The Green Face (33 page)

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, until 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 whirlwinds 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 walls of Jericho have fallen”, he heard the quivering
voice of Chidher Green say aloud in the room. “He has awakened from the dead:’