In A Dark Wood

And his thoughts go involuntarily to the empty rooms in his house, the silent rows of brassieres and bustiers and corsets and slips and step-ins in the shop. He remembers the endless days he spent in the hole, the smell of earth, his rooting in the ground, like an animal, the animal that he became more and more each day, and the image of the plundered shop slides over that memory, how he cycled through the town, to the town hall, pleaded and almost implored, and how he was thrown out onto the street; he sees the wet patch in the crotch of AryanBookshopHilbrandts, the barrel of the pistol pressing motionlessly against his temple. His grandfather falling face-first into the chicken soup. His mother having to clear away ‘her mess’. Heijman’s face, which refuses to stay a face in his memory, staying instead a vague blur that he calls his brother. He remembers all that in the good room of the Veenhoeve and he thinks: the order, the fullness.

And there, among the Ferwerdas’ dark furniture, in the gloomy room, looking out at the abundant sunlight touching the gardens, the maid, the roofs and the walls, Jacob Noah feels like a man at a parting of the ways: a straight, level road to the left, a winding mountain path to the right. Without hesitating for so much as a moment, he makes a decision: order, the straight path, Ferwerda’s room is one way; the full garden, where all is ripe and heavy with fruits, where smells rise from the deep green of plants and herbs and shrubs and colours glimmer in the light, there, outside, where the maid is on her way to the cowshed, her aproned hips swaying under the blue linen, that’s the other one, and that’s the one he will choose.

Where now is his emotion over the respectable gravity of the God-fearing people of Smilde? Where the grateful humility with which he bought, last Friday, a black bicycle from the Mustang factory? He came to redeem a debt and prove his honour to the farmer who hid him on his land, and now here he is – the sun creeps in and makes the well-scrubbed table smell heavily of wax – here he stands and he knows that he is rejecting the empty fullness of this room and the orderly life of the Ferwerdas and that he will accept the full emptiness of the sunlit world beyond the window. No more humility, no self-renouncing rejection of worldly turmoil. He is alive.

At the end of the morning, after coffee with aniseed cake, Jacob Noah asks Ferwerda’s daughter to help him put the new bicycle in the barn and show him where he can find some oil and grease. Even before they have reached the green sliding doors he has kissed her and asked her to marry him.

Later, as they walk back arm in arm to the good room where the Ferwerdas sit surrounded by the smell of beeswax, waiting for the second sermon of the day, he remembers what he was thinking about empty fullness and full emptiness. Where does Jetty Ferwerda belong in that, he wonders, as they crunch down the gravel path that runs along the farmhouse: the order of the Sunday room or the abundant blossoming of the garden? There’s no time to answer that question, because they’re already inside, and Jetty leads him to the Sunday room and he asks her father with a lot of ums and coughing a very different sort of question and after a brief nod gets an answer, after which the maids are called in, who treat Jetty to smacking kisses, and the farmhands suck noisily on the fat cigars that the farmer distributes.

That afternoon, when Jacob Noah is sitting on the bus to Assen, he looks at the canal that passes slowly by, the cumulus clouds that drift like blobs of whipped cream in the light-blue air.

The bus stops a few times on the way. A farmer’s wife gets on with two little children, a bent-backed man in a raincoat buttoned up to the neck gets off the bus. A dense shadow hangs under the trees along the canal and here and there the sheltered spots are taken by staring fishermen, most of them alone, just one with a knitting wife sitting beside him on a stool. When they’re about to leave the village, they pass a church where a service is just beginning. A silent row of men and women in black, some holding children by the hand, slowly slide inside through the wide-open door.

Calm and order and silence. There is so much calm and order and silence that Jacob Noah, leaning his head against a window post, is seized by a kind of asphyxia. He has difficulty finding any oxygen.

Throbbing, the bus speeds up, the sun flickers between the trees as they glide by. Jacob Noah closes his eyes. Order and chaos. Fullness and emptiness. The words repeat in his thoughts to the rhythm of the low rattle of the bus’s diesel engine. And his breathing joins in. Order, chaos, fullness, emptiness. By the time they arrive at the station in Assen, he is drenched in sweat. His head roars, he is dizzy, his jaws are pressed so rigidly together that his teeth are grinding.

Outside, in front of the station, he stands for a long time in the sun, as if waiting for a bus that won’t come. Then, once he has calmed down, he walks home through the quiet Sunday town. But still not knowing whether Jetty Ferwerda is one thing or the other. The only image that hovers in his thoughts, and won’t go away, is that of the face of Farmer Ferwerda, his serious, brooding expression, the almost imperceptible frown of his eyebrows, his slight nod and his voice, when he said: ‘My daughter’s hand, Mr Noah? I thought you had come to bring something, but now it seems you have come to take something away.’

…

Summer comes and autumn and winter passes and when it is spring, upstairs, in the big bed, in the house above the shop, Jetty Ferwerda lies with her eyes wide open and her legs spread, bringing into the world the child who will be the first of three daughters. It’s a Sunday afternoon, at around six, when Jacob Noah holds out his arms to receive the child, both literally and figuratively, into his hands. The midwife has just turned her back on the bed to take off the doctor’s shoes, which she splashed a few minutes before with boiling hot water when she came into the room with a washtub so heavy that she couldn’t help setting it down so hard that a steaming wave crashed over the rim and drenched Dr Wiegman’s shoes and almost scalded his feet, and as the nurse kneels on the floor in front of the doctor and the doctor sits grimacing on a white leather armchair a torpedo of glistening skin and black hair plastered against the temples appears and before Jacob Noah can think what to do, there are his outstretched arms, his outspread hands and, to his later surprise, a steady gaze fixed upon a new life, and he picks the child up, lays it in a cloth and looks at it with a mixture of bewilderment and happiness that is utterly unfamiliar to him.

The whole wild hubbub of the world falls still. An explosion of silence fills the room, the house, the square in front of the house, the town and, probably, the whole province of Drenthe. It’s as if cars stop everywhere, cyclists stop cycling, factories creak to a standstill and planets freeze in their orbits. In the folds of the cloth there lies a wet potato. From the potato two black-blue eyes stare at him almost sardonically. ‘Who are you?’ he thinks, before realising that it’s a stupid question and at the same time being overwhelmed by his own voice, which thunders out at full blast.

‘A daughter!’ he bellows, so harshly that both child and mother burst into tears.

The midwife, taking the bundle from his hand, throws him a look of contempt and snips the umbilical. And while the things that have to happen happen and the world resumes its course, cars drive, bicycles bicycle, factories produce and planets rush through space, he stands up, drunk with excitement, exhaustion and joy, and says resolutely: ‘Aphra.’

His wife stares at him uncomprehendingly.

Late that evening, when the midwife closes the door gently behind her and goes home on her tall black bicycle, he slips upstairs, to the little room where his daughter is sleeping. On the wall there glows the soft yellow lamp that the midwife had looked at scornfully (‘Day is day, night is night, Mr Noah! Even for children.’) and which he left on nonetheless. In the frail light, no more than the thought of moon and stars and, damn it, the notquitedarkness when he hid in his mother’s dress, he peers into the cradle at the peaceful, empty little face of his child. She no longer looks like a wet potato. On the contrary: she looks like a girl. The worst wrinkles have vanished from her face, her eyelids, small and transparent as bees’ wings, lie calmly together, her mouth is gentle and relaxed. Beside her head there lies a little hand that looks so frail and so pink it scares him. Aphra. He tries to imagine them – him, Jetty Ferwerda (as he still always calls her) and Aphra – coming outside in a few weeks’ time: the child in the pram, his wife in a thin white dress, a family amongst other strolling families. The speckled shadow beneath the trees at the Deerpark, the smell of the forest, the tock of balls against rackets, now and then a car grunting past. He sees them all walking to old Ferwerda’s farmhouse, beside the long canal that lies gleaming between its embankments, and the farmer’s big hands taking the child from the arms of a wearily smiling Jetty Ferwerda.

Below him, in the linen cover of the cradle, the child moves her head. It hurts him to look at her.

When he – it’s past midnight and he a ghost against the darkness – slips into the bedroom, his wife doesn’t even wake up. There is still a vague memory of disinfectant in the dark bedroom, and as he walks to the chair over which he intends to hang his clothes, his left foot lands in the wet patch where the midwife set the washtub down too hard. When he lays his head on the pillow and looks sideways at his sleeping wife, the pain that he felt when he peered at his daughter disappears, only to make way for a new kind of pain. This time it isn’t the rending of a breast full to bursting, a ribcage swelling with pride and joy and, God, an amount of confusions and emotions that he has never known before. Now it is the shrinking pain of emptiness.

He has been a father for barely six hours and now, lying next to his wife in the marital bed, Jacob Noah just feels cold.

…

Only years later, decades later, when he is sitting in his car at nearly six o’clock one Friday evening and feels the warmth of the sinking sun on his face, and the light colours his eyelids red and all around him is still, will he understand the coldness within him. He will then finally understand why he has thought his whole life long that he was not a good man, something that he would probably never have worked out if they had stayed childless, that it was precisely the birth of his first daughter that made him understand that from now on the child would be the only bond that he could have with his wife and that with the two who came after things would just get even worse.

There, in his car, he will remember what he hasn’t remembered his whole life long, between the births of his first child and that moment: watching the doctor on bare red feet helping the midwife weigh the child and tie the navel. He will see himself, the way he looked at his wife who lay glowing with post-natal contentment in the pillows. And he will know again what he thought without knowing then that he thought it: the earth spinning through the universe, human beings like ants, light going on in towns and off in other towns, aeroplanes shooting through the air, trains boring tunnels through the night. Everything.

His wife had opened her eyes – he remembers those many decades later with frightening clarity – and smiled vaguely. As he mechanically returned his wife’s smile, he suddenly knew that he didn’t feel what he was supposed to feel for the mother of his newborn daughter. His mouth had fallen open, his shoulders slumped and he stood bent beneath the burden of his understanding.

‘Will you hold her for a moment, before we give her to your wife?’ the midwife had asked and he had almost shaken his head. He had almost said ‘no’. He had almost said that he might have felt one with creation, the worlds, miss, do you understand that?, but that he had just discovered that he had no feeling for his fellow man and that … insects, miss, people are insects as far as I’m concerned … but then he had held out his arms to take the child and his mouth closed, he felt his shoulders drawing up and his muscles and sinews and blood vessels and skin and … everything stretched and pulled and tensed. He felt a vitality and a power running through his limbs which at the same time surprised him and made him overflow with happiness.

Decades later, that Friday evening at about six o’clock, eyes narrowed to slits in the light of the sun, the familiar grumble of the slowing car, he will remember that and know that he could not love his wife. As his car slides down the slip road of the viaduct and he can suddenly feel the warmth of the sun on his face, he knows that his gains, his conquests and his merits (the businesses, the money, the women, his name in the paper), that all of those things could never be enough to fill the hole in his life, that he only used his wife to bring his children into the world, to fill the emptiness that his mother, his father and Heijman left behind.

There, in the car, the light glides over the windscreen, a sudden memory of a perfume wells up in him, and he knows: everything is nothing.

…

Although in the night after the birth of his daughter he had lain staring a hole in the darkness, brooding over the feeling that he didn’t feel and the feelings that he did feel, in the years that followed another two daughters had come. It had been months before he dared to approach his wife (and that was actually what he had called it in his thoughts: approaching, as if the act itself was an admission of guilt) and when he threw himself on her with a hunger that astonished even him and the sigh of both relief and surprise rose from Jetty Ferwerda’s throat, he became aware of something that he had never known before.

Jetty Ferwerda had been his first girlfriend, and between them it had been just as they could have imagined: beautiful, bright and careful. Now, Jacob Noah brought his guilt with him when he came to her, his actions were shrouded by something that he could only describe as ‘darkness’, through which he lost his sexual innocence and the guilt that he felt increased. The first time after the birth, after months of cautious abstinence, benignly ignoring the yearning looks of his wife, he had taken her like a dark beast. He had dropped a claw on her right breast, pushed her head aside with his and hurled himself on her like a thirsty man finally finding the oasis after days of travel and throwing his whole body into the water.

‘Yaaah …’ said his wife. He didn’t know if she wanted to say his name, if she was encouraging him or losing herself in her own pleasure. Perhaps in that bewildering whirl of animality she was choking back an attempt to say the forbidden name of God. At any rate it had only made him feel more furious. Half raised, staring into eyes cloudy with pleasure, her acknowledgement of an encouraging desire that confirmed his guilt – yaaah, you have to destroy all that is clean and pure because what was clean and pure has been destroyed – he had laid his right hand on her jaw, stretched his thumb over her lips and then suddenly opened those lips and shoved his thumb into her mouth. She had, sucking violently, come. Her pelvis jerked as if she was having an electric shock. Only months later, when Aphra was almost a year old and life had completely resumed its rhythm, did she tell him during a post-coital conversation that it had been her first orgasm. Leaning on his elbow, lying on his side, looking at her in the twilight, he had nodded. She smiled and said: ‘So much love, I’ve never known that.’ He had felt a wave of fresh suffering well up in him and he said: ‘Or so much evil?’ She had turned her head away slightly from him and looked at him from the corners of her eyes, pretending not to understand him. A vague sort of loathing ran through him, then he pushed his hand under her neck and kneaded it gently. ‘Bad things.’ He laid his other hand on her breast, stroked her nipple and then let his hand slide over her belly to her pubic hair. ‘Jacob. No.’ He nodded, as if he had expected as much. ‘I’m the bad man.’ She sighed deeply. ‘The guide to lead you out of Eden.’ She gave a tortured groan. He felt a deep arousal mounting in her, an arousal that fought stubbornly against her resistance to the peculiar things that he was saying. ‘What do you want?’ he said. She shook her head. His hand lay on her mount of Venus, while his fingers played her as if she was an instrument. ‘You don’t want anything?’ She arched her back. ‘Yaaah,’ she said. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. Never before had she been so wet. He pushed a finger inside her, as the tip of his thumb rotated gently around the little button at the top of her vagina. ‘Do …’ She was, close to her climax, barely comprehensible. Suddenly he got up. He gripped her tightly, threw her over until she was half on her knees and with a fluid motion entered her. The pillow smothered her cry. He held her hips in his hands and thrust himself into her. The faint moonlight that pierced the curtains cast a silk-soft gleam on the curves of her backside. ‘What,’ he said, as he slid his hands over her buttocks and stroked the soft skin. ‘What. Do. You. Want?’ He couldn’t hear what she said. Her words were smothered in the pillow. ‘What?’ He let his thumb slide down to where he was going in and out of her and where it was wet from her own moisture. She made a grumbling sound. ‘What … Jetty … Ferwerda …’ She began to shudder. He didn’t know if she was crying or coming. He laid his moist thumb between her buttocks. When she began to scream into the pillow, he understood that she was actually crying and coming at the same time and that he himself was barely present in all that violence.

Bracha was born two years later. She smiled the first time he picked her up. He had never heard that a newborn could do that, and when he said what had happened – the midwife and the doctor were still in the room – no one would believe him. But he had seen it, the vague, precocious smile that seemed to challenge him. And three years after the second one came Chaja, who didn’t cry, didn’t look up or down and certainly didn’t smile, but just stared straight in front of her, silent and serene, with eyes as big and dark as dew-covered grapes and an expression as if she was trying to think of something that wouldn’t come to mind. He had looked at the child and known that she would always be a mystery to him.

The doctor had asked, when he stood with the staring Chaja in his arms and said her name, whether he was trying to assemble a whole alphabet, and when he looked up he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s complete.’

His wife hadn’t been surprised when he stopped trying to approach her after the birth of the third daughter, any more than she had been startled by the grim emphasis with which he had come to her in the years before. It was plain to her that he respected her, but didn’t love her; that he wanted children with a … a despair that she couldn’t understand, and seemed nonetheless incapable of taking pleasure in the deed that would lead to that end. When they made love, when they still did that, she sometimes saw in the moonlight that fell into their room how the veins in his neck swelled and his forehead was a great sea of ripples. He ground his teeth when he fucked her, as if he was not busy with the play of love but had to wrest something from it. It was a frightening expression, and she wasn’t sorry not to see it any more. He had taught her what an orgasm was and how you could have one. All things considered, she no longer even needed him.

Chapter 6 (#ulink_a55396ad-030a-5b00-8ad1-77aed210428f)

And then there he is, the seasons and the years have passed. He has grown, widthwise, his children have grown, lengthwise, his wife has grown thin. Yes, Jetty Ferwerda, with her flowing hips and her arching breasts, rich blonde hair that seemed to cry out nothing but Health! Strength! Fertility!, has changed into a scrawny, nervous woman with a bob cut so sharply that Aphra will later ask if she can take her hair off. The business has grown, too. Jacob has bought the shop next door and the one next door to that and the two shops behind them and knocked everything together and is now the owner of a complete block of which the ground floor forms the biggest lingerie store in the province. Once a year he attends the meeting of the business club, but always without saying a word, until in the autumn of 1962 he asks to speak, is granted permission and to the surprise of all his fellow shopkeepers unrolls the scroll that he was carrying under his arm when he came in and presents a plan which is immediately rejected, but which will later completely change the town. That evening he listens affably to the objections. He isn’t upset by the outcry. Even the two men right beside him who hiss something with the word ‘Jew’ into each other’s ears don’t seem to bother him. He knows what will happen. He is a fisherman at the water’s edge, a man who knows that his patience will win out over the suspicion of the fish. He even knows when he will win. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says that evening, when the cigar smoke has become a thick blue fog in the little hall in the Hotel de Jonge. ‘Gentlemen, you say “no” and “provided that” and “never”, but in ten years we will be here again and it will have happened.’ And he looks around the room to let his words reach everyone and says: ‘You are not the object of history, but its subject.’ And he rolls up his paper, stubs out his cigar, throws his coat over his shoulders and walks alone but very contentedly through the drizzly autumn darkness back to the house where his three daughters have stayed up far too late to hear their father’s report. And when he gives it, and Aphra – with a grim expression under her black eyebrows, arms folded and eyes fixed on the table – is angry and sulks, he explains that time is like porcelain. Chaja stares at him with enormous eyes. He walks to the dresser, takes a cup and saucer … and another … and another … He gives one to each of his daughters. He posts them at one side of the room, goes himself to the other side and says: ‘Whoever brings me theirs first. One. Two. Three!’ and there they go, Aphra panting before she’s out of breath, Bracha hesitating and bending her little body over the cup and saucer and running, running, running, and right at the back Chaja, lifting up the crockery almost proudly, her staring eyes fixed on the outstretched hand of her father, ready to receive what is held out to him.

There goes Chaja, untouched by the mêlée of swaying legs, flying pottery and shrill cries. Her sisters crash to the floor with laughter, but she seems to be making a voyage across the room, like a Parsifal bearing his Holy Grail. Chaja sets off through forests and over hills, she treads a straight path in the middle of lots of crooked ones, blind to what is happening around her, oblivious to noise and wild amusement. And then, after what seems like an age, she stops in front of her father, hands him the cup and saucer with a gravity that makes the cheerful hubbub fall suddenly silent, and says: ‘Seventeen.’

Her sisters are lying amidst shattered crockery. Her mother is sitting bolt upright in her chair, on the other side of the room, with a piece of embroidery in her lap. The dark figure of Jacob Noah stands in front of Chaja and bends over her, one hand held behind his ear, and asks: ‘Seventeen?’

He receives the cup and saucer from her, gives a tormented smile, straightens up and looks down at the little girl with her calm face.

She nods: ‘Seventeen.’

And Jacob Noah, standing there with his cup and saucer, like a waiter who has forgotten which table his order is for, stares straight ahead and feels his shoulders slump under the weight of time.

So much to do. So little time.

He feels like a man trying to swim out of the suction of a maelstrom.

Later that evening, when the darkness has turned liquid, with a glass of whisky, very unusual for him, he thinks about himself, how he has spread like an ink stain over the town. The shops that he has bought. The life-sized game of Monopoly that he is playing. Although his property is spread out over the whole centre, part of it is clotted compactly together. It started with an old tailor’s shop in a low-roofed little worker’s cottage beside his own shop, then a big, three-storey house, heavily reduced in value by a widow who had refused to admit strangers into her house after her husband’s death. Then a shop selling sewing machines, and not long after that the adjacent travel agency. And now he owns a stone rectangle in the centre of the town, a block of houses and shops, a confusion of alleyways and courtyards and warehouses, with his lingerie shop as its beating heart.

He raises his glass and peers into the amber fluid.

‘Seventeen,’ he says and smiles gently, but as he does so and gives a worldly-wise look at his whisky, the laugh becomes a fishbone in his throat.

How many premises are there in his block in the town centre?

He stands up and wades through the darkness to the window. The square lies before and below him. Behind, beside and beneath him his property.

While the germ of a plan sprouts in one part of his head and begins to bud and blossom … in another part a voice asks why he didn’t see this when he thought he saw everything. He brings his glass to his mouth and drains it without thinking, in one draught, turns round and walks to the door, down the stairs to the floor below, as the whisky sinks into his body and his throat begins to burn and his head fills with the vapours of the alcohol.

Outside he walks jacketless through the damp evening air. It’s as dark as the inside of a church collection bag. He walks to the middle of the square, where he takes up position, feet slightly apart: a man at ease with himself. A bedroom light springs on behind a window on the top floor of his house, and while Jacob Noah looks from the square at his stone castle, a small figure appears in the sharp white rectangle of light. Jacob Noah sees only a dark silhouette busy hoisting itself up, but he doesn’t need his imagination to know who is looking at him from high up there. Behind the window, standing on the chair that is normally beside her bed, Chaja is looking down at him. He sees the dark mass of his property, the bright rectangle in the middle and the figure of his youngest daughter in it and nods thoughtfully. The soft nocturnal rain soaks his suit and drips along his temples and down the collar of his shirt. He raises his right hand, waves to the little figure up above and says silently: ‘Seventeen.’