In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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СКАЧАТЬ fisherman at the water’s edge, a man who knows that his patience will win out over the suspicion of the fish. He even knows when he will win. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says that evening, when the cigar smoke has become a thick blue fog in the little hall in the Hotel de Jonge. ‘Gentlemen, you say “no” and “provided that” and “never”, but in ten years we will be here again and it will have happened.’ And he looks around the room to let his words reach everyone and says: ‘You are not the object of history, but its subject.’ And he rolls up his paper, stubs out his cigar, throws his coat over his shoulders and walks alone but very contentedly through the drizzly autumn darkness back to the house where his three daughters have stayed up far too late to hear their father’s report. And when he gives it, and Aphra – with a grim expression under her black eyebrows, arms folded and eyes fixed on the table – is angry and sulks, he explains that time is like porcelain. Chaja stares at him with enormous eyes. He walks to the dresser, takes a cup and saucer … and another … and another … He gives one to each of his daughters. He posts them at one side of the room, goes himself to the other side and says: ‘Whoever brings me theirs first. One. Two. Three!’ and there they go, Aphra panting before she’s out of breath, Bracha hesitating and bending her little body over the cup and saucer and running, running, running, and right at the back Chaja, lifting up the crockery almost proudly, her staring eyes fixed on the outstretched hand of her father, ready to receive what is held out to him.

      There goes Chaja, untouched by the mêlée of swaying legs, flying pottery and shrill cries. Her sisters crash to the floor with laughter, but she seems to be making a voyage across the room, like a Parsifal bearing his Holy Grail. Chaja sets off through forests and over hills, she treads a straight path in the middle of lots of crooked ones, blind to what is happening around her, oblivious to noise and wild amusement. And then, after what seems like an age, she stops in front of her father, hands him the cup and saucer with a gravity that makes the cheerful hubbub fall suddenly silent, and says: ‘Seventeen.’

      Her sisters are lying amidst shattered crockery. Her mother is sitting bolt upright in her chair, on the other side of the room, with a piece of embroidery in her lap. The dark figure of Jacob Noah stands in front of Chaja and bends over her, one hand held behind his ear, and asks: ‘Seventeen?’

      He receives the cup and saucer from her, gives a tormented smile, straightens up and looks down at the little girl with her calm face.

      She nods: ‘Seventeen.’

      And Jacob Noah, standing there with his cup and saucer, like a waiter who has forgotten which table his order is for, stares straight ahead and feels his shoulders slump under the weight of time.

      So much to do. So little time.

      He feels like a man trying to swim out of the suction of a maelstrom.

      Later that evening, when the darkness has turned liquid, with a glass of whisky, very unusual for him, he thinks about himself, how he has spread like an ink stain over the town. The shops that he has bought. The life-sized game of Monopoly that he is playing. Although his property is spread out over the whole centre, part of it is clotted compactly together. It started with an old tailor’s shop in a low-roofed little worker’s cottage beside his own shop, then a big, three-storey house, heavily reduced in value by a widow who had refused to admit strangers into her house after her husband’s death. Then a shop selling sewing machines, and not long after that the adjacent travel agency. And now he owns a stone rectangle in the centre of the town, a block of houses and shops, a confusion of alleyways and courtyards and warehouses, with his lingerie shop as its beating heart.

      He raises his glass and peers into the amber fluid.

      ‘Seventeen,’ he says and smiles gently, but as he does so and gives a worldly-wise look at his whisky, the laugh becomes a fishbone in his throat.

      How many premises are there in his block in the town centre?

      He stands up and wades through the darkness to the window. The square lies before and below him. Behind, beside and beneath him his property.

      While the germ of a plan sprouts in one part of his head and begins to bud and blossom … in another part a voice asks why he didn’t see this when he thought he saw everything. He brings his glass to his mouth and drains it without thinking, in one draught, turns round and walks to the door, down the stairs to the floor below, as the whisky sinks into his body and his throat begins to burn and his head fills with the vapours of the alcohol.

      Outside he walks jacketless through the damp evening air. It’s as dark as the inside of a church collection bag. He walks to the middle of the square, where he takes up position, feet slightly apart: a man at ease with himself. A bedroom light springs on behind a window on the top floor of his house, and while Jacob Noah looks from the square at his stone castle, a small figure appears in the sharp white rectangle of light. Jacob Noah sees only a dark silhouette busy hoisting itself up, but he doesn’t need his imagination to know who is looking at him from high up there. Behind the window, standing on the chair that is normally beside her bed, Chaja is looking down at him. He sees the dark mass of his property, the bright rectangle in the middle and the figure of his youngest daughter in it and nods thoughtfully. The soft nocturnal rain soaks his suit and drips along his temples and down the collar of his shirt. He raises his right hand, waves to the little figure up above and says silently: ‘Seventeen.’

      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, СКАЧАТЬ