Authors: Peter Buwalda
The days and nights passed, and again something changed in Isabelle’s attitude. He had previously seen her switch from admiring and uninhibited to preachy and moralistic—and now she turned harsh. Her e-mails became shorter, more time elapsed between them. “When are you going to tell her?” she answered when he asked if she was turned on. Sometimes she would get him aroused, and then give him the silent treatment for a quarter of an hour, an hour, the whole night. And because it was, in the end, always a letdown, because she never really cooperated—but also because he never gave up, addicted as he was to those little digital envelopes—he began, out of desperation, scouring the Internet. Driven insane by deferred fulfilment, he found photos where he could actually see what Isabelle was withholding from him. He was shocked to discover how many girls, Asian or otherwise, he could conjure up on his screen with just a few simple search terms. But it worked—and how. By the time Isabelle went to bed—always suddenly and unannounced—his laptop nearly melted from the tabbed sex sites, downloaded pictures of floozies in all manner of positions, pop-ups and weird, virusy dial-up programs. Sometimes it took him a good fifteen minutes to clean his hard drive, after which he would do the same in the upstairs bathroom to the raw chipolata between his legs. The release was followed by a peaceful gloom that got him restfully through the remainder of the night.
• • •
“Who knows if I’ll even get to see the inside of the house again,” says Aaron. He puts on the judo jacket, his hands and forearms shoot out of the sleeves like broomsticks, he overlaps the front flaps.
“Don’t be so pessimistic.”
They hear the soft thwap of flip-flops from down the hall. “Guys?” Joni. “Dad, Aaron, you guys ready to eat? The table’s set.”
Aaron squats down and picks the belt up off the floor from between his bare feet.
“Where are you?” Her footsteps echo as she walks through the gently ventilated bathroom into the dressing room. “Am I disturbing?” Her face does not express irony, but irritation.
“You never disturb, honey,” he mumbles, with exaggerated sweetness.
“Coming,” Aaron says.
She sniffs and walks off without a word. The last time Joni disturbed him was at the end of the month Isabelle had given him; after a sleepless night he sat in the administrative wing like a prepped corpse. Something that seldom happens, happened: his secretary announced Joni. What was she doing there? He still remembers how optimistic she looked: spring was still pondering its next move but Joni was already wearing a summer frock. Her appearance cheered him up, they kissed on both cheeks, sat down at the corner of the conference table. He looked tired, she said; I have a busy job, he answered.
She said: “When you’re in love, anything’s possible.”
He asked: “How do you mean?”
“Dad,” she said, “I don’t want to butt in. I’m just here to warn you.”
“Oh? And what about?”
She leaned over and pulled a folded-up newspaper page out of her bag. She opened it, flattened it out, and slid it toward him. He recognized the photo in the middle all too well: him naked on the riverbank. He’d never shake it.
“You know Aaron took this picture, right?” he asked, just to ask something.
“I took it off the toilet door at our house. Look a little closer.”
He’d seen it already. But to buy time to pull himself together he made a point of scrutinizing the handwritten comments her housemates had scribbled next to his naked body over the past few years. Someone had drawn an enormous balloon in felt-tip pen from his gaping mouth with the text: “Ladies, is Joni behaving herself?” And lower down, under his bare feet in the grass, in large block letters: ERECTOR MAGNIFICUS. “Good one,” he mumbled, “except I don’t get this one.” He tapped the red circle around his shivery penis. “Property of Isabelle Orthel,” read the caption.
“It’s all over campus, Dad. If they write something like this about my father in
my
house, in
my
WC, then you can assume everyone knows you’re doing it with a freshman.”
“And what if it’s true? What then?” It occurred to him that she was four years older than Isabelle.
“I don’t begrudge you anything, Dad. But—”
“But what? What’re you here for, Joni, to chew me out?”
“No. I’m here for Mom—”
“She’s not here.”
“I don’t want Mom reading about your escapades on my bathroom door.”
Aaron has tied the belt around his waist, a tidy, flat knot, and examines the inside of the jacket. “I’ve heard that here and there in the Vluchtestraat interior walls have caved in,” he says. “They want
to inspect the houses one by one to assess the danger of collapse. It’ll take another week or two. That’s what they say at the information post.”
Sigerius swallows and tries to think of something that sounds friendly. Before he can come up with an obligatory assurance that Aaron is welcome for as long as necessary, they hear the ringtone of a cell phone.
“That’s me,” Sigerius said. He pulled out his Nokia from the pocket of his khakis and checked the number on the display. He frowned. “Sigerius,” he said, allowing his eyes to wander around the dressing room. “Hello, Thom. No, no bother. (…) Terrible, never seen anything like it. But Enschede is resilient. (…) Yes, yes, we’re OK, Thom, we’re all fine. And you? Yes. (…) Go ahead, I’m listening.”
But Aaron wasn’t, at first. He looked around the narrow space. On either side, meters of aluminum racks were stuffed with clothing: to the left, suits and sport jackets arranged by color; to the right, twice as long, Tineke’s dresses and caftans. He was used to this—it was nearly impossible to talk to Sigerius for more than ten minutes at a stretch. What did take some getting used to was what he called the everyday Sigerius: they’d never been at such close quarters before. He noticed that Sigerius preferred to keep to himself, more often than not retreating to the living room while the rest of them were out on the terrace. During meals he could be downright grumpy. Maybe the fireworks disaster brought on extra stress at Tubantia, maybe he sensed the tension between him and Joni, although Aaron could hardly imagine that something so banal would affect his mood. Just to have something to do, he sniffed at the sleeves of the judo suit, the white cotton smelled fresh, old-fashionedly fresh, as though it had come straight from
the prehistoric ’60s. Ruska and maybe even Geesink had clutched it, or pulled the collar over Sigerius’s head during a sparring match.
“… sounds very interesting,” he heard Sigerius say. He stood a quarter of a turn from him, with his free hand he gently nudged the toes of a pair of running shoes in the rack. “You folks are really on the ball (…) Yes. (…) I understand, yes. (…) Of course I’ll consider it.” Sigerius wheeled around, his dark, hard gaze locking into Aaron’s eyes. He smiled sheepishly, but Sigerius did not see it. Aaron’s head was reeling. They had been staying at the farmhouse for a week now, and still he hadn’t got a decent night’s sleep. He and Joni were condemned to each other in a narrow guest bed that creaked as though it were slowly contracting; every night he lay there, a nervous wreck, until five in the morning, lest he make it creak or crack, it creaked every time he swallowed, and by dawn he himself was a stiff, groaning plank.
At first he thought it a nifty idea, a few weeks at his in-laws. He was curious about the day-to-day routine on the Langenkampweg—but now he realized how uncomfortable it was. Even more wearing, if possible, than his insomnia was this strife with Joni—it was terrible timing, now that they were living with her parents they were at each other’s throats, they had never bickered so easily before, about everything and nothing. She still seemed pissed off about that wedding. And he in turn was being driven crazy by all her speculating about Boudewijn Stol and his wonderful internships.
And then there was that Ennio. Like hundreds of other Enschede residents, the poor guy lay crumpled in the hospital, bruised, beaten, and burned, not a pretty sight, and he could well imagine that for Joni the accident had “hit close to home,” but what he couldn’t take—Jesus, there wasn’t much he
could
take, that endless sniveling and blubbering was the least of it—was that he felt excluded; wherever he went, whether into the living room or out onto the terrace
for a smoke, there she was, usually in the company of her mother, red-eyed, weeping, in an apparent heart-to-heart that was cut short the minute he appeared. If he asked whether she was all right, the answer was invariably “yeah, fine.” Apparently he was not the one to come crying to about other men. Sigerius had told him yesterday, not to his displeasure, that Ennio had moved to the Kievitstraat after his wife had kicked him out of the house. Apparently on account of messing around with a young female employee.
“When do you want to know?” Sigerius asked. “Fine. (…) Strictly confidential. Understood. I’ll get back to you within two weeks. It’s a deal. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye, Thom.” Sigerius held his telephone at eye level, stared briefly at the display, and then slowly dropped his hand. He looked at Aaron and said: “Well, just look at you.”
“Like it’s tailor-made,” he replied.
“Two weeks,” Sigerius said.
“Two weeks?”
“If he hasn’t fallen before then.” Sigerius eyed him thoughtfully. “Aaron, listen, can you keep a secret? Yes, of course you can. You’ve already heard half of it anyway.”
Without waiting for an answer Sigerius confided in him (his deep, calm voice sounded charged) that it was D66 chief Thom de Graaf who called to say that Kruidenier, the current Minister of Education, was expected to be sacked within a month, or would resign, which in itself wasn’t earthshaking news: it had been the talk of the town in The Hague for the past few weeks. “And would I make myself available.” Normally his father-in-law spoke deliberately, placing a full stop after just about every word, but now the sentences gurgled forth like a brook, his small nostrils flared with triumph. “Could be as early as next week. Or six months from now.”
Sigerius looked at him expectantly. Aaron racked his brains
for something appropriate to say, but drew a blank. He was overwhelmed by the news, more forcefully than Sigerius could have been, it had a physical effect on him, as though he’d been given a kick in the backside. Sigerius a Cabinet minister—somewhere in his exhausted body a sprinkler started spouting adrenaline. He had to say something about Kruidenier and his squabbling with parliament, he’d read about it, the guy had misinformed the MPs regarding alleged fraud in public colleges. But his mouth was too dry to get a word out. He stared at the shoe racks alongside Sigerius’s face, a dark blotch on which no doubt surprise or even disbelief was starting to take form. He focused on a pair of waltzed-out, matt-black pumps.
“If I say yes, that is,” he heard Sigerius say. “Anyway, the party’s fed up with Kruidenier. Maybe he’ll just pack his bags himself. That’s what they’re hoping.”
Aaron was overheating, his jaw was clenched. Those pumps had suffered under Tineke’s weight, they were ruined. Sigerius sniffed. From the hallway came a loud, life-saving shout. Tineke. “
Boys!
We’re about to start!”
“We’re coming,” Sigerius called back. He laid a hand on Aaron’s cotton shoulder and squeezed past him. From the doorpost he said: “I’ll tell them you’re getting changed. Mum’s the word for now.”
Blissfully alone, Aaron let the judo jacket glide off his clammy torso. He stepped out of the white cotton trousers, pulled on his stiff new jeans. He walked into the bedroom. Between the two copper-colored bedside tables, each with a tidy stack of books, was an unusually high double bed, with old-fashioned sheets and blankets. No clothes strewn about. He wriggled into the polo shirt Sigerius had lent him and stood at the full-length mirror mounted on the closet door. He examined his hot head. At the very crown
of his skull there was still a small scab, a souvenir of his tumble against the men’s room door.
As he walked through the living room—heavy blue velour curtains kept out the evening sun, Joni’s
Financial Times
lay quartered on the sofa—he could already hear the clatter of cutlery. And like an ostinato, Sigerius’s bass voice.
“… so I know him a bit, once I had him work something out for the Socio-Economic Council, it was maybe … six years ago? He was still a partner at McKinsey. He came to give a presentation, and I have to say …”
Aaron halted in the middle of the room, long before he could be seen from the sunroom, and grabbed hold of the back of the swivel armchair. Were they talking about Boudewijn Stol?
There was a lull in the conversation, Sigerius did not finish his sentence, maybe they had heard him coming. With a sigh he propelled himself into motion, circumvented the two enormous ferns that guarded Tineke’s open kitchen, and stepped into the sunroom. “Bon appétit,” he said. Tineke smiled at him, Sigerius dished himself up some salad, Janis and Joni carried on eating without looking up. He sat down next to Joni, directly across from her father. She swallowed a mouthful and said: “Hey, guess what.”
“I give up,” he said stiffly. The sliding door was open, clumps of poplar fluff hesitated on the threshold, he heard the old chestnut tree rustle in the May breeze.
“While you were in the shower Boudewijn phoned, he asked if I would do my internship with him in Amsterdam.” She said it coolly, but her voice curled at the edges. He felt himself getting all hot and bothered again, this time with impotent rage.
“Amsterdam?” he asked hoarsely. “I thought you were all gung-ho about going abroad. Why would you want to go sit in an office in Amsterdam? Seems to me a … a complete waste of time.”
She smiled at her parents across the whiteness of the table. “Aaron and Boudewijn Stol didn’t hit it off.”
“We hit it off just fine,” he said.
“Really?” Sigerius asked with a mouthful of food, ignoring his comeback, “I was just saying that I know Boudewijn a little …” He took a sip of wine, swallowed and continued: “He’s a decent guy, and extremely good at what he does nowadays. Sounds to me a golden opportunity, Joni.”
“Me too,” Aaron said weakly. “Naturally. But my point is that Joni shouldn’t sacrifice her foreign adventure for something like this.” This was a disadvantage of Sigerius: he was a friend you want to keep as a friend, and sometimes a little voice deep down wondered if that kind of friend really was a friend after all.