“I don’t know. Something.”
“Protect your head.”
“I don’t know.”
“That miniature donkey’s been dead for years and the hooded crow’s flown off.”
“Still.”
“I’m going,” I say. “Will you do the yearlings?”
“Yes,” he drawls. “Later.”
Late March and the sun is already up when I start milking. When I’ve milked ten cows, I walk to the shed door. There’s a blackbird somewhere, the muck heap is steaming, the pollarded willows could sprout tomorrow. The yearlings are restless in the shed, but otherwise it’s so quiet I can hear the donkeys trotting in the paddock.
It’s been almost thirty years since I read a poem — not counting death notices — and now I’m thinking of a poem. I didn’t learn much in my seven months in Amsterdam, but one thing I still remember is that poems are almost always retrospective. A poem (incredibly, instead of the muck heap, I now see our energetic modern lit. lecturer before me: his tangled curls, his owlish glasses, as if he’s a poet himself) is “condensed reality,” an “incident that has been reduced to its essence,” a “sublimation.” A poem is never about what it seems to be about (gushed our energetic modern lit. lecturer). If only I smoked, I could go now and lean against the shed wall to gaze pensively — smoking, as I imagine it, is a pensive activity — at the motionless Bosman windmill. I go back into the shed, plug the claw into the milk and pulse tubes, and put the teat cups on the eleventh cow.
After milking I fill a couple of buckets with water, tip them into the barrel on the other side of the gate in the donkey paddock and chuck a couple of winter carrots down next to it. Rather than rushing straight to the gate, the donkeys stroll casually towards me, side by side. These animals are mine, really mine, I bought them. Nothing else here is really mine: not the cows and not the sheep, I even inherited the Lakenvelder chickens. The old Opel Kadett, the muck heap, the willows-Idrive it, I throw my dung on it, I pollard them, but none is mine. I’m a tenant, doing things someone else should have been doing.
The sun is shining, there is hardly any wind. Spring. Something glistens on what’s left of the side wall of the laborer’s cottage, maybe a snail trail. It’s not good, I think, feeling like a poem. It’s because of what Henk said yesterday. The carrots disappear with a crunch in the donkeys’ mouths. I scratch the animals behind the ears. It’s only when they’ve both had enough and start shaking their heads, the two of them at the same time, that I stop, almost without thinking. Then I do the yearlings, much too late. Henk hasn’t got up.
46
Father is turning grayer. He hasn’t eaten for a week now and he’s only drinking water and orange juice, and less and less of the latter because it’s “so tart,” Every now and then I find a trickle of dark yellow urine in the bedpan. In the last seven days I haven’t carried him downstairs once. His wish has come true all the same, he’s getting a final spring. For a few days now it’s been sunny and mild and the buds have started to swell on the ash, turning it into a skeleton tree. Father’s voice is weakening, although I don’t know if that’s because he’s stopped eating. How long does this sort of thing go on? If a body is tough, I imagine it being able to go weeks without food. I go up to look in on him more often than usual and sometimes I get a shock because he looks dead when he’s just sound asleep. He often asks for Henk. He talks to him. Yesterday I couldn’t resist and crept up onto the landing behind him.
“How’s the dying going, Mr. van Wonderen?” Henk asked cheerfully.
“Fine,” Father answered, just as cheerfully, but quietly.
After that Henk must have picked up the gun, because they spent a long time discussing its action. Henk asked Father what he shot. Hare and pheasants, long ago. If the thud against your shoulder wasn’t heavy. No, the recoil was nothing special. If the gun was loaded. No, of course not. Whether he had any bullets (“Cartridges,” Father said, and then a little louder, “cartridges!”) and where did he keep them. In the cupboard in the hall, next to the toilet. And how do you load a gun? You have to undo that little catch, then it breaks open, then you put in two cartridges and close it again. Do both cartridges shoot out at the same time? No, you get two shots and the cartridges stay put. How does it work then? You have to take them out, after you’ve fired it. Or shake them out. The gun went back to its spot, next to the grandfather clock. I heard metal tap wood. It was quiet for a moment.
Then Father asked, “Are you nice to Helmer?”
“Yes,” said Henk.
“And is he nice to you?”
“Nice enough,” said Henk.
Father didn’t say anything. He sighed, very deeply. I crept down the stairs.
He hardly says a word to me. He asks how many lambs have been born and why no one ever visits. Where Ada has got to and why he never hears the voice of the livestock dealer any more. Teun and Ronald? Maybe malnutrition really is starting to get to his memory.
I haven’t written back to Riet. Or phoned her. Henk hasn’t responded either. “Who does she think she is?” he says. “She can go and move in with my sisters.”
I force my way through the old rubbish in Henk’s bedroom. I have to push a lot of stuff aside to open the door of the built-in wardrobe. The cardboard box is on the bottom shelf. “Dutch language and literature, University of Amsterdam, September 1966-April 1967” is written neatly on the top flaps. I don’t remember doing that. I remember grimly stuffing my textbooks into the box when Henk had hardly had time to settle in his grave. I lift the box up onto Mother’s dressing table and look for H. J. M. F. Lodewick’s History of Dutch Literature. I lay Part One (“From the Beginning to Around 1880”) to one side and sit down on Henk’s bed with Part Two (“Around 1880 to the Present”). I hear Father snoring softly, he can’t even do that at full strength any more. Because I don’t know where to find what I’m looking for, I leaf through the book. Gorter, Leopold, Bloem, Nijhoff, Achterberg, Warren, Vroman. I am impatient, reading the odd line that strikes home or will strike home soon (a flood has covered the land, a flood of tepid water and blood, / I am a fatherless man and rooted in the mud), then leafing on quickly. I notice that I am trying to recall faces from my months in Amsterdam-I hear the coots yapping at the same time and finally, on page 531, I find a poem that I read from the first to the last word.
to yearn & pursue
Why do I always see
— when I have closed my eyes
in bed or in my thoughts -
your nose, your hair, your chest?
I sometimes see myself
in mirror or in windowpane
just after I’ve seen you:
my own half body.
For all your youth and beauty,
I think I look like you -
my nose and chest and hair
are all identical.
I see the poet’s name but don’t read what Lodewick has to say about him, or his verdict on the poem. None of that matters. I close the book and put Part One back in the box.
Thinking of Denmark, I go downstairs with Part Two in my hand.