In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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       Chapter 4

      So, eyeswideopen, in his bed, staring into the circle of light, Jacob Noah remembers his mother. Rosa, who was mockingly known as ‘Baroness von Münchhausen’ by her husband, because she had truly dragged the shoe shop out of the morass by her own hair. Rosa, who read to Jacob and Heijman in the evening, sitting between them in their bed and so tired that she sometimes fell asleep with the boys, one in each arm. Here, in the night-nightly warmth of pillows and blankets, Jacob Noah remembers the smell of her full hair that slipped from her bun and flowed in a cataract over her shoulders, the vague hint of eau de cologne at her neck, her irregular, superficial breathing. And the scent of her clothes in the warm bed, clothes in which the hours of the day had left their traces: leather, beeswax, coffee, her skin. It’s a confusing dizziness of smelt memories which, although he doesn’t know this yet, will visit him more often here in his bed than he would like. Yes, when he bends over the laces of a woman’s corset to fit it. And when he bumps into a young employee putting her hair up in the toilets. When he helps a mother who comes along with her daughter to buy her first bra (by now the shop is the biggest lingerie shop in the whole province) and she bends down to whisper something in Noah’s ear and from her thick brown hair, from the soft patches on either side of her throat, from her clothes, something escapes that goes to his head so powerfully that he has to apologise, before stumbling stiffly to the staff toilets to splash his face with cold water from the basin. Later, much later, when he is grown up and successful, he will become a man of myths and legends, someone to whom indescribable sexual proclivities and dark machinations are attributed, but by then he will have long been, to the very depths of his being, a man who is very much aware that he seeks only one thing: the fragrant embrace of his mother.

      So, here, in his bed, in the watery morning light, Jacob Noah thinks about his formidable mother and asks himself out loud what he should have done.

      Whenever he asked her how she had made a solid business out of a shoe shop that was doomed to failure, her answer had been that a person should improve not his strong points, but his weak ones. ‘Our weak point,’ she had said, ‘was that we didn’t want to be a shoemaker’s but a smart shop, and our strong point was that we were shoemakers and not shopkeepers.’

      ‘I thought,’ Jacob had replied, ‘that our weak point was that we were Jews.’

      ‘That too,’ she had said, with the resigned and weary smile of someone who knows that a person can only have so many victories in life. ‘That too, but at the time people were already breaking free of their churches. More and more liberals and socialists were coming. But the most important thing was the patience to realise a great plan step by step. Just as you don’t catch a woman by giving her a gold necklace straight away, Jacobovitz, so you don’t entice clients with the most beautiful and most expensive and most special things. You lay a foundation and you build on that.’

      The foundation had been a rock-solid confidence in shoemaking. People who had come three times with old shoes, had seen the new shoes in the shop three times. The fourth time they bought theirs at Noah’s.

      What, thinks Jacob Noah, as he leaves his bed and sets off for the bathroom, what then is my weak point and what my strength? And as he washes and shaves and dries himself and envelops himself in a dusty cloud of talcum powder, the merry-go-round of words and thoughts begins to whirl in his head.

      In his mind the contours loom up of something so strange that he has to go and sit on the little stool in the corner of the bathroom once the picture comes clearly into focus.