The Twin

by Gerband Bakker

  When it starts to get dark we hear the melancholy call of a wood owl.

  Dead is dead. Gone is gone, and then I won’t even know about it. The new livestock dealer couldn’t have come at a better time. He was driving the old livestock dealer’s truck, he said he’d been able to take it over at a good price. He was a young tearaway, there were dents in the truck that hadn’t been there two months before. He was a windbag too. He called me Helmer from the word go, as if we were old friends. I asked him whether he could offload twenty cows, some yearlings, twenty sheep and a whole lot of lambs at short notice.

  “Easy!” he shouted.

  “How are you going to do it then?”

  “I’ll see.”

  “It has to be fast, and preferably all at once.”

  “Just leave it to me.” On his way back to the truck, something occurred to him. He turned around. “And your milk quota?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  Two days later he roared back into the farmyard. Stony-faced, he quoted a price. “But then you’re done with it in one go,” he shouted immediately after. “And I’m sticking my neck out, I have to make sure I can shift the whole lot before too long, my sheds aren’t that big-”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said.

  “What?!”

  “I’m keeping the sheep, and the lambs too.”

  His eyes seemed to pale a little while he was doing the calculations. After a while, he came up with a lower total. “But it’s still true,” he said, “that I’m the one sticking my neck out and if-”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked, stunned.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well, then-”

  “When?”

  “Soon,” he said, running out of steam. “Soon.”

  I spent the day the animals were picked up in Father’s bedroom. I put the photos, samplers and watercolor mushrooms neatly in a potato crate. I stripped his bed, washed the sheets and pillowcases, took down the curtains, cleaned the windows and vacuumed the blue carpet. When I stuck the nozzle under the bed, the vacuum cleaner almost choked on the poem that was lying there.

  A weird one. He told me I was a weird one. Coming from him, at that moment, it almost sounded like a term of endearment.

  I sat down on Father’s bed and read the words once again. I felt ashamed. Giving an old wreck of a man a poem to read. I folded it in half and shoved it in my back pocket. A week later I took it out of my newly washed jeans as papier-mâché. I didn’t look in the shed until evening, when it was already getting dark. It was emptier than empty: everything was still there - straw, shit, dust, warmth - except the cows. The yearling shed was the same. No - it was even emptier, because going in I was just in time to catch sight of the tail of a mangy cat, shooting off.

  The next day I wrote a letter to the Forestry Commission. I informed them that I was not in the least inclined to sell them the land on which they wanted to build a visitors’ center. And that I would be grateful not to receive any further correspondence on the subject until I contacted them again. Up to the day of our departure for Denmark I hadn’t received a reply. Just as I had requested.

  I looked around for something to put my traveling things in and found a suitcase in a cupboard in the barn: a massive, old, leather thing. I soaped the leather to make it a little suppler. I haven’t had a single holiday in thirty-seven years of milking day and night. I wonder when in God’s name Father and Mother used it. They never went on holiday either.

  I also went to the Rabobank to apply for a bank card. If you go to other countries you need a bank card. I had to wait two weeks before I could go and pick it up. I still don’t understand why, but I used the time to do up the kitchen. I repainted, threw out the old curtains and put up venetian blinds. I cleared out the bureau. I almost drove to Monnickendam to look at kitchens in a furniture shop. “Did you have a bonfire?” asked Ronald when he came by the next day and found a smoldering heap behind the donkey shed. “Without calling us?” added Teun, who was there as well.

  We’re sitting outside, on the roofed patio. Earlier in the day it rained, but it’s not cold now. The garden is steaming and the bamboo along the side of the holiday home rustles gently against the wooden planks. For dinner we had beetroot with meatballs you buy ready-made at the Spar. During the meal we drank a bottle of red wine. Wine is expensive in Denmark.

  “What are we going to do tomorrow?” I ask.

  “Whatever we feel like. We’ll start by getting up and drinking some coffee.”

  I’ve asked him about his nose, his parents, Friesland and his dog. About how he came to work for Father and Mother. “You’ve got a lot of questions, Donkey Man,” he says. “What are your intentions?” The only thing he was willing to discuss was his dog. It died just before the New Year. On a Saturday night, after he’d come home from playing cards with three friends. He sat down on a chair and the dog laid its old head on his lap. All at once the dog’s head turned heavy and it was as if he felt its blood stop flowing under his hand. “He just folded up,” he said, “like one of those toys, one of those little puppets you collapse by pressing the button under its feet.”

  “So you do have friends in Friesland?” I asked.

  He sighed and didn’t say another word.

  He points at the damp cherry tree in the middle of the garden. “We’ll have to stay here at least another month.”

  “Fine by me,” I say. “I like cherries.” I go inside and pour two cups of coffee. When I come back I see that the dark clouds have disappeared. The sun is shining again. Here in the north it doesn’t get dark until very late. I put the coffees down on the garden table and lay a bar of dark chocolate next to them.

  “Why didn’t you get a new dog?”

  “You can’t go on forever.”

  “No?”

  “It hurts. Every time one dies.”

  “I believe that.”

  “It was because the wife of one of my card buddies died. He came over to my place and drank my jenever and talked about “not wanting to lose her” and “having to let her go”. It got on my nerves: someone either dies or they don’t, wanting doesn’t come into it. My dog felt his sorrow and laid his head on his lap, something he never did otherwise. The guy just ignored him. I couldn’t bear it. That dog was close to death himself, but he took the trouble and was kind enough to lift his head to someone who was grieving and that person didn’t react.” He breaks off a square of chocolate, lays it on his tongue and takes a mouthful of coffee. His mouth is shut, but I can see the chocolate melting. “Friends,” he goes on, with a wry smile. “Is that enough? Friends to play cards with, a well-kept house and garden, messing around in the shed, a dog, jenever and a bit of money in the bank?”

  He no longer has that one chipped tooth. A crown?

  “How did you actually know that Father was dead?” I ask.

  “I didn’t.”

  “So it was just coincidence, you coming back on that day of all days?”

  “Yep.”

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence.”

  “Of course there is. I thought: I’ll go, and I went. I wanted to see the West Friesland orchards in blossom. But it was misty so I didn’t see very much. I might just as well ask you why you came out of your house just when I arrived at the laborer’s cottage.”

  Coincidence, I think.

  “I might not have gone to the house at all if you hadn’t come to me.” He repeats the chocolate ritual. In the distance the wood owl starts to call. For the first time it is answered, from very close by. “And where would you have been now, in that case?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Where would I have been now?”

  We both stare into the garden. I think about Riet and Henk. Little Henk. The young tanker driver, the livestock dealer (who he had known as well), Ada. I wonder what kind of things I am going to tell him, or will want to tell him. Suddenly the time between his depart
ure and return no longer interests me. Or even the time of his arrival. What difference does it make? Tomorrow we’ll “start by getting up and drinking some coffee,” and afterwards we’ll do “whatever we feel like.”

  “I’ve never actually learned how to do things by myself,” I say.

  Slowly he turns his head towards me. “Drink your coffee, Donkey Man. It’s time for a game of cards.” He gets up and walks inside.

  He’s right, it’s time to play cards. I roll a medium-strong Van Nelle, light it, stand up and walk around the garden with my head back. I stick the pouch of tobacco and the lighter in a back pocket. I like smoking, it suits me. He hasn’t mentioned it, maybe he thinks I’ve been smoking for years. He has turned the light on over the table. Not because it’s necessary, but because he’s used to having a light on over a card table. I feel like I could reach out and touch the wood owl, its mournful call sounds that close. It might just as well be a long-eared or short-eared owl. I don’t know a thing about owls; there are lots of woods here, that’s why I think it’s a wood owl. Hearing it call is even worse than seeing wet lame sheep or unshorn sheep during a heat wave. It gives me an empty feeling in my chest. As if I haven’t just eaten.

  “You coming?” He’s standing at the open door, but doesn’t sound impatient.

  I don’t say anything, raising one hand.

  He calls me Donkey Man. Now that I’m away from the donkeys for the first time ever. Teun and Ronald have promised to look after them. No, not too much mangold, carrots or stale bread. Yes, inside if it rains for a long time. Yes, always check the big water trough. (“But a bucket of water’s heavy,” says Ronald.) They’re also looking after the Lakenvelder chickens. Their mother can use the eggs in cakes and pancakes. Teun will walk through the sheep field once a day. He is strong enough to help an overturned ewe up on her feet, and maybe even strong enough to get a lamb that’s fallen into a ditch back onto dry land. If not he can fetch his father. Ada has promised “to keep an eye on things” and “run the hoover around the house now and then.” She wanted to know how long I would be gone. “I don’t know,” I said. Just before I left, she came on Wim’s behalf to ask what I was planning to do with my milk quota.

  “This is his chance,” she said. “Our chance,” she added.

  I told her I wanted to think about it and asked why Wim hadn’t come himself to ask me what I was planning with my quota.

  She looked at me as if she was about to make up another excuse for him, then said, “He doesn’t have the nerve.”

  A little later she asked me why I’d kept the sheep.

  “I haven’t got the foggiest,” I said.

  Donkey Man. That’s fine by me.

  When someone addressed me by name, as Helmer, I always added “Henk and” in front of it in my thoughts. No matter how long he had been dead, our names belonged together.

  Maybe Riet was right, on that cold day in January at the cemetery, when she said you could become a new person. It annoyed me at the time, that statement of hers, but if I’d opened my eyes I could have seen it in that run-over duck. It had become a new person in next to no time. A dead person.

  No, no rows of swallows on sagging electricity wires. The poles are still here but the wires are gone. For miles around, men in orange suits are lugging thick cables and digging narrow trenches along the roads. If I’d come a year later, I would never have known that they’d had poles here with wires strung between them.

  56

  I’m still searching for the owl. Smoking is a pensive activity. While searching I think, without any clear idea of what I’m thinking about. I didn’t say, “I’m coming.” I raised a hand. That can mean all kinds of things. Jaap has sat down on a stool at the window. He too is smoking, waiting serenely for me to come in. I throw the butt on the grass and squash it with the toe of my shoe. Then I walk past his car to the gate, which is open.

  I go by the sun, which I lose sight of now and then because of trees and other holiday homes. This place is a maze of paths and unpaved roads. This is the first time I’ve tried to cut through on foot. We do everything by car, usually with Jaap driving, very slowly. Two old codgers on holiday in a foreign country. Who knows, maybe sometimes an elderly Danish woman sees us passing slowly by and thinks, Oh, they’re alone, are they widowers? The lawns in front of the cottages are impeccable. Everywhere, Danes are at work with clippers, hand mowers or hoes. I wouldn’t mow the lawn if it had rained earlier in the day, but there you have it, I’m no Dane. They say hej to me. There’s a smell of resin and wood fires. I’m away from home, in a foreign country I knew only from a two-dimensional map without smells or shapes. In a way I find Donkey Man a more beautiful name than Helmer. With so many paths and side paths, there are a lot of junctions as well. A few Icelandic horses are out in a field. They come up to the electric fence when I pass on the path. I don’t stop to rub their noses. It’s annoying that I can’t head straight for the sun, I have to keep choosing left or right before I can take another road that leads west. “Hej,” I say to a friendly woman with a dog, before asking her the way in English. At least I’m headed in the right direction. She reminds me of my mother.

  I was hoping to come out at the Heather Hill Grill, but went wrong somewhere and hit the newly tarmacked coast road midway between the village and Heather Hill. There’s no footpath or bike lane beside it. A little further along is a campground. As yet there are only a few tents and no one is out jumping on the trampolines, which are at ground level. Three cars pass by, five come from the other direction. The sky has started turning orange, I speed up a little. “Idiot” is the word I think of when I remember Henk, even though so many other words were spoken in our eighteen years. The Grill is shut, the small car park is empty, no one is eating any sausages (pølser they call them here). I turn right and push open the sheep gate. A few minutes later I am standing on the rocky beach.

  I raise a hand to look at the sun through my fingers. It’s hanging half a thumb’s width above the smooth water. Off to the right is the village, with the first houses built on the dune. In front of them a few brightly painted fishing boats are lying on the beach. The stuff of postcards. Off to the left a tall cliff - higher than Heather Hill - plunges into the sea at the end of the rocky beach. Wooden stairs climb up to a black-painted holiday home with a veranda. The beach is deserted. There are no hooded crows in the sky and even the busy gray sandpipers are missing. No planes, no ships, no oil rigs. I take off my jeans and walk a few steps into the sea, using the path we had to clear again this morning. I am the only one for miles around making any noise. Behind me, I think, very far behind me is Lake IJssel, which the sun can never set into. When I’m up to my knees in the water, I cross my arms and turn slightly to the left, towards the sun, which is now a fingernail above the horizon. When the bottom starts to melt into the water like warm wax, I turn back and climb the cliff. I sit down on top of Heather Hill and only then do I see my jeans lying there, alone between the rocks, as if left there by a suicide.

  It’s faster than I expected. It’s not so much the sun that sinks below the horizon, it’s more the water of the sea swallowing the orange ball. Warm air blows across my neck. It’s a while before I realize that it can’t be the wind: wind doesn’t blow in regular, short blasts. Very slowly I turn around. Less than eight inches away, at face height, is the dark head of a lop-eared sheep. She looks at me impassively with her yellow eyes, in which the pupils are not round but almost square. Now her breath is blowing in my face, smelling like herbs. This sheep is no sorry creature. This is a noble beast. When I can’t bear the gaze of her yellow eyes any longer, I look forward again. The sheep stays where she is. I imagine that she, like me, is looking at the sky over the sea, which is blue, orange and yellow - almost purple in places. My breathing adjusts to the warm air blowing over my neck in gentle blasts.

  I know I have to get up. I know that the maze of paths and unpaved roads in the shade of the pines, birches and maples will already be dark. But I st
ay sitting calmly. I am alone.

  archipelago books

  is a not-for-profit literary press devoted to

  promoting cross-cultural exchange through innovative

  classic and contemporary international literature

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  First published in The Netherlands as Boven is het stil by Cossee, Amsterdam, 2006

  Copyright © Gerbrand Bakker and Uitgeverij Cossee 2006

  English translation copyright © David Colmer 2008

  Published in the UK by Harvill Secker, London, 2008

  First Archipelago Books edition, 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bakker, Gerbrand, 1962-

  [Boven is het stil. English]

  The twin / Gerbrand Bakker ; translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. -

  Ist Archipelago Books ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-981-98733-0

  I. Colmer, David, 1960- II. Title.

  PT5882.12.A55B6713 2006

  839.31’37-dc22 2008045725

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street, #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

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