The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  There was more going on than plain generosity towards my rabbit, I was sure of it. This was why I’d suggested other animals when I’d joined Dad bringing in the cows for their winter treatment before breakfast. I was holding a stick to drive them. The best thing to do was to whack their flanks so they’d walk on.

  ‘Other children in my class are having duck, pheasant or turkey, and you fill them with potatoes, leek, onions and beets, stuffed up their bums until they’re overflowing.’

  I glanced at my dad and he nodded. There were various kinds of nods in our village. That in itself was a way of differentiating yourself. I knew them all by now. This was the nod that dad used for the cattle dealers when they offered him a price that was too low but that he had to accept, because there was something wrong with the poor creature and he’d be saddled with it for good otherwise.

  ‘Plenty of pheasants here, especially among the willows,’ I said, glancing at the overgrown area to the left of the farm. I saw them there sometimes in the trees or sitting on the ground. When they saw me, they’d let themselves drop to the ground like a stone and would stay there playing dead until I’d gone. That’s when their heads would pop up again.

  Dad had nodded again, whacked his stick against the ground and hissed, ‘Sssssssjeu, come on,’ at the cows to drive them on. I’d looked in the freezer after that chat but there was no duck, pheasant or turkey to be found among the packets of mixed mincemeat and vegetables for soup.

  Dad’s boots disappeared from sight again, and only a few strands of straw remained behind on the kitchen floor. I put the buckle in my pocket and went upstairs in my stockinged feet to my bedroom, which overlooked the farmyard. I sat on my haunches on the edge of the bed, and thought about my father’s hand on my head when we’d brought in the cows and walked back to the meadow to check the mole-traps. If they were empty, Dad would keep his hands stiffly in his trouser pockets: there was nothing that deserved a reward, not like when we’d caught something and had to prise the twisted, bloodied bodies from the claws with a rusty screwdriver, which I did bent over so that Dad couldn’t see the tears running down my cheeks at the sight of a small creature that had walked unsuspectingly into a trap. I pictured the way Dad would use that hand to wring my rabbit’s neck, like the childproof top of a canister of nitrogen: there was only one right way to do it. I imagined Mum laying out my lifeless pet on the silver dish she used for Russian salad on Sundays after church. She’d display him on a bed of lamb’s lettuce and garnish him with gherkins, tomato chunks, grated carrot and a sprig of thyme. I looked at my hands, at their irregular lines. They were still too small to be used for anything other than holding stuff. They still fitted in my parents’ hands but Mum’s and Dad’s didn’t fit in mine. That was the difference between them and me – they could put theirs around a rabbit’s neck, or around a cheese that had just been flipped in its brine. Their hands were always searching for something and if you were no longer able to hold an animal or a person tenderly, it was better to let go and turn your attention to other useful things instead.

  I pressed my forehead harder and harder against the edge of my bed; I felt the pressure of cold wood on my skin and closed my eyes. Sometimes I found it strange that you had to pray in the dark, although maybe it was like my glow-in-the-dark duvet: the stars and the planets only emitted light and protected you from the night when it was dark enough. God must work the same way. I let my intertwined hands rest on my knees. Angrily I thought about Matthies who’d be drinking hot chocolate from one of the stalls on the ice. I thought of him skating with red cheeks, and about the thaw that would start tomorrow: the curly-haired presenter had warned of roofs that might be too slippery for Saint Nicholas to get down the chimney, and mist which might lead him to get lost and perhaps Matthies too, even though it was his own fault. For a moment, I saw my skates before me, greased and back in their box, ready to be returned to the attic. I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough, how many centimetres on the door-post that was, and I asked God if He please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen.’

  3

  ‘But he’s not dead,’ Mum said to the vet. She got up from the edge of the bath and extricated her hand from a pale blue flannel. She’d been just about to clean Hanna’s bottom, otherwise there was a chance she’d get worms. They made little holes in you like in cabbage leaves. I was old enough to make sure I didn’t get worms, and I wrapped my arms around my knees to look less naked now the vet had suddenly come into the bathroom without knocking.

  In a hurried voice, he said, ‘Just by the far side, the ice was much too weak because of the navigation channels. He’d been in front for a long time, everyone had lost sight of him.’ I knew instantly this wasn’t about my rabbit that was sitting in its hutch as usual, gnawing at carrot tops. And the vet sounded serious. He often came into the house to talk about the cows. Not many people came here who didn’t come to talk about the cows, but this time something wasn’t right. He hadn’t even mentioned the cattle once, not even when he actually meant us – the children – when he asked how the livestock was doing. When he hung his head, I stretched my upper body to be able to see through the little window above the bath. It was already starting to get dark: a group of deacons wearing black were approaching, closer and closer until they’d wrap their arms around us, arriving each day to bring the night in person. I told myself that Matthies had lost track of time: it wouldn’t be unusual for him and that’s why our father had given him a watch with a luminous dial, which he was probably accidentally wearing upside down – or was he still delivering the Christmas cards?

  I let myself sink back into the bath-water and rested my chin on my damp arms, peering through my eyelashes at my mother. We’d recently had a brush-like draught-excluder added to the letterbox in the front door so that we’d stop feeling the wind inside the house. I sometimes peeked through it to the outdoors and now I was looking through my eyelashes, I got the idea that Mum and the vet hadn’t realized I was listening in: that in my thoughts I could erase the lines around my mother’s eyes and mouth because they didn’t belong there, and press dimples into her cheeks with my thumbs. My mother wasn’t the nodding sort; she had too much to say for that, but now she only nodded and for the first time I thought: please say something, Mum, even if it’s about tidying up, about the calves that have got the runs again, the weather forecast for the coming days, the bedroom doors that keep jamming, our ungrateful attitude, or the dried-up toothpaste at the corners of our mouths. She said nothing and looked at the flannel she was holding. The vet pulled the step-stool out from under the sink and sat down on it. It creaked under his weight.

  ‘Evertsen pulled him out of the lake.’ He paused for a moment, looked from Obbe to me and then added, ‘Your brother is dead.’ I looked away from him, at the towels hanging from the hook next to the sink that were stiff from the cold. I wanted the vet to get up and say it was all a mistake, that cows are not that much different from sons: even if they go into the big wide world they always return to their stalls before sunset to be fed.

  ‘He’s out skating and he’ll be back soon,’ Mum said.

  She squeezed the flannel into a ball above the bath-water; the drips made rings. Mum bumped against my raised knees. To give myself something to do, I floated a Lego boat on the waves my sister Hanna made. She hadn’t understood what had just been said and I realized that I could also pretend my ears were blocked, that they’d been tied in a permanent knot. The bath-water began to get tepid and before I knew it, I’d peed. I looked at pee that was ochre yellow and billowing into cloudlike swirls before mixing with the water. Hanna didn’t notice, otherwise she’d have jumped up immediately with a shriek and called me a dirty girl. She was holding a Barbie above the surface of the water. ‘She’ll drown otherwise,’ she said. The doll was wearing a stripy swimsuit. I’d once put my finger under it to feel the plastic tits, and no one had noticed. They felt harder
than the cyst on my dad’s chin. I looked at Hanna’s naked body which was the same as mine. Only Obbe’s was different. He was standing next to the bath, still dressed; he’d just been telling us about a computer game in which he had to shoot people who burst apart like big tomatoes. He was going to use the bath-water after us. I knew he had a little tap he could pee from down below and under it was a wattle like a turkey’s. Sometimes I worried that he had something hanging there that nobody talked about. Maybe he was dangerously ill. Mum called it a winkle, but maybe it was actually called cancer and she didn’t want to frighten us because my granny on the less religious side had died of cancer. Just before she’d died, she’d made eggnog. Dad said the cream had curdled when they found her, that everything curdled when somebody died, unexpectedly or not, and for weeks I hadn’t been able to sleep because I kept seeing Granny’s face in her coffin, her half-opened mouth, eye sockets and pores beginning to ooze eggnog as thin as yolk.

  Mum pulled me and Hanna out of the bath by our upper arms, her fingers leaving white marks on our skin. Usually she’d wrap towels around us and check whether we were fully dry at the end so that we didn’t start to rust, or worse, grow mould like the cracks between the bathroom tiles, but now she left us, teeth chattering, on the bath-mat, soap-suds still in my armpits.

  ‘Dry yourself properly,’ I whispered to my shivering sister as I passed her a rock-hard towel, ‘otherwise we’ll have to descale you later.’ I bent down to check my toes which is where the mould would start first, and this way no one could see that my cheeks were bright red, like two Fireball gobstoppers. If a boy and a rabbit take part in a race, how many miles per hour does one of them have to go faster to win? I heard the teacher inside my head say, as he stabbed his pointer into my stomach, forcing me to reply. After my toes, I quickly checked my fingertips – Dad sometimes joked that our skin would come loose if we stayed in the bath for too long and that he’d nail it to the wooden wall of the shed, next to the pelts of the skinned rabbits. When I stood up again and wrapped the towel around myself, Dad suddenly appeared beside the vet. He was shaking and there were snowflakes on the shoulders of his overalls; his face looked deathly pale. Again and again he blew into his cupped hands. At first I thought about the avalanche our teacher had told us about, even though you surely never get them in the Dutch countryside. I only realized it couldn’t be an avalanche when Dad began to cry, and Obbe moved his head from left to right like a windscreen wiper to get rid of his tears.

  *

  At Mum’s request, our neighbour Lien took down the Christmas tree that very evening. I was sitting on the sofa with Obbe, hiding behind the happy faces of Bert and Ernie on my pyjama top, though my own fears towered over them. I kept the fingers of both hands crossed, like you do in the school playground when you’ve said something you don’t mean, or want to undo your promises, or your prayers. We looked on sadly as the tree was carried from the room, leaving behind a trail of glitter and pine needles. It was only then that I felt a stab in my chest, more than at the vet’s news. Matthies was sure to return but the Christmas tree wouldn’t. A few days earlier, we’d been allowed to decorate the tree with tiny fat Santas, shiny balls, angels and chains of beads, and wreath-shaped chocolates, all to the tune of ‘Jimmy’ by Boudewijn de Groot. We knew the lyrics off by heart and would sing along, looking forward to the lines containing words we weren’t allowed to use. Now we watched through the living room window as Lien used a wheelbarrow to dump the tree at the side of the road, wrapped in an orange tarpaulin. Only the silver star was left sticking out; they’d forgotten to take it off. I didn’t mention it, as what was the point of a star if we didn’t have a tree any more? Lien rearranged the orange tarpaulin a couple of times as though it might alter our view, our situation. Not long ago, Matthies had pushed me around in the same wheelbarrow. I’d had to use both hands to hold on to the sides that were covered in a thin layer of dried manure. I noticed at the time that his back had become more crooked through the hard work, as though he was working his way down to the earth. My brother had suddenly broken into a sprint, causing me to be thrown up higher and higher at every bump. It should have been the other way round, I thought now. I should have pushed Matthies around the farmyard while making engine sounds, even though he’d have been much too heavy to dump at the side of the road afterwards and cover in the orange tarpaulin like the dead calves, so that he could be collected and we could forget him. The next day he’d be born again and there’d be nothing that made this evening any different from all the other evenings.

  ‘The angels are naked,’ I whispered to Obbe.

  They lay on the dresser in front of us next to the chocolate stars that had melted in their jackets. These angels didn’t have trumpets or mistletoe in front of their winkles. Dad couldn’t have noticed that they weren’t wearing any clothes otherwise he’d certainly have put them back in their silver paper. I’d once broken the wings off an angel to see whether they’d grow back. God could surely make that happen. I wanted some kind of sign that He existed and that He was there for us during the daytime too. This seemed sensible to me because then he could keep an eye on things, and look after Hanna, and keep the cows free of milk fever and udder infections. When nothing happened and the broken-off white patch remained visible, I buried the angel in the vegetable patch between a couple of leftover red onions.

  ‘Angels are always naked,’ Obbe whispered back. He still hadn’t had a bath and he had a towel around his neck; he held on to both ends as though he was ready for a fight. The bath-water with my pee in it must have been stone cold by now.

  ‘Don’t they catch cold?’

  ‘They’re cold-blooded, just like snakes and water fleas, and then you don’t need clothes.’

  I nodded but quickly laid my hand over the porcelain willy of one of the angels as a precaution when Lien from next door came in. I heard her in the hall wiping her feet for longer than normal. From now on, every visitor to the house would wipe their feet for longer than necessary. I learned that at first, death requires people to pay attention to small details – the way Mum checks her nails for dried-up bits of rennet from making cheese – to delay the pain. For a moment I hoped Lien had Matthies with her, that he’d been hiding in the hollow tree at the top of the meadow and that he’d had enough of it now and had come out again; the temperature had dropped below freezing outside. Ice would be closing over the holes caused by the wind: my brother wouldn’t be able to find a way out from under it and would have to look around the whole lake on his own in the pitch dark. Even the construction lamp at the skating club had gone out by now. When Lien had finished wiping her feet, she talked to Mum, so quietly I couldn’t hear. I only saw her lips moving and my mother’s pursed shut, like mating slugs. I let my hand slide off the angel’s willy when no one was paying attention and watched Mum go to the kitchen, pushing another hair-grip into her bun. She put in more and more, as though she was trying to fix her head so that it wouldn’t suddenly flip open and reveal everything that was happening inside it. She came back with the Christmas biscuits. We’d bought them at the market together. I’d been looking forward to their brittle interiors, to the crunch of the sprinkles, but Mum gave them to Lien, as well as the rice pudding from the fridge and the rolled meat that Dad had got from the butcher’s, and even the eighty-metre-long roll of red and white string to tie up the meat. We could have wrapped the string around our bodies so that they didn’t fall apart in slices. Later I sometimes thought that this was when the emptiness began. It wasn’t because of Matthies’s death but those two days of Christmas that were given away in pans and empty Russian salad tubs.

  4

  The coffin with my brother in it was in the front room. It was made of oak and had a viewing window above his face, and metal handles. He’d been there for three days. On the first day, Hanna had rapped on the glass with her knuckles and said, in a small voice, ‘Now, I’ve had enough of this – stop messing around, Matthies.’ She remained motionless for a mo
ment as though she was afraid he might be whispering and she wouldn’t hear him if there wasn’t total silence. When there was no reply, she went back to playing with her dolls behind the sofa, her thin body trembling like a dragonfly. I’d wanted to take her between my finger and thumb and blow on her to keep her warm, but I couldn’t tell her that Matthies had gone to sleep forever, that from now on we’d only have viewing windows in our hearts with our brother laid out behind them. Apart from our granny on the less religious side, we didn’t know anyone who was asleep for all eternity, though in the end we all got up again. ‘We live according to God’s will,’ Granny on the more religious side often said about this. When she got up in the morning her stiff knees troubled her, as well as bad breath, ‘as though I’d swallowed a dead sparrow’. Neither that bird nor my brother would ever wake up again.

  The coffin was on the dresser on a white crocheted cloth that was usually taken out for birthdays when there would be cheese sticks, nuts, glasses and punch laid out on it, and just like at the parties, people stood in a ring around it now, their noses pressed into hankies or other people’s necks. Although they said nice things about my brother, death still felt ugly and as indigestible as the lost tiger nut we found days after a birthday party behind a chair or under the TV cabinet. In the coffin, Matthies’s face looked like it was made of beeswax, so smooth and tight. The nurses had stuck tissue paper under his eyelids to keep them shut, while I’d have preferred them to be open so that we could look at each other one more time, so that I could be sure I didn’t forget the colour of his eyes, so that he wouldn’t forget me.

  When the second group of people had left, I tried to spread open his eyes, which made me think of the paper nativity scene I’d made at school, with coloured tissue paper as stained glass and Mary and Joseph figures. At the Christmas breakfast, a tea light had been lit behind them so the tissue paper would light up and Jesus could be born in an illuminated stable. But my brother’s eyes were dull and grey and there wasn’t a stained glass pattern. I quickly let the eyelids drop again and closed the viewing window. They’d tried to replicate his gelled locks but they just hung on his forehead like brown wilted pea pods. Mum and Granny had dressed Matthies in a pair of jeans and his favourite sweater, the blue and green one with HEROES in big letters across the chest. Most of the heroes I’d read about in books could fall from tall buildings or find themselves in an inferno and end up with just a few scratches. I didn’t understand why Matthies couldn’t do this too and why he’d only be immortal in our thoughts from now on. He’d once rescued a heron from the combine harvester just in time, otherwise the bird would have been shredded, added to a bale of straw and fed to the cows.