Authors: Gerbrand Bakker
It took them a while, the men who came to deliver the bed. This one doesn't come apart. The front door was easy enough, the turn from the hall into the living room harder. I'd removed my old bed straight after milking. I put the mattress on its side in Henk's bedroom and threw the pieces of the wooden frame on the woodpile next to the muck heap. It's getting pretty big, I might have to have a bonfire on New Year's Eve, if the wind's right and it's not raining. The deliverymen left muddy tracks in the bedroom and the living room, and didn't want coffee because they had more beds to deliver. It was cold in the house for a long time afterwards because no one, me included, thought of shutting the front door during all that messing around in the hall. A cold easterly wind is angling in on the front windows. There'll be a sharp frost tonight.
The bed has a Swedish or Danish name I've forgotten, something with dots on an A. It is blue-and-white check and extremely wide; no matter which way I lie, my feet don't stick out over the edge. While I'm making the bed, Father keeps shouting. He's desperately curious. I get a fright for a moment because I think I've forgotten where I put the key, but then I remember leaving it in the keyhole. After slipping a pillowcase onto one of the pillows and laying it in place, I go and sit in the kitchen. If I sit on Mother's chair and lean across the table, I can see into the bedroom through the open doors. Two pillows. What do
I
want with two pillows? But one pillow looks funny, somehow it makes the big bed look unbalanced. And they weren't cheap. After reading the front page of the paper and drinking a cup of coffee, I walk to the bedroom to put the pillowcase on the second pillow.
In the afternoon the livestock dealer's lorry drives into the yard. The livestock dealer is a strange bloke who hardly ever says anything. He wears a tidy dustcoat and a cap, which he takes off when he comes into the house. If he finds me outside or in the shed, he raises his cap. He always makes some kind of remark about the weather and then clams up. It's up to me to say whether I have anything for him. If I don't have anything for him, he leaves again immediately, without another word. He has never – and he's been visiting the house for more than thirty years – sat down at the kitchen table. He leaves his clogs next to the hall door and, when standing on the linoleum in the kitchen, puts one foot on top of the other and wriggles his toes in his knitted woollen socks. Today we are standing in the middle of the yard and I've got something for him. A few sheep.
'They been tupped?' he asks.
'Yes. I took the ram away at the end of November.'
'Three?'
'Three. What's a sheep bring these days?'
'Hundred and twenty if you're lucky. More likely a hundred.'
'That's not much.'
'No, it's not much. Have you got them at the house?'
'No, they're in the back field.'
He's happy to lend a hand, although he could have come back tomorrow. Together we walk into the field and drive the sheep to the causeway gate. He grabs one, I grab two. The other twenty rush off. After opening the gate and releasing his sheep into the next field, he takes one from me. We herd the sheep to the causeway gate close to the yard. I climb over it, fetch two sections of fencing out of the barn and set them up on either side of the lowered tailgate. There's fifteen feet at most between the barriers and the causeway gate. I open it and one of the sheep walks straight up into the back of the lorry. The other two follow. The livestock dealer raises and bolts the tailgate.
'That went smoothly,' he says.
'For once,' I agree.
The livestock dealer raises a finger in farewell and gets into his lorry. He drives slowly over to the causeway, then turns onto the road even more slowly.
I shut the gate. The remaining twenty sheep are huddled together near the windmill, in the very far corner of the farm.
That night, just before going to bed, I cut my fingernails and toenails and have a long shower. I leave the gas fire on low and my bedroom door open. In the big mirror above the mantelpiece, I look at myself naked, head to toe. Suddenly I feel like skating. I miss the heavy feeling you get in your backside and the muscles of your legs from long-distance skating. The fire's warmth glows on my penis. Then I crawl in under the duvet for the first time. The glow in my crotch fades fast; the duvet is scratchy new and I hardly sleep a wink all night.
Teun and Ronald are bundling up the willow shoots. They lay a length of baler twine on the ground, each throw an armful of willow shoots on it and tie it tight. They carry the bundles through the front garden to the yard. Every time they pass a window, they wave. In front of me on the kitchen table are a telephone bill and a hand-addressed letter Ada has brought in. The postman drove off just before she turned into the yard with a trailer hitched to the back of her car. It's Saturday.
I'd like to open the letter, but Ada is still standing on the threshold of my bedroom. She just felt the duvet cover. 'You have to wash these covers first!' she calls to me. 'They're always so stiff!' I nod at Ronald, who is waving as he walks past the front window. I follow him in my thoughts and he appears in the side window just when I expect him to. He waves again. He is wearing a woolly hat and snot is trailing from his purple nose. He's happy, he's always happy, even when his fingers are cold and he's trampling kale in my vegetable garden.
'It's lovely.'
She makes me jump.
Ada is standing in the doorway with her head a little to one side, as if listening for something. 'I miss something,' she says. 'In the living room.'
'Chairs?'
'No.' She thinks for a moment. 'A sound.'
'The clock?'
'Yes, the clock. Where's that got to? You didn't throw it on the wood heap, did you?'
'No. It's upstairs with Father.'
'Oh,' says Ada. She looks at my hands. 'Who's the letter from?'
'I don't know, I haven't opened it yet.'
'How is your father?'
'The same.'
'Does he ever come downstairs?'
'Sometimes. He sleeps a lot.'
'I see.' She looks at me with her head to one side, but this time not as if she's listening for something. 'I'll go and load up the trailer.' She turns and walks into the hall. I wait for the sound of the door opening into the scullery, but instead her head reappears around the corner of the kitchen door. 'Two pillows, Helmer,' she says. 'Two pillows.' Ada looks funny when she gives you a meaningful look, with that harelip. Then she really does disappear. I turn the letter over and over in my hand. There is no name on the back.
Dear Helmer
Don't be shocked, I know you looked at the sender first, I always do that when I get letters too, but there's no reason for you to be shocked by my name. Maybe you don't even know who I am any more! We haven't seen or spoken to each other for more than thirty years and that makes writing this letter difficult.
I'll start by honestly saying straight out that I am finally writing to you because I think that your father has probably passed away by now. Am I right? Your father has always been the obstacle that has stopped me from getting in touch with you. I'm not trying to be nasty about this, and maybe you find it hurtful, if you are sad about your father's death (if he has died).
And do I really need to write down all the things that have happened to me? Okay, in a nutshell then. I went to stay with relatives in Brabant, where I soon married a pig farmer. We had two daughters and, much later, a son. My daughters left home long ago. My husband (he was called Wien, I know, it's a bit of a strange name) died last year. My son still lives at home, he just turned eighteen.
I may as well be honest and tell you that I already tried to get in touch with you before writing this letter. Once I cycled out to the farm in the middle of the night and stood there looking at it for a while. I saw you at the bedroom window upstairs (no sign of your father). I was staying at my aunt's in Monnickendam. (Yes, she's still alive, she's eighty-three. Do you know her? She doesn't know you.) I hadn't seen her for fifteen years and she couldn't understand what she owed the honour to. The next day I rang the bell, but suddenly panicked and left in a hurry. I also phoned you and then I heard your voice and hung up like a real coward. But I'm sure you'll understand that it's not easy for me to see or hear you. When I heard your voice, I pictured Henk standing there in your hall.
A letter seemed like the simplest solution, but now I'm writing it I find it difficult. Would you mind if I wrote you another letter later? Or shall we talk on the phone? I'll put my telephone number at the bottom of the letter.
That's all for now,
Best wishes,
Riet
P.S. There's something I'd like to ask you.
Like the envelope, the letter is handwritten. No address, just a telephone number. I don't open the bill.
In the afternoon – on a Saturday of all days – a council cherry picker arrives. One man operates the contraption from the ground while the other unscrews the lamppost cover. I stand behind the blinds in the living room to watch them, I don't think they can see me. It's only when they're finished that I leave my spot at the window. I lie down on the new bed. I'm restless, I have the same feeling in my body as the day I saw that flock of different birds and my sheep stared at me like the members of a firing squad. Sleep is out of the question, all kinds of things keep running through my head, nothing stays put. Painting the living room and the bedroom, pollarding the willows, Jarno Koper in Denmark, the old tanker driver's funeral, the hooded crow in the ash. Buying the new bed, which I am now lying on, and that should be enough to send me to sleep, but I'm too restless.
A letter from Riet.
On 19 April 1967 I was halfway through the third term of the first year of my Dutch language and literature degree. I think I was the hardest working student in my year, not because of any ambition or drive of my own, but to show Father.
I
wasn't eligible for a grant because
he
had too many assets. That was what it said in the rejection letter from the Ministry of Education and Science, Board of Study Grants, and he and I both knew what those assets were: land, buildings, cows and machines. 'Am I supposed to sell cows to send
you
to university?' said Father, when I showed him the letter. He didn't wait for an answer but screwed the letter up without another word and, since there were no bins to hand, threw it in the kitchen sink. If he'd had a lighter or matches on him, he would have set fire to it. Henk was standing in the kitchen too and didn't know how to look at me from under his dark eyebrows. Mother retrieved the letter from the sink and tried to smooth it out, then put it in the bin after all.
So I stayed at home, rode my bike to Amsterdam, attended lectures and did all kinds of jobs to pay the tuition fees. When I sat at the kitchen table in the morning bleary-eyed because I had come home late the previous evening after unloading a delivery lorry at a large department store, Mother would sometimes ask me what I got up to in Amsterdam – Amsterdam, the city you were better off avoiding. She didn't actually have a clue what to ask me, but at least she tried. Until that 19 April, Father might have asked me three times how many big words I'd learnt now, without waiting for an answer before resuming his conversation with Henk. Conversations about cows that had gone dry, yearlings that needed moving or other farmers in the neighbourhood. Things that really meant something. To him and to Henk.
Henk was the farmer. Henk was Father's son. What he was supposed to make of me or what I was supposed to make of myself were questions he could ignore.
And Henk had Riet. Until December 1965, when he met her in a pub in Monnickendam, Henk belonged to me and I belonged to Henk. I was in the same pub and that was a source of some confusion for Riet. It was Christmas Eve,
the
night out for people who didn't attend Midnight Mass. Henk got talking to her and, as the evening progressed, they slid further away from the group that had started the evening together, the group of farm boys I was left with. Henk was facing away from me. I could tell from the back of his head that he was talking nineteen to the dozen, while now and then over his shoulder Riet glanced at me with a bewildered look in her eyes. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. He talked, I was silent, it was a typical Henk and Helmer evening, and not the other way round. We were eighteen and still looked as alike as two lambs, but then from different ewes, and after that Christmas Eve I was left behind, alone.
Riet got her driver's licence at the start of April. On 19 April she wanted to show Henk that, despite what he thought, despite what so many men thought, she hadn't passed the test because of her smile. I'd had a philology lecture that afternoon and rode my bike home. It was blowing from the south-west, a tailwind, my coat wasn't zipped up.
Mother was sitting in the kitchen, alone. 'Henk's dead,' she said.
At Murderer's Breach, between Edam and Warder, Riet went off the road because a car coming from the other direction didn't pull over. The car slid down the dyke, rolled and landed neatly, the right way up, in Lake IJssel. Henk was knocked out, the passenger door was twisted and the roof on his side was dented. Just there, the water was deeper than most places, perhaps because of the flood that once washed away this section of dyke, creating the lake called Murderer's Breach on the inland side. Even with the help of the driver who hadn't given way, Riet was unable to get him out of the car. The car, which wasn't winched out of Lake IJssel until the next day, was Father's dark-blue Simca.
As long as Henk was laid out in the living room, Riet spent every day at our house. She arrived early in the morning and went home late at night. We couldn't leave the coffin open for long because Henk had drowned. The temperature had plummeted during the night of the nineteenth and we kept the two sash windows ajar. Mother and Riet sat in the kitchen doing nothing all day. Now and then someone would visit, grandparents mostly, three of whom were still alive in 1967. Father and I avoided each other and did our best to stay outside as much as possible. Being inside the house was unbearable. The two women sat silently in the kitchen, Henk was laid out in the cold living room, and at night I couldn't sleep because I was afraid I would start to smell him. Two days after the accident I cycled to Amsterdam to attend a couple of lectures. On the way there I stood for a long time at the top of Schellingwoude Bridge, staring at the Orange Locks. I know with absolute certainty that I had a philology lecture on the nineteenth because when I came home Mother said that Henk was dead. The lectures I had before or after that date have completely faded from my memory. On the way back I stopped again for a long time at the top of Schellingwoude Bridge, now staring out over the Outer IJ, postponing the moment I would start pedalling again. That year the bridge was celebrating its tenth anniversary. I felt that I would be forgotten: Father and Mother were the parents, Riet was the almost-wife, I was just the brother.
Since that day almost every journey I make is north, I no longer go south of the village.
After the funeral Riet was still shivering, chilled to the bone by guilt and the icy water of Lake IJssel. Everyone else had left, the four of us were sitting in the kitchen: Riet in Henk's place, with the light from the side window behind her. Father raised his empty coffee cup and jiggled the spoon back and forth, staring down at the tabletop. Mother got up and silently poured another cup. Henk could do that too, make his spoon jump in his cup, but he smiled at me while he was doing it and he thanked Mother after she'd filled his cup. I saw Riet looking at Father. He stirred the milk skin into his coffee. Then she looked at me. In her eyes I saw again the bewilderment with which she had looked at me the night she met Henk. I don't remember talking to her. She did her talking with Mother. It was a week of silence.
She must have had a job, I don't remember. Three days later she was still at our house, as if she didn't know what to do next. She infected Mother with her mood. They'd walk around together, often to the Bosman windmill, as if they knew it was a place that meant a lot to Henk. She ate with us, and that was completely natural. At least for Mother and me. Not for Father. That evening, if I'm counting properly it must have been 26 April, he worked his way through his meal in silence. Just after shoving a forkful of potato into his mouth he spoke to Riet, it was virtually the only thing he said to her in that whole week of silence, 'I want you to go away and never come back.'
She put down her knife and fork – she was the only one who ate with knife and fork – neatly alongside her half-empty plate, slid her chair back and stood up. 'Fine,' she said calmly, as if she'd expected it, as if she'd been waiting for it. She walked to the hall, put on her coat and left through the front door. Mother started to cry. I got up and walked over to the front window. I saw her turning onto the road, on her bike. That's how I remember Riet: her back bent (she had a headwind), her blonde hair fluttering, riding her bike down a narrow, empty road that got emptier and emptier towards the dyke. She disappeared, just like the red light had in November, behind the window frame.
Father had more to say, 'And you're done there in Amsterdam.'
I became Father's boy. Mother didn't stop crying.