In a Dark Wood
Page 35
‘Panta rhei,’ he growled. He sat up, rested the stick over his knees and closed his eyes. ‘Panta rhei and horror vacui, I know it all, but it no longer touches me.’
He was aware that he wasn’t talking to anyone, but he didn’t even mind that. It was dark around him and empty and he didn’t feel the emptiness as he had before, as a threat, it wasn’t as if the world had left him in the lurch. It was a natural phenomenon.
As he sat there and like an unlikely Buddha associated with nothingness and felt that nothingness and realised that unlike the Eastern saint he did not see the manifold, but experienced the emptiness in front of it, something pricked the great emptiness that was spreading around him. It was a thing, one thing. He could, sitting here and staring into the darkness, very accurately identify where the thing was. Right in front of him. No, a little to the right. A few kilometres away in the forest. At a particular spot in the forest. In the ground. He could even see it. Yes, motionless and still, his thoughts rolled up into a small bundle, he could drill his way through the darkness, through the walls of houses, through the red plush auditorium of the theatre, across the Vaart, far away into the depths of the forest, where he stopped in front of a hundred-year-old oak with roots that stubbornly gripped the earth.
One thing. And there was nothing else for it but to dig it up and clear it away.
He breathed in slowly and deeply, opened his eyes and hoisted himself up, resting on his walking stick, slow and dignified, like a man who has seen everything and all the time in the world, because he knows that the world has all the time. He brushed the dust from his trousers and walked, a vague patch of white in the darkness, to the shop windows and looked out over the landscape of his story, of this whole godforsaken, history-forsaken spot, and even before he saw anything, before he could cast a glance at the square emptying in the afterthought of night, just a little sound and light from a beer tent, he turned on his heels, walked to the shop door, opened it with the resolute urgency of a shopkeeper who sees an important customer walking past and stepped into the late-night greyness.
The night was washed out and hurrying westwards, fleeing the morning which, still far off in the distance, licked the horizon. Jacob Noah walked, white and rectangular, brooding, through the retreating darkness across the square. He waved his walking stick and didn’t hear the empty cans and plastic glasses crunching under his feet. He crossed the square, purposefully walking towards the canal, past the theatre where, in a dying municipal flower bed, five fat-bellied bikers lay sleeping around a supermarket trolley full of beer cans. On the other side of the canal he turned into narrow Gymnasiumstraat, where it already smelled like fresh bread and the aroma from the coffee-roaster still hung in the air. Right, up Nassaulaan, left, before turning right just before the old upper school into the forest.
The town forest curved around him like a hand on a moth. The darkness still under the trees and in that deep shimmer branches rose up like fingers. Now and then, as he walked along the paths, the breaking night sky could be seen.
He was a white, hovering ghost walking along the meandering paths, down the mossy lanes, beside the old skating rink, until he reached the pond fenced round by tall trees. He settled on a small bench under a roof of overhanging branches and looked at the water and the little island, barely more than a metre across, in the middle. The dark water lay between its shores like a black sheet of glass. Now and again a bright patch in the sky could be seen in the flat mirror of the water. By the shore on the far side a fish jumped, sending faint ripples over the surface. Then the pond grew still and black once more, and the water looked so hard that Jacob Noah wouldn’t have been surprised if it had borne his weight had he wanted to walk across.
Morning came. He felt it, he heard it, he smelt it. The chill of the night vanished, birds began calling, the smells of the forest freed themselves from their nocturnal confinement.
Morning. Five o’clock? Six o’clock? Earlier?
He pulled on the golden chain of his golden watch and slid it from his waistcoat pocket. A faint cough made a little tear in the silence. He looked around and only when he saw no one did his eye fall upon a raven sitting on a low branch, a few metres to his right, its head at a slight angle, blinking its eyes as if to say: Please carry on, behave as if I’m not here…
He shook his head and tapped thoughtfully on the cover of his watch.
A pretzel of grey steam twisted above the pond. To the east the orange of morning rose and flowed into the indigo of the night. More and more birds were starting to sing in the treetops. Muted by the foliage, the hum of an engine reached him, a car navigating its way along the slow bends of Beilerstraat.
What time? Too late. Or too early. Not on time, at any rate.
He smiled and looked at the waking forest.
No, not on time. In the wrong place at the wrong time. As always. In Amsterdam, buried among corsets when he should have been in Assen. In Assen, that provincial thorn-bush, when he yearned for Amsterdam. A prophet where the changes in the world around him were concerned–the big stores, the town as a playground for free men and women–but blind to the changes in his life. A man for his mother and his daughters, but not for the women his own age, the women he could have loved. He showed up before or after, but was never on time. And now it was too late.
The watch in his hand gleamed softly like an eggshell.
He bent over the workings, looked at the glass beneath which the horizon glowed like a fire in the north-east and the blue shadows of the night withdrew, the charcoal forests turned green and the wind swept over the country and made the wheat fields wave, the leaves of the potato plants flutter and the treetops rustle; far away in the distance the first birds flew up and announced the presence of a fox to the colouring sky, in the sand drifts on the heath, rabbits hopped back to their burrows and a waddling badger made for its sett; the outlines of trees stood out against the rising light, farmhouse roofs, an electricity pylon; gold and orange, the early morning flowed over the land, extinguished lights, made cars drive and woke tractors, factories groaned, postmen remembered their bags and newspaper boys their rounds; the dew on the wet meadows began to glitter, spiders’ webs turned to crystal, farmhouse windows flashed and somewhere where yesterday’s washing still hung on the rotary line a sheet shone like a cinema screen; farmers drove to the field, trailers with rattling milk crates behind the tractor, in the state forests the crisp report of a shotgun rang out; the sky marbled with the slow movement of clouds, an aeroplane crossed the sky on the way to Sweden or Finland or the eastern bloc, and for a brief moment it looked as if Venus could still be seen, a pinprick beside the continually growing mass of light on the horizon; nearby, on the TT campsite in the forest, the first people emerged from their tents and night owls staggered down the long straight forest path on the way to the circuit past comatose sleepers who had lain down on benches where on other days only elderly cyclists sat; and barely a sound other than what must have been a wandering drunk with just enough energy to curse the world that made him end up in the same place over and over again, or the deep throb of a hearse in Torenlaan, where a policeman stood waving his arms about while a young undertaker manoeuvred a big limousine out of a little garden down a narrow passageway across the pavement into the street, watched from behind the kitchen window by a weary grey woman who looked motionlessly at the tyre marks on the lawn, and as she stood there and stared it started snowing and Rika Talens walked past the front of her house in the company of a shabbily dressed stranger and above the roofs, glistening like a dung beetle, pack on his back, hat precariously balanced on the back of his head, like a mystical cabalistic bridegroom, the black figure of the pedlar floated past.
Morning, thought Jacob Noah: chinks of light in the pit of night.
He snapped the watch shut and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. Then, after letting his eye glide once more across the mirror, dark blue by now, of the pond, he stood up slowly and heavily, took his walking stick and walk
ed to the big oak that stood by the bend in the path and bent lovingly down. He wriggled, muttering and grumbling, around the fat, wrinkled trunk, until he was half in the undergrowth, where he had barely enough room to move. There was some pushing and pulling on the stiff branches of the low bushes and then, panting slightly but content, he stuck the tip of his stick into the dark-brown soil and started to scrabble it loose. He pricked and prodded and stirred and after a while he fell almost devotedly to his knees, set his stick aside and plunged his hands in the earth as if he was about to deliver a child, hand stretched out into the womb of the mother…
…earth, yes…
…and he dug,
he dug,
and dug,
and dug,
and dug…
…tree-roots worms half-decayed foliage spongy bits of branch the splinters of a blue Delft plate…
…and dug,
and dug,
d
u
g.
.
.
…until his fingertips in the dark hole, in the dark damp ground, felt something that was cooler than the earth…
…and hard…
…smooth…
…which his fingers slid across surprised at the shape that his hand immediately remembered, which his hand assumed as if of its own accord.
He straightened up and looked at the rusting case, the iron clasp which now, after lying buried for thirty-five years, looked almost innocent. The barrel was full of black earth and at its mouth it showed a reddish-brown ring of rust. The safety catch had become a lump of eroded iron, and a woodlouse scampered over the handle.
He struck the thing against the bark of the tree and took out his pocket handkerchief to remove the last remnants of dirt.
He walked over to the bench, sat down again and set the weapon on his right thigh. It lay there, on the white fabric of his trousers, like something that looked barely capable of the sort of violence it was made for. A piece of rotten, rusty iron. Something you could knock in a nail with. A paperweight. The weapon’s arrogance had been dissolved in the earth. At the time, as he had held it in his hand, brought it up and aimed it at the spot between the eyes of AryanBookshopHilbrandts, then it was a sneering piece of metal, something that emanated contempt, aware of its power over life and death. Noah had felt that. There had been contact between him and this thing. He had almost heard it talking and if it had done, he wouldn’t have been surprised if it had addressed him with the haughty presumption of a superior. Yes, he had known that then, had raised his arm, his hand around the hard metal of the butt, the weight that communicated itself through his hand, arm, shoulder to his body. He had known that he could never possess this weapon, could never keep it, would never fire it. Was that why he had buried it so hastily in the forest that night? Not because he was scared of being caught with it, if the police, warned by AryanBookshopHilbrandts, came to get him, but because he knew that he could never be its owner, that this thing could not have an owner? Because he was scared of it? Scared because it might, one day, really speak to him?
Somewhere deep in his body he knew, now that he was here and staring at the black, angular metal, that the weapon, furtive and secret, had aroused an almost shimmering feeling of excitement, indeed of lust itself. Far away, barely noticeable. But it was there and he had known that it was there. A flame, a quick, bright flash, a rocket shooting up briefly and immediately going out again that showed him visions of death and violence and destruction. For a short while he closed his eyes and returned to that moment in his shoe shop, rechristened as the Aryan Bookshop, when for a few seconds he had stood there, the shop door still swaying on its hinges behind him, himself panting, his head bent forward, a bull preparing to charge, and snorting like a bull, nostrils wide, mouth distorted, shoulders slightly hunched, ribcage swelling, yes, he had stood there with his hand full of death and destruction and felt revenge, rage, blind fury, an unreasoning, wild…No longer for the man in front of him, that mousy little fellow traveller with his fearful grey face and his wet crotch, no, the world, towards the world, which had inflicted this on him, had stolen from him, stuffed him under the ground and taken three years from his life, like a death before death, so that he would get used to everything being nothing, everything nothing, whatever he did, whatever he had done, whatever he had, whatever they had done who came before him, in the hope that their toil would one day lead to life, a life like all the others…
It was a feeling that rose up with a roar, seemed to fill his whole body, took possession of him.
To walk out of the still gently swaying door…Once outside to aim his black hand, for the pistol was now his hand, at the first person who crossed his path…To exterminate the whole of this hole, forgotten by God and time. To roam the streets like a Genghis Khan and smash everything, destroy everything, the people, the houses, the streets…Until nothing remained of this spot but a smoking heap…
Deep in his body: the blaze of a scorching fire.
‘Avenge yourself through me. Purify through me. Use me.’
As if the weapon was saying that to him.
But the light had returned to his eyes, the haze vanished and the world was clear again. Now again he saw the mousy face of the man in front of him, the deathly terror that hung across the grey skin of his cheeks, the thin, back-combed hair that showed pearling drops of sweat at the roots. He couldn’t shake that face away, every detail sharp and so clear that it surprised him and caused him pain. The depth of the folds in his skin, the pores between his eyebrows, the dull, greasy gleam on his narrow forehead. The short eyelids with their pale eyelashes blinked and Jacob Noah’s gaze slipped away with surgical precision, along the uneven sideburns, to two, three spots that the razor had missed, on the bottom left of his chin, beside his Adam’s apple and beside his right nostril. He smelled the stale breath of Hilbrandts, heard his hunted, shallow breathing.
Where did you come from, thought Jacob Noah, without thinking; where did you come from that you stand facing me here, today?
And for a moment the vengeful fury of the weapon had risen up in him once more, like a flourishing climbing plant branching off through veins, nerves, airways, peristaltic system, brainstem, head.
You mouse, he thought. You worm. You killjoy. You inferior creature. You slime.
And then the tide of fury and revenge subsided, his eyes wandered, down to where he saw AryanBookshopHilbrandts’ crotch turning wet and suddenly there was nothing but distaste for himself, woven in with the measly existence of the other, what the other had made of himself, and at that moment he felt himself the other, piss-drenched trousers and everything, and the other became him. It was a character swap that he didn’t want, an empathy that he rejected, a concept (no, it wasn’t that, this perverse exchange lay beyond concept), something at any rate that he despised. He lowered the weapon and turned his head away. A faint sickness slowly welling up in him, misery and coldness and loneliness. A gesture with his black pointing hand in the direction of the door.
What, thought Jacob Noah, on his bench by the still pond in the forest, what if I had fired? Then would I have been the right man at the right moment? Then would I, would my life’s heartbeat have coincided for the first time with the clock of time? Afterwards would I have been in my place?
He breathed deeply and looked at the water. The pond was the shape of an eye. He saw that now for the first time. The kind of eye that the ancient Egyptians drew in their hieroglyphs. He looked involuntarily downwards, as if following the gaze of the eye.
The space between the treetops was marbled dark blue and black, another eye, one that looked back just as indifferently.
There hadn’t been a single reason to dig this thing up. He couldn’t do anything with it and he didn’t want to do anything with it. It had, like himself, spent time under the ground and had, like himself, emerged disarmed, without a function, a form that reminded you of something but could not be what it once had been.
 
; It was strange, but now that he was sitting here he almost missed the pedlar, that inexplicable, crumpled little man with his half-profound observations who had the previous night served him as a shuffling guide through the hell of the TT night. He had asked him who he was and where he came from, but no answer had ever come. Just as it hadn’t become clear to him why he, Jacob Noah, had found himself tied up in this spiral of events. It was something like a birth: you’re thrown into life without explanation or instructions, unasked and perhaps even unwanted, and then there’s nothing to do but finish it off.
You walk the path that is there, he thought, and he pursed his lips at the thought of how well that described what his life had become. He hadn’t sought it out, he hadn’t even wanted it, but it couldn’t have been otherwise. He had walked the path that was there. In the middle of the world’s wide forest he had walked the narrow path of his life.
He weighed the iron object on his thigh.
Freedom, freedom of choice, the feasibility of the world and personal fate, the ideas that had so permeated the post-war years, only held for the blessed, for those whose fate, or fortune, smiled upon them in one inexplicable way or another. For all the others, the cripples, the blind, the poor and the deviant, Jews, Moluccans, blacks, homosexuals and Eskimos, for the categories outside the centre of benign fate, it was a matter of walking in the treadmills, labouring in the sweat of one’s brow and toiling until it was all over.
‘I should have been blond, blue-eyed and Jansen,’ smiled Noah under his roof of oak leaves. ‘Jan Jansen, an ordinary person.’
He nodded to the raven, which was still watching him from a low branch.
The idea of power over his own life, the quest for happiness, the possibility of doing something…Where did it come from? Who had thought of it? It must have arisen in someone who was short of nothing. Someone who had not felt the sucking stream of history, who had not been slung about, like flotsam, swirling and rubbing and submerging, by events that only ever affect the weak, the vulnerable, the fragile, the lonely, the marginal. Just as the trees at the edge of the forest sway in a storm. Or lonely trees. Weak trees.