I sit down, cross my arms and let her take her time.
Riet looks out. “Do you remember the wooden electricity poles you used to have here?”
“Yes, of course.” Irritation itches in my forearms.
“They still have them there, but concrete. They’re a bit behind.” She keeps on staring out, without seeing anything. The water sputters in the coffee machine. “We were there in August, in the car. The farmers had set fire to piles of straw and there were swallows on the electricity wires.”
“Swallows.”
“Yes. Wien didn’t get it at all. ‘Who on earth burns straw!’ he said and, ‘What a waste!’”
“He’s got a point.”
“I don’t know about any of that. I thought those swallows were so beautiful. The electricity cables hung really low.” She starts crying quietly.
“What is it?”
“Ah, I’m chattering away and I actually feel very peculiar here.” She hides her face in her hands.
“Relax. First some coffee.” I stand up and get the best cups from the kitchen cupboard. Not the mugs, the best cups, that’s what Mother would have done. Earlier this morning I put the matching milk jug and sugar pot on the table. I pour coffee into the cups and lay a silver spoon on each saucer. I arrange some biscuits on a plate. I put the coffee and the biscuits on the table. If it wasn’t freezing outside, I would slide the window open. Specks of dust float through the kitchen.
“I feel strange too,” I say, sitting back down.
Riet smiles. “We both feel strange.”
I feel light-headed. Unreal. Take Father, for instance: he’s always been just like he is now. I’ve seen him every day my whole life long. Every day he has grown older, but because we have grown old together, it has all been gradual. When I see a photo of my father as a young man — like the photo on the wall of the bedroom upstairs-I know it’s him, but it’s distinct from the father I have now. I didn’t really know him when he was young, because I was much younger at the time. We’ve both grown old without my noticing. I haven’t seen Riet for more than thirty years. It’s shocking, as if I’m in bed having a bad dream.
This is what I am thinking, what is she thinking? I feel like copying her and hiding my face in my hands. “Who do you see when you look at me?” I ask.
“Henk,” she says.
“I’m Helmer.”
“I know. I still see Henk.”
Before we got to the kitchen, I showed her the new living room. She didn’t like it. “It’s so bare in here,” she said. “What happened to all the photos?” The door to the bedroom was shut and I had no plans to open it for her. “And the curtains and the sideboard and the bookcase with your mother’s books?” She looked at herself in the large mirror above the mantelpiece and used both hands to plump up her hair a little.
“Ah, the cows,” she says, as we walk through the shed. She’s wearing jeans. Her hair is still blonde and even in the sunlight in the kitchen I couldn’t tell whether she bleaches it. It’s not permed like most women’s in their mid-fifties. She walks a little stiffly. It is totally impossible for me to see her as the mistress of this house: making meatballs, running after sheep or heifers, cuddling up to Henk in bed at night, having her kids visit on Saturday mornings, a grandchild climbing the ash in the front garden.
“I broke a leg a long time ago,” she says when she notices me looking at the way she walks. “It stiffens up in cold weather.”
Skiing? A bike accident? A wet floor in the pig shed?
“I was cleaning the kitchen ceiling and the stepladder slipped.”
Sunlight comes in through the square windows, a cow groans and a mangy cat shoots off. It’s a cat I can’t remember having seen before. Is it one that escaped last spring’s motorized cull?
“What kind of animals are they, pigs?” I ask.
“They’re not cows, that’s for sure.” She rests her hand on the bundled lengths of baler twine hung up on an enormous nail. “Piglets are cute, but the older they get, the nastier.”
“And then they’re ready for slaughter.”
“Yes, then they’re ready for slaughter.”
“And your husband?”
“What do you mean?”
“What kind of fellow was he?”
She thinks for a moment. “He was respectable. He was a respectable man.”
“Respectable?”
“Yes.”
We walk into the yard. Riet pulls the collar of her coat tight. “My daughters are respectable women. Maybe Brabant brings that out in people, respectability.”
“And your son?”
“What have you got there!” blurts Riet as she catches sight of the donkey shed. She walks up to it. “This never used to be here. Did it?”
“No,” I say. “The donkeys are new.”
“Donkeys!”
They’ve heard us and are standing inquisitively at the railing with their heads up. When they see us, one starts to swing her head. The light has been on all night.
“Would you like to feed them?” I ask.
“Yes, please.”
I take a few large winter carrots out of the box on the bale of hay and give them to Riet. She sticks two carrots through the bars at once. They disappear in the donkeys’ mouths with a snap. I scratch the donkeys’ ears. For a moment everyone is happy. There’s something comforting about her having established that we both feel strange.
Riet walks from the donkey shed to the chicken coop. She waves a hand at the willows, a little impatiently, maybe to let me know that she can see they’ve been pollarded recently. And that Henk would have pollarded them if things had turned out differently. “You used to have brown chickens here,” she says, peering in through the wire.
“That’s right, Barnevelders.”
“And these?”
“These are Lakenvelders.”
“They’re beautiful. Are they good layers?”
“They’re okay, not as good as the Barnevelders.”
The chicken coop leads inevitably to the causeway gate. She leans her forearms on it and stares out over the fields. It’s incredibly light because of a thin layer of snow on the grass. The ditches are steaming. “The windmill,” she whispers.
I’m not in the mood for that at all. I turn and start walking towards the milking parlor. A little later she follows, I hear her irregular footfall on the frost-hardened yard. Now, with my left arm, I gesture at the donkey paddock. “In good weather they’re out there,” I say. We walk through the milking parlor to the scullery. I cut straight through to the hall door, Riet stops in front of the door to the staircase.
“You coming?” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
“I thought,” I try, “if we eat an early lunch, we can go for a walk to the cemetery afterwards.”
She doesn’t answer.
I keep at it. “Then I can take you back to the ferry on time, before milking.”
She doesn’t answer.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I want to go upstairs.”
“To Henk’s room?”
“Yes.”
I pull the door open and lead the way upstairs. I open the door to Henk’s room. Riet walks in expectantly. I stay in the doorway — it’s so full inside there’s only room for one of us. She looks around and sits down on the bed for a while.
Then I can’t see her any more, she has disappeared completely under Henk and the January sunlight has made way for August moonlight. Henk’s white underpants have got stuck at his knees and his body is going up and down, a movement that doesn’t seem right for someone his age. I can almost smell him. He is holding his breath, the dimple above the crack of his bum is damp, he presses her deeper and deeper into the old mattress, his Achilles tendons are part of the up-and-down, as if the movement is a wave that starts in his toes.