The Twin

Riet is sitting at the kitchen table, in Henk’s old spot. I can’t tell from her face whether she has sat there deliberately. She is staring at a photo on the front page of the newspaper of a group of Koniks standing on a strip of land surrounded by the waters of the Waal. Here it’s freezing, across the borders it’s raining, and washlands and banks everywhere are underwater.

The sun is shining: low and cold, but a warm yellow. I have never been to Austria or Switzerland, but this is how I imagine the sun on ski slopes. The coffee machine is in full sunlight and I see that it needs a wipe with a damp cloth. I take my time, with my back to Riet I don’t have to worry about the expression on my face. From the corner of my eye I see something pass the front window.

I turn around. It’s back in the ash, perched on its old branch and rearranging its feathers. I see the knuckles of my hand, wrapped around the handle of the coffee pot, turn white. This is the moment for noise from upstairs. It stays quiet.

“Have you seen hooded crows before?” I ask, making more noise than necessary as I slide the coffee pot in under the filter.

“I don’t know what it is like, only what it was like. It must be eight years since we last went. The girls weren’t with us, they’d been going on holidays alone for years. It was just the three of us.”

“They still have them there, but concrete. They’re a bit behind.” She keeps on staring out, without seeing anything. The water sputters in the coffee machine. “We were there in August, in the car. The farmers had set fire to piles of straw and there were swallows on the electricity wires.”

“I don’t know about any of that. I thought those swallows were so beautiful. The electricity cables hung really low.” She starts crying quietly.

“Relax. First some coffee.” I stand up and get the best cups from the kitchen cupboard. Not the mugs, the best cups, that’s what Mother would have done. Earlier this morning I put the matching milk jug and sugar pot on the table. I pour coffee into the cups and lay a silver spoon on each saucer. I arrange some biscuits on a plate. I put the coffee and the biscuits on the table. If it wasn’t freezing outside, I would slide the window open. Specks of dust float through the kitchen.

I feel light-headed. Unreal. Take Father, for instance: he’s always been just like he is now. I’ve seen him every day my whole life long. Every day he has grown older, but because we have grown old together, it has all been gradual. When I see a photo of my father as a young man - like the photo on the wall of the bedroom upstairs-I know it’s him, but it’s distinct from the father I have now. I didn’t really know him when he was young, because I was much younger at the time. We’ve both grown old without my noticing. I haven’t seen Riet for more than thirty years. It’s shocking, as if I’m in bed having a bad dream.

This is what I am thinking, what is she thinking? I feel like copying her and hiding my face in my hands. “Who do you see when you look at me?” I ask.

Before we got to the kitchen, I showed her the new living room. She didn’t like it. “It’s so bare in here,” she said. “What happened to all the photos?” The door to the bedroom was shut and I had no plans to open it for her. “And the curtains and the sideboard and the bookcase with your mother’s books?” She looked at herself in the large mirror above the mantelpiece and used both hands to plump up her hair a little.

“Ah, the cows,” she says, as we walk through the shed. She’s wearing jeans. Her hair is still blonde and even in the sunlight in the kitchen I couldn’t tell whether she bleaches it. It’s not permed like most women’s in their mid-fifties. She walks a little stiffly. It is totally impossible for me to see her as the mistress of this house: making meatballs, running after sheep or heifers, cuddling up to Henk in bed at night, having her kids visit on Saturday mornings, a grandchild climbing the ash in the front garden.

“I broke a leg a long time ago,” she says when she notices me looking at the way she walks. “It stiffens up in cold weather.”

Sunlight comes in through the square windows, a cow groans and a mangy cat shoots off. It’s a cat I can’t remember having seen before. Is it one that escaped last spring’s motorized cull?

“They’re not cows, that’s for sure.” She rests her hand on the bundled lengths of baler twine hung up on an enormous nail. “Piglets are cute, but the older they get, the nastier.”

We walk into the yard. Riet pulls the collar of her coat tight. “My daughters are respectable women. Maybe Brabant brings that out in people, respectability.”

“What have you got there!” blurts Riet as she catches sight of the donkey shed. She walks up to it. “This never used to be here. Did it?”

They’ve heard us and are standing inquisitively at the railing with their heads up. When they see us, one starts to swing her head. The light has been on all night.

I take a few large winter carrots out of the box on the bale of hay and give them to Riet. She sticks two carrots through the bars at once. They disappear in the donkeys’ mouths with a snap. I scratch the donkeys’ ears. For a moment everyone is happy. There’s something comforting about her having established that we both feel strange.

Riet walks from the donkey shed to the chicken coop. She waves a hand at the willows, a little impatiently, maybe to let me know that she can see they’ve been pollarded recently. And that Henk would have pollarded them if things had turned out differently. “You used to have brown chickens here,” she says, peering in through the wire.

The chicken coop leads inevitably to the causeway gate. She leans her forearms on it and stares out over the fields. It’s incredibly light because of a thin layer of snow on the grass. The ditches are steaming. “The windmill,” she whispers.

I’m not in the mood for that at all. I turn and start walking towards the milking parlor. A little later she follows, I hear her irregular footfall on the frost-hardened yard. Now, with my left arm, I gesture at the donkey paddock. “In good weather they’re out there,” I say. We walk through the milking parlor to the scullery. I cut straight through to the hall door, Riet stops in front of the door to the staircase.

I pull the door open and lead the way upstairs. I open the door to Henk’s room. Riet walks in expectantly. I stay in the doorway - it’s so full inside there’s only room for one of us. She looks around and sits down on the bed for a while.

Then I can’t see her any more, she has disappeared completely under Henk and the January sunlight has made way for August moonlight. Henk’s white underpants have got stuck at his knees and his body is going up and down, a movement that doesn’t seem right for someone his age. I can almost smell him. He is holding his breath, the dimple above the crack of his bum is damp, he presses her deeper and deeper into the old mattress, his Achilles tendons are part of the up-and-down, as if the movement is a wave that starts in his toes.

“I don’t recognize it. There’s so much junk in here.” She lays her hands beside her on the blanket - as if she has no plans ever to stand up again - and looks out of the window. “That hooded crow is still there,” she says.

“My old bedroom,” I say casually and fairly loudly as we walk past the second door. I notice the key and try to remember whether I locked the door. “Full of junk as well.” I hurry on through to the new room, whose door is wide open. Riet follows.

She leans against one of the walls, knees bent slightly and her jumper bunched up around her shoulders. “His face,” she says. “His face in that cold water. His hair floated back and forth like seaweed.”