ONE SHORT STORY

Translated from the Dutch by Annelies Schoolderman

Countrylife

The move was harmonious, the farewell to their apartment unsentimental. The movers had left. They lived here now, far in the North, where on a good day you smelled the sea. The house was not large, but the deep garden was a juicy prophecy. Tranquility, they’d seen in that garden right away, possibilities. Their hurried hearts began to beat placidly and powerfully from it.

Other than the sycamore, Rivka now saw from inside a kitchen, full of boxes, that in the garden there was a slender larch, a birch, and three pollarded willows by the ditch. No brainers, but Rivka could by now tell about fifty tree species apart. It made the world expand, that something that used to have one name — tree — suddenly branched into countless melodious categories. Poplars, cypresses, dogwoods, what had she done all that time without those words?

Lately, trees could count on a renewed, somewhat desperate appreciation from people and she herself was not exempt from that sentiment. Everyone talked about a book written by a forester, which argued that trees could communicate with each other. With their root systems, they cared for their offspring and their ailing old neighbors. Rivka couldn’t really assess the science behind it, but she saw the charm in the findings. After the success of the tree book, the same forester released an even more striking story about “the secret network of nature,” where plants and animals worked together to keep everything turning. Nature, the audience claimed, already had her own internet for millenia, a wisdom deeper than ours.

That first day in Thunderbay was windy and crisp, spring still on its way. Esse sat on the terrace in her track jacket, staring at the scene in front of her. The trail between the neglected flowerbeds, the grass that was due to be mowed, the sycamore with its naked-cat skin, the small greenhouse, the shed, the knee-high fence, and behind that the land, endless.

“I think the view’s already getting old,” Rivka said, approaching Esse from behind, upon which they burst into their sardonic laugh together, relieved.

The fire in the rusty pit was lit, a bottle of special beer came out of a moving box, there was kissing, a first memory made. They held each other and stared at the flames, as if something would reveal itself.

What were two women, lovers, doing here in the North? Let’s see what the silence does to us, they’d said to each other. The housing market had played a role in the decision, like an antagonistic force of nature, but they called their migration an experiment. They hoped the move would offer them a new perspective on the life they knew.

That life was forged in the city, where dreams were continually satisfied and reawakened and where people nevertheless solemnly bowed over the question of whether this life was sustainable — sustainable, desirable, ethical, and healthy. Over the small and large questions that dominated conversations one prevailed: Should one leave behind offspring on this worn out planet? This and related decisions were the subject, in coffee shops, wine bars, during maternity house calls. Sometimes it seemed like the topic shifted to something else — art, literature, world politics. Naturally, jokes were always being made, tasteless, vile and macabre jokes. But ultimately everything was a disguised argument for or against the most tyrannical of decisions.

She and Esse both wished to let things run their course. That course, they suspected, would do better if it didn’t keep getting ensnared by the cacophony of the city. The course needed room to stretch itself out, silence to make itself heard, and a few trees to measure up against.

Now they had their estate. They walked around in disbelief, looking at it from all angles. This belonged to them, this charming house, this soil.

It was the pointed greenhouse that had initially attracted Rivka the most. It stood in the back of the garden, a transparent church of glass and wood, where seedlings would be raised, protected, and warmed. She knew very well that her idea of gardening was romantic — the question was how much patience she would have with all those unruly sprouts. But she was ready to try it, just like she was ready to set up her writing table and make some headway.

In the city, she’d gradually become too inhibited a writer. The garden’s indifference to everything that had to do with culture would ground her anxieties. That sycamore would instill a bit of sovereignty in her. The old European Tree Guide that she’d picked up in an antique store before the move would be the first thing to come to rest on the writing table.

She and Esse had, all in all, quite high expectations of nature. Rivka found that funny. Look at us catching up with our lesbian destiny, she said, hiking boots and a book about trees.

If it was their age or that feeling of impending doom that visited everyone from time to time, she didn’t know, but she saw her friends seeking consolation in the greenery of the forests. Those friends filled their balconies with plants, read books about trees, put on waterproof clothing from expensive brands, bought featherlight bikes, and took uneasily to the trails. They booked hiking trips to desolate hilly lands, slept under the stars. That resulted in a combination of suffering and surrender, of performance and acceptance. Reluctantly they came back to the inhabited world, they told everyone how much good nature had done them and bowed themselves once again over their laptops. Rivka had the drive to do it better, more thoroughly and less superficially. She saw herself sitting under her own sycamore, neither moving nor performing, becoming imbued with awe, the kind of respect for the earth that she forgot to show in the city.

Esse, she knew, saw herself in motion, weeding, digging, mowing, running through the fields, shooting photos of what was left of the villages around them — the toothless grin of a shopkeeper, an abandoned early medieval church.

The first morning, in a still messy bedroom, Rivka and Esse opened their eyes and looked at each other. For the first time in a year they made love right after waking up. When the dog started to whine, they took their coffee into the garden, which was already sunny and smelled like soil. Rivka thought she recognized it in Esse: the euphoria of something blissful and new.

She stroked the back of Esse’s upper arm, looked at the sycamore. “You know what we’ll do if the shadow finds us here?” she asked.

“We’ll give him a chair,” Esse said.

“Or a hammock, there between the sycamore and that other tree.”

“What kind of tree is that, have you already looked it up, you amateur botanist?”

“A sweet cherry,” Rivka gambled. 

It wasn’t a sweet cherry, as it turned out, but a plum tree that didn’t want to bloom.

That same day, the boxes still unpacked, Esse mowed the lawn and manically pulled all the weeds that she could find out of the earth. Rivka painted primer on the inside of the shed that would become her writing house, played with Snibbe, and took a nap on the couch, tired from the dialogue in her head. I live in the countryside, she told herself. Is this it? Is this good? It’s too early. This will be good, once your mind calms down.

When a glass of natural Slovenian wine was opened at the end of that second day from the delicatessen that Rivka might very well come to miss the most, they looked at the garden. It looked, other than the mowed grass, hardly different after a day of labor. A prayer without end.

Esse must have seen her tense jaw because she walked into the house and came back with a wrapped book. Thankful, Rivka let her hands glide across the red-white paper of her trusted bookstore before she tore it off. Walden by Thoreau, a new translation, hiply illustrated.

“Apparently this is what one needs to read,” Esse said, “when one migrates into nature.”

One. Rivka wrapped her arms around the legs of her sweet, cherished Esse. This sparkling creature had gotten her out of the city.

Thoreau would come to rest on the desk, just like Augustine, John Muir, Annie Dillard, and other hermits who had turned to nature, their backs to civilization. Rivka would have to think about what she was searching for in this farmland. She would have to read and write about it. She’d been so optimistic and impulsive that she’d promised a newspaper and a struggling literary journal an article. About seclusion, about having a garden, about the question of why everyone had to climb Mount Everest so badly these days, to be there on that summit with hundreds of other people longing for solitude in bougie down jackets. She’d hung the iconic photo that captured this tragedy on the humming fridge in the city. The silence seekers all wanted to touch the top of the world, stood in line for it as if they were in front of the Anne Frank house. In that photo Rivka saw both an encouragement to escape from civilization and a mockery of that pursuit.

Good thing Esse hadn’t come here to search for something. She sat there that evening like a bundle of bliss. Her nose was colored, her nails were black, this was going in the right direction.