Henk is on the sofa watching TV. He’s not sitting, he’s draped, with the remote control dangling from one hand. His shirt is unbuttoned. It’s as if he’s taken the place over.
“Have you looked in on the sheep yet?” I ask.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m watching TV.”
“It’s two o’clock.”
“So? It’s war. Look.”
I look at the screen. Buildings with scattered palm trees. An explosion somewhere. Empty streets. Subtitles at the bottom of the picture. Is this what war is like these days? Live on TV? With kids like him slumped on the sofa to watch it? “Do you think the sheep care?”
“Come and sit down for a while.”
I stare at him until he looks up. “Go and do the sheep,” I say. I turn around and go into the kitchen to sit down at the bureau. I turn to page 531, take a pad and a pen and start copying out the poem. When I have finished and torn the page from the pad, I wonder what I’m doing. I stand up with the page in one hand and don’t know where to go. I look out of the front window, out of the side window, I look at the dishes on the draining board and the newspaper on the table, I hear the electric clock buzzing. Because I hear the clock buzzing, I realize the TV is off. I’m standing here holding a neat copy of a poem and I haven’t got a clue what to do with it. I hurry through the hall to the scullery, take the stairs with big strides and catch my breath on the landing. Cautiously, I open the door to Father’s bedroom. He is asleep. His small head is motionless on the pillow, his ears and nose look enormous, his mouth hangs open. Somehow or other, he is very dry. Once again I don’t have a clue what I am going to do next. I look around the bedroom and walk up to the bed. I lay the neatly copied poem on his chest. It rises and falls calmly.
There is a swish outside. It swishes, lands and jerks its wings in, like a farmer in Sunday black making a vain attempt to wipe his big hands. It’s back. Quietly I click my tongue. I suspect it would have done better to stay away.
47
“Am I a kind of Henk now?” Henk had spent a couple of nights in his own room, but tonight it apparently got colder again and he slipped into bed with me for the second time. He was asleep for a while, but woke up and asked me if he is “a kind of Henk.” I was already awake. I was lying on my side looking at the light that comes into the room through the venetian blinds. I was listening. Someone just rode past on a bike, a few ducks landed on the canal, the coots yapped quietly. Father said something, maybe in his sleep, maybe staring into the dark like me, at his curtains, behind which the hooded crow was dozing on its usual branch. I wasn’t entirely relaxed in the first place, but now I feel even more tension entering my body. I know what he’s getting at but I don’t answer.
“Well?” he says. “Am I a kind of Henk?”
“What do you mean?” I ask cagily.
“Your brother. Am I like your brother now?”
Something is going badly wrong here. When did this start? “No,” I say.
He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I think your father’s brave.”
My shoulder blades are itching with annoyance. The selfishness of the boy: talking when he feels like talking, even if it’s the middle of the night. I have to get up to milk, he stays in bed and gets up around eight to do the yearlings. If he gets up at all.
“You could just as well call him a coward,” I say.
“How’s that?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh.”
“Go to sleep,” I say. I’m still lying on my side, but feel like turning over. I stare at the slats of the blinds, but see Ada’s head appearing around the corner of the kitchen door. There is a mischievous look on her face and she says “in a big bed you’ve got room to stretch.” Then she gives me a meaningful look, which still looks funny now, with that harelip. “Two pillows, Helmer, two pillows.” When I think he’s fallen asleep again, I roll onto my back and rub away the itch. I look at the dark frame next to the door. I wish I was in the frame and thinking of here.
“If you ask me I am,” he says, half asleep. “A kind of Henk.”
God almighty, I think.
A little later he’s asleep and I think about the ditch and the sheep. One of the sheep took too long and yesterday I removed two dead lambs. Was that the sheep that fell in the water? I try to remember what I thought or saw, what happened to me in the black minutes between drowning and regaining consciousness. Or was it seconds? Was it like that for Henk too? Or was he already unconscious when the car hit the water? I notice that my hands are clasped together over my stomach. As if I’m laid out. I’d like to lie on my right side, but that’s where Henk is, so I turn back onto my left. Outside it is totally silent.
How does he do it? Asking Father how the dying is going, as if he’s asking him if he’d like some more gravy on his potatoes? And how does Father do it? Answering “fine,” as if looking on contentedly while he pours the gravy?
48
The magnolia is in flower. Like a glacé cherry on a cowpat. Its large flowers are neither white nor red, but pink with a white edge. If the laborer’s cottage was still standing, the top branches would be up to the dormer window. April has come and spring has gone away again. It’s sunny but cold, and at night the temperature falls below zero. But still the magnolia is in flower. None of it makes any difference to a tree and the frost doesn’t seem to have damaged the flowers. A very long time ago, maybe in the days when the farmhand was still living there, a night frost froze all the flowers. Two days later they turned brown, as if they had been scorched by a fire, and the petals, which normally fall from the branches one at a time, didn’t fall. It’s incredibly clear: from Father’s bedroom you can see the lighthouse on Marken. The wind is blowing from the north or northeast. From Denmark.
“When your mother died,” says Father, “you were the only one left.” He is lying on his side because I’ve told him not to lie on his back all the time. The piece of paper with the poem is next to the bed, halfway under the bedside cabinet, blank side up. “And now everyone’s gone. I would have liked another chat with the livestock dealer, even if he hardly ever said anything.”
“He must be in New Zealand by now,” I say, more to myself than to Father.
“Life is such a mess. Ada hasn’t been here for weeks because she watched you through a pair of binoculars, and you watched her. And why doesn’t Teun come any more? Teun is a nice boy. What are you playing at, Helmer?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
I look out of the window. “The ash is in bud,” I say.
“How many lambs?” No matter what happens, he doesn’t want to lose count.
“Fourteen.”
“From?”
“Ten.”
He sighs. “No one could tell you and Henk apart, not the barber, not your teacher, not your grandparents. Even I had to look closely sometimes. Only your mother and Jaap always knew who was who. Jaap always knew that you were Helmer and Henk was Henk. How did he know that? What did he see that I or other people didn’t see? I never trusted him.” He’s lying on the edge of the bed. His nails haven’t been cut for a long time, a clawlike hand hangs down next to the bed. He moves his fingers, as if reaching for the poem. I’m surprised that so many words can come out of such a worn-out person. With the bed up on blocks, his searching fingertips will never reach the ground. Then he rolls onto his back. His arm follows the movement of his body and falls next to him on the blankets like a dry branch. He’s panting slightly. “I don’t know what went on in the laborer’s cottage, but I was glad he left,” he says, almost inaudibly.