In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside
him. And three years after the second one came Chaja, who didn’t cry, didn’t look up or down and certainly didn’t smile, but just stared straight in front of her, silent and serene, with eyes as big and dark as dew-covered grapes and an expression as if she was trying to think of something that wouldn’t come to mind. He had looked at the child and known that she would always be a mystery to him.
The doctor had asked, when he stood with the staring Chaja in his arms and said her name, whether he was trying to assemble a whole alphabet, and when he looked up he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s complete.’
His wife hadn’t been surprised when he stopped trying to approach her after the birth of the third daughter, any more than she had been startled by the grim emphasis with which he had come to her in the years before. It was plain to her that he respected her, but didn’t love her; that he wanted children with a … a despair that she couldn’t understand, and seemed nonetheless incapable of taking pleasure in the deed that would lead to that end. When they made love, when they still did that, she sometimes saw in the moonlight that fell into their room how the veins in his neck swelled and his forehead was a great sea of ripples. He ground his teeth when he fucked her, as if he was not busy with the play of love but had to wrest something from it. It was a frightening expression, and she wasn’t sorry not to see it any more. He had taught her what an orgasm was and how you could have one. All things considered, she no longer even needed him.
And then there he is, the seasons and the years have passed. He has grown, widthwise, his children have grown, lengthwise, his wife has grown thin. Yes, Jetty Ferwerda, with her flowing hips and her arching breasts, rich blonde hair that seemed to cry out nothing but Health! Strength! Fertility!, has changed into a scrawny, nervous woman with a bob cut so sharply that Aphra will later ask if she can take her hair off. The business has grown, too. Jacob has bought the shop next door and the one next door to that and the two shops behind them and knocked everything together and is now the owner of a complete block of which the ground floor forms the biggest lingerie store in the province. Once a year he attends the meeting of the business club, but always without saying a word, until in the autumn of 1962 he asks to speak, is granted permission and to the surprise of all his fellow shopkeepers unrolls the scroll that he was carrying under his arm when he came in and presents a plan which is immediately rejected, but which will later completely change the town. That evening he listens affably to the objections. He isn’t upset by the outcry. Even the two men right beside him who hiss something with the word ‘Jew’ into each other’s ears don’t seem to bother him. He knows what will happen. He is a fisherman at the water’s edge, a man who knows that his patience will win out over the suspicion of the fish. He even knows when he will win. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says that evening, when the cigar smoke has become a thick blue fog in the little hall in the Hotel de Jonge. ‘Gentlemen, you say “no” and “provided that” and “never”, but in ten years we will be here again and it will have happened.’ And he looks around the room to let his words reach everyone and says: ‘You are not the object of history, but its subject.’ And he rolls up his paper, stubs out his cigar, throws his coat over his shoulders and walks alone but very contentedly through the drizzly autumn darkness back to the house where his three daughters have stayed up far too late to hear their father’s report. And when he gives it, and Aphra – with a grim expression under her black eyebrows, arms folded and eyes fixed on the table – is angry and sulks, he explains that time is like porcelain. Chaja stares at him with enormous eyes. He walks to the dresser, takes a cup and saucer … and another … and another … He gives one to each of his daughters. He posts them at one side of the room, goes himself to the other side and says: ‘Whoever brings me theirs first. One. Two. Three!’ and there they go, Aphra panting before she’s out of breath, Bracha hesitating and bending her little body over the cup and saucer and running, running, running, and right at the back Chaja, lifting up the crockery almost proudly, her staring eyes fixed on the outstretched hand of her father, ready to receive what is held out to him.
There goes Chaja, untouched by the mêlée of swaying legs, flying pottery and shrill cries. Her sisters crash to the floor with laughter, but she seems to be making a voyage across the room, like a Parsifal bearing his Holy Grail. Chaja sets off through forests and over hills, she treads a straight path in the middle of lots of crooked ones, blind to what is happening around her, oblivious to noise and wild amusement. And then, after what seems like an age, she stops in front of her father, hands him the cup and saucer with a gravity that makes the cheerful hubbub fall suddenly silent, and says: ‘Seventeen.’
Her sisters are lying amidst shattered crockery. Her mother is sitting bolt upright in her chair, on the other side of the room, with a piece of embroidery in her lap. The dark figure of Jacob Noah stands in front of Chaja and bends over her, one hand held behind his ear, and asks: ‘Seventeen?’
He receives the cup and saucer from her, gives a tormented smile, straightens up and looks down at the little girl with her calm face.
She nods: ‘Seventeen.’
And Jacob Noah, standing there with his cup and saucer, like a waiter who has forgotten which table his order is for, stares straight ahead and feels his shoulders slump under the weight of time.
So much to do. So little time.
He feels like a man trying to swim out of the suction of a maelstrom.
Later that evening, when the darkness has turned liquid, with a glass of whisky, very unusual for him, he thinks about himself, how he has spread like an ink stain over the town. The shops that he has bought. The life-sized game of Monopoly that he is playing. Although his property is spread out over the whole centre, part of it is clotted compactly together. It started with an old tailor’s shop in a low-roofed little worker’s cottage beside his own shop, then a big, three-storey house, heavily reduced in value by a widow who had refused to admit strangers into her house after her husband’s death. Then a shop selling sewing machines, and not long after that the adjacent travel agency. And now he owns a stone rectangle in the centre of the town, a block of houses and shops, a confusion of alleyways and courtyards and warehouses, with his lingerie shop as its beating heart.
He raises his glass and peers into the amber fluid.
‘Seventeen,’ he says and smiles gently, but as he does so and gives a worldly-wise look at his whisky, the laugh becomes a fishbone in his throat.
How many premises are there in his block in the town centre?
He stands up and wades through the darkness to the window. The square lies before and below him. Behind, beside and beneath him his property.
While the germ of a plan sprouts in one part of his head and begins to bud and blossom … in another part a voice asks why he didn’t see this when he thought he saw everything. He brings his glass to his mouth and drains it without thinking, in one draught, turns round and walks to the door, down the stairs to the floor below, as the whisky sinks into his body and his throat begins to burn and his head fills with the vapours of the alcohol.
Outside he walks jacketless through the damp evening air. It’s as dark as the inside of a church collection bag. He walks to the middle of the square, where he takes up position, feet slightly apart: a man at ease with himself. A bedroom light springs on behind a window on the top floor of his house, and while Jacob Noah looks from the square at his stone castle, a small figure appears in the sharp white rectangle of light. Jacob Noah sees only a dark silhouette busy hoisting itself up, but he doesn’t need his imagination to know who is looking at him from high up there. Behind the window, standing on the chair that is normally beside her bed, Chaja is looking down at him. He sees the dark mass of his property, the bright rectangle in the middle and the figure of his youngest daughter in it and nods thoughtfully. The soft nocturnal rain soaks his suit and drips along his temples and down the collar of his shirt. He raises his right hand, waves to the little figure up above and says silently: ‘Seventeen.’
And again the builders are there. They hack holes from one shop to the other,