Gerband Bakker - The Twin

We’re in the shadow cast by the church. Only now do I feel that the sun gave warmth.

“He was so sweet, Helmer,” she says.

“I know that,” I say.

“And beautiful. He was a handsome young man.”

It would be immodest of me to agree to that.

Riet looks at me, she sees Henk. “You’re a handsome man,” she says.

“Ah.”

“It’s true. You can take it from me.”

“If you say so,” I say.

Mother was buried with Henk. I was very curious what I would see. I didn’t see anything. Just a white sheet, hardboard by the look of it, at the bottom of a grave that went deeper. It poured with rain during the funeral, a summer cloudburst, the water splashed up high off the coffin, the flowers drooped.

They bury people three deep in this cemetery, so there’s room for one more. I wonder who Riet finds handsome, me or the young man she sees in me. I also wonder whether she’s noticed anything strange about the headstone.

“What were you talking about in the car?”

“Henk said, ‘Slow down,’ when he saw a car coming from the other direction. I did, but only slightly. My driving instructor was a real macho and he’d told me that you had to force the other traffic to make room. ‘You have to impose your will,’ he said, ‘through the way you act and the look in your eye.’ “ She slides back and forth on the wooden bench. “But she was more imposing.”

“What was the last thing he said?”

“‘Dear oh dear.’”

“‘Dear oh dear’?”

“Yes. As if to say, silly goose, you can tell you just got your license.”

I can hear him saying it, it fitted the Henk-and-Helmer pattern perfectly.

“That driving instructor tried to impose his will on me too by the way he looked at me. He wore a toupee. Of course I never took him up on it.”

“Of course not,” I say.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No.”

“Your father’s insurance did pay for the Simca, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I’m leaning against a cold church wall, but I see myself standing on Schellingwoude Bridge. That’s because I feel forgotten. I felt forgotten then too. Riet was the almost-wife, I was just the brother. Now she’s the one who is remembering things and telling her story. No one’s asked me a thing.

The ducks that jumped out of the water are quacking away on the other side of the church, maybe in front of the closed gate. So many people sit on the grass under the poplars in summer — cyclists from Amsterdam, canoeists, children from the sailing school in Broek — that they are completely fearless. They’ll do anything for a piece of bread. Now and then a car drives past. It sounds as if one brakes, then pulls away again.

“Do you come here often?” asks Riet.

“Birthdays and the anniversaries of their deaths. Four times a year.”

“I could have come as well, of course. At first I didn’t because I’d been sent away and I thought to myself: you needn’t think you’ll ever see me again. Childish. Later I didn’t come because I had Wien, and my children, and I didn’t want to be reminded of those days. I wanted to become a new person.”

“You can never become a new person.”

“Of course you can.”

Now the irritation is itching in my shoulders and I almost rub myself against the church wall like an old, moth-eaten sheep in the summertime.

Does she want something? What does she want? Does she want me to kiss her? Am I supposed to act as if I’m Henk? Does she want me to tell her she’s still a beautiful woman? Am I supposed to ask her to marry me? Does she want me to forgive her?

She’s still beautiful. She’s not one of the hundreds of thousands of ageing women who walk around in the same blouse and knee-length trousers, with chemically tamed hair, a premature stoop and sagging eyes. In summer they cycle past the farm with their husbands, always wobbling a little on their solid, reliable-yet-inexpensive bicycles. No matter how different their blouses and jackets, they’re always the same blouses and jackets.

Riet is almost as tall as I am and her face is a less firm, slightly sagging version of the face she had as a girl. In it I can very clearly see the Riet who was long ago half hidden by Henk’s head in the pub in Monnickendam. Who, even then, I saw thinking, God, he’s got a twin brother, there’s someone just like him, how am I supposed to deal with that? In the eighteen months before Henk died, she didn’t deal with it. In her awkwardness she kept a quiet distance, avoided looking at me and made sure the two of us were almost never alone together.

On December 5th, 1966 her Saint Nicholas gift for me was accompanied by the traditional poem, but she had written something so trite and impersonal that I found it hard to keep back the tears of self-pity that welled up. Like an upset child, I read it out loud for the others with the parcel on my lap. Father noticed and — since he finds Saint Nicholas such a nice occasion — he rubbed it in a little by winking at Riet and telling her that I was used to grander things and was learning how to write poems full of long, difficult words “down there in Amsterdam.” He’s never had a clue. Riet looked at her feet.

“I’m starting to get cold,” she says.

“Let’s go home then.”

She looks at the headstone once more. In her face I see the question I had expected to hear much sooner. “Where’s your father buried?”

“He was cremated.” The freezing air cools my hot face. “And scattered.”

There is only one duck standing by the gate. The other one has been run over, steam rising from its warm body. That’s how it goes, one minute you’re alive and kicking and longing for a piece of bread, the next you’re stone dead. Riet shudders as she steps over the dead duck. I nudge it to the side of the road with my foot. The remaining duck waddles to the water quacking loudly. When we pass the school on the way back, one of the classes is singing: fifteen or so children’s faces turned to look up at their teacher in total concentration. I don’t know the song they are singing and stop for a moment to listen. Riet walks on without a glance. I almost have to run to catch up with her before the bend in the road.

When Riet stayed for dinner we had to get a chair out of Father and Mother’s bedroom. We put it next to Mother’s chair, on the long side of the kitchen table. Consciously or unconsciously Riet has now moved her chair a little to one side before sitting down, almost to the corner of the table. The kitchen clock buzzes. “It’s so quiet here,” she says.

We’re drinking tea. It’s almost time to take her back. Is she imagining lively scenes? Children or grandchildren? Highchairs, different wallpaper, a modern kitchen?

“You were the oldest, weren’t you?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“It was only later, when he was dead and I’d gone away, that I wondered why. .”

“Yes?”

“Why I chose Henk. I mean, why do things happen the way they do?”

“Henk chose you.” She’s annoying me again. Surely now, forty years later, she’s not going to pretend she had it all under control?

She looks at me and picks up her teacup. A respectable, porcelain teacup. “And later still, I thought, why was Henk the farmer? If you were the oldest?”

“I went skating with Mother and the hand while Henk did the yearlings.”

“Huh?”

“Somehow Henk always took the lead. He was quicker than I was and I have an idea he was better with the animals, even though we always did the work together. Father saw that and Henk was his boy, almost from the beginning.”

“But didn’t you want to be a farmer?”

“I don’t know. I always just let things happen.” Now that she’s finally asked me something, I notice how reluctant I am to answer. I force myself to go on. “At any rate I never said anything. I never complained.”