In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside
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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 from their hooks, the stockings are arranged on shelves 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