The Green Face (9 page)

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 problem 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.