“I don’t quite understand, Frau Fromm. What is green – over there?”
“I call it the green land. Sometimes I am there. It is as if it were under water and my breathing stops when I am there. It is far below the surface, in the depths of the sea, and everything seems steeped in a greenish light.”
The Green Land!!! I heard my own voice as if from very far away. The words overwhelmed me with the force of a tidal wave. I stood in a daze, just repeating, “The Green Land!” –
“Nothing good comes from it; I know that when I am there,” continued Frau Fromm, without changing the almost indifferent, yet strangely harsh and threatening tone of her voice, which still contained a tremor of shyness and repressed fear.
I shook myself out of my daze and asked with observant concern, like a doctor:
“Tell me, what has this ‘Green Land’ that you keep on ‘visiting’ to do with Princess Shotokalungin?”
“She has another name there.”
The tension was almost unbearable.
“What name?!”
Frau Fromm faltered, looked at me absentmindedly, hesitated:
“I ... I don’t know.”
“Think, think hard!” – I almost screamed.
I felt that she was under my control, but she just shook her head with a tortured expression. If I can establish rapport, I said to myself, the name must come. But Frau Fromm remained silent; for the first time her eyes slid away from mine. I saw that she was resisting but at the same time seeking spiritual comfort from me. I tried to calm my excitement and withdraw my influence from her – turn my will away from her so that she would come of her own accord. She made a jerky movement. And when she suddenly pulled herself together and slowly put out her foot, I had no idea what it meant. Then she started to walk and passed slowly in front of me, making a gesture as if she were searching, resisting, and it moved me deeply, tore at my heart, so that I was gripped by an irrational impulse to draw her to me, to comfort her, to cry with her, to kiss her like a long-lost lover – like my true and lawful wife. It took all my power of will that I did not do what I had already done in my imagination.
Frau Fromm walked round the chair, in which I usually sit when I am working, and proceeded towards the opposite end of the desk. Her movements were like those of an automaton, her eyes those of a corpse. When she opened her mouth, her voice sounded utterly foreign to me. I did not catch everything she said, only this:
“Are you back again? Go away, tormentor! You cannot deceive me! – I can sense you – I can see your snake’s skin, black and silver – I am not afraid, I have my orders – I – I ...”
Frau Fromm had reached the left-hand end of the desk. Before I realised what she was doing, her hands suddenly leapt forward like a cat’s paws and pounced on the Tula-ware box that Lipotin had given me from Baron Stroganoff and which I had so carefully placed along the line of the meridian.
“Now I have finally got my hands on you, you silver-black snake,” hissed Frau Fromm, and her nervously trembling fingers felt their way along the inlay work of the box.
I wanted to leap up and tear it from her hands. I could not rid myself of the strange superstition that it would somehow disturb the cosmic order if the box was not left in the appointed alignment. This childish delusion took hold of me with a force akin to madness.
“Don’t touch! Leave it where it is!” I imagined I was screaming, but all I could hear from my throat was a hoarse, stifled cry in which the words remained unarticulated.
The next moment Frau Fromm’s restless fingers had gathered at one point on the smooth silver surface – it was like spiders coming together, like sentient beings suddenly attracted by the scent or sight of their prey and descending on the same spot. They clambered over each other, pushed and shoved, scrabbling at the same place with hungry movements until suddenly a spring gave a quiet click: the Tula box lay open in Frau Fromm’s hands.
Immediately I was beside her. She had become quite calm and held the open box out toward me on the palm of her outstretched hand in a gesture expressing disgust or horror at an ugly or dangerous beast. Her features bore a look of triumph and joy, and an inner radiance which I found difficult to interpret, but which affected me like the entreaty of a love too timid to declare itself.
Without a word I took the box out of her hand. At that she seemed to wake up and her face expressed bewilderment, anxiety. She knew how strictly I insisted that nothing on my desk should be touched, nothing moved from its place. Nervous, incomprehending and at the same time triumphant, she looked me full in the face, and I knew that one word of reproach in that moment would have driven her for ever from me and from my house.
The warm surge of mysterious affection which had flooded my innermost being stopped me from speaking the harsh word that was on the tip of my tongue. It was all the matter of a second.
Then I examined the Tula-ware box: on a neatly stitched cushion of green satin, faded and threadbare with age, lay John Dee’s Lapis sacer et praecipuus manifestationis, that had been given to him in the last days at Mortlake by the Green Angel of the West Window: Bartlett Greene’s polished coal which John Dee had burnt in the fire and then received back in such miraculous fashion from the world beyond.
After the very first glance there was no doubt at all for
