Cuttlebone
Saturday, it’s Saturday today. He sits on the side of the bed, hands on knees, whistling softly. It’s ten to six. He looks down at his hands.
At five past six he pulls the bedding straight. The sun’s already up, the tall trees in the front garden look grey and ominously still. Zeeger Kaan fluffs up the pillow and lays it on the duvet cover. He’s had a window wide open all night, but you couldn’t really say it’s cooled off in the bedroom. It was a short night. Under the window the hydrangeas have started to flower. He walks to the toilet and sits down to pee. When he’s finished he doesn’t flush, but throws a few sheets of toilet paper into the bowl and closes the door as quietly as possible. The ticking of the inherited grandfather clock in the hall is loud and cavernous. He thinks of the tiled floor covered with walnuts. Some people eat their walnuts fresh; around here we always dry them for days on end first. Another four months or so and it will be that time of year again. No, more like five.
He doesn’t go back to the bedroom to get dressed. The front door needs opening. He turns the key and unbolts the upper half. The air outside is as still as it is in the house. He goes upstairs.
Jan is lying on his back, legs wide, one arm over his stomach. The curtains are open, the window is shut tight, the duvet has slid down to the floor. Sweat gleams on his nose; a mosquito, fat and red, is sitting on his forehead. He’s dumped his bag on a chair, his clothes are draped over the back. Zeeger Kaan stands there for a long time staring at his son, at the brown-checked curtains, at the trinkets on the coffee table, at the bed Jan is lying on, at the mosquito, which eventually takes slow flight and lands again on the sloping white wall.
At quarter to seven he gets the paper out of the letter box. There aren’t even any dewdrops on the flap. Still dressed in just his vest and underpants he walks, newspaper in hand, up onto the road. Empty. The chocolate Labrador watches from the path. ‘Food?’ Zeeger Kaan asks. The dog barks.
He throws two mugs of dry food into the dog’s bowl and goes into the living room with the paper. After reading the ‘Town & Country’ section, he lays the paper on the coffee table and notices the empty space under the bookshelves. ‘What’s she going to come up with next?’ he mumbles. He goes into the bedroom to get dressed. He wants to go outside, into the back garden, but a basket full of colours keeps him in the laundry just a little longer. He fills the washing machine, sets the temperature to sixty degrees and presses the button. After the machine has been running for about a minute, he goes out through the side door.
At the side and front of the house there’s lawn and trees; behind the house, perennials, and further into the garden, more trees. Anna’s been nagging him about the chestnuts in the front garden for years. She wants him to cut them down because it ‘gets so dark and gloomy’ in the house in summer. Water flows over an algae-covered granite ball and disappears between rocks in the ground. ‘Bloody slugs,’ he says, passing the hostas. He stops under the walnut tree. The dog walks on a little and sits down by the side of the ditch. It’s shady even there, from the row of pollard willows. Together they look at the farm. When a couple of jackdaws land on the roof ridge, a tile slides clattering down, catches the gutter and arcs down onto the gravel. If she wasn’t awake, she is now. There isn’t a single nut at his feet.
At ten to nine he fills the coffee machine with water and tips five scoops of coffee into the filter. He puts the glass jar of ground coffee back in the sideboard, then reconsiders. Jan likes it strong. When he looks up he sees his granddaughter standing on the windowsill and waving enthusiastically with both hands. His daughter-in-law appears, a plant slides out of view, then Dieke’s gone too. He hasn’t even had time to wave back.
A few minutes later Jan pads downstairs in his bare feet, looks around and grabs the paper from the living room.
‘Good morning,’ he says.
‘Yep,’ says his son.
‘Coffee?’
‘Yep.’
Rekel immediately creeps under the kitchen table to lie on Jan’s feet.
‘Sleep well?’
‘OK.’ His son rubs his forehead and opens the ‘Town & Country’ section. He doesn’t ask him if he slept well. Alone. It seems some things are more or less normal, no matter how irregularly they happen.
‘Food?’ he says.
‘Do you have zwieback?’
He gets the zwieback tin out of a cupboard and puts it on the table, drops a single sugar cube into Jan’s coffee and starts to eat. His son eats too, but doesn’t say anything, reading the articles Zeeger read earlier. Pile-driving starts for modern school building, Blue-green algae in recreational lake, Cyclist hit by car in Den Helder, Local resident in finals of international swimming race. ‘I’ve got cuttlebone,’ he says.
‘What for?’ Jan asks.
‘To clean it.’
‘How’s that work? Rekel, get out of there.’
Sighing, the dog comes out from under Jan’s side of the table and walks back under it on the other side, where he lies down on Zeeger Kaan’s bare feet.
‘Wet it, rub it, then wash it off.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Here.’ He pulls his feet out from under the dog and walks through to the laundry, where he picks up the green bucket with the five pieces of cuttlebone. Jan’s followed him and takes one out. He studies it, running a finger over the smooth shining side and pressing a hole in the soft side with his thumb. Exactly what he did when the man at the stone suppliers in Schagen handed the stuff over to him completely free of charge.
‘Paint in the garage?’ Jan asks.
‘Yep. I’ll come with you.’
‘No need, I’ll find it.’ Jan takes the bucket and disappears through the side door. The dog ambles off behind him.
And now? What should he do now? Wait till Jan’s gone. He looks at the breakfast table, the empty plates covered with zwieback crumbs, the half-full cup of coffee and the mild cheese that’s started to sweat. Then he clears it all away.
A few minutes later Jan comes back, disappears into the bathroom, re-emerges without his T-shirt and goes upstairs. Comes back down again in shorts and worn trainers, and fetches his T-shirt from the bathroom. He smells of sunblock.
‘You going?’ Zeeger Kaan asks.
‘Almost.’
‘Found everything?’
‘Sure. You’ve got a flat.’
‘What?’
‘Your back tyre’s flat. On your bike.’
News to me, he thinks. He watches his son walk off, not to the garage, but over the bridge, holding his T-shirt loosely in one hand. Aha, he thinks. Then he unloads the washing machine and hangs the trousers, towels and shirts neatly on the line while looking around the garage in his mind’s eye, trying to remember where he put the puncture repair kit.
Straw
A storm! No, not a storm. But why that tile then? She’s slept, very deeply, but restlessly as well, and the tile sliding off the roof has woken her from her sleep or doze, or maybe it’s just the memory of dozens of glazed roof tiles lying shattered in the yard.
An eternity ago, Zeeger’s grandmother lay dead in her bedroom the morning after a November storm. The fire was cold, the paraffin lamp had gone out. Zeeger’s father was in the yard clearing away the broken tiles and she was standing next to her brand-new husband, bare arm to bare arm. The night had been divided into rising wind, racket on the roof, fading wind. One of the boughs of the red beech in the front garden had snapped, and the bare twigs were scratching across a window at the front of the house. ‘We’ll have to change that pane,’ her mother-in-law had told her father-in-law when he was finished with the tiles. ‘It’s dangerous.’ Her father-in-law had pulled open the door of the cabinet. ‘After we’ve cleared up,’ he said, taking a gold medal from a shelf and buffing it up against his chest. She had looked at Zeeger, willing him to l
ook back at her, but he just stood there as if he’d been nailed to the ground, staring at his grandmother’s face. The Frisian tail clock on the wall ticked very loudly.
She doesn’t know where she is, and when she realises, she doesn’t want to know. She pricks up her ears. Was she really just woken by a falling tile? She looks up through the rafters, trying to see if there are more holes than there were yesterday afternoon. Beneath her: shuffling and snorting in the bullpen. A filthy light fills the barn, as if the day doesn’t want to get properly started. She struggles up to a sitting position, rubs her sore neck with one hand and remembers the dull creak from earlier. Was that her? Are her bones creaking? The parade sword is lying in exactly the same spot as before; the smooth leather scabbard is warm and oily, nothing like her own dry neck. She tears open the packet of biscuits and eats one whole compartment. Then she unscrews the cap of the water bottle and drinks a few musty mouthfuls. She lies down again, on her right side this time, hoping to go back to sleep for a while.
Zeeger’s face, half a century ago. She was so desperate for him to look at her. Shivering in that bedroom with the clivias and sansevierias on the windowsill, the resonant tick of the Frisian clock, the cracked windowpane that would never be replaced, her mother-in-law walking in and out. But no, he stared straight ahead at his dead grandmother. His place on the farm had come one generation closer.
Someone’s walking around the yard. Jan, she thinks, because Zeeger and Klaas walk very differently, if only because those two almost always wear clogs. Is he coming into the barn? She clears her throat quietly. Not that she’s planning on saying anything, but still. The footsteps move away again. She listens so carefully she can even hear Rekel shuffling along. She swallows. It’s quiet. Jan always does a circuit when he comes home. She imagines his route: past the dead sheep, a little further to the collapsed rabbit hutch with the leftover straw and rock-hard pellets, the cracked concrete slabs, a stack of half-rotten gateposts, past the back of the cowshed, then inside where there’s still a mound of dry silage in the feeding passage, maybe he’ll even pull open the toilet door and be surprised by the toilet bowl – unexpectedly clean – then through the feeding passage to the back of the barn, out again, past the old dungheap, behind the sheep shed, then left onto the dusty path alongside the ditch, with the silo on the left and Kees Brak’s plum trees on the other side, then cutting across the yard at an angle to the big threshing doors . . .
He comes into the barn. She hears him walking up to the bullpen. Keep quiet, lie still. Horrible boy. Has he got something to say? The bull snorts, she hears his horns clicking against the iron bars.
‘I’m taking your bike!’ he shouts.
Don’t say anything, just lie still, let him see what it’s like.
It stays quiet down below for a long time. Then he walks to the side doors. She doesn’t want to say anything, she really doesn’t, but when she’s sure he’s outside, she calls out, ‘Don’t change the computer!’ She covers her mouth with one hand, laying the other on her stomach. A little later she hears something fall into the ditch, followed by thrashing and splashing. Jan says something she can’t make out. Then there’s just the swallows flying in and out constantly and the snorting of that superfluous lump of meat. How long before I start on the advocaat? she wonders.
Christmas Trees
Zeeger Kaan watches from the bench by the side door as his son picks up Rekel and carefully clambers down to the ditch. ‘Swim!’ Jan shouts, dropping the dog. His body is only visible from the chest up and now goes lower. ‘No, don’t get out straight away. You need to swim, and then lie down in the shade.’ Jan turns and climbs back up the bank of the ditch. ‘Stupid dog,’ Zeeger hears him say. As Jan comes towards him, Rekel creeps up out of the ditch with his head hanging and his tail between his legs. He just stands there, without shaking himself dry, watching balefully as the man who just dumped him in the water walks away.
‘I’m off,’ Jan says. He goes into the laundry and re-emerges almost immediately with the green bucket.
‘OK,’ says Zeeger. ‘I’ll come and have a look a bit later.’
His son looks at him. ‘She said something.’
He nods.
‘I’m not allowed to change the computer.’
‘Ha. The things she worries about.’
Jan goes around the corner of the house into the back garden. Zeeger waits, wipes his forehead with one hand and looks at the washing, which, if the wind gets up a little, might dry in an hour. Rekel comes over to him and only now shakes himself dry. ‘Ah, nice,’ he says. The dog whimpers and lies down against the leg of the garden table.
He crosses the lawn between the chestnut trees and looks down the road in the direction of the village. Jan is riding slowly, the bucket swinging back and forth on the handlebars, banging against his knee. Then he brakes, gets off, puts the bucket on the pannier rack and pulls the straps up over it. He looks around for a moment before continuing on his way. Zeeger Kaan watches until he’s become a blotch that turns left, into the village. To the north the road is empty, and when he looks in the other direction it turns out to be empty to the south too. Although it’s still early, the countryside is shimmering: the trunks of the young elms diffracting in the bands of light. Even though he can’t see the trees that well, he still shakes his head disdainfully. They’re supposed to be resistant, this variety. Just like the last variety. Straight ahead is a wood. Owned by some guy from the city who, the first time Klaas spoke to him, said things like, ‘Nah, you know, just shaking up the rigidity around here a bit.’ And, later, ‘Lovely, feet in the mud, just planting away. All this free oxygen.’ Or, ‘It’s my way of getting a breath of fresh air to blow through this polluted world, know what I mean?’ A wood, in the middle of the polder. Hopefully without any elms, because they’d all just die. Behind the wood, directly west, it’s hazy: a broad strip of filthy-looking sky is advancing.
In the garage he’s greeted by a voice from the radio that plays day and night. Zeeger Kaan leaves it on because he thinks music and voices scare off burglars. His wife turns it off now and then. She finds it ‘lonely’: a pointless radio playing for nobody. In winter, with a slight easterly, he hears it when he wakes up in the night through the window he keeps ajar. He doesn’t find it ‘lonely’. He investigates what’s missing from his workbench. Jan’s taken the white paint, a few sheets of sandpaper and a brush. Maybe a rag too, and ammonia, there’s a very slight hint of a pungent smell and the red bottle has been moved. He pokes his nose out of the door to look around the corner at the outside tap. The bricks under it are wet. Jan must have moistened a rag. Rekel is lying in front of the open door, full in the sun. ‘Go and lie in the shade, will you, dog?’ he says. The animal beats the yellow clinker bricks with his tail but doesn’t stand up.
‘Radio North-Holland goes classic,’ a woman’s voice says in English, and then violin music really does come from the radio. He resumes his work from yesterday. A Christmas tree made out of seventeen wooden slats. A long vertical one, four for the base and twelve as branches, each circle of four a little smaller than the one below it. The glue is dry, now he can start attaching the aluminium candleholders. In a corner of the garage there’s a whole collection of Christmas trees: some untreated, some painted green. At least fifty of them. Attaching the candleholders is precision work, they’re fragile and he wants them all in exactly the same spot. Fifteen minutes later he tacks the last one in position and puts the Christmas tree with the rest of the collection. In a week there’ll be another car boot sale in Sint Maartenszee. There’ll be Germans there and Germans always buy Christmas trees, even when it’s scorching. Then he remembers the flat tyre. He takes the red tin with the puncture repair kit down from a shelf and whistles along to the violins.
Hydrangeas
The baker with the chapped face is standing in his neat front garden. A gravel path leads from the road to the front door and is
flanked on both sides by low box-hedge squares. Insides the squares are hydrangeas, which he manages to keep blue with copper scrap and some other stuff he picked up in a garden centre. They’re just starting to flower, but the leaves are drooping, they could do with a few watering cans.
‘What are you doing there, twiddling your thumbs?’ A fellow villager with a little dog.
‘What about you?’
‘At least I’m taking the dog for a walk.’
‘I don’t have a dog.’
‘I know. Why don’t you get one?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then you’d always have a reason to go outside.’
‘Aren’t I allowed to stand in my own front garden?’
‘Of course, why not? It’s unbearable inside anyway.’
The men are quiet for a moment. ‘Off on holiday soon?’ the baker asks.
‘Already been. A week in Burgh-Haamstede. Beautiful. You?’
‘I might go yet.’
‘Bye, then.’
‘See you.’
On the other side of the street there are tall fences around the snack bar, the Eating Corner. Have been for months. The windows are boarded up too. According to the large sign on the patio, two new apartments are going to replace it. The baker sighs and goes inside. The radio in the kitchen is playing classical music. That’s strange, Radio North-Holland never has violin music at this time of day. Although there’s nobody in the house to change stations, he checks that the radio is still tuned to Radio North-Holland, then walks through the hall to the living room, where he stands at the large back window. Two or three kilometres away there’s another road parallel to this one, recognisable by the young elms planted along it, and between his back garden and that road – the Kruisweg – nothing but drab green grass with a kind of desert sky above, that’s how he imagines it. He has jammed some newspapers behind the pot plants on the windowsill. He doesn’t know exactly what purpose they serve, but it’s something his wife always did and that’s why he does it now.
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