June

by Gerbrand Bakker

  His daughter lives in Limburg. South Limburg. He’s started to hum along to the violins. A dog. Why not actually? Not a big one, but medium-sized, one of the ones with a German name. A schnauzer, that’s it. Or is that the kind of dog you have to get trimmed every couple of months? Suddenly he’s had enough of the view. He goes into the hall and opens the door to the shop. It’s darker here than anywhere else in the house, with yellowed lace curtains hanging in the enormous window. Nothing’s changed in this room. The counter’s still there; the cabinet that used to contain the zwieback, rye and gingerbread hasn’t been moved. Everything’s just empty. He flicks the lights over the counter on and off a couple of times. He reads Blom’s Breadery in mirror writing through the curtains. ‘Blom’s Breadery?!’ He can still hear his wife saying it, much too long ago. ‘What’s wrong with Blom’s Bread and Pastries?’ He’d mumbled something about the seventies being just around the corner. A new era, a different era, elegant lettering on the Volkswagen van. ‘You’re weird,’ she’d said, but without any real spite.

  A gleaming, light-grey 1968 Volkswagen van, Type T2a. Tailgate and sliding side door, packed full at the start of the round with bread and pastries, cakes and white rolls, and everything still within easy reach. The streamlined VW logo prominent on the front, beautifully central between the two headlights; the chrome hubcaps and door handles; the red leather seats and front-door lining. The dealer in Den Helder told him, not without pride, that the chassis had Y-shaped steel supports and that ‘in the event of an accident’ the steering column would fold forward to prevent him from being crushed. The Saturday farm run in particular was fantastic at the start. At the start. Fresh bread and fresh leather, as if the two smells belonged together and were inseparable, made for each other.

  He flicks the lights on and off once again, then strides through to the kitchen, where he pulls the large watering can out of the cupboard under the sink.

  While emptying it between the hydrangeas for the third time, he sees a cyclist approaching on the other side of the canal that bisects the village. With difficulty, he straightens up; the watering cans are heavy and his back is old. A man with a green bucket on the pannier rack, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Short red hair. Early forties. ‘Hmm,’ goes the baker with the chapped face, putting the half-emptied watering can down on the gravel. He keeps watching the red-headed man until he turns off and rides onto the grounds of the former Polder House, where he slowly rounds the rose bed on the left before disappearing around the side of the building. The baker sticks a hand into the watering can and scoops up some water, bends forward a little and rubs his face with it, even though it’s no longer that cool.

  ‘So! At least now you’re doing something.’ The villager with the little dog is on his way back home.

  ‘What kind of dog is that anyway?’

  ‘This? Jack Russell. Rough coat. Have I got you thinking?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Jesus, man, the sweat’s pouring out of you. I’d sit down if I were you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m about to.’

  ‘We’re going to get some rain. At last.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I do. You can put that watering can away. We’ll be getting gallons of the stuff and you won’t have to pay a penny for it.’ The villager walks on without saying goodbye.

  Not one like that anyway, the baker with the chapped face thinks. Too small. He pours the remaining water out over the gravel path without noticing, then walks in through the open front door, puts the watering can on the draining board and sits down, both hands neatly placed on the table in front of him.

  The old Queen. She was there once, in front of the Polder House, long ago, when the light-grey Volkswagen van was still gleaming. She was presented with two pygmy goats. By the district council if his memory serves him right. What happened to those goats? Did the driver stuff them in the boot of that big black limo? Did they spend years eating grass in the back garden of Soestdijk Palace? I’ve got photos of them somewhere, of that whole visit, he thinks. Lots and lots of photos. She was inside the Polder House too, of course. I saw the table, he thinks. White tablecloth, plates and glasses, vases with sweet peas. I delivered freshly baked bread there in the morning. Ordinary bread, nothing special, that’s what the district clerk said. Brown and white rolls, fruit loaf. It was only after she left that I started on my round of the surrounding farms. Yes, there are photos. Later. Now I’ll sit down.

  He looks at the calendar, hanging between the two narrow windows. Saturday. There are words written there that he can’t read from this distance, but he knows what they say. Dinner at Dinie’s. He sweeps imaginary crumbs off the tabletop.

  Coffee

  ‘Look, Daddy, a gold ring!’

  ‘Nice,’ says Klaas. ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘From a plant.’

  ‘A plant?’

  ‘Uh-huh, it’s broken now. It was there.’ Dieke points at the floor.

  His gaze goes from the floor up to the windowsill, where one of the Christmas cactuses is now in a plastic tub and listing to one side. Then he has a closer look at the large ring. It reminds him of something, something from the old days. ‘You going to put it in your bag?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can I have a look in that bag sometime?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s my bag.’

  ‘Can’t argue with that.’

  ‘Can I have it back now?’

  He hands the ring back to his daughter and rustles the newspaper. When they’ve finished the paper it goes over to the other side of the ditch, and the newspaper from the other side of the ditch comes here. The breakfast things are still on the table, but the mid-morning coffee is already dripping through the filter. It’s almost ten o’clock. A long way to go to midday, he thinks, and after that, a much longer afternoon.

  ‘I’d still rather you didn’t hide the bag so far in under your bed,’ his wife says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s dusty.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Yes, what.’

  ‘Otherwise people will look in it.’

  ‘No they won’t. Your father and I aren’t going to look in it if you say we’re not allowed to.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the swimming pool.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to go see Uncle Jan.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the village. He just left. On Grandma’s bike.’

  ‘Haven’t you arranged something with Evelien?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. He had something hanging off his handlebars.’

  ‘It does matter.’

  ‘I don’t like it at the swimming pool!’

  ‘Yesterday,’ Klaas says, ‘talking to Jan, you were full of it.’

  ‘That was yesterday! Now it’s today.’

  ‘Whereabouts in the village has Jan gone?’ his wife asks.

  I didn’t ask him anything, Klaas thinks. I don’t really have a clue. ‘He’s probably gone to the churchyard.’

  ‘The cemetery.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s a cemetery, the church is miles away.’

  ‘Yeah! I want to go there!’ Dieke screeches.

  ‘You think that’s fun?’

  ‘Of course! He said he was going there to work. I can help him, can’t I?’

  ‘And then every ten minutes you’ll want to come home again I suppose?’

  ‘Or start whining for Evelien? Wouldn’t you be better off going to the swimming pool?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Lovely,’ says Klaas.

  His wife pours the coffee. Big mugfuls. She opens a cupboard and gets out a packet of biscuits, tear
ing it open with one index finger. The mugs and biscuits go on the table, between the teacups, jam and chocolate sprinkles. Klaas takes milk and sugar, his wife drinks her coffee black. Dieke is quiet, letting the gold ring slide through her fingers and not whinging for a glass of lemonade. Klaas has put the paper aside and rolled a cigarette. His wife has already lit one. Now and then he looks at her over the top of his brown mug. She has a dour expression on her face and keeps her eyes fixed either on the tabletop or out of the window, maybe staring at the withered grass in the drinking trough. He doesn’t know what she thinks about it, that grass. She doesn’t seem to mind it too much; she’s never attempted to fill it with a few violets or some ivy-leaved geraniums. The kitchen is blue with smoke.

  ‘You’ll take her?’ she asks.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘Really? What, for instance?’

  Say something immediately, don’t wait, it doesn’t matter what. ‘Clean out the cowshed.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘See?’

  She gets up, pulls the jug out of the coffee maker and tops them up. Then she stubs out her cigarette, stuffs a third biscuit into her mouth and looks menacingly at Dieke – who is still being as quiet as a mouse. ‘The cemetery,’ she mumbles. ‘What next?’

  After the coffee, his wife and Dieke leave on the bike for the village. For appearances’ sake, Klaas walks through the front garden to the cowshed, where he really doesn’t want to be. Not that it’s that much work: clear the mound of silage from the feeding passage with the tractor, muck out the calf stalls, give them a spray with the high-pressure hose and you’re done. Monday, I’ll do it Monday. It’s the weekend now, and maybe in a couple of days it won’t be so out-rageously hot. He pulls open the toilet door. It smells fresh, of lemon, the bowl is spotless and there’s water in it. He doesn’t know who does this, who takes the trouble of coming here every now and then to flush the toilet and maybe even clean it with the brush. There are no spiderwebs in sight and even the light-brown tiles are clean. He unzips his flies, lowers his jeans, turns and sits down. He leaves the door ajar. After wiping his arse – there’s even a roll of toilet paper under the calendar from the company that sold them the tractor – he tugs his jeans back up. The calendar’s behind. He rips off the old days, tears them up and throws the pieces into the toilet bowl. He hesitates about whether or not to push the button on the cistern. In the end he does, but doesn’t stay to watch the water gush through. He closes the door softly behind him.

  On a shelf in the milking parlour is the old radio that used to go on twice a day. Sometimes he forgot to turn it on and the cows reminded him by getting restless. He turns it on. Classical music, violins. He twists the knob back a little too energetically and the radio tumbles off the shelf, landing corner first on the white-tiled floor and bursting open. The batteries skid into the milking pit, the volume knob rolls out through the open door and into the feeding passage. Klaas watches it roll away, then follows it without tidying up the mess.

  Stepping out through the front doors onto the concrete path that leads to the road, he sees a hazy strip of clouds in the west. Rekel bumps up against his legs. ‘Here, boy,’ he says, leading the way through the front garden and back to the yard. There, he picks the heavy dog up and descends carefully to the ditch, near the bridge. With a slight swinging movement, he throws Rekel into the water, overbalances, comes close to falling in after the dog, but is able to grasp the bridge railing just in time to steady himself. The dog circles back, snorting, makes as if to climb up out of the ditch on Klaas’s side, then changes his mind and swims over to the other side where the bank isn’t as steep. He climbs up out of the water like an otter, his tail stuck to his belly and his head down to the ground, then shakes himself thoroughly once he’s reached the top of the bank. Only then does he turn around. Klaas and the dog exchange glances. ‘Why don’t you do that yourself sometimes?’ Klaas asks. Rekel just stares at him impassively, then saunters along beside the ditch to the far corner of the garden and starts an extended sniffing of the root of a willow. It’s the last pollard in the row of five: runty and stunted for years now, with a small head, probably because it’s too close to a much older pear tree and has never had enough light and air. Or is it because of that other dog? Is that what Rekel can smell, even though it was buried there some twenty-five years ago?

  Shit

  The woman who thinks she’s responsible for the cemetery leans on her worktop with both hands to look out through her kitchen window and across her back garden at the hedge around the cemetery. The hedge is some kind of conifer and thick, except directly across from her back garden, where a section suddenly turned light brown two years ago. After which, council gardeners removed quite a few conifers. Without replacing them. Besides the hole and the headstones, the woman can’t see a thing. She takes her hands off the worktop and shuffles through to the living room, glancing at the calendar on the way past. It’s one she bought late last year with paintings by Ada Breedveld. Not that she’d ever heard of Ada Breedveld: the paintings just appealed to her. Herm dinner is written under today’s date.

  There are newspaper cuttings spread out over the coffee table. The light in the stifling-hot through room is yellow; she made sure to lower the awning early this morning. Apart from a bra, she’s not wearing anything on her upper body at all. She sits down in one of the easy chairs and shuffles the clippings. She doesn’t need to read them, she knows perfectly well what they’re about. ‘Yes, Benno,’ she tells her dog. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Next to the clippings is the framed photo of her husband. ‘We’ll go over there again later,’ she tells the dog, which is enormous, with a broad head and lots of fur. ‘Have they gone completely mad?’ Shit: that’s what the clippings are about. Cow shit. And about ‘an unidentified vandal or vandals’ and ‘an investigation that has been launched’. She hasn’t seen a single police officer over there once. Now she stops to think about it, she never sees any police anywhere, not even cycling or driving past.

  The dog, which has been staring out the window lethargically, walks over to the woman and starts to lick her knees. She pulls her skirt up a little and tucks the fabric into the waistband. ‘Good boy,’ she says. ‘Your mistress is boiling.’ She slips a thumb under a bra strap to wipe away the sweat. Just when she’s about to get up to turn on the radio, she sees a woman passing on a bike with a child on the back. A red-headed girl who, judging by her mouth, is talking nineteen to the dozen. She’s wearing a small rucksack. She doesn’t know the woman; there are so many people she doesn’t know in the village. She only moved back from Den Helder after her husband died, mainly because he wanted to be buried here. If it had been up to her, she would never have come back. People have left, died, been born, moved, disappeared. She has no desire to start over again. There are all kinds mixed up together on the new estate, even a Negro and a family of Muslims, though she doesn’t have a clue what country they’re from. She’s standing there in her bra, her thumb now under the other bra strap, and she sees the woman and the child both look up at the front of her house. I’m virtually naked, she thinks to herself, only just realising. I’m standing here on display for the whole neighbourhood. Next thing, that Negro will come walking past! She tries to think of nasty things about Negroes – sneaking into other people’s houses, stealing, lying, that little black kid, is he the Negro’s son? – but doesn’t get very far; she doesn’t want the word ‘rape’ in her head, even if that’s nasty too, but it’s the one that sticks. She hurries into the hall and, from the hall, upstairs to put on a blouse.

  Shells

  Counting trees. That’s what Dieke does until she gets to a number that’s too big for her. She starts again, but is soon distracted by other things. Farms, the prospect of going to the cemetery, where she’s never been before, passing tree trunks, her mother’s hips that grow and shrink under her hands, grow and
shrink, a grey heron standing in the ditch as still as if it’s in a photo. When they pass the sign for the village, she says, ‘Will you do the houses?’

  ‘Dilemma,’ her mother says. Big white house. Tall, more than anything, with a red-tiled roof.

  ‘Moving On.’ House with geraniums on the windowsills, and curtains.

  ‘Let ’Em Talk.’ Junk in the front garden, shopping trolleys, railway sleepers, no plants in the windows.

  ‘Eben-Ezer.’

  ‘What’s that mean, Mummy?’

  ‘You know I don’t know what it means, Diek.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t. Why do you keep asking? I’ll look it up for you one day. Hi, hello!’ Her mother waves at a woman pulling up weeds in her front garden. The bike wobbles. Dieke grips her mother’s hips extra tight.

  The Eating Corner. Boarded-up windows, tall fences, weeds.

  ‘That lady should work here,’ she says.

  ‘You’re not wrong there. Do you want to go through the new estate or shall we go past the Polder House?’

  Dieke has to think about that. Usually there’s more happening and more to see in the new estate. The swimming pool is behind the new houses, near the football pitches. Her bottom’s starting to hurt from sitting on the pannier rack, she wants to get off the bike sooner rather than later, but she doesn’t know which route is shorter. And she thinks of Evelien, who might already be at the swimming pool.

  ‘Well? We haven’t got all day.’

  ‘New estate,’ she says.

  ‘Linquenda.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Just yes.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then.’