In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  What do we find, this Friday evening, between the haunted house, the big wheel and the cakewalk?

  All the people.

  Everyone.

  Goddamned Everyman.

  That’s what we find at the funfair, the epicentre of excitement, sensation and adventure, the spot where hundreds of marriages have begun and at least as many ended and where enough black eyes are delivered to fill a whole village.

  The whole known world starts the night here, ends it here, or at least wanders about here for a few minutes.

  The spot, you might say (and Marcus does say, although inaudibly and with distaste) to find what he’s looking for.

  In the distance, as they turn the corner–Oostersingel, Java-straat–the roar of the music thunders up and the big illuminated wheel circles above the roofs and as they go on walking, nearly running, he meets Berte and Anne, or Anne and Berte, calling them after half a minute Anneberte, because they finish each other’s sentences like a kind of female Huey, Dewey and Louie. Ahead of them walk four guys wearing the high street’s response to the rage of punk. Hands in their pockets, at least when they aren’t bumping into each other, grabbing hold of each other, pushing each other away, in short: when they aren’t bounding along the street like adolescent chimpanzees.

  And then suddenly the fountain of coloured light and distorted sound that is the funfair looms up ahead of them: flat-trodden straw on the muddy paths, groups of young men around the crane machines and couples with their arms around each other in the Octopus. A ballet of yellow, red, blue and green light sweeps through the evening air. Fragments of top-ten hits mingle with the noise of sirens, bells, klaxons and the shrieking of hundreds of excited girls. It smells of the cinnamon of cinnamon sticks, the sickly petticoat scent of candyfloss, the blue oily smoke of the fatfryer and the wet-clothes odour of beer. Everything spins and sways and grinds and goes up and down. It’s almost too much. No, it is too much.

  They’re standing in what can barely still be called an open space, the ghost house to their left, above their heads the bright halo of the big wheel and people everywhere.

  ‘The Polyp!’ cry Anneberte, as they drag him in the direction of something that looks like an apparatus in which trainee cosmonauts in far-off Baikonur get their G-force baptism.

  ‘Not a hope,’ says Marcus.

  ‘The ghost house!’ they cry and cast him coaxing glances.

  ‘No such thing as ghosts,’ says Marcus.

  Two frowns are directed at him.

  The Apollo 2000, then?

  The Matterhorn?

  The Caterpillar?

  ‘Let’s go…’ said Marcus, and he lets his eyes wander over the brightness, the sparkle, the flicker, the glimmer and gleam, before letting them come finally to rest on an inconspicuous little tent, deep dark blue with an eight-sided roof adorned with clumsily cut-out astrological signs. ‘Let’s go to the fortune-teller.’

  And despite their sceptical expressions they join him and reel past the crane machines, the tent with cinnamon sticks and the candyfloss stall. The big wheel turns, shrieks come from the chair-o-plane, the air rifles of the shooting gallery splutter and somewhere the hammer hits the test-your-strength machine and the bright TING! of the bell rings out.

  ‘Here it is…’ say Anneberte, ‘…pitch dark.’

  ‘Secrets lie in darkness, ladies,’ says Marcus and he parts the heavy cloths that form the entrance to the tent and leads them into the deep gloom. ‘Won’t you take me to…funky toooown…’ sings a voice on one side, and on the other: ‘I want you…to want me.’

  And then, just before they are plunged into darkness and the fabric sarcophagus swallows them up, Marcus sees a gaunt figure. He is dressed in the dead beige of a lifelong civil servant and stands motionless in the pulsing light of an enormous merry-go-round.

  ‘Marcooooo…’ whine Anneberte. ‘Come onnnn…’

  But Marcus, halfway through the canvas, the quiet darkness behind him and the pulsing festival of light in front of him, looks at Filthy Frans, the narrow little shoulders in the putty-coloured jacket, the inevitable bag lying crookedly across his chest, the dull, bald head with nothing above the ears but fluffy grey tufts. Filthy Frans is staring at a mechanical octopus, its arms an orgy of different coloured lights flickering on and off and at the end of the arms little cars with people sitting in them. They shriek, their pale faces shoot by in a blur. The man standing there is completely lost in what is happening. Then, as if he feels that someone is spying on him, he suddenly jerks around. His head twitches back and forth, as if he is systematically reading the surroundings, and almost without transition he shrugs his shoulders, pulls the bag tighter to his chest and moves in an agitated step, hopping so as not to run, into the dense throng.

  ‘Maaaarcoooo…’

  Four hands drag him in, slip under his jacket, twist fingers through his hair and lead him down a bloodstream-red illuminated fabric tunnel. And Marcus, a child of the Freudian age, thinks what he must think.

  ‘Fifteen guilders for a palm-reading and twenty-five for a complete forecast.’ Madame Zara’s tone is at its weariest. She switches on the lamp that stands in the middle of the table and clearly stands in for the crystal ball. An absent expression and the red curls escaping from under her headscarf suggest that this evening she got herself ready in a hurry.

  ‘Five…’

  ‘Ten?’

  Call Anneberte.

  ‘Don’t pester, ladies,’ says Marcus. ‘The future can’t be bought for nothing.’ He looks severely at the black-haired one, Anne, and points to the table. ‘You go first.’ Her intuitive protest turns into a melting smile when he doesn’t avert his eyes and she quickly sits down at the flowery tablecloth, lays her hand next to the lamp and inhales so deeply that it looks as if she’s about to undergo a deep medical examination.

  It’s a tent, but that’s not how it seems. The space they occupy doesn’t look like a…space. It’s a time. It’s a red time, a time that consists of rags and cloths and has no entrance or exit. As he looks around, Marcus tries to discover how he got in, the whereabouts of the glowing red tunnel that made him think of the birth canal, but he doesn’t see a thing.

  Anne gets to her feet and strides solemnly towards him and Berte sits down at the table and stares so intensely at the lamp standing in for the crystal ball that Marcus fears for a moment that it’s going to explode.

  What he would like, here in this little red tent at the funfair, is a fortune-teller who wouldn’t predict his future, but would instead explain his past. He would like to come in here, sit down and see in the milk-white mist of the glass bowl how he got here and what happened to get him here, the whole journey undertaken up to this moment, further back, to before his birth, when there wasn’t yet a town here, just a dry patch among the bogs, and long before that, when the megalithic farmers hunted and built their big stone tombs, yes, to the creation of the world.

  ‘You too, sir?’

  Anneberte look at him. The fortune-teller looks at him.

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Me too,’ he says, and as he sits down at the table he is overcome by a feeling of exhaustion that doesn’t suit the time of day, which he knows only from long ago, when he had Pfeiffer’s disease and spent a month, longer even, in bed and thought he would never be able to summon the courage to get up and take the first step, and the second…He sighs a sigh that makes his whole body groan.

  ‘Is there something special you would like to know?’

  Marcus raises his head, looks across the lamp into her absent brown eyes and smiles a crooked smile.

  ‘The past, madam,’ he says, ‘can you do anything with it?’

  It’s a question which, he can tell from the fortune-teller’s perplexed expression, he would have been better off not asking.

  ‘A joke,’ he says. ‘The red light suggests that humour is in the air.’

  Behind him the girls shuffle.

  He smiles again and fixes an inviti
ng look upon the oracle.

  Only later on, when they are standing outside once more and the fury of the world of the funfair washes around them, only then will it occur to him how the fortune-teller looked up at him when she took his hand in hers. Not that she saw anything in the lines that cross the glowing landscape of his palm. Nothing but the nicotine stain on the inside of his middle finger, at any rate, the vague scar on the tip of his thumb, perhaps, the calm structure of shallow folds as it appears in the palm of a reasonably healthy man in the prime of life. Nothing but that, no. But she sat up, slowly raised her head, and looked at him meditatively. As if she wanted to say, in the good old fortune-telling tradition: What brings you here, stranger, what long road have you travelled? And for a moment, as they stand there outside the tent, he and the girls and all that noise and light and the movement around him, for a moment he remembers that he had given her unasked question a thoughtful answer: I have returned, madam, I have travelled the world and now I am in Ithaca. But he had said nothing. He had sat down as limply as a neglected house plant at the table with the flower-patterned cloth and the round lamp, his clammy hand on the dry, slightly wrinkled palm of the fortune-teller, his thoughts like falling drops of water in his head, her oracular words evaporating in his ears.

  I see a dark manwomanstranger. A rich and healthy life. And long. Many children. Prosperity.

  He had felt the nail of her index finger running lightly over the lines in his palm. Manicured. Severely varnished. Filed, polished, undercoat, and then the glistening blood drop to finish it off.

  Like Chaja used to do.

  A performance he had never been able to take his eyes off: When She Does Her Nails. With Mathematical Precision.

  The haughtily waving hand letting the varnish dry. A claw. After clawing. Blooddripping.

  The vague tingle of dark excitement that ran through his belly.

  Blood.

  Claw.

  If this Madam Thing really did read his hand.

  ‘You will marry twice. Or rather: you will have a family twice. Twice two children, I see.’

  Old bullshit.

  ‘The life line heralds a fine old age. Eighty-three.’

  As if he’s going to ask for his money back if he dies of lung cancer at fifty-two.

  ‘You’re a wandering soul. You move house a lot. Very…’

  A vague feeling of unease now.

  ‘…alone.’

  Oh, Christ.

  ‘In the light of eternity we are all alone, madam,’ he had said.

  She had glanced up and looked at him for the first time with eyes that were bright and alert.

  ‘I meant alone in the sense of lonely,’ she said gently.

  He had returned her gaze by staring at her expressionlessly. Then he got up, nodded, smiled, laid the money on the table and said airily, as light as candyfloss: ‘Thank you. Now I’m going to celebrate my long life and enjoy the brief hour of freedom granted me on the eve of my two marriages.’

  Towards the edge of the funfair grounds lies the big dodgems tent. It’s there that the youth of the village hang out. A throng of young people swarms around the tent, each waiting for a free car in which he can steer with his left hand as he puts his right arm around her shoulder. Marcus suddenly wonders if this is all a conspiracy, if the little cars are intended for rebellious adolescents to get them used to life as daddy and mummy, and the glass boxes of the crane machines, filled with plastic watches and cheap metal rings, to make them familiar with the idea that eternal fidelity is fixed by the giving of presents. Father bird brings a twig, mother tidies the nest. The haunted house: where she is supposed to be afraid and he, without danger to his own life, can act the hero. The test-your-strength machine…The shooting gallery…He shakes off the thoughts.

  They walk, arm in arm again, along the straw path. At the dodgems Anne and Berte plunge into the queue at the counter and Marcus listens to the music.

  Don’t bring me down.

  No no, no no, no no, no no, no, ooh ooh.

  The deep black water of the canal.

  Suddenly he thinks of the canal behind the funfair. It’s an image that stands before his eyes like a rock-solid black-and-white photograph. He has no idea why.

  No plan to drown myself this evening, he thinks.

  Still black water motionless between the banks of the canal. Low-roofed houses.

  Down, down, down, down, down.

  I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor,

  don’t bring me down.

  Anne and Berte have disappeared into the swarming crowd queuing for the ticket desk.

  A bell rings, the dodgems come to a standstill, and suddenly the floor of the tent is a mêlée of people storming in and out and others who want to get in. The speakers under the roof roar out a new song.

  Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this!

  This is the heavy heavy monster sound,

  the nuttiest sound around.

  So if you’ve come in off the street

  and you’re beginning to feel the heat…

  Around a bright-red car, somewhere in the left-hand corner, two young men start pulling at each other. Their girlfriends are screaming at each other. Staff come running.

  ONE STEP BEYOND!

  In the space thus formed a fist flies through the air. Someone falls backwards, into a group of leather-clad boys. Another jumps over a dodgem car.

  ONE STEP BEYOND!

  Arms wave through the air. A girl shrieks, high and loud. From the circle of people waiting outside the tent someone throws a tin of beer at what is now a fighting tangle. A man goes sprawling and lies on the floor.

  ONE STEP BEYOND!

  Near the ticket desk, peering around the corner, Anne and Berte stand watching the rolling tangle of people in the tent.

  And then, just as unexpectedly as it began, it comes to an end. A few men walk outside with torn eyebrows and bloody noses, clapping each other on the shoulder and grinning as if congratulating each other on the result. A fat guy with a spotty face and a denim jacket with Motörhead on it walks past Marcus, bumps against his shoulder and snarls: ‘Watch where you’re going, arsehole!’ Marcus watches thoughtfully after him.

  The deep black water of the canal…

  And without looking around for Anneberte, paying no heed to the returning peace and the dodgems coming free, the little cars in which he and his two sirens should have taken their seats, he slips along the tent,

  hop step jumps

  the school champion

  jumps the furthest

  and hop step jump

  and highjump

  jumps

  steps

  hops

  across the patches of mud forming the edge of the grounds and disappears into the darkness beyond the funfair’s waterfall of light, the sound of voices (Mr Kolpa! Mr Kolpa, formerly Polak!) and screaming machines, brilliant stroboscopes and coloured strip lights that become hazy rectangles.

  Making a wide arc, he strolls back to the centre. Right along the water. Although. It’s hardly strolling. More a kind of speed-walking. Where the Kleine Marktstraat turns into the Arcade, a rather grand name for a covered street and a half with dying little shops, he avoids the massive fight that’s going on in the square in front of the two cigar shops. Just before he ducks into the Arcade, when he glances over his shoulder, he sees someone take a blow from a fist and go sailing backwards through the window of one of the cigar shops. A bright-red pulsating stream of blood starts spurting from the hole in the glass. A pair of legs sticks kicking and twitching out of the window display.

  Under the dingy roof of the Arcade, a butcher’s shop across from the brown café on his right that is so full that he doesn’t even think about going in.

  I just laugh and walk awayyyyyy…

  Off to the left and further into the tunnel that is the Arcade, a procession of shapeless people meandering to and fro, half-dead, stumbling figures dreaming that this isn’t a dream.
On and on and…There, on the left, down below. The Grotto. The place where the greengrocer and the baker grab a drink at half past four in the morning and wait till the wholesale auction begins and the oven is warm, the spot where in the evening the flotsam and jetsam of the town wash up, lying there until another ebb tide comes and everyone is carried along on the tide of the day to consume eight hours of light and do some work. Until the night’s flood returns and washes everything into the sheltered bay that is The Grotto. This bar, which lies half underground, is the drinking place for locally famous artistic big game: a few painters and one singer, half a poet, two photographers and a homosexual korfball player who dreams of having his own florist’s shop. Every evening the barman plays Sinatra at full volume and sings into the telephone receiver at the top of his voice. There is a regular customer who always falls asleep with his head on the bar and has to be woken up to go home, where he once tried in vain to murder his family, a house that now consists of empty rooms and cold walls, cupboards of children’s and women’s clothes that will never be worn again, dusty floors and chairs on which no one will ever sit again.

  Through the open door, down by the roughly laid steps, he sees nothing but bodies packed on top of one another. People are smoking, talking loudly and laughing hard, it’s murky and oppressively hot, the space is sliced in two by bluish-grey layers of cigarette smoke. He knows already that it won’t just be so stuffy that the air can be cut with a knife, it will also swallow him up. What lies half underground is more living history than he has ever rejected. Anyone who enters there abandons all hope of a future.

  It’s the spot where everyone is.

  ‘Marcus! You wanker! Come here. Jesus…Where have you been all this time?’

  ‘Professor Calculus!’

  ‘Jan! Give Marcus here a beer!’

  ‘Marcus? Is that Marcus Kolpa? May the devil drag me naked by my bollocks through hell. Marcus Kolpa…So, son, you’re here for the big night?’