Читать книгу In A Dark Wood - Marcel Moring, Shaun Whiteside - Страница 18

Seven o’clock is the hour when the good people of Assen have finished their dinner, hot dinner, simple, nourishing meals of potatoes, meat and vegetables and semolina pudding with a skin for afters.

But where we are, no one is eating. Here, nothing is consumed but beer.

The Hotel de Jonge is the nodal point in the history of Assen, the place through which all paths lead, a drinking hole in the desert of life, set on a square that doesn’t want to be a square. Off at an angle to the right it is watched, constantly and unmoved, by the law court, an island in the middle of a shapeless lake of lawn (behind it the old jailhouse, so visibly old that many a lawbreaker dreads the wheel and the rack and dark cellars where water seeps down the walls and rats as big as pet dogs shuffle under the simple bench), to the left lies a confluence of streets that is almost a little square. (But the town has no real squares, just attempts in that direction, wide sheets of stone that bear the name, but aren’t: deserted car parks and collisions between streets that have fallen ashamed into each other’s arms as they meet. Just as the town has no statues. Yes, not that far from the Hotel de Jonge, actually the only statue in the town, on the Brink – again, not a square – in a few years a shapeless lump of gingerbread will be placed, a gift from a local manufacturer. It represents a cooper bending over his barrel, but looks more like something left behind by a constipated elephant. It will be placed in the bend of the road and for some miraculous reason no car ever crashes into it.)

The Hotel de Jonge. A sleepy provincial hotel-café-restaurant in a sleepy provincial town.

But not tonight, tonight Assen is the town of towns and we anticipate the night of nights, the night before the TT bike races, yes, this town of roughly forty thousand inhabitants is suddenly four or five times as big, which is to say: four or five times as many people, four or five times as much violence and sex and traffic and at least four hundred times as much beer. In the bar of the Hotel de Jonge the drinkers are already standing shoulder to shoulder, crotch to buttock, face to neck, in the stench of human bodies, beer and smoke all through the room, lined entirely with rustic oak, designed in a style that makes you think of haciendas without really losing the je ne sais quoi which tells you straight away that you are indeed in the deepest provinces. The drinkers shuffle across the endless reddish-brown tile floor that spreads through the bar like a flood of seventies cosiness and is so omnipresent, extending even to the toilets, that one of the younger customers once observed that it’s like drinking in a hollowed-out stone. To the right of the central bar, a big room that can be separated off with a beige folding door, and on the left the breakfast room, again behind a little barrier for special events. All crammed full of drinkers.

In the middle of the building rises the staircase, all in brown-painted wood. It leads to seventeen rooms almost all of which were booked a year ago by journalists, one or two racing fans, the manager of a racing driver and, the smallest small room, at the end of the long corridor, by Marcus Kolpa.

In the main bar, that hole of wood and tiles, the landlord buys off the first fight of the evening with a free round of beer and the servility disguised as affability that is his trademark. The floor is already wet, the windows are misted up. The waitress, who has just been goosed by a jolly German, causing her to drop her tray, making the floor even wetter than before with glass that now crunches under the biker boots, the waitress is now sitting in the kitchen on a crate of white bread rolls crying her eyes out. Everything is fine, everything is as it should be, the till tinkles so unceasingly that it sounds like music.

Ah, there is so much pleasure and merriment, such loud affirmation of the free-market economy (and that in these difficult times of deep financial crisis!), that a vitality, you might even call it an ‘atavism’, hovers in the air, so tangible that you could almost cut it with a knife. And that’s why it isn’t even slightly strange when Marcus, washed and perfumed now, black-suit-white-shirt, his unruly dark hair wet along the temples, makes his entrance and a loud voice rings out from the densely packed crowd: ‘A vicar!’ Out rings the generous bellow of simple people who enjoy simple jokes. He looks questingly around. He raises one eyebrow, ignores the landlord’s apologetic smile and immediately dashes outside, pausing for a moment like a ship leaving a stormy harbour and powering up its engine before breaking through the waves.

Outside it’s packed with people. In spite of the weather, a cool evening, just about to rain, the terrace is packed with drinkers. But Marcus cleaves through the turbulence, slaloms, swings, weaves his way through the crowd, turns blindly off to the right, strides onwards on his long tall legs and doesn’t come to rest until fifty metres on, when he runs aground in a new crowd formed by a throng of evangelical bikers, a leather-clad army of the Lord gliding like a flight of black angels on their Harleys and Hondas and Ducatis and Yamahas and BMWs along the Brink and past the law court, watched by dense rows of cheering passers-by.

To the left, on the trampled grass of the Brink, a heaving, whooping crowd throngs around a mechanical bull. To the right, people are frolicking in front of a big tent where as they wait for the band a kind of music is being played which Marcus can only describe as ‘farmers’ rock’. Someone falls through a shop window. Two straggly adolescents climb the roof of the tent and slide down the slope of the canvas. A biker girl pulls her leather jacket open and shows her swelling breasts to a ring of leather-clad youths (a surprisingly large number of them in clogs).

And everywhere noise, the smell of fat and meat and stale beer.

Marcus shuts his eyes and tries to find a still point.

The world.

The world he lives in.

The world of the people who ask him how far he’s got in the dictionary, the world that thinks he’s an arrogant tosser because he knows the meaning of the word ‘solipsist’.

The world of humanity, evolution, the lobe-finned creatures that crept onto land, reptiles that climbed into the trees, thinking monkeys, stone axes, fire, iron, bronze, steam, atom.

The world of God’s own pet.

And in spite of his furious attempts to find rest and clarity and light, Marcus thinks: Lord … Pitch and brimstone. Now!

He closes his eyes, feels everything rotating around him, feels himself in the middle of that rotation, a motionless object, a still centre.

A pillar of salt in the guilty landscape, in the hubbub and the smoke and the rubbish of that town that the Lord has overthrown just as he once overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

He actually does look like a vicar. Even now, when real rain is finally falling from the sky and many people are seeking shelter under shop awnings, tents and the dense crowns of the tall oaks on the Brink. Even now, when there seems to be no particular call for formal clothing and the whole place is emptying around him and he is the only one left in the square in front of the Brink, even now he still looks like a preacher. One of the itinerant kind, admittedly, a wanderer without a congregation, but a preacher nonetheless.

While he is actually a poet.

Oh, yes, they may think he’s a stern preacher and laugh at him and mock him behind his back, they can call him both a poof and a Don Juan, a Jew and a vicar, they know that he’s a poet and not just any old poet, not one of your club-footed rhyming dialect verse-makers, not some paedophile absolving himself in a linguistically defective village mumble, whacking himself off onto paper as he sits at his oak desk thinking of the bony girls’ knees under summer cotton dresses or sturdy scouts’ legs in greasy corduroy trousers. No. And he certainly isn’t the man for affable farce and three doors and five cupboards in which Harm hides himself to watch Albert bending his neighbour’s wife Jantien over the dining table in the front parlour and teaching her to see the stars.

He’s a real poet.

Albeit the poet of a single poem.

But let’s forget that poem and concentrate on the figure in black standing there in the rain. Soon he will walk on, he will go round the corner and into Torenlaan.

Look, there he goes. He has just lifted his face to the sky and tasted a drop or two, or three, on his lips and in them the faint perfume of petrol. Now he carries on walking. Past the low houses of the Brink, off to the right, around the corner, pacing like a swimmer in shallow water, head slightly bent, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of his trousers and a smoking Gauloise in the right-hand corner of his mouth. Right into Torenlaan, where he meets a real tidal wave coming towards him, because the motorbike acrobats are taking a break and Torenlaan is emptying out into the expanse of the Brink. Propelled by the mass, pushed forward and aside, he hobbles clumsily back past the houses, the pensioners’ club, what used to be the youth club, beneath which there is said to be a secret passageway that runs from the monastery to a place far outside the town; on and on into the narrow Kloosterstraat, where a raggedy group bound whooping for the funfair picks him up entirely against his will with the generosity of people enthusiastically putting into practice the concept of the more the merrier. Two young women have linked arms with him and to the amusement of the party they guide him through the streets that lead zigzagging to the grounds of the old cattle market where, as every year, the funfair has been set up. His resistance is feeble. No more than a sputtered mumble.

‘But …’

And: ‘Ladies …’

And: ‘I’ve got to …’

The truth is that it’s all for the best that a choice has been made for him. Under his own steam he would never have gone in that direction.

What do we find, this Friday evening, between the haunted house, the big wheel and the cakewalk?

All the people.

Everyone.

Goddamned Everyman.

That’s what we find at the funfair, the epicentre of excitement, sensation and adventure, the spot where hundreds of marriages have begun and at least as many ended and where enough black eyes are delivered to fill a whole village.

The whole known world starts the night here, ends it here, or at least wanders about here for a few minutes.

The spot, you might say (and Marcus does say, although inaudibly and with distaste) to find what he’s looking for.

In the distance, as they turn the corner – Oostersingel, Java-straat – the roar of the music thunders up and the big illuminated wheel circles above the roofs and as they go on walking, nearly running, he meets Berte and Anne, or Anne and Berte, calling them after half a minute Anneberte, because they finish each other’s sentences like a kind of female Huey, Dewey and Louie. Ahead of them walk four guys wearing the high street’s response to the rage of punk. Hands in their pockets, at least when they aren’t bumping into each other, grabbing hold of each other, pushing each other away, in short: when they aren’t bounding along the street like adolescent chimpanzees.

And then suddenly the fountain of coloured light and distorted sound that is the funfair looms up ahead of them: flat-trodden straw on the muddy paths, groups of young men around the crane machines and couples with their arms around each other in the Octopus. A ballet of yellow, red, blue and green light sweeps through the evening air. Fragments of top-ten hits mingle with the noise of sirens, bells, klaxons and the shrieking of hundreds of excited girls. It smells of the cinnamon of cinnamon sticks, the sickly petticoat scent of candyfloss, the blue oily smoke of the fat-fryer and the wet-clothes odour of beer. Everything spins and sways and grinds and goes up and down. It’s almost too much. No, it is too much.

They’re standing in what can barely still be called an open space, the ghost house to their left, above their heads the bright halo of the big wheel and people everywhere.

‘The Polyp!’ cry Anneberte, as they drag him in the direction of something that looks like an apparatus in which trainee cosmonauts in far-off Baikonur get their G-force baptism.

‘Not a hope,’ says Marcus.

‘The ghost house!’ they cry and cast him coaxing glances.

‘No such thing as ghosts,’ says Marcus.

Two frowns are directed at him.

The Apollo 2000, then?

The Matterhorn?

The Caterpillar?

‘Let’s go …’ said Marcus, and he lets his eyes wander over the brightness, the sparkle, the flicker, the glimmer and gleam, before letting them come finally to rest on an inconspicuous little tent, deep dark blue with an eight-sided roof adorned with clumsily cut-out astrological signs. ‘Let’s go to the fortune-teller.’

And despite their sceptical expressions they join him and reel past the crane machines, the tent with cinnamon sticks and the candyfloss stall. The big wheel turns, shrieks come from the chair-o-plane, the air rifles of the shooting gallery splutter and somewhere the hammer hits the test-your-strength machine and the bright TING! of the bell rings out.

‘Here it is …’ say Anneberte, ‘… pitch dark.’

‘Secrets lie in darkness, ladies,’ says Marcus and he parts the heavy cloths that form the entrance to the tent and leads them into the deep gloom. ‘Won’t you take me to … funky toooown …’ sings a voice on one side, and on the other: ‘I want you … to want me.’

And then, just before they are plunged into darkness and the fabric sarcophagus swallows them up, Marcus sees a gaunt figure. He is dressed in the dead beige of a lifelong civil servant and stands motionless in the pulsing light of an enormous merry-go-round.

‘Marcooooo …’ whine Anneberte. ‘Come onnnn …’

But Marcus, halfway through the canvas, the quiet darkness behind him and the pulsing festival of light in front of him, looks at Filthy Frans, the narrow little shoulders in the putty-coloured jacket, the inevitable bag lying crookedly across his chest, the dull, bald head with nothing above the ears but fluffy grey tufts. Filthy Frans is staring at a mechanical octopus, its arms an orgy of different coloured lights flickering on and off and at the end of the arms little cars with people sitting in them. They shriek, their pale faces shoot by in a blur. The man standing there is completely lost in what is happening. Then, as if he feels that someone is spying on him, he suddenly jerks around. His head twitches back and forth, as if he is systematically reading the surroundings, and almost without transition he shrugs his shoulders, pulls the bag tighter to his chest and moves in an agitated step, hopping so as not to run, into the dense throng.

‘Maaaarcoooo …’

Four hands drag him in, slip under his jacket, twist fingers through his hair and lead him down a bloodstream-red illuminated fabric tunnel. And Marcus, a child of the Freudian age, thinks what he must think.

‘Fifteen guilders for a palm-reading and twenty-five for a complete forecast.’ Madame Zara’s tone is at its weariest. She switches on the lamp that stands in the middle of the table and clearly stands in for the crystal ball. An absent expression and the red curls escaping from under her headscarf suggest that this evening she got herself ready in a hurry.

‘Five …’

‘Ten?’

Call Anneberte.

‘Don’t pester, ladies,’ says Marcus. ‘The future can’t be bought for nothing.’ He looks severely at the black-haired one, Anne, and points to the table. ‘You go first.’ Her intuitive protest turns into a melting smile when he doesn’t avert his eyes and she quickly sits down at the flowery tablecloth, lays her hand next to the lamp and inhales so deeply that it looks as if she’s about to undergo a deep medical examination.

It’s a tent, but that’s not how it seems. The space they occupy doesn’t look like a … space. It’s a time. It’s a red time, a time that consists of rags and cloths and has no entrance or exit. As he looks around, Marcus tries to discover how he got in, the whereabouts of the glowing red tunnel that made him think of the birth canal, but he doesn’t see a thing.

Anne gets to her feet and strides solemnly towards him and Berte sits down at the table and stares so intensely at the lamp standing in for the crystal ball that Marcus fears for a moment that it’s going to explode.

What he would like, here in this little red tent at the funfair, is a fortune-teller who wouldn’t predict his future, but would instead explain his past. He would like to come in here, sit down and see in the milk-white mist of the glass bowl how he got here and what happened to get him here, the whole journey undertaken up to this moment, further back, to before his birth, when there wasn’t yet a town here, just a dry patch among the bogs, and long before that, when the megalithic farmers hunted and built their big stone tombs, yes, to the creation of the world.

‘You too, sir?’

Anneberte look at him. The fortune-teller looks at him.

‘You too?’

‘Me too,’ he says, and as he sits down at the table he is overcome by a feeling of exhaustion that doesn’t suit the time of day, which he knows only from long ago, when he had Pfeiffer’s disease and spent a month, longer even, in bed and thought he would never be able to summon the courage to get up and take the first step, and the second … He sighs a sigh that makes his whole body groan.

‘Is there something special you would like to know?’

Marcus raises his head, looks across the lamp into her absent brown eyes and smiles a crooked smile.

‘The past, madam,’ he says, ‘can you do anything with it?’

It’s a question which, he can tell from the fortune-teller’s perplexed expression, he would have been better off not asking.

‘A joke,’ he says. ‘The red light suggests that humour is in the air.’

Behind him the girls shuffle.

He smiles again and fixes an inviting look upon the oracle.

Only later on, when they are standing outside once more and the fury of the world of the funfair washes around them, only then will it occur to him how the fortune-teller looked up at him when she took his hand in hers. Not that she saw anything in the lines that cross the glowing landscape of his palm. Nothing but the nicotine stain on the inside of his middle finger, at any rate, the vague scar on the tip of his thumb, perhaps, the calm structure of shallow folds as it appears in the palm of a reasonably healthy man in the prime of life. Nothing but that, no. But she sat up, slowly raised her head, and looked at him meditatively. As if she wanted to say, in the good old fortune-telling tradition: What brings you here, stranger, what long road have you travelled? And for a moment, as they stand there outside the tent, he and the girls and all that noise and light and the movement around him, for a moment he remembers that he had given her unasked question a thoughtful answer: I have returned, madam, I have travelled the world and now I am in Ithaca. But he had said nothing. He had sat down as limply as a neglected house plant at the table with the flower-patterned cloth and the round lamp, his clammy hand on the dry, slightly wrinkled palm of the fortune-teller, his thoughts like falling drops of water in his head, her oracular words evaporating in his ears.

I see a dark manwomanstranger. A rich and healthy life. And long. Many children. Prosperity.

He had felt the nail of her index finger running lightly over the lines in his palm. Manicured. Severely varnished. Filed, polished, undercoat, and then the glistening blood drop to finish it off.

Like Chaja used to do.

A performance he had never been able to take his eyes off: When She Does Her Nails. With Mathematical Precision.

The haughtily waving hand letting the varnish dry. A claw. After clawing. Blooddripping.

The vague tingle of dark excitement that ran through his belly.

Blood.

Claw.

If this Madam Thing really did read his hand.

‘You will marry twice. Or rather: you will have a family twice. Twice two children, I see.’

Old bullshit.

‘The life line heralds a fine old age. Eighty-three.’

As if he’s going to ask for his money back if he dies of lung cancer at fifty-two.

‘You’re a wandering soul. You move house a lot. Very …’

A vague feeling of unease now.

‘… alone.’

Oh, Christ.

‘In the light of eternity we are all alone, madam,’ he had said.

She had glanced up and looked at him for the first time with eyes that were bright and alert.

‘I meant alone in the sense of lonely,’ she said gently.

He had returned her gaze by staring at her expressionlessly. Then he got up, nodded, smiled, laid the money on the table and said airily, as light as candyfloss: ‘Thank you. Now I’m going to celebrate my long life and enjoy the brief hour of freedom granted me on the eve of my two marriages.’

Towards the edge of the funfair grounds lies the big dodgems tent. It’s there that the youth of the village hang out. A throng of young people swarms around the tent, each waiting for a free car in which he can steer with his left hand as he puts his right arm around her shoulder. Marcus suddenly wonders if this is all a conspiracy, if the little cars are intended for rebellious adolescents to get them used to life as daddy and mummy, and the glass boxes of the crane machines, filled with plastic watches and cheap metal rings, to make them familiar with the idea that eternal fidelity is fixed by the giving of presents. Father bird brings a twig, mother tidies the nest. The haunted house: where she is supposed to be afraid and he, without danger to his own life, can act the hero. The test-your-strength machine … The shooting gallery … He shakes off the thoughts.

They walk, arm in arm again, along the straw path. At the dodgems Anne and Berte plunge into the queue at the counter and Marcus listens to the music.

Don’t bring me down.

No no, no no, no no, no no, no, ooh ooh.

The deep black water of the canal.

Suddenly he thinks of the canal behind the funfair. It’s an image that stands before his eyes like a rock-solid black-and-white photograph. He has no idea why.

No plan to drown myself this evening, he thinks.

Still black water motionless between the banks of the canal. Low-roofed houses.

Down, down, down, down, down.

I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor,

don’t bring me down.

Anne and Berte have disappeared into the swarming crowd queuing for the ticket desk.

A bell rings, the dodgems come to a standstill, and suddenly the floor of the tent is a mêlée of people storming in and out and others who want to get in. The speakers under the roof roar out a new song.

Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this!

This is the heavy heavy monster sound,

the nuttiest sound around.

So if you’ve come in off the street

and you’re beginning to feel the heat …

Around a bright-red car, somewhere in the left-hand corner, two young men start pulling at each other. Their girlfriends are screaming at each other. Staff come running.