In A Dark Wood

Nothing is important.

Everything is nothing.

To fill the void of his existence, or at any rate camouflage it well, he becomes more active than ever, and it’s as if the void drives him harder than striving ever did. He fills one meeting after another with project-developers, planners and other dreamers. In the evening he stands in plastic-coated offices and laminated conference rooms, bent over blueprints and prospectuses. Once the meetings are over he walks through strange, dark towns and lets the neon light, the cries of the whores in their red-lit little rooms and the music from the bars wash over him. Not that he himself is in the little rooms or bars. He never managed to become a drinker. He isn’t going to become a whoremonger, because his sympathy for wrecked lives excludes any form of passion.

But life, the dark, nightly existence in which the day’s emptiness becomes laughable, life draws him as a candle draws a moth.

He does fuck. In the accounting limbo of desire and loss, action is a great source of comfort. He seduces one of his secretaries (in the pantry, where he takes her standing, half pressed against the fridge, while a visitor awaits an audience in the waiting room). He gets a blow job in his car from the wife of a dignitary who keeps having to move her pearl necklace aside to prevent it from twisting around his cock. There is a widow in a neighbouring village who he visits once every two weeks with flowers and port and after tea he throws her across the table and …

And every time he seduces a woman there’s a moment of safety and Odysseus really seems to have arrived in Ithaca.

Until, as ever, the void returns and nestles grinning within him.

Even when he finally – Aphra and Bracha are studying something vague and are by now Marxist, anti-imperialist and sexually liberated and Chaja has graduated from high school – even then, when he leaves both his wife and the town and settles in an enormous old village school that he has converted into a dwelling, to the surprise of the population of the village where he goes to live, even in the midst of all the release and freedom (his eldest daughters come at weekends and bring a flood of friends and acquaintances, each one more hazy and recalcitrant than the other, sometimes there’s a whole pop group there), even in those turbulent seventies, when he resisted the wild stream of life, there is emptiness and lack. While in his vast house beneath the tall oaks the young people dance and sing and smoke and fuck as if the world might stop turning at any moment and the sun might go out, he stands in the garden, listens to the rustle of the summer evening wind through the oak leaves, a frosted glass of vodka in his hand, and whispers his brother’s name.

Chapter 8 (#ulink_4d168ebd-08f1-520a-8431-f4e47efd76ae)

And then one day it’s the twenty-seventh of June 1980 and the sun shines on the road between the fields, the path Jacob Noah drives along, a tarmac path that lies there like a long grey ribbon thrown away by an old Drenthe giant who stood astride the land and decided that something had to be thrown away … a megalithic tomb? a forest? a whole village? no: a ribbon that passes through ash trees and hills, through heaths and sand drifts, river valleys and forests, and now here lies the ribbon, and in the sinking sun, there in the distance, on the viaduct, where the path rises, it becomes vague, vaguer and vaguer, until it dissolves into a grey road in the watery air of the west and Jacob Noah, who comes driving along the ribbon, rising and falling on the long swell of the asphalt, sees the country lying before him, the fields, the clumps of trees in the fields, the forests in the distance, the grey of the tarmac in between, and for a moment, less than half a second before he flicks up the indicator and pulls the steering wheel to the right, there is the almost physical urge to keep driving straight on, as if he could drive into the light in the distance, as if he could take off and he’d be away … released … (but what from? Him with his big car and his converted schoolhouse, his three gorgeous daughters and more money in the bank than he can spend in his lifetime) and for a moment in one all-encompassing gaze he sees the magnitude of the country, how fragile it all is, how wonderful and magnificent, it’s an experience that makes him literally sink back into the soft French springs of his DS, an experience that makes him long for the magnificent, the majestic, a feeling that makes him yearn to dissolve into the distance.

But he turns off. The car drives down the slip road and the sun, above the treetops in the distance, finds a hole in the thin cloud cover and suddenly and unexpectedly washes mightily over the car. The sharp light makes a haze of the windscreen. He shuts his eyes tight and the blood in his eyelids colours everything red. For a moment, and with bewildering clarity, a family photograph rises out of the red haze: him, Jetty Ferwerda, their three daughters; a photograph that was never taken because he didn’t want to be ‘captured’ in that way, but nonetheless he sees the picture sharp, framed, there’s even a bit of non-existent buffet in it, and he sees himself standing behind the girls, at the same time seeming to protect them (his body, his hands, everything) and keeping them away from his wife, and at that moment he suddenly knows that he has really done it, that he has kept them away from his wife and he also knows that he has never loved Jetty Ferwerda like the man who loves a woman because she is The Woman, but that she was the crank, the lever with which he lifted his daughters into the world, and as he grasps that he understands for the first time in his life, for the first time in sixty-one years, that he has never loved any woman at all, that he has never permitted such a thing, that he didn’t allow women to love him. He is alone. And he is alone because he wanted to be alone and he wants to be alone because he can’t bear someone else’s tenderness.

Whether it’s the sun shining into his face through the dirty windscreen, the power of memory or the sudden understanding of something that has decided his whole life, he doesn’t know, but his eyes sting and he feels the moisture welling up.

In the faint light everything is white and hazy in the car. The tyres sing, the engine growls comfortably.

Down at the slip road, almost weightless in the white light and blinking his tear-filled eyes, he changes down to second gear. The road is a grey path, the edge of the forest no more than a blurred green smear and the car that appears beeping harshly from the left something that shouldn’t be there.

The hazy white light in the car explodes. The treetops spin, he himself spins, the snowing glass of the windscreen spirals inside like a snowstorm and as everything turns and swirls and he is weightless for a moment, he sees again the photograph that he never had taken, and not just that one, but other photographs too, photographs that he doesn’t have, faces he can’t remember after half a lifetime: his mother, Heijman in his far too thick winter coat, his father at the dinner table with the ledger, Dr Wiegman’s red feet and the little yellow light in Aphra’s bedroom, Bracha’s hand in his much bigger hand, Chaja’s quiet eyes looking at him as her lips silently form a number.

Part 2 (#ulink_56016d26-9dc8-56d5-9aca-8238038d4bbe)

Chapter 9 (#ulink_857b0e56-ad95-58dc-a7de-e0410f5ef323)

The highest point for miles around, an elevation of sand in a circle of marshland, a dry plateau that is an island in the sucking peat bog where long ago the purple-brown corpses were found of the Princess of Yde (who wasn’t a princess) and the married couple of Weerdinge (not a married couple, but two tenderly embracing Ice-Age men with their chests bored through), where those bog bodies, dried to leather and scales, were once exhumed and where many probably still lie, including a bishop who thought he might be able to put the place in order for a while.

An inverted soup bowl, as a geographer once visualised it.

No Eternally Singing Forests.

No Unapproachable Cretaceous Rocks.

No Ridged Massif or Empty Quarters.

A soup bowl.

That’s where we are. That’s where the children of the town spend their youth: on the landscape equivalent of a piece of crockery, in a bloated hamlet on the highest part of a sandy bank that for want of monumentally beautiful, exciting history or thrilling nature is prized as ‘the town amidst the greenery’, although ‘the greenery in the town’ would be better, because although the place in which we find ourselves really is magnificently located in the middle of extensive heaths, endless moor and, yes, lots of green woods, it’s the forest in the town that is special. It’s perhaps the only town in the country with a whole forest within the built-up area. And not just some kind of little park. Not a pathetic little tuft of trees left over from a once big and mighty wood. No: a real forest with centuries-old oak trees, four cemeteries, two ponds, a children’s farm where the ducks always seem to be fucking, a dilapidated open-air theatre, a little brook, three football clubs, a skating rink and a swimming pool, a riding school and of course the place where Frederik Rooster, amidst sprouting grass and dry brambles, once grew enough marijuana to put the whole under-age population of the town to sleep for a week.

If we were a buzzard and hung above all this, above the forest, above the many, many people in the town this evening, wings still, settling from time to time in the airstream, hooked head lowered, turning from left to right and back to left and down, then in the deep pit of our vision we would see a glittering beast with steaming flanks struggling down an avenue that from so high up is nothing more than a groove in an abundance of green. But just before we can distinguish the features of the wiggling beast the thermal lifts us up, the depths grow deeper, the great spectacle wider and below us, held in the south and west by the grey ribbons of the asphalt and in the north by the straight black line of the canal (topographical map 12D, in which the town seems to hang in the curve of two motorways like a shapely breast in the landscape), we now see the alpha and omega: the Jewish cemetery on the outermost edge, the concrete mountain of the oil company, the green embroidery of the town forest that begins along the bypass and leads into the centre with its labyrinthine filigree of paths and open patches, to the west the skating rink, the football pitches, and to the east, on the most beautiful street in the town, the big cemetery; and then, right wing resting on the airstream, the bypass beneath the flapping feathery fingers, we see the mad houses, as they are known locally, on either side of the road, Licht en Kracht – ‘Light and Strength’ – and Port Natal (optimistic, calming, fraudulent names), they slumber lazily in the calming greenery, unsettlingly close to the railway that runs alongside the bypass here and so effectively separates the heart of the town from the rest that rather than being one town, it could just as well be two villages.

The broccoli clouds of the treetops glide on.

The centre, the tangle of little streets: Nieuwe Huizen, Brink, Torenlaan, Dr Nassaulaan, Hoofdlaan.

A single straight line from the old local government building (anno 1885, now the Provincial Museum) to the new one (1973, a fine example of the work of Professor Marius Duintjer).

At the end of the straight line: the sluggish grey curve of the bypass that circles three-quarters of the town.

An inverted soup bowl, among trees and fields.

1980, 27 June, six o’clock, Friday. That is the day.

The drizzle has stopped (but it won’t be dry for long) and the sun appears again above the treetops of the Forest of Assen.

It’s the eve of the TT races, when the little town with a population of just over forty thousand inhabitants swells to about five times that size. At intervals along the streets (strings of bulbs have been lit, even though it isn’t even nearly dark yet, and here and there the beams of headlights flash their chilly glare) engines roar and long processions pass by and leather-clad partygoers move from the mechanical bull to the motorbike trial, from the go-kart races to the music stages, from the beer tents to the sausage stands, the strippers and the funfair, the film and the chilly pavement cafés. The air is greyish-blue with dirty white shreds of cloud and the occasional clear patch. The lights in the houses have come on, in Gymnasiumstraat garlands and lanterns are being hung in a courtyard, two men are laying a table (one of them raises his head) and from the open kitchen window comes the tinkling laughter of a woman and the clatter of crockery and the sound of a food mixer racing and water flowing, and much further away, on the edge of the newest new suburb, to the north, where a gentle breeze swishes over fallow land, a father says to his little son: ‘There’s always enough time to pick up a pretty stone,’ and he bends down and pulls an ammonite from the yellow sand that has just been shot in the air, and in a gloomy red tent at the funfair, where the music of the Octopus and the dodgems roars faintly, Madame Zara stares at the bright-red handkerchief draped over the lamp in front of her while she acts out the future to a retired probation officer and remembers that her daughter is arriving on the nine-thirty-four train the following morning, and in the late-afternoon light the wind rolls, a wind from other parts, now, a wind that smells different, that brings different sounds, the same wind that brought Antonia d’Albero here, all the way from Milan, her stomach burning with all the plastic cups of murky coffee that she drank in equally murky Raststätten, a tongue pickled by smoking too many Marlboros, the dust of two days’ travelling deep in her pores, the dust of Via Mac Mahon, of Arisdorf, Raunheim and Apeldoorn, and the evening wind blows through the conifers around the bungalow on the south side of the town, between a cemetery and the colossal buildings of the oil company, where Mrs Kolpa, née Polak, sits with her back to the windows talking to a doctor she can’t see because she’s looking elsewhere, at an indefinable patch behind him, she’s peering into another time, just as he has been looking at a patch behind her since midway through the afternoon, when he began listening to the answer to the question of when it all started, and as usual in these cases he has had to ask only one question to get the whole story, the story that she has told no one, not her ex-husband or her son, and which has now become an unstoppable stream that is, many hours later, fading away in the mantra that has made her think for thirty-five years, no: thirty-eight years, that it is a Friday in 1942, always Friday: Yes, I remember the day I still recall what day it was the second of October a Friday it was night it was two o’clock it was Friday. It was the second of October two o’clock at night. They knocked at the door.

And although it is in fact Friday, it isn’t the second of October and it isn’t night either. It’s six o’clock in the evening and above the terraces in the square in front of the Hotel de Jonge the strings of bulbs are already blinking in the gentle wind that has risen up and the sound of loud songs from hundreds of throats and in many languages won’t stop now. Ah, the Hotel de Jonge, less than a hundred metres from the spot where the town was born in 1258 and where for many years now everyone and everything has convened, the spot through which every thread in the fabric of the town passes at least once, where this evening and tonight the sweaty bodies of the drinkers will stand crammed closely together, the spot which on every other day of the year is a sheltered haven of oak wainscoting and low lamplight, where lonely men seek oblivion in the bosom of barmaid Tine (as jolly as she is dismissive), where the Club of Twenty meets, a society that has no other purpose than to reject member number twenty-one, where the billiard players play on Monday evening, the card players on Tuesday evening (and their wives on Wednesday evening), the Rotary meets once a month on Thursday evening, and in a little room behind the café the ice hockey club, several political parties, the newspaper editors, the shopkeepers’ association, the humanists, anthroposophists, happy bikers and God knows who else fantasise for a few hours that they are here, now, at the centre of the world, in a whirl of activity and necessity and importance.

The beer pumps in the Hotel de Jonge no longer get turned off. There’s no point flicking the tap up when the stream of empty glasses just keeps coming. Luckily the barrels are stacked high in the cellars, so the gold liquid gushes, splashes and babbles all around. Litres of beer pass through them. Lakes. Oceans. And a slow befuddlement takes possession of the town, a sluggishly swelling intoxication that makes everything look different and banishes the unsummery chill: men in short sleeves, biker girls in tight T-shirts, bare bellies, hot heads. The tropics on the 53rd latitude.

The heart of the heart. The midst of the battle. Midway through our lives, when we find ourselves in a dark wood. In the shit. That’s where we are now.

Later on, a chill gloom will settle over the town. Between the houses, in the narrow streets of the town centre, the light becomes a mourning veil. The houses are dead, the streets are dead, the windows above the shops are chilly holes and all the shops deep nests of shadow. In the non-light it will look as if the pattern of streets is carved into the town with an enormous knife, as if someone has, with the tip of that knife, scratched lines in the surface of the town. Where the glow of floodlights is reflected on the mechanical bull outside the museum, the go-kart track behind the theatre, the big music tent on Koopmansplein, the town becomes a peepshow. The light hangs like a yellow sphere beneath the trees or is caught between the three canvas sides of the tent, it steams between the house-fronts and makes everything small and unreal.

The town becomes a dream, the kind in which behind every dark corner there lies a deathly street with leaning or vanishing houses, where the glass of the windowpanes is sometimes a blue-black reflection, then a wrinkling hole in stone; the chimneys mumble, the street lights leer. The gutters bubble and beneath the pavement the sand drifts. There’s something behind the windows, but only if you don’t look. The blue treetops of the Governor’s Garden rustle in a wind that doesn’t blow. Beneath the shine of the artificial light, wandering black leather figures continue to move. It’s a silent marche funèbre in this strange light: inexpressive, uniform, so massively drifting, so aimlessly purposeful. And there is, in spite of the spiralling mass of heads and arms and legs, emptiness. As if all those people don’t matter, aren’t really there, don’t really exist.

Of course they are there. They’re there every year on this day. They drink and get drunk. They hit and are hit, rape and are raped, seek and are sought, sleep and are woken, live and die.

They are there.

Drinking and pissing they stumble on. They sway arm in arm from pavement to pavement, they hit each other in the face till they bleed, they kiss till the spit runs down their jaws and they drink the cellars of the Hotel de Jonge dry. Yes, there in the big taproom of the most important drinking place in town everything is thirst and beer. The trestle tables that were set out earlier this week are wet, the floor is sticky with liquid and the faces are red and clammy. The people drinking here aren’t hotel guests. Although all the rooms are let, you won’t see a single guest here tonight. Apart from one. Right up at the top, in the smallest room, at the end of a long corridor, Marcus Kolpa sits in the deafening roar of music and shouting.

Marcus (his family on his father’s side came from Belgium a century ago and still wallows with unconcealed pleasure in the memory of the good old days when Dutch was a language that sounded more like the barking of dogs than a means of communication among civilised people), Marcus Kolpa is a star of the kind you seldom see. He is a rare kind of star. Thirty-one now and, if you asked him, he still hasn’t achieved a thing in life, apart from a private library capable of provoking the jealousy and surprise of some middle-sized provincial towns and the general acknowledgement that he is ‘an intellectual’. Clothes that look as if they were chosen by an elder of the Reformed Church, a love life that gives new meaning to the word ‘vacuum’ and a mind, a mind like a double razor blade. Great God! Let Marcus Kolpa loose on any edition of any encyclopaedia and he will find three mistakes a page. Drop him in a conference of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, scientists, historians, literati, housewives if need be, and within a few minutes he will be surrounded by a humbly nodding audience admitting that, yes, Marcus Kolpa has a great future.

A promise, that’s what he is. Has been for thirty-one years now.

Shoe size 43. Jacket 48. Left eye minus four, right minus four and a half.

And a dick that would send a Great Dane creeping off with its tail between its legs.

But a dick that he doesn’t do anything with.

Although …

As we meet him now, he is kneeling in front of the television in his little hotel room.

The carpet is caramel brown with round patches that once were flowers.

The television is a Philips produced for the hotel trade.