In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  ‘Heart attack,’ said Gerritsma, who was busy lighting a cigar. ‘Heart attack.’ He coughed. ‘At the blessed age of seventy-four,’ he added.

  ‘He boozed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He drank,’ said the policeman. ‘He always went to play cards in Bellevue on Tuesday evenings. Some sort of club for old men. When he came back it was as if that car of his was stuck to the edge of the kerb. He never went any faster than twenty-five miles an hour.’

  ‘That’s the club of thirty,’ said Gerritsma. ‘I’m a member too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He didn’t booze,’ said Gerritsma, ‘but he did enjoy himself. A tonic, a gin, a tonic, a gin. If he played well, same again. He played well. Did you ever stop him?’

  ‘No. Everyone knows…Everyone knew him. He drove very slowly, but straight as a ruler.’

  Gerritsma smiled contentedly.

  ‘New recruits,’ said the policeman, ‘don’t know at first. But when they call in to headquarters to say that someone’s driving suspiciously on Nassaulaan and it’s Tuesday evening, headquarters always asks them if it’s an old Pontiac.’

  Noah knew Talens’s car. As long as anyone could remember, he had driven a black monster that looked as if it came from a museum: perfectly cleaned, not a scratch on the paintwork, jet-washed tyres. A car from another world.

  ‘He wasn’t easy,’ said Gerritsma.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Talens. Difficult bugger.’ The tip of his cigar glowed slightly. He blew a slow smoke ring between himself and the policeman. The smoke spread, turned into a thin cloud that hung pale grey in the evening and then let them see each other’s faces again. ‘His daughter, do you know her?’

  The policeman held his head at a slight angle and looked at the undertaker.

  ‘Rika Talens,’ said Gerritsma. ‘Who lives in that house on Muse-umlaantje. Where the curtains are always shut.’

  The policeman pursed his lips and stared ahead as he tried to think. ‘No, no idea,’ he said.

  ‘I was there,’ said Gerritsma.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Bellevue.’ His gaze wandered off towards the dark treetops against the even darker air.

  The roar of a swarm of motorbikes washed over the silence between them. They waited until the hubbub ebbed away, but then the scraps of loudspeaker din blew over them again.

  ‘…kart races in the…performance begins…world famous…’

  Gerritsma looked at his watch, straightened up, cast a glance at the heavy velvet over the windows of the house of death and nodded to the policeman. ‘I’m going home. At what time will the barriers come down, did you say?’

  ‘Four or five. If you call headquarters, we’ll help you.’

  ‘That’s fine, then. I wish you a safe night. And if a fight breaks out, give it a wide berth. It’s not worth getting involved.’

  The policeman grinned. He walked with the old man and his son down the dark path, to the street.

  Noah followed them at a careful distance.

  ‘Not the easiest of customers, Gerritsma,’ said the policeman when they had reached the point where the path opened up. ‘What’s the situation with that daughter of his now?’

  In front of them, high above the heads of the people and in a haze of orange sodium light, a motorbike was driving over the construction of scaffolding and planks.

  ‘She was the apple of his eye.’

  Noah looked up with surprise. The undertaker had said it with an emphasis unusual for him.

  ‘The what?’ said the policeman.

  ‘It’s a sad story.’ He stared straight ahead for a moment and then shrugged.

  ‘She married an Arabian prince. At least that’s what people said. But he was actually a conjuror.’

  ‘I remember that,’ said Jacob Noah. He had spoken before he could catch himself, but the men standing in the wedge of light between the dark walls hadn’t heard him.

  Another motorbike passed along the obstacle course. The strange light spread over the helmet, flickered for a moment on the peak and then lit up the face of the Jew of Assen. He rolled slowly forward, balancing affectedly, and raised a hand as he passed Noah, who took a step forward and just managed to see him take a sort of seesaw, heading on towards a row of red-painted oil drums, speeding up and leaping the barrels with surprising grace. A cheer went up. The old undertaker shook his head, beckoned his son and twisted to the right among the tightly packed bodies. The policeman stopped to look for a moment, his hands behind him and his head thrown back. Then he took off his cap, ran his fingers through his hair and disappeared as well.

  Before leaving the path Noah turned round once more. Half invisible behind the house, like a black marble catafalque, the hearse stood on the grass. The contours of the coachwork gleamed softly in the light still shining from the kitchen.

  As he walked back up Torenlaan an orange haze of sodium light lay upon the darkening dusk of evening. He shuffled his way between the crowd and the houses, pressed close against the shimmering red bricks. It was as if he was walking through an illuminated well. Between the houses hung the gleam of party lights and the white glow of floodlights, but above the roofs the air looked darker than it should have been at that time of day.

  He stretched up and saw behind the heads of the people a scaffolding construction of pointed bits of wood and metal that made him think of the remnants of a stranded ship.

  Every now and again the gauzy cloud of buzz and hum that hung above the town was pierced when the sudden roar of a motorbike cut through the gloom.

  At the end of the avenue, where the town hall and the museum with their brightly lit façades stood on a kidney-shaped area of grass and gravel paths called the Brink, he turned off to the left. Under the trees on the grass in front of the museum a few hundred people stood in a circle. Wild cries rose up from the middle of the ring. A hand waved through the air, followed by a madly moving head. He crossed the street and walked onto the grass, until he had reached the outermost edge of the ring. He slid into the pool of cheering people and felt arms, shoulders, smelt the stale beery breath of early drinkers, the leather that everyone was wearing.

  In the middle of the ring a man in a black biker’s suit with red leather flames stitched onto it sat on a mechanical bull. The beast stood on a big blue air cushion and was a strange assemblage of wrist-thick pipes covered with threadbare cowhide. When the bull jerked its mechanical rear to throw the rider off, the skin flapped up and the pumping of hydraulic joints could be seen. The man on the back of the animal had raised his left hand behind him and with his other hand gripped a piece of rope protruding from the neck of the headless animal. The beast bucked, reared, turned on its axis and knelt down and swept the rider backwards and forwards and left and right. He slumped along the back of the artificial animal, swung along with it in a slow and menacing circle and shot back up again. His face was pale blue. Every now and again, as the bull rose, his tongue came out and a long thread of spittle went flying through the air. Some of the onlookers shook their beer bottles and squirted the escaping foam at the bull and the leather man on its back. The rider’s hair was black with damp, and clung to his temples. A lock fell into his left eye. Every time the bull seemed to come to rest for a moment, he tried to wipe his eye with his free hand, but no sooner was the hand near his face than the bull reared up again and started spinning and bucking and whipped his hand away.

  A photographer who had been squatting next to the air cushion rose to his feet and walked over to the journalist he was clearly working with, and shouted into his right ear, ‘Welcome to evolution.’ They laughed, turned round and disappeared into the crowd. Noah stood for a moment looking into the void that they left behind, which was quickly filled by an influx of bodies. He took a deep breath, turned and pushed his way through the forest of bodies, shuffling over the flattened grass, splintering plastic glasses, cigarette butts and discarded pamphlets. When he looked round he saw once again
, among the roaring mouths and wide-open eyes, the waving arms and spraying flecks of beer foam, the head of the man on the bull. For a moment it was as if time was stretching and everything was moving slowly. The pale face was turning into a blurred patch with a pair of dark holes, the hair a slow explosion of black threads.

  At the edge of the Brink, near Kloosterstraat, things were quieter. He stood in front of the red-lit façade of the building where the provincial deputies had once met, and which had now, for a hundred years or so, been home to a museum that was dusty with sleep. He had, like all other children in the town, first visited the building with the intention of shuddering at the peacock-purple bog bodies that lay in a display case with a few half-decayed scraps of coarsely woven clothing: ‘the princess’, a young woman with a toothless grin that even now, thousands of years later, still made her look as if she couldn’t breathe, a strip of fabric around her tanned and wrinkled neck, her head tilted slightly back so that the hole of her mouth screamed into the void of now for the air of then; close by, ‘the couple’, two strangled corpses which in a burst of nineteenth-century romanticism were identified as a man and a woman, but later turned out to be two men.

  An explosion of cheers rose up. He looked round. In Torenlaan a motorbike was waiting on the high scaffolding structure. The rider stood on the pedals with his right arm and clenched fist in the air. Behind him, far away in the distance, above the town forest, the sinking sun still lay above the tops of the trees. Against that background the man on his motorbike was just a shadow, the silhouette of a rider against an ominous, operatic sky, exhaust billowing orange around his feet in the glow of the sodium lamps.

  In Kloosterstraat, too, there was the roar of motorbikes, the din of the fairground and the amplified calls from the loudspeakers, but the little houses on either side of the cobblestones looked as if they had nothing to do with the party. Their windows were black rectangles, the light from the street lamps, lit already, was only just visible. The order that prevailed was almost grotesque, as if a bell jar had been placed over this street, a bell jar in which someone had shoved a postcard of village life as it was very long ago, in the days when you could still leave your front door unlocked.

  Noah had no idea why he was walking down this particular deathly street. It led him away from the noise of the centre to the bare, straight Stationsstraat, a place where he had even less to seek. As he passed the final house, he paused. The curtains were closed. They were closed as they had been closed for years, decades. It was a house that looked untouched by time, its paint stretched taut, upright and angular and indifferent.

  ‘A sad story.’

  He saw the Jew of Assen from the corner of his eye, in all his moth-eaten blackness, a nasty black bowler hat on his crumpled head.

  The Jew sighed. ‘The tale of the eastern prince and how he…’ He shrugged and stood there like that for a while. He looked even more like a beetle than usual. ‘Has it ever struck you, Jacob Noah, that this little town seems to be made up of tales? The tale of the Eastern Prince. The Soldier Who Went to Indonesia. Filthy Frans, or the Innocent Criminal. The Peanut Peelers. The Murder in the Monastery. The Squire’s Shame. Blood on the Sheets. The Boy Who Wanted to Fly. Riek’s Burn Ointment.’ He shuddered.

  It started raining softly. There was no sign of life behind the curtains of the silent house, not a hint of light, not a trace of movement.

  ‘And you, Jew of Assen?’

  The little man stared at his shoes, as the drops drummed down on his hat. ‘Ah,’ he said after a while, staring at the dead house. He nodded a few times, as if agreeing with something, and a vague smile even played around his mouth. Then he brought his right hand to his bowler hat, took the thing off and looked inside. He took a goose feather out of the hatband, stroked the inside of his hat with the feathered end and drew an imaginary rectangle in the dusk, from the pavement to just above his head, a metre to the right and back down again. ‘Stories are doors in time,’ he said. ‘And what, Mr Noah, am I if not that?’ He clutched Noah’s arm and as they stepped through the imaginary rectangle into the darkness, which was beginning to lighten faintly, Noah just had time to mutter something about homespun aphorisms before slow flakes whirled down in the yellow light of the street lamps and in a darkness so dense that they could hardly see where the houses began and the street ended they saw a lonely traveller wrestling with the wind.

  The man in the blizzard stopped every now and then to wait for an opening in the white curtain. Then he set down the little suitcase that he was carrying, stared into the distance, as far as that was possible, and tried to get his bearings. He stayed close to the houses, sometimes touching a façade or a gate, like a blind person feeling his way. He shot across the white void of the Brink, where the snow was lighter under the treetops, and disappeared into Torenlaan. About halfway across he ducked into the cover of a passageway. There, pressed against the blind side wall of a house, he knocked the snow from his hair and pulled the collar of his thin jacket more tightly around him, grumbling softly at the snow and the cold and his stupidity at going out without a hat and scarf in such wintry weather. He clapped his hands together, blew on his fingers and was just spreading his arms to slap himself warm when a young woman shot round the corner and fell slap-bang into his embrace.

  ‘Madam!’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘So sorry.’

  ‘Please accept my…’

  She fell silent and looked at him penetratingly from under her snowy hair.

  ‘Who are you, actually?’

  He let go of her, she stepped hesitantly back.

  ‘A stranger, madam.’ He nodded politely. ‘Lost.’ He looked around. ‘That is to say…I was taking shelter here, among the houses. I’m on my way to…’

  ‘You’re the magician.’ A snowflake fell on her mouth, and she licked it away with a pointed little tongue.

  He nodded again. ‘Your servant, madam. I’m on my way to a theatre that…’

  ‘Bellevue,’ she said. ‘It’s more of a general venue. Not really a theatre.’

  ‘Ah.’ The burst of disappointment, or was it shame, that passed across his face did not escape her.

  ‘Do you know the way?’

  He moved his head, somewhere between a nod and a shake. ‘Keep straight on, I was told. Is that…’ He tried to look round the corner of the building, but the young woman was still standing in front of him and didn’t look as if she planned to step aside. She fastened upon him a gaze that now made him slightly uneasy.

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ she said. ‘It isn’t so far.’

  He shook his head, grabbed his suitcase, set it back down in the snow and murmured, ‘no, no’ and ‘absolutely not…’ and ‘always find my own way’. It made no impression. She turned resolutely and beckoned. He started to follow her, froze, then took another step, and when she didn’t seem to be watching where he was, he shrugged and sped off after her. When he caught up with her and started walking beside her, she put her hand in the hollow of his arm and said, ‘It’s starting to get slippery.’

  They walked in silence through the steadily falling flakes, two figures drawn in pencil on a restless white surface. Every now and again a car passed slowly. After Church Square he heard her speaking again. Her voice sounded muffled in the thick snow.

  ‘That name on the poster, is that your real name?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, no. People expect an exotic name with the things I do.’

  ‘Abana…’

  ‘Abinadab,’ he sighed and shrugged as if there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘Can I ask you what it means?’

  He felt her leaning into his arm, as if she really needed support in this snowy world.

  ‘A biblical name,’ he said. ‘That is: someone from biblical times. Reputedly the man in whose house the Ark of the Covenant was kept for twenty years. The keeper of the great secret.’

  He glanced aside. ‘It also means the willing or generous one.’


  It was silent. They could almost hear the snow rustling. They passed Gymnasiumstraat and the Catholic church, the steeple rising up as a vague outline behind the white shading of the snow.

  ‘And?’

  He looked sideways at the young woman who was walking arm in arm with him and who in these curious circumstances–a strange man, a town buried under snow–seemed to feel completely at ease.

  ‘Are you a willing man?’

  He laughed unhappily.

  ‘Or would you describe yourself as “generous”?’

  They began to approach the Bellevue. The big mansions and villas on Nassaulaan, barely visible in the snowy darkness, drew slowly past them.

  Suddenly he stopped. She turned to look at him. He noticed that he couldn’t escape her eyes. They were big and they gleamed and they were…

  He could think of no other word: they were open.

  He looked into her eyes and saw reticence, it was as if he had access to her whole being and she didn’t resist him in any way, she surrendered herself to him with her eyes. Deep within his body something started undulating.

  Her throat swallowed. Snow blew around her face, flakes touched her cheeks, her mouth, one landed on the lashes of her right eye. He was on the point of reaching out his hand to brush away the flake, when he heard her say they were there.

  Oh, the snow, oh, the white world, immaculate purity of downy streets in evening light, fat layers that lie like cream on the rooftops, the silent light reflects off the ground and is a blue mist beneath the trees, the dull silence in the empty streets, the far-off crunch of lonely feet, the twinkle of moonlight, the fluffy outlines of path and house and fence, cotton-wool cars, the drifting of white clouds on a sudden gust of wind, a cat treading high-footed through a front garden, the silent trails of a deer in the winter forest and the mysterious falling of flakes on the cold water of the duck pond and the tall trees around it that are now no longer black and bare but…The sudden spiralling whirl that is a swirl of cherry blossom, the first flakes spinning down like confetti and lying on the street like specks of milk foam.