For a few days now I’ve been looking round the kitchen and wondering whether I shouldn’t also paint in here. Every time my survey ends at the hooded crow in the ash and my thoughts turn to the farmhand. I’ve started to think of him as “Little Henk.” Riet phoned to ask if I’d thought about it. “Yes,” I answered, “but not enough.” I’ve never had a farmhand. I was one myself, Father’s. Every now and then the crow goes off somewhere, always swooping down a little first (as if to test its wings), before starting to fly.
It’s only today that Ada has reappeared in my kitchen, five days after Riet’s visit. Saturday. Teun and Ronald are at football, the winter break for the junior teams is already over.
“Helmer! How lovely! What was it like?”
“Strange,” I say.
“What kind of answer’s that? Your sister-in-law!”
“No. My sister-in-law-to-be.”
“Still.” Ada acts as if Ronald hasn’t told her a thing about Riet. “I saw you out walking and I said to myself, What a good-looking woman.”
“Yes, she’s still good looking.”
“Was your father excited about it as well?”
“Very excited.”
“What did he think about it?”
“Not much.”
“Ah, don’t be so offhand. I can tell from your face you enjoyed it!”
“It brought a smile to his face,” I say. I look Ada in the eye and after a few seconds she turns away. She is more wound up than usual, flustered.
“What kind of things did you talk about?”
“Nothing special, the old days, her husband who died last year, her daughters, what a sweetheart Henk was, the donkeys and the chickens.”
“Is she going to come again sometime?” Her voice is different too, pinched. I can almost see the exclamation marks.
“Maybe. That’s what she told Ronald before she got into the car.”
Ada blushes. These aren’t red cheeks from busyness and spring-cleaning. “Great,” she says.
Between the side window and the kitchen cupboards is an old electric clock. The face is brown, the case is orange, the hands are white. The clock buzzes quietly, almost inaudibly. The other day, when Riet was here, I heard it buzzing. I can’t remember ever having heard it before. Now it’s buzzing louder than ever. Maybe it’s on its last legs.
“She didn’t come here on her own account,” I say.
“What?”
“When we got to the ferry, instead of getting out of the car, she started talking about her son.”
“Her son?”
“Her son, Henk. Whether he could come and work for me.”
“Why?” Her face has regained its normal color. She brightens up.
“He doesn’t do anything at home. He hasn’t got a job, he spends a lot of time in bed and sometimes he disappears.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Riet asked me whether I could use him as a farmhand.”
“Fantastic!” exclaims Ada.
“Fantastic?”
“Yes! You’ve had to do it all yourself since your father fell ill.”
“I can do it easily, there’s no work for him here.”
“It would be more fun together, surely? Of course there’s work for him. Take the yearling barn, it’s high time that was creosoted again. Two people to do the milking, in a few months you’ll be busy with the sheep-”
“I have twenty sheep.”
“Still. If you’re helping the kid out at the same time. And Riet?”
She says the name as if she’s known her for years.
“Hmmm,” I say.
“You going to do it?”
“I have to give it some more thought.”
“Does she want to come and live here too?” She does her best to sound casual.
“Surely not?” I say.
“I’m asking you.”
“No, I don’t think so, she didn’t say anything about that.”
Ada turns to check the clock. She stands up. “I have to pick the boys up from football.”
“Have they lost their hero yet?”
She gives me a baffled look.
“Jarno Koper? Is he gone yet?”
“Oh, Jarno Koper. Yes, he left.”
I walk her through the scullery.
“She must have loved your brother very deeply,” Ada says as she opens the door to the milking parlor.
“To call her son Henk?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a common enough name.”
“Bye, Helmer. Say hello to your father for me, will you?”
“I will.”
I watch her walk past the storage tank and out of the milking parlor. There’s something elderly about the way she holds her back, something I’ve never noticed before.
The first thing I do when I go into Father’s bedroom is say hello from Ada. Then I give him the works. I sit him down on the toilet and ask whether he wants to shave before or after his shower. Before, he says, and he wants to do it himself. I take the small mirror off the wall in the hall and put it on the sink so that he can see himself while sitting on the plastic stool. It takes forever: his hands tremble and he finds it difficult to pull the folds in his neck smooth and use the razor at the same time. Besides washing his body, I also squirt a big dollop of shampoo into his hair. Once he’s clean, I ask him whether he can stay sitting on the stool. He can, as long as he clamps his hands on his knees and leans back against the tiled wall. I go upstairs, strip the bed and remake it with clean sheets and pillowcases. I catch myself whistling while I’m at it. Before going downstairs again, I walk to the window and look at the hooded crow. “Yes, have a good look,” I say, when I see its eye on me. A little later Father is back in bed with fresh-smelling, combed hair.
“I want some French toast,” he says.
“Do you turn over in bed sometimes?”
“Turn over? Why should I?”
“If you always lie on your back like that, you’ll get bedsores and then you’ll have to go to hospital, and, once you’re there, that’ll be it, there’ll be no coming back.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“In Purmerend?”
“What in Purmerend?”
“The hospital.”
“If you like.”
“Nonsense,” he says, closing his eyes.
But just before I shut the door I hear the fresh sheets rustling.
25
Strange, my making such a fuss about being the last Van Wonderen. Without a wife, without kids and with a decrepit father who’s never wasted a word on family in my presence, I never expected myself to get sentimental about my own flesh and blood. Is it the farm? Our farm? A collection of buildings, animals and land I didn’t want anything to do with, an entity that was forced on me, but gradually became part of me?
Next to the donkey paddock there used to be a cottage that was going to be Henk and Riet’s home after their wedding. First the farmhand had to go, then later Henk and Riet would have children, starting a family that would outgrow the cottage and end up moving into the farmhouse. Everything had been planned in advance: in her mind Mother had already furnished the cottage. After the farmhand left they rented it out to Amsterdammers, who only came for holidays and weekends. When I turned thirty, Father decided to sell it. Mother disagreed. “You never know,” she said, with a sidelong glance in my direction. On a Sunday night in the autumn of 1987 after the Amsterdammers had been there for the weekend it burned down, about eight months before Mother died. It’s still strange to see the gnarled magnolia flower every spring in the totally overgrown garden. One of the side walls is still half standing, but that won’t last long either.
The Forestry Commission wants to buy the land.
I regret throwing my bed on the New Year’s bonfire. “Another bed?” the jovial shop assistant asked yesterday when I went in for a cheap pine bed. “Yes,” I said, “another bed.” Did I want a mattress to go with it? No, I didn�
�t need a mattress. In the other shop I wasn’t served by the young girl with the black braids, but by an older, weary looking woman. I bought a single duvet, two duvet covers and two white fitted sheets, all in a sale. I paid no attention to the colors or patterns. Satisfied with my purchases, I bought a pound of eel at the smokehouse. I poked the long sides of the bed out of the front passenger and rear left windows and tried to get home at an even speed, without accelerating or braking hard.
Before setting to work, I open the window and spread newspapers over the blue carpet. I have brought the transistor radio upstairs from the kitchen. It’s nice to paint with the radio on. When I’m painting outside in the summer, I always have Radio Tour de France on. I don’t care who wins or loses, it’s the commentary that matters. I start with the ceiling. It was already white so one coat is enough. The wallpaper on the walls is patterned, a sixties pattern. A tanker has turned over near Reeuwijk, four men in yellow suits are cleaning up the slaked lime. People living in the immediate vicinity are advised to keep all windows and doors shut. The paint dries quickly and as it dries the pattern grows fainter and fainter. I was only planning on doing the walls and ceiling but, now I’ve started, the varnished wooden frame of the window annoys me. Thom de Graaf of Democrats ‘66 explains the benefits of direct prime-ministerial elections. “Will they give us a prime minister with a cute bum?” the reporter asks. The question doesn’t faze De Graaf. “The only people who ever talk about cute bums are journalists,” he says. I look at the radio, unable to believe I’m hearing what I’m hearing. The door is white gloss. When I’ve finished the first coat, I walk to the barn to get the bluish-gray primer from the poison cabinet. Lifting the tin, I can tell that there is enough left to paint the door and window. I take the primer, a sheet of sandpaper and a brush back upstairs and sand the woodwork very carefully. The paint is still wet. Indonesians may not have a word for ice-skating, but at a shopping mall in Jakarta people are skating on an ice rink. There are no signs of an economic crisis in Indonesia, but the population has still had enough of President Megawati. When I’ve finished the primer, I do another coat of white on the walls. The pattern re-emerges under the roller. I’ll have to check tonight to make sure the second layer has really covered it. At the moment there are scattered showers across the country. Later, rain will move in from the west. Tomorrow will be overcast, clearing slightly in the course of the day.
I turn the light on in Henk’s bedroom and shift some old junk out of the way to get at the bedside cabinet. I pick it up and carry it through to the new room, where I give it a lick of primer as well. Then I look in on Father.
He sniffs. “You painting?”
“Yep.”
“What this time?”
“The new room.”
“Why?”
“For the farmhand.”
“The farmhand?”
“Yep. Didn’t I tell you?”
“I just lie here, no one tells me anything.”
“I did tell you, you’ve forgotten.”
“I never forget anything.”
“Have it your own way. I bought some eel, would you like a bit later?”
“Delicious,” he says, grinning. It’s still unbearable, but not as bad as usual.
In the evening I spend a long time in the shower. I want to be wet: warm and wet. I don’t even want to think about drying myself off. The walls of the new room are finished, the sixties pattern has disappeared completely. Tomorrow morning: the Velux window, the door and the bedside cabinet. Tomorrow evening I’ll assemble the bed, chuck my old mattress on top and put the bedside cabinet next to it. When I see that my fingertips have started shriveling, I turn off the taps. I dry myself quickly and hurry through the scullery. I comb my hair in front of the big mirror above the mantelpiece. The warmth from the fire glows on my legs and lower belly. I turn the knob down from 4 to 1 and walk over to my bedroom door.
“Krraa,” I hear from outside. And then four more times. I leave the bedroom door open and notice while climbing into bed that the leg I’m still standing on is trembling slightly. I lie back to listen, but find myself straining to hear only silence. Calling five times was enough for the hooded crow.
26
It’s ten thirty in the morning. Raining from low clouds. As usual, the weathermen had it wrong. The kitchen light is on. The crooked ash gleams. The hooded crow is hunched over on its branch. Now and then it ruffles its feathers without spreading its wings, which makes it look like a sparrow bathing in a puddle in the yard. A giant sparrow. I wait. The newspaper is lying on the table in front of me, but I can’t read. I sit and stare out of the window. The clock buzzes; it’s quiet upstairs, there are a few mouthfuls of cold coffee left in my mug. It’s not only quiet upstairs, it’s quiet everywhere, the rain taps softly on the window ledge, the road is wet and empty. I am alone, with no one to cuddle up to.
In February 1963 Father drove circles on the Gouw Sea with Henk and me sitting on the back seat. “This is once in a lifetime,” he chuckled. Henk and I were sitting far away from each other, glued to our own windows. Mother had stayed behind in Monnickendam; she was too scared. When we got back to the harbor she was standing waiting for us in exactly the same spot, little icicles on her eyelashes. During the third or fourth lap Father steered right instead of left at the end of the embankment. After about fifty yards he braked. The embankment is like a dyke from Marken to Volendam that the builders forgot to complete, leaving the island and the town separate forever. Father leaned over the steering wheel and stared at the end of the embankment, the gate to Lake IJssel. He sighed. The sun was shining, it was as if the sun had shone all through that long winter. Snow drifted over the ice like sand on a wet beach. Without looking at each other, Henk and I realized what Father wanted to do. We broke free from our windows and slid towards each other on the back seat. We were fifteen years old. We saw another car driving past in the rear-view mirror, we didn’t hear it. Father sighed again. The engine had stalled, it was quiet. “The ice is a good two and a half feet thick,” someone at the harbor had told Father. That was unimaginably thick. Father measured it roughly for himself with his hands and mustered the courage. Two and a half feet of ice, that would hold a truck. It was more than quiet, the silence was terrifying. Father didn’t know how thick the ice was past the embankment. While he sat there sighing, we crept even closer together on the back seat until we were like Siamese twins joined from the sides of our feet to our shoulders. If Father was brave enough for the big adventure, we would face it as one man, without fear, silently. Father started the car, it didn’t turn over until the fourth or fifth attempt. I no longer had any sense of my own skin, my own muscles, my own bones. He could have put the car into first. But he reversed, very slowly, as if taking the time to change his mind. Henk and I saw the four mounds of snow that had blown up against the tires grow slowly smaller. Then Father did a fourth or fifth lap at top speed, with the car slipping now and then and, for a moment, a very brief moment, disrupting our Siamese unity. It was only when we saw that Mother could see us, just before Father drove the car up the boat ramp in the harbor, that we let go of each other and became Henk and Helmer again. Mother couldn’t get a word out, her chin refused to lower, her lips were two strips of frozen flesh.
Before heading off, I do things I could just as well do later. I move the sick heifer, which is no longer sick, back with the other yearlings. I lift up the lid of the feed bin in the chicken coop and tip in a bag of feed. The donkeys get a few handfuls of hay, even though I already gave them a chopped-up mangold this morning. It’s still cloudy, but it’s stopped raining. Past Zunderdorp, the city lies before me like a plain of gray blocks.
27
In front of the chip stand. A place both Riet and I know. But driving up, I see that the chip stand has vanished and the spot in front of the vanished chip stand is already taken. I park the Opel Kadett behind the other car, a shiny, expensive model with two men in the front.
Riet sounded very bus
inesslike during the telephone conversation, as if my yes hadn’t surprised her at all. Henk already knew about it and he had said yes, too. No, she wasn’t coming with him. “He wouldn’t appreciate that, his mother dropping him off at a sleepover.” In answer to my question as to how I would recognize him, she told me to look out for his ears and said she would describe me to him. Just before hanging up, she was more specific about that “yes” of his: his exact words were “what difference does it make?”
I get out of the car. A little further along the walk-on ferry arrives and, with the boat, the name of the service looms up from the late sixties: the Eagle Ferry. The men in the expensive car are both smoking. They’re wearing suits. The kind of car and the kind of men you only see in the city. It starts raining again and I wonder what kind of behavior goes with “what difference does it make.”
“My mother said you’d be wearing this sweater.”
The teenager with short hair and big ears is shaking my hand. He found me, I was watching the young lad who walked off the ferry behind him and off to one side. I’m wearing my good sweater. The blue one with black stripes that I also wore during Riet’s visit, on New Year’s Eve, and to the old tanker driver’s funeral. The lad who came off the ferry behind him looked like Riet. He had the same color hair and was looking around shyly. I was so sure he was Henk that I stepped aside to look past the person standing in my way.
The Twin Page 10
