In a Dark Wood Read online

  It’s the bell that tells him: everything is nothing.

  Silence falls like dust, the dust itself falls, the rising and falling of his chest settles, his breathing grows slower, his heart resumes its old rhythm. He is standing in the shop, a black pistol in his hand and the vague pain of too many thoughts behind his brow, and as he stands there and brings his free hand to his face and presses his thumb into his left eye socket, against his nose, and his middle finger into his right eye socket and his index finger to his forehead and thinks and thinks and thinks, he sees his future crumbling, literally and figuratively, as if in a vision. He sees himself in a gown and jabot, his diploma in his hand, surrounded by fellow students, professors and the portraits of illustrious predecessors, and as he looks round and sees himself grinning like an idiot in his bath, a crack runs across the picture, and then another, another, a spider’s web of cracks until it looks like a painting covered with craquelé and the first bits of paint flake off and whirl down and he knows with the effortlessness of absolute certainty that his future is over before it has begun, and that evening, lying in bed above the shop, where the private apartment no longer looks like anything he has known, he stares at the ceiling, light fanning in through the curtainless windows. It’s a real bundle of rays, one after the other, as though the day has begun outside while he, in here, is getting ready for the night. He gets out of bed and, like a swimmer walking through shallow water, his feet in the dark, feels his way towards the window. There behind the pane, where the roofs of the houses and the ragged treetops of the Forest of Assen have torn the night sky from the earth, he is met by the sharp light…God yes, the sharp light of…no, not of insight, or the epiphany that comes in the blackest hour of night when the questions that otherwise seem so easily answered–analysis, synthesis, my good Mr Noah!–become bottomless pits of despair in which night-time doubt battles against the day’s cool reason with an archangel’s obstinacy; not that light, but the light that comes from a spotlight mounted on the boot of a Canadian half-track, a contraption–half truck, half tank–that looks like a car at an evolutionary crossroads. On the boot, a Canadian soldier is manipulating a kind of dustbin from which a bright white column radiates. Across the house-fronts runs a sharp-edged circle, a tree of light rises into the night air, touches the clouds and sweeps down on the other side and touches Jacob Noah behind his window. He steps back, trips over a chair and falls on the floor, and as he crashes onto the bare wooden planks of the bedroom in a billow of material, and the back of his head touches the hard wood and a cloud of stars explodes between his eyes, he sees the universe as a little cloud of milk in a cup of coffee. He opens his hand and fog whirls in the middle of his hand, he sees the slow explosion of stars, the dashing tails of comets and the steady ellipses of the planets.

  And while the universe, tennis-ball-sized, hovers before his eyes, just as once the Holy Grail must have hovered before the eyes of the exhausted Parsifal, and he lies on the floor, arms outstretched, legs parted, mouth open, staring at the world like a patriarch staring at God’s angels, breath held for fear of disturbing the eddying galaxies in the hollow of his hand, he slowly pulls himself upright, his arm stretched out strangely in front of him, his eyes focused on the marbled jewel in his palm.

  And then time begins to flow, rushed breathing takes hold of him, a little mist of moisture appears on his upper lip, becoming a silver moustache in the ghostly glimmer with which the bundle lights the room. Stumbling, stepping, twisting and wriggling, he drags the clothes around his limbs (because this isn’t what you would call getting dressed, shirt out of the trousers, no socks, laces loose), stumbles down the stairs, opens the back door and sets off on a creeping expedition through gardens and woods and pathways behind houses until he reaches the canal, where under the cover of the trees next to the concert hall he stands and waits until the path on the other side of the water is completely deserted, crosses, glides like a shadow along the house-fronts on Gymnasiumstraat and finally disappears on the edge of the Forest of Assen.

  The moon is a piece of orange peel, visible every now and again between the floes of dark, drifting cloud-light.

  In the deep darkness of the Forest of Assen, the forest that resembles the firmament itself with its curving, coiling, circling, fading paths, a cloudy infinity of treetops with unexpected open patches, folds and wrinkles, mirror-flat pools, ditches and brooks and canals, which still contains remains of the old woodland that once ringed the town, in that big, old forest Jacob Noah lies on last year’s crunching leaves, hooded by a dry blackberry bush, among the high oaks, under the velvety night air, and he stares at the universe in his hand. There is no thought in him, he isn’t thinking. Perhaps it looks as if he is breathing, as if blood is flowing through his veins, as though his peristalsis is pinching and kneading and his glands are doing whatever it is that glands do. But it’s all appearance. In reality he is still and motionless, caught in the image of what he is holding in his hand, just as what he holds in his hand is caught by him. His lips move, but not a word leaves his mouth. He peers into the swirling marble filling the hollow of his hand and sees…

  He sees everything.

  He recognises the days that have been and the days that will come. He sees his parents and his brother in their long black coats crammed tight against one another in a packed train carriage that crashes and bangs, his brother’s right hand (when he sees this for a moment he is his brother) on his father’s shoulder. He sees the three daughters he will bring forth and as he sees them grow, from babies to fine young women, their mouths open and they speak their names (the two eldest, that is, the third looks at him with her big dark eyes and already, long before she is born, she breaks his heart). He bends over his hand, Jacob Noah, just as a father bends over his child the better to hear it, and his gaze disappears in the cloudy mist. He travels and travels and travels, until he sees first the country, then the whole godforsaken province and finally the town, but a long time ago: four farmhouses and a monastery, half wood and half stone, then a fire and a new monastery, houses, new houses, avenues, a village green…A rampant mould. Until he creeps out, a mole from a hole in the bog, steals a bicycle, cycles

  and cycles

  and cycles,

  the whole long straight road along the canal, he raises a pistol, sees the light, and there is the wood in which he, on last year’s crackling leaves, in the hood of a dry blackberry bush, between the high oaks, under the velvety night sky, bends over his hand and stares into his own face.

  The years blow around him like autumn leaves.

  Summer comes, and autumn. Days pass, months fly by. He clears up the shop and buys in goods. He gets bread from the baker and vegetables from the greengrocer. In the evening he stands in the kitchen holding a cauliflower in his hand, staring at it as Hamlet stared at Yorick’s skull, and as the water comes to the boil and the steam clouds the window, he shakes his head and drops the vegetable into the bin. He goes to bed. He gets up again. He butters sandwiches on the cracked granite surface and chews them standing up, looking out of the kitchen window over the roofs of the town towards the houses, the little factories, a school and the stump of an old windmill. A mind that is empty from early morning till late evening. A life that is nothing but movement, day in, day out. And every morning and every evening, in his kitchen, by the window, looking out over the town, he wonders what it is that he sees, this jumble of roof tiles, these angles and curves and diagonal lines, the rhythmic skip of saddle, pointed and flat roofs. And the days pass. And the months pass. Years go by. Five years. As if he is giving himself time to despair. Five years. Five years in which he doesn’t eat a cauliflower, but does fry eggs, puts shoes in boxes and takes them out again, years in which he shaves and doesn’t see himself in the mirror, eats an omelette at the same empty dinner table at which he goes through Red Cross lists in the evening, writes letters and collects information. For five years in which at night, bobbing in an endless sea of emptiness, he wakes up, gets dresse
d and walks through the dark, silent streets of the empty town, to the station, where he crosses the rails and, shoulders hunched in his jacket, looks out from the platform–the steaming fields, the water tower dripping tap-tap-tap on the rails, the melancholy lowing of a cow in the pasture of the farm on the other side–years and nights in which he watches the rails, gleaming in the moonlight, disappearing into the distant darkness among the trees.

  And then, after those five years, the contractor’s men come. They demolish half the top floor, break down the shop shelves and saw and hammer and lay bricks, and after five weeks, because everything seems to be in fives at this time, he stands in a shoe shop ready for a future that won’t begin for a long time and living in a house in which all traces of the past have been expunged, because he hasn’t just turned the en-suite bedrooms with stained-glass doors into a big sitting room and combined and converted the many little bedrooms on the first floor so that there are now four big bedrooms and an ample bathroom, he’s also got rid of the curtains, the carpet, the tables and the cupboards and the chairs. Everything is new, nothing is as it was.

  It’s 1950. Jacob Noah has shed his past the way a fox gnaws off the foot that got it caught in the trap. The future lies before him like a blank sheet of paper.

  But it changes nothing.

  The past doesn’t pass.

  The path towards a stirring future lies before him, open like the first page of a book whose story has yet to begin and could go on for thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages.

  But still.

  In the morning he stands in the doorway and looks out over the quiet crossroads and in the evening he stares out of the window over the rooftops, and although he barely wakes up at night these days and he has completely stopped walking to the station to wait for travellers who don’t come, he often lies down in bed wondering what he’s done wrong, how things could be different, what the problem is.

  He begins to doubt what he saw in the forest when he saw the whole world in the palm of his hand.

  In the evening he sits bent over his old schoolbooks at the dining-room table and over his middle-school Latin lessons he dreams of lecture theatres and learned discussions with professors.

  How it could have been.

  How it should have been.

  Then–one evening by the yellow light of the standard lamp by the bookcase that holds not much more than what he has kept from his schooldays and the first volume of the encyclopaedia he subscribed to not that long ago. He drinks his coffee, and although the open accounts book on the dining table gleams in the lamplight, he starts flicking through part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He has never felt the need to travel, he has never been further than Amsterdam, but in the encyclopaedia he travels over continents and through whole eras and cultures. That evening, as he flicks through his first and only volume, his thoughts catch on the word ‘Atom’, and as he reads about Rutherford and Szilard the image of the atom comes and hovers in his mind: a nucleus with a cloud of electrons floating around it, attracted by the mass of the nucleus and at the same time almost escaping because of their velocity; and suddenly he thinks about the town as he sees it in the morning and the evening, the roofs and their pattern of kinks and bumps and, yes: paths.

  He wonders where the nucleus is.

  Once it was the monastery around which the village grew. The produce of the fields was brought to the monastery and the monastery provided shelter in troubled times and the knowledge of medicine in times of sickness and the comfort of God in times of need. Later, beside the monastery, the town hall was built.

  But, Jacob Noah thinks, a waxwork in the circle of lamplight around his chair: God is no longer at the centre of life, and in a population that has evolved from a peasant community into a society of workers who don’t have to provide for their own most basic needs, but who buy them with the money that they earn with their work…

  What is the nucleus?

  It is deep in the night as a light still burns behind the windows of the house above the shoe shop, and in that light Jacob Noah is bent over the dining table on which he has laid out a big sheet of brown wrapping paper and is drawing something in thick lines that could be a reasonably faithful depiction of the street plan, no: the structure of the town. That is to say: the structure of the town as he has come to see it over the past few hours.

  The nucleus is what lies beyond his window and is at present only a ramshackle collection of apartments, warehouses, little streets and alleyways, but is soon to become a square, an open space edged with a ring of high-street shops and, like electrons swarming around it, small shops held in place by the gravitational force of the nucleus, and neither engulfed nor repelled by it.

  That night, a moonless sky hanging in velvet silence above the town, he stands at the window of his new big empty bedroom, the bed a white catafalque in the darkness. He looks out over the scaly roofs of the town and reflects that it could be another twenty or thirty years before his idea becomes reality, and as that sober realisation hits home his mind is filled by the sad idea that if something were to mark his life then it would probably be the fact that he is the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place. It is a thought he isn’t sure he can live with, but tonight at any rate he resolves to sleep on it.

  Before morning announces its presence with the leaden greyness of a Dutch autumn day, he wakes up. He switches on the lamp and lies on his back staring at the new ceiling, as questionsquestionsquestions like trainstrainstrains rush through his head. Is he going to change the town by himself? He who, after the renovation, heard people asking where that Jew got it all from? He who is alone, no wife, no friend, no one but a few survivors, people with whom, when it comes down to it, he has little in common? Does he have to go into politics? Does he have to become so rich that he’s impossible to avoid? Does he have to become a member of the shopkeepers’ association that wouldn’t let his father become a member? What, he thinks, and that is the first question that he doesn’t imagine as rhetorical, what kind of person do I actually want to be? What am I? He lies in his bed, his arms stretched out beside him, and thinks about his mother.

  A memory overwhelms him, so powerfully that he is surprised by the intensity with which it comes upon him. (Many years later it will happen again, in the shop, as he helps a woman tie up a new corset and bends forward to pull the laces tighter. In the waft of perfume that rises from her warm skin he is so overcome by the memory that he has to stay in that posture for a moment, bent at the hips, head lowered, till the intoxication passes.)

  It is his mother that Jacob Noah remembers in his circle of light, the woman who had formed Jacob and his brother according to the ideal that she herself had never attained, the mother he remembers with the gnawing melancholy of a man who knows he misses what he never thought he would miss.

  Rosa Deutscher had been the apple of her father’s eye, the man who had brought her up as a son. She had sat on his lap and learned to cut leather, sew gloves and sole shoes. Sitting beside him at the dinner table, she had followed his finger from right to left across the broken stones of the Hebrew script and like him she rocked gently back and forth to the sing-song of the text, until one day she read out the line before he had had a chance to speak it. By the age of thirteen she knew everything, and more, that a thirteen-year-old boy should know, except that she was a thirteen-year-old girl and couldn’t display her knowledge in the synagogue, but she sat beside her seriously listening father at the dining table, observed by her head-shaking mother, and read her text without mistakes. Her father rewarded her with a German grammar, and her mother shook her head again. ‘Know this, child,’ her father had said. ‘Know this. You can win or lose everything in life, but no one can take away from you what you know.’ And although he was to be proved badly wrong in this, little Rosa saw it as a self-evident truth and paid no heed to her hand-wringing mother, who said that knowledge was all well and good, but that a good dress was more valuable to a woman than a fat German book,
and that conceited girls had difficulties finding a husband.

  And so Rosa Deutscher married to avoid the problem of marriage, which was apparently a problem in the case of conceited girls like her. If one thing was clear, it was that you had to get married, sooner or later. The path towards better education, everything other than sewing and embroidering, was an impassable one, because untravelled by any woman anywhere, let alone the daughter of a Jewish shoemaker.

  Abraham Noah had struck her as a suitable candidate, because he was busy climbing the ladder and consequently too preoccupied to bother himself with a woman who read books when there was no discernible need. And besides, she liked men with a purpose. If she couldn’t have a purpose herself, apart from being a good housewife and bringing an heir into the world, then for God’s sake let her have a chap with ambition.