In A Dark Wood

Pure and clean as a whistle.

And at that moment, when the shower stream washes away the foam and rains down on his closed eyes, he sees very clearly, as if it was yesterday, as if they’ve only just met each other, and he hasn’t yet closed his heart and his face and his eyes, at that moment he sees Chaja disappearing into the packed Saturday morning shop, her black curly hair among the Saturday heads of the provincial shoppers. He stands in the Saturday sun, looks at the bare house-fronts and the Saturday air up there, clear and blue, as if it’s going to be a fine day in spite of everything.

Chapter 10 (#ulink_92556d74-9099-5498-82f1-cd1059318d06)

Seven o’clock is the hour when the good people of Assen have finished their dinner, hot dinner, simple, nourishing meals of potatoes, meat and vegetables and semolina pudding with a skin for afters.

But where we are, no one is eating. Here, nothing is consumed but beer.

The Hotel de Jonge is the nodal point in the history of Assen, the place through which all paths lead, a drinking hole in the desert of life, set on a square that doesn’t want to be a square. Off at an angle to the right it is watched, constantly and unmoved, by the law court, an island in the middle of a shapeless lake of lawn (behind it the old jailhouse, so visibly old that many a lawbreaker dreads the wheel and the rack and dark cellars where water seeps down the walls and rats as big as pet dogs shuffle under the simple bench), to the left lies a confluence of streets that is almost a little square. (But the town has no real squares, just attempts in that direction, wide sheets of stone that bear the name, but aren’t: deserted car parks and collisions between streets that have fallen ashamed into each other’s arms as they meet. Just as the town has no statues. Yes, not that far from the Hotel de Jonge, actually the only statue in the town, on the Brink – again, not a square – in a few years a shapeless lump of gingerbread will be placed, a gift from a local manufacturer. It represents a cooper bending over his barrel, but looks more like something left behind by a constipated elephant. It will be placed in the bend of the road and for some miraculous reason no car ever crashes into it.)

The Hotel de Jonge. A sleepy provincial hotel-café-restaurant in a sleepy provincial town.

But not tonight, tonight Assen is the town of towns and we anticipate the night of nights, the night before the TT bike races, yes, this town of roughly forty thousand inhabitants is suddenly four or five times as big, which is to say: four or five times as many people, four or five times as much violence and sex and traffic and at least four hundred times as much beer. In the bar of the Hotel de Jonge the drinkers are already standing shoulder to shoulder, crotch to buttock, face to neck, in the stench of human bodies, beer and smoke all through the room, lined entirely with rustic oak, designed in a style that makes you think of haciendas without really losing the je ne sais quoi which tells you straight away that you are indeed in the deepest provinces. The drinkers shuffle across the endless reddish-brown tile floor that spreads through the bar like a flood of seventies cosiness and is so omnipresent, extending even to the toilets, that one of the younger customers once observed that it’s like drinking in a hollowed-out stone. To the right of the central bar, a big room that can be separated off with a beige folding door, and on the left the breakfast room, again behind a little barrier for special events. All crammed full of drinkers.

In the middle of the building rises the staircase, all in brown-painted wood. It leads to seventeen rooms almost all of which were booked a year ago by journalists, one or two racing fans, the manager of a racing driver and, the smallest small room, at the end of the long corridor, by Marcus Kolpa.

In the main bar, that hole of wood and tiles, the landlord buys off the first fight of the evening with a free round of beer and the servility disguised as affability that is his trademark. The floor is already wet, the windows are misted up. The waitress, who has just been goosed by a jolly German, causing her to drop her tray, making the floor even wetter than before with glass that now crunches under the biker boots, the waitress is now sitting in the kitchen on a crate of white bread rolls crying her eyes out. Everything is fine, everything is as it should be, the till tinkles so unceasingly that it sounds like music.

Ah, there is so much pleasure and merriment, such loud affirmation of the free-market economy (and that in these difficult times of deep financial crisis!), that a vitality, you might even call it an ‘atavism’, hovers in the air, so tangible that you could almost cut it with a knife. And that’s why it isn’t even slightly strange when Marcus, washed and perfumed now, black-suit-white-shirt, his unruly dark hair wet along the temples, makes his entrance and a loud voice rings out from the densely packed crowd: ‘A vicar!’ Out rings the generous bellow of simple people who enjoy simple jokes. He looks questingly around. He raises one eyebrow, ignores the landlord’s apologetic smile and immediately dashes outside, pausing for a moment like a ship leaving a stormy harbour and powering up its engine before breaking through the waves.

Outside it’s packed with people. In spite of the weather, a cool evening, just about to rain, the terrace is packed with drinkers. But Marcus cleaves through the turbulence, slaloms, swings, weaves his way through the crowd, turns blindly off to the right, strides onwards on his long tall legs and doesn’t come to rest until fifty metres on, when he runs aground in a new crowd formed by a throng of evangelical bikers, a leather-clad army of the Lord gliding like a flight of black angels on their Harleys and Hondas and Ducatis and Yamahas and BMWs along the Brink and past the law court, watched by dense rows of cheering passers-by.

To the left, on the trampled grass of the Brink, a heaving, whooping crowd throngs around a mechanical bull. To the right, people are frolicking in front of a big tent where as they wait for the band a kind of music is being played which Marcus can only describe as ‘farmers’ rock’. Someone falls through a shop window. Two straggly adolescents climb the roof of the tent and slide down the slope of the canvas. A biker girl pulls her leather jacket open and shows her swelling breasts to a ring of leather-clad youths (a surprisingly large number of them in clogs).

And everywhere noise, the smell of fat and meat and stale beer.

Marcus shuts his eyes and tries to find a still point.

The world.

The world he lives in.

The world of the people who ask him how far he’s got in the dictionary, the world that thinks he’s an arrogant tosser because he knows the meaning of the word ‘solipsist’.

The world of humanity, evolution, the lobe-finned creatures that crept onto land, reptiles that climbed into the trees, thinking monkeys, stone axes, fire, iron, bronze, steam, atom.

The world of God’s own pet.

And in spite of his furious attempts to find rest and clarity and light, Marcus thinks: Lord … Pitch and brimstone. Now!

He closes his eyes, feels everything rotating around him, feels himself in the middle of that rotation, a motionless object, a still centre.

A pillar of salt in the guilty landscape, in the hubbub and the smoke and the rubbish of that town that the Lord has overthrown just as he once overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

He actually does look like a vicar. Even now, when real rain is finally falling from the sky and many people are seeking shelter under shop awnings, tents and the dense crowns of the tall oaks on the Brink. Even now, when there seems to be no particular call for formal clothing and the whole place is emptying around him and he is the only one left in the square in front of the Brink, even now he still looks like a preacher. One of the itinerant kind, admittedly, a wanderer without a congregation, but a preacher nonetheless.

While he is actually a poet.

Oh, yes, they may think he’s a stern preacher and laugh at him and mock him behind his back, they can call him both a poof and a Don Juan, a Jew and a vicar, they know that he’s a poet and not just any old poet, not one of your club-footed rhyming dialect verse-makers, not some paedophile absolving himself in a linguistically defective village mumble, whacking himself off onto paper as he sits at his oak desk thinking of the bony girls’ knees under summer cotton dresses or sturdy scouts’ legs in greasy corduroy trousers. No. And he certainly isn’t the man for affable farce and three doors and five cupboards in which Harm hides himself to watch Albert bending his neighbour’s wife Jantien over the dining table in the front parlour and teaching her to see the stars.

He’s a real poet.

Albeit the poet of a single poem.

But let’s forget that poem and concentrate on the figure in black standing there in the rain. Soon he will walk on, he will go round the corner and into Torenlaan.

Look, there he goes. He has just lifted his face to the sky and tasted a drop or two, or three, on his lips and in them the faint perfume of petrol. Now he carries on walking. Past the low houses of the Brink, off to the right, around the corner, pacing like a swimmer in shallow water, head slightly bent, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of his trousers and a smoking Gauloise in the right-hand corner of his mouth. Right into Torenlaan, where he meets a real tidal wave coming towards him, because the motorbike acrobats are taking a break and Torenlaan is emptying out into the expanse of the Brink. Propelled by the mass, pushed forward and aside, he hobbles clumsily back past the houses, the pensioners’ club, what used to be the youth club, beneath which there is said to be a secret passageway that runs from the monastery to a place far outside the town; on and on into the narrow Kloosterstraat, where a raggedy group bound whooping for the funfair picks him up entirely against his will with the generosity of people enthusiastically putting into practice the concept of the more the merrier. Two young women have linked arms with him and to the amusement of the party they guide him through the streets that lead zigzagging to the grounds of the old cattle market where, as every year, the funfair has been set up. His resistance is feeble. No more than a sputtered mumble.

‘But …’

And: ‘Ladies …’

And: ‘I’ve got to …’

The truth is that it’s all for the best that a choice has been made for him. Under his own steam he would never have gone in that direction.

What do we find, this Friday evening, between the haunted house, the big wheel and the cakewalk?

All the people.

Everyone.

Goddamned Everyman.

That’s what we find at the funfair, the epicentre of excitement, sensation and adventure, the spot where hundreds of marriages have begun and at least as many ended and where enough black eyes are delivered to fill a whole village.

The whole known world starts the night here, ends it here, or at least wanders about here for a few minutes.

The spot, you might say (and Marcus does say, although inaudibly and with distaste) to find what he’s looking for.

In the distance, as they turn the corner – Oostersingel, Java-straat – the roar of the music thunders up and the big illuminated wheel circles above the roofs and as they go on walking, nearly running, he meets Berte and Anne, or Anne and Berte, calling them after half a minute Anneberte, because they finish each other’s sentences like a kind of female Huey, Dewey and Louie. Ahead of them walk four guys wearing the high street’s response to the rage of punk. Hands in their pockets, at least when they aren’t bumping into each other, grabbing hold of each other, pushing each other away, in short: when they aren’t bounding along the street like adolescent chimpanzees.

And then suddenly the fountain of coloured light and distorted sound that is the funfair looms up ahead of them: flat-trodden straw on the muddy paths, groups of young men around the crane machines and couples with their arms around each other in the Octopus. A ballet of yellow, red, blue and green light sweeps through the evening air. Fragments of top-ten hits mingle with the noise of sirens, bells, klaxons and the shrieking of hundreds of excited girls. It smells of the cinnamon of cinnamon sticks, the sickly petticoat scent of candyfloss, the blue oily smoke of the fat-fryer and the wet-clothes odour of beer. Everything spins and sways and grinds and goes up and down. It’s almost too much. No, it is too much.

They’re standing in what can barely still be called an open space, the ghost house to their left, above their heads the bright halo of the big wheel and people everywhere.

‘The Polyp!’ cry Anneberte, as they drag him in the direction of something that looks like an apparatus in which trainee cosmonauts in far-off Baikonur get their G-force baptism.

‘Not a hope,’ says Marcus.

‘The ghost house!’ they cry and cast him coaxing glances.

‘No such thing as ghosts,’ says Marcus.

Two frowns are directed at him.

The Apollo 2000, then?