In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  ‘Yes, now sir knows it all very well!’

  ‘But who are you?’ Jacob cried at last, slightly dizzy from the litany that had just rained down upon him.

  The man with the thin jacket and the crumpled lapels stared at his face with surprise. Silence lingered between them.

  ‘Do you really not know?’ he said. ‘Have you never heard of the club of a hundred hedonists?’

  He looked round and took in the lumpenproletariat at his feet.

  ‘Hedonism, sir. In the end, life is there to be enjoyed. The years of suffering and thrift and make-do-and-mend are over. This is the harvest time, the time when the fruits of our efforts are plucked and when the sweat of our faces has turned to milk and honey. We are waiting here to be transported to Amsterdam.’

  ‘The bus should have been here ages ago!’ someone cried.

  ‘Every year we flee this town, this awful place of Calvinism and shallow fun, to spend the TT weekend in the glow of urban neon, the museums…’

  ‘…the restaurants…’

  ‘…the sex shops…’

  ‘…the red light district…’

  ‘…the furniture shops with their Gispen and Eames and Breuers…’

  ‘OK…’

  ‘We’re like that party from The Decameron, fleeing the pestilence that has fallen upon our territory.’

  ‘Oh, and no more people going on at you in a dialect that makes you think of blocked sewers in which the shit and effluent of generations, bubbling and gurgling, are seeking a way out…’

  ‘Now! No! More!’

  ‘Finally out of a landscape where whole villages marched behind the drums of the Dutch Nazis and the agrarian organisations…’

  ‘Amen. Norg. Grolloo.’

  ‘The list is endless. Anyone going on his Sunday bike ride round here passes through more brown filth than a sewage worker in a blocked culvert…’

  ‘…a…’

  ‘stop!’

  The rain fell endlessly, slowly, incessantly, and no one seemed concerned, as if all of them, the whole ragged band in grey and drab and colourless, considered it perfectly normal to get wet, here at the foot of the Groningerstraat Bridge, waiting for a bus that should have been here long ago, and wasn’t coming, not this evening at any rate.

  ‘Good people,’ said Noah, raising a hand now to bring an end to the litanies that sprouted like vines under this apparently fertile rain. ‘Dear, dear people.’ (He suddenly felt like a television presenter.) ‘There is no bus, no bus is coming.’ And, gripped by repetition: ‘No bus will come. The bus is a…It’s an image, people. The bus is a metaphor. Even hedonism doesn’t exist.’ (He had no idea what he was doing, but he felt caught up in it, and filled with a stream of words that unstoppably sought a way to his mouth…) ‘It’s a false theory, people. There is nothing but sweat and weary arms and legs, a head full of worries and dread of the day to come. There is no time of pleasure and there is no time of harvest, because what is harvested is nothing more than the seed for the day to come. Life, people…’ (He had to speak louder and louder, because there was a stirring in the hunkered mass, a tremendous though still quiet unease that could turn at any moment, that was what he felt, into fury over so much betrayal and disappointment.) ‘Life is suffering. All is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth around continually, and returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’

  A cadence of biblical magnitude had verily fallen upon him, and he had no idea how it happened or where it had come from.

  ‘Vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun,’ he was just able to cry before the dust was swept up and swirled around him like a whirlwind with a taste for picking things up and throwing them far away.

  ‘Come,’ said the pedlar.

  Noah felt his elbow held in a tight grip, and although he wanted to object and struggle and resist, he felt himself being dragged away from the raging troop. They were standing on the clattering planks of the bridge when he was finally able to look round and saw nothing in the shady distance but the empty Groningerstraat and the filling station a little way further on, emanating a vaguely red and yellow light that only made the north of the town emptier and yet more desolate.

  He and the pedlar had taken the ghoulish path along the town canal, through the sinking evening light, the black water on their right and the centre on their left, all the way to the Vaart, the waterway that carried on through the countryside. There, where the canal ended and was separated by a narrow street from the broad water of the Vaart, they stood and looked in the direction of the motorbikes that came racing down the road on the other side of the water, from the direction of the circuit, where the big campsites were and most of the biking visitors had put up their tents.

  ‘What…?’

  The pedlar opened his eyes wide. Noah frowned. The pedlar turned round. Noah turned round. Their eyes met when they had turned one hundred and eighty degrees.

  An old man with a dog cart laboured crunching and squeaking beside the water of the canal. He and his wooden vehicle crawled along the water’s edge like an ant.

  ‘Levi Philips?’ whispered Jacob Noah.

  The dog cart, and behind it the man, approached very slowly. The wheels scraped, the tyres squeaked, the dog panted, Levi Philips toiled. And so, scraping and squeaking and crunching and groaning, they crawled their way along until, in a cloud of echoing springs and breathless dog and man, they stood in front of them.

  ‘Levi Philips,’ said Jacob Noah. ‘Well, I never…’

  ‘You know each other,’ said the pedlar, assessing the situation.

  ‘Well, not know exactly…That is: from stories. The rabbi with the dog cart.’

  ‘The rabbi with the dog cart,’ said the pedlar parsimoniously. ‘Well, well.’ He even sounded slightly put out.

  Levi Philips was a tawny-coloured man of about eighty, in a surprisingly uncrumpled pair of black trousers, an immaculate white shirt with its sleeves rolled up above his elbows, a ruler in his breast pocket and above his white shirt what one might have called a healthy head of grey hair. He had the tanned complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. It was almost as if the man brought his own climate with him, as if a circle of sun and warmth surrounded him, an umbrella of better weather than it had been here all evening. Or more than that: the closer the rabbi with the dog cart came, the warmer and sunnier that rainy evening felt.

  ‘Won’t you introduce me, Mr Noah?’

  ‘Introduce you? Of course. Although we don’t really know one another. Mr Philips, the Jew of Assen. Jew of Assen, Levi Philips.’

  One way or another there was something peculiar about introducing these two men to one another.

  Levi Philips bent down and unharnessed the big dog from the cart. He took an enamel bowl from the platform, filled it with water from a dented canteen and gave it to the creature to drink.

  ‘It’s strange,’ he said, when he stood up again and let his eye drift over his surroundings and then over his companions. ‘I haven’t dreamt of this spot for fifty years.’

  ‘Dreamt…’ said Jacob Noah.

  ‘I didn’t even live here for all that long. I couldn’t even have remembered what it looked like. Except perhaps the street where we lived.’ He turned to the Jew of Assen and smiled. ‘I was born and brought up in Paul Krügerstraat. Everything was still new there, and Pa
ul Krüger was still a hero. My father…’

  ‘What do you mean: dreamt?’ said Jacob Noah.

  The Jew of Assen put the tip of his index finger to his lips and closed both eyes.

  ‘…was a cattle trader. Only a small trader. He got up at five o’clock in the morning, because he had to be at the market or the farm very early. We also had our own pasture, on Kloosterveen, where the bullocks stayed until they were sold to the butchers.’

  He ran a hand through his white hair and smiled again.

  ‘Five o’clock…And then I got up too, because after washing my father put on his tefillin and said his morning prayers. He was an orthodox religious man, my father. When he had prayed, he drank his hot milk with a dash of coffee and we ate bread and then I came and sat next to him and then we read a bit of the Torah together and that day’s section of the Talmud. One portion every day! For my father there was no middle way in Judaism: Talmud and Torah or nothing. I’m afraid that isn’t for me these days.’

  ‘So that’s why you were called the rabbi with the dog cart?’

  ‘Me? I was a boy. I wasn’t even a bar mitzvah yet. No, that’ll have been my father. Although even then he didn’t drive the dog cart. That was my job. Then I ferried stuff around for my mother. You must remember: she had a small trade in perfume and lotions. And then of course there was her famous burn ointment.’

  ‘Ah,’ sighed the pedlar.

  ‘So young?’ said Noah.

  ‘Oh, yes. Sometimes in the morning before school. Yes. Mostly in the afternoon. He…’

  A nod towards the dog, which now lay under the cart with his head on his front paws, drops of water glittering in its whiskers.

  ‘…he was already waiting at home. Always been a real working dog. Isn’t that right, Boris!’

  The dog barked. Once. Loud and brief.

  ‘He liked nothing better than going out with the cart. I thought it was pitiful. I’d have been just as happy to pull that cart myself. A boy. Did I say that? Not yet thirteen. That dog…’

  ‘The rabbi with the dog cart was your father…’ said Noah.

  Levi Philips nodded. ‘My father started out as a trader in pretty much everything and one day he bought a cow. The risk is greater than it is with thread and ribbons and fabrics, but so is the profit, he always said. Later in my life I took that to mean that you have to go a long way if you want to achieve a lot. Perhaps that’s why it was so early that…But anyway, my father started out with the dog cart. Not with Boris. A predecessor of his. One cow, which he sold at a profit. He had a little help from his father-in-law, who was a butcher and knew quite a lot about animals and prices. A second cow, a third, and within two years the cart stood behind the house and my father was a cattle trader. The farmers knew him as “the Hebrew”.’

  Noah groaned.

  ‘You mustn’t think ill of them for it.’

  He stared dreamily into the distance, as if it was all yesterday.

  ‘He never earned as much as the other traders. As a pious Jew he had to miss the Saturday markets, and on Friday afternoon, of course, he was free for the start of Shabbat at home. But we did well, not least from my mother’s business.’

  ‘The burn ointment.’

  ‘She didn’t earn anything from that. Mostly people were just given a pot when they came. No, her business was soap, cologne, ointments and creams. We did well enough to send my sister to grammar school and me to senior school. I once thought that she should have put her burn ointment into pretty pots with a pretty label, and sold them. No one knew the recipe and everyone wanted it. But she just gave it away.

  ‘We’re talking now about the thirties, the early thirties. Hitler was on the rise and the Zionists were increasingly active. Here too you had Zionist youth clubs and youth associations. My sister was very active. She always was. A very political girl. Red as a radish, white inside. Ha. Do you know that one? The poet Gorter?’

  Noah nodded.

  ‘That was my sister. My father was never happy about it. He was pious, the socialists were a thorn in his flesh. He thought of God and the Zionists thought of land. He said: a Zionist is a Jew who gives another Jew money to send a third Jew to Palestine. My sister was one of those third Jews. I was never aware of any kind of anti-Semitism, but she claimed that she was always bothered by it. She wanted to go to a country where that wasn’t the case and the only country that came into consideration, of course, was Palestine. A stubborn girl she was. Once she had got it into her head that she should go there, she decided what she was going to study. It had to be a subject that would benefit the people of Palestine. And I must say that I was gradually caught up in her enthusiasm. She barely talked about anything but “the country”, evening after evening and at the weekend at the meetings of the Zionist youth association. I wanted to go along, not just because my sister had persuaded me, but also because I wanted to get out of the house. You must know, Mr Noah, I have good memories of those mornings with my father, but it was also oppressive. I sometimes asked, when we had reached a particular part, why something was as it was and not otherwise, and then you often didn’t get an answer. And we skipped Sodom and Gomorrah, and the question of how there were people again after the flood, Lot and his daughters “who lay with him”, and what happened to the fish. The Torah is a confusing book for a young child! Later, when I studied mechanical engineering, I saw the world more and more as something that can be explained in technical terms and by cause and effect, rather than by a text that is old and corrupt. No, much of what is now viewed with nostalgia, bearded old men who know the whole Torah and half the Talmud off by heart, much of it was nothing but ignorance and narrow-mindedness.’

  ‘But the rabbi with the dog cart?’

  ‘Ah. I think what has been at work here was what is also at work in the Bible: mythologising. My father wasn’t just pious, he looked that way too. When he went out with the cart, to the villages and the farmers who lived alone in the country, he was a curious phenomenon: a Jew with a thick, long, black beard, in black trousers and a white shirt and the tassels of his little prayer cloak sticking out from under his shirt. On the way he stopped for his prayers, put on the prayer straps and prayed, rocking and muttering. Can you imagine that, on the crossroads of two sandy paths between heathland and ash trees? The farmers in those days didn’t know very much and my father had all kinds of medicines. He helped them with simple illnesses, things to do with hygiene, he helped them write letters and do sums, he just answered their questions. And because of that the farmers and the farmers’ wives thought he was some kind of roving magician, a Drentsche Baal Shem Tov. But he was just a trader with a dog cart, a man like all other men, my father.’

  ‘And now you’re here with the cart?’

  ‘I haven’t dreamt of this place for a long time. But I am old now. I live in a land where I have spent the largest part of my life, a land of heat and drought and red, fertile soil, a land where you can stick a matchstick in the ground and a day later a tree will stand here. I have drained swamps there, and contracted malaria. I have built milking machines for the dairy industry. I have been through more wars than most Europeans in their country. But I’ll tell you: when I shut my eyes, I’m in Paul Krügerstraat. When I have my afternoon nap, I smell the smell of beeswax and linseed in my mother’s basement, where she made her ointment. Sometimes at night I sit on my father’s lap and he teaches me the Hebrew alphabet with honey, a lick of honey from his finger every time I know a letter. And I taste the taste of liquorice. I still remember what it smelt like in the corridors of my school, there on the edge of the Forest of Assen. And the Forest of Assen itself, I still know it off by heart. Mr Noah, you can travel hundreds, thousands of kilometres and never come back, you can travel to countries where everything is different, and perhaps better, but one day you’re old and tired and suddenly you find yourself smelling the Torenlaan after a rainstorm.’

  And while Levi Philips the younger said these words it suddenly came clattering out of
the sky. The water of the grey Vaart started boiling and all of a sudden the silent black of the canal was a watery gravel path. It wasn’t a downpour, but the drops were fat and heavy and they landed on the quays with a slap. It was real evening rain, cool and brief. Everything was wet and a gust of wind even rose up for a moment.

  It was all over just as quickly. A few more drops fell here and there, and then the shower moved away in a northerly direction. And there, from the north, down a road that shone in the light of the street lamps–a smell of wet stone hung in the air–there came another dog cart, creaking, squeaking, sighing under the weight of time, pulled by a big yellowish-brown beast followed by a man with a stick, in a black jacket, black trousers, with a white face framed in a shining black beard.

  ‘Well I never…Mr Philips…Isn’t that your…’

  There was no Levi Philips now. There was just the spot where he and his dog and his cart had stood, a vague dry rectangle on the wet road.

  ‘Good Shabbat, gentlemen.’ He had a deep, slightly hoarse voice, this man, and he didn’t seem to doubt that the men before him would appreciate this traditional, although rather tardy greeting.

  When they had shaken hands and that dog too had been unharnessed and given something to drink, the visitor leaned on his stick, took a tin of snuff from his pocket, offered it unsuccessfully to his companions and took some himself.

  ‘You’re late,’ said Noah. ‘There are already three stars in the sky.’

  ‘It’s the weather. I don’t like making him walk through the puddles. It’s bad enough that he has to work for me. And I’ve been doing some sums for a farmer in Zeijen.’

  ‘Sums?’

  ‘Yes, most of them have only a year or two of primary school. The children are only able to go to school when there’s no sowing, mowing or ploughing to be done, and that doesn’t leave many days over. Most of them only go in the winter. With so little education it’s difficult when there are problems with the taxes or the council. May I invite you to Shabbat dinner?’