The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

electric heater after all, it's damp in here. Before you know it he'll have all kinds of terrible fungal infections. I rest my elbows on the armrests and rub my hands together. The wall with photos, samplers and paintings is a big rectangle with little rectangles and squares on it, I can't see any detail. I stand up and turn on the light. With my hands behind my back, like someone visiting a gallery, I walk along the wall extremely slowly before sitting down again. 'Why did your mother embroider two samplers instead of just one?'
     
'You'd have to ask her,' Father says reluctantly.
     
'I can't.'
     
'No, you can't,' he says with a sigh.
     
'Did she think one of us wouldn't make it?'
     
'I don't know.'
     
'Was it so you could throw one of them out?'
     
'Shouldn't you be milking?'
     
'Soon. The cows aren't going anywhere.'
     
'Hmmm . . .'
     
'It was economical of her,' I say. 'No, not economical, practical.'
     
'Yes, practical,' says Father.
     
'But still, when someone dies at nineteen, you don't take their sampler off the wall.'
     
'No.'
     
I talk, but hardly hear what I'm saying. The telephone conversation with Riet is on my mind. That's what I want to talk about, I wanted to taunt him with it and instead I'm taunting him with our samplers. Until five minutes ago I'd never stopped to think why grandmother Van Wonderen embroidered two separate samplers. One sampler must have been a big enough job as it was. Did Mother actually know she was going to have twins? I sigh and open my eyes. I am really not in the mood for tormenting Father. It's New Year's Day.
     
'What's the matter?' asks Father.
     
I open my eyes. 'Nothing.' I get up and walk to the door. I pull up the weights of the grandfather clock. 'Kale tonight?'
     
'Delicious,' says Father. He looks happy. It's unbearable.
     
'Light on?'
     
'Yes.'
     
'Curtains closed?'
     
'Yes.'
     
I walk back to the window and draw the curtains. The lamppost in front of the farm is already on. Now it's been fixed, no one can stare in unseen.
     
The bulb in the scullery casts a dim glow up the staircase and onto the landing. The door of the new room is open. As an invitation: come and fill me. I look at the key in the lock of the bedroom door. I look but don't turn it. I hurry downstairs.
     
I ring Ada to ask about Ronald's hand.
     
'It's fine,' she says, 'it's not that bad at all.'
     
I'm glad to hear it. It was my fire.
     

19
Mother was not just outrageously ugly. She was outrageously kind-hearted too. Her eyes were always a little watery, a bit moist, perhaps because of the slight bulge. There was something wrong with her thyroid, and those moist eyes softened her view of the world. Father beat and scolded, Mother only had to look at Henk and me to make things better again. She looked at us a lot.
     
Henk was Father's boy; I was not Mother's boy. She didn't differentiate, although I did notice that, during the period when Riet joined us at the table, she looked at me more often than she looked at Henk. It wasn't a look of consolation, it was a look of encouragement, like a hand on my back to push me forward. Mother got along perfectly well with Riet, but her presence also placed Mother in a dilemma: through no fault of her own, her boys were no longer equal. Father had no such scruples, he had taken sides long before.
     
When she died (not from an overactive thyroid, but from a heart attack), Father could no longer make his spoon jump in his coffee cup the way Henk had as well. After all, there was no one there to answer the call. I was there, of course, but he wasn't reckless enough to provoke me like that. We just stopped drinking coffee, or we drank coffee separately. Ada hadn't moved in next door yet, she never knew Mother.
     
She had the heart attack in the shower. That means it was a Saturday. I wasn't at home and it wouldn't have occurred to Father to go and check, despite her staying in the bathroom much longer than usual. Some people have a heart