55
There’s a sand dune here with an English name. A long time ago a rich Englishman came to this shore. He had a large house built on the highest dune and laid out a garden with ponds, paths and low stone walls. Because the whole dune had been covered with heather he named his estate Heather Hill. He drowned while swimming in the sea and the house disappeared long ago. All that’s left of the garden is a silted-up pond and a few shrubs. It’s grazed by sheep of a breed I don’t recognize, with dark heads and long floppy ears. They are much tamer than my sheep; they’re used to people coming here to walk or swim. Along the coast, the dune is actually a cliff, with a straight drop to the narrow, rocky beach. It’s not the North Sea here. There are no bare dunes held together with difficulty by planted marram grass and wind-blasted pines. Here the grass grows almost all the way down to the sea and even beeches and oaks thrive ten yards from the high-water line. I’ve tasted the water: it’s brackish, a little saltier than the water of Lake IJssel. I know almost the whole map of Denmark off by heart, especially Zealand, but Rågeleje is new to me, and that’s where we are now. Not that you’d know it when you hear the locals say the name of their village. Danish is a strange, sloppy language. I don’t understand a word of it; he says he can follow it. I wanted to know how that was possible. “I’m Frisian,” he said. The owner of the Heather Hill Grill, located next to a car park on the coast road, told him the story of the Englishman, though it’s possible it was all very different in reality. We often go there for a sausage. The Danes love their sausages.
We swim every day. The water is cold, but clear. Every three days we have to toss aside the rocks we tossed aside three days before to make it easier to get into the water. We always swim in the same place, at the end of the path that skirts Heather Hill on its way from the coast road to the rocky beach. There’s a gate at the road and another one just before the beach. The sheep have to stay on Heather Hill to keep the grass short and eat the birch seedlings. It’s quiet on the rocky beach, the Danes aren’t on holiday yet. If we look to the right on clear days we can see the coast of Sweden in the distance. “We should go there sometime too,” he says. I nod. It’s not far to Helsingør, from there we can take the ferry to Helsingborg. Hooded crows glide above the cliff. They hold their wings still and float on the updrafts without moving forward. At the weekends the hooded crows aren’t there. Then men and women leap off the cliff with parachutes. Sometimes they float for miles before turning around and coming back to land on top of Heather Hill again. The height they fly at is determined by the height of the dunes. We swim naked: we’re almost always alone and if someone does show up we ignore them. “We’re too old to worry about that,” he says. I nod and then, like two kids at a swimming pool, we joke about each other’s scrotums, which the cold water has shriveled up. He can’t help giving me instructions: “Keep your fingers together” or “Move those feet of yours for once.” Afterwards we warm up again by playing a game of badminton-a little stiffly, and with him a bit stiffer than me - in the holiday house garden. He found the racquets and shuttlecocks in a rack at the Spar. I paid.
Father was laid out in the house for four nights. I didn’t touch him once.
When he went into the living room he immediately sat down on the kitchen chair next to the coffin. I stayed standing by the door. He rolled a cigarette, maybe because he saw an ashtray on the arm of the sofa. While smoking, he looked at Father. His glance moved from Father to the photos on the mantelpiece. “She was a beautiful woman, in her own way,” he said, nodding at the formal photo of my mother. “I don’t think many people saw that.” A horizontal layer of smoke formed in the living room. All the times I sat there smoking next to the open coffin, I didn’t manage that once.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Things have changed a lot in here.”
“I did that, a few months ago.”
“That recently?”
“Yes.”
He took a couple of deep drags from his roll-up then nodded in the direction of the mantelpiece again. “Dead brother,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette and laid the backs of his fingers lightly on Father’s forehead. Then he stood up and shook my hand, with the fingers that had just touched the dead body. “Your father’s dead, Helmer,” he said.
He didn’t kiss me on the mouth, although someone really was dead now.
As if I didn’t know it yet myself: beautiful mother, dead brother, dead father. Twenty cows, some yearlings, two nameless donkeys, twenty sheep, thirty-one lambs and a few Lakenvelder chickens.
“Do I smell coffee?” he asked, crossing the hall to the kitchen, where he didn’t just sit down on the first chair he came to. He walked around the table and sat down with his back to the side window. Henk’s chair. He drummed on the tabletop, as if waiting impatiently for me to pour him a cup of coffee. He looked with mild surprise at the binoculars, the open packet of almond cakes and the mugs Ada and I had drunk out of. He said this was the first time he had sat at the kitchen table. Still standing there in the doorway of the living room, I looked from his drumming fingers to Father’s forehead and from Father’s forehead to my hand.
I didn’t pour him a coffee right away. I went over to stand by the front window. The hooded crow was staring at me from its usual branch. It lowered its head a little as if shrugging its shoulders. I wondered whether birds have shoulders, whether you can call the elbows of folded wings shoulders. It looked like an animal that can stalk, somehow feline. It had been sitting there since autumn. Sometimes I forgot about it and some days I noticed it again and felt like I had the first time I saw it, the day I sat down on all four chairs, as if trying to avoid eating alone. It pulled its shoulders up a little bit more and fell forwards, not spreading its wings until just before it would have hit the ground. I stepped back; it looked like it was going to sail straight through the windowpane. During the sharp turn it had to make, its wingtip touched the glass. It flew off towards the dyke, the Lake IJssel dyke. I watched it go until there were tears in my eyes.
He cleared his throat. I turned around. Yes, he would like some coffee - black with sugar - and yes, he wouldn’t say no to one of those almond cakes either.
Dead is dead. Gone is gone, and then I won’t even know about it. That’s why I wasn’t the only one to attend Father’s funeral. A funeral is not for the dead, it’s for those left behind. It was egotistical of Father to want to be buried on the sly. Jaap was there, Ada and the boys (not Wim, he hates death, and what’s more he had something else to do, something important) and the young tanker driver. “How did you . . .” I started and Ada, who was standing behind him, formed a telephone receiver with her little finger and thumb and held it up to her ear and mouth. She shrugged apologetically, holding her head a little to one side.
“Solidarity, that’s important,” he said to Jaap.
“You’re right about that, lad,” Jaap replied, “absolutely.”
I didn’t mind, even if I was beginning to suspect the young tanker driver of making a habit of going to as many funerals as possible, which was something of an aberration. Once again there was a white sheet, hardboard by the look of it, at the bottom of a grave that actually went deeper. It didn’t last long, there weren’t any speakers. The sun was shining and the temperature was around average for late April. I threw earth in the grave. Not a handful, a shovelful. Because I like that at funerals. I don’t regard a handful of earth that blows away before it hits the coffin as any kind of conclusion. Only Ronald followed my example.
“How do you like the new driver?” Galtjo asked when we were sitting in the kitchen later. Ada had put on some coffee and I had bought marzipan castles at the baker’s in Monnickendam. All in honor of Father. There was jenever for the men. Teun and Ronald drank something with bubbles.
“She’s a bit mouthy for me,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, smiling as ever. “I’ve heard that.” His smile no longer moved me.
“Are you farmers too?” Jaap asked Teun and Ronald.
“We’re kids,” Teun corrected him.
What surprised me was the number of cards that appeared in the green letterbox on the roadside in the days after the death notice appeared in the paper. Dozens of cards. There was one from the livestock dealer, who returned from New Zealand two days after the funeral. There was even a card from Klaas van Baalen, the farmer who was the same age as me and had had his sheep removed because he neglected them. Jarno Koper’s parents sent one and so did the old tanker driver’s widow. And, of course, there were cards from all kinds of distant relatives, second and third cousins, none of whom I knew and none of whom were called Van Wonderen.
I sent a card to Riet and Henk, who obviously wouldn’t read our paper all the way down in Brabant. Riet didn’t respond at all, although it was from her that I had expected to receive a perhaps not-so-friendly card in return. If I never hear from her again, I won’t be surprised. Henk sent a postcard in reply. I already knew, he wrote on the back. And I think it’s a shame, because he was a nice man. I’m using his bike here now. I brought it with me because I couldn’t lock it up and it would have just been stolen otherwise. So I think of him now and then. Cheers, Henk. I had to smile at the card he had chosen, showing a tower of animals: a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster. “That’s cute,” said Ada. “They’re the Bremen town musicians. One of Grimms’ fairy tales.” The donkey in particular appeals to me. He didn’t just grab a card from the rack. I think.
Two weeks ago I turned fifty-six. In Germany. He wanted to drive over the Lake IJssel dam, I wanted to go through the new polders. Since the Opel Kadett would almost certainly have broken down halfway through Denmark, we took his car and drove over the dam. At the monument - we’d only been on the road for an hour - he pulled over. We smoked a medium-strong Van Nelle each, looking out over the Wadden Sea. Then we drove to his house - in a small village past Leeuwarden. He showed me the shed where he makes the owl boards he sells to customers from all over Friesland, without having to advertise them. “How do you think I can afford to buy my jenever?” he said, pouring two glasses. “From the pension?” He also took me out to where he’d buried the dog, in a far corner of the garden, under a gnarled pear tree that had long since lost all its blossom. He had welded two pieces of metal together to make a cross and stuck it in the ground. The turned soil was still raised. In his living room there was a large bookcase with at least twice as many books as he had had in the laborer’s cottage. He poured me another generous glass of jenever but no more for himself, because he was driving. I knocked it back: I didn’t want to be in Friesland, I wanted to go much further north.
Past Nieuweschans, just over the German border, we stopped again because he was hungry. “We’re going to eat now, Donkey Man,” he said. It was fine by me.
If you keep driving it’s easy to reach Denmark in a day, it’s not even five hundred miles. But we didn’t keep driving and stopped for the night at a Raststätte just past Hamburg. “Double room?” asked the disinterested woman behind the counter. “Of course,” he said. “It’s cheaper, isn’t it?” In the enormous bed we both lay on our backs, me with my hands clasped over my stomach. I don’t know how he was lying. When I woke up it was my birthday. I was planning on keeping it secret from him, but there was no secret to keep. He had remembered. I wanted to know how that was possible.
“For about thirteen years in a row I wasn’t invited to you and your brother’s birthday,” he said. “Do you think that’s the kind of thing you forget? I worked as usual while you two ran around with your chests puffed out and party hats on your heads. Sometimes you’d even come and stand in front of me to proudly shout, ‘It’s our birthday!’”
I don’t remember this at all. He says that’s what it was like, so that must have been what it was like.
Sometimes I forget that he knew me as a brat. Sometimes I also forget that he came to work for Father when he was a boy himself. About Henk’s age.
The boat sailed from Puttgarden and landed at Rødby. The crossing only took forty-five minutes. I drove the car off the ferry and wanted to pull over to the side of the road straightaway.
“What are you doing, Donkey Man?” he asked.
I told him that we were in Denmark and I wanted finally to feel it with my own two feet.
“There’s a lot more Denmark to come,” he said. “Down the road.”
Driving along I had a sense of having been here before, I knew almost all of the place names on the signs. We stopped to buy something to eat in a roadside restaurant outside Copenhagen and only then did we discover that we couldn’t pay with euros in Denmark. The guy at the cash register accepted them, but grudgingly, it seemed to me. Past Copenhagen (“Much too big,” he said. “Much too busy, we’ll drive on.”) I put a bank card in a cash machine for the first time in my life, typed in my PIN number, and pulled Danish kroner out of the slot. He doesn’t have a bank card; either that or he hasn’t brought it with him. I pay for everything. Since we didn’t know where we were going, we decided to keep driving until we couldn’t go any further. That was how we ended up in this village with the unpronounceable name.
Here there are rolling hills and no ditches. There are hardly any cows either, apparently they’re mostly in Jutland. With Jarno Koper. When we do see cows, they’re usually brown. “Beef,” he growls and we look the other way. There are wheat, barley and rye fields. And rapeseed: entire hilltops covered with yellow flowering rape, bordered by cow parsley. A few days ago I saw a rhododendron and a purple lilac in flower in a garden, next to a few red tulips. Everything here seems to flower at the same time.
When it starts to get dark we hear the melancholy call of a wood owl.
Dead is dead. Gone is gone, and then I won’t even know about it. The new livestock dealer couldn’t have come at a better time. He was driving the old livestock dealer’s truck, he said he’d been able to take it over at a good price. He was a young tearaway, there were dents in the truck that hadn’t been there two months before. He was a windbag too. He called me Helmer from the word go, as if we were old friends. I asked him whether he could offload twenty cows, some yearlings, twenty sheep and a whole lot of lambs at short notice.
“Easy!” he shouted.
“How are you going to do it then?”
“I’ll see.”
“It has to be fast, and preferably all at once.”
“Just leave it to me.” On his way back to the truck, something occurred to him. He turned around. “And your milk quota?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Okay, fine.”
Two days later he roared back into the farmyard. Stony-faced, he quoted a price. “But then you’re done with it in one go,” he shouted immediately after. “And I’m sticking my neck out, I have to make sure I can shift the whole lot before too long, my sheds aren’t that big-”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said.
“What?!”
“I’m keeping the sheep, and the lambs too.”
His eyes seemed to pale a little while he was doing the calculations. After a while, he came up with a lower total. “But it’s still true,” he said, “that I’m the one sticking my neck out and if-”
“Fine,” I said.
“Really?” he asked, stunned.
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, then-”
“When?”
“Soon,” he said, running out of steam. “Soon.”
I spent the day the animals were picked up in Father’s bedroom. I put the photos, samplers and watercolor mushrooms neatly in a potato crate. I stripped his bed, washed the sheets and pillowcases, took down the curtains, cleaned the windows and vacuumed the blue carpet. When I stuck the nozzle under the bed, the vacuum cleaner almost choked on the poem that was lying there.
A weird one. He told me I was a weird one. Coming from him, at that moment, it almost sounded like a term of endearment.
I sat down on Father’s bed and read the words once again. I felt ashamed. Giving an old wreck of a man a poem to read. I folded it in half and shoved it in my back pocket. A week later I took it out of my newly washed jeans as papier-mâché. I didn’t look in the shed until evening, when it was already getting dark. It was emptier than empty: everything was still there - straw, shit, dust, warmth - except the cows. The yearling shed was the same. No - it was even emptier, because going in I was just in time to catch sight of the tail of a mangy cat, shooting off.
The next day I wrote a letter to the Forestry Commission. I informed them that I was not in the least inclined to sell them the land on which they wanted to build a visitors’ center. And that I would be grateful not to receive any further correspondence on the subject until I contacted them again. Up to the day of our departure for Denmark I hadn’t received a reply. Just as I had requested.
I looked around for something to put my traveling things in and found a suitcase in a cupboard in the barn: a massive, old, leather thing. I soaped the leather to make it a little suppler. I haven’t had a single holiday in thirty-seven years of milking day and night. I wonder when in God’s name Father and Mother used it. They never went on holiday either.
I also went to the Rabobank to apply for a bank card. If you go to other countries you need a bank card. I had to wait two weeks before I could go and pick it up. I still don’t understand why, but I used the time to do up the kitchen. I repainted, threw out the old curtains and put up venetian blinds. I cleared out the bureau. I almost drove to Monnickendam to look at kitchens in a furniture shop. “Did you have a bonfire?” asked Ronald when he came by the next day and found a smoldering heap behind the donkey shed. “Without calling us?” added Teun, who was there as well.
We’re sitting outside, on the roofed patio. Earlier in the day it rained, but it’s not cold now. The garden is steaming and the bamboo along the side of the holiday home rustles gently against the wooden planks. For dinner we had beetroot with meatballs you buy ready-made at the Spar. During the meal we drank a bottle of red wine. Wine is expensive in Denmark.
“What are we going to do tomorrow?” I ask.
“Whatever we feel like. We’ll start by getting up and drinking some coffee.”
I’ve asked him about his nose, his parents, Friesland and his dog. About how he came to work for Father and Mother. “You’ve got a lot of questions, Donkey Man,” he says. “What are your intentions?” The only thing he was willing to discuss was his dog. It died just before the New Year. On a Saturday night, after he’d come home from playing cards with three friends. He sat down on a chair and the dog laid its old head on his lap. All at once the dog’s head turned heavy and it was as if he felt its blood stop flowing under his hand. “He just folded up,” he said, “like one of those toys, one of those little puppets you collapse by pressing the button under its feet.”
“So you do have friends in Friesland?” I asked.
He sighed and didn’t say another word.
He points at the damp cherry tree in the middle of the garden. “We’ll have to stay here at least another month.”
“Fine by me,” I say. “I like cherries.” I go inside and pour two cups of coffee. When I come back I see that the dark clouds have disappeared. The sun is shining again. Here in the north it doesn’t get dark until very late. I put the coffees down on the garden table and lay a bar of dark chocolate next to them.
“Why didn’t you get a new dog?”
“You can’t go on forever.”
“No?”
“It hurts. Every time one dies.”
“I believe that.”
“It was because the wife of one of my card buddies died. He came over to my place and drank my jenever and talked about “not wanting to lose her” and “having to let her go”. It got on my nerves: someone either dies or they don’t, wanting doesn’t come into it. My dog felt his sorrow and laid his head on his lap, something he never did otherwise. The guy just ignored him. I couldn’t bear it. That dog was close to death himself, but he took the trouble and was kind enough to lift his head to someone who was grieving and that person didn’t react.” He breaks off a square of chocolate, lays it on his tongue and takes a mouthful of coffee. His mouth is shut, but I can see the chocolate melting. “Friends,” he goes on, with a wry smile. “Is that enough? Friends to play cards with, a well-kept house and garden, messing around in the shed, a dog, jenever and a bit of money in the bank?”
He no longer has that one chipped tooth. A crown?
“How did you actually know that Father was dead?” I ask.
“I didn’t.”
“So it was just coincidence, you coming back on that day of all days?”
“Yep.”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence.”
“Of course there is. I thought: I’ll go, and I went. I wanted to see the West Friesland orchards in blossom. But it was misty so I didn’t see very much. I might just as well ask you why you came out of your house just when I arrived at the laborer’s cottage.”
Coincidence, I think.
“I might not have gone to the house at all if you hadn’t come to me.” He repeats the chocolate ritual. In the distance the wood owl starts to call. For the first time it is answered, from very close by. “And where would you have been now, in that case?”
“Yes,” I say. “Where would I have been now?”
We both stare into the garden. I think about Riet and Henk. Little Henk. The young tanker driver, the livestock dealer (who he had known as well), Ada. I wonder what kind of things I am going to tell him, or will want to tell him. Suddenly the time between his departure and return no longer interests me. Or even the time of his arrival. What difference does it make? Tomorrow we’ll “start by getting up and drinking some coffee,” and afterwards we’ll do “whatever we feel like.”
“I’ve never actually learned how to do things by myself,” I say.
Slowly he turns his head towards me. “Drink your coffee, Donkey Man. It’s time for a game of cards.” He gets up and walks inside.
He’s right, it’s time to play cards. I roll a medium-strong Van Nelle, light it, stand up and walk around the garden with my head back. I stick the pouch of tobacco and the lighter in a back pocket. I like smoking, it suits me. He hasn’t mentioned it, maybe he thinks I’ve been smoking for years. He has turned the light on over the table. Not because it’s necessary, but because he’s used to having a light on over a card table. I feel like I could reach out and touch the wood owl, its mournful call sounds that close. It might just as well be a long-eared or short-eared owl. I don’t know a thing about owls; there are lots of woods here, that’s why I think it’s a wood owl. Hearing it call is even worse than seeing wet lame sheep or unshorn sheep during a heat wave. It gives me an empty feeling in my chest. As if I haven’t just eaten.
“You coming?” He’s standing at the open door, but doesn’t sound impatient.
I don’t say anything, raising one hand.
He calls me Donkey Man. Now that I’m away from the donkeys for the first time ever. Teun and Ronald have promised to look after them. No, not too much mangold, carrots or stale bread. Yes, inside if it rains for a long time. Yes, always check the big water trough. (“But a bucket of water’s heavy,” says Ronald.) They’re also looking after the Lakenvelder chickens. Their mother can use the eggs in cakes and pancakes. Teun will walk through the sheep field once a day. He is strong enough to help an overturned ewe up on her feet, and maybe even strong enough to get a lamb that’s fallen into a ditch back onto dry land. If not he can fetch his father. Ada has promised “to keep an eye on things” and “run the hoover around the house now and then.” She wanted to know how long I would be gone. “I don’t know,” I said. Just before I left, she came on Wim’s behalf to ask what I was planning to do with my milk quota.
“This is his chance,” she said. “Our chance,” she added.
I told her I wanted to think about it and asked why Wim hadn’t come himself to ask me what I was planning with my quota.
She looked at me as if she was about to make up another excuse for him, then said, “He doesn’t have the nerve.”
A little later she asked me why I’d kept the sheep.
“I haven’t got the foggiest,” I said.
Donkey Man. That’s fine by me.
When someone addressed me by name, as Helmer, I always added “Henk and” in front of it in my thoughts. No matter how long he had been dead, our names belonged together.
Maybe Riet was right, on that cold day in January at the cemetery, when she said you could become a new person. It annoyed me at the time, that statement of hers, but if I’d opened my eyes I could have seen it in that run-over duck. It had become a new person in next to no time. A dead person.
No, no rows of swallows on sagging electricity wires. The poles are still here but the wires are gone. For miles around, men in orange suits are lugging thick cables and digging narrow trenches along the roads. If I’d come a year later, I would never have known that they’d had poles here with wires strung between them.
