In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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      In the evening he sits bent over his old schoolbooks at the dining-room table and over his middle-school Latin lessons he dreams of lecture theatres and learned discussions with professors.

      How it could have been.

      How it should have been.

      Then – one evening by the yellow light of the standard lamp by the bookcase that holds not much more than what he has kept from his schooldays and the first volume of the encyclopaedia he subscribed to not that long ago. He drinks his coffee, and although the open accounts book on the dining table gleams in the lamplight, he starts flicking through part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He has never felt the need to travel, he has never been further than Amsterdam, but in the encyclopaedia he travels over continents and through whole eras and cultures. That evening, as he flicks through his first and only volume, his thoughts catch on the word ‘Atom’, and as he reads about Rutherford and Szilard the image of the atom comes and hovers in his mind: a nucleus with a cloud of electrons floating around it, attracted by the mass of the nucleus and at the same time almost escaping because of their velocity; and suddenly he thinks about the town as he sees it in the morning and the evening, the roofs and their pattern of kinks and bumps and, yes: paths.

      He wonders where the nucleus is.

      Once it was the monastery around which the village grew. The produce of the fields was brought to the monastery and the monastery provided shelter in troubled times and the knowledge of medicine in times of sickness and the comfort of God in times of need. Later, beside the monastery, the town hall was built.

      But, Jacob Noah thinks, a waxwork in the circle of lamplight around his chair: God is no longer at the centre of life, and in a population that has evolved from a peasant community into a society of workers who don’t have to provide for their own most basic needs, but who buy them with the money that they earn with their work …

      What is the nucleus?

      It is deep in the night as a light still burns behind the windows of the house above the shoe shop, and in that light Jacob Noah is bent over the dining table on which he has laid out a big sheet of brown wrapping paper and is drawing something in thick lines that could be a reasonably faithful depiction of the street plan, no: the structure of the town. That is to say: the structure of the town as he has come to see it over the past few hours.

      The nucleus is what lies beyond his window and is at present only a ramshackle collection of apartments, warehouses, little streets and alleyways, but is soon to become a square, an open space edged with a ring of high-street shops and, like electrons swarming around it, small shops held in place by the gravitational force of the nucleus, and neither engulfed nor repelled by it.

      That night, a moonless sky hanging in velvet silence above the town, he stands at the window of his new big empty bedroom, the bed a white catafalque in the darkness. He looks out over the scaly roofs of the town and reflects that it could be another twenty or thirty years before his idea becomes reality, and as that sober realisation hits home his mind is filled by the sad idea that if something were to mark his life then it would probably be the fact that he is the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place. It is a thought he isn’t sure he can live with, but tonight at any rate he resolves to sleep on it.

      Before morning announces its presence with the leaden greyness of a Dutch autumn day, he wakes up. He switches on the lamp and lies on his back staring at the new ceiling, as questionsquestionsquestions like trainstrainstrains rush through his head. Is he going to change the town by himself? He who, after the renovation, heard people asking where that Jew got it all from? He who is alone, no wife, no friend, no one but a few survivors, people with whom, when it comes down to it, he has little in common? Does he have to go into politics? Does he have to become so rich that he’s impossible to avoid? Does he have to become a member of the shopkeepers’ association that wouldn’t let his father become a member? What, he thinks, and that is the first question that he doesn’t imagine as rhetorical, what kind of person do I actually want to be? What am I? He lies in his bed, his arms stretched out beside him, and thinks about his mother.

      A memory overwhelms him, so powerfully that he is surprised by the intensity with which it comes upon him. (Many years later it will happen again, in the shop, as he helps a woman tie up a new corset and bends forward to pull the laces tighter. In the waft of perfume that rises from her warm skin he is so overcome by the memory that he has to stay in that posture for a moment, bent at the hips, head lowered, till the intoxication passes.)

      It is his mother that Jacob Noah remembers in his circle of light, the woman who had formed Jacob and his brother according to the ideal that she herself had never attained, the mother he remembers with the gnawing melancholy of a man who knows he misses what he never thought he would miss.

       Chapter 3

      Rosa Deutscher had been the apple of her father’s eye, the man who had brought her up as a son. She had sat on his lap and learned to cut leather, sew gloves and sole shoes. Sitting beside him at the dinner table, she had followed his finger from right to left across the broken stones of the Hebrew script and like him she rocked gently back and forth to the sing-song of the text, until one day she read out the line before he had had a chance to speak it. By the age of thirteen she knew everything, and more, that a thirteen-year-old boy should know, except that she was a thirteen-year-old girl and couldn’t display her knowledge in the synagogue, but she sat beside her seriously listening father at the dining table, observed by her head-shaking mother, and read her text without mistakes. Her father rewarded her with a German grammar, and her mother shook her head again. ‘Know this, child,’ her father had said. ‘Know this. You can win or lose everything in life, but no one can take away from you what you know.’ And although he was to be proved badly wrong in this, little Rosa saw it as a self-evident truth and paid no heed to her hand-wringing mother, who said that knowledge was all well and good, but that a good dress was more valuable to a woman than a fat German book, and that conceited girls had difficulties finding a husband.

      And so Rosa Deutscher married to avoid the problem of marriage, which was apparently a problem in the case of conceited girls like her. If one thing was clear, it was that you had to get married, sooner or later. The path towards better education, everything other than sewing and embroidering, was an impassable one, because untravelled by any woman anywhere, let alone the daughter of a Jewish shoemaker.

      Abraham Noah had struck her as a suitable candidate, because he was busy climbing the ladder and consequently too preoccupied to bother himself with a woman who read books when there was no discernible need. And besides, she liked men with a purpose. If she couldn’t have a purpose herself, apart from being a good housewife and bringing an heir into the world, then for God’s sake let her have a chap with ambition.

      His suitability had been made clear to her when she came and sat next to him in the tabernacle that her father had built in the courtyard at the back of the house. It had been a surprisingly mild evening, and lots of guests had come, because the Deutschers’ sukkah was one of the few in the town. They had nibbled on snacks and Noah had asked her permission to light a cigar. She had granted it, surprised at his casual insolence. It was clear that he had come along not for any religious considerations, but to honour her father’s tabernacle. Any credit that he might have been able to accrue by so doing had gone up in the smoke of his cigar, and that had amused her. She had gone indoors to fetch an ashtray, and when she came back and poured him a cup of mocha, she had asked him: ‘Tell me, Abraham Noah, what you do when you’re not sitting in tabernacles smoking cigars.’ He had laid the white cone of ash of his cigar in the ashtray, looked at her with a broad grin and said, ‘I work on my plan to shoe the feet of all the women СКАЧАТЬ