II
18
“There’s no such thing as a pig farmer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pig keepers, maybe, but you can’t call them farmers.”
“Why not?”
“Did that husband of yours have land?”
“Yes.”
“How many acres?”
“A bit between the sheds and another bit around the side.”
“That’s what I mean. A farmer has land and he does something with that land. Pig keepers keep pigs in sheds for slaughter. That ’s got nothing to do with farming . . .”
“The clothesline was on one bit of land and the silage clamp was on the other.”
“. . . it’s all about money.” I’m standing in the hall and looking out of the kitchen window. It’s raining. The fitful thaw has finally set in and any ditches with ice left in them are now steaming. Funnily enough it was sunny all day yesterday and the temperature dropped below zero again last night. I have no idea what Riet is looking out at. The telephone conversation isn’t going well. Riet (who answered using the name of her deceased husband) mentioned pig farmers and I couldn’t help myself. I feel like hanging up.
“Come on, Helmer, let’s change the subject.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Would it be all right if I dropped by?”
“That’s what I’m calling about.”
“How . . . is your father . . .”
“Dead.” I’ll sort that one out later.
“Oh,” says Riet, as if she’s suddenly intensely sorry.
“It’s no big deal.”
It’s quiet for a moment, somewhere in Brabant. “Did you have a good Christmas?”
“Yep.”
“And last night?”
“I lit a New Year’s bonfire.”
“Just like the old days!”
“That’s right. The two boys from next door came to watch. And help, of course.”
“That must have been fun.”
“It was. Except the youngest, Ronald, burned his hand.”
“Oh . . .”
“Not badly. He even managed to laugh about it, he thought it was cool. Fortunately his mother was there too.”
“When shall I come? I can any time.”
I can any time. Half my life I haven’t thought about a thing. I’ve milked the cows, day after day. In a way I curse them, the cows, but they’re also warm and serene when you lean your forehead on their flanks to attach the teat cups. There is nothing as calming, as protected, as a shed full of sedately breathing cows on a winter’s evening. Day in, day out, summer, autumn, winter, spring.
Riet says “I can any time” and those four words send everything toppling. I see her emptiness, and her emptiness shows me mine.
Of course it’s Father I’m cursing, it’s not the cows’ fault, especially not the cows we have now.
“Helmer?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m here”
“When shall I come?”
“Whenever you like.”
For a long time that afternoon I sit with the donkeys, feeding them pieces of mangold. Although it’s stopped raining, it’s still gray. The light is on in the donkey shed. I recognized her voice.
Yesterday evening, before I poured diesel over the woodpile, Ada, Teun, Ronald and I stood by the donkeys for a while. Cold stars were shining over the shed. Ada’s husband wasn’t there, he wanted to keep his eye on a cow that was about to calve. Plus - according to Ada - he doesn’t like “the festive season,” I had made doughnuts, a task I have taken upon myself every New Year since Mother’s death. Father was sitting very briefly at his old place at the kitchen table. He worked hard to keep himself upright on his elbows and ate two doughnuts. I sat in Mother’s old spot and stared at him while he and Ada talked. Teun and Ronald shared the other kitchen chair. Ronald kept his eye on Father and seemed a bit scared, he had trouble swallowing. Father told Ada no less than three times that he wanted to see a doctor. When she shot me a questioning glance after the third time, I raised my eyebrows significantly.
“I hope you get better soon, Mr. van Wonderen,” she said as I carried him out of the kitchen.
“Do you have heating upstairs?” she asked in a concerned voice when I came back down.
“No,” I said. “But he’s a tough old codger. A shame he’s not altogether with it any more. He’s going downhill fast.”
“Is he dying?” asked Ronald, eating a doughnut at top speed now there was nothing to hold him back.
“Ronald!” Ada said.
“When are we going to light the fire?” asked Teun.
And then the donkeys, and then the New Year’s bonfire, and then a smoldering board (from my old bed) falling on Ronald’s hand. He’d got a little too keen while poking the fire with a thick branch.
“Finished!” Father calls. The flush gurgles dully, as if the lid is closed.
I’ve been standing for a good while in the hall, in front of the toilet door. The doughnuts have got his bowels working. I contract my nostrils, open the door and lift him up. He pulls up his own pajama bottoms. “Wash your hands,” I say.
He picks up the piece of soap on the sink and I turn on the tap.
Carrying him upstairs, I ask, “Do you actually know what day it is today?”
“Christmas?” he says.
“New Year’s Day. You’re not right in the head any more.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You’re the one who’s not right in the head. I’m not mad.”
“Have it your own way,” I say, laying him on the bed.
“Ada was here last night,” he says.
“Yes, she was.” I sit down on the chair in front of the window. Maybe I should buy an electric heater after all, it’s damp in here. Before you know it he’ll have all kinds of terrible fungal infections. I rest my elbows on the armrests and rub my hands together. The wall with photos, samplers and paintings is a big rectangle with little rectangles and squares on it, I can’t see any detail. I stand up and turn on the light. With my hands behind my back, like someone visiting a gallery, I walk along the wall extremely slowly before sitting down again. “Why did your mother embroider two samplers instead of just one?”
“You’d have to ask her,” Father says reluctantly.
“I can’t.”
“No, you can’t,” he says with a sigh.
“Did she think one of us wouldn’t make it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it so you could throw one of them out?”
“Shouldn’t you be milking?”
“Soon. The cows aren’t going anywhere.”
“Hmmm . . .”
“It was economical of her,” I say. “No, not economical, practical.”
“Yes, practical,” says Father.
“But still, when someone dies at nineteen, you don’t take their sampler off the wall.”
“No.”
I talk, but hardly hear what I’m saying. The telephone conversation with Riet is on my mind. That’s what I want to talk about, I wanted to taunt him with it and instead I’m taunting him with our samplers. Until five minutes ago I’d never stopped to think why grandmother Van Wonderen embroidered two separate samplers. One sampler must have been a big enough job as it was. Did Mother actually know she was going to have twins? I sigh and open my eyes. I am really not in the mood for tormenting Father. It’s New Year’s Day.
“What’s the matter?” asks Father.
I open my eyes. “Nothing.” I get up and walk to the door. I pull up the weights of the grandfather clock. “Kale tonight?”
“Delicious,” says Father. He looks happy. It’s unbearable.
“Light on?”
“Yes.”
“Curtains closed?”
“Yes.”
I walk back to the window and draw the curtains. The lamppost in front of the farm is already on. Now it’s been fixed, no one can stare in unseen.
The bulb in the scullery casts a dim glow up the staircase and onto the landing. The door of the new room is open. As an invitation: come and fill me. I look at the key in the lock of the bedroom door. I look but don’t turn it. I hurry downstairs.
I ring Ada to ask about Ronald’s hand.
“It’s fine,” she says, “it’s not that bad at all.”
I’m glad to hear it. It was my fire.
19
Mother was not just outrageously ugly. She was outrageously kind-hearted too. Her eyes were always a little watery, a bit moist, perhaps because of the slight bulge. There was something wrong with her thyroid, and those moist eyes softened her view of the world. Father beat and scolded, Mother only had to look at Henk and me to make things better again. She looked at us a lot.
Henk was Father’s boy; I was not Mother’s boy. She didn’t differentiate, although I did notice that, during the period when Riet joined us at the table, she looked at me more often than she looked at Henk. It wasn’t a look of consolation, it was a look of encouragement, like a hand on my back to push me forward. Mother got along perfectly well with Riet, but her presence also placed Mother in a dilemma: through no fault of her own, her boys were no longer equal. Father had no such scruples, he had taken sides long before.
When she died (not from an overactive thyroid, but from a heart attack), Father could no longer make his spoon jump in his coffee cup the way Henk had as well. After all, there was no one there to answer the call. I was there, of course, but he wasn’t reckless enough to provoke me like that. We just stopped drinking coffee, or we drank coffee separately. Ada hadn’t moved in next door yet, she never knew Mother.
She had the heart attack in the shower. That means it was a Saturday. I wasn’t at home and it wouldn’t have occurred to Father to go and check, despite her staying in the bathroom much longer than usual. Some people have a heart attack and just keep on going, some people collapse and never get up again. Mother never got up again.
I never blamed her for not speaking up the day Father sent Riet away and told me I was done “there in Amsterdam.” What if, instead of crying, she had said something to protect me from spending my life milking cows? Would I have seized the opportunity? I don’t think so. I was nineteen, I was already a man. I could have stuck up for myself. I didn’t, I stayed as silent as Mother. Long after Riet had disappeared behind the window frame (by then she was sure to be up on the dyke and I’d had plenty of time to commit to memory a place where I might find a nest of peewit’s eggs), I turned around. To the left of Father’s back I saw her half-emptied plate, the cutlery placed neatly on either side. To the right of Father’s back sat Mother, looking at me even more moistly than usual. At that moment an alliance was sealed. I couldn’t say exactly what that alliance involved, but it definitely included some we’ll-get-through-this-together. I sat back down at the table and we finished the meal in silence. The next morning Father and I milked the cows together. After the milking I put my textbooks in a cardboard box and put the box in Henk’s built-in wardrobe. Weeks later a letter from my tutor arrived, asking where I was and whether I was planning on coming back. I put the unanswered letter in with the books. I’ve ignored the cardboard box ever since.
The alliance held until her death. It was an alliance of glances, not words. Mother and I looked at each other when he disappeared into the bedroom after calling her a romantic soul; when he growled while cutting the gristle off a piece of braised steak; when he raged across the fields while moving the yearlings or sheep from one field to another; when he went to bed at ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve; when he barked the day’s jobs at me (as if I was a fifteen-year-old kid and not a forty-year-old man); when he said “I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole” in discussions about anything at all, before going to sit in his chair in the living room like a lump of rock.
On very rare occasions she avoided looking at me, and that was almost always after Father had asked if it wasn’t time for me to start looking for a wife. I took that to mean that for once she agreed with him.
After her death I didn’t have anyone left to look at, to look with - that was the worst of it. The alliance had been unilaterally dissolved. I found it - and find it - very difficult to look Father straight in the eye. In Mother’s eyes I always saw Henk’s shadow and I assumed that she saw the same in mine. (Of course, she also saw Henk in my body as a whole, in my eyes she saw him double.) Father’s eyes never gave away anything - after Mother’s death even her shadow was absent.
20
For Riet I make an exception: I drive south. South-west, to be precise. To the ferry in North Amsterdam. We have agreed on a time and long before that time I am already parked in front of a chip stand on the IJ. Futuristic ferries cross back and forth, streamlined butter dishes in blue and white, nothing like the pale-green boats they had in 1967. Back then they still took cars, the ferries were sailing motorways. I see “Municipal Ferry No. 15” before me, and the narrow, roofed sections for bikes and motorbikes. They were only pale green inside the deck, the outside was a filthy white. I’d forgotten that.
I try to think my way further into the city. Faces and names of fellow students don’t come back and I can’t even picture the building I had lectures in. It’s all gone, there across the water.
I described the Opel Kadett to her, but, faced with the stream of pedestrians and cyclists, I start to worry. Who will discover who? Should I stay in the car or get out and stand next to it?
Earlier this morning, when I was in the middle of the yard with Father in my arms and he asked me through chattering teeth and trembling lips where I was taking him, I decided to carry him back to his bedroom. I was going to put him in the loft of the yearling shed. His question and the inquisitive looks from the donkeys (one of the two started to bray loudly, waking the chickens from their morning snooze) were enough to make me abandon the plan. How was I going to get him up the ladder anyway? The return journey went smoothly, all the doors were wide open. I put him back in bed (still warm) and was going to leave the room without a word. At the door I changed my mind.
“I’m going to pick up Riet,” I said.
He looked at me with a blank expression.
“At the ferry in Amsterdam. She’s coming to visit.”
“Riet?” The name croaked out and he went a bit pale.
“Yes, Riet. And you’re dead.”
“Dead?”
“I told her you’re dead.”
“Why?”
Now I tried to look at him blankly. “Do you need to ask?”
He thought about it.
“If I were you, I’d keep quiet,” I said ominously. “Otherwise there’s a chance she’ll come upstairs.”
“What for?”
“Payback.”
“Oh . . .”
“And you’re not all there, remember?”
“Oh . . .”
“I’m going now.”
Que será, será, as Doris Day would say, I thought on the stairs. Whatever will be, will be.
I’m old, I thought in the scullery.
A ferry arrives every six minutes: five since I’ve been parked here. A lot of women in their fifties have got off them, fortunately I can exclude the ones with bikes. They’re all wearing thick coats and scarves. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a winter like this: the temperature has fallen below zero again and there is even snow on the ground. The sixth ferry approaches the quayside. I check my watch; this will be the ferry that brings her to me. Where are all these people going on an ordinary weekday? Riet is one of the last to get off the ferry. I feel a little dizzy, I was expecting someone who looks like Ada (why that should be, I don’t know), but it is Riet just as she rode away thirty years ago. Without the long blonde hair, a little plumper, and with a different way of walking. I sit rigid behind the steering wheel, which I have involuntarily grabbed with both hands. She walks straight up to the car. I feel like falling to one side, crawling under the dashboard, putting the ca
r in reverse and disappearing backwards into the IJ, straight through the chip stand if necessary. Maybe she’ll try to save me.
She stops in front of the car and looks in through the windscreen. I wait for a moment, then open the door. She approaches with outstretched arms.
“Hello, Helmer,” she says.
“Hello, Riet,” I say.
Very old fury, a fury I can’t remember having, whose existence I didn’t even suspect, rises up inside me. Riet isn’t troubled by fury, I can see that. She is moved and confused, that’s what’s troubling her. The longer Henk is dead, the more I look like him, simply because there is no longer any comparing.
No, fury is too big a word, outrage is closer.
What is it like to have a relationship with a twin? I wouldn’t know - apart from some childish carry-on at primary school-I have never been involved in anything like it. That Christmas Eve was followed by a Christmas Henk filled with absent-minded humming, not even stopping during meals. Over the roast beef and cauliflower cheese, he answered all of our grandparents’ questions in such detail that Father looked up with surprise and Mother looked at me with an expression which would only become normal later, during our alliance. He was home on New Year’s Eve, but two minutes into the New Year he disappeared without telling me where he was going. Late at night, when I was crossing the bridge near The Weighhouse with the group of farm boys we had both been a part of until the week before, I saw them. They were sitting holding hands on a bench in the drizzle. I tried to hide behind the brawniest farm boy and spotted something further along-a snot-colored Volkswagen Beetle two or three steps away - that I might be able to reach without being seen. As the brawniest farm boy was also the one who had drunk the most, he pushed his way through the others to talk to Henk, leaving me exposed. I can still picture the snot-colored Beetle perfectly, I have no idea what was said. There are two other things I haven’t forgotten. One: Henk saw me there - at the back of the group, while he was talking to the drunk youth and keeping Riet’s hand firmly clasped in his - and wasn’t able to look me in the eye. That had never happened before. Two: a little later Riet noticed me as well and I realized that I was the last person she wanted to see, she wanted to forget that there was someone else walking around who looked just like Henk. I broke away from the group and turned down a lane behind the Beetle, fortunately Monnickendam is full of lanes. About a hundred yards later, I put a hand on a damp wall, bent forwards and spewed up all the beer and doughnuts. Then I went off in search of my bike, finally finding it where we had started our pub crawl. Someone had set off fireworks between the spokes of the back wheel. I hoisted the bike up onto one shoulder and walked home, swapping the bike back and forth between my right and left shoulders on the way. I licked drops of water off the bell to get the dirty taste out of my mouth. Late at night had changed to early in the morning. Drizzle isn’t much more than mist with delusions of grandeur, but I was still saturated by the time I got home.
The Twin Page 7
