The Green Face (4 page)

“I’m afraid, Mevrouw”, Pfeill turned to the lady again, “that in your circles my alltootruism is exaggerated. My supply of
bottle tops, which the war-wounded so urgently need, is considerably smaller than would appear. Even if I did once - unknowingly, I assure you - affiliate to a charitable association
which brought me the odium of public Samaritanism, yet I fear
my moral backbone is insufficiently steely to cut off international prostitution from its source of revenue; perhaps I might
remind you ofthe well-known saying, Yoni soitqui mal ypense.
And as for putting a stop to the white slave trade, I’m afraid I
haven contacts at all withthe captains ofthis industry, norhave
I had the opportunity to become intimately acquainted with
senior officers of foreign vice squads.”

“But youmusthave some useless articles forthe warorphans,
mustn’t you, my dear Baron?”

“Is there such a great demand for useless articles among the
war orphans, madame?”

Madame did not notice the ironic question, or ignored it. “But
my dear Baron, you must take a few tickets for the grand charity
ball we are organising in the autumn. The net proceeds, which
will be distributed in the spring, will go to support all those who
have suffered through the war. It will be a sensation: the ladies
will all be masked and any gentleman who has bought more than
five tickets will be decorated with the Order of Charity of the
Duchesse de Lusignan.”

“Such a grand ball has many attractions indeed”, admitted
Baron Pfeill reflectively, “especially as at such charitable
functions the commandment to love thy neighbour is often
interpreted in such a liberal manner that thy left hand knows not
what thy right hand doeth. And it must give the rich great
pleasure to know that the poor will benefit from the great distribution -eventually. On the other hand, I am not enough of an
exhibitionist to go round with the evidence of my quintuple
charity hanging from my buttonhole. Of course, if you insist,
madame

“So I can put you down for five tickets?”

“Only four, if you please, Mevrouw.”

“Sir, sir, Baron, sir”, breathed a voice, and agrubby little hand tugged shyly at Pfeill’s sleeve. When he turned round he saw a
shabbily-dressed girl with sunken cheeks and white lips thathad
squeezed her way between the oleander tubs to us and held out
aletterto him. He immediately fumbled in his pocket fora coin.

“Grandfather says to tell you -“

“Who are you, my child?” asked Pfeill in a low voice.

“Grandfather, Klinkherbogk the cobbler, says to tell you I am
his little girl” - the girl was mixing up her answer and the
message she was to deliver- “that you made a mistake, Baron,
sir. Instead of the ten guilders forthe last pair of shoes therewere
a thousand -“

Neill turned bright red, tapped somewhat violently on the
table with his silver cigarette case to drown the girl’s words and
said in a loud, brusque voice, “There you are, there’s twenty
cents for your trouble”, and added in softer tones that it was all
in order, she should go home and not lose the letter on the way.

As if to explain that the girl had not come alone, but for
safety’s sake had been accompanied by her grandfather so that
she would not lose the envelope with the banknote on her way
to the coffee house, for a second between the ivy bushes there
appeared the face of an old man. It was deathly pale, for he had
obviously heard what Pfeill had just said and was so moved that
he was incapable of saying a word; his tongue was paralysed and
his jaw trembling, and all that came out was a babbling wheeze.

Without paying any attention at all to the little scene, the
charitable lady noted down the four tickets in her little book and
took her leave with a few polite words of farewell.

For a while the two men sat in silence, avoiding each other’s
eyes and drumming with their fingers on the arms of their chairs
now and then.

Hauberrisser knew his friend only too well not to sense that
to ask what the story with the shoemaker was would have so
embarrassed Neill that he would have let his imagination run
riot to invent some story, any story, to allay the suspicion that
he had helped a poor cobbler in great need. He was therefore
racking his brain to find some topic of conversation that - naturally - would have nothing to do with charity or a shoemaker,
but on the other hand, did not sound too far-fetched.

It seemed an easy enough task, but as the minutes passed, it
became more and more difficult.

`Coming up with an idea is a confounded thing’, he thought
to himself. `We think our brain produces them, but in reality
they do what they like with our brain and are more unbiddable
than any living creature.’ He pulled himself together. “Tell me
Neill”, (the face he had seen in his dream in the Hall of Riddles
had suddenly come back to mind) “tell me, you spend so much
time reading, doesn’t the legend of the Wandering Jew have its
origin in Holland?”

Pfeill gave him a suspicious look, “You mean because he was
a cobbler?”

“Cobbler? What do you mean?”

“Well, the story goes that the Wandering Jew was originally
a cobbler called Ahashverosh from Jerusalem who, when Jesus
wanted to rest by his workshop on his road to Golgotha - the
Place of a Skull - drove him away in anger. Since then he has
had to wander the face of the earth and cannot die till Christ
should return.” When Pfeill saw the surprised look on
Hauberrisser’s face, he hastily continued his explanation so as
to get away from the theme of the cobbler as quickly as possible,
“In the thirteenth century an English bishop claimed to have met
a Jew called Cartaphilus in Armenia who told him that at certain
phases of the moon his body rejuvenated itself, and that for a
while he had been John the Evangelist, of whom it was well
known that Christ had said he should not taste of death till he saw
the Son of Man coming into his kingdom. In Holland the Wandering Jew is called Isaac Laquedem. There was a man of that
name who was presumed to be Ahasuerus because he stood
looking at a head of Christ in stone and then cried out, “That is
he, that is he, that is what he looked like!“The museums of Basle
and Berne even exhibit a shoe - one right and one left - strange
things, made up of various pieces of leather, three feet long and
weighing a stone, which were found in different places in the
mountain passes of the frontier between Italy and Switzerland
and, because they are so inexplicable, were connected with the
Wandering Jew. As a matter of fact -“

Pfeill lit a cigarette.

“As a matter of fact, it’s odd you should think of asking me
about the Wandering Jew just at this moment. Only a few minutes ago I was most vividly reminded of a picture that I once
saw many years ago in a private collection in Leyden. It is by
an unknown master and represents Ahasuerus: an extremely
frightening face of an olive bronze colour, a black cloth round
its forehead and the eyes without whites and withoutpupils, like
- how shall I put it? - like chasms almost. For a long time it
haunted my dreams.”

Hauberrisser started, but Pfeill did not notice and continued,

‘The black cloth round his forehead: I read somewhere later
on that in the Near East that is considered a sure sign of the
Wandering Jew. It is said he uses it to conceal a blazing cross
which etches itself on his forehead: every time the skin grows
back the cross eats it away again. Scholars maintain these things
are merely references to cosmic events involving the moon and
for that reason the Wandering Jew is also referred to as Chidher,
that is, the Green One - but to my mind that’s all nonsense.

This mania of interpreting anything inexplicable from antiquity in terms of the Signs of the Zodiac is becoming widespread
again today. It’s spread was halted for a while after a witty
Frenchman wrote a satire on it: Napoleon never actually existed, he too was an astral myth; in reality he was the Sun God
Apollo and his twelve generals represented the twelve signs of
the Zodiac.

I believe that the old mysteries conceal much more dangerous
things than knowledge of phases of the moon and eclipses of the
sun, things that really had to be concealed - but which do not
need to be concealed nowadays because the foolish throng
would not believe them anyway, only laugh at them -things that
obey the same laws of harmony as the stars and which are
therefore similarto them. Well, be that as it may, forthe moment
scholars have thrown away the kernel and kept the husk.”

Hauberrisser was deep in thought.

“What do you think of Jews as a whole?” he asked after a long
silence.

“Hm. What do I think of them? On the whole they are like
ravens without wings: incredibly cunning, black, hooked beaks and can’t fly. But sometimes theythrow up an eagle, no question
of that. Spinoza, for example.”

“You’re not antisemitic, then?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. For one thing, because I have no very
high opinion of Christians. The Jews are accused of having no
ideals. If that is true, then the Christians have only false ones.
The Jews take everything to extremes: obeying laws and breaking laws, piety and impiety, working and idling; the only things
they don’t take to extremes are mountain climbing and rowing,
what they call ‘Goyim naches’ - and bombast, they’re not very
keen on that. Christians, on the other hand, overdo the bombast
and underdo just about everything else. As far as religion is
concerned, the Jews study their sacred books too closely, the
Christians not closely enough.”

“Do you think the Jews have a mission?”

“Of course! The mission of overcoming themselves. All
people have the mission of overcoming themselves. Anyone
who is overcome by others has failed in his mission; anyone who
fails in his mission will be overcome by others. If one overcomes oneself, other people don’t notice; if, however, one
overcomes others, then the sky turns red and the man in the street
calls the phenomenon progress. The feeble-minded think the
flash is the important part of an explosion. - But you must
excuse me, I’d better stop now.” Neill looked at his watch,
“Firstly I must get home as quickly as possible, and secondly I
don’t think I could live up to all this clever talk in the long run.
So, your servant sir- as people say whenthey mean the opposite
- and if you feel like it, come and see me in Hilversum soon.”

He put a coin on the table for the waiter, gave his friend a
friendly wave and left.

Hauberrisser tried to get his thoughts back in order.

`Am I still dreaming?’ he asked himself in astonishment.
`What was that? Is there a thread of remarkable coincidences
running through everyone’s life or am I the only person these
things happen to? Are events like rings which only link to form
a chain when they are not disturbed by people making plans and
then charging after them and tearing destiny to tatters, when if
they hadn’t, they could have woven themselves miraculously into a continuous chain?T

Out of the habit of generations and from his own experience,
which had so far appeared to make sense, he put this appearance
of the same thought at the same time in his mind and that of his
friend down to the effect of thought transfer, but for once the
theory did not seem to correspond to the facts, something which
in the past he had merely accepted and then tried to forget as
quickly as possible. Pfeill’s memory of the face with the olivegreen glow and the black cloth over its forehead had a tangible
source: a portrait that was supposed to be on a wall in Leyden;
but what was the origin of his dream vision of a similar olivegreen face with a black cloth over its forehead which he had seen
just a short while ago in Chidher Green’s shop?

‘The reappearance of the odd name Chidher within such a
short time as one hour, first of all on a shop sign and then as
a legendary designation for the Wandering Jew is strange
enough’, Hauberrissermused to himself, `but there are probably
few people who have not had any number of such experiences.
How is it that names which one has never heard of before suddenly pour down upon one from alldirections? And why is itthat
one often finds that people in the street start to look more and
more like a friend one has not seen for years, until he himself
comes round the comer - not just like one’s memory, no, a
photographic likeness, so similar that one’s thoughts automatically turn to one’s old friend; where do such things come from?
Do people who look similar also have similar destinies? How
often have I found that to be true. Destiny seems to be inextricably bound up with one’s physique and physiognomy; there
seems to be a law of correspondence governing it, right down
to minute detail. A ball will roll, and so will a die, though in a
different way; why should not a creature with a thousandfold
more complicated existence not be yoked according to a law as
regular, if a thousandfold more complicated, to one pair of
shafts? I can well understand why astrology does not die out,
perhaps has even more believers than ever before, and that one
in ten have their horoscope cast; but people are on the wrong
path if they believe the stars they can see in the sky determine
the path of their destiny. That comes from other `planets’, from ones which orbit in their blood and around their hearts and have
different periods from the heavenly bodies, Jupiter, Saturn etc.
If the place, hour and minute of birth were the sole deciding
factors, how could it be that the Blaschek sisters, siamese twins
who were born at the very same minute, could have had such
different destinies, the one becoming a mother, the other
remaining a virgin?’

A man in a white flannel suit, red tie and Panama hat set at
a jaunty angle, his fingers laden with showy rings and a monocle
stuck in his dark eye had appeared behind the cover of a Hungarian newspaper at one of the more distant tables some time
ago and, by changing his place several times, as if he were
bothered by the draught, had inched his way closer to Hauberrisser, although the latter had been too deep in thought to notice.