The Green Face

by Gustav Meyrink

  “As I said”, Swammerdam went on, “it was my realisation that the fulfilment of Klinkherbogk’s prophecy far outweighed his horrible death that turned my grief to joy. Such a ‘changing-round of the lights’ does exist; it is a transformation of bitter into sweet that can be brought about by the power of truth alone.”

  “In spite of that”, Sephardi joined in the conversation again, “what still puzzles me is what gives you the strength to master your sorrow merely through such a realisation. However much I seek refuge in philosophy to overcome my sorrow at Eva’s death, I still feel as if my happiness has gone for ever.”

  Swammerdam nodded thoughtfully. “True, true. The reason is that your insights come from rational thought and not from the `inner voice’. Without knowing it, we distrust our own insights; that is why they are grey and dead. The insights that come to us from the inner voice, on the other hand, are gifts of living truth, and they delight us more than we can say, whenever they are granted us.

  Since I have been following the ‘path’, the inner voice has only spoken to me a few times, but it has still brightened my whole existence.”

  “And has what it told you always come to pass?” asked Sephardi, trying to conceal the scepticism in his voice. “Or did it not prophesy to you?”

  “There were three prophecies concerning the distant future. The first was, that with my help a young couple would open up a spiritual path which had been blocked for thousands of years, but which would now, in the coming age, be revealed to many people. It is this path that gives life its true worth, gives meaning to existence. My whole life has come to centre round this prophecy.

  I would rather not talk about the second one, you would think I was insane, if I were to tell you -“

  Neill quickly asked, “Does it concern Eva?”

  Swammerdam’s only answer was a smile, “and the third seems unimportant, although that cannot really be the case, and wouldn’t interest you.”

  “Have you any indications that at least one of the three predictions will come true?” asked Sephardi.

  “Yes. My feeling of absolute certainty. I don’t care in the slightest whether I ever see them come true; I am content with the knowledge that it is impossible for me to feel the slightest doubt about them.

  You cannot know what it is to feel the presence of the truth that can never err. It is something you must experience yourself.

  I have never seen a so-called ‘supernatural’ apparition; only once in my sleep I saw the image of my wife as I was searching for a green insect. I have never desired to ‘see God’; an angel has never come tome, as one did to Klinkherbogk; unlike Lazarus Egyolk, I have never met the prophet Elijah, but that does not grieve me: I find myself rewarded a thousand times because the living truth of what is said in the Bible, ‘Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’, has shown itself in my life. I believed when there was no ground for belief, and have learnt to think of the impossible as possible.

  Sometimes I feel there is someone next to me, immense and all-powerful; or I know he is holding his hand over this or that person; I cannot see him, nor can I hear him, but I know that he is there.

  My hope is not that I shall ever see him; my hope is in him.

  I know that a time of terrible devastation is at hand that will be ushered in by a storm, the like of which the world has never known. I care not whether I shall see that time or not, but I am glad that it will come!” Both Pfeill and Sephardi felt a shiver at the cold, calm way Swammenlam spoke those words. “This morning, you asked me where I thought Eva could have been hidden all this time. That I did not know - how could I? - but I knew that she would come, and she has come.

  And I know, just as surely as I know that I am standing here, that she is not dead. His hand is over her!”

  “But she is in a coffin, in the church!”

  “But tomorrow she will be buried!” Exclaimed Pfeill and Sephardi together.

  “Even if she were to be buried a thousand times over, even if I were to hold her skull in my hand - I know that she has not died”

  “Mad. Mad!” said Pfeill to Sephardi after Swammerdam had left.

  The colours of the high, arched windows of St. Nicholas’ glowed out into the misty night with a dull gleam, as if a candle had been lit inside the church. The heavy, tired tread of the policeman, who, since the violent incidents on the Zeedijk, had been assigned to patrol the infamous harbour area, echoed along the churchyard wall. Unseen in its shadow, Usibepu waited motionless until he had passed, then climbed over the gate, pulled himself up by a tree onto the sacristy roof, which projected out like a small chapel, cautiously opened the round skylight and dropped to the floor like a cat.

  On a silver catafalque in the centreof the nave Eva’s body was bedded on a mound of white roses, her hands folded over her breast, her eyes closed, with a smile on her rigid features. At the head and either side of the coffin red and gold candles as thick as a man’s arm kept the deathwatch with a steady flame.

  In a recess in the wall hung the picture of a black Madonna with the child on her ann and in front of it, suspended from the roof by a glittering wire, was the blood-red glow of the sanctuary lamp in a glass bowl like a ruby heart. Its dull light illuminated pale hands and feet made of wax behind curving bars; a pair of crutches nearby and amessage, `Mary came to my aid’; painted wooden statues of Popes on stone pedestals with white tiaras on their heads, their hands raised in blessing; columns of fluted marble disappearing into the darkness - and the Zulu slipping noiselessly from the shadow of one column to the next, eyes wide in astonishment at all the strange objects around; he nodded grimly to himself when he saw the wax limbs, assuming they came from defeated enemies, peeped through the chinks in the confessionals and suspiciously tapped the huge figures of the saints, to make sure they were not alive.

  When he was certain he was alone, he crept on tiptoe to where the body was and stood there for a long time, looking at it sadly. Dazed by her beauty, he stretched out his hand and touched her soft blond hair, then pulled it back, as if afraid he might disturb her sleep.

  Why had she been so terrified of him, that summer’s night on the Zeedijk? He could not understand it. Until then any woman, black or white, that he had desired, had been proud to belong to him, even Antje, the waitress in the tavern, and she was white and had yellow hair. He had never had to resort to his Vidoo spells, they had all come of their own accord and flung themselves into his arms. One alone had not: She. She alone he had not been able to possess, she for whom he would willingly have given all the money for which he had strangled the old man with the gold paper crown.

  Night after night since he had fled from the sailors he had wandered through the streets looking for her, but in vain; none of the countless women, who sought men in the darkness, could tell him where she was.

  He put his hands over his eyes. Memories rushed past as in a wild dream: the torrid savannahs of his homeland; the English trader who had lured him to Cape Town with the promise of making him King of Zululand; the floating house that had brought him to Amsterdam; the circus troupe of wretched Nubian slaves, with whom he had to perform war dances every night for money which kept being taken away from him; the stone city where his heart had withered so far from home and where no-one understood his language.

  With gentle fingers he stroked the dead woman’s arm, and an expression of boundless desolation appeared on his face; she did not know that forher sake he had lost his God. To make her come to him, he had called the dreadful souquiant, the snake-idol with the human face; in doing so he had risked - and lost-the power to walk over red-hot stones.

  Dismissed from the circus and moneyless, he was to have been sent back to Africa, to return as a beggar instead of as a king! He had leapt from the ship into the water and swum back to land; by day he had hidden in barges carrying fruit and by night prowled around the Zeedijk, looking for her, her whom he loved more than the savannahs of home, more than his black wives, more than th
e sun in the sky, more than anything.

  Once, only once, since then the angry snake-god had appeared to him; in his sleep it had given him the cruel order to call Eva to the house of a rival. He was only allowed to see her again here in the church, when she was dead.

  Full of grief, he let his eyes wander round the gloomy building: a man with a crown of thorns, nailed to a cross with iron nails through his hands and feet? A dove with green twigs in its beak? An old man with a large golden sphere in one hand? A young man pierced by arrows? Strange white gods; he did not know their secret names, by which to call them.

  And yet, they must be able to work magic and bring the dead woman back to life. Who else gave Mister Arpad Zitter the power to push daggers through his throat, to swallow eggs and make them reappear?

  He felt one last ray of hope when he saw the Madonna in the alcove. She must be a goddess, for she wore a golden diadem in her hair, she was black, perhaps she could understand his language?

  He squatted down before the picture and held his breath until he could hear in his ears the wailing of his executed foes, who had to await his arrival as slaves at the gates of the life beyond; then with a gurgle he swallowed his tongue, so that he could cross over into the realm where men can speak with the invisible ones: Nothing. Nothing but deep, deep blackness instead of the pale, green glow he was accustomed to see; he could not find the way to the foreign goddess.

  Slowly, sadly he returned to the bier, huddled down at the foot of the catafalque and started the burial song of the Zulus, a wild, awful liturgy consisting of barbaric, moaning grunts answered by a breathless muttering, like the clatter of antelopes in flight, interrupted by the harsh screeching of a hawk, hoarse yelps of despair and a melancholy keening, which seemed to lose itself in distant forests, then reappear in a dull sobbing and turn into the long-drawn-out howling of a dog that has lost its master, before it finally died away.

  Then he stood up, reached inside his shirt and brought out a small, white chain made of the vertebrae of kings’ wives that he had strangled: the symbol of his status as King of the Zulus, which grants immortality to anyone who takes it to the grave with them. He twisted it, like a gruesome rosary, round the dead woman’s hands, which had been folded together in prayer.

  It was themostprecious thing he possessed on earth, but what was immortality to him now? He was homeless, here and on the other side; Eva could not enter the paradise of the black people, nor he the paradise of the whites.

  A slight noise startled him.

  He tensed, like a predator about to strike.

  Nothing.

  It must have been a rustling from the wreaths as the foliage withered.

  Then his eye noticed the candle at the head of the bier, and he saw the flame flicker and then lean to one side, as if struck by a current of air - someone must have come into the church!

  In a single movement he was in the shadow of the pillar, looking towards the sacristy to see if the door was opening: nothing!

  When he looked back towards the body, he saw a high, stone seat had replaced the flickering candle. On it throned an Egyptian god, slim, taller than a man, motionless and naked apart from a red and blue cloth about his loins, holding the crook and scourge in his hands and with the feather crown on his head: the Judge of the Dead. On a chain around his neck hung a golden tablet. Facing him at the foot of the coffin was a brown man with the head of an ibis, holding in his right hand the green ankh, the T-shaped cross with a loop at the top, the symbol of eternal life. On either side of the bier were two further figures, one with the head of a sparrowhawk, the other with the head of a jackal.

  The Zulu realised that they had come to pronounce judgment on the dead woman.

  Wearing a close-fitting dress and a vulture-head cap, the Goddess of Truth approached down the central isle, went up to Eva, who sat up stiffly, took her heart out of her breast and laid it on a balance. The man with the jackal’s head came up and threw a tiny bronze statuette into the other pan.

  The sparrowhawk checked the weight.

  The pan with Eva’s heart in sank down low.

  The man with the ibis head silently wrote on a wax tablet.

  Then the Judge of the Dead spoke:

  “She has been weighed and not found wanting; devout was her life on earth and heedful of the Lord of the Gods, therefore she has reached the land of truth and justification.

  She will wake as a living god and shine in the choir of the gods which are in heaven, for she is of our stock.

  Thus it is written in the Book of the Hidden Abode.”

  He sank into the ground.

  Eva, her eyes closed, stepped down from the bier. Placed between the two gods, she silently followed the man with the head of a sparrowhawk through the walls of the church. All three disappeared.

  Then the candles changed into brown figures with flames blazing up over their heads who lifted the lid onto the empty coffin.

  A rasping sound echoed through the church as the screws bit into the wood.

  Holland had been visited by an icy, sombre winter, which had cast its white shroud over the plains and then slowly, very slowly receded. But still spring did not come: it was as if the earth were never going to wake again; May came with a pallid yellow light, and went again, and still there was no new growth in the meadows.

  The trees were withered and bare, without buds and frozen to their roots. Everywhere was black, dead earth, the grass brown and sere, and the air unnaturally calm; the sea was as motionless as if it were glass, for months there had been not a drop of rain and the sun peered dimly through a veil of dust; the nights were close and the morning brought no refreshing dew.

  The cycle of nature seemed to have ground to a halt.

  As in the terrible days of the Anabaptists, the population was seized with the fear of an imminent cataclysm which was whipped up by frenzied priests, who roamed the streets of the city, bellowing psalms and calling for repentance.

  There were rumours of a great famine and the end of the world.

  Hauberrisser had moved from his apartment in the Hooigracht out to the flat land in the south-east of Amsterdam. He was living alone in a house about which a legend ran that it had once been a so-called druid’s stone. It stood by itself, with its back to a low hill in the middle of the ditches of the Slotermeer polder.

  He had seen it on his way back from Eva’s funeral and, as it had been standing empty for some time, taken it on the spot and moved in on the very same day; in the course of the winter he had had it refurbished so that it was tolerably comfortable. He wanted to be alone with himself and far from the throng, which seemed to consist of shades without substance.

  From his window he could see the city; with its gloomy buildings and the forest of ships’ masts in the background it lay before him like a spiny monster breathing out smoke.

  At times he viewed the city through his binoculars, and the sight of the two spires of St. Nicholas’ and the countless other towers and gables close before his eyes gave him a strange feeling: as if what he was seeing were not solid objects, but tormenting memories that had taken on visible form and were stretching out their cruel arms to grasp him. Then they would dissolve again and drain back into the silhouette of the houses and roofs in the hazy distance.

  At first he had occasionally visited Eva’s grave in the nearby cemetery, but it was always just a mechanical, mindless walk. Whenever he tried to tell himself that she was there, under the earth, and that he ought to feel sorrow, the thought seemed so absurd that he often forgot to place the flowers he had brought on the mound, and took them back home with him.

  The whole idea of sorrow had become an empty word forhim and had lost all power over his emotions. Sometimes, when he pondered on this strange transformation within him, he felt almost a horror of himself.

  In such a mood he was sitting one evening at the window, his eyes fixed on the setting sun. In front of the house a tall poplar towered up from a desert of dry, brown grass. The only s
ign of life far and wide was a tiny patch of green, like an oasis, where there grew an apple-tree covered in blossom; sometimes the farmers came to see it, as if they were on a pilgrimage to the site of a miracle.

  As he gazed out over the desolate landscape, a thought came to him, “Mankind, that eternal phoenix, has burnt itself to ashes in the course of the centuries; but will it rise again?”

  He remembered the apparition of Chidher Green, and his words came back to him that he had stayed on earth in order to `give’.

  “And what am I doing?” he asked himself. “I have become a walking corpse, a withered tree like that poplar over there. Who, apart from myself, knows there is a second, secret life? Swammerdam set me on the path, and the unknown writer showed me the way, but I keep all these fruits that destiny has dropped in my lap for myself. Not even my best friends, Pfeill and Sephardi, suspect what is going on inside me; they imagine I have withdrawn to solitude to grieve for Eva. People seem to me like ghosts making their way blindly through life, or like caterpillars, crawling along the ground, unaware that they have the seeds of a butterfly inside them; but does that give me the right to avoid them?”

  He leapt up as he felt a sudden violent urge to set off for the city that very moment, to stand at some street comer, like one of the many itinerant prophets who were announcing the Day of Judgment, and scream to the multitude that there was a bridge linking life on earth with the world beyond. The next moment he sat down again. “I would only be casting pearls before swine”, he reflected. “Me masses would not understand me; they snivel and whine for a god to come down from heaven to them, only to betray him and crucify him. And the few people of true worth, the few who are seeking a way of redemption for themselves, would they listen to me? No. Those who have truth to give away have fallen into disrepute.” Pfeill came to mind, who in Hilversum had said he would have to be asked first whether he was prepared to accept a gift.

  “No, no, that wouldn’t work”, he told himself, and thought hard. “Strange; the richer you become in inner wealth, the less you can give to others. My path is taking me farther and farther away from mankind, soon the time will come when they cannot hear my voice at all.”