Gerbrand Bakker: Ten White Geese

*

The boy packs his rucksack. It doesn’t take long; not once has he taken everything out of it. Before leaving the study, he looks at the pile of books on the coffee table and puts The Wind in the Willows in the top pocket of his rucksack because it has a mole, a toad and a rat on the cover. In the kitchen he looks out of the window. Not a trace of the cop and the husband. He sits down at the table and looks at the sheet of paper. Her handwriting. Her language. The word bed stands out in the middle of the first line, bed met , but that’s about all. The message on the postcard is just two words but equally incomprehensible, Ik kom . For the first time he sees her name, it really does say ‘Agnes’. The name ‘Rutger’ is on the card too. He peels the silver foil off the rectangular object. It’s a kind of cake with dark brown in it. He gets a knife and cuts a piece. It’s delicious; he cuts another. When he’s finished, he wraps it back up. He stands up, looks at the Christmas tree and thinks, a lost tree. His gaze passes from the tree to the men’s bags, next to the sideboard. He hesitates very briefly, then takes forty pounds from each wallet, even though they both have a lot more in them. He puts Rutger’s wallet in Anton’s bag and Anton’s in Rutger’s. With a plastic bag in his hand and the rucksack over one shoulder, he walks out of the house. He changes his mind, sets the rucksack against the wall next to the door, puts the plastic bag on top of it and goes back into the house. Slowly, he starts to strip the Christmas tree, putting the baubles and tinsel and finally the fairy lights in a drawer of the sideboard. After that, he pulls the tree out of the crushed slate and gives the roots a good shake. He carries it outside, down the path that runs into the lawn, fetches the spade from the shed and digs a hole at the end of the new path. Then he puts the tree in the hole and presses down the soil, before returning the spade to the shed. He takes the plastic bag from his rucksack and goes into the cellar one last time. He puts the bread, the cheese and the bananas in the plastic bag, picks up a bottle of water and climbs the concrete steps. He lays the plastic bag on top of his clothes and clicks the top flap of the rucksack shut, loosens a strap on the side and slides the one-and-a-half-litre bottle of water down through it until it comes to rest in a side pocket, after which he carefully tightens the strap. He hoists the rucksack up onto his back, closes the front door like a good boy and walks through the kissing gate in the stone wall.

*

He crosses the stream. He hasn’t decided yet whether to stay on the path or walk parallel to it, on the other side of the thick wooded bank. He knows he has to hike back a full day. He simply took the wrong direction. Sometimes a day’s work is for nothing because it leads nowhere . He told her that himself weeks ago. The long-distance path has to climb the mountain through Llanberis, giving hikers a choice: on foot or by steam train. And descending from the top of Yr Wyddfa to Rhyd Ddu — with a note that walking the ridge is not without danger — before gradually heading towards the coast. Aberystwyth would be a good ending point. It has a train station. Shrewsbury in under two hours. He should have realised before. This is the wrong side of the mountain.

He looks to the south-west. He still has a couple of hours’ light. When he hears voices in the distance, he hesitates, then pushes his way through the wooded bank and squats behind a tree. Someone once told him that nails and hair keep growing after someone dies. How long, he wonders, would an unformed being continue to absorb blood and nutrition? He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to squat still, doing nothing. He wants to walk, to move. Then he sighs and looks at the meadow in front of him, bordered by a thick hedge. As a kid, when he was sitting here and the wind was right, he could hear his mother’s and Mrs Evans’s voices. He never strayed beyond the range of those voices. In ten or twenty years, not much here will have changed. He doesn’t emerge from behind the old holly tree until the men have moved out of earshot. He starts whistling softly.