“. . his bed?”
“What?”
“Is this the bed Henk slept in?”
I blink a few times, it takes a while for the warm August night to turn back into a January morning. “Yes.”
“I don’t recognize it. There’s so much junk in here.” She lays her hands beside her on the blanket — as if she has no plans ever to stand up again — and looks out of the window. “That hooded crow is still there,” she says.
“Come on,” I say.
She stands up and leaves the bedroom.
“My old bedroom,” I say casually and fairly loudly as we walk past the second door. I notice the key and try to remember whether I locked the door. “Full of junk as well.” I hurry on through to the new room, whose door is wide open. Riet follows.
She leans against one of the walls, knees bent slightly and her jumper bunched up around her shoulders. “His face,” she says. “His face in that cold water. His hair floated back and forth like seaweed.”
22
“Nothing’s changed here at all,” she says.
“They’re not allowed to build.”
“Why not?”
“Heritage area.”
We’re walking through the village to the cemetery. Ten minutes ago Ada just happened to be watering the plants on her kitchen windowsill. The sun has only just passed its highest point but our shadows still stretch out in front of us. “You should come back in late summer,” I say. “For years now there’s been a kind of competition going on here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Who has the most hydrangeas in their front garden. Preferably in as many colors as possible. It’s everywhere, a hedge of hydrangeas half a mile long. If you haven’t got hydrangeas, you don’t belong.”
“I don’t like hydrangeas.”
In the distance is the white church, on the western edge of the village. I feel like I’ve said enough and we carry on in silence. When we arrive, Riet ignores the church and walks between the poplars to the bank of the Aa.
“We went skating here in the winter of 1966,” she says.
“1967,” I say. “January 1967.”
“Either way, that winter. Winter always goes from one year to the next.”
She’s right about that. Winter is a season that doesn’t limit itself to the calendar year, a season that straddles years. Now, apart from a thin film between the reeds, there’s no ice at all. A pair of ducks — drakes — race towards us. They jump up onto the bank like penguins. Riet watches the ducks coolly and turns away. She crosses the street and tugs at the cemetery gate. She keeps on tugging until I’m next to her, slide open the bolt on the back of the gate and, bending forward, swing it open for her. Without a word she walks into the cemetery.
When we’re at the grave, I say, “You’re grateful to Father now, I guess.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“He’s the one who renews the rights to the grave every ten years.”
“Hmm,” she says.
To me Riet seems like the kind of person to run her fingers over the letters. She doesn’t. Instead she sits down on a green bench on the shell path next to the church. I take a few steps backwards and stand with my back against the cold wall. I stick my hands in my pockets.
“I wasn’t angry at your father,” she says. “I felt humiliated. Later, sure. Later I got angry and I stayed angry.”
We’re in the shadow cast by the church. Only now do I feel that the sun gave warmth.
“He was so sweet, Helmer,” she says.
“I know that,” I say.
“And beautiful. He was a handsome young man.”
It would be immodest of me to agree to that.
Riet looks at me, she sees Henk. “You’re a handsome man,” she says.
“Ah.”
“It’s true. You can take it from me.”
“If you say so,” I say.
Mother was buried with Henk. I was very curious what I would see. I didn’t see anything. Just a white sheet, hardboard by the look of it, at the bottom of a grave that went deeper. It poured with rain during the funeral, a summer cloudburst, the water splashed up high off the coffin, the flowers drooped.
They bury people three deep in this cemetery, so there’s room for one more. I wonder who Riet finds handsome, me or the young man she sees in me. I also wonder whether she’s noticed anything strange about the headstone.
“What were you talking about in the car?”
“Henk said, ‘Slow down,’ when he saw a car coming from the other direction. I did, but only slightly. My driving instructor was a real macho and he’d told me that you had to force the other traffic to make room. ‘You have to impose your will,’ he said, ‘through the way you act and the look in your eye.’ “ She slides back and forth on the wooden bench. “But she was more imposing.”
“What was the last thing he said?”
“‘Dear oh dear.’”
“‘Dear oh dear’?”
“Yes. As if to say, silly goose, you can tell you just got your license.”
I can hear him saying it, it fitted the Henk-and-Helmer pattern perfectly.
“That driving instructor tried to impose his will on me too by the way he looked at me. He wore a toupee. Of course I never took him up on it.”
“Of course not,” I say.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No.”
“Your father’s insurance did pay for the Simca, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I’m leaning against a cold church wall, but I see myself standing on Schellingwoude Bridge. That’s because I feel forgotten. I felt forgotten then too. Riet was the almost-wife, I was just the brother. Now she’s the one who is remembering things and telling her story. No one’s asked me a thing.
The ducks that jumped out of the water are quacking away on the other side of the church, maybe in front of the closed gate. So many people sit on the grass under the poplars in summer — cyclists from Amsterdam, canoeists, children from the sailing school in Broek — that they are completely fearless. They’ll do anything for a piece of bread. Now and then a car drives past. It sounds as if one brakes, then pulls away again.
“Do you come here often?” asks Riet.
“Birthdays and the anniversaries of their deaths. Four times a year.”
“I could have come as well, of course. At first I didn’t because I’d been sent away and I thought to myself: you needn’t think you’ll ever see me again. Childish. Later I didn’t come because I had Wien, and my children, and I didn’t want to be reminded of those days. I wanted to become a new person.”
“You can never become a new person.”
“Of course you can.”
Now the irritation is itching in my shoulders and I almost rub myself against the church wall like an old, moth-eaten sheep in the summertime.
Does she want something? What does she want? Does she want me to kiss her? Am I supposed to act as if I’m Henk? Does she want me to tell her she’s still a beautiful woman? Am I supposed to ask her to marry me? Does she want me to forgive her?
She’s still beautiful. She’s not one of the hundreds of thousands of ageing women who walk around in the same blouse and knee-length trousers, with chemically tamed hair, a premature stoop and sagging eyes. In summer they cycle past the farm with their husbands, always wobbling a little on their solid, reliable-yet-inexpensive bicycles. No matter how different their blouses and jackets, they’re always the same blouses and jackets.