In a Dark Wood Read online

  Then he is sometimes overwhelmed by the truth of the here and now, where he is and when. For a breath’s duration he was in the company of what was dearer and more necessary to him than anything else, but it couldn’t be.

  He has to do it alone.

  That is his task. That is the task that he doesn’t want to but must fulfil, the task to which he strugglingly submits.

  Because there is no other way.

  The stone mountain that he has built in the heart of the town, the ark of things to which everyone comes to get what is to their taste, a ludicrous striving for something that no longer exists, or is at least no longer ‘there’. There is a gleaming marble of clarity in his head then, deeply buried in the fogs of figures and letters, and a black veil of loneliness settles like an autumn mist that creeps over fields and hides the path. But the understanding is there nonetheless, like a hard nucleus, like something that won’t go away: he must lose everything in order to have something.

  Time passes. Jacob Noah gets his first grey hairs and puts on a few more pounds. He sees his daughters blossoming and coming home with great tall beanpoles in army-surplus clothes and carrying bags bearing the names of singers he’s never heard of. He looks with controlled excitement at the littlest one, who always looks back with the same silent gaze. He looks at his wife, who has given up embroidery and now plays tennis day in and day out and just gets slimmer and browner. He looks at the town, which is still the same.

  Everything slides and drifts during those years. Schools are turned upside down, universities are occupied by their students, the annual motorbike races are preceded by enormous pitched battles between bewildered policemen and exuberant hordes of youths. Jacob Noah, like all his competitors, has boarded up all the windows and doors of the shop. And just as he nails his shop shut against the raging disturbances and tumult of the world, he also erects, although much more slowly and much less conspicuously, a rampart around his heart. Not to protect himself against the outside world (he has long been hardened against that), but to shield the outside world from the violence that rages within him. Cabinets fall, political parties emerge and disappear, builders and dockers strike, angry students take to the streets and soldiers walk around with long hair. Women claim the right to abortion, young people claim freedom and everyone claims happiness. Value Added Tax is introduced, oil prices rise. In various places around the world aeroplanes are hijacked and blown up. And Jacob Noah extends his empire with a shop, a warehouse and a few dilapidated properties. Two, three, four new members of staff are added, he buys a Citroën DS and his name appears in advertisements, brochures and house-to-house flyers. He opens a branch in a different town, and another, and another, and at the weekend, when he’s sitting by the tennis court watching his two eldest daughters run over the glowing gravel, with the big scoreboard saying Noah Lingerie in the background, the hand of the littlest one in his hand, he feels not contentment but the restless gnaw of hunger. He feels the raging of the world, the aimlessness of the swarming on the anthill, the whole goddamned panta rhei, and at such moments he sometimes lowers his head until his chin rests on his chest, and in his chest he sees the hole in the bog, the damp walls, the roof of roots and earth, the stamped floor and the stale bread that lies waiting in a tin, and deep within he feels a yearning for that hole, where nothing was everything and he couldn’t lose it because he had already lost everything, a yearning so great that it’s all he can do not to kneel down on the spot, beside the tennis court, sun and gravel and bare legs and all, rap his knuckles together and scream: ‘Take me back!’

  And then one evening he is standing there in the shop where his empire began. The lights are nearly all out, the staff have gone home to new buildings in the new suburbs, the boxes are on their shelves, the bras hang from their hooks, the stockings are arranged on shelves and racks. Outside it’s dark, inside the silence rustles and Jacob Noah walks through the audible stillness and inspects his kingdom. He is a man who believes in always setting a good example and so he walks along the racks, straightens a slip, a corset, a poster. He stacks a stack of boxes and picks up a tangle of parcel string beside the wrapping table. He lets his eye slide over the coffee-maker in the corner, sweeps away a few grains of sugar and quickly wipes the sink of the little kitchen. And then, by the little sink, staring into the mirror behind the basin, the mirror in which the shop girls adjust their hair and apply the lines of mascara around their eyes, his heart sinks in his breast. Upstairs, at home, his wife sits on the sofa watching television. Aphra and Bracha are squabbling about clothes (who can wear what and for how long) and Chaja sits silently over her sisters’ science books mumbling rows of numbers as if they were prayers. There, upstairs, is his life and here, downstairs, is he. The length of parcel string dangles slackly in his hand. He tries to call up the image of Jetty Ferwerda, her peasant creaminess, the blue and white striped apron she was wearing when he came to visit her on the farm and she hadn’t finished working. Her white arms, full and bare…Her arching bosom…Her magnificent buttocks when she bent over to pick up a calf…Like the land itself.

  And he had tried to work her, like the land. He had taught her pleasure and surrender. But he was two men. He was a lover and a man standing behind the lover, looking over his shoulder, watching him, one eyebrow raised, a sneer around his lips.

  Here he is, facing his reflection–a man whose hair is beginning to turn grey and on whose face lines have appeared, forming the map of the journey he has travelled. Between his legs he feels the dead weight of his genitals.

  He wants to respect her, but he can’t respect her because he wants to fuck, in her, the whole country. He wants to take her just as an Umbrian peasant, on the first day of spring, throws his wife face-first into a freshly ploughed furrow and mounts her, her big white arse in his hands, her knees in the loose black earth, a fertility ritual.

  But Jetty is no longer the farmer’s daughter and, he reflects, probably never was.

  He turns away from the mirror, switches off the lamp in the little kitchen, walks into the shop and stares through the big display window into the evening town. Where once houses stood, a square has now come into being, around which construction work is going on intensively on the department stores he planned a long time ago. A light flashes on a builder’s crane. Beyond it, the darkness of evening hangs blackly down.

  When he turns off the light in the shop and stands for a moment in the dark room, suddenly a thought arises in him that makes him clench his fist, from which the piece of string still dangles.

  He has everything, but what does he have?

  Brother, mother, father dead. Wife he can’t love as he wants to love a wife. Three daughters who are painfully dear to him.

  He has loss and he has something that must yet be lost.

  A life, he thinks, like accountancy.

  Like a mole from his hole he came out of the bog and he cycledcycledcycled to the town, to the shop.

  Why didn’t he go and study, when there was no one left who expected anything from him?

  But where on earth was he, an orphan, supposed to get the money to study? He had to work to stay alive and because he was working he couldn’t study, even though he probably earned enough to pay for his studies. History had trapped him.

  And what if he had sold the shop? That was a possibility he had never investigated.

  Here, in the dark shop, where it smells of linen and cotton and rubber, he asks the question that he has never asked before.

  Why? Why did he never find out if he could sell the shop?

  He raises his arm, stares at the length of parcel string and slaps it hard into the palm of his left hand. He feels the burn of the pain before he hears the lash of the string. He shuts his eyes tight.

  To finish the work of the dead?

  To imagine their pride?

  To leave the mark of his family behind?

  But he doesn’t know if he has comforted the dead, if that were possible at all.

 
And he doesn’t know if his parents would rather have seen him as a professor.

  And the town will not bear the sign of the Noahs anyway, because no one will give him credit for what he has done. The square will never bear his family name. None of the streets, soon to be stripped of narrow workers’ cottages and lying new and clean and spacious around the square, will bear his name. Even in the industrial zone, where roads are named after big businessmen, there will not be so much as a car park that he can look at with perfect pride.

  In his life’s accounts the result will be in the red.

  But he isn’t there yet. First come the years when he sells the shop, adds the proceeds to the capital that he has amassed and starts to gnaw at the town like a beast of prey returning to the remains of a corpse. He buys up so many properties so fast that the local estate agents no longer bother to advertise their wares. He buys shops, houses, empty shells of warehouses, abandoned factories, empty schools and fallow land, apparently at random, seemingly without purpose. He spreads his influence across the centre with the hunger and haste of a contagious disease. No one knows what ‘mad Noah’ wants with all those possessions, the baffling collection of condemned workers’ cottages, shabby shops, warehouses, sheds and barns. And it seems as if he himself has no idea, because he does nothing with most of the properties. Some he hires out as stores; friends of his eldest daughters camp out in others, making the heavy music that they can’t make anywhere else. Once the police call in on him to ask if those long-haired work-shy scum really have his permission to…Yes, he nods, yes, with his complete agreement and approval. Does he know all the things they’re getting up to, asks the main policeman in charge of the pair. He knows precisely what, because he visits them regularly. And he tries out the ‘young people, different times, different customs’ story, but long before he has finished the policemen’s eyes glaze over.

  And then, from one day to the next, big capital discovers Assen. A plan emerges which resembles the one that he once presented like two peas in a pod, in which the square in front of his old shop becomes the aorta of all the town’s business activity. One chain after another comes to him for land, premises and storage space, and in less than three years Jacob Noah transfers all his non-profitable and fallow terrain to the gentlemen from V&D, HEMA, Albert Heijn and various high-street chains. The negotiations run strangely smoothly, because the big capitalists are used to prices rather larger than those in Assen and Jacob Noah seems to own so much land and real estate in strategic places that resistance is useless. He has become a man who cannot be avoided.

  And then come the wrecking balls, the bulldozers, the cranes and the diggers. There is rubble and dust and stagnant water in deep construction pits. Contractors follow, and lay foundations, erect new cranes to hoist enormous concrete slabs into place and an endless procession of electricians, plumbers, roofers, bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers passes back and forth, day in, day out, year after year, until finally, after what seems like an eternity, the whole of the town centre has disappeared and made way for a shopping centre to put every other town in the north in the shade.

  And then life resumes its weary, predictable course. Jacob Noah is in profit, more so than he could ever have dreamed. He is no longer a shopkeeper, but a real estate magnate. Which means that he has no more work to do. But for the time being that isn’t a problem. First the big department stores open their doors, and the attraction for farmers, townspeople and outsiders, which he predicted long ago, comes into effect. The small shopkeepers who once resisted his plan and then did everything they could to put a stop to the big stores, see their profits double from one accounting year to the next. From now on, every Wednesday afternoon and every Saturday is a spring flood in Assen. Customers come from as far away as Groningen, and often it’s so packed that Jacob Noah wonders, as he looks out of his window at the dense streams of sauntering bodies, what people so urgently need to buy.

  He has more money, as they say, than he knows what to do with. As his bank account steadily fills and he is greeted as he enters the local head office as though he owns the bank as well (which isn’t so wide of the mark), his life becomes emptier. He sits in the office that he set up in a property he has kept and stares at the door, through which no one comes, looks at the calendar, on which no meetings are announced, and stares at his bank statements, on which the interest grows and grows and grows. It’s a very long time before he dares to leave his office and gets into the car to drive ‘outside’. It is autumn and he takes a trip in his DS through the little villages around Assen, the villages whose level of involvement in Dutch Nazi organisations he knows off by heart. The leaves of the red birch blaze in the soft afternoon light. The oaks are already turning yellow and brown. The wooded banks are thinning out.

  He has nothing to do but look and although he isn’t blind to the beauty of the ash trees, the quiet village greens and the severe Gothic of the high, straight oak trunks along the narrow paths, looking isn’t enough. Unease roams within him like an animal.

  Winter comes, and spring. Although he has nothing to do and gets a bit richer every day, his life runs as empty as a dirty bath. In the evening he gets into his cold side of the marital bed, which has long ceased to be the place where darkness overpowered him, and he in turn overpowered Jetty Ferwerda. He lies there staring into the void, surprised by his success, and feels frighteningly hollow because it seems so insignificant. Made it? He hasn’t made it. He’s just well-to-do. And what is left that still matters to him? His daughters are going their way, his wife has gone already and the world goes imperturbably on. In spite of everything, everything that’s happened.

  Nothing is important.

  Everything is nothing.

  To fill the void of his existence, or at any rate camouflage it well, he becomes more active than ever, and it’s as if the void drives him harder than striving ever did. He fills one meeting after another with project-developers, planners and other dreamers. In the evening he stands in plastic-coated offices and laminated conference rooms, bent over blueprints and prospectuses. Once the meetings are over he walks through strange, dark towns and lets the neon light, the cries of the whores in their red-lit little rooms and the music from the bars wash over him. Not that he himself is in the little rooms or bars. He never managed to become a drinker. He isn’t going to become a whoremonger, because his sympathy for wrecked lives excludes any form of passion.

  But life, the dark, nightly existence in which the day’s emptiness becomes laughable, life draws him as a candle draws a moth.

  He does fuck. In the accounting limbo of desire and loss, action is a great source of comfort. He seduces one of his secretaries (in the pantry, where he takes her standing, half pressed against the fridge, while a visitor awaits an audience in the waiting room). He gets a blow job in his car from the wife of a dignitary who keeps having to move her pearl necklace aside to prevent it from twisting around his cock. There is a widow in a neighbouring village who he visits once every two weeks with flowers and port and after tea he throws her across the table and…

  And every time he seduces a woman there’s a moment of safety and Odysseus really seems to have arrived in Ithaca.

  Until, as ever, the void returns and nestles grinning within him.

  Even when he finally–Aphra and Bracha are studying something vague and are by now Marxist, anti-imperialist and sexually liberated and Chaja has graduated from high school–even then, when he leaves both his wife and the town and settles in an enormous old village school that he has converted into a dwelling, to the surprise of the population of the village where he goes to live, even in the midst of all the release and freedom (his eldest daughters come at weekends and bring a flood of friends and acquaintances, each one more hazy and recalcitrant than the other, sometimes there’s a whole pop group there), even in those turbulent seventies, when he resisted the wild stream of life, there is emptiness and lack. While in his vast house beneath the tall oaks the young people dance and s
ing and smoke and fuck as if the world might stop turning at any moment and the sun might go out, he stands in the garden, listens to the rustle of the summer evening wind through the oak leaves, a frosted glass of vodka in his hand, and whispers his brother’s name.

  And then one day it’s the twenty-seventh of June 1980 and the sun shines on the road between the fields, the path Jacob Noah drives along, a tarmac path that lies there like a long grey ribbon thrown away by an old Drenthe giant who stood astride the land and decided that something had to be thrown away…a megalithic tomb? a forest? a whole village? no: a ribbon that passes through ash trees and hills, through heaths and sand drifts, river valleys and forests, and now here lies the ribbon, and in the sinking sun, there in the distance, on the viaduct, where the path rises, it becomes vague, vaguer and vaguer, until it dissolves into a grey road in the watery air of the west and Jacob Noah, who comes driving along the ribbon, rising and falling on the long swell of the asphalt, sees the country lying before him, the fields, the clumps of trees in the fields, the forests in the distance, the grey of the tarmac in between, and for a moment, less than half a second before he flicks up the indicator and pulls the steering wheel to the right, there is the almost physical urge to keep driving straight on, as if he could drive into the light in the distance, as if he could take off and he’d be away…released…(but what from? Him with his big car and his converted schoolhouse, his three gorgeous daughters and more money in the bank than he can spend in his lifetime) and for a moment in one all-encompassing gaze he sees the magnitude of the country, how fragile it all is, how wonderful and magnificent, it’s an experience that makes him literally sink back into the soft French springs of his DS, an experience that makes him long for the magnificent, the majestic, a feeling that makes him yearn to dissolve into the distance.