Authors: Peter Buwalda
“Do it,” he said a week ago over the telephone, when Sigerius told him he was in the running. “
Do it.
” And then the flattery: “They’d give their eye-teeth over at Education for a strong, competent minister, someone with a well-grounded vision, and at the same time a guy with balls, a leader.” Sigerius was worried about the short-term nature of the post, two years, not even that: “What’s
a year and a half, Frederik?” But Kannegieter was having none of it, all politics was short-term, he said, there was no such thing as certainty. And the location: “Zoetermeer, Frederik, who the hell builds a ministry in Zoetermeer, of all places?” “Grab it,” Kannegieter said.
You
always grab it, you old vulture, he thought. If Olde Kannegieter doesn’t advise you to grab it, a week later he’ll grab it himself.
Of course he has made himself available. He weighed up both scenarios: a hectic government life in the public eye, or in the shadows of a farmhouse on the fringe of a provincial university where his role would shortly be played out. Back to his own institute, or worse yet, a faculty post—he can’t picture that. He considered America, he always considers America. Princeton’s itching to have him, he could be a full professor, but he doesn’t want to mess around with them: his mathematical acuity has dulled over the past ten years or so. Besides, he has to admit he’s hooked on the idea of public office, and maybe on power itself.
Kruidenier, meanwhile, is tenacious, surviving one no-confidence vote after the other. Sigerius’s intuition tells him that time is not on his side, which is why he pushed for this meeting with Kannegieter. Between bites of club sandwich they ask after each other’s families, he fields questions about the situation in Enschede, and then gets to the point. “The problem is,” Sigerius says slowly, “that the Prime Minister’s got a candidate of his own. He never wanted Kruidenier in the first place, D66 shoved Kruidenier down his throat. The more time the PM gets, the more likely he’ll make his own choice. Unless, perhaps … I was thinking … and that’s why lunch is on me, Frederik—unless you exert a bit of your influence.”
“And you think Wim will listen to me?” His friend has taken off his imposing glasses and polishes them with a jagged-edged yellow cloth.
“I do, in fact.” Kannegieter is not only the Cabinet’s official
comptroller, the man who supplies the PM’s office with facts and figures, but he is also a prominent PvdA member, a Labour Party ideologue who contributed to the recent manifesto and the guy who whispers in PM Wim Kok’s ear when the masses need to be addressed with a worker’s heart. If the PM is forced to backpedal on an issue, the party’s thinktank is for Kannegieter only a bike ride away.
He inspects his glasses in the sunlight. “So do I,” he says, “so do I.” Mock vanity, sarcastic irony, even back in Boston it was his forte. Sigerius recalls a reception for a chemist who had won the Nobel Prize, they stood chatting with an American woman who could only talk about whether or not to dump some or other click fund; you guys are mathematicians, what do you think? I have advice, said Kannegieter, dead serious, but it would only apply to complex dollars in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.
They both looked in silence for a moment at a waiter whose orange apron was emblazoned with a flag of the Dutch lion sticking out of Dudok’s façade.
“What time does the inquisition start tonight?” Kannegieter asks.
“Quarter to nine.”
“Siem,” he says, “let me put it another way. I spoke to Wim a few days ago, we talked a lot about you, he brought it up himself—and yes, doubts, doubts … he respects you as a scientist, believe me, and as an administrator too, only he’s not sure where you stand politically. It’s a gamble, of course.” A bit of bacon flies out of Kannegieter’s mouth, arcs across the table and lands on the edge of Sigerius’s plate. “He asked, so I told him about our time in Boston, about our working relationship, about mathematics, naturally—but also about our friendship, Siem, the family outings, the kids’ sleepovers. What it boils down to for him is: can he trust you? Don’t worry about it too much.”
The skies suddenly darken in Sigerius’s head, as they have done so often the last few weeks. Kannegieter’s sweet talk neither reassures nor gratifies him; rather, it makes him somber, latently aggressive; it doesn’t interest him, inside him the little speech forms a syrupy pool of indifference, he has to actively resist his neurotransmitters to prevent himself from exploding. Friendship? He is infuriated by the largesse with which the word passes over Kannegieter’s lips. They glance at each other. What’s left of their “friendship”? Of their once so familiar and frequent association? How tight
were
they? Oh sure, they were like two peas in a pod when it came to the rarefied abstractions of their work; twice, three times a day they perched on each other’s desks to discuss unital C*-algebras with a predual—What do you think, Fred, are they unique? Like a Banach space, I mean, or maybe always? Isomorphics excepted, etc. etc., for hours on end—and yes,
that
was good. But friendship? How often do we still talk, Kannegieter?
What do we know about each other?
The man seated across from him expected a different response, he holds the right lens of his glasses between thumb and index finger, keeps rubbing just to hold a pose. What if he were to ask a
real
question. Just spit it out, boom, his real concern, his worst fear. What if he said: “Listen, Frederik, I’m worried that my daughter is prostituting herself on the Internet.” His hands go clammy with the thought. Can’t do it. Somewhere behind the hedge that separates them from the Binnenhof a car honks, they both look momentarily at the leafy wall.
“Thanks, Fred,” he says distractedly. “I appreciate your putting in a good word for me.”
After he’s paid, they walk around the pond to the square where Kannegieter’s chauffeur is eating an omelette at an outdoor café. The atmosphere has become awkward. They say goodbye.
• • •
He strolls through the windy Korte Houtstraat, kills a quarter of an hour flipping through bins of jazz albums in the Plaatboef. Does he even know what friendship is? The contacts he maintains: are these what you could call friendships? While he walks as slowly as possible to the Health Ministry, his mind pages through his address book. He might look like a collegial kind of guy, his contacts handed to him on a silver platter, but in fact he chooses sparring partners, competitors. The other as yardstick, a whetting stone.
He walks through an architecturally correct archway, crosses the ministry courtyard. “I’m an egotist,” Menno once said en route to a tournament in Düsseldorf, “and you are too, Siem. We’re loners, our kind, friendless in a way.”
At the reception desk of the enormous redbrick building he’s given a badge. He takes the elevator to the fifth floor and steps out into a corridor paneled in light veneer. He attends some ten hours of meetings a week. But talk? Who with, for God’s sake? He stands in front of one of the tall windows and stares at the steep gables of the main towers until it is two o’clock on the dot.
The vice-premier’s bright office has the same wood paneling, her glass-topped desk is half the size of his own in Twente. She receives him cordially, with a trace of inattentiveness he regards as typical for those at the top. They know each other from the obligatory hand-shaking at party congresses; her job is to massage the Cabinet, and Kok in particular, into accepting his nomination. The interview goes well, they talk for nearly two hours, she is “delighted” with his motivation and compliments him on his articles on higher education. “We can’t afford any more inopportune appointments,” she says. They discuss the tricky dossiers, he
mentions his own views, her intelligent female voice lists the potential stumbling blocks. Every so often he sticks his left hand into his pants pocket and rasps his thumb over the sharp teeth of the key.
Groups of singing football supporters swarm The Hague Central Station; he has to run to catch the 4:06 train. When he alights in Enschede two and a half hours later, he goes to a phone booth and dials the number of Aaron’s house. He lets it ring until he hears a busy signal. Then he calls Tineke on his cell phone. “Still at The Hague Station,” he says. “I’ll just come and watch the match at home.”
“Great,” she says with her dependable, pleasant voice, “Janis’ll like that. How’d it go?”
“Useful. Frederik sends his regards. He’s really done his best.”
“Shall I save you some dinner?”
“Please. OK, got to board now.”
“Have a good trip, dear.”
He leaves the station, in front of the Bruna newsstand a kid with curly wet hair and an overnight bag nods at him, he smiles back, always smile back, and decides to take a taxi.
He clears his throat. “Vluchtestraat.”
The Mercedes glides through the orange-bedecked streets like a stingray. Children have painted the wooden partitions. Dark redbrick row houses that retain the day’s heat, open windows with screens. Nightfall is hours away. The street Joni and Aaron drove off from five days ago, the car fully packed, is festooned with orange banners, flags, balloons—as though the explosion never happened. Enschede is a salamander that’s lost its tail.
He has the driver stop at the end of the street, pays him, and removes the key from his pocket before he gets out. He takes a
deep breath and, without lingering, walks along the quiet Vluchtestraat, past a sort of nurses’ residence, then crosses diagonally and cuts into the short path leading to Aaron’s front door. If he rings the bell, just for show, the neighbors might hear. No, this needs to be done like a Band-Aid: rip it off in one quick jerk. Holding his breath, he inserts the virgin steel into the lock. It refuses. He jiggles it back and forth, softly, his fingers become moist.
During their last week at the farmhouse Aaron showed up with a brand-new key, and while Sigerius listened to his story—the city had replaced the locks on all the doors they’d had to force open—he registered precisely where Aaron put it: on the key ring in the pocket of his summer jacket, a corduroy blazer he hung neatly on a hanger in the front hall closet. He was the last one in the living room that night. While the rest of the house slept, he smuggled the keys out of Aaron’s pocket and took them to the bathroom, where he wrestled the only one that looked like an unused house key off the ring. The next day his secretary had it copied at a Mister Minit.
The wrong one? A superstitious person would see the hand of Fate at work. (
You’re making a mistake, go home, forget everything
.) He wipes his hands on his trousers and looks around.
Never look around
. On the second attempt the lock glides open.
He steps inside and closes the door softly behind him. It is a full minute before he can hear the silence above his own heart. A vague animal smell penetrates his nostrils. He exhales and considers locking the door. A neighbor who waltzes in and starts filling a watering can. He rehearses his reaction: insurance papers, my son-in-law phoned from his vacation address, a fender-bender, I’m just busy upstairs.
A small stack of dish towels lies on the white-painted steps, a pair of running shoes on the next step up. That is where he must go, upstairs, but first, just to be sure, he opens the door to the living room.
It is cramped and dusty, he feels clumsy, as though he’ll knock things over. On the coffee table, around which they congregate once a year for a slice of birthday
vlaai
, lies a pair of badminton rackets and a container of birdies. Opposite the TV, a stylish sofa with soft purple upholstery, matching armchairs, two pillar-shaped speakers he and Aaron bought together in Münster, an old Dual turntable and next to it a stack of jazz LPs he recognizes as his. The fascinating wall of books coaxes a smile out of him, but it is a nervous smile. Out of the corner of his eye, to the left, he notices a large, dark rectangle with glowing edges: the curtains to the backyard are drawn. Something starts humming resonantly. The fridge? The curtains on the street side are open, unfortunately; a Moroccan woman pushing a baby stroller along the sidewalk glances at him as she passes. Always smile and wave. Behind her, a low apartment block; beyond that, the provisional fence around Roombeek. His heart bulges: someone comes crashing down a flight of stairs, thud, a door clicks shut—the nextdoor neighbor? Stay calm. France is a long way away. You whisked them neatly out of the country.
Here, take 1,500 guilders and beat it. Relax, enjoy. Talk things out. He walks into the kitchenette and picks up a glass from the counter, fills it from the tap, and drains it sloppily. It was an emergency measure, he would rather have bided his time. An opportunity to use the key would present itself sooner or later, those two were always jaunting off on some vacation or another, it made you wonder where they got the money. But then Tineke told him the relationship was on the rocks. Serious trouble. Hanging by a thread. Tineke had gone to Ennio’s funeral, a depressing, poorly attended affair; she had expected to see Joni and Aaron together, but their daughter was there alone. Afterward, in the chapel, she told her mother about the argument with Aaron, and expressed her misgivings about their future.
That made everything a sight more complicated. They wouldn’t be going on vacation anytime soon, maybe never. And he couldn’t very well break into the house of his daughter’s ex … The previous week, their last training in the dusty gym: five minutes before they were to start it occurred to him that Aaron might not show up. But he did, after all. Let him bring it up, he thought. They laid out the mats, thwap, chatted about the upcoming European Cup, warmed up in silence, practiced groundwork, and went through
katas
—and all that time, not a word. “Aaron”—he eventually got the ball rolling himself—“what do you think, will you and Joni patch things up?”
“Have you spoken to her then?” They stood there arranging their suits, the bald beanpole with his black belt between his chin and chest.
“Have
you
spoken to her?”
“No. I’m not allowed to phone. And you know Joni.”
I know Joni? Don’t make me laugh
. “It’s awful, Siem.”