I’ve been doing things by halves for so long now. For so long I’ve had just half a body. No more shoulder to shoulder, no more chest to chest, no more taking each other’s presence for granted. Soon I’ll go and do the milking. Tomorrow morning I’ll milk again. And the rest of the week, of course, and next week. But it’s no longer enough. I don’t think I can go on hiding behind the cows and letting things happen. Like an idiot.
44
His arms are next to his body, I can’t see his wrists. The fog has lifted and I have set the window ajar. The new room smells of illness, even though he’s been better for a day or two now. It also smells of cigarette smoke. He refuses to get up. The letter his mother sent him is lying next to the bed. The letter she sent me is downstairs, on the kitchen table.
I changed the bandage on his head once, pulling the gauze cap back on over the top. When I went to do it a second time (he had already taken to his bed), I saw that the wound was dry and left it. The ends of the blue stitches are longer than his hair. “They always go for my head,” he mutters. “Animals.”
I wonder when the stitches need to be removed. Is that something you can do yourself? I like the idea of doing it myself. I’d clamp his skull against my chest and use one steady hand to remove the threads with a pair of tweezers.
I hear the milk tanker turning into the yard. The new driver is a determined woman in her mid-forties. I’ve only exchanged a word or two with her, she is standoffish and, like the old tanker driver, a bit surly.
“Do you miss your brother?” Henk asks.
“What?”
“Do you miss your brother. Henk?”
I don’t answer.
“I don’t miss my sisters at all.”
“They’re still alive.”
“True. Were they really going to get married?”
“Yes.”
“And you looked like each other?”
“You’ve seen the photos in Father’s bedroom, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, but. .”
“We were twins.”
“Why did she fall in love with your brother and not with you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or did she see him first and you afterwards?”
“No, both at the same time. We were at the pub together.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, Henk. Things just happen like that.”
“It could just as easily have been different.”
“I’m not so-”
“What if she’d-”
“Stop it.”
“I think she wants to marry you.”
“I thought so too.”
“Not any more?”
“No.”
“I think she’s even using me for that.”
“How?”
“By sending me here.”
“You watch too much TV.”
“She’s going to be disappointed.” He sniggers.
I look at him. “It’s time you got up.”
“No. I’m staying here.”
“What’s she say?”
“That she needs me and you’re a liar and I have to come home.”
The tanker drives out of the yard. It grows quiet outside. I can feel from my back that I’m still standing under the window, under the sloping wall. I slide his clothes off the chair and sit down.
“She’s angry. With my father, my sisters, me. Always has been. She’s angry with everything and everyone. Even the pigs. She’s probably angry with you too.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you tell her your father was dead?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“No, you don’t. We have to get the sheep in.”
“Why?”
“They’re about to yean.”
“You mean lamb.”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you do that by yourself?”
“No. I need your help.”
“Will I have to run?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m ill.”
“You were.”
“I’m scared.”
“You’re young, you should take things in stride.”
“I want to stay here permanently. I don’t want to go back to my angry mother, to Brabant. I hate it there, there’s nothing for me in Brabant. What good are sisters?”
“Is there anything for you here?”
“Yes.” Two wrists appear. He fumbles for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside cabinet. “It must be weird,” he says. “Having a twin brother. Someone who’s exactly like you.” He lights his cigarette.
I get up off the chair and open the window a little wider.
“Exactly the same body.”
“What are you actually scared of?”
“Summer.”
“What?”
“Summer is long and lonely and light.” The duvet has slipped down a little, baring his chest. A smooth young chest with a timorous heart. He blows out a cloud of smoke. Not at the window, but straight in my face. “With a twin brother that’s not a problem. You’re always together.”
Of course he runs twice as fast as I do. He runs too fast, scattering the sheep in all directions. I tell him to take it easy, reminding him that he’s dealing with pregnant animals. When I check after milking, two lambs are already walking around the sheep shed. A fence in the middle of the shed divides it into the drop pen on one side and the lambing pen on the other. I pick up the two lambs and an ewe starts to stamp. That is the mother. I put the ewe and the lambs in the lamb pen. Henk watches from the doorway. His face is flushed. Wisps of steam are rising from his shoulders.
“Come on,” I say.
We walk through fields that are sheepless but not empty to the Bosman windmill. Two graylag geese are standing next to the ditch. I also see two peewits, a flock of wood pigeons, a pair of white wagtails and a solitary black-tailed godwit. When I’m almost certain that the redshanks haven’t arrived yet, two fly past. The sun is about to set. The vanes of the mill are turning very slowly. I fold the tail forward to disengage it and wipe my hands on the legs of my overalls. Let the water come.
“We spent a lot of time here,” I say, “in the summer.”
“You and Henk?”
“Yes.”
“Like now,” he says. “But it’s not summer yet.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not summer.” The geese take wing, one flying higher than the other, the way geese do. “Your mother used to come here too, just after Henk died. With my mother.”
That doesn’t interest him. “What did you do here?”
“Hang around.”
Hang around. Stand, walk, sit. Stare at the yellow water lilies in the canal, watch clouds drift slowly — always slowly — by. Watch the water bulging in the ditch. When we closed our eyes to listen to the larks, the squeaking of the windmill’s greased axle and the wind blowing through the struts, time stood still. All kinds of things flicked back and forth under our eyelids and it was never dark. It was orange. When it was summer and we were in another country here — almost like America — nothing else existed. We existed and even stronger than the smell of warm water, sheep droppings and dried-out thistles was our own smell. A sweet, sometimes chalky smell of bare knees and bare stomachs. Sitting on the itchy grass. When we touched each other, we touched ourselves. Feeling someone else’s heartbeat and thinking it’s your own, you can’t get any closer than that. Almost like the sheep and me, merging together just before it drowned me.