The coffin with my brother in it was in the front room. It was made of oak and had a viewing window above his face, and metal handles. He’d been there for three days. On the first day, Hanna had rapped on the glass with her knuckles and said, in a small voice, ‘Now, I’ve had enough of this – stop messing around, Matthies.’ She remained motionless for a moment as though she was afraid he might be whispering and she wouldn’t hear him if there wasn’t total silence. When there was no reply, she went back to playing with her dolls behind the sofa, her thin body trembling like a dragonfly. I’d wanted to take her between my finger and thumb and blow on her to keep her warm, but I couldn’t tell her that Matthies had gone to sleep forever, that from now on we’d only have viewing windows in our hearts with our brother laid out behind them. Apart from our granny on the less religious side, we didn’t know anyone who was asleep for all eternity, though in the end we all got up again. ‘We live according to God’s will,’ Granny on the more religious side often said about this. When she got up in the morning her stiff knees troubled her, as well as bad breath, ‘as though I’d swallowed a dead sparrow’. Neither that bird nor my brother would ever wake up again.
The coffin was on the dresser on a white crocheted cloth that was usually taken out for birthdays when there would be cheese sticks, nuts, glasses and punch laid out on it, and just like at the parties, people stood in a ring around it now, their noses pressed into hankies or other people’s necks. Although they said nice things about my brother, death still felt ugly and as indigestible as the lost tiger nut we found days after a birthday party behind a chair or under the TV cabinet. In the coffin, Matthies’s face looked like it was made of beeswax, so smooth and tight. The nurses had stuck tissue paper under his eyelids to keep them shut, while I’d have preferred them to be open so that we could look at each other one more time, so that I could be sure I didn’t forget the colour of his eyes, so that he wouldn’t forget me.
When the second group of people had left, I tried to spread open his eyes, which made me think of the paper nativity scene I’d made at school, with coloured tissue paper as stained glass and Mary and Joseph figures. At the Christmas breakfast, a tea light had been lit behind them so the tissue paper would light up and Jesus could be born in an illuminated stable. But my brother’s eyes were dull and grey and there wasn’t a stained glass pattern. I quickly let the eyelids drop again and closed the viewing window. They’d tried to replicate his gelled locks but they just hung on his forehead like brown wilted pea pods. Mum and Granny had dressed Matthies in a pair of jeans and his favourite sweater, the blue and green one with HEROES in big letters across the chest. Most of the heroes I’d read about in books could fall from tall buildings or find themselves in an inferno and end up with just a few scratches. I didn’t understand why Matthies couldn’t do this too and why he’d only be immortal in our thoughts from now on. He’d once rescued a heron from the combine harvester just in time, otherwise the bird would have been shredded, added to a bale of straw and fed to the cows.
From behind the door where I was hiding, as she was dressing his body, I’d heard Granny tell my brother, ‘You always have to swim to the dark patch. You knew that, didn’t you?’ I couldn’t imagine how you managed to swim to the dark patch myself. It was about differences in colour. When there was snow on the ice you had to look for the light, but when there wasn’t any snow, the ice would be lighter than the hole and you had to swim to the dark. Matthies had told me this himself when he’d come into my bedroom before skating and shown me in his socks how to slide your feet toward and away from each other in turn. ‘Like riding two fish,’ he said. I had watched from my bed and made a clicking sound with my tongue against the roof of my mouth, the way the skates sounded on television as they went across ice. We loved that sound. Now my tongue lay curled in my mouth like an increasingly dangerous navigation channel in a lake. I didn’t dare make clicking sounds any more.
Granny came into the front room with a bottle of liquid soap – maybe that’s why they’d put papers under his eyelids, so that the soap wouldn’t get in and sting. Once they’d tidied him up, they’d probably take them away again, like the tea light in my nativity scene which was blown out so that Mary and Joseph could get on with their lives. Granny pulled me to her chest for a moment. She smelled of beestings pancakes with ham and syrup: there was still a big pile of them on the counter left over from lunch, greasy with butter, their edges crispy. Dad had asked who had made a face of bramble jam, raisins and apple on his pancake, looking at each of us one by one. His eyes stopped at Granny who smiled at him just as cheerfully as his pancake.
‘The poor lad is laid out nicely.’
More and more brown patches were appearing on her face, like the apples she’d cut up and used as mouths on the pancakes. You get overripe from old age in the end.
‘Can’t we put a rolled-up pancake in there with him? It’s Matthies’s favourite food.’
‘That would only smell. Do you want to attract worms?’
I removed my head from her breast and looked at the angels that were on the second step of the stairs in a box, ready to be taken back to the attic. I’d been allowed to put them back in the silver paper, one by one, facing downwards. I still hadn’t cried. I’d tried but hadn’t been able to each time, not even if I tried to picture Matthies falling through the ice in great detail: his hand feeling the ice for the hole, looking for the light or the dark, his clothes and skates heavy under the water. I held my breath and didn’t even manage it for half a minute.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I hate those stupid worms.’
Granny smiled at me. I wanted her to stop smiling, I wanted Dad to take his fork to her face and mash up everything like he’d done with his pancake. I didn’t hear her muffled sobs until she was alone in the front room.
In the nights that followed, I kept sneaking downstairs to check whether my brother was really dead. First I’d lie in my bed wiggling around or ‘making a candle’, as I called it, by throwing my legs up in the air and supporting my hips with my hands. In the mornings his death seemed obvious but as soon as it grew dark, I’d begin to have my doubts. What if we hadn’t looked hard enough and he woke up under the ground? Each time, I’d hope that God had changed his mind and hadn’t listened to me when I’d prayed for him to protect Dieuwertje, just like the time – I must have been about seven – when I’d asked for a new bike: a red one with at least seven gears, and a soft saddle with double suspension so that I didn’t get a pain in my crotch when I had to cycle home from school into the wind. I never got the bike. If I went downstairs now, I hoped, it wouldn’t be Matthies lying beneath the sheet but my rabbit. Of course I’d be sad, but it would be different from the beating veins in my forehead when I tried to hold my breath in bed to understand death, or when I made the candle for so long my blood ran to my head like candlewax. Finally, I let my legs drop back onto my mattress and carefully opened my bedroom door. I tiptoed onto the landing and down the stairs. Dad had beaten me to it: through the banisters I saw him sitting on a chair next to the coffin, his head on the glass of the viewing window. I looked down at his messy blond hair that always smelled of cows, even when he’d just had a bath. I looked at his bent body. He was shaking; as he wiped his nose on his pyjama top, I thought how the fabric would become hard with snot, just like my coat sleeves. I looked at him and began to feel little stabs inside my chest. I imagined I was watching Nederland 1, 2 or 3 and could zap away at any moment if it got too much. Dad sat there for so long my feet got cold. When he pushed his chair in and returned to bed – my parents had a waterbed that Dad would sink back into now – I descended the rest of the stairs and sat down on his chair. It was still warm. I pressed my mouth to the window, like the ice in my dreams, and blew. I tasted the salt of my father’s tears. Matthies’s face was as pale as fennel; his lips were purple from the cooling mechanism that kept him frozen. I wanted to turn it off so that he could thaw in my arms and I could carry him upstairs so that we could sleep on it, like Dad sometimes ordered us to when we’d misbehaved and been sent to bed without any dinner. I’d ask him whether this was really the right way to leave us.
The first night he was in the coffin in the front room, Dad saw me sitting with my hands around the banisters and my head pushed through them. He’d sniffed and said, ‘They’ve put cotton wads in his bottom to stop his crap coming out. He must still be warm inside. That makes me feel better.’ I held my breath and counted: thirty-three seconds of suffocation. It wouldn’t be long before I could hold my breath for so long that I’d be able to fish Matthies out of his sleep, and just like the frogspawn we got out of the ditch behind the cowshed with a fishing net and kept in a bucket until they were tadpoles and tails and legs slowly began to grow out of them, Matthies would also slowly transform from lifeless to alive and kicking.
*
On the morning of the third day, Dad asked from the bottom of the stairs whether I wanted to go with him to Farmer Janssen’s to pick up some mangels and drop them off at the new bit of land. I would have preferred to stay with my brother so that I could be certain he didn’t thaw in my absence, melting out of our life like a snowflake, but I didn’t want to disappoint him so I put on my red coat over my overalls, the zip done up to my chin. The tractor was so old I was shaken back and forth at every bump; I had to cling on to the edge of the open window. Anxiously I glanced over at my father: the lines of sleep were still on his face, the waterbed made rivers in his skin, an impression of the lake. Mum’s bobbing body had stopped him from sleeping, as had his own bobbing body, or the idea of bodies heaving as they fell into water. Tomorrow they’d buy a normal mattress. My stomach rumbled.
‘I need to poo.’
‘Why didn’t you go at home?’
‘I didn’t need to then.’
‘That’s impossible, you feel it coming on.’
‘But it’s the truth. I think I’ve got the runs.’
Dad parked the tractor on the land, turned off the engine, and reached over to push open my door for me.
‘Squat down over by that tree, the ash there.’
I quickly climbed out of the cab, pulled off my coat and let my overalls and pants drop to my knees. I imagined the diarrhoea splattering onto the grass like the caramel sauce my granny poured onto the rice pudding, and squeezed my buttocks together. Dad leaned against the tractor’s tyre, lit up a cigarette and looked at me.
‘If you take any longer, moles will start tunnelling up your bum hole.’
I began to sweat, picturing the cotton wads my dad had mentioned, the way the moles would burrow into my brother when he was buried, and the way they’d dig up everything in me afterwards. My poo belonged to me, but once it was between the blades of grass, it belonged to the world.
‘Just push,’ Dad said. He came over and handed me a used tissue. His eyes were hard. I wasn’t used to this expression on him, even though I knew he hated waiting because then he had to stand still for too long, which made him dwell on things, and then he smoked more. No one in the village liked to dwell: the crops might wither, and we only knew about the harvest that came from the land, not about things that grew inside ourselves. I breathed in Dad’s smoke so that his cares would become mine. After that, I said a quick prayer to God that he wouldn’t give me cancer from the cigarette smoke if I helped with the toad migration when I was old enough. ‘The righteous care for the needs of their livestock,’ I’d once read in the Bible, so I was safe as far as illness was concerned.
‘The urge went away,’ I said. I pulled my pants back up and put my overalls back on, closed my coat and zipped it up to my chin. I could hold in my poo. I wouldn’t have to lose anything I wanted to keep from now on.
Dad stamped out his butt on a molehill. ‘Drink lots of water, that helps with the calves too. Otherwise it will come out the other end one day.’ He laid his hand on my head, and I tried to walk as upright as I could beneath it. Now there were two things I’d have to watch out for at both ends.
We walked back to the tractor. The new bit of land was older than me and yet it continued to be called that. It was like the way there used to be a doctor living at the bottom of the dike where there was now a playground with a bumpy slide, which we still called the Old Doctor’s when arranging play dates.
‘Do you think worms and maggots are going to eat Matthies?’ I asked my father as we walked back. I didn’t dare look at him. Dad had once read out from Isaiah, ‘All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you,’ and now I was worried this would happen to my brother too. Dad tugged open the tractor’s door without answering me. I feverishly pictured my brother’s body full of holes like strawberry matting.
When we arrived at the mangels, some of them were rotten. The mushy white pulp that looked like pus stuck to my fingers when I picked them up. Dad tossed them nonchalantly over his shoulder into the trailer. They made a dull thud. Whenever he looked at me I felt my cheeks burning. We had to agree upon times when my parents couldn’t look at me, I thought, the same as with the TV. Perhaps that was why Matthies didn’t come home that day – because the doors to the TV cabinet were closed and no one was keeping an eye on us.
I didn’t dare ask my father any more questions about Matthies and threw the last mangel into the trailer, taking my place next to him in the cabin afterwards. There was a sticker on the rusty rim above the rearview mirror that said MILK THE COW, NOT THE FARMER.
Back at the farm, Dad and Obbe dragged the dark blue waterbed outside. Dad pulled off the nozzle and the safety cap and let the water drain out into the farmyard. It wasn’t long before a thin layer of ice had formed. I didn’t dare stand on it, afraid that I would fall through. The dark mattress slowly shrank like a vacuum-sealed packet of coffee. Then my father rolled up the waterbed and laid it at the side of the road, next to the wheelbarrow containing the Christmas tree that would be picked up on Monday by the waste disposal company. Obbe nudged me and said, ‘There he is.’ I stared at the place he was pointing to and saw the black hearse approaching over the dike; it came closer and closer like a large crow, then it turned left and drove onto the farm, across the layer of ice from the waterbed, which had indeed cracked. Reverend Renkema got out with two of my uncles. Dad had chosen them and Farmer Evertsen and Farmer Janssen to lift the oak coffin into the hearse and later carry it into the church as Hymn 416 was sung, accompanied by the band in which Matthies had played the trombone for years, and the only thing that was right about that afternoon was that heroes are always borne aloft.