Now, five nights after the festivities, he once again lay staring at the ceiling, and caught himself stupidly musing on the virtues of mutton.
Claire snored with drawn-out snuffles. She slept right through the hum. Perhaps thanks to the numbing effect of the white wine. Until six days ago, Herman snored too. His hand glided over the bulge of his belly and hooked itself under the elastic of his pajama bottoms.
We’re too fat, he thought. We’re both too fat, and that’s why we snore.
A useless thought in the middle of the fifth useless night.
◆
Postman Walter De Gryse liked the tingling pain in his legs. The wind from the Blaashoek Canal caught him from the side and yanked on his handlebars. It did not bother him in the least. He could have used a motorbike or a car, if only to save time. But he had been given permission to deliver his route by bicycle, rain or shine, until his retirement. Or until his body gave out.
For Walter, the daily bike ride from the main post office to Blaashoek and back was the best remedy against minor infirmities. His body consisted of bone, tendon and muscle. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. In his twenty-five-year career he hadn’t taken a single day of sick leave. Not a single day! This did not make him popular with his fellow postmen, who had all unanimously cheered the introduction of motorbikes and delivery trucks. While Walter happily mounted his bicycle for the seven-kilometer trip to Blaashoek, they grumbled and groused about the new routes and lit up a cigarette as soon as the foreman was out of sight.
The wind made Walter’s eyes water and sucked snot out of his nose. He cleared his throat and spat a wad of phlegm onto the grassy shoulder. He righted himself, looked across the water and saw the turbines. Beautiful, the stately way they dominated the landscape. The same wind that rattled through his spokes was being converted into electricity. Marvelous. Fifteen years ago, as chairman of the action group ‘No Nuclear Waste in Blaashoek’, Walter took up arms against the government, which was planning to dump radioactive garbage in this haven of natural beauty. At home he kept a scrapbook with all the newspaper clippings from back then. The construction of the wind park in his town felt like a personal victory over nuclear energy and the dark forces intent on propping it up. He shifted to a higher gear to allow the pedals to turn at the same tempo as the turbine blades.
The turbines were beautiful for another reason as well. They reminded Walter of the coast, where as a child he always spent the last week of the summer vacation. For hours on end Walter would build sand castles and dig moats, which to his delight filled with water at high tide. Then he had a real fortress, surrounded by a real moat that no one else could cross. And it was only truly finished when he had carefully placed the paper windmills on top of his edifice. How often had his cursing father dragged him from the beach, because back in their stifling efficiency apartment dinner was getting cold while Walter sat gazing at his little windmills at sunset. After a school year full of tedious bookwork, he yearned for the sea, the sun and the paper windmills.
Later, when he outgrew windmills and his interests shifted to bikinis, he dreamt of exotic oceanic tableaux with waves that made the North Sea look like a puddle. But he never got to see palm trees and pearly-white beaches. His youthful romance with Magda—and particularly her unexpected pregnancy at age seventeen—kept him in Blaashoek. For twenty-eight years now they had lived in her home town, which compared to the Shangri-las of his dreams was no more than a sandbox where toddlers jealously eyed one another’s sand-cake stands.
In the sandbox of Blaashoek, Walter was the kid with the smallest bucket. Practically everyone in the town lived with the comforting thought that there was always someone less well-off than they: Walter the postman and his little woman Magda. It did not bother him, he was content. He and his puny bucket had also built dream castles.
Shortly after Laura was born he went to work as a postman. Barely a year later Lisa completed the family. The girls’ upbringing took a big chunk out of the family budget, but conscientious bookkeeping meant he and Magda could afford to give them a happy childhood. Walter took great pleasure in planting little windmills atop his daughters’ sand castles during vacations at the beach. At Sinterklaas they always got less than they had hoped for, but were content to play with the cheap toys. Lisa wore Laura’s hand-me-downs without grumbling. Thanks to all their economizing they were able to send both daughters to university. Now Laura earned twice what he did, and if Lisa got her promotion next year she would earn three times as much. His daughters’ busy schedules prevented them from visiting regularly. He regretted that. Money alone did not buy happiness.
Walter glanced over his shoulder and pulled onto the two-way road just before the Blaashoek exit. He took the first curve and banged with a short kadunk onto the sidewalk. Time to deliver the mail.
◆
Herman heard the familiar klunk with which, every workday, Walter coasted up onto the sidewalk. He had to grab hold of the delivery van. He looked at the half-pigs that dangled from the meat hooks like abstract artworks. His eyes wouldn’t focus. The meat seemed to swell and the van shrink, or vice versa, and the dead meat’s delicate odor, much reduced by the refrigeration, turned his stomach. He was tired, dead tired.
‘Just bills for you today,’ he heard Walter say. Herman let go of the van and took the envelopes. The electric company’s logo floated on one of them. The address consisted of vague, dark flecks.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
Walter looked into the delivery van and sniffed.
‘Mighty cozy in there.’
Herman smiled and looked as well. Now he saw the cadavers in razor-sharp relief. Then they went all blurry again.
‘Magda’ll come by later to pick up some of your pâté,’ Walter continued. ‘Set aside a nice big slab for her.’
Bracke’s Blaashoek Pâté. Herman realized he urgently needed to whip up another batch. Today.
‘I’ll be going, you’ve got your hands full here,’ Walter said, placing his foot on the pedal, ready to push off.
‘Do you hear them too, at night?’ asked Herman.
Walter took his foot off the pedal.
‘Pardon?’
Herman hesitated.
‘Do you hear them too, the turbines?’
In Walter’s face were the eyes of the gaping sheep.
‘Do I hear … I’m not sure I get your drift.’
‘I thought maybe you also … that you …’
Now Walter looked as if he felt the cold metal of the electric pistol in his neck that would turn him into a lamb chop.
‘Never mind.’
The postman squeezed Herman’s shoulder. ‘You take these little piggies to market, and I’ll deliver a few more bills.’
He winked and rode off. Herman followed the sinewy body and the dark mop of hair, and wondered if he was the only one who heard the turbines. That couldn’t be. Surely the drone deprived someone else of a good night’s sleep? The awful idea that he alone lay awake night after night, that he alone endured that torture, made his spine stiffen. As though he dangled in the delivery van among those hunks of meat.
He looked over the rooftops and saw them.
‘Monsters,’ he muttered.
◆
A new girl had come to live in the subsidized housing. Walter inspected the name on the envelope. He peered through the letter slot, as though she might be standing there on the other side, waiting for him. Nothing but an empty hallway. He smiled at his own foolish thought, pushed the letter through the slot and rode, whistling, to the next mailbox.
◆
Saskia