Gerbrand Bakker - Ten White Geese

‘You were gone a long time,’ the mother said.

‘Yeah.’ He gestured at the cast.

‘We’re so happy. Really, very happy,’ the father said. ‘That she’s been found.’

‘Shouldn’t we open a bottle of something?’ the mother asked. The skating was finished, there were commercials on TV, the sound was turned right down. She’d laid the exercise book on the windowsill.

‘Good idea. Help yourself to a glass of white,’ the father said. ‘The bottle’s in the fridge. It needs using up.’

‘Men? A drop of genever?’

‘Sure,’ said the policeman.

Men , thought the husband. A drop . ‘I’ll have one too while you’re at it.’

‘Could you slice up a dried sausage?’ the father said to the mother’s back. ‘Was it expensive?’

‘Yes,’ said the husband. ‘Very.’

The father looked at him. The husband thought he was going to offer to pay a share of the investigation fee. Instead the father turned his attention to the policeman. ‘How come you didn’t put him in prison?’ he asked.

‘Because he’s such a nice guy.’

*

‘You misinformed me,’ the policeman said. They were negotiating the slippery pavement on their way back to the Van Woustraat. After two shots it seemed a lot easier.

‘I know,’ the husband said. ‘They’re a strange couple.’

‘Things like that have a knock-on effect.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I could start questioning the truth of what else you’ve said.’

‘You’re not a detective, are you?’

‘No, I’m just a simple police officer. But I’m also human.’

The husband’s crutches slipped out from under him — he had to put his cast down on the ground. He didn’t fall over — the policeman already had him in a firm grip.

‘Never,’ the policeman said. ‘You can never tell exactly what someone’s thinking or feeling.’

‘You want to eat?’ the husband asked. ‘I haven’t got anything at home.’

‘OK,’ the policeman said. ‘There’s a Turkish place just up the road. You can make it that far.’

‘Can you just stay away like that? What will your wife think? Won’t your kids miss you?’

The policeman smiled.

I need a kind of shoulder pad, thought the man, but in my armpit. An armpit pad. He’d got into a good rhythm, pushing the crutches deep into the snow. I could send a card with a priority sticker on it. Old-fashioned, but the only way.

She tore off chunks of bread and threw them to the geese. Three birds ate the bread, a fourth watched her every move. There was hardly any snow left, the land was steaming. Between the trunks of the oaks in the wood behind the goose shelter it was already growing dark. A few sheep stood around the hay, most of the others were grazing. ‘Strange,’ she said. ‘At first they disappeared really quickly and now these four have been left for quite a while.’

The boy didn’t speak.

‘They’re not anybody’s. What if I just left?’

‘I’d still be here.’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘You’d still be here.’

The boy cleared his throat.

She looked left. A sound she’d heard before was coming from the oak wood, but she didn’t recognise it until the big brown bird took off from a branch.

‘A kite!’ Bradwen said.

‘A bird,’ she said.

It swooped low over the ground and, like the last time, glided up to disappear over the roof ridge of the house, which it seemed to use as a kind of ski jump. It made the geese restless.

‘It’s a red kite.’

She couldn’t work it out. She knew that it meant something else, this word that the boy had said twice now, but she could only picture a red diamond on a string with a tail of knotted rags. Somewhere in her head, something needed to happen. His English needed to become her English, so that she could simply understand him. ‘ Vlieger ,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘ Vlieger . I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

Her left temple started to pound. She wanted to say ‘kite’, she was sure of that, her tongue was definitely moving towards the roof of her mouth, slightly to the back, but instead she blew air out between her lower lip and upper teeth and her tongue relaxed, not altogether involuntarily, and came to rest where the roof of her mouth met her teeth. Bradwen began to say incomprehensible things, spitting out sounds. She looked him in the eye, fixing on his squint in the hope that he might somehow be able to explain things to her in some other way, without words, without sounds.

*

‘There, there.’ That she understood. His arms around her belly as if he were scared that something would fall out, that too was familiar. His breath on the back of her neck. The geese acted like they weren’t seeing anything. They were whiter again, their beaks brownish now, not the bright orange they’d been in the snow. Please go inside for once, she thought. The sheep were almost invisible. Her hands on the top board of the gate. As if she were pushing against it with the boy holding her back. If someone came down the path now, they might think he was raping her. Had the English named man-made kites after that big brown bird? she wondered, and now its Dutch name came to her. The wouw , red or otherwise. He’s not raping me, she thought. He’s taking care of me. He’s a sweet boy. A beautiful gymnast. And he should have left long ago.

‘I need a tablet,’ she said.

‘What kind of tablet?’

‘A tablet the doctor prescribed for me this morning.’

‘In Caernarfon?’

She could stand again. She could talk to him normally again.

The boy rubbed her tummy with his lower arms, still breathing on her neck. Not just a boy now, a son.

‘There’s one thing I want to know,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘This afternoon or this morning, I’ve forgotten which…’ I really have forgotten, she thought. Maybe it’s the next day already? She looked at the steaming countryside. Where had the snow got to so quickly?

‘Yes?’

Not the next day then? ‘Why did you come over the stream and the garden wall?’

‘I took a detour via the stone circle.’

‘What for?’

‘To have a look. There was snow. If there’d been tracks, I would have seen them.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing.’

No badgers. No fox. No dog. It was a shame that Sam was gone. If he hadn’t driven off with the sheep farmer, he could have leant against her legs now, or against the gate, to get at her hands. To lick them. The hands of the alpha female.

Buying, writing and sending a card was hardly straightforward. Just choosing one, for starters. The local Bruna had seven revolving racks full of them. The shop was incredibly busy too; he had to deploy his crutches — ‘Careful, Josje, that man wants to get past!’ — to reach them. Everything had significance, she could read something into every picture. In the end it came down to a choice between a hippo and a dog. He pulled the card with the dog out of the rack, mainly because she’d never been crazy about pets and could misinterpret the hippo. A neutral card. He’d already started to pay when he remembered stamps and priority stickers.

*

The student. She had told him herself, very coolly. Here in this living room, on a Sunday evening. He’d just got back from a run and was about to shower. It had been over for ages, she said. It was the real reason she’d been fired. During his run, he’d smelt the change of seasons and looked forward to competing in drizzle. The autumn races. Still sweating and with his chest expanded, he had stood there in the living room. Her confession was matter-of-fact; he had listened calmly. Now he knew that there was something else she had kept quiet. They had spent a week avoiding each other, then she’d disappeared. Two days later, he noticed an empty spot in the living room. After doing a circuit of the house and discovering that other things were missing too, he went through her desk drawers and found a number of notes: Our ‘respected’ Translation Studies Lecturer screws around. She is in no way like her beloved Emily Dickinson. She is a heartless Bitch . He went looking for her. He visited his parents-in-law and drove to the university. In a corner he found one more note and then he knew for certain that they had been hung all over the building. In her office, which was empty but unlocked — trusting people, academics — he had finally imagined this student, a boy whose name he didn’t even know, who had probably been there in that very place, maybe with his jeans down around his ankles. That image got to him. Not an image of his wife, no, the boy. Without being fully aware of what he was doing, he had torn up a couple of books and hurled them under a desk. With a box of matches he’d found in a pen tray, he’d initiated a book-burning. When it got out of hand — he felt the heat of the flames on his face — he opened the door and shouted, ‘Fire!’ He was confused, definitely, but he wasn’t a pyromaniac.