The Elder Man Read online

  That seemed to stump Monica.

  “Not to mention,” added Van conversationally, “and you can call me an old paranoid fart, I really don’t mind, but any simpleton can raise a pig and make sausages by himself on his two acres of land. The amount of infrastructure and middlemen required to import quinoa from Peru on the other hand… No, livestock husbandry is one of the most essential things human kind has ever learned, and I should be sorry to see it disappear. It is the monstrous excesses we see nowadays that are the problem.”

  “So what’s the solution?” asked Ella.

  “I wish I knew. Diet and ecology are too complex a topic to have a simple one-fits-all solution. But eating less meat, and better meat, fed off the land as much as possible, is my choice, at least. It worked for a few million years. It can’t be that bad.”

  “So are you saying that we should all go back to living like in the Middle Ages?” asked Meintje.

  “Goodness, no,” said Van emphatically. “It was a perfectly wretched time to be around.”

  “How do you know? You weren’t there,” said Maja. “You are not that old.”

  “Oh,” said Van, winking, “much, much older. Absolutely, disgustingly ancient.”

  She snorted her tea through her nose she laughed so hard.

  “No, no,” said Van, resuming his previous sentence, “the last couple of centuries brought about a lot of good things. Human rights, amazing medical and surgical achievements, widespread literacy, an understanding of sanitation, microbiology. But what do we do with all this knowledge? Nothing. We go on poisoning earth, streams, and sky regardless, because acting in any other way would be inconvenient. I don’t diss the new knowledge at all. I just don’t think we should condemn all the old ways as barbaric, ignorant, and unenlightened. There is wisdom in all ages. If the old ways lasted so long, it is also because they were sustainable. Trouble is there’s seven billion of us now.”

  There was much shaking of heads and grumblings around the table.

  “Oh, lighten up, I think this is a good century, all things considered,” said Edith.

  “Of course it is,” said Van.

  “We invented lots of good things,” said Frederic.

  “Toilet paper,” said Meintje.

  “Antibiotics,” said Mark.

  “Uh, Spotify, hello?” said Josefine.

  “Good mattresses,” said Edith.

  “Tampons,” said Monica.

  “Good quality replaceable saw blades,” said Van.

  “Affordable public transport,” said Armin.

  “Meh, nah, we don’t have that stuff here,” said Van, causing some laughter. “Vibrators,” he added, which caused considerably more laughter.

  “Van!” squealed Allie.

  “Well,” he said, “as a cure for hysteria, they are an improvement to anything we had before, trust me.”

  Chapter Four

  Wednesday

  Armin

  That night Armin woke up in pitch-dark, with a full bladder and a longing for a regular indoor toilet, one that didn’t require a sleepy, bed-warm man to get dressed, find a flashlight, and walk across half a hillside in the middle of the fucking night to go and relieve himself at the nearest outhouse.

  He fumbled for his phone and checked the time. It was four in the morning.

  Fuck it, he thought despondently. I am a man, ain’t I? I have a cock, and this place is full of trees, and who’s gonna be around to see at this god-forsaken time of night?

  He opened the door very quietly like a thief, padded as stealthily as a cat in the not-quite-darkness—the moon was small but shone bright enough—out of his diminutive cottage and along a flower bed and across a path, and at the nearest tree, he smartly lowered his boxers, extracted his cock, and let go with a sigh of relief.

  No sooner had the first drops hit the bole of the unidentified tree than a hair-raising, bloodcurdling unearthly shriek cut through the night like the vengeful cry of the restless dead or a banshee screaming for human blood.

  “Wha… wai—I…”

  He stuffed his cock back in, splashing pee all over himself, and rushed back into the palace as fast as he could fly.

  He slammed the door behind him and stood frozen, panting wildly. The scream was repeated, even closer. It rose and waned, and it was no mortal voice, but a Black Rider’s wail, right out of the Lord of the Rings.

  “I’m sorry,” he yelled out of the small window. “I’m sorry, okay? I won’t do it again!”

  There was silence outside. The forest seemed to hold its breath in, waiting. Minutes passed, and Armin finally dared move again.

  Jesus Christ, what a place. What a fucking nightmare of a place. Even the trees are demons!

  He mopped himself more or less clean with a wet wipe from his toilet bag and plunged back into bed, pulling the duvet over his head and the pillow too, for good measure.

  He was not so sure that he might not grab a teddy bear from the shelf.

  It was so late when he woke up again that he almost missed breakfast. The nightly shriek seemed like a stupid bad dream, and Armin made no mention of it, but Van gave him a thoughtful look over his coffee and a small amused grin.

  “Spooky dreams last night, kiddo?” he asked, and Armin had the uneasy feeling that the older man knew exactly what had happened.

  When they wandered to the building place that morning, chatting amiably, full of coffee and pastries, they were a bit surprised to find that all the tarps had been folded away.

  “Gather round, children,” said Van, and they all formed a dutiful circle.

  Maja hugged him tight around his middle—she really was a ridiculously loving and loveable little girl—and unlike Armin the day before, Van was completely unfazed by the hug. Her two elder sisters had skipped breakfast and were nowhere to be seen.

  “It’s been a few years since some of us were called children, I bet,” said Mark.

  “We are all children in the eyes of the gods,” said Van with a mock-pompous tone. “Very well, everyone. Now you all know how to use a tarp to make cob. Neat, efficient, very controlled. Tarps. One of the best inventions in the modern world. You can make cob of excellent quality with a tarp, and it’s easy on your back.”

  “Oh, is it?” groaned Meintje in one of her rare contributions to the general talk.

  “Well, like all things, you’ve got to get the hang of it. Next time we use tarps, remind me to work with you. If your back hurts, you are doing something wrong. We’ll fix that,” said Van. “Anyway. We’ll do more tarp-work in the next days. But today, we’ll try the pit system. It’s a good way to make a lot of cob very fast. But it makes for messy work and very wet cob, so it’s not always great. Still, if you have a fine, warm, drying weather, like today, and a lot of plain wall to build, that’s a handy way to do it. Closer to the old system, you know, when they just mixed cob in the backyard. They’d use cattle to trample it. The fresh manure just made the mix better of course. That’s how we did it before they invented tarps,” he said, looking down to Maja, who was still hanging around his waist. “When I was a young cobber, around the time of the Crusades.”

  Maja giggled, and he pinched her nose.

  “Come on, we’ll need a whole lot of earth and water in this pit. If you make very wet cob, you want to be extra careful to add enough sand or coarse gravelly soil, or it will crack something cruel. And at the same time, watch that you don’t add too much straw, or it will be too clumpy. It can be tricky to judge. Armin, you are the youngest stud here, so you’ll have to do the heavy work with me. Grab a bucket and start filling the pit. Orange clay from that pile and that coarse brown ground from that mound, in layers. We’ll add water as we go and more in the end.”

  Oh fucking great, thought Armin, who had always been rather on the weedy side, had never at any point in his life thought of himself as a stud, and had been shut indoors for almost a year doing intensive online research, during which time he had never lifted anything heavier than a six-pac
k of beer.

  The “pit” was a shallow bowl dug into the soil where the tarps had been spread the day before, maybe five meters across, its edges raised with the excavated topsoil. Armin could only guess that Van had dug it single-handedly before breakfast.

  He took the bucket in hand, tottered over to the pit, barely managed to tilt the heavy contents over the edge, and almost pitched headlong down after it.

  “Whoa, that’ll be the death of you,” said Van, not teasingly but in a cool, matter-of-fact way. “Don’t try to lift it by main force of arms. Use your legs and your whole back here, waist to shoulder, and make it swing, like this. Stand aside.” He swung an even heavier bucket with an almost lazy, effortless ease, first backwards then in an upwards arch around his hip, and the whole contents flew out and landed neatly in the very middle of the pit, as if the clay had been trained to play tricks.

  Wow, thought Armin. Van was much older than him, and he was absolutely not bulging with muscle anywhere. He had powerful shoulders and arms, but he was not the sort of built, sculpted guy you saw at gyms or in the magazines. He was not fat, not even plump or chubby, but he looked, well, comfortable, easy in a well-lined skin, a man who worked hard and also ate well.

  Armin was not exactly bristling with male pride, but even so, this was a little humbling.

  “Come on. Let me see you doing it right,” said Van. “I don’t want you to do yourself an injury.”

  Armin, both nervous and determined not to disgrace himself in front of a whole bunch of much older people, put his back into it. He had to try a few times before he got the hang of that deceptively simple swipe, twist, and lift, and learned to use the velocity of that quick swing to send the heavy clay flying precisely where he wanted it. Once he got the gist of it, though, it was remarkably satisfactory, and he began to make good time in his task. And Van’s approving nod and smile had warmed him up through and through.

  “I don’t see why lifting heavy buckets should be the province of young men,” said Monica and came to help.

  “Be my guest,” said Van, handing her a full bucket, which she nearly dropped.

  “Show me again, that lifting trick,” she said. Van showed her, with endless patience and real concern. He obviously didn’t want anyone to get hurt, but also he seemed to think that teaching them how to use their whole body to accomplish heavy physical labor gracefully and efficiently was as important as teaching them the basics of natural building.

  Still, she’s making quite a big production of it, isn’t she? She’s all over the man. I am surprised Allie is not stepping in. If he were my husband, I sure would.

  Between the three of them, they started filling up the pit fast enough, with an occasional clash of swung buckets and one close miss, as Monica almost sliced Armin’s legs in half with a shovel while refilling. Frederic came over and helped. Josefine and Sofia appeared, looking sleepy and pink—they had obviously slept in—and were put to work carrying water. Mark started piling clay and ground in the buckets. Everybody else started threading and sloshing about in the pit.

  This batch of cob was much, much wetter than what they had done yesterday, and within minutes, they were all more or less covered in mud and straw. Tar and feathers came to mind. It was gruesome, but the children thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Michel was utterly fearless, and Maja was worse. When Josefine lifted her up and dunked her upside down in the sloshing mud, it was the end of all attempts at serious, studious behavior.

  They all became more or less covered in filth by the end. Jade the black hound wandered into the area, looked critically at them, and wandered off again in disgust, on one of his mysterious rambles.

  “Well done,” said Van, laughing, when they exited the pit looking like a line of half-baked golems. “We’ll make cobbers out of ye, yet. We will let it rest over lunch and let some of the water drain out from under. That’s why we don’t use a tarp for this. Come, go give yourself a quick wash before you scare off all the woodland creatures. See you at lunch.”

  Armin gave himself a quick rinse under a hose, fetched a clean t-shirt from the palace, and he was walking back down to the open-air kitchen, ready to eat seven pizzas and a couple of cakes and having an uneasy craving for rare steak, when a needle of pure fire pierced the bottom of his foot.

  Oh shit! Oh shit, I’m fucked.

  I knew it. I knew it.

  Walk barefoot, they said. It will be fun, they said. Fucking tree-huggers. Zealots. Forest lunatics, he thought, hopping on his unhurt foot, looking for somewhere to sit and examine the injury. He prayed it was nothing poisonous.

  “Oh, there, the Easter bunny,” called a voice behind him, and he turned to see Van coming down the path with a tool box, surrounded by a cloud of smoke. To Armin’s astonishment, he was smoking a cigar. The turn and surprise made him lose his balance, and he almost toppled over in a hedge of raspberries, getting some prickles stuck into his ass, for good measure.

  “I—got—something in my foot,” said Armin, grimacing with pain.

  “Well, stay put then. Quit hopping about. Sit down, and let me see.”

  Armin finally flopped down, plonking his butt on the path unceremoniously, and pulled his left foot onto his right knee. Van came to squat by him, grinning, brutally unconcerned it seemed to Armin, and took the hurt foot in his hands. Armin was a little perturbed by the direct, uncomplicated physical contact and even more by the cloud of cigar smoke. He did his best to breathe away from it.

  Van’s palms were callused, his fingernails worn and chipped with rough work. But the hands were both steady and gentle, very warm.

  Van leaned down to look closer and plucked something invisible from somewhere close to Armin’s big toe.

  “There,” he said. “A chestnut spine. They are a bit of a hazard around here, but seldom lethal. You might still live.”

  “I—what?” said Armin, who had to bend down and examine Van’s fingertip closely to see the spine. It was so minuscule he had to prod it to make sure it was there. Van grinned and flicked it off toward the raspberries.

  “That can’t have been it. It’s too small. It was excruciating!” But on close examination, he could find nothing else in his foot, and when he stood gingerly on it, there was no pain at all.

  “Let’s go,” said Van.

  “Should I not disinfect it?” he asked.

  “Oh, dear, sure. Actually I’d amputate at the knee, just to be on the safe side. Don’t worry. I have a saw right here. It’ll be quick.” He waved the tool box meaningfully. “There. Rub it with this.” He picked a small feathery leaf from a weed sprouting at the side of the path. Armin took the leaf and scowled.

  “Achillea,” said Van. “Yarrow. Blutstillkraut, for you literal Teutonic types. It’s antiseptic, styptic, and analgesic. The leg might still be saved, if you act quick.”

  He grinned and walked off in the direction of the building site and the kitchen, shaking his head.

  Armin sniffed. He really thought this was no joking matter. But finally he tentatively rubbed the leaf on the spot where he thought the thorn had been—there was no wound to be seen, and nothing to be felt, so it was hard to tell—leaving a green smudge with a pungent smell on it, and followed Van down the path.

  ****

  Van

  Armin was already sitting at lunch when Van arrived at the table after fixing a limping wheelbarrow at the building site. The table was abuzz with talk. The Danes were their usual bright selves, the two elder girls having finally decided to grace their table. They were fond of their beds in the mornings. It was understandable, but it did not suit Van. Although people came here to learn and paid for the privilege, they were also all supposed to pull their weight if the workshop goals were to be reached. Something would have to be done.

  Monica was deep into talk with Allie—Van caught something about workplace harassment and pay equality. Allie, who for most of her adult life had worked with Van, splitting profits exactly in half, seemed a little ill a
t ease, and Van moved on very quickly. It was the kind of discussion where a man couldn’t possibly say anything right anyway. Rebekka and Meintje were engaged in a rather more promising talk about historical sites of the region.

  “Wherever you go, wherever, it’s all an historical site here, really,” said Rebekka, which really summed it up. “You really can’t get an idea in a week. You could come and stay at my place, a few weeks or the whole summer. I have the space. There’s so much to see…”

  Armin sat between Ella and Edith in front of Mark. Van sat down between the Americans. They had left him the head of the table.

  Of course they did. You’d think I’m their grandfather. Goodness, I do grow tired of this shit at times.

  “So, you are Dutch, right?” asked Mark.

  “Me? Nein, ich bin Deutsch. German. Well, Dutch, too, on my father’s side. But I always lived in Germany, with my mother.”

  “Ah, still, that explains the height. We were in Amsterdam last year for a month, and goodness me, they are all as tall as trees,” said Edith, filling her bowl with asparagus soup.

  Armin smiled, politely.

  “Where in Germany, if I may ask?” added Mark.

  “Er, Frankfurt mostly. Lately.”

  “So you are a journalist,” Edith said with great interest.

  “Yeah. Freelance,” said Armin, chewing a piece of bread.

  “And are you always writing about sustainable lifestyle topics and such?”

  “We-ell,” said Armin, hesitating. He took another bite of food, mostly, thought Van, to give himself time to think. “I take what comes my way, really.” Then he nimbly turned the conversation away from himself by asking, “So how come two Americans, in France, learning to make cob houses?”