The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mum asks. She turns around and goes to turn the cheeses lying on the wall shelving. Of course I should have known she wasn’t going to give away her operating base just like that. Just as you have to be careful with the cows when combining different races. Maybe she’s preparing to go away, to leave us. Maybe that’s why she’s stopped wearing her glasses, so that we stay at a distance.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, ‘nothing is your fault, not even that stone in your tummy.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Mum says, ‘and don’t pick your nose. Do you want to get worms again?’ Mum grabs my arm hard; for the second time her nails prick through the fabric of my coat. She hasn’t cut her nails for a long time, I notice. They’ve got white tips, partly yellow from the whey. ‘What have we got to thank for this?’ I don’t reply. There are some questions Mum doesn’t want a reply to. She doesn’t say this, so you have to sense it. If you reply it only makes her sadder. She lets go of me more carefully than she grabbed me. I think of the plague she was talking to Dad about that night I got my bear down off the washing line. The plagues broke out in Egypt because the people wanted to go to the other side. Here they break out because we’re not allowed to go to the other side although we long for it. It could even be that if Hanna and I leave, the stone in my mother’s tummy would get less heavy. Maybe I could ask the vet to operate on her. He once cut a couple of abscesses from a cow after the neighbour trod on her udder. He threw them onto the muck-heap and less than an hour later, the crows had already eaten the bloody lumps.

  Behind us the shed door opens. Mum has just started testing a new cheese. She looks back and puts the cheese scoop down beside her on the counter.

  ‘Why isn’t there any coffee?’ Dad asks.

  ‘Because you weren’t here,’ Mum says.

  ‘But I am here, and it’s already long past four.’

  ‘You’ll have to make it yourself then, if you need some.’

  ‘What I need is a bit more respect!’

  He strides back through the door, slamming it behind him. Anger has hinges that need oiling. For a moment Mum pretends to continue with her work, but then she begins to sigh and goes to make coffee all the same. Everything here is a maths sum: respect equals four sugar lumps and a shot of condensed milk. I quickly stuff the cheese scoop into my pocket with all my memories.

  *

  ‘Boudewijn de Groot,’ I whisper a couple of hours later to the darkness and the place I’m expecting Hanna’s ear to be. I didn’t have to think for very long. If there’s anyone whose voice has been running through my head for days, it’s his. I even have a photo of Boudewijn in my purse, along with the photo of my first love: a boy called Sjoerd. There are cracks in his photo, and I remember how I felt when I found out that he swapped his love for me for two Pokémon cards and a milk biscuit behind the bike shed. From that moment on, I always emptied my dinosaur beaker of syrup and buttermilk into the bushes there as a memorial, especially because my classmates said it stank – they got real drinking yoghurt in a box. The ground and the plants behind the bike shed turned white. No, Boudewijn de Groot seemed the right choice to me because anyone who sings so beautifully about love must be able to save love. And Mum and Dad like him. Surely they won’t mind if he takes us away. Mum always used to sing along to ‘Het land van Maas en Waal’ so loudly that I thought she was longing for another place. Now she only listens to The Musical Fruit Basket – the requests programme for psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.

  Hanna and I are lying on our backs in my bed with our arms hooked, like a pretzel. The duvet covers us to the waist, but it’s too hot to lie under it completely. I’m picking my nose and put my little finger in my mouth.

  ‘Gross,’ Hanna says. She pulls her arm out of mine and frees herself from me. She wasn’t able to see it but she knows I often fill my silences with picking my nose. It helps me think, as though looking for ways out in my thoughts also has to be expressed physically. Hanna says it will give me wide nostrils, that the elastic will get stretched, just like on my undies. You can buy new underwear but you can’t buy a new nose. I lay my hand on my belly beneath my coat. A scab is forming around the drawing pin. With my other hand I feel Hanna’s face, taking her earlobe between my thumb and forefinger for a moment. It’s the softest part of a human body. Hanna snuggles up to me again. Sometimes I like it but more often I don’t. When someone stands or lies too close I get the feeling I have to admit something, that I have to justify my presence: I’m here because Mum and Dad believed in me and from that thought I could be born – even though they’ve been having more doubts recently and they’re paying less attention to us. There are creases in my clothes. I’m crumpled like the screwed-up shopping list in the bin, waiting for someone to smooth me out and read me again.

  ‘Mr Herbert is my choice,’ Hanna says.

  We’re sharing my pillow. I move ever further away from her and picture my head falling off the edge, causing a tipping point in my thoughts, hoping that I’ll be able to convince Hanna I don’t need a saviour, that I do want to go to the other side, far away from here, that maybe we need something other than a man, that we can’t simply swap God – he’s the strongest Pokémon card we have. Even though I don’t have any other solutions for getting out of here.

  ‘Why Boudewijn?’ Hanna asks.

  ‘Why Mr Herbert?’

  ‘Because I love him.’

  ‘And I love Boudewijn de Groot,’ I say. Maybe it’s because he looks a bit like Dad, even though Dad’s blond and he’s got a smaller nose and can’t sing as well. He never wears colourful shirts either, just his overalls, his blue skipper’s jumper and a black suit with shiny lapels on Sundays. Dad can only play the recorder too. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, he accompanies us to the psalm of the week so that on Mondays we’ll make a good impression at school. Every few couplets he presses his index finger to the air hole and blows, as if he knows that I always stray from the line I should be following. Sometimes I feel like I’m not singing for my father but for the whole village, with a voice as soft as butter and clear as a song thrush’s; a thrush that’s fallen into the butter churn – that’s how they’d revere me, Mulder’s girl. The shrill, flat sound of the recorder hurts my eardrums.

  ‘You have to know where he lives. That’s a condition,’ Hanna says. She leans over me and switches on the globe. My eyes have to get used to the light, as though the things in the room quickly have to put on a straight face, smooth down their clothes and become silent, so they match the idea I have of them. It’s a bit like the way Mum always jumps if we go into her bedroom when she’s only half-dressed, as if she’s afraid she’ll no longer satisfy the image we have of her, and decks herself out like a Christmas tree every morning.

  ‘On the other side of the bridge.’

  Hanna’s eyes narrow. I’m not even sure Boudewijn de Groot lives on the other side, but I realize how exciting it sounds: the other side. Mr Herbert lives in the house one further than the sweet-shop, exactly the way we think about things: first what you want is sweets and later it’s love. We understand that order of events.

  ‘That’s it,’ Hanna says, ‘we have to go there. There are tons of saviours and Mum and Dad won’t dare to go there.’

  I pinch the drawing pin under my coat, a lifebuoy in the middle of the North Sea.

  ‘Do you want to kiss Boudewijn?’ my sister suddenly asks.

  I shake my head frantically. Kissing is for old people, and they do it when they’ve run out of words. Hanna is now lying so close to me that I can smell her breath. Toothpaste. She moistens her lips with her tongue. An overdue milk tooth is still trying to become a grown-up tooth.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she says, ‘I’ll be right back.’

  She slides out from between the sheets and comes back carrying Dad’s Sunday suit.

  ‘What do you want with that?’ I ask.

  Hanna doesn’t reply. There’s a perfume bag on the hanger – lavender. I watch her put on
the suit over her nightdress. I grin but Hanna doesn’t smile. Using a black marker from my pen pot she draws a moustache above her top lip. Now she looks a bit like Hitler. I wish I could cover her entirely in pen so that I can always remember her and mark her as mine. She’s too big for my coat pockets.

  ‘Come on. You have to lie on your back otherwise it won’t work.’

  I do what she says, as I’m used to her taking charge and me obeying her. She’s dressed her bony legs in Dad’s much too baggy trousers and has planted them next to my hips, her hair swept out of her face. In the light of the globe she looks creepy with a black moustache that looks more like a bow-tie.

  ‘I’m from the city and I’m a man,’ she says in a deep voice. I instantly know what I have to do, as though it’s dead normal for her to be sitting on me in the middle of the night wearing Dad’s suit. The jacket with the shiny lapels makes her shoulders bigger and her head as small as a porcelain doll’s.

  ‘I’m from the village and I’m a woman,’ I say in a higher pitched voice than my own.

  ‘And you were looking for a man?’ Hanna growls.

  ‘That’s right. I’m looking for a man to save me from this terrible village. Someone who is very strong. And handsome. And kind.’

  ‘Well madam, then you’ve come to the right place. Shall we kiss?’

  Before I can answer, she presses her lips to mine and immediately pushes her tongue inside. It’s lukewarm, like a leftover steak that Mum’s warmed up in the microwave and served again. She moves it around rapidly a few times, her saliva mixing with mine and dripping down my cheek. As quickly as she’s pushed it in, she pulls it out again.

  ‘Can you feel it too?’ Hanna asks, breathlessly.

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘In your belly and between your legs?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘just your moustache. It tickles a bit.’

  We laugh as though we can’t stop and for a moment it feels like that. Then Hanna collapses next to me.

  ‘You taste of metal,’ she says.

  ‘You of wet milk biscuits,’ I say.

  We both know how bad that is.

  10

  My sister and I wake up with black stripes on our faces and Dad’s Sunday suit all creased. I sit up in bed at once. If Dad catches us, he’ll get the Authorized Version out of the drawer in the dining room table and read to us from Romans: ‘If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.’ With that same mouth we kissed each other last night. Hanna pushed her tongue inside me as she was looking for words she didn’t possess herself. You can refuse the guilt of sin entry to your heart but never to your home. That’s why when he comes to drum us out of bed, Dad will quickly find out that we’ve invited this sin in, the way we once let in a stray cat. We put it in the walnut basket behind the wood stove and fed it milk and crusts until it grew stronger. Neither Hanna nor I is going to be saved now.

  Hanna smooths the creases out of Dad’s suit and takes half a roll of peppermints from the breast pocket. She puts one in her mouth. I ask myself why she’s doing this because the peppermints are meant for getting through the sermon, to keep us quiet so we don’t start swinging our legs, which makes the pew creak so everyone in the row knows that Mulder’s kids aren’t listening to the words of Reverend Renkema. We have no reason to sit still now – we have to get moving. After the service when we complain about how long it was, he says, ‘Anyone displaying impatience can listen for twice as long for punishment,’ before saying, ‘Lien next door, now she rambles on. She could talk the hind legs off a donkey, or the ears off your head.’ For a moment I picture my father and Lien standing facing each other on the farm track, with his ears falling off like autumn leaves. We’d have to stick them back on with Pritt stick. I’d rather put them in a little velvet box and whisper the sweetest and the most terrible words into them every night, before putting the lid back on and shaking the box so I’m sure the words have slid into the ear canal. I’ve got so many words but it’s as if fewer and fewer come out of me, while the biblical vocabulary in my head is pretty much bursting at the seams. I can’t stop smiling at the idea of Dad’s glued-on ears. And as long as Dad is making jokes about Lien next door and keeps repeating them, just like this week’s weather forecast, we’ve got nothing to fear.

  Yet Dad eats the most peppermints during the silent contemplation and, just recently, as soon as we get home he’s been asking what the sermon was about to check whether we were paying attention. Secretly I think he asks for himself because he’s been distracted and is using us to get a summary. Last Sunday I said the sermon had been about the prodigal son, which wasn’t true but Dad didn’t correct me. The return of the prodigal son is my favourite story. Sometimes I picture Matthies arriving on foot with snow-white skin, and Dad taking the best calf from the cowshed and slaughtering it. Despite the fact that Mum doesn’t like parties because of all the ‘jigging about and bam-bam-bam’ as she calls dancing and music, we’d organize a big party on the farm with lanterns, streamers, Coke and deep-ridged crisps ‘because he was lost and is found again’.

  ‘Do you think we did something wrong?’ I ask Hanna. She tries to suppress a yawn behind her hand. We’ve only had three hours’ sleep.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know. Maybe we’re the reason why things are like they are with Mum and Dad. Maybe it’s our fault that Matthies and Tiesey are dead.’

  Hanna thinks for a moment. When she thinks she moves her nose up and down. There is marker pen on her cheeks too now. She says, ‘Everything there’s a reason for comes good in the end.’

  My sister often says wise things, but I don’t think she understands much of what she says herself.

  ‘Will it be all right, do you think?’

  I feel my eyes moisten. I quickly turn them onto Dad’s suit, the padded shoulders that give him more authority on Sundays. We could easily puncture them with a knife. I pick the yellow trails of sleep out of my eyes with my little finger and wipe them on my duvet.

  ‘Of course. And Obbe didn’t mean it that way, it was an accident.’

  I nod. Yes, it was an accident. Here in the village it’s always that way: people fall in love by accident, buy the wrong meat by accident, forget their prayer book by accident, don’t speak by accident. Hanna has got up and is hanging Dad’s jacket back on the hanger. The perfume bag of lavender has burst open, and there are little purple flowers all over my duvet. I lie on my back in the lavender. Please let the day wait so that I don’t have to go to school, long enough for the grass in the fields to be dry enough to make hay, long enough for the dampness in me to slowly subside.

  11

  On the news they’ve recommended drinking a large glass of water every hour, and even show a picture of what a big glass looks like – though it doesn’t look like the glasses we own. Here in the village no two houses have the same glasses, and you can use glasses to make yourself different from the others. We use the ones that used to have mustard in them. In turn we drink water from a Coke bottle that Dad fills the glasses with. The bottle wasn’t rinsed properly, giving the water a Coke taste, lukewarm from the sun. My nose itches from the dust that was whipped up by the haymaking. When I pick my nose the snot comes out black. I wipe it on my trousers, and don’t dare eat it, afraid I’ll get ill and return to dust. The hay-bales lie around me like bars of green soap in the field. I don’t want to think about my dad’s finger in me, and take a bite of the doughnut he’s just given us. I can barely manage another soggy doughnut: they’re coming out of our ears as the baker’s hardly had anything else recently. I take a bite all the same, even if only to feel connected to Obbe and Dad: three people sitting on a hay-bale eating doughnuts need some kind of connection. Its soggy skin sticks to my teeth and the roof of my mouth. I swallow without really tasting it.

  ‘God’s knocked over his pot of ink,’ Obbe says as he stares at the darkening sky abov
e our sweaty heads. I grin and even Dad smiles for the first time in ages. He gets up and wipes his hands on his trouser legs as a sign we should get back to work. Soon he’ll start getting nervous that it will rain on the bales and they’ll go mouldy. I get up too and pluck a handful of dried grass to protect my palms from the string around the bale. I take another quick peek at the smile on Dad’s face. Look, I think, we only have to make sure that the ropes don’t leave impressions behind, then everything will come good with us, and we don’t have to be afraid of the Day of Judgement descending on our parents at any moment like a jackdaw on its prey, or that we sin more than we pray. As I pick up a new bale, my coat sticks to my sweaty skin. Even now it’s boiling hot I don’t take it off. I throw the bales onto the hay-cart so that Dad can arrange them in neat rows of six.

  ‘We have to hurry up before the sky breaks open,’ Dad says, staring at the ever-darkening sky above us.

  As I look up at him I say, ‘Matthies could lift two bales of hay in one go; he stuck his pitchfork into them as though they were chunks of nettle cheese.’ Dad’s smile immediately sinks into the skin of his face until nothing is left. There are people whose smiles are always visible even when they’re sad. The smile lines can no longer be erased. It’s the other way round with Mum and Dad. Even when they smile they look sad, as though someone’s put a set square next to the corners of their mouths and drawn two lines pointing down.

  ‘We don’t think about the dead, we remember them.’

  ‘We can remember out loud, can’t we?’ I ask.

  Dad gives me a penetrating look, jumps from the hay-cart and sticks his pitchfork in the ground. ‘What did you say?’

  I see the muscles in his upper arms tense.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.