In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  But now they aren’t there. She can think them, but they have no meaning. They might as well be the ink blots of a Rorschach test, the patches on the side of a cow, clouds, breadcrumbs on a sink unit, spilt sugar…

  There is nothing but her hot face in the suffocating pillow.

  And then, suddenly, as she lies there like that and Billie Holiday’s saxophone voice ebbs away and makes room for something very different:

  Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away…

  From the courtyard comes Kat’s loud voice.

  ‘Christ, turn that racket off!’

  Jenny shouts back. ‘Sorry! I switched it to radio.’

  Chaja sits up, first on her hands and knees, then tottering beside the bed. She walks to the basin and splashes a few handfuls of water in her face. She hears Kat standing up. The bench shifts with a scraping noise over the stones, a door creaks and slams with a clatter. There is the sound of laughter and a little while later the jumpy jazz of a trumpet and a saxophone.

  She straightens to pick up the towel and dry her face and then, as her eye slides across the mirror, she gives a start. It only lasts a few seconds, five perhaps, not even ten. In that short time she doesn’t recognise her face. They aren’t unpleasant features that she sees in the mirror, but she doesn’t recognise them as hers.

  There are water droplets on the wax-pale skin, the dark eyes are big and moist and slightly bloodshot. The curly hair lies like a wreath of little rings on the slightly bulging forehead. The unmade-up mouth is shapely, but pale and dry. A woman.

  In that brief moment in which she doesn’t know that she and the reflection are one, she straightens and bends forward to take another good look and then immediately to think: it’s you! But that’s as much a consequence of logic (there’s no one else here, this is a mirror, after all) as the smooth lack of doubt of ordinary life. Because even after the correction, her alarm at the unfamiliar face lingers for a moment in the mirror.

  All in all she must stare at herself for a good five minutes, long after she’s turned back into herself again. She stares into the mirror and wonders how it can be that for a few minutes she didn’t know…didn’t see…not a single…For a moment she runs the tips of her fingers along her cheek. She touches her lips, licks her fingers and feels her wet tongue, her fingers feel the wetness of her tongue. She puts her hands to her cheeks and holds her head for a little while, until she suddenly thinks that she looks like someone acting pathetic.

  In the end she repeats her movements. She goes and lies on the bed again, sits up, gets on her hands and knees, totters, walks to the basin, buries her face in the water, which she scoops up with her hands, twice, three times, four, shoots upright, corner of the mirror, towards the towel.

  But there’s nothing strange. That person in the glass, that’s her.

  She looks at herself and raises her eyebrows. Her eye falls on the toiletries that Marcus has set out on the shelf. Three little grey-green pots and bottles: deodorant, eau de toilette, aftershave. Next to it his razor and a little bottle with an oily liquid that seems to be called ‘shaving oil’. On the basin, in the mirror: toothbrush, tube of Parodontax. If she were a detective, she would conclude what she knows already: a man with particular personal preferences, probably preferences that will last a lifetime. A man like the number 47. A man who adds up.

  She takes the top off his eau de toilette and smells the vague smell of verbena that she knows. When they kiss by way of greeting or farewell, that’s what she smells.

  She resists the temptation to spray some on her wrists.

  And then suddenly she is gripped by unease. She turns round with a jerk and takes in the room. The white walls. The white ceiling. The tall cupboards that separate this space from the rest of the room and make a little passageway to the shower.

  He isn’t here. He has…escaped.

  So what’s she doing here? If he isn’t here, what’s she doing here?

  New music is heard from the sitting room, something with a slow saxophone, the shrill brass of a trumpet blowing over it and a sluggish, walking bass.

  She looks into the mirror, into her eyes, the black of her eyes, as if she can look through them and discover what it is that makes her thoughts cling to Marcus so, and then she takes a deep breath and walks smoothly and confidently from the room, down the corridor, outside, where she turns right so as not to have to walk along the sitting-room window.

  Immediately there’s the noise of motorbikes, the far-off roar of indistinct music, the vague but unmistakeable smell of frying oil and exhaust fumes.

  She walks along the place where the bikers park their machines, year in, year out, to compare them with each other, and ignores the glances, the shouting, the whistling. She walks resolutely on, very aware of the click of her heels on the uneven stones. She doesn’t just hear her heels’ staccato click on the pavement, she also feels her bottom rubbing against her skirt, the movement of her breasts in her blouse, her shoulders going from left to right and from right to left. She is ‘body’, entirely ‘body’. Perhaps that’s because she’s been lying in the imprint of Marcus’s body. Perhaps her body has woken from a long sleep by dint of the fact that she has been lying where he slept.

  His sleep woke me, she thinks.

  The shouting, the whistling, her body being thrust forward by the eyes of the men in leather who stand showing off their bikes. This isn’t an evening for coats and skirts. But she is always formally dressed. She likes clarity and structure, unambiguous figures, order and regularity. Even when she has a day off, she goes through the ritual of someone going to work. She has tried doing things differently. Kat, who sometimes walks around as if she’s gone running through the Salvation Army clothes shop and put on whatever got stuck to her, Kat once asked her, she remembers it verbatim: ‘Child, why don’t you make life a bit easier for yourself? You don’t always have to look as if you’re a model secretary.’

  She had tried it a few times, but she hadn’t succeeded. On a day off, and also once in the evening, she had walked round at home in the tracksuit that she had for tennis, without make-up, her hair loose. It had given her an awkward, unstructured feeling, as if there was a lack of direction, as if she was in a kind of no-man’s-land where nothing was clear. It was like the way she felt when she walked on flat shoes. She wasn’t used to it and she didn’t want to get used to it. She felt, without her self-chosen uniform, ill at ease. She didn’t like, she thought now as she walked towards Koopmansplein, she didn’t like the feeling of looseness and freedom that casual clothes gave her. That was why she never took her shoes off when she was at home. The idea of walking through the house in stockinged feet…A loss of decorum, as if she were naked and vulnerable. Chaja was smart, her clothes were carefully designed, she thought nothing of painful feet or the effort it took her to wear the clothes that she wore. The apparent feelings of unease that accompanied such clothing for other people were perfectly normal to her. Relaxation, looseness and formlessness simply brought her no pleasure.

  That was what she saw in Marcus, the love of structure and order, the desire for form and decorum. Perhaps she sought that in him, perhaps she yearned for his form as a way of shedding something of her own formality. Perhaps she wanted to lose herself in him.

  In and around her everything was regulated, her life was a rigid system of lines and rules: to here and no further, this way but not that way, she was never drunk, she never got anything more than slightly tipsy, she had never yielded to anyone in love, because no one had asked her to, or would have known how to take it if she had.

  But in Marcus she wanted to lose herself.

  The square is scattered with groups of people with their arms drunkenly around each other’s shoulders, dancing to the music that blasts from a big beer tent or pushing their friends in stolen supermarket trolleys.

  Born, born to be alive

  she hears. Just in front of her a supermarket trolley rattles over with a shrill clatter. The yo
ung man sitting in it goes flying through the air like a ball of flailing arms and legs and smacks hard on the stones. He lies still while his friends laugh and cheer. When the sacrificial victim has finally scrambled to his feet, the left side of his face bloodied and his grazed left elbow poking through his jumper, he totters towards them and starts hoarsely cheering back.

  An unsettling sense of desolation.

  What is she doing here, at this time of night? Looking for Marcus among tens of thousands of drunkards? And what if she finds him? What if he isn’t looking for her, but someone else? Why has that thought never occurred to her before? She involuntarily remembers lying on his bed, in the imprint of his body.

  His sleep has woken me…

  On the other side of the square, light shines from the opening of the Moluccan football club’s big beer tent. Inside only a few of the long wooden tables are occupied. At the end, where the long bar stands, she recognises someone she was at school with. She waves absently and for a moment considers whether to go on walking, go home, or perhaps back to Kat’s, but she goes inside. A drowsy head lifts up from the pool of beer in which it lay sleeping. The eyes, rolling aimlessly in their sockets, make an attempt to look at her. At another table eight leather-clad men are yelling at each other in German. In the background ‘Sajang é’, the hit by the Moluccan pop group called Massada, is playing softly.

  ‘Hi, Saar,’ says Chaja as she arrives at the bar.

  The young woman with the long hair in a ponytail smiles at her. ‘Hey, Chaja, what are you doing here!’

  She understands why Saar is so surprised by her presence. At school she wasn’t necessarily one of those who went to the disco at the weekend, and if she did she usually sat at a table with the black-clad types who called themselves anarcho-syndicalists at the very least.

  ‘I was at a party with Marcus Kolpa,’ she says. ‘And he said he was going into town for a while. I thought he might be here.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Saar.

  For a long time Marcus was popular in what were grandly known as ‘revolutionary circles’, but consisted of little more than six or seven schoolmates who philosophised non-committally about the reformation of the bourgeois Netherlands into a self-contained, pacifist state on an anarchist model. That popularity had come to an abrupt end when Marcus wrote a piece that he called, rather pompously she thought, ‘Homo homini lupus’. In that piece he had ridiculed the socialist idea that man was naturally good and only spoilt by capitalism. En passant he had condemned the struggle of the ‘German comrades’ in the Red Army Faction. He had called them ‘spoilt afterthoughts of the leftist movement, who with their pseudo-revolutionary actions bear out the bankruptcy of the socialist belief in the innate goodness of man’. He had described the Moluccan train hijackings as ‘a desperate and unimaginative violent reaction to the geopolitical status quo’. Striving for their own state was, according to Marcus, ‘essentially reactionary, because it was a desire for the bourgeois protection of nation and nationality in a world that can only change through cosmopolitanism’. It was a sentence that Chaja had never forgotten. Not because she disagreed with it, but more particularly because it was the last sentence that Marcus wrote in the grotesque Marxist dialect of those years. She had mocked him about it for ages, and it had taken him a long time to admit that she was right. ‘All it was lacking was a mention of the “historical consciousness of the masses”,’ she had said and in the end there was nothing for him to do but nod. After that piece, published in his own stencilled magazine, rather pompously entitled The Nonconformist, his popularity was over and he seemed to have done with historical materialism, Marcuse and literature that privileged textual exegesis over a good story. Almost from one day to the next he got rid of his long hair and his beard, dressed in black (surprise surprise) suits and white shirts and declared form and structure to be decisive (in a non-Marxist sense!) for the quality of a book. The Nonconformist had gone on to survive for another two, unsold, issues.

  ‘I haven’t seen him here,’ says Saar. ‘And I don’t think the guys would be very happy with him.’

  Chaja looks round and sees Albert, Chris, a few vaguely familiar faces, and in a corner at the back of the tent a little group of ‘oldies’, as the generation above one’s own are always called, even if there’s only a decade or so’s difference between them.

  ‘No, that’s quite likely. What do you think of him yourself, Saar?’

  The young woman receives a tray of glasses and starts washing up. ‘I don’t get mixed up in politics. Nothing but misery ever comes out of it. It’s all just talk by the menfolk.’

  Chaja laughs.

  A hand falls on her shoulder and she hears Albert’s light, hoarse, ironic voice: ‘Chaja Noah…Welcome to the kampong.’

  ‘Hi, Albert.’

  ‘Have you tried our namu-namu?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Do me a favour and eat some of them. Eat a hundred. We can’t get rid of the things. This isn’t the clientele for the specialities of Moluccan cuisine. Isn’t your friend here?’

  ‘Which friend do you mean exactly, Albert?’

  ‘The great Marcus Kolpa. I heard rumours that he’s walking around here this evening.’

  ‘I’m looking for him, but I can’t find him.’

  ‘Isn’t that always the problem with Marcus Kolpa? That you can never quite pin him down?’

  Someone approaches carrying a dish with ingeniously folded pastry envelopes lying on it. Chaja knows that she’s going to have to eat one, ideally accompanied by crazy exclamations.

  ‘Something to drink?’

  She shakes her head. When she’s swallowed down the first bite (herbal, aromatic, rather tasty) she mumbles that she isn’t a beer drinker.

  ‘The beer is for the customers,’ says Albert. ‘We have something better behind the bar for ourselves.’ He nods to Saar and a moment later Chaja is holding a glass of Muscadet. She has just enough time to raise a toast and thank her host before a big group of fat-bellied blokes in half-stripped-off biker suits come tumbling in. They move like a many-legged and many-headed body to a long table in the middle, which they immediately start thumping with their fists, shouting for beer.

  ‘It’s all for a higher purpose,’ sighs Albert, nodding to Saar. A tray of empty beer glasses is set down and the full complement of staff lines up at the pumps. ‘How many are there?’ Albert calls, and before anyone can count they hear Chaja saying ‘17’.

  From the depths Bertus Huisman cries at the moon, like an animal sliding on its belly along the forest floor, he creeps through the undergrowth, in search of an open spot surrounded by high-looming trees, a place of sacrifice, a ritual void, a pit in the blackness of the forest where the glimmer of the forever hiding night-light falls blue on young fir trees and thickets, without a bicycle now, where has he left his bicycle? the only thing he remembers is a timelessly long moment in which he, hands gripping the handlebars, stands staring, where? on Nassaulaan? yes there on Nassaulaan standslies his bike then still there on the yes there on Nassaulaan? it’s a question that keeps him busy for just a second, much shorter than the little phrase that now sings in his head with the moaning power of a nursery rhyme where? on Nassaulaan? yes there on Nassaulaan where? on Nassaulaan? yes there on Nassaulaan where? on Nassaulaan? yes there on Nassaulaan but by now he doesn’t really know where he is, he who knows every tree in this forest, he who slinks around here at night as if he lives in the forest and sleeps there, by the little brook that runs under the bypass to the Jewish cemetery, but he never goes there, never over the bypass, never near the Jewish cemetery, all the other churchyards, but not that one, because Jews have secret powers, you can’t sleep on their graves, never mind the unspeakable act that seems so pure and deep and true in the light of the moon, because they will pursue him with their magic until the seventh generation, not there, he won’t go there, but the question remains: where is he now? and where has he been? and where is the open space that he’s seek
ing so urgently now? that he deeply desires, yes, a desire that sticks in his throat like the bone of a bad fish, one that you start eating with guzzling greed, fat soft white fish flesh, the melting of the high-protein layers that fall apart on the tongue and fill the cheeks with an unexpected fullness, and then suddenly the harsh punishment of the bone, a needle of a bone that sticks in the softness of your palate or right in your throat, just under the uvula, after which the white flesh steams up at you sweet and steaming and sickly, as if you’re the guest of a landlord who’s served you up his own leg as a main dish, which you only understand when your host limps into the bar, where is the open space? he creepwalks through the dense wood and is in fits the animal that has taken possession of him, the twitching of the head, sensory perceptions that rise from his deep-most being, a dog’s sense of smell, a bull’s erection, a tongue tasting the air, eyes that can see twigs like black strips on the black of the night-time forest and more than anything the howling thought of an open space in the forest, where the moon shines blue on the low grey growth, where the cool quivering moonlight steams between the trees, the light in which he can bathe his glowing O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden body, his scratched arms, his bloody head, his smarting legs and lashed ribcage, so has he already lost his clothes? father, father, he lisps and pulls himself together, in a sitting crouch staring at the marbled light: mother, mother, and he remembers her heavy washerwoman body in the apron dress, bent under the burden of baskets of wet washing, the smell of soap and soda and wet stones in the shed, the clouding white of linen on the lines, radiant in the midday sun, walls of bright washing which he, still a little boy, ran among and lost himself and how light it was in such a passageway of drying white sheets, how light and how white, that’s what heaven must be like, and how dark here, in the forest, where he looks up among the trees with his head tilted back and tries to see the cloud-flecked night air, creepwalks on, the menacing sound of his own panting in his ears, nothing but the swish and sweep of twigs, the uneasy rustle of leaves on the forest bed, a crow creaking like an old board floor.