In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  He isn’t the only one perspiring. It’s hot under the lamps of the television studio as well. The lady newsreader’s hair sags slightly and hangs in tired, heavy tendrils around her pancaked face, making her big grey-blue eyes, those weary, sympathetic eyes, look even bigger and more tired and sympathetic and her face even paler, her alabaster cheeks and her lipsticked mouth even more gentle and understanding, and he, knees hurting, brings his face close to her face, so close that he sees her mouth disintegrate into grains, her eyes dissolve in the grey of the picture lines, her skin a haze of electrons, he rests his forehead against the cool screen, where her forehead is, close to her, licks the dust from her face, her whole face, the whole screen, as she finishes off the financial summary, the ailing national budget, the rising interest rates and falling growth figures, the decline in purchasing power, new mass redundancies, and he looks for her pupils, as if he could look through them, through the pupils, behind the pancaked image, and see the woman who wakes up in the morning on smiling sheets the perspiration between her breasts the pillows that kiss her cheeks and…God yes to kiss her there between her breasts to lick her salty cleavage as he is now licking the screen her grainy eyeshadow the wings of her nose God that and that voice originating in her throat so full his name fuck me everywhere Marcus fuckmeeverywhere Jesus-painknees your servant lady or rather in her suit against the wall and her skirt pulled up and notherenotnow oh when long ago at a student party and her looking out of the attic window bending over the town looking the undecided isshethinkingwhatimthinking doesshewantwhatiwant her black skirt her white blouse a lady but young still just like him oh Christ the weather sun and rain and low temperatures and everything on go on yes then tipsy already and no longer entirely master of what raged and stirred and she looked sideways and he looked sideways her dark eyes so big and moist and her hair in a ponytail the short distance between them…ah…a space of unspoken thoughts and will and…suddenly the firework that exploded outside dripping fiery flowers of rockets and firecrackers and his hand doing what he himself didn’t want to do and rested on her neck pulled her roughly to him lips that sought and opened and found each other but didn’t kiss just feverishly touched skin felt other lips but not the kiss no and still that hand on her neck that guided her clasped her turned her to face the windowsill head-first out of the window his other hand on her hip clawing at the fabric of her skirt that tugged her skirt up and the hand on her neck forcing her forward and the other hand pulling her panties down…God…his sword his member his hardasahammer lifted into her…and the fading light of the firework behind the windows which also burst the soap bubble of his imagination and he and she looked at each other faintly smiled hello you here too yes me too…his slight hesitation at the thought of the vision that had seemed so real that he was afraid that she had seen the lust in his eyes.

  Think about something else. Just think about something else. No laundry service in this hotel. Not that it matters. If they had one they’d bring your shirts back boiled to bits and ironed till they shone. The Hilton in, what was it…Oh, with those terrific sandwiches with spicy chicken and brie with cranberries. A Chinese wash house that did the laundry. Shirtssocksboxers came back as if they had personally received the attention of a direct descendant of a thousand-year race of Washermen from the Upper Mandarin, washed with Confucian precision in clear spring water from Szechuan, ironed with a silver iron and…There she is again her pancaked face her deep emotional voice her big eyes like pools of desperate desire or desiring desperation, chat with the weatherman, people’s endless obsession with the weather, probably uncertainty about what to wear the following day dungarees or C&A, nother-notshe, in her pastel suits, her chintzily gleaming stockings, her suede shoes which he, provided that they were new and not worn out, so wished to lick just as he, yes, there she is, yearned to my girl lollipop lick from head to toe, tongue in her ear her throat her eyes.

  lady no one so

  devoted to you no one who in the summary

  of today’s news has so kissed your throat

  the gently beating pale blue vein thumping

  in your throat thumping lifted up and your legs wrapped

  around me and locked behind my back

  because never before no one who so

  understands you so devoted so wants

  to vanish inside you dissolve until there’s nothing but your eyes

  the electronic haze of grey-blue

  in your pancaked face the lipstick lips

  opening to receive my lips your tongue

  venturing to my tongue,

  seekingyouandthearmsmyconsolingarms,

  the unexpected moist warmth

  of

  yourmouthyourgodopenyourmouth

  comeinmeMarcuscome

  inme

  in

  me

  in

  And there, at the moment suprême

  (because that’s what it is)

  Marcus Kolpa hears his sperm hit the screen.

  Splat!

  (Yes, he really hears that.)

  It splashes in the newsreader’s face, between her eyes, and drips like a sagging blob of paint down her nose, her mouth, down along her throat.

  It’s an epiphanic moment.

  It’s the end of the news.

  It’s what the creator must have felt when he said let there be light and there was too.

  And while the liberating emptiness of the orgasm shoots through him,

  outofhisbellybackthroughhisspinalcolumn

  betweenhishoulderbladesthroughthebackofhishead

  tohisbrain,

  the frightening post-orgasmic chill fills him up and he sees in a single glance the smeared screen, himself (man, black suit, trousers round his ankles, a putty penis), the carpet with the worn patches where other men have stood, sat, God knows perhaps knelt like him, and the desolation of what he is and what his life has become.

  He sits there like that for a few seconds and then pulls himself up, with one hand on the TV, his other hand holding his trousers up. In the depths of his chest a tulip of desperation sprouts, bursts and fades, all in the blink of an eye, as if it’s a time-lapse sequence from a film by David Attenborough. His head sags, his chin on his chest. He suppresses the raw scream that rises up in him and staggers to the bathroom.

  And then there’s the steam, the water clattering down, his hair turning liquid, his skin, himself. Water, clear, clean. This is the moment when he’s empty and without thoughts. For a moment even without memories, without worries and fretting, and without the brilliant ideas for which he is famous and which make him so terribly tired. Just the water streaming over him and he a thing, yes, that’s what it feels like, as if he’s an object, a wall, a roof, a street, a clinker path beneath heavy trees as the first drips fall tapping on the roof of leaves and the downpour that then explodes spills through the foliage and turns the stones dark and gleaming, and while the water slithers down the gutters and washes over the pavement, over the thresholds of houses, into cellars, up stairs, among chairs and tables, armchairs come running and rolling, bobbing from the houses, the whole world is water, the treetops are little islands of dripping green above the surface, so he, Marcus, is flooded and vanished, something that is nothing and something that no longer matters.

  He is, face raised into the needles of water from the shower, pure. Empty and pure. His fingers unwrap the greaseproof paper of a piece of hotel soap that imagines it smells of roses. He lets his big hands run with the tiny bar of soap along the slopes of his armpits, over the ridges of his pelvis, through the thicket of his crotch, the long journey down his legs to his feet and then back up again, his ribcage, back, arms, till finally, as if he hasn’t been standing long enough with his head thrown back in the falling water, his face.

  Pure and clean as a whistle.

  And at that moment, when the shower stream washes away the foam and rains down on his closed eyes, he sees very clearly, as if it was yesterday, as if they’ve only
just met each other, and he hasn’t yet closed his heart and his face and his eyes, at that moment he sees Chaja disappearing into the packed Saturday morning shop, her black curly hair among the Saturday heads of the provincial shoppers. He stands in the Saturday sun, looks at the bare house-fronts and the Saturday air up there, clear and blue, as if it’s going to be a fine day in spite of everything.

  Seven o’clock is the hour when the good people of Assen have finished their dinner, hot dinner, simple, nourishing meals of potatoes, meat and vegetables and semolina pudding with a skin for afters.

  But where we are, no one is eating. Here, nothing is consumed but beer.

  The Hotel de Jonge is the nodal point in the history of Assen, the place through which all paths lead, a drinking hole in the desert of life, set on a square that doesn’t want to be a square. Off at an angle to the right it is watched, constantly and unmoved, by the law court, an island in the middle of a shapeless lake of lawn (behind it the old jailhouse, so visibly old that many a lawbreaker dreads the wheel and the rack and dark cellars where water seeps down the walls and rats as big as pet dogs shuffle under the simple bench), to the left lies a confluence of streets that is almost a little square. (But the town has no real squares, just attempts in that direction, wide sheets of stone that bear the name, but aren’t: deserted car parks and collisions between streets that have fallen ashamed into each other’s arms as they meet. Just as the town has no statues. Yes, not that far from the Hotel de Jonge, actually the only statue in the town, on the Brink–again, not a square–in a few years a shapeless lump of gingerbread will be placed, a gift from a local manufacturer. It represents a cooper bending over his barrel, but looks more like something left behind by a constipated elephant. It will be placed in the bend of the road and for some miraculous reason no car ever crashes into it.)

  The Hotel de Jonge. A sleepy provincial hotel-café-restaurant in a sleepy provincial town.

  But not tonight, tonight Assen is the town of towns and we anticipate the night of nights, the night before the TT bike races, yes, this town of roughly forty thousand inhabitants is suddenly four or five times as big, which is to say: four or five times as many people, four or five times as much violence and sex and traffic and at least four hundred times as much beer. In the bar of the Hotel de Jonge the drinkers are already standing shoulder to shoulder, crotch to buttock, face to neck, in the stench of human bodies, beer and smoke all through the room, lined entirely with rustic oak, designed in a style that makes you think of haciendas without really losing the je ne sais quoi which tells you straight away that you are indeed in the deepest provinces. The drinkers shuffle across the endless reddish-brown tile floor that spreads through the bar like a flood of seventies cosiness and is so omnipresent, extending even to the toilets, that one of the younger customers once observed that it’s like drinking in a hollowed-out stone. To the right of the central bar, a big room that can be separated off with a beige folding door, and on the left the breakfast room, again behind a little barrier for special events. All crammed full of drinkers.

  In the middle of the building rises the staircase, all in brown-painted wood. It leads to seventeen rooms almost all of which were booked a year ago by journalists, one or two racing fans, the manager of a racing driver and, the smallest small room, at the end of the long corridor, by Marcus Kolpa.

  In the main bar, that hole of wood and tiles, the landlord buys off the first fight of the evening with a free round of beer and the servility disguised as affability that is his trademark. The floor is already wet, the windows are misted up. The waitress, who has just been goosed by a jolly German, causing her to drop her tray, making the floor even wetter than before with glass that now crunches under the biker boots, the waitress is now sitting in the kitchen on a crate of white bread rolls crying her eyes out. Everything is fine, everything is as it should be, the till tinkles so unceasingly that it sounds like music.

  Ah, there is so much pleasure and merriment, such loud affirmation of the free-market economy (and that in these difficult times of deep financial crisis!), that a vitality, you might even call it an ‘atavism’, hovers in the air, so tangible that you could almost cut it with a knife. And that’s why it isn’t even slightly strange when Marcus, washed and perfumed now, black-suit-white-shirt, his unruly dark hair wet along the temples, makes his entrance and a loud voice rings out from the densely packed crowd: ‘A vicar!’ Out rings the generous bellow of simple people who enjoy simple jokes. He looks questingly around. He raises one eyebrow, ignores the landlord’s apologetic smile and immediately dashes outside, pausing for a moment like a ship leaving a stormy harbour and powering up its engine before breaking through the waves.

  Outside it’s packed with people. In spite of the weather, a cool evening, just about to rain, the terrace is packed with drinkers. But Marcus cleaves through the turbulence, slaloms, swings, weaves his way through the crowd, turns blindly off to the right, strides onwards on his long tall legs and doesn’t come to rest until fifty metres on, when he runs aground in a new crowd formed by a throng of evangelical bikers, a leather-clad army of the Lord gliding like a flight of black angels on their Harleys and Hondas and Ducatis and Yamahas and BMWs along the Brink and past the law court, watched by dense rows of cheering passers-by.

  To the left, on the trampled grass of the Brink, a heaving, whooping crowd throngs around a mechanical bull. To the right, people are frolicking in front of a big tent where as they wait for the band a kind of music is being played which Marcus can only describe as ‘farmers’ rock’. Someone falls through a shop window. Two straggly adolescents climb the roof of the tent and slide down the slope of the canvas. A biker girl pulls her leather jacket open and shows her swelling breasts to a ring of leather-clad youths (a surprisingly large number of them in clogs).

  And everywhere noise, the smell of fat and meat and stale beer.

  Marcus shuts his eyes and tries to find a still point.

  The world.

  The world he lives in.

  The world of the people who ask him how far he’s got in the dictionary, the world that thinks he’s an arrogant tosser because he knows the meaning of the word ‘solipsist’.

  The world of humanity, evolution, the lobe-finned creatures that crept onto land, reptiles that climbed into the trees, thinking monkeys, stone axes, fire, iron, bronze, steam, atom.

  The world of God’s own pet.

  And in spite of his furious attempts to find rest and clarity and light, Marcus thinks: Lord…Pitch and brimstone. Now!

  He closes his eyes, feels everything rotating around him, feels himself in the middle of that rotation, a motionless object, a still centre.

  A pillar of salt in the guilty landscape, in the hubbub and the smoke and the rubbish of that town that the Lord has overthrown just as he once overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

  He actually does look like a vicar. Even now, when real rain is finally falling from the sky and many people are seeking shelter under shop awnings, tents and the dense crowns of the tall oaks on the Brink. Even now, when there seems to be no particular call for formal clothing and the whole place is emptying around him and he is the only one left in the square in front of the Brink, even now he still looks like a preacher. One of the itinerant kind, admittedly, a wanderer without a congregation, but a preacher nonetheless.

  While he is actually a poet.

  Oh, yes, they may think he’s a stern preacher and laugh at him and mock him behind his back, they can call him both a poof and a Don Juan, a Jew and a vicar, they know that he’s a poet and not just any old poet, not one of your club-footed rhyming dialect verse-makers, not some paedophile absolving himself in a linguistically defective village mumble, whacking himself off onto paper as he sits at his oak desk thinking of the bony girls’ knees under summer cotton dresses or sturdy scouts’ legs in greasy corduroy trousers. No. And he certainly isn’t the man for affable farce and three doors and five cupboards in which Harm hides himself to watch Albert
bending his neighbour’s wife Jantien over the dining table in the front parlour and teaching her to see the stars.

  He’s a real poet.

  Albeit the poet of a single poem.

  But let’s forget that poem and concentrate on the figure in black standing there in the rain. Soon he will walk on, he will go round the corner and into Torenlaan.

  Look, there he goes. He has just lifted his face to the sky and tasted a drop or two, or three, on his lips and in them the faint perfume of petrol. Now he carries on walking. Past the low houses of the Brink, off to the right, around the corner, pacing like a swimmer in shallow water, head slightly bent, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of his trousers and a smoking Gauloise in the right-hand corner of his mouth. Right into Torenlaan, where he meets a real tidal wave coming towards him, because the motorbike acrobats are taking a break and Torenlaan is emptying out into the expanse of the Brink. Propelled by the mass, pushed forward and aside, he hobbles clumsily back past the houses, the pensioners’ club, what used to be the youth club, beneath which there is said to be a secret passageway that runs from the monastery to a place far outside the town; on and on into the narrow Kloosterstraat, where a raggedy group bound whooping for the funfair picks him up entirely against his will with the generosity of people enthusiastically putting into practice the concept of the more the merrier. Two young women have linked arms with him and to the amusement of the party they guide him through the streets that lead zigzagging to the grounds of the old cattle market where, as every year, the funfair has been set up. His resistance is feeble. No more than a sputtered mumble.

  ‘But…’

  And: ‘Ladies…’

  And: ‘I’ve got to…’

  The truth is that it’s all for the best that a choice has been made for him. Under his own steam he would never have gone in that direction.