In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  On the way from the empty newspaper office to the place where he has arranged to meet Albert Gallus, Marcus Kolpa takes his last tour of the town. He has an hour or two to kill and like all the other roamers tonight he can’t think of anything better to do than walk around. He strolls out of Torenlaan, passes the Brink, avoids reeling drunks and nods stiffly to pugnacious characters who pigheadedly try to walk right through him.

  Odysseus has arrived in Ithaca, the palace is squatted by drunkards and boasters, the paint flakes like falling autumn leaves from the walls and the enchanting glow that memory has cast over his destination has stopped working. Ithaca is just as much of a pigsty as the rest of the world.

  He turns up his jacket collar, sticks his hands in his pockets, raises his shoulders and lowers his head. It has started raining softly. Drizzle, Chaja used to call it, and suddenly he remembers what her father always used to say when a story about hardship and setbacks reached his ears: ‘A struggle in the bogs.’ He lifts his head and smiles. A bloody great struggle in the bogs, indeed. He can think about it for his whole life, he can write learned essays until he nearly drops, he can read until he is as blind as the oracle of Buenos Aires, he can go on seeking till he weighs an ounce–in the end it all boils down to a struggle in the bogs.

  He passes the law court. It was here that he ran to escape the riot squad when the angry Moluccan boys attempted to free family members who were being led away in prison buses.

  ‘Ithaca,’ he murmurs, ‘and what kind of Odysseus am I? Away for years, but the Cyclops was myself, driven only half blind by my faith in the all-embracing system that was supposed to make the world a better place and later blinded by my being right about it.’

  The terrace of the Hotel de Jonge. The interior of the café can’t be seen, the windows are so thick with condensation. The water drips down them in little streams.

  He could go in now and sit and wait till Bertolucci is back. No, he walks on. He’s busy with his Odysseus story now and he can only finish it off if he’s walking.

  Although, Odysseus…He has unmasked himself as the Cyclops. What is left of him as a cunning hero who was travelling in the prime of life and overcoming one obstacle after another to get home, to his Penelope?

  Home? He doesn’t have one. Never did. A floor in Amsterdam where he very rarely is. Spare rooms at friends’ houses with sponge bags containing soap wrapped in cellophane and shaving equipment.

  I’ve never lived anywhere, he thinks. I’ve had houses and flats and I’ve never wanted to stay anywhere. Where did I live longest?

  Off to the right, quick march, up the Noordersingel, towards the fairground.

  He can’t remember what address it was. All a bit the same. About seven in the last ten years. And each time all those books in boxes all over again, unpacking them again and with painstaking precision putting them back in the boxes according to language, author and publication date. Each time waking up in the night again and for a very brief moment not knowing where. Although that had come to an end after he’d decided to leave a light on. It had also helped that he furnished his flats like a modern hotel: efficient, impersonal, a space that emanated nothing but utility and hygiene.

  Circe, he thinks. Where is Circe? Who is she?

  To his left the big wheel flickers.

  He can’t think of any lovesick sorceresses in his life.

  Penelope, not a problem. But he hasn’t reached her either. And perhaps she wasn’t Penelope. Perhaps Chaja was only something that he carried with him, an internal picture, the way Brontë heroines keep a lock of hair from their romanticised beloved on their bosom.

  The crossing with Rolderstraat, as a column of bikers with crosses and lines from the psalms on their backs drives past.

  He stands still and stares at the drops of water on the tips of his shoes. They glimmer faintly in the light from the street lamps.

  It’s entirely possible that he has constructed her, as courtly lovers did who had no access to their beloved. A notional altar and on it a saint who only expects lip service, who is neither flesh nor blood and can never disappoint. But shouldn’t he have discovered that years ago? If he had cheated himself like that, then he would have…

  He turns his collar down and walks thoughtfully to the fairground entrance.

  He isn’t entirely sure that he’d be able to see through himself.

  ‘I know you, Marcus Kolpa,’ he says in the voice that Albert Gallus would use. ‘You’re even better at convincing yourself than convincing others.’

  An Odysseus manqué, he thinks, a soppy Yid who can overcome nothing but himself and discovers nothing but what is around him.

  Odysseus, Schmodysseus.

  What about the lotus-eaters? Yes, them he knows. Them he has seen. Not here, but there. Although here, too. Herman Starink, with him in the first or second year of middle school, who one day swallowed a piece of LSD-soaked blotting paper and less than half an hour later stepped off the balcony of a flat with the message that he was going to fly around for a bit, back shortly. And Echo, so-called because he could play a duet with the reverb of his own guitar, whose special talent apparently couldn’t ease the pain in his head and who for that reason slowly drank himself to pieces, but not without spending years wandering about in filth and rags, kept alive by the money that old acquaintances handed him and food that he was given by shopkeepers. You’d see him in the morning sitting on a bench in front of the shops with coffee from one and a cheese sandwich from another, eyes clenched shut against the inescapable harsh light of early morning. When Marcus passed him, he’d call after him: ‘Hey, journalist!’

  Enough lotus-eaters. He had tasted of the flower himself, but always with moderation, because always afraid of losing control. He had smoked the stuff that Frederik Rooster grew at a secret spot in the Forest of Assen and with which he, the handlebars of his bike laden with fat bundles of hemp, rode awkwardly through the town centre.

  He wasn’t a lotus-eater. He had tasted what they ate and left them to their highs.

  Hades? Piece of cake.

  Perhaps, he thinks, as he walks into the fairground and breathes in the sweet, greasy mixture of smells that takes him back to a youth that he would rather forget, perhaps that’s the significance of the Odysseus story, that the hero overcomes nothing but himself, the Circe in him, the Cyclops that he is, on the way to the Ithaca that was always already with him, the Penelope that he himself created.

  Not a trip through the world. A journey into the interior.

  High above him the big wheel, next to him cranes in Perspex boxes fail to grip Taiwanese junk. The ghost-house wails, the dodgems scream. Roaring music from every corner, all jumbled together

  and suddenly there is the image of Noah, that time when he came to collect Chaja from her Saturday job and was called into the shop. ‘Marcus Kolpa…’ (the vague echo of formerly known as Polak). ‘Come in. She’s busy right now. Coffee?’ And off he went, in the wake of the as far as he was concerned legendary figure of Jacob Noah, to a surprisingly sober little office, more a spot where the warehouse and the staff canteen ran into one another: a stack of boxes, hotel crockery, a vague round table and a thermos coffee pot with a pump mechanism. ‘Black?’ And then sitting down together at a table that was far too big, the short silence. And then Noah’s friendly-ironic: ‘So, Mr Kolpa. How’s the revolution going?’

  For some reason there and then, he had felt the immediate need to explain himself more closely, to say that his highfalutin texts, the revolutionary élan, that it was all mere romanticism (and the sudden understanding that that was actually the case, that it was really nothing but posturing and desire) and he had grinned and drunk some of his coffee and then said: ‘Big business is in the ascendant for the time being.’ Noah’s slow, deep nod. A new silence, which the sounds of the shop began to penetrate, women’s voices, laughter, even cooing. And then, completely unexpectedly:

  ‘Marcus.’

  He had almost sat bolt upright.r />
  His quizzical expression.

  ‘Capital, property, even success, it’s all transient by nature. Fame, acquaintance, respect or contempt, all fleeting.’

  His frown. What’s going on here? A paternal chat from the man who had shaped this town as if it was a ball of clay in his hand? A ‘you and I, even if you represent the new and changeable and I the old and enduring, we aren’t that different from each other’ conversation? He had two conflicting impulses to speak, somewhere in his throat or just below it, where the ribcage forces the words through the vocal cords: You are not my father, Jacob Noah, and: Tell me your story.

  ‘There’s only one thing, Marcus.’

  He straightened without physically sitting up. He straightened internally. He understood that he, perhaps for the first time in his life, was ready to listen to a mentor. Nestor was speaking!

  ‘Love.’

  (That was it? That almost solemn, that pompous preamble to great and deep and true, and that was what came out? Love?)

  He slumped and looked at the grains of sugar on the melamine tabletop that had almost formed a constellation, he just didn’t know which one.

  ‘Love,’ he repeated with disbelief.

  Noah nodded. He stood up and produced a cigar that looked like a twig and lit it.

  ‘Unspectacular, don’t you think?’

  He disappeared in a cloud of smoke that smelled strongly of burning leaves.

  ‘Life is unspectacular. Mostly, in fact, it’s nothing more than a concatenation of banalities. Desire greatness and you will come away with misery. There is no intensity without pain. But cut away the desire for uniqueness and what remains is a single need. And that is love. No God, no commandment, no romantic secular Judaism that has assumed the form of radical socialism. Love.’

  And what do you know about it, Mr Noah, he had wanted to say. What do you know, you who work and work and couldn’t be a one-woman man, you who walk around restlessly, a seeker who doesn’t find and probably doesn’t even want to?

  The door opened and Chaja came in with an arm full of cash books. She stopped in the doorway and raised one eyebrow.

  ‘Marcus,’ she said. It sounded like a statement.

  He grinned at her. And as he did so he saw in the corner of his eye Noah’s face blossoming like a flower in a time-lapse film about nature. And he thought: so that’s how you know love, Mr Noah, in the derived form, love for your daughters. He looked at Chaja, who was setting down the oblong books in front of her father. She was wearing, as always, a skirt that stopped just above the knee and this time a white silk blouse. For a fraction of a second, as she bent over the table and pointed something out to her father, he let his eyes pass over her: her dark, tightly tied-up hair, her slender form, hidden under conservative clothing. Then he blinked and looked at her. She had asked him a question that he hadn’t heard.

  A sudden loud noise makes him start. He is standing in front of a metal octopus that is hurling its tentacles around with a roar. Little lights shoot through the air, noise swirls. Ah, here he is. Near the fortune-teller’s tent. What had she said? Old and unhappy? No, old and lonely-but-not-alone. Thank God. Things can always get worse.

  He stands for a while looking at the whirling couples hurled round by the octopus. Screeching girls, sturdy boys. He has participated in the last big wave of emancipation more or less deliberately, but here at the funfair he has the creeping suspicion that the feminist movement still has some missionary work to do. And perhaps it’s work that hasn’t even begun. Girls will probably go on screeching even if they know the work of Kate Millett off by heart. And boys will stay sturdy machos. No kind of anti-sexist newsletter was going to change that. He chuckles at the thought.

  A great need for a drink, now. A keen craving for whisky, vodka, methylated spirits if need be. Something that stings and dulls and brings oblivion to the lotus-eater in him.

  She sits bolt upright with the haste of someone suddenly remembering something.

  And that’s how it is.

  She remembers that it’s Friday night.

  Rucksacks. Family. Police. Station. Raid.

  The bright red numbers of her clock tell the time severely.

  Another time.

  Not then.

  The skin above her breast is wet, like her back.

  Did she…

  …scream? Yes, probably.

  The whole family used to wake up at least once a week when she screamed.

  Later Marcus took it over.

  The screaming.

  Then her husband got out of bed twice a week to tell one or other of them, panicking in their sleep, that yes, everything was fine, and no, they didn’t have to leave, the roof hadn’t collapsed, no one was after them.

  He hadn’t kept it up, her husband. Packed his bag one day, loaded up the car and took off as if God knows what was on his heels.

  As if it was infectious, bad dreams and screams in the night.

  Perhaps it was.

  In the distance a lonely motorbike turning on its engine and shooting down the long Beilerstraat like a ball of furious noise.

  Out of bed, feeling around for slippers, dressing gown, light, tiptoeing to the bathroom, medicine box open, two Lorazepams, through the other door into the hall, to the sitting room, light, light, on the sofa and staring at the window and the dark night sky above the other bungalows, the dark windows that she can’t see, but knows they are there, because everyone is sleeping now, sleeping silently, and probably dreaming of grassy meadows and peaceful sheep chewing in soft golden light.

  Tomorrow Marcus is coming.

  Marcus is coming tomorrow.

  Her heart thumps so hard it hurts. Her head is a carousel of sentences.

  Tomorrow Marcus is coming.

  Marcus is coming tomorrow.

  Is Marcus coming tomorrow?

  Tomorrow Marcus…

  The years after her husband left, The Husband (Marcus had called him that. Any word from The Husband? As if he were a function. Or a special sort of bird that you rarely saw), the years after he left it had just been the two of them and they had screamed each other awake. At night they had then had curiously airy conversations at the kitchen table. About the pamphlets he made, the poems she found on his desk, left so nonchalantly open that she had to read them. About music, cookery, wine. He had taught her to drink wine. But never about Friday night, the second of October, in the second year of the war.

  Once. Once they tried.

  For two sentences.

  Get up, tiptoe to the kitchen, kettle on the flame, stare at the dark little street and the lamp that stands on the corner faintly illuminating the bottom half of a birch tree. A light burns in the police garage. The same light as always.

  She used to see Marcus coming along here on his bike, after an evening out, lurching slightly, his head thrown back as if he were taking his bearings from the stars and didn’t have to look at the road. But that wasn’t the case, because once, right in front of the house, just before he was supposed to cycle up the drive to the garage, he fell flat on his face.

  And then don’t walk out like the concerned mother. Because a boy, a man, doesn’t want a concerned mother. Wants to save himself. As he always saved himself.

  Marcus has never asked for anything. No help. No money. No attention. No…God, Hester, if only I had a quiet child like yours, acquaintances said. Then she thought: if only I had a child who needed me, who didn’t think only about how much he couldn’t need anything.

  The Husband had called him a cuckoo’s child. ‘I’m not leaving,’ he had cried, ‘I’ve been pushed out of the nest by that cuckoo’s boy of yours!’

  ‘He’s your son too,’ she had said (stammered).

  ‘Oh yes?’ And he had burst out laughing. Packed his bag and at the same time walked roaring with laughter and swearing to the car, the same car he would live in for almost a year, with the dog that she had never allowed him to have, the car in which a year later, late, with drink
inside him, he would drive to his death and in which he would be found the next morning. After which everyone who had known him and her, or either one of them, turned against her. The poor man. She drove him to his death. Only Jacob Noah kept coming. In the afternoon. Before teatime. Just like before. Because in the evening, when The Husband had been at home, he wasn’t welcome. The Husband didn’t like him. ‘What’s that fool doing here? He owns half the town. Does he think he can play the boss here, too?’

  Kettle whistles, water in the pot, swirl it round, pour, tea, water on the tea.

  Consider all actions beforehand and then carry them out in a regular rhythm. Onetwothreefourfivesixseven, warm the teapot. Onetwothreefourfivesix, pour. Count the minutes for it to draw. To the bedroom, count footsteps. Everything structure and order. If there is no structure and order the walls crumble, the floor sinks away, her legs melt, there’s no end to the chaos.

  Tomorrow Marcus is coming.

  Marcus is coming tomorrow.

  …fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Go and sit in the bedroom, on the sofa, wall behind you, never a door, stare at the night, and so on, and so on, count breaths, go on counting, four in, hold two, four out. Calm. Calm.

  Heart.

  Head.

  Lungs.

  It’s Friday night.

  Tomorrow Marcus is coming.

  Although the forest rises up in front of him like a dark mountain against the ink-blue backdrop of the sky, Siebold Sikkema walks with the resolute step of one who walks holding the hand of the Almighty: filled with faith and devotion. If he had a hesitant feeling as he walked along the dark forest path, it vanishes in a flash as the psalm sounds in his head: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?