A virtuoso…If his technique had suffered from anything it was from the gratification of the women he had slept with. He himself was always left hungry. He had played them and taken care of them and bewitched them, but had only been able to do so by sacrificing himself on the altar of their pleasure. He busied himself with them so intensely, he held them so in his thrall, that they couldn’t even begin to get to grips with him. And he didn’t want them to. The thought that he might be the subject, the object of love and devotion and God knows what all those things are called, that thought was unbearable. He had never allowed them to say that he was ‘sweet’. The very word made him shudder. ‘I love you’: they hadn’t even been able to say that, either. They had to submit to his love and give nothing in return. Perhaps that was what Dora had meant. Perhaps she had meant that there hadn’t been two of them there in that hotel bed.
He stared at the crowd surging around him and felt the answer to an unasked question like a shrinking pain in his chest. As if his very heart was in pain. It was what he had often felt when he looked at his daughters, the pain that was there when he had lain awake at night long, long ago and felt the emptiness around him, and Heijman and his mother and his father…It was the same pain that he had felt when other people said they felt acknowledged, when they felt part of a greater whole, one with a shared experience, or a common history, a whole. That was something with which he was unfamiliar, it was something he couldn’t understand. A lonely oarsman on a wide black stretch of water.
Sometime in the early sixties he and Jetty had gone on holiday to Rome and she had burst into tears in front of the Pietà. He had looked at her with the uninvolved expression that had become second nature to him, the expression of a lab assistant staring into a terrarium.
She had been standing there in silence and suddenly, without any discernible transition, she started sobbing uncontrollably. Later, at the end of an oppressively hot afternoon in their hot and noisy hotel, they had rowed about it. ‘You don’t have to understand,’ she had said. ‘But you mustn’t look down on it. I know your way of looking. It’s contempt.’ He had shaken his head, very resolutely, and said it wasn’t contempt, that he had never felt contemptuous of her and was also very sure that he never would. ‘But that thing there,’ he had said, and with that ‘there’ the marble masterpiece had become a pile of stone, ‘that thing there isn’t worth bursting into tears over.’ She had stiffened indignantly. ‘Christ,’ she had exclaimed, through the mounting moans of their amorous neighbours, ‘Christ, who died for me and I’m not worthy of his sacrifice!’ And again the tears ran down her cheeks. He had shaken his head. But who is, he thought. Who is worthy of such a sacrifice? And how many had died for him? Three? Certainly three. But without having to think too hard he could also count fifty. Was he worthy of that? Did that sacrifice mean less than the death of that one other Jew? He wanted to tell her, but he noticed that he couldn’t utter the sentences and to his own surprise his mouth produced something else: ‘A Jew could never have made such a sculpture.’ She had looked at him with bewilderment. ‘A Jew,’ he said, ‘would show mother and child in an embrace, comforting and protecting one another at the same time. Not suffering, but the reaction to suffering. That lump of marble is only there to say that suffering has a meaning, that suffering is valuable in itself.’ She had shaken her head slowly with disbelief. ‘Why do you always have to bring everything back to yourself?’ she yelled. ‘Do you think the whole world revolves around Jacob Noah?’ He had gone on to say, though listlessly, already prey to the sad coldness that was beginning to rise through him from his feet, that Jesus was a Jew, with a Jewish mother, and that what had happened to him was what had happened to Jews in those days, many more Jews than her one true Jesus, and as the cold took possession of him and Jetty turned round and hugged herself and looked outside, at some rustic Piazza del Popolo or other with wine-drinking tourists and whining Vespas, he felt himself becoming Jesus. It was a scarily strong fantasy that filled him and was immediately followed by the perverse desire to run outside and offer himself for crucifixion, to hang on a cross in the square, the Piazza del Popolo, surrounded by the crowd, and bleed and suffer, for them, for Jetty, for everything, for always.
He looked at the Jew of Assen, who stood a little way off staring short-sightedly at the arc lamps high above the crowd. Who was he? What did he want? Was he, the wandering Jew, wandering around here because he wanted to suffer too? And for whom? For the handful who remained after barely more than fifty of the seven hundred had come back in 1945? Of those fifty, mind you, only a few were left. Half of them had already moved away to areas where the hole in their history gaped less conspicuously. Some lived in the United States, others in unknown South American countries, a few in Israel. Here, in Assen, not even enough had survived to keep the synagogue going, which was why they had had to sell it to a Reformed Church society. If there was no Jew of Assen, Jacob Noah thought, one would have to be appointed, a wandering Jew as a memory of all those lives nipped in the bud, the ones who closed the curtains when their neighbours were taken away, the shrugs with which everything was accepted, as if the whole extermination had been nothing but a natural disaster, something that would fall under the ‘Act of God’ clause in a life insurance policy. He shook his head and sighed. In one way or another there seemed no other option but to go on.
They walked through the early evening, their thoughts swarming round them like bees around a bee-keeper, and they weren’t the only ones who would wander abroad until the morning light drove the darkness away, because it was The Night, the night before the races, the night in which the town of roughly forty thousand inhabitants swelled to three, four times that size, until it was a place where Germans built like tree trunks roamed eerily around with pallid Englishmen on their backs, embarrassed Spaniards sang with jocular Dutchmen, drunken Scandinavians flirted with chic Italian girls and beer-drinking Belgians and shy Frenchmen once again failed to understand one another. It had still only just begun, the nations were still moving into the streets in serried ranks, there were already thousands of them, tens of thousands were still to come, but now, even though it was barely half past seven, the beer was swirling down the gutters, people were already dancing, singing, fighting and buying and selling, and everywhere there was the sound of engines, cheering from a multitude of throats when someone was slung from the mechanical bull or drunkenly clasped a lamp post, and the meaningless babble poured from the loudspeakers, the call of cap-sellers, sausage-sellers and fairground folk…Later, when the darkness crept over the town and the difference between today and tomorrow faded in the iridescent glow of the arc light and the scraps of distorted music, later it would turn into another world. People would drink until up was down and left was right and housewives would lie on cellar steps watching, in the darkness, the white buttocks of strange young men rising and falling in their laps. Knuckles would land on jaws and people who had never felt life before would experience it properly for the first time. Blood would flow and tears and vomit and semen. And in the tents the music would whirl and outside the light would spin and…
But for now it was early and the night was, as they say, young. From the east, indigo flowed across the sky although in the west, above the forest, it stayed clearer. Against the darkening light the museum at the end of Torenlaan was a mountain and the town looked like an abyss.
The Jew of Assen and Jacob Noah wiggled their way along the rows of spectators watching the men in red overalls who were busy erecting scaffolding. Across the construction ran rising and falling planks, interrupted by a high pile of sewage pipes, a half-demolished bus and a mountain of yellowish sand. A few boys on dirt bikes were trying out the little plank path. The scaffolding construction, the faces of the people and the treetops on the other side of the avenue were a strange metallic orange in the high beam of the arc lamps. The smell of petrol and oil mingled with the sickly smoke of sausage and popcorn, while the people gave off an odour of sweat and stale beer.<
br />
Noah averted his head and tried to walk on, but the forest of legs and arms and bodies was too dense. Outside a house with closed curtains the row undulated and he was pushed backwards and before he knew it he was standing in a tall dark passageway between two big houses.
At the end of the passageway, which fell away slightly and after a wooden garage led to an unlit garden, a big hearse loomed. He turned his head towards the street and saw people shuffling forward by the crush barriers. In the lee of the blind wall he leaned his back against the cool stone. A faint sound of voices could be heard, further off, at the end of the path where the twilight flowed from beneath the tall treetops across the grass, thick as syrup. Two people, perhaps three. Behind the car.
In a cloud of exhaust and murmuring a voice called from the loudspeakers that hung from the trees and lamp posts. Between the high walls it was hard to make anything out. Wait…leasepatience-please…At nine o’clock…on stage…the music tent on the…patience…on the…tience…
Something glided past him, almost silently, and then, when it drew level with the hearse, the passageway exploded in a ball of light that clearly dazzled the two men who stood half hidden behind the black coachwork. Hands held defensively in front of their eyes, they flinched. The man shining a torch at them–against the light a sharp silhouette with a policeman’s cap–laughed faintly.
‘So, a fine catch. The Gerritsmas. Who’s died?’
‘Talens. We can’t get the car out.’
Noah, still in the gloomy shelter of the wall, recognised them now, father and son, both in sombre funereal mouse-grey. The policeman was an old classmate of his daughters, a broad-shouldered, kindly boy who had joined the police even though he had been considered a bit of a hooligan when he was at school.
‘Turn that light off, Theo,’ said the younger man. ‘Mrs Talens is absolutely terrified and one heart attack is enough for an evening.’
The torch went out. It was briefly quiet, as everyone was taking a moment to get used to the darkness that was unexpectedly dense here, between the high walls.
A white flake drifted through the gloom and Gerritsma the elder began to wipe his brow with a big handkerchief.
‘Still no back-up, Theo?’
The young policeman shook his head.
The undertaker wiped his eyebrows dry again. ‘I hope it won’t last long. We’ve got to get this car out of here. Tonight…’
‘Otherwise we’ll lift the coffin together,’ said the policeman.
The man laughed sourly. ‘It’s staying here. They’re holding a wake. The last wake I can remember was fifteen years ago, when…Can’t we just shove the crush barriers aside? Is there enough room to get the car out?’
‘No, Mr Gerritsma. We can’t get these people out of the way. And it’s even more crowded further in. The crowd’s too dense to do anything now. The best you can do is leave the car here. We’ll happily help you at about four or five.’
‘Five in the morning?’
The policeman nodded.
‘There’ll be nothing left of the car by then.’
They turned to the black monster that looked, between the high walls, like a ship passing through a lock.
‘Couldn’t it go in Talens’s garage?’ asked the policeman.
The younger Gerritsma shook his head. ‘No, Theo. Talens’s car is in it. He’s still at home.’
There was suppressed laughter.
‘Hasn’t Talens got a garden as well?’
Gerritsma père et fils nodded.
‘Can’t we put it on the grass?’
It was quiet for a moment. The son began to smile, his father’s face showed no expression.
‘Then I throw up my hands,’ said the policeman. ‘I can’t think of anything else, gentlemen. We won’t get it out of here tonight.’
The undertaker sighed and shrugged. He stood there like that, with his head between the shoulder pads of his jacket. A door opened in the darkness behind the house. A yellowish triangle of light fanned across the field of grass and after a while an old lady appeared in the opening of the passageway that ran between the properties. She was dressed in black from head to toe, and in the faint light that fell between the houses, her silk mourning clothes had the dull sheen of pitch.
‘Gentlemen.’
They almost shot to attention, the undertaker and his son, the policeman, even Noah. Mrs Talens turned round and disappeared back behind the house. Without wondering why, and a considerable distance behind, Noah followed the others in her direction.
When they had twisted their way past the hearse and arrived at the back of the house, in the fan of light which fell across a small lawn like a billiard table and almost tenderly illuminated the wooden shed at the end of the garden, Mrs Talens stood by the kitchen door with her arms folded.
The little group of men waited in the beam of light that fell through the high kitchen window. It wasn’t yet late enough to be dark, but here, behind the mansions, between the enormous trees that had been spared both traffic and urban renewal, the dusk hung heavy as a black veil. Although they were outside, old Gerritsma wiped his feet on a grate on the floor. He spent so long over it that Jacob Noah wondered if it was part of his job, a peculiar sort of occupational deformity among undertakers, or whether he was apologising for a problem for which he was not responsible. Mrs Talens, a weary grey lady in old-fashioned mourning, watched in silence. The young undertaker stepped on the grate when it came free and began the same lengthy purification ritual.
‘Gerritsma?’
The undertaker drew his white handkerchief over his forehead again and pursed his lips for a moment.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Talens. We can’t get the hearse out. It’ll have to stay here.’
The widow nodded as if she had expected nothing else. She stood by the kitchen door, the light behind her, her arms still folded, almost as if she wished to deny the men entrance to the house of death. She looked past the elder Gerritsma and fixed her eye on the policeman.
‘We can’t push the crush barriers aside, madam. It’s too dangerous with so many people.’ The policeman glanced sideways. ‘I was just saying to Gerritsma: perhaps we could park the hearse behind the house.’
‘My husband’s car is in the garage.’
Gerritsma smiled helplessly.
The policeman leapt to his assistance: ‘Yes, Gerritsma did say that and then I said: perhaps it could stay on the lawn for the night. If we…’ The policeman looked over his shoulder, at the immaculate lawn that showed not a single bump even in the light that poured from the kitchen.
The widow unfolded her arms and looked coldly at the policeman. ‘My husband,’ she said, ‘toiled on that grass his whole life long, that grass is…’
Sacred, thought Noah, she wants to say sacred.
‘Madam,’ said the policeman, ‘if we don’t do it, they’ll come up here between the houses tonight and smash the place to pieces.’
Mrs Talens looked at Gerritsma. Noah saw that she blamed the undertaker personally for the car, the drunken party in the town, the howling motorbikes, probably even the death of her husband. Gerritsma drew up his shoulders and looked at her unhappily.
The widow turned her head away and made a tiny gesture with her hand. She gripped the handle of the kitchen door and struggled inside, leaving the two Gerritsmas and the policeman behind.
‘Is that a yes or a no?’ asked the policeman.
‘A yes,’ said Gerritsma. ‘That was a yes.’
They turned round and walked towards the hearse. ‘I’ll reverse it,’ the son said to the policeman. ‘You guide me.’ He looked over his shoulder at the policeman, who was now a hovering white head, and said, ‘And for God’s sake take care. If I touch so much as a single conifer I can dig my own grave tomorrow.’ The two young men grinned significantly.
The heavy engine of the hearse throbbed gently and the path filled with the vague smell of exhaust fumes.
Jacob Noah looked over his shoulder, a
t the strip of road visible between the high walls of the passageway. Torenlaan looked as if it was on fire. Beneath big lights stretched on steel wires between the lamp posts were yellowy-orange clouds of smoke. From high in the air the announcer’s voice rang out, heralding, incomprehensibly in three languages, all the things yet to come.
‘Steady as she goes…’
The policeman had switched his torch back on and shone the beam on the side wall of Talens’s house. He walked along the car, onto the grass, and pointed with his light at the conifers that had to be avoided.
Noah followed the car and stopped, when it rolled slowly and majestically onto the grass, by the hedge between Talens’s garden and that of the neighbours. From there he saw Gerritsma inspecting the shrubbery. A rustle was heard in the darkness, and from behind the gleaming black monolith that was the hearse, the son and the young policeman loomed up. They walked over to the old undertaker. A lot of nodding was done, as if to confirm that the operation had been carried out wonderfully well. Then they stood side by side in silence for a little while.
‘What was wrong with him?’ the policeman asked finally.
‘Who?’
‘Talens,’ said the policeman. ‘What did he die of?’
From where they were standing they looked at the back of three properties: Talens’s house, to the right of it the newspaper office, and to the left the house of Mr Tammeling, who lived off his investments. Behind the windows of that house they saw yellow light in a high-ceilinged room. Two paintings were visible on the walls, and a Friesian wall clock. Noah looked back at the dead man’s house. A hint of light flickered through a chink in the heavy velvet curtains. What were they doing there? Were they sitting around the coffin with candles?
In a Dark Wood Page 16
