In A Dark Wood - Shaun Whiteside

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were part of the other man’s body, as though he … the other man is … he feels that … he him … and suddenly he feels in his chest a painful sort of human sympathy, a searing sense of compassion, a sudden switch of identity in which he is the other one and the other one is him and in an infinitesimally tiny moment knows with unshakeable certainty that the other man will never feel that, has never felt that, and while he tries to grasp that absurd sentiment (why he … such a … ) his gaze slides down to the Aryan bookseller’s crotch.

      A dark patch is spreading slowly outwards from the level of AryanBookshopHilbrandts’ sexual organs.

      Jacob Noah lowers his wartime souvenir, shakes his head and averts his gaze.

      To say that the shop doorbell echoes for several minutes in the empty space where the walls silently rise with Dutch-nationalist books and a poster showing the portrait of a Teutonic hero looks down on him would be an understatement. It takes years, many years, decades. He will still hear it when he is married to the daughter of the farmer in whose peat bog, on whose outstretched land he lived. He still hears it when he leaves the farmer’s daughter, the sixties are coming to an end and the modern world is still busy forcing its way through to the little town, when he himself is going through the divorce that isn’t a divorce (because he leaves her, but doesn’t officially get divorced from her) and which excludes him from the town’s inner circle. The bell echoes as he doubles the shop in size, and later does the same thing again, and finally transforms it into the best fine lingerie shop in the whole damned province, where till he turned up they’d been walking around in knitted underpants and grey bloomers. The bell tinkles at night, when he wakes from black and lonely sleep with his brother’s name on his lips, when his children are born, grow up and leave home. Even when he is sitting in his car on Friday, 27 June, and the setting sun shines over the treetops onto the glass of the windscreen, even then the bell still rings. Throughout the whole of the rest of his life, its high points and its lows, when he’s sitting alone in the shop one evening looking at the walls of bras and corsets and slips and step-ins, and he feels a plan welling up in him that will change the entire centre of this accursed hole (whereby he will harvest the glory that he expects and the subsequent abuse that he just as fully expects), when he is walking with a sexton through the attic of what was once the synagogue and is now the Reformed church, and finds in a rubbish bag the lost archive of the Jewish community and sees all those names and all those faces before him again – the musty smell of old paper containing the dust of half a century, the dust that touched them – and when he is rejected as a member of the business club because he doesn’t live with his wife just as his father was rejected by the business club because he wasn’t a Christian, for the whole of the rest of his life after that one day in the empty shop the bell will go on tinkling.

      It’s the bell that tells him: everything is nothing.

      Silence falls like dust, the dust itself falls, the rising and falling of his chest settles, his breathing grows slower, his heart resumes its old rhythm. He is standing in the shop, a black pistol in his hand and the vague pain of too many thoughts behind his brow, and as he stands there and brings his free hand to his face and presses his thumb into his left eye socket, against his nose, and his middle finger into his right eye socket and his index finger to his forehead and thinks and thinks and thinks, he sees his future crumbling, literally and figuratively, as if in a vision. He sees himself in a gown and jabot, his diploma in his hand, surrounded by fellow students, professors and the portraits of illustrious predecessors, and as he looks round and sees himself grinning like an idiot in his bath, a crack runs across the picture, and then another, another, a spider’s web of cracks until it looks like a painting covered with craquelé and the first bits of paint flake off and whirl down and he knows with the effortlessness of absolute certainty that his future is over before it has begun, and that evening, lying in bed above the shop, where the private apartment no longer looks like anything he has known, he stares at the ceiling, light fanning in through the curtainless windows. It’s a real bundle of rays, one after the other, as though the day has begun outside while he, in here, is getting ready for the night. He gets out of bed and, like a swimmer walking through shallow water, his feet in the dark, feels his way towards the window. There behind the pane, where the roofs of the houses and the ragged treetops of the Forest of Assen have torn the night sky from the earth, he is met by the sharp light … God yes, the sharp light of … no, not of insight, or the epiphany that comes in the blackest hour of night when the questions that otherwise seem so easily answered – analysis, synthesis, my good Mr Noah! – become bottomless pits of despair in which night-time doubt battles against the day’s cool reason with an archangel’s obstinacy; not that light, but the light that comes from a spotlight mounted on the boot of a Canadian half-track, a contraption – half truck, half tank – that looks like a car at an evolutionary crossroads. On the boot, a Canadian soldier is manipulating a kind of dustbin from which a bright white column radiates. Across the house-fronts runs a sharp-edged circle, a tree of light rises into the night air, touches the clouds and sweeps down on the other side and touches Jacob Noah behind his window. He steps back, trips over a chair and falls on the floor, and as he crashes onto the bare wooden planks of the bedroom in a billow of material, and the back of his head touches the hard wood and a cloud of stars explodes between his eyes, he sees the universe as a little cloud of milk in a cup of coffee. He opens his hand and fog whirls in the middle of his hand, he sees the slow explosion of stars, the dashing tails of comets and the steady ellipses of the planets.

      And while the universe, tennis-ball-sized, hovers before his eyes, just as once the Holy Grail must have hovered before the eyes of the exhausted Parsifal, and he lies on the floor, arms outstretched, legs parted, mouth open, staring at the world like a patriarch staring at God’s angels, breath held for fear of disturbing the eddying galaxies in the hollow of his hand, he slowly pulls himself upright, his arm stretched out strangely in front of him, his eyes focused on the marbled jewel in his palm.

      And then time begins to flow, rushed breathing takes hold of him, a little mist of moisture appears on his upper lip, becoming a silver moustache in the ghostly glimmer with which the bundle lights the room. Stumbling, stepping, twisting and wriggling, he drags the clothes around his limbs (because this isn’t what you would call getting dressed, shirt out of the trousers, no socks, laces loose), stumbles down the stairs, opens the back door and sets off on a creeping expedition through gardens and woods and pathways behind houses until he reaches the canal, where under the cover of the trees next to the concert hall he stands and waits until the path on the other side of the water is completely deserted, crosses, glides like a shadow along the house-fronts on Gymnasiumstraat and finally disappears on the edge of the Forest of Assen.

      The moon is a piece of orange peel, visible every now and again between the floes of dark, drifting cloud-light.

      …

      In the deep darkness of the Forest of Assen, the forest that resembles the firmament itself with its curving, coiling, circling, fading paths, a cloudy infinity of treetops with unexpected open patches, folds and wrinkles, mirror-flat pools, ditches and brooks and canals, which still contains remains of the old woodland that once ringed the town, in that big, old forest Jacob Noah lies on last year’s crunching leaves, hooded by a dry blackberry bush, among the high oaks, under the velvety night air, and he stares at the universe in his hand. There is no thought in him, he isn’t thinking. Perhaps it looks as if he is breathing, as if blood is flowing through his veins, as though his peristalsis is pinching and kneading and his glands are doing whatever it is that glands do. But it’s all appearance. In reality he is still and motionless, caught in the image of what he is holding in his hand, just as what he holds in his hand is caught by him. His lips move, but not a word leaves his mouth. He peers into the swirling marble filling the hollow of his hand and sees …

      He sees everything.

      He recognises the days that have been and the days that will come. He sees his parents and his brother in their long black coats crammed tight against one another in a packed train carriage that crashes and bangs, his brother’s right hand (when he sees this for a moment he is his brother) on his father’s shoulder. He sees the three daughters he will bring forth and as he sees them grow, from babies to fine young women, their mouths open and they speak their names (the two eldest, that is, the third looks

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