47
“Am I a kind of Henk now?” Henk had spent a couple of nights in his own room, but tonight it apparently got colder again and he slipped into bed with me for the second time. He was asleep for a while, but woke up and asked me if he is “a kind of Henk.” I was already awake. I was lying on my side looking at the light that comes into the room through the venetian blinds. I was listening. Someone just rode past on a bike, a few ducks landed on the canal, the coots yapped quietly. Father said something, maybe in his sleep, maybe staring into the dark like me, at his curtains, behind which the hooded crow was dozing on its usual branch. I wasn’t entirely relaxed in the first place, but now I feel even more tension entering my body. I know what he’s getting at but I don’t answer.
“Well?” he says. “Am I a kind of Henk?”
“What do you mean?” I ask cagily.
“Your brother. Am I like your brother now?”
Something is going badly wrong here. When did this start? “No,” I say.
He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I think your father’s brave.”
My shoulder blades are itching with annoyance. The selfishness of the boy: talking when he feels like talking, even if it’s the middle of the night. I have to get up to milk, he stays in bed and gets up around eight to do the yearlings. If he gets up at all.
“You could just as well call him a coward,” I say.
“How’s that?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh.”
“Go to sleep,” I say. I’m still lying on my side, but feel like turning over. I stare at the slats of the blinds, but see Ada’s head appearing around the corner of the kitchen door. There is a mischievous look on her face and she says “in a big bed you’ve got room to stretch.” Then she gives me a meaningful look, which still looks funny now, with that harelip. “Two pillows, Helmer, two pillows.” When I think he’s fallen asleep again, I roll onto my back and rub away the itch. I look at the dark frame next to the door. I wish I was in the frame and thinking of here.
“If you ask me I am,” he says, half asleep. “A kind of Henk.”
God almighty, I think.
A little later he’s asleep and I think about the ditch and the sheep. One of the sheep took too long and yesterday I removed two dead lambs. Was that the sheep that fell in the water? I try to remember what I thought or saw, what happened to me in the black minutes between drowning and regaining consciousness. Or was it seconds? Was it like that for Henk too? Or was he already unconscious when the car hit the water? I notice that my hands are clasped together over my stomach. As if I’m laid out. I’d like to lie on my right side, but that’s where Henk is, so I turn back onto my left. Outside it is totally silent.
How does he do it? Asking Father how the dying is going, as if he’s asking him if he’d like some more gravy on his potatoes? And how does Father do it? Answering “fine,” as if looking on contentedly while he pours the gravy?