Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker Read Free Book Online Page A

the branches in that furrow, one after the other. She sat down on the step. It looked neat. The branches were thick enough to form a real border. Only now did she see that the grassy field was a lawn that someone must have mown relativelyrecently. The cows were gone. When she stood up, she discovered that they were quite far away. She hadn’t noticed that at all, their walking away. A beautiful way of measuring the passing time: the sun that had suddenly leapt forward and was already quite low, a herd of cows that had silently and serenely relocated. She saw this for the first time and thought of her thesis.

21
    Emily Dickinson. Despite her reputation (
probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets
, according to the back of Habegger’s biography), Dickinson wrote an awful lot of lazy rhyming quatrains, doggerel as far as she was concerned. She leafed through the
Collected Poems
, earth under her fingernails. It was night, pitch black outside but for the odd light in the distance. She drank a glass of wine and smoked a cigarette. Downstairs, a pan sat on the draining board with quite a bit of food left in it. The fire was burning. Never stung by a single bee, she mused. Bees everywhere: on a gentle breeze or in the clover. She thought of her university office: the cold computer containing all of her Dickinson notes and a very rough plan of her thesis, which was supposed to be about the plethora of lesser poems and Dickinson’s all-too-eager canonisation; the pot plants; the steel filing cabinets; and, through the window, which looked out on a long, narrow street, snow. Habegger’sindigestible biography – a doorstop full of question marks and nonsensical little theories (so exhaustive it even cites a coughing fit Dickinson’s great-great-uncle suffered in the spring of 1837 as a possible explanation for a certain sensibility in her poetry) – had delayed her work for months.
    She screwed up the piece of paper on which she had written ‘curtains’ (the window in the small bedroom was still uncovered) and picked up the soft pencil. She imagined herself outside in the daylight with her back to the front door, and sketched the lawn, the gently winding stream, the low stone wall forming an L around the grass, the pigsty diagonally opposite the house, the new, straight path along the front wall, the three alders and the three shrubs. Pity she didn’t have any coloured pencils. There’d be a new path: from the front door straight through the grass, ending at the wall. There’d be flower beds. She tried to draw a rose arch, which proved much more difficult than she’d imagined. It ruined the sketch and she didn’t have a rubber. She screwed up this piece of paper too. Sticking a new cigarette in her mouth instead, she picked up the
Collected Poems
and opened it at the contents page. She’d had this book for more than a decade – there were notes in it, the pages were stained, the dust jacket was torn – and now noticed for the first time how short the section titled LOVE was and how long the last, TIME AND ETERNITY. She started to cry.

22
    The husband sat in the living room that was too small for the new TV. His wife’s mother sat next to him on the couch, her father on a chair near the TV. Gusty November rain beat against the windows, a street light swung back and forth. The TV was on. It had been on the first time the husband came here, a good few years ago now, and every other occasion he had been here at night. Quite often during the day too, especially at weekends. They had turned the volume down five notches when he had arrived but it was still annoying. There was singing and judging, with blaring ads in between.
    ‘It’s almost December,’ the mother said.
    ‘Yes,’ said the husband.
    ‘This is really starting to upset me.’
    ‘What can we do about it?’ he asked.
    ‘It’s all your fault.’
    ‘My fault?’
    The mother gave him a look that said no further explanation was