In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  The part of the wood in which Jacob Noah found himself was an offshoot, cut off by the bypass and the turn-off leading to the motorway and the bike track, a slice of cake that had once been spared the tarmac machines and the bulldozers of progress because this was where the Jewish cemetery lay. The vertical stones were faintly visible behind the trees. But that wasn’t what Jacob Noah was looking at. He directed his gaze at the path that ran towards the bypass and struggled through the thicket. Although it was a laborious quest, his mood didn’t suffer. There was a smell of wood and resin and humus all around him and when he had emerged at the crossing after taking a few steps, he might well have obeyed the urge to whistle a little tune. The thought was rather disturbed by what he saw when the confusion of young branches disappeared and provided a glimpse of the goal of his brief journey.

  It wasn’t a crossing at all.

  It was a dust road lined with crooked electricity poles, burnt grey by the dryness. There was emptiness, an expanse of poor, dry land.

  But no crossing.

  Noah shook his head, stuck the tip of a shoe into the sand, as though to reassure himself that it was all real, and then, still shaking his head, continued on his way. He waved his stick and trudged sulkily across the hard piece of ground between the tyre tracks and what must have been the verge, a barely discernible rise where dry grass yellowed further and here and there empty Coke tins lay. He felt hot in his suit and wiped his forehead with the red handkerchief that he took without thinking from his breast pocket.

  When he was stopped a few minutes later he was almost relieved. The sun shone into his eyes and the sweat was by now running in streams down his face. Before him stood a Mexican border guard who was wiping the back of his neck with something that looked very like a washing-up cloth. He pushed his hat back on his head, hitched up his trousers by the belt and nodded, as he let his eye slide down to something which seemed to be further away, but which was invisible to Jacob Noah when he looked around.

  ‘Buenas noches, señor. Ausweis, bitte.’

  Noah began to tap his pockets, by his hips, up to his chest, where he felt the familiar right angle of his passport in his inside pocket.

  ‘Jude?’

  Noah nodded.

  ‘Sind Sie zum ersten Mal hier?’

  The sun shone into his eyes. He was standing in what could only be described as a blinding sun, dusty two-tone shoes planted firmly in the sand, a Mexican standing in front of him, dubbed into German.

  ‘Where is…here?’ he said, handing over his passport and glancing around–a semi-dilapidated petrol station with a sign so rusty that he couldn’t make out what brand it had once recommended, a few girls with grubby white skirts and bare feet pulling a toy car behind them, and the pockmarked, white-painted concrete box that represented the customs booth.

  The border guard took possession of the passport like a fisherman reeling in a boot. ‘Hier, Gringo, in unserem Land.’

  He could now see that the Mexican wasn’t perfectly dubbed.

  ‘I have no idea whether I’ve been in Ihrem Land before,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I am, let alone why, and if I’m being honest,’ he looked around, ‘this doesn’t look like the kind of place you would visit twice.’

  The Mexican grinned. He took from his breast pocket a small cigar that looked a lot like a dried mouse tail and, when he lit it, smelt like one too.

  In the distance the door of the petrol station opened. Out stepped a man Noah immediately thought he recognised. He took a few steps, laid his right arm in front of his chest, gripped his left arm just above the elbow and stood there like that as he took in his surroundings.

  He looked at the border guard, who snapped shut the passport and held it out between two fingers. It was a moment before the man with the stinking cigar followed his gaze.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, as his face brightened. ‘Señor Wayne…’

  In the distance rose the sounds of a mariachi band with a trumpet like a tin siren. ‘Mi corazon…’ he heard, in a plaintive, sweet sound that threw him back into a memory of the holidays he had spent–when? a month ago, two months ago, it seemed, good grief, like a past life–spent in Mexico. He had been lying on his back, on a bed of carved mahogany so densely ornamented that in his feverish dreams the figures on the posts supporting the canopy looked as if they were creeping up and down and turning to him every now and again to show him an obscenely polished grin or their shining, rubbed brown bottoms. The cold sweat had run down his body, his eyes rolled painfully in their sockets and something seemed to be stuck in his throat. Late in the afternoon he had fallen asleep, a disturbed, spiralling string of dreams in which he saw his grey face in the misted bathroom mirror: unshaven, his eyes deep and lacklustre, his hair sticking wet and black against his temples; and suddenly, as he stood there looking, the skin of his face had pulled tight, the flesh on his bones had shrivelled and he was staring at the grinning mask of his skull. The mirror turned murky, as if he had stirred shallow water and mud had swirled up, and there were the figures from his bed again: a clumsily carved nymph with rock-hard round breasts the size of melons, welcoming the bony paw of a skeleton in her bosom as she pressed her burgeoning buttocks against his pelvis. There was an old man with a stick, on the arm of a caped Grim Reaper, shuffling to a freshly dug grave, and three kings got up in ermine and scarlet who, to their visible horror, were meeting equally expressionlessly staring skeletons. His mouth was as dry as an old leather wallet and his belly was churning with the hollow feeling of insatiable hunger. When he looked up, the canopy of the four-poster seemed not to be made of fabric, but instead he saw the uneven boards of a bunk bed. Myriads of dust specks floated down like a slowly rushing snowstorm. Heijman, in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, strangely curled up like a toddler, sucking his thumb, lay next to him. His handkerchief hung from his breast pocket like a lick of cream on his lapel. Noah turned sideways and touched his brother’s arm. It was a moment before he woke up. Then a slow shudder ran through his body. His head moved briefly, he stretched out his legs and then his eyes opened. The face turned towards him was like the faces he had seen before: a skull covered with pale skin, grinning obscenely. ‘Huh…’ he stammered, but his brother’s name stuck in his throat like a fishbone. The bony lower jaw dropped. He heard a creaking voice: ‘Jakobovitz…’ Now he could see that it wasn’t a pinstripe suit that Heijman was wearing, or at least not any more. It was more like a pair of pyjamas. The first beats of a mariachi band sounded outside. Noah quickly sat up and saw through the dusty pane what must have been a parade ground. Five men in SS uniforms were marching with musical instruments across the dusty plain. The bleak winter sun was reflected in the leather of their boots and cast hard patches of light on the guitars and the trumpet. ‘…mein armes Herz…’ he heard.

  ‘Es ist Zeit. Gehen Sie, Gringo,’ said the Mexican.

  He took the little cigar from his mouth and spat on the ground between his boots. The spit lay like a silvery snail on the dust.

  Jacob Noah nodded.

  He planted his right foot in the dust and took a step forward, across what must have been the border. The Mexican raised his left eyebrow.

  ‘Where…’

  The border guard was in front of him. He sighed audibly and said, even more badly dubbed than before, his mouth still moving when he had already finished speaking for a good second or so: ‘Alle sind bereits da.’

  And yes, in the distance, where John Wayne had by now taken up position on the paint-flaked veranda, brushing his boots and drinking coffee from an enamel mug with a grin as if this were a deeply experienced existential act, there out of the languidly swirling dust, where the heat quivered above the sand, like a ghost painted in ochre and sienna watercolour, as though he had been roaming through the desert for forty years and had found nothing, not even a nomad God in a bad mood, let alone a promised land with a honey-dripping bougainvillea and milk-flowing rivers between grassy pastures, and on top of everything still didn’t k
now where he was, where the hazy light of the low midday sun hung above the asphalt and an ambulance came along the bypass and vanished in the direction of the motorway, behind a gate-like opening in the forest on the other side of the river of tar appeared a form that seemed so familiar to him that for a moment he thought it must be family, although that was impossible. He opened his mouth to call out, caught himself and began a bumpy trot. He was crossing the grey asphalt when the black figure disappeared into the greenery. His footsteps rang out on a little wooden bridge. On the left the narrow brook flowed in a lazy curve along the edge of the forest and disappeared further off into the trees and under the ground, on the right it dipped under the road to come back up on the other side. The path leading through an offshoot of the forest, with scrub and low trees growing in an arch overhead, provided a view of a field beside the road scattered with tents and motorbikes. Under the trees it was almost in darkness, but at the end of the path, where it disappeared into the forest again, he could still just make out the white patch of the head of…of who, goddamn it…the white patch of a head that danced in the twilight of the forest.

  ‘Hey…’

  He was nearly breathless.

  ‘Hello?’

  A soft rain began, tapped on the oak leaves above his head, formed little circles in the brook and fell on the ground with audible little thuds. The hazy field began to glisten and in the early-evening light thousands of droplets started glittering like broken glass. People busied themselves between tents, carrying their belongings to safety and pulling plastic sheets over their motorbikes. The bluish smoke of a campfire flattened out in the damp air and drifted into a tent. Someone coughed. A stroke of the clock sounded in the damp air.

  He slumped onto a little bench that stood with its back to the trees and looked out onto the field that had been transformed into a campsite. Half hidden by the smoke, as the soft rain fell, it could have been gypsies rather than bikers running around there. What was lacking was the plaintive croon of a violin, the smell of a pot of food on an open fire and the excited voices of children playing. He closed his eyes and waited till his heart had settled. Far off in the distance the siren sounded again, rain rustled in the treetops above him.

  When he opened his eyes there was a pedlar sitting next to him, a greasy bowler hat on his head, a box in his lap, a gentleman for all that he was gleaming, black and threadbare. The little man nodded him an encouraging smile.

  Jacob Noah had witnessed the end of the heyday of pedlars, the era when the Jews of Assen needed only three words to describe the complete range of their economy: hack, pack and sack; butchers, pedlars and rag-and-bone men. When he himself was young the pedlars had called themselves ‘travellers’, and if they wanted to be very chic, ‘sales representatives’, but what they did barely differed from what their fathers had done a generation before, and long before that: moving from village to village and town to town to sell glasses, thread and ribbons, tea, lottery tickets, clocks or prints.

  The living fossil he was sitting next to, this coelacanth from Jewish economic history, fished a big red handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck.

  Jacob Noah closed his eyes again and rested on his stick.

  ‘I know what you want to say,’ croaked the pedlar.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Noah. He tried to control the rising fury in his breast. ‘You can’t possibly know what I’m going to say.’

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ said the pedlar, rather jauntily. ‘What in God’s name, goddamn it, is going on that I come across one bloody lunatic after the other and move from one ludicrous fantasy to the next crazed hallucination I’ve had it up to here really up to here all the way up to my gullet I’ve had enough of it I want it to stop and everyone and everything to leave me in peace.’

  Noah turned his head round, so slowly that he himself was annoyed, aware that his mouth was hanging open.

  ‘Was that it?’

  ‘How…’ said Noah.

  ‘It’s a gift,’ said the pedlar. He produced something that looked like a parchment smile and tried to look modest as he did so. ‘A gift,’ he repeated contentedly.

  ‘A…’ Noah felt something welling up in him, as if boiling milk was rising at alarming speed and could spill at any moment over the saucepan-rim of his self-control.

  The pedlar shifted a few inches from him and looked at him with concern. ‘Come now, Mr Noah. It isn’t my intention to make you angry.’

  ‘A…goddamned…gift!’

  ‘Mr Noah.’

  ‘Mr…What’s your name, by the way?’

  ‘Now?’ The little pedlar suddenly looked slightly unhappy.

  ‘What do you mean: now?’ said Noah irritably. ‘Does it depend on the time of day? Who you meet? Or the angle of your hat?’

  ‘No, no,’ mumbled the man. He made a dismissive gesture with his right hand, which then shot up to his hat and briefly touched the rim. He stared directly ahead for a moment, murmuring softly to the box in his lap, straightened, as far as he could, and then said, so quietly that Noah at first thought he had heard wrong: ‘The Jew of Assen.’

  ‘The…what?’

  ‘…Jew of…’ said the pedlar.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ groaned Noah. He took the red handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at his lips. He raised his head, looked up, where the last drips were tapping on the leaves, felt one of them splash on his forehead and closed his eyes. ‘Why, Lord? Was I not your loyal servant?’

  ‘Mr Noah?’

  ‘I’m talking to the boss,’ said Noah. He touched the wet patch on his forehead and brought his finger to his mouth. The rain tasted of petrol. ‘No reply,’ he said after a little while. ‘I thought as much.’

  The pedlar shook his head.

  ‘Jew of Assen,’ said Noah. ‘Does that mean there’s only one Jew of Assen and the few other Jews in this godforsaken hamlet aren’t real Jews? That’s quite possible, because if it’s orthodoxy you’re concerned about, I would have to agree with you. That’s something we haven’t seen here for a long time. Or does “The Jew of Assen” mean that there’s one person who bears within himself everything Jewish in this hole in the ground poisoned by the NSB and other fellow travellers, the representative, the, shall I say, archetypal Jew? In which last case I must advise you to seek another path, because Assen doesn’t like Jews and the Jews of Assen don’t like Jewish Jews. They only draw attention to, well, to the Jewishness of Jews.’ He took a deep breath and sighed tormentedly. ‘Jew of Assen, tell it. Tell it without delay. Tell it without deviation. Give me the alpha and omega. And do it, please, in a nutshell.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Now,’ said Noah, bending his head so that he looked at the gleaming, dark little man from beneath his eyebrows. ‘The whole story.’

  The pedlar shook his head regretfully.

  ‘And why in heaven’s name not?’ roared Noah. He got to his feet and rose up in all his majestic whiteness. All five foot six of him, normally so insignificant, grew till he cast shadows around him and seemed to leave the bulk of his surroundings in darkness. ‘WHY? NOT?’

  The pedlar lifted his box, wiggled an arm through one of the straps and stood up, as he let the monster slip onto his back. ‘I can’t tell my story so well if I’m sitting down, Mr Noah. I’m used to walking.’

  ‘The wandering Jew,’ said Noah softly. He looked down almost tenderly at the gleaming black little man, that Jewish dung beetle with his box, that scarab rolling his little ball of shit into eternity and beyond.

  The little man looked up obliquely. The shadow of a smile cracked from the folds of his face. ‘You say it, Mr Noah. And you say it very appropriately.’

  Noah let his eye stray. The rain had stopped. The field of tents came back to life, people crept outside and tried to poke the smoking campfire back to life, a motorcyclist lay asleep on the seat of his bike, the trees dripped, the brook murmured faintly under the little bridge.

  ‘C
ome,’ said the pedlar. ‘Come then, Mr Noah, let’s go. The first and the last. The, as it is so aptly called, alpha and omega.’

  There was slight confusion about the direction they should take. They bumped into one another, turned round with a lot of ‘excuse me’s’ and ‘pardons’ and ‘please forgive me’s’, then stood with their backs to each other, turned round again, and then the pedlar bent down, gripped the exaggeratedly big stick that rested against the bench, and set off in a northerly direction, where the heart of the forest lay, and beyond it the town, where the bell of St Joseph’s boomed.

  They stood pressed stiffly against the glass façade of the snack bar in the square in front of the church, in the heavy smoke of chips and rissoles, between three motorcyclists so drunk that they just stood there, bent over, and danced slowly on the spot to keep their balance. Jacob Noah felt the wall behind him and gasped for breath. High above the rooftops the bronze bell of St Joseph’s rang out and voices crackled from loudspeakers, in Torenlaan bright white light shone from work-lamps on a scaffolding construction, behind it the indigo from the departing evening light pulled a blanket over the town. Where the Hoofdlaan left the forest, on his left, a thick and endless stream of motorcycles swelled. The sinking evening light brushed across the helmets, glowed in the smoke that rose from a thousand exhaust pipes and bounced from chrome to glass and visor. It was a beast emerging from the jaws of the forest, a bony dragon with a spine of helmets, steaming flanks and the multicoloured glitter of leathery scales on its sides. Right at the front a young woman stood on a pillion, her blonde curls waving in the breeze, swaying from left to right and right to left with her head, her face an ecstatic haze, her mouth a screaming hole.