45
I sit on the side of the bed and look at him. He is lying on his back and wearing the T-shirt he had on yesterday. His chest rises and falls calmly. Exhaling, he puffs a little. He’s lying in my bed as if he’s never lain anywhere else. That annoys me. I get up and pull on my work trousers. “You going to come and do something?” I ask loudly. Wake up, Henk is something I can’t bring myself to say.
He gives a slight groan, rolls over and snuggles down on his stomach. “Yeah, sure,” he mumbles into the pillow. “Not yet.”
“It’s five thirty,” I say.
It takes a while before he says anything else. “Those animals.”
“What about them?”
“The ones that go for my head.”
“Yes?”
“I have to do something about it.”
“What do you want to do about it?” I’m almost in the living room.
“I don’t know. Something.”
“Protect your head.”
“I don’t know.”
“That miniature donkey’s been dead for years and the hooded crow’s flown off.”
“Still.”
“I’m going,” I say. “Will you do the yearlings?”
“Yes,” he drawls. “Later.”
Late March and the sun is already up when I start milking. When I’ve milked ten cows, I walk to the shed door. There’s a blackbird somewhere, the muck heap is steaming, the pollarded willows could sprout tomorrow. The yearlings are restless in the shed, but otherwise it’s so quiet I can hear the donkeys trotting in the paddock.
It’s been almost thirty years since I read a poem - not counting death notices - and now I’m thinking of a poem. I didn’t learn much in my seven months in Amsterdam, but one thing I still remember is that poems are almost always retrospective. A poem (incredibly, instead of the muck heap, I now see our energetic modern lit. lecturer before me: his tangled curls, his owlish glasses, as if he’s a poet himself) is “condensed reality,” an “incident that has been reduced to its essence,” a “sublimation.” A poem is never about what it seems to be about (gushed our energetic modern lit. lecturer). If only I smoked, I could go now and lean against the shed wall to gaze pensively - smoking, as I imagine it, is a pensive activity - at the motionless Bosman windmill. I go back into the shed, plug the claw into the milk and pulse tubes, and put the teat cups on the eleventh cow.
After milking I fill a couple of buckets with water, tip them into the barrel on the other side of the gate in the donkey paddock and chuck a couple of winter carrots down next to it. Rather than rushing straight to the gate, the donkeys stroll casually towards me, side by side. These animals are mine, really mine, I bought them. Nothing else here is really mine: not the cows and not the sheep, I even inherited the Lakenvelder chickens. The old Opel Kadett, the muck heap, the willows-Idrive it, I throw my dung on it, I pollard them, but none is mine. I’m a tenant, doing things someone else should have been doing.
The sun is shining, there is hardly any wind. Spring. Something glistens on what’s left of the side wall of the laborer’s cottage, maybe a snail trail. It’s not good, I think, feeling like a poem. It’s because of what Henk said yesterday. The carrots disappear with a crunch in the donkeys’ mouths. I scratch the animals behind the ears. It’s only when they’ve both had enough and start shaking their heads, the two of them at the same time, that I stop, almost without thinking. Then I do the yearlings, much too late. Henk hasn’t got up.