Читать книгу In A Dark Wood - Marcel Moring, Shaun Whiteside - Страница 16

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 at the bright-red handkerchief draped over the lamp in front of her while she acts 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 equals rape, a notion that isn’t even one of the more extreme declarations, because there are even among new feminists some who consider that penetrative sex is an act of violence and therefore, and because of the more general oppression of women, declare themselves ideologically lesbian.)

Is Marcus, then, for want of erotic amusements, watching a German channel showing some rather risqué dance?

Not that either.

Figure skating, perhaps, the comfort for the eyes of older men who have gone too long without the sight of young women’s full buttocks?

It isn’t the season for that.

No, Marcus Kolpa is on his knees jerking off to the early-evening news, his face close to the screen, his right hand resolutely clutching his legendary dick, jacket open and trousers around his ankles.

The man who knows everything about German literature from between the wars, pre-Renaissance painting and early industrial machinery, the man with a brilliant future behind him, is kneeling here, we might well say devoutly, in front of the television news. The veins swell at his temples. His perspiration (Marcus Kolpa would never say ‘sweat’) trickles along his temples and down the stiff collar of his shirt.

He isn’t the only one perspiring. It’s hot under the lamps of the television studio as well. The lady newsreader’s hair sags slightly and hangs in tired, heavy tendrils around her pancaked face, making her big grey-blue eyes, those weary, sympathetic eyes, look even bigger and more tired and sympathetic and her face even paler, her alabaster cheeks and her lipsticked mouth even more gentle and understanding, and he, knees hurting, brings his face close to her face, so close that he sees her mouth disintegrate into grains, her eyes dissolve in the grey of the picture lines, her skin a haze of electrons, he rests his forehead against the cool screen, where her forehead is, close to her, licks the dust from her face, her whole face, the whole screen, as she finishes off the financial summary, the ailing national budget, the rising interest rates and falling growth figures, the decline in purchasing power, new mass redundancies, and he looks for her pupils, as if he could look through them, through the pupils, behind the pancaked image, and see the woman who wakes up in the morning on smiling sheets the perspiration between her breasts the pillows that kiss her cheeks and … God yes to kiss her there between her breasts to lick her salty cleavage as he is now licking the screen her grainy eyeshadow the wings of her nose God that and that voice originating in her throat so full his name fuck me everywhere Marcus fuckmeeverywhere Jesus-painknees your servant lady or rather in her suit against the wall and her skirt pulled up and notherenotnow oh when long ago at a student party and her looking out of the attic window bending over the town looking the undecided isshethinkingwhatimthinking doesshewantwhatiwant her black skirt her white blouse a lady but young still just like him oh Christ the weather sun and rain and low temperatures and everything on go on yes then tipsy already and no longer entirely master of what raged and stirred and she looked sideways and he looked sideways her dark eyes so big and moist and her hair in a ponytail the short distance between them … ah … a space of unspoken thoughts and will and … suddenly the firework that exploded outside dripping fiery flowers of rockets and firecrackers and his hand doing what he himself didn’t want to do and rested on her neck pulled her roughly to him lips that sought and opened and found each other but didn’t kiss just feverishly touched skin felt other lips but not the kiss no and still that hand on her neck that guided her clasped her turned her to face the windowsill head-first out of the window his other hand on her hip clawing at the fabric of her skirt that tugged her skirt up and the hand on her neck forcing her forward and the other hand pulling her panties down … God … his sword his member his hardasahammer lifted into her … and the fading light of the firework behind the windows which also burst the soap bubble of his imagination and he and she looked at each other faintly smiled hello you here too yes me too … his slight hesitation at the thought of the vision that had seemed so real that he was afraid that she had seen the lust in his eyes.

Think about something else. Just think about something else. No laundry service in this hotel. Not that it matters. If they had one they’d bring your shirts back boiled to bits and ironed till they shone. The Hilton in, what was it … Oh, with those terrific sandwiches with spicy chicken and brie with cranberries. A Chinese wash house that did the laundry. Shirtssocksboxers came back as if they had personally received the attention of a direct descendant of a thousand-year race of Washermen from the Upper Mandarin, washed with Confucian precision in clear spring water from Szechuan, ironed with a silver iron and … There she is again her pancaked face her deep emotional voice her big eyes like pools of desperate desire or desiring desperation, chat with the weatherman, people’s endless obsession with the weather, probably uncertainty about what to wear the following day dungarees or C&A, nother-notshe, in her pastel suits, her chintzily gleaming stockings, her suede shoes which he, provided that they were new and not worn out, so wished to lick just as he, yes, there she is, yearned to my girl lollipop lick from head to toe, tongue in her ear her throat her eyes.

lady no one so

devoted to you no one who in the summary

of today’s news has so kissed your throat

the gently beating pale blue vein thumping

in your throat thumping lifted up and your legs wrapped

around me and locked behind my back

because never before no one who so

understands you so devoted so wants

to vanish inside you dissolve until there’s nothing but your eyes

the electronic haze of grey-blue

in your pancaked face the lipstick lips

opening to receive my lips your tongue

venturing to my tongue,

seekingyouandthearmsmyconsolingarms,

the unexpected moist warmth

of

yourmouthyourgodopenyourmouth

comeinmeMarcuscome

inme

in

me

in

And there, at the moment suprême

(because that’s what it is)

Marcus Kolpa hears his sperm hit the screen.