The Twin

by Gerband Bakker

  It was months before Henk finally brought Riet home with him. Our farm was at its best for her first visit. It was the time of year when eager lambs dive at the ewes in the field next to the farmhouse, peewits and godwits call their own names while defending their nests, the willows have already sprouted and the crooked ash in the front garden is about to come into leaf. A light-green spring in which even a muck heap can look fresh. Father kept his distance; Mother welcomed Riet with moist eyes and open arms.

  I had seen her a few times since New Year and been clumsy and insecure in her company. She was awkward and quiet in mine. Now that she was going to be in our house I had even less idea of how to act. Henk took her to the Bosman windmill, our windmill, that very first time. They came back with a peewit’s egg, and after that things were never really right between Riet and me.

  Worse still, things between Henk and me were never right again either.

  Later Riet spent her first night at our house, it must have been some time in August.

  “Colts and fillies separate,” Mother announced one night at the kitchen table. The night before Riet was expected.

  “What?” said Henk.

  “Colts and fillies separate.”

  Henk had to think it over for a moment. “But you’re a colt and a filly too?” he said with all the innocence he could muster, gesturing at Father.

  Father snarled.

  Riet slept in Henk’s room, Henk slept in mine. On a mattress on the floor. I couldn’t think of anything to say, I had trouble breathing, something I put down to the oppressive heat. The window was wide open, the curtains weren’t drawn, a full moon was shining straight into the room. Henk was lying half under a sheet, his upper body bared and bluish. He was beautiful, so beautiful. After a long silence, almost as oppressive as the temperature, he whispered something I didn’t understand.

  “What?” I said.

  “Shhh!”

  “What did you say?” I whispered.

  “I’m going next door.”

  “To Riet?” I said numbly.

  “Where else?” He sat up straight and pushed away the sheet. He pulled up his knees and stood up. He was wearing big white underpants. He walked to the door as if treading on eggshells and pulled it open inch by inch. It took a very long time before his body had left my bedroom and the door was shut again.

  I’ve hated moonlit nights ever since. The bluish light that comes into bedrooms through curtains or venetian blinds and can’t be kept out is cold, even in summer.

  No, give me coots, there’s something I like to hear at night. Their yapping drives away emptiness and next year they’ll yap again, even if they’re not the same ones, and ten years from now they’ll be yapping still. You can depend on coots.

  21

  Riet is sitting at the kitchen table, in Henk’s old spot. I can’t tell from her face whether she has sat there deliberately. She is staring at a photo on the front page of the newspaper of a group of Koniks standing on a strip of land surrounded by the waters of the Waal. Here it’s freezing, across the borders it’s raining, and washlands and banks everywhere are underwater.

  “Polish horses,” she says to the newspaper.

  “Coffee?” I ask.

  Only now does she look up. “Yes, please.”

  The sun is shining: low and cold, but a warm yellow. I have never been to Austria or Switzerland, but this is how I imagine the sun on ski slopes. The coffee machine is in full sunlight and I see that it needs a wipe with a damp cloth. I take my time, with my back to Riet I don’t have to worry about the expression on my face. From the corner of my eye I see something pass the front window.

  “A hooded crow!” exclaims Riet.

  I turn around. It’s back in the ash, perched on its old branch and rearranging its feathers. I see the knuckles of my hand, wrapped around the handle of the coffee pot, turn white. This is the moment for noise from upstairs. It stays quiet.

  “Have you seen hooded crows before?” I ask, making more noise than necessary as I slide the coffee pot in under the filter.

  “Sure, often enough. In Denmark. They’re almost all hooded crows up there.”

  “Have you been to Denmark?”

  “A few times. On holiday.” She thinks for a moment. “Four times.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “I don’t know what it is like, only what it was like. It must be eight years since we last went. The girls weren’t with us, they’d been going on holidays alone for years. It was just the three of us.”

  I sit down, cross my arms and let her take her time.

  Riet looks out. “Do you remember the wooden electricity poles you used to have here?”

  “Yes, of course.” Irritation itches in my forearms.

  “They still have them there, but concrete. They’re a bit behind.” She keeps on staring out, without seeing anything. The water sputters in the coffee machine. “We were there in August, in the car. The farmers had set fire to piles of straw and there were swallows on the electricity wires.”

  “Swallows.”

  “Yes. Wien didn’t get it at all. ‘Who on earth burns straw!’ he said and, ‘What a waste!’”

  “He’s got a point.”

  “I don’t know about any of that. I thought those swallows were so beautiful. The electricity cables hung really low.” She starts crying quietly.

  “What is it?”

  “Ah, I’m chattering away and I actually feel very peculiar here.” She hides her face in her hands.

  “Relax. First some coffee.” I stand up and get the best cups from the kitchen cupboard. Not the mugs, the best cups, that’s what Mother would have done. Earlier this morning I put the matching milk jug and sugar pot on the table. I pour coffee into the cups and lay a silver spoon on each saucer. I arrange some biscuits on a plate. I put the coffee and the biscuits on the table. If it wasn’t freezing outside, I would slide the window open. Specks of dust float through the kitchen.

  “I feel strange too,” I say, sitting back down.

  Riet smiles. “We both feel strange.”

  I feel light-headed. Unreal. Take Father, for instance: he’s always been just like he is now. I’ve seen him every day my whole life long. Every day he has grown older, but because we have grown old together, it has all been gradual. When I see a photo of my father as a young man - like the photo on the wall of the bedroom upstairs-I know it’s him, but it’s distinct from the father I have now. I didn’t really know him when he was young, because I was much younger at the time. We’ve both grown old without my noticing. I haven’t seen Riet for more than thirty years. It’s shocking, as if I’m in bed having a bad dream.

  This is what I am thinking, what is she thinking? I feel like copying her and hiding my face in my hands. “Who do you see when you look at me?” I ask.

  “Henk,” she says.

  “I’m Helmer.”

  “I know. I still see Henk.”

  Before we got to the kitchen, I showed her the new living room. She didn’t like it. “It’s so bare in here,” she said. “What happened to all the photos?” The door to the bedroom was shut and I had no plans to open it for her. “And the curtains and the sideboard and the bookcase with your mother’s books?” She looked at herself in the large mirror above the mantelpiece and used both hands to plump up her hair a little.

  “Ah, the cows,” she says, as we walk through the shed. She’s wearing jeans. Her hair is still blonde and even in the sunlight in the kitchen I couldn’t tell whether she bleaches it. It’s not permed like most women’s in their mid-fifties. She walks a little stiffly. It is totally impossible for me to see her as the mistress of this house: making meatballs, running after sheep or heifers, cuddling up to Henk in bed at night, having her kids visit on Saturday mornings, a grandchild climbing the ash in the front garden.

  “I broke a leg a long time ago,” she says when she notices me looking at the way she walks. “It stiffens up in cold weather.”

  Skiing? A bike
accident? A wet floor in the pig shed?

  “I was cleaning the kitchen ceiling and the stepladder slipped.”

  Sunlight comes in through the square windows, a cow groans and a mangy cat shoots off. It’s a cat I can’t remember having seen before. Is it one that escaped last spring’s motorized cull?

  “What kind of animals are they, pigs?” I ask.

  “They’re not cows, that’s for sure.” She rests her hand on the bundled lengths of baler twine hung up on an enormous nail. “Piglets are cute, but the older they get, the nastier.”

  “And then they’re ready for slaughter.”

  “Yes, then they’re ready for slaughter.”

  “And your husband?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What kind of fellow was he?”

  She thinks for a moment. “He was respectable. He was a respectable man.”

  “Respectable?”

  “Yes.”

  We walk into the yard. Riet pulls the collar of her coat tight. “My daughters are respectable women. Maybe Brabant brings that out in people, respectability.”

  “And your son?”

  “What have you got there!” blurts Riet as she catches sight of the donkey shed. She walks up to it. “This never used to be here. Did it?”

  “No,” I say. “The donkeys are new.”

  “Donkeys!”

  They’ve heard us and are standing inquisitively at the railing with their heads up. When they see us, one starts to swing her head. The light has been on all night.

  “Would you like to feed them?” I ask.

  “Yes, please.”

  I take a few large winter carrots out of the box on the bale of hay and give them to Riet. She sticks two carrots through the bars at once. They disappear in the donkeys’ mouths with a snap. I scratch the donkeys’ ears. For a moment everyone is happy. There’s something comforting about her having established that we both feel strange.

  Riet walks from the donkey shed to the chicken coop. She waves a hand at the willows, a little impatiently, maybe to let me know that she can see they’ve been pollarded recently. And that Henk would have pollarded them if things had turned out differently. “You used to have brown chickens here,” she says, peering in through the wire.

  “That’s right, Barnevelders.”

  “And these?”

  “These are Lakenvelders.”

  “They’re beautiful. Are they good layers?”

  “They’re okay, not as good as the Barnevelders.”

  The chicken coop leads inevitably to the causeway gate. She leans her forearms on it and stares out over the fields. It’s incredibly light because of a thin layer of snow on the grass. The ditches are steaming. “The windmill,” she whispers.

  I’m not in the mood for that at all. I turn and start walking towards the milking parlor. A little later she follows, I hear her irregular footfall on the frost-hardened yard. Now, with my left arm, I gesture at the donkey paddock. “In good weather they’re out there,” I say. We walk through the milking parlor to the scullery. I cut straight through to the hall door, Riet stops in front of the door to the staircase.

  “You coming?” I say.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I thought,” I try, “if we eat an early lunch, we can go for a walk to the cemetery afterwards.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  I keep at it. “Then I can take you back to the ferry on time, before milking.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I want to go upstairs.”

  “To Henk’s room?”

  “Yes.”

  I pull the door open and lead the way upstairs. I open the door to Henk’s room. Riet walks in expectantly. I stay in the doorway - it’s so full inside there’s only room for one of us. She looks around and sits down on the bed for a while.

  Then I can’t see her any more, she has disappeared completely under Henk and the January sunlight has made way for August moonlight. Henk’s white underpants have got stuck at his knees and his body is going up and down, a movement that doesn’t seem right for someone his age. I can almost smell him. He is holding his breath, the dimple above the crack of his bum is damp, he presses her deeper and deeper into the old mattress, his Achilles tendons are part of the up-and-down, as if the movement is a wave that starts in his toes.

  “. . . his bed?”

  “What?”

  “Is this the bed Henk slept in?”

  I blink a few times, it takes a while for the warm August night to turn back into a January morning. “Yes.”

  “I don’t recognize it. There’s so much junk in here.” She lays her hands beside her on the blanket - as if she has no plans ever to stand up again - and looks out of the window. “That hooded crow is still there,” she says.

  “Come on,” I say.

  She stands up and leaves the bedroom.

  “My old bedroom,” I say casually and fairly loudly as we walk past the second door. I notice the key and try to remember whether I locked the door. “Full of junk as well.” I hurry on through to the new room, whose door is wide open. Riet follows.

  She leans against one of the walls, knees bent slightly and her jumper bunched up around her shoulders. “His face,” she says. “His face in that cold water. His hair floated back and forth like seaweed.”

  22

  “Nothing’s changed here at all,” she says.

  “They’re not allowed to build.”

  “Why not?”

  “Heritage area.”

  We’re walking through the village to the cemetery. Ten minutes ago Ada just happened to be watering the plants on her kitchen windowsill. The sun has only just passed its highest point but our shadows still stretch out in front of us. “You should come back in late summer,” I say. “For years now there’s been a kind of competition going on here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who has the most hydrangeas in their front garden. Preferably in as many colors as possible. It’s everywhere, a hedge of hydrangeas half a mile long. If you haven’t got hydrangeas, you don’t belong.”

  “I don’t like hydrangeas.”

  In the distance is the white church, on the western edge of the village. I feel like I’ve said enough and we carry on in silence. When we arrive, Riet ignores the church and walks between the poplars to the bank of the Aa.

  “We went skating here in the winter of 1966,” she says.

  “1967,” I say. “January 1967.”

  “Either way, that winter. Winter always goes from one year to the next.”

  She’s right about that. Winter is a season that doesn’t limit itself to the calendar year, a season that straddles years. Now, apart from a thin film between the reeds, there’s no ice at all. A pair of ducks - drakes - race towards us. They jump up onto the bank like penguins. Riet watches the ducks coolly and turns away. She crosses the street and tugs at the cemetery gate. She keeps on tugging until I’m next to her, slide open the bolt on the back of the gate and, bending forward, swing it open for her. Without a word she walks into the cemetery.

  When we’re at the grave, I say, “You’re grateful to Father now, I guess.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “He’s the one who renews the rights to the grave every ten years.”

  “Hmm,” she says.

  To me Riet seems like the kind of person to run her fingers over the letters. She doesn’t. Instead she sits down on a green bench on the shell path next to the church. I take a few steps backwards and stand with my back against the cold wall. I stick my hands in my pockets.

  “I wasn’t angry at your father,” she says. “I felt humiliated. Later, sure. Later I got angry and I stayed angry.”

  We’re in the shadow cast by the church. Only now do I feel that the sun gave warmth.

  “He was so sweet, Helmer,” she says.

  “I know that,” I say.

  “And beautiful. He was a handso
me young man.”

  It would be immodest of me to agree to that.

  Riet looks at me, she sees Henk. “You’re a handsome man,” she says.

  “Ah.”

  “It’s true. You can take it from me.”

  “If you say so,” I say.

  Mother was buried with Henk. I was very curious what I would see. I didn’t see anything. Just a white sheet, hardboard by the look of it, at the bottom of a grave that went deeper. It poured with rain during the funeral, a summer cloudburst, the water splashed up high off the coffin, the flowers drooped.

  They bury people three deep in this cemetery, so there’s room for one more. I wonder who Riet finds handsome, me or the young man she sees in me. I also wonder whether she’s noticed anything strange about the headstone.