Gerbrand Bakker: Ten White Geese

‘I was bitten by a badger.’

‘Impossible.’ The doctor stubbed out his cigarette.

‘But I was.’

‘Liar.’

She looked at the man. He really meant it.

‘Badgers are meek animals.’ Meek?

‘Are you religious?’ she asked.

He pointed to a cross on the wall next to a crooked poster warning against HIV infection: an obscure shape she couldn’t quite place and the words Exit only .

‘And yes, one day there will be nothing but badgers walking around this town. People have already started to move away. Badgers and foxes. Or they just up and die, that’s an option too of course. Could you perhaps tell me how you possibly came to be bitten by such a meek animal?’

Not enough personal pronouns and an excess of roundabout verb constructions, she thought. ‘I was asleep.’

‘Did the animal get into your house? Do you live here in town?’

‘I live up the road. I was outside, lying on a big rock.’

‘Did the badger bite you through your shoe?’

‘Do you have time for all this talk? I’d rather you look at my foot.’

‘It’s quiet this morning. You sound a little hoarse. Trouble with your throat?’

Hoarse? Did she sound hoarse? ‘Maybe I have a temperature.’

‘Are you tired too?’

‘Dead tired. But that —’

‘You weren’t wearing any shoes?’

‘Yes. I mean, I’d taken off my shoes.’

The doctor looked at her, but let it slide. ‘Show me.’ He gestured at a bed.

She hopped over and struggled up onto it, as it was quite high. She pulled the thick sock off her injured foot.

‘Ouch,’ the doctor said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s damn painful.’

He took her left foot and squeezed it cautiously. Then he ran a hand up her shin. ‘There are scratches here too,’ he said.

She tried to restrain the blush rising from her throat, but knew how pointless that was. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

‘The badger?’

‘Yes.’

He rubbed her knee. ‘Not just the shoes.’

‘The sun is still very strong here even in November,’ she said.

‘We have a marvellous climate.’

She sighed.

‘Any other complaints?’

Before answering, she glanced around the surgery once again. ‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘People don’t come here for a splinter in their eye. They use it as an excuse to casually mention all their aches and pains.’

She kept her eyes on the cross. Like the poster, it was slightly crooked. The doctor finally took his hand off her knee.

‘If you’re sure it was a badger, I’ll need to give you a tetanus injection.’

‘It was a badger.’

‘I’ll leave the wound. Soak it two or three times a day in hot water with a couple of teaspoons of baking soda dissolved in it. It’s an old remedy. And I’ll put you on antibiotics.’

The injection hurt like hell. After throwing away the phial and needle, he immediately lit up a fresh cigarette. With the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and one eye watering, he wrote out the prescription. ‘Do you know where the chemist is?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Six houses along.’ He looked at his watch. ‘He’s open now.’

She stood up and accepted the prescription. ‘Thank you.’

‘If the wound’s no better after about four days, come back.’

‘I will.’

‘And watch out for badgers.’

‘Yes.’

‘Badgers and foxes. Foxes have a nasty bite on them too.’

‘They’re too busy with my geese,’ she said.

The doctor started to cough.

*

My geese , she thought on the way to the chemist’s. Now they’re my geese all of a sudden. Hopping was too difficult: she could hang the sock in front of the stove at home and if she wore a hole in it, she could throw it away. A young couple were walking towards her, laughing and talking loudly, arms around each other’s waists. When they passed her, the girl looked at her as only girls who think the world is theirs for the taking can, lost in the happiness of the moment and insisting on making others party to their bliss. It was almost offensive: unadulterated happiness that would very soon come undone. Share my joy! the girl beamed. She met her gaze with indifference, ignoring the boy. Having young women half her age walking around at all was unbearable enough. Seconds later she pushed open the door to the chemist’s. There was no queue at the counter.

Along with the antibiotics she had been prescribed, she bought a full first-aid kit, five boxes of paracetamol, hand cream, a tube of toothpaste and a couple of tubes of cough drops. ‘Holidays?’ the woman behind the counter asked.

‘No,’ she said.

‘German?’

‘No.’

‘Sore foot?’

‘Yes.’

The chemist’s assistant completed the transaction in silence.

It was still raining. She drove back to the house at a snail’s pace.

That evening she could hardly move her arm and her foot was still throbbing. She boiled some potatoes, then fried them up with a couple of onions and five cloves of garlic. Two glasses of wine with dinner. She felt like drinking more but remembered hearing that alcohol and antibiotics were a bad combination. The doctor hadn’t mentioned it. No surprise there, he was too busy smoking himself to death in a surgery with a cross on the wall. After dinner she climbed the stairs like an old woman, a weak hand on the banister and dragging her leg. There was still a little light coming in through the two windows and she lay down on the divan in the study. Flowers, she thought. This room needs flowers. A phone would be handy too. A badger had bitten her on the foot — she could have broken both her legs. The doctor hadn’t said anything about a stiff arm either. A radio. It was so quiet she could hear the individual sheets of rain passing the windows and, between them, the bamboo scraping against the oil tank at the side of the house.

She smoked a cigarette.

She lay there. The heartless bitch .

It was 18 November.

The husband had been past every noticeboard in the English Department. In a blind spot on the wall between two offices, he had found another note half hidden behind a list of exam results. It was exactly the same as the one in his hand. Our ‘respected’ Translation Studies Lecturer screws around. She is in no way like her beloved Emily Dickinson: she is a heartless Bitch. He realised that the same message must have hung on a lot of boards. He walked to her office. It was very quiet in the long, narrow corridors of the university building. On the door, under his wife’s name and the name of a colleague he had heard of, there was a new plastic plate with a man’s name and the title: Lecturer, Translation Studies. He hesitated, finding it hard to imagine they’d already cleared away all her stuff. Computer, books, notes — surely they’d still be here? As far as he knew she was no longer employed as a lecturer, but maybe they still let her work on her thesis in the office. He went in; there was no one there. Shortly afterwards he came back out into the corridor and started shouting. Two men put out the fire with a hose on a reel, managing to contain it to this one office. When the fire brigade arrived ten minutes later, there was nothing for them to do. The husband waited calmly for the police to show up.

*

The note was lying on the table in the interview room of the nearest police station. He had already admitted arson and had pulled the note out of his back pocket halfway through questioning. ‘I’ll break his neck,’ he said.

‘That’s not allowed,’ said the policeman who was taking his statement.