Authors: Peter Buwalda
“Take a seat,” he said, clumsily formal, as though I wasn’t his daughter but one of his doctoral students. There was an empty coffee cup on the tablecloth, next to a saucer emblazoned with the Tubantia logo. He looked tired, and in the bright sunlight his suit looked rumpled.
“What’ll you have, honey?”
“Dad, I’ve got sandwiches.”
“Throw ’em out. I’m having the steak sandwich. It’s delicious here. How’d economics go?”
“Went OK.”
He closed the leather-bound menu, beckoned the waiter, and ordered two steak sandwiches. He said something about our vice-principal, uptight man. And then, more to himself than to me: “All right. Now then.”
Without a segue he related what Maurice had told him last
Sunday. He tried to, at least: first he got all tangled up in a woolly introduction, and for a moment it looked like he was just going to drop it, but then he cleared his throat and got down to it. His head like a hornet’s, he told me about the handkerchief, still euphemistic and clumsy, and when he got to the scarf, to the shower curtain, and what Wilbert had been up to behind it, the whole thing just ground to a halt: his message, it seemed, was a round peg and his mouth a square hole. Why is discussing sex with our parents so awkward? We sat there embarrassed, both of us, but me most of all for him, until he picked up a hammer and bashed his way through the misery that had cost him a good night’s sleep.
I think I said something like “jeez,” in a slightly surprised tone. A mild kiddie-curse resulting from at least two emotions that tugged at me during my father’s tortured account. The worst one was my urge to burst out laughing at what sounded like Wilbert’s constant efforts to exponentially augment his repertoire of tomfoolery, which I was starting, deep down, to consider more and more fascinating and arousing—certainly in this “blue” area, one that involved what girls and boys could get up to together. At the same time, this was exactly what
kept
me from laughing—I was watching my step. Yes, that second emotion was apprehension. My father was clearly allergic to Wilbert in general, but of all his irritations I think the most deep-rooted and now the least visible was Wilbert’s—how to put it?—lack of inhibition. It was more than just confidence. His aggression, his sloth, his boldness (his
stupidity
, according to my father): these things you could quite reasonably fight about, I’d seen them do so with great enthusiasm. But the fondling and the filthy language, that non-stop hormonal surge—since his arrival the farmhouse had turned into a particle accelerator. Wilbert and the girls, it made Siem nervous, set him on edge. Before the prodigal son had returned to Daddy’s hearth and home, four-letter words were
like electric fencing; within a radius of 200 meters our little throats slammed shut, Janis and I were struck dumb with cuss-aphasia. But from the minute he sets foot in our house, Wilbert calls everything “cocksucker” or “fucked” or “jism” or “ho” or just “shit,” there’s no stopping him. After just three weeks he brings a girl back to the farmhouse one Saturday night; the next morning an unfamiliar red and blue granny-bike is leaning against the chestnut tree next to the terrace. The whole Sunday my parents sit there like some Bible-belt couple waiting to see what comes downstairs, but nothing at all comes down the stairs, until Wilbert and the girl saunter into the living room, half naked, at five in the afternoon: “We’ve come to score a couple of fried eggs.”
But instead of just letting them fry up a couple of eggs, my father, covertly pissed off, hisses that the kitchen is closed—shower and beat it, both of you. So that was the last we saw of his one-night stands, from then on Wilbert did that elsewhere, but what we did see more of was skin mags flung about, and boxes of condoms. One day my father storms into Wilbert’s room with a gigantic phone bill—itemized, of course. “06” numbers. That sort of to-do in a house which, pre-Wilbert, you could raze to the ground without finding even one single unillustrated and footnoted sex-education manual, let alone anything remotely titillating. Not even a
Panorama
. Weren’t you two from the sixties? God, the prudishness! The complete absence of sex in our house. Yeah, they had a Jan Wolkers novel on the bookshelf. But the wrong one.
“Jeez,” my father repeated with a mouthful of steak and Italian bread. “That idiot, the jerk, the
scum
bag, molested your French teacher. In our bathroom, in
my
house.” Now he was angry, indignant, I could see it on his face, but that Vivianne and her
Maurice, they were livid, especially Maurice. He talked about lifelong traumas
and
about a lawsuit. And my father didn’t blame them—on the contrary, he agreed with them entirely. “And if they don’t do it, I will.”
“Wait a second, Dad—you want to sue your own
son
?”
“Enough’s enough, Joni. That creep is ruining us. All of us. Your mother, me, Janis, you. Your sister can’t sleep. Janis is afraid of everything. And you …”
“
Me?
What
about
me?”
But first he finished chewing. Grinding up that hunk of beef, swallowing it, collecting enough saliva to be able to continue talking, appeared to require more effort than fattening and slaughtering the cow itself. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “You, I worry most about,” he said.
“Dad, what. Why do you worry about
me?
What does that kid have to do with me?”
He did not answer, but looked at his right hand, the one holding his water glass. Was he just thinking? The sight of this tired, bearded, brooding man made me uneasy; I could tell he was struggling with something he found much more taxing than mathematics.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “you know you never have to be ashamed of anything in front of me. Never.” Something unlike him: he laid his hand on mine.
“How should I say this. Mom and I get the feeling that Wilbert is … uh … very fond of you. Do you get my drift? We get the feeling that he’s …
more
than just fond of you. And that he probably … how can I put it decently … Mom and I get the feeling that he … that you two …”
“Dad! What do you
mean?
What are you trying to say?” I yanked my hand back out from under his and shoved my chair
back. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. You mean … No, of course not! How dare you!” Although I knew I was overdoing it, I got up and slapped my hands on the table.
“Joni!” he whispered. “Sit
down
. Wait. Sit. Calm. Listen to me. Often, when someone is the victim of this kind of thing, they’re ashamed, maybe they’re
so
ashamed that—”
“Dad! Shut. Up. Don’t say another word.”
“Just
listen
to me. And keep your voice down. I hate having to confront you like this, but your mother—”
He got choked up. To regain his composure he used the last bite of bread and meat to sop up some gravy, jabbed it, but it fell off his fork onto his lap. Without cursing, without a laid-back chuckle, he plucked up the wayward morsel and set it on the edge of his plate. “Your mother and I
know
you two are … together a lot. We know he takes you out with him, and that’s, that
was
… fine. I can’t tell you how much I … appreciate the attention you’ve given him. You’re my daughter. You’ve done your best to make Wilbert feel … to feel at home.”
To my shock I saw his eyes welling up. Moisture was collecting in a place that was supposed to stay dry. No! Do not start crying.
“Sweetheart, listen.” He appeared to pull himself together. “Of
course
he likes you, I understand that completely,
all
the boys like you, so he … so Wilbert
cer
tainly does. That’s to be expected. But it’s unac
cept
able. It’s dangerous;
he’s
dangerous. That boy doesn’t know the difference between liking and …”
“And?”
“Joni.” His voice was suddenly sharp. “Answer me. Has Wilbert ever …
molested
you? That’s what I want to know. It’s not such an outrageous question. And that’s what the judge is going to want to know. Be honest now.”
No. No way. I was not going to tell him about the few times
we came back from town on a Saturday night and plopped down together on the sofa, tipsy, exchanging stories with muted voices, or just making stupid jokes, channel-surfing while the rest of the farmhouse slept. And that it was
me
who put the moves on
him
. At fourteen I was perfectly capable of making a boy of seventeen get all hot under the collar, nothing could be easier—seventeen-year-old boys seldom found themselves on a sofa in the middle of the night alone with a girl who felt
this
comfortable with herself in their sultry presence. Not even Wilbert Sigerius. And so I would quasi-nonchalantly pull up my knees, or just the opposite, spread my legs far too wide while I laughed at what some guy panted in my ear back in the joint where Wilbert had sat at the bar watching me on the dance floor. Or I’d shake my hair loose with a sigh, twang the rubber band into his crotch, and lay down on the sofa with my legs across his lap. When he’d finally put his hands on my bare legs—too hesitantly, if at all—I’d pull myself up on one of those fantastic arms of his and climb, play-insulted, onto his lap, my knees straddling his thighs, I dug my hands into his firm hips, tickled him—“bitch,” he would hiss, and I’d poke my index finger under his discreetly stubbly chin, “look at me—what’d you just say, boy?” while we both felt my terry-cloth crotch push against the fly of his jeans—sorry Dad,
that
is all I could think of.
But that was about it. No more than that.
“Dad—you know what you can do?” I said, loud enough so that the waiter looked up. “You go ahead and lie to your lawyer. Tell them Wilbert molested
you
.”
His full, thick lower lip trembled as he nodded and stood up. “Be right back,” he said and shuffled, in a tragic parody of his hobbling gait, to the men’s room at the back of the bistro.
• • •
My legs were covered in goose bumps. Above the enormous windows that looked out onto a schoolyard basketball court were elongated pivot windows. They were open. Soon, after I’d cleared out, Wilbert would close them with the long aluminum pole I saw lying under the radiator. So what was the fuckin’ skank supposed to answer?
To my surprise he started talking himself. He had slouched back into his patchwork chair, his hands clasped behind his neck so I could see his leached-out armpits. With his good eye focused on me, he told me how he’d had ten months’ juvenile detention, which I already knew, of course, and that they’d put him in De Hunnerberg on the outskirts of Nijmegen, this I knew too, and that he was surrounded by retards, and that he hated me. This last piece of information, I had only assumed.
“When they dragged us out of bed at 7 a.m. and kicked us into the shower, then I took either an ice-cold or a scalding-hot one. That was the only way to spend five minutes
not
thinking of revenge, see. As soon as I turned off the water, I thought: I hate her.”
He stopped and sniffed loudly. I crossed my legs. I didn’t know what to say.
“I imagined you all having breakfast in the farmhouse. Your mom in her bathrobe, your dad counting scoops of coffee, you and Janis—fuck, I hated you all. I was dangerous.” He slurped saliva, and shook his head, grinning.
“But among all those retards I had one friend, see. Big ol’ blond dude I sat next to in those classes they made us take. Manners, something with emotions, whatever. Ronnie. Ronnie Raamsdonk. Seventeen, armed robbery. Says he’s a nephew of Pedro van Raamsdonk, this and that, but what happened to the ‘van,’ I ask. He looks at me like I’ve said something really comical. ‘Where’s the “van”
then, pal? Your name’s Raamsdonk, right?’ Well, he didn’t know, that’s just how it was. Anyway, I told him how you fucked me around. You have to talk, you—”
“Wilbert,” I interrupted, my head spinning from his declaration of hate, “I wish you knew how sorry I am, I—”
“Just listen,” he said. “Don’t talk.” He waited awhile before continuing.
“So I told Ronnie I hated you. ‘You want to even the score,’ he said, ‘you want to get out of here so you can even the score with your stepsister.’ He was right about that, I got all sweaty and jittery at the thought of it. He told me there was 17,000 guilders buried in the woods near Zwolle. He thinks about that money every minute of the day, sometimes out of desperation he tries to count to 17,000, he says, that’s how much those Gs are on his mind, this guy was
dumb
. He believed he had to get to those woods before he turned eighteen, otherwise the stash would be gone, see. ‘We’re gonna help each other out,’ he said, ‘and I already know how.’ ”
Their outdoor exercise space, Wilbert told me, was surrounded by a four-meter-high steel fence, untakable without a pole vault, but there was a sort of bus stop shelter up against it for when it rained. If Wilbert were to give Ronnie a boost, he’d pull Wilbert up onto the roof. “This hombre had the meanest arms, see. You hadda see what that guy pumped in the gym. We’d go to the woods near Zwolle together, and I’d get a thousand smackers from him.”
“Why on earth would you want to escape?” I asked. “Ten months, weren’t you already, like, halfway? I don’t get it—really, I don’t.”
He laughed noiselessly. “You have no idea of time. You’ve never been mad for more than an hour. You have no idea of anger. What it’s like to be eaten up by anger for a week, a month, three months.
You should just keep your trap shut. For weeks I lay awake till dawn”—he made a pistol with his hand—“it got light outside and I stuck this here in your mouth …
Bang
.”
So one freezing-cold January evening he and his hulking friend smashed a bathroom window and within three minutes they were standing on the other side of that fence. They sprinted down the Berg en Dalseweg and got on the train, without a ticket, to Zwolle. He had cut his shoulder pretty badly but did not feel it. Revenge, see.
“But you—”
He shot me a sharp look.
But you weren’t entirely innocent
. You
are
a dangerous lunatic—goddammit man,
didn’t
you molest Vivianne?
Didn’t
you bash a guy to death? The sentences forced their way up to my molars, but I sent them back. As I stared at him they transformed themselves into something more dangerous, a deeper thought. How was I supposed to explain what came over me when our father, long ago, had retreated to the men’s room in the Bastille in order to get a grip on himself? What was my reasoning? I only half understood it myself. In my five minutes alone at that stiffly set table I made a hasty decision. I decided to betray Wilbert. My father came back and sat down as an old man. Without batting an eye, I said: “You’re right, Dad. It’s true. Wilbert’s been hassling me.” Why did I say that?
Why?