In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  Around the corner of the street, where the avenue that connects the forest with the town is a river of leather-clad bikers and strollers and where petrol fumes hang in the evening light, his name rings out through the surrounding din. Fred and Isaac emerge from the dense gloom of the street. Fred calls out, and before Marcus can disappear among the people they both see him.

  ‘Hey, we’re coming with you, mate.’ Fred slaps him on the shoulder.

  ‘If you don’t mind, that is,’ mumbles Isaac.

  Marcus looks at them. ‘As long as you don’t have anything more to drink,’ he says to Fred. ‘I don’t feel like dragging you out of a gang of leather-clad idiots later on.’

  ‘One little beer…’

  ‘No little beer. You’re staying dry. If you want to come with me, we’ll do it my way. Is that clear, Fred?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They start walking, towards the Church Square, three men descending into the pit of night.

  ‘Ize?’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Who sent you after me?’

  Isaac looks at him in surprise.

  ‘Are theologians allowed to lie?’

  ‘Is that a rhetorical question, Marcus?’ says Isaac.

  ‘Oh, stop going on,’ grumbles Fred. ‘Chaja and Kat didn’t want to let you go. Not alone, at any rate. And how do you always manage to be at the centre of everything?’

  Marcus glances sideways. The good thing about Fred is that, especially when he’s been drinking, he never tries to hide his feelings. Right now jealousy and rage are flowing in alternating waves across his face. It’s a fascinating sight, that contorted face, constantly in motion.

  ‘Perhaps you should ask yourself, Fred, whether I mightn’t prefer the reverse to be true, and whether it isn’t something I do on purpose.’

  ‘Huh?’ Fred’s face assumes a slightly stupid expression.

  ‘I don’t want to be at the centre of things. I want to be left in peace. I didn’t ask you along.’

  ‘OK, I’ll be off then, you bastard!’

  Marcus sighs. ‘My God, Fred, you always do your best to confirm all the prejudices people might have about you.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Just go, Fred. Go back to your wife. Stop acting the sulky little boy. Be a man and accept your life. You’ve made your bed, now go and lie in it. And stop fucking around.’

  ‘Marcus…’

  ‘Leave me alone, Ize. I’ve had it up to here with Freddy-boy. Fred’s attention-seeking has gone on long enough. I would never have asked him to come along and if I let him come along it was just so as not to offend him. But perhaps he has to be offended sooner or later. Fred, you’re well on the way to becoming an even bigger arsehole than you were already. Fuck off and grow up.’

  And Marcus strides off, all the way across the square, past the church steps, off to the left down a shopping street where he is sucked into the flow.

  There isn’t much light from the shop windows and street lights here, and the throngs of people around him are anonymous and uniform in the evening darkness. These unfamiliar bodies provide a strange sort of security, the dark air above them and the expectant sense that the night will not be over for a long time. The deep blue light forms a sliver above the roofs of the shops. It’s as if he’s at the bottom of a crevasse.

  ‘Not so fast, Marcus.’

  That’s Isaac’s hand settling on his shoulder, he doesn’t even have to look round.

  ‘Go back to the others.’

  ‘Are you sending me away?’

  ‘No. But I’m not good company.’

  ‘I don’t see it that way.’

  They walk in silence through the people and reach the market. There, in spite of the weather, the terraces are full and the cafés are crammed to the gills.

  ‘Shall we get a whisky?’

  Marcus glances at him. The long form of his boyhood friend is already heading towards the whisky bar of the most expensive bistro in town.

  ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘I can’t think of a better reason.’

  They cross the square, which is filled almost to the last stone with people, and push their way through a drinking crowd into the whisky bar, where it’s even more packed. All the stools at the horseshoe-shaped bar are occupied, as are the three little tables and the space between them and the bar. Even the area at the back, not more than a waiting area for the toilets, is packed with people.

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  Isaac raises his hand. ‘Wait. I’ll get them. Your preference?’

  Marcus presses his lips together and shuts his eyes. ‘An Islay. Drop of water. No ice.’

  ‘It shall be done, sir.’

  This isn’t Marcus’s favourite spot, certainly not in the middle of all these people. The proximity of so many bodies, which have shed their anonymity in the light of the flower-shaped lamps along the bar, the impossibility of getting away from here quickly, of being no one, lost, sought but not found, makes his heart beat faster. Gloomy bodies in gloomy streets, he has no problem with that. But big, organic crowds…He was the only one of his friends who never went along to demonstrations. The image of thousands of people twisting through the streets, people who for a moment all seemed to think the same thing, that image literally gave him nightmares. Once, a couple of days before one of those demonstrations, he had had a dream in which he had seen himself drowning, a swimmer in a sea of corpses. He had risen above the mass, like a camera, and had, far below, seen his arm waving above the heaving heads, a drowning man begging in vain for help. Waking up in a sweat-drenched bed, he had decided that night not to go. No one had been surprised. His highly politicised friends in the west of the country, where he himself lived (and who wasn’t politicised and radical in those days?), had seen it all coming. Marcus’s political commitment was something they observed with equal amounts of tenderness and annoyance. They plunged with great dedication into the growing influence of the left, the squatter movement, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, the women’s movement. Although he shared many of their ideas, he lacked the passion for what had once been called ‘the cause’. He feared that that cause, he told them, might one day become more important than any obstacles in the way of its fulfilment. ‘Here comes Marcus again with a “why”,’ was the stock line in every discussion in which he took part, and in which he attempted to say something.

  ‘A Jura, sir, with the landlord’s compliments.’

  Isaac holds up two crystal glasses, a rarity tonight when everything is made of plastic.

  ‘The landlord…’ Marcus tries to peer through the bodies.

  ‘We had a chat, and when I told him I was here with you, he insisted on letting me have these on the house.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say? Marcus, what in God’s name is up with you?’

  ‘Are you allowed to take God’s name in vain?’

  ‘Marcus…’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Tell me: what’s up.’

  Marcus takes a sip from his whisky, feels, smells, no: becomes the whisky itself. Iodine, the salty odour of sea air, ah, turf fire in the distance. And then the alcohol exploding in his throat and the hollow of his mouth, boring its warm way down, to his stomach, and it’s as if a flower begins to blossom in his belly.

  ‘Nothing’s up, Ize. I’m tired and irritable. I’m just…tired. And I really don’t think I can keep the traditions going, the old friendships that have to be kept alive for the sake of the past. Not you. Not you. But Fred. Ella. And Kat…I can’t be what she demands of me. I can’t do it. I don’t want to be their Jew.’

  He lowers his head.

  ‘Marcus…What are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t want to be anyone’s Jew any more, Ize. I want to get away. I want to dissolve. I don’t want to be anybody any more. I want to forget myself.’

  ‘Marcus, what’s all this nonsense about “being someone’s Jew”?’

  ‘Ize. I k
now you don’t understand, and I know it sounds like overwrought rubbish, but that’s the way it is. I’m Fred’s Jew, because he’s become something that he isn’t. I’m Kat’s Jew, because just like her I fall outside the categories. I’m Ella’s Jew, because she’s looking for something wounded. And I’ve always been that, Ize. They just needed to think about it and I was what they wanted me to be. Why can’t they stop needing me? Why don’t they leave me alone?’

  ‘Most people just want to be needed.’

  Marcus taps hastily at his pockets, finds cigarettes and lights one. He inhales like a swimmer coming up from the depths. Then his eyes meet Isaac’s and what he sees in those eyes freezes the blood in his breast, so much so that he coughs and splutters the smoke from his cigarette.

  ‘Look after her,’ he wheezes.

  ‘Marcus, you sound like someone saying his goodbyes.’

  A reckless person rings the bell that hangs beneath racks of glasses and bottles at the bar, and a great cheer explodes.

  ‘I am saying goodbye, Ize. This is the last time I’ll be here. No more traditions for me. No past. No one counting on me any more.’

  He can just, between the people’s heads, see outside to the square between the restaurants and the cafés and the only shop that’s survived here. Between the reeling groups of bikers walks Jacob Noah, swimming through the crowd like a white whale.

  ‘Ize…Isn’t that…Yes, it is, damn it.’

  Isaac stands on tiptoes and looks outside.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Noah…Jacob Noah…’

  ‘Do I know him?’

  ‘Chaja’s father!’

  ‘I’ve never met him. So that’s the man who owns half the town centre. Where is he, then?’

  Marcus knocks back his whisky. ‘Got to go. Sorry.’

  And he presses his empty glass into Isaac’s hand, turns round, is out of the door and has vanished amongst all the people before his old friend can take so much as a step.

  When Jacob Noah opened his eyes there was fragrant earth, earth and leaves and the heavy moist perfume of humus, moss, loose black forest soil, a hint of grass too and green acorns. A hip designer could have turned it into a successful and fashionable perfume. In the skimming light that slid over the forest floor a dung beetle clambered over a half-decayed oak leaf, its wing case glittering in the late light, a spark of so many iridescent colours that the insect was a walking jewel. A young oak tree, no more than a green stem with two absurdly large leaves, poked up from between some fallen bark and rusting leaves and from where he lay with his face deep in the soft forest floor, only his right eye open, that little plant was a gentle giant: the soft young green was almost transparent and it was as if he could see the sap stream beating in the veins. Somewhere–though he, head half buried in the humus, couldn’t hear exactly where–the wailing of an ambulance siren rose up like a skylark.

  He turned onto his back, swept some earth from his mouth and looked at the trees and the patches of blue-grey air visible between the hazy treetops. He sat up on his right hand with a groan, but paused when a black haze appeared before his eyes and dizziness washed through him like sadness. He shook his head and looked out from beneath a deep frown at the trees and the sun that cut between the trunks like a knife of light. Only then did he notice himself. That is: the bright brilliance that rose from him.

  He was wearing a suit, so white that it seemed to radiate light.

  Two-tone shoes on his feet.

  Beneath his jacket an exuberant red floral waistcoat over a black silk shirt. A gold watch chain protruded from his waistcoat pocket. A handkerchief with a red paisley motif hung sadly from his breast pocket. And in his left hand, glistening like an adder among the rotting leaves, lay an ebony walking stick with a silver knob.

  Sitting half-upright, he looked down at himself and could only conclude that he looked like a clown, a ludicrous figure who had fallen from the dark ridge of the big top onto the sawdust of the arena, and had now woken up in the beam of a floodlight that had just been switched on.

  He dropped onto his back and closed his eyes.

  No one could ever have described Jacob Noah as a man for the easy life, for lounging listlessly in deckchairs and pointlessly sitting around on benches. Even after he had sold his business and later the real estate he had so carefully acquired, when his hardworking life had lost its purpose and there was nothing to be done but make more money, even then he wasn’t allowed la dolce vita. He would have liked it–he envied people who knew, felt and pleasurably endured the meaning of idleness–but something had always propelled him onwards. Once when Aphra had encouraged him finally ‘to give himself a break’, he had told her of Spinoza’s apocryphal assertion that everyone in the Netherlands was Calvinist: Protestants, Catholics, even Jews, and that he was evidently a very Calvinistic Jew, all work ethic and making the most of his talents, the toil of his labours and the sweat of his brow.

  But now here he lay, in the white suit of the louche flâneur, comfortably nestling in the dry leaves under the trees, his crown resting on what looked like a patch of downy moss, and he didn’t find it disagreeable. His body felt pleasantly loose and light and he discovered that a faint little smile was playing around his lips. He felt no pressure, it was true, but in other circumstances he would have liked to yawn long and hard and tense the muscles in his body, his back hollow as a cat’s and his jaws open wide.

  A gentle sigh passed through the tops of the trees, something rustled in the leaves, the void swished, a siren wailed, the bell of St Joseph’s Church rang out. A bird called, another bird answered, and a moment later it even sounded as if a little tune could be heard.

  He opened his eyes again only after a long time, and looked up at the treetops that hung like nets in the air. He was filled with great peace and repose. I must do this more often, he thought, just go and lie somewhere and let the world turn. His eyes slid over the leaf roof, behind him, beside him, above him. A cathedral, he thought, it looks like a…

  On a low branch in the tree just in front of him sat a raven. The speckled sunlight made its charcoal feather-suit gleam gently. The bird held its head at an angle, apparently unable to avert its eyes from the flowery red belly there in the depths that stuck up like a whale from the immaculate white folds of the jacket of the man lying on the forest floor.

  Jacob Noah frowned, ran his hand over his embonpoint, button by button by button, and felt the watch chain. He lifted his head and pulled the watch from his waistcoat pocket. The yellow-gold case exploded in a haze of little stars, like a spiralling mist of pale yellow patches of light. The raven cawed softly. Noah got up, flipped open the lid of the case and gave a start as he looked into its innermost depths.

  Under the watch glass, like an anthill between two plates, glowing in the curious sinking light of the sun, lay the town. Not a delicate picture of the town, not a depiction of Beautiful Assen, Town in the Woods, minutely painted with a marten-hair brush by a rustic neo-realist from Groningen, no, beneath the vaulted glass of the watch lay the whole town, the only and authentic town, where he was born and grew and would have his grave. He saw the forest, the houses and the station, the TT funfair on the grounds of the cattle market and the annual sluggish stream of the strolling crowd in search of entertainment. From above, captured in the gold case, it looked like a bacterial culture, a winding, slithering, searching and groping colony of tiny life forms clotting here, growing there into a fingering tentacle, a ‘thing’ filling streets and alleyways, squares and parks, nervously seeking space to go on growing, food, something; just outside the centre it was calmer, behind one of the big houses on the stately Nassaulaan, the size of sculpted grains of sand, there behind the big little houses children were playing with a ball, while three adults watched them from garden chairs arranged in a semicircle on the grass, the shadow of a cloud the size of a speck of dust drifted lazily across the school playground to the rear of the house, a motorbike shot like a strip of black and red out of th
e forest and stopped just in front of the Church Square, where other motorbikes waited in long lines, fuming and throbbing, and on the other side of the square, at the start of Torenlaan, he saw, on the path between the big houses, a shining black hearse, while the avenue itself was an undulating, pulsating mass of bacteria around a scaffolding structure that pointed straight up and the strings of bulbs hanging from it cast a magical glow on the crowds that thronged the street, watching the motorbikes balancing their way carefully along the planks on the scaffolding; closer, in the forest, ragged little bikers rode slowly along the avenues to the town and the still water of the swimming pool lay like a dark, clouded little mirror amidst its grassy sunbathing areas, and still closer, here, on the ground between the trees of the forest, radiant white in the low light, a man bent forward staring at a watch.

  ‘What in God’s name is going on here?’

  He quickly struggled to his feet, holding the watch like an over-full cup of tea, and looked irritably around. He opened his mouth to reply and then understood that he had heard his own voice.

  He shook his head, glanced around furtively and then raised his eyebrows.

  Quite: what was going on here, that he was startled by a question that he himself had posed, what was going on here, that he was lying about in a white suit (with a walking stick!) in the forest and, in a watch that wasn’t his own, he saw the town?

  A dream? It wasn’t the sort of dream he normally had.

  A vision? In his old age?

  A hallucination, perhaps?

  He raised his walking stick, drew up his shoulders and flailed it wildly around. The top of a stinging nettle sailed through the air, three little twigs spun to the ground. Dry leaves whirled around his feet, his jacket-tails flapped.

  Suddenly he stopped, panting. He was slightly bent, he stared from under his eyebrows at the falling leaves and waving nettles, then straightened and stood for a moment looking round. He cast a cold eye on the swarm in his watch–an anthill, a bloody anthill–and snapped the lid shut. He sniffed a furious sniff, raised the stick, pointed it in a particular direction and set off resolutely towards where he knew he would find the intersection that led to the town, accompanied by the ominous suspicion (it hovered above him like a little thunder cloud and followed him wherever he went) that something was badly wrong. Muted by the foliage, the church bell, still ringing, was a distant and sonorous roar.