Authors: Peter Buwalda
After that the naked rector surfaced everywhere, blown up above the bar in the rowing club canteen, on a local debating society’s T-shirts, on a poster announcing a massive summer festival on campus. Aaron saw him taped to dormitory bathroom doors. And, coincidence or no, Sigerius was increasingly the subject of wild speculation, in the fraternities on the Oude Markt, at parties in the campus housing. The rector was said to have traveled with Ruska through the Soviet Union and China en route to Japan, trashing Russian eateries on the way; he was purported to have been given electroshock treatment in an American madhouse after his big mathematical breakthrough; there were allegedly children from an earlier marriage who had come to no good. You only had to take a better look at the photo, and all doubt melted off the paper onto your lap. Everyone could see that Sigerius’s ears were representative of the body hidden beneath those immaculate two-piece suits,
mostly monotonous dark blue, sometimes light-gray pinstripe; the body, so crudely exposed, appeared surprisingly tough and sinewy, hard, unbreakable—“dry,” to express it in sports terms. It was difficult not to have an opinion about that body, or about the clearly visible tattoos on the left side of his chest, over Sigerius’s heart: Aaron recognized the inscription, in cheap, dark-blue sailor’s ink, the pair of Japanese characters—“judo.” It evoked conflicting reactions: in 1995, not only were tattoos relatively rare, they were downright tacky. But at the same time it tallied entirely with Sigerius’s physicality, the apeman who would tip back his chair during meetings, balancing on the back legs until he had to grab the edge of the table, who rolled his shoulders loose like a trapeze artist during the coffee breaks, looking around to see if there was anyone who needed a thrashing before the meeting reconvened—murky keyholes through which the campus could catch a glimpse of another, discarded Sigerius, a thug, a he-man whose dream career had begun with two European judo titles, a fighter for whom the Munich Olympics should have been the highlight of his life.
In interviews they read that their rector was, like Ruska, tipped for a medal in 1972, but that a month before the Games, fate intervened: hungry for a custard donut, Sigerius crossed the Biltstraat in Utrecht, and just as the soft, creamy custard made contact with his mouth he was sideswiped by a motor scooter, whose metal footboard drove straight through his shin:
crack
, goodbye athletic career. What no journalist, no student, no scientist could get enough of was the idea that without that uneaten donut, the real miracle of Sigerius’s career would never have taken place. The Miracle of the Antonius Matthaeuslaan, as he himself called it, after the street in Utrecht where for eight months he was confined to a bed in a tiny upstairs apartment, encased up to his groin in plaster. In the dark winter following the ’72 Olympics, as Joni’s father,
bruised and broken, lay thumbing through a cardboard box of back issues of waiting-room magazines, he came across a stray exam booklet from the Dutch Mathematics Olympiad—a pamphlet full of uncommonly difficult problems for uncommonly brainy highschool students—and out of sheer boredom started scribbling sums in the margins. The next morning he was finished.
Exactly what happened in those twenty-four hours, which doors were flung open in Sigerius’s traumatized athlete’s head, is anybody’s guess, but the fact was that within three years he had graduated summa cum laude from the Utrecht Mathematics Department, produced an alarmingly brilliant doctoral dissertation, and in the early ’80s moved with his family to Berkeley, California. And there, at long last, he reached his Olympian peak. The Ramanujan of Utrecht forced a breakthrough in knot theory, a branch of mathematics that attempts to understand the number of ways in which a piece of rope can be tied—there is no conciser, simpler definition of his work—which earned him the Fields Medal in 1986 at the quadrennial congress of the International Mathematics Union.
All this shot through Aaron’s mind when he recognized the woman sitting diagonally across from him. Despite her metamorphosis he knew straightaway who she was. There, next to a gum-chewing girl in the crimson sales uniform of some chain store, sat Joni’s mother. He was blinded by a stroboscopic shock of white light.
He had been jolted out of a dreamless doze, and although he was still sitting in the express train to Brussels—they’d already passed Liège—his situation had altered drastically in the half hour he’d been sleeping. The carriage was now jam-packed, the evening light that shone through the windows appeared heavy, leaden, it
was Belgian light, refracted and made turbid by the undulating landscape. Tineke Sigerius, he saw in a glance, leaned with her temple against the window and stared absently at the receding Walloon hills and single-steepled villages. His first reflex was to bolt, make a run for it, but his escape route was blocked by standing passengers—so to get up and move to the other end of the compartment was virtually impossible. His body acted as though it were racing up a steep slope in blind panic. He sat like this for several minutes, sweating, hyperventilating, exhorting himself to calm down, in anticipation of the confrontation.
Nothing happened. Whenever a bump or unexpected noise jerked Tineke Sigerius away from the view, he felt her eyes glide over his jittery body without stopping.
She pretended not to see him
. They were in the same boat, he realized, she didn’t want this any more than he did. Happenstance had forced her to sit across from him, she was glad to get a seat in the overfull Sunday evening train, and only once she’d settled in did she recognize him. She must have been relieved to see that he was sleeping, a lucky break that allowed her to catch her breath and devise a strategy. She had boarded in Liège, which surprised him more than that she was heading for Brussels. What was Tineke Sigerius doing in Liège? He hadn’t seen or spoken to her for eight years, of course plenty could have changed since then. Maybe she and Sigerius had left Enschede, maybe Sigerius was a European commissioner by now and they had moved to Belgium. This coincidence struck him as overwhelmingly unfair. Perhaps they had split up and she was living here alone? Of course someone else would have taken his place by now; she’d have a real son-in-law, a rich, successful one. Wallowing in self-pity, he fantasized that Tineke was not on her way to Brussels after all, but to Paris, the city of her grandchildren, where Joni now lived and worked (her American adventure could
only have lasted a couple of years, he guessed) and ran a family together with some French moron, a guy with a fat face, greased-back black hair, and platinum cuff links, he could just see him opening their lacquered front door, his welcoming arms spread out for his mother-in-law on the granite doorstep.
Or was he mistaken? He glanced briefly in her direction in the hope that his conscience was playing tricks on him. No, that was Joni’s mother all right. But look how skinny she’d got, it was like she’d been halved; her surreally narrow hips were wrapped in brown slacks with a neat pinstripe, she wore a tailored jacket and under it a cream-colored blouse, on her feet were boots with thin, elegant heels that on the old Tineke Sigerius would have bored straight through the chassis of the train carriage. Her mid-length hair was graying, not unflatteringly, and lay in a studied knot above her weirdly sunken face, which radiated something most people would describe as decisive, independent, and even sympathetic, rather than what he suspected even back when he was still Joni’s boyfriend: ill-tempered, or downright nasty. And now it dawned on him: along with all that fat, the last bit of kindness had been boiled off, apparently for good. Although she had gained a certain femininity, the effect was undermined by an excess of loose skin around her cheeks and chin, by her baggy, pink-smeared eyelids that hung dejectedly over her lashes. She looked, in a word, bitchy.
Sigeriuses did not belong in Belgian trains, Sigeriuses belonged at home in Twente, where he had left them nearly eight years ago. It was precisely to avoid this kind of encounter that he had skipped town. It wasn’t the cuisine that had drawn him to Linkebeek, a dump just south of Brussels where, he’d thought until five minutes ago, a person could start afresh as inconspicuously as in Asunción or Montevideo. He had imagined himself sheltered and unseen, Linkebeek was a village where the trees outnumbered the
inhabitants, every lopsided thing that human hands had built was concealed from view by rustling, crackling, snapping wood.
He stole a glance at Tineke’s hands. They lay in her lap, strangely fine and bony, emphatically segmented. How many tables, how many chairs, how many chests had those hands produced by now? Joni’s mother made furniture in a workshop behind the farmhouse, she did back then anyway, chic and pricey interior furnishings that found their way into villas, offices, and stately canal houses across the Netherlands. Now, the one hand took hold of a finger on the other, one after the other, and gave each a little—bitter, he presumed—tug.
They had never hit it off, he and Tineke. They didn’t gel. He thought back to the first time he and Joni slept at her parents’ house; he, as usual, lay awake for hours on end, yearning desperately for Sigerius’s wine cellar, and finally crept out of the narrow guest bed and down the open staircase, through the cool front hall and into the living room. From the kitchen he descended—routinely, he knew the way—the creaking cellar stairs and removed one of Sigerius’s self-tapped bottles from the cast-iron rack, determined to uncork it at the kitchen counter and guzzle as much of it as possible in the hope that it would knock him out. But on his way back up the stairs he heard footsteps in the living room and had to duck back into the opening. Someone entering the kitchen, cupboards being opened and shut. Standing on his tiptoes, he peered over the edge, and what he saw was shocking and repulsive: he looked out onto a hideous back, a mountainside like you saw in nature films about South Africa or the Arizona prairies, but this was a mountain of flesh. It was Tineke. He counted six deeply pleated rolls of fat between her armpits and her backside, on which, halfway down, hung a sort of orange awning, which even with the best will in the world you couldn’t call a “panty.”
Joni’s mother tore open a cardboard packet and poured its contents into her gaping mouth, half of it skittered off in all directions, chocolate sprinkles rained across the floor tiles. Once the package was empty she wrung it out, squashed it flat and shoved it deep into the trash can. He recoiled at the fleshy thud as she fell to her knees. She gathered up the spilt sprinkles with spit on her fingertips and palms. By then he had forgotten his cover, and as she sat there licking off her fingers she suddenly swung her head a quarter-turn and looked at him. “Hey,” he said, once they had both got over the initial shock. “I was thirsty.” She did not answer, she could at least have said, “I was hungry”; instead she hoisted herself up and stumbled out of the kitchen without a word, and only after he heard her bedroom door close down the hall did he return to his own bed.
And now? What could they possibly say to each other now? The train was too full, he reassured himself, for a scene, and he therefore tried to imagine how a controlled variant might proceed. So, Aaron, how are you these days? God, now that was one question he did not relish. He would rather continue his journey on the roof of the intercity than give an honest answer. He’d just spent the weekend at his parents’ in Venlo—doctor’s orders, just as everything he did was on doctor’s orders. It was awful to have to admit he was sick, that he was tethered to neuroleptics and antidepressants. How do you tell someone you’re a five-star basket case? How was he to tell this woman he was insane? That’s me, Tineke: nothing but doctor’s orders.
After the debacle in Enschede he worked briefly as a photographer for the better Brussels newspapers, but after a second severe psychosis in the winter of 2002 nearly did him in, he and his mental health counselors decided he should quit. Since then he had been driving around in a VW van refitted as a photo studio, taking
individual and class pictures of primary-school children in Brussels and its surroundings. He would trace a numbered silhouette of each group photo on a lightbox. On his meticulously maintained website, fathers and mothers and grannies and grandpas could order reprints by clicking on a variety of formats, frames, and captions. The rest of his time—the hours, days, weeks, months that other men his age spent breeding, chasing careers, or maybe even raising idealistic hell somewhere—he just loafed about like some retired geezer, shuffling up the mossy steps to the town square, buying a newspaper in a secondhand bookshop appropriately called Once Upon a Time, picking up his meds in the pharmacy across from the ancient sycamore. Sometimes he snacked on a satay in the bistro at the end of the square, and then shambled back to the ridge, scuffing behind an imaginary Zimmer frame, and allowed himself to be swallowed up by his oversized, mortgage-free house.
According to his doctors he was a patient who “identified and acknowledged” his own condition, which meant he took his capsules voluntarily and thus was capable of living on his own. But that was about it. He led an entirely aimless existence. His motivation in life was avoidance: avoid stimulation, avoid excitement, avoid motivation itself.
He looked at his knees. What if he were to blurt it all out, right here in this chock-full train compartment? A detailed, concentrated, no-holds-barred monologue on his misery, on his psychosis-induced fears? A lecture, a short story, an epic poem on the immeasurable, irrational terror he had endured. The commuters hung cheek by jowl on their ceiling straps, no one could get away. If he really put his mind to it, if he were to wax eloquent, who knows, maybe the fear he described would spark over to his listeners, first to Tineke and the girl in the too-tight outfit, and then to everyone in the seats and aisles. And they would all be scared to death. His fear became
everyone’s fear. Frenzied panic, as though the Semtex in his brain had finally exploded.
He and Sigerius gelled just fine. In the winter of 1995 he had latched onto an intelligent, headstrong, beautiful girl named Joni, and Joni turned out to be a full-blood Sigerius. Two months later, to his amazement, there he was paying a house call to this guy and his family. And then the truly improbable happened: the man whom the entire campus sucked up to, the man whom he, the Venlo dropout, gawked at on the TV,
that
man extended him a calloused judo hand. And he accepted that hand, eager but also surprised. They became friends, and he took care not to wonder too often why.