Marcel Möring
IN A DARK WOOD

TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE

Epigraph

Ego dixi: In dimidio dierum

meorum vadam ad portas inferi.

I said: In the midst of my days I

shall go to the gates of hell.

Isaiah 38:10

You come from nothing, you’re

going back to nothing. What’ve

you lost? Nothing!

Eric Idle, ‘Always Look on

the Bright Side of Life’

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part 2

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part 3

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part 4

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part 5

Chapter 21

Part 6

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part 7

Chapter 25

Part 8

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part 9

Chapter 35

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part 1

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.

And while the universe, tennis-ball-sized, hovers before his eyes, just as once the Holy Grail must have hovered before the eyes of the exhausted Parsifal, and he lies on the floor, arms outstretched, legs parted, mouth open, staring at the world like a patriarch staring at God’s angels, breath held for fear of disturbing the eddying galaxies in the hollow of his hand, he slowly pulls himself upright, his arm stretched out strangely in front of him, his eyes focused on the marbled jewel in his palm.

And then time begins to flow, rushed breathing takes hold of him, a little mist of moisture appears on his upper lip, becoming a silver moustache in the ghostly glimmer with which the bundle lights the room. Stumbling, stepping, twisting and wriggling, he drags the clothes around his limbs (because this isn’t what you would call getting dressed, shirt out of the trousers, no socks, laces loose), stumbles down the stairs, opens the back door and sets off on a creeping expedition through gardens and woods and pathways behind houses until he reaches the canal, where under the cover of the trees next to the concert hall he stands and waits until the path on the other side of the water is completely deserted, crosses, glides like a shadow along the house-fronts on Gymnasiumstraat and finally disappears on the edge of the Forest of Assen.

The moon is a piece of orange peel, visible every now and again between the floes of dark, drifting cloud-light.

…

In the deep darkness of the Forest of Assen, the forest that resembles the firmament itself with its curving, coiling, circling, fading paths, a cloudy infinity of treetops with unexpected open patches, folds and wrinkles, mirror-flat pools, ditches and brooks and canals, which still contains remains of the old woodland that once ringed the town, in that big, old forest Jacob Noah lies on last year’s crunching leaves, hooded by a dry blackberry bush, among the high oaks, under the velvety night air, and he stares at the universe in his hand. There is no thought in him, he isn’t thinking. Perhaps it looks as if he is breathing, as if blood is flowing through his veins, as though his peristalsis is pinching and kneading and his glands are doing whatever it is that glands do. But it’s all appearance. In reality he is still and motionless, caught in the image of what he is holding in his hand, just as what he holds in his hand is caught by him. His lips move, but not a word leaves his mouth. He peers into the swirling marble filling the hollow of his hand and sees …

He sees everything.

He recognises the days that have been and the days that will come. He sees his parents and his brother in their long black coats crammed tight against one another in a packed train carriage that crashes and bangs, his brother’s right hand (when he sees this for a moment he is his brother) on his father’s shoulder. He sees the three daughters he will bring forth and as he sees them grow, from babies to fine young women, their mouths open and they speak their names (the two eldest, that is, the third looks at him with her big dark eyes and already, long before she is born, she breaks his heart). He bends over his hand, Jacob Noah, just as a father bends over his child the better to hear it, and his gaze disappears in the cloudy mist. He travels and travels and travels, until he sees first the country, then the whole godforsaken province and finally the town, but a long time ago: four farmhouses and a monastery, half wood and half stone, then a fire and a new monastery, houses, new houses, avenues, a village green … A rampant mould. Until he creeps out, a mole from a hole in the bog, steals a bicycle, cycles

and cycles

and cycles,

the whole long straight road along the canal, he raises a pistol, sees the light, and there is the wood in which he, on last year’s crackling leaves, in the hood of a dry blackberry bush, between the high oaks, under the velvety night sky, bends over his hand and stares into his own face.

The years blow around him like autumn leaves.

Chapter 2

Summer comes, and autumn. Days pass, months fly by. He clears up the shop and buys in goods. He gets bread from the baker and vegetables from the greengrocer. In the evening he stands in the kitchen holding a cauliflower in his hand, staring at it as Hamlet stared at Yorick’s skull, and as the water comes to the boil and the steam clouds the window, he shakes his head and drops the vegetable into the bin. He goes to bed. He gets up again. He butters sandwiches on the cracked granite surface and chews them standing up, looking out of the kitchen window over the roofs of the town towards the houses, the little factories, a school and the stump of an old windmill. A mind that is empty from early morning till late evening. A life that is nothing but movement, day in, day out. And every morning and every evening, in his kitchen, by the window, looking out over the town, he wonders what it is that he sees, this jumble of roof tiles, these angles and curves and diagonal lines, the rhythmic skip of saddle, pointed and flat roofs. And the days pass. And the months pass. Years go by. Five years. As if he is giving himself time to despair. Five years. Five years in which he doesn’t eat a cauliflower, but does fry eggs, puts shoes in boxes and takes them out again, years in which he shaves and doesn’t see himself in the mirror, eats an omelette at the same empty dinner table at which he goes through Red Cross lists in the evening, writes letters and collects information. For five years in which at night, bobbing in an endless sea of emptiness, he wakes up, gets dressed and walks through the dark, silent streets of the empty town, to the station, where he crosses the rails and, shoulders hunched in his jacket, looks out from the platform – the steaming fields, the water tower dripping tap-tap-tap on the rails, the melancholy lowing of a cow in the pasture of the farm on the other side – years and nights in which he watches the rails, gleaming in the moonlight, disappearing into the distant darkness among the trees.

And then, after those five years, the contractor’s men come. They demolish half the top floor, break down the shop shelves and saw and hammer and lay bricks, and after five weeks, because everything seems to be in fives at this time, he stands in a shoe shop ready for a future that won’t begin for a long time and living in a house in which all traces of the past have been expunged, because he hasn’t just turned the en-suite bedrooms with stained-glass doors into a big sitting room and combined and converted the many little bedrooms on the first floor so that there are now four big bedrooms and an ample bathroom, he’s also got rid of the curtains, the carpet, the tables and the cupboards and the chairs. Everything is new, nothing is as it was.

It’s 1950. Jacob Noah has shed his past the way a fox gnaws off the foot that got it caught in the trap. The future lies before him like a blank sheet of paper.

But it changes nothing.

The past doesn’t pass.

The path towards a stirring future lies before him, open like the first page of a book whose story has yet to begin and could go on for thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages.

But still.

In the morning he stands in the doorway and looks out over the quiet crossroads and in the evening he stares out of the window over the rooftops, and although he barely wakes up at night these days and he has completely stopped walking to the station to wait for travellers who don’t come, he often lies down in bed wondering what he’s done wrong, how things could be different, what the problem is.

He begins to doubt what he saw in the forest when he saw the whole world in the palm of his hand.

In the evening he sits bent over his old schoolbooks at the dining-room table and over his middle-school Latin lessons he dreams of lecture theatres and learned discussions with professors.

How it could have been.

How it should have been.

Then – one evening by the yellow light of the standard lamp by the bookcase that holds not much more than what he has kept from his schooldays and the first volume of the encyclopaedia he subscribed to not that long ago. He drinks his coffee, and although the open accounts book on the dining table gleams in the lamplight, he starts flicking through part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He has never felt the need to travel, he has never been further than Amsterdam, but in the encyclopaedia he travels over continents and through whole eras and cultures. That evening, as he flicks through his first and only volume, his thoughts catch on the word ‘Atom’, and as he reads about Rutherford and Szilard the image of the atom comes and hovers in his mind: a nucleus with a cloud of electrons floating around it, attracted by the mass of the nucleus and at the same time almost escaping because of their velocity; and suddenly he thinks about the town as he sees it in the morning and the evening, the roofs and their pattern of kinks and bumps and, yes: paths.

He wonders where the nucleus is.

Once it was the monastery around which the village grew. The produce of the fields was brought to the monastery and the monastery provided shelter in troubled times and the knowledge of medicine in times of sickness and the comfort of God in times of need. Later, beside the monastery, the town hall was built.

But, Jacob Noah thinks, a waxwork in the circle of lamplight around his chair: God is no longer at the centre of life, and in a population that has evolved from a peasant community into a society of workers who don’t have to provide for their own most basic needs, but who buy them with the money that they earn with their work …

What is the nucleus?

It is deep in the night as a light still burns behind the windows of the house above the shoe shop, and in that light Jacob Noah is bent over the dining table on which he has laid out a big sheet of brown wrapping paper and is drawing something in thick lines that could be a reasonably faithful depiction of the street plan, no: the structure of the town. That is to say: the structure of the town as he has come to see it over the past few hours.

The nucleus is what lies beyond his window and is at present only a ramshackle collection of apartments, warehouses, little streets and alleyways, but is soon to become a square, an open space edged with a ring of high-street shops and, like electrons swarming around it, small shops held in place by the gravitational force of the nucleus, and neither engulfed nor repelled by it.

That night, a moonless sky hanging in velvet silence above the town, he stands at the window of his new big empty bedroom, the bed a white catafalque in the darkness. He looks out over the scaly roofs of the town and reflects that it could be another twenty or thirty years before his idea becomes reality, and as that sober realisation hits home his mind is filled by the sad idea that if something were to mark his life then it would probably be the fact that he is the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place. It is a thought he isn’t sure he can live with, but tonight at any rate he resolves to sleep on it.

Before morning announces its presence with the leaden greyness of a Dutch autumn day, he wakes up. He switches on the lamp and lies on his back staring at the new ceiling, as questionsquestionsquestions like trainstrainstrains rush through his head. Is he going to change the town by himself? He who, after the renovation, heard people asking where that Jew got it all from? He who is alone, no wife, no friend, no one but a few survivors, people with whom, when it comes down to it, he has little in common? Does he have to go into politics? Does he have to become so rich that he’s impossible to avoid? Does he have to become a member of the shopkeepers’ association that wouldn’t let his father become a member? What, he thinks, and that is the first question that he doesn’t imagine as rhetorical, what kind of person do I actually want to be? What am I? He lies in his bed, his arms stretched out beside him, and thinks about his mother.

A memory overwhelms him, so powerfully that he is surprised by the intensity with which it comes upon him. (Many years later it will happen again, in the shop, as he helps a woman tie up a new corset and bends forward to pull the laces tighter. In the waft of perfume that rises from her warm skin he is so overcome by the memory that he has to stay in that posture for a moment, bent at the hips, head lowered, till the intoxication passes.)

It is his mother that Jacob Noah remembers in his circle of light, the woman who had formed Jacob and his brother according to the ideal that she herself had never attained, the mother he remembers with the gnawing melancholy of a man who knows he misses what he never thought he would miss.

Chapter 3

Rosa Deutscher had been the apple of her father’s eye, the man who had brought her up as a son. She had sat on his lap and learned to cut leather, sew gloves and sole shoes. Sitting beside him at the dinner table, she had followed his finger from right to left across the broken stones of the Hebrew script and like him she rocked gently back and forth to the sing-song of the text, until one day she read out the line before he had had a chance to speak it. By the age of thirteen she knew everything, and more, that a thirteen-year-old boy should know, except that she was a thirteen-year-old girl and couldn’t display her knowledge in the synagogue, but she sat beside her seriously listening father at the dining table, observed by her head-shaking mother, and read her text without mistakes. Her father rewarded her with a German grammar, and her mother shook her head again. ‘Know this, child,’ her father had said. ‘Know this. You can win or lose everything in life, but no one can take away from you what you know.’ And although he was to be proved badly wrong in this, little Rosa saw it as a self-evident truth and paid no heed to her hand-wringing mother, who said that knowledge was all well and good, but that a good dress was more valuable to a woman than a fat German book, and that conceited girls had difficulties finding a husband.

And so Rosa Deutscher married to avoid the problem of marriage, which was apparently a problem in the case of conceited girls like her. If one thing was clear, it was that you had to get married, sooner or later. The path towards better education, everything other than sewing and embroidering, was an impassable one, because untravelled by any woman anywhere, let alone the daughter of a Jewish shoemaker.

Abraham Noah had struck her as a suitable candidate, because he was busy climbing the ladder and consequently too preoccupied to bother himself with a woman who read books when there was no discernible need. And besides, she liked men with a purpose. If she couldn’t have a purpose herself, apart from being a good housewife and bringing an heir into the world, then for God’s sake let her have a chap with ambition.

His suitability had been made clear to her when she came and sat next to him in the tabernacle that her father had built in the courtyard at the back of the house. It had been a surprisingly mild evening, and lots of guests had come, because the Deutschers’ sukkah was one of the few in the town. They had nibbled on snacks and Noah had asked her permission to light a cigar. She had granted it, surprised at his casual insolence. It was clear that he had come along not for any religious considerations, but to honour her father’s tabernacle. Any credit that he might have been able to accrue by so doing had gone up in the smoke of his cigar, and that had amused her. She had gone indoors to fetch an ashtray, and when she came back and poured him a cup of mocha, she had asked him: ‘Tell me, Abraham Noah, what you do when you’re not sitting in tabernacles smoking cigars.’ He had laid the white cone of ash of his cigar in the ashtray, looked at her with a broad grin and said, ‘I work on my plan to shoe the feet of all the women in Assen.’ She looked at him for a moment. ‘All the women?’ she had asked. Her leg had involuntarily kicked slightly forward, only a little bit, just enough to free her boot from the rich folds of her skirt. And he, cigar in his mouth, had felt his eye drifting down, towards that boot, and he knew that from this moment onwards he would think only of her feet each time he picked up a shoe.

All the women of Assen? That was hardly realistic. Isaac Deutscher had his shop on the old cattle market, and many a time on a Friday evening, when the Sabbath had begun and his cares slipped from his shoulders, he’d pull his few remaining hairs from his head when he saw a Catholic or Protestant coming to his door under cover of darkness with a crackling paper bag to disturb his Sabbath rest. The bag contained the inevitable pair of shoes that had already been turned down by at least two other shoemakers, and was only good enough for ‘the Jew’. They didn’t buy new shoes from him. If that did happen, the purchaser took little delight in them, because at church on Sunday he would hear harsh words from a Catholic or Protestant shopkeeper, criticising his defecting client for his faithlessness. Catholics (insofar as there were any in this part of the county) bought from Catholics, orthodox Protestants from orthodox Protestants and the many liberal Protestants from the liberal Protestants, and although Deutscher was famous for his craftsmanship and quality, only Jews bought from him, and they were generally too poor for good new shoes.

‘All the women of Assen?’ Rosa had asked, there in the tabernacle, holding the coffee pot. ‘All the women of Assen,’ Abraham Noah had nodded with his impudent cigar in his mouth.

A man with a mission, she saw in him, a man who would give her a good house and the silk dressing gowns to which her mother was so devoted, and he would never complain as long as she could create the impression of being a good Jewish wife.

That hadn’t been hard for her. A year after the wedding, which was held less than six months after they met in the tabernacle, she gave birth to their first son, whom they named Jacob, and Heijman followed two years later.

And then, one quiet Friday evening, as they were celebrating Sabbath with her parents in the house above the shop, the doorbell was rung once again by a man with a paper bag containing two lumps that no one would ever have recognised as shoes. Abraham had stumbled downstairs and opened the door, and when he came back into the room where the pot of chicken soup stood steaming and the boys lolled sleepily in their high chairs while their grandfather tried to guide to their mouths pieces of challah that made the sound of a steam train on the way, old Deutscher lifted his head, looked at the brown paper bag and collapsed.

How old had he been, Jacob Noah, that evening when his father came into the room with a brown paper bag and his grandfather lowered his head and fell face-first into his grandson’s bowl of chicken soup? Four. Five. No older. But nonetheless: his first memory. His grandfather’s gleaming pate, surrounded by a grey ring of hair, in a bowl of soup.

And of course the chaos that immediately followed: his grandmother, her right hand thrown up over her mouth, her left hand on her chest, sinking down into her chair and only coming to when her daughter rubbed her wrists with vinegar; his father flying out of the door to fetch the doctor; his mother sitting her father upright, wiping his face clean and trying to drag him to the sofa, which didn’t work because the old man slumped against the back of his chair like a wet bag of sand. Heijman, two years old, crowing and exploiting the opportunity to lift his spoon and stoutly smack it into his plate of soup, and he himself, whether that was his memory or the desire to see things like this, looking at the scene, not knowing what was happening, but aware that it was something he would never forget.

Isaac Deutscher had never regained consciousness, and less than two weeks later he was laid to rest in the graveyard behind the Forest of Assen. The shop was taken over by his son-in-law.

Abraham Noah, who had learned the trade at fairs, and had good-naturedly held his ground there amongst drunken farmers’ boys and clog-footed milkmaids, went energetically to work. The shoemaking disappeared into the background, and he had a shop window made, in which the new goods were displayed on blue velvet, and two coloured prints hung on the wall, making the charm and elegance of London and Paris almost tangibly present. The town was not yet ready for that charm, that elegance. Although it was the capital of the province, and the administrative centre, and in the wider surroundings there was not a single shoe shop with such ostentatious chic in its range, the bell seldom rang, and when it did it was to let in a dazed-looking man or woman carrying a rustling brown paper bag in their hand. Even Noah’s attempts to become a member of the shopkeepers’ association failed. His written request to join never received a reply, and when he bumped into the chairman one day in the Kruisstraat, the chairman said that the body could not consider his application because it was after all a Christian organisation. Noah would just have to set up his own association.

Rosa saw her confident Abraham becoming an anxious man who smoked his cigars with diminishing relish, and in whose eyes the spark of boldness was already starting to go out. In the evening, when the children had been sent to bed, he sat at the dining table with cash book and ledger and calculated until the figures, mockingly, it seemed, danced before his eyes and the world appeared to exist only to let him taste the bitter wormwood of his fruitless toil. After a year the shop was bringing in so little that Abraham had to set off on his travels again and Rosa was forced to run the store.

What seemed too much for Abraham Noah’s pride became a challenge for Rosa’s quashed ambitions. Although she assumed her new task with appropriate timidity, it was painfully clear that her life was only now beginning. She hung her silk dressing gowns in a wardrobe with mothballs, rolled her thick brown hair in a tight bun, elaborated a complicated scheme for cooking, cleaning and childcare, and even remembered the principles of shoemaking. She took on an apprentice for the workshop, and single-handedly removed the blue velvet from the window and the French and English prints from the wall. Abraham, who saw the changes occurring after a few months – but only once they had already taken place, because he often came home just before the weekend – shook his head and seemed to shrink into himself both literally and figuratively. During that year after his misfortune, he assumed a resigned, bent posture and began to remember what a friend had said when he told him that he was going to marry Rosa Deutscher, his boss’s daughter. ‘You may never,’ his friend had said, ‘have a beautiful woman all to yourself, but no one owns a clever woman.’ He had, proud of his beautiful and clever wife, laughed at these words. At the time he had heard only the first part, and had not been afraid. Now he began to suspect that the second might also be true.

The shop blossomed. The orthodox still bought from the orthodox, the liberal from the liberal and the few Catholics from the Catholics, but new customers slowly trickled in: young people who thought it possible that a Jew could make shoes that fitted a Protestant, people from somewhere else who had come to live in the town and socialists who weren’t welcome anywhere, and whose numbers were growing. In her shop Rosa sold the same sober footwear as her competitors, but it was with her repairs that she put the name of ‘Abraham Noah Shoes’ on the map. Three years passed like that, and then the whole town knew that Rosa Noah never said that shoes were worn beyond repair and had to be replaced, but that on the contrary she could make a mistreated pair of brogues, boots or lace-ups look almost new. With her level-headed honesty she cultivated a clientele that became so loyal to her and thought so highly of her shop that the business seemed to be built on a foundation of ancient, immovable rock.

Everything has its price, even prosperity wrought from diligent ambition and healthy common sense, and the price paid by Rosa Noah, née Deutscher, was the slow erosion of her once so promising marriage. Abraham, who had always prided himself on his modern, indeed: properly socialist ideas, was able to stomach his wife’s business success, where he himself had clearly failed, only with great difficulty. He became quieter, introverted, sullen. To compensate for the loss of his authority in the shop he became a domestic tyrant who from Friday evening, when he came back from his travels, until Monday morning, when he set off once more for a long and lonely week, had something to say about everything, complained about his wife’s meals and kept his two sons on such a short rein that they were visibly relieved when he left again. As happy and free as the atmosphere was during the week in the house above the shop, so it was suffocating and bleak at the weekend, when the brooding, sombre man who was their father and husband exerted his power over the family.

Although his mother, in spite of everything, seemed to be an alert and spontaneous woman, the realisation travelled all the way to Jacob, as he grew older, that she was actually two women. It was no more than a suspicion, a that-must-be-it, but he barely doubted it and his last doubt fled when he was woken one Saturday evening by banging and clattering and left his bed, with a mixture of unease and curiosity, to seek the source of the noise.

Upstairs everything was in darkness, and downstairs too, where the sitting-room door was open and the coals behind the mica window of the stove spread an orange glow. He opened the door of the kitchen and found nothing and no one. Finally he went, shivering on his bare feet, down the tiled corridor to the shoemaking workshop and the shop behind it.

In the workshop the faint light of a carbon-filament bulb still burned. The yellowish glimmer was a broad ribbon in the chink of the door. He laid his head against the doorpost, his heart thumping on the hard wood, and looked inside. On the workshop floor, in a white petticoat with big black stains, his mother knelt, her opulent dark hair loose, her face smeared. Her husband towered high above her, arms folded, face frozen. Suddenly, he must have shuffled or pushed against the door, perhaps it was his breathing, he saw his father’s back straighten. In a single motion he reached the door, threw it open and pulled the boy inside by his arm. ‘So,’ he said, setting Jacob down in front of him, hands heavy on his shoulders. ‘So, take a look, if you’re so curious. Look how your mother clears away her mess.’ Jacob tugged and pulled, but his father held him firmly in place, as his mother smiled at him as if none of it were of any importance, a little joke between husband and wife, and went on imperturbably with her work. He could do nothing but watch, even though he didn’t want to be there. Slowly, as he let his gaze rest on his mother and felt his father’s hands on his shoulders, he felt a distance within him, as if he was two people, one that watched and one that wasn’t there, didn’t belong there. It was just like the time his grandfather had slumped forward into his bowl of chicken soup, and he registered everything, perceived everything in a strangely distant way without really feeling part of it: Heijman banging his spoon into his bowl, his mother rubbing her mother’s wrists with vinegar, his father flying out of the door, and his grandfather’s slack corpse, the crown of white hair around his gleaming head, hanging backwards in his chair, swirls of vermicelli still in his face. He saw everything. Everything happened. But without him.

Chapter 4

So, eyeswideopen, in his bed, staring into the circle of light, Jacob Noah remembers his mother. Rosa, who was mockingly known as ‘Baroness von Münchhausen’ by her husband, because she had truly dragged the shoe shop out of the morass by her own hair. Rosa, who read to Jacob and Heijman in the evening, sitting between them in their bed and so tired that she sometimes fell asleep with the boys, one in each arm. Here, in the night-nightly warmth of pillows and blankets, Jacob Noah remembers the smell of her full hair that slipped from her bun and flowed in a cataract over her shoulders, the vague hint of eau de cologne at her neck, her irregular, superficial breathing. And the scent of her clothes in the warm bed, clothes in which the hours of the day had left their traces: leather, beeswax, coffee, her skin. It’s a confusing dizziness of smelt memories which, although he doesn’t know this yet, will visit him more often here in his bed than he would like. Yes, when he bends over the laces of a woman’s corset to fit it. And when he bumps into a young employee putting her hair up in the toilets. When he helps a mother who comes along with her daughter to buy her first bra (by now the shop is the biggest lingerie shop in the whole province) and she bends down to whisper something in Noah’s ear and from her thick brown hair, from the soft patches on either side of her throat, from her clothes, something escapes that goes to his head so powerfully that he has to apologise, before stumbling stiffly to the staff toilets to splash his face with cold water from the basin. Later, much later, when he is grown up and successful, he will become a man of myths and legends, someone to whom indescribable sexual proclivities and dark machinations are attributed, but by then he will have long been, to the very depths of his being, a man who is very much aware that he seeks only one thing: the fragrant embrace of his mother.

So, here, in his bed, in the watery morning light, Jacob Noah thinks about his formidable mother and asks himself out loud what he should have done.

Whenever he asked her how she had made a solid business out of a shoe shop that was doomed to failure, her answer had been that a person should improve not his strong points, but his weak ones. ‘Our weak point,’ she had said, ‘was that we didn’t want to be a shoemaker’s but a smart shop, and our strong point was that we were shoemakers and not shopkeepers.’

‘I thought,’ Jacob had replied, ‘that our weak point was that we were Jews.’

‘That too,’ she had said, with the resigned and weary smile of someone who knows that a person can only have so many victories in life. ‘That too, but at the time people were already breaking free of their churches. More and more liberals and socialists were coming. But the most important thing was the patience to realise a great plan step by step. Just as you don’t catch a woman by giving her a gold necklace straight away, Jacobovitz, so you don’t entice clients with the most beautiful and most expensive and most special things. You lay a foundation and you build on that.’

The foundation had been a rock-solid confidence in shoemaking. People who had come three times with old shoes, had seen the new shoes in the shop three times. The fourth time they bought theirs at Noah’s.

What, thinks Jacob Noah, as he leaves his bed and sets off for the bathroom, what then is my weak point and what my strength? And as he washes and shaves and dries himself and envelops himself in a dusty cloud of talcum powder, the merry-go-round of words and thoughts begins to whirl in his head.

In his mind the contours loom up of something so strange that he has to go and sit on the little stool in the corner of the bathroom once the picture comes clearly into focus.

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