In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  Dis. She had never forgotten that word and every time she began the long journey to this place and drove northwards along dusty roads, stood drinking sharp-tasting coffee at little standing tables in German service stations, or smoking a Marlboro on the verge, she thought: I’m going to Dis.

  A young woman in a pair of biking trousers that have assumed the shape that results from a long period of sitting down comes up to her. She knows her from many years ago. She’s a German girl from Berlin who first came here illicitly when she was seventeen, on a biking holiday with her boyfriend, who was four years older. Her parents thought she was going with a girlfriend to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

  ‘Can’t sleep, Antonia?’

  She makes room on the groundsheet for her German friend and shakes her head.

  ‘Thoughts,’ she says. ‘Night-time thoughts.’

  ‘Nearly-morning thoughts,’ says Heike. ‘The sun’ll be up in an hour or so. Going to the races tomorrow?’

  Antonia nods.

  ‘Want to bet who’s going to win?’

  Heike nods.

  ‘I don’t know. An Italian.’

  They laugh.

  ‘A Dutchman,’ says Heike. ‘I say Jack Middelburg’s going to win.’

  Antonia shakes her head. ‘As far as I know he hasn’t even got a factory-made bike. Heike, they call that man “Jumping Jack” because he’s always falling off. No, it won’t be him.’

  But Heike smiles serenely.

  ‘And how’s the love life?’ asks Antonia.

  The smoke from the campfire, no longer anything more than a few hesitantly flickering flames over the remains of a tree trunk and some dark-grey pieces of charcoal, rolls gently into the darkness. There’s just enough light to give their faces a soft orange glow.

  ‘Ah,’ sighs Heike.

  A few years ago she married a biker friend from her youth, but the marriage didn’t bring her what she expected of it. Martin, her husband, turned into a good bourgeois from one day to the next. He started wearing boring off-the-peg suits and gave up his independent existence as a designer to work for the advertising department of a major industrial company. The heavy Yamaha Goldwing was sold and made way for a good solid BMW bike.

  ‘He wants to buy a house in the Ruhr area, because that’s where they want to transfer him. The bike has to go, no more trips…’

  ‘…and he’s turned into a useless lover,’ says Antonia.

  Heike gives a start. She looks around shyly. Then she says with a whisper: ‘How do you know that? How on earth is that possible? He comes home and reads the paper, he expects me to cook dinner and wash up and he only feels like it once every two weeks, whether he really feels like it or not. Everything’s become a duty.’

  A sob rising up in her voice.

  Antonia throws her arm around her friend and nods.

  ‘Cara,’ she says. ‘I know because I’ve heard the story countless times. They act modern, the men of our time, but deep inside they’re just like their fathers. And if you’re German it’s even worse.’

  Heike laughs through the tears that she’s holding back.

  ‘No, really, I mean it. You two are such a conservative couple. What your Martin is doing is only what’s expected of him: wife, house, career. Be careful, soon there’ll be a car, too, ideally the kind that’ll make his colleagues say: Well, well, Martin’s doing well for himself.’

  Heike sighs.

  ‘And so it goes on, princess. Year after year, until you too have forgotten that there’s more to life and you’re just waiting for the end of every day, when you can go to sleep and forget that this isn’t what you were expecting. Heike, if you want something out of life you have to go and get it. Have you talked to Martin about it?’

  ‘About sex?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘No, not about that!’

  ‘And the other stuff?’

  ‘Oh, Antonia. When I do he says, Heike, we’re not seventeen any more, real life has begun, we’ve got responsibilities. I’m worried that he wants children, too.’

  ‘And you don’t…’

  ‘No. No. I don’t think so.’

  She throws her hand over her mouth and makes a little strangled sound.

  ‘Sometimes I think I’m a bad woman for wanting something different from everyone else.’

  Antonia shakes her head.

  ‘Do you know what this place is called?’

  Heike looks up in surprise. ‘Yes, of course. What do you m…’

  ‘No, not in real life. I’ve got a good friend who used to live here. He had a name for it. He always acted as if he was talking about this place, but I think he meant anywhere.’

  She turns towards her friend and smiles at her.

  ‘Heike, have you ever read Dante?’

  He turns off to the rear of the fairground, walks without knowing exactly where he is through gardens and along paths with sheds and takes a short cut towards Groningerstraat, suddenly having had his fill of noise and fun and cheerfully coloured lights. Near the intersection with Rolderstraat and Oudestraat, groups of drunk men and women come wandering towards him, also searching for something, but in all likelihood not the same thing as him. For more of the centre, he thinks, more pubs, but there isn’t any more. This little spot, the few cafés, those two dying cinemas always showing the same inane films, the one sighing and groaning theatre, one spicy little restaurant (but for how long), one big department store (Noah’s Ark, unshakeably wedged on the Mount Ararat that is this town…).

  Almost at the end of Oudestraat he passes once again the nightclub that he went into with Johan van Gelder. Once he, Van Gelder, had forced him, half joking, but very insistently, to throw a party. Marcus had rented a flat and was about to leave his mother for the first time. When the editorial department found out, there were a lot of shouts of ‘housewarming party!’ He had ignored it, until Van Gelder had said that for a casual article-writer customer relations were a good idea. And so he, who abhorred parties and had for that reason, since his early teens, ceased to celebrate his birthday, gave a party in his new house. At seven o’clock in the evening he had looked around his empty flat, the sea of off-white carpet, the sober black sofa that stood against the wall, the round table that he had designed himself and the three chairs to go with it, and beyond that the emptiness, the emptiness he had so striven for and cultivated. He had shaken his head and understood that this was impossible, and had hastily run upstairs to fetch the chairs he had put in his study. He had brought them down and realised that they were drops of water on a hot plate. It stayed empty and white.

  But at that moment the doorbell had rung and one after the other editors and their wives (‘My, how lovely and tidy it is in here’) had come in and then it had become a job of picking up glasses, pouring drinks, setting down and handing round snacks, all activities that made him understand once again that one gives a party not for oneself but for the guests.

  People drank as if there would be nothing more to drink after this evening. He himself hadn’t been able to join in, because he was constantly running back and forth with bottles and plates.

  The first cracks appeared at about eleven, when someone came over to him and said that ‘two people were bickering upstairs’. Upstairs? he thought. How come upstairs? Upstairs is private. Who said they could go into my bedroom and study? He went up and saw one of the editors, who had opened his bedroom window and was trying to wriggle out, calling out that he was going to jump, that life had lost its meaning, that he…The window was far too narrow for his angular form, but nonetheless Marcus pulled him back, set him on the edge of his sober single bed and tried to persuade him that tomorrow wasn’t just a new day, but also probably much nicer than tonight. He ended up in a tight embrace, listening to a tearful confession of loneliness and betrayal.

  He had just brought the rescued suicide downstairs when the crash of shattering glass came from the sitting room. As he hurried in, he had to dodge a glass. The other gues
ts barely looked up. In the open kitchen the shards of a bottle of wine lay in a purple puddle and on either side of the puddle stood Van Gelder and his wife. He walked up to them and before he could even say anything, Van Gelder tried to have a go at his wife. There was nothing Marcus could do but go and stand between them and firmly grab hold of the skinny figure of his employer. Together they staggered backwards, against the crockery cabinet, and when they had regained their balance Marcus looked over his shoulder to see the cabinet missing Van Gelder’s wife by a hair, toppling backwards in a cloud of creaking woodwork and breaking glass and pottery. An editor’s wife called for salt and a bewildered Marcus pointed her to a cupboard. She took the bag and poured it all out onto the purple stain. ‘Tmorrow ywoan seea thing,’ she said happily. Albert Gallus manoeuvred the Van Gelders outside, loaded them into his car and took them away, and as if that was the sign all the other people suddenly took their leave, thanked him for the pleasant evening and hastily departed. When he ran to close the front door, he heard a curious thumping noise coming from the toilet. He opened the door and found Greet the editorial archivist sitting precariously on the washbasin, her bare legs wrapped round the waist of a journalist. At that moment there was nothing he could do but shake his head and wait until they too left the premises and allowed him at least his loneliness.

  He was still cleaning and tidying when Albert came back. They silently swept up the broken glass, scraped the bits of plates and cups together, and eventually, when Albert was walking to the bin with dustpan and brush, he glanced out of the kitchen window and stammered: ‘My God…Marcus. Christ…Have a look…’

  Outside, down below, on the upper edge of the little square between the buildings, level with the supermarket, the naked figure of Van Gelder staggered along the house-fronts. His white body was like a ghost in the darkness and his posture suggested not only that he was still drunk, but that he was bent under an invisible burden.

  What it was, that burden, they saw when he rang the doorbell a minute or so later. He stood at the door grinning broadly, in all his nakedness, and carrying a plastic tray of pot plants in his arms. Marcus immediately knew where they came from. When he had been at the supermarket earlier that day, he had seen them outside the florist’s. Apparently the florist had forgotten to take them in.

  They stood facing one another, the naked man swaying on his feet and him. One with outstretched arms full of young plants, the other with a face carved from stone.

  ‘Johan,’ Marcus said after a while, ‘take those things, put them back and take your misery with you, too.’

  Then he turned round and closed the door behind him.

  He had been busy until the small hours clearing up the havoc in his house and when he had finished and Albert and he were sitting on the black sofa with a glass of wine, they stared at the enormous pale purple stain that seemed to be coming into the sitting room from the kitchen.

  ‘White carpet,’ said Marcus. ‘I should never have done it.’

  Albert nodded.

  ‘Party,’ said Marcus. ‘I should never have done that either.’

  ‘Not all parties turn out like that.’

  ‘They do when I give them, Albertolucci. They do if your name is Marcus Kolpa.’

  He has now reached the rear of the beer tent where he’s supposed to be meeting Albert. It’s too early, but everything in the town is too much for him now. He feels like a ship on a high swell yearning for a safe haven. Odysseus, yes. A Jewish Odysseus and thus one without a haven. And where is Penelope?

  He had woken with the unreal, metallic feeling of too little sleep. His wife had heard the alarm, he hadn’t, and it was a while before she managed to get him to turn off the alarm, get out of bed and stagger to the bathroom.

  He hadn’t slept more than three hours, less, in fact, much less.

  The strip light above the mirror struck the back of his eyes, or at least that was what it felt like, and he had to suppress the inclination to turn it off and curl up here, on the little mat by the foot of the basin, and carry on sleeping.

  He washed fleetingly, brushed his teeth in the hope that a fresh mouth would mean the start of a fresh constitution and went to the dark bedroom, where without turning on the light he hoisted himself into clothes still warm from last night.

  Downstairs he put on a small quantity of coffee. He waited by the machine until the water had run through and stared hollowly outside, where the darkness was the colour of raw steel and hung like death between the shrubs and bushes. Two little dots of light shone out from among the undergrowth. It took him a moment to work out that it must have been a cat creeping through the gardens.

  He poured coffee into a mug with a vacantly grinning gnome. His youngest had given it to him for his birthday and he felt obliged to drink from it until the thing finally fell to pieces. There was little chance of that happening. He knew from experience that ugly things break much less quickly than beautiful ones.

  There was so little time that he didn’t bother to have breakfast. He didn’t even sit down. He went on standing up, drank his coffee as if it was medicine and stared outside with the obstinacy of a sausage-seller in the rain. In one of the houses behind his a light came on, somewhere on the top floor. He wondered who it was and why on earth someone was getting up so early. Before he could come up with an answer the light went out again.

  He put his cup in the sink, walked to the hall, where he found his wallet, keys and papers on the camel’s saddle, crept on tiptoe down the natural stone passageway and opened the front door so slowly and so gently that he barely heard it himself.

  The worst of the pressure of the big night was past, although the nocturnal peace that he knew so well from all the times he had been called by the police to take away an accident victim did not prevail. Nor was it getting up in the middle of the night that made him feel so hollow and empty, and perhaps it wasn’t even his short sleep. Somewhere in his head there roamed the remnant of something that had been like a dream, but wasn’t.

  He walked down a gently twisting street and saw at the end of it the remains of the go-kart circuit. A lorry was busy loading fences and hay bales. Men in overalls stood smoking together in the white glow of a spotlight and watched the driver reversing.

  It had been a voice. Barely asleep, still shivering slightly from the chill in the mortuary air, he had been woken by a sentence.

  No, not really woken.

  Become aware of.

  You thought you could escape.

  Like the gardener from death.

  He had hovered in the darkness and peered around the room.