Gerband Bakker: The Twin

“Yes,” I say. “Where would I have been now?”

We both stare into the garden. I think about Riet and Henk. Little Henk. The young tanker driver, the livestock dealer (who he had known as well), Ada. I wonder what kind of things I am going to tell him, or will want to tell him. Suddenly the time between his departure and return no longer interests me. Or even the time of his arrival. What difference does it make? Tomorrow we’ll “start by getting up and drinking some coffee,” and afterwards we’ll do “whatever we feel like.”

“I’ve never actually learned how to do things by myself,” I say.

Slowly he turns his head towards me. “Drink your coffee, Donkey Man. It’s time for a game of cards.” He gets up and walks inside.

He’s right, it’s time to play cards. I roll a medium-strong Van Nelle, light it, stand up and walk around the garden with my head back. I stick the pouch of tobacco and the lighter in a back pocket. I like smoking, it suits me. He hasn’t mentioned it, maybe he thinks I’ve been smoking for years. He has turned the light on over the table. Not because it’s necessary, but because he’s used to having a light on over a card table. I feel like I could reach out and touch the wood owl, its mournful call sounds that close. It might just as well be a long-eared or short-eared owl. I don’t know a thing about owls; there are lots of woods here, that’s why I think it’s a wood owl. Hearing it call is even worse than seeing wet lame sheep or unshorn sheep during a heat wave. It gives me an empty feeling in my chest. As if I haven’t just eaten.

“You coming?” He’s standing at the open door, but doesn’t sound impatient.

I don’t say anything, raising one hand.

He calls me Donkey Man. Now that I’m away from the donkeys for the first time ever. Teun and Ronald have promised to look after them. No, not too much mangold, carrots or stale bread. Yes, inside if it rains for a long time. Yes, always check the big water trough. (“But a bucket of water’s heavy,” says Ronald.) They’re also looking after the Lakenvelder chickens. Their mother can use the eggs in cakes and pancakes. Teun will walk through the sheep field once a day. He is strong enough to help an overturned ewe up on her feet, and maybe even strong enough to get a lamb that’s fallen into a ditch back onto dry land. If not he can fetch his father. Ada has promised “to keep an eye on things” and “run the hoover around the house now and then.” She wanted to know how long I would be gone. “I don’t know,” I said. Just before I left, she came on Wim’s behalf to ask what I was planning to do with my milk quota.

“This is his chance,” she said. “Our chance,” she added.

I told her I wanted to think about it and asked why Wim hadn’t come himself to ask me what I was planning with my quota.

She looked at me as if she was about to make up another excuse for him, then said, “He doesn’t have the nerve.”

A little later she asked me why I’d kept the sheep.

“I haven’t got the foggiest,” I said.

Donkey Man. That’s fine by me.

When someone addressed me by name, as Helmer, I always added “Henk and” in front of it in my thoughts. No matter how long he had been dead, our names belonged together.

Maybe Riet was right, on that cold day in January at the cemetery, when she said you could become a new person. It annoyed me at the time, that statement of hers, but if I’d opened my eyes I could have seen it in that run-over duck. It had become a new person in next to no time. A dead person.

No, no rows of swallows on sagging electricity wires. The poles are still here but the wires are gone. For miles around, men in orange suits are lugging thick cables and digging narrow trenches along the roads. If I’d come a year later, I would never have known that they’d had poles here with wires strung between them.

I’m still searching for the owl. Smoking is a pensive activity. While searching I think, without any clear idea of what I’m thinking about. I didn’t say, “I’m coming.” I raised a hand. That can mean all kinds of things. Jaap has sat down on a stool at the window. He too is smoking, waiting serenely for me to come in. I throw the butt on the grass and squash it with the toe of my shoe. Then I walk past his car to the gate, which is open.

I go by the sun, which I lose sight of now and then because of trees and other holiday homes. This place is a maze of paths and unpaved roads. This is the first time I’ve tried to cut through on foot. We do everything by car, usually with Jaap driving, very slowly. Two old codgers on holiday in a foreign country. Who knows, maybe sometimes an elderly Danish woman sees us passing slowly by and thinks, Oh, they’re alone, are they widowers? The lawns in front of the cottages are impeccable. Everywhere, Danes are at work with clippers, hand mowers or hoes. I wouldn’t mow the lawn if it had rained earlier in the day, but there you have it, I’m no Dane. They say hej to me. There’s a smell of resin and wood fires. I’m away from home, in a foreign country I knew only from a two-dimensional map without smells or shapes. In a way I find Donkey Man a more beautiful name than Helmer. With so many paths and side paths, there are a lot of junctions as well. A few Icelandic horses are out in a field. They come up to the electric fence when I pass on the path. I don’t stop to rub their noses. It’s annoying that I can’t head straight for the sun, I have to keep choosing left or right before I can take another road that leads west. “ Hej, ” I say to a friendly woman with a dog, before asking her the way in English. At least I’m headed in the right direction. She reminds me of my mother.

I was hoping to come out at the Heather Hill Grill, but went wrong somewhere and hit the newly tarmacked coast road midway between the village and Heather Hill. There’s no footpath or bike lane beside it. A little further along is a campground. As yet there are only a few tents and no one is out jumping on the trampolines, which are at ground level. Three cars pass by, five come from the other direction. The sky has started turning orange, I speed up a little. “Idiot” is the word I think of when I remember Henk, even though so many other words were spoken in our eighteen years. The Grill is shut, the small car park is empty, no one is eating any sausages ( pølser they call them here). I turn right and push open the sheep gate. A few minutes later I am standing on the rocky beach.

I raise a hand to look at the sun through my fingers. It’s hanging half a thumb’s width above the smooth water. Off to the right is the village, with the first houses built on the dune. In front of them a few brightly painted fishing boats are lying on the beach. The stuff of postcards. Off to the left a tall cliff — higher than Heather Hill — plunges into the sea at the end of the rocky beach. Wooden stairs climb up to a black-painted holiday home with a veranda. The beach is deserted. There are no hooded crows in the sky and even the busy gray sandpipers are missing. No planes, no ships, no oil rigs. I take off my jeans and walk a few steps into the sea, using the path we had to clear again this morning. I am the only one for miles around making any noise. Behind me, I think, very far behind me is Lake IJssel, which the sun can never set into. When I’m up to my knees in the water, I cross my arms and turn slightly to the left, towards the sun, which is now a fingernail above the horizon. When the bottom starts to melt into the water like warm wax, I turn back and climb the cliff. I sit down on top of Heather Hill and only then do I see my jeans lying there, alone between the rocks, as if left there by a suicide.