What Had Become of Us by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer Page A

just as I could not, forestall the fates.
    The poplar trees in this mess of a forest all these years later had been planted in 1946 under the instruction of the Belgian government, once the ash from the Second World War had settled. The distance between each of these trees, the distance between all trees in Belgium, was set at eight metres. The undergrowth was grassy where it wasn’t overgrown with stinging nettle or damped down by rotting leaves. A recent hurricane had spun the tops of the trees viciously in twisted circles and back on themselves, plucked them out of the earth like so many weeds and thrown them down like little sticks on top of each other. Their trunks flexed unnaturally; some of these trees were thirty metres in height (now length), and the torque buildup in their stems was enormously dangerous if you happened to want to try to trim the branches, cut the roots away, clean the butt end, and chop the leaders off, which is exactly what we intended to do. We expected the trees to violently resist our taming.
    This one’s for Erwin, Pieter said. He dedicated every forest he felled or cleaned up to his brother, as if an accumulation of offerings would alter the course of history. I watched the chimney stack of the Doem nuclear station off to the left, far in the distance, its smoke billowing in a cumulus of waste and condensation. The infrastructure for the building was largely underground; the stack was huge. They were having problems with fish — herring mostly — being drawn into the reactor by the tens of thousands. They were drawn through the water intake into the heavy water tanks. Pieter and Erwin used to slide herring down their throats, whole.
    These are fantastic, Adriana. Open up.
    Yes, open up, Erwin had said, forcing me to sit and then pulling my head back, making me laugh so that he could bring a fish down over my tongue. I gagged on the salty ocean meat; he held his open palm along my throat.
    Hollanders and the people of the lowlands have a great love for herring. They smoke by the millions those caught off the coast in the cold currents of the North Sea, and what is more, they pickle the rest and can them in attractive little aluminum tins, the lids of which peel off with the help of a sort of Allen key. They stand at market, and have done so for centuries, in little manly groups, tilting their heads back and sliding the fish down their gullets. It is a tradition — men in wooden clompen and blue marine sweaters (knitted in cables and tied with effeminate pompoms at the neck), their throats translucently white, like swans swallowing. The Doem laboratories subcontracted the job, installing underwater screens and noisemakers to keep the herring in safe water. A loud, dull, unfriendly din was broadcast beneath the sea, and still the herring were awed by the sucking intake toward the heavy water containers. Some slipped through the protective mesh. The rest huddled, their noses bumping again and again into the screen, listening to the whirr of eradication.
    Pieter and Erwin had been singing a song, and when they finished, they rolled open a tin of little dead fishes and laughed at my disgust and slid them into their mouths. I felt Erwin’s hand undulate along the shape of the fish, creating space in my esophagus; his fingertips ran slightly under my sweater. I could have left Pieter in our bed that night and gone to him — his hand would run down my throat, my hand would draw his foreskin down, we should kiss then, a line of spittle between our tongues.
    Pieter had introduced me to Erwin within days of my arrival in Ghent.
    He’ s better than me in every way.
    Erwin was a tall, tousle-haired dirty blond with a cheeky smile and a lanky off-kilter walk, like an overgrown child. He was not better in any way than Pieter but rather was a sort of complement, as if the two brothers, so close in age, had taken only certain human aspects and nurtured them but left the rest to