The Twin

by Gerband Bakker

  “I’m just happy you’ve come over,” I tell Ada, in answer to her question.

  “Of course I’ve come,” she says, almost indignantly. “And I’ll come tomorrow as well. It’s horrible, especially now it’s Easter, without a soul around. You have to come and eat with us, and shall I phone farm relief, to send someone for the milking? Wim wanted to come as well, but the bulk tank’s not working properly and he has to be there when the supplier . . .”

  “You have to cry now,” says Ronald. “Your eyes are wet.”

  I don’t answer. The boys are sitting together on one chair, because the fourth kitchen chair is in the living room.

  “Has Henk gone?” Ronald asks.

  “Yes, he’s not here any more.”

  “Why’s he gone?”

  “He’d been here long enough,” I say.

  “Has he gone back to Brabbend, where his mother lives?”

  “Ronald,” Teun says through a mouthful of cake, “just shut up for once.”

  I really am happy they’ve come.

  Ada, Teun and Ronald have gone, it’s quiet again in the house, but a different kind of quiet. Better. I don’t want to sit down on the kitchen chair next to the coffin any more. I walk through the scullery and the shed to the yard. It’s almost time to put the cows out again. I check the sheep and then walk over to the chicken coop. The wheelbarrow is in front of the donkey shed. I should actually muck it out. Not now. I go back inside and get the binoculars from the bureau. I stand with my legs apart in front of the side window and raise the binoculars to my eyes. Ada is standing there five hundred yards away. When she sees me she immediately raises one hand and waves. She gestures with her other hand. Teun and Ronald come into view. They raise their hands as well. I wave back and lower the binoculars. For a moment I stay there, in front of the side window, binoculars at chest height. Letting them have a good look at me. How long has she been standing there? How long has she been waiting for me? She knew I would appear at the window. Just as I knew she would be standing there. Relieved, I put the binoculars down on the table. Now she can come back with a light heart and take charge of things around here again.

  After smoking another roll-up next to the coffin, I go out through the front door. I walk over to the bridge and sit on the rail. The hooded crow has taken a few steps to one side and has turned to face me. It looks at me. I look back. Until I see a car pulling up at the remains of the laborer’s cottage out of the corner of my eye. A man gets out of the car. It is bleak and gray and there are no sunny-day cyclists. A large group of coots is bobbing in the canal. The man has walked from the car to the magnolia. He grabs a branch and shakes it. Then he walks to the half-wall. When the man has been standing there motionless for a while staring up the imaginary staircase, I slide off the rail and walk up onto the road. The donkeys come over to the new fence and follow me to the former laborer’s cottage. He turns around when he hears me approaching. It is an old man with a weather-beaten face. An outdoor face.

  “Helmer,” he says.

  “I thought you were from the Forestry Commission,” I say.

  “And I didn’t know whether I could expect to find you here.”

  “Henk’s dead,” I say.

  “Really?” he says. “Since when?”

  “April 1967.”

  “That’s a long time. And now you’re the farmer.”

  “Yep. Mother’s dead too and Father is laid out in the living room.”

  He screws up his eyes. It is a lot of deaths in one go. Then he turns around. “And the cottage burned down.”

  “Yes,” I say to his back. “Amsterdammers. Holiday home.” I shiver, I’ve come out without a coat.

  He stands there staring for a while, then turns back. He lays a hand on my shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll go and pay my respects to your father.” He walks over to his car. His back is straight, the stubbornness hasn’t disappeared. I follow and get in next to him. He puts the car in reverse and backs onto the road. We drive slowly to the southwest.

  “It smells of dog in here,” I say. I can smell that, even though we never had a dog.

  He looks at me and smiles. “He always sat where you’re sitting.” Because he’s looking at me, he sees the donkeys. “Are they your donkeys?”

  I nod.

  Again he smiles. “Yes,” he says. “You’re a donkey man all right.”

  IV

  55

  There’s a sand dune here with an English name. A long time ago a rich Englishman came to this shore. He had a large house built on the highest dune and laid out a garden with ponds, paths and low stone walls. Because the whole dune had been covered with heather he named his estate Heather Hill. He drowned while swimming in the sea and the house disappeared long ago. All that’s left of the garden is a silted-up pond and a few shrubs. It’s grazed by sheep of a breed I don’t recognize, with dark heads and long floppy ears. They are much tamer than my sheep; they’re used to people coming here to walk or swim. Along the coast, the dune is actually a cliff, with a straight drop to the narrow, rocky beach. It’s not the North Sea here. There are no bare dunes held together with difficulty by planted marram grass and wind-blasted pines. Here the grass grows almost all the way down to the sea and even beeches and oaks thrive ten yards from the high-water line. I’ve tasted the water: it’s brackish, a little saltier than the water of Lake IJssel. I know almost the whole map of Denmark off by heart, especially Zealand, but Rågeleje is new to me, and that’s where we are now. Not that you’d know it when you hear the locals say the name of their village. Danish is a strange, sloppy language. I don’t understand a word of it; he says he can follow it. I wanted to know how that was possible. “I’m Frisian,” he said. The owner of the Heather Hill Grill, located next to a car park on the coast road, told him the story of the Englishman, though it’s possible it was all very different in reality. We often go there for a sausage. The Danes love their sausages.

  We swim every day. The water is cold, but clear. Every three days we have to toss aside the rocks we tossed aside three days before to make it easier to get into the water. We always swim in the same place, at the end of the path that skirts Heather Hill on its way from the coast road to the rocky beach. There’s a gate at the road and another one just before the beach. The sheep have to stay on Heather Hill to keep the grass short and eat the birch seedlings. It’s quiet on the rocky beach, the Danes aren’t on holiday yet. If we look to the right on clear days we can see the coast of Sweden in the distance. “We should go there sometime too,” he says. I nod. It’s not far to Helsingør, from there we can take the ferry to Helsingborg. Hooded crows glide above the cliff. They hold their wings still and float on the updrafts without moving forward. At the weekends the hooded crows aren’t there. Then men and women leap off the cliff with parachutes. Sometimes they float for miles before turning around and coming back to land on top of Heather Hill again. The height they fly at is determined by the height of the dunes. We swim naked: we’re almost always alone and if someone does show up we ignore them. “We’re too old to worry about that,” he says. I nod and then, like two kids at a swimming pool, we joke about each other’s scrotums, which the cold water has shriveled up. He can’t help giving me instructions: “Keep your fingers together” or “Move those feet of yours for once.” Afterwards we warm up again by playing a game of badminton-a little stiffly, and with him a bit stiffer than me - in the holiday house garden. He found the racquets and shuttlecocks in a rack at the Spar. I paid.

  Father was laid out in the house for four nights. I didn’t touch him once.

  When he went into the living room he immediately sat down on the kitchen chair next to the coffin. I stayed standing by the door. He rolled a cigarette, maybe because he saw an ashtray on the arm of the sofa. While smoking, he looked at Father. His glance moved from Father to the photos on the mantelpiece. “She was a beautiful woman, in her own way,” he said, nodding at the formal photo of my mother. “I don’t think many pe
ople saw that.” A horizontal layer of smoke formed in the living room. All the times I sat there smoking next to the open coffin, I didn’t manage that once.

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Things have changed a lot in here.”

  “I did that, a few months ago.”

  “That recently?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a couple of deep drags from his roll-up then nodded in the direction of the mantelpiece again. “Dead brother,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette and laid the backs of his fingers lightly on Father’s forehead. Then he stood up and shook my hand, with the fingers that had just touched the dead body. “Your father’s dead, Helmer,” he said.

  He didn’t kiss me on the mouth, although someone really was dead now.

  As if I didn’t know it yet myself: beautiful mother, dead brother, dead father. Twenty cows, some yearlings, two nameless donkeys, twenty sheep, thirty-one lambs and a few Lakenvelder chickens.

  “Do I smell coffee?” he asked, crossing the hall to the kitchen, where he didn’t just sit down on the first chair he came to. He walked around the table and sat down with his back to the side window. Henk’s chair. He drummed on the tabletop, as if waiting impatiently for me to pour him a cup of coffee. He looked with mild surprise at the binoculars, the open packet of almond cakes and the mugs Ada and I had drunk out of. He said this was the first time he had sat at the kitchen table. Still standing there in the doorway of the living room, I looked from his drumming fingers to Father’s forehead and from Father’s forehead to my hand.

  I didn’t pour him a coffee right away. I went over to stand by the front window. The hooded crow was staring at me from its usual branch. It lowered its head a little as if shrugging its shoulders. I wondered whether birds have shoulders, whether you can call the elbows of folded wings shoulders. It looked like an animal that can stalk, somehow feline. It had been sitting there since autumn. Sometimes I forgot about it and some days I noticed it again and felt like I had the first time I saw it, the day I sat down on all four chairs, as if trying to avoid eating alone. It pulled its shoulders up a little bit more and fell forwards, not spreading its wings until just before it would have hit the ground. I stepped back; it looked like it was going to sail straight through the windowpane. During the sharp turn it had to make, its wingtip touched the glass. It flew off towards the dyke, the Lake IJssel dyke. I watched it go until there were tears in my eyes.

  He cleared his throat. I turned around. Yes, he would like some coffee - black with sugar - and yes, he wouldn’t say no to one of those almond cakes either.

  Dead is dead. Gone is gone, and then I won’t even know about it. That’s why I wasn’t the only one to attend Father’s funeral. A funeral is not for the dead, it’s for those left behind. It was egotistical of Father to want to be buried on the sly. Jaap was there, Ada and the boys (not Wim, he hates death, and what’s more he had something else to do, something important) and the young tanker driver. “How did you . . .” I started and Ada, who was standing behind him, formed a telephone receiver with her little finger and thumb and held it up to her ear and mouth. She shrugged apologetically, holding her head a little to one side.

  “Solidarity, that’s important,” he said to Jaap.

  “You’re right about that, lad,” Jaap replied, “absolutely.”

  I didn’t mind, even if I was beginning to suspect the young tanker driver of making a habit of going to as many funerals as possible, which was something of an aberration. Once again there was a white sheet, hardboard by the look of it, at the bottom of a grave that actually went deeper. It didn’t last long, there weren’t any speakers. The sun was shining and the temperature was around average for late April. I threw earth in the grave. Not a handful, a shovelful. Because I like that at funerals. I don’t regard a handful of earth that blows away before it hits the coffin as any kind of conclusion. Only Ronald followed my example.

  “How do you like the new driver?” Galtjo asked when we were sitting in the kitchen later. Ada had put on some coffee and I had bought marzipan castles at the baker’s in Monnickendam. All in honor of Father. There was jenever for the men. Teun and Ronald drank something with bubbles.

  “She’s a bit mouthy for me,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling as ever. “I’ve heard that.” His smile no longer moved me.

  “Are you farmers too?” Jaap asked Teun and Ronald.

  “We’re kids,” Teun corrected him.

  What surprised me was the number of cards that appeared in the green letterbox on the roadside in the days after the death notice appeared in the paper. Dozens of cards. There was one from the livestock dealer, who returned from New Zealand two days after the funeral. There was even a card from Klaas van Baalen, the farmer who was the same age as me and had had his sheep removed because he neglected them. Jarno Koper’s parents sent one and so did the old tanker driver’s widow. And, of course, there were cards from all kinds of distant relatives, second and third cousins, none of whom I knew and none of whom were called Van Wonderen.

  I sent a card to Riet and Henk, who obviously wouldn’t read our paper all the way down in Brabant. Riet didn’t respond at all, although it was from her that I had expected to receive a perhaps not-so-friendly card in return. If I never hear from her again, I won’t be surprised. Henk sent a postcard in reply. I already knew, he wrote on the back. And I think it’s a shame, because he was a nice man. I’m using his bike here now. I brought it with me because I couldn’t lock it up and it would have just been stolen otherwise. So I think of him now and then. Cheers, Henk. I had to smile at the card he had chosen, showing a tower of animals: a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster. “That’s cute,” said Ada. “They’re the Bremen town musicians. One of Grimms’ fairy tales.” The donkey in particular appeals to me. He didn’t just grab a card from the rack. I think.

  Two weeks ago I turned fifty-six. In Germany. He wanted to drive over the Lake IJssel dam, I wanted to go through the new polders. Since the Opel Kadett would almost certainly have broken down halfway through Denmark, we took his car and drove over the dam. At the monument - we’d only been on the road for an hour - he pulled over. We smoked a medium-strong Van Nelle each, looking out over the Wadden Sea. Then we drove to his house - in a small village past Leeuwarden. He showed me the shed where he makes the owl boards he sells to customers from all over Friesland, without having to advertise them. “How do you think I can afford to buy my jenever?” he said, pouring two glasses. “From the pension?” He also took me out to where he’d buried the dog, in a far corner of the garden, under a gnarled pear tree that had long since lost all its blossom. He had welded two pieces of metal together to make a cross and stuck it in the ground. The turned soil was still raised. In his living room there was a large bookcase with at least twice as many books as he had had in the laborer’s cottage. He poured me another generous glass of jenever but no more for himself, because he was driving. I knocked it back: I didn’t want to be in Friesland, I wanted to go much further north.

  Past Nieuweschans, just over the German border, we stopped again because he was hungry. “We’re going to eat now, Donkey Man,” he said. It was fine by me.

  If you keep driving it’s easy to reach Denmark in a day, it’s not even five hundred miles. But we didn’t keep driving and stopped for the night at a Raststätte just past Hamburg. “Double room?” asked the disinterested woman behind the counter. “Of course,” he said. “It’s cheaper, isn’t it?” In the enormous bed we both lay on our backs, me with my hands clasped over my stomach. I don’t know how he was lying. When I woke up it was my birthday. I was planning on keeping it secret from him, but there was no secret to keep. He had remembered. I wanted to know how that was possible.

  “For about thirteen years in a row I wasn’t invited to you and your brother’s birthday,” he said. “Do you think that’s the kind of thing you forget? I worked as usual while you two ran around with yo
ur chests puffed out and party hats on your heads. Sometimes you’d even come and stand in front of me to proudly shout, ‘It’s our birthday!’”

  I don’t remember this at all. He says that’s what it was like, so that must have been what it was like.

  Sometimes I forget that he knew me as a brat. Sometimes I also forget that he came to work for Father when he was a boy himself. About Henk’s age.

  The boat sailed from Puttgarden and landed at Rødby. The crossing only took forty-five minutes. I drove the car off the ferry and wanted to pull over to the side of the road straightaway.

  “What are you doing, Donkey Man?” he asked.

  I told him that we were in Denmark and I wanted finally to feel it with my own two feet.

  “There’s a lot more Denmark to come,” he said. “Down the road.”

  Driving along I had a sense of having been here before, I knew almost all of the place names on the signs. We stopped to buy something to eat in a roadside restaurant outside Copenhagen and only then did we discover that we couldn’t pay with euros in Denmark. The guy at the cash register accepted them, but grudgingly, it seemed to me. Past Copenhagen (“Much too big,” he said. “Much too busy, we’ll drive on.”) I put a bank card in a cash machine for the first time in my life, typed in my PIN number, and pulled Danish kroner out of the slot. He doesn’t have a bank card; either that or he hasn’t brought it with him. I pay for everything. Since we didn’t know where we were going, we decided to keep driving until we couldn’t go any further. That was how we ended up in this village with the unpronounceable name.

  Here there are rolling hills and no ditches. There are hardly any cows either, apparently they’re mostly in Jutland. With Jarno Koper. When we do see cows, they’re usually brown. “Beef,” he growls and we look the other way. There are wheat, barley and rye fields. And rapeseed: entire hilltops covered with yellow flowering rape, bordered by cow parsley. A few days ago I saw a rhododendron and a purple lilac in flower in a garden, next to a few red tulips. Everything here seems to flower at the same time.