Spectres, monstrous yet without form and only discernible through the devastation they wrought, had been called up by faceless and power-hungry bureaucrats in their secret seances and had devoured millions of innocent victims before returning to the sleep from which they had been roused. But there was another phantom, still more horrible, that had long since caught the foul stench of a decaying civilisation in its gaping nostrils and now raised its snake-wreathed countenance from the abyss where it had lain, to mock humanity with the realisation that the juggernaut they had driven for the last four years in the belief it would clear the world for a new generation of free men was a treadmill in which they were trapped for all time.
During the last few weeks Hauberrisser had managed to turn a blind eye to his world-weariness. Against all appearances he had convinced himself he could live the life of a hermit, of an uninvolved bystander, here, in the middle of a city which almost overnight the pressure of events had transformed from a centre of international trade into the place where deranged minds from all over the world gathered to give free rein to their wildest fantasies. He had even succeeded in carrying out his plan to a certain extent but then, triggered off by some slight circumstance, the old tiredness had descended on him once again, more stifling than before; the sight of the giddy crowds around him whirling their senseless way through life only served to increase his weariness.
His eyes were suddenly opened to the shock of the distorted expressions on the faces crowding round him. Those were not the expressions he remembered, the expressions of people in pursuit of pleasure, hurrying to forget their troubles at some entertainment. Their faces were already irrevocably marked by a sense of dislocation.
The struggle for existence carves different lines and furrows on the face of mankind. These reminded him of the old woodcuts depicting frenzied dances in times of plague, and then, again, of flocks of birds which, sensing a coming earthquake, fly round and round in silent, instinctive fear.
Car after car screeched to a halt outside the circus, and the occupants scurried into the tent as if it were a matter of life and death: bejewelled ladies with delicate features; French baronesses who had become flues de joie; slim, refined Englishwomen, the creme de la creme and now arm-in-arm with some hyena from the stock-market who had m ade a fortune overnight; and Russian princesses, every fibre of their bodies twitching with nervous exhaustion: all trace of aristocratic sangfroid had disappeared, washed away by the waves of a cultural deluge.
Like the portent of the approach of an age of doom, there came at intervals from the interior of the tent, sometimes fearfully close and loud, sometimes stifled by heavy curtains, the harsh, long-drawn-out bellowing of wild beasts, whilst an acrid stench of big cats, perfume, raw flesh and horse sweat wafted out onto the street.
A contrasting image was released from Hauberrisser’s memory and appeared before his inner eye: a bear behind the bars of a travelling menagerie, chained by the left paw, the embodiment of utter desperation as it danced from one leg to the other, constantly, day after day, month after month - even year after year as Hauberrisser saw when he came across the menagerie in a fairground years later.
`Why didn’t you buy its freedom!’ The thought reverberated through his brain, a thought he had ignored a hundred times already, but which still ambushed him, still burnt in his mind with a fire of self-reproach as intense and unquenchable as when it first appeared; it was a dwarf of a thought, tiny and insignificant compared with the gigantic sins of omission that form an unbroken chain through a man’s life, and yet it was the only one that time could not subdue.
`The shades of all tortured and murdered creatures have cursed us, their blood cries out for revenge.’ For a heartbeat Hauberrisser’s mind was filled with a confused vision, `Woe to mankind if, on Judgment Day, there is the soul of one single horse among the council of the accusers: why did I not set it free?’ How often had he not bitterly reproached himself for it, and how often had he not stifled the reproach with the argument that the liberation of the bear would have been as inconsequential as the fall of one grain of sand in the desert. But - he quickly surveyed his past life - had he ever done anything that was of more consequence? He had spent his youth not in the sunshine, but in colleges and libraries, learning how to build machines, and he had spent his manhood building machines that had long since rusted away, instead of helping others to enjoy the sunshine; he had made his own contribution to the pointlessness of existence.
He fought his way through the jostling throng until he came to a less crowded square where he called a cab and asked to be driven out into the country.
He suddenly felt a thirst for all the summer days he had wasted.
How slowly the wheels rumbled over the cobbles! And the sun was already beginning to go down! His impatience to reach the open countryside merely made him more irritated.
There, at last, was the rich green of the fields, cut up as far as the eye could see into a chequerboard by the grid of brown drainage ditches, and on the green squares thousands of speckled cows with a rug on their backs to protect them against the cool of the evening, and among them the Dutch dairymaids with their white caps fastened to their hair by brass spirals and their gleaming pails; when the scene was finally before his eyes it was like the image on a huge, pale-blue soap-bubble, and all the windmills with their sails were like the first black crosses signifying the coming of eternal night.
He wandered along narrow pathways beside the meadows, always separated from them by a strip of water glowing red in the setting sun, and they seemed to him like the dream vision of a land he was destined never to set foot in.
His unrest was calmed by the scent of water and grass, but only to be replaced by a feeling of melancholy and desolation.
Then, as the meadows darkened and a silvery mist rose from the ground so that the cattle seemed to be wreathed in smoke, he began to feel as if his skull were a prison cell and he himself were sitting in it looking out through his eyes on a free world for the last time.
The twilight was thickening as he reached the first houses of the city and the air trembled with the echoing boom of the numberless bells in their bizarrely shaped towers.
He paid off the cabbie and set out in the direction of his apartment, down narrow alleyways, along canals with clumsy black barges floating on the motionless water, through a flood of rotten apples and decaying rubbish, beneath protruding gables with the iron arms of the hoists reflected in the canal. Outside the doors men in wide blue trousers and red smocks and women mending nets sat gossiping on chairs they had brought out from their houses while hordes of children played in the streets.
He hurried past the open doors, which exhaled a smell of fish, sweat and poverty, and across squares with waffle-stands in the comers, filling all the narrow alleyways with the reek of burnt fat.
The dreariness of the Dutch port settled over him like a peasouper: the scrubbed pavements and filthy canals, the taciturn inhabitants, the tall, pigeon-chested buildings with their pallid chequerboard pattern of flat sash windows, the narrow-fronted cheese and pickled-herring shops with their smoky paraffin lamps, and the reddish-black gable roofs.
Fora moment he was struck by a longing to leave this gloomy city that had turned its back on lightheartedness and return to one of the brighter ones he had known in earlier, happier days. Life there suddenly seemed desirable again, just as everything that lies in the past seems better and more beautiful than the present. But the gentle upsurge of homesickness was immediately stifled by the final memories he had come away with, bitter memories of physical and moral decay, of irreversible decline.
He took a short cut over an iron bridge leading to the fashionable part of the city, crossed a brightly-lit and crowded street with shop windows full of elegant goods, and found himself a few steps later- as if the cityhad done a lightning-quick. change - back in a pitch-dark alley: the `Nes’, the notorious street of pimps and prostitutes in old Amsterdam that had been torn down years ago had re
appeared in another part of the town, like a new outbreak of some insidious disease. It was the same yet not the same, it was less coarse, less brutal, but far more terrible.
The dregs of Paris and London, of the cities of Belgium and Russia, fleeing in panic the revolutions that had broken out in their own countries, had settled in these `exclusive’ establishments. As Hauberrisser walked past, silent, robot-like commissionaires in long blue coats and three-cornered hats with brass-mounted staffs in their hands flung open the padded doors and then closed them again with a flourish. Each time a blinding shaft of garish light fell across the pavement, and for a second the air was tom by the wild scream of a jazz trumpet, the crash of cymbals or the sob of gypsy violins.
There was a different kind of life lurking behind the red curtains of the upper stories of the houses: the brief staccato drumming of fingers on the windowpanes, furtive whisperings, grunts and stifled cries - in all languages of the world and yet immediately comprehensible; a female body in a white slip, the head invisible in the darkness, as if it had been cut off, leaving a torso with waving arms; and then again, empty windows, pitch-black, silent as the tomb, as if death dwelt in those rooms.
The comer house at the end of the alley seemed relatively innocuous, a mixture of music-hall and restaurant, to go by the posters on the walls.
Hauberrisser went in; a room packed with people eating and drinking at round tables with yellow tablecloths met his eye.
At the back was a stage where a dozen or so artistes - singers and comics - were sitting in a semicircle waiting until it was time for their number.
An old man with a spherical belly, a pair of false goggle-eyes, a white handlebar moustache and his incredibly thin legs encased in green tights with webbed feet was sitting, casually waggling his toes, in apparently serious conversation with a French chanteuse in the extravagant costume of the Directoire. The audience, meanwhile, was listening in mute incomprehension to a German monologue delivered by a character actor dressed as a Polish Jew in caftan and high boots. Brandishing a small glass syringe for rinsing out the ears such as can be bought at any chemist’s, he declaimed his interminable poem, breaking into a grotesque jig between each verse, to which he sang in a nasal voice:
Hauberrisser looked round for an empty seat; everywhere the diners - they mostly seemed to be respectable locals - were packed tight; only one table in the middle of the room stood out by having a few empty chairs leant against it. Three corpulent ladies of mature years and one old one with an austere look and horn-rimmed spectacles perched on her aquiline nose were sitting around a coffee-pot sporting a gaily-coloured woollen cosy, busily knitting socks, an island of domestic calm amid all the noise and bustle.
With friendly nods the four ladies granted Haubenisser permission to sit at the table.
His first thought had been that it must be a mother with her widowed daughters, but a second glance told him that they could hardly be related. Although they did not look alike, the three younger ones were similar in that they were all of the Dutch type - roughly forty-five years old, blonde, fat and of a bovine stolidity - whilst the white-haired matron clearly came from the South.
The waiter set his steak in front of him with a half-concealed grin, and the people at the tables around were casting covert glances at the table, grinning and exchanging quiet remarks: what did it all mean? Hauberrisser was completely baffled; he gave the four ladies a quick scrutiny -no, impossible, they were very pillars of society. Their age alone almost guaranteed their respectability.
Up on the stage a scrawny, redbearded man with a starspangled top hat, tight, blue and white striped trousers, an alarm-clock dangling from his green and yellow checked waistcoat and a strangled goose in his coat pocket, had just split open the skull of the ancient frog-man to the ringing tones of `Yankee doodle’, and now a rag-and-bone couple from Rotterdam were singing - “with piano accompaniment” - the melancholy song of the vanished `Zandstraat’:
As solemnly as if it were a hymn - tears glistened in the eyes of the three fat Dutch ladies - the audience joined in:
The programme was a mish-mash of acts, changing constantly like the brightly-coloured patterns in a kaleidoscope: babyfaced English girls with curly locks and a terrifying innocence, Parisian gangsters with long red scarves, a Syrian belly-dancer with wobbling intestines, four men imitating bells and the melodic burping of a Bavarian yodelling song.
This meaningless hodge-podge calmed Hauberrisser’s nerves with an almost narcotic effect; it was not unlike the strange magic emanating from children’s toys, which often exercise a greater healing power over a heart wearied by life than the most sublime work of art.
Hauberrisser lost all track of time, and when the grand finale came and the whole company marched off waving the flags of all nations - presumably symbolising the return of peace - and led by a negro dancing the cakewalk and singing:
he was astonished to find that the audience had disappeared without his noticing and the room was almost empty.
Even his fourladies had silently vanished, leaving, as a token, a pink visiting card propped up against his wine-glass. It bore a picture of two turtle-doves billing and cooing and the address:
MADAME GRISEL HUSSY open all night Waterloo Plein No. 21 15 charming ladies Private entrance
So they were, after all!
“Would sir wish to purchase a continuation ticket?” asked the waiter in a soft voice as he deftly replaced the yellow tablecloth with one of white linen, placed a vase of tulips in the middle and laid the silver.
A huge ventilator began to whirr, sucking out the plebeian air. Liveried servants sprayed perfume, a tongue of red carpet unrolled from the door to the stage, leather armchairs were wheeled in.
A crowd of ladies in elegant evening gowns and men in white tie and tails poured in; it was the same cosmopolitan would-be cream of society that Hauberrisser had seen rushing into the circus tent.
In a few minutes every last seat was taken.
The soft jingle of lorgnon chains, muted laughter, the rustle of silk skirts, the scent of ladies’ gloves and hyacinths, cascades of pearls and clusters of diamonds, the fizz of champagne, the dry clink of ice-cubes in the silver buckets, the furious yapping of a lap-dog, white shoulders with a discreet touch of powder, foaming lace, the sweet, spicy smell of Russian cigarettes -the room he had first entered was unrecognisable.
Once more the seats at Hauberrisser’s table were taken by four ladies - one older with a gold lorgnette and three younger ones, each more beautiful than the other. They were Russians with slim, nervous hands, blond hair and dark eyes, which did not avoid the stares of the men around, yet seemed not to see them.
A young Englishman, whose faultless evening dress clearly said Savile Row, came and stood for a while at the table, exchanging a few friendly words with them. His delicate, aristocratic features bore a look of immense weariness; the left sleeve of his coat was empty up to the shoulder and hung down limply, making the tall, frail figure appear even slimmer, his monocle seemed to have become part of the bony socket beneath his eyebrow.
All around were people such as the eternal petty bourgeois of all lands eyes with the instinctive hatred of the bandy-legged mongrel for a thoroughbred, beings that will ever remain a mystery to the masses, arousing both contempt and envy, creatures that can wade through blood without batting an eyelid and yet swoon at the screech of a fork across a plate, who will pull out a revolver at the slightest suggestion of a sneer yet calmly smile when caught cheating at cards, for whom vices, the very thought of which makes the ordinary citizen shudder, are commonplace and who would rather go thirsty for days than drink out of a glass another has used, who accept God as a matter of course and yet shut themselves off from Him because they find Him boring, who are considered hollow by people who crudely assume that what, in the course of generations, has become the essence of such creatures, is mere veneer and outward show; they are neither hollow nor the opposite, they are beings who have lost their
souls and have therefore become the incarnation of evil for the multitude which will never possess a soul, they are aristocrats who would rather die than crawl to anyone, who, with unerring instinct, spot the plebeian within their fellow-man and place him lower than the animals and yet fall down before him if he happens to be sitting on the throne, they are lords of the earth who can become helpless as a child at the slightest frown on the face of destiny, instruments of the Devil and at the same time his plaything.
An invisible band had just finished playing the Wedding March from Lohengrin.
A bell jangled shrilly.
The room grew quiet.
On the wall over the stage appeared, in letters made of tiny electric lights, the words:
!La force d’imagination!
and out through the curtains stepped a man in a dinner jacket and white gloves with the look of a French hairdresser sparse, greasy hair, yellow skin, flabby cheeks, a tiny red rosette in his buttonhole and dark shadows under his eyes. Without a word he bowed to the audience and sat down on a chair in the middle of the stage.
Hauberrisser assumed this would be followed by the usual more or less risque monologue and turned away in irritation when the artiste - was it in embarrassment or was it the lead-in to some smutty joke? - began to finger his flies.
A minute passed and still silence reigned in the auditorium and on the stage.
Then two muted violins from the band began to play “0 fare thee well, It was not meant to be”, joined, as if from a great distance, by the soulful tones of a French horn.
Surprised, Hauberrisser snatched up his opera glasses to peer at the stage - then almost let them drop in horror. What was that?! Had he suddenly gone mad? He broke out into a cold sweat; no doubt about it, he must have gone mad! That obscene spectacle on the stage could not really be taking place here, here before hundreds of people, before all these exquisite creatures who until a few months ago had been the cream of society. In a harbour tavern on the Nieuwendijk perhaps, or as an anatomical freak demonstrated at medical school, but here??!
The Green Face Page 4