Gerband Bakker - The Twin

After milking I fill a couple of buckets with water, tip them into the barrel on the other side of the gate in the donkey paddock and chuck a couple of winter carrots down next to it. Rather than rushing straight to the gate, the donkeys stroll casually towards me, side by side. These animals are mine, really mine, I bought them. Nothing else here is really mine: not the cows and not the sheep, I even inherited the Lakenvelder chickens. The old Opel Kadett, the muck heap, the willows-Idrive it, I throw my dung on it, I pollard them, but none is mine. I’m a tenant, doing things someone else should have been doing.

The sun is shining, there is hardly any wind. Spring. Something glistens on what’s left of the side wall of the laborer’s cottage, maybe a snail trail. It’s not good, I think, feeling like a poem. It’s because of what Henk said yesterday. The carrots disappear with a crunch in the donkeys’ mouths. I scratch the animals behind the ears. It’s only when they’ve both had enough and start shaking their heads, the two of them at the same time, that I stop, almost without thinking. Then I do the yearlings, much too late. Henk hasn’t got up.

Father is turning grayer. He hasn’t eaten for a week now and he’s only drinking water and orange juice, and less and less of the latter because it’s “so tart,” Every now and then I find a trickle of dark yellow urine in the bedpan. In the last seven days I haven’t carried him downstairs once. His wish has come true all the same, he’s getting a final spring. For a few days now it’s been sunny and mild and the buds have started to swell on the ash, turning it into a skeleton tree. Father’s voice is weakening, although I don’t know if that’s because he’s stopped eating. How long does this sort of thing go on? If a body is tough, I imagine it being able to go weeks without food. I go up to look in on him more often than usual and sometimes I get a shock because he looks dead when he’s just sound asleep. He often asks for Henk. He talks to him. Yesterday I couldn’t resist and crept up onto the landing behind him.

“How’s the dying going, Mr. van Wonderen?” Henk asked cheerfully.

“Fine,” Father answered, just as cheerfully, but quietly.

After that Henk must have picked up the gun, because they spent a long time discussing its action. Henk asked Father what he shot. Hare and pheasants, long ago. If the thud against your shoulder wasn’t heavy. No, the recoil was nothing special. If the gun was loaded. No, of course not. Whether he had any bullets (“Cartridges,” Father said, and then a little louder, “cartridges!”) and where did he keep them. In the cupboard in the hall, next to the toilet. And how do you load a gun? You have to undo that little catch, then it breaks open, then you put in two cartridges and close it again. Do both cartridges shoot out at the same time? No, you get two shots and the cartridges stay put. How does it work then? You have to take them out, after you’ve fired it. Or shake them out. The gun went back to its spot, next to the grandfather clock. I heard metal tap wood. It was quiet for a moment.

Then Father asked, “Are you nice to Helmer?”

“Yes,” said Henk.

“And is he nice to you?”

“Nice enough,” said Henk.

Father didn’t say anything. He sighed, very deeply. I crept down the stairs.

He hardly says a word to me. He asks how many lambs have been born and why no one ever visits. Where Ada has got to and why he never hears the voice of the livestock dealer any more. Teun and Ronald? Maybe malnutrition really is starting to get to his memory.

I haven’t written back to Riet. Or phoned her. Henk hasn’t responded either. “Who does she think she is?” he says. “She can go and move in with my sisters.”

I force my way through the old rubbish in Henk’s bedroom. I have to push a lot of stuff aside to open the door of the built-in wardrobe. The cardboard box is on the bottom shelf. “Dutch language and literature, University of Amsterdam, September 1966-April 1967” is written neatly on the top flaps. I don’t remember doing that. I remember grimly stuffing my textbooks into the box when Henk had hardly had time to settle in his grave. I lift the box up onto Mother’s dressing table and look for H. J. M. F. Lodewick’s History of Dutch Literature . I lay Part One (“From the Beginning to Around 1880”) to one side and sit down on Henk’s bed with Part Two (“Around 1880 to the Present”). I hear Father snoring softly, he can’t even do that at full strength any more. Because I don’t know where to find what I’m looking for, I leaf through the book. Gorter, Leopold, Bloem, Nijhoff, Achterberg, Warren, Vroman. I am impatient, reading the odd line that strikes home or will strike home soon ( a flood has covered the land, a flood of tepid water and blood, / I am a fatherless man and rooted in the mud ), then leafing on quickly. I notice that I am trying to recall faces from my months in Amsterdam-I hear the coots yapping at the same time and finally, on page 531, I find a poem that I read from the first to the last word.

to yearn & pursue

Why do I always see

— when I have closed my eyes

in bed or in my thoughts -

your nose, your hair, your chest?

I sometimes see myself

in mirror or in windowpane

just after I’ve seen you:

my own half body.

For all your youth and beauty,

I think I look like you -

my nose and chest and hair

are all identical.

I see the poet’s name but don’t read what Lodewick has to say about him, or his verdict on the poem. None of that matters. I close the book and put Part One back in the box.

Thinking of Denmark, I go downstairs with Part Two in my hand.

Henk is on the sofa watching TV. He’s not sitting, he’s draped, with the remote control dangling from one hand. His shirt is unbuttoned. It’s as if he’s taken the place over.

“Have you looked in on the sheep yet?” I ask.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m watching TV.”

“It’s two o’clock.”

“So? It’s war. Look.”

I look at the screen. Buildings with scattered palm trees. An explosion somewhere. Empty streets. Subtitles at the bottom of the picture. Is this what war is like these days? Live on TV? With kids like him slumped on the sofa to watch it? “Do you think the sheep care?”

“Come and sit down for a while.”

I stare at him until he looks up. “Go and do the sheep,” I say. I turn around and go into the kitchen to sit down at the bureau. I turn to page 531, take a pad and a pen and start copying out the poem. When I have finished and torn the page from the pad, I wonder what I’m doing. I stand up with the page in one hand and don’t know where to go. I look out of the front window, out of the side window, I look at the dishes on the draining board and the newspaper on the table, I hear the electric clock buzzing. Because I hear the clock buzzing, I realize the TV is off. I’m standing here holding a neat copy of a poem and I haven’t got a clue what to do with it. I hurry through the hall to the scullery, take the stairs with big strides and catch my breath on the landing. Cautiously, I open the door to Father’s bedroom. He is asleep. His small head is motionless on the pillow, his ears and nose look enormous, his mouth hangs open. Somehow or other, he is very dry. Once again I don’t have a clue what I am going to do next. I look around the bedroom and walk up to the bed. I lay the neatly copied poem on his chest. It rises and falls calmly.