Gerbrand Bakker - June

At ten to nine he fills the coffee machine with water and tips five scoops of coffee into the filter. He puts the glass jar of ground coffee back in the sideboard, then reconsiders. Jan likes it strong. When he looks up he sees his granddaughter standing on the windowsill and waving enthusiastically with both hands. His daughter-in-law appears, a plant slides out of view, then Dieke’s gone too. He hasn’t even had time to wave back.

A few minutes later Jan pads downstairs in his bare feet, looks around and grabs the paper from the living room.

‘Good morning,’ he says.

‘Yep,’ says his son.

‘Coffee?’

‘Yep.’

Rekel immediately creeps under the kitchen table to lie on Jan’s feet.

‘Sleep well?’

‘OK.’ His son rubs his forehead and opens the ‘Town & Country’ section. He doesn’t ask him if he slept well. Alone. It seems some things are more or less normal, no matter how irregularly they happen.

‘Food?’ he says.

‘Do you have zwieback?’

He gets the zwieback tin out of a cupboard and puts it on the table, drops a single sugar cube into Jan’s coffee and starts to eat. His son eats too, but doesn’t say anything, reading the articles Zeeger read earlier. Pile-driving starts for modern school building, Blue-green algae in recreational lake, Cyclist hit by car in Den Helder, Local resident in finals of international swimming race. ‘I’ve got cuttlebone,’ he says.

‘What for?’ Jan asks.

‘To clean it.’

‘How’s that work? Rekel, get out of there.’

Sighing, the dog comes out from under Jan’s side of the table and walks back under it on the other side, where he lies down on Zeeger Kaan’s bare feet.

‘Wet it, rub it, then wash it off.’

‘Can I see?’

‘Here.’ He pulls his feet out from under the dog and walks through to the laundry, where he picks up the green bucket with the five pieces of cuttlebone. Jan’s followed him and takes one out. He studies it, running a finger over the smooth shining side and pressing a hole in the soft side with his thumb. Exactly what he did when the man at the stone suppliers in Schagen handed the stuff over to him completely free of charge.

‘Paint in the garage?’ Jan asks.

‘Yep. I’ll come with you.’

‘No need, I’ll find it.’ Jan takes the bucket and disappears through the side door. The dog ambles off behind him.

And now? What should he do now? Wait till Jan’s gone. He looks at the breakfast table, the empty plates covered with zwieback crumbs, the half-full cup of coffee and the mild cheese that’s started to sweat. Then he clears it all away.

A few minutes later Jan comes back, disappears into the bathroom, re-emerges without his T-shirt and goes upstairs. Comes back down again in shorts and worn trainers, and fetches his T-shirt from the bathroom. He smells of sunblock.

‘You going?’ Zeeger Kaan asks.

‘Almost.’

‘Found everything?’

‘Sure. You’ve got a flat.’

‘What?’

‘Your back tyre’s flat. On your bike.’

News to me, he thinks. He watches his son walk off, not to the garage, but over the bridge, holding his T-shirt loosely in one hand. Aha, he thinks. Then he unloads the washing machine and hangs the trousers, towels and shirts neatly on the line while looking around the garage in his mind’s eye, trying to remember where he put the puncture repair kit.

A storm! No, not a storm. But why that tile then? She’s slept, very deeply, but restlessly as well, and the tile sliding off the roof has woken her from her sleep or doze, or maybe it’s just the memory of dozens of glazed roof tiles lying shattered in the yard.

An eternity ago, Zeeger’s grandmother lay dead in her bedroom the morning after a November storm. The fire was cold, the paraffin lamp had gone out. Zeeger’s father was in the yard clearing away the broken tiles and she was standing next to her brand-new husband, bare arm to bare arm. The night had been divided into rising wind, racket on the roof, fading wind. One of the boughs of the red beech in the front garden had snapped, and the bare twigs were scratching across a window at the front of the house. ‘We’ll have to change that pane,’ her mother-in-law had told her father-in-law when he was finished with the tiles. ‘It’s dangerous.’ Her father-in-law had pulled open the door of the cabinet. ‘After we’ve cleared up,’ he said, taking a gold medal from a shelf and buffing it up against his chest. She had looked at Zeeger, willing him to look back at her, but he just stood there as if he’d been nailed to the ground, staring at his grandmother’s face. The Frisian tail clock on the wall ticked very loudly.

She doesn’t know where she is, and when she realises, she doesn’t want to know. She pricks up her ears. Was she really just woken by a falling tile? She looks up through the rafters, trying to see if there are more holes than there were yesterday afternoon. Beneath her: shuffling and snorting in the bullpen. A filthy light fills the barn, as if the day doesn’t want to get properly started. She struggles up to a sitting position, rubs her sore neck with one hand and remembers the dull creak from earlier. Was that her? Are her bones creaking? The parade sword is lying in exactly the same spot as before; the smooth leather scabbard is warm and oily, nothing like her own dry neck. She tears open the packet of biscuits and eats one whole compartment. Then she unscrews the cap of the water bottle and drinks a few musty mouthfuls. She lies down again, on her right side this time, hoping to go back to sleep for a while.

Zeeger’s face, half a century ago. She was so desperate for him to look at her. Shivering in that bedroom with the clivias and sansevierias on the windowsill, the resonant tick of the Frisian clock, the cracked windowpane that would never be replaced, her mother-in-law walking in and out. But no, he stared straight ahead at his dead grandmother. His place on the farm had come one generation closer.

Someone’s walking around the yard. Jan, she thinks, because Zeeger and Klaas walk very differently, if only because those two almost always wear clogs. Is he coming into the barn? She clears her throat quietly. Not that she’s planning on saying anything, but still. The footsteps move away again. She listens so carefully she can even hear Rekel shuffling along. She swallows. It’s quiet. Jan always does a circuit when he comes home. She imagines his route: past the dead sheep, a little further to the collapsed rabbit hutch with the leftover straw and rock-hard pellets, the cracked concrete slabs, a stack of half-rotten gateposts, past the back of the cowshed, then inside where there’s still a mound of dry silage in the feeding passage, maybe he’ll even pull open the toilet door and be surprised by the toilet bowl — unexpectedly clean — then through the feeding passage to the back of the barn, out again, past the old dungheap, behind the sheep shed, then left onto the dusty path alongside the ditch, with the silo on the left and Kees Brak’s plum trees on the other side, then cutting across the yard at an angle to the big threshing doors…

He comes into the barn. She hears him walking up to the bullpen. Keep quiet, lie still. Horrible boy. Has he got something to say? The bull snorts, she hears his horns clicking against the iron bars.

‘I’m taking your bike!’ he shouts.

Don’t say anything, just lie still, let him see what it’s like.

It stays quiet down below for a long time. Then he walks to the side doors. She doesn’t want to say anything, she really doesn’t, but when she’s sure he’s outside, she calls out, ‘Don’t change the computer!’ She covers her mouth with one hand, laying the other on her stomach. A little later she hears something fall into the ditch, followed by thrashing and splashing. Jan says something she can’t make out. Then there’s just the swallows flying in and out constantly and the snorting of that superfluous lump of meat. How long before I start on the advocaat? she wonders.