“Why is he dead?”
“He ate an egg, Ronald.”
It makes him laugh. “I eat eggs, they don’t kill me.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I say. “Come on, let’s go into the kitchen. Would you like an almond cake?”
“Yes!” shouts Ronald.
“Please,” Teun says politely.
We go into the kitchen. The coffee machine is on, its gurgling drowns out the buzzing of the electric clock. Ada has put out two mugs. I get a packet of almond cakes out of a kitchen cupboard and tear it open.
“I’m just happy you’ve come over,” I tell Ada, in answer to her question.
“Of course I’ve come,” she says, almost indignantly. “And I’ll come tomorrow as well. It’s horrible, especially now it’s Easter, without a soul around. You have to come and eat with us, and shall I phone farm relief, to send someone for the milking? Wim wanted to come as well, but the bulk tank’s not working properly and he has to be there when the supplier. .”
“You have to cry now,” says Ronald. “Your eyes are wet.”
I don’t answer. The boys are sitting together on one chair, because the fourth kitchen chair is in the living room.
“Has Henk gone?” Ronald asks.
“Yes, he’s not here any more.”
“Why’s he gone?”
“He’d been here long enough,” I say.
“Has he gone back to Brabbend, where his mother lives?”
“Ronald,” Teun says through a mouthful of cake, “just shut up for once.”
I really am happy they’ve come.
Ada, Teun and Ronald have gone, it’s quiet again in the house, but a different kind of quiet. Better. I don’t want to sit down on the kitchen chair next to the coffin any more. I walk through the scullery and the shed to the yard. It’s almost time to put the cows out again. I check the sheep and then walk over to the chicken coop. The wheelbarrow is in front of the donkey shed. I should actually muck it out. Not now. I go back inside and get the binoculars from the bureau. I stand with my legs apart in front of the side window and raise the binoculars to my eyes. Ada is standing there five hundred yards away. When she sees me she immediately raises one hand and waves. She gestures with her other hand. Teun and Ronald come into view. They raise their hands as well. I wave back and lower the binoculars. For a moment I stay there, in front of the side window, binoculars at chest height. Letting them have a good look at me. How long has she been standing there? How long has she been waiting for me? She knew I would appear at the window. Just as I knew she would be standing there. Relieved, I put the binoculars down on the table. Now she can come back with a light heart and take charge of things around here again.
After smoking another roll-up next to the coffin, I go out through the front door. I walk over to the bridge and sit on the rail. The hooded crow has taken a few steps to one side and has turned to face me. It looks at me. I look back. Until I see a car pulling up at the remains of the laborer’s cottage out of the corner of my eye. A man gets out of the car. It is bleak and gray and there are no sunny-day cyclists. A large group of coots is bobbing in the canal. The man has walked from the car to the magnolia. He grabs a branch and shakes it. Then he walks to the half-wall. When the man has been standing there motionless for a while staring up the imaginary staircase, I slide off the rail and walk up onto the road. The donkeys come over to the new fence and follow me to the former laborer’s cottage. He turns around when he hears me approaching. It is an old man with a weather-beaten face. An outdoor face.
“Helmer,” he says.
“I thought you were from the Forestry Commission,” I say.
“And I didn’t know whether I could expect to find you here.”
“Henk’s dead,” I say.
“Really?” he says. “Since when?”
“April 1967.”
“That’s a long time. And now you’re the farmer.”
“Yep. Mother’s dead too and Father is laid out in the living room.”
He screws up his eyes. It is a lot of deaths in one go. Then he turns around. “And the cottage burned down.”
“Yes,” I say to his back. “Amsterdammers. Holiday home.” I shiver, I’ve come out without a coat.
He stands there staring for a while, then turns back. He lays a hand on my shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll go and pay my respects to your father.” He walks over to his car. His back is straight, the stubbornness hasn’t disappeared. I follow and get in next to him. He puts the car in reverse and backs onto the road. We drive slowly to the southwest.
“It smells of dog in here,” I say. I can smell that, even though we never had a dog.
He looks at me and smiles. “He always sat where you’re sitting.” Because he’s looking at me, he sees the donkeys. “Are they your donkeys?”
I nod.
Again he smiles. “Yes,” he says. “You’re a donkey man all right.”
IV
55
There’s a sand dune here with an English name. A long time ago a rich Englishman came to this shore. He had a large house built on the highest dune and laid out a garden with ponds, paths and low stone walls. Because the whole dune had been covered with heather he named his estate Heather Hill. He drowned while swimming in the sea and the house disappeared long ago. All that’s left of the garden is a silted-up pond and a few shrubs. It’s grazed by sheep of a breed I don’t recognize, with dark heads and long floppy ears. They are much tamer than my sheep; they’re used to people coming here to walk or swim. Along the coast, the dune is actually a cliff, with a straight drop to the narrow, rocky beach. It’s not the North Sea here. There are no bare dunes held together with difficulty by planted marram grass and wind-blasted pines. Here the grass grows almost all the way down to the sea and even beeches and oaks thrive ten yards from the high-water line. I’ve tasted the water: it’s brackish, a little saltier than the water of Lake IJssel. I know almost the whole map of Denmark off by heart, especially Zealand, but Rågeleje is new to me, and that’s where we are now. Not that you’d know it when you hear the locals say the name of their village. Danish is a strange, sloppy language. I don’t understand a word of it; he says he can follow it. I wanted to know how that was possible. “I’m Frisian,” he said. The owner of the Heather Hill Grill, located next to a car park on the coast road, told him the story of the Englishman, though it’s possible it was all very different in reality. We often go there for a sausage. The Danes love their sausages.
We swim every day. The water is cold, but clear. Every three days we have to toss aside the rocks we tossed aside three days before to make it easier to get into the water. We always swim in the same place, at the end of the path that skirts Heather Hill on its way from the coast road to the rocky beach. There’s a gate at the road and another one just before the beach. The sheep have to stay on Heather Hill to keep the grass short and eat the birch seedlings. It’s quiet on the rocky beach, the Danes aren’t on holiday yet. If we look to the right on clear days we can see the coast of Sweden in the distance. “We should go there sometime too,” he says. I nod. It’s not far to Helsingør, from there we can take the ferry to Helsingborg. Hooded crows glide above the cliff. They hold their wings still and float on the updrafts without moving forward. At the weekends the hooded crows aren’t there. Then men and women leap off the cliff with parachutes. Sometimes they float for miles before turning around and coming back to land on top of Heather Hill again. The height they fly at is determined by the height of the dunes. We swim naked: we’re almost always alone and if someone does show up we ignore them. “We’re too old to worry about that,” he says. I nod and then, like two kids at a swimming pool, we joke about each other’s scrotums, which the cold water has shriveled up. He can’t help giving me instructions: “Keep your fingers together” or “Move those feet of yours for once.” Afterwards we warm up again by playing a game of badminton-a little stiffly, and with him a bit stiffer than me — in the holiday house garden. He found the racquets and shuttlecocks in a rack at the Spar. I paid.