Authors: Peter Buwalda
“Go away,” he whispers.
It cowers, it is a little boy, he sees, he drops his ball in fright,
grabs it as it bounces away and sprints with hollow footsteps toward the Lasondersingel. He remains stock-still, waits before exhaling, a trembling sigh. Slowly his hearing sharpens again, he hears a bus drive by, he hears soccer coming from the houses, the voice of a commentator, fans. God bless football.
Keep my alley clear
. He allows his tension to ebb slightly—but then stiffens again. He’s overestimating his invisibility. These people only have to walk into their backyard. And Aaron and Joni? He’s still bleeding like crazy, a tepid stream trickles down his biceps. He needs to think more clearly. He can’t stay here. But then what? A sudden roar rushes sweat to his skin. Shouting inside the house, cheering from all the backyards: the hordes are coming to get him. A goal. He realizes he’s still clamping the nylon stocking in his fist, he shakes it loose as though it’s a rattlesnake. The branches are armies of ants. What can he do? The streets are abandoned, emptier than this it will never get. He tries to control his breathing, shifts his feet and visualizes the Vluchtestraat. Maybe he can ring somebody’s bell. Say he’s been robbed. The thought of himself on a garden path in these panties. But he can’t very well take them off.
Everything is ruined
. He is humiliated,
she
is humiliated. Is she really?
Must get out of here
.
He considers: half of them are on vacation. He visualizes the low-rise apartments at the end of the street with all his might; museum on the left, block of flats on the right, wooden garden fences behind. Can he get up to one of those balconies? And which one? Is there a logical approach? Closed balcony doors mean the occupants are away. Open: football, closed: away. Can he sprint there? Peek out of the alley, choose your moment, make a dash for it. He tries to estimate the distance. Forty meters. Fifty. Six seconds. And getting up onto one of those balconies? For a
second he thinks of home, of the tangle of grass behind their farmhouse, of the tranquillity, the shelteredness. It has to be pitch-dark before he can … walk home? Christ on a crutch. Must he
walk
home?
You’re in a dream, you’re in the mother of all nightmares
. A short-cut, maybe? All the jogging paths he’s seen in the past twenty years unfold simultaneously before him, a knot of wooded paths and loose sand. But there’s the city in between. A taxi?
You don’t even have a phone
. No keys, no money, nothing. His thoughts turn to Tineke. He can’t face her. He mustn’t even
get
home before midnight. Is there a spare key in the garden?
Got to get onto one of those balconies
.
He turns his head 180 degrees, bristles rub against his eyelids and cheeks, his neck is strangely stiff. His chin tucked against his own blood, he looks over his shoulder, down the alleyway, and listens. On this side the world is quiet. Again he is struck by the indifference of objects: gray paving tiles absorbing his blood, the indifferent exterior walls. He inhales as though he’s about to take a dive and glides out from the trees.
Run
. Adrenaline dissolves in his blood, is discharged from his wounds. The air on his bare skin. Every few steps he looks back, tries to suppress his panting. Behind that brick wall:
them
.
The street clutches the setting sun. He is overcome by the sudden spaciousness. The purple sky is infinitely high, his nakedness is intensified. He peers around the corner of the brick house at the apartments, the wide balconies, it’s farther away than he had hoped. The balconies are fronted by orangey-pastel panels; that’s where he wants to be, behind one of those panels. Across from the entrance door with the letter slots is a large concrete and steel bin, a mini-bunker for garbage bags. Already now, from his trench, he feels the warm asphalt under his feet, pebbles in his open sole. A
car turns into the street, with a groan he darts back into the alley. Holds his breath until the unhurried machine has passed. So close to their front door. The street is empty.
Now
.
First the cement sidewalk, then with five long strides diagonally across the asphalt, don’t look back or around, the apartment is getting bigger, casts a shadow. He jumps up onto the massive concrete container like a baboon, bags of smoldering garbage bulge out from under the metal lids. Don’t think,
act
. Why does he keep seeing himself? A naked man clambers over the squeaking lids, curls his toes over the edge of the concrete. He estimates the height: a meter and a half separates him from the railing of the nearest balcony. If he loses his grip he’ll land in somebody’s front yard. He flies, he’s a flying monkey! He’ll make noise. They’re watching football. His knees bang against the pastel-colored panel, his fingers grasp, one hand flies loose, the other grabs the edge of the rail. His body dangles, stretches. His weight pulls on the fingers of his right hand, it feels as though his shoulder is being torn open even farther, as though the skeleton will glide out of his skin, he throws his second hand over the railing. For a moment he hangs totally motionless, his belly pressed against the warm panel. Cutting straight through the pain is the vision of himself dangling there; the disgust energizes him. He’s hung on a high bar plenty of times, did the parallel bars, the pommel horse: he was the best gymnast of them all, better than Snijders, better than Geesink—but that was forty years ago. He pulls himself up with all his might, works himself up until his elbows are locked. The balcony door is closed, the apartment is dark. He swings his left leg over the railing, clambers over, lands on the cool concrete floor. He crouches behind the panel.
He sits like this for a while, panting like after a fight, his good shoulder against the panel, staring at his toes on the concrete. Wait
a bit. If someone is home, then they’ll have heard him, the door will fly open any second. He waits. His breathing relaxes, from the neighboring balconies comes the reassuring sound of the football match. Has anyone seen him? On the street? Good chance that the police are on their way. His right shoulder is bleeding again, dripping blood onto the concrete. He inspects the bottom of his foot. In the ball of the foot, just back from his big toe, is a star-shaped hole. It is his short leg: feeling never really returned to his foot after the scooter accident. Now he doesn’t regret it. He pulls out a splinter of glass. New blood wells up.
He gradually persuades himself that no one is home. He looks around, this time in more detail: the balcony is a meter or so deep and runs the breadth of the apartment. To his right is a dark-red door. From a crouch he can just peek into the living room: a green-and-white plaid sofa opposite an old bulky television; farther in, an ironing board and behind it, a kitchenette. A student flat? What would be worse, he wonders: a Tubantia student who recognizes him or a regular Enschede resident face-to-face with a dangerous lunatic?
On the balcony itself there are two plastic chairs, alongside them three empty Grolsch swing-top bottles and in the far corner boxes of waste paper. Opposite the boxes, a yellow drying rack hangs on the railing:
laundry
. He crawls past a chair toward it. Two dishcloths, a towel, a pair of pink and black ladies’ socks, a pair of red knee-length men’s swim trunks. He wriggles out of the panties and, still sitting, puts on the bathing suit. A wave of euphoria and relief streams through him. He stuffs the panties in one of the back pockets. He lays the drier of the two dishcloths over the wound on his shoulder and ties it with endless fumbling under his armpit. Having no other choice, he tugs the stiffly dried socks onto his feet.
Then he lies down on his back. The concrete supports his
weary body. He lies like this for maybe half an hour. The panel doesn’t extend all the way to the floor, if he rests his chin against his bandaged shoulder he can peer through the gap. By turning slightly farther onto his side and pressing his chin farther into his flesh, he can even see Aaron’s house. In the distance he sees the shrubbery at the foot of the path and the top of the front door. Heavy with regret, he looks at it for a while. He gradually becomes calmer, his reasoning takes form. How big was
this
coincidence? he wonders. The chance of being caught like that? Caught at the most wretched moment of his life. The modulations of fate: coincidences are usually smaller than you’d think, the football match he’d just thanked his lucky stars for probably played a role in his downfall. Undoubtedly. Without the soccer alibi he wouldn’t have even come here tonight, not at this exact time—and knowing those two, the same is true for them. They drove here with the match in mind. Switched on the TV the minute they got home.
Above and alongside him, a new outbreak of cheering. Although he feels relatively safe on this balcony—it gives him a rudimentary sense of security—he’s itching for it to get dark. It’s his younger sister’s birthday. The longest day of the year. Any thoughts about the consequences—what does all this mean for Joni and him, for his family?—he tries to postpone. I’ve got the longest birthday, Ankie always said. Get these old bones of his into his own bed.
But time on this stranger’s balcony clots, the events repeat themselves like TV clips, immutably sharp, he keeps seeing himself crash through that glass door. And with each rerun of that image he realizes what Joni saw, and he wonders how
grim
her conclusions are. Disastrous, for sure.
• • •
It gets dark, finally. A breeze brings him the first goose bumps of the evening. He prepares to lower his bruised body off the balcony. By way of disguise he wraps the second dishcloth around his head. He knows which getaway route he’ll take, but his patience is being tested once again: the match is over, their team has obviously won. People begin to stream outdoors. From all sides he hears men talking excitedly, a car door slams. Wait until things die down again. But: the chance that the resident of this apartment thanks his hosts for the fun evening and climbs onto his bike—he’s already up. Without feeling his body, without feeling the concrete under his feet, without touching the railing, without touching the grass on which he lands, he’s standing in front of the apartment, and immediately breaks into a run. He scuttles off like a rat, scoots along the fencing toward the Deurningerstraat, ducks into the peaceful residential neighborhood.
His foot strains and stings, but the pain has a cleansing effect, he stays as much as possible in the ever-deepening shadows. In a pinch, he decides, he’ll feign drunkenness. He keeps walking, each step is a step closer to home. Cyclists pass him without so much as a second look, nobody pays him any notice. The sole of his foot is killing him, but pain has meanwhile risen up into his calf. He chooses quiet streets, walks past elegant houses with the curtains drawn. When he reaches the Horstlindelaan he feels a guarded sense of relief. He sits down on a bench but springs back up again.
It’s a strange sensation, as the landscape passes him slowly by, his bare chest exposed to the mild summer evening, this walk puts nearly everything in a different perspective, the immediate contact of his feet with the earth, the gravelly asphalt, the spongy moss on the edge of the road. The starry night sky is perfectly clear, his eyes seem more sensitive than usual, he reads the surroundings
like a night animal. He hears a marten burrowing under a bush, in the yellow light of the moon the trees and meadows seem more intensely colored than before.
It’s the second time, damn it. The second time in his life he’s been caught with his pants down. And just as it did back then, the foundation of his life has shifted. As he walks along the wooded path to the campus like a criminal he thinks back on the other time he was caught red-handed. Maybe he’s recalling Tineke’s long-ago birthday party in Utrecht in order to distract his short-term memory. Tineke Beers-Profijt she was called back then—the very idea that his wife was once married to the downstairs neighbor. He and Margriet had been invited; together with about fifteen other neighbors and friends they sat in the ground-floor flat inhabited by Tineke and that vague husband of hers, a weekday cocktail party for the neighbors and colleagues from her furniture workshop; wine, beer, and Campari and funnily enough Tineke’s sister from Amersfoort kept putting on yet another LP by Mojo Mama, Theun’s band, he never saw him anymore, a curious choice of music, Theun was conspicuously absent, as though he hadn’t been invited to his own wife’s birthday party, or, more likely, just didn’t bother showing up. This was Tineke’s midseventies rock ’n’ roll marriage.
His own marriage was, if possible, even worse. He remembers the whopper of a fight that broke out between him and Margriet just before the party, they were at each other’s throats in their kitchen, their floor was the ceiling under which Tineke was welcoming her first guests with beer and liverwurst (how old were they? Twenty-five?), and he can still recall the exact anger in their bodies as they walked down the stairs from 59B and rang the doorbell of number 59A. Memories of the actual gathering, no, not really—the Antonius Matthaeuslaan was a regular party street in those days, and since everyone had a workday ahead of them, most had already
left by midnight, with the exception of a few hangers-on, including Margriet and him. And when the hangers-on had pushed off, Margriet started tugging at his sleeve (the booze was finished), but, contrary to his usual way of doing things, he suggested, no, he
announced
, that he was going to finish his own drink and, entirely contrary to
her
way of doing things, Margriet went home alone, upstairs. “I’m going to turn in, honey,” she said to Tineke.
After which things took a turn for the worse—or the better, of course. As soon as everyone had gone and he and Tineke were left alone and he stayed sitting next to his fresh-faced, good-humored, intelligent, interested neighbor, next to each other on Theun’s orange three-seater, among the empty glasses and the full ashtrays, his leg against hers, a broad, warm thigh against that still-slender thigh of hers—precisely at that moment, the incident that had been two years in coming, came. Before they knew it Siem was on top and Tineke underneath, kissing, intensely, without so much as a chuckle or introductory mumbling, a transgression that had been brewing ever since he lay plastered together in his bed, from the first time Tineke had paid him a daytime visit, offering him companionship while he recovered from that scooter accident. Why did she come, actually? Just because, just to drink a cup of coffee with someone
different
, with a
man
, not to have to talk about the kids of friends of friends? Even back then they were preparing to take this leap.