I look at my hand. The knuckles are red, two of them are skinned – the flesh is pinker there with red bloody edges like ruptured prawns’ heads. I go to the shed and put one foot on the heel of the other to take off my boot without touching it. I don’t want to use the boot-jack, which has been standing there in solitude now that no one asks for help any more. Since the cows went, Mum and Dad have only been wearing their black clogs. A long time ago we had a cast-iron boot-jack but it got bent because of Dad’s deformed leg. I kick my boots off and go through the dividing door into the kitchen. It’s spotless and even the chairs are at an equal distance from the table, coffee cups upside down on a tea-towel on the counter, teaspoons lined up neatly next to them. On the counter there’s a memo pad upon which is written, ‘Slept badly.’ And above it the date, one day before the cows were put down. Mum has been keeping a diary in short sentences ever since the outbreak of foot-and-mouth. On the day the cows were killed, it says, ‘Circus has begun.’ Nothing more and nothing less. Next to the memo pad, there’s a note: ‘Guests in the front room, be quiet.’
I tiptoe into the sitting room in my socks and lay my ear to the door of the front room. I can hear the elders talking in solemn voices. Once a week they come to see whether ‘the preaching has borne fruit’, whether ‘crops have grown after the Word was sown’. Are we faithful believers and do we listen to God and to Renkema’s sermons? After this, they always start to talk about forgiveness, as they stir vortices into their coffee, like the ones their piercing glances cause in my belly. Usually Mum and Dad take the house visits and we, the three kings, only have to join them once a month. We’re mainly asked which part of the Bible we know well, how we cope with or think we’re going to cope with the internet and alcohol, with the exuberance of growing up, our appearance. After that comes the standard warning: ‘Sanctification follows justification. They cannot be separated. Beware the leaven of the Pharisees.’
Now the new stock of cattle is coming, Dad is busy with the preparations, so Mum has to take the house visit alone. On the other side of the door, I hear one of the elders ask, ‘How pure is your way of life now?’ I press my ear harder to the wood but can’t hear the answer. When Mum whispers that usually says enough; she doesn’t want God to hear while we all know that the ears of the consistory also belong to Him – He shaped them, after all.
‘Would you like a shortbread biscuit?’ I suddenly hear Mum ask loudly. The biscuit tin with Queen Beatrix’s head on it is opened. I can smell the fragile sweet smell of shortbread from here. You should never dip shortbread in your coffee – it collapses immediately so that you have to scrape the crumbs from the bottom with your teaspoon. Yet the elders still dunk their biscuits in their mugs every time, as carefully as the pastor who dunks the fragile children being baptized into the water, as he quietly recites the baptismal formula from the Book of Matthew.
I look at the clock and see that the house visit has only just begun, so they’ll be here for at least another hour. This is perfect; no one will disturb me. I knock gently on the basement door and whisper, ‘Friend.’ No reaction. After killing Dad’s cockerel, I can no longer be counted among the ‘friends’, but when I say ‘foe’ I don’t hear anything – no nervous shuffling, no one quickly hiding behind the apple sauce, even though it’s almost all been eaten.
I push open the door and feel along the wall for the light cord. The light flickers slightly as though it’s wondering whether to illuminate or not, and then comes on. There’s a greasy cooking smell in the basement that issues from the milk pails filled with doughnuts and apple fritters. I can’t see the Jewish people anywhere, nowhere the light of the glow-in-the-dark stars on their coats. The bottles of blackcurrant cordial stand untouched on the shelf next to dozens of tins of frankfurter sausages and jars of egg liqueur. Maybe they’ve fled? Did Mum warn them and hide them somewhere else? I close the door behind me and walk deeper into the basement, my head bent to avoid the spider’s webs, a grey gossamer of silence now there’s no longer anyone hiding here. I feel the toads in my pocket. They’re finally sitting on top of one another and stick to the fabric of my coat like ice cubes. ‘I’ll free you in a minute,’ I reassure them, thinking of the words from Exodus: ‘Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.’
It’s time I let them go, because their skins feel as cold as the chocolate frogs and mice filled with fondant that Mum bought at the HEMA and whose silver jackets I always smooth out with my nail and keep. On TV yesterday, Dieuwertje Blok bit the head off a purple frog. She showed the white filling: on the inside they were made of ice cream. She winked and said that everything was going to be all right, that the saint’s helpers had got lost but a sharp-eyed farmer had found them and they were on their way again. Every child would still get their presents in time, as long as the chimney was well swept, clean like all children’s hearts.
After that, Mum had watched Lingo from behind the ironing board. Hanna suggested that Mum should go on TV sometime, that we should put her name down. I’d nervously shaken my head: once Mum was behind the glass of the TV set, we’d never get her back, or maybe only in pixels when the screen was snowy, and what would become of Dad then? And who would guess the jumbled-up word? Mum was good at that – yesterday it began with the letter D. For the first time she didn’t guess but I knew at once: d-a-r-k-n-e-s-s. It seemed like a sign I couldn’t ignore.
I stop in front of the freezer next to the wall. I move the cloth hanging over it with fruit weights on its corners – which are unnecessary because there’s never any wind in the basement – and open the lid. I see only frozen Christmas Stollen: Mum and Dad get them every year from the butcher, the skating association and the trade union. We can’t eat them all and the chickens have had enough of them too, and leave them untouched in the run where they slowly rot away.
The freezer’s lid is incredibly heavy – you have to pull hard before it comes free from the rubber seal. Mum always warned us about that, saying that ‘if you topple in, we won’t see you again until around Christmas’. I always pictured Hanna’s body as frozen food and Mum scooping her out.
Once I’ve got the lid open, I quickly push the pole standing next to the freezer into the rim so that it stays open, and squeeze myself through the opening, through the hole in the ice. I think about Matthies. Is this how he felt? Was his breath so abruptly cut off? Suddenly I remember what the vet said when he fished my brother out of the water with Evertsen: ‘When people have hypothermia, you have to handle them like porcelain. The smallest touch could be deadly.’ All this time we’ve been so careful with Matthies that we don’t even talk about him, so that he can’t break into pieces inside our heads.
I lie down among the Christmas Stollen and fold my hands over my stomach, which is bloated again and overfull. I feel the drawing pin pricking through my coat, the ice on the sides of the freezer, hear the clap of ice skates. Then I take the toads out of my coat pocket and put them beside me in the freezer. Their skins look bluish, their eyes are closed. I read somewhere that when toads climb on top of each other, the male gets black horny lumps in its thumbs so that it can hold the female more tightly. They are sitting so quietly and close to one another I feel touched. I take the smoothed-out, coloured silver foil papers from the chocolate frogs out of my other coat pocket and fold them carefully around the toads’ bodies so that they’ll stay warm. Without giving it any further thought, I kick the pole out from under the lid and whisper, ‘I’m coming, dear Matthies.’ A loud bang follows, the freezer light flips off. Everything is pitch dark and silent now. Icily silent.