15

On April 19th, 1967 I was halfway through the third term of the first year of my Dutch language and literature degree. I think I was the hardest working student in my year, not because of any ambition or drive of my own, but to show Father. I wasn’t eligible for a grant because he had too many assets. That was what it said in the rejection letter from the Ministry of Education and Science, Board of Study Grants, and he and I both knew what those assets were: land, buildings, cows and machines. “Am I supposed to sell cows to send you to university?” said Father, when I showed him the letter. He didn’t wait for an answer but crumpled the letter up without another word and, since there were no bins to hand, threw it in the kitchen sink. If he’d had a lighter or matches on him, he would have set fire to it. Henk was standing in the kitchen too and didn’t know how to look at me from under his dark eyebrows. Mother retrieved the letter from the sink and tried to smooth it out, then put it in the bin after all.

So I stayed at home, rode my bike to Amsterdam, attended lectures and did all kinds of jobs to pay the tuition fees. When I sat at the kitchen table in the morning bleary-eyed because I had come home late the previous evening after unloading a delivery truck at a large department store, Mother would sometimes ask me what I got up to in Amsterdam - Amsterdam, the city you were better off avoiding. She didn’t actually have a clue what to ask me, but at least she tried. Until that 19th of April, Father might have asked me three times how many big words I’d learned now, without waiting for an answer before resuming his conversation with Henk. Conversations about cows that had gone dry, yearlings that needed moving or other farmers in the neighborhood. Things that really meant something. To him and to Henk.

Henk was the farmer. Henk was Father’s son. What he was supposed to make of me or what I was supposed to make of myself were questions he could ignore.

And Henk had Riet. Until December 1965, when he met her in a pub in Monnickendam, Henk belonged to me and I belonged to Henk. I was in the same pub and that was a source of some confusion for Riet. It was Christmas Eve, the night out for people who didn’t attend Midnight Mass. Henk got talking to her and, as the evening progressed, they slid further away from the group that had started the evening together, the group of farm boys I was left with. Henk was facing away from me. I could tell from the back of his head that he was talking nineteen to the dozen, while now and then over his shoulder Riet glanced at me with a bewildered look in her eyes. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. He talked, I was silent, it was a typical Henk and Helmer evening, and not the other way round. We were eighteen and still looked as alike as two lambs, but then from different ewes, and after that Christmas Eve I was left behind, alone.

 

Riet got her driver’s license at the start of April. On April 19th she wanted to show Henk that, despite what he thought, despite what so many men thought, she hadn’t passed the test because of her smile. I’d had a philology lecture that afternoon and rode my bike home. It was blowing from the south-west, a tailwind, my coat wasn’t zipped up.

Mother was sitting in the kitchen, alone. “Henk’s dead,” she said.

 

At Murderer’s Breach, between Edam and Warder, Riet went off the road because a car coming from the other direction didn’t pull over. The car slid down the dyke, rolled and landed neatly, the right way up, in Lake IJssel. Henk was knocked out, the passenger door was twisted and the roof on his side was dented. Just there, the water was deeper than most places, perhaps because of the flood that once washed away this section of dyke, creating the lake called Murderer’s Breach on the inland side. Even with the help of the driver who hadn’t given way, Riet was unable to get him out of the car. The car, which wasn’t winched out of Lake IJssel until the next day, was Father’s dark-blue Simca.

 

As long as Henk was laid out in the living room, Riet spent every day at our house. She arrived early in the morning and went home late at night. We couldn’t leave the coffin open for long because Henk had drowned. The temperature had plummeted during the night of the nineteenth and we kept the two sash windows ajar. Mother and Riet sat in the kitchen doing nothing all day. Now and then someone would visit, grandparents mostly, three of whom were still alive in 1967. Father and I avoided each other and did our best to stay outside as much as possible. Being inside the house was unbearable. The two women sat silently in the kitchen, Henk was laid out in the cold living room, and at night I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid I would start to smell him. Two days after the accident I cycled to Amsterdam to attend a couple of lectures. On the way there I stood for a long time at the top of Schellingwoude Bridge, staring at the Orange Locks. I know with absolute certainty that I had a philology lecture on the nineteenth because when I came home Mother said that Henk was dead. The lectures I had before or after that date have completely faded from my memory. On the way back I stopped again for a long time at the top of Schellingwoude Bridge, now staring out over the Outer IJ, postponing the moment I would start pedaling again. That year the bridge was celebrating its tenth anniversary. I felt that I would be forgotten: Father and Mother were the parents, Riet was the almost-wife, I was just the brother.

Since that day almost every journey I make is north, I no longer go south of the village.

 

After the funeral Riet was still shivering, chilled to the bone by guilt and the icy water of Lake IJssel. Everyone else had left, the four of us were sitting in the kitchen: Riet in Henk’s place, with the light from the side window behind her. Father raised his empty coffee cup and jiggled the spoon back and forth, staring down at the tabletop. Mother got up and silently poured another cup. Henk could do that too, make his spoon jump in his cup, but he smiled at me while he was doing it and he thanked Mother after she’d filled his cup. I saw Riet looking at Father. He stirred the milk skin into his coffee. Then she looked at me. In her eyes I saw again the bewilderment with which she had looked at me the night she met Henk. I don’t remember talking to her. She did her talking with Mother. It was a week of silence.

 

She must have had a job, I don’t remember. Three days later she was still at our house, as if she didn’t know what to do next. She infected Mother with her mood. They’d walk around together, often to the Bosman windmill, as if they knew it was a place that meant a lot to Henk. She ate with us, and that was completely natural. At least for Mother and me. Not for Father. That evening, if I’m counting properly it must have been the 26th of April, he worked his way through his meal in silence. Just after shoving a forkful of potato into his mouth he spoke to Riet, it was virtually the only thing he said to her in that whole week of silence, “I want you to go away and never come back.”

She put down her knife and fork - she was the only one who ate with knife and fork - neatly alongside her half-empty plate, slid her chair back and stood up. “Fine,” she said calmly, as if she’d expected it, as if she’d been waiting for it. She walked to the hall, put on her coat and left through the front door. Mother started to cry. I got up and walked over to the front window. I saw her turning onto the road, on her bike. That’s how I remember Riet: her back bent (she had a headwind), her blonde hair fluttering, riding her bike down a narrow, empty road that got emptier and emptier towards the dyke. She disappeared, just like the red light had in November, behind the window frame.

Father had more to say, “And you’re done there in Amsterdam.”

I became Father’s boy. Mother didn’t stop crying.