In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ spend money rather than just save it. You don’t just want freedom, you want luxury as well. And, with the Dutch being so Calvinistic, luxury shouldn’t be conspicuous. What could be both more invisible and more luxurious than expensive underwear?

      Although he opens a business in something that no one thinks they need, they all come: the ladies of the notaries, lawyers and barristers, the daughters of aldermen, jewellers, scrap-metal merchants and army officers. They practically break the door down. One shop assistant is taken on, and then another, an office is added for administration, signs with his name on them appear beside hockey pitches and tennis courts, and one day when he’s at home with balance sheet and ledger on the tablecloth, the deep summereveningblue behind the windowpanes, above the forest, his thoughts drift away to what it was like and what there was and he sees himself again on his bicycle, cycling along the long canal from Smilde to Assen, the stolen bicycle that he has forgotten he had stolen, and he slams the ledger shut, leaves the balance sheet, goes downstairs, to the shed that he never goes to, and looks in the yellow light of a small bulb at the bicycle grey with dust and cobwebs, the frail, flat tyres and the discoloured handlebars.

      That Sunday he cycles along the water. It’s a still summer day, the firmament a picture postcard, bulrushes along the edge of the canal and ripe corn and fat cows in the fields. He whirrs along on a new bicycle, a sparkling gentleman’s bike with a leather saddle and deep black tyres, chrome that flashes in the sunlight and paint that gleams like a Japanese chest. His tyres thrum along the path, his spokes sing in the wind, his great bush of recalcitrant dark hair whips and his jacket tails flap. A solitary fisherman sits at the water’s edge, chewing on a fat cigar, but the countryside is empty because it’s Sunday, the day when the good people of Smilde stay at home and reflect on vices they don’t have but will probably acquire from all that fretting. They sit in their good rooms, in black suits with stiff white collars and in long dresses and warm stockings, and listen to the minutes rustling past until it’s time to go to church and hear the sermon from a vicar who asks the question, every week and twice on Sundays, of what our sins are and whether we have really been touched by the Lord. He passes them as he cycles into the village, walking two by two on the left-hand side of the street, church-book under their arms, peppermints in their pockets, a silent column of the chosen, an unrelenting procession of the righteous whose appearance moves him so powerfully that his eyes grow moist and the harsh sun that comes unhindered across the vast empty fields makes his tears flash so that for a moment he can’t see and all of a sudden, hoopla, he rides into the leaden water of the canal and escapes drowning only thanks to a big farmer’s hand grabbing him by the collar and pulling him to the shore.

      And who should be there, as he lies on his back in the grass of the bank, his wet clothes sticking to his body and his hair a mess of black streaks, who should be towering over him, like a monolith of silence, in his black suit, a deep frown on his black eyebrows, a barely concealed twinkle of irony in his right eye?

      ‘Farmer Ferwerda,’ he says as he lifts himself dripping from the juicy grass and holds out a wet hand. ‘I have come to bring you a bicycle.’

      In the good room at the Veenhoeve, the Bog Farm, it’s as quiet as the day before Creation, for an hour and a half, while the family goes to church and Jacob Noah waits in borrowed clothes until the service is over. Outside, leaning almost as if ashamed against the scullery wall, the new black bicycle stands drying in the sun. Further along, dusty red salvias stand out like little flames against the dry grey of the flower bed, the lawn runs from the bleaching green to the back garden, immaculately untrodden, as if the Lord God of the Ferwerdas had only that morning hit upon the idea of making something beautiful. There are ripe yellow marigolds and blossoming geraniums, a honeysuckle climbs powerfully yet shyly against the fence. Far off in the distance, before the wooden side of the garden shed, seven enormous sunflowers sing out their joy at Creation, and still further along, where the kitchen garden lies, beanpoles, vertical rows of leeks, knotty beds of lettuce and exuberant potato plants gleam in the bright sunlight. In the Ferwerdas’ front room a cool shimmer makes the polished dresser shine gently and turns the open Dutch Authorised Bible on the table into a perfect likeness of the parting of the Red Sea. Above the sofa hangs a picture showing a clearing in a forest, with tall trunks of oak trees in heavy shade and three men standing around a horse and cart looking strangely helpless. From somewhere in the house comes the sound of buckets clattering against each other, a high-pitched girl’s voice laughs brightly, water gushes into a stone sink. A door opens and slams shut again and in the courtyard the maid appears, wearing a blue apron.

      My God, thinks Jacob Noah. My God. The order of these things.

      And his thoughts go involuntarily to the empty rooms in his house, the silent rows of brassieres and bustiers and corsets and slips and step-ins in the shop. He remembers the endless days he spent in the hole, the smell of earth, his rooting in the ground, like an animal, the animal that he became more and more each day, and the image of the plundered shop slides over that memory, how he cycled through the town, to the town hall, pleaded and almost implored, and how he was thrown out onto the street; he sees the wet patch in the crotch of AryanBookshopHilbrandts, the barrel of the pistol pressing motionlessly against his temple. His grandfather falling face-first into the chicken soup. His mother having to clear away ‘her mess’. Heijman’s face, which refuses to stay a face in his memory, staying instead a vague blur that he calls his brother. He remembers all that in the good room of the Veenhoeve and he thinks: the order, the fullness.

      And there, among the Ferwerdas’ dark furniture, in the gloomy room, looking out at the abundant sunlight touching the gardens, the maid, the roofs and the walls, Jacob Noah feels like a man at a parting of the ways: a straight, level road to the left, a winding mountain path to the right. Without hesitating for so much as a moment, he makes a decision: order, the straight path, Ferwerda’s room is one way; the full garden, where all is ripe and heavy with fruits, where smells rise from the deep green of plants and herbs and shrubs and colours glimmer in the light, there, outside, where the maid is on her way to the cowshed, her aproned hips swaying under the blue linen, that’s the other one, and that’s the one he will choose.

      Where now is his emotion over the respectable gravity of the God-fearing people of Smilde? Where the grateful humility with which he bought, last Friday, a black bicycle from the Mustang factory? He came to redeem a debt and prove his honour to the farmer who hid him on his land, and now here he is – the sun creeps in and makes the well-scrubbed table smell heavily of wax – here he stands and he knows that he is rejecting the empty fullness of this room and the orderly life of the Ferwerdas and that he will accept the full emptiness of the sunlit world beyond the window. No more humility, no self-renouncing rejection of worldly turmoil. He is alive.

      At the end of the morning, after coffee with aniseed cake, Jacob Noah asks Ferwerda’s daughter to help him put the new bicycle in the barn and show him where he can find some oil and grease. Even before they have reached the green sliding doors he has kissed her and asked her to marry him.

      Later, as they walk back arm in arm to the good room where the Ferwerdas sit surrounded by the smell of beeswax, waiting for the second sermon of the day, he remembers what he was thinking about empty fullness and full emptiness. Where does Jetty Ferwerda belong in that, he wonders, as they crunch down the gravel path that runs along the farmhouse: the order of the Sunday room or the abundant blossoming of the garden? There’s no time to answer that question, because they’re already inside, and Jetty leads him to the Sunday room and he asks her father with a lot of ums and coughing a very different sort of question and after a brief nod gets an answer, after which the maids are called in, who treat Jetty to smacking kisses, and the farmhands suck noisily on the fat cigars that the farmer distributes.

      That afternoon, when Jacob Noah is sitting on the bus to Assen, he looks at the canal that passes slowly by, the cumulus clouds that drift like blobs of whipped cream in the light-blue air.

      The bus stops a few times on the way. A farmer’s wife gets on with two little children, a bent-backed man in a raincoat buttoned СКАЧАТЬ