In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  And somewhere in that swelling night the dark began to curve and the walls, which had slowly loomed up and looked strangely unfamiliar, had become fluid, the wood drooped down from the ceiling, and below, under his bed, the floor surged like a sluggish sea of lava. The chair from which his clothes hung swelled like a toad until it assumed monstrous proportions and heaved its way through the room.

  Yes, that was what he felt like at that indecisive moment, when the bicycle had stopped and they stood in silence for a moment at the edge of the forest. The black tree trunks hung in the black night and when he looked up he saw the faint glitter of the leaves in the crowns and it looked as if the canopy was floating and in the space between the treetops the stars twinkled and it was as if he was underground, as if the flickering points of starlight were little holes in the canvas of an enormous tent, or no, a peepshow, in which he was part of a cut-out, stuck-on picture, the picture that would be called Slaughter in the Forest.

  ‘Come, Noah,’ he had said, the man who had carried him out of the town on the bicycle, whose fluttering coat-tails had flapped around him on the long journey through the darkness.

  ‘Come, let’s go.’

  And everything was reversed. They had walked, slightly bowed, between the trees, twisting and avoiding branches, creeping, but still leaving a trail of rustling leaves and creaking twigs. And the forest had breathed around them, the trees bowed with them and sprang back, and the little crops of stars in the openings of the leaf canopy slid above them and the further they got in the forest, the stranger the world became, faces staring from the undergrowth, figures turning into tree trunks, a staring buck with curved horns changing into a bundle of dead branches.

  On a small open spot, where a glittering mountain of holly sat like a hood above a foxhole, they paused. They had been walking for almost half an hour and not a word had been spoken. They had, as they hurried through the darkness, changed into two animals on a silent foray.

  Beyond the bushes the forest floor sloped steeply down into a ditch full of dry leaves. The man stuck his hand into a bush of dry branches and swept open a gap where the branches seemed to be tied firmly together. He looked round and moved his head with a sideways gesture. Jacob Noah entered a deep darkness that welcomed him with the strong smell of earth and humus.

  He was where he belonged. He was nowhere. He was where everything was nothing.

  The shop was dark and it was quiet. Jacob Noah couldn’t even hear his own breathing. Outside, he knew, there must be the noise of The Night, the drinking and fighting, the slurring, the running through the streets, but even that didn’t get through to here. He had long ceased to be surprised by it and he didn’t care any more either. He sat in the darkness and let it all just wash ashore, the thoughts and images, the memories and absurdities, as if he were an island uncomplainingly letting the dark tide lap at his coastline. Hadn’t he sat like that too, the night he had come back from his hole, hadn’t he seen, on a…He’d seen the universe, and the stars, the everything and everywhere in the palm of his hand. And the nights in his bed, staring hollow-eyed into the nothing, waiting for the noise to come back into the house, but it would never come back and he knew that, even if he sat there until the end of time. Those nights when he hurried through the bible-black darkness to the station to wait for a train that didn’t come (to pick someone up or be picked up, he suddenly wondered now), all those nights, his whole life. That night when he finally took his daughters along, after they had spent the whole week nagging about going into town on Friday, the night before the races…He hadn’t gone down without a fight, but he had also remembered them standing at the window on one such night before, with a fixed smile on his face, and what Bracha had said then, her weary ‘yes, now we know, papa’ and what he had thought then, and he had thrown up an ironic barrier when the begging didn’t stop and said that they could only go out if he could be spared a whole week of that record that they’d been playing every day for almost a month now, which was received with an indignant intake of breath. No Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? No With a Little Help from my Friends? It had been a joke, a silly little joke, he really quite liked the music, but they had taken it seriously and left the black disc in peace for a whole week, grinding their teeth but resolute nonetheless, and when Friday came, 29 June, at breakfast they insisted on their reward and because he was not a man to renege on a promise made earlier, even if he had reservations that made him uneasy, that evening after dinner he took Aphra by his left hand, Bracha by his right, and walked outside with them.

  It had been a mild, dry evening and the biker crowd moved like a slow, friendly animal along the festively illuminated streets, as it had said in one of the girls’ dictations. Somewhere slides of the TT races were being shown. People were walking around drinking beer. Aphra pointed at the many flattened green cans lying in the street, as if an enormous dragon had lost its scales, and he told them that beer in bottles had been forbidden this year because last year so many bottles had been smashed that the whole town centre was scattered with shards. It was 1967 and cans of drink were still a relatively new phenomenon. He had to keep Bracha from picking up one of the flat cans.

  They walked in a little circle through the narrow streets of the centre. The evening dusk hung between the shops, even though there were party lights stretched across the street, a river of little lights flowing over their heads. They drifted slowly along with the grey people in their black motorcycle suits and dark clothes, a leaden procession that pressed its way with difficulty through the narrow streets.

  His daughters looked round, wide-eyed, even though there wasn’t much to see but the strolling crowds and the strings of light bulbs and here and there a shop window decorated with photographs of riders and bikes taking a bend almost flat on the tarmac. They stopped by a stall where white straw hats with the letters ‘TT’ were being sold, but the crowd was pushing so hard that Noah took his daughters more firmly by the hand and dragged them along through the ever denser crowds in the darkness. The girls huddled closer to him and gripped his hands. Near the Brink they had a moment to catch their breath. Noah followed Aphra’s eye, looking up over his shoulder. There, he saw when he turned round, the topmost bit of the Ferris wheel could just be seen.

  ‘The fairground?’ he said.

  They laughed delightedly, the excitement of peppermint sticks, candyfloss, lights and chair-o-planes, the big wheel and the shooting gallery and the fortune-teller already visible in their eyes.

  In the years that followed the image of him and his two daughters at the fair would be like an anchor in his memory. They would be tumultuous years, the years that followed, a time of revolution and change, of revolt and big plans for building in the town, the years in which his daughters became young women, came home with their first boyfriends and walked round town in skirts that were far too short, or in long, fluttering robes, he would see them in photographs in the newspaper, grouped around locally or regionally famous pop musicians, long-haired, surly young men who looked as if they hadn’t slept for a week. They were always together, Aphra and Bracha, Noah’s wild girls, as the town called them. They stood side by side in the little band demonstrating against the American presence in Vietnam, together they carried a banner calling for the establishment of a youth centre, they stood arm in arm in the wings at a performance by Cuby and the Blizzards. These were the years when he saw them as if from a distance, sometimes as if through a mist, visible but far away, almost touchable but always just out of reach. He lost them during those years and he knew without thinking, without really knowing, that there was nothing to be done because he was losing them to the times. If Chaja hadn’t been there, always by his side, serious and silent, he wouldn’t have been able to give his two eldest daughters the freedom that they clearly needed. Chaja was his cornerstone, she was the sacrifice of bondage required for the freedom of her sisters, although she herself probably didn’t see it like that, because nothing in her suggested that she yea
rned for the ‘wild life’ of her sisters. Sometimes, when he looked at her, when she was doing her homework, and later when she did the accounting in his office, he wondered who she looked like. Her seriousness was a new phenomenon in the family. Only much later, when it was too late, did he understand that she had inherited her purposeful devotion from his mother, the grandmother she had never known. In her Jacob Noah saw the ghost of his mother and how she had, with her self-sacrifice and perseverance, helped the shoe shop out of the morass. Baroness von Münchhausen…

  Although their lives would change radically after that evening and they would all go their own way, the girls upwards, into the hills, Jacob Noah downwards, further into the valley, the funfair would stay with them all. At crucial moments Noah would always see his daughters’ faces as he had seen them that evening, eyes glittering in the multicoloured party lights, cheeks aglow with excitement, hair whipping in the wind of the chair-o-plane and the Thunderbird. He would see them come giddy and laughing through the fence by the big wheel, gripping one another tightly by the elbow, all joy and life and vitality and…

  Happiness, he would later think. If he had done anything good in his life, it was that he had provided happiness that evening. Wherever they should find themselves later on, wherever he should come upon them, whatever stories he should hear about them in this godforsaken, narrow-minded place, where a frivolous glance was enough to condemn someone to unnameability, whatever: he had created a brief moment of happiness for them. And they, although he would never know, because after all it is the fate of parents not to know such things, they would think back to that evening in those moments when their lives had reached a dead end, when they were far away, sitting alone in a corner and grieving over a man, a job in which they were unhappy or just over life itself, they would see themselves again, sitting high up in the spinning seat of a ride, looking down on the already balding head of their father, the small but stout figure of Jacob Noah, terror of the town, smiling encouragingly far below.

  They began to walk back, later that evening, blissful and content, and even by the time they approached the shopping streets in the centre the mood seemed to have turned. Beer cans sailed through the strings of lights stretched above the streets and every time a bulb was hit the cheers rolled through the crowd with the thundering noise of an approaching train. A scooter shot into the crowd, people leapt aside, a Fiat 500 came after it. More beer cans followed and more bulbs exploded. Even where they were standing, a hundred metres away, they could feel the tension of a crowd aware that the surf of its excitement could at any moment become a tidal wave. Noah, with his daughters, was less than two minutes from the safe haven of the house when the police arrived and the crowd began to surge. He clutched his daughters by their wrists, so that he could hold them even more tightly, and pulled them to a doorway. Before they got there, the cans started raining down. A barrage of projectiles shot through the air, in the direction of the police. A roar rose up and turned into a cheer. In the middle of the street a small fire erupted. Someone ran over and kicked the flames. Sparks spat all around, and a burning piece of wood sailed across the street. Jacob Noah pushed his daughters into the doorway and went and stood in front of them. He made himself as wide and as tall as possible. A few bulbs were hit on the string of lights from the doorway to the other side of the street and it suddenly got a bit darker and in the sudden darkness the first line of policemen advanced with truncheons drawn. A group of youths ran towards them, came to a stop in front of Noah and his daughters, and started throwing beer cans, chunks of paving stone and empty bottles. On their way back to the big group the men shouted something indistinct. A few looked around wildly, but didn’t seem to say anything. In the faint light of a shop window Noah saw their contorted faces, as if they were kneaded from clay, and the eyes in those half-kneaded faces were empty. As if only corpses were running now, organisms acting according to a deep instinct, without thoughts. A phrase came into his head: the hunt has begun.

  When the police and the rioters met, it happened not far from the doorway where Jacob Noah and his two daughters were sheltering. The clash unleashed an explosion of shouts and curses. Police whistles shrilled, pale faces flared up in the darkness. Truncheons were raised, cans, stones and wood sailed in an arc through the air. Noah felt his daughters pushing past him. He spread his arms and held them back.

  In front of them, in the middle of the street, in the gap between the two warring parties, a fight broke out between two men with white TT hats. The tinkle of glass rang out. A cheer. Suddenly more people were fighting and in the mêlée Noah saw someone lying on the ground, while someone else kicked his head with a biker boot.

  ‘Stop!’ called Noah from the shelter of his doorway, but his voice dissolved in the hubbub. The boot disappeared and came back again, very slowly it seemed, and swung inevitably at the skull of the man lying there with his eyes closed on the cobblestones.

  Thump.

  Noah was sure that he couldn’t be hearing what he heard, but he did hear it. He saw the jerk with which the head shot forward and sprung back, the quiver of the flesh in the face, the hair growing darker.

  ‘Stop! In God’s name…’

  He wanted to throw himself forward, but now it was his daughters’ hands that held him back.

  Sirens sounded. Boots ran all around. Light shot over leather suits and bounced off helmets.

  He had seen that before. A long time ago he had seen something like that. But where? When?

  The space of the fighting men was filled, there was pulling and jerking and then the tide withdrew and someone came running into the space created. He darted into the doorway and crashed into Noah. In the darkness–almost all the party lights had now been smashed–it was a moment before they recognised one another. The man nodded and gasped for breath.

  ‘Noah…’

  ‘Faber.’

  They looked at each other for a moment, before turning their eyes to the street, where some sort of cat-and-mouse game was now going on. The police surged forward and forced the crowd back and when they had advanced about twenty metres, something suddenly came flying through the air, stone, tin, wood, it could have been anything, and then their opponents stormed forward and the police retreated, defending themselves with their truncheons.

  ‘Dear, dear,’ said the man called Faber.

  Noah nodded. He was still holding his daughters behind him with his slightly spread arms.

  ‘I think in Amsterdam they call them “yobs”.’

  ‘I can think of a few other names,’ said Noah.

  ‘Fascists!’ yelled a youth in glasses at a policeman who caught him with his truncheon.

  Faber looked sideways. ‘Not that,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Noah frowned. ‘No, probably not.’

  The fighting started to shift in fits and starts, like a many-legged, many-headed monster trying to twist and wriggle its way out of the confines of the street.

  ‘I think it’s safe to go,’ said Faber.

  Noah took his daughters by the hand and pushed them forward. ‘Shake this gentleman’s hand, girls.’ They smiled wanly and did as they were told.

  Faber in turn extended his hand to Noah and nodded to him. ‘Safe journey home,’ he said.

  On the way, as they hurried through the dark street, Bracha asked who that man was and why they had had to shake his hand so demonstratively. Noah glanced around and pulled them onwards. Only when they were at the door, breathless from running and standing still (when another yelling troop came running down the street), did he answer her question.

  ‘Mr Faber,’ he said, ‘rescued me twenty-five years ago, twenty-five years ago, when the scum was also spilling down the streets. I sat here at home waiting, everyone was dragged away, and he came to get me, not to take me to the station, like the others, but to a hole in the ground.’

  The girls stared at him in bafflement. He had never told them about his rescue, the war, he had never talked about anything at all, ev
en if they asked him to, once even appealing to their right to know about their family history. And even now, in the dark stairwell of the house from which he was rescued twenty-five years ago by the man who had just been thrown into their place of refuge by the violence in the street, he wouldn’t tell them anything. Even when Aphra and Bracha said ‘but’ and ‘how’ and ‘what’, he strode upstairs, taking his daughters with him, and put them unceremoniously to bed.

  His wife was already asleep when they got home and when the girls had gone into their room and he had heard the familiar sounds of teeth being polished and a visit to the toilet and it was peaceful, he sat down in the sitting room, a glass of whisky in his hand, and looked through the window at the damaged party lights that burned in the still noisy shopping streets. The irregularly spaced light bulbs looked like stars spread out in long, irregular patterns. He drank and thought about the man they had met, and that he should have met him this evening of all times, that in his hour of need he had been visited once again by the same unexpected saviour. A feeling of helplessness and guilt–yes, it was as if those two somehow formed one feeling–filled him.

  Here he sat, a man with a family, with property, with a life, but helpless and guilty and in no state to shake off his helplessness and assuage his guilt. Once he had gone with a new black bicycle to the farmer on whose land he had lived in a hole, the man who had fed and sheltered him. With his heart overflowing he had ridden that bicycle into the canal. He had married the farmer’s daughter. By way of atonement? Because of the bicycle? Or had he really, there in Farmer Ferwerda’s best room, opted for the full life and taken the prettiest girl in the village, Jetty with her swaying hips? Or was it different again and he had wanted to have in her everything that he was not, because by fucking her he was fucking the whole world, the world that made him feel guilty, guilty about his guilt and guilty about existing?

  He got up for a fresh glass and went and stood at the black window. He didn’t know if it came from tonight’s events, feeling at once naked and filled with resentment, but it wouldn’t have surprised him.