The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  ‘Do you think that Hitler sometimes cried when he was alone?’

  The teacher, who is also my form tutor, looked at me for a long time before answering. She had eyes that always shone, as though there were battery-run tea lights behind them that lasted a long time. Maybe she was waiting for me to cry so that she could see whether I was a good or a bad person. After all, I still hadn’t cried about my brother, not even soundlessly, as my tears got stuck in the corner of my eye. I guessed it was because of my coat. It was warm in the classroom, which meant my tears would surely evaporate before they reached my cheeks.

  ‘Villains don’t cry,’ the teacher said then. ‘Only heroes cry.’

  I’d looked down. Were Obbe and I villains? Mum only cried with her back to us, and so quietly you couldn’t hear it. Everything her body did was silent, even her farts.

  The teacher told us that Hitler’s favourite pastime was daydreaming and that he was afraid of illness. He suffered from stomach cramps, eczema and wind, although that last one was because he ate a lot of bean soup. Hitler had lost three brothers and a sister, none of whom made it to the age of six. I’m like him, I thought, and nobody must know it. We even share the same birthday – 20 April. On good days, Dad tells us from his smoking chair that it was the coldest April day in years and that I came into the world light blue that Saturday, and they almost had to chisel me out of the womb like a statue out of ice. In my baby album, there’s a coil stuck next to my first scan: a copper tube with a bow on it and little white hooks like tiny shark’s teeth that could bite every sperm dead, and a thread at the bottom that looks like a mucus trail. I’d managed to avoid the coil and had swum through it. When I asked why Mum had shark’s teeth in her, Dad had said, ‘Be ye fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply, but make sure you’ve got enough bedrooms first. This was a stop-gap solution, God knew that, only you were already as stubborn as a mule.’ After I was born, my mum didn’t get another coil. ‘Children are the Lord’s legacy.’ You can’t say no to legacies.

  I secretly Googled my birthday later. We can only get on the internet when the phone cable is out and the internet cable is plugged in, so it crackles and beeps as it connects – and we’re not allowed on for long in case our parents get an important phone call, even though they never get important phone calls and they’re usually only about a cow that’s got out again on the new bit of land. They think everything on the internet is wicked, but as Dad sometimes says, ‘We’re in the world, not of the world.’ We’re only allowed to use it for school sometimes, even though I have my doubts about Dad’s line (which is from John) when people say they can see from our Reformed faces which village we come from. I saw that there were powerful gusts of wind on that day, but Dad had said that it was so calm outside that even the knotted willows kept their branches reverentially still. On that day in April, Hitler had been dead for forty-six years already. And the only difference between him and me is that I’m afraid of vomiting and diarrhoea, not Jewish people – even though I’ve never seen a Jew in real life, but maybe they are still hiding in people’s attics or cellars, hidden by Dutch farmers like in the war, or perhaps that’s why we’re not allowed down in the basement. There must be a reason Mum takes two full supermarket bags down there on Friday evenings. There are tins of hot dogs in them, even though we never eat hot dogs.

  I take the crumpled letter from my coat pocket that the teacher made us write to Anne Frank. I thought that was a crazy thing to do. Anne Frank was dead, and I knew the letterbox in the village only had two slots – one for ‘other postcodes’ and one for more local numbers, 8000 to 8617. Heaven wasn’t included. That would be mad too, because dead people are always missed more than living ones so there would be too much post going there.

  ‘It’s about empathizing with her situation,’ the teacher said. She felt I was good at putting myself in another’s shoes but not so great at kicking off my own and having fun. Sometimes I’d get stuck in the other person for too long because that was easier than staying inside myself. I shunted my chair a bit closer to Belle. We’d been sitting next to each other since the first week of secondary school. I’d liked her at once because she had big ears that stuck out through her straw-blonde hair and her mouth was a bit crooked on her face, like a clay doll that had dried before it was completely finished. The sick cows were always sweeter too; you could stroke them gently without them suddenly kicking back at you.

  Belle leaned towards me for a moment and whispered, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of your uniform?’ I followed her eyes – they were made up with eyeliner, and the lines under and over looked like curves on a number line that made jumps too big to work out an answer – in the direction of my coat. The cords of my hood lay on my chest, hard from dried-up spit. In the wind they sometimes wound around my neck like umbilical cords.

  I shook my head.

  ‘They talk about you in the playground.’

  ‘So what?’

  In the meantime, I opened the drawer under my desk slightly. I was the only person who still had a drawer; the desk was actually from the primary school that was next to the secondary school. The sight of the foil-wrapped packages made me feel calm: a mass grave of milk biscuits. My stomach rumbled. Some of the biscuits had already gone soft, as though someone had put them in their mouth and then spat them back out into the silver foil. After it had been through your intestines, food turned into poo. All of the toilets here had a ledge inside – my turd would be served up to me on a white plate, and I didn’t want that. I had to keep it inside me.

  ‘They say you can’t grow tits and that’s why you always wear your coat. And that you never wash it. We can smell cow.’

  Belle used her fountain pen to make a full stop after the title on her page. I wanted to be that blue dot for a moment. And then for there to be nothing else after me. No lists, thoughts or longings. Just nothing at all.

  Belle looked at me expectantly. ‘You’re just like Anne Frank. You’re in hiding.’ I pushed my pencil into the grinder of my pencil sharpener that I’d got out of my bag, and turned it until there was a very sharp point. I let it break twice.

  *

  I roll over on the mattress that used to belong to Matthies so that I’m lying on my belly. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been sleeping in his bedroom in the attic. Hanna’s got my old room now. Sometimes I think that Johnny has stayed in my old room, that he finds it too scary in the attic because since then, Dad hasn’t told me anything about him, and only his absence has made an impression. In the middle of the mattress there’s the hollow of my brother’s body. It’s the shape left by death and whichever way I turn it or flip it over, the hollow stays a hollow that I try not to end up in.

  I look for my teddy bear but can’t see it anywhere. Not at the foot of the bed, not under the duvet, not under the bed. Immediately I hear my mum’s voice inside my head: ‘Disgusting.’ That’s what she’d said and it was in the look on her face when she suddenly came into my room, the stress on ‘gust’. It was an ugly word and if you said it, it was a bit like needing to vomit. She’d first said the word and then spelled it out: d-i-s-g-u-s-t-i-n-g, her nose stuck up in the air. I suddenly realize where my bear must be. I slip through the opening in the covers and look out of my bedroom window into the garden where I see my bear hanging on the washing line. There are two red wooden pegs in each ear. He is being rocked roughly back and forth by the wind, making exactly the same movement I made when I was lying on top of him, causing Mum to clap her hands three times like she was chasing a crow from the cherry tree. She’d seen the way I was pushing my crotch into its fluffy bottom. Since I’ve been sleeping here in the attic I’ve been doing that. I close my eyes and first run through the day as I move, repeating everything everyone said to me and the way they said it, and only then do I think about the Philips Discman I really wanted, about two snails having sex on top of each other, the way Obbe separated them that time with a screwdriver, about Dieuwertje Blok from
the TV, about Matthies on the ice, about a life without my coat but with myself. Just until I need to pee.

  ‘An idol is what you flee to before you go to God,’ she said to me a bit later, when I came down for a beaker of warm milk with aniseed. As a punishment she’s put my bear in the wash and hung him on the line. I creep down the stairs in my socks, slip through the hall to the back garden, and step into the tepid evening air. Behind me in the farmyard, the construction light is still on. My parents are giving the calves their milk before they go to bed, a sum I’m not allowed to forget: one scoop of protein powder to two litres of water. That’s how the calves get extra protein; after drinking it, their noses smell of vanilla. I can hear the milk tank buzzing, the clatter of the drinking troughs. I quickly pull on my mum’s clogs which are next to the door, sprint across the grass to the washing line, take the pegs from my bear’s ears and clutch him tight to my chest, rocking him gently back and forth a few times as though he’s Matthies, as though I’ve fished him out of the dark lake in the dead of the night. He feels heavy and wet. It will be at least a night before he’s dry, a week before the smell of washing powder has worn off. His right eye is watering. When I walk back across the lawn, Mum and Dad’s voices become louder. By the sound of it they are arguing. I can’t handle arguments, just like Obbe can’t handle anyone talking back to him, and presses his hands to his ears and begins to hum. Since I don’t want to stand out in the darkness, I lay one hand over the fluorescent star on my coat, hold my bear in the other, and hide behind the rabbit hutches. The warm ammonia smell of the rabbits seeps through the splits in the wood. Obbe had got a couple of fat maggots from the muck-heap to use for fishing. When he went to thread the hook through those little bodies, I quickly looked the other way. From here I can hear what the row’s about, and I see Mum standing next to the manure pit with a pitchfork.

  ‘If you hadn’t have wanted to get rid of the child …’

  ‘Oh, so now it’s my fault?’ Dad says.

  ‘That’s why God took away our oldest son.’

  ‘We weren’t married yet …’

  ‘It’s the tenth plague, I’m sure of it.’

  I hold my breath. My coat feels damp from the wet bear against my chest, and its head droops forwards. I wonder for a moment whether Hitler would have told his mum what he was planning and that he was going to make a mess of it. I haven’t told anyone that I prayed for Dieuwertje to survive. Could the tenth plague be my fault?

  ‘We have to get along with what we’ve got,’ Dad says.

  I see his outline in the light of the construction lamp. His shoulders are higher than normal. Just like the coat rack he’s hung higher now that we’re taller, his shoulders are raised a couple of centimetres. Mum laughs. It’s not her normal laugh: it’s the laugh she does when she actually doesn’t find something funny. It’s confusing, but grown-ups are often confusing because their heads work like a Tetris game and they have to arrange all their worries in the right place. When there are too many of them, they pile up and everything gets stuck. Game over.

  ‘I’d rather jump off the silo tank.’

  The stabs in my belly get worse. It’s as though my stomach is Granny’s pincushion, which she pricks her pins in so as not to lose them.

  ‘You haven’t told anyone about the baby. Who knows what the family thinks. Only God knows and he’ll forgive a thousand times over,’ Dad says.

  ‘As long as you’re keeping count,’ Mum says, turning her back. She is almost as thin as the manure fork leaning against the wall of the barn. Now it dawns on me why she’s stopped eating. During the toad migration, Obbe told me that after they’ve hibernated, toads don’t eat again until they’ve mated, no sooner. My parents no longer touch each other, not even briefly. This must mean they don’t mate either.

  Back in my bedroom I look at the toads in the bucket under my desk. They’re not on top of each other yet and the lettuce leaves are untouched at the bottom of the bucket.

  ‘Tomorrow you’re going to mate,’ I say. Sometimes you have to be clear about things, set down rules, otherwise everyone will walk all over you.

  Then I stand in front of the mirror next to my wardrobe and brush my hair sideways across my head. Hitler combed his hair like this to hide the scar of a bullet that had grazed his face. Once my hair is combed, I go and lie on my bed. In the light of my globe, I can see the rope hanging above my head from a beam. There still isn’t a swing on it, or a rabbit. I see a loop at the end. Just big enough for a hare’s neck. I try to reassure myself by thinking that my mum’s neck is at least three times thicker and she’s scared of heights.

  4

  ‘Are you angry?’

  ‘No,’ Mum says.

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Happy?’

  ‘Just normal,’ Mum says, ‘I’m just normal.’

  No, I think to myself, my mum’s anything but normal. Even the omelette she’s making right now is anything but normal. There are bits of eggshell in it and it’s stuck to the bottom of the frying pan, and both the white and the yolk have dried out. She’s stopped using butter and she’s forgotten the salt and pepper again. Her eyes have been deeper in their sockets lately too, like my old flat football is sinking further and further into the manure pit next to the cowshed. I throw the eggshells on the counter into the bin and see the shards of my smashed cow amongst the rubbish. I fish out its head, which, apart from the horns, is still intact, and quickly put it in my coat pocket. Then I get the yellow dish-cloth from the sink to wipe up the slimy trails left by the broken eggs. A shiver runs through me: I don’t like dried-up dish-cloths; they feel less dirty when they’re wet than when they’re dry and are still full of bacteria. I rinse it under the tap and stand next to my mother again, ever closer in the hope that she’ll accidentally touch me when she moves the frying pan to the plates set out ready on the counter. Just for a moment. Skin against skin, hunger against hunger. Dad had made her stand on the scales before breakfast, otherwise he’d refuse to accompany her to church. It was an empty threat. I could hardly imagine a service without my dad being there, the way I sometimes ask myself what would become of God without my father. To underline his words, he’d put on his Sunday shoes immediately after breakfast rather than putting them in a row to be polished: we were only to appear before the Lord with polished toecaps, Mum sometimes said. Especially today, because it’s the day of prayer for the crops, an important day for all the farmers in the village. Twice a year, before and after the harvest, the members of the Reformed community come together to pray and give thanks for the fields and the crops, that everything might blossom and grow – even while Mum is just getting thinner and thinner.

  ‘Less than one and a half calves,’ Dad said when Mum finally got on the scales. He bent over the numbers on the scales. Obbe and I stood in the door opening and glanced at each other. We all knew what happened to calves that were born too light, which were too skinny to go to the slaughter-house and too expensive to feed up. That’s why most of them were given an injection. The longer Dad left her standing there, the more the numbers tried to crawl back, like snails, Mum getting quieter and seeming to shrink, as though the entire year’s harvest was going to seed before our very eyes and there was nothing we could do about it. I wished I could have put on a packet of pancake flour and castor-sugar so that Dad would stop this. He’d once told us that a single calf could feed fifteen hundred people, so it would be a long time before we’d nibbled away at all of Mum, until there were only bones left. All of us staring at her all the time was causing her not to eat: my rabbit Dieuwertje didn’t start gnawing at the carrots poking through his manger until he got the idea I was no longer around. When Dad put the scales back under the sink later, I quickly took out the batteries.

  *

  Mum doesn’t touch me once while portioning out the omelette, not even by accident. I take a step back and then another. Sadness ends up in your spine. Mum’s back is getting more and more bent. Thi
s time there are two plates missing, one for Mum and one for Matthies. She has stopped eating with us, even though she keeps up appearances by making herself a sandwich, and she still sits at the head of the table opposite Dad, watching us with the eyes of Argus, bringing our forks to our mouths. For a moment I picture a dead baby and the Big Bad Wolf Granny used to tell us about when we stayed at her house and she tucked us in beneath an itchy horse blanket. One day they cut open the Big Bad Wolf’s belly to rescue the seven goats and put stones in instead and sewed his belly up again. They must have put a stone back in my Mum’s belly, I realize, which is why she’s so hard and cold sometimes.

  I take a bite of my bread. During dinner, Dad tells us about the cows that won’t lie in the free stalls but sleep on the slats, which isn’t good for their udders. He holds up a piece of omelette.

  ‘No salt on this,’ he says, pulling a face and taking a sip of his coffee at the same time. No salt on the egg but still a sip of coffee with it.

  ‘And the bottom’s burnt,’ Obbe says.

  ‘There are bits in it,’ Hanna says.

  All three look at Mum, who gets up from the table abruptly and dumps her cumin cheese sandwich in the bin and puts her plate in the sink. She wants us to think she wasn’t planning on eating the sandwich, that we’re the reason she’s got so thin. She doesn’t look at anyone, as though we’re the crusts she always carefully cuts off and lays next to her plate, like points to deduct from our scores later. Her back to us, she says, ‘See, you always take his side.’