Jan walked back to his seat, in the last row by the window. Next to an enormous pot plant that hung partly over his desk. It was still quiet in the classroom. On the way, he looked at his classmates and tried to work out what they were thinking. Did he see a gleam in the butcher’s son’s eyes? Was he smiling without raising the corners of his mouth? At least the baker’s daughter was still staring down at the exercise book in front of her. The conspiratorial feeling he’d just had was gone completely. Slipping in behind Peter to sit down again he felt, there’s something wrong here. Peter nudged him. He didn’t feel it.
In the schoolyard the marble craze was already over again. It was almost the summer holidays. Jan and Peter were standing near Klaas, who was telling tall stories about barges making waves in the canal. Peter was talking at him. If only Klaas would say something to him, but no, he blabbed away to his own classmates and made a point of looking in the other direction. Teun was leaning against the wall of the school building. Alone. Staring down at the paving stones under his feet. He glanced up, then looked back down at the grey paving stones, as if there was a lot to see there. It was dry, the drizzle of the previous weekend had blown over. Peter was talking; Jan heard the schoolchildren yelling and running and screeching around him, the clicking of a skipping rope, the wind in the hedge around the schoolyard, and the quivering thumps of the diving board.
On the third day after the funeral, Tuesday again, Jan and Johan did their sixth funeral drawings. Jan finished first and watched Johan add the finishing touches to his. ‘The coffin wasn’t black.’
‘Yes it was.’
‘Grandma Kaan didn’t stand there.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘Why isn’t Klaas crying? Klaas was crying!’
‘I can’t do tears.’
‘The sun is yellow, not red. Why have you put in the sun? It was raining!’
‘Hey, you can do the “r”!’
Jan didn’t say anything.
‘The sun is red, anyway.’
‘Why don’t you use green? There’s a new green felt tip right here.’
‘What do I need green for?’
‘Are you stupid?’
‘What? What’s green?’
‘Trees are green. Dad’s coat’s green.’
‘Can you do the hands?’
‘OK.’ Jan drew hands on the stick figures that represented people according to Johan. He slid the drawing back over to Johan, who made a futile attempt to change the red sun to yellow by colouring it in again with a yellow felt tip.
In Jan’s drawing there were dripping trees. Big trees with fat drops. And Uncle Piet. Instead of simply standing on the ground, he was on the black ledge that stuck out at the bottom of the Polder House wall. It was a very narrow ledge and Uncle Piet had big feet. Jan had noticed it when they came around the corner behind Hanne’s coffin, which was being carried by four men wearing light-grey hats. A group of wet people were clustered together and Uncle Piet towered over everyone because he was standing on that black ledge. It was impossible. That was why he drew it. The brown shoes stuck out ridiculously far, and to leave no doubt about who it was, he had written UNCLE PIET next to him in big letters.
Both grandmothers had spoken. Grandma Kooijman recited something from the Bible by heart. That went in one ear and out the other for almost everyone. Grandma Kaan read something from a piece of paper that got so wet it fell apart before she’d finished. She paused, then did the rest from memory. She was wearing a light-grey jacket and her dark-grey hair drooped like the paper she was holding. She looked like a heron that could fall over at any minute.
It was a short funeral. The undertaker in charge of proceedings didn’t seem very sure of himself. After Grandma Kaan had rounded off her reading, there was brief, calm confusion. The rain was so light it didn’t make any sound. The undertaker asked if anyone else wanted to speak. He looked around. ‘May I then re –’ he said, and then Aris Breebaart started to cry. Tinie Breebaart took him by the arm and led him away. Grandparents followed, Uncle Piet, the baker. Klaas, Jan and Johan walked off too. Anna and Zeeger stayed behind.
In the evening they ate rice pudding with brown sugar. Something they usually only ate on Saturdays. During tea, a few flies flew into the sticky strip that hung from the fluorescent light over the table. They buzzed and buzzed and beat their wings furiously until their wings were stuck to the strip too. Then they just buzzed. Nobody thought of turning the radio back on.
After Johan discovered that yellow over red doesn’t work, his sixth funeral drawing was finished and the boys went looking for their mother. They couldn’t find her anywhere. Along the way they picked up Tinus, who was whimpering on the other side of the kitchen door. Finally they ended up in the bedroom that was no longer a bedroom, and sat down together on the floor under the cracked window. Tinus jumped up on Hanne’s bed. They stared at the wall hanging with the three Piccaninnies.
‘The sun is red,’ said Johan.
Jan didn’t say anything.
Tinus turned around on the spot a couple of times and, sighing, lay down on the pillow.
That evening Grandma Kooijman came.
Anna Kaan came down off the straw after one and a half days. ‘So,’ she said, nudging her mother, who was standing at the stove, over to one side.
Hannie Kooijman stared at her daughter as if she was Lazarus emerging from the grave.
‘I wish it would stop blowing,’ said Anna. ‘I hate it when it’s windy.’
Silently, her mother handed her the wooden spoon she had been using to stir the contents of a saucepan.
‘You can go back home now,’ said Anna.
The baker simply continued to deliver the bread, although he no longer whistled while he was at it and stopped doing his flourish with the one and a half loaves too. They milked the cows and did the second round of haymaking. Tinus grew quickly and the swimming lessons carried on as normal. Jan had no trouble at all getting his A, even if treading water took forever and he had cramp in his neck when he climbed up out of the pool. Anna sewed the badge on the front of his swimming trunks by hand. ‘The B goes here,’ she said, pointing to the other side.
‘Where’s C go?’ he asked.
‘On your bum!’ shouted Johan.
Johan can shout all he likes, thought Jan. Now he was allowed to cross all of the imaginary lines in the swimming pool whenever he liked, not just for swimming lessons. He was an ‘experienced swimmer’ too now, but not Johan. After long afternoons at the swimming pool, he cycled to the Breebaarts’ with Peter and, before he rode on, Auntie Tinie made him crackers with cheese he didn’t get at home, delicious cheese. She never said anything about Hanne. Neither did Peter. Nobody said anything.
The boy with the yellow swimming trunks was the only one who could jump higher than he could. Older boys tried too, without success. Jan, Peter and the others spread their towels out near the diving board. After all, that was where you hung out when you had the run of the whole swimming pool. A narrow strip of grass, wedged in between the pool and a ditch that formed a hairpin curve. At the bend in the ditch there was a pumping station that buzzed. Johan never got that far, he was right over on the other side of the pool, sometimes in zone three now, having his lessons.
They closed their eyes and listened to the poplars that bordered the pool like a rustling wall. Like that – with their eyes closed, the sun red through their eyelids, hearing the trees, the voices of boisterous children and worried mothers, the splashing, the buzzing of the pump and the sound of the big lambs in the fields behind the windbreak, still bleating like babies – it was as if the summer could last forever.
Jan learned to listen really closely, and after a while he was somehow able to tell when it was Teun up on the diving board, he didn’t even need to open his eyes. Teun touched the board less often before disappearing into the deep water of
zone four with an upright jump, a somersault or a swallow dive. Sometimes Jan would sit up after all, the only one in the group of boys to put his hands on the grass behind him and watch. The Edwin Hawkins Singers stayed at the top of the charts, the summer days remained happy days. After a while the ticket lady stopped turning up the radio. The boy in the yellow trunks jumped, Jan watched and gradually started to think he was doing it all just for him.
Almost every day, no matter how delicious Auntie Tinie’s jam, cheese or homemade cake was, there came a moment when Jan was on his way back home and reached the spot where the baker’s grey van had stood, where Uncle Aris had caught up to him on his bike. Besides Johan, nobody had noticed that he could do a real ‘r’. Zeeger forgot to give him a Dinky Toy. Jan didn’t remind him.
Uncle Aris, the baker, the yellow dress, the diving board. June, July, August. A summer at the swimming pool, no bogeyman but plenty of water fleas. Johan, shivering sometimes at the edge of zone two. ‘Hey, Jan!’ he called, when his brother was on his way to the shop to buy liquorice shoelaces. Lips quivering, feet turned inward. Klaas, who only came to the swimming pool for lessons for his C, and otherwise swam in the canal. Or jumped off the bridge with his friends just as a barge sailed past.
The attic with the half-finished bedroom, the doorjamb without a door. Long, light nights. The painting at the top of the stairs, a grey painting. Of a woman with pursed lips holding a dandelion. Jan and Johan thought that it was Great-grandmother Kaan when she was young. Zeeger told them so. In Grandma and Grandpa Kaan’s house there was a similar painting but slightly later, the dandelion parachutes were blowing around and the young woman had a mysterious smile. Klaas made fun of them when they told him. Klaas slept alone in the small bedroom; Jan and Johan shared the big one with the balcony doors.
Behind the green curtains it refused to get dark and Johan had started snoring almost immediately.
‘Johan,’ Jan whispered.
Nothing happened.
‘Johan!’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ Now he was awake at least.
But not for long. Soon Johan was breathing deeply again.
Every evening Jan waited for Klaas. When he heard his big brother come upstairs and close the door of his bedroom behind him, his night could begin. He pulled the blankets up over his head and thought he was asleep. He also imagined himself waking up the next morning – when it had been dark for a little while after all – and saw people tumbling through a kind of infinity.
Auntie Tinie, the baker, the yellow swimming trunks, the hand around his, the invisible Queen, the swimming pool, June, July, August, September. The bedroom downstairs, with the strange crack in the window. Hanne’s bed, which was taken away at the end of summer. The bedless bedroom that was no longer a real bedroom, where the cloth with the Piccaninnies was left hanging on the wall. Johan, who, when he was awake, didn’t put any green in his funeral drawings. One morning, while fishing in front of Grandma and Grandpa Kaan’s house, he fell into the wide canal. Grandpa Kaan pulled him up out of the water, but he would probably have managed to climb up the side himself. He didn’t die and held on tight to his fishing rod, so that didn’t get lost either. Teeth chattering, he muttered something about ‘the bogeyman’; Grandma Kaan couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Jan, who thought he hardly slept but still dreamt much more than he suspected. One afternoon, his hands slid off the rung of the ladder he was climbing up to the hayloft and he fell backwards onto the concrete. It didn’t really hurt, the stinging white whack blocked out most of the pain, and a wet flannel eased the lump. He didn’t die. Klaas, alone in his small room with the soles of his feet hurting after jumping from too high up off the rail of the bridge. One evening after it had been raining, he slipped on the bridge’s wet boards, grazed his thigh so badly it bled and ended up almost upside down in the water. But he didn’t die. Anna, who was away for one and a half days, though no one even mentioned her absence. Zeeger, who mostly milked, made hay, shore sheep and cleared the banks of the ditches in silence. And started planting trees. That was something new.
Five summers later, anyone at the swimming pool who wanted to make out the lyrics of the song that had been number one for almost two months had to listen very carefully. The ticket lady didn’t like it. If she wasn’t busy checking a season ticket and there weren’t any children standing at the sweet counter, she’d turn the radio down when it came on, and by early August she’d begun turning the volume dial all the way to the left. ‘Sugar baby love, sugar baby love. I didn’t mean to hurt you. People, take my advice, if you love someone, don’t think twice.’
They all had at least two certificates and seemed to have established a permanent claim to the narrow strip of lawn between the diving board and the hairpin ditch. Jan had already begged for a new pair of swimming trunks a couple of times: the A and B badges sewn on the front were for kids. What’s more, the rubber cut into the tops of his legs, especially when his trunks were dry. Johan had two certificates too; he sat a bit further along with his own friends. He’d learnt to stop saying ‘Hey, Jan’. The moment Klaas had got his C, he stopped coming to the swimming pool at all.
As hot as the days got, the water wasn’t appealing. Lying around, talking and looking, that was appealing. Looking at the girls lying by the corner of zone four. Talking about dicks. Jan listened, but kept getting distracted by the diving board.
‘He did. He pissed spunk!’
‘You can’t piss spunk.’
‘Yes you can!’
‘Who told you that?’
‘He did.’
‘Who?’
‘Bram.’
‘His brother, you know who that is, don’t you?’
‘Oh, him. How old is he anyway?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘So your brother pisses spunk?’
‘Yep.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘It’s true.’
‘What’s it look like then?’
‘Well, kind of bit whitish. And thick.’
‘Thick?’
‘If you’ve got a hard-on then your, what’s-it-called, the tube your piss comes through. It doesn’t work any more.’
‘So you always piss spunk if you piss with a hard-on?’
‘Um . . .’
Jan only saw Teun in summer now. He still wore his yellow swimming trunks, although they were getting more and more faded. His jumps were still high, the water still swallowed him like a transparent plastic bag after a somersault. He climbed out of the pool and sat down, directly behind the diving board, without drying himself off. Alone. He always sat alone. With his knees up and his hands on the ground behind him. His black hair was like a helmet on his head, one wisp over his ear. Jan looked at the grass behind his back, at the hands supporting his weight. The pump started to buzz louder and burst into action, water gushing into the ditch. A girl walked up.
‘Here,’ she said, handing Jan a note that was folded up as small as possible.
It took him a moment to smooth out the paper. It said: Do you want to go out with me? Yvonne. He looked diagonally across the pool at the girls’ group and then at the messenger, who was staring down at him quizzically and a little impatiently.
‘OK,’ he said.
The girl walked back. It was that easy, the other boys didn’t even mention it. Because the messenger walked back past Teun with Jan watching her, he saw that Teun was staring at him. Then Teun stood up. He pushed a few boys waiting their turn at the diving board out of the way and walked out to the end of the board, raised one leg, jumped and dived.
‘I’m off,’ Jan said to Peter.
‘Already?’
‘Yep.’
‘To the girls?’
‘No, home.’
‘Same tomorrow?’
‘I’ll pick you up on th
e way.’
Teun surfaced at the end of zone four, pulled himself up onto the duckboards and slid back into the water on the other side. Then swam leisurely to the side. Jan walked alongside the ditch to the paddling pool. Johan was lying on his towel on his stomach and didn’t see him passing. Cutting through between screeching children and hushing mothers, he reached the changing cubicles, avoiding Yvonne. Tomorrow, he thought. Starting tomorrow I’ll go out with her. In the changing cubicle the rustling of the poplars sounded much louder than outside. He deliberately took his time getting changed. Teun’s mother was sitting behind the counter smoking. He was pretty sure that wasn’t even allowed. Her pitch-black hair stood out against the white planks. ‘Bye-bye, Kaan!’ she called as he walked towards the exit. Unbearable woman. Teun was waiting outside.
He lived near school. There were fields behind the house all the way to the north dyke. Jan never went to the north dyke; his dyke was the east dyke. It was a small house with a narrow kitchen and big furniture in front of a television set. ‘It’s boring,’ Teun said, ‘being an only child.’ And, ‘Tech’s OK, but all the way to Schagen on a bike, do you know how far that is? Especially when you’ve got a headwind. Soon,’ he said, ‘I’ll have a moped.’ He asked where Jan was going at the end of August (the state comprehensive) and whether he was hungry (no, Jan wasn’t hungry). It was muggy in the house, or did Jan think it was OK? ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk to the dyke. Leave the bag here, you can pick it up later,’ Teun said.
Jan let Teun lead the way. He didn’t know these fields, every now and then he turned and saw things he’d never seen before. The village houses from the back, with unexpected sheds, extensions and shrubs. The playing fields behind the school, the grass green and summer-holiday empty. The swimming pool through the windbreak (Yvonne on the other side of the trees, invisible from here), the yelling audible even at this distance. Past the swimming pool, a piece of land with a low embankment around it: for now a sheep field with lamp posts; in winter, the ice-skating rink. To the right, a strip of wheat, already changing colour. The north dyke itself, on the other side of a wide ditch, accessible across a narrow board that sagged badly. When they were standing up on the top, Teun pointed east. There, where the canal curved and three polders came together, there was a triangle of water, a small lake. The Pishoek. ‘You know it?’ Yes, Jan had heard of it. Klaas went swimming there sometimes; he’d never been himself. Strange name. Yeah, maybe people used to come here to piss. Jan tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out right. ‘Later, at home, I can show you on a map. It’s really called that,’ Teun said. ‘OK,’ said Jan. ‘Towels?’ Ah, no need, it was hot.
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