In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 at him with her big dark eyes and already, long before she is born, she breaks his heart). He bends over his hand, Jacob Noah, just as a father bends over his child the better to hear it, and his gaze disappears in the cloudy mist. He travels and travels and travels, until he sees first the country, then the whole godforsaken province and finally the town, but a long time ago: four farmhouses and a monastery, half wood and half stone, then a fire and a new monastery, houses, new houses, avenues, a village green … A rampant mould. Until he creeps out, a mole from a hole in the bog, steals a bicycle, cycles

      and cycles

       and cycles,

      the whole long straight road along the canal, he raises a pistol, sees the light, and there is the wood in which he, on last year’s crackling leaves, in the hood of a dry blackberry bush, between the high oaks, under the velvety night sky, bends over his hand and stares into his own face.

      The years blow around him like autumn leaves.

       Chapter 2

      Summer comes, and autumn. Days pass, months fly by. He clears up the shop and buys in goods. He gets bread from the baker and vegetables from the greengrocer. In the evening he stands in the kitchen holding a cauliflower in his hand, staring at it as Hamlet stared at Yorick’s skull, and as the water comes to the boil and the steam clouds the window, he shakes his head and drops the vegetable into the bin. He goes to bed. He gets up again. He butters sandwiches on the cracked granite surface and chews them standing up, looking out of the kitchen window over the roofs of the town towards the houses, the little factories, a school and the stump of an old windmill. A mind that is empty from early morning till late evening. A life that is nothing but movement, day in, day out. And every morning and every evening, in his kitchen, by the window, looking out over the town, he wonders what it is that he sees, this jumble of roof tiles, these angles and curves and diagonal lines, the rhythmic skip of saddle, pointed and flat roofs. And the days pass. And the months pass. Years go by. Five years. As if he is giving himself time to despair. Five years. Five years in which he doesn’t eat a cauliflower, but does fry eggs, puts shoes in boxes and takes them out again, years in which he shaves and doesn’t see himself in the mirror, eats an omelette at the same empty dinner table at which he goes through Red Cross lists in the evening, writes letters and collects information. For five years in which at night, bobbing in an endless sea of emptiness, he wakes up, gets dressed and walks through the dark, silent streets of the empty town, to the station, where he crosses the rails and, shoulders hunched in his jacket, looks out from the platform – the steaming fields, the water tower dripping tap-tap-tap on the rails, the melancholy lowing of a cow in the pasture of the farm on the other side – years and nights in which he watches the rails, gleaming in the moonlight, disappearing into the distant darkness among the trees.

      And then, after those five years, the contractor’s men come. They demolish half the top floor, break down the shop shelves and saw and hammer and lay bricks, and after five weeks, because everything seems to be in fives at this time, he stands in a shoe shop ready for a future that won’t begin for a long time and living in a house in which all traces of the past have been expunged, because he hasn’t just turned the en-suite bedrooms with stained-glass doors into a big sitting room and combined and converted the many little bedrooms on the first floor so that there are now four big bedrooms and an ample bathroom, he’s also got rid of the curtains, the carpet, the tables and the cupboards and the chairs. Everything is new, nothing is as it was.

      It’s 1950. Jacob Noah has shed his past the way a fox gnaws off the foot that got it caught in the trap. The future lies before him like a blank sheet of paper.

      But it changes nothing.

      The past doesn’t pass.

      The path towards a stirring future lies before him, open like the first page of a book whose story has yet to begin and could go on for thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages.

      But still.

      In the morning he stands in the doorway and looks out over the quiet crossroads and in the evening he stares out of the window over the rooftops, and although he barely wakes up at night these days and he has completely stopped walking to the station to wait for travellers who don’t come, he often lies down in bed wondering what he’s done wrong, how things could be different, what the problem is.

      He begins to doubt what he saw in the forest СКАЧАТЬ