The Twin Read online

  “Yes?”

  “I have to do something about it.”

  “What do you want to do about it?” I’m almost in the living room.

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  “Protect your head.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That miniature donkey’s been dead for years and the hooded crow’s flown off.”

  “Still.”

  “I’m going,” I say. “Will you do the yearlings?”

  “Yes,” he drawls. “Later.”

  Late March and the sun is already up when I start milking. When I’ve milked ten cows, I walk to the shed door. There’s a blackbird somewhere, the muck heap is steaming, the pollarded willows could sprout tomorrow. The yearlings are restless in the shed, but otherwise it’s so quiet I can hear the donkeys trotting in the paddock.

  It’s been almost thirty years since I read a poem - not counting death notices - and now I’m thinking of a poem. I didn’t learn much in my seven months in Amsterdam, but one thing I still remember is that poems are almost always retrospective. A poem (incredibly, instead of the muck heap, I now see our energetic modern lit. lecturer before me: his tangled curls, his owlish glasses, as if he’s a poet himself) is “condensed reality,” an “incident that has been reduced to its essence,” a “sublimation.” A poem is never about what it seems to be about (gushed our energetic modern lit. lecturer). If only I smoked, I could go now and lean against the shed wall to gaze pensively - smoking, as I imagine it, is a pensive activity - at the motionless Bosman windmill. I go back into the shed, plug the claw into the milk and pulse tubes, and put the teat cups on the eleventh cow.

  After milking I fill a couple of buckets with water, tip them into the barrel on the other side of the gate in the donkey paddock and chuck a couple of winter carrots down next to it. Rather than rushing straight to the gate, the donkeys stroll casually towards me, side by side. These animals are mine, really mine, I bought them. Nothing else here is really mine: not the cows and not the sheep, I even inherited the Lakenvelder chickens. The old Opel Kadett, the muck heap, the willows-Idrive it, I throw my dung on it, I pollard them, but none is mine. I’m a tenant, doing things someone else should have been doing.

  The sun is shining, there is hardly any wind. Spring. Something glistens on what’s left of the side wall of the laborer’s cottage, maybe a snail trail. It’s not good, I think, feeling like a poem. It’s because of what Henk said yesterday. The carrots disappear with a crunch in the donkeys’ mouths. I scratch the animals behind the ears. It’s only when they’ve both had enough and start shaking their heads, the two of them at the same time, that I stop, almost without thinking. Then I do the yearlings, much too late. Henk hasn’t got up.

  46

  Father is turning grayer. He hasn’t eaten for a week now and he’s only drinking water and orange juice, and less and less of the latter because it’s “so tart,” Every now and then I find a trickle of dark yellow urine in the bedpan. In the last seven days I haven’t carried him downstairs once. His wish has come true all the same, he’s getting a final spring. For a few days now it’s been sunny and mild and the buds have started to swell on the ash, turning it into a skeleton tree. Father’s voice is weakening, although I don’t know if that’s because he’s stopped eating. How long does this sort of thing go on? If a body is tough, I imagine it being able to go weeks without food. I go up to look in on him more often than usual and sometimes I get a shock because he looks dead when he’s just sound asleep. He often asks for Henk. He talks to him. Yesterday I couldn’t resist and crept up onto the landing behind him.

  “How’s the dying going, Mr. van Wonderen?” Henk asked cheerfully.

  “Fine,” Father answered, just as cheerfully, but quietly.

  After that Henk must have picked up the gun, because they spent a long time discussing its action. Henk asked Father what he shot. Hare and pheasants, long ago. If the thud against your shoulder wasn’t heavy. No, the recoil was nothing special. If the gun was loaded. No, of course not. Whether he had any bullets (“Cartridges,” Father said, and then a little louder, “cartridges!”) and where did he keep them. In the cupboard in the hall, next to the toilet. And how do you load a gun? You have to undo that little catch, then it breaks open, then you put in two cartridges and close it again. Do both cartridges shoot out at the same time? No, you get two shots and the cartridges stay put. How does it work then? You have to take them out, after you’ve fired it. Or shake them out. The gun went back to its spot, next to the grandfather clock. I heard metal tap wood. It was quiet for a moment.

  Then Father asked, “Are you nice to Helmer?”

  “Yes,” said Henk.

  “And is he nice to you?”

  “Nice enough,” said Henk.

  Father didn’t say anything. He sighed, very deeply. I crept down the stairs.

  He hardly says a word to me. He asks how many lambs have been born and why no one ever visits. Where Ada has got to and why he never hears the voice of the livestock dealer any more. Teun and Ronald? Maybe malnutrition really is starting to get to his memory.

  I haven’t written back to Riet. Or phoned her. Henk hasn’t responded either. “Who does she think she is?” he says. “She can go and move in with my sisters.”

  I force my way through the old rubbish in Henk’s bedroom. I have to push a lot of stuff aside to open the door of the built-in wardrobe. The cardboard box is on the bottom shelf. “Dutch language and literature, University of Amsterdam, September 1966-April 1967” is written neatly on the top flaps. I don’t remember doing that. I remember grimly stuffing my textbooks into the box when Henk had hardly had time to settle in his grave. I lift the box up onto Mother’s dressing table and look for H. J. M. F. Lodewick’s History of Dutch Literature. I lay Part One (“From the Beginning to Around 1880”) to one side and sit down on Henk’s bed with Part Two (“Around 1880 to the Present”). I hear Father snoring softly, he can’t even do that at full strength any more. Because I don’t know where to find what I’m looking for, I leaf through the book. Gorter, Leopold, Bloem, Nijhoff, Achterberg, Warren, Vroman. I am impatient, reading the odd line that strikes home or will strike home soon (a flood has covered the land, a flood of tepid water and blood, / I am a fatherless man and rooted in the mud), then leafing on quickly. I notice that I am trying to recall faces from my months in Amsterdam-I hear the coots yapping at the same time and finally, on page 531, I find a poem that I read from the first to the last word.

  to yearn & pursue

  Why do I always see

  - when I have closed my eyes

  in bed or in my thoughts -

  your nose, your hair, your chest?

  I sometimes see myself

  in mirror or in windowpane

  just after I’ve seen you:

  my own half body.

  For all your youth and beauty,

  I think I look like you -

  my nose and chest and hair

  are all identical.

  I see the poet’s name but don’t read what Lodewick has to say about him, or his verdict on the poem. None of that matters. I close the book and put Part One back in the box.

  Thinking of Denmark, I go downstairs with Part Two in my hand.

  Henk is on the sofa watching TV. He’s not sitting, he’s draped, with the remote control dangling from one hand. His shirt is unbuttoned. It’s as if he’s taken the place over.

  “Have you looked in on the sheep yet?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m watching TV.”

  “It’s two o’clock.”

  “So? It’s war. Look.”

  I look at the screen. Buildings with scattered palm trees. An explosion somewhere. Empty streets. Subtitles at the bottom of the picture. Is this what war is like these days? Live on TV? With kids like him slumped on the sofa to watch it? “Do you think the sheep care?”

  “Come and sit down for a while.”

&nbs
p; I stare at him until he looks up. “Go and do the sheep,” I say. I turn around and go into the kitchen to sit down at the bureau. I turn to page 531, take a pad and a pen and start copying out the poem. When I have finished and torn the page from the pad, I wonder what I’m doing. I stand up with the page in one hand and don’t know where to go. I look out of the front window, out of the side window, I look at the dishes on the draining board and the newspaper on the table, I hear the electric clock buzzing. Because I hear the clock buzzing, I realize the TV is off. I’m standing here holding a neat copy of a poem and I haven’t got a clue what to do with it. I hurry through the hall to the scullery, take the stairs with big strides and catch my breath on the landing. Cautiously, I open the door to Father’s bedroom. He is asleep. His small head is motionless on the pillow, his ears and nose look enormous, his mouth hangs open. Somehow or other, he is very dry. Once again I don’t have a clue what I am going to do next. I look around the bedroom and walk up to the bed. I lay the neatly copied poem on his chest. It rises and falls calmly.

  There is a swish outside. It swishes, lands and jerks its wings in, like a farmer in Sunday black making a vain attempt to wipe his big hands. It’s back. Quietly I click my tongue. I suspect it would have done better to stay away.

  47

  “Am I a kind of Henk now?” Henk had spent a couple of nights in his own room, but tonight it apparently got colder again and he slipped into bed with me for the second time. He was asleep for a while, but woke up and asked me if he is “a kind of Henk.” I was already awake. I was lying on my side looking at the light that comes into the room through the venetian blinds. I was listening. Someone just rode past on a bike, a few ducks landed on the canal, the coots yapped quietly. Father said something, maybe in his sleep, maybe staring into the dark like me, at his curtains, behind which the hooded crow was dozing on its usual branch. I wasn’t entirely relaxed in the first place, but now I feel even more tension entering my body. I know what he’s getting at but I don’t answer.

  “Well?” he says. “Am I a kind of Henk?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask cagily.

  “Your brother. Am I like your brother now?”

  Something is going badly wrong here. When did this start? “No,” I say.

  He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I think your father’s brave.”

  My shoulder blades are itching with annoyance. The selfishness of the boy: talking when he feels like talking, even if it’s the middle of the night. I have to get up to milk, he stays in bed and gets up around eight to do the yearlings. If he gets up at all.

  “You could just as well call him a coward,” I say.

  “How’s that?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh.”

  “Go to sleep,” I say. I’m still lying on my side, but feel like turning over. I stare at the slats of the blinds, but see Ada’s head appearing around the corner of the kitchen door. There is a mischievous look on her face and she says “in a big bed you’ve got room to stretch.” Then she gives me a meaningful look, which still looks funny now, with that harelip. “Two pillows, Helmer, two pillows.” When I think he’s fallen asleep again, I roll onto my back and rub away the itch. I look at the dark frame next to the door. I wish I was in the frame and thinking of here.

  “If you ask me I am,” he says, half asleep. “A kind of Henk.”

  God almighty, I think.

  A little later he’s asleep and I think about the ditch and the sheep. One of the sheep took too long and yesterday I removed two dead lambs. Was that the sheep that fell in the water? I try to remember what I thought or saw, what happened to me in the black minutes between drowning and regaining consciousness. Or was it seconds? Was it like that for Henk too? Or was he already unconscious when the car hit the water? I notice that my hands are clasped together over my stomach. As if I’m laid out. I’d like to lie on my right side, but that’s where Henk is, so I turn back onto my left. Outside it is totally silent.

  How does he do it? Asking Father how the dying is going, as if he’s asking him if he’d like some more gravy on his potatoes? And how does Father do it? Answering “fine,” as if looking on contentedly while he pours the gravy?

  48

  The magnolia is in flower. Like a glacé cherry on a cowpat. Its large flowers are neither white nor red, but pink with a white edge. If the laborer’s cottage was still standing, the top branches would be up to the dormer window. April has come and spring has gone away again. It’s sunny but cold, and at night the temperature falls below zero. But still the magnolia is in flower. None of it makes any difference to a tree and the frost doesn’t seem to have damaged the flowers. A very long time ago, maybe in the days when the farmhand was still living there, a night frost froze all the flowers. Two days later they turned brown, as if they had been scorched by a fire, and the petals, which normally fall from the branches one at a time, didn’t fall. It’s incredibly clear: from Father’s bedroom you can see the lighthouse on Marken. The wind is blowing from the north or northeast. From Denmark.

  “When your mother died,” says Father, “you were the only one left.” He is lying on his side because I’ve told him not to lie on his back all the time. The piece of paper with the poem is next to the bed, halfway under the bedside cabinet, blank side up. “And now everyone’s gone. I would have liked another chat with the livestock dealer, even if he hardly ever said anything.”

  “He must be in New Zealand by now,” I say, more to myself than to Father.

  “Life is such a mess. Ada hasn’t been here for weeks because she watched you through a pair of binoculars, and you watched her. And why doesn’t Teun come any more? Teun is a nice boy. What are you playing at, Helmer?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  I look out of the window. “The ash is in bud,” I say.

  “How many lambs?” No matter what happens, he doesn’t want to lose count.

  “Fourteen.”

  “From?”

  “Ten.”

  He sighs. “No one could tell you and Henk apart, not the barber, not your teacher, not your grandparents. Even I had to look closely sometimes. Only your mother and Jaap always knew who was who. Jaap always knew that you were Helmer and Henk was Henk. How did he know that? What did he see that I or other people didn’t see? I never trusted him.” He’s lying on the edge of the bed. His nails haven’t been cut for a long time, a clawlike hand hangs down next to the bed. He moves his fingers, as if reaching for the poem. I’m surprised that so many words can come out of such a worn-out person. With the bed up on blocks, his searching fingertips will never reach the ground. Then he rolls onto his back. His arm follows the movement of his body and falls next to him on the blankets like a dry branch. He’s panting slightly. “I don’t know what went on in the laborer’s cottage, but I was glad he left,” he says, almost inaudibly.

  “What?”

  “Kissing,” he sighs. “Men don’t kiss.”

  Until this instant I hadn’t noticed the ticking of the grandfather clock. It’s ticking irregularly, slowly. It’s been a long time since I raised the weights. “He . . .” Then I let it be, I let him be. I stand up and open the glass door of the clock. After I’ve raised the weights, the ticking is as good as ever.

  “You never said anything,” Father says. “You never said you didn’t want to.”

  “You didn’t have much choice.” I walk back to the window and follow the line of the dyke until I can see the lighthouse again.

  “No.”

  I clear my throat. “I didn’t have much choice either.”

  He doesn’t answer that. He’s still panting.

  “And now Henk is here.” A car drives along the dyke, very slowly. The windows catch the sunlight so that it looks as if the sun is shining from inside the car. The chariot of the sun god. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I reply.

  “No, maybe not,” says Father.

  The chariot
corners and changes back to a car. I turn around.

  Father’s eyelids droop, but his eyeballs are still moving. “I . . .” he says. Then it’s quiet for a long time. “I have almost no body any more.”

  I knew it. I knew he had read the poem.

  49

  “What’s your name actually?”

  “Greta.”

  “I’m Helmer van Wonderen.”

  She gives me an insolent look. “Yes, I know that.”

  “What’s your surname?”

  “What’s it matter? I’m only the driver.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”

  Greta bends over and unscrews the milk hose. She’s wearing trainers, but doesn’t raise her feet to avoid the last bit of milk that runs out of the tank and hose.

  “How’s your boy going?” she asks.

  “My boy?”

  “Your helper.”

  “Henk?”

  “How would I know what he’s called?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “It seems like a strange question to me.”

  “Yeah?” She’s finished and walks over to the cab. She climbs up. The young tanker driver always leapt up like a cat, pulling the door open as he leapt. Greta clambers, pants, grabs hold and hauls herself up. She has to pull the door twice before it shuts properly. I can’t see her any more, but imagine her sliding her fat ass back and forth to make herself comfortable before setting to work on the gear stick, clutch and accelerator. After it’s been quiet for a while in the milking parlor, I start to hose out the tank and wash off the tiles.

  There’s someone in the field. Near the Bosman windmill. I stand at the causeway gate and watch him approach the farm. He gets bigger and bigger and smaller and smaller at the same time. It’s Ronald.