Mum didn’t like me holding the vials to my cheeks – she said it was unsavoury. She said calves were forged from it, like Granny made new candles from the candlewax that everyone in the village saved for her. But the stuff in the vials was whitish, sometimes watery, sometimes very thick. One time I secretly took some up to my bedroom. Hanna insisted we open the vial once it had cooled down and we could no longer warm ourselves up with it. When the vial got as cold as our bodies, we each dipped our little fingers in it, and, counting to three, stuck it in our mouths. It tasted insipid and salty. In the evening hours we fantasized that calves would come out of us, until the plan to find a rescuer blossomed in our minds and we felt bigger than ever: we’d turn into liquid in the rescuer’s hands, just as fluid as the semen in the test tubes.
‘Is your coat comfortable?’
It’s a while before I can answer. My thoughts are still taken up with the blisters on his palms.
‘Yes, very.’
‘Not too hot?’
‘Not too hot.’
‘Do you get teased about it?’
I shrug. I’m good at thinking of answers but less good at saying them. Every answer gives rise to an observation. I don’t like observations. They’re as persistent as when a butter brush covered in cheese wax falls onto your clothes – almost impossible to wash out.
The vet smiles. I only notice now that he has the widest nostrils I’ve ever seen, which must mean he spends a lot of time picking his nose. It creates a bond I mustn’t forget. There’s a stethoscope around his neck. For a moment I imagine the cold metal on my chest and him listening to everything moving inside me and changing. The vet drawing a worried frown across his forehead and pushing his thumb and index finger between my jaws to feed me, just like the calf. He’d keep me warm under his green dust-coat.
‘Do you miss your brother?’ he asks suddenly. He lays his hand around my lower leg and gently squeezes. Maybe he’s feeling whether I’m sick: you can tell from the fleshiness of calves’ legs how healthy they are. He rubs his hand softly back and forth, which makes the skin under the denim grow hot, and the warmth spreads through my whole body like the thought of homecoming and hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day, a thought that is quite a lot less warm by the time you get home. I stare at his neatly trimmed fingernails. You can see the impression of a ring around his ring finger – the skin is lighter there. Loved ones always remain visible in your heart or under your skin, the way my chest seems like it will split when my mum sits on the edge of my bed and asks in a porcelain voice whether I love her and I reply, ‘From hell to heaven.’ Sometimes I hear my ribcage crack and I’m afraid I’ll split for good.
‘Yes, I miss him,’ I whisper.
It’s the first time anyone’s asked me whether I miss Matthies. Not a pat on the head or a pinch of the cheek but a question. Not: how are your parents doing? How are the cows doing? But: how are you doing? I stare at my shoes.
When I look at the vet, he suddenly appears cast down, the way Mum often looks, as though she’s been carrying a glass of water on top of her head to the other side all day without spilling a drop. That’s why I say, ‘But I’m doing so well I may even speak of happiness, praise the Lord until the knees of my jeans are replaced by patches featuring comic-book characters.’
The vet laughs. ‘You know you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen?’
I feel my cheeks fill with colour like the circles after multiple-choice questions. I don’t know how many girls he’s seen in his life but I still feel flattered. Someone finds me pretty. Even with my faded coat that’s beginning to fray at the seams. I don’t know how to respond. Multiple-choice questions often have traps, according to my teacher, because they all contain part of the reality and at the same time are lies. The vet hides his stethoscope under his shirt. Before he goes out, he winks at me. ‘To make peace,’ Mum sometimes says when Dad does that to her. She says it angrily because peace died out long ago. Still, something sears inside my ribcage, something different than inside my heart, which often blazes like a bramble bush.
19
We are growing up with the Word, but words are lacking more and more frequently at the farm. Now it’s long past coffee time and yet we’re still sitting silently in the kitchen, nodding our heads at unasked questions. The vet is sitting in Dad’s place at the head of the table. He takes his coffee black, I take my squash dark. Like every afternoon before feeding time, Dad has set off on his bike for the lake to see whether he’s missed anything, a blue clothes peg on his left trouser leg so that it doesn’t flap into the spokes. There’s a lot Dad misses. He looks at the ground or up at the sky more than at the things at eye height. At my current size I’m right between those things, and I’ll either have to make myself bigger or smaller to be seen by him. Some days I watch him through the kitchen window until he’s just a speck on top of the dike, a bird fallen from its flock. In the first weeks after my brother’s death, I kept expecting him to be brought back on the carrier of Dad’s bike, albeit frozen to the bone. Then everything would be all right again. Now I know Dad always returns with an empty carrier and that Matthies will never come back, just like Jesus will never descend on a cloud.
There’s silence around the table. There’s less talk in general and that’s why most of the conversations only take place inside my head. I’ll have long chats with the Jewish people in the basement and ask them how they’d describe my mother’s state of mind, whether they happen to have seen her eat anything recently, whether they think that she’ll just drop down dead one day, like my toads that keep refusing to mate. I fantasize there’s a laid table in the middle of the basement between the shelves of flour packets and pots of gherkins, with Mum’s favourite nuts in those greasy packets – although she only likes whole nuts, not the half ones, which she gives to Dad. And she has put on her favourite dress, the sea blue one with daisies on it. I ask the Jewish people whether they’ll say the Song of Songs for her because she finds that one so lovely, and whether they’ll take care of her, in happiness or in adversity.
The conversations about my dad are different. They’re often about his bottom drawer. I hope his new family will talk back to him more if he leaves us, that someone will dare to challenge him and doubt him, the way we sometimes doubt God. Sometimes I even hope that someone will get angry with him and say, ‘Your ears are full of mangels, you can only hear yourself, and that traffic-barrier arm that’s so loose, we’ll have to repair it, there shouldn’t be any hinges.’ That would be nice.
*
Obbe sticks his tongue out at me. Every time I look at him he sticks out his tongue, which is brown from the chocolate meringue biscuits they gave us with our squash. I took mine apart so I could scrape off the white cream with my teeth. I don’t realize that my eyes are filled with tears until the vet winks at me. I think about the science lesson we had at school about Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, about the way the moon must have felt when someone took the trouble to come closer by for the first time in its existence. Maybe the vet’s an astronaut too and someone will finally take the trouble to see how much life is left in me. I’m hoping it will be a good conversation. Only I’m not sure what a good conversation would consist of. It will have to contain the word ‘good’, that seems clear to me. And I mustn’t forget to look the other person in the eye for a long time, because people who look away too often have secrets to hide, and secrets are always hidden in the deep-freeze compartment of your head, like containers of minced meat in the freezer. As soon as you take them out and leave them unattended, they go off.
‘All the animals have got the runs. It can’t get much worse,’ the vet says in an attempt to break the silence. Mum has balled her hands into fists. They lie on the table like rolled-up hedgehogs. I’d told Hanna they were hibernating but that soon she was sure to feel along the veins of our jaws, the way she sometimes did with her index finger before scraping the dried milk from the corners of our mouths.
Then the hall d
oor opens and Dad comes into the kitchen. He unzips his skipper’s jersey and throws a bag of frozen bread onto the work counter. He stands next to the table and eats his meringue biscuits with large bites.
‘They’re coming tomorrow around coffee time,’ the vet says.
Dad thumps the table. Mum’s biscuit bounces up slightly, and she lays her hand protectively over it – if only I was a meringue biscuit, I’d fit perfectly inside the bowl of her hand.
‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Mum asks. She shunts her chair back and goes to the counter. Dad pinches his septum, his fingers like a bread clip so that he won’t dry out by starting to cry.
‘Upstairs, all of you,’ is all he says. ‘Now.’
Obbe gestures at the loft. We follow him up to his room – his curtains are still completely closed. This afternoon, the teacher said at the end of the science lesson that if you breathe through your nose, everything gets filtered by the little hairs in it. If you breathe through your mouth everything gets right inside you, you can’t stop illnesses getting in. Belle had started breathing loudly through her mouth, which made everyone laugh. I’d only looked at her anxiously: if Belle got sick, it would mean the end of our friendship. Now I only breathe through my nose; I keep my lips firmly sealed. I only open them to say something, even though that’s less often now.
‘You have to drop your trousers, Hanna.’
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Because it’s a matter of life or death.’
‘Does Dad need more pants for the cows?’
I think about my own. Maybe Mum found the knickers under my bed and she saw that they were yellow and hard from the dried-up piss. Obbe raises his eyebrows as though I’m the one asking funny questions. Then he shakes his head.
‘I know something fun to do.’
‘Not about death again?’ Hanna asks.
‘No. Not about death. It’s a game.’
Hanna nods eagerly. She loves games. She often plays Monopoly on her own on the carpet in the sitting room.
‘Then you have to take off your knickers and go and lie on the bed.’
Before I can ask what his plan is, Hanna’s taken off her trousers and her pants are around her ankles. I look at the slit between her legs. It doesn’t look like the custard bun Obbe was talking about. More like the slug Obbe once cut open behind the boot-jack with his penknife, that slime came out of.
He sits on the bed next to Hanna. ‘Now close your eyes and spread your legs.’
‘You’re peeking,’ I say.
‘Am not,’ Hanna says.
‘I saw your eyelashes quiver.’
‘That’s the draught,’ Hanna says.
Just to be sure, I lay my hand over her eyes and feel her eyelashes tickling my skin. I watch Obbe take a can of Coke and begin to shake it around wildly. Then he holds the can to her slit and forces her legs as wide open as possible, affording me a view of the pinkish flesh. He shakes the can a few more times then holds it as close as possible to the opening. Suddenly he opens the ring pull and the Coke squirts in a straight line into her flesh. Hanna’s hips jerk, she cries out. But what I see in her eyes when I take away my hand in shock is not something I know. Not pain but more like peace. She giggles. Obbe shakes a second can and repeats the procedure. Hanna’s eyes grow bigger, her lips press damply against my palm, she moans quietly.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘No, it feels nice.’
Then Obbe breaks the ring pull off one of the cans and lays it on the little pink ball sticking out from the slit. He gives it a quick jerk as though he wants to open her like a can of Coke. Hanna moans louder now and writhes across the duvet.
‘Stop, Obbe. You’re hurting her!’ I say. My sister lies on the pillow, sweating and wet from the fizzy drink. Obbe is sweating too. He picks up the half-empty Coke cans from the floor and gives me one. I drink it greedily and see over the top of it that Hanna’s about to put her knickers back on.
‘Wait a minute,’ Obbe says, ‘you have to keep something safe for us.’ He gets the bin out from beneath his desk, empties it onto the floor and fishes out dozens of Coke ring pulls from among the failed test papers. Then he pushes them into Hanna one by one.
‘Otherwise Mum and Dad will notice that you two have been stealing cans,’ he says. Hanna doesn’t complain. She seems like someone else all of a sudden. She almost looks relieved, even though we’d promised each other we’d feel eternally burdened to take the weight off our parents. I look at her angrily. ‘Mum and Dad don’t love you.’ It’s out before I realize it. She sticks out her tongue. But I see the relief slowly fading from her eyes, her pupils becoming smaller. I quickly rest my hand on her shoulder and say that it was a joke. We all want Mum and Dad’s love.
‘We’ll have to make more sacrifices,’ Obbe says. He sits down at his computer which springs buzzing to life. I don’t know what kind of sacrifice we’ve just made but I daren’t ask any more questions, afraid he’ll come up with a new mission. Hanna sits down next to him on a folding chair. They both act as though nothing happened, and maybe that’s the case and I’m worrying unnecessarily, the way I worry about night falling every time. It’s just part of the process. However afraid I am of the dark, in the end it always gets light again – like now, even though the light’s artificial, the light of the screen, but still the darkness of just then has largely disappeared. I pick up a forgotten ring pull and put it in my coat pocket with the whiskers and the shards of my piggy bank. We have to be careful with Hanna – she could betray us with every step – you can probably hear the tinkle of ring pulls inside her body, the way they sometimes break off when you’re drinking and fall into the can and can be heard with every sip. I look at my brother and sister’s backs. It suddenly dawns on me that I can no longer hear the fluttering of butterfly wings against the lids of the cottage cheese tubs. A line from Matthew springs to mind: ‘If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother.’ Obbe and I really need to talk. And even though it’s never just the two of us but three, I have to make sure that Hanna’s ears are closed, just for a moment.
*
After dinner, I quickly slip outside, step over the red ribbon around the cowshed, and hold my hand in front of my mouth like a paper face mask as I go in. Since no doors or stable windows are allowed to be open, there’s a strong whiff of ammonia, mixed with the smell of silage. I run the manure shovel across the gratings behind the cows and pile up the runny shit in the middle. The slurry falls between the gratings – I hear it ending up in the sub-basement. You have to keep the shovel at a good angle from your body otherwise it keeps getting stuck between the gaps. From time to time, I push against a cow’s hoofs to tell it to move. Sometimes you have to do it more roughly or they just ignore you. I walk along behind the gutter to the dry cows, which stand there chewing amiably as though unmoved by the fact that this is their last meal. I let Beatrix lick my hand. She’s a black cow with a white head and brown patches around her eyes – all cows have blue eyes because they have an extra layer that reflects the light. In the winter I do that with the calves – I let them suck on my frozen fingers until they’re totally vacuum-packed, like the sadness inside my chest. Every time I hear that sucking sound it makes me think of that story of Obbe’s. He said that Janssen’s son didn’t put his fingers in there but something else, but those were just stories that went around the village like the stink of muck-spreading once a month, and it was better to turn your nose up at them.
I let the cow lick my hand again. First you have to gain their trust and only then do you strike without mercy, that’s what Obbe taught me. That was how he’d caught the butterflies for his collection. I let my hand glide from her head along the backbone to the place between her hip bone and tail. Along with their ears, it’s the place cows like being touched the most. Every evening I search for a similar place on my own body with a torch, but I don’t find anything worth stroking, anythi
ng that calms me down or makes me breathe faster. As if of its own accord, my hand glides further from her hip bone towards her tail. I can see her bum hole opening and closing like the mouth of a hungry baby. Without thinking about it, I push my finger into the cow’s bum hole. It’s warm and spacious. Underneath it I can see something hanging that does indeed look like the custard bun Obbe was talking about, but then pinker, with a tuft of hair at the end of it. Between the two, I feel another hole, this one narrow and soft. It has to be the cow’s cunt, I think. Immediately she clenches her hips and holds her tail close to her, shifting her leg back restlessly. Hanna flashes through my mind and I move my finger in and out, quicker and quicker until it begins to get boring. I put my other hand in my coat pocket and all of a sudden I feel the cheese scoop between the shards of piggy bank, the Coke ring pulls and Dieuwertje’s whiskers. I’d forgotten about taking it from the cheese shed. I get it out of my coat pocket and turn it a few times in the air to examine it from all angles. An idea pops into my head. A rescuer needs to be tested, the way divers need to get a diving licence. This is going to be a test for the vet, because if he can save a cow from a roving cheese scoop, he can save a girl’s roving heart too. I squeeze my eyes into slits in anticipation of the pain Beatrix must feel, and then carefully insert the cheese scoop into her bum hole. I press harder and harder so that her bum hole becomes wider and shapes itself around the scoop, until I can go no deeper. My hand and wrist completely inside the cow, I let go and pull my arm back. It’s covered in shit. I pat her warm flank, the way my dad patted my lower leg when he was finished with the soap.
‘There’s something wrong with Beatrix,’ I say to the vet after I’ve cleaned my arm with the stuff my mum uses to clean the milking pails, rinsed the soles of my wellies with the hose and turned off the tap.
The Discomfort of Evening Page 15