Ode to the Platteland
The Twin - for which Gerbrand Bakker won the 2010 International Dublin Literary Award - is a slow, complex story, narrated from the perspective of the unassuming Helmer van Wonderen. Helmer lives on his father’s farm in the heart of the Dutch countryside, the platteland. After the tragic death of his twin brother Henk over four decades ago, Helmer gave up his dreams of studying literature in Amsterdam. Psychologically dominated by his father, he returned to the family farm, where he has worked ever since.
At the beginning of the novel, a pair of boys canoeing past the farm remark that it seems to be frozen in time. Indeed, almost nothing has changed since Henk’s death. Helmer has performed the same tasks, eaten the same food, and talked to the same neighbours and farmers and delivery drivers for decades. An unused cottage which once served as living quarters for live-in farmhands is still standing in the same place, rotten and overgrown.
Helmer’s mind is locked in the past. Often, during a conversation with someone, he will be asked or discuss something which triggers a memory, at which point Helmer (the narrator) will digress from the present-day to explain this memory. These are the moments in which he is warmest and most open. The story will seamlessly jump between the present day into Helmer’s memories. To the person he is talking with, Helmer must seem idle-minded and impossible to read; there is no way for them to know what he is thinking. It’s a very convincing portrait of a repressed farmer stuck in his thoughts.
The only addition to the farm that could be said to Helmer’s is a pair of donkeys. They have no names; “I couldn’t think of any names and after a while it was too late, they had already become ‘the donkeys’.” (22). They share his quiet endurance, stubbornly taking up their burdens without complaint. All of Helmer’s repressed memories and dreams breed resentment and paranoia, and when these threaten to overwhelm him, he finds comfort in feeding and playing with his donkeys. A common task that he repeats in the novel is to feed them cut-up sugar beets, scratch their ears, and listen to them snort with pleasure. It’s both a comfort and a security.
The idea of a farm in which nothing happens, which is frozen in time and in which nothing ever changes, is also reflected in the novel’s Dutch title, Boven is het stil, “It is quiet upstairs.” But changes do come to the farm, and it is these which cause Helmer to open up about his memories and begin to assert some control over the direction of his life.
The first of these changes is the opening scene of the book, in which Helmer’s ailing father - whose mind is crumbling - has his room moved upstairs:
I’ve put Father upstairs. I had to park him on a chair first to take the bed apart. He sat there like a calf that’s just a couple of minutes old, before it’s been licked clean: with a directionless, wobbly head and eyes that drift over things. (3)
Though simple and unadorned, the writing here has great effect. This is exactly how a farmer might describe it, telling us something about the narrator. By comparing him with a newborn calf, Helmer not only captures the woozy bewilderment of his senile father, but also something of his mortality.
The move upstairs is a significant shift in who has the power between Helmer and his father. It is the first of a series of changes that make Helmer recognise the possibility of life being different. There are other changes too. A family friend sells his farm and moves to Denmark. A delivery driver dies and is replaced with another one: the idea of a new driver is just as strange and shocking to Helmer as the somewhat arbitrary death of the old one. Finally, the book itself is structured around the passing of the seasons, which itself determines farm life. And as the book passes out of winter and into spring, so do we witness a thawing of the mindset that has kept Helmer locked inside his own grievances. This transition is shown by Helmer taking up new season-specific tasks and doing season-specific activities - such as ice skating - as well as the emergence of new animals and vegetation.
The most important change is the arrival of his dead twin brother’s wife, Riet. She has brought her son from her second marriage - also called Henk - to live on the farm against his will. Nobody gets along. Helmer does most of the work, barely looking after his father and trying to muster up the courage to tell off Henk Jr for not doing his tasks. But having Henk Jr around causes Helmer to finally open up about his relationship to his dead twin brother.
Helmer always felt extremely close to Henk since birth, and always lived in his shadow; Henk was always the more active, popular, and gifted brother. Their father always clearly favoured Henk. And on the night that Riet met Henk, Helmer was standing right next to him. Being twins, they look exactly the same, and their father admits that no-one could ever tell them apart. Yet for some reason, just from a look across the room, it is Henk that Riet fell in love with, not Helmer.
Helmer’s separation from Henk was a gradual process that was completed when Henk died, but had already started when Henk met Riet. As Henk and Riet fell in love Henk spent less and less time with his brother. One day, after Riet had moved in, Helmer tried to get in bed with Henk - like the two had done as young boys scared of the thunder - only for Henk to angrily send him away. Whereas they had first been “two boys with one body”, now they “had become a pair of twins with two bodies.” (161).
The idea of the two twins being one is also powerfully reinforced by one of Helmer’s memories of a particularly cold winter in which the boys were taken for a drive across the frozen Gouw Sea. Helmer and Henk are terrified of their father’s driving, and terrified the car might fall through the ice. They cling to each other in the backseat, merging into one:
…we crept even closer together on the back seat until we were like Siamese twins joined from the sides of our feet to our shoulders. If Father was brave enough for the big adventure, we would face it as one man, without fear, silently. Father started the car, it didn’t turn over until the fourth or fifth attempt. I no longer had any sense of my own skin, my own muscles, my own bones… It was only when we saw that Mother could see us, just before Father drove the car up the boat ramp in the harbour, that we let go of each other and became Hank and Helmer again. (120-1).
Because they were like one person, the loss of Henk is a psychological “halving” for Helmer. He does not cope well with this, and his father does not ever provide the affection or consolation necessary for Helmer to begin to develop his own sense of self-worth. The only consolation he receives is from Jaap, an older farmhand that lives and works with the family. The two grow close, with Jaap becoming something between a friend and a father. He teaches Helmer to swim and skate, and gives him beer and cigarettes. Finally, Helmer confides in Jaap that he feels diminished and upset about losing his brother to Riet, and Jaap reassures him:
‘I don’t know exactly how it works with twins,’ he said, ‘but I can imagine them having to split up eventually.’... He checked the trembling of my lip by kissing me on the mouth the way you might kiss your grandfather on the mouth once in your life when your grandmother has died. (167).
After Henk and Riet marry, Helmer moves to Amsterdam to study literature. That is when Henk’s tragic death happens. Not long after, their mother also passes away. Not even a semester into his studies, Helmer is ordered back by his father to help out on the family farm. Traumatised by his brother’s death, he is too powerless to speak up against this.
While Henk’s death explains why Helmer feels so empty, it does not explain everything about his troubled relationship with his father. Mr van Wonderen is far from an affectionate man. Early in the novel, Helmer recalls that his father would round up the stray cats that lived around the farm to drown them in sacks. In the present day - as a mad old man - he repeatedly backs over a sack of stray kittens with his car, an incident which makes it clear that he is not doing this purely for pest control, but also derives some kind of pleasure out of it. Helmer also views Jaap with distrust, calling him a strange man, and admonishing Helmer for kissing him on the mouth (“Men don’t kiss”).
Helmer is deeply moved by the kiss on the mouth because he never received that kind of affection from his father. That is one of his deep resentments which he keeps bottled up. But is that all there was to the kiss?
Many things in this book indicate that Helmer is gay. There’s no suggestion in the text that Helmer and Jaap had any kind of sexual or romantic relationship; even when they kissed, Jaap impelled him towards the door immediately afterwards. But it’s implied that Helmer continued to visit him before and after, and there is definitely an erotic tinge to their relationship. The two go swimming naked, for example (I suspected this might be a “rural Dutch thing”; a rural Dutchwoman has told me it isn’t). While swimming naked, Helmer falls over and cuts his leg, and Jaap bandages it with his underwear. Jaap - a grown man - plies Helmer - a teenage boy - with beer and cigarettes. Helmer also frequently points out how awkward and self-conscious he feels around Jaap. This could merely be his shy adolescence - or it could be sexual or romantic desire.
There is admittedly nothing which concludes that Jaap and Helmer are gay. Being gay explains a lot about Helmer’s life, though. To begin with, he repeatedly mentions feeling like half a person. Clearly this is referring to him being one half of a pair of twins, but he might also feel like half a person because of his inability to move with ease in a family and community that is (presumably) not understanding of a gay man. Being gay would also explain the seemingly instinctual dislike of his father towards him. And if Helmer is gay and somehow projects that in the way he carries himself, it might also explain why Riet was drawn to Henk when she first saw the two identical-looking twins across the room. Perhaps not even Helmer knows he is gay, either lacking the ability to express this, or having repressed it.
With the gay subtext in mind, other events in this book take on a different character, such as the possibility of an incestuous angle. Helmer’s love for Henk is clearly brotherly, but at other times there appears to be a sexual component to it. Helmer’s only sexual experience appears to be spying on Riet and Henk having sex, and masturbating to it. On the one hand, Helmer - seeing himself as one person with Henk - could be thinking of himself having sex with Riet. But what if Helmer is actually masturbating to his brother? What if his sexual confusion has caused him to confuse brother and lover?
One other event from his childhood seems to encourage this reading. The first night Riet stays at the farm, Henk sleeps on the floor, and as Helmer looks down at his half-naked body, he is flustered:
I couldn’t think of anything to say, I had trouble breathing, something I put down to the oppressive heat. The window was wide open, the curtains weren’t drawn, a full moon was shining straight into the room. Henk was lying half under a sheet, his upper body bared and bluish. He was beautiful, so beautiful. (88).
At other points in the book, Helmer observes various young men sitting in that same position - half sitting, half lying - with some amount of chest exposed, including Henk Jr lying on the couch and Jaap in the farmhand’s cottage. The observation of Jaap’s body in particular comes after the episode where he masturbates to Henk and Riet, and his body is contrasted with that of Henk’s: “This was a much larger body, a strange body, not a body you could simply mould yourself to.” (165). Whereas masturbation is an act directed at the self, for pure gratification of one’s own pleasures, sex is other-directed. At its most intimate, it is the union of two people in an act of love. By noting the strangeness of Jaap’s body, our attention is drawn to the sexual undertones of the scene, including the possibility of a sexual relationship between Jaap and Helmer.
There are also the situations where Helmer attempts to sleep in the same bed as Henk. This is justified initially because the two brothers are scared of the thunder. It then becomes a habit, until Henk and Riet move in together. Helmer emulates this with Henk Jr, who even tries to get in the shower with him, though he plays it off as a kind of joke. Despite their contrasting and clanging personalities, there does appear to be some inexplicable warmth to their relationship. This kind of behaviour still seems unlikely though, unless one or both are gay.
As Helmer begins to open up about his relationship with Henk, he begins to realise that he doesn’t have to stay on the farm. Inspired by the family friend, he buys a map of Denmark and spends his evening memorising the names of towns and islands. But before he can give up the family farm, it is necessary for his father to die - and for himself. His own “death” happens on two occasions, both times through “merging”. Merging not only results in the creation of a new thing - and with it new possibilities - it also means the death of those being merged.
The first death by merging happens on the Gouw Sea, when Helmer and Henk cling to each other in the back seat. In becoming one with Henk, Helmer gave up some of his own identity, and was subsequently halved when Henk died. The second merging comes when Helmer tries to save a drowning sheep. They are saved only by the intervention of Henk Jr, who pulls them out of the mud, but not before he becomes one with the sheep: “I think I can feel its heartbeat, a furious pounding, but it could be my own.” (203). He compares these events more directly when Henk Jr asks what he used to do with Henk. This question takes Helmer by surprise. He withdraws into his memories to reflect on this question:
Hang around. Stand, walk, sit. Stare at the yellow water lilies in the canal, watch clouds drift slowly - always slowly - by. Watch the water bulging in the ditch. When we closed our eyes to listen to the larks, the squeaking of the windmill’s greased axle and the wind blowing through the struts, time stood still. All kinds of things flicked back and forth under our eyelids and it was never dark. It was orange. When it was summer and we were in another country here - almost like America - nothing else existed. We existed and even stronger than the smell of warm water, sheep droppings, and dried-out thistles was our own smell. A sweet, sometimes chalky smell of bare knees and bare stomachs. Sitting on the itchy grass. When we touched each other, we touched ourselves. Feeling someone else’s heartbeat and thinking it’s your own, you can’t get any closer than that. Almost like the sheep and me, merging together just before it drowned me. (217).
Two mergings: Helmer with Henk, then Helmer with the sheep. Both are kinds of deaths: the first death condemns Helmer to work on the farm, the second finally frees him. And the hooded crow which visits the family each night is a portent of his father’s death, the one which offers freedom to move away from the farm.
Having pulled himself out of his repression and his stupor, Helmer works up the courage to tell his father how selfish he was to make Helmer stay on the farm. He does this while his father is asleep - even still, it’s a hugely courageous act, being the first time Helmer has ever spoken for himself, on behalf of himself. It turns out his father is only pretending to sleep; he’s actually awake, and later confronts Helmer about the accusations. Helmer’s father - not exactly an open or expressive man - is dismayed. He points out that Helmer never actually said anything about not wanting to run the farm. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, how could he possibly have known if Helmer never said anything, nor expressed in any way that he didn’t want to stay on the farm?
In a book that is mostly driven by the routines and chores of Helmer around the farm - and gibbering ramblings of his mad fathers - this conversation is the most open and frank discussion the two have, which makes it one of the most important events of the book. Yet it leaves us with more questions than answers. Until now, Helmer’s father is understood to be essentially insane: he talks about irrelevant things and is sometimes barely capable of producing a full sentence. Yet by fooling Helmer (by pretending to be asleep) and having such a lucid conversation about his failings as a father, he actually seems to be of a sounder mind than we were initially led to believe. It’s entirely possible that Helmer’s father is just having a particularly lucid moment. But given that the story is related entirely from Helmer’s perspective, and given that Helmer has very deep resentments about his father which he cannot move past, it’s also entirely possible that his father is not as crazy or unreasonable as he makes him out to be and Helmer is both a cruel son in his father’s decline, and an unreliable narrator.
Dead kittens aside, Helmer’s father isn’t a particularly affectionate or caring person. Is Helmer any of these things either, or do we just pity him? Indeed, the story begins with Helmer moving his father upstairs into a small, cramped room, against his will. He hides his father when Riet and the next-door neighbour (Ada) come around. He sometimes refuses to feed his father, admonishing him like a spoiled child. Helmer is clearly upset at how his life has turned out, and is definitely capable of holding a grudge. He also admits being the sort of person that becomes overwhelmed or fearful, which causes him to see things “that couldn’t possibly be there”:
I’ve been scared all my life. Scared of silence and darkness. I’ve also had trouble falling asleep all my life. I only need to hear one sound I can’t place and I’m wide awake. Still, I’ve never really stopped to think about what happens outside at night. Of course, in the old days I used to see all kinds of things pass the window, even though I knew that the window was high above the gravel path. I saw shoulders: the tense, hunched shoulders of someone climbing up the front of the house. Like a anther, sometimes with one arm hooked over the window ledge. Then I’d listen to Henk breathing next to me or later imagine him asleep in the bedroom next to mine, and the shoulders or whatever else I thought I had seen would disappear. In the back of my mind I Knew that I saw things that couldn’t possibly be there. (24-5).
This passage is initially presented as a justification for a few inexplicable things that Helmer experiences, such as a red bicycle light that appears outside his house and a phone-call that he picks up, only to hear silence down the other end. Both turn out to be Riet, foreshadowing herself before she makes her reappearance at the farm. This has a perfectly rational explanation, it does not change the way in which Helmer’s fear and paranoia distort his life, and this could equally be seeping into his narration.
In various parts of the book, Helmer acknowledges the unreliability of his memories. He refers to a memory he can’t possibly have, of looking up at his mother’s face while he is being breastfed. He also remarks on some memories being incomplete or hazy, such as when he skated with Jaap. As the entire book is narrated from his perspective, that means the story - as we are told it - could all very well be distorted by his resentments and paranoias. Helmer talks about the memories which he knows aren’t true; what about those which he doesn’t know? Did his relationship with his father ever play out like he thought it did? Was it really obvious to anyone but himself that he didn’t want to work on the farm?
It makes you wonder to what extent his father was actually going crazy or whether Helmer - having finally reversed the power dynamic between them - is now seizing the opportunity to make his father’s life miserable, under the pretext of his father being old and mad. Helmer is a highly repressed person. He is probably gay, in a time and place where they wouldn’t have been easy. His mind is locked in the traumatic years of his childhood. We’re told very little of what happened between then and the present day from which the book is narrated - probably because to him, nothing has happened. The farm is frozen in time, and Helmer with it, all of his fears and failures and anger towards his father bottled up since Henk’s death. The possibility of Helmer being an unreliable narrator adds another layer to this story. The truth of Henk and Jaap and Riet can never be properly told, only gestured at.
The Twin ends with a puzzling epilogue, set after Helmer’s father’s death, in which Helmer travels around Denmark with Jaap. It’s a strange ending I don’t quite understand. While Jaap obviously played an enormous role in his life, he was only in it for a relatively short period of time, and until this point doesn’t appear except in Helmer’s recollections from the 60s. Helmer is essentially a recluse and there is no other indication as to where Jaap ended up, so how is this reunion possible? The narrative voice here even feels off, like it’s being told by a different person.
On the face of it, this is merely a story about a repressed Dutch farmer standing up to his dying father. But The Twin is an evasive, allusory work, packed with double-meanings that cannot be neatly disentangled. While its quiet writing and slow pace won’t be to everyone’s liking, it has a wonderful sense of place - the Dutch platteland - and is narrated by an incredibly convincing character, who relates his life to you with the careful touch of a farmer who knows the proper names of every bird and tree and moves - like they do - with the slow, fatalistic turn of the seasons.
This is the Dutch word for the countryside. Its literal meaning is “flat land”.