Gerbrand Bakker: June

Beneath her she hears the bull shuffling and groaning. Dirk. A superfluous lump of meat. Otherwise it’s quiet, as quiet as only a hot day in June can be. The swallows flying in and out are almost silent. She screws the cap back on the bottle, holds it up to see how much water is left, then lays it back down next to her. When the straw stops rustling, she hears footsteps. Very quick footsteps. ‘Dirk!’ she hears. Dieke. The child doesn’t know her grandmother is up above her. A little later, when the footsteps have almost reached the barn doors, the child shouts, ‘Uncle Jan!’ Dirk starts to snort. Dieke says something else, but she can’t make it out. Soon after, it falls quiet again. She leans back carefully and, once she’s rubbed against it for a while, the straw is reasonably comfortable again. Inasmuch as anything other than a soft mattress can be reasonably comfortable when you’re the wrong side of seventy. She gives her belly a slow and thorough scratch, then rubs her face with both hands.

What’s that bull still doing here? Why doesn’t Klaas sell that enormous beast? She stares at the outside world through the hole in the roof. A very small, rectangular outside world. For now, that’s plenty. I’ll never celebrate anything again. Ever. We’re not cut out for celebrating. We always say exactly the wrong thing. The long faces of those boys as they tramped around the zoo. A daughter would have taken photos or said things like, ‘Look, a baboon. My first ever baboon!’

Somewhere in the barn something creaks. It’s a dull dry creaking, loud too. The timbers? The boards of the hayloft? The big doors?

There are six windows in the living room. Dieke looks out through the one with the crack. She’s staring at the lawn that extends from the front of the house all the way to the road. In the middle stands an enormous red beech. The leaves of the tree aren’t moving. The blades of grass in the unmown lawn are completely still too.

The crack bothers her. It has for a long time now. She’s scared that the glass might fall out of the window frame, maybe while she’s looking through it. Dieke sighs and walks out of the living room, across the hall and into the kitchen. Her mother is sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. ‘What are you sighing about?’ she asks.

Dieke doesn’t answer. She goes over to the window and uses both hands to wave at her grandfather, who she can see on the other side of the yard, past the wide ditch and her grandmother’s vegetable garden, standing at his own kitchen window. If there were sheets on the clothes line, or towels and trousers, she wouldn’t be able to see him. He doesn’t wave back. The sun’s almost reached the kitchen. Her grandfather walks away from his window.

‘Where’s Uncle Jan?’ she asks.

‘Is Jan here?’

‘Uh-huh,’ says Dieke. ‘He just came over the bridge.’

‘I don’t know, Dieke. Somewhere out the back, I guess.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Six o’clock.’

‘Is it almost teatime?’

Her mother turns her head to look at the stove, which doesn’t have any pans on it. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Go and look for him.’ She stubs her cigarette out in a brown ashtray that is already full to overflowing.

Dieke slides over the laminate floor in her socks. Her yellow wellies are on the coconut mat in front of the door. She pulls one on, then starts walking before she’s finished pulling on the other and tumbles over. ‘Doesn’t matter, it doesn’t hurt,’ she says to herself, getting up again. It’s cooler in the long corridor that separates the house from the barn, but the concrete floor is as dry as a bone. When the floor’s damp it’s going to rain, she knows that. It’s not going to rain. She jumps into the old milking parlour from the corridor, over the two concrete steps. After the milking parlour comes the barn. She stands still for a second and looks up. ‘Doesn’t hurt, doesn’t hurt.’ It’s very big and gloomy in here, even with all the doors opened wide like now. The biggest doors are at the back of the barn, thirty steps away or more, big steps. An enormous rectangle of light, so bright that when she looks back up at the roof, she can no longer see the giant beams.

She starts to run. Halfway she yells out at the top of her lungs, ‘Dirk!’ The bull turns his enormous body towards the sound, but Dieke doesn’t even look at him. She keeps running. She stops in the doorway. In front of her is the shadow cast by the farmhouse, stretching almost to the sheep shed. One of the two doors is hanging crooked on its hinges. On one side of the sheep shed is the old dungheap, on the other a salt-stained, concrete silo. The dung left on the slab is as black as ink and teeming with fishing worms. There are elderberry bushes growing in the silo.

Somewhere out the back, that’s what her mother said. But somewhere is a very big place. In the sheep shed? Past the heaps of silage? Or all the way out in the fields? ‘Uncle Jan!’ she bawls. Behind her, in the gloomy depths of the barn, the bull starts snorting. ‘I’m not calling you,’ she says, without looking back. She takes a couple of steps forward and calls again, even louder.

‘Here.’

‘Where’s here?’

‘Behind the sheep shed.’

She can choose: either cut through between the silo and the sheep shed — but there are tall prickle bushes there — or take the path alongside the wide ditch and then go a bit to the right. She decides on the path and kicks the dust up as she goes. ‘Watch the ditch,’ she tells herself. ‘Watch the ditch, watch the ditch.’ When she spots her uncle, she glances back. The cloud of dust over the path is taking a long time to settle. Her uncle is sitting on a causeway gate looking out over the fields. She grabs the top board and carefully puts one foot on the bottom board, then waits until she’s sure she’s standing firmly before lifting the other foot. Uncle Jan doesn’t say a word and doesn’t look at her either. He’s not the kind of person to just launch into conversation. She’s now standing with both feet on the second board and her upper body starts to lean forward. It’s getting difficult. She has to keep her balance with her hands on the top board, but if she puts her feet up any higher, she’ll topple over forward and land face first on the hard cracked ground on the other side of the gate. She stays there like that, wavering between carrying on, stopping and climbing back down.

‘Can’t you manage?’

‘No,’ she says.

Her uncle jumps down on the other side of the gate and grips her under her arms. When he lifts her up, she swings her yellow wellies over the top board and sits down. Just like Uncle Jan, who’s climbed back up onto the gate, though his legs are a lot longer. His feet reach down to the second board, hers are up on the third. She holds on tight to stop herself from falling forward or, even worse, backwards. She lets out a deep sigh.

‘Is it still too hard?’

‘No,’ she says.

‘Hold my arm.’

She does and that’s better. As long as she’s holding on to Uncle Jan, she won’t fall. She doesn’t fidget or slide around because it’s an old gate, a gate the cows have chewed on.

Uncle Jan stares into the distance. Grass, yellowish stubble in Brak’s fields next door, blue sky. There are no cows out in the fields and no sheep either. There aren’t any animals in the fields at all. A bit further along there’s a second gate and beyond that a third. Between the gates, two dead-straight parallel tracks. Shadows are starting to appear where cows dropped their pats and the grass is a little longer. The blades of the big wind turbines past the third gate aren’t turning. Dieke feels the evening sun on her neck.