Gerband Bakker - The Twin

Through the window I see the donkeys in the far corner of the donkey paddock. I put them out again early this morning. They’re always together, it’s only when walking or trotting around that they occasionally separate and then they’re so shocked they can’t wait to get back together again. Before going downstairs I open the window a little.

It was the bed shop. Later in the day the jovial bed salesman calls a second time and says that he tried earlier. The bed is coming tomorrow. I want to know what time. He can’t say exactly, “some time in the morning.” Before hanging up, he advises me to buy an answering machine, so it’s more convenient when people want to leave a message.

Behind the chicken coop, the donkey shed and the muck heap, there are eight willows in a row along the ditch. Seven stand up straight, one overhangs the ditch. For years now I have tackled that tree the same way: I lay the two sections of a ladder next to each other over the ditch and attach a short beam at right angles across the ladders, hammering in a few long nails to keep it in place (the sides of the ditch are at different heights). Then I lay a wooden pallet on the ladders, resting one side on the beam so it’s as good as horizontal. By resting the wooden crate on the pallet, I can then reach the branches of the willow. I always start with the crooked willow, once that’s done the rest are easy. The razor-sharp steel of the handsaw cuts smoothly through the young, tender wood. After the six trees yesterday, my arms and shoulders aren’t moving quite as smoothly. I do a couple of willows, then rest, watching the sheep in the field near the Bosman windmill.

Twenty-three, that’s an odd number actually, twenty would be more beautiful.

It took them a while, the men who came to deliver the bed. This one doesn’t come apart. The front door was easy enough, the turn from the hall into the living room harder. I’d removed my old bed straight after milking. I put the mattress on its side in Henk’s bedroom and threw the pieces of the wooden frame on the woodpile next to the muck heap. It’s getting pretty big, I might have to have a bonfire on New Year’s Eve, if the wind’s right and it’s not raining. The deliverymen left muddy tracks in the bedroom and the living room, and didn’t want coffee because they had more beds to deliver. It was cold in the house for a long time afterwards because no one, me included, thought of shutting the front door during all that messing around in the hall. A cold easterly wind is angling in on the front windows. There’ll be a sharp frost tonight.

The bed has a Swedish or Danish name I’ve forgotten, something with dots on an A. It is blue-and-white check and extremely wide; no matter which way I lie, my feet don’t stick out over the edge. While I’m making the bed, Father keeps shouting. He’s desperately curious. I get a fright for a moment because I think I’ve forgotten where I put the key, but then I remember leaving it in the keyhole. After slipping a pillowcase onto one of the pillows and laying it in place, I go and sit in the kitchen. If I sit on Mother’s chair and lean across the table, I can see into the bedroom through the open doors. Two pillows. What do I want with two pillows? But one pillow looks funny, somehow it makes the big bed look unbalanced. And they weren’t cheap. After reading the front page of the paper and drinking a cup of coffee, I walk to the bedroom to put the pillowcase on the second pillow.

In the afternoon the livestock dealer’s truck drives into the yard. The livestock dealer is a strange fellow who hardly ever says anything. He wears a tidy dustcoat and a cap, which he takes off when he comes into the house. If he finds me outside or in the shed, he raises his cap. He always makes some kind of remark about the weather and then clams up. It’s up to me to say whether I have anything for him. If I don’t have anything for him, he leaves again immediately, without another word. He has never — and he’s been visiting the house for more than thirty years — sat down at the kitchen table. He leaves his clogs next to the hall door and, when standing on the linoleum in the kitchen, puts one foot on top of the other and wriggles his toes in his knitted woolen socks. Today we are standing in the middle of the yard and I’ve got something for him. A few sheep.

“They been tupped?” he asks.

“Yes. I took the ram away at the end of November.”

“Three?”

“Three. What’s a sheep bring these days?”

“Hundred and twenty if you’re lucky. More likely a hundred.”

“That’s not much.”

“No, it’s not much. Have you got them at the house?”

“No, they’re in the back field.”

He’s happy to lend a hand, although he could have come back tomorrow. Together we walk into the field and drive the sheep to the causeway gate. He grabs one, I grab two. The other twenty rush off. After opening the gate and releasing his sheep into the next field, he takes one from me. We herd the sheep to the causeway gate close to the yard. I climb over it, fetch two sections of fencing out of the barn and set them up on either side of the lowered tailgate. There’s fifteen feet at most between the barriers and the causeway gate. I open it and one of the sheep walks straight up into the back of the truck. The other two follow. The livestock dealer raises and bolts the tailgate.

“That went smoothly,” he says.

“For once,” I agree.

The livestock dealer raises a finger in farewell and gets into his truck. He drives slowly over to the causeway, then turns onto the road even more slowly.

I shut the gate. The remaining twenty sheep are huddled together near the windmill, in the very far corner of the farm.

That night, just before going to bed, I cut my fingernails and toenails and have a long shower. I leave the gas fire on low and my bedroom door open. In the big mirror above the mantelpiece, I look at myself naked, head to toe. Suddenly I feel like skating. I miss the heavy feeling you get in your backside and the muscles of your legs from long-distance skating. The fire’s warmth glows on my penis. Then I crawl in under the duvet for the first time. The glow in my crotch fades fast; the duvet is scratchy new and I hardly sleep a wink all night.

Teun and Ronald are bundling up the willow shoots. They lay a length of baler twine on the ground, each throw an armful of willow shoots on it and tie it tight. They carry the bundles through the front garden to the yard. Every time they pass a window, they wave. In front of me on the kitchen table are a telephone bill and a hand-addressed letter Ada has brought in. The postman drove off just before she turned into the yard with a trailer hitched to the back of her car. It’s Saturday.

I’d like to open the letter, but Ada is still standing on the threshold of my bedroom. She just felt the duvet cover. “You have to wash these covers first!” she calls to me. “They’re always so stiff!” I nod at Ronald, who is waving as he walks past the front window. I follow him in my thoughts and he appears in the side window just when I expect him to. He waves again. He is wearing a woolly hat and snot is trailing from his purple nose. He’s happy, he’s always happy, even when his fingers are cold and he’s trampling kale in my vegetable garden.

“It’s lovely.”

She makes me jump.

Ada is standing in the doorway with her head a little to one side, as if listening for something. “I miss something,” she says. “In the living room.”

“Chairs?”

“No.” She thinks for a moment. “A sound.”

“The clock?”

“Yes, the clock. Where’s that got to? You didn’t throw it on the woodpile, did you?”