Gerband Bakker: The Twin

Last spring I saw him shuffling around the barn with saucers of milk. I didn’t say anything, but sighed deeply, so deeply he must have heard. Within a few days he had the kittens drinking from a single saucer of milk. He grabbed them and stuffed them in a bag. Not a gunny sack, we don’t get them any more. It was a paper feed bag. He tied the bag on to the rear bumper of the Opel Kadett with a piece of rope about three feet long.

Seven years ago when his license needed renewing they made him do a test. There were all kinds of things wrong with him and he failed. Since then he hasn’t been allowed to drive. He still climbed into the car. There was a green haze on the trees that line the yard and narcissuses flowering around the trunks. I stood in the barn doorway and watched him start the car, which immediately shot off, throwing him back against the seat, then jerking him forward so that he hit his head on the steering wheel. Then he reversed without looking over his shoulder or in the rear-view mirror. He did that for a while: driving forward, changing into reverse (the gearbox howled) and backing up, turning the steering wheel just a little. Up and down and back and forth until a cloud of exhaust fumes hung between the trees. He climbed out of the car, untied the paper bag very calmly and tried to throw it on the muck heap. He had to pick it up again no less than three times, his arms were no longer strong enough for a hearty swing. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he said, coming into the barn. He wiped his forehead and rubbed his hands together in his one-chore-out-of-the-way gesture; it made a rasping sound.

It took me a while to get moving. Slowly I walked over to the muck heap. The bag wasn’t right at the top, it had slid down a little, and not just from gravity, but partly from the movement inside. I could hear very quiet squeaking and almost inaudible scratching. Father had made a mess of things and I could fix them for him. Damned if I would. I turned and walked away from the muck heap until I had gone far enough to be well out of earshot and then stayed there until there were no more sounds and no more movement.

He wants to celebrate Saint Nicholas, because “it’s nice.”

I don’t know what’s going on here, but now a hooded crow is staring at me from a branch in the bare ash. It’s the first time I have ever seen a hooded crow around here. It’s magnificent, but it is really getting on my nerves, I can hardly get a bite down. I go and sit somewhere else, with a view out the side window. There are four chairs around the table, I can sit where I like, the other three aren’t used.

I always sit where Mother used to sit, on the chair closest to the stove. Father sat opposite her, with his back to the front window. Henk sat with his back to the side window and could look through to the living room when the doors were open. I sat with my back to the kitchen door and often saw Henk as a silhouette, because of the light shining through the window behind him. It didn’t matter, my spitting image was opposite me and I knew exactly what he looked like. I’m back in my old spot at the kitchen table now and I don’t like it. I stand up, push my plate across the table, and walk around to sit down on Henk’s chair. Now I’m visible once more to the hooded crow, which turns its head slightly to get a better look at me. Being watched reminds me of the sheep that stood there staring at me a few days ago, all twenty-four of them. It gave me the feeling that the sheep were my equals, that they weren’t just animals looking at me. I’ve never felt like that before, not even with my two donkeys. And now this strange hooded crow.

I slide my chair back, walk through the hall to the front door and step out onto the gravel path. “Kssshh!” The crow cocks its head and moves a leg. “Go!” I shout, and only then do I look around uncomfortably. Weird, semi-elderly farmer shouts at something invisible from his open front door.

The hooded crow stares at me condescendingly. I slam the front door. When quiet has returned to the hall, I hear Father saying something upstairs. I open the staircase door.

“What d’you say?” I yell.

“A hooded crow,” he calls.

“So?” I yell.

“Why chase it away?” Whatever else, he’s not deaf.

I close the staircase door and go back to the kitchen table, sitting in Father’s place, with my back to the front window. I chew my sandwich stolidly while doing my best to ignore Father, who’s still talking away.

In the space of ten minutes I’ve sat on every chair. If someone saw me, they’d think I was trying to be four people at once to avoid eating alone.

Before doing the woodwork, I painted the living room walls and ceiling white. I needed two coats to cover the pale rectangles that emerged when I took down the paintings, photos and samplers. After buying paint and a new brush from the painter’s, I visited the DIY shop, where I found wooden venetian blinds that fitted the bedroom and living-room windows exactly. Apparently the dimensions they used a hundred and fifty years ago are still common today. Before putting up the blinds, I took the plants I’d left on the windowsills and threw them on the muck heap as well. Now it’s empty and bluish gray in both rooms and the light enters in horizontal strips. Instead of pulling up the blinds in the morning, I just rotate the narrow slats.

I go upstairs with a box of nails, a hammer and a big, heavy potato crate.

“What are you doing?” Father asks.

I take the paintings, photos and samplers out one by one and start hanging them. “You think Saint Nicholas is nice,” I say, “but we can make it nice in here too.”

“What are you doing downstairs?

“All kinds of things,” I say. I hang the first photos up around the painting of the sheep, but soon have to move on to the other walls. Framed photos of Mother and Henk, champion milkers with rosettes, our grandparents and me, samplers made for our birth (not one, but two) and Father and Mother’s wedding. The paintings include six watercolors of mushrooms, a genuine series.

“What’s the idea?”

“This way you’ll have something to look at,” I say.

When they’re all hung, I look at the photos more closely. There is one of Mother in an armchair. She has seated herself like a real lady, hands clasped respectably in her lap and legs pressed modestly together and angled slightly — obliging her to turn her upper body a little. She’s looking at the photographer in a way that doesn’t suit her at all, with an expression that combines arrogance with a hint of seductiveness, an impression reinforced by her angled legs. I take the photo down from the wall and lay it in the empty potato crate, together with the nails and the hammer.

“Leave her here,” Father says.

“No,” I say. “I’m taking her back downstairs.”

“Have we got any mandarins?”

“Would you like some mandarins?”

“Yes.”

I fold out the stand on the back of the frame and put Mother on the mantelpiece. Then I get two mandarins from the scullery and take them upstairs. I put them on the bedside cabinet and walk over to the window. The hooded crow is still in the ash: from here I’m looking straight out at it.

“Does that hooded crow look at you?” I ask.

“No,” says Father. “It looks down a bit more.”

Suddenly I remember what I had forgotten. I go downstairs and into the kitchen. In the corner next to the bureau is Father’s shotgun. I pick it up, wondering whether it’s loaded. I don’t check it. It feels odd to be holding it. In the old days we weren’t allowed to touch it, later I didn’t want to. I take the gun upstairs and lean it against the side of the grandfather clock. Father has fallen asleep. He is lying on his back, his head has drooped to one side, a thread of dribble is trailing onto the pillow.