Past Nieuweschans, just over the German border, we stopped again because he was hungry. “We’re going to eat now, Donkey Man,” he said. It was fine by me.
If you keep driving it’s easy to reach Denmark in a day, it’s not even five hundred miles. But we didn’t keep driving and stopped for the night at a Raststätte just past Hamburg. “Double room?” asked the disinterested woman behind the counter. “Of course,” he said. “It’s cheaper, isn’t it?” In the enormous bed we both lay on our backs, me with my hands clasped over my stomach. I don’t know how he was lying. When I woke up it was my birthday. I was planning on keeping it secret from him, but there was no secret to keep. He had remembered. I wanted to know how that was possible.
“For about thirteen years in a row I wasn’t invited to you and your brother’s birthday,” he said. “Do you think that’s the kind of thing you forget? I worked as usual while you two ran around with your chests puffed out and party hats on your heads. Sometimes you’d even come and stand in front of me to proudly shout, ‘It’s our birthday!’”
I don’t remember this at all. He says that’s what it was like, so that must have been what it was like.
Sometimes I forget that he knew me as a brat. Sometimes I also forget that he came to work for Father when he was a boy himself. About Henk’s age.
The boat sailed from Puttgarden and landed at Rødby. The crossing only took forty-five minutes. I drove the car off the ferry and wanted to pull over to the side of the road straightaway.
“What are you doing, Donkey Man?” he asked.
I told him that we were in Denmark and I wanted finally to feel it with my own two feet.
“There’s a lot more Denmark to come,” he said. “Down the road.”
Driving along I had a sense of having been here before, I knew almost all of the place names on the signs. We stopped to buy something to eat in a roadside restaurant outside Copenhagen and only then did we discover that we couldn’t pay with euros in Denmark. The guy at the cash register accepted them, but grudgingly, it seemed to me. Past Copenhagen (“Much too big,” he said. “Much too busy, we’ll drive on.”) I put a bank card in a cash machine for the first time in my life, typed in my PIN number, and pulled Danish kroner out of the slot. He doesn’t have a bank card; either that or he hasn’t brought it with him. I pay for everything. Since we didn’t know where we were going, we decided to keep driving until we couldn’t go any further. That was how we ended up in this village with the unpronounceable name.
Here there are rolling hills and no ditches. There are hardly any cows either, apparently they’re mostly in Jutland. With Jarno Koper. When we do see cows, they’re usually brown. “Beef,” he growls and we look the other way. There are wheat, barley and rye fields. And rapeseed: entire hilltops covered with yellow flowering rape, bordered by cow parsley. A few days ago I saw a rhododendron and a purple lilac in flower in a garden, next to a few red tulips. Everything here seems to flower at the same time.
When it starts to get dark we hear the melancholy call of a wood owl.
Dead is dead. Gone is gone, and then I won’t even know about it. The new livestock dealer couldn’t have come at a better time. He was driving the old livestock dealer’s truck, he said he’d been able to take it over at a good price. He was a young tearaway, there were dents in the truck that hadn’t been there two months before. He was a windbag too. He called me Helmer from the word go, as if we were old friends. I asked him whether he could offload twenty cows, some yearlings, twenty sheep and a whole lot of lambs at short notice.
“Easy!” he shouted.
“How are you going to do it then?”
“I’ll see.”
“It has to be fast, and preferably all at once.”
“Just leave it to me.” On his way back to the truck, something occurred to him. He turned around. “And your milk quota?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Okay, fine.”
Two days later he roared back into the farmyard. Stony-faced, he quoted a price. “But then you’re done with it in one go,” he shouted immediately after. “And I’m sticking my neck out, I have to make sure I can shift the whole lot before too long, my sheds aren’t that big-”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said.
“What?!”
“I’m keeping the sheep, and the lambs too.”
His eyes seemed to pale a little while he was doing the calculations. After a while, he came up with a lower total. “But it’s still true,” he said, “that I’m the one sticking my neck out and if-”
“Fine,” I said.
“Really?” he asked, stunned.
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, then-”
“When?”
“Soon,” he said, running out of steam. “Soon.”
I spent the day the animals were picked up in Father’s bedroom. I put the photos, samplers and watercolor mushrooms neatly in a potato crate. I stripped his bed, washed the sheets and pillowcases, took down the curtains, cleaned the windows and vacuumed the blue carpet. When I stuck the nozzle under the bed, the vacuum cleaner almost choked on the poem that was lying there.
A weird one. He told me I was a weird one. Coming from him, at that moment, it almost sounded like a term of endearment.
I sat down on Father’s bed and read the words once again. I felt ashamed. Giving an old wreck of a man a poem to read. I folded it in half and shoved it in my back pocket. A week later I took it out of my newly washed jeans as papier-mâché. I didn’t look in the shed until evening, when it was already getting dark. It was emptier than empty: everything was still there — straw, shit, dust, warmth — except the cows. The yearling shed was the same. No — it was even emptier, because going in I was just in time to catch sight of the tail of a mangy cat, shooting off.
The next day I wrote a letter to the Forestry Commission. I informed them that I was not in the least inclined to sell them the land on which they wanted to build a visitors’ center. And that I would be grateful not to receive any further correspondence on the subject until I contacted them again. Up to the day of our departure for Denmark I hadn’t received a reply. Just as I had requested.
I looked around for something to put my traveling things in and found a suitcase in a cupboard in the barn: a massive, old, leather thing. I soaped the leather to make it a little suppler. I haven’t had a single holiday in thirty-seven years of milking day and night. I wonder when in God’s name Father and Mother used it. They never went on holiday either.
I also went to the Rabobank to apply for a bank card. If you go to other countries you need a bank card. I had to wait two weeks before I could go and pick it up. I still don’t understand why, but I used the time to do up the kitchen. I repainted, threw out the old curtains and put up venetian blinds. I cleared out the bureau. I almost drove to Monnickendam to look at kitchens in a furniture shop. “Did you have a bonfire?” asked Ronald when he came by the next day and found a smoldering heap behind the donkey shed. “Without calling us?” added Teun, who was there as well.