Gerbrand Bakker: June

Zeeger Kaan watches from the bench by the side door as his son picks up Rekel and carefully clambers down to the ditch. ‘Swim!’ Jan shouts, dropping the dog. His body is only visible from the chest up and now goes lower. ‘No, don’t get out straight away. You need to swim, and then lie down in the shade.’ Jan turns and climbs back up the bank of the ditch. ‘Stupid dog,’ Zeeger hears him say. As Jan comes towards him, Rekel creeps up out of the ditch with his head hanging and his tail between his legs. He just stands there, without shaking himself dry, watching balefully as the man who just dumped him in the water walks away.

‘I’m off,’ Jan says. He goes into the laundry and re-emerges almost immediately with the green bucket.

‘OK,’ says Zeeger. ‘I’ll come and have a look a bit later.’

His son looks at him. ‘She said something.’

He nods.

‘I’m not allowed to change the computer.’

‘Ha. The things she worries about.’

Jan goes around the corner of the house into the back garden. Zeeger waits, wipes his forehead with one hand and looks at the washing, which, if the wind gets up a little, might dry in an hour. Rekel comes over to him and only now shakes himself dry. ‘Ah, nice,’ he says. The dog whimpers and lies down against the leg of the garden table.

He crosses the lawn between the chestnut trees and looks down the road in the direction of the village. Jan is riding slowly, the bucket swinging back and forth on the handlebars, banging against his knee. Then he brakes, gets off, puts the bucket on the pannier rack and pulls the straps up over it. He looks around for a moment before continuing on his way. Zeeger Kaan watches until he’s become a blotch that turns left, into the village. To the north the road is empty, and when he looks in the other direction it turns out to be empty to the south too. Although it’s still early, the countryside is shimmering: the trunks of the young elms diffracting in the bands of light. Even though he can’t see the trees that well, he still shakes his head disdainfully. They’re supposed to be resistant, this variety. Just like the last variety. Straight ahead is a wood. Owned by some guy from the city who, the first time Klaas spoke to him, said things like, ‘Nah, you know, just shaking up the rigidity around here a bit.’ And, later, ‘Lovely, feet in the mud, just planting away. All this free oxygen.’ Or, ‘It’s my way of getting a breath of fresh air to blow through this polluted world, know what I mean?’ A wood, in the middle of the polder. Hopefully without any elms, because they’d all just die. Behind the wood, directly west, it’s hazy: a broad strip of filthy-looking sky is advancing.

In the garage he’s greeted by a voice from the radio that plays day and night. Zeeger Kaan leaves it on because he thinks music and voices scare off burglars. His wife turns it off now and then. She finds it ‘lonely’: a pointless radio playing for nobody. In winter, with a slight easterly, he hears it when he wakes up in the night through the window he keeps ajar. He doesn’t find it ‘lonely’. He investigates what’s missing from his workbench. Jan’s taken the white paint, a few sheets of sandpaper and a brush. Maybe a rag too, and ammonia, there’s a very slight hint of a pungent smell and the red bottle has been moved. He pokes his nose out of the door to look around the corner at the outside tap. The bricks under it are wet. Jan must have moistened a rag. Rekel is lying in front of the open door, full in the sun. ‘Go and lie in the shade, will you, dog?’ he says. The animal beats the yellow clinker bricks with his tail but doesn’t stand up.

‘ Radio North-Holland goes classic ,’ a woman’s voice says in English, and then violin music really does come from the radio. He resumes his work from yesterday. A Christmas tree made out of seventeen wooden slats. A long vertical one, four for the base and twelve as branches, each circle of four a little smaller than the one below it. The glue is dry, now he can start attaching the aluminium candleholders. In a corner of the garage there’s a whole collection of Christmas trees: some untreated, some painted green. At least fifty of them. Attaching the candleholders is precision work, they’re fragile and he wants them all in exactly the same spot. Fifteen minutes later he tacks the last one in position and puts the Christmas tree with the rest of the collection. In a week there’ll be another car boot sale in Sint Maartenszee. There’ll be Germans there and Germans always buy Christmas trees, even when it’s scorching. Then he remembers the flat tyre. He takes the red tin with the puncture repair kit down from a shelf and whistles along to the violins.

The baker with the chapped face is standing in his neat front garden. A gravel path leads from the road to the front door and is flanked on both sides by low box-hedge squares. Insides the squares are hydrangeas, which he manages to keep blue with copper scrap and some other stuff he picked up in a garden centre. They’re just starting to flower, but the leaves are drooping, they could do with a few watering cans.

‘What are you doing there, twiddling your thumbs?’ A fellow villager with a little dog.

‘What about you?’

‘At least I’m taking the dog for a walk.’

‘I don’t have a dog.’

‘I know. Why don’t you get one?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then you’d always have a reason to go outside.’

‘Aren’t I allowed to stand in my own front garden?’

‘Of course, why not? It’s unbearable inside anyway.’

The men are quiet for a moment. ‘Off on holiday soon?’ the baker asks.

‘Already been. A week in Burgh-Haamstede. Beautiful. You?’

‘I might go yet.’

‘Bye, then.’

‘See you.’

On the other side of the street there are tall fences around the snack bar, the Eating Corner. Have been for months. The windows are boarded up too. According to the large sign on the patio, two new apartments are going to replace it. The baker sighs and goes inside. The radio in the kitchen is playing classical music. That’s strange, Radio North-Holland never has violin music at this time of day. Although there’s nobody in the house to change stations, he checks that the radio is still tuned to Radio North-Holland, then walks through the hall to the living room, where he stands at the large back window. Two or three kilometres away there’s another road parallel to this one, recognisable by the young elms planted along it, and between his back garden and that road — the Kruisweg — nothing but drab green grass with a kind of desert sky above, that’s how he imagines it. He has jammed some newspapers behind the pot plants on the windowsill. He doesn’t know exactly what purpose they serve, but it’s something his wife always did and that’s why he does it now.

His daughter lives in Limburg. South Limburg. He’s started to hum along to the violins. A dog. Why not actually? Not a big one, but medium-sized, one of the ones with a German name. A schnauzer, that’s it. Or is that the kind of dog you have to get trimmed every couple of months? Suddenly he’s had enough of the view. He goes into the hall and opens the door to the shop. It’s darker here than anywhere else in the house, with yellowed lace curtains hanging in the enormous window. Nothing’s changed in this room. The counter’s still there; the cabinet that used to contain the zwieback, rye and gingerbread hasn’t been moved. Everything’s just empty. He flicks the lights over the counter on and off a couple of times. He reads Blom’s Breadery in mirror writing through the curtains. ‘Blom’s Breadery?!’ He can still hear his wife saying it, much too long ago. ‘What’s wrong with Blom’s Bread and Pastries?’ He’d mumbled something about the seventies being just around the corner. A new era, a different era, elegant lettering on the Volkswagen van. ‘You’re weird,’ she’d said, but without any real spite.