The Safekeep - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yael van der Wouden is a writer and a teacher. The Safekeep, her debut novel, was a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize and has been longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Time, The Economist, Kirkus Reviews, The Times (London), The Independent, BookPage, and others. She lives in Utrecht, Netherlands.

 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

1

ISABEL FOUND A BROKEN PIECE of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd. Spring had brought a shock of frost, a week of wet snow, and now—at the lip of summer—the vegetable garden was shrinking into itself. The beans, the radishes, the cauliflower: browned and rotting. Isabel was on her knees, gloved hands and a stringed hat, removing the dying things. The shard nicked through her glove, pierced a little hole.

It wasn’t a wound and it didn’t bleed. Isabel took off her glove and stretched the skin of her palm tight, looking for a puncture. There was none, only a sting of pain that left quickly.

Back at the house she washed the piece and held it in watery hands. Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken. It had once been a plate, which was part of a set—her mother’s favorite: the good chinaware, for holidays, for guests. When Mother was alive the set was kept in a glass vitrine in the dining room and no one was allowed to handle it. It had been years since her passing and the plates were still kept behind the closed doors, unused. On the rare occasion when Isabel’s brothers visited, Isabel would set the table using everyday plates and Hendrik would try to pry open the vitrine and say, “Isa, Isa, come now, what’s the point of having good things if you can’t touch them?” And Isabel would answer: “They are not for touching. They are for keeping.”

There was no explanation for the broken piece, for where it had come from and why it had been buried. None of Mother’s plates had ever gone missing. Isabel knew this and still she checked now. The set was as it had been left: a deck of plates, bowls, a little milk jug. In the middle of each one—three hares, chasing one another in a circle.

She took the piece with her on the train to Den Haag the next day, wrapped in brown paper. Hendrik’s car was parked outside the restaurant when she arrived, and he was at the wheel: windows down, smoking. Rubbing a thumb into his eye, looking like he was having a conversation with himself over something, a disagreement. His hair was longer than she liked it. She bent down and said, “Hello,” and he startled and knocked his elbow and said, “Jesus Christ, Isa.”

She got in the car next to him and kept her purse in her lap. He sighed out smoke and leaned over, kissed her three times—once on each cheek, and one more for good measure.

“You’re early,” she said.

He said, “That’s a nice hat.”

She touched it. “Yes.” She’d worried over it, leaving the house. It was bigger than what she usually wore. It had a bright-green ribbon. “How are you, then?”

“Oh, you know.” He ashed his cigarette out the window, leaned back. “Sebastian’s been talking about going home.”

Isabel touched her hat once more, her nape. She pushed a bobby pin further into place. Hendrik had called recently to tell her as much: Sebastian’s mother’s health taking a turn for the worse, Sebastian wanting to visit her. Sebastian wanting Hendrik to come with him. Isabel had not known what to say of it, and so she said nothing. And so she ignored the information and instead updated him about the state of the garden, about Neelke the maid and how she might be stealing things, about Johan’s disruptive visits that left her nonplussed, and about a recent car bill. Hendrik hung up quickly after that.

“I think I will have to go with him,” he continued, not looking at her. “I can’t let him go alone, I can’t—”

“I found this,” she interrupted, and took the wrapped package from her purse. Opened it for him, still in her palm. “Buried in the garden. Under one of the gourds.”

He considered her for a moment, confused. Then, with a quick blink, a breath, took the piece and inspected it. Turned it over. “One of Mother’s plates?”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“All right,” he said cautiously, and gave it back. On the other side of the street, a couple argued while they walked. The woman tried to hush the conversation, the man only raised his voice in response.

Isabel continued on a held breath: “I think Neelke—”

“Isabel.” Hendrik turned to face her now, cigarette still in hand. The space between them clouded with smoke. “There’s not going to be any maids left in the province if you keep on firing all of them with some imaginary ideas of—”

“Imaginary! I have been stolen from. They have—”

“Once,” he said. “That happened once, and she was so young, Isa, come on. Haven’t you been young?” She’d looked away from him and he ducked to catch her eye. He was putting on his funny voice. “Haven’t I, once?”

They were not old now. She was nearly thirty, and he was younger still. The youngest of them all. She wrapped the piece back into the paper and put it back in her purse.

“And besides,” he said. “It could’ve been in that ground a long time. Maybe Louis accidentally broke a plate once and panicked and—”

“Mother would’ve noticed,” Isabel said.

Hendrik wasn’t taking her seriously. “Well, I mean, who knows how the house was kept before we moved in.”

“What do you mean, before?”

“Before we moved in. Someone else might’ve broken a plate. There were always only five of them, no? What happened to the sixth?”

“Those are—Hendrik. Those are Mother’s plates.”

“No, no. The house came with the…” He gestured vaguely. “Crockery. Chairs.”

She had been eleven when they moved to the east of the country, and Louis—the oldest—thirteen. Hendrik was small for his age at ten, a hollow-cheeked and melancholy boy. Isabel hadn’t thought he remembered much of those early days in the house. They mostly spoke of what came before: their childhood in Amsterdam, Father before he got sick, the smell of the city in December, a toy train that went round and round.

But he was right somehow. An odd angle of a thought that hadn’t struck her before—they’d moved into a finished house, a full house. Nearly everything laid out: the sheets, the pots, the vases in the windowsills.

“But it was Mother’s…” Isabel trailed off. Their mother had loved the hare’s pattern. The house was full of it: hare figurines on sills, hares on the tiled back of the hearth.

Hendrik said, “We used to have—Oh, you remember, in Amsterdam, we had the plates with the bluebells. No, I think it belonged to—that woman Uncle Karel was married to back then, no? Didn’t she get the house ready for us?”

“Uncle Karel was never married,” Isabel said.

“Oh, briefly. Tall. Birthmark on her cheek. Would say hello with a yodel.”

“No.”

“She was with us for a while, before Mother joined. You really don’t remember?”

She didn’t remember a woman. She didn’t remember the day of their arrival, or anyone showing them around, telling them where to go, where to sleep, why the beds...