Authors: Peter Buwalda
“How about you tell me what happened down there,” Aaron said a quarter of an hour later, during which he had been guardedly caressing her shoulders and hips.
She was asleep, or pretended to be. He turned onto his back, the window was an aquarium filled with floating May stars. A few minutes later he got out of bed, tripped over the clothes she had thrown off in her fury, and pushed the window farther open. The outside air was warm and thick; he drew the curtain. He heard her sniffle. “Come on,” he said.
“All right,” she said when he lay down next to her again. “For starters, you should know that Wilbert lived here for a while. About a year.”
“Excuse me?” he asked. “
Where
. Here?”
“Here. In the farmhouse. For nearly all of 1989 he lived here. With us.”
It was as though she were informing him that the garbage had to be put out on Thursdays from now on. He switched on the bedside lamp, his hands clammy, and gaped wide-eyed at the back of her blond head. Did he really know
nothing
about her life? “You’re shitting me,” he said.
“Wish I was.”
He was speechless. After a while he asked: “But why? What was he doing here?”
“Living. You live here now too, right? Sometimes people just need a place to live.”
With the same restrained, infuriating aplomb, in complete contrast to her temper tantrum just now, she started to explain what happened when she and Janis and her parents returned from America. During their first years living on the Tubantia campus they picked up signals that things were going badly,
seriously
badly, with Wilbert’s mother. She drank. She
binge
-drank. Gone were the years when Margriet Wijn lived up to her name by putting away a liter of wine a day, no more but no less; she’d moved onto hard liquor, whiskey, jenever, cheap vodka, which she also drank by the liter, lending her surname an optimistic, even nostalgic quality. Margriet’s brother told them she occasionally spent a few months on Texel, locked up in a rehab clinic. “So one day,” said Joni, still with her back to him, “she was dead.”
Not twenty-four hours after Wilbert’s mother had drunk herself to death, by unlucky coincidence on her son’s seventeenth birthday,
Menno Wijn had informed his nephew that living together under one roof was getting tiresome. You can say that again, said Wilbert. A few days later, Sigerius watched them lay Margriet’s booze-ravaged body to rest at a Utrecht cemetery. Only at the very end of the coffee reception did he walk over to his son—without any plan, he confessed to Joni years later; in fact he was motivated by the evil looks from his ex-in-laws. In a fit of guilt-ridden fatherliness he assured Wilbert that his door in Enschede was always open, and he should keep it in mind.
That offer did not fall on deaf ears. Two weeks after his mother’s funeral, Wilbert turned up at their farmhouse. Unannounced. Seventeen and vagrant. He didn’t park his motorbike on the road, like a normal person would, but roared around the back with it. He planted the thing in the middle of the clover-grass lawn and himself in front of it, waiting for his new family to step into the April sunshine. Aaron could just see it: the idling off-roader and, in front of it, the future murderer, sprouting, pimply, petulant, in a sleeveless T-shirt from which, he imagined, hung two sinewy limbs—suntanned arms made for unloading Rhine barges, throwing punches, wedging girls against brick walls.
He asked numbly: “Did you recognize him?”
“Sure did,” she said. “He looked just like I had pictured him.” Eleven years on, Wilbert’s saddle-like face was still gypsyish, except that the oil-paint teardrop had made way for a highly flammable sneer, untrustworthy and mistrustful at the same time. His hair was still jet-black, almost blue, but longer and greasier.
According to Joni, 1989 was the craziest year of her life, but Aaron was only half listening. He was stunned by the news itself. So the IJmuiden Basher had lived here. For four years Joni had not uttered a word about it, not Sigerius, nobody. Sigerius must have assumed he knew—a perfectly normal assumption, because how
could he
not
know something like this after four years together with Joni. Aaron was so dumbfounded that he forgot to get angry, too preoccupied with the insane idea that Wilbert Sigerius had stretched out in his gym socks on the old-rose three-seater downstairs, had filed out the cylinders of his Honda on the terrace in the garden, had rinsed off his greasy mitts in the same shower he was expected to use the next morning.
“So where’d he sleep?” An idiotic, all-important question.
“Next door,” said Joni, “in my father’s study. The day he arrived the two of them dragged out the desk, and brought in this bed. He slept in this bed.”
“No way.”
She sighed. “The first few weeks were the worst. The guy was just suddenly
there
. At breakfast, in the bathtub, his big fingers all over the remote control in the evening. At the beginning I used to burn candles in the hope that he’d just go away.”
“Candles?” He was angry, but curious.
“Here,” she said, “on the windowsill. Tea lights. Sat here praying he’d bundle up all his junk back onto his motorbike. A real bigmouth, all of a sudden. He was shy for precisely ten minutes. If they asked me at school who he was, I lied, said Wilbert was an exchange student from Hungary.”
He heaved a deep sigh. “Why does nobody ever tell me anything? What was it like?”
“At first everybody did their absolute best,” she continued. “Dad, Mom, Janis, me—even him. He showed up with the weirdest presents. We’re out in the garden, for instance, and my mother mentions in passing that her hairdryer conked out that morning, and the next day he gives her a brand-new one. Out of gratitude.”
“Stolen?”
“Not even. Wilbert had money coming out of his ears, he
bought the most expensive hairdryer. My parents didn’t know how to react. So there’s my mother on an ordinary Tuesday evening, unpacking this gift-wrapped hairdryer. Gosh, um, why thank you, Wilbert. My father was suspicious, he went to the V&D and to the Blokker and to Scheer & Foppen, until he got to the Kijkshop and they told him that yes, a young fellow with a motorcycle helmet and a West Coast accent had bought the hairdryer. You see? he’d say. The first few months my father was the driving force. Still so optimistic. He was going to get Wilbert back on the rails.”
“Big mistake.”
“You know how it turned out,” she said. “We were clueless. For instance, I wasn’t even aware that he’d already done time. More and more, he and Dad would go at it. God, could those two clash, unbelievable. And then it wasn’t even about the real shit, I mean: the incidents, the fights downtown, the break-ins, the cocaine. No, it was, like, normal day-to-day stuff. Forever arguing about everything and nothing. Those endless arguments about his musical taste, when I think back on it …” The drone of an ambulance siren wafted in from outside.
When she carried on with her story, she sounded more upbeat. “Wilbert liked rap and hip hop. Public Enemy, especially. I actually found it kind of interesting. Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Terminator X, I know all those names by heart.
Yo! Bum Rush the Show, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
, blaring the whole day long from four huge speakers he’d managed, within no time, to pick up somewhere.
Turn it down!
I can still hear my father screaming. The anger and desperation in that shouting from the bottom of the stairs. When I biked home from school via the campus, I’d ride up the Langenkampweg and even before our house appeared between the trees you could already hear the pounding. ‘Louder than a Bomb.’ All from that little cubbyhole next door.”
“I also used to get into rows about music. That’s normal.”
“Believe me,” she said, “it was
not
normal. They were at each other’s throats over the most trivial things. Over nothing, over … over
cola
. We were never allowed cola at home. Wilbert shows up, turns out he’s hooked on cola. All his life Wilbert is used to drinking two liters of cola a day, not just any old cola, but
Coca
-Cola. Any other brand he pours down the drain, except Pepsi: Pepsi he flushes down the toilet, I saw him do it. Come Sunday evening, if there was no bottle of Coke in the fridge, he’d ride off in a sweat to the nearest snack bar.”
“Perfect,” said Aaron. “Cola kills you. Eventually.”
She pretended not to hear him. “So, OK, fine, Janis and I can have cola too. One day we’re sitting at the table talking about my sister’s fillings. Janis had just come back from the dentist, eleven years old and two cavities. So we’re discussing brushing, sweets, and so on, the usual routine. Wilbert says: ‘I’ve got zero cavities.’ Gosh, Wilbert, says my mother, that’s terrific. ‘Zero cavities,’ he says,
‘therefore
, cola is good for your teeth.’ A normal person gets a laugh out of that kind of claptrap, is amused by that ‘therefore,’ or maybe not amused, but anyhow doesn’t take it seriously. Siem, he takes it
dead
serious. Reacts way over the top. For months he’s been convinced Wilbert has the same toxic effect on his daughters as two liters of cola a day has on your teeth. He goes ballistic over that ‘therefore.’ A normal kid backs off, says: ‘Just kidding, take it easy,’ but Wilbert is not a normal kid, Wilbert is itching for a fight, constantly. He’s adamant about it, keeps insisting that cola is good for your teeth. That he has
scientifically
proven that cola is good for your teeth.”
“Was he serious?”
“He was needling him. And you know Siem, he’s reasonable, he’s intelligent, but humor:
nada
. You know what a short fuse he’s
got. He goes berserk. But Wilbert doesn’t budge an inch, he says: vodka, now that’s bad for you, just look at my mother, but not cola, oh no, cola’s got fluoride in it, and he taps his teeth with his knife, tick, tick, tick. That’s how it went, about the most trivial things. And my father just kept taking the bait.”
She gave Sigerius less than his due, he thought. Maybe in her anger she forgot how alien to her father’s nature Wilbert’s fooling must have been. Cola good for your teeth, for fuck’s sake. Once, Aaron was talking to a doctoral student, a hefty Korean who was allowed to study Sigerius’s writings, where one could follow the bumpy road of his argumentation. “So krool,” the fellow said a couple of times, before Aaron realized he was saying
so cruel
, referring to how mercilessly Sigerius threw his own work overboard as soon as his theories could be disproved. Months of work, sometimes years.
“I only heard later that there was a lot more to it, more than they told me and Janis about.” She sniffed and rolled onto her back. “They fought like cats and dogs about Coca-Cola, but in the meantime there were hassles about cocaine, about dentist bills for having knocked out somebody’s teeth. There was some flap about a job my father had wangled for him at the university’s Technical Services. He’d pinched two grinding machines and sold them.”
As he listened, Aaron wondered how he would have reacted to a similar invasion himself. What would he have done when he was fourteen if some out-of-control hooligan had moved into their house? Someone like … Piet Suiker, he thought of Piet, an incredibly tough and brash kid from his youth, a creep who hadn’t crossed his mind for some fifteen years. Piet Suiker, “Suik” to his sidekicks—the most explosive maniac of them all, who called it quits after his fifth year of primary school, he didn’t go on to sixth grade, what good was that. A lunatic from the early Middle
Ages of his life, whose nerve-racking presence seemed certain to last an eternity, but who suddenly, like a plantar wart, shriveled and vanished. Suik, from whom you could order the sport shoes of your choice for just a fiver, which he would then shoplift from Sijbers’ Sporting Goods across the bridge in Venlo; who in the shower room after swimming lessons would grab the nearest pair of glasses and put them on his dick. When he was eleven he’d take you back behind the rose bushes and for a guilder show you how he could, from that same, now shockingly distended noodle, yank out “jism”: still, to this day, by far the most disgusting word Aaron knew. When his Zündapp motorbike was stolen, Suik marched into Genooi, the Bronx of Venlo, armed with a baseball bat, and sure enough, he returned with that bike. While Aaron was doing his high school finals, Piet was roaring down the streets in a souped-up Opel Manta. That kind of kid. What if one night Suik had parked that Manta in front of their house and his overpriced Adidas on the shoe rack next to the kitchen door? That’s what it came down to. Suik at their kitchen table. Suik in his pajamas on his dad’s Commodore. “Boys,” his mother would call from the TV room, “
Run the Gauntlet
is about to start,” at which point not only he and Sebastian, but also that brawny nutcase would come barreling down the stairs.
That
is what happened to Joni.
She loosened up, her warm side touching his. “And even with these kinds of things going on—horrible things, really, I thought so too—I started to take a liking to Wilbert.”
Now he held his breath. With the subtlest possible movement he shifted himself loose from her skin.
“It was a dilemma: of course I didn’t
want
to like him. But he was nice to me. Protective. He brought me to the station on his motorbike. He insisted on picking me up if I was out late.”
“Great guy,” he said. She didn’t answer. He thought he heard her grind her teeth.
“He introduced me to his music. LL Cool J, Run DMC, NWA—got them all from him. Listen to this, listen to that. He bought me a Walkman …”
“Stole you a Walkman.”
“… a really expensive Sony. He took me to Amsterdam on the sly, to Paradiso: just the two of us, to Public Enemy—my first concert, my father still doesn’t know. We got the earliest train back. And I taught him to ride a horse. What’s now the workshop used to be Peggy Sue’s stall. He couldn’t get enough of it. When he wasn’t on his motorbike or bumming around Enschede he was with my horse. He was determined to learn to ride. I used to go with him to the Horstlinde stables, ride circles in the ring.”
“Drienerlo Probation Service.” He was trying to sound blithe.