In A Dark Wood

And again the builders are there. They hack holes from one shop to the other, lay floors, open up ceilings and cover over internal spaces. There are processions of cement mixers, tipper trucks and cranes. And for almost a year the place echoes with the banging of picks, the rattle of drills and the dull thud of sledgehammers. In the midst of all that din and chaos Noah camps out in a bedroom where the plaster dust sticks to his feet when he gets up in the morning. He eats a cheese and dust sandwich and drinks coffee with a powdery skin to the deafening rattle of pneumatic drills and compressors. In the shop, which is shut now because no woman wants to fit a bra surrounded by crashing construction workers and coarsely roaring demolition men, he sits in the shop, in his office, juggling figures, writing letters and drawing up contracts. His family have escaped the violence of the building work, and until this storm of activity and entrepreneurship has passed, seek domicile in Jetty’s father’s farm. It is there that he sees them every Sunday. It is there that he discovers that he is no longer necessary.

Yes, every time he cycles back along the long canal to Assen after a long Sunday afternoon, he brings emptiness with him. Winter, spring and summer pass. The snow and the hard blue ice in the canal make way for new grass on the banks and barges of cattle and milk churns. Buttercups appear and bulrushes and duckweed and farmhands in blue overalls sitting all along the edge with fishing rods. The world becomes full and rich and Jacob cycles through it, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, and becomes emptier and emptier and emptier.

Every weekend he sees his family, his three daughters playing in the flower garden behind the farmhouse with an old doll’s pram and a cat on a string, his wife moving around in her parents’ house with an ease and a lightness which she, he knows for sure, has never had in his presence or at least doesn’t know any more, and each weekend the thought assumes more solid form that she has become better off without him, happier, freer, that he has become superfluous, ballast that was once necessary for the balance of the ship called family, but which must now be jettisoned for a free, light crossing. Once, after parking his car on the spotless gravel beside the farm, he hears the voices of his three daughters. They call to him, but as he walks past the barn, he doesn’t see them on the bleaching green or amongst the lettuces running along the little paths that divide the beds of the kitchen garden. Just as he is on his way back to the car he spots them. They are across the water, on the other side of the canal, in the tall grass of the embankment. They form a little row – mother, big child, child, small child – and they are complete. Their hands go into the air and they wave at him, their voices ring out clearly over the water, and although he wants to walk to them – something in him begins a half-hearted run – he knows the water is between them. No bridge to the left, nor to the right. He crosses the road, stands on the bank and spreads his arms out wide as if to apologise for his unattainability.

After almost a year Jacob Noah is the owner of the heart of the town and the biggest department store, the biggest department store of the province itself, perhaps even the biggest outside the big cities. Above the proud, wide entrance to the square, in the place where his little daughter once stared down from behind her lit window, he hangs a neon sign showing a stylised version of Noah’s Ark, a flowing line of light as the ship and in front of it a broad stairway along which thronging hordes pour in. It is impossible to tell from the neon whether it is people or animals that are entering the ark.

In the big stone block that is now a department store, there is also the little shop with which it all began, his grandfather’s ‘emporium’, nearly wrecked by his father and successfully transformed by his mother into the best shoe shop in the town. He has transferred the old interior which lay stored for years in a warehouse and had it rebuilt in what must be more or less precisely the middle. The counter the colour of fresh horse dung. The once immense, now surprisingly modest wall with shelves for boxes and drawers. The shop window with reproductions of old advertising posters and the velvet display tables. Around the old counter, floors stretch across five storeys with wonders that draw surprised visitors from four provinces. They smell cheeses they’ve never seen before, see an ocean of furniture, pass amongst endless racks of clothes and touch more kitchen implements than they could ever have imagined. The young people come to the record section, which has its own top thirty and organises signing sessions with locally, regionally and nationally famous musicians. The customers arrive breathlessly at the restaurant, which is covered entirely in orange and white formica, and recover from their amazement. Profits soar, not only those of the Noah Department Store, but also those of the surrounding shops. A great huntsman drops enough for the lesser ones to live off.

And everyone wonders how that man Noah did it, how he turned such a dismal little underwear shop into this palace of consumer gratification. The town’s chamber of commerce sees an explosion in numbers coming to the town, other shopkeepers profit from it or else can’t keep up with the competition, young people buy their hip clothes and the latest hits from Noah, while at the same time seeing him as the embodiment of capitalism. And in a few years Jacob Noah loses his name as a controversial figure and grows into a person of mythical proportions. Stories about him begin to circulate. He is a screen for an even wealthier man, or even a consortium. He has received a large amount in reparations from Germany. He has sold his soul to the devil. He has dug up a treasure trove on the long-abandoned estate of Vredeveld, where long ago a bastard child of Napoleon’s brother tried to hide away, silent and invisible, with her embittered husband.

And in the evening, in his office, which is now on the top floor of the department store, Jacob Noah sits as the lonely ruler of his empire. His family are back, but they have changed. Or perhaps he is no longer the same person. There is somehow a distance and awkwardness that wasn’t there before, a space dividing them that is just as futile and at the same time as insuperable as the canal that once lay between them.

And just as he once forgot the faces of his father and mother and mother and brother and was left with a shrinking feeling of lack that he calls ‘family’, so now his wife and his three daughters are vague and remote to him. He is standing beside the Smilder Canal and they are on the other side. He doesn’t know how to get across the water.

In his little office, amongst his files, his cash books and ledgers, he sometimes looks out of the circle of light that the desk lamp casts on his work, and stares out through the high window, where there is nothing but dark night air and sometimes the moon. From time to time he gets to his feet to stand at the window, hands in his trouser pockets, belly thrown slightly forward, eyebrows like caterpillars wiggling above his eyes, and puts aside the files and contracts. Then he peers into the darkness until he knows again: Jacob Noah, son of Abraham Noah, son of Rosa Deutscher, brother of Heijman Noah.

Then he is sometimes overwhelmed by the truth of the here and now, where he is and when. For a breath’s duration he was in the company of what was dearer and more necessary to him than anything else, but it couldn’t be.

He has to do it alone.

That is his task. That is the task that he doesn’t want to but must fulfil, the task to which he strugglingly submits.

Because there is no other way.

The stone mountain that he has built in the heart of the town, the ark of things to which everyone comes to get what is to their taste, a ludicrous striving for something that no longer exists, or is at least no longer ‘there’. There is a gleaming marble of clarity in his head then, deeply buried in the fogs of figures and letters, and a black veil of loneliness settles like an autumn mist that creeps over fields and hides the path. But the understanding is there nonetheless, like a hard nucleus, like something that won’t go away: he must lose everything in order to have something.

Chapter 7 (#ulink_91099922-10cb-5a79-a95b-62ddfe25303f)

Time passes. Jacob Noah gets his first grey hairs and puts on a few more pounds. He sees his daughters blossoming and coming home with great tall beanpoles in army-surplus clothes and carrying bags bearing the names of singers he’s never heard of. He looks with controlled excitement at the littlest one, who always looks back with the same silent gaze. He looks at his wife, who has given up embroidery and now plays tennis day in and day out and just gets slimmer and browner. He looks at the town, which is still the same.

Everything slides and drifts during those years. Schools are turned upside down, universities are occupied by their students, the annual motorbike races are preceded by enormous pitched battles between bewildered policemen and exuberant hordes of youths. Jacob Noah, like all his competitors, has boarded up all the windows and doors of the shop. And just as he nails his shop shut against the raging disturbances and tumult of the world, he also erects, although much more slowly and much less conspicuously, a rampart around his heart. Not to protect himself against the outside world (he has long been hardened against that), but to shield the outside world from the violence that rages within him. Cabinets fall, political parties emerge and disappear, builders and dockers strike, angry students take to the streets and soldiers walk around with long hair. Women claim the right to abortion, young people claim freedom and everyone claims happiness. Value Added Tax is introduced, oil prices rise. In various places around the world aeroplanes are hijacked and blown up. And Jacob Noah extends his empire with a shop, a warehouse and a few dilapidated properties. Two, three, four new members of staff are added, he buys a Citroën DS and his name appears in advertisements, brochures and house-to-house flyers. He opens a branch in a different town, and another, and another, and at the weekend, when he’s sitting by the tennis court watching his two eldest daughters run over the glowing gravel, with the big scoreboard saying Noah Lingerie in the background, the hand of the littlest one in his hand, he feels not contentment but the restless gnaw of hunger. He feels the raging of the world, the aimlessness of the swarming on the anthill, the whole goddamned panta rhei, and at such moments he sometimes lowers his head until his chin rests on his chest, and in his chest he sees the hole in the bog, the damp walls, the roof of roots and earth, the stamped floor and the stale bread that lies waiting in a tin, and deep within he feels a yearning for that hole, where nothing was everything and he couldn’t lose it because he had already lost everything, a yearning so great that it’s all he can do not to kneel down on the spot, beside the tennis court, sun and gravel and bare legs and all, rap his knuckles together and scream: ‘Take me back!’

And then one evening he is standing there in the shop where his empire began. The lights are nearly all out, the staff have gone home to new buildings in the new suburbs, the boxes are on their shelves, the bras hang from their hooks, the stockings are arranged on shelves and racks. Outside it’s dark, inside the silence rustles and Jacob Noah walks through the audible stillness and inspects his kingdom. He is a man who believes in always setting a good example and so he walks along the racks, straightens a slip, a corset, a poster. He stacks a stack of boxes and picks up a tangle of parcel string beside the wrapping table. He lets his eye slide over the coffee-maker in the corner, sweeps away a few grains of sugar and quickly wipes the sink of the little kitchen. And then, by the little sink, staring into the mirror behind the basin, the mirror in which the shop girls adjust their hair and apply the lines of mascara around their eyes, his heart sinks in his breast. Upstairs, at home, his wife sits on the sofa watching television. Aphra and Bracha are squabbling about clothes (who can wear what and for how long) and Chaja sits silently over her sisters’ science books mumbling rows of numbers as if they were prayers. There, upstairs, is his life and here, downstairs, is he. The length of parcel string dangles slackly in his hand. He tries to call up the image of Jetty Ferwerda, her peasant creaminess, the blue and white striped apron she was wearing when he came to visit her on the farm and she hadn’t finished working. Her white arms, full and bare … Her arching bosom … Her magnificent buttocks when she bent over to pick up a calf … Like the land itself.

And he had tried to work her, like the land. He had taught her pleasure and surrender. But he was two men. He was a lover and a man standing behind the lover, looking over his shoulder, watching him, one eyebrow raised, a sneer around his lips.

Here he is, facing his reflection – a man whose hair is beginning to turn grey and on whose face lines have appeared, forming the map of the journey he has travelled. Between his legs he feels the dead weight of his genitals.

He wants to respect her, but he can’t respect her because he wants to fuck, in her, the whole country. He wants to take her just as an Umbrian peasant, on the first day of spring, throws his wife face-first into a freshly ploughed furrow and mounts her, her big white arse in his hands, her knees in the loose black earth, a fertility ritual.

But Jetty is no longer the farmer’s daughter and, he reflects, probably never was.

He turns away from the mirror, switches off the lamp in the little kitchen, walks into the shop and stares through the big display window into the evening town. Where once houses stood, a square has now come into being, around which construction work is going on intensively on the department stores he planned a long time ago. A light flashes on a builder’s crane. Beyond it, the darkness of evening hangs blackly down.

When he turns off the light in the shop and stands for a moment in the dark room, suddenly a thought arises in him that makes him clench his fist, from which the piece of string still dangles.

He has everything, but what does he have?

Brother, mother, father dead. Wife he can’t love as he wants to love a wife. Three daughters who are painfully dear to him.

He has loss and he has something that must yet be lost.

A life, he thinks, like accountancy.

Like a mole from his hole he came out of the bog and he cycledcycledcycled to the town, to the shop.

Why didn’t he go and study, when there was no one left who expected anything from him?

But where on earth was he, an orphan, supposed to get the money to study? He had to work to stay alive and because he was working he couldn’t study, even though he probably earned enough to pay for his studies. History had trapped him.

And what if he had sold the shop? That was a possibility he had never investigated.

Here, in the dark shop, where it smells of linen and cotton and rubber, he asks the question that he has never asked before.

Why? Why did he never find out if he could sell the shop?

He raises his arm, stares at the length of parcel string and slaps it hard into the palm of his left hand. He feels the burn of the pain before he hears the lash of the string. He shuts his eyes tight.

To finish the work of the dead?

To imagine their pride?

To leave the mark of his family behind?

But he doesn’t know if he has comforted the dead, if that were possible at all.

And he doesn’t know if his parents would rather have seen him as a professor.

And the town will not bear the sign of the Noahs anyway, because no one will give him credit for what he has done. The square will never bear his family name. None of the streets, soon to be stripped of narrow workers’ cottages and lying new and clean and spacious around the square, will bear his name. Even in the industrial zone, where roads are named after big businessmen, there will not be so much as a car park that he can look at with perfect pride.

In his life’s accounts the result will be in the red.

…

But he isn’t there yet. First come the years when he sells the shop, adds the proceeds to the capital that he has amassed and starts to gnaw at the town like a beast of prey returning to the remains of a corpse. He buys up so many properties so fast that the local estate agents no longer bother to advertise their wares. He buys shops, houses, empty shells of warehouses, abandoned factories, empty schools and fallow land, apparently at random, seemingly without purpose. He spreads his influence across the centre with the hunger and haste of a contagious disease. No one knows what ‘mad Noah’ wants with all those possessions, the baffling collection of condemned workers’ cottages, shabby shops, warehouses, sheds and barns. And it seems as if he himself has no idea, because he does nothing with most of the properties. Some he hires out as stores; friends of his eldest daughters camp out in others, making the heavy music that they can’t make anywhere else. Once the police call in on him to ask if those long-haired work-shy scum really have his permission to … Yes, he nods, yes, with his complete agreement and approval. Does he know all the things they’re getting up to, asks the main policeman in charge of the pair. He knows precisely what, because he visits them regularly. And he tries out the ‘young people, different times, different customs’ story, but long before he has finished the policemen’s eyes glaze over.

And then, from one day to the next, big capital discovers Assen. A plan emerges which resembles the one that he once presented like two peas in a pod, in which the square in front of his old shop becomes the aorta of all the town’s business activity. One chain after another comes to him for land, premises and storage space, and in less than three years Jacob Noah transfers all his non-profitable and fallow terrain to the gentlemen from V&D, HEMA, Albert Heijn and various high-street chains. The negotiations run strangely smoothly, because the big capitalists are used to prices rather larger than those in Assen and Jacob Noah seems to own so much land and real estate in strategic places that resistance is useless. He has become a man who cannot be avoided.

And then come the wrecking balls, the bulldozers, the cranes and the diggers. There is rubble and dust and stagnant water in deep construction pits. Contractors follow, and lay foundations, erect new cranes to hoist enormous concrete slabs into place and an endless procession of electricians, plumbers, roofers, bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers passes back and forth, day in, day out, year after year, until finally, after what seems like an eternity, the whole of the town centre has disappeared and made way for a shopping centre to put every other town in the north in the shade.

And then life resumes its weary, predictable course. Jacob Noah is in profit, more so than he could ever have dreamed. He is no longer a shopkeeper, but a real estate magnate. Which means that he has no more work to do. But for the time being that isn’t a problem. First the big department stores open their doors, and the attraction for farmers, townspeople and outsiders, which he predicted long ago, comes into effect. The small shopkeepers who once resisted his plan and then did everything they could to put a stop to the big stores, see their profits double from one accounting year to the next. From now on, every Wednesday afternoon and every Saturday is a spring flood in Assen. Customers come from as far away as Groningen, and often it’s so packed that Jacob Noah wonders, as he looks out of his window at the dense streams of sauntering bodies, what people so urgently need to buy.

He has more money, as they say, than he knows what to do with. As his bank account steadily fills and he is greeted as he enters the local head office as though he owns the bank as well (which isn’t so wide of the mark), his life becomes emptier. He sits in the office that he set up in a property he has kept and stares at the door, through which no one comes, looks at the calendar, on which no meetings are announced, and stares at his bank statements, on which the interest grows and grows and grows. It’s a very long time before he dares to leave his office and gets into the car to drive ‘outside’. It is autumn and he takes a trip in his DS through the little villages around Assen, the villages whose level of involvement in Dutch Nazi organisations he knows off by heart. The leaves of the red birch blaze in the soft afternoon light. The oaks are already turning yellow and brown. The wooded banks are thinning out.

He has nothing to do but look and although he isn’t blind to the beauty of the ash trees, the quiet village greens and the severe Gothic of the high, straight oak trunks along the narrow paths, looking isn’t enough. Unease roams within him like an animal.

Winter comes, and spring. Although he has nothing to do and gets a bit richer every day, his life runs as empty as a dirty bath. In the evening he gets into his cold side of the marital bed, which has long ceased to be the place where darkness overpowered him, and he in turn overpowered Jetty Ferwerda. He lies there staring into the void, surprised by his success, and feels frighteningly hollow because it seems so insignificant. Made it? He hasn’t made it. He’s just well-to-do. And what is left that still matters to him? His daughters are going their way, his wife has gone already and the world goes imperturbably on. In spite of everything, everything that’s happened.