In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

out the future to a retired probation officer and remembers that her daughter is arriving on the nine-thirty-four train the following morning, and in the late-afternoon light the wind rolls, a wind from other parts, now, a wind that smells different, that brings different sounds, the same wind that brought Antonia d’Albero here, all the way from Milan, her stomach burning with all the plastic cups of murky coffee that she drank in equally murky Raststätten, a tongue pickled by smoking too many Marlboros, the dust of two days’ travelling deep in her pores, the dust of Via Mac Mahon, of Arisdorf, Raunheim and Apeldoorn, and the evening wind blows through the conifers around the bungalow on the south side of the town, between a cemetery and the colossal buildings of the oil company, where Mrs Kolpa, née Polak, sits with her back to the windows talking to a doctor she can’t see because she’s looking elsewhere, at an indefinable patch behind him, she’s peering into another time, just as he has been looking at a patch behind her since midway through the afternoon, when he began listening to the answer to the question of when it all started, and as usual in these cases he has had to ask only one question to get the whole story, the story that she has told no one, not her ex-husband or her son, and which has now become an unstoppable stream that is, many hours later, fading away in the mantra that has made her think for thirty-five years, no: thirty-eight years, that it is a Friday in 1942, always Friday: Yes, I remember the day I still recall what day it was the second of October a Friday it was night it was two o’clock it was Friday. It was the second of October two o’clock at night. They knocked at the door.

      And although it is in fact Friday, it isn’t the second of October and it isn’t night either. It’s six o’clock in the evening and above the terraces in the square in front of the Hotel de Jonge the strings of bulbs are already blinking in the gentle wind that has risen up and the sound of loud songs from hundreds of throats and in many languages won’t stop now. Ah, the Hotel de Jonge, less than a hundred metres from the spot where the town was born in 1258 and where for many years now everyone and everything has convened, the spot through which every thread in the fabric of the town passes at least once, where this evening and tonight the sweaty bodies of the drinkers will stand crammed closely together, the spot which on every other day of the year is a sheltered haven of oak wainscoting and low lamplight, where lonely men seek oblivion in the bosom of barmaid Tine (as jolly as she is dismissive), where the Club of Twenty meets, a society that has no other purpose than to reject member number twenty-one, where the billiard players play on Monday evening, the card players on Tuesday evening (and their wives on Wednesday evening), the Rotary meets once a month on Thursday evening, and in a little room behind the café the ice hockey club, several political parties, the newspaper editors, the shopkeepers’ association, the humanists, anthroposophists, happy bikers and God knows who else fantasise for a few hours that they are here, now, at the centre of the world, in a whirl of activity and necessity and importance.

      The beer pumps in the Hotel de Jonge no longer get turned off. There’s no point flicking the tap up when the stream of empty glasses just keeps coming. Luckily the barrels are stacked high in the cellars, so the gold liquid gushes, splashes and babbles all around. Litres of beer pass through them. Lakes. Oceans. And a slow befuddlement takes possession of the town, a sluggishly swelling intoxication that makes everything look different and banishes the unsummery chill: men in short sleeves, biker girls in tight T-shirts, bare bellies, hot heads. The tropics on the 53rd latitude.

      The heart of the heart. The midst of the battle. Midway through our lives, when we find ourselves in a dark wood. In the shit. That’s where we are now.

      Later on, a chill gloom will settle over the town. Between the houses, in the narrow streets of the town centre, the light becomes a mourning veil. The houses are dead, the streets are dead, the windows above the shops are chilly holes and all the shops deep nests of shadow. In the non-light it will look as if the pattern of streets is carved into the town with an enormous knife, as if someone has, with the tip of that knife, scratched lines in the surface of the town. Where the glow of floodlights is reflected on the mechanical bull outside the museum, the go-kart track behind the theatre, the big music tent on Koopmansplein, the town becomes a peepshow. The light hangs like a yellow sphere beneath the trees or is caught between the three canvas sides of the tent, it steams between the house-fronts and makes everything small and unreal.

      The town becomes a dream, the kind in which behind every dark corner there lies a deathly street with leaning or vanishing houses, where the glass of the windowpanes is sometimes a blue-black reflection, then a wrinkling hole in stone; the chimneys mumble, the street lights leer. The gutters bubble and beneath the pavement the sand drifts. There’s something behind the windows, but only if you don’t look. The blue treetops of the Governor’s Garden rustle in a wind that doesn’t blow. Beneath the shine of the artificial light, wandering black leather figures continue to move. It’s a silent marche funèbre in this strange light: inexpressive, uniform, so massively drifting, so aimlessly purposeful. And there is, in spite of the spiralling mass of heads and arms and legs, emptiness. As if all those people don’t matter, aren’t really there, don’t really exist.

      Of course they are there. They’re there every year on this day. They drink and get drunk. They hit and are hit, rape and are raped, seek and are sought, sleep and are woken, live and die.

      They are there.

      Drinking and pissing they stumble on. They sway arm in arm from pavement to pavement, they hit each other in the face till they bleed, they kiss till the spit runs down their jaws and they drink the cellars of the Hotel de Jonge dry. Yes, there in the big taproom of the most important drinking place in town everything is thirst and beer. The trestle tables that were set out earlier this week are wet, the floor is sticky with liquid and the faces are red and clammy. The people drinking here aren’t hotel guests. Although all the rooms are let, you won’t see a single guest here tonight. Apart from one. Right up at the top, in the smallest room, at the end of a long corridor, Marcus Kolpa sits in the deafening roar of music and shouting.

      Marcus (his family on his father’s side came from Belgium a century ago and still wallows with unconcealed pleasure in the memory of the good old days when Dutch was a language that sounded more like the barking of dogs than a means of communication among civilised people), Marcus Kolpa is a star of the kind you seldom see. He is a rare kind of star. Thirty-one now and, if you asked him, he still hasn’t achieved a thing in life, apart from a private library capable of provoking the jealousy and surprise of some middle-sized provincial towns and the general acknowledgement that he is ‘an intellectual’. Clothes that look as if they were chosen by an elder of the Reformed Church, a love life that gives new meaning to the word ‘vacuum’ and a mind, a mind like a double razor blade. Great God! Let Marcus Kolpa loose on any edition of any encyclopaedia and he will find three mistakes a page. Drop him in a conference of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, scientists, historians, literati, housewives if need be, and within a few minutes he will be surrounded by a humbly nodding audience admitting that, yes, Marcus Kolpa has a great future.

      A promise, that’s what he is. Has been for thirty-one years now.

      Shoe size 43. Jacket 48. Left eye minus four, right minus four and a half.

      And a dick that would send a Great Dane creeping off with its tail between its legs.

      But a dick that he doesn’t do anything with.

      Although …

      As we meet him now, he is kneeling in front of the television in his little hotel room.

      The carpet is caramel brown with round patches that once were flowers.

      The television is a Philips produced for the hotel trade.

      What is he doing there, kneeling in front of the box?

      Is he watching the porn channel, which provides comfort for so many businessmen on their lonely quests in strange places?

      No, they haven’t got that here. (And besides: it’s 1980, a time when pornography has just fallen out of fashion and hasn’t yet fallen back in. The last great feminist wave of the millennium is washing over the continent, carrying with it the stylish wreckage of dungarees and purple overalls and the hardly statistical notion that pornography