For a few days now I’ve been looking round the kitchen and wondering whether I shouldn’t also paint in here. Every time my survey ends at the hooded crow in the ash and my thoughts turn to the farmhand. I’ve started to think of him as “Little Henk.” Riet phoned to ask if I’d thought about it. “Yes,” I answered, “but not enough.” I’ve never had a farmhand. I was one myself, Father’s. Every now and then the crow goes off somewhere, always swooping down a little first (as if to test its wings), before starting to fly.
It’s only today that Ada has reappeared in my kitchen, five days after Riet’s visit. Saturday. Teun and Ronald are at football, the winter break for the junior teams is already over.
“Helmer! How lovely! What was it like?”
“Strange,” I say.
“What kind of answer’s that? Your sister-in-law!”
“No. My sister-in-law-to-be.”
“Still.” Ada acts as if Ronald hasn’t told her a thing about Riet. “I saw you out walking and I said to myself, What a good-looking woman.”
“Yes, she’s still good looking.”
“Was your father excited about it as well?”
“Very excited.”
“What did he think about it?”
“Not much.”
“Ah, don’t be so offhand. I can tell from your face you enjoyed it!”
“It brought a smile to his face,” I say. I look Ada in the eye and after a few seconds she turns away. She is more wound up than usual, flustered.
“What kind of things did you talk about?”
“Nothing special, the old days, her husband who died last year, her daughters, what a sweetheart Henk was, the donkeys and the chickens.”
“Is she going to come again sometime?” Her voice is different too, pinched. I can almost see the exclamation marks.
“Maybe. That’s what she told Ronald before she got into the car.”
Ada blushes. These aren’t red cheeks from busyness and spring-cleaning. “Great,” she says.
Between the side window and the kitchen cupboards is an old electric clock. The face is brown, the case is orange, the hands are white. The clock buzzes quietly, almost inaudibly. The other day, when Riet was here, I heard it buzzing. I can’t remember ever having heard it before. Now it’s buzzing louder than ever. Maybe it’s on its last legs.
“She didn’t come here on her own account,” I say.
“What?”
“When we got to the ferry, instead of getting out of the car, she started talking about her son.”
“Her son?”
“Her son, Henk. Whether he could come and work for me.”
“Why?” Her face has regained its normal color. She brightens up.
“He doesn’t do anything at home. He hasn’t got a job, he spends a lot of time in bed and sometimes he disappears.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Riet asked me whether I could use him as a farmhand.”
“Fantastic!” exclaims Ada.
“Fantastic?”
“Yes! You’ve had to do it all yourself since your father fell ill.”
“I can do it easily, there’s no work for him here.”
“It would be more fun together, surely? Of course there’s work for him. Take the yearling barn, it’s high time that was creosoted again. Two people to do the milking, in a few months you’ll be busy with the sheep-”
“I have twenty sheep.”
“Still. If you’re helping the kid out at the same time. And Riet?”
She says the name as if she’s known her for years.
“Hmmm,” I say.
“You going to do it?”
“I have to give it some more thought.”
“Does she want to come and live here too?” She does her best to sound casual.
“Surely not?” I say.
“I’m asking you.”
“No, I don’t think so, she didn’t say anything about that.”
Ada turns to check the clock. She stands up. “I have to pick the boys up from football.”
“Have they lost their hero yet?”
She gives me a baffled look.
“Jarno Koper? Is he gone yet?”
“Oh, Jarno Koper. Yes, he left.”
I walk her through the scullery.
“She must have loved your brother very deeply,” Ada says as she opens the door to the milking parlor.
“To call her son Henk?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a common enough name.”
“Bye, Helmer. Say hello to your father for me, will you?”
“I will.”
I watch her walk past the storage tank and out of the milking parlor. There’s something elderly about the way she holds her back, something I’ve never noticed before.
The first thing I do when I go into Father’s bedroom is say hello from Ada. Then I give him the works. I sit him down on the toilet and ask whether he wants to shave before or after his shower. Before, he says, and he wants to do it himself. I take the small mirror off the wall in the hall and put it on the sink so that he can see himself while sitting on the plastic stool. It takes forever: his hands tremble and he finds it difficult to pull the folds in his neck smooth and use the razor at the same time. Besides washing his body, I also squirt a big dollop of shampoo into his hair. Once he’s clean, I ask him whether he can stay sitting on the stool. He can, as long as he clamps his hands on his knees and leans back against the tiled wall. I go upstairs, strip the bed and remake it with clean sheets and pillowcases. I catch myself whistling while I’m at it. Before going downstairs again, I walk to the window and look at the hooded crow. “Yes, have a good look,” I say, when I see its eye on me. A little later Father is back in bed with fresh-smelling, combed hair.
“I want some French toast,” he says.
“Do you turn over in bed sometimes?”
“Turn over? Why should I?”
“If you always lie on your back like that, you’ll get bedsores and then you’ll have to go to hospital, and, once you’re there, that’ll be it, there’ll be no coming back.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“In Purmerend?”
“What in Purmerend?”
“The hospital.”
“If you like.”
“Nonsense,” he says, closing his eyes.
But just before I shut the door I hear the fresh sheets rustling.
25
Strange, my making such a fuss about being the last Van Wonderen. Without a wife, without kids and with a decrepit father who’s never wasted a word on family in my presence, I never expected myself to get sentimental about my own flesh and blood. Is it the farm? Our farm? A collection of buildings, animals and land I didn’t want anything to do with, an entity that was forced on me, but gradually became part of me?
Next to the donkey paddock there used to be a cottage that was going to be Henk and Riet’s home after their wedding. First the farmhand had to go, then later Henk and Riet would have children, starting a family that would outgrow the cottage and end up moving into the farmhouse. Everything had been planned in advance: in her mind Mother had already furnished the cottage. After the farmhand left they rented it out to Amsterdammers, who only came for holidays and weekends. When I turned thirty, Father decided to sell it. Mother disagreed. “You never know,” she said, with a sidelong glance in my direction. On a Sunday night in the autumn of 1987 after the Amsterdammers had been there for the weekend it burned down, about eight months before Mother died. It’s still strange to see the gnarled magnolia flower every spring in the totally overgrown garden. One of the side walls is still half standing, but that won’t last long either.