Gerbrand Bakker - Ten White Geese

Standing in front of her, the doctor lit a cigarette. ‘You coming by again?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ she said.

‘So I can check the wound. Among other things.’

‘I don’t think that’s necessary.’ She kept her eyes stubbornly fixed on a photo of an enormous green pumpkin.

‘Whatever you think best,’ the doctor said. ‘Whatever you think best.’ He left.

‘Come and sit over here,’ said the hairdresser. ‘Then we’ll start by giving your hair a nice wash.’

*

The hairdresser kneaded and stroked. Her hands were soft. The water was exactly the right temperature, the shampoo smelt very pleasant. As far as she was concerned, they could postpone the cutting for a while.

‘How would you like it?’ the hairdresser asked. ‘A trim?’

‘Short, please. Easy.’

‘The badger. Was that really true?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And badgers come out in the daytime too.’ They said nothing more during the wash. When it was finished, she thought she could smell Mrs Evans again, despite the shampoo. She looked at herself in the mirror — hair gone from around her neck, face pale, eyes dark — and knew that she was going to ask for something she had never asked for before. ‘Could you perhaps turn me round?’

‘What?’

‘Turn me round. The chair.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I…’ She didn’t know how to explain it.

‘You won’t be able to see what I’m doing.’

‘I’m confident you’ll do a good job. I like surprises.’

‘This is a new one on me,’ the hairdresser said, turning the chair with her foot. ‘I can’t see what I’m doing properly now either.’ She tapped a cigarette out of the packet and set the door ajar, after first opening it all the way and looking left and right down the street. Then she laid the burning cigarette on the ashtray. ‘Is this a Dutch custom?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Well, here we go then.’ A quarter of an hour later she was finished. No new customers had come in. The hairdresser used a dryer to dry the gel she had rubbed into her hair and pulled it into shape with rough tugs. The cigarette had burnt down unsmoked.

She got up without turning to face the mirror and walked over to the small counter with the till on it.

‘Don’t you want to look?’

‘No. I really do want it to be a surprise.’

The hairdresser stared at her and opened her mouth, perhaps to ask if that was another Dutch custom.

‘I like surprises,’ she said.

Deeply insulted, the hairdresser closed her mouth and typed an amount on the old-fashioned cash register, which rang loudly.

She paid, said a friendly goodbye and walked out of the salon, leaving the door slightly ajar. A little way down the street she glanced back and saw the hairdresser standing outside her shop, one arm crossed under her breasts with the hand tucked in her armpit, a cigarette in the other hand, staring fixedly at the perfumery across the road, her bleached hair thin in the slowly rising cloud of sunlit cigarette smoke. She kept a grip on herself through the narrow streets and the car park, even though there was hardly anyone around. It was only when she was sitting in the car and saw herself looking like a startled animal in the rear-view mirror that she began to cry.

She inspected the wood supply in the pigsty, looking and counting, and decided not to light fires in more than one room at a time. Then there’d be enough. And if she did run out, she could always sit in the kitchen near the cooker.

The sun was shining again and the smoke from her cigarette rose straight up, just like the hairdresser’s yesterday. She leant against the light-coloured wall of the sty and felt its warmth on her back through her nightie, but her neck was cold to touch. Her head was light, as if kilos of hair had been cut off. She smoked with her eyes shut.

Here she was, without a single appointment, without a single obligation. She thought of the geese and the cord strung along the path and remembered one commitment she had made — to buy bread from the baker in Waunfawr — then felt like everything was too much. She threw the cigarette onto the lawn and went into the house, wiping her bare feet off on the mat to get rid of the slate grit. She dressed, put a towel in the rucksack and went for a walk.

*

On her own path. Across the stream and through the oiled kissing gates and the small wood of ancient trees, where the path grew clearer each time she used it. Song from birds she couldn’t identify and had never known; a squirrel. She walked straight through the stone circle and onto the embankment through the marshy ground. The map was back home on the kitchen table. Past the boggy section, she came to a steel gate with long-haired, big-horned black cattle on the other side. A stile next to the gate. She’d have to cross the field. She didn’t hesitate, but climbed over, paying no attention to the cattle. If I pretend they don’t exist, they won’t notice me either, she thought. The path seemed to follow a wooded bank. If necessary, she could crawl into the thick undergrowth for safety. The countryside kept undulating and when she looked back after fifty steps, she didn’t recognise a thing. She was lucky: the frame of what had once been a kissing gate showed that she had taken the right direction. She left the black cattle behind her. In front of her the land sloped down; she could see the water.

The trees here were almost completely leafless, the grass yellow and grazed close to the ground, here and there a clump of thistles. On the bank was an upright stone, the kind they called standing stones on the map, but this one looked like the work of a farmer with heavy machinery. Walking around the large pond, she saw concrete banks and a small brick building; inside, she could hear water flowing but couldn’t see where it came out. That confirmed her idea that the pond was man-made, some kind of reservoir. An asphalt road came to a dead end behind the building. The water before her was so smooth and motionless it made her think of a freshly polished silver tray. It was clear and viscous, but didn’t look cold. She undressed next to a big rock she could lay her clothes on, then broke the water by dipping the foot with the scar into it. It was cold, but not cold enough to put her off. The bottom felt rock hard under a thin layer of mud, like an enormous concrete slab that had been cleaned fairly recently. Walking as slowly as possible, she waded out to the middle where — with the water up to her waist — she stayed until the last ripple had died away and it was smooth again. She could see her toes and her knees, minuscule air bubbles on each pubic hair, a strange refraction of the light at her belly and forearms, as if the lower body belonged to someone else and didn’t fit properly. She looked around and, yes, this bank too had neither a beginning nor an end. Like a circle. Maybe she didn’t feel cold because, without the slightest breath of wind, even the weak sun was able to warm her upper body, and because she continued to think of the water as viscous, slow and heavy. She remained standing there and understood perfectly why her uncle had been so indecisive in that hotel pond: the place itself had robbed him of the ability to decide. It was only when she saw goosebumps appearing around her nipples that she waded back to the bank. She had seen time passing in the rotation of the long shadows of the trees, the arrival of a school of tiny fish at her toes and their departure, and the appearance of five sheep next to the standing stone. Was this it, what Emily Dickinson had done for almost her entire adult life? Had she tried to hold back time, making it bearable and less lonely too perhaps, by capturing it in hundreds of poems? And not just TIME but also LOVE and LIFE and even NATURE. It doesn’t matter, she thought. It’s not important any more, and anyway, those sections weren’t even Dickinson’s idea. She dried herself and put her clothes back on, walking away from the water long before the last ripples had died down.