Ten White Geese (9781101603055) Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  TEN WHITE GEESE

  Gerbrand Bakker won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his first novel, The Twin. He worked as a subtitler for nature films before becoming a gardener. He lives in Holland.

  David Colmer is the translator of Gerbrand Bakker’s IMPAC Prize–winning novel, The Twin.

  International Acclaim for

  Gerbrand Bakker and Ten White Geese

  “A beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us…Assured and mature…Even more powerful [than The Twin].”

  —John Burnside, The Guardian (London)

  “Simple and devastating…Written and translated with lapidary precision, perspective, and crisp prose; there is emotion and expression, but held back from the writing, which is controlled and full of clean, physical detail.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “A novel full of hints and mysteries [that] will almost certainly keep you rooted to your chair until the dénouement.”

  —The Spectator (London)

  “Bakker’s writing is fabulously clear, so clear that each sentence leaves a rippling wake.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A beautiful, convincing, subdued novel [with] a spare simplicity and expressiveness reminiscent of J. M. Coetzee.”

  —Trouw (The Netherlands)

  “Intensely moving…An incredibly tender book, capturing new and old relationships in simple yet beautiful detail.”

  —The Tattooed Book (UK)

  “With his fine style and gripping plot twists, this is a writer who ultimately grabs his readers by the throat.”

  —Nederlands Letterenfonds

  “Bakker sees beauty and complexity in the smallest corners of everyday life and portrays them with a quiet mastery.”

  —The Quarterly Conversation

  “Bakker is the best writer of nature in the Netherlands. How he writes about geese, reeds, and grassy paths through a meadow makes me weep. I imprisoned myself with the story, pulled up the blankets and wanted to disappear into it. This book is a beauty.”

  —Marleen Janssen, Libell.nl (The Netherlands)

  “An accomplished work [with] many clear parallels [to J. M. Coetzee]: both authors dish out their novels in spare, economic prose and manage the trick of skirting on the surface of their characters whilst hinting at great storms of emotion underneath.”

  —Booktrust (London)

  “The type of book you need to read in a single evening. Then you’re gradually hypnotized by the calmly and sharply observed story.”

  —De Standaard (Belgium)

  “Gripping…Thrillingly fresh…It bears his indelible poetic stamp, his incisor cut…. Galvanizing.”

  —Irish Independent

  “An enchanting style by a wonderful writer. He knows how to evoke a lot of tension with minimal resources.”

  —Tros Nieuwsshow (The Netherlands)

  “Mesmerizing…So spare and so poignant…haunting and charismatic…It is impossible to put it down without feeling a deep sense of acquaintance with its wild, neglected terrain, and with the foibles and aspirations of his characters…. Highly recommended.”

  —The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

  “This novel proves that great literature benefits from a simple setting.”

  —Literatuurplein.nl (The Netherlands)

  “Monumental.”

  —Titel Magazin (Germany)

  “You do not want to miss this!”

  —Linda Magazine (The Netherlands)

  “Tranquility and tension generate a quiet triumph.”

  —Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

  “Captivating. It is all deceptively straightforward. But this makes the turns in the story much more surprising and thrilling.”

  —Nederlands Dagblad

  “Through his reserved storytelling Bakker creates the enormous poetic force that he has made his own.”

  —Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland)

  “Phenomenal. There is no other word for Gerbrand Bakker’s new novel.”

  —Noorhollands Dagblad

  “Confirm[s] Bakker as a leading light of new European fiction.”

  —Wales Arts Review

  “Terribly gripping…there is a continuous tension, a tension only the very best of thrillers have.”

  —Kurier (Austria)

  Ten White Geese

  A NOVEL

  Gerbrand Bakker

  TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH

  BY

  David Colmer

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published with the title De omweg by Uitgeverij Cossee 2010

  Published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker 2012

  Published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © Gerbrand Bakker and Uitgeverij Cossee, 2010

  English translation copyright © David Colmer, 2012

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60305-5

  CIP data available

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  Ample make this bed.

  Make this bed with awe;

  In it wait till judgment break

  Excellent and fair.

  Be its mattress straight,

  Be its pillow round;

  Let no sunrise’ yellow noise

  Interrupt this ground.

  Emily Dickinson

  Table o
f Contents

  November

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  December

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  November

  1

  Early one morning she saw the badgers. They were near the stone circle she had discovered a few days earlier and wanted to see at dawn. She had always thought of them as peaceful, shy and somehow lumbering animals, but they were fighting and hissing. When they noticed her they ambled off into the flowering gorse. There was a smell of coconut in the air. She walked back along the path you could find only by looking into the distance, a path whose existence she had surmised from rusty kissing gates, rotten stiles and the odd post with a symbol presumably meant to represent a hiker. The grass was untrodden.

  November. Windless and damp. She was happy about the badgers, satisfied to know they were at the stone circle whether she went there or not. Beside the grassy path stood ancient trees covered with coarse, light grey lichen, their branches brittle. Brittle yet tenacious, still in leaf. The trees were remarkably green for the time of year. The weather was often grey. The sea was close by; when she looked out from the upstairs windows in the daytime she occasionally spotted it. On other days it was nowhere in sight. Just trees, mainly oaks, sometimes light brown cows looking at her, inquisitive and indifferent at once.

  At night she heard water; a stream ran past the house. Now and then she would wake with a start. The wind had turned or picked up and the rushing of the stream no longer carried. She had been there about three weeks. Long enough to wake up because a sound was missing.

  2

  Of the ten fat white geese in the field next to the drive, only seven were left a couple of weeks later. All she found of the other three were feathers and one orange foot. The remaining birds stood by impassively and ate the grass. She couldn’t think of any predator other than a fox, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that there were wolves or even bears in the area. She felt that she was to blame for the geese being eaten, that she was responsible for their survival.

  ‘Drive’ was a flattering word for the winding dirt track, about a kilometre and a half long and patched here and there with a load of crushed brick or broken roof tiles. The land along the drive – meadows, bog, woods – belonged to the house, but she still hadn’t worked out just how it slotted together, mainly because it was hilly. The goose field, at least, was fenced neatly with barbed wire. It didn’t save them. Once, someone had dug them three ponds, each a little lower than the last and all three fed by the same invisible spring. Once, a wooden hut had stood next to those ponds: now it was little more than a capsized roof with a sagging bench in front of it.

  The house faced away from the drive towards the stone circle (out of sight) and, much farther, the sea. The countryside fell away very gradually and all of the main windows looked out over it. At the back there were just two small windows, one in the large bedroom and one in the bathroom. The stream was on the kitchen side of the house. In the living room, where she kept the light on almost all day, there was a large wood-burning stove. The stairs were an open construction against a side wall, directly opposite the front door, the top half of which was a thick pane of glass. Upstairs, two bedrooms and an enormous bathroom with an old claw-foot tub. The former pigsty – which could never have held more than three large pigs at once – was now a shed containing a good supply of firewood and all kinds of abandoned junk. Under it, a large cellar, whose purpose she hadn’t quite fathomed. It was tidy and well made, the walls finished with some kind of clay. A horizontal strip window next to the concrete stairs offered a little light. The cellar could be sealed with a trapdoor which, by the look of it, hadn’t been lowered for quite some time. She was gradually expanding the area she moved in; the stone circle couldn’t have been much more than two kilometres away.

  3

  The area around the house. She had driven to Bangor once to do the shopping but after that she went to Caernarfon, which was closer. Bangor was tiny but still much too busy for her. They had a university there and that meant students. She had no desire to set eyes on another university student, especially not a first year. Bangor was out. In the even smaller town of Caernarfon, a lot of the shops were closed, with FOR SALE daubed on the windows in white paint. She noticed shopkeepers visiting each other to keep their spirits up with coffee and cigarettes. The castle was as desolate as an outdoor swimming pool in January. The Tesco’s was large and spacious and open till nine. She still couldn’t get used to the narrow, sunken lanes: braking for every bend, panicking about left or right.

  She slept in the small bedroom on a mattress on the floor. There was a fireplace, as in the large bedroom, but so far she hadn’t used it. She should have really, if only to see if the chimney drew. It was a lot less damp than she’d expected. Her favourite place upstairs was the landing, with its L-shaped wooden balustrade, worn floorboards and window seat. Now and then, at night, sitting on the window seat and looking out into the darkness through the tendrils of an old creeper, she would notice that she wasn’t entirely alone: somewhere in the distance there was a light. Anglesey was in that direction too and from Anglesey you could catch a ferry to Ireland. The ferry put out to sea at fixed times and at other fixed times it put into harbour. Once she saw the sea gleaming in the moonlight, the water pale and smooth. Sometimes she heard honking from the goose field, muffled by the thick walls. She couldn’t do anything about it; she couldn’t stop a fox in the night.

  4

  One day her uncle had walked into the pond, the pond in the large front garden of the hotel he worked at. The water refused to come up any higher than his hips. Other staff members pulled him out, gave him a pair of dry trousers and sat him on a chair in the warm kitchen (it was mid-November). Clean socks were not available. They put his shoes on an oven. That was about it, or what she knew of it anyway, no one ever went into any more detail. Just that he’d walked into the pond and stood there a while, wet up to his hotel-uniform belt. Surprised, perhaps. He must have judged the water to be deeper.

  Her being here had something to do with that uncle. At least, she had begun to suspect as much. Scarcely a day passed without her thinking of him, seeing him before her in the smooth water of the hotel pond. So far gone that he hardly realised that hip-deep water wasn’t enough to drown in. Incapable of simply toppling over. All of the pockets of the clothes he was wearing stuffed with the heaviest objects he had been able to find in the hotel kitchen.

  She hadn’t thought about him for a very long time. Perhaps she did now, in this foreign country, because it was November here too or because she sensed how vulnerable people are when they have no idea what to do next, how to move forward or back. That a shallow hotel pond can feel like a standstill, like marking time with the bank – no start or end, a circle – as the past, present and unlimited future. And because of that, she also thought she understood him just standing the
re and not trying to get his head underwater. A standstill. Without any form of physicality: no sex, no eroticism, no sense of expectation. In the few weeks she’d been in the house, with the exception of when she was in the claw-foot bath, she had not once felt any impulse to put a hand between her legs. She inhabited this house the way he’d stood in that pond.

  5

  She had set up the large bedroom as a study. More precisely, she had pushed the worm-eaten oak table that was there when she arrived over to the window and put a desk lamp on it. Next to the lamp she placed an ashtray and next to the ashtray she laid the Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Before sitting down at the table she usually slid the window up a little. When she smoked, she blew the smoke at the crack. In this room the leaves of the creeper annoyed her, so one day she took the rickety wooden stepladder from the pigsty and hacked the tendrils in front of the window away with a knife. That gave her an unimpeded view of the oaks, the fields and – very occasionally – the sea, and left her free to think about what the word ‘study’ still meant to her, if anything. Behind her was a divan she’d made her own by covering it with a moss-green cloth. She had stacked a few books on a small table next to it, but didn’t read a word. She’d put the portrait of Dickinson in the exact middle of the mantelpiece, in a Blokker picture frame. It was the controversial portrait, a copy of the daguerreotype that had been listed for sale on eBay.

  Sometimes the light brown cows stood at the stone wall that separated the fields from her yard; they seemed to know exactly which window she was observing them from. My yard. I could do something with that, she thought, smoking one cigarette after another. She wondered which farmer the cows belonged to, where his farmhouse was. These hills brimming with streams and brooks and copses were much too complicated and confusing for her. Now and then she laid a hand on the Dickinson, running her fingers over the roses on the cover. She bought a pair of secateurs and a pruning saw at a hardware shop in Caernarfon.