In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  He doesn’t know how it happened, but tonight he feels, yes: feels the clichés being pulled from him, not as if he himself were producing them, not as if he were sitting here and, with the professional cynicism of the man who has done it all before, many times, incessantly, in fact, year in year out…no, not as if he were sitting here and, sneering cynically, dumping them onto the paper, the ‘chatty’ little sentences, the ‘mood piece’, but as if he were being emptied, as a silkworm is emptied, milked like a cow that is milked day in, day out, a donkey on a treadmill, cannon fodder, a worker bee flying blindly back and forth, a cog in a machine, an ant, a…

  Wife, child, a car that needs paying for and a new house with a mortgage at the highest rate in forty years and, damn it, once he was a boy in short trousers who crept through the Governor’s Garden and climbed trees, a boy who lay on his back in the unmown grass and saw the ripe stalks swaying against the pale blue of the sky. That oasis between the forests. That arcadia of silence and timelessness. That pastoral of unconcerned youth and rattling milk churns, farmers in the countryside standing up and raising a hand, long walks to school with winter coats and wet rubber boots, the hard ice on the pond in the forest and the earthy smell of pea soup in the food and drink stand, his little sister’s hand in his as they sat on the slope of the TT track watching the training sessions, while their father sat waving on the other side of the grey tarmac on his little chair by the First Aid post.

  Our reporter…

  Tonight he would like to write about the clink and clank of the scaffolding pipes that were being unloaded that morning when he came to the office. He would like to write about the smell of wet grass drifting from the Governor’s Garden and the coffee that he spilled when he filled the enormous filter from the coffee pot that stands steaming all the livelong day in the archive room, the brown grains that had lain on the formica top of the fridge in the form of a face from long ago, a face that he no longer knew but still remembered. Yes, now, amidst the noise from the office, the chatter from the police radio, his colleagues from the provincial section who don’t have a stroke to do and sit with their feet up on their desks announcing one grandiose piece of wisdom after another, what he would now like to write is:

  IN LOCAL EDITORIAL OFFICE COFFEE ROOM:

  STRANGER’S FACE APPEARS

  From one of our reporters

  ASSEN–Saturday, 28 June 1980–A day can hardly begin more sad and grey than that of your reporter. No, desolate is the word, because greyness and sadness are bearable if there can be hope of consolation and that is precisely what is missing in the morning when one climbs the café-au-lait-coloured steps that run past the photographers’ office–who don’t treat it as an office but endlessly smoke and drink coffee–up one more flight of steps, this time covered with black studded rubber, past the darkroom and then down the little corridor that passes a space where the old volumes are kept and in which on a long table a register lies open, finally arriving in the editorial office.

  Editorial office. It’s a big word, readers. Think of something with the outline of a sitting room in a house built a hundred years ago. On the right-hand side, against the front windows, five greenish-grey desks are grouped together, separated by a narrow path from a cluster of four identical desks on the left, against the windows to the rear of the building.

  For whoever comes in first in the morning there is the smell of yesterday’s cigarettes, the sight of a few full ashtrays, a cup of dried-up coffee on the desk of the reporter who was on evening duty and a few empty beer bottles next to the typewriter of the staff member who came in last night to type up a review.

  Behind this space is the archive. It isn’t an archive. It’s a little room barely bigger than a box and contains no more than an over-filled wardrobe–though still empty now, so early in the morning; a wooden rack bearing indefinable rubbish–a broken typewriter, a catering pack of coffee, a few books that no one wants to steal and a few old newspapers; and last of all a fridge with a formica top and on it a stainless steel coffee urn with a black plastic tap.

  Sometimes your reporter has a good day. When the urn was switched off in the evening and he isn’t greeted by the bitter stench of boiled-down coffee. Those are the days when he looks at his work and his life with confidence. On a day like that he fills the urn with litres of fresh water which he fetches jug by jug from the cigarette-smoke-stinking darkroom, rinses out the big aluminium filter and fills it with fresh coffee. The smell that rises from the big tin on that kind of day is almost, yes…comforting.

  Your reporter counts the spoonfuls, which must be in an exact proportion to the quantity of water, presses the red switch and:

  Percolare!

  There is joy, melancholy and confidence. Based on nothing but the smell of coffee and the one or two chance events that made his day begin so prematurely. But nonetheless: joy, melancholy and confidence.

  Until his eyes fall upon the grains that he spilled beside the filter and which have arranged themselves in a pattern that makes him bend over and look at it more closely.

  Coffee, my dear readers, resembles clouds in the sense that some people see animals, objects, faces in clouds and your humble reporter experiences something similar in spilt coffee.

  A face?

  Yes, today it’s a face. Last week, on Thursday, it was a Bugatti that he thought he could make out in the coffee. That was the day after the visit he made to the car museum, that shed next to the gasworks into which an offshoot of a semi-aristocratic family is squandering his family capital. A press conference was the reason for the presence of your reporter, who discovered, surrounded by the ‘passion of the collector’, that he had not been summoned to view a strange old automobile (photograph with caption on page three), or the confirmation of the long-slumbering suspicion of imminent bankruptcy (a one-column piece continued on page three), but was instead expected to write a big and stirring piece about the new opening hours and the special exhibition programme for the occasion of the TT races, a programme that contained little more than three smartened-up old motorbikes which had been fetched from a barn and now, along with a helmeted shop-window dummy wrapped up in faded leather, had found a spot among the Bugattis, Ferraris and MGs.

  That was then. A week or two before this interesting get-together he saw a tree, no: an oak, clearly an oak. It cannot yet be established whether the apparition of that tree in the form of spilt percolator coffee is rooted in an earlier event.

  This morning a face stared at him from the smooth formica.

  What face?

  That is the question.

  A face that was barely granted time for reflection, because while your reporter stood looking at the spilt coffee grains on the tray of the refrigerator, he was startled by a loud CLINK CLANK. When he pushed aside the unwashed piece of brown netting that covered the window, he saw outside the flat platform of a big lorry, a young man standing on it and, with the careless routine of someone who does this often, throwing long pieces of scaffolding into the street. The chime of metal on stone filled the quiet morning Torenlaan. It clattered between the façades of the high buildings and seemed to fade away in the still light-blue June light. Your reporter’s eye was drawn towards the Governor’s Garden, on the other side of the street, where the dew steamed between the tree roots and the faint sunbeams lit up drops of water on the bushes.

  And suddenly, readers (suddenly, unexpectedly, without warning, at that selfsame moment), your reporter was filled with an unfamiliar unease, or no: vitality, perhaps that’s a better word, although it doesn’t completely describe what passed through him, what urgent desire rose up in him and, completely contrary to his habits, made him leave the archive where the aroma of coffee was heavy now, grab his jacket, leave the editorial office, go down the black flight of stairs in a single leap, two leaps to clear the café-au-lait-coloured stone staircase, push open the heavy door and…

  The smell of early morning. The sense-deluding smells from the Governor’s Garden.
The smell even of scaffolding pipes! And yes, here too, coffee in the air, but not of long-unwashed editorial percolators, no: the strong, earthy smell of beans being roasted at Broekema & Nagel, local coffee roasters and tea merchants since time immemorial.

  Readers, readers. Blood gushing powerfully and oxygen-rich through the veins. A head filled with lucidity. Lungs clear and strong. Muscles like those of a well-trained sportsman. And a tread, loyal readers, so springy and purposeful that your reporter could almost forget that he had no idea where he was walking to and what he was actually going to do.

  There he walked, in the still faint early-morning sun, his task unclear, an urnful of coffee left behind to turn bitter all by itself in the archive. Why, where to and what for? He himself didn’t know. Something had driven him outside, something had forced him to leave the offices and seek out the street. Mother, I’m putting out to sea! Like that. It shimmered inside him…It trembled. The world flashed with joie de vivre and an urge to action.

  He walked up Torenlaan to the Brink, where the trees were bigger and greener and browner, and…more treeish than normal. Two crows looped the loop above the roof of the museum, in the silent Kloosterstraat he saw the shadowy figure of a woman darting away, a car pottered slowly along. There was a great feeling of wholeness and significance in the things he saw. If he hadn’t smoked already he would have taken it up. It was not clear to your reporter where he was going, when he stood with the door handle of the Hotel de Jonge in his hand, the door opened and behind it, in the doorway, in the limbo between door and draught curtain, he smelled the characteristic aroma of fresh coffee in a café. At that early hour of the morning there weren’t many people and the big reading table in the middle was still completely empty. He sat down with his back to the window that looked out on the deathly Mulderstraat, took a newspaper that he never read from the paper rack and called to Jan, the waiter, when he walked by, that he wanted a coffee.

  The Cabinet was still alive. He knew that and even if he hadn’t known he wouldn’t have wanted to read it in the phrasing of the newspaper that he was now holding in his hands and which usually cried out such news with huge, ominous letters. He would really have liked to read not a newspaper, but a book.

  Once he was a reader of books. Max Havelaar, Among Professors by W. F. Hermans, and a whole series of thin little books for his final-year exams. Not a great reader, that your reporter would admit here and now without hesitation, but one who had absorbed his portion of the national literature. But now he wasn’t concerned with reading, to be perfectly honest. It was the attitude: to be a man who walks early in the morning through the hesitant sunlight to a café to open a big, ideally hardback, book. Perhaps a pen on the darkening oak of the café table, the kind of pen with which you can make a note in the margin of a book like that.

  His order arrived on a small brown tray. It was the coffee that had once emerged from a magazine survey as the worst in the whole country. The waiter himself was mentioned in the article, because he had served the journalists their second cup with a rustic ‘right then’. There were days when your reporter also felt too good for it, for that dourness and curtness, but today he had been happy to hear the waiter’s surly remark.

  Halfway through his coffee (black) and by now immersed in a magazine article, he noticed that his thoughts were elsewhere. It was, dear readers, as if he…

  No, it must be put differently. All that young morning your reporter had experienced a vague sense of vitality, excitement, perhaps unease, and now, sitting at the reading table of the Hotel de Jonge, musing away over an article that he wasn’t reading and coffee that he drank slowly, pleasurably enveloped in the fresh cloud of smoke of the cigarette that he had just lit, now that feeling turned into an image.

  He felt…as if he was sitting on a crust.

  Yes, that was it. As if the town was a crust over another world, another reality, a…something deeper. And he saw himself leaving the newspaper building, crossing the Torenlaan in the morning sun, along the Brink, walking over a scab. Like a man walking over ice, unsure whether or not it’s reliable. Or someone risking walking on lava that has only recently set. A walker on a shell that covered something big, deep and unknown. And instead of fear or unease a boundless desire for exploration rose up in your reporter, and while he noticed that in himself, he thought about what he must have seen from the corner of his eye, but hadn’t perceived it when it was happening: the building workers by the old library on the Brink. And he remembered that he had been there a week before, with the photographer, for a photograph with a caption, and that one of the building workers had told him they had happened upon an unknown underground space…

  ‘Damn it, Lutra! What are you doing sitting there staring into the distance like Mahatma Gandhi! You can solve the mysteries of the world in your own time. Type! It’s a quarter past nine! They’re waiting for your piece on the other side! How far have you got?’

  He looks narrowly at the sheet in his typewriter, reads the first paragraph with faint disgust, pulls on the crank and resumes typing.

  ‘Five minutes!’ he calls. ‘And could someone get the photographer out of his shed. I’ve only got two pictures so far.’

  In crowded tents thousands of people were enjoying…

  He frowns, lights a cigarette and goes on hammering, fag between index and middle finger, scattering a rain of ash between the typewriter keys. The emptiness within him fills, his fullness empties. Ebb and flow. Day and night. Waking and dreaming. Duty and desire. He is a reporter, the medium that translates the messages of the world into chatty pieces to convey them to his readers, who all have according to the boss the maturity of a thirteen-year-old secondary-school pupil and can’t spell anything with more than two syllables. He is an oracle, a seer who describes events that are yet to manifest themselves, will manifest themselves or, if they don’t manifest themselves while he is describing them, are made true with his pen.

  Here and there people fought, rows broke out. A dull drizzle hung like a veil over the town. Through the foggy night the thousands, tens of thousands, moved like ghosts between the façades of houses and shops put the brakes on any excess of ‘conviviality’.

  Marcus and Chaja had met when she was still only seventeen and he was almost twenty. She was so slim (and that was also how he described her throughout all the years afterwards, whenever he told someone about his first love), so unimaginably slim that his fingertips touched when he put his hands around her waist.

  He had done that when they were standing under a lamp in the forest, just by the miniature golf course where they’d had a drink, and in the light of the lamp he had seen her high cheekbones, the gleam of her curly black hair, the way it clouded round her face when she lifted it to his and he lowered his to hers.

  He put his hands around her waist and was surprised when his fingertips touched.

  That had been the beginning.

  He was what all passionate young men of his age were: a will-o’ the-wisp, a romantic. But apart from that: an anaemic encyclopaedia reader, violently suffering poet, lonely masturbator, dark soul, empty vessel, hollow heart, a roamer who wanted to roam. He was a boy who had read Tristan and Isolde one afternoon, in one go, afterwards running out of the house in a furious explosion of bookish sorrow, mowing the lawn around the bungalow, and then, his eyes wet with tears and his body wet with sweat, had gone back inside to devour the book once more, again in one go, and burst into tears again and run back outside to mow the lawn again. A romantic boy, one who lost his way in the forest of tales, and wanted to do precisely that.

  Nine months they were together and then, at a party that she hadn’t gone to and at which he had sat in studied melancholy on the stairs between mountains of jackets, away from the bustle, listening to Billie Holiday’s saxophone-like vocals, a girl had come over to him. She looked at him for a moment, went and stood in front of him and asked if he was still with ‘Noah’s little girl’. He had nodded and asked what she meant by that.
She explained at length: how she had always thought that he and Chaja didn’t suit one another, that he…and she too, incidentally…And he listened, knowing that he shouldn’t listen, that it wouldn’t be good for him. An hour later he knew two things: he had betrayed Chaja (in his head, that is, he hadn’t touched the girl, he hadn’t even flirted with her) and an unfamiliar insecurity had germinated within him. He had snatched a bottle of whisky from a table, gone back to the stairs with the jackets and drunk until he no longer doubted anything and laughed at everything.

  The next day he was waiting outside Noah’s shop at twelve o’clock. It had become a habit for him to collect her from her Saturday job at her father’s shop around lunchtime. In the canteen of the big store they had a coffee and a toasted sandwich, after which she went back to work and he to the bungalow where his mother was waiting for him. In the evening he then cycled to the village where she lived with her father and sisters, and collected her to go out.

  That Saturday they walked in silence to the canteen, where they sat down at a little orange formica table and he tried to deny the crashing in his head and she waited for what was obviously about to come.

  His stammering words. His index finger, rubbing flakes of ash into the tabletop.

  It wasn’t her.

  Him.

  There wasn’t anyone else.

  His fault.

  His…

  And she had looked at him. She had suddenly seemed older, wiser, almost maternal. She had smiled and nodded.

  Then they had gone downstairs, past the dinner sets and the record department and the lingerie and the socks, and when they came out and stood by the glass doors and the curtain of tepid air that flowed down behind them, she had rested her right hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eyes and kissed him on the cheek.