“What’s that?”
“When Helmer says something I don’t agree with.”
“And Henk says something I don’t agree with.”
“Oh,” says Ronald. “Are the donkeys going into the pasture?”
“Yep.”
“Great! Can I help?”
“Sure. Where’s Teun?”
“At home.”
“Didn’t he feel like coming?”
“No.” He looks from me to Henk and back again before deciding to take us into his confidence. “He thinks you’re stupid.”
“Go and stand in the yard over there.” I gesture in the direction of the causeway.
Ronald runs off straightaway — happy, always happy — and stops level with the door to the milking parlor. He holds up a hand to show he’s in position.
“So if I want to, I can go?” asks Henk.
“I’m not stopping you.”
He walks into the barn and comes out a little later on Father’s bike. He takes the curve wide and rides off towards the causeway. Ronald looks at him in astonishment. “Are you going?” I hear him asking Henk. Slowly I walk to the house.
Maybe Henk says something. I can’t hear because the hooded crow starts cawing. It comes swooping around the corner of the house and flies into the side of Henk’s head. It beats its wings wildly to stay in the air and pushes off against Henk’s skull with its claws, while the bike and Henk roll over beneath it. It stays hanging there for a moment, almost like a giant kestrel that’s spotted a mouse, then flies away, between the trees along the donkey paddock, towards Marken.
“Henk fell off the bike,” says Ronald.
40
“Henk fell off the bike,” said Ronald. It looked to me more like he was “flapped off it.” When I reached him he was trying to get up. He was still on all fours and blood was running down his forehead. I told him to stay put. Ronald pulled the bike upright but because it was Father’s old bike, a heavy, reliable bike, the handlebars slipped out of his grip. The seat hit Henk on the back.
“Leave it, Ronald,” I said.
“What happened?” asked Henk.
“I’ll get the first-aid kit.”
When I came back out through the milking parlor door, Ronald was standing over Henk with his hands on his hips and looking about. “He hasn’t said anything,” he said. “But he didn’t have to cry.”
I knelt down and dabbed the blood from Henk’s head with a clean, damp tea towel.
Ronald watched over my shoulder. “What a crack!” he shouted and I immediately realized there was no question of my taking care of it myself. I decided to skip the GP and drive straight to the hospital in Purmerend. There were a few people waiting at Accident and Emergency, but they gave Henk priority, probably because of the blood-drenched tea towel he was pressing against his head. They cleaned and stitched the largest wound — the beak wound — but only cleaned the scratches from the crow’s claws. The doctor wanted to know whether my son had had a tetanus injection in the last few years. I asked Henk and, because he couldn’t remember any injections, they gave him one. The doctor was glad he had such short hair. He covered the stitched-up wound with a thick piece of gauze and pulled a kind of elasticated fine-mesh bathing cap on over Henk’s head. He had never seen anything like it and didn’t even know that hooded crows existed. “Pretty exceptional really,” he told Henk with a smile, “getting your scalp ripped open like that.” Henk couldn’t see the funny side of it.
In the car on the way home, Henk sat next to me silently with a somewhat dazed look in his eyes. “My son,” I said. Instead of laughing, he sighed deeply. His hair was hidden completely by the strange bathing cap and if the cap hadn’t been there and he hadn’t sighed so deeply, I would have touched it. When I turned into the yard, prepared to drive around Father’s bike, I saw that it had been dragged over to the side of the house. Ronald had wanted to do something useful before going home. In the hall I took Henk by the elbows and turned him to face the mirror. He avoided his own eyes and for a moment it looked as if he was about to spit at his reflection.
Now he’s been sitting on the sofa in the living room for at least half an hour. He’s not saying anything, the TV isn’t on. Once in a while he rubs his left arm with his right hand. He doesn’t want any coffee, he doesn’t want anything to eat. The hooded crow hasn’t come back to its regular perch in the ash.
Of course, I don’t need anyone else to get the donkeys into their paddock. I open the gate, walk to the shed, open the gate there and saunter back to the paddock. They buck and bray behind me, but don’t pass. Just in front of the open gate, I make room for them. Only then do they leap past and start trotting in circles. When they’ve calmed down a little, they sniff the new fence. I close the gate, tie it fast and walk alongside the mesh to the road. The daffodils are about to come out around the trunks of the row of trees. I turn the corner and follow the new fence as far as the ruins of the laborer’s cottage. The donkeys walk beside me on the other side for the last twenty or thirty yards. Glistening from the drizzle, they scratch their chins on the new wooden rail. They are contented.
I take a run-up and jump over the ditch. The Forestry Commission wants to build a visitors’ center where the laborer’s cottage used to stand. The day is coming when there won’t be any farmers left in Waterland. Or one last farmer, to keep an eye on the Galloways or the Highland cattle, mow the grass, clear away empty soft-drink cans, cut the reeds and run tours from the planned visitors’ center, in neatly painted flatboats, for instance. The Forestry Commission already owns the rest of our land, I just lease it. In spring I turn the Bosman windmill away from the wind, flooding part of the land for the peewits, godwits and redshanks. In return I get a provincial grant. I do it every year when I bring the sheep in. It’s fine by me, but I still resist selling this bit of land.
Every six months a letter arrives from the Forestry Commission. Father’s keen to write back but I’m not. I didn’t even show him the last letter. It’s in one of the pigeonholes in the bureau.
The floor plan of the cottage is still visible in the foundations. I brush aside leaves, dead branches and clods of soil with my foot. This was the living room, the kitchen was here, the toilet and hall were here. The cellar doesn’t exist any more: it’s a hole full of bricks and earth. Weeds grow out of wide cracks in the concrete. A few feet above my head was the large attic with its two dormer windows. I don’t want children running around here screaming or a token farmer standing here giving his conservationist spiel. I want to come here now and then and rebuild the walls in my thoughts, see the ceiling close silently and fix the red tiles on the tile laths. I want to imagine the living room with open windows, bottles of beer and the smell of medium-strong rolling tobacco.
I run my fingers through my wet hair and rub my palm over my face. Water is good and clean, it washes away all kinds of things (dirt, dead skin, years), in water you’re weightless, water makes you reckless and ageless. Henk will always remain nineteen. I see him sitting on the sofa before me, a bottle of warm beer in one hand, the top buttons of his shirt undone, his other arm over the back of the chair. Henk kissing me as if someone has just died. Lonely music, soft. I shake my head and kick a clump of weeds away with the toe of my boot. Jaap. It was Jaap. Was he a substitute? A replacement for Henk, telling me all kinds of things would come in time?
What happened to Henk?
What happened to Jaap?
I take the road back to the farm, to Henk with his aching head, to my worn-out father who wants to see one last spring. The donkeys let me go, staying where they are in the corner by the cottage. I pick up Father’s bike, lift a leg up over the bar and cycle back in the reverse of the route Henk took earlier today. My muscles are still aching from the fencing. Inside the barn it is dark. Before going into the milking parlor, I turn on the strip lights over the workbench. I hang a pair of pliers up on the wooden board with the nails and the penciled outlines. What happened to me? I think, as I hang up the claw hammer in its outline.