The Twin (22 page)

In the scullery I take off my clothes and throw them in the basket. The sound of TV is coming from the living room. I go into the bathroom, turn on the taps and start by washing my hair with Henk's shampoo. Just when I'm putting the bottle back on the shelf under the mirror, the door opens. He comes into the bathroom and closes the door behind him.

'What are you doing?' I ask, wiping the lather out of my eyes.

'I want to get in the shower,' he says.

'Can't you see I'm in here?'

'Yes,' he says. He pulls off his T-shirt. 'You using my shampoo?'

'Yes.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'Go away, Henk,' I say.

'Why?'

'Because I say so.'

'Ha!' he says.

'Who's the boss here?'

He's standing opposite me, the T-shirt dangling from his right hand. He looks surprised. 'What's got into you?'

'Who's the boss here?' I repeat. The foam on my skull is starting to itch, my head is buzzing. I have become my father. I'm not embarrassed, I don't have the slightest urge to conceal my nakedness. Henk keeps looking at me, I see him turning things over in his head, searching for something to say. But he doesn't have any allies, there isn't anyone standing behind me and off to one side.

'You're the boss,' he says. Very calmly, he puts his T-shirt back on before disappearing from the bathroom.

When I emerge, all the lights are on. In the kitchen voices drift from the radio; in the living room the TV is on a music channel. Henk is nowhere to be seen. I do a circuit of the house and turn off all the lights, the radio and the TV. Finally I turn the fire down to the lowest setting and go into my bedroom. I turn on the light and go over to stand in front of the map of Denmark. 'Skanderborg,' I say quietly. Generally three or four other names follow, but not this time. I get into the enormous bed and close my eyes. A little later I hear the sound of a passing cyclist's dynamo. After that it gets very quiet.

I wake up when someone climbs into bed with me. He sighs and shuffles back and forth. The pillowcase on the pillow next to mine rustles. He hasn't turned on the light. I wait.

'I don't want to sleep in that room any more,' he says. 'It's cold and horrible.'

I know that. It
is
cold and horrible. It's also empty.

He lies very still, I can't even hear his breathing.

'Your father hasn't eaten,' he says after a while.

I clear my throat. 'He doesn't want to eat any more.'

'Does he want to die?'

'Yes.'

'I don't,' he says, with a satisfied sigh. Then he turns over onto his side. It's too dark to see which side.

I have already said something else. I answered him. Now it's too late to send him away. Maybe this is what you have to do in return for someone saving your life.

I sit on the side of the bed and look at him. He is lying on his back and wearing the T-shirt he had on yesterday. His chest rises and falls calmly. Exhaling, he puffs a little. He's lying in my bed as if he's never lain anywhere else. That annoys me. I get up and pull on my work trousers. 'You going to come and do something?' I ask loudly.
Wake up, Henk
is something I can't bring myself to say.

He gives a slight groan, rolls over and snuggles down on his stomach. 'Yeah, sure,' he mumbles into the pillow. 'Not yet.'

'It's five thirty,' I say.

It takes a while before he says anything else. 'Those animals.'

'What about them?'

'The ones that go for my head.'

'Yes?'

'I have to do something about it.'

'What do you want to do about it?' I'm almost in the living room.

'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 – I drive 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 labourer'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.

Father is turning greyer. 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.

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 realise 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.