In a Dark Wood Read online

  That Sunday he cycles along the water. It’s a still summer day, the firmament a picture postcard, bulrushes along the edge of the canal and ripe corn and fat cows in the fields. He whirrs along on a new bicycle, a sparkling gentleman’s bike with a leather saddle and deep black tyres, chrome that flashes in the sunlight and paint that gleams like a Japanese chest. His tyres thrum along the path, his spokes sing in the wind, his great bush of recalcitrant dark hair whips and his jacket tails flap. A solitary fisherman sits at the water’s edge, chewing on a fat cigar, but the countryside is empty because it’s Sunday, the day when the good people of Smilde stay at home and reflect on vices they don’t have but will probably acquire from all that fretting. They sit in their good rooms, in black suits with stiff white collars and in long dresses and warm stockings, and listen to the minutes rustling past until it’s time to go to church and hear the sermon from a vicar who asks the question, every week and twice on Sundays, of what our sins are and whether we have really been touched by the Lord. He passes them as he cycles into the village, walking two by two on the left-hand side of the street, church-book under their arms, peppermints in their pockets, a silent column of the chosen, an unrelenting procession of the righteous whose appearance moves him so powerfully that his eyes grow moist and the harsh sun that comes unhindered across the vast empty fields makes his tears flash so that for a moment he can’t see and all of a sudden, hoopla, he rides into the leaden water of the canal and escapes drowning only thanks to a big farmer’s hand grabbing him by the collar and pulling him to the shore.

  And who should be there, as he lies on his back in the grass of the bank, his wet clothes sticking to his body and his hair a mess of black streaks, who should be towering over him, like a monolith of silence, in his black suit, a deep frown on his black eyebrows, a barely concealed twinkle of irony in his right eye?

  ‘Farmer Ferwerda,’ he says as he lifts himself dripping from the juicy grass and holds out a wet hand. ‘I have come to bring you a bicycle.’

  In the good room at the Veenhoeve, the Bog Farm, it’s as quiet as the day before Creation, for an hour and a half, while the family goes to church and Jacob Noah waits in borrowed clothes until the service is over. Outside, leaning almost as if ashamed against the scullery wall, the new black bicycle stands drying in the sun. Further along, dusty red salvias stand out like little flames against the dry grey of the flower bed, the lawn runs from the bleaching green to the back garden, immaculately untrodden, as if the Lord God of the Ferwerdas had only that morning hit upon the idea of making something beautiful. There are ripe yellow marigolds and blossoming geraniums, a honeysuckle climbs powerfully yet shyly against the fence. Far off in the distance, before the wooden side of the garden shed, seven enormous sunflowers sing out their joy at Creation, and still further along, where the kitchen garden lies, beanpoles, vertical rows of leeks, knotty beds of lettuce and exuberant potato plants gleam in the bright sunlight. In the Ferwerdas’ front room a cool shimmer makes the polished dresser shine gently and turns the open Dutch Authorised Bible on the table into a perfect likeness of the parting of the Red Sea. Above the sofa hangs a picture showing a clearing in a forest, with tall trunks of oak trees in heavy shade and three men standing around a horse and cart looking strangely helpless. From somewhere in the house comes the sound of buckets clattering against each other, a high-pitched girl’s voice laughs brightly, water gushes into a stone sink. A door opens and slams shut again and in the courtyard the maid appears, wearing a blue apron.

  My God, thinks Jacob Noah. My God. The order of these things.

  And his thoughts go involuntarily to the empty rooms in his house, the silent rows of brassieres and bustiers and corsets and slips and step-ins in the shop. He remembers the endless days he spent in the hole, the smell of earth, his rooting in the ground, like an animal, the animal that he became more and more each day, and the image of the plundered shop slides over that memory, how he cycled through the town, to the town hall, pleaded and almost implored, and how he was thrown out onto the street; he sees the wet patch in the crotch of AryanBookshopHilbrandts, the barrel of the pistol pressing motionlessly against his temple. His grandfather falling face-first into the chicken soup. His mother having to clear away ‘her mess’. Heijman’s face, which refuses to stay a face in his memory, staying instead a vague blur that he calls his brother. He remembers all that in the good room of the Veenhoeve and he thinks: the order, the fullness.

  And there, among the Ferwerdas’ dark furniture, in the gloomy room, looking out at the abundant sunlight touching the gardens, the maid, the roofs and the walls, Jacob Noah feels like a man at a parting of the ways: a straight, level road to the left, a winding mountain path to the right. Without hesitating for so much as a moment, he makes a decision: order, the straight path, Ferwerda’s room is one way; the full garden, where all is ripe and heavy with fruits, where smells rise from the deep green of plants and herbs and shrubs and colours glimmer in the light, there, outside, where the maid is on her way to the cowshed, her aproned hips swaying under the blue linen, that’s the other one, and that’s the one he will choose.

  Where now is his emotion over the respectable gravity of the God-fearing people of Smilde? Where the grateful humility with which he bought, last Friday, a black bicycle from the Mustang factory? He came to redeem a debt and prove his honour to the farmer who hid him on his land, and now here he is–the sun creeps in and makes the well-scrubbed table smell heavily of wax–here he stands and he knows that he is rejecting the empty fullness of this room and the orderly life of the Ferwerdas and that he will accept the full emptiness of the sunlit world beyond the window. No more humility, no self-renouncing rejection of worldly turmoil. He is alive.

  At the end of the morning, after coffee with aniseed cake, Jacob Noah asks Ferwerda’s daughter to help him put the new bicycle in the barn and show him where he can find some oil and grease. Even before they have reached the green sliding doors he has kissed her and asked her to marry him.

  Later, as they walk back arm in arm to the good room where the Ferwerdas sit surrounded by the smell of beeswax, waiting for the second sermon of the day, he remembers what he was thinking about empty fullness and full emptiness. Where does Jetty Ferwerda belong in that, he wonders, as they crunch down the gravel path that runs along the farmhouse: the order of the Sunday room or the abundant blossoming of the garden? There’s no time to answer that question, because they’re already inside, and Jetty leads him to the Sunday room and he asks her father with a lot of ums and coughing a very different sort of question and after a brief nod gets an answer, after which the maids are called in, who treat Jetty to smacking kisses, and the farmhands suck noisily on the fat cigars that the farmer distributes.

  That afternoon, when Jacob Noah is sitting on the bus to Assen, he looks at the canal that passes slowly by, the cumulus clouds that drift like blobs of whipped cream in the light-blue air.

  The bus stops a few times on the way. A farmer’s wife gets on with two little children, a bent-backed man in a raincoat buttoned up to the neck gets off the bus. A dense shadow hangs under the trees along the canal and here and there the sheltered spots are taken by staring fishermen, most of them alone, just one with a knitting wife sitting beside him on a stool. When they’re about to leave the village, they pass a church where a service is just beginning. A silent row of men and women in black, some holding children by the hand, slowly slide inside through the wide-open door.

  Calm and order and silence. There is so much calm and order and silence that Jacob Noah, leaning his head against a window post, is seized by a kind of asphyxia. He has difficulty finding any oxygen.

  Throbbing, the bus speeds up, the sun flickers between the trees as they glide by. Jacob Noah closes his eyes. Order and chaos. Fullness and emptiness. The words repeat in his thoughts to the rhythm of the low rattle of the bus’s diesel engine. And his breathing joins in. Order, chaos, fullness, emptiness. By the time they arrive at the stat
ion in Assen, he is drenched in sweat. His head roars, he is dizzy, his jaws are pressed so rigidly together that his teeth are grinding.

  Outside, in front of the station, he stands for a long time in the sun, as if waiting for a bus that won’t come. Then, once he has calmed down, he walks home through the quiet Sunday town. But still not knowing whether Jetty Ferwerda is one thing or the other. The only image that hovers in his thoughts, and won’t go away, is that of the face of Farmer Ferwerda, his serious, brooding expression, the almost imperceptible frown of his eyebrows, his slight nod and his voice, when he said: ‘My daughter’s hand, Mr Noah? I thought you had come to bring something, but now it seems you have come to take something away.’

  Summer comes and autumn and winter passes and when it is spring, upstairs, in the big bed, in the house above the shop, Jetty Ferwerda lies with her eyes wide open and her legs spread, bringing into the world the child who will be the first of three daughters. It’s a Sunday afternoon, at around six, when Jacob Noah holds out his arms to receive the child, both literally and figuratively, into his hands. The midwife has just turned her back on the bed to take off the doctor’s shoes, which she splashed a few minutes before with boiling hot water when she came into the room with a washtub so heavy that she couldn’t help setting it down so hard that a steaming wave crashed over the rim and drenched Dr Wiegman’s shoes and almost scalded his feet, and as the nurse kneels on the floor in front of the doctor and the doctor sits grimacing on a white leather armchair a torpedo of glistening skin and black hair plastered against the temples appears and before Jacob Noah can think what to do, there are his outstretched arms, his outspread hands and, to his later surprise, a steady gaze fixed upon a new life, and he picks the child up, lays it in a cloth and looks at it with a mixture of bewilderment and happiness that is utterly unfamiliar to him.

  The whole wild hubbub of the world falls still. An explosion of silence fills the room, the house, the square in front of the house, the town and, probably, the whole province of Drenthe. It’s as if cars stop everywhere, cyclists stop cycling, factories creak to a standstill and planets freeze in their orbits. In the folds of the cloth there lies a wet potato. From the potato two black-blue eyes stare at him almost sardonically. ‘Who are you?’ he thinks, before realising that it’s a stupid question and at the same time being overwhelmed by his own voice, which thunders out at full blast.

  ‘A daughter!’ he bellows, so harshly that both child and mother burst into tears.

  The midwife, taking the bundle from his hand, throws him a look of contempt and snips the umbilical. And while the things that have to happen happen and the world resumes its course, cars drive, bicycles bicycle, factories produce and planets rush through space, he stands up, drunk with excitement, exhaustion and joy, and says resolutely: ‘Aphra.’

  His wife stares at him uncomprehendingly.

  Late that evening, when the midwife closes the door gently behind her and goes home on her tall black bicycle, he slips upstairs, to the little room where his daughter is sleeping. On the wall there glows the soft yellow lamp that the midwife had looked at scornfully (‘Day is day, night is night, Mr Noah! Even for children.’) and which he left on nonetheless. In the frail light, no more than the thought of moon and stars and, damn it, the notquitedarkness when he hid in his mother’s dress, he peers into the cradle at the peaceful, empty little face of his child. She no longer looks like a wet potato. On the contrary: she looks like a girl. The worst wrinkles have vanished from her face, her eyelids, small and transparent as bees’ wings, lie calmly together, her mouth is gentle and relaxed. Beside her head there lies a little hand that looks so frail and so pink it scares him. Aphra. He tries to imagine them–him, Jetty Ferwerda (as he still always calls her) and Aphra–coming outside in a few weeks’ time: the child in the pram, his wife in a thin white dress, a family amongst other strolling families. The speckled shadow beneath the trees at the Deerpark, the smell of the forest, the tock of balls against rackets, now and then a car grunting past. He sees them all walking to old Ferwerda’s farmhouse, beside the long canal that lies gleaming between its embankments, and the farmer’s big hands taking the child from the arms of a wearily smiling Jetty Ferwerda.

  Below him, in the linen cover of the cradle, the child moves her head. It hurts him to look at her.

  When he–it’s past midnight and he a ghost against the darkness–slips into the bedroom, his wife doesn’t even wake up. There is still a vague memory of disinfectant in the dark bedroom, and as he walks to the chair over which he intends to hang his clothes, his left foot lands in the wet patch where the midwife set the washtub down too hard. When he lays his head on the pillow and looks sideways at his sleeping wife, the pain that he felt when he peered at his daughter disappears, only to make way for a new kind of pain. This time it isn’t the rending of a breast full to bursting, a ribcage swelling with pride and joy and, God, an amount of confusions and emotions that he has never known before. Now it is the shrinking pain of emptiness.

  He has been a father for barely six hours and now, lying next to his wife in the marital bed, Jacob Noah just feels cold.

  Only years later, decades later, when he is sitting in his car at nearly six o’clock one Friday evening and feels the warmth of the sinking sun on his face, and the light colours his eyelids red and all around him is still, will he understand the coldness within him. He will then finally understand why he has thought his whole life long that he was not a good man, something that he would probably never have worked out if they had stayed childless, that it was precisely the birth of his first daughter that made him understand that from now on the child would be the only bond that he could have with his wife and that with the two who came after things would just get even worse.

  There, in his car, he will remember what he hasn’t remembered his whole life long, between the births of his first child and that moment: watching the doctor on bare red feet helping the midwife weigh the child and tie the navel. He will see himself, the way he looked at his wife who lay glowing with post-natal contentment in the pillows. And he will know again what he thought without knowing then that he thought it: the earth spinning through the universe, human beings like ants, light going on in towns and off in other towns, aeroplanes shooting through the air, trains boring tunnels through the night. Everything.

  His wife had opened her eyes–he remembers those many decades later with frightening clarity–and smiled vaguely. As he mechanically returned his wife’s smile, he suddenly knew that he didn’t feel what he was supposed to feel for the mother of his newborn daughter. His mouth had fallen open, his shoulders slumped and he stood bent beneath the burden of his understanding.

  ‘Will you hold her for a moment, before we give her to your wife?’ the midwife had asked and he had almost shaken his head. He had almost said ‘no’. He had almost said that he might have felt one with creation, the worlds, miss, do you understand that?, but that he had just discovered that he had no feeling for his fellow man and that…insects, miss, people are insects as far as I’m concerned… but then he had held out his arms to take the child and his mouth closed, he felt his shoulders drawing up and his muscles and sinews and blood vessels and skin and…everything stretched and pulled and tensed. He felt a vitality and a power running through his limbs which at the same time surprised him and made him overflow with happiness.

  Decades later, that Friday evening at about six o’clock, eyes narrowed to slits in the light of the sun, the familiar grumble of the slowing car, he will remember that and know that he could not love his wife. As his car slides down the slip road of the viaduct and he can suddenly feel the warmth of the sun on his face, he knows that his gains, his conquests and his merits (the businesses, the money, the women, his name in the paper), that all of those things could never be enough to fill the hole in his life, that he only used his wife to bring his children into the world, to fill the emptiness that his mother, his father and Heijman left behind.

 
; There, in the car, the light glides over the windscreen, a sudden memory of a perfume wells up in him, and he knows: everything is nothing.

  Although in the night after the birth of his daughter he had lain staring a hole in the darkness, brooding over the feeling that he didn’t feel and the feelings that he did feel, in the years that followed another two daughters had come. It had been months before he dared to approach his wife (and that was actually what he had called it in his thoughts: approaching, as if the act itself was an admission of guilt) and when he threw himself on her with a hunger that astonished even him and the sigh of both relief and surprise rose from Jetty Ferwerda’s throat, he became aware of something that he had never known before.

  Jetty Ferwerda had been his first girlfriend, and between them it had been just as they could have imagined: beautiful, bright and careful. Now, Jacob Noah brought his guilt with him when he came to her, his actions were shrouded by something that he could only describe as ‘darkness’, through which he lost his sexual innocence and the guilt that he felt increased. The first time after the birth, after months of cautious abstinence, benignly ignoring the yearning looks of his wife, he had taken her like a dark beast. He had dropped a claw on her right breast, pushed her head aside with his and hurled himself on her like a thirsty man finally finding the oasis after days of travel and throwing his whole body into the water.