Straw

Anna Kaan and Rekel stare at each other. Anna looking down, Rekel looking up. They’ve been at it for quite a while. Anna is lying on her stomach with her head sticking out over the side of the straw; Rekel is sitting motionless on the hard concrete. Every now and then she says, ‘Come on, boy,’ and Rekel slaps the concrete with his tail without moving from the spot. Dogs aren’t as thick as you’d think, she thinks. By the looks of him he’s just been for a swim in the ditch. The Barbary duck waddles in through the big barn doors. Anna sees it out of the corner of her eye. There used to be more of those ducks, but there’s only one left. A big drake. Now it’s going to get interesting. She keeps her eyes fixed on the dog and can tell from his eyebrows that he’s wavering. When Dirk starts snorting too, Rekel gives in, stands up and barks once at the duck, which is gone again through the doors in a flash. Dirk falls silent. The equilibrium in the barn has been restored but when the dog sits down again Anna Kaan has already disappeared.

She crawls back to the spot she squashed down flat, where the straw isn’t as hard, and grabs the bottle of advocaat. It must be afternoon by now. Straight out of the bottle? That’s the problem with advocaat: it’s thick, you can’t really drink it. When she grabbed a few things yesterday – just after Johan rang – she didn’t think of taking a spoon, let alone a glass. The viscous substance slides into her mouth – too thick to drink, not thick enough to eat. She feels a tremendous craving for metworst, the dry sausage she used to buy in the old days when they still had a real butcher in the village. She would get it on Saturdays, or send Klaas or Jan to get some. She squishes the advocaat up against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. The old days.

She screws the cap back on the bottle and stands it up next to the water bottle, the open packet of Viennese biscuits and the parade sword. Swallows flying in and out. Rekel, slowly starting to whimper. What is it with dogs? Do they sense your hostility? Do they like getting kicked? If she’d had her way, they would never have had another dog after Tinus. The last bit of advocaat is stuck at the back of her throat. She hawks it up and spits it out straight ahead. It disappears below the edge of the straw. That’s for Rekel.

She lies down again and imagines herself sitting up nice and straight at a birthday party, surrounded by a gaggle of neighbours. That makes her laugh, coming immediately after letting fly with such a heartfelt gob. She has another shameless scratch. Is that it? she wonders. Is that why she’s up on the straw? Married fifty years, when did that happen? She holds both hands up in the air with the backs turned towards her. It’s too dark in here: she can’t see the veins, liver spots and loose skin.

The old days. Orchards with quinces and Notaris apples, test fields with linseed or buckwheat. Down the road there’s a farm, now renovated, made spacious and bright, where they once took photos of prize bulls and 100,000-litre cows, where the farmer had sons who spent their weekdays at agricultural college in Wageningen but were still happy to turn their back on the city and return to the country after years of study, where the magnolias in the garden weren’t shrubs but trees, and where they had books with fancy blue-linen dust jackets that stated this polder measures 1,800 morgens and 580 rods inside dyke length. And on this farm, girls also preserved everything there was to preserve and lined the jars up on wooden shelves in the cool cellar. Here, her mother-in-law had the farmhands and their wives over for coffee in their Sunday best once a year, presenting them with homemade biscuits on the fancy tray. All long before bakers bought new Volkswagen vans, friends had their bathrooms renovated and Beentjes Bros. of Assen began installing one Mueller bulk tank after another. Saturday. Brown beans or marrowfat peas. Klaas or Jan off to the grocer’s for a jar of apple sauce. Washing the car, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn.

She groans. Where in her head had those precise numbers been hiding? ‘Klaas!’ she shouts. Breaking her silence wasn’t the idea. Dirk answers her call. The useless lump of meat. No, she’ll never celebrate anything again.

Two or three weeks ago they had all driven in a minibus to a zoo in the east of the country. After a considerable delay, because Jan had to come from Texel and Johan forgot. As soon as they arrived, the misery began. The driver said there were two locations, the old zoo and the new park. Half the minibus wanted to go to the old location, the other half preferred the new one. ‘We’re going to the butterfly garden!’ Zeeger shouted, and because he was the loudest, the old zoo won. No sooner were they were inside than it turned out the two locations were connected anyway, so the driver had caused all that discord needlessly. Johan got lost almost immediately, and when Anna’s brother, Piet, went off to look for him, he got lost too. Jan walked around with his shoulders hunched and a scowl on his face. Klaas’s wife didn’t look friendly either and Zeeger got into an argument with his sister – in the hot, humid butterfly garden of all places. Since Johan had the shopping trolley full of food and drink with him, and the drive had taken more than two hours, everyone got hungry and thirsty but Zeeger refused to buy anything. After an hour and a half, Dieke and Klaas found Johan with a squirrel monkey on his head that had been there, according to Johan, ‘f-or at l-east an hour’ and was holding on tight to his ears with its little hands. That was why he’d just stayed sitting where he was. Then it took a while to get everyone gathered around the shopping trolley with the food and drink and, for the quarter of an hour that followed, the Kaans themselves were an attraction for the other zoo visitors. Anna Kaan had tried to keep her spirits up, but when, separated from the group, she arrived at the baboon rock, it was too much for her. Everything was so far from how she’d imagined this day that her legs went weak and she had to sit down on the massive stone wall that surrounded the enclosure.

Never again, she thinks, I’ll never celebrate anything again. We’re incapable. She stares straight up at the sky through the hole in the roof. She can’t tell if it’s blue or not, just like you can’t tell from a paint swatch what the colour will be like on a whole wall. She sits up and reaches for the water bottle. After drinking a few mouthfuls, she eats three biscuits and lies down again. Next time I’ll bring some pillows, she thinks.

Zeeger had booked a table at a restaurant, not in the city with the zoo but in a village close to home on Lake Amstel. During the drive back, Klaas, Jan and Johan ate everything there was to eat – crisps, Mars minis, almond cakes – and then nodded off deliberately in protest at the lack of beer. Anna’s brother Piet and his wife, and Zeeger’s sister and her husband, stared out at the landscape for two hours, while the driver whistled along softly but badly to the radio, which was turned up fairly loud. First they had to take photos on the dyke behind the restaurant. When Anna picked up the prints she could hardly bear to look at all those aggrieved, dissatisfied faces. The photos are still in the envelope. The meal itself, served at six o’clock sharp, was a disaster. Weekend staff brought it out to the table and Zeeger and Klaas’s wife insisted there was a stand-in chef in the kitchen too. Everything had been ordered and arranged in advance, and of course the menu didn’t satisfy anyone. Plates were pushed back and forth across the table and it wasn’t long before chips were flying through the air. Jan kept ordering more drinks at the top of his voice, although that too had been arranged beforehand. Johan matched Jan glass for glass, even though he can’t hold his drink at all, and Klaas and his wife lit up while others were still eating and that annoyed Jan even more, which got Klaas’s back up so much he started chain-smoking just to be difficult. Zeeger spent ten minutes shut in the toilet because the lock was broken, and nobody even noticed until Dieke had to go too and couldn’t get in. Anna began getting visions of a daughter who squatted down next to her chair to ask softly if she was enjoying herself, before handing out sheets of paper with a song she’d written for the occasion, a song to be sung ‘to the tune of’, the same daughter who had earlier exclaimed cheerfully how lovely it was to finally see baboons in real life.

Then someone started off about the grave. She’s not sure who – probably Zeeger, he’s the one who extends the leases on the plots every ten years. Jan picked up on it and said he’d do the painting. In a moment of quiet she said, ‘No question of it,’ which nobody reacted to, except perhaps Johan who said that he wanted ‘to d-o some thing too’. After she had again categorically stated that she wasn’t having it and, without pausing to take a breath, finally told Zeeger that as far as she was concerned they didn’t need to extend the lease again either, even Klaas and his wife butted in. Zeeger was making trouble on purpose, everyone was winding everyone else up, for a moment they stopped drinking and throwing chips around. She felt alone, as if everyone had been waiting for that opportunity to join forces and turn on her.

And then Dieke, sulking over a pudding she hadn’t ordered. It was unbearable. Anna Kaan had grabbed her tightly by her upper arm, perhaps a little too tightly, and said, ‘Eat it!’ Klaas and his wife were sitting further up the table, puffing away as if their lives depended on it. ‘This isn’t what I wanted,’ Dieke sobbed. Anna squeezed her arm even harder. ‘Eat it, you ungrateful little brat!’

She grabs the advocaat and forces down a few globs, which isn’t easy, as she already has a lump in her throat from that last image. And what were they doing, celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in June when they got married in April?

‘I have to catch the last ferry,’ Jan had said. Although they’d already made up a bed for him and left the window of the spare room ajar. They finished up quickly. Her brother Piet, who lives in Den Helder, gave Jan a lift to the ferry. Everyone left in their own vehicles. Anna and Zeeger didn’t say a word during the drive home from the restaurant, almost fifteen minutes. She sat there wondering what had been the most painful thing to have happened that day. As they were getting into bed, Zeeger said, ‘So, the day went quite well, I think.’

And maybe that was it: the most painful thing.

She screws the cap back on the bottle and checks how much is left. About half. She lays the bottle down next to her and crawls over to the edge of the straw. Something beneath her is shaking. Shaking worse than it should from just her crawling. When she reaches the edge and looks down, the concrete floor is completely empty. No dog, no Barbary duck, no Zeeger. Even Dirk is keeping quiet. Please don’t let me start thinking about earlier celebrations, she thinks. Lying back down in her old spot, she realises that her feet are cold.