In a Dark Wood Read online

  ‘Yaaah…’ said his wife. He didn’t know if she wanted to say his name, if she was encouraging him or losing herself in her own pleasure. Perhaps in that bewildering whirl of animality she was choking back an attempt to say the forbidden name of God. At any rate it had only made him feel more furious. Half raised, staring into eyes cloudy with pleasure, her acknowledgement of an encouraging desire that confirmed his guilt–yaaah, you have to destroy all that is clean and pure because what was clean and pure has been destroyed–he had laid his right hand on her jaw, stretched his thumb over her lips and then suddenly opened those lips and shoved his thumb into her mouth. She had, sucking violently, come. Her pelvis jerked as if she was having an electric shock. Only months later, when Aphra was almost a year old and life had completely resumed its rhythm, did she tell him during a post-coital conversation that it had been her first orgasm. Leaning on his elbow, lying on his side, looking at her in the twilight, he had nodded. She smiled and said: ‘So much love, I’ve never known that.’ He had felt a wave of fresh suffering well up in him and he said: ‘Or so much evil?’ She had turned her head away slightly from him and looked at him from the corners of her eyes, pretending not to understand him. A vague sort of loathing ran through him, then he pushed his hand under her neck and kneaded it gently. ‘Bad things.’ He laid his other hand on her breast, stroked her nipple and then let his hand slide over her belly to her pubic hair. ‘Jacob. No.’ He nodded, as if he had expected as much. ‘I’m the bad man.’ She sighed deeply. ‘The guide to lead you out of Eden.’ She gave a tortured groan. He felt a deep arousal mounting in her, an arousal that fought stubbornly against her resistance to the peculiar things that he was saying. ‘What do you want?’ he said. She shook her head. His hand lay on her mount of Venus, while his fingers played her as if she was an instrument. ‘You don’t want anything?’ She arched her back. ‘Yaaah,’ she said. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. Never before had she been so wet. He pushed a finger inside her, as the tip of his thumb rotated gently around the little button at the top of her vagina. ‘Do…’ She was, close to her climax, barely comprehensible. Suddenly he got up. He gripped her tightly, threw her over until she was half on her knees and with a fluid motion entered her. The pillow smothered her cry. He held her hips in his hands and thrust himself into her. The faint moonlight that pierced the curtains cast a silk-soft gleam on the curves of her backside. ‘What,’ he said, as he slid his hands over her buttocks and stroked the soft skin. ‘What. Do. You. Want?’ He couldn’t hear what she said. Her words were smothered in the pillow. ‘What?’ He let his thumb slide down to where he was going in and out of her and where it was wet from her own moisture. She made a grumbling sound. ‘What…Jetty…Ferwerda…’ She began to shudder. He didn’t know if she was crying or coming. He laid his moist thumb between her buttocks. When she began to scream into the pillow, he understood that she was actually crying and coming at the same time and that he himself was barely present in all that violence.

  Bracha was born two years later. She smiled the first time he picked her up. He had never heard that a newborn could do that, and when he said what had happened–the midwife and the doctor were still in the room–no one would believe him. But he had seen it, the vague, precocious smile that seemed to challenge him. And three years after the second one came Chaja, who didn’t cry, didn’t look up or down and certainly didn’t smile, but just stared straight in front of her, silent and serene, with eyes as big and dark as dew-covered grapes and an expression as if she was trying to think of something that wouldn’t come to mind. He had looked at the child and known that she would always be a mystery to him.

  The doctor had asked, when he stood with the staring Chaja in his arms and said her name, whether he was trying to assemble a whole alphabet, and when he looked up he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s complete.’

  His wife hadn’t been surprised when he stopped trying to approach her after the birth of the third daughter, any more than she had been startled by the grim emphasis with which he had come to her in the years before. It was plain to her that he respected her, but didn’t love her; that he wanted children with a…a despair that she couldn’t understand, and seemed nonetheless incapable of taking pleasure in the deed that would lead to that end. When they made love, when they still did that, she sometimes saw in the moonlight that fell into their room how the veins in his neck swelled and his forehead was a great sea of ripples. He ground his teeth when he fucked her, as if he was not busy with the play of love but had to wrest something from it. It was a frightening expression, and she wasn’t sorry not to see it any more. He had taught her what an orgasm was and how you could have one. All things considered, she no longer even needed him.

  And then there he is, the seasons and the years have passed. He has grown, widthwise, his children have grown, lengthwise, his wife has grown thin. Yes, Jetty Ferwerda, with her flowing hips and her arching breasts, rich blonde hair that seemed to cry out nothing but Health! Strength! Fertility!, has changed into a scrawny, nervous woman with a bob cut so sharply that Aphra will later ask if she can take her hair off. The business has grown, too. Jacob has bought the shop next door and the one next door to that and the two shops behind them and knocked everything together and is now the owner of a complete block of which the ground floor forms the biggest lingerie store in the province. Once a year he attends the meeting of the business club, but always without saying a word, until in the autumn of 1962 he asks to speak, is granted permission and to the surprise of all his fellow shopkeepers unrolls the scroll that he was carrying under his arm when he came in and presents a plan which is immediately rejected, but which will later completely change the town. That evening he listens affably to the objections. He isn’t upset by the outcry. Even the two men right beside him who hiss something with the word ‘Jew’ into each other’s ears don’t seem to bother him. He knows what will happen. He is a fisherman at the water’s edge, a man who knows that his patience will win out over the suspicion of the fish. He even knows when he will win. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says that evening, when the cigar smoke has become a thick blue fog in the little hall in the Hotel de Jonge. ‘Gentlemen, you say “no” and “provided that” and “never”, but in ten years we will be here again and it will have happened.’ And he looks around the room to let his words reach everyone and says: ‘You are not the object of history, but its subject.’ And he rolls up his paper, stubs out his cigar, throws his coat over his shoulders and walks alone but very contentedly through the drizzly autumn darkness back to the house where his three daughters have stayed up far too late to hear their father’s report. And when he gives it, and Aphra–with a grim expression under her black eyebrows, arms folded and eyes fixed on the table–is angry and sulks, he explains that time is like porcelain. Chaja stares at him with enormous eyes. He walks to the dresser, takes a cup and saucer…and another…and another…He gives one to each of his daughters. He posts them at one side of the room, goes himself to the other side and says: ‘Whoever brings me theirs first. One. Two. Three!’ and there they go, Aphra panting before she’s out of breath, Bracha hesitating and bending her little body over the cup and saucer and running, running, running, and right at the back Chaja, lifting up the crockery almost proudly, her staring eyes fixed on the outstretched hand of her father, ready to receive what is held out to him.

  There goes Chaja, untouched by the mêlée of swaying legs, flying pottery and shrill cries. Her sisters crash to the floor with laughter, but she seems to be making a voyage across the room, like a Parsifal bearing his Holy Grail. Chaja sets off through forests and over hills, she treads a straight path in the middle of lots of crooked ones, blind to what is happening around her, oblivious to noise and wild amusement. And then, after what seems like an age, she stops in front of her father, hands him the cup and saucer with a gravity that makes the cheerful hubbub fall suddenly silent, and says: ‘Seventeen.’

  Her sisters are lying amidst shattered crockery. Her mot
her is sitting bolt upright in her chair, on the other side of the room, with a piece of embroidery in her lap. The dark figure of Jacob Noah stands in front of Chaja and bends over her, one hand held behind his ear, and asks: ‘Seventeen?’

  He receives the cup and saucer from her, gives a tormented smile, straightens up and looks down at the little girl with her calm face.

  She nods: ‘Seventeen.’

  And Jacob Noah, standing there with his cup and saucer, like a waiter who has forgotten which table his order is for, stares straight ahead and feels his shoulders slump under the weight of time.

  So much to do. So little time.

  He feels like a man trying to swim out of the suction of a maelstrom.

  Later that evening, when the darkness has turned liquid, with a glass of whisky, very unusual for him, he thinks about himself, how he has spread like an ink stain over the town. The shops that he has bought. The life-sized game of Monopoly that he is playing. Although his property is spread out over the whole centre, part of it is clotted compactly together. It started with an old tailor’s shop in a low-roofed little worker’s cottage beside his own shop, then a big, three-storey house, heavily reduced in value by a widow who had refused to admit strangers into her house after her husband’s death. Then a shop selling sewing machines, and not long after that the adjacent travel agency. And now he owns a stone rectangle in the centre of the town, a block of houses and shops, a confusion of alleyways and courtyards and warehouses, with his lingerie shop as its beating heart.

  He raises his glass and peers into the amber fluid.

  ‘Seventeen,’ he says and smiles gently, but as he does so and gives a worldly-wise look at his whisky, the laugh becomes a fishbone in his throat.

  How many premises are there in his block in the town centre?

  He stands up and wades through the darkness to the window. The square lies before and below him. Behind, beside and beneath him his property.

  While the germ of a plan sprouts in one part of his head and begins to bud and blossom…in another part a voice asks why he didn’t see this when he thought he saw everything. He brings his glass to his mouth and drains it without thinking, in one draught, turns round and walks to the door, down the stairs to the floor below, as the whisky sinks into his body and his throat begins to burn and his head fills with the vapours of the alcohol.

  Outside he walks jacketless through the damp evening air. It’s as dark as the inside of a church collection bag. He walks to the middle of the square, where he takes up position, feet slightly apart: a man at ease with himself. A bedroom light springs on behind a window on the top floor of his house, and while Jacob Noah looks from the square at his stone castle, a small figure appears in the sharp white rectangle of light. Jacob Noah sees only a dark silhouette busy hoisting itself up, but he doesn’t need his imagination to know who is looking at him from high up there. Behind the window, standing on the chair that is normally beside her bed, Chaja is looking down at him. He sees the dark mass of his property, the bright rectangle in the middle and the figure of his youngest daughter in it and nods thoughtfully. The soft nocturnal rain soaks his suit and drips along his temples and down the collar of his shirt. He raises his right hand, waves to the little figure up above and says silently: ‘Seventeen.’

  And again the builders are there. They hack holes from one shop to the other, lay floors, open up ceilings and cover over internal spaces. There are processions of cement mixers, tipper trucks and cranes. And for almost a year the place echoes with the banging of picks, the rattle of drills and the dull thud of sledgehammers. In the midst of all that din and chaos Noah camps out in a bedroom where the plaster dust sticks to his feet when he gets up in the morning. He eats a cheese and dust sandwich and drinks coffee with a powdery skin to the deafening rattle of pneumatic drills and compressors. In the shop, which is shut now because no woman wants to fit a bra surrounded by crashing construction workers and coarsely roaring demolition men, he sits in the shop, in his office, juggling figures, writing letters and drawing up contracts. His family have escaped the violence of the building work, and until this storm of activity and entrepreneurship has passed, seek domicile in Jetty’s father’s farm. It is there that he sees them every Sunday. It is there that he discovers that he is no longer necessary.

  Yes, every time he cycles back along the long canal to Assen after a long Sunday afternoon, he brings emptiness with him. Winter, spring and summer pass. The snow and the hard blue ice in the canal make way for new grass on the banks and barges of cattle and milk churns. Buttercups appear and bulrushes and duckweed and farmhands in blue overalls sitting all along the edge with fishing rods. The world becomes full and rich and Jacob cycles through it, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, and becomes emptier and emptier and emptier.

  Every weekend he sees his family, his three daughters playing in the flower garden behind the farmhouse with an old doll’s pram and a cat on a string, his wife moving around in her parents’ house with an ease and a lightness which she, he knows for sure, has never had in his presence or at least doesn’t know any more, and each weekend the thought assumes more solid form that she has become better off without him, happier, freer, that he has become superfluous, ballast that was once necessary for the balance of the ship called family, but which must now be jettisoned for a free, light crossing. Once, after parking his car on the spotless gravel beside the farm, he hears the voices of his three daughters. They call to him, but as he walks past the barn, he doesn’t see them on the bleaching green or amongst the lettuces running along the little paths that divide the beds of the kitchen garden. Just as he is on his way back to the car he spots them. They are across the water, on the other side of the canal, in the tall grass of the embankment. They form a little row–mother, big child, child, small child–and they are complete. Their hands go into the air and they wave at him, their voices ring out clearly over the water, and although he wants to walk to them–something in him begins a half-hearted run–he knows the water is between them. No bridge to the left, nor to the right. He crosses the road, stands on the bank and spreads his arms out wide as if to apologise for his unattainability.

  After almost a year Jacob Noah is the owner of the heart of the town and the biggest department store, the biggest department store of the province itself, perhaps even the biggest outside the big cities. Above the proud, wide entrance to the square, in the place where his little daughter once stared down from behind her lit window, he hangs a neon sign showing a stylised version of Noah’s Ark, a flowing line of light as the ship and in front of it a broad stairway along which thronging hordes pour in. It is impossible to tell from the neon whether it is people or animals that are entering the ark.

  In the big stone block that is now a department store, there is also the little shop with which it all began, his grandfather’s ‘emporium’, nearly wrecked by his father and successfully transformed by his mother into the best shoe shop in the town. He has transferred the old interior which lay stored for years in a warehouse and had it rebuilt in what must be more or less precisely the middle. The counter the colour of fresh horse dung. The once immense, now surprisingly modest wall with shelves for boxes and drawers. The shop window with reproductions of old advertising posters and the velvet display tables. Around the old counter, floors stretch across five storeys with wonders that draw surprised visitors from four provinces. They smell cheeses they’ve never seen before, see an ocean of furniture, pass amongst endless racks of clothes and touch more kitchen implements than they could ever have imagined. The young people come to the record section, which has its own top thirty and organises signing sessions with locally, regionally and nationally famous musicians. The customers arrive breathlessly at the restaurant, which is covered entirely in orange and white formica, and recover from their amazement. Profits soar, not only those of the Noah Department Store, but also those of the surrounding shops. A great huntsman drops enough for the lesser ones to live off.

 
And everyone wonders how that man Noah did it, how he turned such a dismal little underwear shop into this palace of consumer gratification. The town’s chamber of commerce sees an explosion in numbers coming to the town, other shopkeepers profit from it or else can’t keep up with the competition, young people buy their hip clothes and the latest hits from Noah, while at the same time seeing him as the embodiment of capitalism. And in a few years Jacob Noah loses his name as a controversial figure and grows into a person of mythical proportions. Stories about him begin to circulate. He is a screen for an even wealthier man, or even a consortium. He has received a large amount in reparations from Germany. He has sold his soul to the devil. He has dug up a treasure trove on the long-abandoned estate of Vredeveld, where long ago a bastard child of Napoleon’s brother tried to hide away, silent and invisible, with her embittered husband.

  And in the evening, in his office, which is now on the top floor of the department store, Jacob Noah sits as the lonely ruler of his empire. His family are back, but they have changed. Or perhaps he is no longer the same person. There is somehow a distance and awkwardness that wasn’t there before, a space dividing them that is just as futile and at the same time as insuperable as the canal that once lay between them.

  And just as he once forgot the faces of his father and mother and mother and brother and was left with a shrinking feeling of lack that he calls ‘family’, so now his wife and his three daughters are vague and remote to him. He is standing beside the Smilder Canal and they are on the other side. He doesn’t know how to get across the water.

  In his little office, amongst his files, his cash books and ledgers, he sometimes looks out of the circle of light that the desk lamp casts on his work, and stares out through the high window, where there is nothing but dark night air and sometimes the moon. From time to time he gets to his feet to stand at the window, hands in his trouser pockets, belly thrown slightly forward, eyebrows like caterpillars wiggling above his eyes, and puts aside the files and contracts. Then he peers into the darkness until he knows again: Jacob Noah, son of Abraham Noah, son of Rosa Deutscher, brother of Heijman Noah.