In A Dark Wood

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 (#ulink_3a1a3888-cedb-5059-b023-790971ba00cf)

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 (#ulink_777c20d2-5b0d-5627-82b5-1324beeb9d7d)

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.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_03a081aa-92e8-5732-9b7c-6eb004742303)

And here come the workmen again, they demolish the interior of the shop, they break and break and break until there’s nothing left but a bare, straight space and in that stone box according to his instructions they build a new shop, a temple for invisible pieces of clothing at a time when people are walking around in woollen underwear and flesh-coloured brassieres that look as if they’re made of cardboard and ample knickers that look more like something that might have held potatoes than the packaging in which a woman presents her secrets. In those days a shop selling nothing but lingerie is like a greengrocer’s with nothing but strawberries on its shelves. Here at least. Far from everything. In Assen. In 1947.

Incidentally, Jacob Noah has no ambitions in the field of underwear. He doesn’t even have any ambitions towards the retail trade. No, he needs money. There’s just one reason why he opens a shop that is clearly superfluous, or premature at the very least: he needs to acquire capital. And as everyone who hasn’t studied economics will be aware, you don’t earn money by doing what people are doing already, but by undertaking the unthinkable. If he had wanted an income, he would have carried on with the shoe shop. If he had wanted to stay alive, he could have done just about anything in the growing post-war economy. But if he wants to acquire capital, quickly and in large amounts, he must see possibilities where no one else sees them.

Lingerie.

Now, in these days of peace and growing affluence, Jacob Noah reasons, a person wants to do more than stay alive. You want to spend money rather than just save it. You don’t just want freedom, you want luxury as well. And, with the Dutch being so Calvinistic, luxury shouldn’t be conspicuous. What could be both more invisible and more luxurious than expensive underwear?

Although he opens a business in something that no one thinks they need, they all come: the ladies of the notaries, lawyers and barristers, the daughters of aldermen, jewellers, scrap-metal merchants and army officers. They practically break the door down. One shop assistant is taken on, and then another, an office is added for administration, signs with his name on them appear beside hockey pitches and tennis courts, and one day when he’s at home with balance sheet and ledger on the tablecloth, the deep summereveningblue behind the windowpanes, above the forest, his thoughts drift away to what it was like and what there was and he sees himself again on his bicycle, cycling along the long canal from Smilde to Assen, the stolen bicycle that he has forgotten he had stolen, and he slams the ledger shut, leaves the balance sheet, goes downstairs, to the shed that he never goes to, and looks in the yellow light of a small bulb at the bicycle grey with dust and cobwebs, the frail, flat tyres and the discoloured handlebars.

That Sunday he cycles along the water. It’s a still summer day, the firmament a picture postcard, bulrushes along the edge of the canal and ripe corn and fat cows in the fields. He whirrs along on a new bicycle, a sparkling gentleman’s bike with a leather saddle and deep black tyres, chrome that flashes in the sunlight and paint that gleams like a Japanese chest. His tyres thrum along the path, his spokes sing in the wind, his great bush of recalcitrant dark hair whips and his jacket tails flap. A solitary fisherman sits at the water’s edge, chewing on a fat cigar, but the countryside is empty because it’s Sunday, the day when the good people of Smilde stay at home and reflect on vices they don’t have but will probably acquire from all that fretting. They sit in their good rooms, in black suits with stiff white collars and in long dresses and warm stockings, and listen to the minutes rustling past until it’s time to go to church and hear the sermon from a vicar who asks the question, every week and twice on Sundays, of what our sins are and whether we have really been touched by the Lord. He passes them as he cycles into the village, walking two by two on the left-hand side of the street, church-book under their arms, peppermints in their pockets, a silent column of the chosen, an unrelenting procession of the righteous whose appearance moves him so powerfully that his eyes grow moist and the harsh sun that comes unhindered across the vast empty fields makes his tears flash so that for a moment he can’t see and all of a sudden, hoopla, he rides into the leaden water of the canal and escapes drowning only thanks to a big farmer’s hand grabbing him by the collar and pulling him to the shore.

And who should be there, as he lies on his back in the grass of the bank, his wet clothes sticking to his body and his hair a mess of black streaks, who should be towering over him, like a monolith of silence, in his black suit, a deep frown on his black eyebrows, a barely concealed twinkle of irony in his right eye?

‘Farmer Ferwerda,’ he says as he lifts himself dripping from the juicy grass and holds out a wet hand. ‘I have come to bring you a bicycle.’

In the good room at the Veenhoeve, the Bog Farm, it’s as quiet as the day before Creation, for an hour and a half, while the family goes to church and Jacob Noah waits in borrowed clothes until the service is over. Outside, leaning almost as if ashamed against the scullery wall, the new black bicycle stands drying in the sun. Further along, dusty red salvias stand out like little flames against the dry grey of the flower bed, the lawn runs from the bleaching green to the back garden, immaculately untrodden, as if the Lord God of the Ferwerdas had only that morning hit upon the idea of making something beautiful. There are ripe yellow marigolds and blossoming geraniums, a honeysuckle climbs powerfully yet shyly against the fence. Far off in the distance, before the wooden side of the garden shed, seven enormous sunflowers sing out their joy at Creation, and still further along, where the kitchen garden lies, beanpoles, vertical rows of leeks, knotty beds of lettuce and exuberant potato plants gleam in the bright sunlight. In the Ferwerdas’ front room a cool shimmer makes the polished dresser shine gently and turns the open Dutch Authorised Bible on the table into a perfect likeness of the parting of the Red Sea. Above the sofa hangs a picture showing a clearing in a forest, with tall trunks of oak trees in heavy shade and three men standing around a horse and cart looking strangely helpless. From somewhere in the house comes the sound of buckets clattering against each other, a high-pitched girl’s voice laughs brightly, water gushes into a stone sink. A door opens and slams shut again and in the courtyard the maid appears, wearing a blue apron.

My God, thinks Jacob Noah. My God. The order of these things.