In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside
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like a freshly polished sideboard and he walks half-bent if you want to call his walking walking and the sun stings his eyes his eyes water with the sting of the sun in his eyes after three years and when he comes out of the peat bog and stands upright and sees the May clouds in the airmail-blue light there are the houses along the Smilder Canal the straight edge of the wood a leaden wall hiding something that he knows all too well and in his head is just one thought one thought but it wants to stay one thought that knocks and bangs like a festering finger one feeling that makes his heart contract his fingers bend but around one thing that he wants to hold tight on to and squeeze it squeeze the juice from it till the life disappears …
God …
One thought and it’s revenge.
He wants revenge. Revenge for everything. He wants to pull out the piece of rope that holds up his trousers brush the earth to the side and fuck the damned field of the damned farmers to avenge himself. Throw the first the best broad-bosomed blonde peasant with her blushing face in a furrow and while her face lies in the fat soil and the spittle runs from her mouth and mixes with the black earth fuck her up the arse.
He wants to ride fire-starting and plundering through villages and fields and like a vengeful black figure on a pale horse reduce this land to ashes till nothing is left but pitch and sulphur the blackened stumps of houses the smoking foundations of farms ashen dry fields and swollen cadavers and purple corpses along the edge of the road.
But that’s not how it works.
A fighter plane skims over, wings waving. The RAF insignia a haze of blue and white and red.
A pig squeals in the distance.
Children in blue overalls fish in the black water.
Dandelions stand yellow in the grassy verge.
A workhorse trots neck bowed through a meadow.
Just before noon he steals a bicycle from behind a barn and without looking round at the yelling farm labourers busy in the field he pushes the pedals round, along the canal, towards the town.
He cycles.
He cycles along the straight canal, his only souvenir of the years as a mole in a hole banging against his leg in his jacket pocket.
He cycles. For the first time in three years he cycles and the wind blows through his blurring curls and his eyes water and his legs hurt and he cycles
and he cycles
and he cycles.
And as he
approaches the town half an hour later he pulls on his brakes to look around for a moment and the sunlight, faintyellowfaraway, a balm for the hard lines of the landscape, washes over his face and into his eyes and through his hair, and in the distance, where the dark water of the long canal disappears into the horizon and then grey and then a blur, where he lived for three years like a mole in a hole in the bog, a worm in the earth, and for three years smelt earth, bog, peat, brown water, his godforsaken soul, the high light rises like a wall of summer blue, a cliché of prosperity and happiness and beautiful memories fromwhenwewerestillyoungandtheworldwasgood, and the bile wells up in him, a bitterness wells up which to his own surprise makes him bend sideways to puke a silvery strand from his empty belly, right next to his string-laced shoes, a glittering salamander on the road surface.
Never again.
In the town he cycles through a web of surprised glances. Flags hang from the windows, orange pennants ripple in the mild spring wind, here and there a half-torn poster flaps against a wall.
The house and the shop come into view and stillness falls around him. It’s as if the air has been sucked away.
The trees stop rustling and the wooden tyres of his bicycle stop rattling over the cobbles. There is no movement.
As if he was cycling through a peepshow.
And then he sees it.
Where before on a red-brown wooden board above both display windows with the ostentatious pride of one who had struggled long and finally conquered, in pseudo-medieval letters that suggested a permanence that didn’t exist, where once stood his name and that of his brother, his father and his mother
Abraham Noah Shoes (also repairs)
it now jabbers in illegible gothic script:
Hilbrandts Aryan Bookshop
He stands over the crossbar of his bicycle, which isn’t his bicycle, and looks at the red board with the black letters. Mouth open.
Aryanbloodybookshop?
On the brown velvet of the window display no Russian leather boots, gleaming Oxfords, stout brogues or slender court shoes, but a magazine called The Hearth, a sheet of paper with curling edges and an envelope on which in stark black and white the firm jaws of a Teutonic model worker gleam. Next to it a book bearing the unreal title Mother, Tell Us about Adolf Hitler! and a few dead flies lying against the glass.
His father’s shop, started by his grandfather, half of the premises back then, a pitiful business where poor people had their poor shoes made by a poor shoemaker, a dark workshop where all the walls were covered with shelves packed with shoes and boots, here and there even a clog that needed a strap put round it. Behind the light-brown counter his grandfather, sitting on the three-legged stool, had knocked, hammered, cut, sewn and scoured. There was a sewing machine powered by a foot pedal, a device bought sometime around 1915 or ’16, such a major acquisition that the machine had to be polished each evening till the brass gleamed and the black-painted cast iron shone like a new stove. Oh, if he shut his eyes now, he could hear the machine’s heavy flywheel hum, the sticky smell of the glue pot on the stove would come to life in the back of his head. Knives crooked and straight, pitched thread hanging over a stick, lasts, punch awls and sewing awls, oxhide for making soles, calf, horse and goat for the uppers in reeking stacks, bent needles, straight needles, round, triangular, thick, thin, short and long, aniline and beeswax, grease and cream, oily sheep’s wool, flannel rags, horsehair brushes, iron scrapers.
And the voice of his grandfather softly, along the thread between his teeth, singing a little song …
When Rabbi Elimelech went on his way …
A goddamned Aryan …
He stands in the unimaginable silence of the gloomy bookshop, where amidst the smell of paper and linen a vague olfactory memory of shoes is barely discernible and the ringing of the shop bell still echoes, and sees what looks like a trick of the light, but is actually a bookshop. Footsteps sound in the dark corridor between the house and the shop and out of the shadows steps a surly-looking man in waistcoat and shirtsleeves.
‘We’re closed.’
Jacob Noah stares the man in the face with an expression that could only be called blank: no trace of a reaction, no emotion, no expression, eyes as empty as creation before the Supreme Being rolled up his sleeves and made something of it.
Silence hangs between them, a gauzy silence that makes the space dense and diffuse and reminds him of something he doesn’t know. His thoughts travel through the landscape of his past.
How sharp it all is … the light that falls through the dusty windows, brushes across the counter and lays a silk-soft gleam on the wood, worn smooth by all that use and time … how sharply drawn the pigeonholes in the boxes along the walls, where shoe-boxes used to be stacked, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a mosaic of white, pink, black, green, red, brown, blue, mauve and grey rectangles.
‘We’re …’
‘Out. Of. My. Shop.’
The man screws up his eyes and looks at him as if he has been addressed in a language that bears no relation to any language he has ever encountered before.
‘OUT.’