In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ