The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  To give her an idea of the seriousness of all of this, I rest my hand on the pillow covering the back of her head, then take both ends of it and press down hard. Hanna immediately begins to twist the lower part of her body, which means I have to use more force. Her hands thrash around, clawing into my coat. I’m stronger than her; she can’t get out from under me.

  ‘This is an initiation,’ I repeat. ‘Anyone coming to live here has to feel what it’s like to almost suffocate, just like Matthies, to almost die. Only then can we become friends.’

  When I remove the pillow, Hanna begins to sob. Her face is as red as a tomato. She greedily tries to take air. ‘Idiot,’ she says, ‘I almost suffocated.’

  ‘That’s part of it,’ I say. ‘Now you know how I feel every night, and now the bed knows what can happen.’

  I snuggle up to the sobbing Hanna and kiss her cheeks dry, the salty fear.

  ‘Don’t cry, little man.’

  ‘You’re frightening me, little woman,’ Hanna whispers.

  I slowly begin to move against my sister, as I often do with my teddy bear, and whisper, ‘Our days may be longer if we show daring.’

  My body gets hotter and hotter from my movements; my coat sticks to my skin. I only stop when I feel that Hanna is about to fall asleep. We don’t have time for sleep now. I sit up in bed again.

  ‘I choose the vet,’ I say suddenly, trying to make my voice sound decisive. There’s a moment’s silence. ‘He’s kind and he lives on the other side and he has listened to lots of hearts, thousands,’ I continue.

  Hanna nods and the Barbie’s head does too. ‘Boudewijn de Groot is much too ambitious for girls like us,’ she says.

  I don’t know what she means by this – girls like us. What actually makes us who we are? How can people tell by looking at us that we’re all Mulders? I think that lots of girls like us exist, it’s just we haven’t run into them yet. Fathers and mothers meet each other one day too. And since everyone has a parent inside them, they can finally get married.

  It’s still a mystery how our parents found each other. The thing is, Dad’s hopeless at looking. When he’s lost something it’s usually in his pocket, and when he goes to do the shopping he always comes back with something different than what was on the list: Mum’s the wrong kind of yoghurt, but one he was happy enough with and vice versa. They’ve never told us about how they met – Mum never thinks it a good time. There are rarely any good times here, and if we have them we only realize afterwards. My suspicion is that it was exactly like with the cows, that one day Granny and Grandpa opened my mum’s bedroom door and put Dad in with her like a bull. After that they shut the door and hey presto: there we were. From that day on, Dad called her ‘wife’ and Mum called him ‘husband’. On good days ‘little man’ and ‘little woman’, which I found strange, as though they were worried they’d forget each other’s sex, or that they belonged to each other.

  I fibbed to Belle about how they met. I told her they bumped into each other in the Russian salad section of the supermarket and they’d both picked the beef version, their hands touching briefly as they reached for the tubs. According to our teacher, eye contact isn’t necessary for love, touch is more than enough. I wondered then what you should call it when both of them are lacking: eye contact and touch.

  Even though I think there are girls like us, I nod at Hanna. Maybe they don’t smell of cows all the time, or of Dad’s anger and cigarette smoke, but there’s probably something you can do about that.

  I briefly press my own hand to my throat. I can still feel the impression of the rope in my skin, and I think about earlier, the wobbly kitchen stepladder and the crash, and then the rope seems to be a bit tighter, a double knot under the larynx. Everything seems to stop just below the throat, just like the strip of light from Dad’s tractor headlights on my duvet. We can hear him outside, spreading cow manure across the fields. He has to do it secretly because no one’s allowed to muckspread any more, to reduce the chances of contamination. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do with it otherwise. The planks on the muck-heap you roll the wheelbarrow along have sunk away into the muck – there isn’t room for any more. Dad said that not a soul would notice if he spread it across the fields at night. There was even someone from the fallen stock company who came in a white suit, and brought dozens of rat boxes filled with blue poison to spread around the farm so that the rats couldn’t pass on the foot-and-mouth. Hanna and I have to stay awake. Dad mustn’t suddenly slip away from us. The strip of light moves from the foot end to beneath my chin and begins again from the bottom after a while.

  ‘Tractor accident or a fall into the slurry pit?’

  Hanna squashes up close to me beneath the duvet. Her dark hair smells of silage grass. I breathe in the smell deeply for a moment and think about how often I have cursed the cows, but now they’re about to be killed, I’d like nothing more than for them to stay with us – that it will never become so quiet on the farm that we can only remember the sound of them, that only the crows in the guttering are left to keep an eye on us.

  ‘You’re as cold as frozen bread,’ Hanna says. She lays her head in my armpit. She isn’t joining in with the game. Maybe she’s worried that if she says something it will actually happen. That like in Lingo, we’ll be able to predict beforehand who is going to take the lucky green balls for the jackpot, and that we’ll be able to predict death too.

  ‘Better a frozen loaf than a defrosted bag of beans,’ I say, and we laugh with the duvet pulled over our heads so that we won’t wake up Mum. Then I move my hand from my throat to Hanna’s neck. It feels warm. I feel her vertebrae through the skin.

  ‘You’re closer to the perfect thickness than me, little woman.’

  ‘What for, my little man?’ Hanna plays along.

  ‘For a rescue.’

  Hanna pushes my hand away. For a rescue you don’t need the perfect thickness – it’s actually the absence of perfection that means we’re fragile and need to be rescued.

  ‘Are we fragile?’

  ‘As fragile as a blade of straw,’ Hanna says.

  Suddenly I realize what’s going on. Everything from the recent past falls into place, all the times we were fragile, and I say, ‘This is another of the plagues from Exodus, it must be. Only they’re coming to us in the wrong order. Do you understand?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you had a nosebleed which meant water changed into blood. We’ve had the toad migration, head lice at school, the death of the firstborn, horseflies around the muck-heap, a grasshopper squashed by Obbe’s boot, ulcers on my tongue from the fried egg, and hailstorms.’

  ‘And you think that’s why there’s a cattle plague now?’ Hanna asks with a shocked expression. She’s laid her hand on her heart, exactly above the Barbie’s ears, as though she’s not allowed to hear what we’re discussing. I nod slowly. After this, there’s one more to come, I think to myself, and that’s the worst one: darkness, total darkness, daytime eternally clad in Dad’s Sunday overcoat. I don’t say it out loud but we both know that there are two people in this house who long constantly for the other side, who want to cross the lake and make sacrifices there, whether Fireball gobstoppers or dead animals.

  Then we hear the tractor cut out. I switch on the globe on my bedside table to combat the darkness now that the tractor lights are no longer illuminating my bedroom. Dad has finished the muck-spreading. I picture him in his overalls standing looking at the farm from a distance. The only light shining is at the front of the farm, the oval-shaped window that is lit up as though the moon has tumbled a few feet downwards half-drunk. When he looks at the farm he sees three generations of farmers. It belonged to Grandpa Mulder and he took it over from his father. After Grandpa’s death, many of his cows lived on. Dad used to often tell the story of one of Grandpa’s cows that also had foot-and-mouth and wouldn’t drink. ‘He bought a keg of herrings and forced it into the mouth of the sick animal. It didn’t just get some protein
but also it made it very thirsty, so that it got over the pain of the blisters and started drinking again.’ I still think it’s a nice story. You can’t treat tongue blisters with herring any more; Grandpa’s cows will be put down too. Dad’s entire living will be taken from him in one go. That’s how it must feel to him – Tiesey but then times the number of cows, times one hundred and eighty. He knows every cow and every calf.

  Hanna disentangles herself from me – her sticky skin slowly pulls free from mine. I sometimes feel as though she’s one of the celestial bodies on my ceiling that fall down from time to time, meaning that I’ve run out of wishes to make; although I’ve learned that the heavens aren’t a wishing-well but a mass grave. Every star is a dead child, and the most beautiful star is Matthies – Mum taught us that. That was why I was afraid on some days that he would fall and end up in someone else’s garden, and that we wouldn’t notice.

  ‘We have to get ourselves to the safe zone,’ Hanna says.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But when then, when are we going to the other side?’

  My sister sounds impatient. She doesn’t know much about waiting and always wants to do everything right away. I’m more cautious; that’s why so many things pass me by, because things can be impatient sometimes too.

  ‘You’re good at talking but not much comes of it.’

  I promise Hanna I’ll try harder and say, ‘When the mice are away, love will play.’

  ‘Is that another plague? Mice?’

  ‘No, it’s protection for when the cat comes back.’

  ‘What’s love?’

  I think for a moment and then say, ‘Like the eggnog Granny on the less religious side used to make that was thick and golden yellow: to get it to taste nice, it was important to add all the ingredients in the right order and the right proportions.’

  ‘Eggnog’s gross,’ Hanna says.

  ‘Because you have to learn to like it. You don’t like love at first either but it starts to taste better, and sweeter, with time.’

  Hanna clamps on to me briefly – she holds me the way she holds her dolls, under my armpits. Mum and Dad never cuddle; that must be because otherwise some of your secrets end up sticking to the other person, like Vaseline. That’s why I never spontaneously give hugs myself – I’m not sure which secrets I want to give away.

  18

  Dad’s clogs are next to the door-mat, with blue plastic covers around their hard noses to prevent any further contamination. I wish I could stick a plastic cover over my face so I could only breathe my own breath. I wear his clogs to empty the basket of peelings onto the muck-heap, tipping them out onto cow pats white with dew, and suddenly it occurs to me that this might be the last pile of cow shit that I’ll see for a while. Just like the sound of the early morning mooing, the feed concentrate mixers, the milk tank’s cooling system turning on, the cooing of the wood pigeons attracted by the corn feed that build nests in the rafters of the barn, everything will ultimately fade into something we only recall on birthdays or when we can’t get to sleep at night, and everything will be empty: the cows’ stalls, the cheese shed, the feed silos, our hearts.

  A trail of milk runs from the milk tank to the drain in the middle of the farmyard – Dad has opened the tap. The milk can’t be sold any more, but he continues to milk the cows as though nothing’s about to happen. He secures the cows between the bars, attaches the cups to their udders, then uses one of my old underpants covered in salve to clean them afterwards. I often used to feel embarrassed when Dad rubbed one of my worn-out pairs of knickers on the udders, or cleaned the milking cups with them without any kind of bashfulness – but sometimes at night I’ve thought about the crotch that has passed through so many other people’s hands, from Obbe’s to Farmer Janssen’s, and that they touch me that way, with calluses and blisters on their palms. Sometimes a pair of knickers gets lost among the cows before finally getting kicked between the gratings. Dad calls them udder cloths; he doesn’t see them as underpants any more. On Saturdays Mum washes the udder cloths and hangs them to dry on the washing line.

  I pick a leftover apple core from the bottom of the peelings basket with my fingernail, and see out of the corner of my eye the vet squatting next to a white tent. He sinks a syringe into a jar of antibiotics and presses the needle into a calf’s neck. The calf’s got diarrhoea – mustard yellow has splattered against her sides, legs trembling like fence poles in the wind. Even on a Sunday the vet is here, but if we were to lie on the bathroom rug with thermometers up our bare bums, things would be put off until Monday. Mum would sing the Dutch nursery rhyme about Kortjakje – ‘often is Kortjakje sick, never on Sundays but always in the week’. And I thought, Kortjakje’s a coward: she can’t go to school but she can go to church – that’s a bit wet. It wasn’t until I started secondary school that I understood. Kortjakje was frightened of everything unfamiliar. Was she bullied? Did she get tummy ache as soon as she caught sight of the school playground like I do? When school trips were announced and all the germs would go along too? Did she break peppermints on the edge of the table to stop feeling sick? Actually, you had to feel sorry for Kortjakje.

  The plastic covers crunch with every step. Dad once said, ‘Death always comes wearing clogs.’ I hadn’t understood. Why not ice skates or trainers? Now I get it: Death announces itself in most cases, but we’re often the ones who don’t want to see or hear it. We knew that the ice was too weak in some places, and we knew the foot-and-mouth wouldn’t skip our village.

  I escape to the rabbit shed where I’m safe from all the illnesses, and I press the limp carrot tops through the wire mesh. I briefly think about a rabbit’s neck vertebrae. Would they crack if you twisted the head? It’s a scary thought that we hold other beings’ death in our hands, however small mine are – like bricklaying trowels, you can use them to build, but also to chop things to the right size with the sharp edge. I slide away the manger, let my hand descend onto the fur, and stroke Dieuwertje’s ears flat to his body. The edges of his ears are hard from the cartilage in them. For a moment I close my eyes and think of the lady with the curls from children’s TV. The concern in her eyes when she explains that Saint Nicholas’s helpers have all got lost, and everyone’s going to wake up to empty shoes next to the fireplace and the carrots next to them for his horse, gone floppy from the heat, their orange skins all wrinkly. I also think about the meringues on her table, the gingerbread men, and the way I sometimes fantasize that I’m a gingerbread man allowed to get very close to her, closer than to anyone before. She’d say, ‘Jas, things grow and shrink, but people always stay the same size.’ The way she’d reassure me because I can no longer reassure myself.

  When I open my eyes again, I take my rabbit’s right ear between my fingers. Then I feel the place between Dieuwertje’s back legs. It just happens, like with the little porcelain angels in the past. At that moment the vet comes in. I quickly withdraw my hand, bending my head to put the manger back in front of the hatch. If your head turns red it’s heavier, because embarrassment has a larger mass.

  ‘They’ve all got a fever, some of them even forty-two degrees,’ he says. The vet washes his hands in the water barrel with a bar of green soap. There’s algae on the inside of the barrel. I urgently have to clean it with a brush. I peer over the edge. The froth from the soap makes me feel sick, and when I place my hand on my lower belly I can feel my swollen intestines. They feel just like the fennel sausages from the butcher’s that are impossible to digest.

  The vet puts the bar of green soap between the stone feeding troughs on a wooden table. They are from earlier rabbits, most of which died of old age. Dad buried them with a spade in the furthest field where we’re never allowed to play. Sometimes I worry about the rabbits there, whether their teeth might carry on growing a long time after death and stick out of the ground where a cow could get caught on them, or worse, my dad. That’s why I give Dieuwertje a lot of tops, and I pick buckets of grass for him so that his teeth don’t grow too long
and he’s got enough to chew on.

  ‘Why can’t they get better? Children get better again when they have a fever, don’t they?’

  The vet dries his hands on an old tea-towel and hangs it back on a hook on the wall of the shed. ‘It’s too infectious, and you can’t sell any of the meat or the milk. You’d only make a loss then.’

  I nod, even though I don’t get it. Isn’t it a greater loss this way? All those steaming bodies we love so much will soon be killed. It’s like with the Jewish people, only they were hated, and then you die sooner than when you go to your grave out of love and powerlessness.

  The vet turns a feed bucket upside down and sits on it. His black curls hang like party streamers around his face. I feel like I’m all legs now I tower over him. It’s difficult anyway to know what to do with the extra centimetres only noted in friendship books. We used to mark them on the door-post. Dad would fetch his tape measure and a pencil, and score a line in the wood at the place your head reached. When Matthies didn’t come home, he painted the door-post olive green; the same green as the shutters at the front of the house that have been kept shut all the time recently – no one is allowed to see us growing up.

  ‘It’s a sorry business.’ He sighs as he turns the palms of his hands upwards. You can see the blisters on the inside. They’re just like the air cushions in the envelopes Dad sent off vials of bull sperm in, which sometimes stood, lukewarm, among the breakfast things on the table. In the winter I’d hold them to my cheek when I’d just got up and the cold of the floor had reached my cheeks via my toes – hearing Mum in the background spitting on the little windows in the wood-stove before polishing them with a piece of kitchen roll. She always did that before Dad was allowed to put in the kindling, which he lit with some old newspaper. She said you could feel more heat if you could see the flames fighting for a piece of wood.