The Discomfort of Evening
Page 1
MARIEKE LUCAS RIJNEVELD
The Discomfort of Evening
Translated by Michele Hutchison
Restlessness gives wings to the imagination.
MAURICE GILLIAMS
It is written, ‘I am making all things new!’
But the chords are a clothesline of grief,
Razor-sharp gusts snap the faith
Of he who would flee this cruel start.
Ice rain beats blossom to a glassy pulp,
A cur shakes his pelt bone-dry in the violence.
from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JAN WOLKERS (2008)
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
PART I
1
2
3
4
PART II
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
PART III
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
About the Author
Copyright
PART I
1
I was ten and stopped taking off my coat. That morning, Mum had covered us one by one in udder ointment to protect us from the cold. It came out of a yellow Bogena tin and was normally used to prevent dairy cows’ teats from getting cracks, calluses and cauliflower-like lumps. The tin’s lid was so greasy you could only screw it off with a tea-towel. It smelled of stewed udder, the thick slices I’d sometimes find cooking in a pan of stock on our stove, sprinkled with salt and pepper. They filled me with horror, just like the reeking ointment on my skin. Mum pressed her fat fingers into our faces like the round cheeses she patted to check whether the rind was ripening. Our pale cheeks shone in the light of the kitchen bulb, which was encrusted with fly shit. For years we’d been planning to get a lampshade, a pretty one with flowers, but whenever we saw one in the village, Mum could never make up her mind. She’d been doing this for three years now. That morning, two days before Christmas, I felt her slippery thumbs in my eye sockets and for a moment I was afraid she’d press too hard, that my eyeballs would plop into my skull like marbles, and she’d say, ‘That’s what happens when your eyes are always roaming and you never keep them still like a true believer, gazing up at God as though the heavens might break open at any moment.’ But the heavens here only broke open for a snowstorm – nothing to keep staring at like an idiot.
In the middle of the breakfast table there was a woven bread-basket lined with a napkin decorated with Christmas angels. They were holding trumpets and twigs of mistletoe protectively in front of their willies. Even if you held the napkin up to the light of the bulb you couldn’t see what they looked like – my guess was rolled-up slices of luncheon meat. Mum had arranged the bread neatly on the napkin: white, wholemeal with poppy seeds, and currant loaf. She’d used a sieve to carefully sprinkle icing sugar onto the crispy back of the loaf, like the first light snow that had fallen onto the backs of the blazed cows in the meadow before we drove them inside. The bread-bag’s plastic clip was kept on top of the biscuit tin: we’d lose it otherwise and Mum didn’t like the look of a knot in a plastic bag.
‘Meat or cheese first before you go for the sweet stuff,’ she’d always say. This was the rule and it would make us big and strong, as big as the giant Goliath and as strong as Samson in the Bible. We always had to drink a large glass of fresh milk as well; it had usually been out of the tank for a couple of hours and was lukewarm, and sometimes there was a yellowish layer of cream that stuck to the top of your mouth if you drank too slowly. The best thing was to gulp down the whole glass of milk with your eyes closed, something Mum called ‘irreverent’ although there’s nothing in the Bible about drinking milk slowly, or about eating a cow’s body. I took a slice of white bread from the basket and put it on my plate upside down so that it looked just like a pale toddler’s bum, even more convincing when partly spread with chocolate spread, which never failed to amuse me and my brothers, and they’d always say, ‘Are you arse-licking again?’
‘If you put goldfish in a dark room for too long they go really pale,’ I whispered to Matthies, putting six slices of cooked sausage on my bread so that they covered it perfectly. You’ve got six cows and two of them get eaten. How many are left? I heard the teacher’s voice inside my head every time I ate something. Why those stupid sums were combined with food – apples, cakes, pizzas and biscuits – I didn’t know, but in any case the teacher had given up hope that I’d ever be able to do sums, that my exercise book would ever be pristine white without a single red underscore. It had taken me a year to learn to tell the time – Dad had spent hours with me at the kitchen table with the school’s practice clock which he’d sometimes thrown on the floor in despair, at which point the mechanism would bounce out and the annoying thing would just keep on ringing – and even now when I looked at a clock the arms would still sometimes turn into the earthworms we dug out of the ground behind the cowshed with a fork to use as fishing bait. They wriggled every which way when you held them between forefinger and thumb and didn’t calm down until you gave them a couple of taps, and then they’d lie in your hand and look just like those sweet, red strawberry shoelaces from Van Luik’s sweet-shop.
‘It’s rude to whisper in company,’ said my little sister Hanna, who was sitting next to Obbe and opposite me at the kitchen table. When she didn’t like something, she’d move her lips from left to right.
‘Some words are too big for your little ears; they won’t fit in,’ I said with my mouth full.
Obbe stirred his glass of milk boredly with his finger, held up a bit of skin and then quickly wiped it on the tablecloth. It stuck there like a whitish lump of snot. It looked horrible, and I knew there was a chance the tablecloth would be the other way around tomorrow, with the encrusted milk skin on my side. I would refuse to put my plate on the table. We all knew the paper serviettes were only there for decoration and that Mum smoothed them out and put them back in the kitchen drawer after breakfast. They weren’t meant for our dirty fingers and mouths. Some part of me also felt bad at the thought of the angels being scrunched up in my fist like mosquitoes so that their wings broke, or having their white angel’s hair dirtied with strawberry jam.
‘I have to spend time outside because I look so pale,’ Matthies whispered. He smiled and stuck his knife with utmost concentration into the white chocolate part of the Duo Penotti pot, so as not to get any of the milk chocolate bit on it. We only had Duo Penotti in the holidays. We’d been looking forward to it for days and now the Christmas holidays had begun, it was finally time. The best moment was when Mum pulled off the protective paper, cleaned the bits of glue from the edges and then showed us the brown and white patches, like the unique pattern on a newborn calf. Whoever had the best marks at school that week was allowed the pot first. I was always the last to get a turn.
I slid backwards and forwards on my chair: my toes didn’t quite reach the floor yet. What I wanted was to keep everyone safe indoors and spread them out across the farm like slices of cooked sausage. In the weekly roundup yesterday, about the South Pole, our teacher had said that some penguins go fishing and never come back. Even though we didn’t live at the South Pole, it was cold here, so cold that th
e lake had frozen over and the cows’ drinking troughs were full of ice.
We each had two pale blue freezer bags next to our breakfast plates. I held one up and gave my mother a questioning look.
‘To put over your socks,’ she said with a smile that made dimples in her cheeks. ‘It will keep them warm and stop your feet getting wet.’ Meanwhile, she was preparing breakfast for Dad who was helping a cow to calve; after each slice of bread, she’d slide the knife between her thumb and index finger until the butter reached the tips of her fingers, and then she’d scrape it off with the blunt side of the knife. Dad was probably sitting on a milking stool next to a cow taking off a bit of the beestings, clouds of breath and cigarette smoke rising up above its steaming back. I realized there weren’t any freezer bags next to his plate: his feet were probably too big, in particular his left one which was deformed after an accident with a combine harvester when he was about twenty. Next to Mum on the table was the silver cheese scoop she used to assess the flavour of the cheeses she made in the mornings. Before she cut one open, she’d stick the cheese scoop into the middle, through the plastic layer, twist it twice and then slowly pull it out. And she’d eat a piece of cumin cheese just the way she ate the white bread during communion at church, just as thoughtfully and devoutly, slow and staring. Obbe had once joked that Jesus’ body was made of cheese, too, and that was why we were only allowed two slices on our bread each day, otherwise we’d run out of Him too quickly.
Once our mother had said the morning prayer and thanked God ‘for poverty and for wealth; while many eat the bread of sorrows, Thou hast fed us mild and well,’ Matthies pushed his chair back, hung his black leather ice skates around his neck, and put the Christmas cards in his pocket that Mum had asked him to put through the letterboxes of a few neighbours. He was going on ahead to the lake where he was going to take part in the local skating competition with a couple of his friends. It was a twenty-mile route, and the winner got a plate of stewed udders with mustard and a gold medal with the year 2000 on it. I wished I could put a freezer bag over his head, too, so that he’d stay warm for a long time, the seal closed around his neck. He ran his hand through my hair for a moment. I quickly smoothed it back into place and wiped a few crumbs from my pyjama top. Matthies always parted his hair in the middle and put gel in his front locks. They were like two curls of butter on a dish; Mum always made those around Christmas: butter from a tub wasn’t very festive, she thought. That was for normal days and the day of Jesus’ birth wasn’t a normal day, not even if it happened every year all over again as if He died for our sins each year, which I found strange. I often thought to myself: that poor man has been dead a long time, they must have forgotten by now. But better not to mention it, otherwise there wouldn’t be any more sprinkle-covered biscuits and no one would tell the Christmas story of the three kings and the star in the East.
Matthies went into the hall to check his hair, even though it would turn rock hard in the freezing cold and his two curls would go flat and stick to his forehead.
‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. Dad had got my wooden skates out of the attic and strapped them to my shoes with their brown leather ties. I’d been walking around the farm in my skates for a few days, my hands behind my back and the protectors over the blades so they wouldn’t leave marks on the floor. My calves were hard. I’d practised enough now to be able to go out onto the ice without a folding chair to push around.
‘No, you can’t,’ he said. And then more quietly so that only I could hear it, ‘Because we’re going to the other side.’
‘I want to go to the other side, too,’ I whispered.
‘I’ll take you with me when you’re older.’ He put on his woolly hat and smiled. I saw his braces with their zigzagging blue elastic bands.
‘I’ll be back before dark,’ he called to Mum. He turned around once again in the doorway and waved to me, the scene I’d keep replaying in my mind later until his arm no longer raised itself and I began to doubt whether we had even said goodbye.
2
We didn’t have any of the commercial channels, only Nederland 1, 2 and 3. Dad said there wasn’t any nudity on them. He pronounced the word ‘nudity’ as though a fruit fly had just flown into his mouth – he spat as he said it. The word mainly made me think of the potatoes whose jackets my mother peeled off every evening before she dropped them into the water – that plopping sound they made. I can imagine if you think about naked people for too long shoots grow out of you, just like potatoes sprout after a while so you have to dig them out of the soft flesh with the point of a knife. We fed the forked green bits to the chickens, who were crazy about them. I lay on my stomach in front of the oak cabinet that hid the TV. One of the buckles of my skates had rolled under it when I’d kicked them off angrily in the corner of the living room. I was too young for the other side and too old to skate on the manure ditch behind the cowsheds. To be honest, you couldn’t even call it skating – it was more a kind of shuffling, like the way the geese that landed there in search of something edible shuffled. The stench of manure broke free with every score in the ice and the blades of your skates turned light brown. We must have been a ridiculous sight standing there on the ditch like a pair of silly geese, our bundled-up bodies waggling from one grassy bank to the other, instead of joining in the skate on the big lake with everyone else from the village.
‘We can’t go and watch Matthies,’ Dad had said, ‘one of the calves has got the runs.’
‘But you promised,’ I cried. I’d even wrapped my feet in the freezer bags.
‘Mitigating circumstances,’ Dad said, pulling his black beret down over his eyebrows. I’d nodded a couple of times. There was nothing we could do about unforeseen circumstances and no one stood a chance against the cows anyway; they were always more important. Even when they didn’t require any attention – even when their fat clumsy bodies were lying sated in the stalls – they still managed to take priority. I’d folded my arms in a sulk. All that practising in my strap-on skates had been for nothing; my calves were even harder than the porcelain Jesus in the hall that was as big as Dad. I deliberately threw the freezer bags in the bin, and pushed them deep into the coffee grounds and bread crusts so that Mum wouldn’t be able to reuse them like the serviettes.
It was dusty under the cabinet. I found a hairclip, a dried-up raisin and a Lego block. Mum shut the cabinet doors whenever family members or the elders from the Reformed church came to visit. They mustn’t see that we allowed ourselves to be diverted from God’s path in the evenings. On Mondays, Mum always watched a quiz show called Lingo. We all had to be as quiet as mice so that she could guess the words from behind the ironing board; we’d hear the iron hissing at each correct answer, steam spiralling up. They were usually words that weren’t in the Bible, but our mother still seemed to know them. She called them ‘blush words’ because some of them turned your cheeks red. Obbe once told me that when the screen was black, the television was the eye of God, and that when Mum closed the doors she wanted Him not to see us. She was probably ashamed of us because we sometimes used blush words when Lingo wasn’t on. She tried to wash them out of our mouths with a bar of green soap, like the grease and mud stains from our good school clothes.
I felt around the floor for the buckle. From where I was lying, I could see into the kitchen. Dad’s green wellies suddenly appeared in front of the fridge, bits of straw and cow shit sticking to their sides. He must have come in to fetch another bunch of carrot tops from the vegetable drawer. He’d cut the leaves off with the hoof-paring knife he kept in the breast pocket of his overalls. For days he’d been walking back and forth between the fridge and the rabbit hutches. The cream slice that was left from Hanna’s seventh birthday went with him – I’d been drooling over it every time the fridge was open. I hadn’t been able to resist secretly scooping off a corner of the pink icing with my fingernail and putting it in my mouth. I’d made a tunnel in the cream that had thickened in the fridge and stuck to my finge
rtip like a yellow hat. Dad didn’t notice. ‘Once he’s got his mind set on something, there’s no budging him,’ my granny on the most religious side of the family sometimes said, and that was why I suspected he was feeding up my rabbit Dieuwertje, which I’d got from Lien next door, for the big Christmas dinner in two days’ time. He never normally got involved with the rabbits – ‘small stock’ belonged on your plate and he only liked animals whose presence filled his entire field of vision, but my rabbit didn’t even fill the half of it. He’d once said that the neck vertebrae were the most breakable part of a body – I heard them snapping in my head as though my mother was breaking a handful of raw vermicelli above the pan – and a rope with a noose in it had recently appeared in the attic, hanging from the rafters. ‘It’s for a swing,’ Dad said, but there was still no swing. I didn’t understand why the rope was hanging in the attic and not in the shed with the screwdrivers and his collection of bolts. Maybe, I thought, Dad wanted us to watch; maybe it would happen if we sinned. I briefly pictured my rabbit hanging broken-necked from the rope in the attic, behind Matthies’s bed, so that our father could skin it more easily. It would probably come off the same way as the skin from the big cooked sausage that Mum peeled with her potato knife in the mornings: only they’d put Dieuwertje in a layer of butter in the big casserole dish on the gas stove, and the whole house would smell of broiled rabbit. All of us Mulders would be able to smell from afar that Christmas dinner was ready to be served; we’d know not to spoil our appetite. I’d noticed that while I used to have to be sparing with the feed, I was now allowed to give my rabbit a whole scoopful, as well as the carrot tops. Despite the fact that he was a buck, I’d named him after the curly-haired female presenter on children’s TV because I found her so pretty. I wanted to put her at the top of my Christmas list, but I waited a while as I hadn’t seen her in any of the toy catalogues yet.