The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker Page A

attack and just keep on going, some people collapse and never get up again. Mother never got up again.
     
I never blamed her for not speaking up the day Father sent Riet away and told me I was done 'there in Amsterdam'. What if, instead of crying, she had said something to protect me from spending my life milking cows? Would I have seized the opportunity? I don't think so. I was nineteen, I was already a man. I could have stuck up for myself. I didn't, I stayed as silent as Mother. Long after Riet had disappeared behind the window frame (by then she was sure to be up on the dyke and I'd had plenty of time to commit to memory a place where I might find a nest of peewit's eggs), I turned around. To the left of Father's back I saw her half-emptied plate, the cutlery placed neatly on either side. To the right of Father's back sat Mother, looking at me even more moistly than usual. At that moment an alliance was sealed. I couldn't say exactly what that alliance involved, but it definitely included some we'll-get-through-this-together. I sat back down at the table and we finished the meal in silence. The next morning Father and I milked the cows together. After the milking I put my textbooks in a cardboard box and put the box in Henk's built-in wardrobe. Weeks later a letter from my tutor arrived, asking where I was and whether I was planning on coming back. I put the unanswered letter in with the books. I've ignored the cardboard box ever since.
     
The alliance held until her death. It was an alliance of glances, not words. Mother and I looked at each other when he disappeared into the bedroom after calling her a romantic soul; when he growled while cutting the gristle off a piece of braised steak; when he raged across the fields while moving the yearlings or sheep from one field to another; when he went to bed at ten o'clock on New Year's Eve; when he barked the day's jobs at me (as if I was a fifteen-year-old kid and not a forty-year-old man); when he said 'I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' in discussions about anything at all, before going to sit in his chair in the living room like a lump of rock.
     
On very rare occasions she avoided looking at me, and that was almost always after Father had asked if it wasn't time for me to start looking for a wife. I took that to mean that for once she agreed with him.
     
After her death I didn't have anyone left to look at, to look with – that was the worst of it. The alliance had been unilaterally dissolved. I found it – and find it – very difficult to look Father straight in the eye. In Mother's eyes I always saw Henk's shadow and I assumed that she saw the same in mine. (Of course, she also saw Henk in my body as a whole, in my eyes she saw him double.) Father's eyes never gave away anything – after Mother's death even her shadow was absent.
     

20
For Riet I make an exception: I drive south. South-west, to be precise. To the ferry in North Amsterdam. We have agreed a time and long before that time I am already parked in front of a chip stand on the IJ. Futuristic ferries cross back and forth, streamlined butter dishes in blue and white, nothing like the pale-green boats they had in 1967. Back then they still took cars, the ferries were sailing motorways. I see 'Municipal Ferry No. 15' before me, and the narrow, roofed sections for bikes and motorbikes. They were only pale green inside the deck, the outside was a filthy white. I'd forgotten that.
     
I try to think my way further into the city. Faces and names of fellow students don't come back and I can't even picture the building I had lectures in. It's all gone, there across the water.
     
I described the Opel Kadett to her, but, faced with the stream of pedestrians and cyclists, I start to worry. Who will discover who? Should I stay in the car or get out and stand next to it?
     
Earlier this morning, when I was in the middle of the yard with Father in my arms and he asked me through chattering teeth and trembling