The Green Face (30 page)

Sometimes I feel there is someone next to me, immense and
all-powerful; or I know he is holding his hand over this or that
person; I cannot see him, nor can I hear him, but I know that he
is there.

My hope is not that I shall ever see him; my hope is in him.

I know that a time of terrible devastation is at hand that will
be ushered in by a storm, the like of which the world has never
known. I care not whether I shall see that time or not, but I am
glad that it will come!” Both Pfeill and Sephardi felt a shiver at
the cold, calm way Swammenlam spoke those words. “This
morning, you asked me where I thought Eva could have been
hidden all this time. That I did not know - how could I? - but
I knew that she would come, and she has come.

And I know, just as surely as I know that I am standing here,
that she is not dead. His hand is over her!”

“But she is in a coffin, in the church!”

“But tomorrow she will be buried!” Exclaimed Pfeill and
Sephardi together.

“Even if she were to be buried a thousand times over, even
if I were to hold her skull in my hand - I know that she has not
died”

“Mad. Mad!” said Pfeill to Sephardi after Swammerdam had
left.

The colours of the high, arched windows of St. Nicholas’
glowed out into the misty night with a dull gleam, as if a candle
had been lit inside the church. The heavy, tired tread of the
policeman, who, since the violent incidents on the Zeedijk, had
been assigned to patrol the infamous harbour area, echoed along
the churchyard wall. Unseen in its shadow, Usibepu waited
motionless until he had passed, then climbed over the gate,
pulled himself up by a tree onto the sacristy roof, which projected out like a small chapel, cautiously opened the round
skylight and dropped to the floor like a cat.

On a silver catafalque in the centreof the nave Eva’s body was bedded on a mound of white roses, her hands folded over her
breast, her eyes closed, with a smile on her rigid features. At the
head and either side of the coffin red and gold candles as thick
as a man’s arm kept the deathwatch with a steady flame.

In a recess in the wall hung the picture of a black Madonna
with the child on her ann and in front of it, suspended from the
roof by a glittering wire, was the blood-red glow of the sanctuary lamp in a glass bowl like a ruby heart. Its dull light illuminated pale hands and feet made of wax behind curving bars;
a pair of crutches nearby and amessage, `Mary came to my aid’;
painted wooden statues of Popes on stone pedestals with white
tiaras on their heads, their hands raised in blessing; columns of
fluted marble disappearing into the darkness - and the Zulu
slipping noiselessly from the shadow of one column to the next,
eyes wide in astonishment at all the strange objects around; he
nodded grimly to himself when he saw the wax limbs, assuming
they came from defeated enemies, peeped through the chinks in
the confessionals and suspiciously tapped the huge figures of
the saints, to make sure they were not alive.

When he was certain he was alone, he crept on tiptoe to where
the body was and stood there for a long time, looking at it sadly.
Dazed by her beauty, he stretched out his hand and touched her
soft blond hair, then pulled it back, as if afraid he might disturb
her sleep.

Why had she been so terrified of him, that summer’s night on
the Zeedijk? He could not understand it. Until then any woman,
black or white, that he had desired, had been proud to belong to
him, even Antje, the waitress in the tavern, and she was white
and had yellow hair. He had never had to resort to his Vidoo
spells, they had all come of their own accord and flung themselves into his arms. One alone had not: She. She alone he had
not been able to possess, she for whom he would willingly have
given all the money for which he had strangled the old man with
the gold paper crown.

Night after night since he had fled from the sailors he had
wandered through the streets looking for her, but in vain; none
of the countless women, who sought men in the darkness, could
tell him where she was.

He put his hands over his eyes. Memories rushed past as in
a wild dream: the torrid savannahs of his homeland; the English
trader who had lured him to Cape Town with the promise of
making him King of Zululand; the floating house that had
brought him to Amsterdam; the circus troupe of wretched
Nubian slaves, with whom he had to perform war dances every
night for money which kept being taken away from him; the
stone city where his heart had withered so far from home and
where no-one understood his language.

With gentle fingers he stroked the dead woman’s arm, and an
expression of boundless desolation appeared on his face; she did
not know that forher sake he had lost his God. To make her come
to him, he had called the dreadful souquiant, the snake-idol with
the human face; in doing so he had risked - and lost-the power
to walk over red-hot stones.

Dismissed from the circus and moneyless, he was to have
been sent back to Africa, to return as a beggar instead of as a
king! He had leapt from the ship into the water and swum back
to land; by day he had hidden in barges carrying fruit and by
night prowled around the Zeedijk, looking for her, her whom he
loved more than the savannahs of home, more than his black
wives, more than the sun in the sky, more than anything.

Once, only once, since then the angry snake-god had appeared to him; in his sleep it had given him the cruel order to call
Eva to the house of a rival. He was only allowed to see her again
here in the church, when she was dead.

Full of grief, he let his eyes wander round the gloomy building: a man with a crown of thorns, nailed to a cross with iron
nails through his hands and feet? A dove with green twigs in its
beak? An old man with a large golden sphere in one hand? A
young man pierced by arrows? Strange white gods; he did not
know their secret names, by which to call them.

And yet, they must be able to work magic and bring the dead
woman back to life. Who else gave Mister Arpad Zitter the
power to push daggers through his throat, to swallow eggs and
make them reappear?

He felt one last ray of hope when he saw the Madonna in the
alcove. She must be a goddess, for she wore a golden diadem in her hair, she was black, perhaps she could understand his language?

He squatted down before the picture and held his breath until
he could hear in his ears the wailing of his executed foes, who
had to await his arrival as slaves at the gates of the life beyond;
then with a gurgle he swallowed his tongue, so that he could
cross over into the realm where men can speak with the invisible
ones: Nothing. Nothing but deep, deep blackness instead of the
pale, green glow he was accustomed to see; he could not find the
way to the foreign goddess.

Slowly, sadly he returned to the bier, huddled down at the foot
of the catafalque and started the burial song of the Zulus, a wild,
awful liturgy consisting of barbaric, moaning grunts answered
by a breathless muttering, like the clatter of antelopes in flight,
interrupted by the harsh screeching of a hawk, hoarse yelps of
despair and a melancholy keening, which seemed to lose itself
in distant forests, then reappear in a dull sobbing and turn into
the long-drawn-out howling of a dog that has lost its master,
before it finally died away.

Then he stood up, reached inside his shirt and brought out a
small, white chain made of the vertebrae of kings’ wives that he
had strangled: the symbol of his status as King of the Zulus,
which grants immortality to anyone who takes it to the grave
with them. He twisted it, like a gruesome rosary, round the dead
woman’s hands, which had been folded together in prayer.

It was themostprecious thing he possessed on earth, but what
was immortality to him now? He was homeless, here and on the
other side; Eva could not enter the paradise of the black people,
nor he the paradise of the whites.

A slight noise startled him.

He tensed, like a predator about to strike.

Nothing.

It must have been a rustling from the wreaths as the foliage
withered.

Then his eye noticed the candle at the head of the bier, and he
saw the flame flicker and then lean to one side, as if struck by
a current of air - someone must have come into the church!

In a single movement he was in the shadow of the pillar, looking towards the sacristy to see if the door was opening:
nothing!

When he looked back towards the body, he saw a high, stone
seat had replaced the flickering candle. On it throned an Egyptian god, slim, taller than a man, motionless and naked apart
from a red and blue cloth about his loins, holding the crook and
scourge in his hands and with the feather crown on his head: the
Judge of the Dead. On a chain around his neck hung a golden
tablet. Facing him at the foot of the coffin was a brown man with
the head of an ibis, holding in his right hand the green ankh, the
T-shaped cross with a loop at the top, the symbol of eternal life.
On either side of the bier were two further figures, one with the
head of a sparrowhawk, the other with the head of a jackal.

The Zulu realised that they had come to pronounce judgment
on the dead woman.

Wearing a close-fitting dress and a vulture-head cap, the
Goddess of Truth approached down the central isle, went up to
Eva, who sat up stiffly, took her heart out of her breast and laid
it on a balance. The man with the jackal’s head came up and
threw a tiny bronze statuette into the other pan.

The sparrowhawk checked the weight.

The pan with Eva’s heart in sank down low.

The man with the ibis head silently wrote on a wax tablet.

Then the Judge of the Dead spoke:

“She has been weighed and not found wanting; devout
was her life on earth and heedful of the Lord of the Gods,
therefore she has reached the land of truth and justification.

She will wake as a living god and shine in the choir of the
gods which are in heaven, for she is of our stock.

Thus it is written in the Book of the Hidden Abode.”

He sank into the ground.

Eva, her eyes closed, stepped down from the bier. Placed
between the two gods, she silently followed the man with the
head of a sparrowhawk through the walls of the church. All three
disappeared.

Then the candles changed into brown figures with flames
blazing up over their heads who lifted the lid onto the empty
coffin.

A rasping sound echoed through the church as the screws bit
into the wood.

Holland had been visited by an icy, sombre winter, which had
cast its white shroud over the plains and then slowly, very
slowly receded. But still spring did not come: it was as if the
earth were never going to wake again; May came with a pallid
yellow light, and went again, and still there was no new growth
in the meadows.

The trees were withered and bare, without buds and frozen to
their roots. Everywhere was black, dead earth, the grass brown
and sere, and the air unnaturally calm; the sea was as motionless
as if it were glass, for months there had been not a drop of rain
and the sun peered dimly through a veil of dust; the nights were
close and the morning brought no refreshing dew.

The cycle of nature seemed to have ground to a halt.

As in the terrible days of the Anabaptists, the population
was seized with the fear of an imminent cataclysm which was
whipped up by frenzied priests, who roamed the streets of the
city, bellowing psalms and calling for repentance.

There were rumours of a great famine and the end of the
world.

Hauberrisser had moved from his apartment in the Hooigracht out to the flat land in the south-east of Amsterdam. He
was living alone in a house about which a legend ran that it had
once been a so-called druid’s stone. It stood by itself, with its
back to a low hill in the middle of the ditches of the Slotermeer
polder.

He had seen it on his way back from Eva’s funeral and, as it
had been standing empty for some time, taken it on the spot and
moved in on the very same day; in the course of the winter he
had had it refurbished so that it was tolerably comfortable. He
wanted to be alone with himself and far from the throng, which
seemed to consist of shades without substance.

From his window he could see the city; with its gloomy
buildings and the forest of ships’ masts in the background it lay
before him like a spiny monster breathing out smoke.

At times he viewed the city through his binoculars, and the sight of the two spires of St. Nicholas’ and the countless other
towers and gables close before his eyes gave him a strange
feeling: as if what he was seeing were not solid objects, but
tormenting memories that had taken on visible form and were
stretching out their cruel arms to grasp him. Then they would
dissolve again and drain back into the silhouette of the houses
and roofs in the hazy distance.