The Twin Read online

  Last spring I saw him shuffling around the barn with saucers of milk. I didn’t say anything, but sighed deeply, so deeply he must have heard. Within a few days he had the kittens drinking from a single saucer of milk. He grabbed them and stuffed them in a bag. Not a gunny sack, we don’t get them any more. It was a paper feed bag. He tied the bag on to the rear bumper of the Opel Kadett with a piece of rope about three feet long.

  Seven years ago when his license needed renewing they made him do a test. There were all kinds of things wrong with him and he failed. Since then he hasn’t been allowed to drive. He still climbed into the car. There was a green haze on the trees that line the yard and narcissuses flowering around the trunks. I stood in the barn doorway and watched him start the car, which immediately shot off, throwing him back against the seat, then jerking him forward so that he hit his head on the steering wheel. Then he reversed without looking over his shoulder or in the rear-view mirror. He did that for a while: driving forward, changing into reverse (the gearbox howled) and backing up, turning the steering wheel just a little. Up and down and back and forth until a cloud of exhaust fumes hung between the trees. He climbed out of the car, untied the paper bag very calmly and tried to throw it on the muck heap. He had to pick it up again no less than three times, his arms were no longer strong enough for a hearty swing. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he said, coming into the barn. He wiped his forehead and rubbed his hands together in his one-chore-out-of-the-way gesture; it made a rasping sound.

  It took me a while to get moving. Slowly I walked over to the muck heap. The bag wasn’t right at the top, it had slid down a little, and not just from gravity, but partly from the movement inside. I could hear very quiet squeaking and almost inaudible scratching. Father had made a mess of things and I could fix them for him. Damned if I would. I turned and walked away from the muck heap until I had gone far enough to be well out of earshot and then stayed there until there were no more sounds and no more movement.

  He wants to celebrate Saint Nicholas, because “it’s nice.”

  5

  I don’t know what’s going on here, but now a hooded crow is staring at me from a branch in the bare ash. It’s the first time I have ever seen a hooded crow around here. It’s magnificent, but it is really getting on my nerves, I can hardly get a bite down. I go and sit somewhere else, with a view out the side window. There are four chairs around the table, I can sit where I like, the other three aren’t used.

  I always sit where Mother used to sit, on the chair closest to the stove. Father sat opposite her, with his back to the front window. Henk sat with his back to the side window and could look through to the living room when the doors were open. I sat with my back to the kitchen door and often saw Henk as a silhouette, because of the light shining through the window behind him. It didn’t matter, my spitting image was opposite me and I knew exactly what he looked like. I’m back in my old spot at the kitchen table now and I don’t like it. I stand up, push my plate across the table, and walk around to sit down on Henk’s chair. Now I’m visible once more to the hooded crow, which turns its head slightly to get a better look at me. Being watched reminds me of the sheep that stood there staring at me a few days ago, all twenty-four of them. It gave me the feeling that the sheep were my equals, that they weren’t just animals looking at me. I’ve never felt like that before, not even with my two donkeys. And now this strange hooded crow.

  I slide my chair back, walk through the hall to the front door and step out onto the gravel path. “Kssshh!” The crow cocks its head and moves a leg. “Go!” I shout, and only then do I look around uncomfortably. Weird, semi-elderly farmer shouts at something invisible from his open front door.

  The hooded crow stares at me condescendingly. I slam the front door. When quiet has returned to the hall, I hear Father saying something upstairs. I open the staircase door.

  “What d’you say?” I yell.

  “A hooded crow,” he calls.

  “So?” I yell.

  “Why chase it away?” Whatever else, he’s not deaf.

  I close the staircase door and go back to the kitchen table, sitting in Father’s place, with my back to the front window. I chew my sandwich stolidly while doing my best to ignore Father, who’s still talking away.

  In the space of ten minutes I’ve sat on every chair. If someone saw me, they’d think I was trying to be four people at once to avoid eating alone.

  Before doing the woodwork, I painted the living room walls and ceiling white. I needed two coats to cover the pale rectangles that emerged when I took down the paintings, photos and samplers. After buying paint and a new brush from the painter’s, I visited the DIY shop, where I found wooden venetian blinds that fitted the bedroom and living-room windows exactly. Apparently the dimensions they used a hundred and fifty years ago are still common today. Before putting up the blinds, I took the plants I’d left on the windowsills and threw them on the muck heap as well. Now it’s empty and bluish gray in both rooms and the light enters in horizontal strips. Instead of pulling up the blinds in the morning, I just rotate the narrow slats.

  I go upstairs with a box of nails, a hammer and a big, heavy potato crate.

  “What are you doing?” Father asks.

  I take the paintings, photos and samplers out one by one and start hanging them. “You think Saint Nicholas is nice,” I say, “but we can make it nice in here too.”

  “What are you doing downstairs?

  “All kinds of things,” I say. I hang the first photos up around the painting of the sheep, but soon have to move on to the other walls. Framed photos of Mother and Henk, champion milkers with rosettes, our grandparents and me, samplers made for our birth (not one, but two) and Father and Mother’s wedding. The paintings include six watercolors of mushrooms, a genuine series.

  “What’s the idea?”

  “This way you’ll have something to look at,” I say.

  When they’re all hung, I look at the photos more closely. There is one of Mother in an armchair. She has seated herself like a real lady, hands clasped respectably in her lap and legs pressed modestly together and angled slightly - obliging her to turn her upper body a little. She’s looking at the photographer in a way that doesn’t suit her at all, with an expression that combines arrogance with a hint of seductiveness, an impression reinforced by her angled legs. I take the photo down from the wall and lay it in the empty potato crate, together with the nails and the hammer.

  “Leave her here,” Father says.

  “No,” I say. “I’m taking her back downstairs.”

  “Have we got any mandarins?”

  “Would you like some mandarins?”

  “Yes.”

  I fold out the stand on the back of the frame and put Mother on the mantelpiece. Then I get two mandarins from the scullery and take them upstairs. I put them on the bedside cabinet and walk over to the window. The hooded crow is still in the ash: from here I’m looking straight out at it.

  “Does that hooded crow look at you?” I ask.

  “No,” says Father. “It looks down a bit more.”

  Suddenly I remember what I had forgotten. I go downstairs and into the kitchen. In the corner next to the bureau is Father’s shotgun. I pick it up, wondering whether it’s loaded. I don’t check it. It feels odd to be holding it. In the old days we weren’t allowed to touch it, later I didn’t want to. I take the gun upstairs and lean it against the side of the grandfather clock. Father has fallen asleep. He is lying on his back, his head has drooped to one side, a thread of dribble is trailing onto the pillow.

  6

  Mother was an outrageously ugly woman. Someone who hadn’t known her would probably consider the photo on the mantelpiece laughable: bony, pop-eyed farmer’s wife with thrice-yearly hairdo does her best to assume a dignified pose. I don’t laugh at the photo. She’s my mother. But sometimes I have wondered why Father - who, when awake, no doubt lies there staring at the handsome figure he cut in those ancient photos
- ever married her. Or rather, now that I’ve been looking at her photo for a while and thinking about the man upstairs, I wonder why she married him.

  There isn’t much else left on the mantelpiece, which is black marble. A bronze candlestick holding a white candle, and an old pencil box with a picture of a belted cow on it. All the other knickknacks are in a box in Henk’s bedroom, along with other superfluous stuff. Henk’s room has become a storeroom. His bed, which has never served as a visitor’s bed, is hemmed in by all kinds of things he also saw and knew. His bedroom has become one big gathering point for the past, and the living museum piece in the adjacent bedroom just keeps on breathing. Breathing and talking. Even now, here, I can hear him muttering. Is he talking to the hooded crow? To the photos, or the six watercolor mushrooms?

  Henk and I were born in 1947; I’m a few minutes older. At first they thought we wouldn’t live to see the next day (May 24th), but Mother never doubted us. “Women are made for twins,” is what she supposedly said after putting us on the breast for the first time. I don’t believe it: statements like that always emerge from a mass of events and comments finally to remain as sole survivor. Plenty of other things must have been said at the time and this was most likely a variation on something Father or the doctor said. Mother probably didn’t say much at all.

  I have a memory I can’t have. I see her face from below, above a bright, soft swelling. I’m looking at her chin and, especially, at her slightly bulging eyes, which are directed not at me but at a point in the distance, nowhere in particular: the fields, maybe the dyke. It is summer and my feet feel other feet. Mother was a taciturn woman but she noticed everything. Father was the talker and he hardly noticed anything. He always just yelled his way through.

  Someone taps on the window. Teun and Ronald are standing in the front garden, shouting and gesticulating. I walk to the front door.

  “Helmer! The donkeys are loose!” Ronald says, in a tone that tells me he wishes the donkeys got loose every day.

  “They’re still in the yard,” Teun says, in a tone that tells me that he too has heard what his little brother really wants.

  They run ahead of me around the corner of the house. “Take it easy!” I call.

  The donkeys are between the trees, about five yards in front of the partly open gate. The rope that usually keeps the gate shut is dangling from the concrete post. I realize what has happened.

  “Well,” I say. “You’d better get them back in the paddock.”

  “Who?” asks Ronald.

  “Who do you think? You two.”

  “Why us?”

  “Because.”

  Now that the donkeys have broken out, Teun and Ronald are scared of them. It’s like faucets: when you’re little they’re great things until you turn one on and have no idea how to shut it off again and panic about all the water that comes gushing out.

  “Because?” says Teun. “What’s that mean?”

  “It means,” I say, “that I know that you opened the gate because you were too lazy to climb over it, and that Ronald followed you, and that he opened the gate a little bit more.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Ronald.

  Teun shoots him an angry glance.

  “Go on,” I say. “Push.”

  “Push? The gate?”

  “No, push the donkeys.” I stroll over to the gate, lift it and walk it around until it’s wide open. The boys don’t move and look at me disbelievingly and a little scared.

  In the winter the donkeys often spend long periods in the donkey shed next to the chicken coop. Donkeys absolutely hate having wet feet. In the shed it’s dry and there’s a layer of straw on the ground. The shed is sixteen feet wide and twenty feet deep. It is open at the front, with an overhanging roof. The donkeys have a sixteen-by-fourteen stall and in the six feet that are left, at the front, there are hay bales and a bag of oats. I generally keep some sugar beets and winter carrots in a box. On a shelf I have a large knife, a currycomb, a brush, a coarse rasp, a hoof pick and a scraper. When the donkeys are inside, Teun and Ronald don’t let a day go by without visiting the shed. They sit on the hay bales or on the scattered straw in the stall. They like it most when it’s getting darker outside and I’ve turned on the light. Once I found them lying flat on their backs under the donkeys. I asked them why they were doing that. “We want to conquer our fear,” said Teun, who was about six at the time. Ronald sneezed because the donkey’s long winter coat was hanging in his face. Now the donkeys are out they are afraid.

  “How?” Ronald asks.

  “Nothing special. Just go and stand behind them and give them a push.”

  “No way,” says Teun.

  “They won’t do anything,” I say.

  “You sure?” asks Ronald.

  “I’m sure.”

  They both go around behind a donkey and Ronald immediately starts pushing with all his might. Teun carefully taps his donkey’s backside to make sure it won’t kick. I’m curious to see what happens.

  Nothing happens. I walk to the barn.

  “Where are you going?” asks Teun.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say.

  In the barn I scoop a few handfuls of feed into a bucket and peek around the corner at the boys to check on things before going back. Nothing has changed. When I see Teun looking around anxiously, I stroll up to them. “Not working?” I ask.

  “No,” Ronald says. “Stupid animals.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Well . . .” he says.

  “They won’t budge,” says Teun.

  I walk into the paddock and shake the bucket. Ronald falls over, that’s how fast the donkey he was pushing rushes over to me. I empty the bucket and close the gate. Afterwards the three of us spend a while leaning over the gate watching the donkeys eat the feed. I’m standing on the ground, Teun’s on the bottom bar and Ronald is on the second-to-bottom bar.

  “You won’t do it again, will you?” I say.

  “No,” they both say at once.

  They jump down and walk into the yard. When they’re almost at the causeway, Teun turns around. “Where’s your father?” he shouts.

  “Inside,” I say.

  He doesn’t need to know any more. They cross the causeway and turn right.

  I stay behind with the donkeys. They don’t have names. When I bought them, years ago, I couldn’t think of any names and after a while it was too late, they had already become “the donkeys.” Father asked me if I’d gone mad. “Donkeys?” he said. “What do we want with bloody donkeys? They’ll cost us a fortune.” I told him they weren’t our donkeys, but my donkeys. The livestock dealer was more than happy to arrange it - something different for a change. The donkeys are mixed breed, they’re not French, Irish, Italian or Spanish purebreds. They are very dark gray and one has a light-gray muzzle. I click my tongue at them and whisper, “Where’s your father?” They come up to me and nudge me on the head with their different colored muzzles.

  The cows are restless, two of them kicked out when I went to attach the teat cups. Until recently I was sure it was because they weren’t getting out any more, but now I’ve begun to suspect that it’s me who’s restless. In that regard cows can be just like dogs - dogs are supposed to be able to sense their master’s state of mind as well. I don’t have a dog. We’ve never had dogs here.

  Father hasn’t eaten the mandarins. I don’t want to know. I carried him upstairs and now he can go and perch on the roof as far as I’m concerned, and then, from there, he can carry on to the tops of the poplars that line the yard so that he can blow away on a gust of wind, into the sky. That would be best, if he just disappeared.

  “I can’t get the peel off,” he says.

  I try not to look at the mandarins on the bedside cabinet or the crooked fingers on the blanket. It really is starting to stink in here, despite my always keeping the window ajar. If he won’t disappear, I’ll have to wash him. Before drawing the curtains, I cup my hands against the windowpane to block out the light
from the lamp. With my face pressed against my hands I peer out at the ash in the front garden. The hooded crow has gone. Or is it so dark that it blends in with the branches and the night sky?

  Then I see someone walking. There are lampposts along the road, one for each house or farm. That makes a total of seven lampposts. There has been something wrong with my lamppost for a few weeks now. It glows, but that’s all; even if you stood right under it, the light wouldn’t reach you. The venetian blinds in the living room are closed. It is so dark outside that I can only see that someone is walking and, now, that they have stopped in front of the farm. A dark patch, barely visible against the canal in the background. I can’t even see which direction the patch is looking in.

  “What is it?” asks Father.

  “Someone on the road,” I whisper.

  “Who?”

  “I can’t see properly.” Then the patch moves and suddenly acquires a bicycle’s red back light. I follow the back light until it disappears past the window frame. I jerk the curtains shut. My heart is beating in my throat. “All right then,” I say, picking the mandarins up from the bedside cabinet. I peel them both, remove the bitter white threads and hand them to Father in segments. Soon the juice is running down his chin.

  “Delicious,” he says.

  7

  I’ve been scared all my life. Scared of silence and darkness. I’ve also had trouble falling asleep all my life. I only need to hear one sound I can’t place and I’m wide awake. Still, I’ve never really stopped to think about what happens outside at night. Of course, in the old days I used to see all kinds of things pass the window, even though I knew that the window was high above the gravel path. I saw shoulders: the tense, hunched shoulders of someone climbing up the front of the house. Like a panther, sometimes with one arm hooked over the window ledge. Then I’d listen to Henk breathing next to me, or later imagine him asleep in the bedroom next to mine, and the shoulders or whatever else I thought I had seen would disappear. In the back of my mind I knew that I saw things that couldn’t possibly be there.