He thought he was about to suffocate and bit his own hand, blocked up his ears with his fingers, grasped the chairs and shook them, to try and calm his mind; he flung open the window and sucked in the cool night air, but it was all in vain, he remained convinced that he had done some damage in the spiritual world of first causes that could not be put right again.
Like rabid beasts, the thoughts, which in his pride he believed he had conquered once and for all, fell upon him; `sitting still’ was no use against them any more, and `awakening’ failed him as well.
`It’s madness, madness, madness’, he repeated to himself desperately, rushing up and down in the room, his teeth clenched together. `Nothing happened! It was a phantom, nothing more! I’m going mad! Delusions, delusions! The voice was lying, the apparition was not real. Where could the wood and the snake have come from … and … the spider?!’
He forced himself to laugh out loud, but his lips were twisted into a distorted grin. `The spider! Why isn’t thathere anymore?’ he tried to mock himself he lit a match to light under the table, but the vague fear that the spider might really be there, as a kind of left-over from the ghostly apparition, was too strong; he did not have the courage to look.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he heard three o’clock strike from the towers. `Thank God, the night is almost over.’
He went over to the window, leant out and gazed at the misty darkness, looking - or so he thought - for the first signs of the approach of dawn; then he suddenly realised what the real reason for doing it was: every fibre of his being was straining to see whether Eva might still not come.
`My longing for her has become so overpowering, that, even when I am wide awake, my imagination conjures up nightmare images.’ He was pacing up and down the room again, trying to soothe the torment that was still racking him, when suddenly his eye was caught by a dark patch on the floor that he could not remember having seen before. He bent down and saw that on the spot where, as far as he could recall, the truncated cross with the snake had stood, the wood of the floorboards was rotten.
He gasped. It was impossible that the patch should have always been there!
A loud blow, like a single knock, jolted him out of his trance.
Eva?
There it was again.
No, that could not be Eva; a solid fist was hammering violently on the door of the house.
He ran to the window and called out into the darkness, asking who it was.
No answer.
Then again, after a while, the same rapid, impatient knocking.
He grasped the red silk tassel on the end of the cord that went through the wall and down the steep stairs to the latch on the door, and pulled it.
The bolts creaked.
Deathly silence.
He listened: no one.
Not the faintest creak from the stairs.
At last: a rustling, almost inaudible, as if outside a hand were feeling for the doorknob.
Immediately the door was opened and Usibepu entered, barefoot and with the bowl of hair on his head damp from the fog. He did not say a word.
Instinctively Hauberrisser looked round for a weapon, but the Zulu did not take the slightest notice of him, did not seem to see him, but prowled round the table with silent, hesitant steps, his eyes fixed to the floor and his trembling nostrils flared like a dog on the scent.
“What are you doing here?” Hauberrisser shouted at him; he gave no answer, scarcely even turned his head. His deep, stertorous breaths showed that he was sleep-walking and completely unconscious.
Suddenly he seemed to have found what he was looking for, for he changed direction and, his face bent low over the floor, went to the rotten patch of wood and stood there looking at it.
Then his eye moved slowly up, seeming to follow an invisible line, until it stopped in mid-air. The movement was so convincing, so pregnant, that fora moment Hauberrisser thought he could see the truncated cross growing out of the floor again.
He felt there was no longer any doubt that it was the snake that the negro was watching; he was gazing upwards, his eyes fixed on one single point, and his thick lips muttered, as if he were talking to it. The expression on his face was constantly changing, from burning desire to corpse-like fatigue, from wild joy to blazing jealousy and uncontrollable fury.
The inaudible conversation seemed to have finished; he turned to face the door and squatted on the ground.
He appeared to be in the grip of a convulsive fit. Hauberrisser watched as he opened his mouth wide, stuck out his tongue as far as possible then jerked it back in and, to judge by the gulping and gurgling, swallowed it. His pupils began to flutter and gradually disappeared up under the wide-open lids whilst his face turned a deathly ashen grey.
Hauberrisser wanted to rush over to him and shake him back to consciousness, but an inexplicable leaden weariness kept him paralysed in his chair. He could scarcely even lift his arm: he seemed to have been infected by the Zulu’s catalepsy.
The picture of the room with the dark, motionless figure in it hovered in front of his gaze, like a tormenting dream-image that had slipped out of time to remain forever unchanged; the only sign of life he felt was the monotonous throb of his heartbeat, even his anxiety about Eva had vanished.
Once more he heard the bells resound from the towers, but he was incapable of counting the strokes; in his dazed stupor, there seemed to be an eternity between each one.
Hours might have passed when finally the Zulu began to move. As if through a veil, Hauberrisser saw him stand up and, still in a deep trance, leave the room. Hauberrisser called up all his reserves of strength to break out of the state of lethargy, and ran down the stairs after him. But Usibepu had already disappeared: the door of the house was wide open and the thick, impenetrable fog had swallowed up any trace of him.
He was about to go back into the house, when suddenly he heard a soft footstep, and the next moment Eva was coming out of the white mist towards him.
With an exclamation of joy, he took her in his anus, but she seemed in a state of total exhaustion and only began to come to after he had carried her into the house and laid her gently in a chair. Then they held each other in a long, long embrace, unable to grasp the fullness of their joy. He was on his knees before her, mute, speechless, and she was holding his face between her hands and covering it over and over with burning kisses.
The past was like a long-forgotten dream; to ask where she had been all those long months and how it had all come about, seemed like a waste of the present. A cascade of sound streamed into the room: the church bells had woken-but they did not hear it; the pale half-light of morning crept through the windows - they did not see it, they only saw each other. He caressed her cheeks, kissed her hands, eyes, mouth, breathed in the scent of her hair: he still could not believe it was actually happening, that it was her heart he could feel beating next to his.
“Eva! Eva! Never leave me again.” The words were stifled in a flood of kisses. “Tell me that you will neverleave me again, Eva.”
She put her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek up against his, “No, no, I’ll stay with you for ever. Even in death. I am so happy, so unspeakably happy that I was allowed to come to you.”
“Eva, Eva, do not talk of death”, he exclaimed; her hands had suddenly gone cold.
“Eva!”
“Do not be afraid, I cannot leave you ever again, my love. Love is stronger than death. He said it. He cannot lie. I lay dead and he brought me back to life. He will keep on bringing me back to life, even if I should die.” She was talking as if in a fever, he picked her up and carried her to his bed. “He nursed me when I lay ill; for weeks I was mad, I was hanging by the hands from the red strap that death wears round his neck, hanging in the air between heaven and earth. He tore death’s neckthong, since then I have been free. Did you not feel that I was with you every hour? Why - why - do the hours rush past so quickly?” Her voice faltered, “Let me - let me be - your wife. I want to
be a mother the next time I come to you.”
They embraced each other in ecstatic, boundless love as they sank, oblivious to the world, beneath waves of happiness.
“Eva!”
“Eva!”
Not a sound.
“Eva! Can’t you hear me?” - he tore open the curtains of the bed - “Eva! -Eva!” He grasped her hand - she fell back lifeless onto the pillow. He felt for her heart - it had stopped beating. Her eyes were blank.
“Eva, Eva, Eva!” With a fearful cry he leapt up and staggered to the table - “Water! Bring water!”- and collapsed as if struck on the forehead-“Eva!”-the glass splintered and cut his finger, he leapt up, tore his hair and ran to the bed - “Eva!”- tried to clasp her to him, saw the set smile of death on her rigid features and sank gibbering to his knees, his head on her shoulder.
“There - out in the street - someone clattering tin buckets - the milkwoman! - Yes, yes, of course - clattering - the milkwoman - clattering.” He felt that his mind had suddenly gone blank. He could hear a heart beating somewhere quite near, he could count the calm, regular pulse and did not know that the heart was his own. Mechanically he caressed the long silky locks in front of his eyes on the white pillow. “How beautiful they are! - Why is the clock not ticking?” He looked up. “Time is standing still. - Of course. It’s not yet light. - And over there on the desk are some scissors and - and the two candlesticks beside them are lit. - Why did I light them? -I forgot to put them out when the negro left. - Of course, and afterwards there was no time to do it because - because Eva - came. - Eva?? - But - but she is - dead! Dead!” the whimper bubbled up from his breast. He was engulfed in a blaze of terrible, unbearable pain.
“Finish it all! Finish it all! - Eva! I must follow her. - Eva! Eva! Wait for me!” Gasping for breath, he flung himself at the table, seized the scissors and was about to plunge them into his breast when he stopped, “No, death is not enough. Blind I will be, before I go from this accursed world!” Mad with despair, he opened the points of the scissors to thrust them into his eyes, when a hand hit his arm with such force that the scissors clattered onto the floor.
“Do you mean to go and seek the living in the realm of the dead?” Chidher Green was standing before him, as he had so many months ago in the shop in the Jodenbreetstraat: in a black caftan with white ringlets. “Do you believe the real world is `over there’? It is only the land of transient joys for blind ghosts, just as the earth is the land of transient sorrows for blind dreamers. Anyone who has not learnt to `see’ here on earth, will certainly not learn to see over there. Do you think that because her body is lying as if dead”, he pointed to Eva, “she cannot rise again? She is alive, it is you who are still dead. Anyone who has come alive as she has, can never die; but one who is dead, as you are, can still come alive:’ He picked up the two candlesticks and changed them round, the left-hand one to the right and the right-hand one to the left, and Hauberrisser could not feel his heart beating any more, it was as if it had vanished from his breast. “As truly as you can put your hand into my side now, just so will you be united with Eva, when you have come into your new spiritual life. What should it matter to you that people will believe that she has died? You cannot expect sleepers to see those who are awake.
You called for transitory love”, he pointed to the place where the truncated cross had stood, passed his hand over the rotten patch in the floorboards and it disappeared, “and transitory love I brought to you, for I have not remained upon earth to take, but to give, to give to each what he longs for. But men do not know what their souls long for; if they knew, they would be able to see.
You went into the shop where the world sells magic and asked for new eyes to see the things of this earth in a new light. Remember: did I not tell you that you would first of all have to cry your old eyes out of your head before you could have new ones?
You asked for knowledge, and I gave you the papers of one of my disciples, who lived in this house when he was still in his corruptible body.
Eva longed for everlasting love; I gave it to her, just as for her sake I now give it to you. Transitory love is a phantom love.
Wherever on earth I see a love put forth its shoots and grow beyond the love that is between phantoms, I hold my hands over it like protective branches, to shield it against Death, the Harvester; for I am not only the phantom with the green face, I am also Chidher, the Ever Green Tree:’
When Vrouw Ohms, his housekeeper, came into the room in the morning with his breakfast, she saw to her horror the body of a beautiful young girl lying on the bed and Hauberrisser kneeling before it, pressing the dead girl’s hand to his face.
She sent a message to his friends; when Pfeill and Sephardi came and, assuming he was unconscious, tried to lift him up, they started back in horror at the smiling expression on his face and the radiance in his eyes.
Dr. Sephardi had asked Baron Mill and Swammerdam to come to his house. They had already been sitting together in the library for over an hour, and night had fallen. They talked of mysticism and philosophy, of the Cabbala, of the strange Lazarus Egyolk, who had long since been released from medical custody and started running his liquor business again, but the conversation kept on returning to Hauberrisser.
Tomorrow was Eva’s burial.
“It is terrible. The poor, poor man!” exclaimed Pfeill as he rose and paced restlessly up and down. “I shudder whenever I try to imagine how he must feel.” He stopped and looked at Sephardi. “Should we not go and keep him company? What do you think, Swammerdam? Do you really think there is no possibility of him waking from his incomprehensible languor. What if he should suddenly come to and, finding himself alone with his sorrow,… ?”
Swammerdam shook his head. “You do not need to worry about him, Baron. Despair cannot touch him ever again; Egyolk would say the lights have been changed round inside him.”
“I find something fearful in your belief’, said Sephardi. “Whenever I hear you talk like that I am gripped by - by fear.” He hesitated for a while, uncertain whether he might not open up an old wound. “When your friend Klinkherbogk was murdered, we were all very concerned for you. We thought it might be too much for you to bear. Eva particularly asked me to go and visit you, to try to calm you down.
Where on earth did you find the courage to bear such a dreadful occurrence, that must have shaken your faith to its very foundations?”
Swammerdam interrupted, “Can you still remember Klinkherbogk’s words before his death?”
“Yes. Every single one. Later I came to understand their meaning, as well. There can be no doubt that he foresaw his end, even before Usibepu entered his room. What he said about the `King from the Land of the Moors’ bringing him the `myrrh of the life beyond’ proves that.”
“You see, then, Doctor Sephardi, it was precisely the fact that his prophecy was fulfilled that healed my sorrow. At first, of course, I was overwhelmed by it, but then I saw it in all its greatness, and I asked myself this question: what is more worthwhile, that words spoken in a state of spiritual rapture should become reality, or that a sick, consumptive child and a frail old shoemaker should remain in this world a little while longer? Would it have been better if the spiritual voices had lied?
Since then, the memory of that night has been a source of pure, unalloyed joy for me.
What does it matter that the two of them had to die? Believe me, they feel much better now.”
“So you are convinced that there is life after death?” asked Neill. “Though to tell the truth”, he added, “I believe in it myself now.
“Certainly I am convinced of it. Of course, paradise is not a place, but a state of being; life on earth is just a state of being, too.”
“And - and you long to be there?”
“N-no.” Swammerdam hesitated, as if it was something he did not want to talk about.
The old servant in his mulberry livery announced that his master was wanted on the telephone. Sephardi stood up and left the room. Immedi
ately Swammerdam continued. Neill realised that what he had to say was not meant for Sephardi’s ears.
“The question ofparadise is a two-edged sword. Some people can be harmed beyond cure by being told that ‘over there’ there is nothing but images.”
“Images? How do you mean?”
“I willgive you anexample. My wife-you know that she died years ago - had an immense love for me, and I for her, now she is ‘over there’, and dreaming that I am with her. She does not know that it is not really I who am with her, but only my image. If she did know, paradise would be hell for her.
Everyone who dies fords, when he crosses over, the images of those he has been longing for, and takes them for real, even the images of the objects his soul was attached to”, he pointed to the rows of books on the library shelves. “My wife believed in the Mother of God; now, `over there’, she is dreaming in her arms.
The rationalists, who want to turn the people away from religion, do not know what they are doing. Truth is only for the few and should be kept secret from the masses; anyone who has only half understood it will find himself in a paradise devoid of colour when he dies.
Klinkherbogk’s longing on earth was to see God; now he is on the other side and can see `God’. He was a man without knowledge or learning, and yet, so consumed was he with his thirst for God, that his lips spoke words of truth; and fate was merciful enough to keep their inner meaning hidden from him.
For a long time I could not understand why that was so; today I know the reason. He had only half understood the truth, and his desire to see God could not have been fulfilled, neither in reality, nor in the dreams of the world beyond.” He stopped abruptly as he heard Sephardi returning.
Pfeill guessed intuitively why he did so: he obviously knew about Sephardi’s love for the dead Eva, and also that, for all his scholarship, deep down inside Sephardi was a religious, even a pious person; Swammerdam did not want to disturb his ‘paradise’, the illusion he would have in the life beyond that he was united with Eva.
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