In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

He shuts his eyes tight and the blood in his eyelids colours everything red. For a moment, and with bewildering clarity, a family photograph rises out of the red haze: him, Jetty Ferwerda, their three daughters; a photograph that was never taken because he didn’t want to be ‘captured’ in that way, but nonetheless he sees the picture sharp, framed, there’s even a bit of non-existent buffet in it, and he sees himself standing behind the girls, at the same time seeming to protect them (his body, his hands, everything) and keeping them away from his wife, and at that moment he suddenly knows that he has really done it, that he has kept them away from his wife and he also knows that he has never loved Jetty Ferwerda like the man who loves a woman because she is The Woman, but that she was the crank, the lever with which he lifted his daughters into the world, and as he grasps that he understands for the first time in his life, for the first time in sixty-one years, that he has never loved any woman at all, that he has never permitted such a thing, that he didn’t allow women to love him. He is alone. And he is alone because he wanted to be alone and he wants to be alone because he can’t bear someone else’s tenderness.

      Whether it’s the sun shining into his face through the dirty windscreen, the power of memory or the sudden understanding of something that has decided his whole life, he doesn’t know, but his eyes sting and he feels the moisture welling up.

      In the faint light everything is white and hazy in the car. The tyres sing, the engine growls comfortably.

      Down at the slip road, almost weightless in the white light and blinking his tear-filled eyes, he changes down to second gear. The road is a grey path, the edge of the forest no more than a blurred green smear and the car that appears beeping harshly from the left something that shouldn’t be there.

      The hazy white light in the car explodes. The treetops spin, he himself spins, the snowing glass of the windscreen spirals inside like a snowstorm and as everything turns and swirls and he is weightless for a moment, he sees again the photograph that he never had taken, and not just that one, but other photographs too, photographs that he doesn’t have, faces he can’t remember after half a lifetime: his mother, Heijman in his far too thick winter coat, his father at the dinner table with the ledger, Dr Wiegman’s red feet and the little yellow light in Aphra’s bedroom, Bracha’s hand in his much bigger hand, Chaja’s quiet eyes looking at him as her lips silently form a number.

Part 2

       Chapter 9

      The highest point for miles around, an elevation of sand in a circle of marshland, a dry plateau that is an island in the sucking peat bog where long ago the purple-brown corpses were found of the Princess of Yde (who wasn’t a princess) and the married couple of Weerdinge (not a married couple, but two tenderly embracing Ice-Age men with their chests bored through), where those bog bodies, dried to leather and scales, were once exhumed and where many probably still lie, including a bishop who thought he might be able to put the place in order for a while.

      An inverted soup bowl, as a geographer once visualised it.

      No Eternally Singing Forests.

      No Unapproachable Cretaceous Rocks.

      No Ridged Massif or Empty Quarters.

      A soup bowl.

      That’s where we are. That’s where the children of the town spend their youth: on the landscape equivalent of a piece of crockery, in a bloated hamlet on the highest part of a sandy bank that for want of monumentally beautiful, exciting history or thrilling nature is prized as ‘the town amidst the greenery’, although ‘the greenery in the town’ would be better, because although the place in which we find ourselves really is magnificently located in the middle of extensive heaths, endless moor and, yes, lots of green woods, it’s the forest in the town that is special. It’s perhaps the only town in the country with a whole forest within the built-up area. And not just some kind of little park. Not a pathetic little tuft of trees left over from a once big and mighty wood. No: a real forest with centuries-old oak trees, four cemeteries, two ponds, a children’s farm where the ducks always seem to be fucking, a dilapidated open-air theatre, a little brook, three football clubs, a skating rink and a swimming pool, a riding school and of course the place where Frederik Rooster, amidst sprouting grass and dry brambles, once grew enough marijuana to put the whole under-age population of the town to sleep for a week.

      If we were a buzzard and hung above all this, above the forest, above the many, many people in the town this evening, wings still, settling from time to time in the airstream, hooked head lowered, turning from left to right and back to left and down, then in the deep pit of our vision we would see a glittering beast with steaming flanks struggling down an avenue that from so high up is nothing more than a groove in an abundance of green. But just before we can distinguish the features of the wiggling beast the thermal lifts us up, the depths grow deeper, the great spectacle wider and below us, held in the south and west by the grey ribbons of the asphalt and in the north by the straight black line of the canal (topographical map 12D, in which the town seems to hang in the curve of two motorways like a shapely breast in the landscape), we now see the alpha and omega: the Jewish cemetery on the outermost edge, the concrete mountain of the oil company, the green embroidery of the town forest that begins along the bypass and leads into the centre with its labyrinthine filigree of paths and open patches, to the west the skating rink, the football pitches, and to the east, on the most beautiful street in the town, the big cemetery; and then, right wing resting on the airstream, the bypass beneath the flapping feathery fingers, we see the mad houses, as they are known locally, on either side of the road, Licht en Kracht – ‘Light and Strength’ – and Port Natal (optimistic, calming, fraudulent names), they slumber lazily in the calming greenery, unsettlingly close to the railway that runs alongside the bypass here and so effectively separates the heart of the town from the rest that rather than being one town, it could just as well be two villages.

      The broccoli clouds of the treetops glide on.

      The centre, the tangle of little streets: Nieuwe Huizen, Brink, Torenlaan, Dr Nassaulaan, Hoofdlaan.

      A single straight line from the old local government building (anno 1885, now the Provincial Museum) to the new one (1973, a fine example of the work of Professor Marius Duintjer).

      At the end of the straight line: the sluggish grey curve of the bypass that circles three-quarters of the town.

      An inverted soup bowl, among trees and fields.

      1980, 27 June, six o’clock, Friday. That is the day.

      The drizzle has stopped (but it won’t be dry for long) and the sun appears again above the treetops of the Forest of Assen.

      It’s the eve of the TT races, when the little town with a population of just over forty thousand inhabitants swells to about five times that size. At intervals along the streets (strings of bulbs have been lit, even though it isn’t even nearly dark yet, and here and there the beams of headlights flash their chilly glare) engines roar and long processions pass by and leather-clad partygoers move from the mechanical bull to the motorbike trial, from the go-kart races to the music stages, from the beer tents to the sausage stands, the strippers and the funfair, the film and the chilly pavement cafés. The air is greyish-blue with dirty white shreds of cloud and the occasional clear patch. The lights in the houses have come on, in Gymnasiumstraat garlands and lanterns are being hung in a courtyard, two men are laying a table (one of them raises his head) and from the open kitchen window comes the tinkling laughter of a woman and the clatter of crockery and the sound of a food mixer racing and water flowing, and much further away, on the edge of the newest new suburb, to the north, where a gentle breeze swishes over fallow land, a father says to his little son: ‘There’s always enough time to pick up a pretty stone,’ and he bends down and pulls an ammonite from the yellow sand that has just been shot in the air, and in a gloomy red tent at the funfair, where the music of the Octopus and the dodgems roars faintly, Madame Zara stares