In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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СКАЧАТЬ and racks. Outside it’s dark, inside the silence rustles and Jacob Noah walks through the audible stillness and inspects his kingdom. He is a man who believes in always setting a good example and so he walks along the racks, straightens a slip, a corset, a poster. He stacks a stack of boxes and picks up a tangle of parcel string beside the wrapping table. He lets his eye slide over the coffee-maker in the corner, sweeps away a few grains of sugar and quickly wipes the sink of the little kitchen. And then, by the little sink, staring into the mirror behind the basin, the mirror in which the shop girls adjust their hair and apply the lines of mascara around their eyes, his heart sinks in his breast. Upstairs, at home, his wife sits on the sofa watching television. Aphra and Bracha are squabbling about clothes (who can wear what and for how long) and Chaja sits silently over her sisters’ science books mumbling rows of numbers as if they were prayers. There, upstairs, is his life and here, downstairs, is he. The length of parcel string dangles slackly in his hand. He tries to call up the image of Jetty Ferwerda, her peasant creaminess, the blue and white striped apron she was wearing when he came to visit her on the farm and she hadn’t finished working. Her white arms, full and bare … Her arching bosom … Her magnificent buttocks when she bent over to pick up a calf … Like the land itself.

      And he had tried to work her, like the land. He had taught her pleasure and surrender. But he was two men. He was a lover and a man standing behind the lover, looking over his shoulder, watching him, one eyebrow raised, a sneer around his lips.

      Here he is, facing his reflection – a man whose hair is beginning to turn grey and on whose face lines have appeared, forming the map of the journey he has travelled. Between his legs he feels the dead weight of his genitals.

      He wants to respect her, but he can’t respect her because he wants to fuck, in her, the whole country. He wants to take her just as an Umbrian peasant, on the first day of spring, throws his wife face-first into a freshly ploughed furrow and mounts her, her big white arse in his hands, her knees in the loose black earth, a fertility ritual.

      But Jetty is no longer the farmer’s daughter and, he reflects, probably never was.

      He turns away from the mirror, switches off the lamp in the little kitchen, walks into the shop and stares through the big display window into the evening town. Where once houses stood, a square has now come into being, around which construction work is going on intensively on the department stores he planned a long time ago. A light flashes on a builder’s crane. Beyond it, the darkness of evening hangs blackly down.

      When he turns off the light in the shop and stands for a moment in the dark room, suddenly a thought arises in him that makes him clench his fist, from which the piece of string still dangles.

      He has everything, but what does he have?

      Brother, mother, father dead. Wife he can’t love as he wants to love a wife. Three daughters who are painfully dear to him.

      He has loss and he has something that must yet be lost.

      A life, he thinks, like accountancy.

      Like a mole from his hole he came out of the bog and he cycledcycledcycled to the town, to the shop.

      Why didn’t he go and study, when there was no one left who expected anything from him?

      But where on earth was he, an orphan, supposed to get the money to study? He had to work to stay alive and because he was working he couldn’t study, even though he probably earned enough to pay for his studies. History had trapped him.

      And what if he had sold the shop? That was a possibility he had never investigated.

      Here, in the dark shop, where it smells of linen and cotton and rubber, he asks the question that he has never asked before.

      Why? Why did he never find out if he could sell the shop?

      He raises his arm, stares at the length of parcel string and slaps it hard into the palm of his left hand. He feels the burn of the pain before he hears the lash of the string. He shuts his eyes tight.

      To finish the work of the dead?

      To imagine their pride?

      To leave the mark of his family behind?

      But he doesn’t know if he has comforted the dead, if that were possible at all.

      And he doesn’t know if his parents would rather have seen him as a professor.

      And the town will not bear the sign of the Noahs anyway, because no one will give him credit for what he has done. The square will never bear his family name. None of the streets, soon to be stripped of narrow workers’ cottages and lying new and clean and spacious around the square, will bear his name. Even in the industrial zone, where roads are named after big businessmen, there will not be so much as a car park that he can look at with perfect pride.

      In his life’s accounts the result will be in the red.

      …

      But he isn’t there yet. First come the years when he sells the shop, adds the proceeds to the capital that he has amassed and starts to gnaw at the town like a beast of prey returning to the remains of a corpse. He buys up so many properties so fast that the local estate agents no longer bother to advertise their wares. He buys shops, houses, empty shells of warehouses, abandoned factories, empty schools and fallow land, apparently at random, seemingly without purpose. He spreads his influence across the centre with the hunger and haste of a contagious disease. No one knows what ‘mad Noah’ wants with all those possessions, the baffling collection of condemned workers’ cottages, shabby shops, warehouses, sheds and barns. And it seems as if he himself has no idea, because he does nothing with most of the properties. Some he hires out as stores; friends of his eldest daughters camp out in others, making the heavy music that they can’t make anywhere else. Once the police call in on him to ask if those long-haired work-shy scum really have his permission to … Yes, he nods, yes, with his complete agreement and approval. Does he know all the things they’re getting up to, asks the main policeman in charge of the pair. He knows precisely what, because he visits them regularly. And he tries out the ‘young people, different times, different customs’ story, but long before he has finished the policemen’s eyes glaze over.

      And then, from one day to the next, big capital discovers Assen. A plan emerges which resembles the one that he once presented like two peas in a pod, in which the square in front of his old shop becomes the aorta of all the town’s business activity. One chain after another comes to him for land, premises and storage space, and in less than three years Jacob Noah transfers all his non-profitable and fallow terrain to the gentlemen from V&D, HEMA, Albert Heijn and various high-street chains. The negotiations run strangely smoothly, because the big capitalists are used to prices rather larger than those in Assen and Jacob Noah seems to own so much land and real estate in strategic places that resistance is useless. He has become a man who cannot be avoided.

      And then come the wrecking balls, the bulldozers, the cranes and the diggers. There is rubble and dust and stagnant water in deep construction pits. Contractors follow, and lay foundations, erect new cranes to hoist enormous concrete slabs into place and an endless procession of electricians, plumbers, roofers, bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers passes back and forth, day in, day out, year after year, until finally, after what seems like an eternity, the whole of the town centre has disappeared and made way for a shopping centre to put every other town in the north in the shade.

      And then life resumes its weary, predictable course. Jacob Noah is in profit, more so than he could ever have dreamed. He is no longer a shopkeeper, but a real estate magnate. Which means that СКАЧАТЬ