Authors: Peter Buwalda
So they drove around for hours, each pothole and bump sending his tearful mother into paroxysms of agony, he himself terrified that the ball of her upper arm would rip through the bloodless, tautly stretched skin. Finally their father just pulled over somewhere, jerked on the parking brake, and ran in barely concealed panic toward a dimly lit clump of stones, this mill house—to ask directions, they thought, but he came back with a huge man named Jean-Baptiste, who carried his mother into his big pink abode, his father close behind. There, out of the children’s earshot, the two men rammed and jammed his mother’s shoulder back into place.
That same afternoon his father and brother pitched their tents in the tufted grass where he now sat, while his mother went to Jean-Baptiste’s doctor on the Linkebeek village square. His parents apparently clicked with the miller and his wife, because they stayed for a week. It was unforgettable. He and his brother befriended the daughter and son, twins about his own age, who took them to building sites, orchards, creeks, the ruins of a castle where they spent long evenings enacting knightly exploits. The girl was named Julie, she had fluffy brown hair and taught him, somewhere in these woods, how to “kino-kiss”: two wide-open fish mouths that exchanged moist air, like in the movies. The next year, and the one after that, he already started dropping hints in April: Mom, Dad,
can we go back to the mill this year? How about if we, etc., etc. They never went back. Years later, Sebastian told him that his mother had fallen in love with Jean-Baptiste. Their father found out they’d been corresponding via a post office box near her work.
Maybe Joni got found out
, he thought suddenly. He had never considered the possibility. That aborted career at McKinsey—had somebody stumbled across those photos? There were bound to be pictures still circulating on free sites. Maybe someone recognized her, once it got out, she’d be finished, no way you’d keep your job after that in puritanical America. Could it be? It would explain her keeping her head down.
He closed his eyes. The rough bark of the willow chafed the back of his head. Compassion filled his tear ducts. He wasn’t the only loser: 2000 had been a massacre. And
that
was why he longed for Joni, they could talk about it, he would comfort her. They shared a wild, disastrous past that together they could put behind them. Joni could come live with him; they could transform his absurd, empty, sad house into a home. She could easily find a job in Brussels, or in Linkebeek. Just last week he saw there was an opening at the library, not for a back-to-work mom but someone serious about maintaining the collection. And in Brussels there was plenty of office work.
He thought it was a great idea. She knew him inside out, knew him before he got sick. She could bring her children with her. He would raise them lovingly, just as
her
stepfather had done. And who knows.
Who knows
. How old was she now? Thirty-five? Thirty-six tops. He tried to imagine a thirty-six-year-old Joni. What did she look like? (All week he hadn’t succeeded in recalling her natural, relaxed face.) He tried to envisage her … He tried to imagine how Joni, here in Linkebeek … how she would look
pregnant
.
Instead of that he saw something else, as so often when he
thought of her: that wide-eyed, stunned grimace—her expression during the last seconds that they had a future together.
She was sitting on the floor, half under the table. He came running into the room, alarmed, the neon-yellow Oilily bag with their dirty washing from Corsica slung over his shoulder, and there she sat, arms wrapped around her knees, the dining room table a canopy, as though she had taken cover from a shower of shards. On the table and on the floor around her lay envelopes and newspapers and slivers of glass, an orderly, serene still life compared to her face, which appeared to have been struck by something high up on the Richter scale. They gaped at each other for a few moments, her eyes bulged, her eyelids were bunched-up like sweater sleeves. In a thick voice she said that it was her father, that he knew everything, and that he just charged through the sliding glass door, “he just walked straight through the glass.” She sat there stock-still.
Not Aaron. He dropped the Oilily bag, his heart kicking and pounding in his chest, he couldn’t talk through his panting, did he hit you? he wanted to ask, she looked like she’d been knocked senseless, but he couldn’t talk, he was dizzy—which is why he strode, with two big steps, through the splintery frame of the sliding door, out to the back terrace. “Blood,” he stammered, there were thick splatters of blood amid the broken glass on the paving tiles. He walked farther onto the grass, “damn,” he blustered breathily, “damn, damn, damn,” but stopped abruptly, something moved, sunlight, he gestured defensively,
don’t hit me
, bounded back in the living room, looked back into the yard, his breath rasping, and saw that it was only his bicycle, the sun reflecting off his bike. Joni was still sitting like a sculpture on the floor, her eyes bulging, staring blankly into space. She sniffled. He walked back,
jerked the curtains closed, banged his shin against the coffee table, went into the hallway, and locked the front door without looking down the street. He stood with his back against the wavy glass. Then he launched into a lamentation, an uncontrolled stream of clichés, verbal diarrhea, this is what you get, they asked for this, fuck, Joni,
fuck
, they should have stopped, why did they even start, he stumbled into the living room grasping his sunburned head, “I was always afraid of this, why—”
“Shut your trap,” Joni said. To his amazement, she stood up, plucked a sliver of glass from her shoulder. “You do understand,” she said with unnerving calmness, “that we’re stopping
now
. It’s over, Aaron.”
His arms slid off his head like rubber. He let out a sob, a deep sob—and nodded. Yes. Case closed. Not only did he understand what Joni said, he
knew
it. He knew it already outside on the deserted street, when he lifted the Oilily bag out of the trunk and heard the cacophony of breaking glass roll toward him from the front hall, he knew then that it was all over. A profound and irreversible knowing. He
knew
that it was Sigerius who had just smashed through his newly installed sliding glass door. A crystalline finale to everything, to Joni and him, their fresh start, his friendship with her father, life in the farmhouse, his adopted city. (Strangely enough, he told Haitink later, the
real
din was internal, his insides shattered. In his head too, something was smashed to pieces. He
himself
splintered into little bits. “You think so now,” Haitink said. “I thought so
then
,” he said. “
Now
you think you thought so
then
.”)
The national anthem was being sung on the TV. They stared at the football players. “What did he say?”
“I’m going,” she said flatly. “I need to be alone. Maybe I’ll call you.” She pulled some clothes out of the Oilily bag, took her rolling suitcase by the handle and walked outside. Was this really
happening? Ten minutes ago they were like the little figures on top of a wedding cake, gushing over a future they had cut short their vacation for: California here we come! He believed it, and otherwise at least Joni did. The morning after the brush fire nearly drove them into the sea, she rose out of the surf of their little pebbled beach like his very own Ursula Andress. “You know what?” she had said as she walked over to him, wringing out her hair and tossing her flippers and snorkel at his feet, “I want to go home. We’ve got a million things to do. We’ll watch the France-Holland match back in Enschede.” And now she was just walking out of his life?
He spent the first few days and nights mostly frightened. Somebody who walked out like that could just as well walk right back in. Every hour of the day and the mostly sleepless nights he was aware that Sigerius could show up to settle the score. He lay on the clammy leather of his sofa in the darkened living room, cringing with every sound from outside. So as not to be caught off guard he took the telephone with him to the toilet, and while he showered the thing lay in his piss-stained washbasin. He went to the shed and dragged back the splintered panels the city had used to board up his windows the first time around, and nailed them over the new hole in his house. (The previous time had been no more than a foretaste, a harbinger.)
During that clumsy carpentry job in the full midday sun, he let the likely scene between Joni and her father expand into something monstrous, he continually replayed the moment where Sigerius smacked his daughter in the face,
take that, whore
, he felt it himself, a white-hot blow that in fact was intended for
him
, after which he pictured Sigerius, like a Viking in a suit, head-butt the glass door to smithereens. The violence of that deed surpassed his worst
fears, belittled the visions of vengeance that he’d tried so hard to suppress during his moments of regret about the website.
When he stumbled upon a black tennis bag that turned out to contain a bolt cutter, it dawned on him that his father-in-law had been on a mission. Holding that leaden weight in his hands, he realized that Sigerius hadn’t sent them abroad simply out of benevolence, it was a premeditated move. But how did he get into his house in the first place? The tool fell to the floor with a thud, it made him dizzy, he had to sit down: how long had his father-in-law been wise to their shenanigans? He avoided going up to the attic, spared himself seeing the ravaged room, upturned bins of clothing, dildos, wigs torn asunder.
Joni’s departure left behind an abyss; occasionally he could touch the spongy, weedy bottom. The last remnants of his ability to sleep at normal times of the day dried up; his body only turned off when the empty batteries started to rust through. At night he lay on a sheet on the sofa, during the day blades of light pierced the splintered boards. Only when he’d entirely run out of provisions, down to the last crumb and last sheet of toilet paper, did he venture out. Everywhere he used to shop had either been blown to bits or burned to the ground, so he undertook longer expeditions by bike, returning from these other neighborhoods completely wrecked, more from nerves than from physical exertion. He saw them everywhere, sitting, walking, standing—Sigerius or Joni, or both. In his weakest moments he dialed Joni’s number, but of course she didn’t answer, and he did not know what to say into her voice mail. His grief turned into raging jealousy, and vice versa.
One day he found an envelope with the keys to their Alfa on the doormat. Their website had gone off-line, he noticed one night; he was surprised she was able to manage it on her own. He began to suspect that perhaps she had already left for America. At
night—daytime there—he checked their joint bank account, he’d studied that astronomical seven-digit balance so often he could recite it like a telephone number—until, sure enough, the dollars started evaporating. From certain transactions he concluded that Joni had instructed their collection agency to refund money to clients. Withdrawals from Sunnyvale Plaza, purchases at Borders Books and Trader Joe’s—amounts that approximated his own withdrawal of crisp 100s he used to pay the Italian or Chinese food deliveries—confirmed that she was indeed in America. He was crazy with mistrust. Did she have someone else there? One afternoon he called up McKinsey Amsterdam and invented an excuse to be connected to Boudewijn Stol. When he actually answered, Aaron waited a moment and then gently put down the receiver.
He hung in time like a jellyfish in the ocean, pulsating silently as though not only Roombeek, but also the entire world had exploded, and his living room was the sole entity revolving around the sun. He gave his insomnia free rein, day and night lost all relevance, his waking state gradually took on an inscrutable rhythm, drifting in and out of sleep. His dreams were intense. He now ordered all his food by phone, and the doorbell invariably shook him violently out of a turbulent underworld. Every now and then he got so sick of himself that he attempted to read something, or stared at the television, played a jazz record at full volume, only to wake up to the tick-tick-tick of the needle catching in the lock groove.
The few times the phone rang, he first had to get over the shock before he dared listen to his voice mail. Whenever anyone rang his doorbell—the postman, charity collections, even once his friend Thijmen—he would sink to his knees next to the radiator and peek under the curtains to see who was there to threaten him. The constant fear that it was Sigerius.
One day his voice mail overflowed with messages from Blaauwbroek.
The jovial banter about putting out his barbecue, about rinsing the suntan lotion out of his ears, whether he was back in long pants—it was as though his boss was speaking a foreign language. He did not respond. Only after the third message, “Bever, stick some TNT in your ass and get over to the newsroom,” did he force himself into action. Maybe, he thought, the world just kept on turning. He shaved, put on the only clean clothes he could find, and got on his bike.
His eyes no longer accustomed to so much daylight, he blinked his way around the fenced-off disaster area and cycled toward the Drienerlo woods. The brilliant sun burned into his retina, passing cars screamed in his face. His mouth was bone-dry. The campus still exerted a magnetic force on him, but now the poles were reversed. He cycled uphill, or so it seemed, he had to toss his cigarette away because he was gasping like a drowning man. When he reached the green corridor between the city and university he gradually slowed down, he couldn’t catch his breath, even though he was almost standing still it was like he was being sandblasted. He was up against the sound barrier. Deafening noise, birds, leaves, insects, the stomping of ants. Up in the trees, libelous whispers. Everything on his body itched and tightened, his eyes watered.
A few hundred meters on, Sigerius rounded the leafy curve with a collie on a leash. Nauseous with dread, he swerved off the path, coasted behind an oak tree and into some low shrubs, coming to a standstill against a wall of pale-yellow sand. Still straddling the bike, he threw up. And there he stood panting in his shelter, spitting pukey saliva out of his mouth. The man and his dog walked past.