‘I’ll go take a look,’ he says, walking to the cowshed. When he returns a few moments later, I can’t make out anything in his gaze. No worried frown between the eyes, no grim set to his mouth.
‘Well?’ I ask.
‘She’s royalty, you know. They always make a song and a dance when they have a bit of pain. Nothing wrong there, that animal is as healthy as can be, and just to think that the poor creature is going to be put down tomorrow. This foot-and-mouth is an abomination in God’s eyes.’
I smile at him, the way the TV lady from Lingo smiles when someone has failed to grab the green ball.
20
‘The first cow is going down now,’ Mum says. She’s standing next to the cowshed door with a thermos flask in each hand – one of them has got TEA written on it in waterproof marker, the other COFFEE. As though she can keep her balance this way. A packet of pink-glazed cakes is clamped under her arm. Her voice sounds hoarse. I follow her into the cowshed, and at that very moment the first cows fall down dead on the gratings, and their unwieldy bodies are pulled along the ground by their back legs to the grab loader, which picks them up like cuddly toys at the fair and drops them into the truck. Two bovines stand under the rotating cattle brush chewing idly, their noses covered in thick scabs. They stare feverishly at their fellows whose legs are giving way, or who are slipping and smacking down onto the floor blocks in the stalls. Some of the calves are still alive as they go into the carcass-disposal truck, others get a stud shot into their foreheads with a bolt stunner. The moaning and the sound of banging against the side of the truck causes small cracks under my skin, and my body begins to feel feverish. It’s no longer enough to pull my collar up to my nose and chew on my coat cords. Even Maxima, Jewel and Blaze are killed without remorse. They collapse and are gone, folded up like empty milk cartons and thrown into the container.
Suddenly I hear Dad shouting. He’s standing with Obbe in the feed section among the men in blue-green overalls wearing bathing caps and face masks. At the top of his voice he quotes Psalm 35, verse 1, until it becomes a scream, spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. ‘Contend Lord, with those who contend with me; fight against those who fight against me. Take up shield and armour; arise and come to my aid. Brandish spear and javelin against those who pursue me.’ Saliva drips slowly down his chin onto the floor in the feed section. I concentrate on the drops, on the sadness trickling out of him, like the runny manure and the blood from the dead cows that flow between the ridges of the tiles and end up in the drain, mixing with the milk from the cooling tank.
The calves were the first to go, so that they didn’t have to see their mothers being brutally murdered. In protest, Obbe has hung the youngest calf in the yard upside down by its leg from the branch of a tree, tongue dangling from its mouth. Each farmer in the village has hung up one of his dead cows or pigs next to their drive. Some of them have also sawn down a tree and laid the trunk across the farm track so that the disposal service can’t get through. After that the man in the white suit, the one who had put the rat poison boxes around the farm previously, took the corpses away and carefully put them in the disposal service’s van. The same care was missing now; he just tossed the poison pellets into the black container.
‘Thou shalt not kill,’ Dad cries. He’s standing next to a cow that used to belong to Grandpa and is now lying on the floor with its legs in the air. There are broken-off tails on the gratings. Horns. Chunks of hoof.
‘Murderers! Hitler!’ Obbe shouts afterwards. I think about the Jewish people who met their fate like hunted-down cattle, about Hitler who was so terrified of illnesses that he started to see people as bacteria, as something you can easily stamp out. The teacher told us during the history lesson that Hitler had fallen through ice when he was four and had been saved by a priest, that some people can fall through ice and it’s better if they’re not rescued. I wondered then why a bad person like Hitler could be saved and not my brother. Why the cows had to die while they hadn’t done anything wrong.
And I see the hate in Obbe’s eyes as he begins to hit one of the men in masks. Farmer Evertsen and Farmer Janssen pull him back by his overalls and try to calm him down, but he tears himself away and runs out of the cowshed, past Mum, who is still riveted to the door opening holding the two thermos flasks. If I take one from her hand, she’ll probably collapse to the ground just as hard as the dry cows whose turn it is now. The stench of death sticks in my throat, like a chunk of congealed protein powder. I try to gulp it down and blink away the calves in the corners of my eyes like thunderbugs, until they begin to smart and I can only get rid of them with tears. Every loss contains all previous attempts to hang on to something you didn’t want to lose but had to let go of anyway, from a marble bag filled with the most beautiful marbles and rare shooters, to my brother. We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are – vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again. I cry for the cows, I cry for the three kings – out of pity, and then for my ridiculous self, wrapped in a coat of anxiety, wiping the tears away quickly again. I have to go and tell Hanna we can’t go to the other side for the time being. We can’t leave Mum and Dad behind like this. What’s going to become of them when the cows have gone?
I hold my hand in front of my mouth to combat the smell and keep whispering, ‘My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos, My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos, My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos.’ It doesn’t help, I don’t calm down. I look at my dad; he’s holding a pitchfork that he points angrily at the men every now and again. If only they were bales of hay or silage grass, I think to myself, then we’d be able to lift them up together and move them, or wrap them in green plastic and put them out in the fields for the view, and then let them dry out. One of the men, the tallest of the group, is standing next to the cowshed door with Mum, eating a pink iced cake; his face mask dangles under his chin like a sick bag. He scrapes the icing off with his front teeth and only after he’s done that does he eat the cake, while around him cows are flying into walls and bullets are being fired into heads. When he whisks a second cake out of the packet and carefully strips it of its icing, the cracks in my skin seem to grow bigger – this is how a caterpillar must feel when it’s about to become a butterfly, but it has something that keeps holding it back, even though it can see the cracks forming around it, the light of freedom falling through them – and my heart begins to beat so wildly behind my ribs that I’m afraid for a moment that the entire village can hear it, the way I’m sometimes afraid they’ll hear in the night when I’m lying on my bear, moving past the darkness. I wish I could scream and kick the men in their stomachs or tie two face masks in front of their eyes so they can’t see the cows any more, only the darkness of their deeds, that are black and sticky and will cling to them with every step they take. I’d drag their stupid heads through the stained stalls and then grab them by their legs with the grab loader and drop them above the container.
Dad drops the fork and raises his head to the rafters of the shed, where doves are flying up with every bang. Their feathers are dirty – peace always comes in white, but this is war. And I briefly hope that Dad will come to me and pull me tightly to him, so that the press studs of his overalls press into my cheek, so that I can lose myself in the longing to cling on to him tightly, but the only thing I can lose myself in now is loss itself.
When I go outside, I see Obbe taking off his disposable overalls. He throws them into the protest fire built from dried reeds that is burning in the field next to the muck-heap, with a handful of lost farmers standing around it. If only we could take off our bodies in the same way, freed of the dirt upon us.
PART III
1
All of a sudden, Obbe presses his mouth to my ear and whispers slowly and emphatically: ‘God-damm-it.’ A strip of light falls through the chink in the curtains onto his forehead. The red gash from the banging has become a scar, like
the seam of my sock. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel his warm toothpaste breath containing the forbidden word, which he repeats, disappear into the vortex of my eardrum. Lucky they’re my ears and not my parents’, because that is the worst word we can say and think and no one on the farm has ever said it before. I feel myself getting sad, more for God than for myself. He can’t help the way things are going here and yet His name is being taken in vain. The more he says the word, the more I shrink under my covers.
‘You used the Sims password.’ Obbe hovers over me in his striped pyjamas. His hands rest on either side of my pillow.
‘Just the once,’ I say quietly.
‘Not true – your avatars never have to work again because they’re filthy rich. You’ve been cheating. You should have asked my permission first, Goddammit!’
I smell Dad’s aftershave: a mixture of cinnamon and walnut. I’ll have to satisfy Obbe in the same way as Dad, I decide, before instinctively rolling onto my belly, and pulling down my pyjamas and knickers to bare my bum. Obbe takes his mouth away from next to my ear and says, ‘What are you doing?’
‘You have to put your finger in my bum hole.’
‘But that’s dirty!’
‘Dad does it, though, so that I can poo every day. You make a tunnel ready, you know, like we made tunnels for the ants we put in the aquarium filled with sand? It’ll only take a moment.’
Obbe rolls up his shirt-sleeves, carefully parts my buttocks as though they’re an animal encyclopaedia he’s taking good care of and that only he is allowed to touch, and pushes in his index finger as though pointing out a rare creature, a cockatoo for example.
‘Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘No,’ I say, trying to hold back the tears by clenching my jaws. I don’t tell him he’s supposed to push in some Sunlight green soap, which isn’t green at all but a kind of yellowish brown. I don’t want my lips to start frothing, like some of the cows that had foot-and-mouth. Dad is forgetting to do it more and more often. Someone has to take over the job so that I don’t have to go to the doctor or be exterminated.
Obbe pushes in his finger as far as he can.
‘Don’t you dare do a fart,’ he says.
When I look back, I see that his pyjama bottoms are tight around his crotch. I think about the last time his willy performed a trick, and wonder how many fingers’ worth of thickness he’d be, whether we could put that in to make the tunnel even bigger. But I don’t mention it, not now: asking questions creates expectations and I don’t know if I can live up to them. When the teacher asks me a question, my thoughts sometimes seem to have been Tippexed away. And I mustn’t make Obbe even angrier. Imagine if his swearing woke up Mum and Dad. Suddenly Obbe begins to move his finger backwards and forwards, faster and faster as though he wants to give the rare creature in his collection a poke so that it will come to life. My hips slowly begin to move up and down: I want to run away and stay at the same time. I want to sink and I want to stay afloat. A snowy landscape appears around me.
‘Do you know how long eels live?’
‘No,’ I whisper. There’s no reason to be whispering but my voice becomes quieter and hoarser on its own. My mouth fills with saliva. I briefly think about my toads. They’re sitting on top of each other and call each other ‘little man’ and ‘little woman’. Their long tongues swing around each other, as though they’re fighting for the same imaginary bluebottle. Does a toad have a willy? And can it pull it back into its sheath like a bull can, the way Obbe’s wooden revolver can go back into its holster?
‘They can live to be eighty-eight and they’ve got three enemies: cormorants, maw-worms and fishermen.’
Obbe abruptly withdraws his finger from my bum hole. The snowy landscape begins to melt. Alongside relief I also feel disappointment inside my chest, as though he’s pushed me back into my pitch-black mind – a torch that is shone onto you to give you a stage but then switched off again. I’m spending more and more time escaping the farm by lying on my belly moving my crotch against my teddy bear, making my bed slats squeak, harder and harder until I can no longer hear it, until I’ve got rid of all of the day’s tension and all I can hear is the whooshing in my ears, the sea so much closer than during the day.
‘Mum and Dad are forty-five and they don’t have any enemies.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ I reply, as I pull my knickers and pyjama bottoms back up. I hope Dad won’t be angry I’ve taken his job away from him, even though he failed to do it himself and has stopped touching me completely. I don’t want to be even more of a burden to him.
‘No, it doesn’t mean anything,’ Obbe says.
He swallows audibly a couple of times, pretending not to be bothered by it, or that he’s not scared we’re going to lose them even sooner than ourselves. He makes a face as he looks at his index finger. He has a quick sniff.
‘That’s what a secret smells like,’ he says.
‘You’re gross.’
‘Don’t say anything to Mum and Dad, otherwise I’ll murder Dieuwertje and pull that stupid coat off you, Goddammit.’ Obbe pushes me away from him and strides out of my bedroom. I hear him go downstairs where he opens kitchen cupboards, then slams them shut again. Now the cows have gone we no longer have breakfast at a fixed time. Sometimes there isn’t any breakfast to be had, just some dry crackers and instant porridge. Dad forgets to fetch bread on Wednesdays from the baker in the village. Or he’s suddenly become afraid of the mould. We have to stand in front of him in the afternoons. He’ll be sitting in his smoking chair next to the window with his right leg crossed over his left, which doesn’t suit him – legs wide apart is better – in his hand the blue fountain pen from his accounts book. We’re the new stock and we have to be checked for potential illnesses; we have to show our bare backs like the undersides of our egg cakes. Dad inspects us for blue and white spots.
‘Promise me you won’t die,’ he says, and we nod and don’t mention the hunger in our bellies or the fact you can die of that too. In the evenings we get tinned soup with meatballs and extra vermicelli that Mum breaks above the pan. That way it seems as though she’s still cooked for us. Some of the vermicelli strands float like lifebuoys in the soup bowls decorated with hens.
I move my legs a bit under the dinosaur duvet cover until they no longer feel heavy but their normal weight, even though I don’t know exactly how legs are supposed to feel, probably weightless. Everything that’s part of you is weightless and the things that are alien feel heavy. Obbe’s toothpaste breath mixed with the swear-word hangs around me like a demanding milk customer: they’re not satisfied with anything and stride into other people’s farmyards as though they own them, heads held high. I push off the duvet and cross the landing to Hanna’s room. She sleeps at the end of the corridor, her bedroom door always open a chink. She insists the landing light stays on the whole time. Hanna thinks that burglars are attracted to lamps like moths and that Dad could chase them outside again in the morning.
I gently push open her door. My sister is already awake and is lying reading a picture book. We read a lot – we like heroes and carry them with us inside our heads, continuing their story there, but now with a leading role for ourselves. One day I’ll be Mum’s hero so that Hanna and I can go to the other side with peace of mind. Then I’ll free the toads and the Jewish people, and buy my dad a cowshed full of brand-new blazed cows, and get rid of all the ropes as well as the feed silo. No heights any more, no temptations.
‘Obbe swore. He said G-d-it,’ I whisper as I sit down on the foot of the bed. Hanna’s eyes widen. She puts her picture book down.
‘If Dad hears that …’ she says. There’s sleep in the corners of her eyes. I could wipe it away with my little finger, the way Obbe and I once got a snail out of its shell with a filling knife and smeared the slimy creature onto the tiles.
‘I know. We have to do something … Maybe we should tell Mum that Obbe’s being mean? Remember when Evertsen wanted to get rid of his dog? He said it was a
nasty animal and a week later it was put down,’ I say.
‘Obbe’s not a dog, you idiot.’
‘But he is mean and nasty.’
‘Yes, but we have to give him something. Something more like a bone than an injection – to keep him quiet,’ Hanna says.
‘What then?’
‘An animal.’
‘Dead or alive?’
‘Dead. That’s what he wants.’
‘That’s not nice for the poor creature. I’ll have a talk with him first,’ I say.
‘Don’t say anything stupid, you’ll just make him angry. And we have to talk about The Plan. I don’t want to stay here much longer.’
I think about the vet – he didn’t manage to find the cheese scoop so it’s impossible he’ll be able to save my heart. I don’t mention it – there are more important things going on.
Hanna takes a bag of Fireballs from her bedside table. There’s a cartoon character with flames coming out of its mouth on the front. She tears open the plastic and gives me a red ball. I put it in my mouth and suck. As soon as it gets too hot, I take it out of my mouth again. It keeps changing colour – from red to orange to yellow.
‘Once we’re on the other side and have been saved, we might set up a Fireball factory. We can swim laps through the red balls every day,’ Hanna continues. She moves her gobstopper from cheek to cheek. We buy them in the little sweet-shop at the back of the village on the Karnemelkseweg. The lady who sells the sweets always wears the same cute white apron and has black uncombed hair that sticks out all over the place. Everyone calls her ‘the Witch’. Some horrible stories about her are doing the rounds. According to Belle, she turns stray cats into cat-shaped liquorice sweets and children who try to steal sweets into toffee. All the children in the village still buy their sweets from her, though.
The Discomfort of Evening Page 16