This Translation Tuesday, the spotlight is on an unflinching portrayal of bereavement from Dutch author Dieuwke van Turenhout, brought into the English by the award-winning translator Michele Hutchison.
Nicole’s young daughter is in hospital, hooked to machines that keep her alive. The prognosis is that she will soon die. Nicole is overwhelmed with a vicious grief, but a hospital is no place to voice the waves of anguish, panic and rage that churn and tear inside her. The blank pretence and sterile platitudes she must adopt serve only to heighten her desolation. But at her very lowest, a moment of connection with a fellow parent shows the beginning of a path forward. By cutting through suffocating politesse, she is able, finally, to confront the impending death of her child.
She passes the smokers, her fists clenched. Every afternoon, she makes her way through their fumes, dizzy from the hospital air and her faltering breath. Beyond the smokers, she sniffs disdainfully in disgust and then fills her lungs. She doesn’t give a damn that sometimes, walking with her eyes closed, she almost knocks over one of them. She doesn’t want to see them either, this good-natured puffing herd, choosing to smoke themselves to death, to wilfully destroy their organs.
Today had been a good day, as in ‘not so bad’—the nurse’s voice had sounded cheerful. And even though it could have just been the nurse’s mood, she dialled Hugo’s number right away in the stairwell.
As she says hello to Hugo, she looks up. She finds herself amid a group of people waiting around. The boy in the wheelchair is on his own. His blanket has slipped from his torso, he moves a hand slowly over the folded edge. She scans the smokers, no sign of the man with the drooping shoulders, the one she presumes is his father. Although she doesn’t want to, she makes eye contact with the boy. Now she knows he has no eyelashes or brows. Blue worms run across the boy’s hands, pointing to his skinny fingers.
‘Excuse me, would you mind…’
Where’s your father?
‘My father? He’s been dead for years.’
His words fall into the empty well into which all words disappear these days.
The boy taps on the blanket with his intubated hand. ‘Hereditary.’
One less parent whose heart will be torn out without anaesthetic. She nods as if she understands the boy’s condition, lifts the blanket and says: ‘Gee, well, good luck.’ In her haste to get away, she pushes aside a plump gentleman in an olive-green bomber jacket.
The car park is dark and deserted, the cars steel beds in an endless dormitory. She takes her running shoes out of the boot. In the light of the lamp, some colour appears. A red jacket, the last of the green on a bush, the blue around the P on the road sign.
She hates the fact she has a routine. She ties her laces too tightly, and leaves them like that. Now, with every step, she will feel that she has feet, feet that must obey her as she chases away dreams, tramples her nightmares for an hour, armed with nothing but a stitch and a healthy body.
Rays of moonlight point after her as she runs, leaving intensive care far behind.
In the beginning, she stomps hard. She needs force, friction, chafing. It takes a while to beat off her thoughts.
She stops in front of the forest. The trees breathe calmly, she sniffs deeply—hesitates for too long and suddenly becomes aware of everything. The silence, the moon, the smell of gold and brown. This is her favourite season. Her heart pounds, blood beats against her laces. She moves her toes to the beat, feels a rhythm in it and moves her ankles. In the light of the moon, she dances, hesitantly at first, then more and more vigorously, happy hardcore, the first music in weeks to find its way back into her memory. She pumps her elbows, chops with her hands, turns and shifts with her feet, until the moon disappears behind a cloud.
It is busy at the accommodation. Parents talk in hushed tones, a family with another child eats noisily from plastic trays. She greets acquaintances with a terse nod, determined to remember the outside chill on her cheeks. She averts her eyes when she senses a smile on her face. Here, everyone is struggling with prognoses and statistics. Her good day could ruin someone else’s.
When she turns around, she bumps into a man. He talks over her head into a vacuum. Only when he doesn’t move out of the way does she realise he’s actually talking to her: ‘… nice area, maybe I can take Charlize out for a walk, in her bed, or else later in a wheelchair.’
He’s new. Where are the volunteers when you need them? Again she tries to step past him, she has no room for him, or for his Charlize. The man keeps talking.
‘What did you say?’ she focuses on his face. The man is sloppily shaven and now tugging at a dreadlock.
‘… recently spotted in a village, just inside the Dutch border, in the Veluwe national park. First they were almost extinct, and now—for the second year in a row—one of them has entered the country. It would be a miracle if this one survives.’ Abruptly he falls silent.
Then a member of staff taps her shoulder and tells the man: ‘Here we believe in miracles.’ With a sense of relief she hands the man over to the professionals.
In the evening, the cold bites into her neck. There are no more smokers, visiting hours are over. The shops and restaurants in the hospital are closing. On impulse, she grabs a newspaper from a table. She can no longer read. The columns seem too long, the letters sharp knives on too small bodies, every word she reads is a waste of energy, a pyrrhic victory.
So she just looks at the pictures. The Pope waving a friendly hello to her, a white man in a dark suit shaking hands with another white man in a dark suit.
She has reached the picture of the wolf by the time she gets to the door to the disinfection chamber. The photo is grainy, but it is clearly a wolf. And it’s not even that skinny. It doesn’t look scared. Can wolves actually look scared? Or do they just put their tail between their legs?
She pulls blue covers over her shoes. Once she is sure that not a single hair is peeping out from under her cap, she disinfects her hands one last time.
Inside, a nurse is busy with IV bags. ‘Come, I’ll do it,’ she says.
The nurse looks up and nods.
She keeps her eyes on the little body, lying still, eyes closed. The different skin colour, the troubled breathing, the change to the lips: a mother sees everything.
‘I’ve just injected a saline solution, now I’m going to connect the antibiotics.’
She nods, gently rubbing the vein in her daughter’s neck. She regularly complains about it hurting when they flush the lines. The child’s face seems to relax a little.
‘I’m here,’ she says gently. ‘I’m here, everything’s OK.’ Quickly she disconnects the empty IV bag. The nurse picks it up as she checks the new one.
Once the drip is running, she bends over her daughter and holds her forehead to her cheek. How long ago it seems when she was a baby who could still be soothed by skin-on-skin contact. Somewhere there is still a photo of her, barely the length of a forearm, sleeping naked on her mother’s belly after she has just peed. In that photo, she is still a soft pink.
When the nurse has gone, she folds down the bedpost and pulls up the footboard. Her thoughts are grainy, like the photograph of the wolf. It’s hard to finish thoughts, now more than ever. ‘I used to have to read to you about Jelle and the moon every night. Every single night. Sometimes twice in a row.’ Her voice is muffled behind the face mask. She is silent. If she’d had her eyes open, would she have rolled them? She had done that once, and then she and Hugo had burst out laughing. I will never laugh at you again.
‘There’s a wolf. Probably a female wolf, a she-wolf.’ She rubs her ankles gently, resting her head against the bump of her knees under the blanket for a moment. When she talks, the monitor shows that the child’s breathing calms. ‘There weren’t any wolves left in the Netherlands, this is a scout. A female.’ She had said that already. ‘A she-wolf is strong, and smart.’ This is true, but it wasn’t what she wanted to say; she wanted to tell something about herself, something important, something about the past, the present and the future—but the words won’t come. ‘She-wolves will do anything for their cubs’. She looks at the child, at the mercy of the beeps from machines, reading her like doctors read screens and graphs. ‘Goodnight, sweetheart.’
In the disinfection chamber she peels off her protective clothing and throws everything in the bin. The newspaper is still under her coat, she rolls it up and slowly walks away.
The dreadlock is sitting alone in the dark living room. Moonlight reflects on a receding hairline. ‘Bites out of your hair,’ is what the child called it in Hugo’s case.
She knows how it will go. Name. Name of child. Child’s condition. What were the first symptoms, the later symptoms. Name of attending doctor. It’s a sick kind of speed dating.
She goes over to him anyway. A wolf, she thinks, is a pack animal. And here we believe in miracles.
‘Getting used to it?’
He looks up. ‘Can you get used to this?’
‘Yes… and no,’ she says. ‘This part.’ She nods at the dark living room. ‘You never get used to the other part though.’
She appreciates the fact he remains silent, which makes him different from others.
She puts the newspaper on the table. ‘There is news about the wolf.’
He puts his hand on the newspaper. She sees that he is holding a Bible. ‘Charlize says a fairy tale is only good if the Big Bad Wolf appears in it.’ She stands, momentarily surprised that she never realised before that the Big Bad Wolf is a male wolf. ‘Where I grew up, there were no wolves,’ he says.
She feels something in her emptiness, a shard of loss, pity.
‘The driver was talking on his phone,’ he says suddenly. ‘He didn’t even see her.’
Immediately she is a hologram again, with words falling through it.
‘How awful,’ she says. And: ‘She is in good hands here. This is the best hospital for children.’
Only when she reaches the door does she grab her phone and send a message. Hi Janna, when you’re on duty tomorrow: does the daughter of the new resident already have a donor card? Guy with the dreadlocks. Can you ask him?
Suddenly the man is behind her. ‘Have I scared you off?’ Horrified, she turns around. A dark spot in a dark room steps closer, closer than she is happy with, its face turning purple in the light of her phone. The dreadlock looks pained.
‘No.’ She hears herself sounding aggressive and rubs her eyes. ‘Good night.’
‘Mrs Visser? Do you know what this means?’ The doctor is leaning across the table, she sees his shadow in the white edge of her fingernails. It’s a wooden table, more like a kitchen table, though its surface is smooth and spotless. ‘Mrs Visser?’
Once she’s got a handle on the choking feeling in her throat, she looks at him. She focusses on the mole next to his left eye. ‘Three weeks to a month if we’re lucky,’ she says. The mole moves slightly.
‘If we’re lucky.’
Standing outside half an hour later, she can hardly remember anything of the conversation. Only this: only a miracle can save her child.
She takes a breath of air, dizzy once more. The boy in the wheelchair is there again, staring into the distance, across the car park. The man-who-is-not-his-father stands there forlornly. She studies the boy: no match.
It is at moments like this that she misses Hugo the most – his boyish grin, his muscular arms. In her mind’s eye, she sees him sitting along the A1 or the A7 motorways, in bright orange overalls, joking with his mates. He doesn’t always answer the phone when he’s with his new family.
A cold wind blows tears into her eyes as she searches her phone in vain for someone she can call without having to say anything.
Before she knows it, she is standing next to her car. She folds her arms and lays them on the roof, afraid she will suffocate in the emptiness that is growing inside her. She gasps, to die now, she thinks—the irony does not escape her—and she hangs her head, sheltered from the wind, shielded from daylight.
A world passes by, time presses against her ribs. She tries to think something, but when the thoughts rush in like wolves, tumbling over each other in their greediness, she grows cold inside, until the chill gushes through her in great waves. Her diaphragm squeezes and she vomits. Yellow streaks across the white paint.
Now I really am empty, she thinks.
She washes away the worst of it with her water bottle. She gurgles a few times and spits the water out like froth. Her throat still burns.
She kicks the tyre of her car. Again. Again. Harder. She yanks open the door but a long arm blocks the opening.
‘I don’t think that’s wise.’ His face is clean-shaven today, his skin no longer a greyish brown.
‘Fuck off.’ She lashes out at his arm. ‘Seriously, fuck off!’ She wants to duck under his arm, but feels his other arm around her shoulders and neck, ‘Let go of me!’
‘Calm down.’
She struggles, kicking backwards, trying to bite his hand, then slams her head back and feels with satisfaction that she has hit his chin full on. The pain in back of her head is vicious, but he doesn’t flinch. ‘What do you want, man?’ she snarls. ‘Leave. Me. Alone!’
‘I don’t want you to drive like that.’ He loosens his grip and turns her around.
She tears herself free and steps back, right into her own vomit, slipping in it. He grabs her just in time, by her elbow now. She gasps. ‘Don’t touch me.’ She manages to swallow back a curse.
Slightly dizzy, she turns away from him. Her heart is beating wildly, hammering against her chest, her temples. Why is he getting involved? She wipes some vomit from under her sole on the left front wheel. ‘Gross.’ She looks up but the dreadlock is already gone. A pang of shame wipes out all other feelings. She takes a few deep breaths in and out and then sits on the edge of the boot, her buttocks cold on the upholstery. She would indeed have run someone over. Preferably a whole class of matching donor children. Fifteen healthy lungs to choose from, or fourteen, say, if one was damaged by the impact. Thirteen, if the doctors botched one up.
Zero, if none of those children were on the donor register.
The anger disappears and the emptiness presses on her insides again. She puts on her running shoes, her fingers cold by the time she ties her laces. She wraps her dirty shoe in a plastic bag she finds. She is not dressed for running and she is not ready to go back to the accommodation—or the hospital.
The wind whistles as she slams the boot shut. The car park is busy, Friday afternoon bringing partners and siblings to the accommodation for the weekend. Smiling children, anxious parents. Leaves fly by indifferently. A grandfather struggles past with a full shopping bag, while grandma clasps a grandchild in her arms. The dreadlock is nowhere to be seen.
With a smack the wind blows the door shut behind her. The silence is overwhelming. She grabs her seatbelt and freezes. The man is next to her. He has tucked his dreadlocks into a black hairband, exposing small, slightly pointy elf-like ears. His hands are folded on his lap. He looks through the windscreen, seems to be studying a traffic sign, while making soft clicking noises with his mouth closed. There is nothing to show that he does not belong here. He turns his hands over, the light palms upwards, as if in prayer. She looks at her own fingers, squeezing the steering wheel.
She has no energy to send him away, to fight with him, she would…
‘I don’t have the energy for this,’ she says.
‘I understand.’ He moves his left hand as if to touch her briefly, then puts it back on his thigh.
Two holograms. One negative. Breath comes out of her mouth in white clouds. She could sit here forever, while computers match donors, surgeons operate, machines provide children with oxygen, wolves search for new habitats.
‘You can’t come. I… I’m going to look for the wolf.’
Silence.
She grips the steering wheel even harder, her knuckles white as if she is sick, out of her depth comes a maw, a maw that opens, that spits fire and acid, out of her nose and eyes, a shrieking beast that squeezes her throat until she leaps forward and begins to roar.
A warm hand on her back—first the beast keeps howling, but then it makes itself small, lashes out again viciously but cannot win, down, says the hand, back down, back into the depths, the darkness, hide behind the ribs, flee between the entrails.
There is a box of tissues on the dashboard, witness to a time the car was filled with biscuit and cake crumbs. Finally she blows her nose, embarrassed by the sound.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
Silence.
The hand has gone again. The warmth on her back remains.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
As she drives out from the car park, she glances quickly sideways at him.
‘Don’t you have to go see Charlize?’
‘Later.’
‘I’m Nicole.’
‘Travone.’
She focuses on the traffic, the low sun sharp as a knife. Only later, outside the city, when the meadows are staring at her, does she say, ‘Manouk is probably not going to make it.’ Now that she has said it, she knows it is true. Manouk is probably not going to make it. The maw remains silent. She is glad that Travone is sitting next to her, that she doesn’t know him, that he has heard her, and remained silent. He doesn’t start on about God, doesn’t try to talk to her about hope. She is glad that they are driving and that he cannot get out of the car.
The sun has disappeared behind the trees when she parks. The headlights briefly illuminate the Forestry Commission sign. Birds and leaves disappear into the darkness as she turns off the engine.
‘I thought you were going to go into the woods.’
She jumps, exchanging one darkness for another.
‘Not allowed. Only between sunrise and sunset.’
‘Oh…’ he doesn’t sound very surprised, ‘aren’t you going to look for the wolf?’
She looks at him. ‘I was lying.’ She tries to gulp back the sadness and shame.
He nods thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes lying is the kindest way out.’
She thinks of God and angels. Manouk in her bed. Sometimes lying is the kindest way out. Running away without really leaving someone.
She thinks of the fearless wolf, alone, somewhere in the Veluwe. Would she be afraid? Would she lie if she could?
For the first time in months she feels calm. The moment lasts forever and when it’s over, she doesn’t look away.
She opens the window on her side. A brisk wind blows her hair upwards. The smell of the autumnal forest fills the car. Slowly, she turns the key again.
She parks in the verge next to a fence. The meadow is empty, the colour slowly leaches into the ditch beside it, the clumps of grass turn grey and then dark.
In the far distance, she thinks she can see white dots, sheep perhaps, or migrating birds, who knows. The wind blows unfinished thoughts through her, like autumn leaves on a schoolyard; a wolf, Manouk, geese, Little Red Riding Hood warm in the belly of the sleeping beast, Manouk once more, sleeping, Little Red Riding Hood’s nameless, ignorant mother who at night embraces an unblemished daughter, purple scars on white skin, the empty belly of the wolf, the empty belly of the she-wolf.
Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
Dieuwke van Turenhout is a Dutch writer and recovering expat. A graduate of the Antwerp Writer’s Academy in 2015, she has published short stories in various national and international magazines and anthologies. Her work has also been performed on stage. Her debut collection, keeping elephants warm, (In de Knipscheer) was published in 2018.
Michele Hutchison is a prize-winning translator, editor and writer based in Amsterdam where she has lived since 2004. She translates fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, children’s books, and poetry. Her most recent translation, Virgula by Sasja Janssen, was published in 2024 by Prototype.