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The gentlemen of the home haven't noticed anything
of what's going on yet. That is why she has gone and sat down on
a chair and she laments into her own lap.
    'There's nothing wrong with that damned breakfast is there?
There's an egg with it, no less. The other gentlemen don't even
get that when it's their birthday. Just jam. But he does. Because
you want to make him look happy. Because he always looks so
disgruntled. Alright. Perhaps the ham is a little bit discoloured. But
what do you expect with so many people in just one house. For
that's what it is, all said. Just a house. Even if they do call it a
home for the elderly. And then that business of our gentlemen's
poo, too. It all wafts over the food. It does make for smells, that
does. And so the stuff discolours. There's no keeping the ham fresh
then.'
    Her sorrow acquires an ever more loquacious character.
    "Cause it stinks here, after all. Standing here out on the doorstep,
the smell coming from the letter box already makes me retch. It's a
little warehouse. And just one set of facilities and not a scrap of
ventilation. But I eat here too, you know, myself. What the
gentlemen eat, I eat as well. Alright, the ham's a bit discoloured.
But no way has it gone off.'
    Meanwhile, the doctor has entered the home. He is a quiet, placid
man who is no trouble to others. He is most outstandingly a
doctor. He hangs his raincoat (for his wife didn't trust the look of the sky) on the hallstand. A perfectly ordinary raincoat. And yet so
decidedly a doctor's coat that now it almost seems as if the doctor
himself is hanging on the hallstand with his coat.

    He tears off a leaf from the calendar which is still showing
August 31. He smiles, a touch nostalgically.
    'Ah, yes. Tearing them off. Amputating days from a man's life.'
So the doctor has a reflective nature. Good intuition, too. He
knows already that there's something not quite right in the home,
though, of course, he doesn't know yet that Mr Koopman is sitting
in the chestnut tree.
    Before he goes on to the ward, he must just wash his hands first,
at the basin in the toilet. There's always a clean towel hanging
there. For the doctor, specially, to dry his hands once he has
washed them. But there's no towel hanging there now.
    'That's really annoying,' the doctor says. 'That's negligence.
Such small things as these are the ones that prevent a doctor from
doing his work properly and which then begin to play a part in
decisions about life and death.'
    He isn't in such a good mood at all. He had wanted to do a spot
of gardening in his little garden, but he had to go to the home
because one of the gentlemen had mild symptoms yesterday. So
it's not at all such a festive morning for the doctor.
    He goes on to the ward. He's almost sure by now that there are
things going on there and that nothing will come any more of
raking his garden today.
    And the orderly is still sitting there lamenting about the breakfast
that Dirk hasn't wished to partake of and about the grotty life she
really has.
    The gentlemen of the home have taken advantage of her
slackened attention by making a bit of a party of things, in their
own way.
    One of the gentlemen has undressed himself completely and is
walking naked across the ward in macabre sexual display. Other
gents have done naughties on the floor. The stench is such that it
gives the doctor a pain in the nose. He quickly walks over to the
sunlounge to open the garden door. There! Now some fresh air
can come in, at least.
    That's how it comes to pass that the doctor sees Mr Koopman
sitting in the chestnut tree.
    He's unnerved.

    'Heavens,' he says. 'That's Mr Koopman up in the tree.'
    So he's no doctor who'll begin to suffer from delusions because
of minor semblances. He's sure not to take Mr Koopman for a
monkey even if he does think the old gentleman looks peculiar.
And so thin. Eerily thin, in fact.
    He will check him over thoroughly tomorrow.
    That's as