Past the law court with its white columns, which rose up from a sea of wet grass, across the cold but overpopulated terrace of the Hotel de Jonge and a little square where a ball of blue smoke hung, a fat, dense cloud that floated above a circle of roaring bystanders, caused by a leather-clad man on a bike who let his back wheel turn so hard that the rubber burnt and left a thick black trail on the pavement, while the smoke mixed with the greyish-blue exhaust. Along there and further, where the road lay before them like a bent knee. Groningerstraat. Rolderstraat. Two long straight roads whose only purpose seemed to be to lead everyone out of town as quickly and effectively as possible, two roads bordering a neighbourhood that once consisted of low-roofed houses and little shops, and now contained a baker’s, the shop that manufactured and sold Assen’s own bicycle (the Mustang), a Chinese restaurant, a semi-dilapidated shack that served as an ecumenical youth centre, a cobbler’s, some cafés and a cigarette kiosk with porn magazines.
Along there, on and a bit further, they walked, the white-clad but red-bellied Jacob Noah with his thoughtfully waving walking stick, a corpulent angel amidst the leather-clad hell-dwellers who churned around him, and the Jew of Assen, beetle-black and shiny in his worn-out suit, crowned with the grubby hat of someone who has travelled long and far, clutching the staff of a humble pilgrim as if it were a sceptre, a heavy bundle on his back that made him look like a tortoise.
That way, then.
‘Once, long ago, it was my deep desire to own this whole area,’ said Noah, pausing in the bend in the road, musing, both hands resting on the knob of his walking stick, prey to the sudden snowfall of his memory.
‘This,’ he said, ‘was the Mayfair in my game of Monopoly. If this town ever had a Jewish quarter, this was it.’
That time when he, carried away by his recent success, couldn’t stop buying, wanted to own everything, the whole town, and if he couldn’t do that then the centre at least. And the idea that kept coming back to him in those days: the story of Cain and Abel. The story of the oldest fraternal feud, the farmer Cain, the first nonnomadic human being who, to stress how poor God’s cursed earth was, sacrifices a few pathetic fruits, while Abel brings two fat young goats. The Supreme Being’s refusal to accept Cain’s sacrificial protest. The exchange of words between the brothers. And how Cain then imagines dividing the world between them. The nomadic hunter Abel gets everything that moves and is mobile. Cain, the sedentary tiller of the soil, will be in charge of all things motionless and rooted. Abel agrees and when they’re standing facing one another and with a hint of a smile, Cain says, ‘What are you doing here, Abel? You’re standing on my land.’ Abel looks at him in surprise and takes a step back. ‘You’re still standing on my land,’ yells Cain. Abel starts hesitantly walking, Cain comes after him. ‘Still! You’re still standing on my land!’ Abel runs and runs and runs, and Cain runs with him, shouting that his brother is still on his land.
The pursuit ends in the mountains, when Cain breaks his brother’s neck with a rock.
And then, when he runs around his land, mad with remorse, the voice of God: Cain, where is your brother?
And his reply: Is he his brother’s keeper?
Then God leaves him, but not without giving him a sign that will protect him now that God isn’t going to. The four stories: Cain becomes a leper, skin white as snow, creaking limbs; the guard dog that God puts by his side; a horn on his head; the last story, in which a letter of the Holy name is written on Cain’s forehead.
Finally his punishment: ‘As soon as you stand still, you will be hunted and beaten. So you will have to flee unstintingly, if you stand still the earth will shake beneath you. In shame will you die, without a proper grave.’
For seven generations Cain roamed, for seven generations he walked the earth and when he rested he was chased away, when he lay down on the ground to rest his weary legs the earth trembled. The earth shook and quaked as if it was so revolted by him that it wanted to throw him off.
To be this town’s Cain.
To feel the earth’s revulsion, its shaking and quaking.
‘Why?’
Jacob Noah was startled from his Talmudic meditations.
‘What?’
‘Why did you want that street in your game of Monopoly, Mr Noah?’
Noah lowered his head and shrugged his shoulders, as they walked on through the damp evening air.
‘Ah,’ he said after a while.
‘As a symbol?’
Noah muttered something incomprehensible.
‘Out of revenge?’
He stopped. He looked the small, dark figure beside him in the face and slowly shook his head.
‘Revenge, sir,’ he said loftily, ‘revenge is far from my mind.’
The pedlar nodded. They walked on, but they hadn’t taken ten steps when he said softly: ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’
‘It was no longer necessary,’ said Noah.
Was he absolutely sure about it? Hadn’t he secretly tasted the sweetness of late revenge when to everyone’s shock and surprise no building plan in the centre could go ahead without Noah’s agreement, because his real estate, consisting of rickety old properties, was spreading like chocolate sprinkles across the fat slice of bread and butter of the town centre? Had he tasted that sweetness after they’d initially charged him too much for their sheds and warehouses and old factories and workers’ cottages and he, when the department store companies with their big plans came down and asked for large spaces for their vast premises, saw the money pouring in? Then had he felt the satisfaction that is the reward for much patience in advance of revenge? Had he grinned when, after years of furtive mockery behind his back, and sometimes half openly, they worked out that Noah’s stupidly expensive purchases had multiplied their value a hundredfold?
He had grinned, yes.
He had smiled like a prophet of doom who finally sees pitch and brimstone raining down.
But sweet? Revenge?
It was more as if he were being forced to taste his own bitter gall.
He had started out, the shop, the property, to make a mark on the town. He had wanted to make himself visible, he had wanted to write ‘I still exist’ over the town centre, and in so doing his intention had been to draw attention less to himself than to what was no longer there, who was no longer there.
Sweet?
Six youths in denim jackets walked arm in arm ahead of them, with the arrogant gait of young Trojan warriors unaware that they have just brought the beast into the town. Sure of victory, sure of themselves, the immortality of their whole limbs and bodies, still without glasses and wearing outsized jackets for the larger man and extra long socks because the summers are as cold as winters, still with the expectation of deep sleep if they want to sleep and confident of the buoyancy that allows them to survive a night of drinking and smoking as if the wine were water and the hours minutes. Six youths in denim jackets, arm in arm. They reeled from house-front to house-front.
‘The butcher was there,’ said Noah, glancing to the side. ‘The baker.’ His hand moved from left to right and from right to left. ‘Ribbons and thread. Here,’ looking across to the other side, ‘Assen’s first department store…The chicken butcher. Another baker. There…’ He pointed diagonally to the right. ‘That was where Rika Levie lived, the inventor of Riek’s Burn Ointment…’
‘…a renowned remedy in those days,’ the pedlar completed his sentence. ‘Once she was called to a child that had spilled a pan of water from the stove over itself…’
‘…and thanks to Riek’s Burn Ointment the child healed without scars!’
They crossed the road and passed what had once been the synagogue, a modest little building that had fallen into disuse after 1945 for want of Jews, and had for decades now served as a Reformed church. The grey hotchpotch of houses and shops, big and small, led them northwards.
The old tram bridge lay across the water like something resisting the lowly function that it fulfilled. An awkwa
rd bridge in an awkward spot, where the canal and Groningerstraat crossed in a void that emanated greyness and boredom and no-good-will-come-of-this. The four cardinal points opened up cold and unfulfilled in front of Jacob Noah and the Jew of Assen and offered a choice of nothing, a choice of many evils, a choice so meaningless that here, on this bridge that lay stiff and stubborn over the black water, one might just as easily have died.
‘This was where the gallows used to stand,’ said the pedlar cheerfully.
Jacob Noah fell silent. The words faded in his mouth. His tongue, silent, said nothing.
‘What…’
‘In the Middle Ages,’ the pedlar said soothingly.
‘What. Is. That?’ said Jacob Noah.
On the other side of the old bridge stood a moth-eaten troop of grey figures.
‘Perhaps we should walk over and have a look?’ said the pedlar.
‘Walk over? Where to? And who are they?’
But he followed the Jew of Assen as he strolled over the bridge towards the shady crowd of figures which, on the other side of the water, huddled together like a litter of abandoned wolf cubs.
‘I think they’re waiting,’ the pedlar called over his shoulder.
Noah shook his head.
Hunched together under the now steadily falling rain, grey under the thin light of a street lamp, they stood and sat and lay.
Jacob Noah stepped carefully onto the planks, as though he wasn’t sure whether the bridge would carry him.
‘Who are these people? What is this?’
The pedlar didn’t reply. He stood up to his knees in the shivering mass and heard the cries of woe that rose up from the densely packed bodies.
‘The bus isn’t coming!’
‘We’ve been waiting for hours!’
‘Days.’
‘Endlessly.’
‘But the bus isn’t coming.’
There is no bus, Noah wanted to say. No bus comes along here. No bus will stop here. But he understood that that was not the message that these non-travelling travellers lay, sat, stood waiting for.
There was a great gnashing of teeth and melancholy wailing. All that was missing was the rending of garments and ash being strewn on heads.
‘We want transport!’
‘Carriage!’
‘And transport.’
‘And transcendence.’
‘Woe.’
‘Alas.’
‘And woe!’
‘Sticks and stones.’
‘Bricks and bones.’
‘Bricks and bones?’ thought Noah. But even that, he reflected, isn’t the right observation in the right place. Mind you. A nice rhythm. Bricks and bones, sticks and stones. It was already starting to turn into a little song in his head, the kind of little song that you sing when you’re working, which gives the body a rhythm and at the same time puts the mind in a good mood.
Sticks and stones,
bricks and bones,
clog-stamp, bum-clamp
leave you all alone
Nonsense. It was the purest nonsense. And where did it suddenly come from? It was completely meaningless, although the question was what did anything mean, at that moment, in that place?
He was now standing on the edge of the mountain of pale figures. They didn’t seem to notice the steadily dripping rain. As he stood looking down at that grey company, a man within him stood up, a man with the affable condescension of a patrician, an elder statesman addressing his pupils. He inclined his head towards a headscarfed woman, bowed slightly from the hip and asked, in a tone and with a choice of words that surprised even him when the words left his lips and were already on the way to the charlady: ‘But good lady, what passes here? Why do you linger so? Yonder is the feast. Meat and drink there is, and much sport to be had. Simple fare, perhaps, but nourishing. All organised by our most gracious government.’
He had to suppress the inclination to give himself a hard smack on the head.
‘Good sir! We have been waiting here for…’
‘Yes, but why? Or rather: what for? And how did you get here?’
A man hoisted himself from the ragged throng. He adjusted a thin tie, straightened his fading lapels and let his neck rise from the chalice of his collar. He said:
‘Once I had a house, a white stone house on a grey stone square, a French car and a tastefully dressed wife. I had a house and in that house there stood four Charles and Ray Eames chairs, a table, hand-made, of cherry wood, by a designer who will in due course be famous. I had a bookcase, tall and broad as a wall, full of books that I planned to read one day, and on the other wall hung art by all the artists who were my friends, or vice versa. This gentleman here…’
A thin little man with ink-black hair and a mousy face stood up and quickly waved a Marlboro.
‘This gentleman here had an Alfa Romeo…’
‘…Montreal, produced between 1970 and 1977, eight cylinders, 2593 cc, 200 hp at 6500 revs, top speed more than 220 kilometres per hour.’
‘Ah,’ said Jacob Noah, who had no idea what an Alfa Romeo Montreal would look like. His choice of car had always been very simple: he bought the car that was most comfortable, and had consequently spent his whole life in the soft seats of slowly rolling Citroëns.
Now others stood up from the clumps that were sitting, hunched and lying in silence at his feet.
‘I, sir, had a case of all the Mouton Rothschilds from after 1945! You know, the ones with the labels designed by artists. Picasso, Cocteau, Dalí, Miró, Moore, Chagall…’
‘And I had…’
‘I think sir knows very well now.’
‘No, let me…I had a notebook with all the restaurants that I’d visited in the past twenty years, all richly supplied with Michelin stars, at home and abroad. And notes and jottings for every visit. If you were to ask me, I could tell you where I was last year on the second Friday in March, what I enjoyed as an aperitif (a Cheval Blanc, I seem to remember), what the starter was, the hot second course, what the main (in March, it must have been, yes I remember, a partridge, that’s what it must have been, in Jos Boomgaard’s Les Quatre Saisons, oh Lord, a partridge that tasted like my grandmother’s cooking, we drank a red Aloxe-Corton, a bit heavy for the little bird, but the flavour…and the taste of bilberries…the hint of bitter chocolate, which)…’
‘I think sir knows very well now.’
‘Oh no, leave me be,’ called a woman who sprang up like a grey-clad Botticelli Venus from the squawking waves, a shadow of her former self, but still attractive and elegant, a peg for the kind of expensive clothes that couldn’t come from this town.
‘Let me tell you about my men and how many I had and how different they were, as if it were a gathering that I had organised to show the whole world: that’s how they are. I could classify them in my own very special Linnaeus. I had them in my menagerie to serve me by serving themselves. The big-footed. The voracious. The Master of the Whip. The lip-smacking. The insecure softy. The Italian. The Beast. Ah, I had so many and I rode them as if they were a thing with a thing attached. I crouched on hand and knees, my downy buttocks in the glowing hollow of their pelvises, eagerly yearning for the proud entry of all of them, and I wanted everything and I was everything.’
In a Dark Wood Page 23
