Dad doesn’t actually allow us to buy them. ‘She’s a heathen disguised as a God-fearing Christian. I sometimes see her trimming her hedge on a Sunday.’ One time I’d crept round the back with Belle and we’d peeked into her garden over the hedge. It was so overgrown the plants could touch the stars. I scared her by saying that the Witch secretly visited anyone in the night who peeked into her garden, and she could turn you into a plant she’d later re-pot outside her back door.
As well as sweets, the shop also sells stationery and magazines with tractors on the cover or naked women. A bell tinkles when the door opens which is unnecessary because her husband, who wears a dust-coat as white as his face, his body as slender as a whippet’s, is always standing behind the counter watching everyone who comes in. His eyes stick to you like magnets. Next to him there’s a parrot in a cage. Mr and Mrs van Luik talk all the time to that brightly coloured bird, though it’s more like complaining about the new ballpoint pens that haven’t arrived, the liquorice laces that have dried out which you could break a window with, the weather that is too hot or too cold or too stuffy.
‘You have to go now otherwise Mum and Dad will wake up,’ Hanna says. I nod and bite the Fireball into chewing gum. The sweet cinnamon taste fills my mouth. Hanna picks up her picture book and pretends to read on, but I can see she’s no longer able to concentrate on the words. The words are dancing the way they often dance inside my head, finding it harder and harder to form an orderly queue and come out of my mouth.
2
Two forks lie with their teeth through each other in the farmyard, like hands praying. Obbe is nowhere to be seen. I look for him in the empty stalls which smell of dried blood and where the odd broken-off tail is stuck to the ground. No one has been here since the cows were taken. I carry on to the vegetable patch and see my brother collapsed on the ground next to his beetroot plants. His shoulders are shaking. I watch from a distance as he cradles a dead beetroot in his arms and angrily pushes his finger into the soil to plant new seeds, the way he just did between my buttocks. This time he pushes more roughly. Obbe’s other hand strokes the leaves of the beetroot plant – on good days he will also stroke a chicken’s plumage. He has had no influence on what has happened here: Death has come. I wrap my arms around my coat. It’s only November but it froze last night already.
Obbe suddenly pushes himself up, looks back and sees me standing here. I’m reminded of a line from Exodus: ‘If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it.’ I smile at Obbe to show I have come in peace, that I always come in peace, even though I sometimes long to come with war in mind, the same way I sometimes take a broken toy to the vegetable patch and bury it among the red onions, next to the one-winged angel. I know, though, that we’d have to come from a better family to be able to bury our childhood – we’d have to lie under a layer of earth ourselves, but the time isn’t ripe for that yet. We still have our missions which have been keeping us on our feet until now, even though Obbe’s half lying on the damp earth, looking back at me, unmoved. I shuffle my welly awkwardly back and forth over the ground and become aware of the goose bumps on my arms. The elastic of my pyjama bottoms is baggy around my waist. Obbe jumps to his feet; there’s still a trace of tears on his face. He pats the mud from his striped pyjamas. The things that move us will finally cause us to fall apart like a chunk of crumbly cheese.
Obbe stands before me. His bushy eyebrows are like strips of barbed wire above his eyes, a warning not to come any closer. He rubs his cheeks dry with the back of his hand, holding in his other a couple of wilted plants. The beetroots at their tips are wrinkled and display traces of mould. The leaves are brown.
‘What you just saw never happened,’ he whispers.
I nod briefly and look at the coffee grounds around the cauliflowers to keep away pests. Are Mum and Dad the pests that keep eating away at us? Obbe turns around. There’s wet soil on his pyjama top. For the first time I imagine digging a hole in the vegetable garden, laying Obbe in it and closing it, raking it over and letting the frost come over it like you do with kale, hoping it makes things better. I’d get a better version I could call a brother and whom I’d give my milk biscuits to when the drawer gets too full to fit any more. A brother I don’t have to be ashamed of any more in the school playground when he gets into a scrap again or when he shows off in the bike sheds, putting out his Lucky Strike cigarettes on a garden spider.
‘Do not curse if God does not curse; do not swear when the Lord does not swear.’
Obbe stops at the wheelbarrow that Mum had lain in and which now has rainwater in the bottom. I angrily kick at the wheelbarrow with my foot so that it tips over, and the water streams out onto the earth and around the ankles of Obbe’s wellies. Matthies’s rusty go-kart lies next to the wheelbarrow. The red side seat has faded and there’s a big tear in its back. No one has driven it since his death. Obbe smiles.
‘You’re always so good, aren’t you?’
‘I just don’t want you to swear – do you want Mum and Dad to die or something?’
‘They’re already dead.’ Obbe makes a cutting motion across his throat with his finger. ‘And you’re going to die soon too.’
‘You’re making things up,’ I say.
‘Unless you make a sacrifice.’
‘Why a sacrifice?’
‘When the time’s right, I’ll show you.’
‘But when will the time be right?’
‘When it’s the colour of a good beef tomato. If you leave them on the vine too long, they split and burst open and the mould gets in. It’s about finding the right moment,’ Obbe says, walking away from me with the beetroot plants clamped under his arm. They leave mud patches on his pyjamas.
3
One by one, Dad puts the silver cows into a binbag and pulls the yellow loops at the sides towards each other – the opening looks like a cow’s bum, with its sphincter clenching. He pauses for a moment, holding the binbag. I look at him over the top of my nature book, at his washed hair which he has combed neatly into a side parting, making lines with the teeth of the comb like a ploughed field, at his lip which has a dent in it like an ashtray – there’s a cigarette stuck in it now. The side parting makes him look a bit like Hitler, but I don’t say so. Dad might get the idea that I hate him too, and then he’d walk even more crookedly, closer to the soil, closer to Matthies’s double grave where there’s still room for one more family member – ‘first come first served,’ Mum once said. I hope they don’t make a competition of it.
On both the day of his death and his birthday we go to the graveyard next to the Reformed church where death smells of conifers. When we reach the grave, Mum cleans the photo on his gravestone with a bit of spit and a hanky, as though she’s wiping away the imaginary milk residue from around Matthies’s mouth. Dad lights a lantern and waters the plants and flowers around the grave. The gravel beneath our feet crunches as we change positions. I always stay as still as possible so as not to knock against Mum by accident. We don’t speak. I always look at the graves next to and behind Matthies’s. There’s a girl who fell off a boat in the summer and ended up in the propeller; a woman with an enormous butterfly sculpture on her grave because she wanted to fly but didn’t have wings; a man who was only found when he began to smell. But one day, this is what it says in the Bible, all the graves will break open, one day the dead will return. I’d always found that a scary thought: I pictured all the bodies coming out of the earth and marching through the village like a procession of biology models, with chattering teeth and hollow eyes. They’d bang on the doors claiming to know you, saying they were relatives. I remember the lines from Corinthians that Granny once read to me when I was worried we’d no longer recognize Matthies: ‘How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, a
nd to each kind of seed he gives its own body. So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.’ I didn’t understand why we’d had to plant Matthies in the ground like a seed if above the earth he’d have been able to blossom into something wonderful. We never know it’s time to leave until Dad turns around. I usually run my hand along the conifers as I walk past them, as though I’m offering Death my sincere condolences, out of respect, out of fear.
Dad has fixed his side parting with hair wax. I don’t want the Jewish people to see him through the gaps in the floorboard like that – he’d frighten them unnecessarily. Though sometimes I doubt they’re still living in the basement. It’s so quiet and now winter’s coming it’s starting to get freezing cold down there, so cold that their bodies will freeze over time, like the bottles of blackcurrant cordial. I’d put them up in the hay barn where it’s warmer.
I carry on reading my nature book about ants and their carrying capacity: I hope for Mum’s sake that the Jewish people are still there because if you take away a queen ant’s subjects, I read, it’s not long before she dies of loneliness; and vice versa, as the subjects also die if the mother lays downs her wings and ceases to be. Without her, Dad, who is now tying a tight knot in the binbag, wouldn’t survive for long. He once won two silver medals for the cows called Boude and Wijn who had produced a hundred thousand litres of milk. They were his favourite Blaarkoppen and they’d been featured in the Reformist Daily, complete with pictures. That Sunday we received weak handshakes after the church service and a free slice of vanilla sponge in the Hoeksteen, where people discuss the sermon afterwards. For a short while it had seemed as though Dad was emitting light among the members of the congregation, like my glow-in-the-dark stars. He spoke with sweeping hand gestures and grinned from cheek to cheek – the same smile as when he’d sold a calf to a cattle dealer. I looked at him and thought: this isn’t Dad, this is a stranger we’ll be going home with shortly, who will lose his light when the rest around him light up again. That’s why we had to stay dark, as it formed a nice contrast for Dad. I was impressed by him and the way he told people about Boude and Wijn’s success. Sometimes you have to sell yourself – it’s something we’ll have to learn one day. Dad is good at that. One day he’ll close a deal on me and Hanna – even though we’re impatient to take matters into our own hands. As I was listening to Dad talk that Sunday, I picked off the greasy darker edges of the slice of cake in my hand and put them in my coat pocket. I resolved to stand on the edge of the sofa back home and offer the strips to Mum, like worms dangled above the beaks of young starlings. I wondered about putting them on Matthies’s grave – he liked cake, especially with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles and when the centre was still a bit moist, but then I thought it might attract worms and beetles.
Out of the window I see Dad putting the binbag into the black container. When he returns he sits down in the smoking chair next to the window. The smoke of his cigarette causes half of his face to become foggy. Without looking at me, he says, ‘We shouldn’t have hung a calf in the tree as a protest, but a farmer. It would have made a bigger impression on those filthy heathens, those spineless shortbreads.’ Dad often uses ‘shortbreads’ as a swear-word. I immediately picture Dad hanging upside down from a branch with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Now he’s probably going to threaten to leave for good. Now he asks me whether I still remember the story of the man who got on his bike one day and rode to the edge of the world. As he was cycling he discovered that his brakes didn’t work, which was a relief to him because now he couldn’t stop for anything or anyone. The good man cycles off the edge of the world and tumbles and tumbles, the way he’s been tumbling all his life, but now there’s no end to it. That’s what death will feel like – like an endless fall without getting back up again, without plasters. I hold my breath. The story has frightened me a bit. Once Hanna and I had folded bottle tops around the spokes of Dad’s bike so that he couldn’t secretly go after the man. I didn’t realize until later that Dad was the man. Dad was the one tumbling.
‘Have you already pooed?’ he asks all of a sudden.
I feel my body stiffen at once. I hope for a moment he’ll be covered entirely in fog and disappear for a while. The only thing that came out of me was watery like chocolate milk and not really worth giving a name. Dad’s talking about a real poo, the kind you really have to try hard to get out.
‘And what rubbish are you reading there? You’d be better off reading the Authorized Version,’ he continues.
I close my nature book in shock. Ants can carry up to five thousand times their own weight. People are puny in comparison – they can barely lift their own body weight once, let alone the weight of their sorrow. I pull my knees up to protect myself. Dad taps his cigarette ash into his coffee cup. He knows Mum hates him doing that – she says it makes the coffee taste of wet cigarettes, of the number one cause of death.
‘If you don’t start pooing, they’ll have to make a hole in your tummy and your shit will run into a bag. Do you want that?’
Dad pushes himself up from the smoking chair to stoke the fire. He stacks his worries like the sticks of kindling next to it: they blaze up in our feverish minds. We all want Dad’s worries, even though they only burn briefly and don’t give off much heat.
I shake my head. I want to tell him about Obbe and his finger, that it will all be fine. At the same time, I don’t want to disappoint him because you mustn’t just make people superfluous – he could go rusty.
‘You’re holding it in deliberately, aren’t you?’
I shake my head again.
Dad comes and stands in front of me. He’s holding a piece of kindling in his hand. His eyes are dark – the blue seems to have been swallowed up by the pupil.
‘Even dogs shit,’ he says. ‘Show me your stomach.’
I carefully put my legs back down on the ground. He takes hold of the seam of my coat. But the drawing pin, I think then. If Dad sees it, he’ll pull it out roughly, like an ear tag from a dead animal. Mum and Dad will definitely never go on holiday then because the only place I want to go to is myself.
‘Friends,’ we suddenly hear behind us. Dad lets go of my coat. His expression changes at once: the sky often clears unexpectedly inland, as Dieuwertje Blok says on her pre-Christmas show. She’s been back on TV for a week now. Sometimes she winks at me and then I know what we’re doing is right – that once Hanna and I have gone, she’ll keep an eye on things. This reassures me a bit. Dad opens the stove door and throws the stick in.
‘The animal’s healthy from the front but sick at the back end.’
The vet looks from Dad to me. It’s an expression he used for the cows but that is now intended for me. The vet nods and opens the press studs of his green jacket one by one. Dad begins to sigh now. ‘She’s got a problem with her arsehole.’ I think about all the bars of soap I’ve hidden in my bedside table. There are eight of them. I could make the entire ocean froth with them. All the fish, walruses, sharks and sea-horses would be washed clean. I’d make a washing line for them and hang them up with Mum’s clothes pegs.
‘Olive oil and a varied diet,’ the vet says. His nose is running. He sniffs and wipes it on his sleeve.
I clutch my nature book even tighter. I forgot to fold over the corner of the page I was at. If only there was somebody to do that for me so that I’d know my place, where to live my story from again, and whether that place is here or on the other side: the Promised Land.
Dad turns around abruptly and walks to the kitchen. I hear him rummaging around in the herb cupboard. He comes back with an old bottle of olive oil; there are yellow crusts around the edge of the lid. We never use olive oil in the food. Dad is the only one who sometimes uses it, to grease the door hinges to stop them from creaking.
‘Mou
th open,’ he says.
I look at the vet. He doesn’t look back but stares at a wedding photo of Mum and Dad on the wall. It’s the only picture in which they’re really looking at each other, where you can see that they were in love, even though Mum has a dubious smile on her lips and Dad is leaning awkwardly on one knee on the grass, his deformed leg handily out of shot. Their bodies are still supple, as though they’d been coated in olive oil for the shot. Dad is wearing a brown suit and Mum a milk white dress. The longer I look at the photograph, the more doubting their smiles become, as though they already know what the future has in store for them, the cows around them in the field like bridesmaids.
Before I can do anything, Dad squeezes my nose shut, holds the bottle’s spout to my lips and pours the oil into me. I begin to splutter. Dad lets go.
‘There we are. That should be enough.’
I try to swallow the nasty oil and cough a few times. I wipe my mouth on my knee – it’s like a greased baking tin – and wrap my arms around my belly. Don’t throw up, don’t throw up or you’ll die. Dad points outside – the vet follows his finger. I don’t hear what they are saying. All I can hope is that one day God will pick up the farm like the grab loader picked up the dead cows. I clench my hand tighter around my belly. I want to let go of my poo and I don’t want to let go of it. Maybe Obbe should stick in something bigger? If it came out I’d carefully fold up a few pieces of toilet paper – the rule is eight for poo, four for pee – and run my hand between my buttocks like a manure shovel. Should I take a sip of Mum’s rennet that makes holes pop up in the cheese? Then I’ll get holes in me too and everything will be able to get out at last.
4
The Discomfort of Evening Page 17