In A Dark Wood

Chapter 1

… and here when he comes out of the peat bog after three years like a mole in a hole after three years almost black no brown like a fresh horse turd he glistens in the May sun when the sun shines on his skin he gleams like horse shit like a freshly polished sideboard and he walks half-bent if you want to call his walking walking and the sun stings his eyes his eyes water with the sting of the sun in his eyes after three years and when he comes out of the peat bog and stands upright and sees the May clouds in the airmail-blue light there are the houses along the Smilder Canal the straight edge of the wood a leaden wall hiding something that he knows all too well and in his head is just one thought one thought but it wants to stay one thought that knocks and bangs like a festering finger one feeling that makes his heart contract his fingers bend but around one thing that he wants to hold tight on to and squeeze it squeeze the juice from it till the life disappears …

God …

One thought and it’s revenge.

He wants revenge. Revenge for everything. He wants to pull out the piece of rope that holds up his trousers brush the earth to the side and fuck the damned field of the damned farmers to avenge himself. Throw the first the best broad-bosomed blonde peasant with her blushing face in a furrow and while her face lies in the fat soil and the spittle runs from her mouth and mixes with the black earth fuck her up the arse.

He wants to ride fire-starting and plundering through villages and fields and like a vengeful black figure on a pale horse reduce this land to ashes till nothing is left but pitch and sulphur the blackened stumps of houses the smoking foundations of farms ashen dry fields and swollen cadavers and purple corpses along the edge of the road.

But that’s not how it works.

A fighter plane skims over, wings waving. The RAF insignia a haze of blue and white and red.

A pig squeals in the distance.

Children in blue overalls fish in the black water.

Dandelions stand yellow in the grassy verge.

A workhorse trots neck bowed through a meadow.

Just before noon he steals a bicycle from behind a barn and without looking round at the yelling farm labourers busy in the field he pushes the pedals round, along the canal, towards the town.

He cycles.

He cycles along the straight canal, his only souvenir of the years as a mole in a hole banging against his leg in his jacket pocket.

He cycles. For the first time in three years he cycles and the wind blows through his blurring curls and his eyes water and his legs hurt and he cycles

and he cycles

and he cycles.

And as he

approaches the town half an hour later he pulls on his brakes to look around for a moment and the sunlight, faintyellowfaraway, a balm for the hard lines of the landscape, washes over his face and into his eyes and through his hair, and in the distance, where the dark water of the long canal disappears into the horizon and then grey and then a blur, where he lived for three years like a mole in a hole in the bog, a worm in the earth, and for three years smelt earth, bog, peat, brown water, his godforsaken soul, the high light rises like a wall of summer blue, a cliché of prosperity and happiness and beautiful memories fromwhenwewerestillyoungandtheworldwasgood, and the bile wells up in him, a bitterness wells up which to his own surprise makes him bend sideways to puke a silvery strand from his empty belly, right next to his string-laced shoes, a glittering salamander on the road surface.

Never again.

In the town he cycles through a web of surprised glances. Flags hang from the windows, orange pennants ripple in the mild spring wind, here and there a half-torn poster flaps against a wall.

The house and the shop come into view and stillness falls around him. It’s as if the air has been sucked away.

The trees stop rustling and the wooden tyres of his bicycle stop rattling over the cobbles. There is no movement.

As if he was cycling through a peepshow.

And then he sees it.

Where before on a red-brown wooden board above both display windows with the ostentatious pride of one who had struggled long and finally conquered, in pseudo-medieval letters that suggested a permanence that didn’t exist, where once stood his name and that of his brother, his father and his mother

Abraham Noah Shoes (also repairs)

it now jabbers in illegible gothic script:

Hilbrandts Aryan Bookshop

He stands over the crossbar of his bicycle, which isn’t his bicycle, and looks at the red board with the black letters. Mouth open.

Aryanbloodybookshop?

On the brown velvet of the window display no Russian leather boots, gleaming Oxfords, stout brogues or slender court shoes, but a magazine called The Hearth, a sheet of paper with curling edges and an envelope on which in stark black and white the firm jaws of a Teutonic model worker gleam. Next to it a book bearing the unreal title Mother, Tell Us about Adolf Hitler! and a few dead flies lying against the glass.

His father’s shop, started by his grandfather, half of the premises back then, a pitiful business where poor people had their poor shoes made by a poor shoemaker, a dark workshop where all the walls were covered with shelves packed with shoes and boots, here and there even a clog that needed a strap put round it. Behind the light-brown counter his grandfather, sitting on the three-legged stool, had knocked, hammered, cut, sewn and scoured. There was a sewing machine powered by a foot pedal, a device bought sometime around 1915 or ’16, such a major acquisition that the machine had to be polished each evening till the brass gleamed and the black-painted cast iron shone like a new stove. Oh, if he shut his eyes now, he could hear the machine’s heavy flywheel hum, the sticky smell of the glue pot on the stove would come to life in the back of his head. Knives crooked and straight, pitched thread hanging over a stick, lasts, punch awls and sewing awls, oxhide for making soles, calf, horse and goat for the uppers in reeking stacks, bent needles, straight needles, round, triangular, thick, thin, short and long, aniline and beeswax, grease and cream, oily sheep’s wool, flannel rags, horsehair brushes, iron scrapers.

And the voice of his grandfather softly, along the thread between his teeth, singing a little song …

When Rabbi Elimelech went on his way …

A goddamned Aryan …

He stands in the unimaginable silence of the gloomy bookshop, where amidst the smell of paper and linen a vague olfactory memory of shoes is barely discernible and the ringing of the shop bell still echoes, and sees what looks like a trick of the light, but is actually a bookshop. Footsteps sound in the dark corridor between the house and the shop and out of the shadows steps a surly-looking man in waistcoat and shirtsleeves.

‘We’re closed.’

Jacob Noah stares the man in the face with an expression that could only be called blank: no trace of a reaction, no emotion, no expression, eyes as empty as creation before the Supreme Being rolled up his sleeves and made something of it.

Silence hangs between them, a gauzy silence that makes the space dense and diffuse and reminds him of something he doesn’t know. His thoughts travel through the landscape of his past.

How sharp it all is … the light that falls through the dusty windows, brushes across the counter and lays a silk-soft gleam on the wood, worn smooth by all that use and time … how sharply drawn the pigeonholes in the boxes along the walls, where shoe-boxes used to be stacked, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a mosaic of white, pink, black, green, red, brown, blue, mauve and grey rectangles.

‘We’re …’

‘Out. Of. My. Shop.’

The man screws up his eyes and looks at him as if he has been addressed in a language that bears no relation to any language he has ever encountered before.

‘OUT.’

He speaks, as far as he can tell, loudly, but what emerges from his throat is a strangled and barely comprehensible croak.

‘I don’t know who you are, but this is my shop and …’

Jacob Noah, in the bloom of his life, small admittedly and after those years in his hole in the bog unmistakeably pale and thin, thin as he will make a point of not being for the rest of his life, lifts himself up like a bear disturbed while eating. His chest swells like a bellows, and although it is doubtless not really the case his hair seems to stand on end. His shoulders rise, his small, almost feminine hands unfold into enormous coal shovels and his feet suddenly feel so strongly rooted to the earth that it’s unlikely that even a tornado could shift him from the spot.

‘Jacob Noah!’ he roars. ‘Son of Abraham Noah! Son of Rosa Deutscher! Brother of Heijman Noah! This shop is my father’s shop! OUT!’

The man looks at him through narrowed eyes and takes a barely perceptible step back.

They stand facing one another, attracted by their mutual dislike, repelled by a curiosity that fills them both with nausea. Tiny muscular spasms ripple over their faces and through their bodies. Jacob Noah’s jaw tenses and AryanBookshopHilbrandts’ throat muscles ripple, Jacob Noah’s midriff hardens and AryanBookshopHilbrandts’ thighs twitch, Jacob Noah’s stomach shrinks and Aryan Bookshop Hilbrandts’ shoulders bend.

‘It’s my shop,’ the other man says. ‘I know nothing of any previous tenants. I’ve always paid on time.’

Jacob Noah feels the blood thump in his neck. Then he turns round with a jerk and grabs for the door handle.

In the full light of the midday sun he blinks against the brightness of the world. Two women walk past and don’t recognise him.

Aryanbloodybookshop.

He cycles

and he cycles

and he cycles

and he cycles.

He cycles

along the Gedempte Singel, right down Brinkstraat, left up the Brink, where he throws the bike against the wall of the town hall and storms in.

‘Who’re you?’ says the official whom he gets, after five other imperturbable officials, to speak to.

He says his name. He says his father’s name. He would, if it was still in his possession, show his identity card.

The official rises to his feet, walks to the row of filing cabinets behind him, opens a drawer, runs his fingers over the files and, interrupting himself with barely audible remarks (‘No, not that one. Mi, Mij, Mo, Mu. There it is’), he hums a cheerful little tune. He pokes his nose into a folder (‘Yesyesyes. Humhum’) and walks with the file to another row of cabinets, where the same business starts all over again (‘marketmarketmarket, no, there it is’) and at last a fat bundle of cards, architectural drawings and loose papers is revealed.

‘Here it is. No, that property is let to G. Hilbrandts from 13 November 1942. Vacant premises, I see. So.’

‘It’s my property.’

‘Ah, no, I don’t think so. A certain D. Noah, I see here, and you were J. Noah, I seem to remember. So we need Mr D. Noah.’

For a moment the wooden floor of the department of buildings and dwellings gleams smooth and brown as the counter in the shop. Behind the windows lies the sunlit town, where people are walking in the street and hanging pennants from their houses. The greenery, thick and heavy on the trees, promises a lovely summer.

‘There was a war.’

‘Yes,’ says the official, in a tone which suggests that he came across this fact in one of his files a long time ago: World War II, 10 May 1940–5 May 1945.

‘I don’t know where my father is. I don’t know where my parents are. We were in hiding. Taken away.’

The official looks at him confidently.

‘Then it’s a matter of waiting until the affair is administratively clarified, but I can assure you that everything will sort itself out.’

‘There’s a bloody Nazi in that property! My father’s shop … I live there. We … Our life. Our things.’

He has trouble getting the words out and that annoys him.

‘None of that falls within my area of competence. The premises were let by the then government to …’ He glances at the file. ‘G. Hilbrandts.’

‘By whom?’

‘What do you …’

‘Under which official?’

The man straightens, arranges his features into what he doubtless considers to be an official, representative expression, and says in a measured tone: ‘The government is not a person.’

‘You …’

‘I advise you to register a complaint about the tenancy, or a request to have what you believe is your property returned to you. Signature by the legal owner … Noah, D … is required. That is all. I have other things to do. If you will excuse me.’

And less than fifteen minutes later, thrown out by two burly farmhands retrained as clerks, who have no trouble dealing with such a thin little yid, he jumps on the bike that isn’t his bike

and cycles

and cycles

and cycles

and cycles and as he cycles and his heart thumps between his ears and the blood presses behind his eyes, the image of the shop comes back, as the shop was when he came back from Amsterdam God knows how in the middle of the second year of war to that godforsaken bloody hole because he couldn’t sleep for worrying about his parents and walked from the station to the square his whole body bent over the star on his jacket and there in the square found windows boarded over and a door that wasn’t locked and inside, where shoes and boxes and an unimaginable quantity of papers were scattered over the floor and the smell of old air still lingered, there, having walked upstairs, through the empty rooms, and back down again, in the half-plundered shop, on a chair that he had first had to pick up and set upright, it became clear to him that his parents and his brother weren’t there any more, and it had grown dark behind the windows that looked out onto the square, the roofs standing out sharp-edged against the lacerating blue light, a late bird shooting across the even surface of the sky and on his chair, a straight-backed dining-room chair with an embroidered seat, he had hidden his face in his hands and …

everything

everyone

The door to the shop is shut now, but he feels no hesitation and lifts his right leg and kicks just under the lock and as the door flies open he himself goes flying in.

‘What …’

He takes his only souvenir of the whole bloody war out of his jacket pocket, surprised at the weight of the black metal in his hand, and presses the barrel of the pistol against AryanBookshopHilbrandts’ temple as he grabs him by his thin tie and brings the bewildered shopkeeper’s pale, mousy head close to his own.

‘You,’ he says, panting like a god giving birth to one of his creations. ‘Out.’

And, suddenly fluent, but still hoarse: ‘Otherwise I’ll blow a hole in that Nazi head of yours, AryanBookshopHilbrandts.’

He lets the man go and pushes him back, sending him crashing into a bookshelf.

Silence falls, an after-a-lot-of-shouting silence, the sort in which the memory of noise from a moment ago still rustles.

The man against the bookshelf rolls his eyes, a little thread of spit runs from the right-hand corner of his mouth and his head twitches back and forth as he stares at the barrel of the pistol that hovers in front of his face. Jacob Noah’s gaze is fixed on him as though his gaze were part of the other man’s body, as though he … the other man is … he feels that … he him … and suddenly he feels in his chest a painful sort of human sympathy, a searing sense of compassion, a sudden switch of identity in which he is the other one and the other one is him and in an infinitesimally tiny moment knows with unshakeable certainty that the other man will never feel that, has never felt that, and while he tries to grasp that absurd sentiment (why he … such a … ) his gaze slides down to the Aryan bookseller’s crotch.

A dark patch is spreading slowly outwards from the level of AryanBookshopHilbrandts’ sexual organs.

Jacob Noah lowers his wartime souvenir, shakes his head and averts his gaze.

To say that the shop doorbell echoes for several minutes in the empty space where the walls silently rise with Dutch-nationalist books and a poster showing the portrait of a Teutonic hero looks down on him would be an understatement. It takes years, many years, decades. He will still hear it when he is married to the daughter of the farmer in whose peat bog, on whose outstretched land he lived. He still hears it when he leaves the farmer’s daughter, the sixties are coming to an end and the modern world is still busy forcing its way through to the little town, when he himself is going through the divorce that isn’t a divorce (because he leaves her, but doesn’t officially get divorced from her) and which excludes him from the town’s inner circle. The bell echoes as he doubles the shop in size, and later does the same thing again, and finally transforms it into the best fine lingerie shop in the whole damned province, where till he turned up they’d been walking around in knitted underpants and grey bloomers. The bell tinkles at night, when he wakes from black and lonely sleep with his brother’s name on his lips, when his children are born, grow up and leave home. Even when he is sitting in his car on Friday, 27 June, and the setting sun shines over the treetops onto the glass of the windscreen, even then the bell still rings. Throughout the whole of the rest of his life, its high points and its lows, when he’s sitting alone in the shop one evening looking at the walls of bras and corsets and slips and step-ins, and he feels a plan welling up in him that will change the entire centre of this accursed hole (whereby he will harvest the glory that he expects and the subsequent abuse that he just as fully expects), when he is walking with a sexton through the attic of what was once the synagogue and is now the Reformed church, and finds in a rubbish bag the lost archive of the Jewish community and sees all those names and all those faces before him again – the musty smell of old paper containing the dust of half a century, the dust that touched them – and when he is rejected as a member of the business club because he doesn’t live with his wife just as his father was rejected by the business club because he wasn’t a Christian, for the whole of the rest of his life after that one day in the empty shop the bell will go on tinkling.

It’s the bell that tells him: everything is nothing.

Silence falls like dust, the dust itself falls, the rising and falling of his chest settles, his breathing grows slower, his heart resumes its old rhythm. He is standing in the shop, a black pistol in his hand and the vague pain of too many thoughts behind his brow, and as he stands there and brings his free hand to his face and presses his thumb into his left eye socket, against his nose, and his middle finger into his right eye socket and his index finger to his forehead and thinks and thinks and thinks, he sees his future crumbling, literally and figuratively, as if in a vision. He sees himself in a gown and jabot, his diploma in his hand, surrounded by fellow students, professors and the portraits of illustrious predecessors, and as he looks round and sees himself grinning like an idiot in his bath, a crack runs across the picture, and then another, another, a spider’s web of cracks until it looks like a painting covered with craquelé and the first bits of paint flake off and whirl down and he knows with the effortlessness of absolute certainty that his future is over before it has begun, and that evening, lying in bed above the shop, where the private apartment no longer looks like anything he has known, he stares at the ceiling, light fanning in through the curtainless windows. It’s a real bundle of rays, one after the other, as though the day has begun outside while he, in here, is getting ready for the night. He gets out of bed and, like a swimmer walking through shallow water, his feet in the dark, feels his way towards the window. There behind the pane, where the roofs of the houses and the ragged treetops of the Forest of Assen have torn the night sky from the earth, he is met by the sharp light … God yes, the sharp light of … no, not of insight, or the epiphany that comes in the blackest hour of night when the questions that otherwise seem so easily answered – analysis, synthesis, my good Mr Noah! – become bottomless pits of despair in which night-time doubt battles against the day’s cool reason with an archangel’s obstinacy; not that light, but the light that comes from a spotlight mounted on the boot of a Canadian half-track, a contraption – half truck, half tank – that looks like a car at an evolutionary crossroads. On the boot, a Canadian soldier is manipulating a kind of dustbin from which a bright white column radiates. Across the house-fronts runs a sharp-edged circle, a tree of light rises into the night air, touches the clouds and sweeps down on the other side and touches Jacob Noah behind his window. He steps back, trips over a chair and falls on the floor, and as he crashes onto the bare wooden planks of the bedroom in a billow of material, and the back of his head touches the hard wood and a cloud of stars explodes between his eyes, he sees the universe as a little cloud of milk in a cup of coffee. He opens his hand and fog whirls in the middle of his hand, he sees the slow explosion of stars, the dashing tails of comets and the steady ellipses of the planets.