Ledge

Yes, the red beech has had it. The tree is just short of a hundred. Probably planted in 1912, just after the farmhouse was built, in the middle of the newly sown lawn. Directly in front of the blind door and the balcony over it. Zeeger Kaan looks at the tree through a kitchen window that gets no sun, because of the three chestnuts he planted in his own lawn. One of which is already showing signs of that new disease, bleeding dark sap from little holes. What’s it all about? he wonders. All these diseases trees get? What purpose do they serve? Shall I ride or drive? Taking the bike is good for his knees, but the car’s better on a day like today, it’s got air conditioning.

While backing up the drive a little absent-mindedly – earlier that day he hadn’t seen a soul on the road – he has to suddenly brake hard for a car that’s going at least thirty kilometres an hour over the limit. Stunned, he follows the green blur with his eyes. What kind of idiot buys a car that colour? He himself drives calmly up the road in the settling dust. In the village he slows down even more. Here and there he raises an index finger to people painting their eaves or letting out the dog, the odd cyclist. It’s only when parking the car next to the Polder House that he starts to notice the air conditioning. Stupid, he thinks, painting eaves in weather like this. They’ll have blisters in the fresh paint by evening.

‘Hey, Grandpa!’

‘Hi, Diek,’ he calls.

‘We’re over here!’

‘I see you.’ Dieke is standing on the path at the entrance to the new part of the cemetery. Every time he comes here it seems smaller and more cramped. Jan is sitting in front of the headstone. He’s finished Our little and is already working on the s of sweetheart. ‘It’s coming along.’

‘Yep,’ says his son.

‘Hungry?’

‘Nah.’

‘Dieke! You hungry?’

‘Yes,’ Dieke shouts. ‘Grandpa,’ she then adds, as if she hasn’t said hello to him yet, ‘come and have a look here.’

He walks away from his son. Dieke shouldn’t stay out in the sun much longer, her arms are already turning red. She points. Three large herring gulls are standing in a circle and stamping on the dry grass, staring down at their feet. They want worms, but on a day like today they’ll be waiting a long time. Even the red dots on their yellow beaks – here it is, come and get it – won’t lure any worms up. ‘Gulls on land, storm on strand,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘It’s a saying.’ He looks to the west. The hazy air is advancing, the sun no longer quite as bright.

Dieke whispers something.

‘What’d you say, Diek?’

‘I’d like to go home after all.’

‘Then you can come with me in a minute, OK?’

‘OK.’ They walk back together, holding hands. When they reach Jan, Dieke lets go of his hand and carries on to the bench under the linden. She picks up her cup and starts to drink. ‘Phew,’ she says, screwing the lid back on the cup.

‘That cuttlebone . . .’ Jan says.

‘What about it?’

‘What’s it for?’

‘To get it nice and clean.’

‘It’s useless. The stone’s way too rough.’

‘OK, we know that for next time then.’

Jan pulls the brush back out of the w and looks at him. After a while he says, ‘Yep.’

It’s not always easy, watching your children. They resemble you so much. Sometimes they come so close it’s frightening. Jan especially can get a look in his eye that makes Zeeger Kaan feel quite uncomfortable.

‘There’s an auntie of mine over there,’ Dieke yells from her bench. ‘Under the ground.’

Sometimes their faces merge and he’ll suddenly see Jan in Klaas, or Klaas in Jan, and have to close his eyes to get it right again. At other times he’ll see himself, and that gets stronger as they grow older: bags under their eyes, lines at the sides of their mouths, creases in their foreheads. Not with Johan of course, he’s the exception to every rule. Since the accident he’s developed into the best-looking Kaan by far.

‘Is “Piccaninny black as black” a boy or a girl?’

He looks away, opens his mouth to answer his son, then closes it again and hums until he gets up to ‘so she put up her umbrella’. ‘She,’ he says. ‘She’s a girl.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yep.’

‘Hey!’ Dieke yells. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Sure. Is it warm enough for you?’

‘Warm’s not the right word,’ Jan says.

‘I think it’ll be better tomorrow.’

‘I won’t be here tomorrow.’

‘We’re going fishing tonight!’ Dieke calls.

‘You don’t even have a rod,’ says Zeeger Kaan.

‘You do!’

‘Careful, that “e” isn’t going right.’

Jan stands up to hand him the brush.

‘No.’

‘Yes. Go ahead.’

‘Don’t start.’

‘Maybe you can do it better yourself.’

‘No.’ He pushes his son’s hand away.

‘What are you doing?’ Dieke calls.

‘My knees hurt.’

Jan lowers himself back down until he’s sitting on the gravel with his legs either side of the raised edges. ‘You asked me to do it. If you go on at me like that, I’ll just stop.’

‘OK,’ says Zeeger Kaan. It’s true, he thinks. I did ask him. He’s the best painter, he does the maintenance on all those holiday homes over on Texel, and he always used to criticise me when I was painting. And rightly so, I loathed all that scraping and sanding. But I never painted full in the sun.

Zeeger Kaan goes for a wander around the ever-shrinking cemetery. He runs a hand over his short hair, he rubs a knee.

‘You going already?’ Dieke screams.

‘No,’ he calls back. ‘Just a little longer.’

‘Don’t forget me, OK?’

Children’s graves are marked with stuffed animals that were once rain-soaked and swollen and are now dry, lumpy and flocky. He looks at the names and years on the headstones. Three mayors buried in a row. All three of them alone, without wives. One of them was mayor when the old Queen came to visit. Knowing him, he probably said something grovelling like, ‘This way if you please, Your Majesty. Lunch will be served here inside,’ before they disappeared into the Polder House. A bunch of daffodils at the foot of the monument to the English airmen is completely withered, just this side of crumbling to dust. He walks on into the older section, behind the Polder House.

‘Are you going?’

‘I’ll be back in a minute, Diek!’

‘Are you in such a hurry to go?’ he hears his son ask.

‘Not really,’ Dieke says.

He stops at his parents’ grave: Jan Kaan and Neeltje Kaan-Helder. A grave that’s much newer than the one Jan’s working on. A grave whose lease, as he now remembers, needs renewing for another ten years sometime soon. Lying next to them are his grandmother and grandfather: Zeeger Kaan and Griet Kaan-van Zandwijk. Always strange to see your own name on a headstone. He never knew his grandfather, who died young. But his grandmother didn’t die until she was ninety-five, on a stormy night in November. Dozens of roof tiles in the yard, fallen trees, no electricity, a big crack in one of the front windows. And early in the morning, a dead grandmother in the three-quarter bed. He stood there, studying her face for a long time, making out what he took for a last trace of resistance. Anna stood next to him, squeezing his hand so hard she was almost crushing it, and he wanted to look at her and smile, but couldn’t tear his eyes away from the dead woman. In the days that followed, his father and mother had a massive clear-out, with virtually everything going onto a huge pile behind the farmhouse that they weren’t able to light for two or three days because of the constant easterly. The old kapok mattress smoked and fizzed for a long time before it finally caught fire, the sansevierias exploded damply.

He walks on quickly to the gravediggers’ shed, where he turns on the tap, cups his hands and splashes water on his face. Then he sees his father, who after clearing the broken tiles from the yard, went directly to his mother’s cabinet and took out his medal. A gold medal, won with the sleigh on Kolhorn harbour one freezing winter. His father was very good with horses. Rubbing the medal on his chest, puffing on it and cleaning it again, while behind him his mother lay dead in her three-quarter bed. The farm was finally his.

He looks in through the window. A shrivelled magpie is hanging on a string. There is a heavy mallet. An old-fashioned bier. Spades and shovels, posts. It must be suffocating in there.

Going back to get Dieke, he realises that there is a whole village under his feet. No, several villages. And still, the older he gets, the smaller and more cramped this place becomes. Will there be space for me? he wonders. Nellie, that was the name of the horse his father won the medal with. Bloody hell, that just popped up out of nowhere.

‘We’re off.’

‘Yes!’ says Dieke. She jumps down onto the ground, grabs her rucksack and heads straight for the gate.

‘We have to say goodbye to Jan first.’

‘Oh, yeah.’

Jan is up to the second e. Zeeger notices how muscular his back is: although he’s bending forward, his backbone is still in a furrow, not sticking out at all. ‘You should take that T-shirt off your head and just put it on.’ A muscular back and thinning hair.

‘Do you know what I thought of this morning, riding past the Polder House?’

‘What?’

‘Uncle Piet, and how he stood on that black ledge.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘At the funeral. He stood on that black ledge without holding on to anything.’

‘Ah, son, come on. That’s not even possible.’

‘Are we going now?’ Dieke asks.

‘It’s still true.’ He’s talking without looking up. He dips the brush into the paint again and puts the tip in the t.

Zeeger Kaan sighs. What an imagination. He takes Dieke’s hand. ‘Come on.’

When they’re seven or eight graves away, Jan calls out to him. ‘Did Mum say anything?’

‘No,’ he lies.

‘Did you try to get her down?’

‘No.’

Dieke tugs on his hand. ‘Grandpa . . .’

‘When did she actually go up there?’

‘Just before I left to pick you up from the train yesterday, Johan rang. He wanted to speak to her. When we got home, she was up on the straw.’

‘And now?’

‘Grandpa!’

‘Yes, Diek. Nothing.’

They walk on. It’s very quiet. Without speaking, Dieke points out two small birds perched on a low branch of the linden. Blue tits, their beaks wide open. The shells crunch underfoot. He looks at Anna’s bike, which Jan has leant against a chestnut tree. There’s the black-painted ledge that runs all around the base of the Polder House. Seven centimetres wide at most. Black varnish, that’s what it’s painted with. Just to be sure, he inspects the wall, which is painted off-white. Maybe there’s a ring somewhere his brother-in-law could have held on to. Nothing. Dieke has walked ahead to the car. He opens the door and she jumps onto the seat. ‘Oof!’ she says.

‘Wait a sec,’ he tells her. ‘I just have to . . .’

‘It’s boiling in here.’

‘Leave the door open. I won’t be long.’

He walks around the car and opens the door on the driver’s side as well, turns the key in the ignition and switches the radio on. He stops to listen for a moment. A reporter from Radio North-Holland has gone to the seaside: ‘It’s chock-a-block down here, the beach restaurants are doing a roaring trade and that’s a real turnaround from last year when the summer was a complete washout. I’m now walking down the ramp . . .’

‘Boring,’ says Dieke.

‘There’ll be music in a minute.’

He walks back to the black ledge, but changes his mind and carries on. Past his wife’s bike, now in the shade of the chestnuts and the gate, which he fortunately didn’t close behind him, so he can go back into the cemetery without making a sound.

He can’t see anything. His son is hidden behind the headstones. Maybe working on the h, or even the third e. The herring gulls, which he had forgotten, laugh as they take wing. Jan sits up a little to look at the birds as they glide over his head and disappear behind the hedge, tumbling over each other as they fly west. To the beach. Then the cemetery seems deserted again. He turns and walks over to the black ledge, stands with his back against the wall and steps up with one heel on the ledge. When he tries to put his other foot up there too, he immediately loses his balance. He tries it again, this time with the other foot first, and again fails. ‘Strange boy,’ he mumbles.

‘Grandpa!’