The Twin (3 page)

Mother was an outrageously ugly woman. Someone who hadn't known her would probably consider the photo on the mantelpiece laughable: bony, pop-eyed farmer's wife with thrice-yearly hairdo does her best to assume a dignified pose. I don't laugh at the photo. She's my mother. But sometimes I have wondered why Father – who, when awake, no doubt lies there staring at the handsome figure he cut in those ancient photos – ever married her. Or rather, now that I've been looking at her photo for a while and thinking about the man upstairs, I wonder why
she
married him.

There isn't much else left on the mantelpiece, which is black marble. A bronze candlestick holding a white candle, and an old pencil box with a picture of a belted cow on it. All the other knickknacks are in a box in Henk's bedroom, along with other superfluous stuff. Henk's room has become a storeroom. His bed, which has never served as a visitor's bed, is hemmed in by all kinds of things he also saw and knew. His bedroom has become one big gathering point for the past, and the living museum piece in the adjacent bedroom just keeps on breathing. Breathing and talking. Even now, here, I can hear him muttering. Is he talking to the hooded crow? To the photos, or the six watercolour mushrooms?

Henk and I were born in 1947; I'm a few minutes older. At first they thought we wouldn't live to see the next day (24 May), but Mother never doubted us. 'Women are made for twins,' is what she supposedly said after putting us on the breast for the first time. I don't believe it: statements like that always emerge from a mass of events and comments finally to remain as sole survivor. Plenty of other things must have been said at the time and this was most likely a variation on something Father or the doctor said. Mother probably didn't say much at all.

I have a memory I can't have. I see her face from below, above a bright, soft swelling. I'm looking at her chin and, especially, at her slightly bulging eyes, which are directed not at me but at a point in the distance, nowhere in particular: the fields, maybe the dyke. It is summer and my feet feel other feet. Mother was a taciturn woman but she noticed everything. Father was the talker and he hardly noticed anything. He always just yelled his way through.

Someone taps on the window. Teun and Ronald are standing in the front garden, shouting and gesticulating. I walk to the front door.

'Helmer! The donkeys are loose!' Ronald says, in a tone that tells me he wishes the donkeys got loose every day.

'They're still in the yard,' Teun says, in a tone that tells me that he too has heard what his little brother really wants.

They run ahead of me around the corner of the house. 'Take it easy!' I call.

The donkeys are between the trees, about five yards in front of the partly open gate. The rope that usually keeps the gate shut is dangling from the concrete post. I realise what has happened.

'Well,' I say. 'You'd better get them back in the paddock.'

'Who?' asks Ronald.

'Who do you think? You two.'

'Why us?'

'Because.'

Now that the donkeys have broken out, Teun and Ronald are scared of them. It's like taps: when you're little they're great things until you turn one on and have no idea how to shut it off again and panic about all the water that comes gushing out.

'Because?' says Teun. 'What's that mean?'

'It means,' I say, 'that I know that
you
opened the gate because you were too lazy to climb over it, and that Ronald followed you, and that
he
opened the gate a little bit more.'

'Uh-huh,' says Ronald.

Teun shoots him an angry glance.

'Go on,' I say. 'Push.'

'Push? The gate?'

'No, push the donkeys.' I stroll over to the gate, lift it and walk it around until it's wide open. The boys don't move and look at me disbelievingly and a little scared.

In the winter the donkeys often spend long periods in the donkey shed next to the chicken coop. Donkeys absolutely hate having wet feet. In the shed it's dry and there's a layer of straw on the ground. The shed is sixteen feet wide and twenty feet deep. It is open at the front, with an overhanging roof. The donkeys have a sixteen-by-fourteen stall and in the six feet that are left, at the front, there are hay bales and a bag of oats. I generally keep some sugar beets and winter carrots in a box. On a shelf I have a large knife, a currycomb, a brush, a coarse rasp, a hoof pick and a scraper. When the donkeys are inside, Teun and Ronald don't let a day go by without visiting the shed. They sit on the hay bales or on the scattered straw in the stall. They like it most when it's getting darker outside and I've turned on the light. Once I found them lying flat on their backs under the donkeys. I asked them why they were doing that. 'We want to conquer our fear,' said Teun, who was about six at the time. Ronald sneezed because the donkey's long winter coat was hanging in his face. Now the donkeys are out they are afraid.

'How?' Ronald asks.

'Nothing special. Just go and stand behind them and give them a push.'

'No way,' says Teun.

'They won't do anything,' I say.

'You sure?' asks Ronald.

'I'm sure.'

They both go round behind a donkey and Ronald immediately starts pushing with all his might. Teun carefully taps his donkey's backside to make sure it won't kick. I'm curious to see what happens.

Nothing happens. I walk to the barn.

'Where are you going?' asks Teun.

'I'll be straight back,' I say.

In the barn I scoop a few handfuls of feed into a bucket and peek around the corner at the boys to check on things before going back. Nothing has changed. When I see Teun looking around anxiously, I stroll up to them. 'Not working?' I ask.

'No,' Ronald says. 'Stupid animals.'

'What?' I ask.

'Well . . .' he says.

'They won't budge,' says Teun.

I walk into the paddock and shake the bucket. Ronald falls over, that's how fast the donkey he was pushing rushes over to me. I empty the bucket and close the gate. Afterwards the three of us spend a while leaning over the gate watching the donkeys eat the feed. I'm standing on the ground, Teun's on the bottom bar and Ronald is on the second-to-bottom bar.

'You won't do it again, will you?' I say.

'No,' they both say at once.

They jump down and walk into the yard. When they're almost at the causeway, Teun turns around. 'Where's your father?' he shouts.

'Inside,' I say.

He doesn't need to know any more. They cross the causeway and turn right.

I stay behind with the donkeys. They don't have names. When I bought them, years ago, I couldn't think of any names and after a while it was too late, they had already become 'the donkeys'. Father asked me if I'd gone mad. 'Donkeys?' he said. 'What do we want with bloody donkeys? They'll cost us a fortune.' I told him they weren't our donkeys, but my donkeys. The livestock dealer was more than happy to arrange it – something different for a change. The donkeys are mixed breed, they're not French, Irish, Italian or Spanish purebreds. They are very dark grey and one has a light-grey muzzle. I click my tongue at them and whisper, 'Where's your father?'

They come up to me and nudge me on the head with their different coloured muzzles.

The cows are restless, two of them kicked out when I went to attach the teat cups. Until recently I was sure it was because they weren't getting out any more, but now I've begun to suspect that it's me who's restless. In that regard cows can be just like dogs – dogs are supposed to be able to sense their master's state of mind as well. I don't have a dog. We've never had dogs here.

Father hasn't eaten the mandarins. I don't want to know. I carried him upstairs and now he can go and perch on the roof as far as I'm concerned, and then, from there, he can carry on to the tops of the poplars that line the yard so that he can blow away on a gust of wind, into the sky. That would be best, if he just disappeared.

'I can't get the peel off,' he says.

I try not to look at the mandarins on the bedside cabinet or the crooked fingers on the blanket. It really is starting to stink in here, despite my always keeping the window ajar. If he won't disappear, I'll have to wash him. Before drawing the curtains, I cup my hands against the windowpane to block out the light from the lamp. With my face pressed against my hands I peer out at the ash in the front garden. The hooded crow has gone. Or is it so dark that it blends in with the branches and the night sky?

Then I see someone walking. There are lampposts along the road, one for each house or farm. That makes a total of seven lampposts. There has been something wrong with my lamppost for a few weeks now. It glows, but that's all; even if you stood right under it, the light wouldn't reach you. The venetian blinds in the living room are closed. It is so dark outside that I can only see that someone is walking and, now, that they have stopped in front of the farm. A dark patch, barely visible against the canal in the background. I can't even see which direction the patch is looking in.

'What is it?' asks Father.

'Someone on the road,' I whisper.

'Who?'

'I can't see properly.' Then the patch moves and suddenly acquires a bicycle's red back light. I follow the back light until it disappears past the window frame. I jerk the curtains shut. My heart is beating in my throat. 'All right then,' I say, picking the mandarins up from the bedside cabinet. I peel them both, remove the bitter white threads and hand them to Father in segments. Soon the juice is running down his chin.

'Delicious,' he says.

I've been scared all my life. Scared of silence and darkness. I've also had trouble falling asleep all my life. I only need to hear one sound I can't place and I'm wide awake. Still, I've never really stopped to think about what happens outside at night. Of course, in the old days I used to see all kinds of things pass the window, even though I knew that the window was high above the gravel path. I saw shoulders: the tense, hunched shoulders of someone climbing up the front of the house. Like a panther, sometimes with one arm hooked over the window ledge. Then I'd listen to Henk breathing next to me, or later imagine him asleep in the bedroom next to mine, and the shoulders or whatever else I thought I had seen would disappear. In the back of my mind I knew that I saw things that couldn't possibly be there.

Now, after what I saw on the road and after feeding Father, I lie in my bed with my eyes squeezed shut. Sleep, I think, sleep. But I see sheep lying in the field, groaning and chewing the cud, grey smudges in a greenish-black expanse, and crows in the poplars with their feathers fluffed up around their heads, and the donkeys facing each other, close to the gate, necks bent as if they are sleeping on their feet with their heads touching, and the Bosman windmill, which I have stopped again, standing by itself in the far corner, gleaming pale grey when there are breaks in the clouds, and someone by the windmill, looking up at the tail and reading 'No. 40832'. When I see that before me, I open my eyes. Is that a common occurrence, someone standing motionless in front of the farm on autumn nights? And would I have ever known if I hadn't happened to look out of the window?

Later I think of the lads in canoes. The first, the one who said it is timeless here, is vague and soon gone. The other one, the redhead with sunburnt shoulders, sticks in my mind. He said something, but what he said doesn't matter. He saw it, and he saw me. A fairly old farmer in faded blue overalls with the top buttons undone because it was a hot day. Standing next to a farmhouse, in the shade, with no reason to be there except to look on motionlessly, holding his breath. Who has grown older every day since 1967 without anything else changing. No, one thing has changed, the donkeys, and it was the donkeys, of all things, that he commented on. He called them old-fashioned. So it does matter what he said. They paddle out onto Opperwoud Canal, laughing, young, self-obsessed and quick to forget. At the end of the canal the sun is setting. That's impossible because the canal runs eastwards, from here the sun never sets in Lake IJssel, but it can now, and the boys turn into silhouettes with voices that grow weaker and weaker. Then they're gone. Now, I think, now I'll fall asleep. If you think it, you can forget it. The imaginary sun reminds me of the sea, twenty miles to the west as the crow flies. Long ago we went there, twice in one summer. On both days it grew cloudy during the afternoon. Mother wanted to see the sun sink into the water and convinced Father to let the farmhand do the milking by himself. I have never seen the sun go down in the sea, although I could, hardly any distance away.

I hear something. I think it's beneath my window and the hair on the back of my neck prickles. I think of Father, upstairs. He's no use to anyone any more, but I need him now, after all, to conquer my fear.

Maybe the red-headed boy thinks of me sometimes: that old farmer who just stood there, on that beautiful summer's day.