“Nicolaus! Jan! Come into this room.” Nicolaus had never heard his wife speak in that shocked tone. The scarlet-faced women half-ran into the kitchen and let the men go in alone. The thin and wasted body of an elderly man lay on the still sweat-damp sheet. It was Birgit, certainly it was Birgit, but Birgit was a man. Indubitably. The wispy hairs on the narrow chest and the male sexual organs, shrunken and withered but quite real, confounded them. Nicolaus’s mind seethed. He thought not of Birgit but of Bernard. Why? Why? For forty years! And none of them had known.
