In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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СКАЧАТЬ in him begins a half-hearted run – he knows the water is between them. No bridge to the left, nor to the right. He crosses the road, stands on the bank and spreads his arms out wide as if to apologise for his unattainability.

      After almost a year Jacob Noah is the owner of the heart of the town and the biggest department store, the biggest department store of the province itself, perhaps even the biggest outside the big cities. Above the proud, wide entrance to the square, in the place where his little daughter once stared down from behind her lit window, he hangs a neon sign showing a stylised version of Noah’s Ark, a flowing line of light as the ship and in front of it a broad stairway along which thronging hordes pour in. It is impossible to tell from the neon whether it is people or animals that are entering the ark.

      In the big stone block that is now a department store, there is also the little shop with which it all began, his grandfather’s ‘emporium’, nearly wrecked by his father and successfully transformed by his mother into the best shoe shop in the town. He has transferred the old interior which lay stored for years in a warehouse and had it rebuilt in what must be more or less precisely the middle. The counter the colour of fresh horse dung. The once immense, now surprisingly modest wall with shelves for boxes and drawers. The shop window with reproductions of old advertising posters and the velvet display tables. Around the old counter, floors stretch across five storeys with wonders that draw surprised visitors from four provinces. They smell cheeses they’ve never seen before, see an ocean of furniture, pass amongst endless racks of clothes and touch more kitchen implements than they could ever have imagined. The young people come to the record section, which has its own top thirty and organises signing sessions with locally, regionally and nationally famous musicians. The customers arrive breathlessly at the restaurant, which is covered entirely in orange and white formica, and recover from their amazement. Profits soar, not only those of the Noah Department Store, but also those of the surrounding shops. A great huntsman drops enough for the lesser ones to live off.

      And everyone wonders how that man Noah did it, how he turned such a dismal little underwear shop into this palace of consumer gratification. The town’s chamber of commerce sees an explosion in numbers coming to the town, other shopkeepers profit from it or else can’t keep up with the competition, young people buy their hip clothes and the latest hits from Noah, while at the same time seeing him as the embodiment of capitalism. And in a few years Jacob Noah loses his name as a controversial figure and grows into a person of mythical proportions. Stories about him begin to circulate. He is a screen for an even wealthier man, or even a consortium. He has received a large amount in reparations from Germany. He has sold his soul to the devil. He has dug up a treasure trove on the long-abandoned estate of Vredeveld, where long ago a bastard child of Napoleon’s brother tried to hide away, silent and invisible, with her embittered husband.

      And in the evening, in his office, which is now on the top floor of the department store, Jacob Noah sits as the lonely ruler of his empire. His family are back, but they have changed. Or perhaps he is no longer the same person. There is somehow a distance and awkwardness that wasn’t there before, a space dividing them that is just as futile and at the same time as insuperable as the canal that once lay between them.

      And just as he once forgot the faces of his father and mother and mother and brother and was left with a shrinking feeling of lack that he calls ‘family’, so now his wife and his three daughters are vague and remote to him. He is standing beside the Smilder Canal and they are on the other side. He doesn’t know how to get across the water.

      In his little office, amongst his files, his cash books and ledgers, he sometimes looks out of the circle of light that the desk lamp casts on his work, and stares out through the high window, where there is nothing but dark night air and sometimes the moon. From time to time he gets to his feet to stand at the window, hands in his trouser pockets, belly thrown slightly forward, eyebrows like caterpillars wiggling above his eyes, and puts aside the files and contracts. Then he peers into the darkness until he knows again: Jacob Noah, son of Abraham Noah, son of Rosa Deutscher, brother of Heijman Noah.

      Then he is sometimes overwhelmed by the truth of the here and now, where he is and when. For a breath’s duration he was in the company of what was dearer and more necessary to him than anything else, but it couldn’t be.

      He has to do it alone.

      That is his task. That is the task that he doesn’t want to but must fulfil, the task to which he strugglingly submits.

      Because there is no other way.

      The stone mountain that he has built in the heart of the town, the ark of things to which everyone comes to get what is to their taste, a ludicrous striving for something that no longer exists, or is at least no longer ‘there’. There is a gleaming marble of clarity in his head then, deeply buried in the fogs of figures and letters, and a black veil of loneliness settles like an autumn mist that creeps over fields and hides the path. But the understanding is there nonetheless, like a hard nucleus, like something that won’t go away: he must lose everything in order to have something.

       Chapter 7

      Time passes. Jacob Noah gets his first grey hairs and puts on a few more pounds. He sees his daughters blossoming and coming home with great tall beanpoles in army-surplus clothes and carrying bags bearing the names of singers he’s never heard of. He looks with controlled excitement at the littlest one, who always looks back with the same silent gaze. He looks at his wife, who has given up embroidery and now plays tennis day in and day out and just gets slimmer and browner. He looks at the town, which is still the same.

      Everything slides and drifts during those years. Schools are turned upside down, universities are occupied by their students, the annual motorbike races are preceded by enormous pitched battles between bewildered policemen and exuberant hordes of youths. Jacob Noah, like all his competitors, has boarded up all the windows and doors of the shop. And just as he nails his shop shut against the raging disturbances and tumult of the world, he also erects, although much more slowly and much less conspicuously, a rampart around his heart. Not to protect himself against the outside world (he has long been hardened against that), but to shield the outside world from the violence that rages within him. Cabinets fall, political parties emerge and disappear, builders and dockers strike, angry students take to the streets and soldiers walk around with long hair. Women claim the right to abortion, young people claim freedom and everyone claims happiness. Value Added Tax is introduced, oil prices rise. In various places around the world aeroplanes are hijacked and blown up. And Jacob Noah extends his empire with a shop, a warehouse and a few dilapidated properties. Two, three, four new members of staff are added, he buys a Citroën DS and his name appears in advertisements, brochures and house-to-house flyers. He opens a branch in a different town, and another, and another, and at the weekend, when he’s sitting by the tennis court watching his two eldest daughters run over the glowing gravel, with the big scoreboard saying Noah Lingerie in the background, the hand of the littlest one in his hand, he feels not contentment but the restless gnaw of hunger. He feels the raging of the world, the aimlessness of the swarming on the anthill, the whole goddamned panta rhei, and at such moments he sometimes lowers his head until his chin rests on his chest, and in his chest he sees the hole in the bog, the damp walls, the roof of roots and earth, the stamped floor and the stale bread that lies waiting in a tin, and deep within he feels a yearning for that hole, where nothing was everything and he couldn’t lose it because he had already lost everything, a yearning so great that it’s all he can do not to kneel down on the spot, beside the tennis court, sun and gravel and bare legs and all, rap his knuckles together and scream: ‘Take me back!’

      And then one evening he is standing there in the shop where his empire began. The lights are nearly all out, the staff have gone home to new buildings in the new suburbs, the boxes are on their shelves, the bras hang СКАЧАТЬ