‘Is the shop closed? Do I still have time to buy some opera glasses?’
Grinning good-naturedly the tall, thin optician nodded and motioned to him to enter the already half-darkened shop. And scarcely had the tourist got inside when it flashed through his mind that he was making a mistake, and would be better advised to leave the shop, as the face of the shopkeeper was like an unpleasant bird mask. But the flash was so quick, unmotivated and vague that it did not penetrate his logical consciousness. So the young man stayed and went on:
‘In that case, I’d like some opera glasses, simple ones, not too expensive.’ The optician showed him a few and pointed in a laudatory way to their manufacturers’ names.
These were too small, said the young man shyly; being small and delicate himself, he liked large dimensions in personal effects, unconsciously feeling he was making an impression with an outsized handkerchief or gloves that were too big for him.
‘Take these, then,’ urged the shopkeeper.
‘Those are more binoculars for racing,’ laughed the tourist. ‘They’re rather heavy too …’
He looked through them for a moment, turning the knob until the lenses were focused. He could see quite clearly into the street.
‘I do like them, though,’ said the tourist. ‘How much are they?’
The price came as a shock. If he bought the opera glasses, it would be an expensive day. But how sharply these glasses brought the street scene into focus!
‘All right,’ said the tourist, ‘I’ll take these.’
He paid. And left with the opera glasses in their case. Now he had to hurry. Suddenly he remembered that he had found the optician’s birdlike face really unpleasant. But he dismissed that foolish aversion; he frequently had those strange antipathies and sympathies too, and they were often bothersome in everyday life.
Now he made haste. There was the Opera, where the black-silhouetted opera-goers were already streaming across the evening square into the wide illuminated entrances. Nervously, although he knew he was not late, he hurried along, tripped nimbly up the many flights of stairs, while other people laboured, and quickly found his seat, in the front row. He sat down, in happy anticipation of enjoying the music. He took the opera glasses out of their case and placed both in front of him on the wide ledge. Next to him, to left and right, and behind him people were quickly taking their seats: it was filling up as always. Below, too, the tiers of boxes and the stalls were filling up.
Suddenly it struck the young man that the opera glasses might fall into the now dimly lit auditorium and he put them on his knees. The performance began, full of rapt concentration and devotion to Wagner. In the large, full auditorium, besides the huge waves of the music, there was scarcely any sound or movement, scarcely a cough, just a hand holding opera glasses.
The young tourist also trained his opera glasses on Siegmund, whose voice vibrated blissfully through him, in order to bring him closer.
Suddenly, through his pleasure it flashed through him that the auditorium, seen from up there, was an abyss and that the opera glasses were heavy. At the same moment, some distance away, a programme floated down. It distracted him: he saw the programme flutter down and land on the grey, coiffured head of a lady, whose hand had grasped the programme like a bird. Next to the lady sat a gentleman with a shiny bald pate.
But Sieglinde again enchanted the young tourist. The blond Germanic maiden fascinated him, ensnaring his submissive soul in an enchantment of song; he found her touchingly poetic, with Siegmund in Hunding’s hut. The opera glasses weighed heavily on his knee. Again he put them on the ledge, above which the black glasses loomed like twin towers. And yet they were safe enough there.
The young man leaned forward, in amused concern, to see who was sitting exactly below him in the auditorium. And who the opera glasses would land on … should they fall.
It was a mischievous curiosity, welling around the quick conception of an event that was almost impossible. Since now it had occurred to him that the opera glasses might fall, they would not do so.
He could not see clearly who was sitting there, perpendicularly below him. The auditorium was very dark. But precisely because of the darkness in which the outlines of the audience were blurred, he again saw more clearly over there the previously noticed dove-grey lady who had grabbed the fluttering programme. And beside her …
His bald pate gleamed. Among the thousands of rapt silhouettes sitting closely together, the coiffured women’s heads and the bald-headed men, that distant skull gleamed … It gleamed roundly, like an obsessive full moon, sunk among all those darkened figures: attentive backs of heads motionless with concentration. It gleamed like a goal, like a target, it gleamed white, it gleamed …
The young tourist was annoyed at his strange distractedness – it bothered him – and forced himself to give his attention to Hunding. He greatly enjoyed the Liebeslied, the brilliant tenor voice, which sang of an outpouring of love and of spring. But he could not forget the shiny pate down there and could not make himself invisible any longer. His distracted gaze kept returning obliquely to the skull, which seemed to be gleaming in the dim light of the auditorium, now as a huge billiard ball!
A spasm of impatience and annoyance at himself went through him. At the same time he grabbed the opera glasses with the sudden panicky feeling that they would fall. And the glasses did not fall, and the hands of the young man gripped the opera glasses more firmly than was necessary … And he pointed them at Siegmund and Sieglinde.
Then it was as if he could no longer control it … As if a powerful imperative was forcing him to hurl the opera glasses high through the abyss of the auditorium, aiming at that alluring globe, that giant billiard ball, the shiny target down there, three-quarters of the distance between himself and the stage …
In a violent motion of resistance, he threw himself backwards … And, trembling, he just managed to put down the opera glasses … The effort was almost too great for him. Then he pressed his arms to his sides. So as not to grab the opera glasses and hurl them at the round target. Which was down there, gleaming.
The lady in the next seat shot him a sideways glance. He reacted to her movement as if it were a motherly act of rescue.
‘I do apologize,’ he mumbled, pale and half-crazed. ‘I don’t feel well. I feel really ill. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to leave.’
The first act was coming to an end. He got up; trembling, but without a sound, he slid past the legs of the five or six people between himself and the end of the row.
‘You’re forgetting your opera glasses!’ the lady in the next seat whispered after him.
‘That’s all right, madame. I’ll be back shortly, I hope.’
He stumbled down a few steps; there were angry hisses of, ‘Sh!’ Then the curtain closed, the house lights came up, and there was applause. He had deliberately left the opera glasses there, afraid of the things. Now, in the interval, he regained his composure. How stupid he’d been! In the now brightly lit auditorium the obsession of a moment ago struck him as a foolish, ridiculous impulse to which he would never have given in! He wasn’t a lunatic! Hurl his binoculars into the auditorium?! Come on, he would put the crazy notion out of his head with a minimum of will-power and common sense. He felt hungry and went to the bar for a roll and a glass of beer. That would calm him down after that nonsense of just now.
However, when the second act began and the house lights dimmed, he decided that what had surged through him had been a kind of giddy delirium induced by heights, what the French call vertige de l’abîme … Although he had felt no compulsion to plunge down himself. Perhaps it might be better not to sit so far forward in that first row, so high above the abyss of the auditorium … No, it would be better if he stayed back here, in the aisle. Even if the obsession had been nonsense, it might take hold of him again in that seat and so detract from his enjoyment of the music.
He stopped. Down there his seat remained unoccupied and the twin towers of his black o
pera glasses rose sarcastically but harmlessly on the wide ledge in front of his empty seat. But if he stood on tiptoe, he could just see the white pate in the auditorium, gleaming like a target …
He shrugged his shoulders in annoyance, dismissed that annoyance with a ‘tut-tut’ sound, and gave his full attention to Brünnhilde’s exultant cries, atop the rock on which she had appeared. And became calmer. And was transported.
The magic fire motif overwhelmed him and his pure rapture completely restored his equilibrium.
Still, when the opera was over, he determined never again to sit in the first row of the fourth tier. At any rate, never again with such large opera glasses in front of him. And also not to take the opera glasses with him … since their weight had felt so strange in his hands and together with the sense of depth, and because of that stupid target down there, might have triggered that crazy obsession … to leave them there … with their small twin black towers … on the wide ledge … outlined against the void of the auditorium, now emptying below and on all sides.
And he more or less fled right down the stairs, frightened that someone would call after him that he had forgotten his opera glasses.
Five years had gone by. He had been successful in his career. He was married. He had been on short trips in summer and winter, for his work and for holidays. He had not been back to Dresden, but this year he found himself there by chance. In early autumn when the parks are clad in golden leaves. The opera posters announced a series of performances of the Ring cycle. That evening they were performing The Valkyrie. He remembered the beautiful performance of five years before. The memory of his obsession had faded until it had become no more than the vaguest recollection of vertigo, about which he had sometimes since smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He would definitely go and see The Valkyrie again this evening. But at the box office he was told that the show was sold out.
He was sorry. He turned away. When at that moment someone approached and told the box-office clerk that he was selling his seat, booked in the front row, fourth tier, for that evening. He was unable to come.
The young man eagerly took the seat and wondered where he had seen that unpleasant bird face before. Come on, it was the front row of that high fourth tier again, but he wouldn’t get as dizzy again and wouldn’t allow himself to be thrown by an idiotic notion. Come to that, he wouldn’t even take any opera glasses. He didn’t have any with him and he wasn’t going to buy any.
He went rather late that evening. The auditorium was already dark and full; the music had started. He hesitated to disturb the listeners in his row, but the usherette thought he could easily get to his seat past only four people. So he shuffled past their knees, muttering apologies, and sat down.
Then the usherette leaned over him and in a whisper offered him some large opera glasses, asking:
‘Would you like to hire some opera glasses? For one mark?’
He thought he detected a sarcastic tone, started and looked at the opera glasses she was holding out to him. They were his, from five years earlier, left behind here, never reclaimed, not taken to the police station and constantly hired out by the usherette, whenever she could. They were his opera glasses. Before he could refuse, a hand irresistibly grabbed the things. Angry voices called out ‘Sh!’ and the usherette withdrew, saying he could pay later …
So it happened that in the middle of Siegmund and Sieglinde’s duet, high up, in the front row of the fourth tier, someone writhed, screaming, as if overcome by an attack of epilepsy, as if struggling with a force stronger than himself, and a hand hurled through the auditorium, where the audience was startled out of its rapt attention, a heavy object through space, which plunged in an arc into the abyss.
And down below, where next to a dove-grey lady a bald-headed gentleman sat, someone else, although not aimed at or noticed, was fatally injured and roared in his death throes, as the brains spattered.
Translated by Paul Vincent
3
Arthur van Schendel
The Green Dream
De groene droom
Life can be as singular as a dream – a dream of happiness that turns a minute into a century, or a nightmare from which you cannot wake too soon. But a dream can also seem so real that you wonder whether you are really dreaming and whether the world is seen most truly by waking or sleeping eyes, and even if the healthy mind draws a line between fantasy and reality, it must admit, if it is healthy enough to look into the matter, that the distinction between the two is often a mystery.
But whose mind deserves to be called healthy? Is the man who has never dreamed, and doesn’t even know what delusion is, the only one whose mind is free of flaws? In that case, we can be certain there are few people in this world whose minds are perfect and unblemished. Men who never dream appear to be very rare indeed, and as for their minds, a scholar once said that such men must be missing something essential, because the power of thought depends on the power of the imagination. He went on to say that, in fact, new ideas are born of dreams and fantasies.
On the other hand, it seems doubtful that a man who dreams a great deal is perfectly healthy. There are people whose minds are so eager to flee from everyday reality that they need only close their eyes to see dream images. It is not normal, you must admit, this mental compulsion to flee from the world of one’s fellows to another of unreal beings; it is immoderate, irregular. Those who do it are fantasists, dreamers, and they may be ordinary, healthy specimens of their kind, but in human society they are as orchids among flowers, exotic quirks of nature.
When Cloverleaf, dreamer and fantasist, was still young, he was set apart by his many eccentricities. Food and drink that everyone enjoyed, like currant bread and milk, revolted him. Sights everyone agreed were beautiful, like a Sunday suit or a parade, were ugly to him. The things that inflamed passion in every heart, like a comely young woman or a glass of red wine, made his spirits sink. He did not care for this, he did not care for that, and what he did care for were things he had never really known, things beyond his grasp, like fairies and ambrosia. That Cloverleaf, people said, he’s an odd one, there’s no pleasing him. In truth, he had no desire for pleasure. The only thing he enjoyed was sitting by himself, or better still, walking by himself, because then the fantasies in his head were not disturbed.
These fantasies were a process independent of his will. They began to run through his head as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning, and when he closed his eyes again in bed at night, they continued in a slightly different fashion. Sometimes he fought them, because he grew weary of them or because he believed his heart needed something more. Then he would seek diversion, and his extreme behaviour would surprise people. Yet although his head would stop its picture show for as long as he remained frenetically active, no sooner had he stopped than it would take him by surprise with a new show, more vivid and colourful than the last. Once in a while this turned into a battle between Cloverleaf and his mind. Then he would talk and laugh with friends so much and so uproariously that his mind had no way of playing its games. But he couldn’t keep that up for long; his mind would ambush him in his sleep, when his will could not protect him. Dreams, strong and burly, overpowered him with images beyond counting, presented to his inner eye for centuries at a time, while Cloverleaf was aware of lying powerless, a toy, an object that drifted on mists.
Maybe I’m giving you the wrong impression of Cloverleaf’s fantasies. Who put on these picture shows? He himself? His mind? That was what he believed in his youth, and that was why he resisted when he’d had enough. Later, once he’d learned that even the most ferocious opposition could not liberate him from his fantasies for any more than a moment, he began to suspect some other mind or spirit of possessing him and using him as its plaything. Perhaps this was merely another delusional idea, slightly further removed from reality than the previous one, because this delusion went so far as to involve the supernatural. You will understand how easily a man enslaved by his imagination could come to
believe such a thing. Whatever the case may be, Cloverleaf ultimately had no doubt that his head was merely a playground for all sorts of spirits, who communed with each other there, usually without taking any notice of him, although he sometimes seemed to amuse them.
Now, another eccentricity of his was his strong preference for certain colours, sounds and smells and an equally strong aversion to others. The sound of a cat or a tenor caused him pain, he said, while the sound of an infant or a dog was music. Of all colours, he was most attached to blue, so much so that he was never seen dressed in anything but blue – navy blue, or a touch lighter, in winter, sky blue in summer. There was also a colour that he detested, a colour that sent vicious pains stabbing through his head: green, in all its shades. You might think this an unnatural character trait, since nature loves to dress in green, but while he admired the colour in trees and grass, he rejected it anywhere else in the world as false, venomous and pernicious. Green is envy, he would say, green is hate, the heart of the devil, and when he saw someone dressed in green, he would avert his eyes. He believed that heaven was filled with a radiant blue light, while hell burned with green flames that gave off green fumes. Little wonder that many people thought Cloverleaf a man of outlandish tastes and distastes, and those who learned of his fantasies pitied him, saying that he must harbour a diseased spirit.
And one day he had a dream, an illusion, a hallucination, whatever you might call the phenomenon, after which he himself feared that his mind might be poisoned.
When he left home that Saturday around four in the afternoon, he was still in a waking state. It was late June, oppressively hot and humid. Over the roofs he made out a greenish glow of the kind you sometimes see before a storm, and over the bricks that lined the street he also detected some hint of green in the shadows. The air he breathed reminded him of the smell of pickled gherkins. He could normally tolerate that odour well enough, but now it so disgusted him that he made a detour into different streets. By the time he reached the outskirts of the city, the sky had become overcast, with a yellow glimmer here and there. What a strange place, Cloverleaf said to himself, imagining that he had lost his way. Then he froze in astonishment. On his lavender-blue trousers, from top to bottom, and his darker blue jacket, especially on the sleeves, he saw tiny yellow stars and flowers whirling rapidly. He wanted to brush them off with his hand but noticed that this left stains, green like canal water. It made him shudder. When he looked up, a coachman stood before him in a green jacket, with moss-green whiskers, beckoning him into a coach of a dark, dirty green. This is a bad idea, Cloverleaf thought, but he climbed in anyway. Inside it smelled of sulphur, and he noticed that he was riding down a steep slope. The coach came to an abrupt halt, and the coachman, looking a little slimy by this time, loomed up outside the door and ordered him to run away quickly, because it was becoming dangerous there. I knew it, thought Cloverleaf, who felt as if his throat were being pinched. He ran down the hillside through soft reeds of some kind, and as he was running he realized he was dreaming. Well, then, he thought, I have nothing to be afraid of. It must be some spirit playing another mean trick. He stopped and, since his head was growing heavy, lowered himself onto some bushes, which smelled as if they had been painted. The spot where he sat was still on the same slope, with trees below him whose round tops had an enamelled look, dark against the sky. From the right and the left, fleeing in panic, came women in veils who sat down all around him, keeping their faces covered.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 4