Grasshopper
Lotte Verbarendse explores the fragile boundary between care and control, and between nature and human intervention. Set in a quiet, almost surreal garden, the story follows a woman who has withdrawn from her past life to live entirely within her own self-made ecosystem.
Time had stood still in this garden. Deep roots were everywhere, but no growth had breached the surface. The seasons were untrustworthy; I only noticed spring in fickle grey buds. There was never any fruit. Sometimes small spinach leaves popped up, or carrots the size of a pinky toe. It had taken me years to get all these plants out of the ground. I had left my husband of twenty five years to be here on my own.
Outside my front garden, the land seemed to be growing well. Thick, moist layers of earth stretched for miles and sunk down deeply once you stepped into it. At the heel of the dunes, bushes blurred into each other. The town was behind my house. I couldn’t see it.
“My instincts made my limbs tremble, like a grasshopper, thin and puny, feeling the air change around her.”
Hunger still came every day, since I had chosen to only eat from my own land. I drank milk from crushed wheatgrass that I pulped in the blender. It was warm, watery and rough on my tongue. A splash deep in my stomach that quickly ebbed away. I only concerned myself with urgent things. When the shed door broke, the kitchen flooded, or lice overtook the weaker plants, I knew how to act. My instincts made my limbs tremble, like a grasshopper, thin and puny, feeling the air change around her.
A few months ago, I had taken on a student from the city as a volunteer. “You would love working together,” Pieter, her Sustainable Agricultural teacher, had said. Love was a delusional word, but being useful would do. He said these young people needed to experience the real world, instead of being clustered to their laptops, buying cappuccinos that look like pillows. My garden was not the real world, I didn’t want that.
I’d heard my then two-day-fresh volunteer say that the earth decays if you forget about it. If you forget about the injustice and wrongdoings in the world, they will become worse, bigger, more ferocious, like weed that overtakes. You should keep your mind active, alive. Yet I liked poppies, needed nettle.
My volunteer was called Annita. She had been stuck in a career rat race in Amsterdam, she’d explained, “something squirmed within me, it felt different.” Studying had helped her understand.
She’d gotten the idea to make sourdough bread, unaware that I didn’t have an oven. She had had to arrange it herself: borrow an oven, get the sour thing as well; ‘The Mother’ she had called it. The bread had reminded me of Amsterdam. It’d tasted like a phantom in the insides of my cheeks.
*
It was a new summer. My bramberries took over everything, betraying the rest of the plants in the garden, who timidly hid in the folds of her heavy arms. Thorns with light green and red, swollen fruits. Strange how it looked.
I decided not to take on other volunteers after Annita, who had philosophised more about my garden than touched it.
Summer rustled itself to autumn. It was quiet again, and I wasn’t reminded that much of The Mother and the city anymore.
Plants pop up when you least expect it. I had one apple, the first one to ever grow in my garden. I faced it every day with my morning coffee, fed it a little of the brew and whispered nice things to it.
*
One night I woke up to use the bathroom. Had it not been for that reason, I would have never heard their undecipherable instructions. Their bodies were slow and heavy from their backpacks and equipment. Through my bathroom window, I saw the grass flatten in their steps. I was quiet and let them continue. With the help of merely some pins and a crowbar, they managed to open the main door of the barn opposite my house. They were wasting their energy. It was an old, empty building. Besides, the villagers loved to gossip, especially about strangers. Nothing was a secret here. On the narrow, cobbled streets in the centre of town, I always had to put on my headphones to avoid being caught up in small talk.
I didn’t have time for distractions. My apple needed to grow and I needed to be there for it. These squatters were the worst thing that could have happened to Bergen aan Zee.
The next morning, after not having been able to sleep knowing I was sharing the field, I was greeted by one of them. Gus was the abstract form of her generation. Twinkle in her eyes that I could only interpret as a blind spot. I had seen her cuddle various people, which had caused a small pang in my chest.
She put on a broad smile and handed me a flyer with houses that looked like a child’s drawing and letters that said: You light up the neighbourhood!
I asked her why she was doing this. She answered that it was important to get to know each other, and rubbed her fingers through her hair, which made it stand up in various ways.
“The barn in the distance was surrounded by these young types whose tongues rolled smoothly with soft ‘r’s’ and ‘eh’s’.”
I sighed and pressed my palm against the back of my blouse. I didn’t agree with this idea of liveliness. They were speaking about a neighbourhood they didn’t know. The barn in the distance was surrounded by these young types whose tongues rolled smoothly with soft ‘r’s’ and ‘eh’s’. The same vocabulary that my volunteer used to have.
“How is the apple tree doing?” Gus’ eyes gazed at the yellow bucket, filled with a branch the size of an arm. The apple moved in the wind. That must have been an insult. She could see it still needed time to grow. I stroked the bark, the leaves rustled from this motion. “Trees are complicated, you see. What are you growing?”
She politely nodded. “We also want to start a garden.”
*
Gus came back on most days to speak to me. I rediscovered my old habits: chatting to fill the silence. I said something positive about their garden, which was odd, since no one in its decades of desolation had touched it. There were merely some tiles and outgrown grass. She said something about the playfulness of the green plants on my ground and how young I looked there.
What a strange compliment again. I had to point out to her that she was trying too hard to belong here. “Don’t be so nice,” I said.
She tried to conceal her surprise as she smiled.
“I can see you thinking.” I focussed on her forehead. She moved her eyebrows up until they were small moons. “But young women shouldn’t be so agreeable,” I said.
She laughed with a lot of breath and probably didn’t understand what I was trying to get at. And I can see you thinking, what a thing to say.
*
Work always goes slowly in autumn. No new fruit nor extra apples. I kept digging deeper for more carrots; they seemed to want to hide. For weeks I greeted Gus with a wave of my hand. We had stopped talking, maybe because of what I said about her, or maybe because she was busy. Her demands of the barn and its inhabitants got more urgent and reached over the grassfields, spoken in a hushed voice. I somehow felt involved in their presence.
*
It was a roar; the clouds moved. Thunder echoed in the distance; rain pressed itself on my roof. Breathing through the thick air, I threw tarps over the fragile plants to protect them from what they didn’t know was coming. Everything got swallowed by water. Little lakes filled the pots, brown and thick.
“The storm was whipping my face, at this point I could feel it arriving in my bones.”
In the minutes after the covering was done, I felt the need to check if the people across the road were okay, and to apologise to Gus for my inappropriate behaviour. I put my sneakers on and folded the sleeves of my blouse back over my wrists. There was no time to go there, or for any conversation. The storm was whipping my face, at this point I could feel it arriving in my bones.
I saw them being picked up by policemen one by one. Some squatters resisted and ran over the field. These movements should have sounded louder, but I was losing my hearing more each year, and the people were far. Like birds in the trees, some screams popped up every now and then. Other sounds dissolved into the gusts of wind. My breathing stopped and I held the branch of the apple tree to steady myself. I recognised Vincent, the husband of the butcher Marieke, from a distance in his police outfit, dragging this poor girl for metres and metres on her knees, scratched by the dirt. He hit her in the face.
“Vincent?!” I tried to approach him so he would stop. But another policeman, who I didn’t recognise, held his hands up towards me.
“Everything will be fine, miss, stay back please,” he said.
“What is all this?” I sneered. He didn’t look at me as he walked back into the field with a long stick. One of the squatters yelled ‘pig’ to the officer. I didn’t know if I should scream, if that would help. The people were put in the police vans. Gus’ hair moved around her as she was struggling to get loose. She ran off, and I lost track of her. Trembling, I crunched the branch that once was supposed to be an apple tree with a single hand. I felt my knees lock as the sound of their fighting limbs faded. Too soon, all of them had disappeared. I didn’t know this village at all.
The dark dunes morphed with the grey air. I checked the rest of my garden, to see if this brutality had an effect on it. The bushes were still in their place. A cloud covered the sky above my head, attempting to hide the incident. I pulled the broken apple tree up with my hand, lifted it from its pot. The ground around the plant had become thinner.
Lotte Verbarendse (2000) is interested in the tangible history of water and sedimented landscapes, which she researched during her Master Comparative Literature. Currently, she works as an assistant editor for the art magazine See All This. She writes about isolated individuals who try to find each other in their own peculiar ways.