Authors: Karel van Loon
He won’t stop talking.
‘Yesterday’s post is on the table. Two bank statements and a prospectus from a building-materials company. He was reading a book. Something religious. I didn’t know your father
was religious. But, well, when we get older and we start . . . I mean, maybe he felt it coming, who knows? You read about things like that sometimes. Bach knew what day he was going to . . . They
say he worked that date into a lot of his compositions. I don’t know anything about music, of course, I just read that somewhere. Years ago. But I never forgot it. Sometimes that happens,
with that kind of thing. You keep thinking about it for ages. You read something like that and you think: is that really possible?’
I can hear a dog whining in the background.
‘All right, I’m coming! That’s Boris. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, poor puppy. I left him outside. I thought: don’t need that dog around. Mr
Minderhout?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was thinking: I couldn’t hear you any more. I mean, maybe it would be good if you . . . I mean.’
‘I’m coming,’ I say. ‘Go to Boris. I’m coming. I’ll ring your bell when I get there.’
‘Oh, that’s great. Yeah, that’s great.’ He sounds relieved. The panic leaves his voice. ‘You don’t have to rush. I mean . . .’
‘That’s fine, Mr Bruggeman. Thank you very much. I’m coming.’
Ellen is at work.
Bo is at school.
My father is dead.
I ring Ellen and tell her the bad news.
‘I’ll be right there,’ she says.
‘No, I’ll pick you up. We can drive over there together.’
She’s nice to me when she gets in the car. In a way only she can be nice. With a little gesture, a touch, a phrase.
‘You can get used to almost anything. But not to things you don’t see coming.’
We drive to Abcoude. There’s a parking space in front of the door. My father sits there watching as I back the car into place. I misjudge the distance to the kerb. The right rear tyre
scrapes against cement. There are yellow daffodils in flower under the front window. It takes a long time for me to work up the courage to get out of the car. My father doesn’t get up. He
doesn’t open the door.
My father is dead. I believe it’s slowly starting to sink in.
Boris, a black fluffy mongrel, barks and jumps excitedly against the frosted glass of Mr Bruggeman’s front door. It takes a minute for the old man himself to appear. He
looks pale, and his hands are shaking. At his age, he must be thinking that he’s next. (I think: wasn’t it actually his turn? Isn’t it immediately obvious that he should have gone
before my father? But fate decided differently. In my life, fate often decides differently.)
‘Mr Minderhout. Ma’am,’ he says. ‘I’m glad you’re here. Please come in. Boris, get down! Sit! Good dog! Your father . . .’
‘We saw him.’
‘Yes, of course. Boris, c’mere!’ The dog, which was barking loudly and wagging its tail on the way to the door again, comes back into the room. The old man shuffles into the
kitchen, opens a jar and takes out a few chunks of dried dog food.
‘Sit.’ The dog sits.
‘Stay.’ The man picks up a white enamelled bowl with doggy printed on it in red letters. The dog peeps and sticks its tongue out. But it doesn’t move. The man puts the bowl on
the ground, and the dog still waits.
‘Get it!’ And the animal pounces greedily on the dog food.
We walk out of the living room, into the hallway, and Mr Bruggeman closes the door behind him. At the end of the hall is a door to the garden. He walks out in front of us.
‘Be sure to pull the door shut behind you,’ he says. ‘These days Boris can open the hall door.’
As we walk into the garden we indeed hear a latch being pushed down with a bang, then excited barking from the hall. Boris’s black head appears at the window of the back door. All three of
us have to laugh about that. Then we’re standing in my father’s garden. There’s a crate of violets still waiting to be planted. Mr Bruggeman opens the back door and goes inside.
At the door to the living room, he stops.
‘Please, you first,’ he says. We sidle past him, first Ellen, then me. We walk into the room and look at the dead man in the chair by the window. It is undeniably my father. But
it’s undeniably no longer him, either. There’s a strange smell in the room, or maybe I’m imagining it, but Ellen also seems to hesitate before approaching the dead body. She waits
until I’m next to her. She takes my hand. I know she never thought much of my father. She said his self-assured air annoyed her. ‘He acts as though he accepts me, but he only tolerates
me at best.’
I never worried too much about what she thought of him. The contact between my father and me was never that close. Only in the last few years, after my mother died, did we start seeing each
other a bit more. Maybe because we were in the same boat again. Because we were each other’s equals again: widowers both.
‘From the looks of it, he didn’t suffer.’ Mr Bruggeman is the first to break the silence.
‘No,’ Ellen says. ‘He just fell asleep.’ She steps closer. ‘Shall we close his eyes?’
‘Try it,’ I say.
‘Don’t you want to do it?’
‘No, rather not.’
She closes his eyes. I see her shiver.
‘He’s cold and stiff.’
‘Shall we lay him on his bed?’ Mr Bruggeman asks. You can tell from his voice that he hopes we’ll say no.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Let him sit like this. I’ll ring the undertakers, and they’ll take care of everything.’
‘I already threw away what was left in his wineglass,’ Mr Bruggeman says. ‘And I washed the glass. And I put that book back on the shelf.’
‘Thank you,’ Ellen says. She’s still holding my hand. ‘Do you want me to ring?’
‘No, I’ll do it.’
I find the phone book and look up the number of the undertakers who arranged my mother’s funeral. They promise to send someone over right away. Within an hour, we’re all sitting at
the kitchen table, discussing the things that have to be discussed at a moment like this, just as we did two years ago. It’s even the same man. Only my father isn’t in on this
conversation. He’s sitting in his chair, his eyes closed. Everything he wanted to say about his funeral he put down carefully on paper. The man from the undertakers reads it to us in a quiet,
sympathetic voice. When he gets to the part about the music and mentions ‘Ave Maria’, which they also played at my mother’s funeral, I feel a sudden chill. Under the table, Ellen
lays a hand on my leg.
‘Your father wants to be cremated,’ the man says.
I never knew that.
There aren’t many people at the ceremony.
From behind the lectern, I let my gaze run over their faces. An uncle and an aunt, old and grey and with death in their eyes, a number of unfamiliar faces (probably former employees of my
father’s contracting company), two nieces, one pretty and thin but sloppy, the other fat and ugly but dressed to a tee. Their husbands, whom I last saw at my mother’s funeral,
apparently didn’t think it was worth taking time off from work this time, and who am I to blame them? I hate funerals, I’ll seize any excuse not to attend them. For this one, though,
there was no excuse at hand.
I look at Ellen and Bo, sitting beside each other in the front row. Ellen nods encouragingly. It’s about time I said something.
‘I’ve had thirty-six years to prepare myself for this day,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t long enough. What can you say at your own father’s cremation? That you’ll
miss him? That he was important to you? That you loved him, even at those moments when you hated him? That you regularly catch yourself saying things to your son that he used to say to you?
It’s all true, but what good is it?’
Bo looks at the tips of his shoes. Ellen looks at me. The two nieces look at the coffin. Mr Bruggeman looks at his hands lying folded in his lap. Again the thought flashes through my mind:
he’s the one who should have died, not my father. That’s what I’d really like to say, but I don’t.
I say, ‘I’m not going to try to sum up my father in a few words. I would be doing him an injustice, and doing all of you an injustice, and ultimately doing myself an injustice as
well. A person’s life can’t be captured in words; good thing, too. So what else is there to say? A few days ago someone said to me, “You can get used to anything, but not to what
you don’t see coming.” And that’s how it is. You can get used to anything, but not to death.’
When ‘Ave Maria’ is played, I’m the only one who cries. (Bo is sitting next to me. I hear him gulp, but he doesn’t cry.) Ellen puts her hand on my leg again. When I look
at her, she puckers her lips for just a moment, as if she wants to soften my pain with a kiss, the way mothers do with little children.
My father is dead, I think. He’s lying there in that box and in a little while they’ll burn him. So who do I have left? Ellen and Bo. Will that be enough? The year I drank myself to
the edge of the abyss, yes, they were enough for me then – at least, enough to make me stop and turn back right before the edge.
My drinking started when, after two months of hard work and denial, I finally admitted to myself that Monika was dead. At first I drank mostly in cafés, often with Dees, often with Bo,
sometimes completely alone. Then I started drinking at home, too. Whisky, mostly, and red wine. Within a few months I was living a life that would have finished me if Ellen hadn’t been there.
She’s the one who saved me. She and Bo. There were nights when I would sit in a bar with Bo until four in the morning, and then wander through the city for hours, with him asleep on my back.
I got into arguments with other drunkards and vagrants, and it was only because of the toddler on my back that it never really turned ugly.
One early summer morning, Bo and I were sitting on a bench in the Sarphatipark. I’d been roaming all night again, and Bo had just woken up. We looked at the ducks in the pond, and Bo asked
why ducks quack and coots peep.
I had no idea.
Then he asked me why coots moved their heads back and forth like that when they swam, and ducks didn’t. Again, I had no idea. We didn’t say anything for a while.
Two drakes were chasing a female around the pond. ‘Why are they doing that?’ Bo asked. Fortunately, this time I knew the answer. ‘Because the males,’ I said, ‘are
bored to death. That’s because they get so much to eat from people who come here to feed the ducks. Normally, ducks spend most of the day looking for food. But city ducks have a cushy life:
they don’t have to look for food, because it’s thrown to them by nice people like you and me. So they have a lot of time to do other things. The only problem is, ducks don’t have
a very good imagination. They don’t know what to do with all that free time. The only thing they can come up with is to chase the females. So that’s what they do. Sometimes the drakes
chase a female around so much, she finally drowns.’
Bo thought that was pretty terrible. ‘We shouldn’t feed them any more,’ he said.
‘Maybe you’re right, maybe we shouldn’t.’
‘What about gulls?’ he asked then. ‘Do gulls do that too?’
‘No, they don’t do that.’
‘Good,’ Bo said.
Right then I saw Ellen coming into the park. I hadn’t seen her since the day of Monika’s funeral, eight months earlier. She’d rung me twice, but I’d been abrupt and said
I’d ring her when I was feeling better. But the months went by and I never rang. In fact, I wasn’t feeling better.
She was wearing jogging pants, but she wasn’t jogging.
‘Let’s go,’ I said to Bo.
I had no idea whether she’d seen us, but I knew for certain that she hadn’t seen that we’d seen her. She could still consider it a coincidence that I was hurrying away from
her. Bo and I left the park and crossed the Ceintuurbaan to our house. At the front door I glanced over my shoulder. Ellen was nowhere in sight. But we were barely inside when the bell rang.
I hesitated for a long time about opening the door, but I suspected that she’d actually seen me, which would have made it very impolite not to answer. And besides, what possible reason
could I have to avoid her? I didn’t know myself. Or I didn’t want to know.
I opened the door. She was standing at the bottom of the steps. ‘Hi, it’s me. Can I come up?’
‘Better not. It’s such a mess here.’ That was true. It was an awful mess.
‘I want to talk to you. Want to hear how you’re doing. And Bo.’
‘Yes. Good. Or, reasonable. Thanks.’
She remained standing there indecisively. A tram bell clanged.
‘I was in the neighbourhood.’
‘You know what?’ I said. ‘You know that taxi drivers’ café, just down the Ceintuurbaan? There are always a couple of cabs in front of it at this time of day. You
can’t miss it. Let’s meet there. In fifteen minutes. Make it twenty.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
But fifteen minutes later, after I’d shaved and combed my hair and put on clean clothes, and while I was trying to put some clean clothes on Bo as well, he threw himself on the sofa,
shrieking. He kicked and punched me and shouted, ‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to!’ And no matter how I tried to calm him, there was nothing I could do. The fatigue was
taking its toll. I was angry and desperate and sad and ashamed of my impotence, and so I went into the kitchen and poured myself a whisky and sat down in a chair by the window and drank and waited
and drank.
When the phone rang, I didn’t answer. And twenty minutes later, when the doorbell rang for the second time that morning, I didn’t open the door. Bo had fallen asleep on the sofa by
then, and a little later I fell asleep, too. When I woke up late that afternoon, Bo was sitting there, holding my glass of whisky to his lips. Very carefully, he took a sip. And started coughing
terribly right away.
I picked him up and held him tight and I comforted him and promised him I would straighten out my life and get rid of all the nasty drink in the house, and that we wouldn’t spend any more
nights in bars and that we’d start feeding the ducks in the park again, as we used to, but he didn’t want that, and only then, very slowly, did the memories of that morning come back,
and I picked up the phone and rang Ellen. But Ellen wasn’t there.