In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

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 he has no more work to do. But for the time being that isn’t a problem. First the big department stores open their doors, and the attraction for farmers, townspeople and outsiders, which he predicted long ago, comes into effect. The small shopkeepers who once resisted his plan and then did everything they could to put a stop to the big stores, see their profits double from one accounting year to the next. From now on, every Wednesday afternoon and every Saturday is a spring flood in Assen. Customers come from as far away as Groningen, and often it’s so packed that Jacob Noah wonders, as he looks out of his window at the dense streams of sauntering bodies, what people so urgently need to buy.

      He has more money, as they say, than he knows what to do with. As his bank account steadily fills and he is greeted as he enters the local head office as though he owns the bank as well (which isn’t so wide of the mark), his life becomes emptier. He sits in the office that he set up in a property he has kept and stares at the door, through which no one comes, looks at the calendar, on which no meetings are announced, and stares at his bank statements, on which the interest grows and grows and grows. It’s a very long time before he dares to leave his office and gets into the car to drive ‘outside’. It is autumn and he takes a trip in his DS through the little villages around Assen, the villages whose level of involvement in Dutch Nazi organisations he knows off by heart. The leaves of the red birch blaze in the soft afternoon light. The oaks are already turning yellow and brown. The wooded banks are thinning out.

      He has nothing to do but look and although he isn’t blind to the beauty of the ash trees, the quiet village greens and the severe Gothic of the high, straight oak trunks along the narrow paths, looking isn’t enough. Unease roams within him like an animal.

      Winter comes, and spring. Although he has nothing to do and gets a bit richer every day, his life runs as empty as a dirty bath. In the evening he gets into his cold side of the marital bed, which has long ceased to be the place where darkness overpowered him, and he in turn overpowered Jetty Ferwerda. He lies there staring into the void, surprised by his success, and feels frighteningly hollow because it seems so insignificant. Made it? He hasn’t made it. He’s just well-to-do. And what is left that still matters to him? His daughters are going their way, his wife has gone already and the world goes imperturbably on. In spite of everything, everything that’s happened.

      Nothing is important.

      Everything is nothing.

      To fill the void of his existence, or at any rate camouflage it well, he becomes more active than ever, and it’s as if the void drives him harder than striving ever did. He fills one meeting after another with project-developers, planners and other dreamers. In the evening he stands in plastic-coated offices and laminated conference rooms, bent over blueprints and prospectuses. Once the meetings are over he walks through strange, dark towns and lets the neon light, the cries of the whores in their red-lit little rooms and the music from the bars wash over him. Not that he himself is in the little rooms or bars. He never managed to become a drinker. He isn’t going to become a whoremonger, because his sympathy for wrecked lives excludes any form of passion.

      But life, the dark, nightly existence in which the day’s emptiness becomes laughable, life draws him as a candle draws a moth.

      He does fuck. In the accounting limbo of desire and loss, action is a great source of comfort. He seduces one of his secretaries (in the pantry, where he takes her standing, half pressed against the fridge, while a visitor awaits an audience in the waiting room). He gets a blow job in his car from the wife of a dignitary who keeps having to move her pearl necklace aside to prevent it from twisting around his cock. There is a widow in a neighbouring village who he visits once every two weeks with flowers and port and after tea he throws her across the table and …

      And every time he seduces a woman there’s a moment of safety and Odysseus really seems to have arrived in Ithaca.

      Until, as ever, the void returns and nestles grinning within him.

      Even when he finally – Aphra and Bracha are studying something vague and are by now Marxist, anti-imperialist and sexually liberated and Chaja has graduated from high school – even then, when he leaves both his wife and the town and settles in an enormous old village school that he has converted into a dwelling, to the surprise of the population of the village where he goes to live, even in the midst of all the release and freedom (his eldest daughters come at weekends and bring a flood of friends and acquaintances, each one more hazy and recalcitrant than the other, sometimes there’s a whole pop group there), even in those turbulent seventies, when he resisted the wild stream of life, there is emptiness and lack. While in his vast house beneath the tall oaks the young people dance and sing and smoke and fuck as if the world might stop turning at any moment and the sun might go out, he stands in the garden, listens to the rustle of the summer evening wind through the oak leaves, a frosted glass of vodka in his hand, and whispers his brother’s name.

       Chapter 8

      And then one day it’s the twenty-seventh of June 1980 and the sun shines on the road between the fields, the path Jacob Noah drives along, a tarmac path that lies there like a long grey ribbon thrown away by an old Drenthe giant who stood astride the land and decided that something had to be thrown away … a megalithic tomb? a forest? a whole village? no: a ribbon that passes through ash trees and hills, through heaths and sand drifts, river valleys and forests, and now here lies the ribbon, and in the sinking sun, there in the distance, on the viaduct, where the path rises, it becomes vague, vaguer and vaguer, until it dissolves into a grey road in the watery air of the west and Jacob Noah, who comes driving along the ribbon, rising and falling on the long swell of the asphalt, sees the country lying before him, the fields, the clumps of trees in the fields, the forests in the distance, the grey of the tarmac in between, and for a moment, less than half a second before he flicks up the indicator and pulls the steering wheel to the right, there is the almost physical urge to keep driving straight on, as if he could drive into the light in the distance, as if he could take off and he’d be away … released … (but what from? Him with his big car and his converted schoolhouse, his three gorgeous daughters and more money in the bank than he can spend in his lifetime) and for a moment in one all-encompassing gaze he sees the magnitude of the country, how fragile it all is, how wonderful and magnificent, it’s an experience that makes him literally sink back into the soft French springs of his DS, an experience that makes him long for the magnificent, the majestic, a feeling that makes him yearn to dissolve into the distance.

      But he turns off. The car drives down the slip road and the sun, above the treetops in the distance, finds a hole in the thin cloud cover and suddenly and unexpectedly