The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  From behind the door where I was hiding, as she was dressing his body, I’d heard Granny tell my brother, ‘You always have to swim to the dark patch. You knew that, didn’t you?’ I couldn’t imagine how you managed to swim to the dark patch myself. It was about differences in colour. When there was snow on the ice you had to look for the light, but when there wasn’t any snow, the ice would be lighter than the hole and you had to swim to the dark. Matthies had told me this himself when he’d come into my bedroom before skating and shown me in his socks how to slide your feet toward and away from each other in turn. ‘Like riding two fish,’ he said. I had watched from my bed and made a clicking sound with my tongue against the roof of my mouth, the way the skates sounded on television as they went across ice. We loved that sound. Now my tongue lay curled in my mouth like an increasingly dangerous navigation channel in a lake. I didn’t dare make clicking sounds any more.

  Granny came into the front room with a bottle of liquid soap – maybe that’s why they’d put papers under his eyelids, so that the soap wouldn’t get in and sting. Once they’d tidied him up, they’d probably take them away again, like the tea light in my nativity scene which was blown out so that Mary and Joseph could get on with their lives. Granny pulled me to her chest for a moment. She smelled of beestings pancakes with ham and syrup: there was still a big pile of them on the counter left over from lunch, greasy with butter, their edges crispy. Dad had asked who had made a face of bramble jam, raisins and apple on his pancake, looking at each of us one by one. His eyes stopped at Granny who smiled at him just as cheerfully as his pancake.

  ‘The poor lad is laid out nicely.’

  More and more brown patches were appearing on her face, like the apples she’d cut up and used as mouths on the pancakes. You get overripe from old age in the end.

  ‘Can’t we put a rolled-up pancake in there with him? It’s Matthies’s favourite food.’

  ‘That would only smell. Do you want to attract worms?’

  I removed my head from her breast and looked at the angels that were on the second step of the stairs in a box, ready to be taken back to the attic. I’d been allowed to put them back in the silver paper, one by one, facing downwards. I still hadn’t cried. I’d tried but hadn’t been able to each time, not even if I tried to picture Matthies falling through the ice in great detail: his hand feeling the ice for the hole, looking for the light or the dark, his clothes and skates heavy under the water. I held my breath and didn’t even manage it for half a minute.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I hate those stupid worms.’

  Granny smiled at me. I wanted her to stop smiling, I wanted Dad to take his fork to her face and mash up everything like he’d done with his pancake. I didn’t hear her muffled sobs until she was alone in the front room.

  In the nights that followed, I kept sneaking downstairs to check whether my brother was really dead. First I’d lie in my bed wiggling around or ‘making a candle’, as I called it, by throwing my legs up in the air and supporting my hips with my hands. In the mornings his death seemed obvious but as soon as it grew dark, I’d begin to have my doubts. What if we hadn’t looked hard enough and he woke up under the ground? Each time, I’d hope that God had changed his mind and hadn’t listened to me when I’d prayed for him to protect Dieuwertje, just like the time – I must have been about seven – when I’d asked for a new bike: a red one with at least seven gears, and a soft saddle with double suspension so that I didn’t get a pain in my crotch when I had to cycle home from school into the wind. I never got the bike. If I went downstairs now, I hoped, it wouldn’t be Matthies lying beneath the sheet but my rabbit. Of course I’d be sad, but it would be different from the beating veins in my forehead when I tried to hold my breath in bed to understand death, or when I made the candle for so long my blood ran to my head like candlewax. Finally, I let my legs drop back onto my mattress and carefully opened my bedroom door. I tiptoed onto the landing and down the stairs. Dad had beaten me to it: through the banisters I saw him sitting on a chair next to the coffin, his head on the glass of the viewing window. I looked down at his messy blond hair that always smelled of cows, even when he’d just had a bath. I looked at his bent body. He was shaking; as he wiped his nose on his pyjama top, I thought how the fabric would become hard with snot, just like my coat sleeves. I looked at him and began to feel little stabs inside my chest. I imagined I was watching Nederland 1, 2 or 3 and could zap away at any moment if it got too much. Dad sat there for so long my feet got cold. When he pushed his chair in and returned to bed – my parents had a waterbed that Dad would sink back into now – I descended the rest of the stairs and sat down on his chair. It was still warm. I pressed my mouth to the window, like the ice in my dreams, and blew. I tasted the salt of my father’s tears. Matthies’s face was as pale as fennel; his lips were purple from the cooling mechanism that kept him frozen. I wanted to turn it off so that he could thaw in my arms and I could carry him upstairs so that we could sleep on it, like Dad sometimes ordered us to when we’d misbehaved and been sent to bed without any dinner. I’d ask him whether this was really the right way to leave us.

  The first night he was in the coffin in the front room, Dad saw me sitting with my hands around the banisters and my head pushed through them. He’d sniffed and said, ‘They’ve put cotton wads in his bottom to stop his crap coming out. He must still be warm inside. That makes me feel better.’ I held my breath and counted: thirty-three seconds of suffocation. It wouldn’t be long before I could hold my breath for so long that I’d be able to fish Matthies out of his sleep, and just like the frogspawn we got out of the ditch behind the cowshed with a fishing net and kept in a bucket until they were tadpoles and tails and legs slowly began to grow out of them, Matthies would also slowly transform from lifeless to alive and kicking.

  *

  On the morning of the third day, Dad asked from the bottom of the stairs whether I wanted to go with him to Farmer Janssen’s to pick up some mangels and drop them off at the new bit of land. I would have preferred to stay with my brother so that I could be certain he didn’t thaw in my absence, melting out of our life like a snowflake, but I didn’t want to disappoint him so I put on my red coat over my overalls, the zip done up to my chin. The tractor was so old I was shaken back and forth at every bump; I had to cling on to the edge of the open window. Anxiously I glanced over at my father: the lines of sleep were still on his face, the waterbed made rivers in his skin, an impression of the lake. Mum’s bobbing body had stopped him from sleeping, as had his own bobbing body, or the idea of bodies heaving as they fell into water. Tomorrow they’d buy a normal mattress. My stomach rumbled.

  ‘I need to poo.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go at home?’

  ‘I didn’t need to then.’

  ‘That’s impossible, you feel it coming on.’

  ‘But it’s the truth. I think I’ve got the runs.’

  Dad parked the tractor on the land, turned off the engine, and reached over to push open my door for me.

  ‘Squat down over by that tree, the ash there.’

  I quickly climbed out of the cab, pulled off my coat and let my overalls and pants drop to my knees. I imagined the diarrhoea splattering onto the grass like the caramel sauce my granny poured onto the rice pudding, and squeezed my buttocks together. Dad leaned against the tractor’s tyre, lit up a cigarette and looked at me.

  ‘If you take any longer, moles will start tunnelling up your bum hole.’

  I began to sweat, picturing the cotton wads my dad had mentioned, the way the moles would burrow into my brother when he was buried, and the way they’d dig up everything in me afterwards. My poo belonged to me, but once it was between the blades of grass, it belonged to the world.

  ‘Just push,’ Dad said. He came over and handed me a used tissue. His eyes were hard. I wasn’t used to this expression on him, even though I knew he hated waiting because then he had to stand still for too long, which made him dwell on things, and then he s
moked more. No one in the village liked to dwell: the crops might wither, and we only knew about the harvest that came from the land, not about things that grew inside ourselves. I breathed in Dad’s smoke so that his cares would become mine. After that, I said a quick prayer to God that he wouldn’t give me cancer from the cigarette smoke if I helped with the toad migration when I was old enough. ‘The righteous care for the needs of their livestock,’ I’d once read in the Bible, so I was safe as far as illness was concerned.

  ‘The urge went away,’ I said. I pulled my pants back up and put my overalls back on, closed my coat and zipped it up to my chin. I could hold in my poo. I wouldn’t have to lose anything I wanted to keep from now on.

  Dad stamped out his butt on a molehill. ‘Drink lots of water, that helps with the calves too. Otherwise it will come out the other end one day.’ He laid his hand on my head, and I tried to walk as upright as I could beneath it. Now there were two things I’d have to watch out for at both ends.

  We walked back to the tractor. The new bit of land was older than me and yet it continued to be called that. It was like the way there used to be a doctor living at the bottom of the dike where there was now a playground with a bumpy slide, which we still called the Old Doctor’s when arranging play dates.

  ‘Do you think worms and maggots are going to eat Matthies?’ I asked my father as we walked back. I didn’t dare look at him. Dad had once read out from Isaiah, ‘All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you,’ and now I was worried this would happen to my brother too. Dad tugged open the tractor’s door without answering me. I feverishly pictured my brother’s body full of holes like strawberry matting.

  When we arrived at the mangels, some of them were rotten. The mushy white pulp that looked like pus stuck to my fingers when I picked them up. Dad tossed them nonchalantly over his shoulder into the trailer. They made a dull thud. Whenever he looked at me I felt my cheeks burning. We had to agree upon times when my parents couldn’t look at me, I thought, the same as with the TV. Perhaps that was why Matthies didn’t come home that day – because the doors to the TV cabinet were closed and no one was keeping an eye on us.

  I didn’t dare ask my father any more questions about Matthies and threw the last mangel into the trailer, taking my place next to him in the cabin afterwards. There was a sticker on the rusty rim above the rearview mirror that said MILK THE COW, NOT THE FARMER.

  Back at the farm, Dad and Obbe dragged the dark blue waterbed outside. Dad pulled off the nozzle and the safety cap and let the water drain out into the farmyard. It wasn’t long before a thin layer of ice had formed. I didn’t dare stand on it, afraid that I would fall through. The dark mattress slowly shrank like a vacuum-sealed packet of coffee. Then my father rolled up the waterbed and laid it at the side of the road, next to the wheelbarrow containing the Christmas tree that would be picked up on Monday by the waste disposal company. Obbe nudged me and said, ‘There he is.’ I stared at the place he was pointing to and saw the black hearse approaching over the dike; it came closer and closer like a large crow, then it turned left and drove onto the farm, across the layer of ice from the waterbed, which had indeed cracked. Reverend Renkema got out with two of my uncles. Dad had chosen them and Farmer Evertsen and Farmer Janssen to lift the oak coffin into the hearse and later carry it into the church as Hymn 416 was sung, accompanied by the band in which Matthies had played the trombone for years, and the only thing that was right about that afternoon was that heroes are always borne aloft.

  PART II

  1

  From close up the warts on the toads look just like capers. I hate the taste of capers, those little green buds. And if you pop one between your thumb and index finger, some sourish stuff comes out, just like from a toad’s poison gland. I poke at a toad’s fleshy rump with a stick. There’s a black stripe running down its back. It doesn’t move. I push harder and watch the rough skin fold around the stick; for a moment its smooth belly touches the tarmac that has been warmed by the first rays of spring sun, where they love to squat.

  ‘I only want to help you,’ I whisper.

  I put down the lantern they gave us at the Reformed church next to me on the road. It is white with sticking-out folds in the middle. ‘God’s word is a lamp to your feet and a light to your path,’ Reverend Renkema had said as he handed them out to the children. It’s not yet eight o’clock and my candle has already shrunk to half its size. I hope God’s word isn’t going to start fading too.

  In the light of my lantern I see that the toad’s front feet aren’t webbed. Maybe a heron bit them off or he was born like that. Maybe it’s like Dad’s gammy leg that he drags around after him across the farmyard like one of those tube sandbags from the silage heap.

  ‘There’s squash and a Milky Way for everyone,’ I hear a church volunteer say behind me. The thought of having to eat a Milky Way in a place where there are no toilets makes my stomach heave. You never know whether someone’s sneezed onto the squash or spat in it or whether they’ve checked the sell-by dates of the Milky Ways. The chocolate layer around the malt nougat might have turned white, the same thing that happens to your face when food makes you sick. After that death will follow swiftly, I’m sure of that. I try to forget about the Milky Ways.

  ‘If you don’t hurry up, you won’t just have a stripe along your back but tyre tracks,’ I whisper to the toad. My knees are starting to hurt from the squatting. Still no movement from the toad. One of the other toads tries to catch a lift on his back, trying to hang on with its front legs under its armpits, but it keeps sliding off. They’re probably scared of water like me. I stand up again, pick up my lantern and quickly shove the two toads into my coat pocket when no one’s looking, then I search the group for the two people wearing fluorescent vests.

  Mum had insisted we put them on. ‘Otherwise you’ll be as flat as the run-over toads yourselves. Nobody wants that. These will turn you into lanterns.’

  Obbe had smelled the fabric. ‘No way I’m going to put that on. We’ll look like total idiots in these dirty, stinking sweat-bags. No one else will be wearing safety vests.’

  Mum sighed. ‘I always get it wrong, don’t I?’ And she turned the corners of her mouth downwards. They’d been constantly turned downwards recently, as though there were fruit-shaped weights hanging on them, like on the tablecloth that goes with the garden set.

  ‘You’re doing fine, Mum. Of course we’ll wear them,’ I said, gesturing to Obbe. The vests are only used when the kids in the last year of primary take their cycling proficiency test, which Mum oversees. She sits on a fishing chair at the only crossroads in the village, and puts on her concerned face, lips pursed – a poppy that just won’t open. It’s her job to check that everyone sticks out their arm to indicate and gets through the traffic safely. The first time I felt ashamed of my mum was on that crossroads.

  A fluorescent vest comes towards me. Hanna is carrying a black bucket of toads in her right hand, and her vest is half open, its panels flapping in the wind. The sight of it makes me feel anxious. ‘You have to close your vest.’ Hanna raises her eyebrows, staples in the canvas of her face. She manages to keep looking at me like this – with slight irritation – for a long time. Now the sun is becoming hotter during the day, she’s getting more freckles around her nose. An image flashes into my mind: a flattened Hanna with the freckles splattered around her over the tarmac, the way some run-over toads end up in pieces. And then we’d have to scrape her off the road with a spade.

  ‘But I’m so hot,’ Hanna says.

  At that moment, Obbe joins us. His blond hair is long and hangs in greasy strings in front of his face. He repeatedly smooths it behind his ear before it slowly tumbles back again.

  ‘Look. This one looks like Reverend Renkema. See that fat head and those bulging eyes? And Renkema doesn’t have a neck either.’ A brown toad is sitting on the palm of his hand. We laugh but not too loudly:
you mustn’t mock the pastor, just like you mustn’t mock God; they’re best friends and you have to watch out with best friends. I don’t have a best friend yet but there are lots of girls at the new school who might become one. Obbe started secondary ages ago, and Hanna is two years below me at primary school. She’s got as many friends as God had disciples.

  Suddenly Obbe holds his lantern above the toad’s head. I see its skin glow pale yellow. It squeezes its eyes shut. Obbe begins to grin.

  ‘They like heat,’ he says, ‘that’s why they bury their ugly heads in the mud in the winter.’ He moves the lantern closer and closer. When you fry capers they go black and crispy. I want to knock Obbe’s hand away, but then the lady with the squash and the Milky Ways comes over to us. He quickly puts the toad in his bucket. The squash lady is wearing a T-shirt that says LOOK OUT! TOADS CROSSING. She must have seen Hanna’s shocked expression because she asks us if everything’s all right, if all the crushed bodies aren’t upsetting us. I lovingly wrap my arm around my little sister who has put on a sulky pout. I’m aware there’s a risk she could suddenly burst into tears, like this morning when Obbe flattened a grasshopper against the stable wall with his clog. I think it was mainly the sound that scared her, but she stuck to her guns: to her it was that little life, the wings folded in front of the grasshopper’s head like mini fly-screens. She saw life; Obbe and I saw death.