Authors: Peter Buwalda
Cycling through the campus was out of the question. There was no way he would climb the cement stairs to the newsroom, that he would enter Blaauwbroek’s office and take a seat across from
him. Every Monday morning at exactly the same time, Blaauwbroek walked across the quad to the administrative wing and sat down with the rector for a “press moment.” As long as this tradition continued, and continue it would, he could not face his boss; facing Blaauwbroek meant facing Sigerius, and the same went for every last soul on this goddamn campus, it was one huge pyramid, everyone supported, in one way or another, the capstone—except him. He had toppled off.
He wiped his mouth, pulled himself together, and pushed his bike up the sloping bank to the path. Go back. Just as he was about to set off, he noticed two figures cycling his way from the Enschede side. Murk van der Doelen and Björn Knaak. As soon as he saw them he looked the other way. Paralysis spread through his limbs. Not now. Knaak and Van der Doelen, he used to chat with them at keg parties and at gatherings of the debating society, student organizations and the like—mostly in a fairly drunken state, them, but him too. Contact within these groups was superficial, raucous, razzing, noncommittally chummy. The guys were in the same clique as Joni, he had witnessed them addressing fellow students from atop tables, bars, and other raised surfaces—brash, eloquent oratories, delivered with a panache he abhorred and envied at the same time.
They were the last people in the world he felt like bumping into. These guys had practically turned white from sheer cockiness, as scaly as an out-of-date chocolate bar. Knaak and Van der Doelen lived with about ten other Siemsayers in a swanky town house on the Oldenzaalstraat where they had 24/7 training in frat-boy superiority. He’d been in the villa about five times, mostly to photograph their top-drawerness in the run-up to the annual house ball, a self-satisfied fête “to put some pizzazz into the city.”
By now they recognized him. Murk rode in front: a blond stack
of Gouda cheese wheels, slouching on his bike like an old geezer. An expression of mockery spread over his bean-shaped head, which sat on his full-fat chest without any intervention of a neck. He was still standing there, bike in hand, so there was no avoiding them. Murk screeched to a halt.
“Well, if it isn’t Aaron Bever,” said Björn Knaak, coasting toward him until his front tire banged into Aaron’s. Björn was a thickset fellow with a shaved head, mean eyes, and a low-hanging crotch. He was on the rugby team. Aaron had no idea what he studied, but it would have had to be something concrete and easy to grasp. Like Joni, he considered university the instruction manual for the business world.
“Hi guys,” he said softly, and halfheartedly stuck out his hand. Handshakes were part of their obligatory protocol. Oh well, he didn’t really hate them.
Murk van der Doelen took him in from head to toe. “Bever,” he said, “are you dead or what? You look like you died of a lethal fatality.”
Murk studied classical piano, the last thing you’d expect from him. Once, Aaron had heard him give a recital before some student gala: the picture of refinement, Beethoven, Liszt, Prokofiev, his fat fingers danced over the keys, elegant as anything, and afterward a too-long ovation and frilly nibbles on microscopic melba toasts. But deep down, Murk was a lout. Once a year he had his stomach pumped at the Medical Spectrum following the annual beer-drinking tournament in their wood-paneled old boys’ society, a competition involving twenty-four bottles of beer which he, thanks to both technique and character, guzzled faster than anyone else. During the autumn “rush” of aspirant members, Murk defended the long staircase to the bar like a pale-skinned Hulk, cursing and screaming, his blubbery bare torso dripping with deep-frying oil,
his arms around the skinny hips and necks of frightened eighteen-year-old runts who had envisioned something completely different.
“I’m on my way home from work,” Aaron said. “I’m kind of under the weather.”
“About-face, Bever,” Björn said. “There’s a party. It’ll perk you up. We’re going to celebrate your bachelorhood.”
“Who says I’m a bachelor?”
“I do,” said Björn. He wiped his hand over his muscled ferret-snout.
“Everyone does,” said Murk.
“Your lady told me herself,” Björn said. “Your
ex
-lady.”
Actually, I
do
hate you guys, he thought. Maybe this kind of jerk was the reason he’d fled Utrecht, not a thought he’d ever admitted to Joni, who surely wouldn’t have understood. Since you always saw Björn and Murk together, Joni gave them the amusing nickname “Björk.” “I was at De Kater yesterday, and guess who was there? Björk.” The complete ease with which she had these braggadocios in her pocket.
In fact, Joni knew little about the Utrecht debacle that had been on his mind these last few weeks. He kept all references to it vague. After high school his mother had packed a student cookbook and teddy bear for him, and off he went to study Dutch in Utrecht. It was a catastrophe. He flunked two-thirds of his exams, and due to unfinished hazing business at a fraternity he missed the department introduction, so that he didn’t know anyone who could pilot him through the winter semester. He pined away in the room he rented from his great-aunt in Overvecht, a suburb with asbestos flats and its own station with two sets of rails to lie down on. Utrecht’s nightlife was out of reach; from the sixth floor he stared out over a dark-green ocean of grass, his great-aunt’s granite balcony was the edge of the edge. His insomnia thrived, he often woke at four, four-thirty in the
morning, unlocked the door and sat freezing to death on a plastic garden chair for hours on end, until it was time to go to class. He would then grapple his way into town on his great-aunt’s undersized ladies’ bike, performing depressing slaloms through drafty Utrecht-North, which now reminded him of his cycling expeditions through post-explosion Enschede. He noticed from the pillowcases (also borrowed from his great-aunt) that his hair was starting to fall out, just like the bristles of her silky toothbrush that he used on the sly because he kept forgetting to buy his own.
“I talked to her a while ago,” Björn lisped.
“Who?” he asked.
“Who do you think? Your lady, of course. She was in the Hole, a send-off from her debating team.” The Hole: a dank underground drinking cave that literally bored into the Oude Markt. News about Joni in the Hole was always bad news. “One thimble of Bacardi,” drawled Björn, “and she’s pushing her tits up against you. She’ll tell you anything you want to know. And also what you don’t want to know. And forever pressing those party-knockers against you. Pity she’s buggered off to America.”
His big eyes were slanted, the whites were yellow. One way or the other, this ferret never failed to mention Joni’s breasts. Knaak couldn’t
not
talk about them. Yes, he hated Björn, even more than he hated Murk.
“ ‘I’ll bet you’re a free agent now,’ I say to her. ‘How’d you know that?’ she says. You know how ladies say that at 4 a.m. in the Hole.” Björn put on a girlie voice. “ ‘How’d you know
that
?’ ‘Well, I can feel it on two things,’ I say. ‘Two pointy pieces of hard evidence.’ ”
Murk chortled softly. Björn, who only laughed either out of strategic considerations or schadenfreude, put on a serious face. Aaron felt, to his surprise, no jealousy, did not taste the battery acid he used to taste, nor the explosive, childish rage over a pair of nipples
poking into the wrong male body—only loathing. What he’d have liked most of all was to tell these two he was a millionaire, and which tits had made him just that. To check himself, he held the wide point of Björn’s necktie between his fingers. The blue and orange tie was knotted in a full Windsor, which according to Ian Fleming was the mark of a cad.
“Paws off the tie, geek,” said Van der Doelen, and wound up as if to slug him. Aaron decided to play along and let go. These ties were a symbol for the outside world that Knaak and Van der Doelen were officers of the Student Union, the crowning glory of their Tubantia years. Murk especially had a knack for looking back on his student years like an honorary minister, a twenty-three-year-old assessing his past over a good cigar. Of course it was Sigerius, as always, who had put the crown on his head. Three years ago there was a sudden and urgent need for an organization that would “steer all student activism.” A student union, after the Anglo-American model. He had seen how Sigerius had screwed another administrative layer onto Enschede’s student life, just like you sealed the lid onto a jar of canned peas. His hidden agenda was to counteract the exodus from campus. Students who were initially drawn to the compact, friendly, over-organized campus, usually thanks to enthusiastic parents, were now taking rooms in downtown Enschede, in a real student house near the bars and fraternities on the Grote Markt. It was 2000: you couldn’t lock up Dutch college students in the sticks anymore. But now that once-provincial area was packed with hundreds of millions worth of real estate: student flats, faculty housing, a cafeteria and restaurant, a supermarket, an infirmary, a dentist, barber shop, swimming pool, library, pubs, theatres, basement party rooms, athletic fields, works of art—Tubantia
was
the campus. The Student Union was to be the engine behind it.
Sigerius budgeted a heap of money for it, and recruited Björk to mind the shop.
“Let’s go, pussypants,” Murk said. “Your daddy-in-law will be there too.”
Aaron shook his head.
Björn laughed at something, but the sound was drowned out by the rustling of so many leaves surrounding them. “What,” he said. “Sigerius
is
your pal, isn’t he? Or are you chicken?”
Aaron suddenly went red-hot, the air that closed in on him felt like a furnace, it could ignite at any moment. He was
ashamed
, he was overcome by an explosive shame. But what for? From Knaak’s and Van der Doelen’s mugs you could see he had a strange look about him. His embarrassment had nothing to do with Joni’s breasts in the Hole, nor with the fact that he had wholeheartedly distributed them throughout the world, boobs that would bob like driftwood around the Web for years to come—no, he was ashamed because the guys were right: he was chicken.
“What’s with that Student Union?” he asked off the cuff. “It sounds so namby-pamby. In Utrecht it wouldn’t ever get off the ground, in a real varsity town the frats wouldn’t let themselves be bossed around by some student union. I thought that student associations didn’t give a damn about the university.”
As usual, he was only parroting Etienne Vaessen. To his friend, who had been something of a big shot on the Utrecht frat scene, he defended the campus tooth and nail, but as soon as he stood at the bar with guys like this he became a mini-Etienne and did his Utrecht veteran act. Sometimes he couldn’t resist lying outright that he was a fratter, and if they pressed him he would bluff his way forward, delving into repertoire borrowed from Etienne. “A real frat lampoons the university admin,” he said.
“Your point being?” asked Björn. As opposed to Murk, who was at a total loss for words, and whose body hung like a cheap sausage over his handlebars, Björn sprang to attention, his legs spread like a commando, the crossbar of his sticker-covered bike in his low crotch. He wore neatly polished, snug-fitting brogues straight out of the student handbook. His weird, glowing snake-eyes glared belligerently.
“Real fratters don’t give a shit about how their university’s run,” Aaron said nervously. “They just do whatever they goddamn please.”
Before Björn responded, he slid his pronounced lips up and down over that big set of teeth of his. “You hear that, Van der Doelen? Bever here is in the know. Now that Sigerius has dropped him like a piece of dog shit he’s going to tell us just how things should go.” He shook his disgruntled ferret-head. “The school newspaper photographer feels that we should do whatever we goddamn please.” He looked straight at Aaron, mockingly. “For years he’s got his head up Sigerius’s ass and now he thinks
were
ass-lickers. You hear that?”
“I hear it,” Murk said earnestly. “Big talker in the bar, Siem this, Siem that.”
His nausea returned. He might be five years older than these guys, but the world started spinning as though he were on a carnival ride, the rustling treetops became a green morass that whispered to him like a theatre prompter.
Go on, tell them
.
“Sigerius is leaving,” he said. It sounded raspy; he cleared his throat. “He’s through with your campus. He’s going to be the new Minister of Education. I’ve known for months.”
“Bullshit, Bever,” said Björn. “Where were you at Sigerius’s barbecue, anyway? Your bosom buddy doesn’t even invite you around anymore.”
“He’s going to be a Cabinet minister. Still a secret, FYI.”
Björn sniffed and spat into the bushes. “Now that his lady’s off fucking Jim in America—” he said to Murk.
“Jeff,” said Murk.
“Now that his lady’s off fucking Jim
and
Jeff in America,” Björn conceded, “and Daddy can’t bear the sight of butt-kisser anymore, butt-kisser’s gonna spread some secrets.”
Aaron wanted to respond, but his stomach beat him to it. It clenched like a fist, so that the remaining gall made its way up his esophagus. Yellow bile oozed out of his mouth and dribbled over his handlebars. Björn yanked his bike backward.
“You’ve been boozing, Bever,” Murk said. “Should’ve said so earlier.” He laughed uneasily. “Go curl up in your basket, punk.”
Björn, meanwhile, was back on his bike, and before he rode off he gave Aaron’s baggage carrier a firm kick.
Brilliant June sunlight carved the linoleum floor of the former classroom into slices. We both sat looking at the grainy, glossy wooden crucifix on the white stucco wall, so colossal and three-dimensional that it persistently caught your eye. Jesus as hand-hewn athlete in the romantic Tyrol shepherd-with-flock style I recalled from ski vacations in Val Gardena. Every drop of sap would ooze out like blood.
“You hang him up?” I asked to break the silence. Wilbert seemed better at silences than I was. We sat opposite each other, me on an uncomfortable wooden chair, him sprawled on a formless thrift-store armchair covered in light-brown patchwork leather.