only one thing: the fragrant embrace of his mother.
So, here, in his bed, in the watery morning light, Jacob Noah thinks about his formidable mother and asks himself out loud what he should have done.
Whenever he asked her how she had made a solid business out of a shoe shop that was doomed to failure, her answer had been that a person should improve not his strong points, but his weak ones. ‘Our weak point,’ she had said, ‘was that we didn’t want to be a shoemaker’s but a smart shop, and our strong point was that we were shoemakers and not shopkeepers.’
‘I thought,’ Jacob had replied, ‘that our weak point was that we were Jews.’
‘That too,’ she had said, with the resigned and weary smile of someone who knows that a person can only have so many victories in life. ‘That too, but at the time people were already breaking free of their churches. More and more liberals and socialists were coming. But the most important thing was the patience to realise a great plan step by step. Just as you don’t catch a woman by giving her a gold necklace straight away, Jacobovitz, so you don’t entice clients with the most beautiful and most expensive and most special things. You lay a foundation and you build on that.’
The foundation had been a rock-solid confidence in shoemaking. People who had come three times with old shoes, had seen the new shoes in the shop three times. The fourth time they bought theirs at Noah’s.
What, thinks Jacob Noah, as he leaves his bed and sets off for the bathroom, what then is my weak point and what my strength? And as he washes and shaves and dries himself and envelops himself in a dusty cloud of talcum powder, the merry-go-round of words and thoughts begins to whirl in his head.
In his mind the contours loom up of something so strange that he has to go and sit on the little stool in the corner of the bathroom once the picture comes clearly into focus.
And here come the workmen again, they demolish the interior of the shop, they break and break and break until there’s nothing left but a bare, straight space and in that stone box according to his instructions they build a new shop, a temple for invisible pieces of clothing at a time when people are walking around in woollen underwear and flesh-coloured brassieres that look as if they’re made of cardboard and ample knickers that look more like something that might have held potatoes than the packaging in which a woman presents her secrets. In those days a shop selling nothing but lingerie is like a greengrocer’s with nothing but strawberries on its shelves. Here at least. Far from everything. In Assen. In 1947.
Incidentally, Jacob Noah has no ambitions in the field of underwear. He doesn’t even have any ambitions towards the retail trade. No, he needs money. There’s just one reason why he opens a shop that is clearly superfluous, or premature at the very least: he needs to acquire capital. And as everyone who hasn’t studied economics will be aware, you don’t earn money by doing what people are doing already, but by undertaking the unthinkable. If he had wanted an income, he would have carried on with the shoe shop. If he had wanted to stay alive, he could have done just about anything in the growing post-war economy. But if he wants to acquire capital, quickly and in large amounts, he must see possibilities where no one else sees them.
Lingerie.
Now, in these days of peace and growing affluence, Jacob Noah reasons, a person wants to do more than stay alive. You want to spend money rather than just save it. You don’t just want freedom, you want luxury as well. And, with the Dutch being so Calvinistic, luxury shouldn’t be conspicuous. What could be both more invisible and more luxurious than expensive underwear?
Although he opens a business in something that no one thinks they need, they all come: the ladies of the notaries, lawyers and barristers, the daughters of aldermen, jewellers, scrap-metal merchants and army officers. They practically break the door down. One shop assistant is taken on, and then another, an office is added for administration, signs with his name on them appear beside hockey pitches and tennis courts, and one day when he’s at home with balance sheet and ledger on the tablecloth, the deep summereveningblue behind the windowpanes, above the forest, his thoughts drift away to what it was like and what there was and he sees himself again on his bicycle, cycling along the long canal from Smilde to Assen, the stolen bicycle that he has forgotten he had stolen, and he slams the ledger shut, leaves the balance sheet, goes downstairs, to the shed that he never goes to, and looks in the yellow light of a small bulb at the bicycle grey with dust and cobwebs, the frail, flat tyres and the discoloured handlebars.
That Sunday he cycles along the water. It’s a still summer day, the firmament a picture postcard, bulrushes along the edge of the canal and ripe corn and fat cows in the fields. He whirrs along on a new bicycle, a sparkling gentleman’s bike with a leather saddle and deep black tyres, chrome that flashes in the sunlight and paint that gleams like a Japanese chest. His tyres thrum along the path, his spokes sing in the wind, his great bush of recalcitrant dark hair whips and his jacket tails flap. A solitary fisherman sits at the water’s edge, chewing on a fat cigar, but the countryside is empty because it’s Sunday, the day when the good people of Smilde stay at home and reflect on vices they don’t have but will probably acquire from all that fretting. They sit in their good rooms, in black suits with stiff white collars and in long dresses and warm stockings, and listen to the minutes rustling past until it’s time to go to church and hear the sermon from a vicar who asks the question, every week and twice on Sundays, of what our sins are and whether we have really been touched by the Lord. He passes them as he cycles into the village, walking two by two on the left-hand side of the street, church-book under their arms, peppermints in their pockets, a silent column of the chosen, an unrelenting procession of the righteous whose appearance moves him so powerfully that his eyes grow moist and the harsh sun that comes unhindered across the vast empty fields makes his tears flash so that for a moment he can’t see and all of a sudden, hoopla, he rides into the leaden water of the canal and escapes drowning only thanks to a big farmer’s hand grabbing him by the collar and pulling him to the shore.
And who should be there, as he lies on his back in the grass of the bank, his wet clothes sticking to his body and his hair a mess of black streaks, who should be towering over him, like a monolith of silence, in his black suit, a deep frown on his black eyebrows, a barely concealed twinkle of irony in his right eye?
‘Farmer Ferwerda,’ he says as he lifts himself dripping from the juicy grass and holds out a wet hand. ‘I have come to bring you a bicycle.’
In the good room at the Veenhoeve, the Bog Farm, it’s as quiet as the day before Creation, for an hour and a half, while the family goes to church and Jacob Noah waits in borrowed clothes until the service is over. Outside, leaning almost as if ashamed against the scullery wall, the new black bicycle stands drying in the sun. Further along, dusty red salvias stand out like little flames against the dry grey of the flower bed, the lawn runs from the bleaching green to the back garden, immaculately untrodden, as if the Lord God of the Ferwerdas had only that morning hit upon the idea of making something beautiful. There are ripe yellow marigolds and blossoming geraniums, a honeysuckle climbs powerfully yet shyly against the fence. Far off in the distance, before the wooden side of the garden shed, seven enormous sunflowers sing out their joy at Creation, and still further along, where the kitchen garden lies, beanpoles, vertical rows of leeks, knotty beds of lettuce and exuberant potato plants gleam in the bright sunlight. In the Ferwerdas’ front room a cool shimmer makes the polished dresser shine gently and turns the open Dutch Authorised Bible on the table into a perfect likeness of the parting of the Red Sea. Above the sofa hangs a picture showing a clearing in a forest, with tall trunks of oak trees in heavy shade and three men standing around a horse and cart looking strangely helpless. From somewhere in the house comes the sound of buckets clattering against each other, a high-pitched girl’s voice laughs brightly, water gushes into a stone sink. A door opens and slams shut again and in the courtyard the maid appears, wearing a blue apron.
My God, thinks Jacob Noah. My God. The order of these things.
And his thoughts go involuntarily to the empty