In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ