6
My sister is the only person who understands why I’ve stopped taking off my coat. And the only one who tries to think of a solution. Our evenings are filled with this. Sometimes I get afraid that one of her solutions is going to work, that I’ll take away something from my sister, because as long as we still have desires we’re safe from death, draped around the farm’s shoulders like the suffocating smell after a day of muck-spreading. At the same time my red coat is fading, just like my image of Matthies. There isn’t a photo of him anywhere in the house, just his milk teeth, some of which have dried-up blood on them, in a little wooden pot on the windowsill. I try to picture him every evening like an important history test, to learn his features off by heart – just like I learned the slogan ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ which I repeat constantly, especially at grown-up parties to show off what I’ve learned – afraid of the moment other boys might get into my head and let my brother slip out from between them. My coat pockets are heavy with all the things I’m collecting. Hanna bends over me and offers me a handful of salty popcorn: a sacrifice to make up for not having stuck up for me just now. If only I had pushed her from the bed Tiesey might still be alive. I don’t feel like talking to her. The only person I’d like to see now is Mum or Dad, and for them to say that I didn’t do anything wrong. But Dad doesn’t come. He never says sorry. He can’t get the word across his chapped lips – only God’s word rolls out smoothly. You don’t know that things are good again until he asks you to pass the sandwich filling at the table. Then you can be happy you can pass him the apple syrup again, even though sometimes I’d like to take my knife and smear the syrup over his face so that our gazes stick to him, so that he sees the three kings can’t find the Orient.
Suddenly I wonder whether Dad doesn’t only scratch the sticky stars from my ceiling but also from the sky. That might be the reason everything looks blacker and Obbe meaner: we’ve lost our way and there’s no one to ask for directions. Even the Big Bear from my favourite picture book, who takes down the moon every night for the Little Bear who is afraid of the dark, is hibernating. Only the night light in my socket offers some comfort. I’m actually too old for it, but in the night everyone is ageless. Fear has more disguises than my mother has floral dresses, and that’s saying something as she’s got a wardrobe full – though now she often wears the same one, the one with the cacti, as though it’ll keep everyone away from her, even though she now wears her dressing gown over the top of it.
I lie with my face to the wall, which has a black-and-white poster of Boudewijn de Groot on it, the one with the lonely cyclist on a narrow mountain track with a child on the front of his bike. Sometimes, before I go to sleep I fantasize that I’m the child and Mum is riding the bike, even though Mum doesn’t like cycling, as she’s much too afraid of getting her dress caught in the spokes, and we’ll never get so lonely that we end up on the same path. When I turn over, Hanna lays the popcorn between us. It sticks to my bottom sheet right away. We take a piece in turn. A verse from Proverbs pops into my head: ‘To do justice and judgement is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.’ I can’t resist this sacrifice as we rarely have popcorn, and I know that Hanna means well because she gets this guilty look on her face, her eyes raised, like the pastor when he’s listing the sins of the community and looks up at the ceiling that’s just been whitewashed.
From time to time, my hand arrives too late and I’ll touch Hanna’s fingers and feel her bitten-off nails. They’re set deep in red-ringed flesh, chunks of white fat in a sausage. I only have a problem with black dirt stuck under mine. Hanna says my nails are going black because I think about death too much. I immediately picture Tiesey’s bulging eyes, the emptiness that settled inside my head when he stopped treading water, and then the blow, the all-destructive silence of an ending, of an empty wheel.
As Hanna eats the last of the popcorn and talks about the new Barbie she wants, I realize that I’ve had my hands folded under my duvet for a while. Maybe God’s been waiting for half an hour already for what I’m going to say. I unfold my hands: falling silent is also a way of saying something in the village. We don’t have answering machines, but we do let long silences fall, silences in which sometimes you can hear the cows lowing in the background or the whistle of a kettle.
‘Car accident or burning?’ I ask.
Hanna’s face relaxes now she knows I’m not angry with her and we’re simply repeating our daily ritual. Her lips look red and fat from the salt. You get more from sacrifices than you give away. Is that why Obbe killed Tiesey? To get Matthies back? I don’t want to think about my sacrifice that has four legs and more than a hundred million olfactory cells.
‘How are they supposed to burn?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes they forget to blow out the tea lights, the ones next to the window on the yard side,’ I say.
Hanna nods slowly. She’s wondering about the plausibility. I know I go too far, but the further I go in thinking up the different ways in which Mum and Dad might end their days, the less chance of surprises.
‘Murdered or cancer?’
‘Cancer,’ I say.
‘Jumped off the silo or drowned?’
‘Why would you jump off the silo? That’s just stupid,’ Hanna asks.
‘People do that when they feel very sad, they jump off things.’
‘I think it’s an idiotic idea.’
It hasn’t occurred to me before that Mum and Dad couldn’t only be overcome by death but they could beat death to it. That you could plan the Day of Judgement just like a birthday party. It must be because of what I heard my mother say the other day, and the rope on the beam. I think about the different coloured scarves she wraps around her before she goes to church but worry they’ll only make her crazier. She ties them so tightly that you can see the stripes on her skin after church. Maybe she wears them to reach the high notes of a psalm, as sometimes they’re so high you have to clench your buttocks. But I say to my sister, ‘It’s a very stupid idea. I’ll bet on a heart attack or a car accident, Mum drives so recklessly.’
I quickly put the last bit of popcorn in my mouth. It had rolled under my belly. I suck out the salt until it becomes tasteless and pappy on my tongue. It reminds me of the time that Obbe made me put a dead bumblebee in my mouth. It had been lying on the windowsill next to Mum’s piece of chewing gum – before she goes to bed, she takes it out of her mouth, rolls it into a ball and leaves it to go hard overnight before chewing on it again the next day. I did it for a pile of milk caps; Obbe swore I wouldn’t dare. I felt the bumblebee’s little hairs against the roof of my mouth, its wings like sliced almonds on my tongue. Obbe counted to sixty. I pretended that it was a honey sweet, but a whole minute long I’d had death in my mouth.
‘Has Dad got a heart, do you think?’
The image of the bumblebee makes way for Dad’s chest. I saw it today. It was so hot he walked around the fields with the cows without his white vest on. He’s got all of three hairs on his chest. Blond. I can’t imagine a heart behind his ribs, more like a slurry pit.
‘Most likely,’ I say. ‘He’s always generous with the collection at church.’
Hanna nods and sucks in her cheeks. Her eyes are still red from the crying. We don’t talk about Tiesey. We don’t talk about all the things we will never forget. The slurry pit only gets emptied once a year. This isn’t the moment to pour out our hearts, even though I don’t know when is. Granny sometimes says that praying makes your heart less heavy, but mine still only weighs three hundred grams. About the same as a packet of mincemeat.
‘Do you know the story of Rapunzel?’ Hanna asks.
‘Of course I do.’
‘She’s our solution,’ Hanna says. She turns onto her side so she can look me in the face. In the light of my globe, her nose looks like a capsized sailing boat. She has the kind of beauty you rarely see, like the drawings she does with crayons: they’re lopsided and crooked and that’s what gives them their beaut
y, their naturalness.
‘One day she was rescued from her tower. We need a rescuer. Someone to take us away from this ridiculous village, from Dad and Mum, from Obbe, from ourselves.’
I nod, it’s a good plan. Only my hair comes down to just under my ears and it will be years before it’s long enough for someone to climb up with. Aside from that, the highest point here on the farm is the hayloft, and you can just get up there with a ladder.
‘And to get you out of your coat,’ Hanna continues. She runs her sticky fingers through my hair. I can smell the salty odour of popcorn. She moves them across my head, drumming, the way the tickling insects often push against my skin. I never touch Hanna, only when she asks me to. It doesn’t occur to me to. You’ve got two kinds of people, those who hold on and those who let go. I belong to the second category. I can only hold on to a person or a memory with the things I collect. I can safely stow them away in my coat pocket.
There’s a popcorn husk caught on one of Hanna’s incisors. I don’t mention it.
‘But can’t we go together?’ I ask.
‘The other side is just like the off-licence in the village. You can’t get in if you’re under sixteen.’
Hanna gives me a determined look. There’s no point arguing with her now.
‘And it has to be a man. Rescuers are always men.’
‘What about God, then? He’s a rescuer, isn’t he?’
‘God only saves those who have sunk. You don’t dare swim. Apart from that,’ Hanna goes on, ‘God’s too friendly with Dad. He’s sure to tell and then we’ll never get away.’
Hanna is right. Even though I don’t know whether I want a rescuer – first, you have to learn how to hold on yourself, but I don’t want to disappoint my sister. I hear Dad screaming to us: ‘He who leaves his brethren becomes a wanderer, adrift from his original existence.’ Is this our original existence, or is there another life waiting for us somewhere on Earth that will fit around us like my coat?
‘You’ve got twenty-four hours to make a choice,’ Hanna says.
‘Why twenty-four hours?’
‘We don’t have much time, our lives depend on it.’ She says this in the same tone she uses when we’re playing table tennis in the barn, when the ball keeps ending up in the wrong place. Then she says, ‘And now the real one.’ As if we’d just been waving our bats around to chase away the dung flies.
‘What then?’ I ask.
‘Then, then it will start,’ Hanna whispers.
I hold my breath.
‘Kissing. Rapunzel had her long hair, we’ve got our bodies. You always have to use your charms if you want to be rescued.’ Hanna smiles. If I had a chisel I’d give her nose a tap to straighten it.
You should remove everything that attracts unwanted attention, my father once said when I hadn’t been able to resist getting my Pokémon cards out of my bag. He threw them onto the fire, saying, ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.’
He forgot that we already serve two – Dad and God. A third could make things complicated, but that’s something to worry about later.
‘Yuck.’ I pull a disgusted face.
‘Don’t you want to be rescued and go to the other side of the bridge?’
‘What shall we call our plan?’ I say quickly.
Hanna ponders for a moment.
‘Just The Plan?’
I pull the cords of my coat tighter and feel the collar close around my neck. Would the noose on the beam feel the same around your neck? I hear a quiet plopping sound under my desk. Hanna doesn’t know I’m keeping two toads captive, that I’ve already got a bit of the other side in my room. It doesn’t seem very sensible to tell her now – I don’t want her to free them in the lake, to let them swim and see them dive down to the place where Matthies disappeared. Touching them I’ve finally got something I can hold, even though they feel funny. Luckily Hanna hasn’t heard: her head is full of The Plan.
We hear footsteps beneath us. Dad pokes his head up the stepladder. ‘Are the two of you reflecting on your sins?’ Hanna laughs and I go red. That’s the biggest difference between us: she’s light and I go dark, ever darker.
‘Go to your own bed, Hanna. School tomorrow.’ Dad goes back down the ladder. I look down at his parting, and his head looks like a slotted head screw. Sometimes I’d like to bore him into the ground so that he could only do two things: watch and listen, listen a lot.
7
I jolt awake in the middle of the night. My duvet feels clammy with sweat, and the planets and moons on it seem to give off less light. Or maybe they give off the same amount of light but it’s no longer enough for me, as the effect is gradually fading. I push away the damp duvet and sit on the edge of my bed. Immediately my body begins to shiver beneath the thin fabric of my pyjamas, and the draught that comes under the door grabs me by the ankles. I pull the duvet over my shoulders and think about the nightmare I had, in which my parents were lying under the ice like two frozen eels, which Farmer Evertsen sometimes gives us, wrapped up in the Reformist Daily. Dad always used to say, ‘Wrapped up in God’s words they taste even better.’
Evertsen was there too. He was wearing his Sunday suit with the narrow lapels and a shiny black tie. When he saw me, he began to sprinkle salt on the ice and he said, ‘They’ll be preserved for longer like that.’ I lay flat on the ice, like a snow angel fallen from heaven, and looked at my parents – they looked like the dinosaur figures in a pot I got for my birthday once that were stuck in a kind of jelly. Obbe and I had dug them out of the jelly with an apple corer. Once they were out there wasn’t much point to them: their inaccessibility made them interesting, like my frozen parents. I tapped the ice, laid my ear to it, and heard the singing sound of skates. I wanted to call out to them but nothing escaped my throat.
When I got up again I suddenly noticed Reverend Renkema standing at the edge of the water in the special robe he only wears at Easter, when all the children from the community walk down the aisle with wooden crosses. An Easter bunny made of freshly baked bread with two currants for eyes hangs on each cross. Before we leave the church, Obbe has often scoffed half of his. I never dare start mine for fear that I’ll come home to an empty rabbit hutch, that if I break off its ears, the same will happen to Dieuwertje. I let the bunny go mouldy in my desk drawer. That’s less awful. Going mouldy is at least a long process of disintegration. But in my nightmare, Renkema stood there in the tufts of reeds, waiting like a cormorant to peck at something. Before I woke up, he said in a solemn voice, ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. God’s plans are your plans.’ After that everything went black: the grains of salt beneath me began to dissolve, and I seemed to glide slowly under the ice until I saw a hole in it: the light in the socket in my bedroom, next to the bookcase.
‘God’s plans are your plans.’ Could the pastor be referring to Obbe and Hanna’s missions? I turn on the globe on my bedside table, and feel around the floor with my feet until I find my slippers, and smooth the creases from my coat. I don’t know what my plan is, except I want Mum and Dad to mate and become happy again one day, so that Mum starts eating and they don’t die. Once I’ve fulfilled that mission, I can go to the other side with peace of mind. I take the milk pail out from under my desk and glance at the toads that look up at me with drowsy eyes. They seem thinner, their warts whiter, like the pictures of bang snaps that Obbe circles in the fireworks brochure for New Year’s Eve – he spends weeks poring over the rockets and fountains to put together the best package. Hanna and I just pick the ground spinners, as we find them the prettiest and the least scary.
I tilt the bucket slightly so that I can see whether they’ve eaten anything, but the lettuce leaves at the bottom are brown and soggy. Toads can’t see motionless things, I know that, and that’s why they can starve. I move a lettuce leaf up and down in front of
their faces. ‘This will taste nice. Eat it up. Eat it up,’ I sing quietly. It doesn’t help, and the stupid creatures refuse to eat.
‘Then it’s time to mate now,’ I say decisively, picking up the smallest of the two. I gently rub its underbelly over the back of the other toad. I once saw this on a nature programme on School TV. The toads sat on top of each other for days, but there’s no time for that now. My parents don’t have days left: they lie in our hands like touchpapers waiting for someone to light them so they can give us warmth. While I rub the toads together, I whisper to them, ‘Otherwise you’ll die. Do you want to die or what? Well?’ I feel the webbed feet pressing against my palm. I clutch the toads tighter and tighter and press them together more and more insistently. After a few minutes it gets boring and I put them back in the bucket. I take a couple of leaves of spinach I stole from dinner out of a paper napkin, and a chunk of toasted bread which has gone soft in the meantime. The toads still look like they’re dead. I wait for them to eat but nothing happens. I sigh and stand up. Perhaps they need time, change always takes time. The cows don’t just eat a new food mix: you have to add it handful by handful to their old food, until they no longer notice that the pellets are different.
I push the bucket back under my desk with my food, and see a pin lying on the top of it next to my pen pot. It’s fallen from my pinboard, from Lien next door’s postcard. She sends me a postcard every once in a while because I complained about never getting any post when Dad did – pretty blue letters. I think that some of them are about the Jews. Someone must miss them now they’ve been in hiding with us for so long? I’d wanted to tell my teacher about them but was worried someone might overhear. A couple of boys in my class are a bit Nazi-ish, especially David, who smuggled his mouse to school once in his pencil case. He kept it hidden among his leaky pens all day and finally let it out during biology, shouting, ‘A mouse! A mouse!’ The teacher caught it in a trap with some breadcrumbs, where it died because of the shock and all the class’s cheers.
The Discomfort of Evening Page 7