Dad’s clogs are next to the door-mat, with blue plastic covers around their hard noses to prevent any further contamination. I wish I could stick a plastic cover over my face so I could only breathe my own breath. I wear his clogs to empty the basket of peelings onto the muck-heap, tipping them out onto cow pats white with dew, and suddenly it occurs to me that this might be the last pile of cow shit that I’ll see for a while. Just like the sound of the early morning mooing, the feed concentrate mixers, the milk tank’s cooling system turning on, the cooing of the wood pigeons attracted by the corn feed that build nests in the rafters of the barn, everything will ultimately fade into something we only recall on birthdays or when we can’t get to sleep at night, and everything will be empty: the cows’ stalls, the cheese shed, the feed silos, our hearts.
A trail of milk runs from the milk tank to the drain in the middle of the farmyard – Dad has opened the tap. The milk can’t be sold any more, but he continues to milk the cows as though nothing’s about to happen. He secures the cows between the bars, attaches the cups to their udders, then uses one of my old underpants covered in salve to clean them afterwards. I often used to feel embarrassed when Dad rubbed one of my worn-out pairs of knickers on the udders, or cleaned the milking cups with them without any kind of bashfulness – but sometimes at night I’ve thought about the crotch that has passed through so many other people’s hands, from Obbe’s to Farmer Janssen’s, and that they touch me that way, with calluses and blisters on their palms. Sometimes a pair of knickers gets lost among the cows before finally getting kicked between the gratings. Dad calls them udder cloths; he doesn’t see them as underpants any more. On Saturdays Mum washes the udder cloths and hangs them to dry on the washing line.
I pick a leftover apple core from the bottom of the peelings basket with my fingernail, and see out of the corner of my eye the vet squatting next to a white tent. He sinks a syringe into a jar of antibiotics and presses the needle into a calf’s neck. The calf’s got diarrhoea – mustard yellow has splattered against her sides, legs trembling like fence poles in the wind. Even on a Sunday the vet is here, but if we were to lie on the bathroom rug with thermometers up our bare bums, things would be put off until Monday. Mum would sing the Dutch nursery rhyme about Kortjakje – ‘often is Kortjakje sick, never on Sundays but always in the week’. And I thought, Kortjakje’s a coward: she can’t go to school but she can go to church – that’s a bit wet. It wasn’t until I started secondary school that I understood. Kortjakje was frightened of everything unfamiliar. Was she bullied? Did she get tummy ache as soon as she caught sight of the school playground like I do? When school trips were announced and all the germs would go along too? Did she break peppermints on the edge of the table to stop feeling sick? Actually, you had to feel sorry for Kortjakje.
The plastic covers crunch with every step. Dad once said, ‘Death always comes wearing clogs.’ I hadn’t understood. Why not ice skates or trainers? Now I get it: Death announces itself in most cases, but we’re often the ones who don’t want to see or hear it. We knew that the ice was too weak in some places, and we knew the foot-and-mouth wouldn’t skip our village.
I escape to the rabbit shed where I’m safe from all the illnesses, and I press the limp carrot tops through the wire mesh. I briefly think about a rabbit’s neck vertebrae. Would they crack if you twisted the head? It’s a scary thought that we hold other beings’ death in our hands, however small mine are – like bricklaying trowels, you can use them to build, but also to chop things to the right size with the sharp edge. I slide away the manger, let my hand descend onto the fur, and stroke Dieuwertje’s ears flat to his body. The edges of his ears are hard from the cartilage in them. For a moment I close my eyes and think of the lady with the curls from children’s TV. The concern in her eyes when she explains that Saint Nicholas’s helpers have all got lost, and everyone’s going to wake up to empty shoes next to the fireplace and the carrots next to them for his horse, gone floppy from the heat, their orange skins all wrinkly. I also think about the meringues on her table, the gingerbread men, and the way I sometimes fantasize that I’m a gingerbread man allowed to get very close to her, closer than to anyone before. She’d say, ‘Jas, things grow and shrink, but people always stay the same size.’ The way she’d reassure me because I can no longer reassure myself.
When I open my eyes again, I take my rabbit’s right ear between my fingers. Then I feel the place between Dieuwertje’s back legs. It just happens, like with the little porcelain angels in the past. At that moment the vet comes in. I quickly withdraw my hand, bending my head to put the manger back in front of the hatch. If your head turns red it’s heavier, because embarrassment has a larger mass.
‘They’ve all got a fever, some of them even forty-two degrees,’ he says. The vet washes his hands in the water barrel with a bar of green soap. There’s algae on the inside of the barrel. I urgently have to clean it with a brush. I peer over the edge. The froth from the soap makes me feel sick, and when I place my hand on my lower belly I can feel my swollen intestines. They feel just like the fennel sausages from the butcher’s that are impossible to digest.
The vet puts the bar of green soap between the stone feeding troughs on a wooden table. They are from earlier rabbits, most of which died of old age. Dad buried them with a spade in the furthest field where we’re never allowed to play. Sometimes I worry about the rabbits there, whether their teeth might carry on growing a long time after death and stick out of the ground where a cow could get caught on them, or worse, my dad. That’s why I give Dieuwertje a lot of tops, and I pick buckets of grass for him so that his teeth don’t grow too long and he’s got enough to chew on.
‘Why can’t they get better? Children get better again when they have a fever, don’t they?’
The vet dries his hands on an old tea-towel and hangs it back on a hook on the wall of the shed. ‘It’s too infectious, and you can’t sell any of the meat or the milk. You’d only make a loss then.’
I nod, even though I don’t get it. Isn’t it a greater loss this way? All those steaming bodies we love so much will soon be killed. It’s like with the Jewish people, only they were hated, and then you die sooner than when you go to your grave out of love and powerlessness.
The vet turns a feed bucket upside down and sits on it. His black curls hang like party streamers around his face. I feel like I’m all legs now I tower over him. It’s difficult anyway to know what to do with the extra centimetres only noted in friendship books. We used to mark them on the door-post. Dad would fetch his tape measure and a pencil, and score a line in the wood at the place your head reached. When Matthies didn’t come home, he painted the door-post olive green; the same green as the shutters at the front of the house that have been kept shut all the time recently – no one is allowed to see us growing up.
‘It’s a sorry business.’ He sighs as he turns the palms of his hands upwards. You can see the blisters on the inside. They’re just like the air cushions in the envelopes Dad sent off vials of bull sperm in, which sometimes stood, lukewarm, among the breakfast things on the table. In the winter I’d hold them to my cheek when I’d just got up and the cold of the floor had reached my cheeks via my toes – hearing Mum in the background spitting on the little windows in the wood-stove before polishing them with a piece of kitchen roll. She always did that before Dad was allowed to put in the kindling, which he lit with some old newspaper. She said you could feel more heat if you could see the flames fighting for a piece of wood.
Mum didn’t like me holding the vials to my cheeks – she said it was unsavoury. She said calves were forged from it, like Granny made new candles from the candlewax that everyone in the village saved for her. But the stuff in the vials was whitish, sometimes watery, sometimes very thick. One time I secretly took some up to my bedroom. Hanna insisted we open the vial once it had cooled down and we could no longer warm ourselves up with it. When the vial got as cold as our bodies, we each dipped our little fingers in it, and, counting to three, stuck it in our mouths. It tasted insipid and salty. In the evening hours we fantasized that calves would come out of us, until the plan to find a rescuer blossomed in our minds and we felt bigger than ever: we’d turn into liquid in the rescuer’s hands, just as fluid as the semen in the test tubes.
‘Is your coat comfortable?’
It’s a while before I can answer. My thoughts are still taken up with the blisters on his palms.
‘Yes, very.’
‘Not too hot?’
‘Not too hot.’
‘Do you get teased about it?’
I shrug. I’m good at thinking of answers but less good at saying them. Every answer gives rise to an observation. I don’t like observations. They’re as persistent as when a butter brush covered in cheese wax falls onto your clothes – almost impossible to wash out.
The vet smiles. I only notice now that he has the widest nostrils I’ve ever seen, which must mean he spends a lot of time picking his nose. It creates a bond I mustn’t forget. There’s a stethoscope around his neck. For a moment I imagine the cold metal on my chest and him listening to everything moving inside me and changing. The vet drawing a worried frown across his forehead and pushing his thumb and index finger between my jaws to feed me, just like the calf. He’d keep me warm under his green dust-coat.
‘Do you miss your brother?’ he asks suddenly. He lays his hand around my lower leg and gently squeezes. Maybe he’s feeling whether I’m sick: you can tell from the fleshiness of calves’ legs how healthy they are. He rubs his hand softly back and forth, which makes the skin under the denim grow hot, and the warmth spreads through my whole body like the thought of homecoming and hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day, a thought that is quite a lot less warm by the time you get home. I stare at his neatly trimmed fingernails. You can see the impression of a ring around his ring finger – the skin is lighter there. Loved ones always remain visible in your heart or under your skin, the way my chest seems like it will split when my mum sits on the edge of my bed and asks in a porcelain voice whether I love her and I reply, ‘From hell to heaven.’ Sometimes I hear my ribcage crack and I’m afraid I’ll split for good.
‘Yes, I miss him,’ I whisper.
It’s the first time anyone’s asked me whether I miss Matthies. Not a pat on the head or a pinch of the cheek but a question. Not: how are your parents doing? How are the cows doing? But: how are you doing? I stare at my shoes.
When I look at the vet, he suddenly appears cast down, the way Mum often looks, as though she’s been carrying a glass of water on top of her head to the other side all day without spilling a drop. That’s why I say, ‘But I’m doing so well I may even speak of happiness, praise the Lord until the knees of my jeans are replaced by patches featuring comic-book characters.’
The vet laughs. ‘You know you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen?’
I feel my cheeks fill with colour like the circles after multiple-choice questions. I don’t know how many girls he’s seen in his life but I still feel flattered. Someone finds me pretty. Even with my faded coat that’s beginning to fray at the seams. I don’t know how to respond. Multiple-choice questions often have traps, according to my teacher, because they all contain part of the reality and at the same time are lies. The vet hides his stethoscope under his shirt. Before he goes out, he winks at me. ‘To make peace,’ Mum sometimes says when Dad does that to her. She says it angrily because peace died out long ago. Still, something sears inside my ribcage, something different than inside my heart, which often blazes like a bramble bush.