Never again, she thinks, I’ll never celebrate anything again. We’re incapable. She stares straight up at the sky through the hole in the roof. She can’t tell if it’s blue or not, just like you can’t tell from a paint swatch what the colour will be like on a whole wall. She sits up and reaches for the water bottle. After drinking a few mouthfuls, she eats three biscuits and lies down again. Next time I’ll bring some pillows, she thinks.
Zeeger had booked a table at a restaurant, not in the city with the zoo but in a village close to home on Lake Amstel. During the drive back, Klaas, Jan and Johan ate everything there was to eat — crisps, Mars minis, almond cakes — and then nodded off deliberately in protest at the lack of beer. Anna’s brother Piet and his wife, and Zeeger’s sister and her husband, stared out at the landscape for two hours, while the driver whistled along softly but badly to the radio, which was turned up fairly loud. First they had to take photos on the dyke behind the restaurant. When Anna picked up the prints she could hardly bear to look at all those aggrieved, dissatisfied faces. The photos are still in the envelope. The meal itself, served at six o’clock sharp, was a disaster. Weekend staff brought it out to the table and Zeeger and Klaas’s wife insisted there was a stand-in chef in the kitchen too. Everything had been ordered and arranged in advance, and of course the menu didn’t satisfy anyone. Plates were pushed back and forth across the table and it wasn’t long before chips were flying through the air. Jan kept ordering more drinks at the top of his voice, although that too had been arranged beforehand. Johan matched Jan glass for glass, even though he can’t hold his drink at all, and Klaas and his wife lit up while others were still eating and that annoyed Jan even more, which got Klaas’s back up so much he started chain-smoking just to be difficult. Zeeger spent ten minutes shut in the toilet because the lock was broken, and nobody even noticed until Dieke had to go too and couldn’t get in. Anna began getting visions of a daughter who squatted down next to her chair to ask softly if she was enjoying herself, before handing out sheets of paper with a song she’d written for the occasion, a song to be sung ‘to the tune of’, the same daughter who had earlier exclaimed cheerfully how lovely it was to finally see baboons in real life.
Then someone started off about the grave. She’s not sure who — probably Zeeger, he’s the one who extends the leases on the plots every ten years. Jan picked up on it and said he’d do the painting. In a moment of quiet she said, ‘No question of it,’ which nobody reacted to, except perhaps Johan who said that he wanted ‘to d-o some thing too’. After she had again categorically stated that she wasn’t having it and, without pausing to take a breath, finally told Zeeger that as far as she was concerned they didn’t need to extend the lease again either, even Klaas and his wife butted in. Zeeger was making trouble on purpose, everyone was winding everyone else up, for a moment they stopped drinking and throwing chips around. She felt alone, as if everyone had been waiting for that opportunity to join forces and turn on her.
And then Dieke, sulking over a pudding she hadn’t ordered. It was unbearable. Anna Kaan had grabbed her tightly by her upper arm, perhaps a little too tightly, and said, ‘Eat it!’ Klaas and his wife were sitting further up the table, puffing away as if their lives depended on it. ‘This isn’t what I wanted,’ Dieke sobbed. Anna squeezed her arm even harder. ‘Eat it, you ungrateful little brat!’
She grabs the advocaat and forces down a few globs, which isn’t easy, as she already has a lump in her throat from that last image. And what were they doing, celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in June when they got married in April?
‘I have to catch the last ferry,’ Jan had said. Although they’d already made up a bed for him and left the window of the spare room ajar. They finished up quickly. Her brother Piet, who lives in Den Helder, gave Jan a lift to the ferry. Everyone left in their own vehicles. Anna and Zeeger didn’t say a word during the drive home from the restaurant, almost fifteen minutes. She sat there wondering what had been the most painful thing to have happened that day. As they were getting into bed, Zeeger said, ‘So, the day went quite well, I think.’
And maybe that was it: the most painful thing.
She screws the cap back on the bottle and checks how much is left. About half. She lays the bottle down next to her and crawls over to the edge of the straw. Something beneath her is shaking. Shaking worse than it should from just her crawling. When she reaches the edge and looks down, the concrete floor is completely empty. No dog, no Barbary duck, no Zeeger. Even Dirk is keeping quiet. Please don’t let me start thinking about earlier celebrations, she thinks. Lying back down in her old spot, she realises that her feet are cold.
Capitals
‘Did you drop her off?’
‘There’s a heap of silage in the feeding passage.’
‘What?’
‘What are you kneeling down here for?’
‘I’m trying to see if the carpet’s already started to wear.’
‘I thought you were going to muck out the stalls?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘Didn’t Dieke want to go to the pool?’
‘No.’
‘What’s she doing now, then?’
‘How would I know? I didn’t stay there. Has that brother of yours got a mobile?’
‘Doubt it.’
‘Is that brother of yours all there?’
‘And you?’
‘Why are you kneeling down here instead of working in the cowshed? You’re not checking whether I keep it clean, are you?’
‘No. It’s too hot.’
‘I’m hot too.’
‘You’re not mucking out the cowshed.’
‘It can’t go on like this.’
‘What?’
‘This. Everything.’
‘Why aren’t you at work?’
‘It’s summer, everyone’s on holiday.’
‘But a butcher’s always got work. Your brother’s shop is always packed.’
‘It’s summer! Everyone’s gone!’
‘Calm down.’
‘What does Eben-Ezer mean?’
‘Huh?’
‘Forget it.’
‘If everyone’s on holiday, there’s people on holiday in Schagen too and your brother’s as busy as ever.’
‘What?’
‘You have to learn to think the other way round sometimes.’
‘What?’
‘All those Germans. In Schagen.’
‘I don’t speak German.’
‘Anyway, if it can’t go on like this, you’ll have to start working more than one day a week at the butcher’s.’
‘Oh, so you do understand what I’m getting at. Have you already called a land agent?’
‘A land agent?’
‘Don’t play dumb.’
‘What was Jan doing?’
‘He was kneeling down, like you, only not in his daughter’s bedroom. Between the headstones.’