Gerband Bakker - The Twin

“Helmer,” he says.

“I thought you were from the Forestry Commission,” I say.

“And I didn’t know whether I could expect to find you here.”

“Henk’s dead,” I say.

“Really?” he says. “Since when?”

“April 1967.”

“That’s a long time. And now you’re the farmer.”

“Yep. Mother’s dead too and Father is laid out in the living room.”

He screws up his eyes. It is a lot of deaths in one go. Then he turns around. “And the cottage burned down.”

“Yes,” I say to his back. “Amsterdammers. Holiday home.” I shiver, I’ve come out without a coat.

He stands there staring for a while, then turns back. He lays a hand on my shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll go and pay my respects to your father.” He walks over to his car. His back is straight, the stubbornness hasn’t disappeared. I follow and get in next to him. He puts the car in reverse and backs onto the road. We drive slowly to the southwest.

“It smells of dog in here,” I say. I can smell that, even though we never had a dog.

He looks at me and smiles. “He always sat where you’re sitting.” Because he’s looking at me, he sees the donkeys. “Are they your donkeys?”

I nod.

Again he smiles. “Yes,” he says. “You’re a donkey man all right.”

There’s a sand dune here with an English name. A long time ago a rich Englishman came to this shore. He had a large house built on the highest dune and laid out a garden with ponds, paths and low stone walls. Because the whole dune had been covered with heather he named his estate Heather Hill. He drowned while swimming in the sea and the house disappeared long ago. All that’s left of the garden is a silted-up pond and a few shrubs. It’s grazed by sheep of a breed I don’t recognize, with dark heads and long floppy ears. They are much tamer than my sheep; they’re used to people coming here to walk or swim. Along the coast, the dune is actually a cliff, with a straight drop to the narrow, rocky beach. It’s not the North Sea here. There are no bare dunes held together with difficulty by planted marram grass and wind-blasted pines. Here the grass grows almost all the way down to the sea and even beeches and oaks thrive ten yards from the high-water line. I’ve tasted the water: it’s brackish, a little saltier than the water of Lake IJssel. I know almost the whole map of Denmark off by heart, especially Zealand, but Rågeleje is new to me, and that’s where we are now. Not that you’d know it when you hear the locals say the name of their village. Danish is a strange, sloppy language. I don’t understand a word of it; he says he can follow it. I wanted to know how that was possible. “I’m Frisian,” he said. The owner of the Heather Hill Grill, located next to a car park on the coast road, told him the story of the Englishman, though it’s possible it was all very different in reality. We often go there for a sausage. The Danes love their sausages.

We swim every day. The water is cold, but clear. Every three days we have to toss aside the rocks we tossed aside three days before to make it easier to get into the water. We always swim in the same place, at the end of the path that skirts Heather Hill on its way from the coast road to the rocky beach. There’s a gate at the road and another one just before the beach. The sheep have to stay on Heather Hill to keep the grass short and eat the birch seedlings. It’s quiet on the rocky beach, the Danes aren’t on holiday yet. If we look to the right on clear days we can see the coast of Sweden in the distance. “We should go there sometime too,” he says. I nod. It’s not far to Helsingør, from there we can take the ferry to Helsingborg. Hooded crows glide above the cliff. They hold their wings still and float on the updrafts without moving forward. At the weekends the hooded crows aren’t there. Then men and women leap off the cliff with parachutes. Sometimes they float for miles before turning around and coming back to land on top of Heather Hill again. The height they fly at is determined by the height of the dunes. We swim naked: we’re almost always alone and if someone does show up we ignore them. “We’re too old to worry about that,” he says. I nod and then, like two kids at a swimming pool, we joke about each other’s scrotums, which the cold water has shriveled up. He can’t help giving me instructions: “Keep your fingers together” or “Move those feet of yours for once.” Afterwards we warm up again by playing a game of badminton-a little stiffly, and with him a bit stiffer than me — in the holiday house garden. He found the racquets and shuttlecocks in a rack at the Spar. I paid.

Father was laid out in the house for four nights. I didn’t touch him once.

When he went into the living room he immediately sat down on the kitchen chair next to the coffin. I stayed standing by the door. He rolled a cigarette, maybe because he saw an ashtray on the arm of the sofa. While smoking, he looked at Father. His glance moved from Father to the photos on the mantelpiece. “She was a beautiful woman, in her own way,” he said, nodding at the formal photo of my mother. “I don’t think many people saw that.” A horizontal layer of smoke formed in the living room. All the times I sat there smoking next to the open coffin, I didn’t manage that once.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Things have changed a lot in here.”

“I did that, a few months ago.”

“That recently?”

“Yes.”

He took a couple of deep drags from his roll-up then nodded in the direction of the mantelpiece again. “Dead brother,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette and laid the backs of his fingers lightly on Father’s forehead. Then he stood up and shook my hand, with the fingers that had just touched the dead body. “Your father’s dead, Helmer,” he said.

He didn’t kiss me on the mouth, although someone really was dead now.

As if I didn’t know it yet myself: beautiful mother, dead brother, dead father. Twenty cows, some yearlings, two nameless donkeys, twenty sheep, thirty-one lambs and a few Lakenvelder chickens.

“Do I smell coffee?” he asked, crossing the hall to the kitchen, where he didn’t just sit down on the first chair he came to. He walked around the table and sat down with his back to the side window. Henk’s chair. He drummed on the tabletop, as if waiting impatiently for me to pour him a cup of coffee. He looked with mild surprise at the binoculars, the open packet of almond cakes and the mugs Ada and I had drunk out of. He said this was the first time he had sat at the kitchen table. Still standing there in the doorway of the living room, I looked from his drumming fingers to Father’s forehead and from Father’s forehead to my hand.

I didn’t pour him a coffee right away. I went over to stand by the front window. The hooded crow was staring at me from its usual branch. It lowered its head a little as if shrugging its shoulders. I wondered whether birds have shoulders, whether you can call the elbows of folded wings shoulders. It looked like an animal that can stalk, somehow feline. It had been sitting there since autumn. Sometimes I forgot about it and some days I noticed it again and felt like I had the first time I saw it, the day I sat down on all four chairs, as if trying to avoid eating alone. It pulled its shoulders up a little bit more and fell forwards, not spreading its wings until just before it would have hit the ground. I stepped back; it looked like it was going to sail straight through the windowpane. During the sharp turn it had to make, its wingtip touched the glass. It flew off towards the dyke, the Lake IJssel dyke. I watched it go until there were tears in my eyes.