Straw

She really cannot remember why she was running so late. It doesn’t matter. Jan and Johan had already left for school, and would go to the Polder House from there. Klaas was already gone too. She’d been left behind with Hanne. Zeeger was working. Was that the day Hanne put her little hand in the empty apple-sauce tin with the razor-sharp lid still attached? When she’d had to hunt for iodine and plasters and scissors? When she’d had to comfort her? No, that was earlier. Why was I so late? But if I’d been on time, the Queen wouldn’t have touched Hanne or spoken to me.

It’s getting more and more difficult to think straight. The creaking and groaning, the sliding in the silo, the marching borers and woodworms, and the restless crashing of that superfluous lump of meat make it almost impossible. And the cold. She can’t understand where that’s coming from, she doesn’t have the impression the weather’s suddenly turned. If she’d known, thinks Anna Kaan. If she’d known that the child whose cheek she’d stroked after lunch would be dead that afternoon. But she was already in Anna Paulowna by then, and the next day she was on Texel. Noises make their way in from outside, where they are now fishing. She’s lying on her back with her arms by her sides, the straw has moulded itself completely to her body, not a single snapped stalk is poking her in the back. I want to go to the beach tomorrow, she thinks. Go to the beach again after all this time, and Zeeger’s coming with me, whether he wants to or not. Maybe Rie and Jenneke will be there too. Zeeger in the blue swimming trunks that are so old they’re almost disintegrating. Floating in the sea on my back with my toes sticking up out of the water. Just like I’m lying here now, but flapping my hands. I’ll try to lure Rekel into the water. It’s strange, Rekel doesn’t like salt water. I want to clean the old toilet bowl in the cowshed too, she thinks, and tear off the old calendar pages while I’m at it, so it’s today there too. ‘Rekel, here, boy!’ she hears Zeeger call. But Rekel won’t come. Besides disliking salt water he also hates fishing.

Only the empty biscuit packet is lying next to her now. And the ladder, of course. I can go down now, she thinks. Without a word – or maybe just a ‘See?’ to Johan and a quick dirty look at Jan – then cross the bridge and make some coffee. Slice some gingerbread cake. Coffee and gingerbread cake to round off the fishing. Then everyone can go home. Turn on the telly. Feed Rekel, hoping that Zeeger won’t ask or say too much.

When she tries to sit up, she can’t manage it. The cold has crept up through her arms and legs, numbing her limbs. She no longer feels like steak, cold water or crispy-fresh French beans. ‘N-o!’ she hears Johan shout. No? No, what? Then she doesn’t seem to hear anything at all for a while, until Rekel suddenly starts barking. I was too late, my bike fell down. Back home, I carried a basket full of washing out into the yard from the milking parlour. Clothes and sheets, washed in the Miele. It was quiet on the other side of the ditch: the labourer, his wife and two children were on holiday. I hung up Zeeger’s underpants with the pegs and thought, he buys a new radio and a new camera, he gets a new bulk tank and a new pipeline installed, but new underpants never occur to him. He was hammering away upstairs. Jan and Johan were at the swimming pool. Klaas might have been at home. Hanne was playing in the living room. I called out to her when I went into the kitchen. ‘Ah,’ I heard from the living room, so I went to check on her after all. She was kneeling down at the glass-topped table, scribbling on the back of a piece of wallpaper with two felt tips at once. She’d already forgotten about the Queen, she didn’t even know who the Queen was. Tinus was lying next to her, all four legs stretched out. I almost said, ‘Don’t lean too hard,’ because we’d already replaced the glass four times. A big mistake, that table – how are kids supposed to know how fragile a sheet of glass is? I walked back to the kitchen, got a mixing bowl out of a cupboard, shook a packet of flour into it, poured in some milk, broke a few eggs into the mix and added a couple of pinches of salt. A Saturday dinner. Because it felt like a Saturday.

The packet of butter on the sink, the frying pan on the stove, all much too early, but I couldn’t sit still. The Queen spoke to me, I thought, covering the pancake batter with a tea towel. I wanted to keep it to myself. For me and Hanne. I thought I’d seen the baker scuttling around. With a camera? It was high time he came, we were almost out of bread. An hour later, or two, he finally showed up. And left again, and how on earth did Hanne and Tinus get out? I heard it. I heard a car, a bang and then the brakes. I had to go out to see what it was. Zeeger was busy hammering and sawing, he didn’t hear a thing. The baker. Everywhere that whole day long, the baker. I’d planned to tell them about the Queen later, maybe that evening over the pancakes. But then it was already too late.

The creaking and groaning has grown duller, the cobwebs woollier, Dirk’s thudding muffled. It’s inside of me after all, she thinks, that creaking and groaning. I’ll . . . Shall I call out? She tries to open her mouth but her lips feel stiff. She wants to run her fingers over her mouth to rub them and manages to lift one arm. The elbow bends, the hand flops down onto her stomach. She’s able to stroke herself lightly with her fingers; scratching is beyond her, let alone lifting her arm up again. The rectangle – the hole directly overhead with however many tiles to the right of it and a few more to the left, she counted them not long ago – no longer gives her a view of the outside world. Yellow, she thinks. Rain, after all? A real drop, after all?

Someone comes into the barn, she hears them despite the muffling of her ears. ‘Mum?’ she hears, even though she needs to summon all her strength to make out the word. Jan. No, wait, she thinks as the cold reaches her shoulders and pelvis, there’s something I have to tell him. I don’t want to let him go like this. She pricks up her ears, ignoring all the other noises. ‘I’m off.’ He leaves. Then all of the dead appear. Griet Kaan first, in her three-quarter bed, the fire cold, the paraffin lamp empty, the Frisian clock that won’t stop ticking, Zeeger who’s ignoring her; her parents and parents-in-law, she sees their eyes, sees them walking and riding their bicycles, eating cake on birthdays, hospital beds, flowers; she sees time too, racing by, the unbearable duration of a human life, but also the little things, seemingly insignificant, and through it all everyone’s eyes; then someone must have turned on the radio because she hears ‘Oh Happy Day’ and instead of Hanne, who should appear too, Anna Kaan sees the hanging, the enormous wall hanging her mother-in-law made – it hung in the children’s room for years, with palm trees made of green felt, cooking pots, Piccaninnies with real rings in their ears – and, although the cold has now reached her midriff, her lethargic brain starts wondering where on earth that hanging’s got to; the old Queen’s empty study, her legs suddenly buckling when the tour guide said ‘Juliana lay in state here’; and now she adds something to those images she saw earlier of girls making preserves and the boys from nearby farms: all dead – grandparents, parents, girls, farmhands – now she feels that this barn, this place once smelled of fresh wood, of resin, that countless people who can no longer walk have walked here, and that she is a part of that countlessness; and then back to the borers and the woodworms, seething and teeming without a sound. It gets quiet, very quiet, no dog, no Barbary duck, no husband and no children, beyond the dead, the light coming in through the three round windows at the front of the barn, very vague thoughts like Did I really just knock back a whole bottle of advocaat? and Gravel? You buy that at a garden centre, where else?; the rectangle in the tile roof – she can no longer move her head – changes from yellow to white, the cold that has crept from her toes and fingertips into her core seems to be trying to get out again through her nose, slowly, more and more slowly, and changes from cold to smell, as if that’s ultimately the most important thing, overshadowing everything else, and now it turns sweet.

As sweet as autumn.

Stewed pears.

Is that it?

The smell of stewed pears, in June?