The Green Face (18 page)

Sephardi paused for a moment; he seemed to have reached a
point in his account where he had to call on all his reserves of
strength to proceed any farther.

He dug his fingernails into the flesh of his palms and stared
silently at the floor.

Finally he pulled himself out of his reverie, gave Hauberrisser and then Eva a steady look and said in a toneless voice,

“If, however, a man should succeed in crossing the `Bridge
of Life’, then it would be a great good fortune for the world. It
is almost more than if asaviour were sent. Only there is one thing
that is essential: he cannot reach the goal alone, he needs a ….
female companion. It is only possible, if at all, by a combination
of male and female forces. Therein lies the secret meaning of
marriage which has been lost to mankind for thousands of
years.” His voice gave way, and he stood up and went to the
window, to conceal his face from the others. When he continued, his voice appeared calm again. “If I can help the pair of
you at all with my meagre knowledge of these matters, you have
only to ask.”

His words struck Eva like a bolt of lightning. Suddenly she
understood what had been going on inside him. Tears welled up
in her eyes.

It was obvious that Sephardi, with the keen eye of one who
spent his whole life shut away from the outside world, had become aware of what was happening between Hauberrisser
and Eva even before they had. But what could have impelled
him so brutally to expose the tender shoots of their mutual love
to the cold air, forcing its natural development by his almost
brusque insistence on an immediate declaration?

Had his honesty not been above all doubt, she would inevitably have interpreted it as the cunning attempt of a jealous rival
deliberately to tear the delicate web between them, even as it
was being spun.

Or was it perhaps the heroic decision of a man who knew he
was not strong enough to bear the gradual separation from the
woman he secretly loved, preferring to bring matters to a head
himself rather than fighting against it?

But gradually the feeling forced its way into her mind that
there was some other cause forhis precipitate action, something
connected with his knowledge of the `Bridge of Life’, about
which he had given such a deliberately pithy reply.
Swammerdam’s words about destiny suddenly breaking into a
gallop came into her mind, she could almost hear him saying
them. The previous evening, as she had stared down from the
railing into the dark waters of the canal, she had suddenly felt
the courage to follow the old man’s advice and call on God. And
was all this that was happening now the result? So soon? She felt
terrified by the fear that it was so. The scene with the dark bulk
of the Church of St. Nicholas, the sunken house with the iron
chain and the man in the boat trying to conceal himself from her
flitted timidly throughhermind likethememory of abad dream.

Hauberrisser was standing silently at the table, leafing excitedly through a book. Eva felt it was up to her to break the
awkward silence. She went to him, looking him steadily in the
eyes, and said,

“What Doctor Sephardi has just said should not cause
embarrassment between us, MijnheerHauberrisser, they arethe
words of a friend. Neither of us can know what fate has in store
for us. At the moment we are still free, at least I am, and if life
is to bring us together then we cannot change that, nor would we
want to. I see nothing unnatural, nothing to be ashamed of, in
openly considering the possibility. Tomorrow I shall return to Antwerp; I could postpone the journey, but I think it better if we
do not meet for some time. I would not like to be prey to the
feeling that you or I had acted on impulse in tying a knot which
it would be very painful to have to untie later on. From what
Baron Pfeill has said I gather that you are lonely. So am I. May
I take with me the feeling that that is no longer so and that there
is one whom I can call my friend and with whom I share the hope
of finding a path that will lead us beyond the everyday world?
And our friendship”, she turned with a smile to Sephardi, “will
continue as ever, I hope?”

Hauberrisser took the hand she held out to him and kissed it.
“Eva - do not be angry if I use your first name - I will not even
ask you not to go, to stay in Amsterdam. It shall be the first
sacrifice I make for you, that I lose you on the very same day
when you…”

“If you would give me the first proof of yourfriendship”, Eva
interrupted, “then please stop talking about me. I know that what
you are about to say will not be an empty formula, said out of
mere politeness, but still, please do not finish the sentence. I
would prefer to leave it to time to tell us whether we canbe more
than friends to each other.”

Baron Pfeill had stood up when Hauberrisser began to speak
and was about to make an unobtrusive exit, so as not to be in the
way. He realised, however, that Sephardi could not follow
without having to push past the couple, so he went to the small
round table by the door and picked up the newspaper. The very
first lines he read made him exclaim in horror, “There was a
murder in the Zeedijk last night!” Concentrating on the essentials, he hurriedly read out the article to the others,

“MURDERER ALREADY FOUND

Since our report in the afternoon edition, the following facts
have emerged:

It was before first light when Jan Swammerdam, a wellknown local entomologist, went to unlock the door to the attic
where Klinkherbogk lived. For reasons that have not yet been
established, he had locked it from outside the previous evening,
but when he arrived he found the door wide open and on the floor the blood-soaked corpse of Kaatje, Klinkherbogk’s little granddaughter. The shoemaker, Klinkherbogk, had disappeared,
likewise a large sum of money which, according to Swammerdam’s statement, he had had with him the previous evening.

Suspicion immediately fell on a shop assistant who worked
in the same building. A witness came forward who claimed to
have seen him on the darkened landing with a key at the door of
the attic. He was arrested at once, but was released when the real
murderer gave himself up to the police.

The police are working on the assumption that the murderer
first of all killed Klinkherbogk and then his granddaughter,
who must have been woken up by the noise. The body must have
been thrown out of the window into the canal which has been
dragged, but so far without result. At that point it is over ten feet
deep and the bottom is soft mud.

The murderer has made a statement, but it is very confused,
and the police are not ruling out the possibility that the crime
was committed while he was mentally deranged. He admits to
having stolen the money, which was presumably the motive for
the crime. It is thought that the money, a sum of several thousand
guilders, was given to the shoemaker by a well-known spendthrift-let this serve as a warning againstthe dangers of rash and
excessive charitable gestures.”

Pfeill let the newspaper sink as he nodded sadly to himself.

“And the murderer? Who was it?” Eva quickly asked. “That
terrible negro, I’m sure.”

“The murderer?” Pfeill turned the page. “Ibe murderer is …
here it is, `The man who confessed to the murder was an old
Russian Jew by the name of Egyolk who runs a liquor store in
the same building. It is high time that the area around the Zeedijk
was etc., etc.’ …”

“Simon the Crossbearer?” exclaimed Eva in shocked surprise. “I could never believe he would wilfully commit such a
horrendous crime.”

“Not even in a state of mental derangement”, murmured
Doctor Sephardi.

“So you think it was the shop assistant, the one they call
Ezekiel?”

“No more likely than Egyolk. At most he had a skeleton key
and intended to enterthe attic in orderto steal the money but was
prevented at the last moment. The negro was the murderer, it’s
as plain as a pikestaff.”

“But then what in heaven’s name can have impelled old
Lazarus Egyolk to confess to the crime?”

Doctor Sephardi shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps it was an
attack of hysteria brought on by the initial shock; when the
police came, he thought Swammerdam had murdered Klinkherbogk and wanted to sacrifice himself for him. One glance
was enough to tell me that he’s not normal. Do you remember,
Eva, what old Swammerdam said about the power that resides
in names. Egyolk only needs to have borne his spiritual name
of Simon for a sufficient length of time and it is not impossible
that he was just waiting for the opportunity to sacrifice himself
for another. I am even of the opinion that Klinkherbogk, before
he was murdered himself, killed the little girl in a fit of religious
mania. It is well known that he practised the name of Abram for
years; if, instead, he had repeated the word Abraham to himself,
the disastrous playing-out of the sacrifice of Isaac would never
have occurred.”

“What you are saying there is a complete mysteryto me”,
Hauberrisser broke in. “How can repeating a word constantly
to oneself determine or change a person’s fate?”

“Why ever not? The threads that guide a man’s actions are
exceedingly delicate. What is said in the Book of Genesis about
the change of name from Abram to Abraham and from Sarai to
Sarah is connected with the Cabbala, or rather, with other, much
deeper mysteries. I have come across a certain amount of evidence which suggests that it is wrong to speak secret names
aloud, as they did in Klinkherbogk’s group. As you perhaps
know, every letter in the Hebrew alphabet also stands for a
number. For example, S = 300, M = 40, N = 50 etc. It is possible,
therefore, to turn names into numbers and to construct geometrical figures in our imagination from the relationships between
the numbers, a cube, a pyramid and so on. And these geometrical
shapes can become the axis round which our inner life, which
until then has been completely formless, rotates, so to speak, if we imagine it in the right way and with the necessary force.
When we do this we turn our soul - I have no other word for it
- into a crystalline structure from which it derives its eternal
laws. The Egyptians imagined a soul that had reached perfection in the form of a sphere.”

“But what”, mused Baron Weill, “in your opinion, assuming
the poor shoemaker really did kill his granddaughter, was wrong
with his `practice’? Is the name Abram so very different from
Abra-ham?”

“It was Klinkherbogk who gave himself the name of Abram.
It rose from his subconscious and that is what led to the disaster.
What it lacked was what we Jews call the ‘Neshamah’, the
spiritual breath of the deity descending from above, in this
particular case the syllable ‘ha’. In the Bible it was Abra-ham
who was spared from having to sacrifice Isaac; Abram would
have become a murderer, just as Klinkherbogk has. In his thirst
for eternal life, Klinkherbogk called down his own death. I said
before, whoever is weak should not take the path of strength.
The path of weakness, of waiting, was Klinkherbogk’s path and
he departed from it.”

“But something must be done for poor Egyolk!” exclaimed
Eva. “Are we to stand around idly whilst he is tried and sentenced?”

“It takes longer than that to sentence a man”, said Sephardi
soothingly. “romorrow morning I will go and speak to the
police psychiatrist, de Brouwer, I know him from the University.

“And you’ll look after the poor old butterfly-man as well,
won’t you and write and tell me how he is getting on?” asked
Eva, standing up and shaking hands with Pfeill and Sephardi as
she made to leave. “Goodbye; I trust we shall meet again in the
not-too-distant future.”

Hauberrisser realised straight away that she wanted him to
accompany her, and helped her on with her coat, which the
servant had brought in.

As they walked through the park the cool of the evening lay
damp upon the redolent lime trees. Greek statues shimmered
palely in the darkness of tree-lined arcades, dreaming in the splash ofthe fountains which glistened silver in stray light from
the lamps outside the castle.

“Might I not visit you occasionally in Antwerp, Eva?” asked
Hauberrisser in a choking, almost shy voice. “You ask me to
wait until time should bring us together. Do you really think it
would be better to do it by writing rather than by seeing each
other? We both have a different view of life from the masses,
why put a screen between us that can only separate us?”

“No, Eva”, Hauberrisser broke in quickly, “you are wrong.
I know what you are afraid I might say. You don’t want to hear
me tell you what my feelings for you are, and I am not going to
mention them. In spite of the fact that what Doctor Sephardi said
was said in all honesty, and in spite of the fact that I hope with
all my heart that it will come to pass, yet it has still raised an
almost insurmountable barrier between us, of which I am painfully aware. If we do not put all our effort into tearing it down
it will stand between us for ever. And yet I am filled with an
inner sense of joy that it has happened in this way. I think neither
of us need fear a calculated marriage. The danger that was
threatening us - please excuse me, Eva, when I use the words
`we’ and ‘us’ in this way - was that it would be love and desire
alone that brought us together. Doctor Sephardi was right when
he said the meaning of marriage had been lost to mankind.”