Dad is chasing the last cows inside, slapping their haunches with the flat of his hand. He slides the lock on the big stable door. I don’t get it. The lock only gets shut in the winter or when nobody’s on the farm. It’s not winter and we’re all home. Dad piles up all the forks in the feed section and wraps them up in the plastic left over from a silage pack. For a moment, Dad looks up to the heavens. He hasn’t shaved, I notice. He holds his hands to either side of his face, his jaw tense. I want to tell him that Mum’s inside waiting, that she isn’t angry, that she hasn’t yet asked whether we love her, so she can’t be doubting the answer, and that his sandwich is ready on his favourite plate, the one with cowhide patches around the rim, that Hanna and I practised Psalm 100 this morning, the psalm of the week, and that it was as pure as milk.
Dad hasn’t noticed me yet. I stand there watching, the china bowl from the strawberries in my hand. Along with Obbe, he fetches the bull from among the young cows; the bull hasn’t been there two days yet. We’ve called him Bello. Dad calls all the bulls Bello. Even when we’re allowed to choose and pick another name, they always end up being called Bello. I’ve already seen his willy. It wasn’t for very long because Mum came out of the milking shed right that second and put her hand, which was covered in a rubber glove, in front of my eyes and said, ‘They’re doing the conga.’
‘Why aren’t I allowed to see that?’ I asked.
Now Dad spots me at last. He makes a shunting gesture with his hand. ‘You’ve got to get out of the shed, now.’
‘Yes, now,’ Obbe repeats after him, his blue overalls tied around his hips. By the looks of it, he’s taking his role as Dad’s disciple seriously. I feel a brief stab around the area of my spleen. Here among the cows they suddenly seem to understand each other; they are father and son.
‘Why?’
‘Just obey!’ Dad shouts. ‘Close the door.’
The anger in his voice startles me. His eyes are like rock-hard rabbit droppings in his face. Sweat drips down his forehead. At that moment a cow close to me slides over the grating and collapses onto her udders. She makes no effort to get back up again. I give my father and Obbe a questioning look, but they’ve already turned around and are squatting next to the young cow. I stride out of the shed and slam the door behind me, hearing the wood creak. Let that bloody shed collapse, I think, immediately feeling ashamed of my thoughts. Why aren’t I allowed to know what’s going on? Why am I kept out of everything?
*
I crawl under the bird net in the vegetable patch. Lien from next door stretched it out over the rows of strawberries to stop the seagulls and starlings eating them. I fall onto my knees on the damp earth. Because it’s Saturday I’m allowed to wear trousers since there’s work to be done. I carefully push aside the plants to find the best fruit, the ones that are completely red, and put them in the dish. From time to time I pop one in my mouth – they’re deliciously juicy and sweet. I love the texture of strawberries, the little seeds and the hairs on the inside of my mouth. Textures calm me down. Textures create unity, they keep something together that would collapse otherwise. Wok vegetables, cooked chicory and scratchy clothes are the only textures I don’t like. Human skin has texture too. Mum’s is beginning to look increasingly like the bird net: little compartments drawn in soft skin, as though she’s a jigsaw puzzle that’s losing more and more of its pieces. Dad’s got more of a potato skin – it’s smooth and there are a few rough patches, and sometimes a dent from a nail he’s walked into.
Once the bowl is full, I crawl back out from under the bird net and wipe the soil from my trousers. Dad’s and Obbe’s wellies are in the shed, next to the door-mat, one of them still half hanging on the boot-jack. They aren’t at the breakfast table but on the sofa in front of the TV, while it’s daytime and the screen is supposed to be black during the day. Usually there’s just snow to see then. At first I thought we might find Matthies in there, but later I discovered that Dad had simply pulled the cable out. The news was on: ‘Farms here have also been struck by foot-and-mouth. God’s punishment or bitter coincidence?’
Just like the weather, God can never get it right. If a swan is rescued somewhere in the village, in a different place a parishioner dies. I don’t know what foot-and-mouth is and don’t get the chance to ask because my mum says I should go and play with Obbe and Hanna, that this isn’t going to be a normal day like the rest, and I don’t want to interrupt her by saying that the days haven’t been normal for a long time, because her face looks just as pale as the creamy crocheted curtains in the windows. I also notice that Mum and Dad are sitting remarkably close to each other. Maybe this is a sign they are going to get naked soon and I should leave them in peace, like the way you shouldn’t separate two snails that are on top of each other because it might damage the mother-of-pearl on their shells. I put the bowl of strawberries in front of them on the dresser, next to the open Authorized Version, in case Mum gets hungry after mating and finally wants to eat again. Dad is making strange sounds: he hisses, growls, sighs, shakes his head and says, ‘no, no, no’. Different animals make different mating sounds – it must be the same with people. And then I catch a glimpse of a cow’s tongue with blisters on the screen. ‘What’s foot-and-mouth?’ I quickly ask all the same. I don’t get an answer. Dad leans forward to pick up the remote control and just keeps pressing the volume button.
‘Go on!’ Mum says without looking at me.
As though the volume stripes on the screen are stairs, I stamp harder and harder as I go up to my room, but no one comes after me. No one tells me what in God’s name is about to happen.
15
There’s a black note on Obbe’s bedroom door that says DO NOT DISTURB in white letters. He doesn’t want to be disturbed but if Hanna and I don’t go to his room for a while, he does come to ours. We don’t have signs on our doors. We want to be disturbed so that we’re not so alone.
Around the white letters, he’s stuck stickers of pop stars including Robbie Williams and Sugababes from the new Hitzone 23. Dad knows Obbe listens to them but he doesn’t dare confiscate his Discman – it’s the only thing that keeps him quiet, while I’m not allowed to keep saving up for one. ‘Buy books with your savings, that’s more your thing,’ Dad said, and I thought: I’ve been sidelined by the cool stuff. In any case, Dad thinks all the music on CDs and on the radio is wicked. He’d rather we listened to The Musical Fruit Basket, but that’s totally boring and for old people, for rotting fruit, Obbe says sometimes. I think that’s funny, rotting fruit in a sick-bed: a request for Hymn 11. I’d rather listen to Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street because they argue about things normal people would just shrug at; their squabbling calms me down. Then I turn on my CD player and crawl back under the covers and imagine I’m a rare paper clip from Bert’s collection.
‘Klapaucius,’ I whisper, as I gently open the bedroom door a crack. I see a strip of Obbe’s back. He’s sitting on the floor wearing his overalls. The door creaks as I open it a bit more. My brother looks up. Just like the note on his door, his eyes are dark. Suddenly I wonder whether butterflies have a shorter life expectancy when they know they can flap themselves to death.
‘Password?’ Obbe calls.
‘Klapaucius,’ I say again.
‘Wrong,’ Obbe says.
‘But that was the password, wasn’t it?’ Dieuwertje’s whiskers are still in my coat pocket. They tickle my palm. I’m lucky Mum never empties my pockets, otherwise she’d find out about all the things I want to hang on to, the things I’m collecting to become heavier.
‘You’d better come up with something better than that or I won’t let you in.’ Obbe turns back to his Lego. He is building an enormous spaceship. I think for a moment and then say, ‘Heil Hitler.’ It’s silent for a moment. Then I see his shoulders move up and down slightly as he begins to chuckle, louder and louder. It’s good that he’s laughing – it seals an alliance. The butcher in the village always winks at me when I come to buy fresh sausages. Thi
s means that he agrees that it’s a good choice, he’s happy that I’ve come to free him of the sausages he made with so much love and which smell of nutmeg.
‘Say it again but with your arm raised.’
Obbe has turned around completely now. Just like Dad, he’s left the top press studs of his overalls open. His shiny tanned chest looks like a chicken on a spit. In the background I can hear the familiar theme tune to The Sims. I stick my hand in the air without a moment’s hesitation and whisper the greeting again. My brother nods at me as a sign that I can come in, before returning his gaze to his Lego. There are various groups of blocks around him, sorted by colour. He’s taken apart the Lego castle he kept the dead Tiesey in for a while until he began to stink.
There’s a stale smell in his room, a smell of decay, of an adolescent body that hasn’t been washed for a long time. There’s a toilet roll on his bedside table with pale yellow wads around it. I play with the wads and carefully sniff the paper. If tears had a scent, no one would cry secretly any more. The wads don’t smell of anything. Some of them feel sticky, others are as hard as rock. The tip of a magazine sticks out from under his pillow. I lift it up – there’s a naked woman on the cover with breasts like gourds. She looks surprised, as though she doesn’t know herself why she’s naked, as though various circumstances have combined to make this her moment. There are people who are startled by that moment, as though they’ve been looking forward to it all their life, but once they get there it’s still somehow unexpected. I don’t know when my moment’s coming, only that I’ll keep my coat on. The lady must be cold, even though I don’t see any goose bumps on her arms.
I quickly drop the pillow again. I haven’t seen the magazine before. We don’t get anything but the Reformist Daily, the Reformist magazine, Dairy Farmer, some supermarket advertising brochures and Matthies’s judo magazine – my parents keep ‘forgetting’ to cancel the subscription which means that every Friday his death comes crashing onto the door-mat again. Maybe that’s why Obbe bangs his head on the edge of his bed – to get the naked women out of it, so that he can zap himself away like the TV channels, and Dad must see it in you if you’ve had something in your head that isn’t pure.
I sit down next to Obbe on the carpet. He’s holding a princess captive in the ruins of his Lego castle. She’s wearing lipstick and mascara and has long blonde hair to below her shoulders.
‘I’m going to inseminate you,’ Obbe says, pushing his knight up and down against the princess, the way Bello the bull does with the cows. I can hardly put my own hand in front of my eyes because there’s no one to check whether I’m peeking or not. Better to give temptation free rein, I decide. As I watch the scene, he takes from the Lego box a clean tuna tin we’ve been using to keep our coins and gold medallions in – they smell of oily fish. Obbe holds out his hand.
‘Here’s your money, whore.’ My brother tries to make his voice sound deep. His voice has been breaking since the spring, it shoots from high-pitched to low.
‘What’s a whore?’ I ask.
‘A woman farmer.’ He looks at the door to check our parents can’t hear. I know Mum isn’t against women being farmers, even though she considers it more a man’s work. I take another knight from one of the broken lookout towers. Obbe pushes his doll against the princess again. They continue to look happy.
I lower my voice. ‘What’s under your skirt, princess?’
Obbe bursts out laughing. Sometimes it’s just as if a young starling has flown down his throat – he chirps. ‘Don’t you know what’s under it?’
‘No.’ I set the princess upright and study her from all sides. I only know about willies.
‘You’ve got one yourself. A cunt.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘A custard bun.’
I raise my eyebrows. Dad sometimes brings custard buns home from the baker’s. Sometimes there are a few blue spots on the bottom of the bun and the custard has soaked in, but it still tastes quite good. We hear Dad shouting downstairs. He’s shouting more often, as though he wants to force his words hard into us. I think it’s a proverb from Isaiah: ‘Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.’ What kind of rebellion is he talking about?
‘What’s foot-and-mouth?’ I ask Obbe.
‘A disease cows get.’
‘What’s going to happen?’
‘All the cows have to be put down. The entire herd.’
He says it without emotion, but I notice that the hairs around his crown are greasier than at the hairline, like damp silage grass. I don’t know how many times he’s touched his crown but it’s obvious he’s worried.
My chest feels increasingly hot, as though I’ve drunk a mug of hot chocolate too quickly. Someone is stirring it with a spoon, making a whirlpool in my heart – stop stirring, I hear Mum say – and the cows disappear one by one into the whirlpool like chunks of cocoa mixed with milk. I dedicate all my mental energy to thinking about the Lego princess. She’s hidden a custard bun under her skirt and Obbe’s allowed to lick out the cream, his nose covered in icing sugar.
‘But why then?’
‘Because they’re ill. They’re going to die anyway.’
‘Is it infectious?’
Obbe scans my face, squinting his eyes into the flat blades we sometimes buy for Lien next door’s wood chipper, and says, ‘I’d watch out where you breathe and where you don’t if I was you.’ I clasp my hands around my knees, rocking myself faster and faster. I get a sudden vision of Mum and Dad turning as yellow as Lego figures. They will be stuck to one spot when all the cows have gone if no one picks them up by the backs of their necks and clicks them onto the right place.
*
After a while Hanna comes to sit with us. She’s brought cherry tomatoes, which she peels with her teeth, revealing the soft red fleshy pulp. The care with which she eats the tomatoes, doing everything in layers, touches me. When she eats a sandwich she starts with the filling, then the crusts and only then the soft part of the bread. When she eats a milk biscuit, she scrapes off the milk bit with her front teeth and saves the biscuit till last. Hanna eats in layers and I think in layers. Just when she’s about to put a new tomato between her teeth, Obbe’s door opens again and the vet folds his face around the edge. It’s been a long time since he came round, but he’s still wearing the dark green dust-coat with black buttons, the four limp fingers of a rubber glove dangling from his pocket, the thumb folded back. For the second time he’s come to bring us bad news: ‘They’ll come to take samples tomorrow. You can assume they’ll all have to go, even the unregistered ones.’ Dad has a few unregistered cows to be able to sell a bit of extra milk to the villagers or family members. The money from this ‘black-market milk’ is kept in a tin on the mantelpiece. For holidays. Nevertheless, I sometimes see Dad open the tin and take a couple of notes out when he thinks no one else is around. My guess is that he’s saving up for his ‘bottom drawer’, for when he moves out. Eva at school’s doing that too, even though she’s only thirteen. Dad is probably looking for a family where he’s allowed to lick his knife after putting it in the apple syrup jar and doesn’t have to shout or slam doors, where they don’t mind if he leaves his trouser button open after eating and you can see the blond hairs curling up above the waistband of his pants. And maybe he’d even be able to pick out his own clothes there: every morning my mum hangs what he has to wear over the edge of the bed – if Dad doesn’t agree with the choice she spends the whole day not speaking to him or gets rids of yet another foodstuff from her diet, which she announces with a sigh as though the item doesn’t want her any more.
‘If He wants it this way, it must be God’s will.’ He looks at us one by one with a smile. It’s a nice smile, nicer than Boudewijn de Groot’s.
‘And,’ he continues, ‘be extra nice to your parents.’ We nod obediently; only Obbe stares dourly at the heating pipes in his room. The
re are a few butterflies drying on them. I hope the vet doesn’t see and then tell Mum and Dad.
‘I have to get back to the cows,’ the vet says, turning around and closing the door behind him.
‘Why didn’t Dad come and tell us himself?’ I ask.
‘Because he has to take measures,’ Obbe says.
‘Like what?’
‘Close off the farmyard, install a disinfectant bath, take in the calves, disinfect the tools and the milk tank.’
‘Aren’t we measures?’
‘Of course,’ Obbe says, ‘but we’ve been fenced off and tied up since our births. We can’t be anything else.’
Then he moves closer to me. He’s wearing Dad’s aftershave to gain a bit of Dad’s natural authority. ‘Do you want to know how they’re going to murder the cows?’
I nod and think about the teacher who said I’d go far with my empathy and boundless imagination, but in time I’d have to find words for it because otherwise everything and everybody stays inside you. And one day, just like the black stockings which my classmates sometimes tease me about wearing because we’re Reformists – even though I never wear black stockings – I will crumple in on myself until I can only see darkness, eternal darkness. Obbe presses his index finger to his temple, makes a shooting sound and then suddenly pulls the cords of my coat together, constricting my throat. I stare him straight in the eye for a moment and see the same hatred as when he shook the hamster around in the water glass. I pull myself away, and shout, ‘You’re crazy!’
‘We’re all going crazy – you too,’ Obbe says. He takes a packet of mini Aeros from his desk drawer, tears off the wrappers and stuffs them into his mouth, one after the other until they are just a big brown mush. He must have stolen the Aeros from the basement. I hope the Jewish people managed to hide in time behind the wall of apple sauce pots.
The Discomfort of Evening Page 12