There are processions of cement mixers, tipper trucks and cranes. And for almost a year the place echoes with the banging of picks, the rattle of drills and the dull thud of sledgehammers. In the midst of all that din and chaos Noah camps out in a bedroom where the plaster dust sticks to his feet when he gets up in the morning. He eats a cheese and dust sandwich and drinks coffee with a powdery skin to the deafening rattle of pneumatic drills and compressors. In the shop, which is shut now because no woman wants to fit a bra surrounded by crashing construction workers and coarsely roaring demolition men, he sits in the shop, in his office, juggling figures, writing letters and drawing up contracts. His family have escaped the violence of the building work, and until this storm of activity and entrepreneurship has passed, seek domicile in Jetty’s father’s farm. It is there that he sees them every Sunday. It is there that he discovers that he is no longer necessary.
Yes, every time he cycles back along the long canal to Assen after a long Sunday afternoon, he brings emptiness with him. Winter, spring and summer pass. The snow and the hard blue ice in the canal make way for new grass on the banks and barges of cattle and milk churns. Buttercups appear and bulrushes and duckweed and farmhands in blue overalls sitting all along the edge with fishing rods. The world becomes full and rich and Jacob cycles through it, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, and becomes emptier and emptier and emptier.
Every weekend he sees his family, his three daughters playing in the flower garden behind the farmhouse with an old doll’s pram and a cat on a string, his wife moving around in her parents’ house with an ease and a lightness which she, he knows for sure, has never had in his presence or at least doesn’t know any more, and each weekend the thought assumes more solid form that she has become better off without him, happier, freer, that he has become superfluous, ballast that was once necessary for the balance of the ship called family, but which must now be jettisoned for a free, light crossing. Once, after parking his car on the spotless gravel beside the farm, he hears the voices of his three daughters. They call to him, but as he walks past the barn, he doesn’t see them on the bleaching green or amongst the lettuces running along the little paths that divide the beds of the kitchen garden. Just as he is on his way back to the car he spots them. They are across the water, on the other side of the canal, in the tall grass of the embankment. They form a little row – mother, big child, child, small child – and they are complete. Their hands go into the air and they wave at him, their voices ring out clearly over the water, and although he wants to walk to them – something in him begins a half-hearted run – he knows the water is between them. No bridge to the left, nor to the right. He crosses the road, stands on the bank and spreads his arms out wide as if to apologise for his unattainability.
After almost a year Jacob Noah is the owner of the heart of the town and the biggest department store, the biggest department store of the province itself, perhaps even the biggest outside the big cities. Above the proud, wide entrance to the square, in the place where his little daughter once stared down from behind her lit window, he hangs a neon sign showing a stylised version of Noah’s Ark, a flowing line of light as the ship and in front of it a broad stairway along which thronging hordes pour in. It is impossible to tell from the neon whether it is people or animals that are entering the ark.
In the big stone block that is now a department store, there is also the little shop with which it all began, his grandfather’s ‘emporium’, nearly wrecked by his father and successfully transformed by his mother into the best shoe shop in the town. He has transferred the old interior which lay stored for years in a warehouse and had it rebuilt in what must be more or less precisely the middle. The counter the colour of fresh horse dung. The once immense, now surprisingly modest wall with shelves for boxes and drawers. The shop window with reproductions of old advertising posters and the velvet display tables. Around the old counter, floors stretch across five storeys with wonders that draw surprised visitors from four provinces. They smell cheeses they’ve never seen before, see an ocean of furniture, pass amongst endless racks of clothes and touch more kitchen implements than they could ever have imagined. The young people come to the record section, which has its own top thirty and organises signing sessions with locally, regionally and nationally famous musicians. The customers arrive breathlessly at the restaurant, which is covered entirely in orange and white formica, and recover from their amazement. Profits soar, not only those of the Noah Department Store, but also those of the surrounding shops. A great huntsman drops enough for the lesser ones to live off.
And everyone wonders how that man Noah did it, how he turned such a dismal little underwear shop into this palace of consumer gratification. The town’s chamber of commerce sees an explosion in numbers coming to the town, other shopkeepers profit from it or else can’t keep up with the competition, young people buy their hip clothes and the latest hits from Noah, while at the same time seeing him as the embodiment of capitalism. And in a few years Jacob Noah loses his name as a controversial figure and grows into a person of mythical proportions. Stories about him begin to circulate. He is a screen for an even wealthier man, or even a consortium. He has received a large amount in reparations from Germany. He has sold his soul to the devil. He has dug up a treasure trove on the long-abandoned estate of Vredeveld, where long ago a bastard child of Napoleon’s brother tried to hide away, silent and invisible, with her embittered husband.
And in the evening, in his office, which is now on the top floor of the department store, Jacob Noah sits as the lonely ruler of his empire. His family are back, but they have changed. Or perhaps he is no longer the same person. There is somehow a distance and awkwardness that wasn’t there before, a space dividing them that is just as futile and at the same time as insuperable as the canal that once lay between them.
And just as he once forgot the faces of his father and mother and mother and brother and was left with a shrinking feeling of lack that he calls ‘family’, so now his wife and his three daughters are vague and remote to him. He is standing beside the Smilder Canal and they are on the other side. He doesn’t know how to get across the water.
In his little office, amongst his files, his cash books and ledgers, he sometimes looks out of the circle of light that the desk lamp casts on his work, and stares out through the high window, where there is nothing but dark night air and sometimes the moon. From time to time he gets to his feet to stand at the window, hands in his trouser pockets, belly thrown slightly forward, eyebrows like caterpillars wiggling above his eyes, and puts aside the files and contracts. Then he peers into the darkness until he knows again: Jacob Noah, son of Abraham Noah, son of Rosa Deutscher, brother of Heijman Noah.
Then he is sometimes overwhelmed by the truth of the here and now, where he is and when. For a breath’s duration he was in the company of what was dearer and more necessary to him than anything else, but it couldn’t be.
He has to do it alone.
That is his task. That is the task that he doesn’t want to but must fulfil, the task to which he strugglingly submits.
Because there is no other way.
The stone mountain that he has built in the heart of the town, the ark of things to which everyone comes to get what is to their taste, a ludicrous striving for something that no longer exists, or is at least no longer ‘there’. There is a gleaming marble of clarity in his head then, deeply buried in the fogs of figures and letters, and a black veil of loneliness settles like an autumn mist that creeps over fields and hides the path. But the understanding is there nonetheless, like a hard nucleus, like something that won’t go away: he must lose everything in order to have something.
Time passes. Jacob Noah gets his first grey hairs and puts on a few more pounds. He sees his daughters blossoming and coming home with great tall beanpoles in army-surplus clothes and carrying bags bearing the names of singers he’s never heard of. He looks with controlled excitement at the littlest one, who always looks back with the same silent gaze. He looks at his wife, who has given up embroidery and now plays tennis day in and day out and just gets slimmer and browner. He looks at the town, which is still the same.
Everything slides and drifts during those years. Schools are turned upside