Gerbrand Bakker - June

And then Dieke, sulking over a pudding she hadn’t ordered. It was unbearable. Anna Kaan had grabbed her tightly by her upper arm, perhaps a little too tightly, and said, ‘Eat it!’ Klaas and his wife were sitting further up the table, puffing away as if their lives depended on it. ‘This isn’t what I wanted,’ Dieke sobbed. Anna squeezed her arm even harder. ‘Eat it, you ungrateful little brat!’

She grabs the advocaat and forces down a few globs, which isn’t easy, as she already has a lump in her throat from that last image. And what were they doing, celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in June when they got married in April?

‘I have to catch the last ferry,’ Jan had said. Although they’d already made up a bed for him and left the window of the spare room ajar. They finished up quickly. Her brother Piet, who lives in Den Helder, gave Jan a lift to the ferry. Everyone left in their own vehicles. Anna and Zeeger didn’t say a word during the drive home from the restaurant, almost fifteen minutes. She sat there wondering what had been the most painful thing to have happened that day. As they were getting into bed, Zeeger said, ‘So, the day went quite well, I think.’

And maybe that was it: the most painful thing.

She screws the cap back on the bottle and checks how much is left. About half. She lays the bottle down next to her and crawls over to the edge of the straw. Something beneath her is shaking. Shaking worse than it should from just her crawling. When she reaches the edge and looks down, the concrete floor is completely empty. No dog, no Barbary duck, no Zeeger. Even Dirk is keeping quiet. Please don’t let me start thinking about earlier celebrations, she thinks. Lying back down in her old spot, she realises that her feet are cold.

‘Did you drop her off?’

‘There’s a heap of silage in the feeding passage.’

‘What?’

‘What are you kneeling down here for?’

‘I’m trying to see if the carpet’s already started to wear.’

‘I thought you were going to muck out the stalls?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘Didn’t Dieke want to go to the pool?’

‘No.’

‘What’s she doing now, then?’

‘How would I know? I didn’t stay there. Has that brother of yours got a mobile?’

‘Doubt it.’

‘Is that brother of yours all there?’

‘And you?’

‘Why are you kneeling down here instead of working in the cowshed? You’re not checking whether I keep it clean, are you?’

‘No. It’s too hot.’

‘I’m hot too.’

‘You’re not mucking out the cowshed.’

‘It can’t go on like this.’

‘What?’

‘This. Everything.’

‘Why aren’t you at work?’

‘It’s summer, everyone’s on holiday.’

‘But a butcher’s always got work. Your brother’s shop is always packed.’

‘It’s summer! Everyone’s gone!’

‘Calm down.’

‘What does Eben-Ezer mean?’

‘Huh?’

‘Forget it.’

‘If everyone’s on holiday, there’s people on holiday in Schagen too and your brother’s as busy as ever.’

‘What?’

‘You have to learn to think the other way round sometimes.’

‘What?’

‘All those Germans. In Schagen.’

‘I don’t speak German.’

‘Anyway, if it can’t go on like this, you’ll have to start working more than one day a week at the butcher’s.’

‘Oh, so you do understand what I’m getting at. Have you already called a land agent?’

‘A land agent?’

‘Don’t play dumb.’

‘What was Jan doing?’

‘He was kneeling down, like you, only not in his daughter’s bedroom. Between the headstones.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘Klaas, I dropped Dieke off and left again.’

‘Where have you been, then? Riding there and back can’t take more than quarter of an hour.’

She doesn’t say anything else, just turns and walks out of Dieke’s room. Halfway down the stairs she does say something, just loud enough. ‘I’d rather be out on my bike, even if the tyres are melting, than stuck here.’ Silence. ‘Will you go and pick Dieke up in a minute? She won’t last more than half an hour there.’ The staircase door closes quietly.

Klaas stands up. Dieke’s treasure bag was under her bed. Not in a blanket of fluff, but on spotless carpet. He didn’t look in it. When he straightens his back, the window cracks. For a fraction of a second he feels it in his lower back, then wonders how something like that can happen out of the blue. The heat? A structural defect? The crack is in the outside pane of the double glazing and will be sure to cause condensation in autumn. He does some calculations. The window was fitted almost forty years ago. Old age? He pulls on the mechanism to see if it still opens and closes properly. Just before closing it again, he thinks he hears his mother’s shrill voice calling him. He shakes his head, but can’t block out a muffled echo of his name.

Three years ago he resumed work where his father had left off, removing thick layers of dust and grime with a vacuum cleaner and a soft broom. His wife never came upstairs. There was plenty of everything. Wall planks, laths, skirting boards, and more than enough nails. No floor covering. He drove to the Carpet Giant in Schagen and Dieke went with him. With a very determined expression, she pointed out a roll of light-green carpet. Zeeger Kaan would have varnished the planks, everyone did that in the late sixties, but Klaas painted the bedroom lime green. In four weekends he was finished. His father didn’t lift a finger. He came to have a look now and then, mumbled something or other, but didn’t do a thing. That must have taken willpower, because he’s the kind of father who can’t bear to stand by and watch. The sight of his children repairing punctures made him huff and puff until he snatched the puncture repair kit out of their hands to do it better and faster himself. Once the bedroom was finished, he showed up with five letters, capitals he’d sawn out of a piece of wood in his shed. The letters were different colours and he’d screwed eyelets into the tops. Dieke moved from Klaas and his wife’s bedroom to the new room, after he’d installed a gate at the top of the stairs first. DIEKE slept in the new room for the first few weeks, but after that it was always someone else, because she had found a box on the landing she could stand on. IKDEE slept there for a while, and so did IDEEK .

Nobody asked why he had finished off the third bedroom when the two old bedrooms at the front of the house had been empty for years.

Before leaving the bedroom, he takes DEKIE off the door and rehangs the letters in the right order. Very far away, he can still hear his mother calling his name right at the back of his mind. It could have just as easily been five other capital letters, he thinks. In black. Or grey. No, four others. He walks past the stair gate to the front of the house and has a quick look in the other two bedrooms. In each room there’s a bed with just a mattress and a pillow without a case. Nobody ever stays overnight. In the largest room, with the balcony, the air is thick and there’s too much sunlight. He opens the balcony doors, steps out onto the green-stained rectangle and plants his hands on the rail. The crown of the red beech in the middle of the lawn is thinning. That’s something he hasn’t noticed before. The wrought iron of the railings is crumbling under his hands. Cautiously he steps back into the bedroom, where he closes the balcony doors again, equally cautiously. He pulls off his shirt and dries his face with it. Motes of dust spin in the thick air. Thick, he thinks. Nobody breathes it. I’ll go and get Dieke.