Zeeger Kaan goes for a wander around the ever-shrinking cemetery. He runs a hand over his short hair, he rubs a knee.
‘You going already?’ Dieke screams.
‘No,’ he calls back. ‘Just a little longer.’
‘Don’t forget me, OK?’
Children’s graves are marked with stuffed animals that were once rain-soaked and swollen and are now dry, lumpy and flocky. He looks at the names and years on the headstones. Three mayors buried in a row. All three of them alone, without wives. One of them was mayor when the old Queen came to visit. Knowing him, he probably said something grovelling like, ‘This way if you please, Your Majesty. Lunch will be served here inside,’ before they disappeared into the Polder House. A bunch of daffodils at the foot of the monument to the English airmen is completely withered, just this side of crumbling to dust. He walks on into the older section, behind the Polder House.
‘Are you going?’
‘I’ll be back in a minute, Diek!’
‘Are you in such a hurry to go?’ he hears his son ask.
‘Not really,’ Dieke says.
He stops at his parents’ grave: Jan Kaan and Neeltje Kaan-Helder. A grave that’s much newer than the one Jan’s working on. A grave whose lease, as he now remembers, needs renewing for another ten years sometime soon. Lying next to them are his grandmother and grandfather: Zeeger Kaan and Griet Kaan-van Zandwijk. Always strange to see your own name on a headstone. He never knew his grandfather, who died young. But his grandmother didn’t die until she was ninety-five, on a stormy night in November. Dozens of roof tiles in the yard, fallen trees, no electricity, a big crack in one of the front windows. And early in the morning, a dead grandmother in the three-quarter bed. He stood there, studying her face for a long time, making out what he took for a last trace of resistance. Anna stood next to him, squeezing his hand so hard she was almost crushing it, and he wanted to look at her and smile, but couldn’t tear his eyes away from the dead woman. In the days that followed, his father and mother had a massive clear-out, with virtually everything going onto a huge pile behind the farmhouse that they weren’t able to light for two or three days because of the constant easterly. The old kapok mattress smoked and fizzed for a long time before it finally caught fire, the sansevierias exploded damply.
He walks on quickly to the gravediggers’ shed, where he turns on the tap, cups his hands and splashes water on his face. Then he sees his father, who after clearing the broken tiles from the yard, went directly to his mother’s cabinet and took out his medal. A gold medal, won with the sleigh on Kolhorn harbour one freezing winter. His father was very good with horses. Rubbing the medal on his chest, puffing on it and cleaning it again, while behind him his mother lay dead in her three-quarter bed. The farm was finally his.
He looks in through the window. A shrivelled magpie is hanging on a string. There is a heavy mallet. An old-fashioned bier. Spades and shovels, posts. It must be suffocating in there.
Going back to get Dieke, he realises that there is a whole village under his feet. No, several villages. And still, the older he gets, the smaller and more cramped this place becomes. Will there be space for me? he wonders. Nellie, that was the name of the horse his father won the medal with. Bloody hell, that just popped up out of nowhere.
‘We’re off.’
‘Yes!’ says Dieke. She jumps down onto the ground, grabs her rucksack and heads straight for the gate.
‘We have to say goodbye to Jan first.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
Jan is up to the second e. Zeeger notices how muscular his back is: although he’s bending forward, his backbone is still in a furrow, not sticking out at all. ‘You should take that T-shirt off your head and just put it on.’ A muscular back and thinning hair.
‘Do you know what I thought of this morning, riding past the Polder House?’
‘What?’
‘Uncle Piet, and how he stood on that black ledge.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘At the funeral. He stood on that black ledge without holding on to anything.’
‘Ah, son, come on. That’s not even possible.’
‘Are we going now?’ Dieke asks.
‘It’s still true.’ He’s talking without looking up. He dips the brush into the paint again and puts the tip in the t.
Zeeger Kaan sighs. What an imagination. He takes Dieke’s hand. ‘Come on.’
When they’re seven or eight graves away, Jan calls out to him. ‘Did Mum say anything?’
‘No,’ he lies.
‘Did you try to get her down?’
‘No.’
Dieke tugs on his hand. ‘Grandpa . . .’
‘When did she actually go up there?’
‘Just before I left to pick you up from the train yesterday, Johan rang. He wanted to speak to her. When we got home, she was up on the straw.’
‘And now?’
‘Grandpa!’
‘Yes, Diek. Nothing.’
They walk on. It’s very quiet. Without speaking, Dieke points out two small birds perched on a low branch of the linden. Blue tits, their beaks wide open. The shells crunch underfoot. He looks at Anna’s bike, which Jan has leant against a chestnut tree. There’s the black-painted ledge that runs all around the base of the Polder House. Seven centimetres wide at most. Black varnish, that’s what it’s painted with. Just to be sure, he inspects the wall, which is painted off-white. Maybe there’s a ring somewhere his brother-in-law could have held on to. Nothing. Dieke has walked ahead to the car. He opens the door and she jumps onto the seat. ‘Oof!’ she says.
‘Wait a sec,’ he tells her. ‘I just have to . . .’
‘It’s boiling in here.’
‘Leave the door open. I won’t be long.’
He walks around the car and opens the door on the driver’s side as well, turns the key in the ignition and switches the radio on. He stops to listen for a moment. A reporter from Radio North-Holland has gone to the seaside: ‘It’s chock-a-block down here, the beach restaurants are doing a roaring trade and that’s a real turnaround from last year when the summer was a complete washout. I’m now walking down the ramp . . .’
‘Boring,’ says Dieke.
‘There’ll be music in a minute.’
He walks back to the black ledge, but changes his mind and carries on. Past his wife’s bike, now in the shade of the chestnuts and the gate, which he fortunately didn’t close behind him, so he can go back into the cemetery without making a sound.
He can’t see anything. His son is hidden behind the headstones. Maybe working on the h, or even the third e. The herring gulls, which he had forgotten, laugh as they take wing. Jan sits up a little to look at the birds as they glide over his head and disappear behind the hedge, tumbling over each other as they fly west. To the beach. Then the cemetery seems deserted again. He turns and walks over to the black ledge, stands with his back against the wall and steps up with one heel on the ledge. When he tries to put his other foot up there too, he immediately loses his balance. He tries it again, this time with the other foot first, and again fails. ‘Strange boy,’ he mumbles.
‘Grandpa!’
Radio
Klaas is back in the easy chair in the old cow passage. Not because he wants to take it easy, but because he can’t get his mother’s voice out of his head. He still doesn’t know if he imagined it or if she really did call him. He stares out, which means staring at a square in the distance where the sliding door was yesterday evening. Sitting on top of the white-brick wall that forms a partition in the L-shaped cow passage is another radio. In the old days you used to walk out of the cowshed to the sound of music and be greeted by the same music a bit further along. Now the only radio you hear is the old thing in his father’s garage. He turned this one on not expecting it to work, but it did . . . ‘I’m now walking down t
he ramp and onto the beach, let’s see if anyone’s here . . . Could you tell me if . . . Wait, this is a German family, they don’t understand me of course, and if they say something in reply, you won’t understand them. Unless I translate it on the spot, but it’s much too hot for that, ha ha ha. I’ll just walk on a bit and – Ah, yes, here are two dyed-in-the-wool North Hollanders. Ladies, are you enjoying your day on the beach?’
‘It’s glorious, but now the sun’s gone, so we’re not going to get much browner. But we’re not going home yet! Rie and I just love swimming, so we’ll be going back in for another dip!’
‘You heard it, listeners, this is the place to be right now. What was your name? . . . Jenneke and Rie are in their element. The sun really has disappeared for the moment, so let’s switch to our weatherman, Jan Visser. Jan, can you . . .’
The wooden silo starts creaking. Like an upside-down iceberg, only a small part of it is visible from here, the lower section that emerges from the attic and tapers down to form a chute you can open by sliding up a steel door. First it creaks, then something falls against the door. Then it’s quiet again, except for the drivel coming from the radio.
Have you sold the land yet? That brother of his – who spends all his time over there on Texel and never lifts a finger here, who never even shows up for the haymaking, when Johan is up on the cart before the first bale has rolled out of the baler, although it isn’t really responsible, letting him help with something like that – that brother asks if he’s sold the land yet. ‘Tsk,’ he says. He stands up and turns off the radio. Dust billows from the sheet covering the easy chair.
Why do we always try so hard to get Mum to come down? he wonders. What’s the point? In the end she always comes down of her own accord. Once she’d taken his father’s shotgun up with her and even fired it. She’d aimed at a swift, she admitted to her husband much later, and missed it of course. For some reason, his mother isn’t really fond of animals. The next day he and Jan had tied all the ladders they could find together and climbed up to replace the dozens of wrecked roof tiles. Her shoulder was bruised for weeks. Klaas can’t remember when that was, the early eighties maybe. It’s getting more and more embarrassing, especially now she’s in her seventies. Her dragging that old body up the ladder and laying it down on the hard straw; her shrill voice, muffled by a hundred years of dust.
He walks out and gives the door lying flat on the concrete another kick. There’s that dead sheep again. How did they do it in the old days? Did they just bury the dead animals in a field? He remembers one of his grandfather’s stories, about a mass grave on the edge of the farm after the anthrax epidemic of 1923. Hundreds of cow bones at the bottom of a field. He remembers so many things. He starts whistling and, like yesterday evening, walks to the causeway gate and rests his forearms on the top, badly chewed board. Two hares are sitting in the field about fifty metres away. Their ears are trembling. They’re facing each other and staring into each other’s eyes like two competing hypnotists. It’s strange. You often see a single hare or two together, but very rarely do you see a group. They ignore his whistling.
Where the wooden silo comes down through the ceiling there’s an access hatch. An open access hatch. Klaas pulls a rusty bike off a pile of rubbish and leans it against the white wall, grips the top of the wall, steps up onto the bike seat and uses the momentum to raise his hands to the bottom of the hatch. He steps up onto the wall from the bike seat, then hoists his upper body into the space, swinging his legs in the process and kicking the radio off the wall. It definitely won’t work now.
It’s gloomy; at the back of the barn there are just two small skylights. The straw is almost three metres high. He hears Dirk snort. He hasn’t got rid of the bull yet; once he has, the place will be completely dead. Not that he costs much: a few handfuls of straw, a couple of scoops of concentrate now and then, a bucket of water. There’s no ladder leaning against the straw. His mother wasn’t born yesterday. One more thing: that old body hauling up the ladder. And she’s not that clever anyway, because it’s not the only ladder. The others might not be particularly solid, but they’re not totally rickety either. One’s leaning against the old milking parlour; another, aluminium, is lying on the floor at the front of the barn, where they used to keep the hay. If he wanted, he could get up there in no time, even without a ladder.
He leans on the bales of straw, still panting a little from the climb. He wants his mother to say something friendly to him, if only to get that softly echoing ‘Klaas’ out of his head. He hardly gets a friendly word out of his wife these days. She makes demands, she gives commands. He’s forty-bloody-eight years old and he wants his mother to say a kind word. Maybe he even wants her to tell him what to do.
Straw
After hearing something fall and smash below, Anna Kaan turned over onto her stomach. Had he put on the radio specially for her? She pictures the ‘dyed-in-the-wool North Hollanders’, Rie and Jenneke. She’s finished the Viennese biscuits. Together with the lukewarm water and the advocaat, they’ve made her a little queasy. She feels like something fresh: a sour apple, crispy French beans. That’s easy enough, that last one, later – the vegetable garden is full of them. She hears Klaas panting. She knows he wouldn’t have any trouble at all climbing the straw without a ladder. She’s also realised by now that her heart’s not really in it; she can’t even look at the parade sword without feeling hotter than she already is. Strangely enough, her feet are still cold and there’s a numbness in her calves. She feels embarrassed. She’s up here because it’s something she’s been doing for almost forty years; she does it as a reminder, out of habit. I’d be better off lying on the beach next to Rie and Jenneke, she thinks. Going for a swim together. What do I care that the sun’s disappeared?
The three of them are stuck here together: her, Klaas and Dirk. And the swallows of course. She lets her oldest son wait a while first.
‘Klaas?’
‘Yeah?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Standing here.’
That has her stumped. She turns over onto her side; her neck is stiff and her arm hurts. She rubs her breastbone, the nausea is already starting to fade a little.
‘Did you just call me?’
‘No,’ she lies. ‘Why would I call you?’
‘Because you need me.’
‘I don’t need anyone.’
‘Why don’t you come back down?’
‘Mind your own business.’ She hears Klaas let go of the bales, the straw rustles, and then she hears him take a few steps across the wooden floor. Towards the hatch? ‘You have to get Jan away from the cemetery.’
‘Why?’
‘No, just do it. Johan will be there too.’
‘Johan? What makes you think that?’
The first time Johan was lost he was lying under the platform Zeeger had built for the washing machine. In the new milking parlour. It was a Miele top-loader. Apparently Miele was the ultimate when it came to washing machines, but this one was constantly broken. The repairman would drive up in his van with Miele, nothing better written on the side. ‘Humph,’ she says now, almost forty years later. They shouldn’t have been allowed to drive around in a van like that. And just like the baker used to call out ‘Here it is again!’ ad infinitum, laying the bread on the kitchen table with a flourish, the Miele man always used to say, ‘Ready to wash, Mrs Kaan.’ Until the next time it broke. She found Johan when she went to put on a load in between searching. He was lying on his side under the platform with his knees pulled up. A year or two older and he wouldn’t have fitted. ‘I wanted to go away,’ he said, when she asked him what he was doing there. She asked him why. ‘Because,’ he said. Later, he often crawled in under the washing machine. Sometimes she pulled him back out, sometimes she left him lying there until he’d had enough.
‘“Humph”?’ Klaas asks. ‘I asked why you think Johan will be there too.�
�
Oh, Klaas, that’s right. ‘I know he’s there.’
‘Johan’s in Schagen. How would he get here? I don’t think they’re allowed to just up and leave.’
‘As if he’d pay any attention to that.’ She turns onto her back and spreads out her arms. She catches the smell of her own body and thinks of the beach again, the sea. ‘You going?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m your mother!’ She scowls. And she’s heard something in his voice that’s aroused her suspicions. ‘Or have you already been?’
‘Of course not. What for?’
‘You going?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right now?’
‘Yes. Or soon.’
‘Then you’ll be doing something useful at least.’
Klaas doesn’t say anything else. She hears him climb down through the hatch, then something else falls – strangely enough it sounds like a bike – and going by the noise, Klaas hasn’t landed on his own two feet either. ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he swears. The way him and his wife just sat there looking miserable and puffing away through the whole dinner just to wind up Jan. The food lying on the table instead of on the plates. Johan, who had started throwing chips – and earlier in the day sitting there like an imbecile, with a monkey on his head. It wasn’t even anything new, they’d always fooled around with their food. If they were angry they’d turn tins of treacle upside down on each other’s heads, or stick a carefully licked finger in someone else’s custard. Zeeger, ending the festivities with his ‘So, the day went quite well’. If she’s not very mistaken, he even let out a sigh of satisfaction.
It’s quiet again down below.
No, she’ll never celebrate anything again.
And yes, that was where she found Johan. Under the washing machine. But that was later. On the day itself, he and Jan were at Tinie and Aris’s. She’d rung herself, even though she can hardly believe that now. When did she find the time? Was it before or after she called an ambulance? And Klaas, where was Klaas? The baker kept coming in that horrible light-grey van. He just gave up his cheerful ‘Here it is again!’ Of course he kept coming, it was his job, and he could hardly employ someone else just for them. When Blom’s Breadery closed down because there was too much competition from the supermarket in Schagen, the whole village was up in arms. Not that they had any right to be, seeing as everyone realised it was their own fault. The whole village except her. She was relieved. There was a load of washing on the line too: whites, sheets flapping in the June wind. Maybe her mother brought it in. And someone – no idea who – turned off the radio. That was good because they kept playing that horrible song every hour or so.
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