In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  The noise from the motorbikes came and went. It rose in a whirl, a maelstrom of growls and roars, and made the earth tremble. Colours ran into one another, light glittered and clashed, faces became shreds and smears.

  Then the stream welled up between the buildings and spilled over the square. Motorbikes drove through public gardens and over traffic islands, empty beer cans were crushed under wheels, pedestrians leapt aside. Right in front of Jacob Noah’s feet the first of them shot from left and right into the streets of the town, a few came to a halt in front of the house of God. A shaky little group of riders dismounted, stumbled to the steps at the foot of the church and sat down. While he gripped the pedlar’s arm and pressed even harder against the snack-bar façade, the motorbike with the young woman drove past. Behind her the pale fingers of the evening sky stretched over the forest. The woman looked at him. She was standing behind the driver, holding on to his shoulders, a Valkyrie, a hydra, a monster from the mouth of hell. She shook the curls from her face and as she threw her head back she opened her mouth into a hole that could have engulfed the whole town. The loud report of a leaky exhaust crashed between the buildings, a blue cloud of smoke enveloped him, high above the town the bell of St Joseph’s sounded the last chime of seven.

  From the far side of the square came a few people he knew, the boss of the newspaper and several of his journalists. They crossed the little square in front of the church, zigzagging, darting back and forth through the crowd, and landed just in front of them on the safe shore of the pavement. Noah nodded to the boss, but in the mêlée he received no acknowledgement.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  Noah shook his head, turned round and looked at himself in the reflecting panes of the snack bar that had swallowed up the group. ‘These clothes…’ he said.

  ‘I thought you liked them.’

  ‘Liked them?’ Noah looked at his reflection. ‘I don’t look like myself.’

  ‘Everyone looks like himself,’ said the pedlar. ‘But some people don’t know what they look like.’

  Noah glanced sideways at the shiny black Jewish beetle next to him and was about to answer, but as he opened his mouth his eye drifted back to the mirrored glass, the imposing white figure reflected there and the arid, black figure beside him. He turned his head to the side, looked at the pedlar and said, ‘Black and white…’

  ‘Symbolism,’ said the little man. ‘Have I ever told you about my uncle, who one day…’

  ‘You haven’t got an uncle, Jew of Assen. You don’t, as far as I know, have a name. You don’t, as far as I know, come from anywhere. And you aren’t, as far as I can discover, going anywhere, and you’re dragging me with you. I’d like to know once and for all what this is and who you are!’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ said the pedlar. ‘It’s quieter in there.’

  ‘Quieter? They’re probably having the busiest evening of the year in there! For twelve months, this is the moment the chip-fryer’s been waiting for!’

  A bike stopped in the middle of the square. The rider pushed his helmet back on his head, put his foot down and let the back wheel of his motorbike spin at top speed while holding the front wheel still. A fat blue cloud of smoke spewed up and spread. The crowd exploded into cheers and shouts and began to roll like a spring tide. Noah and the pedlar felt the pressure of the mass, they bobbed like driftwood in the sea of people and suddenly they tumbled backwards into the grease-and-starch emporium of Lukas Boom’s snack bar.

  A primeval silence reigned in the palace of grease. It was jam-packed in there, but the people were just as frozen in their movements as the pictures on the many posters that decorated the walls, the eternally yellow beaches, taut and slightly wrinkled, skies like canvases and beneath them pale parasols, some with stripes, others plain yellow or red or orange, decorated with fringes and ruches and waves and ribbons, and beneath them women’s bodies, hotly glowing, undulating and bronzed as desert landscapes; there were sunsets, bleeding like sacrificial bulls, donkeys whose grey-tipped ears poked through straw hats, a baking hot square with sandstone houses and tables and chairs and parasols on which could be read the words Nastro Azz, and everywhere, in fat black or fresh yellow or screaming red letters: Crete, Greece, Torremolinos, Ravenna, Morocco, Israel, Benidorm, Bali. Above the chip-fryer, thick with accumulated grease, wilted and despondent, their edges brown and curling, hung a row of little flags, stuck at an angle on the wall: the collection of trophies of an explorer who was ending his days among the artefacts that reminded him of the undiscovered territory he had put on the map. In the small space between the chiller cabinet with meat patties, meatballs, cheese croquettes (‘Home-made!’), kidney rolls, rice balls, rissoles, and sandwiches with cheese as sweaty as the people in the little room, in that trench of greasy tiles and misted stainless steel stood Lukas Boom, back to the customers, peering into the fryer, mouth agape. At the front the bent shoulders and nodding head of Philip Hoogeveen were just visible. He was covered on the right-hand side by the lean figure of the boss of the local newspaper, Johan van Gelder, and the even leaner figure of his town editor, Bernard Lutra. At a wall table a clotted little group of local politicians trying Lukas Boom’s famous cheese croquettes: an ambitious little Christian Democrat alderman who had, after the elections, walked away with the Public Parks and Swimming Pools portfolio, an enthusiastic Social Democrat who had just discovered, as a cultural alderman, that man is not by nature good, and his political Sancho Panza, a young socialist who bore the nickname ‘Dribbler’ because he leaked stuff to the press so frequently that he seemed incontinent. A shy group of students was crammed into a corner, and further along were the stinking burps, the smoke-gushing mouths and the eyes, starting to squint with drunkenness, of the bikers. The tatutatuuu of a police siren wailed. Music seeped through the chinks and seams of the din, and from the loudspeakers that were hung everywhere in the town scraps of an announcement forced their way into the snack bar. Fat hissed in the chip-fryers, voices struggled to make themselves comprehensible, the transistor radio behind the chiller cabinet whined a German pop song of which all that was distinguishable was a chorus featuring a lot of ‘Haili, hailo’. Someone in the crammed throng of customers groaned. But no one moved.

  ‘Someone has to be the Jew of Assen,’ said the pedlar, as he wriggled his way through the collection of human forms, ‘and since I am the Jew of Assen and the function is the name…’

  ‘An eponym,’ sighed Noah. ‘But that doesn’t explain why someone has to be. And why is it you? Why is all this happening? And what’s going on here?’ He followed the pedlar, who pushed his way forward between the snack-bar customers, and stared with him into the chiller cabinet. ‘And what, Mr Jew of Assen, are we doing here?’

  ‘Questions. Questions,’ said the pedlar. ‘We are here because this is where it started.’

  ‘What started here?’

  ‘Everything, in fact,’ said the Jew of Assen.

  Noah sighed so deeply that his companion looked alarmed.

  ‘I am the man,’ the pedlar began to recite, ‘I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me into darkness but not into light. Surely against me he is turned, he turneth his hand against me all the day. My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones. He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail. He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Don’t come at me with Lamentations 3, Jew of Assen. Anyone else, but not me.’

  The pedlar mumbled something.

  ‘No!’ cried Noah. ‘I’m not saying I have sole rights to Lamentations 3, or 1 or 2, or 4 or 5. On the contrary. I’m saying: it doesn’t work for me.’

  The pedlar lowered his head.

  ‘What started here?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said the pedlar.

  Noah hid his head in his hands, he clenched his teeth and gave a strangled moan: ‘Good, a long story, Jew of Assen.
But is it now at last the time of its telling?’

  The pedlar stared at the cabinet of deep-frying products. Jacob Noah turned his head to one side, opened his mouth to say something and closed it again. The Jew of Assen grimaced with undisguised horror. It was quiet and neither of them moved. Noah turned away and stared irritably at the calendar of a fat-delivery company that showed a group of rather miserable-looking village girls in bathing suits posing with a selection from its range.

  ‘Mr Noah,’ said the pedlar. ‘What strikes you?’ He bent forward and took between his fingers the yellowish-brown cheese croquette that lay waiting on a cardboard tray for one of the frozen customers.

  ‘The snack bar of Lukas Boom, the biggest misery in town, the inventor of the thing that you’re holding there in your hand.’

  The pedlar smiled unpleasantly.

  ‘And?’

  Noah raised his head and took in his surroundings. ‘Nothing. What is this? What in God’s name are we doing here?’

  ‘What strikes you, Jacob Noah?’

  Jacob Noah didn’t like the way the pedlar said ‘Jacob Noah’. But he groaned, straightened himself and obediently delivered his lesson: ‘It is TT night, the evening before the races. The paper is here, Philip Hoogeveen is here, but he’s always everywhere, motorcyclists, some local politicians, a few kids…Nothing strikes me. Tell me: what’s supposed to strike me?’

  ‘What year is it?’

  Noah grumbled. ‘Nineteen-eighty, Jew of Assen. It is nineteen-eighty, Jew of Assen. The twenty-seventh of June, if I’m not mistaken, the twenty-seventh of June nineteen-eighty.’

  ‘And?’ The little man with his box stood next to him, pale and black and crumpled like a primeval insect, the cheese croquette raised between his fingertips as if it was the goddamned Holy Grail.

  ‘Don’t torment me, pedlar! In the name of God, don’t torture me.’

  The pedlar linked his left arm in Jacob Noah’s right arm and looked at him guiltily. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have a rather long-winded way of telling stories.’

  ‘Jew of Assen, do you really exist or…’

  The little man smiled. ‘Oh, yes. In the here and now and a while ago and then.’ A frown rippled over his face. ‘Although I’m not quite clear whether it’s a while ago or then. Or perhaps now.’

  Noah shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And now?’ said Noah, looking round at the frozen movement in the snack bar: raised beer cans, wet mouths opening to bite into a croquette. People smoked endlessly and shouted silently and from outside there still came the din of motorbikes, the scraps of sound from the speakers and, far in the distance, unrecognisable music. The Jew of Assen straightened, as if he had to make a solemn announcement, pulled his shiny jacket tight and cleared his throat. He thought for a moment, wriggled in his jacket and then slumped back into it again. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘Go?’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Why?’ said Noah.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes: why! I have people to see, I hate TT night and if there’s one thing I’m not looking forward to, it’s a stroll through the town.’

  The little man shrugged his shoulders. ‘It must be accomplished,’ he said.

  The sigh that escaped Jacob Noah had, to his surprise, the shape of an orange cloud. The Jew of Assen smiled and clapped him on the back.

  ‘Come, Jacob Noah,’ he said. ‘Let’s start our journey. There’s still a lot to do.’

  Noah grumbled as he followed the pedlar outside. High above the mêlée, the tower clock showed a few minutes past seven. The evening was still, as they say, young.

  Spotless as a spring lamb was the evening when the Jew of Assen and Jacob Noah left the Church Square and walked into Torenlaan, where the air was heavy with smells and sound and movement and they had to wade through a stream of motorcyclists to reach the edge of the provincial town houses that looked out onto the little park, a forgotten patch of green that had been overgrown for decades and lay unused, waiting for a gardener, or death. They walked past the display cases of the local newspaper and saw on the pages that had just been hung up that the Cabinet had been saved by a margin of two votes, Hinault was wearing the yellow jersey and the ferry service to England had been cancelled because of a strike, and when he saw that Jacob Noah could not help thinking of the old tale in which the lowland-dwellers every once in a while were woken around midnight by a knock on the door and then got up, got dressed in silence and walked to the beach where, black against the phosphorescent surf, shimmered the vague forms of boats that no one recognised, and how without speaking the men laid the oars straight and started rowing, the boats low, water up to the rowlocks, and then, halfway through the journey, a voice sounded calling out names and the Dutchmen heard invisible passengers quietly replying and when that roll call was repeated an hour later, just before the English beach, the sloops with the roll call lay higher in the water, until they looked empty, and the men rowed back to the far side, a journey that barely took an hour, after which the oarsmen walked in silence to their houses and fell into a dreamless sleep in their beds. As they walked past the newspaper display cases, the man in white and the man in black, Noah felt like just such a shadowy passenger, and as he was thinking about it he suddenly saw, more clearly than in a vision, on the magnificent night-time water a traveller who, in the noise of the wind and the breaking of the waves, can’t hear other boats passing him.

  It was an image which so surprised him that he suddenly stopped.

  Was that how he saw himself? A lonely man on the black night water? Him? With his full life? Full of business partners, politicians, accountants, women. Full? Too full.

  And suddenly, with the image of the traveller on a dark and empty sea still before his eyes, and still mangled by the thronging TT people around them, he remembered Dora, who long ago, smiling ironically, chin resting on her hand, had looked up at him from a dishevelled hotel bed and said, ‘Where did you go to school, Jacob Noah?’ He hadn’t understood her and had tried to meet her eye in the mirror in which he was tying his tie. ‘A walking handbook for the female orgasm.’ He, looking back over his shoulder at the woman who had returned his gaze, smiled and said that he was glad she had enjoyed it. She had shaken her head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying, Jacob. I’m not saying I enjoyed it. I’m saying that you’ve got an impeccable technique. A virtuoso, that’s what you are.’ He had turned round, fingers on his half-knotted tie, and he had wondered if that word ‘impeccable’ was a cynical reference to his own absent orgasm. ‘I had a sense that you were well taken care of,’ he said and he had felt the cold that rose up from his chest. ‘Unless your moaning and groaning…’ And she had sat up, in all her ripe nakedness. Her breasts fell, her dark hair a tangled forest of curls. He realised he was looking at her with renewed desire.

  She was already on her way to the bathroom when she said, not even over her shoulder: ‘I don’t fake it.’

  They had never seen each other again. Those had been their last words, those few words in the bedroom and the see you and thanks when they left the hotel. Then she had walked away and disappeared into the crowded street of the town where they had met, and he had watched after her, the head with the dancing dark curls, the springing, vital step, her straight back, the jacket hanging loosely over her shoulders, and he had wondered what that had been, the brief exchange of civil phrases in the hotel room, what she had meant with her compliment about his ‘virtuoso’ technique. She hadn’t smiled as she said it, there had been no…satisfaction in her eyes.

  He knew satisfaction. Not in himself, perhaps, but certainly in women. He knew the veiled gaze, the slow return from the twilight world of secret and mystery, the world into which he had led her and been her guide, the world in which he had accepted the gift of their trust and used it to strip them from themselves, to let them go under, to save them, to let them be reborn, to set them free. A painter scraping down a canvas and laying a new
and surprising composition on the old undercoat. Miles Davis going into the studio with a handful of notes and chords and in a hallucinatory session recording Kind of Blue, carrying everyone along with him, with complete confidence in his leadership and the expectation that he will bring them to the place where they have to be. Jacob Noah, the serving master, the considerate leader. But Dora–now, after so many years, he couldn’t even remember her surname, although he saw her before him with frightening clarity–she hadn’t had the veiled gaze, she wasn’t led along, even though she had audibly and visibly come and had not, as she said herself, been play-acting.

  A virtuoso?

  Like some Japanese violinist who performs Vivaldi with mechanical perfection, but can’t put warmth and understanding into his music?

  A masterful manipulator of knobs and buttons, a devil-artist playing the muscles, erogenous zones and the deepest dark crypts of the soul?

  A bloodless Paganini?

  He was a nice, kind man where women were concerned. He was a man who helped them into their coats, opened doors, offered clean handkerchiefs, went shopping with them and listened to their stories. He had, without exception, satisfied them. And more.

  What in God’s name was wrong with technique?

  He looked at the Jew, who was staring up narrow-eyed into the sky from beneath his eyebrows. The little man irritated him, he irritated him and at the same time he couldn’t get rid of him. And that irritated him as well. Why was he allowing himself to be guided on this curious journey through the boozing crowd, and on the one night that he hated more than any other? He put his right hand on his opulently floral-patterned waistcoat, beneath the left lapel of his white jacket. The light and the noise swirled around him like smoke. He felt tired and lost.

  The little man started moving again and while Jacob Noah followed him and looked at his shiny black back, he suddenly wished that he no longer had to walk, that he was being carried. No, it wasn’t a wish, it was a hankering that filled his whole body, as if he was a vessel filled all at once, and while that was happening he realised that all his thoughts were suddenly with his mother, with former times, long ago, when he buried his face in her neck, in the cloud of her hair, veiled by the warmth of her skin, hidden in her shelter, absorbed by her and into her at the same time, it was a thought that rose up in him for the first time, shielding him with its body.