In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  ‘Mr…’

  ‘Yes, yes, Jew of Assen,’ growled Noah.

  The Jew of Assen sat down breathlessly on the bench, took off his pack, placed it carefully against his knees and looked up with a hopeful expression.

  Jacob Noah stood in front of him and drew lines in the sand with the tip of his stick.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Pedlar…That pistol I threw into the water a little while ago…If I’d aimed it at you and fired…What would have…’

  ‘But, Mr Noah…’ the little man cried, bewildered. ‘You wouldn’t…’

  Noah sighed.

  ‘A hypothetical question,’ nodded the Jew of Assen. ‘Of course.’ He laid his forearms on his pedlar’s pack and stared thoughtfully ahead. ‘I don’t think it would have gone off,’ he said at last.

  ‘No,’ said Jacob Noah wearily. ‘I don’t think so either. But if it had gone off?’

  ‘You would never have…’

  ‘And if I had?’ said Noah, raising his voice. He lifted his stick and pointed in the direction of the little man. ‘Would I have killed you, Jew of Assen? Can you die? Are you dead? Are you Death?’

  The pedlar lowered his head and shook it uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Mr Noah. What are you saying now? Me? Death? Do I look like the angel of death? A monster that appears to you in a flutter of wings and a swish of garments and in a hollow voice announces your demise?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m the angel of death, Jew of Assen.’

  The little man looked up.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Look at me. My white suit. No scythe, I admit. But what do you make of this mourning-black ebony walking stick? And…’

  He rummaged in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the watch on the chain.

  ‘…what do you think of that?’

  He leaned forward and waved the watch back and forth.

  ‘The time that advances at the same rate for everyone…’

  He snorted, straightened his back and looked down seriously at the man on the bench.

  ‘No, pedlar, it is far from unthinkable that I am Death.’

  The pedlar straightened and blinked as Noah looked at him.

  ‘Mr Noah, you are not Death. Death wouldn’t take so long to fetch a poor fool like me.’

  ‘Whether you are a poor fool I don’t know yet. But I admit, I have no idea what you are, or who. Let alone why. Incidentally, sometimes the angel of death takes a long time to fetch someone, Jew of Assen. You know that story of the rich man who gets a visit, flutter of wings, hollow voice and all?’

  ‘A rich man like you?’

  ‘Even richer, Jew of Assen. A really rich man.’

  The pedlar smiled.

  ‘No, I don’t know that story, Mr Noah.’

  ‘Hm. It doesn’t matter. At any rate, in that story the angel of death takes a long time.’

  Jacob Noah stuck his walking stick in the ground and looked up, where dark grey clouds drifted along a grey sky.

  ‘I thought you were going to tell that story now,’ the pedlar said.

  Noah looked down irritably.

  ‘Me? You’re the man with the stories here. I’m the one with the questions that always go unanswered. All last night I inquired into the how, what, where, when and why and all night you told stories rather than giving answers. Me tell a story? A Midrash? What do you think, pedlar, that I’m a cosy, bearded clichéd Jew with a quasi-wise story for every dilemma? A friendly, innocent Jew that the Christians love? A figure from the open-air museum of five thousand years of Jewish culture?’

  With some difficulty he pulled his stick out of the earth and prodded it in the direction of the town.

  ‘They would like it, pedlar. They would find it a little more bearable if we were all like that: shuffling along, timid and half invisible, full of half-wisdoms and rustic little tales, the Jewish variation on the village craft fair, not a basket-weaver, but a ragged yokel; rather than a cheese-maker, a kosher chicken-butcher; not a reed-weaver, but a dusty rabbi running his hand through his beard. Yes, then we would be exactly as they wanted us. The Jew who does no harm. The Jew who is no longer human. Just as we were once not human, but now at the other end of the spectrum. Pedlar…’

  He leaned on his stick, bent forward and looked at the Jew of Assen with penetrating eyes.

  ‘Pedlar-man…We were demons, Christ-killers, deflowerers of virgins whose blood we used to make matzos. We were a fifth column, dark manipulators behind cruel rulers, the power behind the power, the cabal. Black we were. Inhuman. And now, now we have to be white. So cleansed by the fire of the ovens, so purified by the ashes of our parents, that at long last we look like the Jew they have revered for so long, the suffering, dying Jew on a stick, their messiah, an unthreatening, powerless, nailed-up Jew.’

  His voice had been getting louder and louder and now he was almost screaming.

  ‘Do you think I’m one of those? A bookish Yid? A snipcocked seal? A cuddly dinosaur? A picture in a prayer book?’

  ‘Mr Noah…’

  ‘Mr Noah nothing. It’s the same thing with Israel. I, pedlar, have always been opposed to anything like the Jewish state. I don’t think it’s a good idea for us all to go and sit in one place. It just makes it easier for them to take us away. But more important than that: real civilisation goes beyond the purely national and I had hoped that we Jews were ready and willing to renounce that cheap, fearful, emotional sentiment of race and state.’

  He waved his stick and looked around.

  ‘This town, this whole country, stood behind Israel as one man, this traffic island for the persecuted, that sanatorium for the sacrificial victims of European history. But now that it is apparently not a land of Jewish basket-weavers and kind-hearted little rabbis, now that they seem to fight and refuse to be crucified, now that they seem to be so human that they’re just as crap as the Dutch, the Germans, the English, the French, now their blind love is cooling. Now the feeling of guilt has to battle it out with annoyance. The local newspaper here once wrote in an editorial, after Israel had done something wrong, that the Jewish people, who had once suffered so terribly in the war, should know better. Then, for the first time in my life, pedlar, I wrote a letter. Did the commentator think the extermination camps were set up as a kind of group therapy for the Jewish people, so that they would never become as other peoples? Ha!’

  The pedlar sighed.

  ‘Never printed.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Never printed!’ cried Noah. ‘The letter was never printed. Ach, it doesn’t matter anyway.’

  The pedlar shoved the parcel off his lap and stood up with a creak. He walked to the shore of the pond and said: ‘No, I don’t believe that, Mr Noah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That it doesn’t matter. I think…’ He turned round and looked quizzically at Noah. ‘I actually think it does matter. I think that you, forgive me, act as if none of it is important, but that by now it’s the most important thing.’

  ‘What?’ Noah asked crossly.

  He turned round, the Jew of Assen, and walked across the water towards the island with the tree. Noah stared after him, shaking his head.

  ‘Whereabouts is it, Mr Noah?’

  The pedlar stood on the water and stared down intently.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Wh…the pistol? How should I know, Jew of Assen? Somewhere. On the bottom. And don’t you dare turn into a cormorant and bring it up. Come here. Come back to the edge, you fake Jesus.’

  The pedlar stood watching him from the water.

  ‘The most important thing, Mr Noah, is what is hidden. Like that weapon. Or your anger. You can throw it in the water or cover it under a layer of relativities, but it will always go on shimmering beneath the surface.’

  ‘My God,’ said Noah, ‘now I know. Freud! You’re the spirit of Sigmund Freud! Come to the edge, Uncle Sigmund, let me give you a hug and offer you a cigar.’

  The pedlar shook his head. He walked onto the
island and stopped there, slightly bowed beneath the tree.

  There was an impasse. The Jew of Assen stood in the middle of the pond on his little island and Jacob Noah snorted from the edge, waving his walking stick.

  A turtle dove began nervously cooing. A car drove by on Beilerstraat. Jacob Noah didn’t have to look at his watch to know that normal life was returning to the town. Dishevelled little groups of hung-over revellers would stagger down the forest path, towards the circuit. Cars with sheets of glass would be driving into the centre to replace shattered shop windows. The council sweeping trucks would soon come out and start on their utterly hopeless task. And in the distance, on the circuit, the mechanics were coming out of their caravans and starting to tinker.

  A curious feeling of haste took hold of him.

  ‘Pedlar! Come away from your island!’

  There was no answer. The pedlar stood next to the little tree and looked like a weathered old branch.

  Jacob Noah shook his head and turned round. He straightened his jacket, gripped his stick tightly and set off in a westerly direction, towards a narrow path that wound alongside the big open space that had once served as a skating rink. He turned off to the left and skirted the old rink, and when he had reached the top of it he walked on. A few minutes later he reached a star-shaped crossing where he turned left, into a long straight avenue.

  The forest was scented. A woodpecker drum-rolled. The first rays of sunlight pierced low among the tree trunks. The light on the horizon had now crept so high that it was even starting to turn pale above the treetops.

  After about ten minutes the forest melted away and he came to a listless brook that flowed between the forest’s edge and a grassy meadow. He followed it, looking at the wooden bridge where he had first seen the Jew of Assen at the start of the night. He had been just as fleeting then.

  He stood on the little bridge for a while watching the traffic that drifted along the tarmac ribbon of the bypass. The water flowed on under him, between plant-covered banks and over a brown, muddy bottom. Here he had once, how long ago?, played Poohsticks with his three daughters. It had been Bracha who had remembered the game. They were already in their early teens, but Winnie the Pooh and his friends’ listless pastime had still appealed to them. Again and again they came running up with twigs and sticks to throw them into the water on one side of the little bridge and wait for them on the other side. A hot summer afternoon, yes. He remembered. Chaja lying on her belly on the planks counting how long it took before a stick appeared and en passant calculating an average. And Aphra, red-faced as she arrived dragging half a tree trunk from the wood to the bridge. After that they’d walked back via the duck pond, where on summer days an ice-cream van stood selling ice-sticks: the salesman would cut slabs off a long cylinder of ice-cream with a spatula and put them between two wafers. They’d come home tired, hot and with sticky chins. A happy family.

  Although Jetty wasn’t with them.

  Why not, in fact?

  He couldn’t remember. She’d never been with them. He’d never let her be with them. The ones you created after your own image, she had once said of him and his daughters. And it was true. He had withdrawn her daughters from her love. Just as he had himself…

  But why? Why had he wanted to withdraw his ABC of daughters from his wife? Was it trust? Of course. He didn’t entrust them to anyone. He was the only one who could protect them, who could form them, knead them so that they had become strong and independent and inventive and…yes…survivors. God…

  But that wasn’t the only thing. He felt there was more.

  But what?

  When Aphra was born, the memory shot through him, he had uttered an almost audible sigh of relief when she proved to be a girl. He had always wanted to have a daughter. Just, he had thought, as there are men who want a son. But he hadn’t counted on a son and heir, as others called it, with all the self-importance of the paterfamilias of an old and illustrious line. Son and heir…Of the Jansen family? No, not him. He had imagined a daughter, a serious, dark-haired girl who would grow into a modest, well-mannered young woman whom he, when she was about eighteen, would take out for dinner and introduce to the world. Yes, he would open the world up to her the way you unfold a map: Look, child, this is all here and it’s all for you. He had, when Jetty was still pregnant, already looked forward to the things his daughter and he would do together, how he would show her Paris, London and New York. He would allow himself to be dragged into expensive clothes shops, where almost indignantly he would take out his wallet to…But he wouldn’t spoil her. No, she would be hard and yet soft.

  But the inaudible sigh that sounded when his first child was in fact a girl, that sigh had not been the product of an expectation that had become reality.

  He stood with his hands around the balustrade, his stick resting on top of it, and stared at the forest on the other side of the path, the little clump of trees and the copse in which the Jewish cemetery lay hidden.

  He nodded.

  Suddenly he knew. Surely and precisely.

  He had wanted daughters because he didn’t want a son.

  What would he have had to do if a boy had been born? Have him circumcised? Turn him into a Jew that the other Jews wouldn’t acknowledge, even if everyone in that small town treated his son as a Jew? Would he, he shivered at the contemptibility of the thought, be able to tolerate a foreskin in his bathroom? And if he could, would his son look like him, look like him but not completely, just as Heijman and he had looked like each other but not completely?

  Daughters. Whom he could not surrender to his wife, whom he could not share with Jetty because he was afraid they would turn out like her. Because he dreaded the moment when he would be a Jew among four non-Jews. And hence alone. Alone like before.

  God, thought Jacob Noah on the little bridge over the sluggish brook flowing into the Forest of Assen: God, all the things I’ve done out of ignorance…

  He took his stick and tapped the tip on the planks. For a moment he wondered how long it would take that stick to appear on the other side, but before the thought could become flesh he realised that the thing probably wouldn’t float.

  Not that I need it, thought Jacob Noah. I don’t even know if it’s mine. Like this suit, this waistcoat, this shirt, the shoes, the watch…If I throw away everything that isn’t mine, I’ll be naked.

  It was a thought that struck him like a blow from a saucepan.

  Naked, he thought with sudden emotion, yes, naked, I’m naked.

  He felt at once relieved and burdened. The thought that he owned nothing but himself made him light and reckless, but also serious and heavy.

  He bent over the railing of the bridge and stared at the sluggish flow of the water. Then he stood up, picked up his walking stick in both hands and, after looking at it for a while, dropped it. He didn’t take the trouble to see whether the stick floated and when it appeared on the other side of the bridge. He took off his jacket, waved it in the air as if he wanted to make a bed out of it and let it sail down. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, he laid the watch on the parapet, and then, bending with difficulty, first one shoe and then the other. Socks, one by one, shirt. Now he stood barefoot, wearing nothing but his white trousers, on the little bridge. A soft early-morning breeze blew along his bare skin. He unbuttoned his trousers, stripped them off and threw them without much ceremony over the edge. His underpants came flying immediately after.

  His nakedness felt magnificent and liberating. The stream of air stroked his skin and made him feel his whole body. The little hairs on his legs, the few that he still had, trembled in the breeze and it was as if he could feel the wind’s fingers on his balls. His whole body tingled and felt filled with vigour. He took the watch, looked at it for a moment, and then walked in all his nakedness to the broad stream of tarmac that ringed the town.

  His feet felt the path that he walked along and his body was aware of the world. It was as if his whole consciousness had descended from his head and
taken root in his skin. He looked down, where his short white toes touched the ground and bent gently before they really touched the tarmac, and he saw the little puddles in the black mass beneath him, the grains of which the tarmac consisted. He even smelt it, the tarry smell of the black road. He heard nothing. No birds, no cars, not even the slap of his soles on the road. He walked upright and confident, like a man who doesn’t know his goal but can feel it.

  It took him longer than he had thought to reach the far side and when he had crossed the river of tar and his feet had trodden the mossy path, overgrown with grass and herbs, which lay on the far side, the light seemed to change. Here, among the trembling shrubs and trees, everything looked soft and green. Although the path was full of sharp stones, shards of tiles and pots and other grit with which the holes were filled, his feet still knew how to find the soft moss. Entirely enclosed by trees and undergrowth, he walked on, amidst the smell of herbs and grass, young foliage and resin. So many smells that it made his head swim.

  After about fifty metres he reached the cemetery gate, to which he barely bestowed a glance. He walked affably onwards until he had almost passed the graveyard and then turned off to the left, balancing along the edge of a ditch, to the point where the fence was rusted away and it was possible to enter the grounds.

  He walked between the vertical stones with their Hebrew and Latin letters, over greenish gravel and fine, fluffy grass, until he was standing by the memorial to the victims of the war. He bent down to pick up a pebble and set it on the plinth. He stood beside the monument for a little while, looked around, at the stars which stood like shields in the grass and the trees that surrounded the grassy rectangle, and tried out the words that fell into his mouth after so many years.

  Beth Olam. The cemetery. House of eternity.

  But ‘olam’ also means world.

  So, he reflected, you could also see it as the house of the world. In the end everyone comes home here, and then one is here for ever. That he remembered from the Jewish school. The teacher would be proud of him. What was his name? Nathans? Mr Nathans? Perhaps not. Dead, definitely. Probably, like the other ninety per cent of the Assen Jews, ended up as fuel for the fire of history.