The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker Read Free Book Online Page A

and walk around the bed. When I'm about to lay him down, the phone rings. Let it ring. If I answer it, I'll probably just hear that pent-up silence again. It rings seven times. I lay Father down on his bed.
     
'I can walk,' he says, still panting.
     
'You know who died?' I ask.
     
'No.'
     
'Arie.'
     
'Arie who?'
     
'The tanker driver.'
     
'No!'
     
'Yes.'
     
*
     
There is no key in his bedroom door. There isn't one on the outside of the door to Henk's bedroom either. I walk in and sit down on his bed. The key is in the keyhole on the inside of the door. I lie down. The curtains are drawn, it's dark in the room. Staring up at the ceiling I realise that everything would be very different if I had someone, if I was married with children. When you have a family, you can get rid of your father without feeling guilty.
     
I stand up and pull the key from the keyhole. I go out onto the landing and stick the key into the lock of Father's door. It fits, but it's only when I turn it that I feel that it really fits. No remarks from inside the bedroom. I take the key out of the lock and stand there for a moment with it in my hand, then I put it back in the keyhole.
     
The two bedrooms are on the right side of the landing. Opposite the staircase is a skylight that doesn't let in much light: upstairs it's always evening. At the end of the landing on the left, next to the skylight, is a third room, smaller than the two bedrooms. This room covers maybe a third of the milking parlour beneath it. 'The new room,' Mother called it to the day she died. I can't remember what the room was supposed to be for, but ever since it was built along with the milking parlour, some time in the sixties, it has remained unused. I never go in there. The door is always shut. The floor is covered with the same dark-blue carpet as the two bedrooms. It is a very strange room, I feel that when now, for once, I go into it. Although it's musty, there is also a lingering smell of newness about it, of its being newly built. There is a fairly large Velux window in the sloping wall, making the room a good deal brighter than the landing. But it's empty, there is no reason to go inside.
     
Through the window I see the donkeys in the far corner of the donkey paddock. I put them out again early this morning. They're always together, it's only when walking or trotting around that they occasionally separate and then they're so shocked they can't wait to get back together again. Before going downstairs I open the window a little.
     
It was the bed shop. Later in the day the jovial bed salesman calls a second time and says that he tried earlier. The bed is coming tomorrow. I want to know what time. He can't say exactly, 'some time in the morning'. Before hanging up, he advises me to buy an answering machine, so it's more convenient when people want to leave a message.
     
Behind the chicken coop, the donkey shed and the muck heap, there are eight willows in a row along the ditch. Seven stand up straight, one overhangs the ditch. For years now I have tackled that tree the same way: I lay the two sections of a ladder next to each other over the ditch and attach a short beam at right angles across the ladders, hammering in a few long nails to keep it in place (the sides of the ditch are at different heights). Then I lay a wooden pallet on the ladders, resting one side on the beam so it's as good as horizontal. By resting the wooden crate on the pallet, I can then reach the branches of the willow. I always start with the crooked willow, once that's done the rest are easy. The razor-sharp steel of the handsaw cuts smoothly through the young, tender wood. After the six trees yesterday, my arms and shoulders aren't moving quite as smoothly. I do a couple of willows, then rest, watching the sheep in the field near the Bosman windmill.
     
Twenty-three, that's an odd number actually, twenty would be more beautiful.
     

13
It took them a while, the men who came to deliver the