When I wake up my plans always seem bigger, just like how humans are bigger in the morning because of the moisture in your intervertebral discs which makes you a couple of centimetres taller. We’re going to the other side today. I don’t know if that’s why I’m feeling strange and everything around me seems darker. Obbe and I stand behind the cowshed as the first snow falls on us, fat flakes sticking to our cheeks, as though God is sprinkling icing sugar the way Mum did over the first doughnuts of the season this morning. The grease drips from the corners of your mouth when you sink your teeth into them. Mum was early this year – she’d fried them herself and built up in three layers in a milk pail: doughnuts, kitchen roll paper, apple fritters. She took two full buckets to the basement, to the Jewish people, because they deserved a new year too. Her fingers were totally bent after peeling the apples for the fritters.
Obbe’s hair is white with snow. He promised that if I make a sacrifice he won’t tell anyone that I still wet the bed, so the Day of Judgement can be delayed. He’s taken one of the cockerels from the coop. Dad is so proud of the creature, sometimes he says, ‘As proud as a cow with seven udders.’ This is because of its bright red saddle feathers and green hackle feathers, its large earlobes and shiny comb. The cock is the only being that has remained unaffected by everything and now parades around the farmyard, its chest thrust out. It’s calmly watching us now with leaden eyes. I feel the toads moving in my coat pocket. I hope they don’t catch a chill. I should have put them inside a glove.
‘You can stop once it’s crowed three times,’ Obbe says.
He hands me the hammer. I clench its handle for the second time. I think about Mum and Dad, about Dieuwertje, my brother Matthies, my body filled with green soap, God and his absence, the stone in Mum’s belly, the star we can’t find, my coat that has to come off, the cheese scoop in the dead cow. It crows once before the claw hammer sticks into its flesh and the cockerel lies dead on the flagstones. My mum made me smash my piggy bank with that hammer. Now it’s blood not money that comes out. It’s the first time I’ve killed an animal with my own hands – before this I was just an accessory. When I once stood on a spider in Granny’s sheltered housing that didn’t have a shelter, Granny said, ‘Death is a process that disintegrates into actions and actions into phases. Death never just happens to you, there is always something that causes it. This time it was you. You can kill too.’ Granny was right. My tears begin to melt the snowflakes on my cheeks. My shoulders jerk irregularly. I try to hold still but don’t manage it.
Obbe casually pulls the hammer out of the cockerel’s flesh and rinses it under the tap next to the cowshed, saying, ‘You’re really sick. You did it too.’ Then he turns around, picks up the cockerel by its legs, and walks toward the fields with its head dangling softer back and forth in the wind. I look at my shaking hands. I’ve made myself small in shock and when I stand up again, it’s as though there are split pins in my joints that keep everything connected but also moving independently. And all of a sudden a magpie moth flutters around me, black patches like spilled ink on its wings. I guess it has escaped from Obbe’s collection. It’s the only possibility; you don’t see butterflies or moths in December – they hibernate. I catch it in my palms and hold it to my ear. You’re not allowed to touch anything of Obbe’s, not his hair or his toys, otherwise he gets furious and begins to swear. You’re not even allowed to touch the crown of his head, while he presses on it the whole time himself. I hear the moth fluttering in panic against the inside of my hands and clench them into a fist, as though holding a scrap piece of paper with irreverent words on it. Silence.
Only the violence inside me makes noise. It grows and grows, just like sadness. Only sadness needs more space, like Belle said, and violence just takes it. I let the dead moth fall out of my hands and into the snow. I slide a fresh layer over it with my welly: it’s an icy grave. Angrily I punch the shed wall, skinning my knuckles. I clench my jaw and look at the stalls. It won’t be long before they’re filled again – my parents are waiting for the new stock. Dad has even given the feed silo a new lick of paint. I’m worried it will stand out too much and attract Mum, a glimmer in her death wish. The problem is it’s going to seem as though everything has gone back to normal, as though everyone is just continuing with their lives after Matthies and the foot-and-mouth. Except for me. Maybe a longing for death is infectious, or it jumps to the next head – mine – just like the lice in Hanna’s class. I let myself fall back into the snow, spread my arms and move them up and down. I’d give a lot to be able to rise up now, to be made of porcelain and for someone to drop me by accident so that I’d break into countless pieces and someone would see that I was broken, that I can no longer be of any use, like those damned angels wrapped in silver paper. The clouds coming from my mouth lessen. I can still feel the hammer’s handle in the flesh of my palms, hear the cock crowing. ‘Thou shalt not kill nor avenge thyself.’ I took revenge and that can only mean one more plague.
I suddenly feel two hands under my armpits and I’m lifted to my feet. When I turn around Dad is standing before me – his black beret isn’t black but white. He slowly raises his hand to my cheek. For a moment I think we’re going to start slapping our hands like at the cattle market, that we’ll assess my meat as healthy or sick, but his fingers curl and stroke my cheek so fleetingly that I wonder afterwards whether it actually happened and whether I haven’t invented a hand made of our misty breath from the cold, that it was only the wind. Trembling, I stare at the blood patch in the yard, but Dad doesn’t see it, and the snow slowly hides the death.
‘Go inside. I’ll come and take off your coat in a moment,’ Dad says, as he walks to the side of the shed to work the beet crusher. He turns the handle firmly – the rusty wheel squeaks as it turns, bits of sugar beet fly around him, most of them landing in the metal basket. They’re for the rabbits – they love them. As I walk away, I leave a trail behind in the snow. My hope that someone will find me is growing steadily. Someone to help me find myself and to say: cold, cold, lukewarm, warm, getting warmer, hot.
When Obbe comes back from the fields, there’s nothing noticeable about him. His back to Dad, he stops in front of me, puts his hand on my coat zip and roughly jerks it upwards, catching the skin of my chin. I scream and step backward. I carefully pull the zip down again and touch the painful patch of skin, abraded by the metal hooks of the zip.
‘That’s what betrayal feels like, and this is just the beginning. You’ll be in for it if you tell Dad that it was my idea,’ Obbe whispers. He makes a cutting gesture across his throat with his finger before turning around and holding up a hand to greet Dad. He is allowed into the cowshed with him. For the first time in ages, Dad is going back into the place where all his cows were exterminated. He doesn’t ask whether I’d like to join them and leaves me behind in the cold, bits of skin stuck in the zip and one cheek burning from his touch. I should have showed my other cheek, like Jesus, to see whether he meant it. I walk back towards the farm and see Hanna rolling a ball of snow.
‘There’s a giant sitting on my chest,’ I say once I reach her. She pauses and looks up, her nose red from the freezing cold. She’s wearing Matthies’s blue mittens the vet had brought with him from the lake, and which lay defrosting on a plate behind the stove like pieces of meat for the evening meal. My brother had thought it childish that Mum had tied a string to them because she was worried he’d lose them, and frozen fingers were the worst thing, she said, not thinking about a heart that stayed cold for too long and how bad that was.
‘What’s the giant doing there?’ Hanna asks.
‘Just sitting there, being heavy.’
‘How long’s he been there?’
‘Quite a long time, but this time he’s refusing to get off again. He arrived when Obbe went into the cowshed with Dad.’
‘Oh,’ Hanna says, ‘you’re jealous.’
‘Not true!’
‘You are. The Lord hates lying lips.’
‘I’m not lying.’
I make my chest swell and then cave in again, as though a claw hammer has been stuck into me too. I keep on feeling it, the same way I still feel the impression of Obbe’s body after he’s lain on top of me, long after taking a shower. I’m not jealous because Obbe’s with Dad, but because he has the death of Dad’s favourite cockerel on his conscience just as much as I do and it hasn’t made him fall backwards into the snow. Why does he never catch a chill from the ice-cold plans he drags us into? I want to tell Hanna about the cockerel, tell her the sacrifice I had to make to keep Mum and Dad alive, but I don’t say anything. I don’t want to worry her unnecessarily. And maybe she’ll never cuddle up to me again in bed, leaning against the chest that contains so much that is hidden and that is capable of more than she thinks. This is one of those afternoons, I think, that I stick to the next page with Pritt stick in my diary, only to carefully peel apart again later. First to get rid of it and later to see whether it really happened.
‘You can shrink giants by making yourself bigger,’ Hanna says, stacking two snowballs on top of each other – the head and the middle section. It reminds me of the time I built a snowman with Hanna and Obbe – on Christmas Day – and called it Harry.
‘Do you still remember Harry?’ I ask Hanna. The corners of my sister’s mouth curl upwards until her cheeks bulge like two mozzarella balls on a white plate.
‘When we put the carrot in the wrong place? Mum was in a total state, and fed the entire supply of winter carrots to the rabbits.’
‘It was your fault,’ I say, grinning.
‘It was because of that magazine in the shop,’ Hanna corrects me.
‘The next morning Harry was gone and Dad was in the front room, dripping with snow.’
‘This is a serious announcement – Harry is dead,’ Hanna says in a fake deep voice.
‘Then we never ate peas with carrots, just the peas – they were much too afraid we’d have dirty thoughts if we ever saw another carrot.’
Hanna arches her back laughing. Before I’ve realized it, I’ve spread my arms. Hanna wipes the snow from her knees and stands up. She takes hold of me. It’s strange to cuddle in broad daylight, as though our arms are stiffer during the day and seem coated with udder ointment in the evenings, like our faces. She takes a broken cigarette from her coat pocket. She found it in the farmyard. It must have fallen from behind Obbe’s ear – he keeps one there because all the boys in the village keep their cigarettes behind their ears. Hanna clamps it between her lips for a moment, then presses it into the snowman under the carrot.