In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  And then she had turned round. She had gone inside through the humming airlock, straight and slim and dark, and he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. She disappeared among the customers. Now and again he saw her black hair reappearing, until she went up the stairs to the record department and vanished from sight. And all that time, as he watched after her and saw her going irrevocably away, absorbed into the crowd, he felt his heart. He thought: the heart is an organ, the heart cannot feel. But his did feel. It hurt. It twisted in his chest, it pinched together, it was as if it were shrinking, as if the life were being squeezed from it bit by bit.

  Of course he had wanted to call out her name, run after her, hold her tight, hug her and say that it was all a mistake, that he’d misinterpreted everything. But he didn’t. He had just watched and he knew, as he watched, with the unshakable certainty of someone who knows he has lost: there goes the woman I loved more than I love myself.

  When he turned round to go home, he felt what he had felt when he had read Tristan and Isolde: the sweet and addictive pain of tragic loneliness.

  Even if first love is something special, there is no reason why one shouldn’t be able to forget it. There will be other loves, life changes, one changes oneself. But he had not been able to forget Chaja, at least not in a way that brought him the tranquillity of someone who has been part of something beautiful and knows it’s over and it isn’t the end of the world. Five years later, when he had been living elsewhere for a long time and was starting to make a name for himself, she was still just as much a part of his thoughts as she had been that Saturday outside the department store. Ten years later, when he was where he had always wanted to be–a man to be reckoned with, one who was valued for his reading and particularly for what he did with that reading–the memory of her was an altar in the darkest corner of his consciousness. That was the corner he sought out, in which he let himself disappear when self-loathing washed over him, when he hated himself even more than he hated the world around him. Then, at such moments, he saw her quiet face, the innocence of her laugh, the purity of her expectations, her hope and above all her seriousness. And at such moments, in his dark corner, he muttered the mea culpa of the man who considers himself guilty of a great mistake, a crime, the auto-da-fé of a man who despises himself for what he has done and what he has become.

  He had once written her a letter apologising for his behaviour, for the person he had been at the time, so clumsy and surly and jealous, and he had also told her why he had broken off their relationship, that there was no real reason, at least none other than his evident need to feel pain, to be pure in his thoughts, because he found her so pure and plainly didn’t consider himself worthy of her. For a moment it had been an argument both clear and indistinct, that letter, and she hadn’t replied. He didn’t even know if she had ever read it. Or perhaps, he thought in the years that followed, she had read it out to her friends, or to the men who had come after him, and they had laughed at it. It wasn’t a thought that made him sad. On the contrary. When he imagined that, he inwardly bowed his head and accepted the imaginary mockery as his just punishment. Chaja had become the point in his body where he felt guilt and shame. And regret. Because even though it had happened five years before, or seven years, or ten years, he couldn’t help thinking of her as the one, the woman he wanted more than all other women, whom he would have to miss for the rest of his life through his own fault. She had become an irresistible longing within him, which could be neither silenced nor muted, and which could take him by surprise at the least desirable moment with an utter despair that sometimes struck him as absurdly harsh and at other times left him stranded in his study, curtains closed, lifelessly staring into the void, despising himself for his weakness but powerless to do anything about it.

  There were enough reasons for thinking that he didn’t actually miss Chaja all that much. A few years after the break-up he had met her on the terrace of the Hotel de Jonge and they had shaken hands and talked, and had a glass of wine together.

  She had been wearing a knee-length black skirt and a severe white blouse. When Marcus spotted her on the terrace, his skin had immediately turned wet.

  Years later he would still remember the details of that day: how warm it was, the sun still shining, just, over the roof of the Hotel de Jonge and immersing the terrace in the full warm light of early evening, the people sitting tanning themselves with their faces raised, waiters trotting along with trays of beer and wine, someone laughing.

  No, she was fine. Yes, she was successful. She even had her own car now.

  After they’d had a drink, they set off as if it was the most natural thing in the world. They walked along the terrace, past the cinema and the law court, across the lawn in front of the town hall. In a car park that smelt of warm tarmac and petrol, she pointed out her little car and they climbed in without exchanging a word and set off.

  They drove in a northerly direction, along Groningerstraat. The sun was sinking below the horizon. The walls of the houses were turning gently orange, the windows of the flats flashed. After a little while they were sitting at a traffic light. In the distance the tarmac shimmered. The road was empty and everything looked very still.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Marcus. He knew that after the traffic light they would be in the countryside.

  She said the name of a village, about fifteen kilometres away.

  ‘What are we going there for?’

  There was a party given by a former classmate. Marcus didn’t much care for parties, just as he didn’t much care for seeing people from the past. He had never attended a reunion, and never would, and the thought of meeting up, after so many years, with people he had once known without wanting to know them was something he wasn’t looking forward to.

  ‘Are you still hanging round with those people?’ he said, and as he said it he knew that he was once again the Marcus who spoiled things, the very Marcus he didn’t want to be for her.

  ‘This is a kidnapping,’ she said, too serious to be joking.

  The traffic light turned green. They sat side by side in silence staring straight ahead.

  Say something, he said to himself. Say: Yes. Say: Can I come? Something.

  The traffic light turned orange.

  Chaja, he thought as they sat motionless at that empty crossroads, was a door and he could open it. He had the key in his hand. He only had to raise his hand, put the key in the lock and turn it. And then everything would change.

  The traffic light turned red.

  Marcus looked sideways.

  She was sitting straight-backed behind the steering wheel, her face gentle and warm in the low light that made her jawline soft and vulnerable. The dark of her eyes was misty and deep and her mouth made him think of nothing so much as dew-covered cherries.

  Open your mouth! a voice screamed inside him.

  Her hand gripped the gearstick, she put it into gear, drove round the traffic island and back to the town.

  After that he didn’t see her again for more than six months, until she suddenly dropped by one evening. He stood in the doorway, stared at her and didn’t know what to say. Finally he gestured to her to come in. What brings you here? So, Chaja. So, there we are. Sentences, meaningless sentences, ran through his head. His mouth was dry, his heart raced in his chest. He said nothing. He couldn’t say anything.

  At that time his house was, apart from a soft white carpet, empty. No chairs, tables, cupboards–nothing. Chaja sat on the floor, right on the other side of the room, her straight back against the wall, her slim legs crossed. On the other side of the room, also on the floor, back against the wall: him.

  ‘Have you got a duvet?’ she asked, after he had poured her a glass of white wine.

  ‘What?’

  She repeated her question.

  ‘Yes,’ he coughed as his wine went down the wrong way.

  Would she like to see it.

  He walked, heart thumping, upstairs in front of her.


  This is it, he thought, as they climbed, this is it, year zero. Because even though they’d been together for nine months, free young people at one of the freest and wildest schools in the country, they had never slept together. He had thought her too young and too pure for that.

  Upstairs, in his bedroom, she looked around and stroked the neatly shaken duvet. In his head the possibilities dashed around each other.

  ‘Would you like another drink?’ he croaked after a long time. She nodded. They came back downstairs.

  He wanted her. God, he wanted her. He wanted her so badly that for fear of losing her he couldn’t act.

  When she left half an hour later he thought there was something like pity in her eyes. As if she wanted to say: my boy, how difficult it must be to be you.

  That had been their last meeting. Shortly afterwards he had left the town.

  Over the years that followed he had become a name and sometimes, when he wrote an article in which he pointed out this or that in the spirit of the age, when he appeared on television to say in his familiar grumpily ironic tone that mankind was only becoming more and more stupid and that this fact explained contemporary music, or cultural policy, or superfluous book production, at such moments he thought again of Chaja and he wondered then whether she would be watching him, whether she read his articles, and what she thought when she did so.

  Meanwhile a procession of women passed through his life. It started, not long after he moved house, with the curator of a photographic collection, a woman who was almost twenty years older than him and listened affably to his categorical pronouncements and the convictions that he expressed with great aplomb. When their relationship ended a year later he was on his own for a while, and then he slowly began to feel ashamed of his worldly-wise behaviour. He bore in mind that he could be glad that the first person he had had a lengthy relationship with had been an older woman. Anyone younger would have constantly disputed his idiotically absolute notions, which would probably have made him believe them all the more firmly.

  A theologian, an estate agent, a teacher and a businesswoman followed, but none of those affairs lasted long. He had never been the one who ended the relationship, but always the first who knew that it was over.

  At first he rushed into each new relationship with the recklessness of a true believer, before discovering each time after a month or two that he was bored, that he felt nothing, that he couldn’t have cared less whether his new girlfriend came home or not. After a while he became more suspicious and cautious where love affairs were concerned, and for a year or so he thought that he had never met the right one.

  But by the time he was about thirty and his life seemed to have settled in every respect (he never had to seek work, people asked him; he had a solid group of acquaintances; every week he was invited to a new premiere; he advised government ministers at brainstorming sessions in the Prime Minister’s residence), just as he seemed to have made it, he started wondering whether the right one really existed, or whether perhaps he himself wasn’t the right one, couldn’t be, never would be.

  Then came the dream.

  He of all people, who had written, according to the editor-in-chief of a weekly news magazine, an ‘interesting article’ in which he declared Freudian theory to be a proto-scientific myth. After its publication a lengthy debate had broken out in the newspaper supplements and weekly magazines and in that debate his erudite filleting session had been the touchstone for the pragmatically intellectual viewpoint of the day.

  In his dream he was walking along the edge of a bright-blue, sunlit swimming pool. Thousands of garishly coloured flowers grew in the beds along the side and behind those beds the light glittered on the leaves of low shrubs. In the distance, and down below, because the swimming pool seemed to lie on a hill, could be seen the rural green of what seemed to be Tuscany. When he had circled the swimming pool–the briny smell of the water, the sweet-smelling nectar of the flowers, the dry, resinous perfume of the conifers in the valley–he walked over to the clothes hooks with someone he recognised as the woman who lived upstairs. He met her almost daily in the street, when she was on her way to work or just coming back, when she was going shopping or just bringing it home. He had, apart from a brief daily greeting, never given her any special thought. Now, as she walked beside him in her black bathing costume, he was suddenly struck by how well-built she was. Not an especially pretty woman, although not unattractive, but seeing her here in her bathing costume he was struck for the first time by the firm curves of a well-toned body: firm round breasts, taut round buttocks, a good waist. They changed in cabins next to one another, where he looked with disgust at the wet patches on the concrete floor. The vague smell of piss and damp stone rose up. He heard his neighbour say she didn’t want to get changed in such filthy conditions. He, on the other hand, balanced on his toes, hopped back and forth and came up with intricate ways of getting his clothes on unsullied. When he came out, his neighbour was gone and he stood looking at the flower beds and hedges that lined this side of the swimming pool as well. As he stood there, the surroundings changed and he suddenly found himself in the bedroom of the babysitter of some acquaintances of his.

  The babysitter was a woman on the brink of fifty. She was someone with a long history of working in the theatre, trips to India (with gurus and singing and dancing) and a more distant past which had, he was given to understand by his pleasurably shuddering acquaintances, something of a dark side. He knew her particularly as someone who was attached to the most crazed and woolly ideas, but was at the same time remarkably pragmatic. She was also almost unashamedly open, unsparing of herself and others. Those few times he had met her, she had fallen upon him as avidly as a panther that has seen a suitable prey. There was always a part of him that she disagreed with, something he had said that she wanted to tear to shreds, a notion that she thought had ‘lots of head and too little heart’. And he, amused and intrigued, had happily gone along with that. But he also had to admit that he thought her a particularly sensual woman. Her long black hair and full red mouth, her billowing bosom, narrow waist and the well-padded derrière beneath it unleashed within him something deep and dark to which he could not easily give a name.

  And now he was in her dreamt bedroom. It wasn’t a big space. The enormous double bed with the red, flower-patterned bedspread in the middle seemed to engulf most of the room. She lay on the bed like an odalisque and beckoned him to her with a gesture of her hand. He accepted her invitation without hesitation. When he was lying next to her on the bedspread she took him in her arms and pressed him to her breast.

  Everything was good.

  That was his dream, and in one strange way or another the images of the nocturnal film-screening, for that was how clear they were, wouldn’t let go of him all day. What in God’s name was this about, and why had he dreamed it?

  Less than two months ago, in his anti-Freud article, he had asserted and, in his view, proved that dreams meant nothing and could mean nothing (electrical storms in the cerebral cortex, sir!) and now he couldn’t shake off the thought that he himself had had a dream that seemed like suspiciously more than a by-product of his cerebral functions.

  Before he could find an answer to the mysteries thrown up during the night, he was assailed by a new dream. The impressions created by this one were so powerful that he woke very early in the morning and lay staring with bewilderment at the thin light.

  In his dream he was on the third floor of an old apartment block in Barcelona, a city that he had in fact visited, though he couldn’t remember any physical reality that matched the content of his dream. He stood in a semicircular bay window and looked outside. Below him ran a street, lined on the far side by a high, blind wall. There was no one to be seen. It was almost Sunday-quiet. Suddenly a circus-like procession emerged from the left, elephants with jangling fetters and trucks with big cats in cages. The pageant, exotic though it was, made little impression on him. The succession of strange animals and people seeme
d to add surprisingly little colour to the grey street scene, and he was about to turn round when his attention was drawn by three or four women in tight black corsets with red flowers. They had curious black boots on their feet, boots with very high heels and very narrow tips. Their hair was tied up in high ponytails, and around their heads was something that looked more than anything like a kind of horse’s bridle. There were bits in their mouths, and around their necks a leather strip with a chain hooked on to it. They were being led by faceless men and crept sensually and confidently on hands and knees through the street, apparently without the slightest discomfort. It was as if the surroundings, the houses, the whole city, in fact, were suddenly flooded with colour. He saw even the shimmering air turning indigo.

  The dream aroused a peculiar feeling in him. It was as if it was only now, after such a long time, that he felt at ease in Amsterdam.

  As it grew light in his bedroom and he cursed the dream that had woken him so prematurely, he became aware of the excitement to which he was prey: a feeling of being at home and a form of sexual nervousness with which he was unfamiliar.

  He had never been a man of many dreams. He usually went to bed late, very late, and always got up early. At nine o’clock he was sitting, washed and dressed, fed and watered, at his desk, which he barely left in the course of the day. In the evening he went on working for a long time, often until deep into the night. Mostly he slept no more than five hours or so, apart from a short afternoon nap of about half an hour. He wasn’t surprised that he barely dreamed, or at least couldn’t remember any dreams. He had no time for them. Once he was in bed, he was so tired that his exhausted mind, as far as he could tell, didn’t even get to the REM sleep phase.

  But now, even though he had slept no more than usual, his nights were densely populated.

  It wasn’t just those two unusually realistic night films. There was another one in which he dropped off ‘his wife’ at a car park along a mountain road, and saw ‘his Japanese girlfriend’ standing there, dressed demurely in a very conservative raincoat, feet neatly side by side, hands folded in front of her lap. In another dream he was someone who brought people back to life and saw a drowned woman coming into his house (books everywhere and lots of people). The drowned woman was wearing a bodice that almost looked like a corset and was entirely dressed in grey and blue tones, and while he knew for certain that he would be able to bring her back to life, he also knew that she would undoubtedly commit suicide again.