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who’d stayed behind to clear up, watched in awe as her father attacked the pie, shoveled up the creamed fish with a wedge of bread, scraped the stewpot clean. He sat at the table for nearly two hours, and in all that time not a word escaped his lips but for the occasional mumbled request for water, cider or bread.
    In the morning it was no different. He was up at first light, as usual, but instead of taking a loaf from the table and heading out with axe or plow, he lingered in the kitchen. “What is it, Harmanus?” Agatha asked, a trace of apprehension creeping into her voice.
    He sat at the crude table, big hands folded before him, and looked up at her, and she thought for a moment she was looking into the eyes of a stranger. “I’m hungry,” he said.
    She was sweeping the floorboards, her elbows jumping like mice. “Shall I make some eggs?”
    He nodded. “And meat.”
    Just then Katrinchee stepped through the door with a pail of fresh milk. Harmanus nearly kicked the table over. “Milk,” he said, as if associating word and object for the first time; his voice was flat, dead, without intonation, the voice of a phantom. He snatched the pail from her hands, lifted it to his lips and drank without pause till it was empty. Then he threw it to the floor, belched, and looked around the room as if he’d never seen it before. “Eggs,” he repeated. “Meat.”
    By this point, the whole family was frightened. Jeremias looked on with a pale face as his father ate his way through the larder, wrestled sturgeon from the smokehouse, plucked a pair of hens for the pot. Katrinchee and Agatha flew around the kitchen, chopping, kneading, frying and baking. Wouter was sent for wood, steam rose from the kettle. There was no work in the fields that day. Harmanus ate till early afternoon, ate till he’d ravaged the garden, emptied the cellar, threatened the livestock. His shirt was a patchwork of grease, egg yolk, sauce and cider. He looked drunk, like one of the geneversoaked beggars on the Heerengracht in Amsterdam. Then all at once he staggered up from the table as if he’d been wounded and fell on a pallet in the corner: he was asleep before he hit the straw.
    The kitchen was devastated, the pots blackened; spatters of food maculated the floorboards, the table, the fieldstone of the hearth. The smokehouse was empty—no venison, no sturgeon, no rabbit or turkey—and the grain and condiments they’d bartered from the van der Meulens were gone too. Agatha could as well have been cooking for the whole village of Schobbejacken, for a wedding feast that had gone on for days. Exhausted, she sank into a chair and held her head in her hands.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with
vader?”
Wouter asked. Jeremias stood at his side. They both looked scared.
    Agatha stared at them in bewilderment. She’d barely had time to puzzle over it herself. What
had
come over him? She remembered something like it when she was a child in Twistzoekeren. One day, Dries Herpertz, the village baker, had declared that cherry tarts were the perfect food and that he would eat nothing else till the day he died. Soup, at least, you must have soup, people said. Milk. Cabbage. Meat. He turned his nose to the air, disdaining them as if they were a coven of sinners, devils set out to tempt him. For a year he ate nothing but cherry tarts. He became fat, enormous, soft as raw dough. He lost his hair, his teeth fell out. A bit of fish, his wife pleaded. Some nice
braadwurst.
Cheese? Grapes? Waffles? Salmon? He waved her off. She spent all day preparing fabulous meals, combed the markets for exotic fruits, dishes from Araby and the Orient, snails, truffles, the swollen livers of force-fed geese, but nothing would tempt him. Finally, after five years of trying, she dropped dead of exhaustion, face down in a
filosoof
casserole. Dries was unmoved. Toothless, fat as a sow, he lived on into his eighties,