29
We eat kale with smoked sausage and mash. Once I’ve started on the kale, I eat it at least twice a week. The supply in the vegetable garden lasts until deep into the winter. Mother always put a beef stock cube in with the potatoes, I use vegetable. I buy the smoked sausage from the butcher. I have a lot of stuff in the deep freeze, but no pork.
“Mr. van Wonderen?”
“Yes?”
“Do you have any wine to go with this?”
“Wine?”
“Red wine. It’s good with kale.”
“No, I don’t have any wine. Only spirits.”
He spoons a large portion of mustard out of the jar. After loading his fork with mash and kale, he smears a dab of mustard over it with his knife. He spears the sausage without mustard.
“Listen, Henk . . .” Before I go on, I take a mouthful. Saying his name was an obstacle.
“Yes?”
“Can you stop calling me Mr. van Wonderen?”
“Okay.”
“It’s Helmer.”
“Helmer,” he says. He takes a mouthful of water, then says, “Difficult.”
“What’s difficult about it?”
“It’s an unusual name. It sounds young.”
“Henk’s a difficult name for me.”
“Why?”
“My brother was called Henk.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You’re named after him.”
“No I’m not.”
“No?”
“I’m named after one of my father’s uncles, but a generation back.”
“A great-uncle.”
“Is that a great-uncle?”
“Yes. Who told you that?”
“My father.”
“Did you know that my brother was called Henk?”
“Yeah, my mother told me a bit about him. But not when I was little, much later.” He thinks for a moment. “I think it was only last year.”
“More sausage?”
“Yes, please.”
I cut off a piece of sausage and lay it on his plate. A car drives by.
“Why aren’t the curtains closed?”
“Who’s going to look in here?”
Henk looks straight ahead, at the side window. I see him gazing at his reflection.
“With a telescope I could look right into that house over there.”
“The neighbor who made the jam lives there.”
“Has she got a telescope?”
“Probably.”
We eat in silence for a while.
“In Russia they eat donkeys,” he says.
“What?”
“Donkeys. In Russia they eat them.”
“How do you know?”
“I dunno, I read it somewhere.”
“Russians are barbarians.”
“Hmm.” He lays his cutlery on his plate and pushes it away. He crosses his arms and looks at himself in the window. I pick up the plates and put them on the draining board. I get the washing-up basin out of the cupboard under the sink and fill it with hot water.
“There’s food left over,” says Henk.
“That’s for my father.” I’m standing with my back to him. He doesn’t say anything. I slip the plates and cutlery into the washing-up basin. It’s still quiet behind me. I turn around. His arms aren’t crossed any more and he’s sitting straighter on the chair. He’s staring at me. If he hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have filled the washing-up basin with hot water yet.
“My father,” I say again.
“Is there someone else in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Your father. I thought . . .”
“What?”
“When you said, “He can’t ride a bike any more” . . .”
“Yes?”
“And that bike’s so old. I thought . . .”
“What did you think?”
“I thought he died ages ago.”
“No.”
“Christ. Where is he then?”
“Upstairs.”
“Where the light was on when we drove up?”
“Yep.”
“Is there something wrong with him?”
“He’s old. His legs are clapped out.”
“How old?”
“In his eighties. He’s starting to go downhill mentally as well.”
“Christ.”
I picture Riet and Henk at home in the village in Brabant. They live there together, but I find it impossible to imagine them in one room. When one walks in somewhere, the other walks out, doors opening and shutting simultaneously. They hardly exchange a word. That’s good for me, I have less to explain than I expected.
“Let’s take his dinner up to him now,” I say, “before it gets cold.”
“What, me too?”
“You too.”
He looks at me as if I’ve asked him to lay out a dead body.
“Show me your hands.”
Now Henk has to go closer to the bed. From the moment he entered the room, he kept his eyes on the things on the walls and finally he noticed the gun leaning against the side of the clock. He’s been staring at it for a while now. He holds out his arms with the backs of his hands up, as if about to dive.
“No, the palms.”
Henk turns his hands over.
“Hmm,” says Father.
“Your bike’s fixed,” I say.
“Yes, my bike. Be careful with it,” he says to Henk.
“Yes, Mr. van Wonderen,” says Henk.
Father has put the plate with the kale, mash and sausage on the bedside cabinet. “Do you have any experience with cows?”
“No,” says Henk.
“His father had pigs,” I say.
“Pigs!”
“Yes,” says Henk. Almost imperceptibly he shuffles away from the bed again.
“There’s no comparison!” Father says. He shakes his head. “Pigs,” he says quietly.
“Henk comes from Brabant,” I say.
“I suppose that why he’s got a Brabant accent.”
I have to admit to being impressed. Rather than lying back like an old, decrepit man, Father is playing the part of a large landowner laid up with a dose of flu. In the spring of 1966 he fired the farmhand. Henk and I were eighteen and Riet was looking like a permanent fixture. He gave the hand six months to find somewhere else to live. That was very obliging of Father, considering the way he treated him otherwise.
“I’m the bloody boss here! You follow my instructions.”
Father and the farmhand were standing in the cowshed, opposite each other. I was behind Father and to one side, squirming, and when I dared to glance up quickly at the hand I saw that, like me, he was keeping his head bowed. I remember being surprised by the phrase “follow my instructions.” Father didn’t usually talk like that. I had no idea what the hand had done wrong.
“Who’s the boss here?”
“You are,” said the hand, not looking up but seething inside. “You’re the boss.”
I was young, young enough to get tears in my eyes. I couldn’t stand my father, I wanted to stick up for the man who had taught me how to skate. But I was young and had no idea what the disagreement was about. Not too young though to notice the trembling muscles in the farmhand’s neck. It was a recalcitrant trembling, somehow provocative. After his subjugation he straightened up, but he didn’t look at Father. He looked at me. His eyes were still smoldering.
Now Father is trying to resume his old role. Maybe he’s not even trying, maybe the master-servant relationship comes naturally. To him.
“Get out of here,” he says. “Then I can eat in peace.”
Henk reaches the door before I do. He dives down the stairs in front of me.
“Christ,” he says, walking into the scullery.
Henk wants to watch TV.
“We don’t have TV here,” I say.
“What? What do you do at night?”
“Read the newspaper, do the paperwork, check the animals.”
“Paperwork?”
“Uh-huh. Nitrate records, health records for the vet, quality control records for the dairy-”
“I get it. What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
I don’t know how to answer that.
“You miss all kinds of stuff, you know, if you don’t have a TV.”
“Yeah?” We’re sitting in the kitchen. Henk doesn’t have anything else to say. I stand up and open the linen cupboard.
“Towels are in here. Come with me.” I lead the way to the scullery. “The washing machine’s here. You can throw your dirty clothes in the basket.” I open the door to the bathroom. “The bathroom,” I say. “The hot water is from a boiler. It’s a big boiler, but it doesn’t last forever.” We walk back to the kitchen. “Can you cook?” I ask.
“I can throw a pasta dish together.”
“Good.”
He walks straight through to the linen cupboard, pulls a towel from the stack and disappears into the hall. As if he’s following instructions. I hear him on the stairs. Then it’s quiet for a moment. He comes back down the stairs. A little later I hear water running in the bathroom. Ten minutes later he turns off the taps. From the instant he left the kitchen I haven’t done a thing. I’ve stayed sitting at the table with my arms crossed. The scullery door opens. “I’m going to bed,” he calls.
“Goodnight,” I call back.
“Goodnight.” He climbs the stairs again. It gets quiet upstairs.
He has taken up half of the shelf under the mirror. Shaving gear, toothbrush and toothpicks, shower gel, shampoo and expensive-looking deodorant. His damp towel is hanging over the shower curtain rail. I wipe the steam from the mirror. “A good thick head of hair,” I mumble. Black hair, even now.
I’m exhausted, but can’t possibly fall asleep. Not that far away a group of coots is swimming on the canal. The hooded crow is quiet and there is no rain drumming on the window ledges. Am I a kind of father now? What am I? Can he sleep in that room up there? It’s not just missing a wardrobe, there’s not even a chair. Thrown-together pasta. I can’t see Father being too happy about that. What is Father thinking about? Suddenly it’s full of breath and life, upstairs. For the first time since taking over Father’s bedroom, I feel some degree of regret about the move. Just before falling asleep, when all my thoughts are slipping away from me, I see the young lad who looked like Riet on the back of that bike. With his arms wrapped tightly around the girl.