We’re sitting outside, on the roofed patio. Earlier in the day it rained, but it’s not cold now. The garden is steaming and the bamboo along the side of the holiday home rustles gently against the wooden planks. For dinner we had beetroot with meatballs you buy ready-made at the Spar. During the meal we drank a bottle of red wine. Wine is expensive in Denmark.
“What are we going to do tomorrow?” I ask.
“Whatever we feel like. We’ll start by getting up and drinking some coffee.”
I’ve asked him about his nose, his parents, Friesland and his dog. About how he came to work for Father and Mother. “You’ve got a lot of questions, Donkey Man,” he says. “What are your intentions?” The only thing he was willing to discuss was his dog. It died just before the New Year. On a Saturday night, after he’d come home from playing cards with three friends. He sat down on a chair and the dog laid its old head on his lap. All at once the dog’s head turned heavy and it was as if he felt its blood stop flowing under his hand. “He just folded up,” he said, “like one of those toys, one of those little puppets you collapse by pressing the button under its feet.”
“So you do have friends in Friesland?” I asked.
He sighed and didn’t say another word.
He points at the damp cherry tree in the middle of the garden. “We’ll have to stay here at least another month.”
“Fine by me,” I say. “I like cherries.” I go inside and pour two cups of coffee. When I come back I see that the dark clouds have disappeared. The sun is shining again. Here in the north it doesn’t get dark until very late. I put the coffees down on the garden table and lay a bar of dark chocolate next to them.
“Why didn’t you get a new dog?”
“You can’t go on forever.”
“No?”
“It hurts. Every time one dies.”
“I believe that.”
“It was because the wife of one of my card buddies died. He came over to my place and drank my jenever and talked about “not wanting to lose her” and “having to let her go”. It got on my nerves: someone either dies or they don’t, wanting doesn’t come into it. My dog felt his sorrow and laid his head on his lap, something he never did otherwise. The guy just ignored him. I couldn’t bear it. That dog was close to death himself, but he took the trouble and was kind enough to lift his head to someone who was grieving and that person didn’t react.” He breaks off a square of chocolate, lays it on his tongue and takes a mouthful of coffee. His mouth is shut, but I can see the chocolate melting. “Friends,” he goes on, with a wry smile. “Is that enough? Friends to play cards with, a well-kept house and garden, messing around in the shed, a dog, jenever and a bit of money in the bank?”
He no longer has that one chipped tooth. A crown?
“How did you actually know that Father was dead?” I ask.
“I didn’t.”
“So it was just coincidence, you coming back on that day of all days?”
“Yep.”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence.”
“Of course there is. I thought: I’ll go, and I went. I wanted to see the West Friesland orchards in blossom. But it was misty so I didn’t see very much. I might just as well ask you why you came out of your house just when I arrived at the laborer’s cottage.”
Coincidence, I think.
“I might not have gone to the house at all if you hadn’t come to me.” He repeats the chocolate ritual. In the distance the wood owl starts to call. For the first time it is answered, from very close by. “And where would you have been now, in that case?”
“Yes,” I say. “Where would I have been now?”
We both stare into the garden. I think about Riet and Henk. Little Henk. The young tanker driver, the livestock dealer (who he had known as well), Ada. I wonder what kind of things I am going to tell him, or will want to tell him. Suddenly the time between his departure and return no longer interests me. Or even the time of his arrival. What difference does it make? Tomorrow we’ll “start by getting up and drinking some coffee,” and afterwards we’ll do “whatever we feel like.”
“I’ve never actually learned how to do things by myself,” I say.
Slowly he turns his head towards me. “Drink your coffee, Donkey Man. It’s time for a game of cards.” He gets up and walks inside.
He’s right, it’s time to play cards. I roll a medium-strong Van Nelle, light it, stand up and walk around the garden with my head back. I stick the pouch of tobacco and the lighter in a back pocket. I like smoking, it suits me. He hasn’t mentioned it, maybe he thinks I’ve been smoking for years. He has turned the light on over the table. Not because it’s necessary, but because he’s used to having a light on over a card table. I feel like I could reach out and touch the wood owl, its mournful call sounds that close. It might just as well be a long-eared or short-eared owl. I don’t know a thing about owls; there are lots of woods here, that’s why I think it’s a wood owl. Hearing it call is even worse than seeing wet lame sheep or unshorn sheep during a heat wave. It gives me an empty feeling in my chest. As if I haven’t just eaten.
“You coming?” He’s standing at the open door, but doesn’t sound impatient.
I don’t say anything, raising one hand.
He calls me Donkey Man. Now that I’m away from the donkeys for the first time ever. Teun and Ronald have promised to look after them. No, not too much mangold, carrots or stale bread. Yes, inside if it rains for a long time. Yes, always check the big water trough. (“But a bucket of water’s heavy,” says Ronald.) They’re also looking after the Lakenvelder chickens. Their mother can use the eggs in cakes and pancakes. Teun will walk through the sheep field once a day. He is strong enough to help an overturned ewe up on her feet, and maybe even strong enough to get a lamb that’s fallen into a ditch back onto dry land. If not he can fetch his father. Ada has promised “to keep an eye on things” and “run the hoover around the house now and then.” She wanted to know how long I would be gone. “I don’t know,” I said. Just before I left, she came on Wim’s behalf to ask what I was planning to do with my milk quota.
“This is his chance,” she said. “Our chance,” she added.
I told her I wanted to think about it and asked why Wim hadn’t come himself to ask me what I was planning with my quota.
She looked at me as if she was about to make up another excuse for him, then said, “He doesn’t have the nerve.”
A little later she asked me why I’d kept the sheep.
“I haven’t got the foggiest,” I said.
Donkey Man. That’s fine by me.
When someone addressed me by name, as Helmer, I always added “Henk and” in front of it in my thoughts. No matter how long he had been dead, our names belonged together.
Maybe Riet was right, on that cold day in January at the cemetery, when she said you could become a new person. It annoyed me at the time, that statement of hers, but if I’d opened my eyes I could have seen it in that run-over duck. It had become a new person in next to no time. A dead person.
No, no rows of swallows on sagging electricity wires. The poles are still here but the wires are gone. For miles around, men in orange suits are lugging thick cables and digging narrow trenches along the roads. If I’d come a year later, I would never have known that they’d had poles here with wires strung between them.
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