We didn’t have any of the commercial channels, only Nederland 1, 2 and 3. Dad said there wasn’t any nudity on them. He pronounced the word ‘nudity’ as though a fruit fly had just flown into his mouth – he spat as he said it. The word mainly made me think of the potatoes whose jackets my mother peeled off every evening before she dropped them into the water – that plopping sound they made. I can imagine if you think about naked people for too long shoots grow out of you, just like potatoes sprout after a while so you have to dig them out of the soft flesh with the point of a knife. We fed the forked green bits to the chickens, who were crazy about them. I lay on my stomach in front of the oak cabinet that hid the TV. One of the buckles of my skates had rolled under it when I’d kicked them off angrily in the corner of the living room. I was too young for the other side and too old to skate on the manure ditch behind the cowsheds. To be honest, you couldn’t even call it skating – it was more a kind of shuffling, like the way the geese that landed there in search of something edible shuffled. The stench of manure broke free with every score in the ice and the blades of your skates turned light brown. We must have been a ridiculous sight standing there on the ditch like a pair of silly geese, our bundled-up bodies waggling from one grassy bank to the other, instead of joining in the skate on the big lake with everyone else from the village.
‘We can’t go and watch Matthies,’ Dad had said, ‘one of the calves has got the runs.’
‘But you promised,’ I cried. I’d even wrapped my feet in the freezer bags.
‘Mitigating circumstances,’ Dad said, pulling his black beret down over his eyebrows. I’d nodded a couple of times. There was nothing we could do about unforeseen circumstances and no one stood a chance against the cows anyway; they were always more important. Even when they didn’t require any attention – even when their fat clumsy bodies were lying sated in the stalls – they still managed to take priority. I’d folded my arms in a sulk. All that practising in my strap-on skates had been for nothing; my calves were even harder than the porcelain Jesus in the hall that was as big as Dad. I deliberately threw the freezer bags in the bin, and pushed them deep into the coffee grounds and bread crusts so that Mum wouldn’t be able to reuse them like the serviettes.
It was dusty under the cabinet. I found a hairclip, a dried-up raisin and a Lego block. Mum shut the cabinet doors whenever family members or the elders from the Reformed church came to visit. They mustn’t see that we allowed ourselves to be diverted from God’s path in the evenings. On Mondays, Mum always watched a quiz show called Lingo. We all had to be as quiet as mice so that she could guess the words from behind the ironing board; we’d hear the iron hissing at each correct answer, steam spiralling up. They were usually words that weren’t in the Bible, but our mother still seemed to know them. She called them ‘blush words’ because some of them turned your cheeks red. Obbe once told me that when the screen was black, the television was the eye of God, and that when Mum closed the doors she wanted Him not to see us. She was probably ashamed of us because we sometimes used blush words when Lingo wasn’t on. She tried to wash them out of our mouths with a bar of green soap, like the grease and mud stains from our good school clothes.
I felt around the floor for the buckle. From where I was lying, I could see into the kitchen. Dad’s green wellies suddenly appeared in front of the fridge, bits of straw and cow shit sticking to their sides. He must have come in to fetch another bunch of carrot tops from the vegetable drawer. He’d cut the leaves off with the hoof-paring knife he kept in the breast pocket of his overalls. For days he’d been walking back and forth between the fridge and the rabbit hutches. The cream slice that was left from Hanna’s seventh birthday went with him – I’d been drooling over it every time the fridge was open. I hadn’t been able to resist secretly scooping off a corner of the pink icing with my fingernail and putting it in my mouth. I’d made a tunnel in the cream that had thickened in the fridge and stuck to my fingertip like a yellow hat. Dad didn’t notice. ‘Once he’s got his mind set on something, there’s no budging him,’ my granny on the most religious side of the family sometimes said, and that was why I suspected he was feeding up my rabbit Dieuwertje, which I’d got from Lien next door, for the big Christmas dinner in two days’ time. He never normally got involved with the rabbits – ‘small stock’ belonged on your plate and he only liked animals whose presence filled his entire field of vision, but my rabbit didn’t even fill the half of it. He’d once said that the neck vertebrae were the most breakable part of a body – I heard them snapping in my head as though my mother was breaking a handful of raw vermicelli above the pan – and a rope with a noose in it had recently appeared in the attic, hanging from the rafters. ‘It’s for a swing,’ Dad said, but there was still no swing. I didn’t understand why the rope was hanging in the attic and not in the shed with the screwdrivers and his collection of bolts. Maybe, I thought, Dad wanted us to watch; maybe it would happen if we sinned. I briefly pictured my rabbit hanging broken-necked from the rope in the attic, behind Matthies’s bed, so that our father could skin it more easily. It would probably come off the same way as the skin from the big cooked sausage that Mum peeled with her potato knife in the mornings: only they’d put Dieuwertje in a layer of butter in the big casserole dish on the gas stove, and the whole house would smell of broiled rabbit. All of us Mulders would be able to smell from afar that Christmas dinner was ready to be served; we’d know not to spoil our appetite. I’d noticed that while I used to have to be sparing with the feed, I was now allowed to give my rabbit a whole scoopful, as well as the carrot tops. Despite the fact that he was a buck, I’d named him after the curly-haired female presenter on children’s TV because I found her so pretty. I wanted to put her at the top of my Christmas list, but I waited a while as I hadn’t seen her in any of the toy catalogues yet.
There was more going on than plain generosity towards my rabbit, I was sure of it. This was why I’d suggested other animals when I’d joined Dad bringing in the cows for their winter treatment before breakfast. I was holding a stick to drive them. The best thing to do was to whack their flanks so they’d walk on.
‘Other children in my class are having duck, pheasant or turkey, and you fill them with potatoes, leek, onions and beets, stuffed up their bums until they’re overflowing.’
I glanced at my dad and he nodded. There were various kinds of nods in our village. That in itself was a way of differentiating yourself. I knew them all by now. This was the nod that dad used for the cattle dealers when they offered him a price that was too low but that he had to accept, because there was something wrong with the poor creature and he’d be saddled with it for good otherwise.
‘Plenty of pheasants here, especially among the willows,’ I said, glancing at the overgrown area to the left of the farm. I saw them there sometimes in the trees or sitting on the ground. When they saw me, they’d let themselves drop to the ground like a stone and would stay there playing dead until I’d gone. That’s when their heads would pop up again.
Dad had nodded again, whacked his stick against the ground and hissed, ‘Sssssssjeu, come on,’ at the cows to drive them on. I’d looked in the freezer after that chat but there was no duck, pheasant or turkey to be found among the packets of mixed mincemeat and vegetables for soup.
Dad’s boots disappeared from sight again, and only a few strands of straw remained behind on the kitchen floor. I put the buckle in my pocket and went upstairs in my stockinged feet to my bedroom, which overlooked the farmyard. I sat on my haunches on the edge of the bed, and thought about my father’s hand on my head when we’d brought in the cows and walked back to the meadow to check the mole-traps. If they were empty, Dad would keep his hands stiffly in his trouser pockets: there was nothing that deserved a reward, not like when we’d caught something and had to prise the twisted, bloodied bodies from the claws with a rusty screwdriver, which I did bent over so that Dad couldn’t see the tears running down my cheeks at the sight of a small creature that had walked unsuspectingly into a trap. I pictured the way Dad would use that hand to wring my rabbit’s neck, like the childproof top of a canister of nitrogen: there was only one right way to do it. I imagined Mum laying out my lifeless pet on the silver dish she used for Russian salad on Sundays after church. She’d display him on a bed of lamb’s lettuce and garnish him with gherkins, tomato chunks, grated carrot and a sprig of thyme. I looked at my hands, at their irregular lines. They were still too small to be used for anything other than holding stuff. They still fitted in my parents’ hands but Mum’s and Dad’s didn’t fit in mine. That was the difference between them and me – they could put theirs around a rabbit’s neck, or around a cheese that had just been flipped in its brine. Their hands were always searching for something and if you were no longer able to hold an animal or a person tenderly, it was better to let go and turn your attention to other useful things instead.
I pressed my forehead harder and harder against the edge of my bed; I felt the pressure of cold wood on my skin and closed my eyes. Sometimes I found it strange that you had to pray in the dark, although maybe it was like my glow-in-the-dark duvet: the stars and the planets only emitted light and protected you from the night when it was dark enough. God must work the same way. I let my intertwined hands rest on my knees. Angrily I thought about Matthies who’d be drinking hot chocolate from one of the stalls on the ice. I thought of him skating with red cheeks, and about the thaw that would start tomorrow: the curly-haired presenter had warned of roofs that might be too slippery for Saint Nicholas to get down the chimney, and mist which might lead him to get lost and perhaps Matthies too, even though it was his own fault. For a moment, I saw my skates before me, greased and back in their box, ready to be returned to the attic. I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough, how many centimetres on the door-post that was, and I asked God if He please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen.’