In a Dark Wood

by Marcel Moring

  He nods.

  ‘Mind if I watch?’

  He picks up his razor and inspects it.

  ‘If you want to be alone I’ll go and get on with something. Make a salad or something. Or light a nice candle.’

  Somewhere in the house a wild screech goes up, a woman’s voice calls something, someone roars with laughter. He takes off his jacket and pulls up his shirtsleeves.

  ‘If you can bear to see me shaving you can stay,’ he says.

  She crouches down until she’s sitting on the threshold, her back against one doorpost, her feet against the other.

  He turns on the tap and mixes the warm water with cold. He pulls down the collar of his shirt and washes his face and neck. When he has finished, he turns off the cold-water tap, puts the razor in the basin and holds his shaving brush in the steaming stream of hot water. He opens a black tin and stirs the brush around in it. When he has made enough foam, he begins to lather himself. A cloudy white beard slowly appears on his jaws. He puts the brush on the basin, takes the razor, juts his chin and begins to draw long trails in the snowy landscape of his cheeks.

  The bell rings. Someone walks through the hall and opens the front door. A ball of surprised screeches rolls through the house.

  ‘Fred and Li Mei, late as usual,’ says Kat. She watches him shaving again, this time from bottom to top. ‘Do you always do that, twice?’

  ‘I’ve got a thick beard,’ he says.

  ‘Hormones,’ she says hoarsely. She puts on the sort of voice that announces a new film in the cinema: ‘He is alone. He has a task. He has twenty-four hours to achieve his goal. Coming soon to a theatre near you: Marcus Kolpa, the movie.’

  He stops shaving. ‘Kat…’

  She waves her left hand dismissively.

  He rinses his razor and lays it on the basin. He bends forward, makes a little bowl of his hands, lets it fill with water and hides his face in it. When he has rinsed and dried himself he dabs his cheeks with lotion.

  ‘It’s a job in itself,’ she says. ‘You underestimate that, as a woman. You always think you have to do so much yourself so as not to look like an old boot, but…’

  The bell rings again. Someone calls: ‘I’ll go.’

  He runs his hands through his hair and straightens his shirt.

  ‘Why do we take so much trouble to look good?’ she says.

  ‘Kat…’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  He goes and sits on the bed and rubs his eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Courtship? I don’t take that much trouble. I’ve been shaving every day, since…since I was fifteen. I don’t want to be handsome. I’m not handsome.’

  ‘You’re not unattractive.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No, seriously.’ She stands up and takes a pack of Gauloises out of her skirt pocket. She offers him one and looks for a light. ‘There’s something…civilised about you. A gentleman. No sex.’

  ‘So that’s what it is.’

  ‘Don’t you miss it?’

  ‘Who says I don’t get any?’

  Kat offers him a light. She inhales deeply and blows the smoke towards the ceiling, which is decorated with plaster Virginia creeper.

  ‘What are we talking about?’ he says.

  She looks at him innocently.

  ‘I’m wondering: is this a topic of conversation, or are we having fun, because if we’re having fun I’d like to know. Then I’ll have fun, too.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a boring conversation?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘Fred’s being unfaithful,’ she says.

  ‘Fred? How do you know?’

  ‘Because Li Mei says so.’

  He looks up and stares at her for a long time. He rubs his chin. ‘We talked about it once when they’d been married for a year or two. He said: I wouldn’t dare be unfaithful, Li Mei says it’ll drop off if I do.’

  ‘Our Fred.’ She knocks her ash into the basin. ‘Clearly someone’s told him in the meantime that it isn’t true.’

  Through the window they see Isaac walking across the courtyard. He goes and sits on the whitewashed water tank and stares straight ahead.

  ‘Christ,’ says Kat. ‘I’ll have to help. Chaja and Ella are alone in the kitchen, and of course those pricks don’t lift a hand, as usual.’

  ‘Li Mei helps. We sit here and talk every year. You’ve never been in the kitchen. It’s the same as every year.’

  ‘I’m a bad woman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Did you and whatsherface split up because you were like a mirror most of the time or because you were impotent?’

  ‘I thought that was last year’s question.’

  She smiles. She glances sideways at the mirror, and rearranges her ponytail slightly. ‘God, I’m getting old,’ she says.

  ‘We’re all getting old, Kat. Old and tired.’

  ‘Would you have thought ten years ago that we’d be sitting here? No one lives here any more, apart from me. Look what’s become of us: me in middle-aged clothes, you in your suit. Fred the manager!’

  ‘Oh, yes, Fred as a manager.’

  ‘Ella the stewardess?’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Isaac the vicar?’

  ‘Never doubted it for a moment.’

  Kat nods. ‘And me a lesbian,’ she says.

  ‘That’s not a career.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  She looks at her reflection, then at his, behind her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Marcus. ‘We’re old, older at any rate, and we feel a little bit guilty. People in their thirties. Worrying about the environment and violence and all the politically correct nightmares of our time.’

  ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Li Mei is Asian. We’re OK.’

  ‘Li Mei…You a lesbian, Chaja and me Jewish. What more do we need?’

  She thinks for a minute. ‘Isaac is a believer.’

  He shakes his head. ‘And he’s gay. And anyway: theologians aren’t religious.’

  ‘Fred and Li Mei have children.’

  ‘Christ…Yes.’

  They look at each other for a moment.

  ‘And you and I are poets,’ she says finally.

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘You should sleep with Chaja,’ she says.

  Marcus frowns and shakes his head. ‘Sometimes I don’t quite follow you,’ he says.

  ‘You not shag, you not write. You shag, you write.’

  He sniffs and looks at his shoes. ‘Once, ten years ago, I wrote a poem. Since then: zip. Now I’m old and no longer promising.’

  ‘In your thirties, Marcowitz, you’re thirty.’

  ‘Thirty-two, and all that time, since my last poem, I’ve kept myself alive by thinking. I’m not a poet. I’m a thinker.’

  ‘That’s one of the loveliest pleonasms I’ve heard this week. Christ.’

  ‘Is that a pleonasm? And by the way, what the hell has Chaja got to do with it? I only left whatshername…’

  ‘…over two years ago, Mr Kolpa. And what’s a bad relationship these days? One marriage in three breaks up. What am I saying: one in two! And I’m not even talking about other relationships. Deferred sex, that’s what I’m concerned about, the deferred sex between you and Chaja.’

  Footsteps ring out on the tiles in the long corridor. Echoing, the sound comes closer. They both look at the doorway. Chaja appears. Her eyes shift to him and then, rather quickly, to Kat. ‘We’d like to put a few things out, but the cellar door’s locked,’ she says.

  ‘Hello, madam. Marcus Kolpa. Pleased to meet you.’

  She blushes. ‘Hello, Marcus,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

  Kat takes a last drag on her cigarette and flicks the butt into the basin. She salutes in his direction and walks out of the room behind Chaja.

  Marcus stands up and puts his cigarette out under the tap. He fishes Kat’s stub from the basin and throws it, with his, out of the window l
ooking onto the courtyard, into the little garden, overgrown with black cherry, which must long ago have been a proper kitchen garden, but after lying fallow for many years has taken matters into its own hands. Isaac is already busy setting out the chairs and tables. Fred stands on a wobbly set of kitchen steps, stretching an awning between the walls. He looks down, towards Marcus, and grins. Marcus waves, shuts the window and pulls the semi-transparent yellow curtain shut. He puts his bag on the ground, strokes his jacket smooth and goes and lies on the bed. With his hands folded in front of his chest and completely stretched out, legs straight beside each other, he looks like a freshly laid-out corpse, and he knows that. He shuts his eyes and as he hears the voices of the guests outside, and the light dims even more, he lets the needle of his inner compass come to rest.

  In the distance there is the sound of rattling crockery, voices echo, someone laughs.

  He is in Kat’s house.

  ‘I hate Fred,’ says Chaja.

  When Isaac looks round he sees Chaja’s face brightening faintly in the deep gloom of the kitchen.

  They are standing at the window looking out. In the courtyard, lit by a string of bulbs, in dilapidated garden chairs, between the flaking light-blue wall of Kat’s house and the moss and algae-covered walls of the factory to the rear of the courtyard, sit their friends. It isn’t yet ten o’clock and Fred is, as he is every year, drunk. In about an hour someone will carry him in, lay him on the bed and hold his hand until he falls asleep. At about twelve o’clock he’ll come back, as he does every year, guilty and pale, to spend the rest of the night sitting there like a little boy who is visibly shaken by his punishment. But now he is still standing on the wooden garden bench in front of the paint-flaked kitchen window, singing. He waves out the beat with his right arm and bawls out the song that made him famous in their student days and has in the intervening years become a source of vicarious shame. Above him the orange awning glows in the light of the bulbs. In the imitated accent of a torch singer from the Jordaan, like an Amsterdam tenore Napolitano, Fred sings out his memories of the time when he was still a ‘crazy guy’. Tears trickle down his cheeks, his Adam’s apple bobs as he tries to swallow back his maudlin emotion.

  The smile of a child

  tells you you’re alive,

  the smile of a child

  with its life yet to come…

  Li Mei lowers her head and looks at the round tabletop. Her hands lie in her lap, exactly as they did last year, when she was eight months pregnant, the year before that, when she wasn’t pregnant, and the year before that, when she first came along with Fred. On the other side of the courtyard Marcus and Kat are sitting on the lid of the rectangular water tank. They have a bottle of white wine in between them, glasses in their hands, and they are looking at the picture under the awning. Jenny and Ella are sitting at the table with Li Mei. Isaac, enveloped in a thin cloud of cigar smoke, is standing with Chaja in the dark kitchen.

  Everything is still the same.

  Most of them weren’t born here. Their parents came to live here a long time ago because they were working for the oil company or had some other good career. That’s always been the reason why people came here, because they had a training. In the town itself, in the whole province, there is not a school of any significance, which is why the upper middle class of the place consists entirely of ‘imported goods’, as the locals bitterly call them. Fred, Li Mei, Marcus, most of them are the children of those imported goods, and even though some of them were born here, they’re still seen as strangers. Their customs more liberal, their parents richer, most of them see the town not as an island in a hostile world, but as a prison of peace and conventionality and stagnation. And almost all of them have moved away: to go and study, to go and work, to live. But they all come back, too, all to Kat’s place, just as they used to come to hers because her house was the only place to go to. During their student days they left their suitcases and their dirty clothes at their parents’ house, kissed the family and cycled to Gymnasium-straat, where Kat sat working at the round table in her kitchen. There they swung open the fridge door as if it was their own fridge and when the beer ran out they put the last of their money together to buy a new crate. And Kat just sat at the table, in that vast kitchen, writing poems. None of them could remember ever seeing her with a textbook. No one knew what she had studied.

  The house is old and stands in the centre. It’s the kind that well-to-do parents buy for their student children, a house where the lights go out in the evening because there’s been another short circuit and the cellar fills up when it rains for a long time, a house that twenty years later seems to be worth a bit of money. Before Kat, an old lady had moved in with her husband in 1904, apparently immune to interior decoration. Consequently, and because Kat was at first too poor and then too lazy to change anything, everything is still, as an intrusive estate agent once put it, ‘in its original condition’. Although the decorated ceiling is flaking and the coloured tiles in the long corridors are dull and there is no source of warmth but a gas heater in the kitchen and the Danish wood-fired stove that stands in front of the black marble fireplace in the sitting room, right now Kat could ask almost ten times its original price.

  Behind the house lies the courtyard, bordered on one long and one short side by the bedrooms and the kitchen and on the other sides by a coffee-roasting factory and a warehouse. In the summer, from the top floor you can see workmen lying on the roof, their shirts rolled around their bellies, big shoes with gaping tongues beside their heads.

  It’s the place where they meet at least once a year. In the paint-flaked courtyard they celebrate the ‘traditional’ summer party. No one remembers exactly how the party began, but it probably has something to do with the bike races that are held the following day, the last Saturday in June. The evening before it used to be an orgy of violence and drink, stones and shattered shop windows, but sometime halfway through the seventies someone hit on the idea of trying out the old theory of bread and circuses once more, and since then the town on that Friday evening has been a cross between a massive fairground and a German Bierhalle. They, the group of old friends, have turned it into a party of their own.

  Mostly they wait until about nine o’clock, when Ella and Chaja open the fridge and remove the dishes and bowls of prepared meals from their shiny aluminium foil. Meanwhile Kat more or less stares into the void and drinks white wine. That’s the deal: Kat does nothing. Or, as she once wrote in one of her poems:

  It was my party and I could have cried

  if I wanted but I didn’t want to.

  Kat is the oldest, but she isn’t more than two or three years older than the rest. She has always been the centre of the group, but even so the others have never felt she really belonged to it. They came to her house and emptied her fridge, but what she did, what she thought and wanted, no one knew. She had no intimate friends, and no one knew if she sat there waiting. None of them understood why someone like her wrote girly poetry, as she called it herself, or what exactly she meant by it. The fact that the poems were published they all saw, nonetheless, as a collective triumph.

  Previously they all went together into the town to drink and there were, it’s true, all kinds of cross-connections–that one went around with that one, and that one in turn with that one–but at the same time there were people who left each other cold. Chaja, for example, went around only with Marcus and Kat, Fred with everyone apart from Chaja, and Isaac with Fred and Jenny and Marcus and Kat. Ella didn’t go around with anyone, she sat at the table and drank beer. All in all it isn’t such a wonder that they ever came together, but more that after so many years they still meet up.

  Originally started as a party that ushered in the start of the summer and the end of the academic year, their meetings have become those of old friends: the weary shimmer of habit lies over it, a patina of melancholy and surprise at how quickly the time has passed, and all the things that have happened. Unconsciously they know that they a
re sitting together in the courtyard without really belonging together, at least no longer as they used to. They no longer tell each other when they’ve been in love and with whom, and over the course of the years the conversations have become more superficial and the meetings rare. Some fall back, now and again, into their former familiarity, but it never lasts for long. Isaac, who once complained about this to Kat, had suggested that you only tell anyone else something about yourself if you know enough about them: ‘There’s probably a kind of economy of friendship. You only give something if you know you’re going to get something comparable in return.’ And because most of them see each other only once a year, the supply of exchangeable commodities has shrunk to such an extent that by now they are almost strangers.

  But in a sense everything is still the same: the awning, the old courtyard, lit by the string of bulbs that is strung, as every year, between the house and the warehouse, with more bulbs that don’t work every year, drinking, talking, laughing, singing. All exactly as before.

  ‘Why?’ says Isaac. ‘Why do you hate Fred?’

  He sees the white patch of her hand rising towards her face. The wine glass clinks against her teeth.

  ‘Why do you hate Fred?’

  He looks outside again, where Fred steps off the garden bench and with arms spread wide accepts some weary applause. The light that hangs under the awning is yellow and ghostly. The yard looks like an Italian film.

  ‘Because he’s a poseur.’

  ‘What standards are we using here, Chaja?’

  He looks around and sees her moving. She opens the fridge, sticks her hand into the fan of light and pulls the white wine from the bottle rack. She shuts the fridge with her foot and pours a drink for herself and Isaac. She puts the empty bottle on the sink unit and comes with her glass to stand next to him.

  ‘What do you mean, what standards?’

  ‘Marcus. Marcus thinks Fred is a poseur,’ he says.

  ‘So I was right.’

  ‘She sneered bitterly.’

  In the courtyard people laugh at a story that Marcus is telling.

  ‘Have you spoken to Fred yet?’ asks Chaja.