In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

tangibly present. The town was not yet ready for that charm, that elegance. Although it was the capital of the province, and the administrative centre, and in the wider surroundings there was not a single shoe shop with such ostentatious chic in its range, the bell seldom rang, and when it did it was to let in a dazed-looking man or woman carrying a rustling brown paper bag in their hand. Even Noah’s attempts to become a member of the shopkeepers’ association failed. His written request to join never received a reply, and when he bumped into the chairman one day in the Kruisstraat, the chairman said that the body could not consider his application because it was after all a Christian organisation. Noah would just have to set up his own association.

      Rosa saw her confident Abraham becoming an anxious man who smoked his cigars with diminishing relish, and in whose eyes the spark of boldness was already starting to go out. In the evening, when the children had been sent to bed, he sat at the dining table with cash book and ledger and calculated until the figures, mockingly, it seemed, danced before his eyes and the world appeared to exist only to let him taste the bitter wormwood of his fruitless toil. After a year the shop was bringing in so little that Abraham had to set off on his travels again and Rosa was forced to run the store.

      What seemed too much for Abraham Noah’s pride became a challenge for Rosa’s quashed ambitions. Although she assumed her new task with appropriate timidity, it was painfully clear that her life was only now beginning. She hung her silk dressing gowns in a wardrobe with mothballs, rolled her thick brown hair in a tight bun, elaborated a complicated scheme for cooking, cleaning and childcare, and even remembered the principles of shoemaking. She took on an apprentice for the workshop, and single-handedly removed the blue velvet from the window and the French and English prints from the wall. Abraham, who saw the changes occurring after a few months – but only once they had already taken place, because he often came home just before the weekend – shook his head and seemed to shrink into himself both literally and figuratively. During that year after his misfortune, he assumed a resigned, bent posture and began to remember what a friend had said when he told him that he was going to marry Rosa Deutscher, his boss’s daughter. ‘You may never,’ his friend had said, ‘have a beautiful woman all to yourself, but no one owns a clever woman.’ He had, proud of his beautiful and clever wife, laughed at these words. At the time he had heard only the first part, and had not been afraid. Now he began to suspect that the second might also be true.

      The shop blossomed. The orthodox still bought from the orthodox, the liberal from the liberal and the few Catholics from the Catholics, but new customers slowly trickled in: young people who thought it possible that a Jew could make shoes that fitted a Protestant, people from somewhere else who had come to live in the town and socialists who weren’t welcome anywhere, and whose numbers were growing. In her shop Rosa sold the same sober footwear as her competitors, but it was with her repairs that she put the name of ‘Abraham Noah Shoes’ on the map. Three years passed like that, and then the whole town knew that Rosa Noah never said that shoes were worn beyond repair and had to be replaced, but that on the contrary she could make a mistreated pair of brogues, boots or lace-ups look almost new. With her level-headed honesty she cultivated a clientele that became so loyal to her and thought so highly of her shop that the business seemed to be built on a foundation of ancient, immovable rock.

      Everything has its price, even prosperity wrought from diligent ambition and healthy common sense, and the price paid by Rosa Noah, née Deutscher, was the slow erosion of her once so promising marriage. Abraham, who had always prided himself on his modern, indeed: properly socialist ideas, was able to stomach his wife’s business success, where he himself had clearly failed, only with great difficulty. He became quieter, introverted, sullen. To compensate for the loss of his authority in the shop he became a domestic tyrant who from Friday evening, when he came back from his travels, until Monday morning, when he set off once more for a long and lonely week, had something to say about everything, complained about his wife’s meals and kept his two sons on such a short rein that they were visibly relieved when he left again. As happy and free as the atmosphere was during the week in the house above the shop, so it was suffocating and bleak at the weekend, when the brooding, sombre man who was their father and husband exerted his power over the family.

      Although his mother, in spite of everything, seemed to be an alert and spontaneous woman, the realisation travelled all the way to Jacob, as he grew older, that she was actually two women. It was no more than a suspicion, a that-must-be-it, but he barely doubted it and his last doubt fled when he was woken one Saturday evening by banging and clattering and left his bed, with a mixture of unease and curiosity, to seek the source of the noise.

      Upstairs everything was in darkness, and downstairs too, where the sitting-room door was open and the coals behind the mica window of the stove spread an orange glow. He opened the door of the kitchen and found nothing and no one. Finally he went, shivering on his bare feet, down the tiled corridor to the shoemaking workshop and the shop behind it.

      In the workshop the faint light of a carbon-filament bulb still burned. The yellowish glimmer was a broad ribbon in the chink of the door. He laid his head against the doorpost, his heart thumping on the hard wood, and looked inside. On the workshop floor, in a white petticoat with big black stains, his mother knelt, her opulent dark hair loose, her face smeared. Her husband towered high above her, arms folded, face frozen. Suddenly, he must have shuffled or pushed against the door, perhaps it was his breathing, he saw his father’s back straighten. In a single motion he reached the door, threw it open and pulled the boy inside by his arm. ‘So,’ he said, setting Jacob down in front of him, hands heavy on his shoulders. ‘So, take a look, if you’re so curious. Look how your mother clears away her mess.’ Jacob tugged and pulled, but his father held him firmly in place, as his mother smiled at him as if none of it were of any importance, a little joke between husband and wife, and went on imperturbably with her work. He could do nothing but watch, even though he didn’t want to be there. Slowly, as he let his gaze rest on his mother and felt his father’s hands on his shoulders, he felt a distance within him, as if he was two people, one that watched and one that wasn’t there, didn’t belong there. It was just like the time his grandfather had slumped forward into his bowl of chicken soup, and he registered everything, perceived everything in a strangely distant way without really feeling part of it: Heijman banging his spoon into his bowl, his mother rubbing her mother’s wrists with vinegar, his father flying out of the door, and his grandfather’s slack corpse, the crown of white hair around his gleaming head, hanging backwards in his chair, swirls of vermicelli still in his face. He saw everything. Everything happened. But without him.

       Chapter 4

      So, eyeswideopen, in his bed, staring into the circle of light, Jacob Noah remembers his mother. Rosa, who was mockingly known as ‘Baroness von Münchhausen’ by her husband, because she had truly dragged the shoe shop out of the morass by her own hair. Rosa, who read to Jacob and Heijman in the evening, sitting between them in their bed and so tired that she sometimes fell asleep with the boys, one in each arm. Here, in the night-nightly warmth of pillows and blankets, Jacob Noah remembers the smell of her full hair that slipped from her bun and flowed in a cataract over her shoulders, the vague hint of eau de cologne at her neck, her irregular, superficial breathing. And the scent of her clothes in the warm bed, clothes in which the hours of the day had left their traces: leather, beeswax, coffee, her skin. It’s a confusing dizziness of smelt memories which, although he doesn’t know this yet, will visit him more often here in his bed than he would like. Yes, when he bends over the laces of a woman’s corset to fit it. And when he bumps into a young employee putting her hair up in the toilets. When he helps a mother who comes along with her daughter to buy her first bra (by now the shop is the biggest lingerie shop in the whole province) and she bends down to whisper something in Noah’s ear and from her thick brown hair, from the soft patches on either side of her throat, from her clothes, something escapes that goes to his head so powerfully that he has to apologise, before stumbling stiffly to the staff toilets to splash his face with cold water from the basin. Later, much later, when he is grown up and successful, he will become a man of myths and legends, someone to whom indescribable sexual proclivities and dark machinations are attributed, but by then he will have