‘Where you see sticks in the ground, that’s where the mole traps are,’ Dad says, handing me a spade. I take hold of it by its middle. I feel sorry for the moles, falling into traps in the darkness. I’m just like them: during the day it seems to get blacker and blacker, and in the evening I can’t see my hand in front of my eyes. I dig a little around my feet, turning up everything we’ve pushed under the turf. This morning I turned on the globe on my bedside table and there was a brief flash of light before it went pitch black. I pressed the switch again but nothing happened. For a moment the ocean seemed to flow out of the globe – my pyjamas were soaking wet and smelled of piss. I held my breath and thought about Matthies. Forty seconds. Then I let some fresh air in and unscrewed the globe. The bulb still looked perfect. I thought briefly: this is the darkness, the last plague, then we’ll have had them all. I quickly dismissed the idea.
The teacher had been right when she told my mum and dad at parents’ evening that I had an overactive imagination, that I built a Lego world around myself. It was easy to click it together and apart – I determined who was an enemy and who was a friend. She also told them I’d given a Nazi salute at the door to the classroom – I had indeed raised my arm in the air and said ‘Heil Hitler’ as Obbe had told me to. He said it would make the teacher laugh. The teacher didn’t laugh but made me write up lines after school: ‘I shall not mock history, just as I shall not mock God.’ And I thought – you don’t know that I belong to the right side, that Mum is hiding Jewish people in the basement who are allowed to eat sweets, including mini biscuits, and drink an infinite amount of fizzy drinks. I tell her the mini biscuits have two sides: one is chocolate and the other is gingerbread. I’ve got two sides too – I’m both Hitler and a Jew, good and evil. I’d taken off my wet pyjamas in the bathroom and spread them over the floor, which was heated. Wearing clean knickers and my coat, I was leaning against the bath, waiting for them to dry, when the door opened and Obbe came in. He looked at my pyjamas as though a corpse was lying there.
‘Have you pissed your pants?’
I shook my head firmly. I clutched the bulb from the globe tightly in my hand. It was a flat little bulb.
‘No, the water came out of my globe light.’
‘Liar, it didn’t have any water in it.’
‘It did too,’ I said. ‘There are five oceans.’
‘Why does it smell of piss here then?’
‘That’s just what the sea smells like. Fish pee too.’
‘Whatever,’ Obbe said. ‘It’s time for the sacrifice.’
‘Tomorrow,’ I promised him.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘tomorrow’s the day.’ He glanced at my pyjamas again and then said, ‘Otherwise I’ll tell everyone at school that you’re a little piss monster.’ He’d closed the door behind him.
I’d lain flat on my belly on the bathroom floor and practised butterfly stroke, which turned into just moving my crotch against the fluffy mat as though it was my bear, as though I was swimming in the ocean among the fish.
*
I follow Dad into the field. The frost has turned the grass rock hard under my wellies. Since the cows no longer go into it, he’s been checking the traps every day; he’s holding a couple of new ones in his right hand to exchange with the old ones that have clapped shut. When I’m doing my homework, I can see him through my bedroom window often taking the same path across the fields. Some days Mum and Obbe go with him. From above, the land looks just like a ludo board and I feel the same relief when they’re safely back in the farm, in the stables, like pawns. Even though it’s getting more difficult for all of us to be in the same place. Each room in the farm can only tolerate one pawn, and as soon as more come along there’s an argument. Dad will lay his mole traps inside then, too. He hasn’t got anything else to do and sits in his smoking chair all day like a stuffed heron, not saying anything until he can turn us into his prey. Herons love moles. If he does say anything it’s often an interrogation about the Authorized Version. Who lost his hair and therefore all his powers? Who turned into a pillar of salt? Who was swallowed by a whale? Who killed his brother? How many books are there in the New Testament? We avoid the smoking chair as though it’s the plague but sometimes you have to go past it, just before a meal for example, and then Dad keeps on asking questions until the soup’s gone cold and the breadsticks soggy. One wrong answer and you’re sent to your bedroom to reflect on things. Dad doesn’t realize there are already so many things to reflect on, that more keep on turning up, that our bodies are growing and that these contemplations can no longer be switched off with a peppermint, like in the church pew.
‘In the olden days, you used to get a guilder per skin. I’d nail them to a plank to let them dry,’ Dad says. He squats down next to one of the sticks. Now he feeds the moles he catches to the herons behind the cowshed. They dip them in the water first – they can’t swallow them dry – and gulp them down without chewing, as though they’re Dad and God’s word, which slips down in the same way.
‘Yes, kiddo, you have to keep your head doing this – if it claps shut you’ll be as dead as a doornail,’ Dad whispers as he pokes the stick deeper into the ground. Nothing in it. We go to the next trap: again nothing. Moles like to live alone. They go into the darkness alone, like everyone has to fight their dark side in the long run. It’s pitch black more and more often inside my head. Hanna digs herself up from time to time, but I don’t know how to get out of that damned tunnel system where I can block Mum and Dad at every corner, arms like weak springs next to their bodies, trapping them like the rusty mole traps in the shed.
‘Much too cold for those animals,’ Dad says. A drip hangs from his nose. He hasn’t shaved for a few days. There’s a red scratch on his nose where he scraped himself on a branch.
‘Yes, much too cold,’ I agree, pulling up my shoulders like a wind-break.
Dad stares at the sticks in the distance and then suddenly says, ‘People are gossiping about you in the village. About your coat.’
‘What’s wrong with my coat?’
‘Are there molehills growing under it? Is that it?’ Dad grins. I turn red. Belle’s have slowly started to grow now. She showed me in the changing rooms during gym; her nipples were pink and swollen like two marshmallows.
‘Now you,’ she’d said.
I shook my head. ‘Mine grow in the dark, just like cress. You mustn’t disturb them otherwise they’ll get drowsy and go limp.’ She understood, but it wouldn’t be long before she became impatient. Even though Obbe and I had shut her up for a while. She hadn’t told her parents what had happened, because there’d been no angry phone call. Only at school now there was a history book between our tables, like the Berlin Wall. She hadn’t wanted to speak to me since the incident and had lost all interest in my collection of milk biscuits.
‘Every healthy girl has molehills,’ Dad says.
He gets to his feet and stands before me. His lips are chapped from the cold. I quickly point at a stick a little way away.
‘I think there’s a mole in that one.’
Dad turns for a moment and peers at the place I pointed out to him. His blond hair has got long, just like mine. It stops just above our shoulders. Normally Mum would have sent us to the hairdresser’s on the square a long time ago. Now she’s forgotten. Or maybe she wants us to be overgrown, for us to slowly disappear like the ivy covering the whole of the front of the house. Then no one will be able to see how little we amount to.
‘Do you think you’ll ever be able to marry before God like that?’
Dad stamps his spade into the earth – one-nil to him. There isn’t a single boy in my class who looks at me. They only point me out when I’m the butt of one of their jokes. Yesterday Pelle had put his hand down his trousers and stuck his finger through the fly.
‘Feel this,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a stiffy.’
Without thinking about it, I’d taken hold of his finger and pinched it. I felt the bones through the thin skin that was yellowish from smoking. The whole class began to whoop. A little bewildered, I’d gone back to my chair next to the window, while the laughing became louder and the Berlin Wall shook in its foundations.
‘I’m never going to get married. I’m going to the other side,’ I say, with my thoughts still in the classroom. It just slips out before I realize. The colour drains from Dad’s face, as though I’ve said the word ‘naked’, which is worse than suggesting we’re talking about developing tits.
‘Anyone who gets it in their head one day to brave the bridge will never return,’ he says in a loud voice. Ever since that first day when Matthies didn’t come home, he’s been warning us and making the city out as a slurry pit that would suck you down if you went into it, and intoxicate you.
‘Sorry, Dad,’ I say in a whisper, ‘I wasn’t thinking about what I said.’
‘You know how things ended for your brother. Do you want that too?’ He pulls his spade out of the ground and walks away from me, giving the wind the chance to come between us. Dad squats next to the last trap.
‘Tomorrow you’ll take your coat off. I’ll burn it and we won’t mention the matter again,’ he cries.
Suddenly I picture Dad’s body between the blades of a mole trap, us sticking a branch in next to his head so that we know where the pawn died. Rinsing the trap with the garden hose in the barrel in the rabbit shed, I shake my head to get rid of the nasty image. I’m not afraid of molehills but I am afraid of the darkness they grow in.
We return to the farm without any loot. On the way back, he whacks some of the molehills with the spade to flatten then.
‘Sometimes it’s good to frighten them a bit,’ Dad says, following this with, ‘Do you want to be as flat as your mother?’
I think about Mum’s breasts, which are as slack as two collection bags in the church. ‘That’s because she doesn’t eat,’ I say.
‘She’s full of worries, there’s no space left for anything else.’
‘Why has she got worries?’
Dad doesn’t reply. I know it’s got something to do with us, that we can never act normally – even when we try to be normal we disappoint, as though we’re the wrong variety, like this year’s potatoes. Mum thought they were too crumbly and then too waxy. I don’t dare say anything about the toads under my desk and that they’re about to mate. I know it’s going to happen and then they’ll start eating again and everything will be all right.
‘If you take your coat off, she’ll fill out again.’ Dad gives me a sideways glance. He attempts to smile but the corners of his mouth seem frozen. I feel big for a moment. Big people smile at each other, they understand each other, even when they don’t understand themselves. I lay my hand on my coat’s zip. When Dad looks away, I pick some snot from my nose with my other hand and put it in my mouth.
‘I can’t take my coat off without getting sick.’
‘Do you want to make us look like twits? You’ll be the death of us with that funny behaviour of yours. Tomorrow it’s coming off.’
I slow my pace until I’m walking behind him and look at Dad’s back. He’s wearing a red jacket and has a trapper’s pouch on his back. No moles in it or anything else. The grass crackles under his feet.
‘I don’t want you to die,’ I scream into the wind. Dad doesn’t hear. The mole traps he’s carrying in his hand gently knock against each other in the wind.