Kitabı oku: «In A Dark Wood», sayfa 2
Chapter 2
Summer comes, and autumn. Days pass, months fly by. He clears up the shop and buys in goods. He gets bread from the baker and vegetables from the greengrocer. In the evening he stands in the kitchen holding a cauliflower in his hand, staring at it as Hamlet stared at Yorick’s skull, and as the water comes to the boil and the steam clouds the window, he shakes his head and drops the vegetable into the bin. He goes to bed. He gets up again. He butters sandwiches on the cracked granite surface and chews them standing up, looking out of the kitchen window over the roofs of the town towards the houses, the little factories, a school and the stump of an old windmill. A mind that is empty from early morning till late evening. A life that is nothing but movement, day in, day out. And every morning and every evening, in his kitchen, by the window, looking out over the town, he wonders what it is that he sees, this jumble of roof tiles, these angles and curves and diagonal lines, the rhythmic skip of saddle, pointed and flat roofs. And the days pass. And the months pass. Years go by. Five years. As if he is giving himself time to despair. Five years. Five years in which he doesn’t eat a cauliflower, but does fry eggs, puts shoes in boxes and takes them out again, years in which he shaves and doesn’t see himself in the mirror, eats an omelette at the same empty dinner table at which he goes through Red Cross lists in the evening, writes letters and collects information. For five years in which at night, bobbing in an endless sea of emptiness, he wakes up, gets dressed and walks through the dark, silent streets of the empty town, to the station, where he crosses the rails and, shoulders hunched in his jacket, looks out from the platform – the steaming fields, the water tower dripping tap-tap-tap on the rails, the melancholy lowing of a cow in the pasture of the farm on the other side – years and nights in which he watches the rails, gleaming in the moonlight, disappearing into the distant darkness among the trees.
And then, after those five years, the contractor’s men come. They demolish half the top floor, break down the shop shelves and saw and hammer and lay bricks, and after five weeks, because everything seems to be in fives at this time, he stands in a shoe shop ready for a future that won’t begin for a long time and living in a house in which all traces of the past have been expunged, because he hasn’t just turned the en-suite bedrooms with stained-glass doors into a big sitting room and combined and converted the many little bedrooms on the first floor so that there are now four big bedrooms and an ample bathroom, he’s also got rid of the curtains, the carpet, the tables and the cupboards and the chairs. Everything is new, nothing is as it was.
It’s 1950. Jacob Noah has shed his past the way a fox gnaws off the foot that got it caught in the trap. The future lies before him like a blank sheet of paper.
But it changes nothing.
The past doesn’t pass.
The path towards a stirring future lies before him, open like the first page of a book whose story has yet to begin and could go on for thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages.
But still.
In the morning he stands in the doorway and looks out over the quiet crossroads and in the evening he stares out of the window over the rooftops, and although he barely wakes up at night these days and he has completely stopped walking to the station to wait for travellers who don’t come, he often lies down in bed wondering what he’s done wrong, how things could be different, what the problem is.
He begins to doubt what he saw in the forest when he saw the whole world in the palm of his hand.
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 in Assen.’ She looked at him for a moment. ‘All the women?’ she had asked. Her leg had involuntarily kicked slightly forward, only a little bit, just enough to free her boot from the rich folds of her skirt. And he, cigar in his mouth, had felt his eye drifting down, towards that boot, and he knew that from this moment onwards he would think only of her feet each time he picked up a shoe.
All the women of Assen? That was hardly realistic. Isaac Deutscher had his shop on the old cattle market, and many a time on a Friday evening, when the Sabbath had begun and his cares slipped from his shoulders, he’d pull his few remaining hairs from his head when he saw a Catholic or Protestant coming to his door under cover of darkness with a crackling paper bag to disturb his Sabbath rest. The bag contained the inevitable pair of shoes that had already been turned down by at least two other shoemakers, and was only good enough for ‘the Jew’. They didn’t buy new shoes from him. If that did happen, the purchaser took little delight in them, because at church on Sunday he would hear harsh words from a Catholic or Protestant shopkeeper, criticising his defecting client for his faithlessness. Catholics (insofar as there were any in this part of the county) bought from Catholics, orthodox Protestants from orthodox Protestants and the many liberal Protestants from the liberal Protestants, and although Deutscher was famous for his craftsmanship and quality, only Jews bought from him, and they were generally too poor for good new shoes.
‘All the women of Assen?’ Rosa had asked, there in the tabernacle, holding the coffee pot. ‘All the women of Assen,’ Abraham Noah had nodded with his impudent cigar in his mouth.
A man with a mission, she saw in him, a man who would give her a good house and the silk dressing gowns to which her mother was so devoted, and he would never complain as long as she could create the impression of being a good Jewish wife.
That hadn’t been hard for her. A year after the wedding, which was held less than six months after they met in the tabernacle, she gave birth to their first son, whom they named Jacob, and Heijman followed two years later.
And then, one quiet Friday evening, as they were celebrating Sabbath with her parents in the house above the shop, the doorbell was rung once again by a man with a paper bag containing two lumps that no one would ever have recognised as shoes. Abraham had stumbled downstairs and opened the door, and when he came back into the room where the pot of chicken soup stood steaming and the boys lolled sleepily in their high chairs while their grandfather tried to guide to their mouths pieces of challah that made the sound of a steam train on the way, old Deutscher lifted his head, looked at the brown paper bag and collapsed.
How old had he been, Jacob Noah, that evening when his father came into the room with a brown paper bag and his grandfather lowered his head and fell face-first into his grandson’s bowl of chicken soup? Four. Five. No older. But nonetheless: his first memory. His grandfather’s gleaming pate, surrounded by a grey ring of hair, in a bowl of soup.
And of course the chaos that immediately followed: his grandmother, her right hand thrown up over her mouth, her left hand on her chest, sinking down into her chair and only coming to when her daughter rubbed her wrists with vinegar; his father flying out of the door to fetch the doctor; his mother sitting her father upright, wiping his face clean and trying to drag him to the sofa, which didn’t work because the old man slumped against the back of his chair like a wet bag of sand. Heijman, two years old, crowing and exploiting the opportunity to lift his spoon and stoutly smack it into his plate of soup, and he himself, whether that was his memory or the desire to see things like this, looking at the scene, not knowing what was happening, but aware that it was something he would never forget.
Isaac Deutscher had never regained consciousness, and less than two weeks later he was laid to rest in the graveyard behind the Forest of Assen. The shop was taken over by his son-in-law.
Abraham Noah, who had learned the trade at fairs, and had good-naturedly held his ground there amongst drunken farmers’ boys and clog-footed milkmaids, went energetically to work. The shoemaking disappeared into the background, and he had a shop window made, in which the new goods were displayed on blue velvet, and two coloured prints hung on the wall, making the charm and elegance of London and Paris almost tangibly present. The town was not yet ready for that charm, that elegance. Although it was the capital of the province, and the administrative centre, and in the wider surroundings there was not a single shoe shop with such ostentatious chic in its range, the bell seldom rang, and when it did it was to let in a dazed-looking man or woman carrying a rustling brown paper bag in their hand. Even Noah’s attempts to become a member of the shopkeepers’ association failed. His written request to join never received a reply, and when he bumped into the chairman one day in the Kruisstraat, the chairman said that the body could not consider his application because it was after all a Christian organisation. Noah would just have to set up his own association.
Rosa saw her confident Abraham becoming an anxious man who smoked his cigars with diminishing relish, and in whose eyes the spark of boldness was already starting to go out. In the evening, when the children had been sent to bed, he sat at the dining table with cash book and ledger and calculated until the figures, mockingly, it seemed, danced before his eyes and the world appeared to exist only to let him taste the bitter wormwood of his fruitless toil. After a year the shop was bringing in so little that Abraham had to set off on his travels again and Rosa was forced to run the store.
What seemed too much for Abraham Noah’s pride became a challenge for Rosa’s quashed ambitions. Although she assumed her new task with appropriate timidity, it was painfully clear that her life was only now beginning. She hung her silk dressing gowns in a wardrobe with mothballs, rolled her thick brown hair in a tight bun, elaborated a complicated scheme for cooking, cleaning and childcare, and even remembered the principles of shoemaking. She took on an apprentice for the workshop, and single-handedly removed the blue velvet from the window and the French and English prints from the wall. Abraham, who saw the changes occurring after a few months – but only once they had already taken place, because he often came home just before the weekend – shook his head and seemed to shrink into himself both literally and figuratively. During that year after his misfortune, he assumed a resigned, bent posture and began to remember what a friend had said when he told him that he was going to marry Rosa Deutscher, his boss’s daughter. ‘You may never,’ his friend had said, ‘have a beautiful woman all to yourself, but no one owns a clever woman.’ He had, proud of his beautiful and clever wife, laughed at these words. At the time he had heard only the first part, and had not been afraid. Now he began to suspect that the second might also be true.
The shop blossomed. The orthodox still bought from the orthodox, the liberal from the liberal and the few Catholics from the Catholics, but new customers slowly trickled in: young people who thought it possible that a Jew could make shoes that fitted a Protestant, people from somewhere else who had come to live in the town and socialists who weren’t welcome anywhere, and whose numbers were growing. In her shop Rosa sold the same sober footwear as her competitors, but it was with her repairs that she put the name of ‘Abraham Noah Shoes’ on the map. Three years passed like that, and then the whole town knew that Rosa Noah never said that shoes were worn beyond repair and had to be replaced, but that on the contrary she could make a mistreated pair of brogues, boots or lace-ups look almost new. With her level-headed honesty she cultivated a clientele that became so loyal to her and thought so highly of her shop that the business seemed to be built on a foundation of ancient, immovable rock.
Everything has its price, even prosperity wrought from diligent ambition and healthy common sense, and the price paid by Rosa Noah, née Deutscher, was the slow erosion of her once so promising marriage. Abraham, who had always prided himself on his modern, indeed: properly socialist ideas, was able to stomach his wife’s business success, where he himself had clearly failed, only with great difficulty. He became quieter, introverted, sullen. To compensate for the loss of his authority in the shop he became a domestic tyrant who from Friday evening, when he came back from his travels, until Monday morning, when he set off once more for a long and lonely week, had something to say about everything, complained about his wife’s meals and kept his two sons on such a short rein that they were visibly relieved when he left again. As happy and free as the atmosphere was during the week in the house above the shop, so it was suffocating and bleak at the weekend, when the brooding, sombre man who was their father and husband exerted his power over the family.
Although his mother, in spite of everything, seemed to be an alert and spontaneous woman, the realisation travelled all the way to Jacob, as he grew older, that she was actually two women. It was no more than a suspicion, a that-must-be-it, but he barely doubted it and his last doubt fled when he was woken one Saturday evening by banging and clattering and left his bed, with a mixture of unease and curiosity, to seek the source of the noise.
Upstairs everything was in darkness, and downstairs too, where the sitting-room door was open and the coals behind the mica window of the stove spread an orange glow. He opened the door of the kitchen and found nothing and no one. Finally he went, shivering on his bare feet, down the tiled corridor to the shoemaking workshop and the shop behind it.
In the workshop the faint light of a carbon-filament bulb still burned. The yellowish glimmer was a broad ribbon in the chink of the door. He laid his head against the doorpost, his heart thumping on the hard wood, and looked inside. On the workshop floor, in a white petticoat with big black stains, his mother knelt, her opulent dark hair loose, her face smeared. Her husband towered high above her, arms folded, face frozen. Suddenly, he must have shuffled or pushed against the door, perhaps it was his breathing, he saw his father’s back straighten. In a single motion he reached the door, threw it open and pulled the boy inside by his arm. ‘So,’ he said, setting Jacob down in front of him, hands heavy on his shoulders. ‘So, take a look, if you’re so curious. Look how your mother clears away her mess.’ Jacob tugged and pulled, but his father held him firmly in place, as his mother smiled at him as if none of it were of any importance, a little joke between husband and wife, and went on imperturbably with her work. He could do nothing but watch, even though he didn’t want to be there. Slowly, as he let his gaze rest on his mother and felt his father’s hands on his shoulders, he felt a distance within him, as if he was two people, one that watched and one that wasn’t there, didn’t belong there. It was just like the time his grandfather had slumped forward into his bowl of chicken soup, and he registered everything, perceived everything in a strangely distant way without really feeling part of it: Heijman banging his spoon into his bowl, his mother rubbing her mother’s wrists with vinegar, his father flying out of the door, and his grandfather’s slack corpse, the crown of white hair around his gleaming head, hanging backwards in his chair, swirls of vermicelli still in his face. He saw everything. Everything happened. But without him.
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