting still, whenever it had occurred to him, for an hour, sometimes more,
sometimes less; he had approached this exercise partly out of
curiosity, and partly with the scepticism of one whose heart bore
the legend, `Nothing will come of it’, a motto which almost
guarantees failure.

After a week the exercise had been reduced to fifteen minutes
each morning; but now he was putting all his effort into it,
performing it for its own sake and not with the exhausting and
ever-disappointed feeling that a miracle might after all happen.

Soon it had become indispensable to him, like a refreshing
bath that he looked forward to every evening when he went to
bed. By day he was for a long time often driven to deepest
despair by the sudden thought that he had lost Eva, at the same
time recoiling inhorrorfrom the idea that he should combat such painful reflections by means of magic, that he should run away,
as it were, from the anguish of the memory of Eva; such an
escape from the pain seemed selfish, a denial of love, a lie, but
one day, when his sorrow became too much for him and he
thought he was about to commit suicide, he did try it.

Following the instructions, he had sat upright, trying to force
himself into a state of higher wakefulness, in order to escape
from his bitter thoughts at least for a few moments; strangely
enough, and quite contrary to his expectations, he succeeded at
the very first try. Before the attempt, he had assumed that if he
did manage to reach the state of higher wakefulness he would
leave it with regret, and return to life with his pain redoubled.
Nothing of the kind happened. On the contrary, he was filled
with an incomprehensible feeling ofcertainty that Eva was alive
and threatened by no danger whatsoever, however much he
deliberately encouraged his doubts, they could not penetrate his
new-found confidence.

Before, the thought of Eva had come to him a hundred times
a day, and each time it had been like the lash of a red-hot whip;
now it seemed like a joyful message that, far away, Eva was
thinking of him and sending a greeting. What had previously
been a cause of anguish had been suddenly transformed into a
source of joy.

Thus the exercise had created a refuge within him, to which
he could withdraw at any time, to find new assurance and that
mysterious growth, which will ever be an empty word to those
who do notknow it from experience, however often they are told
about it.

Before he had experienced this new state, he had imagined
that if he could ever leave his sorrow for Eva behind, it would
mean his wounded soul would heal over all the more quickly,
in an accelerated demonstration of the saying that time is a great
healer. He had resisted this with every fibre in his body, as do
all those who clearly recognise that the passing of sorrow at the
death of the beloved means that the image, which they do not
want to lose, will also fade.

But there was a small, flower-strewn path between these two
precipices, whose existence he had not suspected, but which now opened up before him. Eva’s image had not, as he had
feared it might, sunk without trace in the mists of time; no, only
the pain had disappeared, and her tear-stained image had been
replaced by the risen Eva herself, and at moments of inner
repose he could feel her presence as clearly as if she were standing in front of him.

As he withdrew more and more from the outside world, there
were times when he was overcome with such a deep happiness
as he would never have thought possible. Insight followed
insight as he came to see more and more clearly that there were
true miracles of inner experience compared with which the
events of physical existence not only appeared to be, as he had
always thought, but actually were as light to shade.

The image of the phoenix as the eagle of eternal renewal
impressed itself on him more and more, revealed daily ever new
significance and taught him to appreciate the unsuspected
wealth of difference between living and dead symbols. Everything that he sought seemed to be contained within this inexhaustible symbol. It explained things that puzzled him, like an
omniscient being whom he only had to ask to learn the truth.

In all his efforts to control the comings and goings of his
thoughts he had noticed that, although he sometimes had great
success, when he assumed he knew precisely how it had been
done, he always found the next day he had no memory of it left
whatsoever. It was as if it had been erased from his mind, and
he appeared to have to start from the very beginning again and
think up a new method.

‘The sleep of the body has robbed me of the fruit of my
efforts’, he told himself and decided to counter it by not going
to sleep for as long as possible, until one morning he was granted
the insight that this strange disappearance from his memory was
nothing other than the ‘burning to ashes’ from which, again and
again, the phoenix arose rejuvenated; he realised that it was a
habit from his transient, earthly existence to create methods and
try to remember them, that, as Pfeill had said in Hilversum, the
valuable thing was not the completed painting, but the ability to
paint.

Since he had achieved this insight, mastering his thoughts became a source of constant delight to him, instead of an
exhausting struggle, and, without noticing, he climbed from
step to step until suddenly he realised to his astonishment that
he already possessed the key to a mastery of which he had never
even dreamed. “It is as if until now thoughts had buzzed around
me like a swarm of bees, which took their nourishment from
me”, was how he had explained it to Swammerdam, with whom
he still used to discuss his inner experiences. “Now I can send
them out by my will and they return to me laden with honey -
with insights. They used to plunder me, now they enrich me.”

By chance, a week later he came across a similar spiritual
process described in the roll of papers in almost the same words,
and realised, to his joy, that he had taken the right path of
development without having to be instructed.

The pages on which it was written had previously been stuck
together by damp and mould; they had separated due to the heat
from the sun at the window by which they were kept.

He felt that something similar had happened to his thoughts.

In the years just before and during the war he had read much
about so-called mysticism and, instinctively, everything connected with it had evoked the word `confused’, for everything
he read about it was characterised by vagueness and sounded
like the delirium of an opium-eater. His judgment had not been
wrong, because what commonly went under the name of mysticism was really nothing but groping around in the fog; but now
he realised that there was a true mystical state - difficult to
discover and even more difficult to attain - which was not only
the equal of everyday experience, but in fact far exceeded it in
vividness.

There was nothing here that reminded him of the suspicious
raptures of the ecstatic `mystics’; there was no humble whining
for a selfish `salvation’ which, to appear all the more glorious,
needed to be seen against the bloody background of all the sinners condemned to the eternal torments of hell; and the glutted
complacency of the bestial masses, who equated a ripe belch
with a firm grip on reality, had also vanished like an unpleasant
dream.

Hauberrisser had switched off the light and was sitting at his
desk waiting, waiting through the darkness.

Night covered the window like a dark, heavy cloth.

He felt that Eva was by him, but he could not see her.

When he closed his eyes, colours billowed like clouds behind
his lids, dissolved and then formed again. He had learnt from his
experiences that they were the material from which he could
form pictures, if he wanted, pictures which at first seemed stiff
and lifeless but then, as if some mysterious force had breathed
life into them, took on an independent existence, as if they were
beings like himself.

A few days ago he had managed by this method to bring Eva’s
face to life, and he had thought he must be on the right path to
establishing a new kind of spiritual communication with her,
but then he recalled the passage in the roll of papers about the
hallucinations of the witches and realised that here began the
boundless realm of ghosts and that once he had entered it he
would never find his way back again.

The more this power of giving shape to his innermost,
unconscious wishes grew, the greater, he felt, must be the danger of losing himself on a path from which there was no return.

It was with a feeling of both horror and ardent longing that he
thought back to those minutes when he had succeeded in calling
up the spectre of Eva. At first it had been grey and shadowy, then
it had slowly taken on colour and life, until it stood before him,
as clear as if it were made of flesh and blood. Even now he could
still feel the icy shudder that had run through his body as, driven
on by some magic instinct, he risked trying to make the vision
respond to hearing and touch as well.