him, in the linen cover of the cradle, the child moves her head. It hurts him to look at her.
When he – it’s past midnight and he a ghost against the darkness – slips into the bedroom, his wife doesn’t even wake up. There is still a vague memory of disinfectant in the dark bedroom, and as he walks to the chair over which he intends to hang his clothes, his left foot lands in the wet patch where the midwife set the washtub down too hard. When he lays his head on the pillow and looks sideways at his sleeping wife, the pain that he felt when he peered at his daughter disappears, only to make way for a new kind of pain. This time it isn’t the rending of a breast full to bursting, a ribcage swelling with pride and joy and, God, an amount of confusions and emotions that he has never known before. Now it is the shrinking pain of emptiness.
He has been a father for barely six hours and now, lying next to his wife in the marital bed, Jacob Noah just feels cold.
…
Only years later, decades later, when he is sitting in his car at nearly six o’clock one Friday evening and feels the warmth of the sinking sun on his face, and the light colours his eyelids red and all around him is still, will he understand the coldness within him. He will then finally understand why he has thought his whole life long that he was not a good man, something that he would probably never have worked out if they had stayed childless, that it was precisely the birth of his first daughter that made him understand that from now on the child would be the only bond that he could have with his wife and that with the two who came after things would just get even worse.
There, in his car, he will remember what he hasn’t remembered his whole life long, between the births of his first child and that moment: watching the doctor on bare red feet helping the midwife weigh the child and tie the navel. He will see himself, the way he looked at his wife who lay glowing with post-natal contentment in the pillows. And he will know again what he thought without knowing then that he thought it: the earth spinning through the universe, human beings like ants, light going on in towns and off in other towns, aeroplanes shooting through the air, trains boring tunnels through the night. Everything.
His wife had opened her eyes – he remembers those many decades later with frightening clarity – and smiled vaguely. As he mechanically returned his wife’s smile, he suddenly knew that he didn’t feel what he was supposed to feel for the mother of his newborn daughter. His mouth had fallen open, his shoulders slumped and he stood bent beneath the burden of his understanding.
‘Will you hold her for a moment, before we give her to your wife?’ the midwife had asked and he had almost shaken his head. He had almost said ‘no’. He had almost said that he might have felt one with creation, the worlds, miss, do you understand that?, but that he had just discovered that he had no feeling for his fellow man and that … insects, miss, people are insects as far as I’m concerned … but then he had held out his arms to take the child and his mouth closed, he felt his shoulders drawing up and his muscles and sinews and blood vessels and skin and … everything stretched and pulled and tensed. He felt a vitality and a power running through his limbs which at the same time surprised him and made him overflow with happiness.
Decades later, that Friday evening at about six o’clock, eyes narrowed to slits in the light of the sun, the familiar grumble of the slowing car, he will remember that and know that he could not love his wife. As his car slides down the slip road of the viaduct and he can suddenly feel the warmth of the sun on his face, he knows that his gains, his conquests and his merits (the businesses, the money, the women, his name in the paper), that all of those things could never be enough to fill the hole in his life, that he only used his wife to bring his children into the world, to fill the emptiness that his mother, his father and Heijman left behind.
There, in the car, the light glides over the windscreen, a sudden memory of a perfume wells up in him, and he knows: everything is nothing.
…
Although in the night after the birth of his daughter he had lain staring a hole in the darkness, brooding over the feeling that he didn’t feel and the feelings that he did feel, in the years that followed another two daughters had come. It had been months before he dared to approach his wife (and that was actually what he had called it in his thoughts: approaching, as if the act itself was an admission of guilt) and when he threw himself on her with a hunger that astonished even him and the sigh of both relief and surprise rose from Jetty Ferwerda’s throat, he became aware of something that he had never known before.
Jetty Ferwerda had been his first girlfriend, and between them it had been just as they could have imagined: beautiful, bright and careful. Now, Jacob Noah brought his guilt with him when he came to her, his actions were shrouded by something that he could only describe as ‘darkness’, through which he lost his sexual innocence and the guilt that he felt increased. The first time after the birth, after months of cautious abstinence, benignly ignoring the yearning looks of his wife, he had taken her like a dark beast. He had dropped a claw on her right breast, pushed her head aside with his and hurled himself on her like a thirsty man finally finding the oasis after days of travel and throwing his whole body into the water.
‘Yaaah …’ said his wife. He didn’t know if she wanted to say his name, if she was encouraging him or losing herself in her own pleasure. Perhaps in that bewildering whirl of animality she was choking back an attempt to say the forbidden name of God. At any rate it had only made him feel more furious. Half raised, staring into eyes cloudy with pleasure, her acknowledgement of an encouraging desire that confirmed his guilt – yaaah, you have to destroy all that is clean and pure because what was clean and pure has been destroyed – he had laid his right hand on her jaw, stretched his thumb over her lips and then suddenly opened those lips and shoved his thumb into her mouth. She had, sucking violently, come. Her pelvis jerked as if she was having an electric shock. Only months later, when Aphra was almost a year old and life had completely resumed its rhythm, did she tell him during a post-coital conversation that it had been her first orgasm. Leaning on his elbow, lying on his side, looking at her in the twilight, he had nodded. She smiled and said: ‘So much love, I’ve never known that.’ He had felt a wave of fresh suffering well up in him and he said: ‘Or so much evil?’ She had turned her head away slightly from him and looked at him from the corners of her eyes, pretending not to understand him. A vague sort of loathing ran through him, then he pushed his hand under her neck and kneaded it gently. ‘Bad things.’ He laid his other hand on her breast, stroked her nipple and then let his hand slide over her belly to her pubic hair. ‘Jacob. No.’ He nodded, as if he had expected as much. ‘I’m the bad man.’ She sighed deeply. ‘The guide to lead you out of Eden.’ She gave a tortured groan. He felt a deep arousal mounting in her, an arousal that fought stubbornly against her resistance to the peculiar things that he was saying. ‘What do you want?’ he said. She shook her head. His hand lay on her mount of Venus, while his fingers played her as if she was an instrument. ‘You don’t want anything?’ She arched her back. ‘Yaaah,’ she said. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. Never before had she been so wet. He pushed a finger inside her, as the tip of his thumb rotated gently around the little button at the top of her vagina. ‘Do …’ She was, close to her climax, barely comprehensible. Suddenly he got up. He gripped her tightly, threw her over until she was half on her knees and with a fluid motion entered her. The pillow smothered her cry. He held her hips in his hands and thrust himself into her. The faint moonlight that pierced the curtains cast a silk-soft gleam on the curves of her backside. ‘What,’ he said, as he slid his hands over her buttocks and stroked the soft skin. ‘What. Do. You. Want?’ He couldn’t hear what she said. Her words were smothered in the pillow. ‘What?’ He let his thumb slide down to where he was going in and out of her and where it was wet from her own moisture. She made a grumbling sound. ‘What … Jetty … Ferwerda …’ She began to shudder. He didn’t know if she was crying or coming. He laid his moist thumb between her buttocks. When she began to scream into the pillow, he understood that she was actually crying and coming at the same time and that he himself was barely present in all that violence.
Bracha was born two years later. She smiled the first time he picked her up. He had never heard that a newborn could do that, and when he said what had happened – the midwife and the doctor were