How long was it since he and Jetty had…
He grinned disapprovingly into the darkness and knew how long ago it was.
Something in him, he felt it strongly tonight, something like a well that had been struck and now surged unstoppably through the layers of the earth, something in him wanted to take a woman, wholly take her, not fuck her so much, no, take, have, subjugate, lying at his feet begging for more. He didn’t have the faintest idea what he meant by that, what it would look like, let alone know why he thought it.
He remembered something from long ago, something to do with that night’s violence and the confusion of emotions spinning within him.
It had been Amsterdam, long ago, when he lived there and his parents were still here, it was during the first raid to round up the Jews, or one of the first, when he looked out of the barred window of the cellar into which a stranger had pulled him. Half underground, staring through the dusty window, he had seen boots coming past, light gleaming on leather, and muffled sounds had come in from the twilight outside, shouted orders, something heavy that had clattered on the pavement and provoked laughter. He had, safe and hidden, felt the weight of the stranger’s hand on his upper arm and struggled with the urge to run outside and be part of what was happening there and at the same time he was aware of having been saved. That day, there in the cellar, he had finally worked out that all this would not end, that it wasn’t just here, where he seemed to be rescued for the time being, but everywhere, even far away in the north where his parents and his brother were. It was a realisation that made him so uneasy that he wanted to set off the next day. But he couldn’t: he still had things to do and if he went up into the street he would be picked up. So he stayed in Amsterdam and listened to the footsteps of Paula, his host’s daughter, pacing back and forth in her bedroom.
Perhaps he had stayed mostly for her, for the times when he went downstairs as she was coming upstairs and they passed at the bend in the long staircase.
She had a suitor, whom he saw sometimes when they were getting ready to go to church on Sunday morning: he in his ill-fitting suit, she in a long black dress that gave her the appearance of a prim schoolmistress. His host, the widow Kellerman, sat in the front room on days like that, staring at the dead Koninginneweg and waiting for Jacob Noah to come downstairs to have morning coffee with her.
Sunday coffee was at least as much of a ritual as the Mass that Paula and her silent companion attended. It was never mentioned, but slowly he had come to keep the old lady company when her daughter went to church. Then he was poured a cup of coffee and they sat together by the window in the flower-patterned armchairs watching the city come to life. There was something comforting about this Sunday ritual, something permanent. As he sat there in his chair looking down with his host at the wide street below the house, Jacob Noah had a strong sense of ‘being somewhere’, as if just by sitting in silence he became part of a community, almost as much as when he had joined in the silent procession to church.
He had come to the widow Kellerman via her brother-in-law. Since studying had become impossible because of the restrictions and he couldn’t face going home to the parental house (in Assen, a place to which at night he sometimes dreamed he was being forced to return, leaving Amsterdam and the anonymous temptations of the big city behind him) he had sought a way of being able to stay. Via a nephew of his father’s, who worked in fabrics, he came into contact with one of his customers, Kellerman, who sold corsets and other kinds of women’s underwear and could use someone who would carry out repairs behind the shop. In what was rather grandly called ‘the studio’, but was nothing more than a little shed under a wired glass sawtooth roof overgrown with algae, Jacob Noah mended bras, supplying them with hooks, eyes and straps, and stuffed endless quantities of whalebones into corsets.
He was a young man and his knowledge of the female body was limited to the few times that he had caught a glimpse of his mother and the shapes that he could discern under the many concealing clothes that women wore in those days. Nonetheless, there had been brief confusion when Kellerman threw the first corset onto the sewing table. It was a flesh-coloured shell with a minimum of lace and pipes and cups the size of a quarter of a football. He had gulped, hoping at least that he wasn’t visibly blushing, and listened to the explanation that his boss gave to him.
His youth in the cobbler’s shop was just what was needed. He handled the crooked needle as if he had never done anything else, managed to his own surprise to remember a large number of stitches and drew pleasure from the technique of the fabric armour.
When Kellerman came later that morning to see how the new mender was getting on, he was content. ‘Nice work,’ he said approvingly. ‘Now do it a little faster, Noah.’
And he had got faster and faster and better and better. Behind the shop, in the greenish light that fell through the overgrown window, surrounded by boxes of second-hand clothes, hooks, eyes, needles and spools of thread, he had felt more and more at home. There was a visible, real world, the world in which women wiggled into bras and corsets and suspender belts, the world in which SS boots gleamed in the daylight, and there was his world, behind the shop, behind reality, the place where, in a strange light, he repaired the empty shells in which the women had been, the armour that was still almost warm from their bodies. It was a world in which he felt at home. Here he could be nothing, the invisible man who made whole what was broken, the Spinoza of ladies’ underwear.
And then one day a parcel wrapped in brown paper had come. It was left on the end of his table, and only towards the end of the afternoon, when he had done all his other work, did he draw it to him, unfold the rustling paper and grow dizzy from the heavy floral smell that rose up from the black corset, embroidered with red roses, that lay before him.
The rule was that only washed goods were repaired, but that afternoon it didn’t occur to him to make any remarks about that. He ran the black brocade through his fingers. He was a breath away from pressing his face into the fabric to take a deep breath of the perfume that rose up from it.
On the letter pinned to the paper it said that two whalebones and one of the eyes had to be replaced. Although it was nearly five o’clock, he immediately set to work. Only stopped when Kellerman came to close the shop.
‘It does me good to see that you’re so dedicated, Noah,’ he said. ‘And certainly when it concerns something that belongs to my dear niece. But now it’s time to go. This can wait until tomorrow.’
Kellerman’s niece? When Jacob Noah walked to his room that evening, bent low over the star on his jacket, he tried to imagine that niece. He couldn’t quite manage it. Not even when he dreamt that night of faceless women rolling over his bed in their black corsets embroidered with roses, staring mockingly over their naked shoulders, still just out of reach of his outstretched hands.
The following day, having overslept, he rushed out of the house without breakfast, but was stopped in the hall. It was his landlady, telling him with much hand-wringing but unrelentingly nonetheless, that he had to leave very quickly. Jacob Noah stood with the doorknob in his hand. ‘You know how it is, Mr Noah. It isn’t about you. But the neighbours are talking. And that star…It would kill me if they came in the night to take you away. My heart. I have a weak heart, you must understand. I really have to ask you…’
And he had nodded blankly at her. He understood. He understood everything.
He walked through the mild June morning with his jacket over his arm. Of course he would have to go home. He had wanted to go back for ages. It was probably more dangerous here than in Assen. His jacket so high over his arm that the star on his chest was covered by it…
As if anyone wouldn’t recognise him for the Jew that he was.
Why was he what he was? Why hadn’t he been born two doors further along? Why was this what chance decreed: that he should come into the world in a family that brought him nothing but danger and fate? He could have been called Jan Jansen, a God-fearing Protesta
nt, or a laconic Catholic. Why wasn’t he ‘ordinary’?
In the studio he dutifully completed the work on Kellerman’s niece’s corset. Although the dark scent of flowers still coiled into his nostrils, the excitement had vanished. When he had pushed in and fastened the last whalebone, he sat there ashamed to look at it even for a moment, the thing that had kept him tossing and turning in bed the previous night, when he could have been picked up at any moment, taken away to the east, to God knows what and his mother, his brother, his father…
A wave of self-contempt welled up so powerfully that he sat up and had to take deep breaths to quell his revulsion and keep from choking.
The day drifted sluggishly by. Light crept over the algae-covered roof. When he emerged from his studio at half past five, a young woman was standing in the shop, listening to what seemed to be an apparently penetrating argument from Kellerman.
‘Ah, Noah,’ said the boss when he had noticed him. ‘My niece has just arrived to collect her repairs. Are you ready?’
The woman raised her head slightly, their eyes met. Jacob Noah nodded curtly and hurried back to the studio. There, with the wrapped-up corset in his hands, he stood taking deep breaths. Her eyes! The dark hair, so tightly bound…He pressed the parcel to his belly and bent over as if to protect it. He closed his eyes to stave off the turmoil within him, but was assailed immediately by looping images of a disturbingly lascivious nature.
What was it about this woman that he could only see her writhing, constricted in her corset, creeping towards him, her panting mouth open, her tongue licking along her lips? What was up with him?
He straightened, coughed, blinked and walked back to the shop.
There stood Kellerman and his niece, still talking. She looked at her uncle seriously but vacantly. Jacob Noah set the parcel on the corner of the counter and attempted a cautious smile.
‘There you are, Paula,’ said Kellerman. He took the parcel and handed it to the young woman. ‘See what magic our conjuror has accomplished.’
Paula Kellerman received the parcel, let her eyes slide to Noah and opened the paper without averting her gaze. She gave the paper to her uncle and held the corset up to inspect it. She held it high in front of her, between her own face and her uncle’s, and from behind the corset she looked at Noah with her serious face. She didn’t so much as glance at the garment, her eyes didn’t let him go. Then, after what seemed a very long time, but doubtless was not, she folded the corset, laid it in the paper that Kellerman held up, nodded to Noah, put her hand in her uncle’s, smiled faintly and left without a word.
The shop doorbell rang and Noah was aware that he was releasing the breath he had kept in for so long. He wondered if Kellerman had heard him.
‘So,’ said Kellerman. ‘I assume it’s been approved. See you tomorrow, Noah.’
‘I have to leave the city,’ Noah said hastily. He hadn’t prepared for it, he hadn’t even planned it, but suddenly the words came rolling out of his mouth.
‘Leave?’ Kellerman frowned.
‘My landlady has cancelled my rental agreement and it’s got too dangerous here in Amsterdam. The raids…And…’
‘Cancelled your rental agreement…’ Kellerman closed his eyes and rubbed his chin with his right hand. ‘If you want to leave, then you must go. But I think my sister still has room for a tenant. It’ll cost a pittance as long as you keep her company now and again. But I understand if you want to go. These are difficult times, Noah.’
‘Your sister?’
Kellerman nodded. ‘Paula’s mother. She’s a widow and doesn’t get out much these days. As far as I know she has a decent room standing empty.’
He wanted to shake his head. He wanted to say that he had to get to his parents and his brother, to that hole in the ground in the north, where he would die of boredom and bourgeois good manners if the Germans didn’t come and get him.
‘Thank you,’ he said weakly.
And as he said it, another, shameful voice sounded in him, a voice asking why he had done what he had just done. Wasn’t he going to leave? Because his parents…And now he was staying? Because of the promise of her black corset embroidered with red roses? Because of Paula Kellerman? Whom he didn’t know…Because of…lust?
So, because he wanted to avoid the burden of the parental home and the city he came from, because he let his lust take him over, he moved into the home of the widow Kellerman. Rather than looking after his parents he now looked after Paula’s mother, kept her company on Sundays when her daughter went to church with her fiancé, and on weekdays he often paid her a visit after he had come home and partaken of his sober dinner in his sober room. He was an ideal son for a woman who was not his mother.
He seldom saw Paula. She seemed to have a special talent for coming home when he wasn’t there, and when he was there moving along the dark passageways without him hearing her. He seldom saw her, but she was often there. The thought of her proximity, the heels that he heard walking across the floor in the room next to him (he did hear her then, when she was unapproachable, invisible), it was all enough to have him waking at night from a whirl of obscene images.
The long summer of 1942 passed slowly. Beneath the greenish roof of the studio where he did his repairs it grew cooler and darker. September came, a mild September when the sun shone abundantly. During the last days of the month autumn announced itself with heavy downpours. Through one of those showers Jacob Noah was taken by surprise when he returned to Koninginneweg at the end of a long day under his glass roof. He was sheltering in a doorway with a few others when Paula came running out of the grey curtains of rain. She was holding a clutch bag over her head, but that clearly hadn’t been enough: her white blouse was soaked, the linen stuck to her skin, and fine drops pearled in her pinned-up hair. Her last few steps to the doorway, half running, seemed to be in infinitely slow motion. He saw her slender ankle below her long skirt, the splashing droplets that seemed to hang above the wet stones, the tip of her knee opening the pleat of her skirt, the curve of her hip and above it her jutting, raised shoulder, the grey arc of the falling water in front of her face and the dampness that glistened on her cheeks and made her mouth wet and sensual, the dark lashes in front of her downcast eyes. He saw everything and it went on for hours.
Then she fell into the little cluster of sheltering people, she plunged down like a wounded bird, and Jacob Noah stuck his arms out, caught her before she fell, helped her up, saw her when she looked up and straightened, looked away, looked back, nodded and then said, ‘Thank you.’
Then she turned round and stared, like the others, at the violence with which the raindrops were clattering onto the street, the pools of water spreading like wings as a German vehicle cruised along in the direction of Museumplein. He watched her back, the white linen stuck between her shoulder blades, revealing the delicate dotted line of her spine. His hand was already reaching out when he stopped, closed his eyes and concentrated on the gritting of his teeth. He sniffed in the smell of the rain, the smell of the wet pavement, the steam of wet clothes. He tilted back his head and looked at the vaulted ceiling of the doorway.
The rainstorm gradually passed away and the bravest among them ventured onto the street, bags held over their heads, hurrying in the lee of the house-fronts. There were four people left when she stepped down, just one step, turned round, glanced at him and set off down the street.
He followed her at a distance of four or five paces. Not because he didn’t dare catch up with her, but because he knew, knew for the first time, that he represented danger for her. No, she wasn’t Jewish, she had no star, but what would happen if they walked side by side and he was arrested? He was protecting her by keeping his distance, by not being with her. His self-control was his sacrifice.
As they walked like that over the wet stones of Koninginneweg he knew that she sensed him behind her. He wondered whether she understood why he didn’t just walk up to her, and as he was wondering that it was as if her back, where the
material still stuck between her shoulder blades, was talking to him, saying that she knew full well, that she understood.
He let the distance between them grow as they approached the house and had not expected that he would meet her inside. But in the hall, where he saw drops of water lying on the granite, a trail that led glistening to the door of the front room, he raised his head and saw her standing silent and straight in the half-light: feet side by side, hands folded in front of her, a face at once empty and full of meaning. He looked at her and something in him refused any movement, any signal. He stood and looked. There was something in her eyes that asked for his attention, that sucked his entire being towards her. But he didn’t move. She lowered her head and stood there for a while like that. Then she nodded. She turned round and climbed the stairs.
It was a while before he added his own drops to hers and a second trail led through the hall, a trail that flowed together with hers behind him, and as he climbed the stairs, the tall stairs that disappeared into the shadows at the very top, he didn’t know if he would see her there now, on the landing outside her bedroom, perhaps through the open bathroom door as she dried her hair at the mirror.
His jacket was heavy with damp. It seemed as if the weight of his whole life pulled on him as he went upstairs. He felt that he was growing older with each step, not in years, not because his body was becoming weaker and wearier. No, it was the knowledge of the world that made his legs heavy and his heart slow. That upward journey, a whisper said in his head, that slow hunt for the constantly vanishing shade of Paula Kellerman, seemed burdened with the weight of what he had seen: the raids, the boots, the people gathering with their rucksacks to travel away. The violence around him and the lust within him had become one.
When he had reached the top step, the landing was empty, but the early-evening light chinked through the open door of Paula Kellerman’s bedroom. He stood still, his wet jacket heavy and stiff as sackcloth around his shoulders, his head slightly bowed, as if he was thinking or looking for something. No sound came from the bedroom with the open door. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and took a step forward. It was just a few steps to Paula Kellerman’s bedroom, but Jacob Noah heard his shoes coming down with almost ominous threat on the wooden floor. Thump. Thump. Thump. What must it sound like inside, that menacing, slow step? He tried to make the last two footsteps lighter, but because creeping struck him as even worse, his footfall wasn’t quite right, and his hesitant, stalling step was now more like the gait of a man with a wooden leg.
In a Dark Wood Page 28
