In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  He stopped by the doorway, and what he saw surprised him so much that he felt himself literally recoiling.

  Not far behind the door, beside the bed that stood along the wall and rose beneath its dark red and black floral bedspread like a catafalque from the floor, Paula Kellerman knelt, bent so far forward that her brow touched the linoleum.

  Jacob Noah looked around involuntarily, as if he wanted to check that no one had seen him standing there spying on something so peculiar. When his eye settled once more upon the kneeling figure that seemed almost to want to become one with the floor and that seemed to be run through with a slight shiver, he shook himself from his almost catatonic stillness and hurried to his bedroom, this time silent and light, as if flight made him fleeting.

  That evening, sitting at his little desk in the dark bedroom, he stared at the black city. It was silent and in the silence he heard a rustling in his ears, as if ghostly voices were whispering almost incomprehensible sentences.

  He didn’t sit there for long. Before midnight, in his stockinged feet, so as not to wake anyone in the house, he pulled his suitcase out from under his bed, opened the wardrobe in which his few clothes hung and started packing.

  The next morning, before the house had woken, Jacob Noah dragged his black case along the grey silence of Koninginneweg. It was still barely light. A grey veil of hesitant morning mist hung over the city that he was leaving for a dangerous journey north, where a future at least as dangerous awaited him. He didn’t know, he reflected in the train, as Amsterdam station disappeared behind him and the city gradually made way for the country, what the future held in store for him. He didn’t even know if he was interested. All that he had wanted he was leaving behind: the city, all the people, the wide streets, the lights which in the evening, though that was before the war, burned on Leidseplein and Rembrandtplein, the ice-cream parlours, the university. He was leaving behind him the life that he had planned for himself, and most of all he was leaving Paula Kellerman.

  On the little desk in his bedroom he had left a page from his diary, under the money that he owed in rent for that month and the next. There were only a few words on the page, but even if he had left a whole book he wouldn’t have been able to explain how sorry he was about everything.

  The morning sun shone through the train windows and in the warmth of the early light Jacob Noah sank slowly away, but he wasn’t asleep yet. The space between waking and sleeping became an image inside him, the almost tangible image of a sharp edge on which he stood. Around him there was steel-hard, clear blue sky, a space that was as big and hollow and empty as an enormous dome. A metallic taste seemed to fill not only his mouth, but his whole head. So, as he balanced between waking and sleeping, with the autumnal morning light coming through the dusty windows, painfully aware of his exhaustion and reluctance to fall into a deep sleep, the image loomed once more of the stairs he had climbed the evening before, the landing and the open door, and what he had seen through the opening. And suddenly he saw with unexpected sharpness what he had seen the evening before but at the same time hadn’t seen.

  He jerked upright.

  Paula Kellerman, kneeling beside her bed, had not been kneeling like that because she was…praying.

  Her hands had been behind her back.

  What had Paula Kellerman been doing there? What punishment was she forcing herself to undergo? Why? What for?

  He remembered all those visits to church on Sunday, when she had come into the drawing room to say hello to her mother and her fiancé had stood waiting, sombre and stiff, in the doorway. Clothed entirely in black, in a long, close-fitting frock, a tiny hat with a black veil and her hair in a bun, that was how she had looked. So incredibly proper that his reaction made his heart pound. And when they then, more than an hour later, came back, she always came into the room and thanked him by putting her black-lace-gloved hand in his and nodding to him.

  In Utrecht station it grew dark in the train. He stared out of the window, at the almost empty platforms which, in the dusk of the roof, looked like a menacing kind of peepshow. The train pulled away again, in the other direction, and Jacob Noah closed his weary eyes.

  Paula Kellerman…so proper and pious that she chastised herself by kneeling low next to her bed, with her hands behind her back, so shyly dressed in black, with her pillbox hat and her gloves…In that strictly Catholic young woman he had been chasing an image that escaped him like a mirage and he had almost, last night, made the mistake of acting on his illusions. The shame would have been infinite, the situation unimaginably painful.

  He had resolved never to make such a mistake again, the better to understand what the other world, the world of the Christians, thought and believed and felt. He would have to read what they read, their Bible, and he would have to penetrate deep into their spirit. Now he was in the prison of the war, in which his bars were the yellow stars on his coat and jacket, but if this war was ever over he must not find himself in that other prison, locked up in his own world, in which most of the people he knew were Jews like himself, spoke his language and understood his idiosyncrasies. He would have to be able to be everything, get on with everyone, have an ear like before the confusion of tongues.

  When he woke up, much later, they were passing through the empty Drenthe landscape. The high sky above heathland alternated with the dark strip of a distant forest rim here and there. Had he been asleep all that time? Had no conductor come through? Or had he, seeing him deeply asleep and sunk down in the collar of his jacket, passed him by? Hoogeveen came along and, after a while, Beilen. He stood up, took his suitcase and headed for the balcony. The sense of space, emptiness and that hard sharp edge on which he balanced still hadn’t disappeared. It was as if he wasn’t there, as if his body was moving in one space and his mind was somewhere else.

  And so he sleepwalked from the station to the shop, down the quiet streets of the village that was a city, hunched over the ornament on his coat, like a man protecting a jewel with his body. And in the shop he had found emptiness, in the…among the…no: in the piles of rubbish in the shop, the paper and the empty shoeboxes and the scraps of posters, at his feet a yellowish piece of paper, as of 2 April 1942 it is forbidden to buy from Jews, and he saw the fine layer of dust that lay over everything, like mildew over an apple, as if corruption, decay, was already inside everything and had needed only a good opportunity, or time, to force its way out through the skin and settle. His eye had developed microscopic precision. He no longer saw in a glance, but centimetre by centimetre.

  The chinks between the floorboards.

  A knot in the wood that looked like a whirlpool.

  The shadow that the curled corner of a piece of paper cast under itself.

  The tip of his shoe and in the gleam of the tip the vague image of the man bending over it.

  The lines in the palm of his hand, which already looked like the wrinkles he would get.

  It was as if everything was time, as if everything bore time within it and let it go when the right conditions had been reached. His hand…Jacob Noah, 23 years old, that hand. But also the hand of the old man he would become. The paper on the floor…It was yellow before it was yellowed.

  Always is now, he thought.

  And: now is always.

  He had sat there and sat there, staring in fascination at the microscopic details of the world, with a hallucinatory awareness of what lay beneath the surface of things: decay, corruption, time, the nervous underworld of atoms. And the light disappeared from the windows and it grew dark and night fell and while it first grew grey and colourless around him and then a shadow-play of blue and black silhouettes, his gaze shifted from the broken inventories and the paper ice floes on the floor and the word drawn in white chalk on the big shop window

  and turned inwards to where the lymph flowed, the sluggish blood pulsed, his liver lay quivering wet and purple in his abdominal cavity and his lungs vibrated. A vat of pus and corruption and slime. A bag full of dung and bones.
A porcelain pot of thoughts, too trivial to analyse. He sat on his chair, elbows resting on his thighs, wincing with the pain in his belly, drooling like an old cart dog, and then suddenly the door opened and there, in the faintly lit rectangle, stood the figure of a tall young man.

  ‘Go away,’ said Jacob Noah.

  ‘Is this your shop?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Listen,’ said the man, ‘there isn’t much time.’

  ‘It’s already over.’

  But the man had come in, had grabbed him by the arm and fought his resistance, arm in arm now, with even a hand on his mouth to force him to be quiet, he had dragged him along, into the darkness, to two other men who stood there with bicycles and bound a gag over his mouth and put a cloth over his eyes and he was led between them, blind and mute, already surrendering to the idea that he too would now…

  Four or five hours later, in a pitch-black night, he sat by the faint glow of an oil lamp in a hole under the ground, like a mole in a hole, an animal like other animals, but for the time being not led to the slaughter. No, saved.

  Chaja, for whom the world consists of numbers, who once, long ago, came running to her father with a cup and saucer and said ‘seventeen’. (After which Jacob Noah fretted for seven days before he reached an answer–seventeen steps, seventeen times the tinkle of a cup on the saucer, seventeen chances of an accident–and he had thought: she’s one of those, then.)

  Chaja, who when her sisters went to middle school and dragged themselves with ostentatious dislike through their test papers, read their textbooks as if they were Winnie the Pooh and when she herself started middle school helped her sisters when they faced a difficult test paper or exam.

  Chaja, who leaned on Jacob Noah’s shoulder as he sat at the dinner table with the ledger and cash book and a headache from balancing the entries, and pointed with her slender finger at a mistake, a sum that had to be moved, some interest that threatened to disappear into a teeming anthill of figures.

  Chaja, who lived in an empty, white bedroom with books in alphabetical order, the bed always strictly made, her sole distraction a chessboard showing a problem, while her sisters, all fishnets and incense, swooned over the posters of pop stars pinned onto their bedroom walls.

  Chaja, who barely spoke, in stark contrast to her sisters, who were a great big noise, in whom everything was language, for whom what they thought, felt or fantasised lay so close to the surface that there seemed to be no point keeping it in, while she just looked, saw and considered, and most of the time it was barely possible to tell if something had got through to her, leading Aphra to say that she only opened her mouth to eat (which she barely seemed to do) or to breathe and if there was no other option spoke and even then usually produced a number.

  Chaja, who had already gone through the library, with her double reader’s pass, a girl of figures and letters, but with a heart that beat to the rhythm of the books that she read and a head that could at the same time make something of the number 310421.

  She hasn’t been standing at the kitchen window in Kat’s house for some time now. It’s quiet in the courtyard. Fred and Isaac came back after their attempt to catch Marcus and not long after that Fred and Li Mei went home (the baby…). Isaac and Ella are now sitting talking in the kitchen. Kat has wrapped herself up in an old sleeping bag, and is lying back on the garden bench with a glass of wine that she’s trying to balance on her breastbone, staring at the stars which only penetrate the cloud cover every now and then. In the front room Jenny has put on a Billie Holiday record and is dancing on her own to ‘The Man I Love’, holding a cigarette in her right hand. On the left and right are dishes, either empty or containing soggy melba toast and discoloured brie, Ella’s hearty pie, stuffed eggs whose yolks are now covered with an orange crust and whose whites are as glassy as an eyeball. In the wine cooler there is an empty bottle in lukewarm water with corks bobbing in it. By the sink there is a mountain of washing-up that is going to take two hours and an ashtray so full that no one could stub a cigarette out in it.

  Chaja is lying in the bedroom at the back, on Marcus’s crumpled bed, her face in the pillow, in the dent left by the back of his head, her arms straight along her body, palms up, legs straight, feet turned slightly inwards.

  She lies there as if she wants to disappear into the void left by his body, as if she wants to disappear into him.

  Or perhaps as if she wants to be where he is now and hopes to achieve that by filling his void.

  She’s breathing with difficulty and that’s what she wants to do, because there isn’t a single reason to make breathing any less difficult. It isn’t the pillow that’s taking her breath away. It’s Marcus.

  She isn’t thinking about him. At least she’s trying not to. Chaja is thinking about her favourite numbers.

  47.

  97.

  271, of course.

  The prime numbers of consolation. The consoling purity of the prime numbers.

  She doesn’t have to write them down, she knows them so well. At night she can lie in her narrow single bed and then if she looks at the white wall she sees them projected in graceful letters. 47 the big favourite. She’d like to live at a number 47. Somewhere in a beautiful, spare flat, with hard concrete walls and floors, a little kitchen like an operating theatre and just a few good lamps.

  Chaja Noah, 47 Gödel Square.

  Euler Street would do, too.

  But what’s completely out is the modern tendency to make everything comfortable and cosy.

  4 Fuchsia Close.

  31 Lavender Grove.

  Chaja Noah, 47 Gödel Square.

  When she can’t get to sleep at night, for example because she’s thinking of Marcus and how unattainable he is, when she yearns for him so powerfully that even her body feels it and she twists and turns in her bed, feels her hands creeping over her body and almost submerges in the hunger for his nearness, on nights like that she thinks of Graham’s number and then she looks at the white walls of her bedroom, at the wall, the floor with the light grey linoleum and the figures of the biggest number, the unimaginably big number, the way it covers everything, a row that washes over the walls and the ceiling and the floor and even the duvet, just as she’d like to be washed over by him.

  But now Graham’s number isn’t helping her.

  She lies with her head in the pillow and hot tears well up in her eyes, they wet the pillow and her cheeks, she tastes the salt of her tears on her lips.

  Far off in the distance music is heard and only after she has listened for a long time, holding her breath, motionless, so that even the grating of the linen along her skin is no longer audible, does she recognise ‘The Man I Love’ by Billie Holiday.

  Once, long ago, at a New Year’s Eve party in Groningen, both having drunk a lot, though she was still clear as a…number, she had gone to the top floor of the building in search of a toilet and had found nothing. Apart from him. He. Standing, staring, at a window. A dark silhouette in the dark room. An arabesque of smoke along the glass. He hadn’t even looked round when she came in, and she had walked to the window, as if she wanted to see what he was looking at, she had come and stood next to him, her arms wrapped around her, and suddenly

  the firework had exploded in front of them–a noisy flicker of light and colour, sharp short bangs, stars raining down–and she had jerked back, looked up startled at his white face, which was a mosaic of skipping blue patches, but motionless beneath them. She had laughed nervously to conceal her alarm. To regain her composure she laid her hands on the windowsill and bent forward and as she did so she was suddenly aware of…her posture…of what that posture said…the invitation that lay in it. She had heard him breathing, deep and slow, like an animal readying itself to leap. She had to force herself not to throw her head back and groan gently in preparation for what was to come.

  She had stared at the street, far below her, the people standing around drinking and talking, the Bengal lights flickeringly ill
uminating the façades of the old houses.

  After a while she had left. She had found a toilet, a student loo with a lot of supposedly funny newspaper cuttings on the wall, a few nearly obscene postcards, a seat standing up on a yellow and brown caked bowl and a floor wet with piss, and when she peed in it, half-standing, half-crouching, eyes closed, skirt held up with one hand, seeking support from the wall with her other hand, the thought occurred to her that this was her punishment, this flight, the punishment for her desire, for her animality. She hadn’t drunk much, but in that toilet everything around her began to spin. She tottered, peed over the edge and felt drops splashing against her ankles and the spinning began inside her as well. The world turned to the left, the whirl inside her turned to the right and in the middle of that confusion she sought a hold, the clear spot where 47, or 97, or 271 existed. And very slowly, as she wiped herself, pulled up her panties, dropped her skirt, stepped forward on her toes and opened the door with her fingertips, everything came very slowly to a standstill and the turning and whirling and spinning changed into a sluggish motion, a surge. Only when she was standing outside, on the landing that was piled with jackets and cups, only then was she herself again.

  Numbers have always helped her to create order and free the world around her from hubris and multiplicity. They have always given her the emptiness that she needs and seeks.