Carrying the shovel that still has a bit of white paper from Obbe’s lantern sticking to it, and wearing my pyjamas, I go into the field behind the breeding stable we privately call the sperm barn. I dig a hole just next to the place where Tiesey is buried and where Obbe patted down the overturned earth with the back of the spade, and this time didn’t poke in a stick because it isn’t something we want to remember, that we want to look at. As I dig, the stabbing feelings in my belly get more and more intense. It makes me short of breath and I clench my buttocks tightly, whispering softly, ‘Wait just a little while, Jas, you can almost go.’ Once the hole is deep enough, I glance around quickly. Dad and Obbe are still asleep and Hanna is playing with her Barbies behind the sofa. I don’t know where Mum’s got to. She might even have popped next door to see Lien and Kees, who has just bought a new milk tank for when the new stock arrive – a twenty thousand litre one.
I quickly untie the cords of my striped pyjama bottoms and drop them and my knickers to my ankles, feeling the ice-cold wind on my bottom, and then I squat and hover over the hole. In a last attempt to solve my poo problem by looking it up in the Bible yesterday evening, Dad came across a reference in Deuteronomy: ‘Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.’ He’d leafed on and closed the Bible with a sigh, meaning there was nothing useful for this problem there, but the lines had stuck in my head. It had kept me awake in the night. I tossed and turned in the dark and kept thinking of those three words, ‘outside the camp’. God must have meant outside the farmyard. Was that the only place I’d be able to poo? I didn’t say anything to my parents about my plan because not being able to poo is the only thing we still talk about, the only thing that makes them look up when I stand in front of them in the kitchen and lift my T-shirt, my swollen belly like an egg with a double yolk, feeling the same pride as when one of my silky fowl lays a massive white egg.
I look back between my legs and feel the pressure in my bum. Whether it’s due to the olive oil or the Bible verses, it works. Only instead of a steaming brown trail descending into the earth like an enormous worm, a few droppings come out of my bum. I keep on pressing as the tears run along my clenched jaw and I feel myself grow dizzy. I have to go on and get everything out otherwise I’ll burst one day, and then I’ll be even further from home and from myself. The droppings look a bit like the ones my rabbit Dieuwertje does, but then one size bigger. Mini pasties. Granny once said that poo is healthiest when it looks like the greasy veal sausages she sometimes makes. My poo looks like anything but that.
More and more steam comes out of the hole. I pinch my nose to keep out the smell, which is much worse than a stable full of crapping cows. When nothing else comes, I look around in search of leaves and suddenly notice that everything is bare or buried under a thin layer of frost. I don’t want to freeze shut like the plug in the bath-tub in the field which the cows drink water from in the summer. And so I pull my knickers and pyjama bottoms back up without wiping my bum, trying not to let the fabric touch the skin, otherwise everything will get dirty. As I turn around, I bend over the hole for a moment like an eagle hovering over its chicks. I look at the droppings lying there in a heap and begin to close the hole to cover the excrement. I flatten the earth with the shovel, stamp on it a few times with my wellies, and poke a stick in it so I’ll remember where I lost a piece of myself. I leave the field, put the shovel back among the other shovels and pitchforks, and think briefly about the boys next door who actually find in the toilet bowl all the things they’ve lost: a blue button, a Lego brick, plastic bullets from a gun at the fair, a bolt. For a moment I feel big.