Gerbrand Bakker: Ten White Geese

‘Then I’ll cut his dick off.’

‘That’s definitely not allowed.’ The policeman asked him where his wife was at that moment.

‘I don’t know. She’s gone. That’s all. In her car, and the trailer’s not in the shed any more either.’

Did that leave him without transport?

‘No. We had two cars.’

Had he tried to contact her?

‘What do you think? Of course I have! Her mobile phone just gives the engaged signal the whole time.’

Were things missing from the house?

‘All her clothes and a coffee table, a hideous thing actually, I’m glad to be rid of it. A mattress, duvets. Lamps! And all kinds of odds and ends. Books, quite a bit of bedding, a portrait of Emily Dickinson —’

‘Who?’

‘She’s an American poet. She was writing about her, doing a PhD thesis. Bit late, if you ask me, but she obviously had something to prove. Christ almighty.’

Did they have kids?

That was the only time the husband looked down.

What was the state of their relationship?

‘What’s it to you? What am I doing here anyway?’

The policeman reminded him that he had committed an act of arson in a university building.

‘So what! Just do your job and keep out of my private life.’

The policeman ended up by asking him whether he wanted to register his absent wife as a missing person.

The husband raised his head. ‘No,’ he said after a long pause for thought. ‘No, let’s not do that.’

Would he like some coffee?

He looked at the policeman. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’ While he was drinking the coffee, the policeman waited patiently, a friendly expression on his face. Then the husband said, ‘A single.’

‘What?’

‘The mattress she took was a single.’

She lived in constant expectation of a visitor showing up. Those geese belonged to someone, so did the black sheep along the road. Someone would come eventually, if only a lost hiker. The idea filled her with restlessness. After a few days her foot stopped throbbing and she could see the wound contracting. When it was drying off after the soda bath, she would run her thumb over the itchy teeth marks for minutes at a time, even though she had hardly dared look at it immediately after the bite. Along with the incompatibility of alcohol and antibiotics, she also remembered hearing that you had to complete a course of treatment, and continued taking the tablets. Her upper arm, which was still stiff, now bothered her more than her foot. It kept raining, but it was gentle rain; she didn’t even put on a coat to go out. One Sunday she heard a few shrieking whistles, from which direction she found it impossible to determine. She got out the map and discovered a railway line not far away, the Welsh Highland Railway. Next to Caernarfon there was a picture of an old-fashioned steam engine. Evidently it ran at weekends.

Several days after the other staff members pulled him out of the pond, her uncle started to make a cabinet. It was actually more of a wall unit. ‘See,’ her mother told her father, who was the uncle’s brother. ‘See. That’s how you do it. You do things. You get on and do them.’ He spent weeks on it, weeks of leave, as the hotel management had told him to come back when he was ‘feeling better’. Sawing, drilling, screwing, sanding, painting; sitting on a chair and staring at what he’d done so far. When he finished, he had a slight relapse. ‘I wouldn’t have put it past him to take the whole thing apart again,’ her mother said. ‘But he didn’t.’

She had bought the secateurs and the pruning saw on impulse because she wanted to do something about the creeper clinging to the front of the house. Cutting back the ivy had been enjoyable. She gazed out through the glass in the front door at the grass rectangle between the stream and the low stone wall the light brown cows sometimes gathered behind. Along the stream were a few overgrown shrubs and some strangely shaped trees. Right in front of the house, the grass ended at a wide, ragged-edged gravel path. No, it wasn’t gravel, she saw when she stepped outside and knelt down for the first time. It was pieces of slate, and she realised that the grey mound behind the house wasn’t just a grey mound, it was a supply of crushed slate. She rubbed her left upper arm and went back into the house to put on her oldest trousers. In the bathroom she pushed two paracetamol out of a strip and washed them down with a mouthful of water.

In the pigsty she found a rusty spade and an even rustier pitchfork. She leant them against the low wall, placing the secateurs on top of it. The veils of rain faded into mist, as if a cloud had sunk to the ground. She sighed. From a number of spots along the front wall of the house, she took five steps forward and set a piece of firewood on the ground: one log ended up on the crushed slate, the others on grass. After sticking the spade into the ground and trying to push it down with her good foot, she immediately gave up. It was pointless, she needed clogs. Clogs and a wheelbarrow, cord and short stakes. She put the spade back against the wall. There was a strong smell of cow dung. I have to look carefully and think it through, she thought. That’s all it takes. If I wanted to — really wanted to — I could even put a wall unit together. Jobs like that go step by step. For now, the work was done. She took the secateurs and walked around to the side of the house, where some of the bamboo almost reached the roof. She cut it off at shoulder height and, half an hour later, glancing at the pile of bamboo behind her, realised she could cross the stakes off the list. She had uncovered a small window she hadn’t noticed inside, in the kitchen. Since coming outside she hadn’t smoked a single cigarette. Now she would find it difficult to get her right hand up to her mouth.

*

Later that day the cloud rose and the sun broke through. She walked slowly to the stone circle with the secateurs in her hand, cutting off branches that were in the way and removing ivy from the iron kissing gates. The path was looking more and more like a real path. After reaching the stone circle and before sitting down on the largest rock, she carried on in the same direction and came to a stile. It was wet here, really wet, marshy. With thick clumps of coarse grass sticking up between small puddles. The path led straight through the bog on a kind of natural embankment with rocks dotted here and there. Tomorrow, she thought. On the map she had seen a larger body of water, rectangular, as if it were man-made.

She sat dead still, waiting, her arms around her raised knees. No badgers appeared. Two yellow butterflies fluttered over the gorse. Two butterflies, she thought. Two butterflies went out at noon, / And waltzed above a stream. An enormous wave of homesickness washed over her. She had felt a milder version a couple of times before in the enormous Tesco’s at Caernarfon, especially in the refrigerated aisles. She’d fought it, but here in the sun with the butterflies and the gorse, the memory of the street in De Pijp was impossible to resist. She saw it before her in black and white: the trees half as big as now, cars with rounded features and bodies, children in knitted cardigans with leather patches on the knees of their trousers, the steep stairs up to the front doors, the heady smell of St Martin’s sweets — St Martin’s Day! Just over a week ago. She released her knees and stretched her legs, hugged her belly and bent forward.

Shortly after that, the badger shuffled out from under its gorse bush.

When she got back from the stone circle with an armful of tufted grass, there was a piece of paper on the front door. Came round, nobody home. I’ll be back, maybe tomorrow. Rhys Jones . The note was stuck on with a piece of chewing gum.