In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  Four times a day, from Monday to Friday inclusive, Siebold cycles the long straight road through the forest. From his house in the new suburb on one side, to his work in the town hall on the other side. Home and back in the morning, at twelve o’clock, when he eats his bread and drinks his milk, and home again at the end of the day, when the work is done. Back straight, on his black gentleman’s bicycle from the Mustang bicycle factory, in his charcoal-grey suit from Gijs Fashions, the worn brown briefcase strapped to the crossbar.

  But it isn’t so dark then. Even in the winter, when the light withdraws halfway through the afternoon and deep dusk falls over the forest, it isn’t as dark as it is now.

  Moonless night. That means: a moon hidden behind thick dark clouds.

  I sink in deep mire,

  Where there is no standing;

  I am come into deep water

  Where the floods overflow me.

  That isn’t the song he wanted to think about. But it just flows into his mouth. Him? Sunk in the mire? On this evening, when the Lord gave him the gift of the word, surrounded by his brothers? On a quiet spot in the middle of the godless roar of motorbikes and the selfish amusements of leather-clad fools, he, Siebold Sikkema, has been the mouth of the Supreme One, he was truly full of His word, His alpha and omega, and were it not that humility forced him to be modest, he could have gone on speaking until the early-morning light, he would have risen, had it not been improper, he would have stretched out his right hand and pointed to the horizon, which didn’t lie beyond the tightly drawn curtains of the meeting house, but he had wanted to do that, coat-tails flapping, his sparse hair in wild disorder, like Moses at the Red Sea and…

  In the deep darkness of the forest, in the depths of the night, surrounded by darker depths, O Lord…

  Siebold Sikkema looks around and sees nothing but silent dark wood, he hears the vaguely distant roar of motorbikes and feels the sudden oppression of the forest.

  And what was he thinking a moment ago, when he imagined himself a leader and prophet who would go before his people to…Yes, to what? What has got into him, that he feels so presumptuous…

  It’s the old genever which, in the silent intoxication of his triumph, he went and drank. Oh, he already regretted it when after the gathering he cycled not homewards but full of sparkle and…fullness…steered a course for the Hotel de Jonge, that pit of corruption and drink and whoring…Oh, Siebold Sikkema, what have you done? Why didn’t you just modestly cycle home? Then you wouldn’t have had to walk through this devilish forest, legs heavy with genever, with a troubled heart and a flat tyre to boot.

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…

  That isn’t entirely true, because at that moment he has no bicycle pump. Not that a pump would help him, because whoever it was who let the air out of his tyre also took the valve, which means in fact that he doesn’t just want a pump, he wants a valve, too.

  Siebold Sikkema throws his hand over his mouth.

  What sort of thoughts are those flying past him? How are these evil temptations coming into his head? He doesn’t want a valve or a bicycle pump at all! The vandal who let the air out of his tyre was nothing but a tool of God, sent to punish him, Siebold Sikkema, for his arrogance and the double arrogance that made him go to a café and drink to his arrogance!

  Siebold Sikkema, he says to himself, how high you reached and how low you have fallen. And that all in the course of a single short evening. The Lord provides for you in all things, He is your refuge and…Oh, have pity on me, Lord, in all your mercy, pray forgive my transgressions…Make me pure of heart, o God, and renew a solid soul in me…

  The struggle…It’s a battle. Here he is walking through the dark depths, prey to rebellious thoughts and temptations that fall upon him like carrion flies on a rotting corpse.

  Yes, Sikkema, see what’s in front of your eyes, man. A rotting corpse is what you are. How can there be salvation if the flesh is so weak? How do you expect to dwell in the house of the Lord if you are not pure and resolute? Admit it, you stood there in the sultry heat of the café and knocked back your glasses and you couldn’t keep your eyes off the amusement, the lasciviousness of the drunkards, the sluts with their unbuttoned leather bikers’ jackets. Yes, it was nothing but lasciviousness and desire that ran through your limbs, and even now, in the dark forest, you feel the confusion, the flies of drink are buzzing in your head and the fire of sin burns in your loins. And admit that you thought of the undesired figure of your wife, waiting at home for you in the marital bed with her face covered with cold cream and a hedgehog of curlers in her hair and her hairy legs and her…

  Now he slaps himself hard in the face. He lets his gentleman’s bicycle clatter to the ground and drops moaning to his knees.

  He has fallen, he has truly fallen.

  He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls. And that is how Siebold Sikkema feels now: naked and defenceless and unharnessed. He is in the middle of the dark forest, and the straight path is lost.

  No, really. Now that he looks around, there is nothing that he recognises. He should be at the crossing of Hoofdlaan and Rode Heklaan, halfway along his journey. But no crossing can be seen. There is only darkness around him.

  In the forest edge beside the path something moves, it jumps up from the darkness and ducks in among the branches. Like a fox, but much bigger. Darker. Like a man, but it moves like an animal. Siebold Sikkema looks around him. Black everywhere. There is no sound but the far-off snarl of the motorbikes. He gets hurriedly to his feet, takes a few unsteady steps and stops, heart thumping, as the creature in the forest jumps with him. Lord, he begins, but as he hears the gurgling sound that rises up from behind the trees, his voice breaks down and his muttered prayer sticks in his throat like a bone.

  Ten times, maybe even twenty times, times without number, Johan van Gelder has turned his face to the door of the nightclub and felt in his body another body standing up and preparing to go, and just as many times he has stayed sitting where he was, he has accepted the so-called champagne, the whisky, the Kir Royal, the God knows what that the waitress with the tray and the French chambermaid’s uniform offered him ‘on behalf of the management’, and all those times he raised his glass, his little glass, his thimble, and drank a toast to well-being, long life, prosperous businesses and the proprietor’s good health, his well-filled harem, the art of erotic dance in general and that of ‘the young lady with the snake there’ in particular, a wish that was always answered with an affable nod by the proprietor-director-harem-eunuch in question, and now it’s late at night, or early in the morning, depending on whether you’re a bottle-half-full or a bottle-half-empty type, and the world in which Van Gelder moves, breathes and perspires, the world in which his lymphatic, choleric, apocalyptic, Freudian, post-Marxist, provincial body beats and peristalses and flows and steams, that world is a double-exposure photograph in which everything shoves its way in front of everything else and between the faces that look like blurs and the lights that have become stripes there hangs a haze that consists of nothing but pure alcoholic vapour.

  Ah, life.

  God, death.

  Marcus Kolpa, he was here and he was sitting, with the ease of the sort of young men who have everything in life, born in the right neighbourhood, money and property and the history demanded these days of the living man, he was sitting with that Mafioso brothel-keeper, what else is this but a sort of posh knocking shop, chatting as if they were two old men at a fence talking over a pipe of tobacco about the height of the withers of cattle or sickness in the potato leaves, while it was he who had discovered him, found him, fished him from the pool of incomprehensible modern poems and incomprehensible left-wing essays in the school newspapers he cobbled together, a rough diamond that he had polished, he had, God damn it, taught him to type, for months he had made him write announcements about the annual meeting of the Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek Aquarium Association, three lines,
and construction-work-making-steady-progress, photograph and caption, and half-demented golden-wedding couples attributing their long-lived happiness to ‘giving each other a bit of space’, by which they meant not group sex and key parties, but her going out bowling by herself on Tuesday, and him, after dinner with rice pudding, in the same plate from which they’d just been eating sprouts and potatoes, going to the allotment to pull a few weeds from the ground, piss in the rain barrel and smoke roll-ups till sunset with Teun and Klaas and whatever names all those other bogtrotters might have had.

  Sweet Jesus.

  The devil will drag me naked through the gutter.

  All is lost, Lord, all is lost.

  Time to get up now, a bit unsteady of course, unsteady ship, or, no, heaving ship, unsteady floor, gird your innards first and walk resolutely, onward Christian soldiers, towards the door, the night air, the doubtless cool night air, routine check of the beeper, this gentleman is in a hurry and is very important and is just walking a bit vaguely now because he sent his messages on the wireless transmitter…nothing…to the door, is there a phone here anywhere, is there a doctor in the house, hey, out of the way: press! yes, that’s right, ladies, the newspaper is a gentleman, a drunk gentleman perhaps, but that doesn’t take away from the, away from the way, undoor the door, by the by, it remains your loyal servant, the press, la prensa, die Presse, ink-coolie and letter-slave, toiling its toilsome solitary toil to bring you the news of the day, the poverty-stricken community, is that news? the skirmishings in the TT night, is that news? the construction work that is always making steady progress and never once breaks down, never looks like a Tower of Babel or has no entrance, scandal!, the door, oh, so there it is, Newspaper Boss Finds Door, Breathes In Outside Air And Declares: Definitely Chilly.

  Christ alive.

  Where to?

  Home not an option. Home a long way, and not attractive under present circumstances. Home empty. Not a soul, child, cat or dog. Collection of art and unread books and the sort of designed, excuse me, designer furniture that you might see in the very best designer furniture shops and in fact incidentally were in there not so long ago. That’s right, in this hole. Shut away here by bogs and marshes…Ach.

  Koopmansplein. Always something to do and, apart from that, let’s keep our head here now, on the way home. Somewhat. More or less. Ein bisschen. Un peu.

  Step. Step. Step. Woops.

  Oudestraat Pavement Witnesses Great Event.

  Newspaper Boss Nearly Falls On His Gob.

  Kolpa…He could have been like that. He johanvangelder.

  Had he not felt the eternal dread, the fear, the threat of the knock on the door.

  Hello, was your father by any chance on the wrong side in the war?

  So: what might you doing here?

  The tortoise-shell of history.

  Looklook, who walks there in her dungarees, flaming red hair like a stop light in the darkness. Greet, the editorial archivist. But what…Christ on a bike…

  Hazy and drunk perhaps, but even through the wisps of drunken fog he can still see very clearly what’s about to happen a bit further down the line. There’s the editorial archivist m/f in a circle of badgering youths who seem to be enjoying themselves laughing at fiery-red-dyed Greet. And however unsteady he might have looked on his feet a moment ago, a firm sense of purpose has now taken hold of him and Johan van Gelder breaks right into the circle of shrieking male baboons, takes Greet by the arm and pulls her resolutely out of the group of men, ignoring the shouts and cheers, until they have walked beside the big beer tent in Koopmansplein and seek shelter in the yellow lamplight that shines within. A good choice, thinks Van Gelder, especially since it’s starting to rain now.

  They find a spot at a long wooden trestle table, empty apart from a sleeping drunk.

  The rescued woman doesn’t look very impressed. She sits angrily staring in front of her, as if she’s cross with him for extricating her from her awkward situation. The front of her dungarees barely covers the enormous female symbol on her T-shirt, the Venus mirror that is the proud emblem of the liberated woman.

  ‘Jesus, Greet…Couldn’t you have found a better moment to stand up for the rights of women in contemporary society?’

  She sniffs. ‘I see, so this is something like a miniskirt, is it? Wear a miniskirt and don’t be surprised if someone rapes you? Clear off.’

  Van Gelder shakes his head.

  ‘No, it’s nothing like a miniskirt. But this isn’t the time and place for a statement about sexual politics.’

  ‘There’s always time for that, Johan. Women are actually being oppressed all the time, even when the motorbike races are running.’

  ‘A time and a place. The right time and the right place. Two beers.’

  ‘I don’t want a beer.’

  ‘Two white wines.’

  ‘I don’t want a wine either.’

  ‘Oh, don’t sulk, Greet.’

  ‘You know what’s wrong with men like you?’

  ‘I thought there was something wrong with all men, as a race, that we were categorically guilty. I’m glad you’re not making your complaint…Oh, damn it…I’ve lost the thread…No, got it again…that you’ve been able to narrow down your complaint to one specific person.’

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Is that what’s wrong with men like me? Pfff. I’d have expected at least that we were all at least pot…potent…rapists and murderers in waiting.’

  The wine is of the fill-your-own-bottles-here variety: thin and sour and with a bouquet of horse piss and…in all her fury she actually looks very endearing. All those symbols, that short red hair, the dungarees, the white T-shirt with the women’s symbol. She looks a bit like a teenager who’s suddenly discovered that things go ‘ouch’ when you kick them.

  ‘I’ve split up with Klaas.’

  ‘Klaas?’

  ‘My husband, Johan. I’ve split up with him.’

  ‘But for heaven’s sake. Why? I didn’t know you had such a bad marriage.’

  ‘I don’t want to live with my oppressor any more.’

  He splutters a cloud of bad wine over the table, much of which lands on the bib of Greet’s dungarees.

  ‘Sorry. Erm…Sorry. It went down the wrong way. Because he’s your oppressor? But he’s such a gentle sort of man. I mean: you don’t meet many builders who are as cultured and cultivated as he is.’

  ‘All men are oppressors, and if you sleep with them you’re collaborating with the enemy.’

  Johan van Gelder looks speechlessly at the woman opposite him for a moment. He tries to follow her reasoning. It’s one that he knows, but only in the abstract. In practice it’s suddenly very different.

  ‘But Greet…You can’t just tar all men…I mean…It’s a kind of racism…Discrim…crimination. Discrimination, at the very least.’

  ‘Exactly what you’ve done with me.’

  ‘With you in particular?’

  ‘With my kind. From now on I’m politically lesbian. If I want sex, it’ll only be with women.’

  His shoulders slump. There are moments when words are just words, and this is one of those moments. He knows how to muster all the arguments against, if only because she has never known concrete oppression and acts only according to a derivative political conviction or because her dogmatic purity and the power of her conviction suspiciously resemble the kind of dogmatic purity and conviction in which…But none of it matters. As if the weight of time, not just of this evening, but time in general, rested upon him. Tortoise armour. He feels a desire to be stark naked, to creep round unprotected and unburdened on the wet stones of the square, to be puny and insignificant and to rise, no: dissolve into multiplicity.

  He reaches across the table and lays his hand on her hand, shakes his head and looks at her until she turns her eyes away, but doesn’t draw back her hand and, biting her bottom lip, stares at the bar at the end of the tent, where Chaja Noah is talking to a Moluccan.

  ‘Life
is a minestrone, Greet. You can only eat the whole soup and not just one ingredient.’

  She turns her face towards him, open-mouthed and shaking her head.

  ‘Johan. Where in God’s name did you get that piece of kitsch from?’

  Every year Antonia d’Albero pitches her tent at the same campsite on the edge of the Forest of Assen. It’s a small tent, barely big enough for two people, one that takes up hardly any space on the back of her bike. The same campsite and mostly the same people: bikers and their society from the whole of Europe, bringing a Babylon of languages and customs. Usually she doesn’t arrive until halfway through the evening. First she always goes into town to look for old friends in the Hotel de Jonge, sometimes finding them and sometimes not. This year, for the first time in absolutely ages, she met Marcus, whom she once, before either of them turned twenty, met in the same café during the annual Christmas volleyball tournament, in which she and her school team were taking part.

  Now, as she sits in the light of the campfire in the open space in front of the tents, she remembers with pleasure how shocked he looked and how willingly he had allowed himself to be led to his room in the hotel. She hadn’t forgotten how stiff and inhibited he was. Even a woman like her, who likes men who can overpower her, could lead him by a little string to see, just like before, how the change occurred. Like throwing powder into a glass of water and watching the liquid suddenly turning red. She had also found it fascinating long ago, horrible and exciting at the same time. As soon as the magic moment was there, his eyes turned hard and empty and the man with the suit and the good manners was replaced by a cruel ruler who grabbed her by the hair and took her as if she was his possession. And then, when the deed was done, the other Marcus returned, the man who helped her into her jacket and opened doors for her, who took her out to eat and ordered good wines, entertained her with stories about the books he had read, what was happening in the world (the Red Brigades and why they existed in Italy of all places, that everything would one day be controlled by computers, why athletics was a nobler sport than football) and she laughed and disagreed with him and talked about her books and thoughts and…‘Have you read Dante, Antonia?’ he had asked her once. But of course, what Italian child hasn’t, you twit. ‘It’s the only book. The book of books.’ She admitted that for her it was mostly a memory of long lessons in warm places and a teacher with a bald patch the size of a communion wafer who hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her breasts. ‘Dear Antonia,’ Marcus had said. ‘No one can take their eyes off your breasts. They’re a phenomenon of nature.’ And they had laughed and some of his chilly hardness had almost returned to his eyes. If she could only discover how it worked, why this man could only love if he wasn’t himself. ‘In the Inferno, you remember, Dante and Virgil come to the city of hell.’ She hadn’t a clue any more. They were sitting having dinner in a village somewhere in the provinces, she had put on a polka-dot dress specially, even though it made her bosom look even bigger. The waiter, bent over her shoulder, took a terribly long time filling her glass. But she didn’t care. She was there for Marcus and he was there for her. Even though it lasted only a few days. When it was like that, it was good. She needed nothing more from him, and she knew that he desired nothing more from her. They were two people enjoying each other’s minds and perhaps more importantly each other’s bodies. That was the unspoken agreement. ‘The city in hell,’ said Marcus, filling her glass, ‘is called Dis.’ She had repeated the word. It meant nothing to her. ‘Dis,’ he said. ‘The city in hell. Where all weaknesses come together, there is no truer reflection of the world. Forget the Purgatorio, leave the Paradiso unread. Hell and nothing but that. That is the world.’ She had asked him if he had a dislike of the world, or if he thought that hell was other people? He had shaken his head with a smile. ‘No, I don’t think the world is bad, or that man is bad. But neither am I a sort of dreamy socialist who thinks we’re fundamentally good and only corrupted by circumstances. We are weak. And there are, of course, also bad people, really bad people who want bad things to happen, who have bad plans for us and everyone else.’ He had taken a drink and then said: ‘But don’t think of hell the way your priest once taught you about it. A place where you end up if you haven’t behaved yourself. And you, Antonia, are not one to behave yourself, however much you might pray and confess.’ She had laughed loudly, people at the tables around them had looked up. She had looked at them invitingly. What do you expect, her expression said. I’m Italian. We live outwardly. ‘In hell,’ said Marcus, who didn’t appear to be tiring of the subject, ‘are the people you’d like to meet. The losers, the weaklings, the misfits, the failures, the nonconformists, the freedom-lovers. The ones who have lived are in hell. Have you ever wondered why the Paradiso is so boring?’ No, she hadn’t, because she had done her best to hear nothing of the lessons devoted to it. He smiled when she said that. ‘OK. It’s so boring because only good, pure people end up there. It’s the place of people who have never made a mistake, who saw life as a dangerous inconvenience on the way to non-life. In hell they’re all sitting at a long bar smoking cigarettes. The women dance and curse and sing and talk about Michelangelo and the men drink mescal and chat about the monologue intérieur and Malcolm Lowry and Deep Throat and…Joyce is there, with his eyepatch, and Flaubert, and our Dutch Multatuli, and Picasso, and Beckett, and…’