The Twin (16 page)

'A month?'

'Yes.'

'That's a very long time.'

We're watching TV. I'm sitting on the sofa, Henk is lying on his side on the rug, resting on one elbow. He's got the remote control and races through the channels. I feel like shouting 'hold on! stop!' the whole time; how can you know what it is if it's only on the screen for two seconds? I give up and watch Henk watch TV. After a while it starts to bore him. Before getting up, he lets out a few deep sighs. He hands me the remote control without a word and walks out of the room. I turn off the TV and go over to stand in front of the softly hissing fire. From her framed photo, Mother looks at me with that strange, mixed expression, at once seductive and haughty. For the first time I also see some degree of alertness. From up there on the mantelpiece she is keeping her eye on everything. I've seen Henk look at the photo a couple of times, but he hasn't asked who it is.

Just when I'm loading the washing machine, Henk emerges from the bathroom. He has a towel wrapped around his waist, his shoulders are still wet. 'I'm almost out of cigarettes,' he says.

'You'll have to go to Monnickendam.'

'Is that far?'

'About three miles. We can go tomorrow by car.'

'Maybe I'll take the bike,' he says. He walks over to the staircase door, leaving wet footsteps on the cold floor.

'Doesn't that towel need to go in the wash?'

He turns. 'Now?'

'Sure, why not?'

He pulls off the towel and bends to dry his feet. Then he straightens up and tosses me the towel. I catch it, the warm, damp material flaps around my forearm. For a moment he stands there, proud and embarrassed at once. The scar over his left ear is more visible than usual, maybe because of the hot water. Then he opens the door and disappears upstairs. His first steps up remind me of the supple way the young tanker driver leaps into his cab.

Henk and Helmer. At primary school here in the village there were twin girls in our class. Henk and I had a desk near the window, next to an enormous pot plant with dusty, leathery leaves. The twin girls sat behind us. Of course, we were boyfriends and girlfriends, that was expected. They were relationships in alternating combinations, and we were the ones who alternated. The twin girls looked a lot less like each other than we did.

Henk was faster than me; my reactions were always too slow. When I think back on those days, Henk is always doing something – turning onto the road on his scooter; jumping up from his school desk; answering a question while the headmaster stands waiting in his mustard dustcoat, fingertips brown from Camel Plains – I still have to say 'eh?' before following him. I was never really with it. I daydreamed; he acted. After a while the twin girls knew when we switched. They didn't mind and neither did we, we had a role in the class to fall back on.

Henk and I wore the same clothes and got our hair cut one after the other by the village barber – 'Nice and easy,' he said every time to Mother or us – and we both had red scooters. But still, there were differences. When we wore shirts, Henk's was always hanging half out of his trousers or his collar was turned up. His hair was unrulier than mine (during the haircut he'd stop swallowing. Even before we were out of the door, he'd spit on his hand and run it through his hair. He didn't care if the barber was watching) and his scooter was always ten feet ahead of mine.

It was – looking back, always looking back – as if he knew exactly what he wanted, while I never had a clue. About anything at all. I can still see the bottle of birch lotion next to the barber's mirror, a bottle with a rubber vaporiser. Henk thought it was foul, I wasn't so sure. It had something, that smell.

It wasn't until we were eight that I moved to my own bedroom (where Father now spends his days). I lasted three nights alone. During the fourth night I sneaked back into my real bedroom and crept under the blankets with Henk. 'What are you doing?' he whispered, just for something to say. I didn't answer. He turned onto his side and I nestled up against him, pushing my feet between his. Even though it had been more than seven years since we were breast-fed and the layer of fat had long since disappeared from our feet, it is possible that it was on that night that I formed the memory I can't possibly have: summertime, my feet feeling other feet and Mother's face seen from below, above a pale soft swelling. Her chin and, most importantly, her slightly bulging eyes, directed not at me, but at a point somewhere in the distance: thin air, the fields, maybe the dyke.

He never came to my room. My room was a lonely room, an abandoned room, I should have moved downstairs long ago. Father doesn't understand the loneliness of that room. Towards the end of primary school, when the twin girls had moved away and we were no longer obliged to be anyone's boyfriends, I stopped going into Henk's bedroom every night. It became once a week, sometimes twice.

When the frost flowers were on the windows, we lay in our pyjamas under a pile of blankets. When it was warm, we lay naked under a sheet. We moulded ourselves to each other's bodies. Together we rode our bikes to Monnickendam: Henk to the agricultural college, me to high school. We were separated all day, but in the afternoon we would come riding up from different directions and simultaneously lay our forearms on the handlebars to defy wind and rain together. We celebrated our birthday together, we had friends together and, up to fourteen, we showered together. Until the Saturday night that Father split us up. 'First one, then the other,' he said. 'Now, now,' Mother said later, when we went to her to complain. 'You're not little boys any more.' So what? we thought, but we didn't say it. Our grandparents couldn't even tell who was who from our voices. We still wore the same clothes, we had no need to differentiate. To the dentist together (even if I did always have more cavities than Henk), swimming together in Lake IJssel, getting clipped over the back of the head together when we gagged and tried to push away our plates of boiled endive. On that freezing day in February, when Father almost dared to drive out past the embankment, we did not have any difficulty at all in merging like a pair of Siamese twins. It was entirely automatic. If he had risked it and the ice, despite its thickness, had failed to hold the car, we would have drowned as one person.

In the summer we went to the Bosman windmill. Facing each other, we hung from the iron struts while the sheep looked on. Grease, sun-kissed skin, dry grass and salty sweat. High clouds and larks we couldn't see, no matter how hard we tried. We belonged together, we were two boys with one body.

But along came Riet. When I went into his bedroom in January 1966 and tried to climb into his bed, he sent me away. 'Piss off,' he said. I asked him why. 'Idiot,' he said. I left his bedroom and heard him sigh contemptuously. Shivering, I walked back to my own bed. It was freezing, the new year had just begun and the next morning the window was covered from top to bottom with frost flowers. We had become a pair of twins with two bodies.

The farmhand was as straightforward as his name: Jaap. Big hands, a square face, short blond hair, a sturdy build. His nose was crooked, one of his front teeth was chipped. To me he was always old – he came to work for Father when Henk and I were about five. In the autumn of 1966 he must have been about thirty. Old, in other words, then. Very young now.

Henk and Riet had done it (and I had watched), I had been banned from Henk's bedroom for more than six months, I wasn't Father's boy (especially now that I was left alone and would soon be going to Amsterdam to learn 'big words'), Mother was at a complete loss (our alliance did not yet exist, she avoided looking at me) and August remained warm, golden yellow. It was weather for shorts, but my half-body was cold. I didn't know where to creep off to.

Jaap was always there, like a cow, a sheep, the harrow or the chicken coop – he was part of the farm. 'Hi, boys,' he said when he saw us. Apart from the skating, we were almost always together when we bumped into him. He kept a gentle distance, maybe because we were the farmer's sons, maybe because he didn't actually have anything to say to us. He hardly ever came into the house. He went to the labourer's cottage to drink coffee and eat. He was single when he came and single he stayed. At first his relatives sometimes came to visit, later that stopped.

During the night I lay on the floor of the new room and couldn't sleep because I kept seeing that movement, I remembered the incident with Father and the hand. Only then did I realise that Henk hadn't been there. It was Father, the farmhand and me. And I knew – lying under the window, with the keyhole as a disturbing, black, female patch still there behind my eyelids – that that was why the farmhand had looked at me, because I was standing behind Father alone.

It was the first time I had been in the cottage since Jaap had been living there. I didn't know what I was going to say, I hadn't come up with a reason for going there. I just felt that I had to. I went on a weekday evening.

He opened the front door. 'Hi, Helmer,' he said, as if I dropped by every day. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with the top buttons undone. His arms were tanned brown. It had been a good four months since he had been given his notice. I wasn't surprised by his knowing immediately who I was. I was pleased. Henk would never come knocking on his door. He walked through the small hall to the small living room. I closed the front door. One of the windows in the living room was open, propped with a long wooden slat. There was a pile of books on a coffee table in the middle of the room, a roll-up was smouldering in an ashtray. Next to the ashtray was an almost empty pouch of tobacco. Van Nelle, I read, medium-strong rolling tobacco. Next to the pouch was a packet of Mascotte cigarette papers. Quiet music was coming from a large radio. He sat down on a sofa and indicated a chair. I sat down and wiped my forehead.

'Hot,' he said.

'Yeah,' I said.

A summer evening cyclist rode past, and a little later another one.

'Would you like a drink?'

'Sure.'

'A beer? I'm having one.'

'Okay.'

He got up and fetched two beers from a cupboard in the kitchen. He didn't have a fridge. He put the bottle, which was colder than I had expected, in my hand and sat down again, slouching slightly. One arm on the armrest, the hand holding the beer in his lap. The hand was clean after weeks without any manure, greasy cowhides, diesel or earth. The roll-up smouldered on.

'Where do you swim?' he asked.

'Near Uitdam,' I said.

'I swim at the storm haven.'

'The storm haven?'

'At the start of the dyke to Marken.'

'Oh, there.' I sipped my beer and wiped my forehead again. He hadn't taught me how to swim. I stared at the pile of books and pretended to read the titles on the spines, while trying to imagine how he would have gone about that, swimming lessons.

He moved on the sofa. Now he laid the arm that had been on the armrest in his lap as well, the fingers of both hands wrapped loosely around the beer bottle. 'What's wrong?' he asked. He talked with his upper lip, exposing his uneven front teeth.

I didn't say anything, but kept staring at the books.

'Is it your brother?'

I nodded and swallowed.

'With that bird?'

'Yeah,' I said.

It was still early, but the summer was drawing to a close. Most of the light was coming in through the open kitchen door. A ditch beyond the cottage had started steaming and a thin layer of mist was already forming over the fields. The roll-up had smouldered away, the smoke was still hanging in the small living room in a tidy horizontal layer. I looked at the farmhand, his short hair was touching the bottom of the layer of smoke. I saw what I expected to see: him looking back at me the way he had looked at me then – it must have been at least ten years earlier – simmering, feeling rebellious towards Father and looking for an ally. He stood up, the smoke swirled around his head.

'Come on,' he said. He said it gently, the way he had always spoken to us all those years.

We put the bottles down on the coffee table simultaneously.

He didn't have a car at the time, maybe because he couldn't afford it. We went by bike to the storm haven, not to the dyke near Uitdam. I sat on the carrier and held on to him when he swerved. He had draped a towel over his neck and the ends blew back under his arms and flapped against my chest.

'I saw them,' I said to his back.

'Your brother and that bird?'

'Yeah.'

He turned onto the dyke and pedalled on stolidly. 'I think it's for the best,' he said.

'What do you mean?'

'You're not your brother.'

'No. Of course not.'

A few boats were moored in the storm haven. He lay his bike down on the grass and walked out onto the short breakwater. There was no one around. He took off his clothes and picked his way over the blocks of basalt and into the water. He looked like a racing cyclist: his arms and legs were brown, and his shoulders, back and bum were as white as white can be. Henk's was the only naked body I knew. This was a much larger body, a strange body, not a body you could simply mould yourself to. When the water reached to just over his knees, he fell forward into it. 'Come on,' he called. I took off my clothes as well. I didn't understand exactly what he had meant by 'you're not your brother'. He watched me clamber clumsily over the blocks of basalt. Then we swam: semicircles around the end of the short breakwater. A man on one of the boats raised a hand in greeting. For the first time I asked myself if Jaap usually swam alone. Or were there other farmhands in the area he did things with? I felt awkward, it was the first time I was doing something with him, the first time he was someone other than the farmhand. I was feeling a bit light-headed too, after that bottle of beer. He was a fantastic swimmer. A few long strokes would put him almost twenty yards ahead of me in no time. 'You have to keep your fingers together,' he said. I kept my fingers together. 'Don't forget to use your legs.' I kicked my legs in the water. 'Try to keep your head in the water and then breathe on one side.' I tried and choked. I thought I could already swim, but he disagreed. He didn't take hold of me with his hands during the swimming lesson, maybe because it wasn't convenient, maybe because I was no longer a kid he was teaching to skate.

He was already drying himself when I got out of the water and slipped on an algae-covered block of basalt. I fell forwards and had plenty of time to put out my hands to save myself, but still came down hard on my knees. Jaap had to laugh. Until I scrambled back up and walked over the grass towards him. 'You're bleeding,' he said. I looked at my right knee; it felt hot and now I understood why. He looked around, bent over and picked his underpants up off his pile of clothes. He knotted them around my knee. He handed me his towel. 'Dry yourself off,' he said. 'I'll bandage it later, when we get home.'

He sat me in a chair and went upstairs. I heard him rummaging around. When he finally came back, he was carrying an enormous first-aid kit, the kind with a round lid with a handle in it. Kneeling next to my chair, he very carefully removed the underpants before lifting a bottle of iodine out of the box. Home, I thought, and gritted my teeth. Then he bandaged my knee by wrapping a wide strip of gauze around it and sticking it down with Elastoplast. The radio was still playing quietly, some kind of jazz. Come on, I thought. From behind the cottage, through the open kitchen window, I heard a sheep's dry, barking cough. He stood up and ran his hand through my damp hair, like an elderly village doctor comforting an upset child. 'Another beer?' he asked. 'To get over the fright?'

'Okay,' I said.

A little later we were sitting opposite each other again, like earlier in the evening, each holding a bottle of beer. Jaap had rolled himself a cigarette and was smoking serenely. A car drove by. It was so quiet that we heard it turning up onto the dyke in a lower gear a bit further along. When I'd finished my beer I stood up. 'I'll be heading off,' I said.

Jaap stood up too. 'I don't know exactly how it works with twins,' he said, 'but I can imagine them having to split up eventually.'

I still felt awkward, but not as much as I had an hour before. What with the swimming, his slow smoking, bandaging my knee and the way he raised the beer to his mouth just like me, he was hardly a farmhand at all any more. I nodded.

'Preferably on an equal footing,' he said.

I nodded again and felt my lower lip start to tremble. He stepped over to me and put a hand around the back of my neck. 'It'll come,' he said. He checked the trembling of my lip by kissing me on the mouth the way you might kiss your grandfather on the mouth once in your life when your grandmother has died. 'All that will come in time,' he said again, pushing me softly towards the front door. His bloodied underpants were still lying on the floor next to the chair I had been sitting in.

Mother and Henk were in the kitchen. The light over the table was on.

'What happened to you?' asked Mother.

'Fell over,' I said.

'Who bandaged it like that?' She was already going down on her knee to take the bandage off and do it better.

I stepped back. 'Jaap.'

'Were you at Jaap's?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Have you been drinking?'

'Yes. Beer.'

Henk frowned at me.

All the doors were open and I looked through the hall at Father, mainly to avoid having to look at Henk. He was sitting like a slab of stone in his chair in the living room, not saying a word. He gave an exaggerated rustle to the newspaper he wasn't reading.

Riet wasn't there. As I mentioned, it was a weekday and it was almost time to go to bed.

Afterwards, in late August and early September, I dropped in on Jaap a few more times.

'Why do you keep going to Jaap's?' Father asked suspiciously.

'No reason,' I said.

'Has he found somewhere else to live yet?'

'Dunno.'

'Or another job?'

'I don't think so.'

'What do you talk about then?'

'All kinds of stuff.'

'You never used to go to his place.'

'Now I do.'

'Strange,' said Father slowly. 'Very strange.'

We drank beer and sat opposite each other. Him on the sofa, me in the armchair. I felt like taking up smoking, but didn't. It looked so peaceful. He never offered me his tobacco pouch. He never spoke about Father during any of my visits. He hardly spoke at all. If there was talking, it was me that did it. I was young. Mainly I thought about myself. I hardly asked him anything. I don't know how he got that crooked nose. I didn't even know where he came from. From early September onwards I had a lot to say about my first days at university, my lecturers and my fellow students. He wasn't surprised that I hadn't become a farmer. 'You don't look at the animals the way your brother does,' he said.