Sephardi’s young visitor resumed her narrative. “Then I assumed my father had been referring to the War, but gradually I began to feel what everyone who is not made of stone feels today: the very earth seems to give off a suffocating oppressiveness, which is not at all related to death, and it was this oppressiveness, this inability either to live or to die, which my father meant, I think, when he said that all that mankind had relied on would be torn apart.
When, then, I told Doctor Sephardi about the green bronze face of the one my father called the ancient wanderer who will not taste death, and asked him, as one who has spent much of his life in the study of such matters, to tell me what it all might mean, in the hope that he might reassure me that it was not merely a delusion that had plagued my father, he remembered what you, Baron Pfeill, had told him of a portrait…”
“… that unfortunately does not exist.” Neill completed the sentence. “I told Doctor Sephardi about the picture, that is true. It is also true that I was firmly convinced - until about an hour ago, that is - that I had seen it, in Leyden, as I thought.
The truth I must acknowledge now is that I have never seen it, neither in Leyden nor anywhere else.
This very afternoon I was talking to a friend about the portrait and could even picture it in my memory in its frame, hanging on the wall; then, as I was making my way to the station, I suddenly realised that the olive-green face only appeared to be surrounded by the frame, which my imagination had added to the portrait. I immediately came to the Herengracht to ask Doctor Sephardi whether I really had told him of the painting, or whether maybe I had dreamed that as well.
How the picture came to be in my head is an absolute mystery to me. It used to plague me in my sleep. Perhaps I might also have dreamed I saw it in a collection in Leyden and then remembered the dream as if it were reality?
What makes the matter all the more confusing for me is the fact that while you, my dear Juffrouw van Druysen, were telling us about your father the face appeared to me again with stunning clarity but different from before, no longer fixed and inert like a painting, but brought to life and movement, with its lips trembling as if it were about to speak -“
He suddenly broke off and seemed to be listening to an inner voice, as if the picture were whispering something to him.
Sephardi and the young woman watched him in astonished silence.
From below in the Herengracht came the rich sound of one ofthe great barrel-organs which in the evening sometimes make the rounds of the streets of Amsterdam on a pony-cart.
It was Sephardi who broke the silence. “I can only assume that in your case it is the result of what we call a hypnoidal state: once, in a deep sleep and completely without being aware of it, you must have experienced something that later managed to worm its way into your conscious mind under the guise of a portrait, in which it took on the appearance of reality. There is no need to worry that such a condition is a sign of illness or abnormality”, he added, when he saw Pfeill raise his hands in horror, “such things occur much more frequently than one thinks. And it is my own firm conviction that if we could discover their origin it would be like the scales falling from our eyes: we would gain entry to a parallel existence that we lead in the depths of sleep; at the moment we are unaware of it because it is beyond our physical being and is forgotten as we retrace our steps across the dream bridge that connects day and night. The things that the ecstatics of your Christian mystical tradition write about the `rebirth’ without which it is impossible ‘to see the Kingdom of Heaven’, seem to me to be nothing other than the awakening of the soul, which until that point has been as dead, in a world that exists beyond the range of our external senses, in, to put it in a nutshell, paradise.” He took abook down from the shelves and pointed to a picture in it. “I am sure the tale of Sleeping Beauty has some connection with it, and what else could be the sense of this old alchemical illustration of ‘rebirth’: a naked man rising from his coffin and beside it a skull with a lighted candle on top? By the way, as we have got on to the subject of Christian ecstatics, Juffrouw van Druysen and I are going to a meeting of that kind this evening on the Zeedijk. Oddly enough, your olive-green face haunts that place, too,”
“On the Zeedijk?” laughed Pfeill. “But that’s an extremely shady part of town. What humbug have you fallen for there?”
“It’s not as bad as it used to be, I hear, there’s only one sailors’ tavern left, though a pretty rough one at that, called the Prince of Orange. Otherwise the district is inhabited by harmless craftsmen.”
“One of them is an aged eccentric who lives with his sister, he’s a crazy butterfly collector called Swammerdam, and when he’s not collecting butterflies he imagines he’s King Solomon. We have been invited to visit them”, added the young lady with a laugh. “My aunt goes there every day. She is a Mademoiselle de Bourignon - you see what aristocratic relations I have? And to avoid any unfortunate misconceptions: she is a venerable Canoness of the Beguine Convent and quite formidably pious.”
“What?! Old Jan Swammerdam is still alive?” exclaimed the Baron with a laugh, “he must be over ninety by now! Does he still wear those shoes with the two-inch rubber soles?”
“You know him? what kind of person is he really?” asked Juffrouw van Druysen in pleased surprise. “Is he really a prophet, as my aunt maintains? Tell me what you know of him, please.”
“With pleasure, if you would like to hear it, my dear. But I am in a hurry as I don’t want to miss my train again. I will say my farewells now so that I can dash off as soon as I have finished. But you mustn’t expect any spine-tingling revelations - ribtickling would be a more appropriate expression.”
“All the better.”
“Well then: I have known Swammerdam since I was fourteen, though in more recent years I have lost contact with him. As an adolescent I was full of wild enthusiasm for everything except school, and amongst other things I collected insects and kept reptiles. Whenever a bull-frog or an Asiatic toad the size - and approximate shape - of a handbag appeared in any of the pet shops I would snap it up and take it home, where I kept such things in heated terrariums. At night there was such a cranking and croaking that it made the windows rattle in the neighbours’ houses. And the stuff the beasts needed to eat! I used to bring it in by the sackload. The fact that there are so few flies left in Holland today is solely the result of my perseverance in collecting food for my little charges. Cockroaches, for example, I completely eradicated. The frogs themselves I never actually saw; by day they hid under stones and at night my parents had the strange idea that I ought to be in bed. Eventually my mother suggested it would make no difference and be simpler if I set the animals free and just kept the stones, but I was naturally horrified by such ignorance and rejected the suggestion.
My passion for collecting insects gradually became the talk of the town and eventually drew me to the attention of the entomological society which, at that time, consisted of a knockkneed barber, a furrier, three retired engine drivers and a technician from the Science Museum who, however, could not come on collecting expeditions because his wife would not let him. They were all frail old gentlemen, some of whom collected bugs, others butterflies, and the society had a silk flag with the words ‘Osiris: Society for Biological Research’ embroidered on it. In spite of my young years I was accepted as a member. I still have in my possession the letter inviting me to join which ends, `Yours biologically’.
I soon realised why they were so keen to have me in the club. All the venerable members were either half blind, and therefore incapable of spotting a moth hidden in the cracks of tree bark, or their varicose veins made trudging through the inevitable sand-dunes to look for insects a painful process. Others found that whenever they swooped with their net on a lively peacock butterfly they were interrupted by a staccato coughing fit, which naturally allowed their prey to escape.
I suffered from none of these infirmities and walking a few miles to find a caterpillar on a leaf was no probl
em for me; no wonder, then, that the cunning old men had the idea of using myself and a schoolfriend of mine as tracker-dogs. There was only one who was more than a match for me at finding insects, and that was the aforementioned Jan Swammerdam, who must have been sixty-five, ifhe was a day. He only needed to turn over a stone and there would be a larva or something equally welcome. There was a rumour that he had earned this entomological clairvoyance by having lived a blameless life - you know how highly virtue is regarded in Holland!
I never saw him other than in his black frock coat with the circular mark of his butterfly net, which he stuffed up inside his jacket, between his shoulder blades, and the end of the green handle sticking out between his coat-tails.
He never wore a shirt collar, tying instead the edge he had cut off an old linen-backed map round his neck, and I learnt the reason once when I went to visit him in the attic where he lived. ‘I can’t get in’, he explained to me, pointing to the wardrobe where he kept his clothes, `Hippocampa Milhauseri’ - a very rare caterpillar -‘has pupated right next to the hinge and it will be three years before it emerges.’
On our excursions we all used the railway; all, that is, with the exception of Swammerdam, who went on foot because he was too poor to be able to afford the ticket; and so that he did not wear out the soles of his shoes with all that walking, he used to smear a secret rubber solution on them and, in the course of time, it hardened into a layer a couple of inches thick. I can still see it today.
He made his living by selling the unusual hybrid butterflies which he occasionally managed to breed, but the amount he made was not enough to keep his wife, who patiently shared his poverty and bore his quirks with an understanding smile, from falling into a physical decline from which she eventually died. After that Swammerdam neglected the financial side of his existence entirely and devoted his life to the goal of discovering a certain green dung beetle which, some scientists claim, insists on living exactly fourteen and a half inches under the ground, but only in places where the surface is covered in sheep dung.
My schoolfriend and I were extremely dubious about this rumoured beetle, but that did not stop us, young scoundrels that we were, from carrying sheep’s droppings around with us and occasionally scattering some over a particularly hard part of the track and hiding, so we could giggle at the sight of Swammerdam digging away like a frantic mole.
One day, however, a miracle occurred that shook us to the core. We were out on one of our expeditions. The greybeards were trotting along in front bleating the club song:
and bringing up the rear came Swammerdam, like a beanpole in black with his spade over his shoulder. On his face was an expression of almost Biblical radiancy, and when someone asked him why, he just said mysteriously that he had had a most auspicious dream the night before.
My friend and I surreptitiously dropped a portion of sheep dung onto the path. Swammerdam spotted it, stopped, removed his hat, took a deep breath and, quivering with faith and hope, looked up at the sun until his pupils had contracted to the size of pinheads; then he bent down and began to scrape away at the ground, scattering stones and earth everywhere.
My friend and I stood by watching and the devil within us rejoiced.
Suddenly Swammerdam went deathly pale, dropped his spade and stared at the hole he had dug, his hands clenched tight and pressed against his lips. Then he bent down and with trembling fingers picked up a glistening green beetle from the hole.
He was so moved that for a long time he couldn’t speak, two large tears just rolled down his cheeks. Finally he said, `Last night the ghost of my wife appeared to me in a dream, her face as radiant as a saint’s; and she comforted me and promised me that I would find the beetle.’
We two rascals slipped quietly away like two thieves, and neither could look the other in the face for shame. Later on my schoolfriend told me that for a long time he went in awe of his own hand which, at the very moment when he was using it to play a cruel trick on an old man, had perhaps been an instrument of the Lord.”
After it was dark Doctor Sephardi accompanied Juffrouwvan Druysen to the Zeedijk, a crooked, pitch-black street in the eeriest part of Amsterdam at the comer of two canals, right beside the gloomy church of St. Nicholas.
Above the gables the reddish glow from the booths and tents of the summer fairground, which was already in full swing, illuminated the sky and mixed with the white mist rising from the city and the glistening reflection of the full moon on the roofs to create a mysterious iridescent haze in which the shadows of the church towers hovered like long, pointed triangles of black gauze.
The putter of all the motors driving the roundabouts sounded like the thump-thump of a huge heart. The breathless wail of the hurdy-gurdies, the constant drum-rolls, the shrill voices of the barkers and the whiplash crackle of gunfire from the shooting galleries echoed through the dark streets, conjuring up in the mind a picture of a torchlit crowd milling round stalls piled high with gingerbread, brightly-coloured candy and hairy cannibal faces carved out of coconut shells; gaily-painted wooden horses were whirling round, bobbing up and down, boat-swings rose and fell like giant pendulums, black faces nodded, white clay pipes clenched between their teeth as a target for the air-guns, excited children tried to throw hoops over rows of knives stuck into rough deal tables, glistening seals honked from their tubs of dirty water, flags fluttered over tents where the flickering light reflected by the revolving globe covered in mirror tiles played on the grotesque antics of the monkeys and the parrots screeching on silver swings; and all around, shoulder to shoulder, stood the tall houses like a silent crowd of dusky giants with white, rectangular eyes.
Jan Swammerdam lived well away from the noisy throng in a room on the fourth floor of a building that seemed to lurch forward over the dark street; in the cellar was the notorious sailors’ tavern, the ‘Prince of Orange’.
Inside, the whole house was filled with the dusty odour of dried herbs from a little store by the entrance, and a sign proclaiming that `Spirituous liquors were sold here’ indicated where, during the day, a certain Lazarus Egyolk ran a gin-shop.
Doctor Sephardi and Juffrouw van Druysen climbed up some stairs that were as steep as a chicken ladder and were warmly welcomed at the top by an old lady with snow-white hair and round, child-like eyes who greeted them with the words, “Welcome, Eva, and thou, too, King Balthasar, welcome in the New Jerusalem.”
As the two of them entered, the six people, who had been sitting in solemn silence round the table, rose with gauche politeness and were introduced by Mademoiselle de Bourignon, “This is Jan Swammerdam and his sister” - a wrinkled old woman with a Dutch bonnet and Krulletjes, brass spirals, on her ears who kept on curtseying - “and that is Mijnheer Lazarus Egyolk, who is not actually a member of our spiritual circle, but is `Simon the Cross-bearer’ (“and lives in the same house, your Honours”, proudly added the man in question, an ancient Russian Jew in a caftan); “then there is Juffrouw Mary Faatz of the Salvation Army, her spiritual name is Magdalena, and dear Brother Ezekiel” - she pointed to a young man with a puffy, pockmarked face, which looked as if it had been kneaded out of dough, and inflamed eyelids without lashes - “he works in the herb-store below; his spiritual name is Ezekiel because when the time is fulfilled he will judge mankind.”
Doctor Sephardi gave his companion a puzzled look. Her aunt, who noticed it, explained, “We all have spiritual names. Jan Swammerdam, for example, is King Solomon and his sister Shulamite; I am Gabriela, that is the feminine form of the Archangel Gabriel, but usually I am called `The Guardian of the Threshold’, for it is my task to collect the souls that are scattered in the cosmos and lead them back to paradise. You will come to understand all this much better later on, Doctor Sephardi, for you are one of us, although you do not know it at the moment. Your spiritual name is King Balthasar. Have you never felt the stigmata?”
Sephardi was more confused than ever.
“I’m afraid Sister Gabriela is rushing on ahead a litt
le too quickly”, said Swammerdam with a smile. “Many years ago a true prophet of the Lord arose in this very house, a simple cobbler by the name of Anselm Klinkherbogk. You will meet him this evening. He lives upstairs.
We are not spiritualists, as you might assume, Mijnheer, almost, I am tempted to say, the opposite, for we have nothing to do with the realm of the dead. Ourgoal is eternal life. In every name there resides a hidden power, and when we repeat our names, with our lips closed, to our own hearts until it fills our whole being day and night, then we draw the spiritual powerinto our blood and it circulates through our veins, changing our bodies little by little. This gradual transformation of the body - only the body must be transformed, the spirit is perfect and complete from the very beginning - is expressed in all kinds of feelings which are the harbingers of the state known as`spiritual rebirth’. One such feeling, for example, is the sensation of a gnawing pain that comes and goes without our being able to explain why. At first it just affects the flesh, but then it begins to bore into the bones and penetrates the whole body until, as a sign of the `first baptism’ - that is the baptism of water - the crucifixion of the first degree appears; that is, on the hands there appear inexplicable wounds with water coming out.” He and the others, except forLazarus Egyolk, lifted up their hands to reveal deep, circular scars, as if made by nails.
“But that is hysteria!” cried Juffrouw van Druysen in horror.
“You are welcome to call it hysteria, Mejuffrouw; our hys teria is not an illness. There are different kinds of hysteria. Only hysteria which is associated with trances and mental imbalance is a sickness and leads downwards; our hysteria, on the other hand, is a matter of mental balance, the achieving of clarity, and is the way upwards, from insight through rational thought to knowledge through direct contemplation.
In the scriptures this goal is called `the inner voice’, and just as ordinary men and women think by letting words run through their brain without being conscious of it, so within those who are spiritually reborn there is another, mysterious language with new words, which are beyond error or even uncertainty. Then thought becomes a new manner of thought, becomes magic and no longer a tool of our paltry understanding, becomes a revelation of the truth in the light of which error vanishes because our thoughts are rings that are no longer separate, but have linked together to form a chain.”
The Green Face Page 6