In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  Isaac shakes his head. She looks at him as if she’s waiting for a reply.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I haven’t spoken to him. Why?’

  ‘He said your ex was in town. He saw him yesterday.’

  Isaac sniffs. He stares outside, where Fred is being helped down from the garden bench. They fall silent for a little while.

  ‘What do you think?’ says Chaja. Isaac lifts his glass and takes a greedy swig.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he says, when the wine has disappeared down his gullet. ‘Last year Fred thought he’d seen Father Christmas, when he was drunk. He most likely saw someone who looked like my ex and he was probably pissed at the time. I know Fred and his immature little friends. They’re all people in their thirties who act out Easy Rider once a year. Drinking beer with the rabble, burping loudly and farting.’

  ‘But just imagine…’ says Chaja. ‘Wouldn’t you want to know?’

  ‘Imagine we could fly, we’d be sitting drinking on a branch right now.’

  She wonders what he thinks, what he really thinks. Isaac left his boyfriend abruptly when he was rejected as a minister, with no reason given. Could his God be more important to him than love? She looks outside and drinks and while she stubbornly fixes her eyes on a single point, she’s aware of his presence and all the time she has the feeling that he’s absent at the same time. It’s as if she can feel him thinking. At the end of the courtyard, almost directly opposite her, flickeringly illuminated by the string of bulbs and strangely grey in the thick gloom that lies between the four walls, she sees Marcus looking at her. She looks away and stares at her hands, which rest on the brushed granite of the kitchen sink.

  Yesterday she had lunch with Fred, at his suggestion. He had called her a couple of weeks before to ask if she could talk, now, tomorrow evening, soon at any rate. They negotiated over a date and time, asked after mutual acquaintances and hung up. And then they had sat down facing one another, in Fred’s office, and Chaja saw on the other side of the carefully designed manager’s office a man of her own age, with all the marks of someone who had made it: a lambswool jacket, silk tie, hand-made shirt, clean-shaven and wrapped in a lovely cloud of herby aftershave. Behind him on the wall hung a framed poster of Che Guevara. The desk was so clean and empty that she wondered if the cleaner had just been, or if Fred never did anything. It was close to twelve, and Fred suggested getting something to eat. On the way to the bistro, as he tried to keep the conversation going, she had thought back to the time when they were studying and considered themselves people who had escaped the trap of bourgeois conventionality, although some (Marcus) already knew that that was just a way of looking at things. Now, a decade later, even the pose could no longer be sustained. Fred, art school, had a design office. He was married to Li Mei, someone from outside the group of friends, had one child and another on the way. Isaac had studied theology and worked in an institute where they tried to decipher Dead Sea scrolls. Ella, so brilliant that the school dean had personally wanted to carry her to university, had become a stewardess and was transformed into a walking advertisement for nylons. And lastly Kat lived on the money that her parents slipped her, just as they had bought the house for her. She wrote poems that so gruesomely resembled the music on which they were based that you read them, according to Marcus, and suddenly noticed that somewhere around the top of the head you could hear a sluggish, wailing noise. MowmaaaaaaoMAOW! Girly poetry on the electric guitar, Marcus said.

  They walked across the Vaart, past old premises so recently renovated that the change made them look almost unreal. Fred had a floor in one of those premises, an uneasy amalgam of decorated ceilings, artificial window outlines, marble floors and all’s-right-with-the-world art, as Marcus would have called it.

  ‘Cross here,’ said Fred. He took her by the arm and pulled her to the other side of a vague pedestrian crossing. ‘I’m looking forward to tomorrow evening,’ he said. ‘If I didn’t have that one evening in the year I’d drown in all the over-inflated nonsense that surrounds me.’

  Chaja twisted her arm from his hand and smiled.

  Although they were now grown-up men and women with careers and grown-up lives, around the annual reunion there was always a bit of shame over lost youth and wrecked ideals. At the previous party Fred and Isaac had said they still couldn’t get used to the fact that they weren’t eighteen any more. ‘I stand in front of the mirror in the morning,’ said Fred, ‘and I look, but the man I see there has nothing to do with the boy I am in my mind.’ Isaac had nodded and said that he still spoke of his peers as ‘that boy’ or ‘that girl’ and that most people didn’t know who he was talking about until he pointed at the man or woman in question.

  During their student days they had striven to be dust that blew up every now and then and settled again after a while. They had no goals, they said, and certainly no expectations and that was good. ‘People know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and where they’re heading,’ Isaac always said when he was drunk, ‘but that doesn’t apply to us and we still don’t miss anything, we still don’t live in miserable circumstances.’ They believed that at best you could go on drifting along, regardless of what happened, regardless of what came or went. ‘At the end of the day it doesn’t matter much either way,’ said Isaac. ‘We are but dust and all is vanity.’ He spoke, when he had drunk too much, in long drawn-out sentences, as if he were falling back instinctively on the preaching tone that he had learned during his studies. The aimlessness, perhaps not chosen but at least heartily accepted, had kept pace with most of them for a long time. Fred was the first one to end the postponement of the journey through grown-up life, as he called it, although the realisation of this still hadn’t worked its way through to him.

  He had begun with austere designs set in sans serif, in the Dutch tradition. In between he knocked together cheap brochures and advertisements, of the what-on-earth-do-I-know kind, as he called it. He had chosen to do a lot of meaningless short-term stuff to finance his big long-term projects. One day one of his tasteful designs would catch on and the money would come flooding in. ‘Then,’ Fred said, ‘I’ll give up that other nonsense and go and do some real things.’ By which he was referring to the four years of art school that he had behind him and which had till now led only to the design of logos for local businesses. He hired a room in an old building where he often slept among the tables covered with rubber cement, Rotring pens, graph paper and empty bottles. There was nothing waiting for him at home but dirty washing and old post. A year later he met Li Mei and slowly, as their love developed and they first lived together and then married, Fred became more concerned. Until then he had earned just enough to be able to pay the rent on his office, and now started to wonder why he was working so hard that he was hardly ever at home and earned so little that he could barely feed his young family. The answer came one day when he received a visitor who represented a major company. He looked round, picked up a sheet of paper and started calculating what Fred’s life looked like. After a whole series of questions and figures a sum ended up at the bottom of the page. ‘You’re making fifteen guilders an hour,’ his visitor had said. ‘That’s no more than my cleaning woman.’ Fred stared at the piece of paper and, he later told Isaac, literally saw a ten and a five on it. ‘That’s before tax, by the way,’ the man had added. ‘And I haven’t counted the hours when you aren’t doing anything. So in the end you’re earning much less. Probably fifty guilders a day.’

  That day Fred had taken on the assignment the man had come to see him about, for a fixed rate of eighty-five guilders an hour. It was the first time that he put a lot of time into something he didn’t care about, but which brought in the money.

  His life changed. After that one commission more companies turned up, and less than a year later he was employing two people. Now, at thirty, he was the director of a design agency with a staff of twenty, and although he still drove old cars, now it was a Volvo estate rather than a 1965 Beetle whose exhaust was tied to the b
umper with a piece of wire.

  They had ended up at a restaurant that resembled the boudoir of an ageing courtesan. As they sat down at too small a table and ate affected little dishes and drank tepid wine, Fred told her that he had a problem and that she could help him, at least if she was prepared to go to Israel for him.

  ‘Israel,’ Chaja had said.

  Fred nodded and chewed on his sweetbread. As he washed down his food with a sip of the Haut-Brion that Chaja had chosen, he said: ‘We’ve got a collaborative project with a little company in…God, what’s it called? Some village or other, a kibbutz. At the moment we’re also doing industrial design, and the people there who can make very cheap prototypes and models, even better than here, are sitting idle…You understand. The problem is: for the last six months costs have been constantly rising. And not just a little bit. When we ask what’s going on, they say: it’s a setback, difficulties. Those people barely speak English. I have no idea what’s going on. We’ll end up in the red if it carries on like that. I’ve already had to pour in extra money. I’m worried that we’ll be slowly bled dry unless things change. These are big sums, Chaja. Some of those prototypes are bloody expensive. Something has to happen.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do about it?’

  ‘You’re an accountant. You’ve got a keen mind, you’re critical, you know me, I trust you. You’re charming. I want you to go there and find out what’s going on, ideally some figures, as long as they prove something. We need to have something concrete to be able to break with those people if things don’t change.’

  ‘Espionage.’

  Fred shook his head. He raised his hand, stopped the waitress and asked for the dessert menu.

  ‘Spying’s something else. You have to obtain information, listen, if need be look into things that aren’t meant for your eyes, but you don’t have to spy. We don’t want any secret procedures or anything. I just want to know what’s going on.’

  ‘The difference is, as always, extremely subtle.’

  Fred grinned and ordered sabayon. When his dessert came and Chaja was drinking coffee and watching how the pale yellow foam disappeared into Fred’s mouth, the details were revealed. She would receive her travel and accommodation expenses in advance, plus daily expenses of a hundred dollars. The fee, depending upon the results, was ten thousand guilders (in the absence of results) or fifteen thousand guilders (if she came back with usable material). The company in Israel would be informed that she was coming. She would be announced as an ‘auditor’.

  ‘An auditor,’ she said, ‘is an accountant who investigates a company, or an expert in automation, but an expert in business at any rate. Not a spy.’

  ‘Can you investigate an administration?’ asked Fred.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘How’s Marcus?’

  It took her a moment to change gear.

  ‘Marcus…’ she said. ‘Good. Excellent.’

  ‘Do you ever see him?’

  ‘Fred…’

  They fell silent.

  ‘Why me?’ said Chaja after a little while.

  Fred looked up and shook his head. ‘I’ve already told you: you’ve got a clear mind, I need someone I can trust.’

  ‘Why not your own accountant?’

  Fred sighed. He ordered marc de champagne from the passing waiter and looked around.

  ‘You are…erm…of Jewish descent.’

  ‘Jewish descent…’ said Chaja. She felt him stiffen and for a moment enjoyed his brief fit of shame.

  Fred looked shyly around him. ‘First of all I want you because I can trust you, but it’s easier, it seems to me, if you have some…connection with those people.’

  Chaja looked at him severely. ‘You’re looking for a Trojan horse.’

  Fred sighed heavily. The marc was set down. The drink was so odorous that Chaja could smell the tangy perfume of eau de vie and champagne from her side of the table.

  ‘The most important point–you must accept this from me–the most important point is that I think you can find things. You can put yourself in people’s minds, you always could. You’re calm, and clever, and you can combine and deduce and analyse. That’s why I want you in particular. I’d have asked you even without your background. You aren’t too busy at the moment?’

  ‘It’s OK. When do I have to leave?’

  ‘In a couple of weeks.’

  She bent over the table and looked at him so intensely that he involuntarily flinched. ‘I’m doing this for you, Fred. Just for you. Because of before and what we once shared and all that kind of thing. I’m doing this because I think you’re in such a fix that you’ve forgotten your inhibitions.’

  Fred looked unhappy.

  ‘I’m doing this as the ultimate favour to a friend,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to thank me or pay me for it. You’ll give me travel money and expenses. No fee. Not a cent. Not a bunch of tulips once it’s over.’

  Fred opened his mouth.

  ‘And we’ll never mention it again,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK.’

  She saw that he was already regretting his request. He twisted in his chair and took a sip of the marc.

  ‘There’s one other thing.’

  ‘You’ve got a collaborative project with the Vatican and you want me to ask Isaac…’

  He gave an offended laugh.

  Chaja looked at him, unmoved.

  He turned round and waved to the waiter with a gesture that was both impatient and nervous. ‘I saw,’ he said, with his back to her, ‘…what’s his name…that ex of Isaac’s. I didn’t speak to him. He didn’t see me.’

  ‘Didn’t want to see you, you mean.’

  He turned round in slow motion. There was a look of surprise on his face.

  ‘Fred,’ she had said, ‘grow up.’

  In the courtyard, Marcus and Kat are waltzing to a Miles Davis tune. Jenny is teaching Ella the steps. As they drift round the room, looking with great concentration at their feet, Marcus raises his head and stares right into Chaja’s face. For a moment there’s nothing but the space in which their eyes meet. She sees his quizzical eyes, he sees her questioning gaze. Then Marcus and Kat move out of the light. Isaac feels Chaja stirring beside him. He swings round and leans his hip against the sink. Chaja lets her eyes wander across the courtyard and finally looks at him.

  ‘Chaja,’ he says. ‘Listen. Don’t try to make Marcus happy. Forget him. Think of him as if he’s dead. Marcus has chosen to vanish from this life. This life, which we’re looking at now. The life of us and our friends who act as if they’re happy. He exists, but at the same time he doesn’t. Tomorrow he’ll disappear again and then he’ll be there in Amsterdam, in a world that you don’t know, and probably don’t want to know. He’s alone. None of us can reach him any more.’

  She nods so slowly that he thinks briefly that at any moment she might close her eyes and fall asleep. Then she starts biting her bottom lip with almost absent-minded grimness.

  In the darkening courtyard Marcus looks at the air. The light from the strings of little bulbs rests on the people he grew up with. Kat, perhaps Kat’s the only one he still has anything in common with. Not because he, as she said, is a poet. He did, indeed, once write a poem, but only because he was curious about what she did. She was the true poet. His bond with her is a mixture of half-vanished trust, the two or three trivial little secrets that former lovers share and their still present concern for each other’s well-being. He has always, after the six months in which he thought he belonged with her, and she that she could easily love a man ‘in that way’, passionately wished her to have a great love and she, her conversation as he stood shaving was the umpteenth proof of it, she still tries to bring him together with every woman she trusts. The rest of their old circle of friends is a collection of people he wouldn’t miss if they left the country tomorrow and never came back.

  Apart from Chaja, of course.

  He would like to be a man, he refle
cts, as he sits here in the courtyard and sees her, behind the window, staring out, he would like to be the kind of man who writes a few last words, turns out the light, shuts the door and leaves the house.

  A man who wouldn’t be missed.

  Not far from the house, almost drowned out by the din of the night, the clock of St Joseph’s Church begins to strike ten.

  As he reaches the front door Kat’s heels ring out on the tiles. He leans back against the cool wall, the beckoning front door on his left, the parting of the passageway on his right (left to the kitchen, right to the wing with the bedrooms and basement), and waits till she comes round the corner.

  ‘Oh?’

  He pulls up, by way of a grin, one corner of his mouth. ‘Not oh, Kat. Not: I hadn’t expected that.’

  ‘Can’t you stay?’ She makes a brave effort to grin back.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Are you coming back?’

  He nods.

  ‘You’ve got the key?’

  ‘Kat…’

  She sighs.

  The din from the party in the courtyard is like a vague worraworraworra, as if a whole troop of beavers had just thrown itself on a tree.

  ‘Or shall we head off and get drunk, just the two of us?’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  She nods as if she understands that, but they both know it isn’t so. There’s a sort of dejected melancholy between them, as if the space between their bodies is becoming fluid. Kat walks up to him, hugs him and presses her face deep into the hollow of his neck and shoulder. She sniffs in his scent to keep from sobbing and he knows what she’s about to say.

  But she says something else.

  Just as he’s standing outside and the door has separated them almost completely, he feels her words like a sudden gust of wind behind him.

  He stands at the window. Kat is sitting on the floor in the corridor, he knows that. Through the windowpane and the en-suite doors that separate the sitting room from the kitchen, he sees the long stiff form of Isaac and next to him Chaja’s slender figure, her head turned away. Just as he is about to walk on, Chaja turns round and looks at the window.