In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  I’m like death. Always where you least expect me…

  Beside him he had heard the regular, shallow breathing of his wife. Although he knew that he was in bed and not dreaming, it was as if he wasn’t here either.

  So this is where you are. This is where you’ve got to.

  All that trouble, all those aspirations.

  Here you lie…

  Who are you, he wanted to ask, but he said nothing because his wife was lying beside him and he was also a little ashamed at the thought of talking to something that wasn’t there.

  One question.

  One question that buzzes in your head like a fly in a glass…

  I haven’t got a single question, he thought. And then: No, that isn’t true.

  Is this it?

  Is this IT?

  That’s what you’re thinking.

  He stared at the darkness above him and suddenly knew how vast and omnipresent the night was. This was the moment when, in his childhood years, and probably a little later, too, but not after that, he would pray to God. Yes, then he had sought refuge in the protection given to him by the God of his fathers.

  What did you want to be? What were you striving for?

  And what went wrong?

  He reluctantly tried to give an answer. He quickly became aware that his answers were more like justifications.

  No…

  We have known each other too long to escape…We know what it is when your desires and expectations stand round your bed at night like starving children.

  There was a brief moment when he wondered if he was hearing the voice of God, which would have made it clear once and for all that he was called, blessed, freed now from the doubt that had clung to him when he had decided to stop going to church, to stop praying to an agency that never showed a hint of receiving anything. No, not God, he thought. This nihilism didn’t belong to the God he knew.

  How many suicides had he prepared for the coffin? Washed, powdered, sometimes sewn up, cotton wool in their cheeks, so that they wouldn’t show the fear and the hollow loneliness that had tormented them until the moment of their death. In the box. There were a few he knew from church circles. Silent farmers who had worried themselves sick over the question of whether they were called, whether they really could believe the Bible message. Racked by doubts about their own faith. And then, one dark winter evening, they said to the wife: I’m going to tend to the animals. But they didn’t go to the animals. They walked to the barn, threw a rope over a beam and hanged themselves.

  He had removed, cut away, torn off their clothes. Washed away the shit between their legs. Dressed them again, ideally in a suit, with a high-collared shirt so that the purple bruises around their necks weren’t visible.

  His job.

  Clearing up corpses.

  You are bound hand and foot to yourself. Your own jailer. Your own devil. Your own executioner, your own sacrificial victim.

  And you’re all those things not just for yourself, but for others as well…

  As others were for you.

  No, not God. The devil? It seemed very like him. He had had a different image of the devil’s work. The devil would come with doubts, certainly, but also with sinful temptations. This was more like a factual summation of missed goals, unachieved results. A devil like an accountant.

  My God, he thought. I’ve had a nocturnal visitation from a bookkeeper. He sniffed with a sneer.

  This is it.

  And in spite of all your aspirations: there won’t be anything else. You can just go on waiting. For the rest of your life.

  You know that.

  The rest of your life.

  And when you’ve waited for long enough…

  You know it…

  He knew it. He had known it for a long time. He had walked into the trap that he himself had helped to set. The wrong train had come along and he had got on it. There was a once-in-a-lifetime offer of a cruise and the ship had been called the Titanic.

  But there had to be more. He might have taken a wrong turning, but that didn’t mean that life consisted only of expectations made reality. There was also something like…

  Love?

  Are you saying: love?

  Perhaps…

  But how long does love last? How long before it wears out? How long before you can’t face climbing the long way up, to the altar of the double bed? How long, do you think, when it’s your time to come home, before she thinks: perhaps he’s been in an accident? How long, do you think, does it last before that ceases to be a fear and becomes a wish? And how long, and this is the moment when we’re honest with each other, you and I, because we’ve known each other too long to resort to evasions and fantasies, how long before you can see the comforting story of a better life, the later that keeps on retreating–after retirement, with someone else, in the hereafter–how long before you can see that for what it is?

  The drowning man’s hope of a coast.

  A straw that breaks when you grab it.

  No…Not love…

  He had caught himself out with that thought. On the way home in the afternoon and the sudden fantasy that there would be nobody there. The phone that started ringing and the receptionist coming to tell him that the next corpse would be hers. And he didn’t hate her. He didn’t want her dead.

  But it was as if he had gone into a room, all that time ago, someone had closed the door behind him and now, so many years later, he was here: locked away, with very limited freedom of movement, doomed to wear away his life in a room of which he knew every square inch.

  Listen…

  I’m with you.

  Always have been.

  You know that.

  The voice that rustles at night in the darkness…

  That wakes you and you don’t know what it was that woke you…

  The four-o’clock-in-the-morning voice…

  Or is it later?

  The voice, at any rate, that knows your despair.

  Which you understand…

  Which is with you with a lover’s eager intimacy…

  The voice you can trust…

  The truth and nothing but…

  The snake, he thought suddenly. That must have been how the snake spoke when it tempted Eve to pluck from the tree of knowledge. A whole chain…A snake of arguments, all logical and valid and…Seventy-five years ago the synod in this town had decided that the snake was not a metaphor, not an instrument in a parable, not a little cog in the big machinery of a story, but a ‘sensually perceivable reality’. They had dismissed the Reverend Geelkerken because he doubted sensual perceivability. His family hadn’t gone along with the church-breakers then. They did that in 1944, when the question of baptism led to a divorce. His father, still young, had been the only one in his family to follow the little group which believed that baptism was only valid if the one baptised remained a sincere believer all his life. Even later he had crept up towards the experiential position in which constant doubt took precedence over the question of whether one really stood before God naked and insignificant as the sinner one was, whether one was heard and had to endure the blackness of one’s sins in all one’s misery, to be saved thereafter in gratitude.

  The snake. Was this the voice that the experiential Christians heard? Must he now be the sinner he was and call to Him from the depths?

  You’re alone.

  The voice had said.

  The night is like treacle.

  Deep water.

  Dead of night.

  Even those who seek company and find it…

  Those who work, in the hospital, for the police, as sentries at the barracks…

  Those who find themselves surrounded by noisy entertainment…

  They are all alone.

  This is the time, the place.

  The darkness vaults above you…The night curves and in the curve of the darkness, you are a speck of dust in the velvet bowl of the hand of night…

  Perhaps someone is lying in bed bes
ide you…

  Perhaps someone you’ve just met tonight and whose name you can’t remember…

  It doesn’t help.

  Perhaps you’re sitting behind a desk looking at the silent grey picture on a surveillance monitor…

  Door…

  Two metres of street…

  Fence…

  It doesn’t help.

  Or you’re walking on white Swedish mules down the long, empty corridor in the hospital, a glimmering stretch of green linoleum in front of you, endless walls with closed doors and above your head, in the ceiling, the cold strip light indicating the path you’re taking. The echo of your wooden soles in the stone shaft…

  It doesn’t help.

  Perhaps you’re standing in the piss-reeking toilet of a bar, supporting yourself on one arm, and with your other hand you’re aiming into the ring of caked-on urinary salts…Clamorous scribbles on the walls (Johanna is hot. CUNT. Revolushun. Up the South Moluccas! God help us) and the faint light from an old bulb above you…

  It doesn’t help.

  Or you’re looking down at the cold body of a young accident victim that’s just been brought in and, though dead, still bears all the signs of life’s expectations: an engagement ring on a blue finger, frozen mascara on the closed eyelids, the lipsticked mouth in the death-pale face a bloody gash…

  In a hotel bathroom, razor in his hand, the veins meandering blue across your throat, the bath slowly filling with a soft clatter…

  None of it helps.

  You never wanted all this.

  Look at what you are.

  A moderately loved man with a future behind him.

  A shrub too often trimmed.

  Something for everyone and nothing for yourself.

  He had grown so weary of the endless battering away at his…yes, his what? conscience? self-image? security? faith? He had closed his eyes and felt dizzyingly light. It was as if he was floating above the bed.

  But…you say (you think, because there’s the one beside you, the young corpse on the stainless-steel table, the nearby noise from the bar…There’s always something that means you can’t express yourself).

  No, no ‘but’.

  There is something. There is no one.

  You and I alone. Nothing else.

  Not a soul. (Even if you’ve left a slew of offspring.)

  Friend nor foe. (Even if they’re sitting less than three metres away drinking to your health or your downfall.)

  If the line is drawn here, if this is it, then you’re alone.

  Just one question. A question buzzing through your head like a fly against the windowpane.

  Is this it?

  You can block your ears, you can get out of bed, grab a bottle in the dark sitting room and have a drink.

  But you hear that question.

  You can go up the street and lose yourself in women and men and pleasure and violence.

  I’m there.

  One question.

  Is this it?

  Ah, you thought it was about you. That you were the one who…

  You remember that moment when you understood for the first time that it hadn’t worked out, that it wouldn’t work out again, that it was over before your life was over and that there was nothing else left now other than finishing the job, head in your lap, getting on the daily treadmill from now on because it had to be done, no longer because it was a step on the way to…

  Something bigger?

  Something different?

  Real life?

  IT?

  Listen…

  Perhaps IT doesn’t exist.

  Or perhaps it does exist and you haven’t got it.

  Perhaps your greatness and your lust for life exist only in the smallness of the people around you. The people who haven’t achieved it all either. Who don’t have it all either. Just like you locked up in their own hell, where they torture themselves with their yearnings and doubts and dreams and wishes, their Fata Morganas of real life and meaningful existences, their castles in the air full of deeds and cleverness and truth and great and deep and terrific.

  Perhaps you’re an ant like the other ants.

  Yes. I know.

  And you know too.

  The waste…

  One-way ticket purchased. And where are we going?

  Nowheresville.

  Welcome.

  Welcome to life.

  Your life.

  This is your life.

  He shivered in his jacket and crossed Koopmansplein. Music and light was coming out of the Moluccans’ beer tent. Something within him was attracted by the beam of light that hung beneath the tent flaps. He had never been to a pub, had never visited a beer tent on TT night, either. And not even because he thought things could get bad. That was perhaps the worst thing. The obligations, that was it. There was always an obligation. The beeper that he carried with him and which could call him at any time to a traffic accident or a suicide. The call of the family. He turned into Kruisstraat and walked on with the image that the word ‘family’ had called up in him: a nest of young thrushes with wide-open beaks.

  But perhaps it wasn’t the obligations. Perhaps it wasn’t him. There was nothing to stop him turning on his heels and going to the beer tent. He could collect that car by daylight tomorrow. Talens was laid out and wasn’t going to run away.

  He hesitated.

  A few men in shirts and jeans and a few young women in denim suits were walking on the other side of the street, talking loudly. One of them yelled something and threw a beer can at an illuminated advertisement. Foam flew around in long arcs. When the tin hit the neon, gleaming droplets exploded like a star.

  I’m living on the surface, he thought. Shouldn’t I dive down to the bottom for once?

  He turned round and stepped hesitantly in the direction from which he had come.

  On the spot where Kruisstraat, Gedempte Singel and Koopmansplein met, he stopped. In the distance, beyond the beer tent, but clearly coming towards him, he saw Marcus Kolpa.

  Something in him, he didn’t know exactly what, made him turn round and walk quickly onto Torenlaan.

  He had already reached the Brink, where groups of drinking motorcyclists walked and lay beneath the trees, when it suddenly struck him.

  Marcus Kolpa and the voice in the night-time…

  Jacob Noah sat in a shop that no longer existed, but in fact did, in the dark, staring at his shoes and surrounded by smells that might no longer have been there, but still reached him, sharp and distinct: the dusty, powdery smell of brocade and the rough, rubbery one of elastic; the smell of fine building dust, which you taste on the tip of your tongue and then a smell that talks of people who walked through the house long ago; the sharp, aromatic steam of ethereal oils in good shoe polish and of course the earthy, rutting one of leather, which sticks in the throat and stirs the crotch; the sweet, whirling smell of beeswax and the fleeting one of glue, which makes you hoarse and sickly and which you feel behind your eyes; the enigmatic smell of newborn children, which smell as nothing in the world smells, and if you had to say of what, then of cleanliness and purity and innocence and buttercups, even their nappies; the smell, finally, very clear, of his mother, her eau de cologne, the deep smell that filled her hair and the memory of the day that nestled in her clothes: milky coffee, a customer’s cigar smoke, the warm scent of her body.

  In the darkness of his shop he wondered how on earth he was here, how come life had brought him here. His thoughts floated around him like fireflies…

  At the end of a long night, in a shop that no longer exists, but still does, just as he is no longer, but still is, the young man who came back bent over the star on his jacket, was taken to a hole and came back but never really arrived in the sense of making it, never really started his life in the sense of his life, but instead lived the life that lay ready before him, which history had laid down for him, a future like a past, in a place to which history always gave a wide berth, a spot that history had avoi
ded.

  Memories dreamed around him like old friends around a grave: on the chairs and the footrests, against the box of shoeboxes and above the cash register.

  …I still remember when…

  …no, a few years before…

  …listen…

  a spiralling flow of words and sounds that slowly grew louder and louder, until the whole space was filled with muted, polyphonic lisping and mumbling and moaning and…

  Here.

  Spun into time.

  It was a phrase that his mother would use to him and his brother at the end of a long working day, lying in bed between them, he in her right arm, Heijman in the left, the darkness a soft blanket and a very small lamp giving off a yellowy glow no bigger than a tennis ball. What he remembered most keenly, later on, when he had children himself and told them about it, was the people locked away in the thorn-bushes, the castle in which everyone slept–the cook over his pot of clotted porridge, the guards leaning behind cobwebs in their corners, the king and the queen slumped in their thrones, the musicians with their flutes between their lips, viols under their chins–and how the castle of the sleeping ones was slowly wreathed round by a huge thorn-bush, a bush that closed the castle in and covered it and withdrew it from time.

  …listen…

  …no, look…

  …come…

  …go…

  He felt as if he had been on a long journey and now, having finally arrived, had made the discovery that he was empty-handed, in an empty spot.

  His suit glowed faintly in the darkness, his shoes were vague patches. He rested on his stick, hand over the knob, chin resting on the back of his hand, and pinched his lips disapprovingly. Here then, he thought: like this.

  And he looked at the glowing words that hovered through the dark and let his thoughts flutter freely around. A curious feeling of completeness had taken possession of him. The urge to do, to make, to buy and to sell, to have a grip on things and people and himself, that urge had left him. And he hadn’t become indifferent, no, he was…finished. In one strange way or another, the chaotic, incomplete world around him felt ‘over’, even though he knew that that was impossible, that the characteristic feature of the world, life, was that nothing could be over.