In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

and step-ins in the shop. He remembers the endless days he spent in the hole, the smell of earth, his rooting in the ground, like an animal, the animal that he became more and more each day, and the image of the plundered shop slides over that memory, how he cycled through the town, to the town hall, pleaded and almost implored, and how he was thrown out onto the street; he sees the wet patch in the crotch of AryanBookshopHilbrandts, the barrel of the pistol pressing motionlessly against his temple. His grandfather falling face-first into the chicken soup. His mother having to clear away ‘her mess’. Heijman’s face, which refuses to stay a face in his memory, staying instead a vague blur that he calls his brother. He remembers all that in the good room of the Veenhoeve and he thinks: the order, the fullness.

      And there, among the Ferwerdas’ dark furniture, in the gloomy room, looking out at the abundant sunlight touching the gardens, the maid, the roofs and the walls, Jacob Noah feels like a man at a parting of the ways: a straight, level road to the left, a winding mountain path to the right. Without hesitating for so much as a moment, he makes a decision: order, the straight path, Ferwerda’s room is one way; the full garden, where all is ripe and heavy with fruits, where smells rise from the deep green of plants and herbs and shrubs and colours glimmer in the light, there, outside, where the maid is on her way to the cowshed, her aproned hips swaying under the blue linen, that’s the other one, and that’s the one he will choose.

      Where now is his emotion over the respectable gravity of the God-fearing people of Smilde? Where the grateful humility with which he bought, last Friday, a black bicycle from the Mustang factory? He came to redeem a debt and prove his honour to the farmer who hid him on his land, and now here he is – the sun creeps in and makes the well-scrubbed table smell heavily of wax – here he stands and he knows that he is rejecting the empty fullness of this room and the orderly life of the Ferwerdas and that he will accept the full emptiness of the sunlit world beyond the window. No more humility, no self-renouncing rejection of worldly turmoil. He is alive.

      At the end of the morning, after coffee with aniseed cake, Jacob Noah asks Ferwerda’s daughter to help him put the new bicycle in the barn and show him where he can find some oil and grease. Even before they have reached the green sliding doors he has kissed her and asked her to marry him.

      Later, as they walk back arm in arm to the good room where the Ferwerdas sit surrounded by the smell of beeswax, waiting for the second sermon of the day, he remembers what he was thinking about empty fullness and full emptiness. Where does Jetty Ferwerda belong in that, he wonders, as they crunch down the gravel path that runs along the farmhouse: the order of the Sunday room or the abundant blossoming of the garden? There’s no time to answer that question, because they’re already inside, and Jetty leads him to the Sunday room and he asks her father with a lot of ums and coughing a very different sort of question and after a brief nod gets an answer, after which the maids are called in, who treat Jetty to smacking kisses, and the farmhands suck noisily on the fat cigars that the farmer distributes.

      That afternoon, when Jacob Noah is sitting on the bus to Assen, he looks at the canal that passes slowly by, the cumulus clouds that drift like blobs of whipped cream in the light-blue air.

      The bus stops a few times on the way. A farmer’s wife gets on with two little children, a bent-backed man in a raincoat buttoned up to the neck gets off the bus. A dense shadow hangs under the trees along the canal and here and there the sheltered spots are taken by staring fishermen, most of them alone, just one with a knitting wife sitting beside him on a stool. When they’re about to leave the village, they pass a church where a service is just beginning. A silent row of men and women in black, some holding children by the hand, slowly slide inside through the wide-open door.

      Calm and order and silence. There is so much calm and order and silence that Jacob Noah, leaning his head against a window post, is seized by a kind of asphyxia. He has difficulty finding any oxygen.

      Throbbing, the bus speeds up, the sun flickers between the trees as they glide by. Jacob Noah closes his eyes. Order and chaos. Fullness and emptiness. The words repeat in his thoughts to the rhythm of the low rattle of the bus’s diesel engine. And his breathing joins in. Order, chaos, fullness, emptiness. By the time they arrive at the station in Assen, he is drenched in sweat. His head roars, he is dizzy, his jaws are pressed so rigidly together that his teeth are grinding.

      Outside, in front of the station, he stands for a long time in the sun, as if waiting for a bus that won’t come. Then, once he has calmed down, he walks home through the quiet Sunday town. But still not knowing whether Jetty Ferwerda is one thing or the other. The only image that hovers in his thoughts, and won’t go away, is that of the face of Farmer Ferwerda, his serious, brooding expression, the almost imperceptible frown of his eyebrows, his slight nod and his voice, when he said: ‘My daughter’s hand, Mr Noah? I thought you had come to bring something, but now it seems you have come to take something away.’

      …

      Summer comes and autumn and winter passes and when it is spring, upstairs, in the big bed, in the house above the shop, Jetty Ferwerda lies with her eyes wide open and her legs spread, bringing into the world the child who will be the first of three daughters. It’s a Sunday afternoon, at around six, when Jacob Noah holds out his arms to receive the child, both literally and figuratively, into his hands. The midwife has just turned her back on the bed to take off the doctor’s shoes, which she splashed a few minutes before with boiling hot water when she came into the room with a washtub so heavy that she couldn’t help setting it down so hard that a steaming wave crashed over the rim and drenched Dr Wiegman’s shoes and almost scalded his feet, and as the nurse kneels on the floor in front of the doctor and the doctor sits grimacing on a white leather armchair a torpedo of glistening skin and black hair plastered against the temples appears and before Jacob Noah can think what to do, there are his outstretched arms, his outspread hands and, to his later surprise, a steady gaze fixed upon a new life, and he picks the child up, lays it in a cloth and looks at it with a mixture of bewilderment and happiness that is utterly unfamiliar to him.

      The whole wild hubbub of the world falls still. An explosion of silence fills the room, the house, the square in front of the house, the town and, probably, the whole province of Drenthe. It’s as if cars stop everywhere, cyclists stop cycling, factories creak to a standstill and planets freeze in their orbits. In the folds of the cloth there lies a wet potato. From the potato two black-blue eyes stare at him almost sardonically. ‘Who are you?’ he thinks, before realising that it’s a stupid question and at the same time being overwhelmed by his own voice, which thunders out at full blast.

      ‘A daughter!’ he bellows, so harshly that both child and mother burst into tears.

      The midwife, taking the bundle from his hand, throws him a look of contempt and snips the umbilical. And while the things that have to happen happen and the world resumes its course, cars drive, bicycles bicycle, factories produce and planets rush through space, he stands up, drunk with excitement, exhaustion and joy, and says resolutely: ‘Aphra.’

      His wife stares at him uncomprehendingly.

      Late that evening, when the midwife closes the door gently behind her and goes home on her tall black bicycle, he slips upstairs, to the little room where his daughter is sleeping. On the wall there glows the soft yellow lamp that the midwife had looked at scornfully (‘Day is day, night is night, Mr Noah! Even for children.’) and which he left on nonetheless. In the frail light, no more than the thought of moon and stars and, damn it, the notquitedarkness when he hid in his mother’s dress, he peers into the cradle at the peaceful, empty little face of his child. She no longer looks like a wet potato. On the contrary: she looks like a girl. The worst wrinkles have vanished from her face, her eyelids, small and transparent as bees’ wings, lie calmly together, her mouth is gentle and relaxed. Beside her head there lies a little hand that looks so frail and so pink it scares him. Aphra. He tries to imagine them – him, Jetty Ferwerda (as he still always calls her) and Aphra – coming outside in a few weeks’ time: the child in the pram, his wife in a thin white dress, a family amongst other strolling families. The speckled shadow beneath the trees at the Deerpark, the smell of the forest, the tock of balls against rackets, now and then a car grunting past. He sees them all walking to old Ferwerda’s farmhouse, beside the long canal that lies gleaming