‘In the house, in a neat row in the passage leading to the front door, the rucksacks of the Philips family also stood ready, filled with extra underwear, a lot of socks and a new wide scarf for each of them.
‘“Farmer Veenstra…” said Philips. “What is the occasion of your unexpected visit? A sick cow, or one that’s got better?”
‘The back of Veenstra’s hand landed in the face of Levi Philips before the phrase had fully died away. The policemen behind the man shuffled slightly and some of them turned away in embarrassment.
‘“Outside, you and your brood. We’re marching you off to the station. We don’t need you and your sort here any more.”
‘Supporting himself on his wife’s arm, bleeding violently from his nose and followed closely by a barking Veenstra, Philips left the house, his rucksack, hastily scrabbled together, over only one shoulder, followed by his frightened family. The light of the street lamps lay like a path of yellow pools in front of them, showing them the path they must take.’
‘Now,’ said Jacob Noah, ‘you’ve turned that into a fine story, Jew of Assen. The shudders of history. Or fate, if that’s what you want to call it. And where were you, when all this was going on? What were…’
A swelling fury began to overpower him. He strode through the shop, snorted like a wild bull and crashed his elegant two-tone shoes across the wooden floor as if they were wooden-heeled boots.
‘So? Where were you? Were you a ghost in the shadows? Were you one of the people who stood laughing and watching along the side of the road? Were you at home behind the windows, watching through a chink in the curtain like all the others who allowed their friends and neighbours to be led away like criminals, although it was clear to everyone that they had committed no crime, nothing but being who they were? Where were you?’
The mean little man with his crumpled, papery face seemed to become even smaller and meaner than he already was. He stammered, he sighed, he coughed and he shrugged his shoulders and coughed and stammered and sighed again.
‘I was here,’ he said finally, rather faintly. ‘I was here and I was there. I was everywhere.’ He gasped for breath and mumbled barely intelligibly: ‘I am the Jew of Assen.’
‘If only you were the Golem!’ roared Jacob Noah. ‘If only you were the monster moulded from clay that could be brought to life with a letter from the holy name to protect the Jews of Assen! What use is a Jew of Assen if he can do nothing but look on and suffer? What are you? Jesus? The kind of Yid on a stick who’s only there because it’s such a lovely picture of suffering for Christians? What use to us is a Jew like that, pedlar?’
The Jew of Assen bowed his head low and nodded heavily and slowly.
‘Nothing,’ he said after a while, by which time Noah already regretted his outburst. ‘Such a Jew is no use to anyone.’
Noah took a quick step towards him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no. I’m sorry, Jew of Assen. Please forgive me. I’m…It’s…I can’t…’
He sighed. In the deep shadows of the shop he heard the Jew of Assen muttering something. Words came washing through the darkness, as slowly as if they were floating on an oil-thick sea, brought slowly to his ears on the waves of a heavy surf to the shore. It was a long time before he could fish words from the mumbling and string together a meaning from them.
‘I left them all in the lurch.’
‘What’s that you say? How can you say that, pedlar? You don’t blame the cow for the slaughterhouse, do you?’
The Jew of Assen raised his head. The faint light fell in the folds of his face and it was as if it consisted of shreds of paper.
‘And you, Mr Noah?’ he said. ‘Have you never thought that? That you left them in the lurch?’
The air was heavy and thick. Jacob Noah noticed that he was having trouble catching his breath. The air was too heavy to breathe. The air stuck in his throat like treacle.
‘Jew,’ he said. ‘Jew. Let’s get away from here. Away.’
He brought his hand to his eyes and closed them behind the shelter of his fingers.
‘Where, though, Mr Noah? Where are we going?’
And before Jacob Noah could think, or perhaps just as he thought, or just before he thought–he no longer knew and cared even less–from one moment to the next at any rate it had grown darker around him.
He wasn’t somewhere else. He hadn’t moved. No change of time or place had occurred.
He was, as far as he was concerned, nowhere.
One moment, readers.
One moment to ask a few questions:
the how,
the when,
the who
and the what,
the where
and the why.
Where…
To begin somewhere (and you don’t begin at the beginning, because the beginning is only an imaginary moment when nothing touches something, but there is no nothing, just as there is no never, before the something is another something, before the beginning of time there was another time, perhaps a time when everything was silent and lifeless, but another something, and so it is with the stories of our lives, which don’t just bluntly start somewhere and end somewhere else and are then cleverly over, rounded off, full stop, FIN, no, in the weave of history warp and weft touch one another, threads become entangled with other threads and sometimes they stop and hang as a lonely length on the underside of the tapestry, not finished, not tidily worked into the hem, perhaps not even neatly clipped, even if you’re waiting for the whole story, for the people who say they know the alpha and omega, the world complete and rounded off; the world, which consists of our stories, is a steaming bowl of spaghetti in which the strands run into each other and touch one another, what’s on the top can reach down to the bottom and what looks long can be short and vice versa, everything is everything, everything is now, time is place…but I digress…).
Where. That was the question. And the answer is: here.
Here. A place to which time flows, as a river flows around an island.
(With this difference: that the river forms the island and time, or let’s just use the word ‘history’, has barely touched this place.)
Oh, there was war.
And, yes, there was peace.
But here only the seasons changed.
A third of Europe died, stinking of pus and screaming with pain.
But the rider on the pale horse rode past this place at a calm trot.
Kingdoms shot from the ground like mushrooms and dissolved like smoke.
Peoples wriggled from the clutches of cruel rulers and were enslaved again.
Here they mowed the lawn and smoked a pipe.
The modern age exploded in an orgy of hope, knowledge and violence.
In Assen someone wrote a dissertation on the significance of the bonnets worn by farmers’ wives.
The arse of the world, readers.
The anus mundi of boredom…
A place where even death starts yawning…
A void in time…
A dance hall after a wedding…
A nun at a stag party…
A…
You get my meaning.
A becalmed spot in history, let’s call it that. A hesitation in time. The lee of The Stream Of History.
But also:
A place as time, where time is a place.
Now, at this moment, it’s Friday evening, at about twelve. It has been raining, but for now it’s dry. In the course of the night a little shower will fall from time to time and it will get colder. In the Marktzicht Café, near the fair, the party is already over, because there the flying squad has separated an enormous crowd of fighting people, but only after most of the windows were broken and the furniture was ready for a bonfire. Workmen from the council are busy there now, nailing planks over the windows by the light of the police-car headlights, while behind them the fair is a firework of light and noise, shouting and yelling.
It’s 27 June 1980. Just after twel
ve.
But also: 1416, Lent
And 14 April 1945.
November 1350.
One summer evening, Saturday, 27 May 1978, in the crunching gravel outside a farmhouse.
And a year later, a bit more than a year later, in the cafés and in the streets between the cafés.
Always…
It’s always.
All. Ways.
Have it written on your forehead. Tattoo it on the most conspicuous part of your wrist (always handy and to hand). Paint it over the door. Weave it into the doormat:
There we are: in a clearing in the forest of time, a spot where the sunlight suddenly, like a downpour of…yes…light…falls between the trees and for a moment everything is here and now and…looks significant.
Time flows through us like ink through water.
There is no now and no then, no here and no there.
Friday evening, 27 June 1980.
Just after twelve.
Now, you might wonder why here, why in a place like this, if we could also wander the snowbound forests of Sweden, if we could roam around Soho or stand still in Times Square? Why this unattractive little place? Who in God’s name is interested in Assen? Most people don’t even know where it is and those who do get no further than geographical knowledge–topographical map 12D, on which Assen hangs in the landscape like a lazy breast, have we had that before?–or they remember a school excursion to the youth traffic park because the whole educational and didactic idea of learning the highway code through play always degenerated into an orgy of crashing pedal cars–perhaps they still remember Bartje, the little boy in the book by Anne de Vries who didn’t want to pray for brown beans, and some remember the train hijackings by disaffected Moluccans, a few have probably seen the bog bodies in the Provincial Museum.
It isn’t much.
And yet. Here we are.
Because everything is here.
Because this is everything.
(Everything. Always. Here. Give me a minute or so and I’ll connect every event in the long, sad history of the world with this unattractive little place. Allow me an hour, a day at most, to wander through the warehouses of my memory and I will place everyone in the history of this spot, from Gandhi to Schicklgruber, from Kennedy to the inventor of the custard flip.)
But of course there’s more.
There’s always more.
It’s a town built on guilt.
A town built on guilt in a guilty landscape.
Long ago, long before the town was there, on 27 July 1227, the inhabitants of this landscape, stirred up by Lord Rudolf van Coevorden, rose up against the spiritual and secular lord and master of their domain. That was the Bishop of Utrecht, Otto van Lippe. He had taken great affront at tithes long unpaid and tax collectors being chased with pitchforks, sought and received the support of the Dutch nobility and rode with a proud army of horsemen and foot soldiers to the stinking swamps of Drenthe.
They all came in their rattling, gleaming grandeur: Gijsbrecht van Aemstel, the Lords of Woerden and Montfoort, Count Floris van Holland, Count van Kleef, Gerard van Gelre, Count Bodekin van Bentheim, Lord Jan VI van Arkel, Provost Dirk van Deventer, Lord Reinout van Rese and Bernhard van Horstmar, the crusader whose very name cast terror into the hearts of the Saracens.
Great was the enthusiasm when, just south of Coevorden, they met a ragged gang of peasants armed with rakes and sticks and knives.
A day out.
A tournament and a jolly open-air battle with real-life stuffed dummies.
A fine hunt for two-legged quarry.
But that wasn’t how it turned out.
Bishop Otto’s army moved into the marshland around Ane and got stuck fast in the sucking bog, splashed through stinking water, stumbled over unruly clumps of sedge and retreated, but couldn’t retreat, because of the stubbornness of barely cultivated peasant folk, who had neither eye nor respect for the gleaming grandeur of a harnessed knight on horseback, a knight who was sinking slowly and helplessly into the living bog.
The bishop was killed. His army drowned, suffocated, had their brains knocked in and, where they weren’t slaughtered like swine, fled. The famous Bernhard van Horstmar, the sporting hero of his day, died pitifully.
Festivities, joy and a lot of beer drunk in Drenthe.
Until less than a year later when a new bishop stood on the border. Wilbrand invaded with six armies from six sides.
End of the uprising, end of freedom.
Time to pay the penalty.
A Cistercian convent was set up. It was called Maria in Campis and sprang up, like an ever-present symbol of guilt and punishment, near the spot where Otto’s army was chopped to pieces.
But the spot where the nuns settled was an area that was ravaged in the summer by thick clouds of midges, clouds so big that they darkened the sky, and it was so wet there that the fields were flooded in the autumn and the spring, so that the crops in the fields stood and rotted.
Although Cistercian nuns have a predilection for the hard and simple life, the intention is not to die of hunger and exhaustion, so the convent was relocated to a spot on the high sand (the inverted soup bowl, there it is again) and that place (no more than a few farmhouses), close to Rolde, important at the time (now a drowsy village), was Assen.
There, here, we are. On the spot where the penalty was paid, where a town was founded that wouldn’t have existed if…
But if ain’t when, as they say around here.
Guilt and penance, at any rate, that’s what it comes down to.
Yes, here we are, in this gap, in the lee of time.
In the middle of the town, the town in the middle of a landscape that once, long ago, was marked on the map as Trans, but later bore the lofty name of Triantha and even later Drenthe. An area that was but a passage from one inhabited part of the country to another. A spot to be waded through, crossed over, travelled through, forgotten. A spot forgotten by time.
Onwards.
Let’s go onwards.
It’s Friday.
It’s Friday, 27 June 1980. Twelve o’clock. (Or a little later.)
Come.
He had always been nowhere, between events, in the twilight between day and night, or night and day, present yet not present, absent yet not gone. When he looked back on his life, it was as if he saw something yet to begin, an endless preamble, the frozen beginning of a leap into something full, whole and exhilarating. No, here, nowhere, that didn’t disturb him, any more than the earth-silent darkness of the hole had disturbed him, yes, that moment was still fresh in his mind, arriving at night in the, yes, nothing, the nothing of the black night over the black land, as if they had travelled for a long time and now looked around and saw a strange environment with leaden forests, cruel furrows in endless anthracite fields, now and again the reflection of moonlight on rainwater in a furrow. A gloomy fairy tale in which he, sitting in front on the crossbar of his abductor’s bicycle, suddenly felt like a child. Who rides by night through woodland so wild? It is the fond father embracing his child…And he had closed his eyes and heard the rush of the wind in his ears, the soft whirr of the tyres over the stones, and he had felt the cold night air on his face and through his hair and he had known that he really was a child now, or like a child, helplessly entrusted to someone who was bringing him through the cold black night to a place where he might have been protected, or might just as well have become the prey of some evil still unknown…Oh yes, he felt carried, the wind in his hair and the rustling wood around him, then the outstretched void of the road along the canal, the bare fields on the other side of the water, the high moon in the mottled sky, the wind in his hair and his watery eyes, the creaking of the bicycle along the dark path and no more worry that was his worry, his fate in the hands of the one who was taking him with him.
When they were among the trees and the bicycle was hidden under scrub, there was a moment of indecision, a brief pause of time and motion. There was no sound and it was even dark
er than it had been among the fields. And suddenly he had ceased to feel like the child being carried to safety, but was at the mercy of childlike fears that he knew from much longer ago. There was a bare, naked void within him and in his thoughts the image appeared of the night when he had encountered his father and his mother downstairs in the shop, she on her knees, with black stains on her petticoat and her hair in rat’s tails along her face, and his father towering up there tall and black. He had, but only after a short endless time, jerked himself out of the oppressive grip of his father, down the passageway, through the kitchen, up the stairs, into the darkness that hung above the stairs, to his room, and when he was lying in his bed it was as if the warmth and familiarity had been stripped from the den of sheets and blankets, taken away from him. He had rolled up into a ball and listened to the irregular breathing of his little brother, who turned over after a while and began softly moaning. Nothing could be heard downstairs, but he didn’t need a sound to know what was happening there. The night began to stretch out, as he lay there naked and empty in bed, floating in the nothing of the blackness–that was what it felt like, in the nothing–the night grew longer and more stretched out until it was an endless black void, a timeless and formless plain.
In a Dark Wood Page 26
