The Discomfort of Evening

by Lucas Rijneveld

That morning, two days before Christmas, I felt her slippery thumbs in my eye sockets and for a moment I was afraid she’d press too hard, that my eyeballs would plop into my skull like marbles, and she’d say, ‘That’s what happens when your eyes are always roaming and you never keep them still like a true believer, gazing up at God as though the heavens might break open at any moment.’ But the heavens here only broke open for a snowstorm – nothing to keep staring at like an idiot.

We all knew the paper serviettes were only there for decoration and that Mum smoothed them out and put them back in the kitchen drawer after breakfast. They weren’t meant for our dirty fingers and mouths. Some part of me also felt bad at the thought of the angels being scrunched up in my fist like mosquitoes so that their wings broke, or having their white angel’s hair dirtied with strawberry jam.

He was going on ahead to the lake where he was going to take part in the local skating competition with a couple of his friends. It was a twenty-mile route, and the winner got a plate of stewed udders with mustard and a gold medal with the year 2000 on it. I wished I could put a freezer bag over his head, too, so that he’d stay warm for a long time, the seal closed around his neck.

He turned around once again in the doorway and waved to me, the scene I’d keep replaying in my mind later until his arm no longer raised itself and I began to doubt whether we had even said goodbye.

Angrily I thought about Matthies who’d be drinking hot chocolate from one of the stalls on the ice. I thought of him skating with red cheeks, and about the thaw that would start tomorrow: the curly-haired presenter had warned of roofs that might be too slippery for Saint Nicholas to get down the chimney, and mist which might lead him to get lost and perhaps Matthies too, even though it was his own fault. For a moment, I saw my skates before me, greased and back in their box, ready to be returned to the attic. I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough, how many centimetres on the door-post that was, and I asked God if He please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen.’

I’d once broken the wings off an angel to see whether they’d grow back. God could surely make that happen. I wanted some kind of sign that He existed and that He was there for us during the daytime too.

I learned that at first, death requires people to pay attention to small details – the way Mum checks her nails for dried-up bits of rennet from making cheese – to delay the pain.

Most of the heroes I’d read about in books could fall from tall buildings or find themselves in an inferno and end up with just a few scratches. I didn’t understand why Matthies couldn’t do this too and why he’d only be immortal in our thoughts from now on.

Each time, I’d hope that God had changed his mind and hadn’t listened to me when I’d prayed for him to protect Dieuwertje, just like the time – I must have been about seven – when I’d asked for a new bike: a red one with at least seven gears, and a soft saddle with double suspension so that I didn’t get a pain in my crotch when I had to cycle home from school into the wind. I never got the bike. If I went downstairs now, I hoped, it wouldn’t be Matthies lying beneath the sheet but my rabbit. Of course I’d be sad, but it would be different from the beating veins in my forehead when I tried to hold my breath in bed to understand death, or when I made the candle for so long my blood ran to my head like candlewax.

His eyes were hard. I wasn’t used to this expression on him, even though I knew he hated waiting because then he had to stand still for too long, which made him dwell on things, and then he smoked more. No one in the village liked to dwell: the crops might wither, and we only knew about the harvest that came from the land, not about things that grew inside ourselves.

‘The urge went away,’ I said. I pulled my pants back up and put my overalls back on, closed my coat and zipped it up to my chin. I could hold in my poo. I wouldn’t have to lose anything I wanted to keep from now on.

Dad says children can’t have worries because they only come when you have to plough and grub your own fields, even though I keep discovering more and more worries of my own and they keep me awake at night. They seem to be growing. Now that Mum has got thinner and her dresses baggier, I’m afraid she’ll die soon and that Dad will go with her. I follow them about all day so that they can’t suddenly die and disappear. I always keep them in the corner of my eye, like the tears for Matthies. And I never switch off the light globe on my bedside table until I’ve heard Dad’s snores, and the bedsprings creaking twice.

‘Because of your sins He keeps Himself hidden and He no longer wants to hear you,’ Mum says. She is holdig a claw hammer – she must have been waiting for me with it. I try not to think about the Discman I want so much. My parents’ loss is much worse – you can’t save up for a new son.

On that day in April, Hitler had been dead for forty-six years already. And the only difference between him and me is that I’m afraid of vomiting and diarrhoea, not Jewish people – even though I’ve never seen a Jew in real life, but maybe they are still hiding in people’s attics or cellars, hidden by Dutch farmers like in the war, or perhaps that’s why we’re not allowed down in the basement. There must be a reason Mum takes two full supermarket bags down there on Friday evenings. There are tins of hot dogs in them, even though we never eat hot dogs.

‘It’s about empathizing with her situation,’ the teacher said. She felt I was good at putting myself in another’s shoes but not so great at kicking off my own and having fun. Sometimes I’d get stuck in the other person for too long because that was easier than staying inside myself.

‘They say you can’t grow tits and that’s why you always wear your coat. And that you never wash it. We can smell cow.’ Belle used her fountain pen to make a full stop after the title on her page. I wanted to be that blue dot for a moment. And then for there to be nothing else after me. No lists, thoughts or longings. Just nothing at all. Belle looked at me expectantly. ‘You’re just like Anne Frank. You’re in hiding.’ I pushed my pencil into the grinder of my pencil sharpener that I’d got out of my bag, and turned it until there was a very sharp point. I let it break twice.

‘If you hadn’t have wanted to get rid of the child …’ ‘Oh, so now it’s my fault?’ Dad says. ‘That’s why God took away our oldest son.’ ‘We weren’t married yet …’ ‘It’s the tenth plague, I’m sure of it.’ I hold my breath. My coat feels damp from the wet bear against my chest, and its head droops forwards. I wonder for a moment whether Hitler would have told his mum what he was planning and that he was going to make a mess of it. I haven’t told anyone that I prayed for Dieuwertje to survive. Could the tenth plague be my fault?

Mum laughs. It’s not her normal laugh: it’s the laugh she does when she actually doesn’t find something funny. It’s confusing, but grown-ups are often confusing because their heads work like a Tetris game and they have to arrange all their worries in the right place. When there are too many of them, they pile up and everything gets stuck. Game over.

Once my hair is combed, I go and lie on my bed. In the light of my globe, I can see the rope hanging above my head from a beam. There still isn’t a swing on it, or a rabbit. I see a loop at the end. Just big enough for a hare’s neck. I try to reassure myself by thinking that my mum’s neck is at least three times thicker and she’s scared of heights.

For a moment I picture a dead baby and the Big Bad Wolf Granny used to tell us about when we stayed at her house and she tucked us in beneath an itchy horse blanket. One day they cut open the Big Bad Wolf’s belly to rescue the seven goats and put stones in instead and sewed his belly up again. They must have put a stone back in my Mum’s belly, I realize, which is why she’s so hard and cold sometimes.

Every Wednesday we fetch bread from the baker’s in the village before school. All the bread is past its sell-by date and actually supposed to go to the chickens, but we mainly eat it ourselves. Dad says, ‘If the chickens don’t get ill from it, neither will you.’ I still get worried sometimes that mould will grow inside me, that one day my skin will turn blue and white, like the spiced buns Dad slices the mould off with a big knife before serving to us, and that in due course, I’ll only be good as chicken feed.

We always sit in the front pew of the Reformed church on the dike – in the morning, evening and sometimes in the afternoon too for the children’s service – so that everyone can see us coming in and know that despite our loss we still visit the House of the Lord, that despite everything we still believe in Him – even though I’m beginning to have more and more doubts about whether I find God nice enough to want to go and talk to Him. I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves. I think I’ll belong to that second group.

My sister is the only person who understands why I’ve stopped taking off my coat. And the only one who tries to think of a solution. Our evenings are filled with this. Sometimes I get afraid that one of her solutions is going to work, that I’ll take away something from my sister, because as long as we still have desires we’re safe from death, draped around the farm’s shoulders like the suffocating smell after a day of muck-spreading. At the same time my red coat is fading, just like my image of Matthies.

I never touch Hanna, only when she asks me to. It doesn’t occur to me to. You’ve got two kinds of people, those who hold on and those who let go. I belong to the second category. I can only hold on to a person or a memory with the things I collect. I can safely stow them away in my coat pocket.

‘And it has to be a man. Rescuers are always men.’ ‘What about God, then? He’s a rescuer, isn’t he?’ ‘God only saves those who have sunk. You don’t dare swim. Apart from that,’ Hanna goes on, ‘God’s too friendly with Dad. He’s sure to tell and then we’ll never get away.’ Hanna is right. Even though I don’t know whether I want a rescuer – first, you have to learn how to hold on yourself, but I don’t want to disappoint my sister. I hear Dad screaming to us: ‘He who leaves his brethren becomes a wanderer, adrift from his original existence.’ Is this our original existence, or is there another life waiting for us somewhere on Earth that will fit around us like my coat?

You should remove everything that attracts unwanted attention, my father once said when I hadn’t been able to resist getting my Pokémon cards out of my bag. He threw them onto the fire, saying, ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.’ He forgot that we already serve two – Dad and God. A third could make things complicated, but that’s something to worry about later.

It’s good, the teacher said, to dream about places you’d like to visit one day. I pull up my coat and shirt until my navel is bare. Hanna’s the only one with a sticking-out belly button – a pale bobble like a newborn mouse that is still blind and curled up, the way we sometimes find them under the tarpaulin in the mound of silage grass. ‘One day I’d like to go to myself,’ I say quietly, pushing the pin into the soft flesh of my navel. I bite my lip so as not to make a sound, and a trickle of blood runs down to the elastic of my pants and soaks into the fabric. I daren’t take out the pin, afraid blood will gush out everywhere, and everyone in the house will know that I don’t want to go to God but to myself.

‘Will we ever grow some?’ Belle asks. I shake my head. ‘We’ll stay tit-less forever. You only grow them if a boy looks at you for longer than ten minutes.’ Belle looks around at the boys who are getting ready to dive through the hole. We’re not being looked at, only observed, which is something quite different. ‘Then we’ll have to make sure they see us.’

My sister and I wake up with black stripes on our faces and Dad’s Sunday suit all creased. I sit up in bed at once. If Dad catches us, he’ll get the Authorized Version out of the drawer in the dining room table and read to us from Romans: ‘If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.’ With that same mouth we kissed each other last night. Hanna pushed her tongue inside me as she was looking for words she didn’t possess herself. You can refuse the guilt of sin entry to your heart but never to your home. That’s why when he comes to drum us out of bed, Dad will quickly find out that we’ve invited this sin in, the way we once let in a stray cat. We put it in the walnut basket behind the wood stove and fed it milk and crusts until it grew stronger. Neither Hanna nor I is going to be saved now.

At that moment we hear laughter behind the hedge, and see the boys next door jumping into the inflatable paddling pool and floating on their brown backs, like raisins being soaked in brandy. I tug at Belle’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s ask if we can play at theirs.’ ‘But how are we going to get to see the willies?’ ‘They always have to pee at some point,’ I say, with a conviction that makes my chest swell. The idea that I’ve got something someone else is longing for makes me bigger. Side by side we go next door. My belly is full of bubbles. Will the worms inside me survive the Coke?