Authors: Peter Buwalda
And when they’d found themselves without passports in those sublime, overwhelming foreign lands, they decided, with no discussion, to stay there longer. They stood up, he and his stable, friendly downstairs neighbor, kissing with ever more abandon,
we can’t
, he whispered—
can’t what?—do this
, but it was only a half-hearted protest, more passionate than guilty, and they staggered toward the bedroom, through the narrow passage, and one door farther
(and yet another door farther, who was sleeping there? Little Joni), turned the handle, stumbled into the bedroom, flopped onto the double bed that had stood there waiting for years, a bed under a humongous Kralingen poster, he recalled, Mojo Mama in between Dr. John the Night Tripper and Tyrannosaurus Rex, there you are, Teuntje Beers’s triumph that the upstairs neighbor did not register, a triumph that paled the moment he laid Tineke down on the crocheted bedspread.
Although the shortest route is tempting, to be on the safe side he stumbles with his gnarly feet in ladies’ socks around the campus rather than through it, takes the now-darkened path through the woods north of the Langenkampweg—the harbor in view, but which harbor? He knows Tineke well enough to be sure she’ll be asleep when he gets home. But what about tomorrow? He’s got to tell her
something
, even if it’s just to be a step ahead of Joni and Aaron. Entirely unpredictable what those two will do. Will they assume he talks to Tineke? No idea. He carefully touches his shoulder. Can he even keep it under wraps?
Can
he lie yet again to the woman to whom he once, long ago, had to give his radical, blind, immediate trust?
For they had made a mistake. They neglected, in their overactive, dizzy state, one small detail. How
human
of them. The front door is not shut. They were too busy to notice that it was ajar—left that way by Margriet from upstairs, simple Maggie Sigerius, maybe a tad less fresh-faced, interested, and intelligent than the woman he is feverishly undressing, but not born yesterday. A drinker, and emotionally labile—but not blind.
And Margriet goes all the way upstairs (at least that’s how he reconstructed her movements, in retrospect, in detail), climbs the steep stairs to their cramped apartment, and then goes straightaway to the upper floor, into the front bedroom (who is sleeping there?
Wilbert, sucking his thumb), and, holding her breath, she looks at her little boy, for maybe a full minute, as though she’s listening to his dream. A good mother.
Am I?
But actually she’s not thinking about Wilbert, in fact her hearing is directed two floors below, to the downstairs neighbor’s open front door, and walks slowly back down—but stop, first into the kitchen, she
forces
herself to go into the kitchen, where she pours herself a glass of wine and commands herself to drink it
slowly
, calmly, give them time, five, no,
seven
minutes’ more self-control. And while she drinks, one glass, two glasses, her ears are lying like rubber dinghies on the kitchen floor. After seven torturous minutes she takes off her boots and walks silently down the steep stairs to the front door.
Hi, I’m back
.
He reaches the Langenkampweg, walks past the first four detached houses that look out onto the street, averting his gaze, he hardly talks to these people anyway, the hell with ’em. As soon as the leafy canopy reveals the front of his house he stands still. There’s a light on downstairs, a faint glow, she’s left a light on for him.
Margriet Sigerius, twenty-three years old, walked in the direction of the sleazy, sordid sound that she could just hear above her heartbeat—her heart, too, was bigger than usual, her heart is a pounding machine, but cutting through that pounding she
hears
it: the far wilder banging from the room adjacent to the still-warm birthday room with the showy wicker-and-beanbag interior. She stands at the bedroom door, clammy hand trembling above the handle, but she chokes. Can’t go in. She listens, petrified. Then she takes a deep breath, and screams. Melted together with his downstairs neighbor for the first time, Sigerius hears his own wife screech at the top of her lungs, “SIE-IEM”—she screams his name three times, and then: “
What are you doing, what are you doing, I hate you.
” Like stiffened corpses they lie on top of each other, he
and Tineke, the rapture never existed. Out in the passage it goes quiet. Dead still.
Maybe we’re dead ourselves?
Then the door flies open, smacks against the wall, the frosted glass shatters into tiny fragments. He looks into Tineke’s wide-open eyes.
She’s watching them
. “You’re never setting foot back in that house, asshole. Never, do you understand? Don’t you dare try coming back home, goddammit.”
He remains silent, his impudent tongue lies in state in his mouth. They do not hear her leave, the front door slams all the more deafeningly, a grenade. The door to 59B, her own front door, hers and her little boy’s, formerly also of Siem Sigerius: she bolts it shut.
The farmhouse, finally. He takes the gravel path around the back, shuffles onto the grass of the backyard, too dark to see his hand in front of his face. Thanks to Janis’s habit of leaving her house keys in Deventer there is a spare key hidden in the bird house at the far end of the terrace. He finds it without much trouble and walks over to the garbage can next to the workshop. He bangs mercilessly into the tree stump for chopping hardwood, clenches his teeth against the pain, and removes the worn-out socks from his feet. The left one is drenched in blood. He wraps them in the dishcloth from his head and squashes the wad as deep as possible under the cardboard boxes and scrap wood in the plastic bin.
Strangely enough he yearns not so much for the security of his house as for Tineke, he yearns to curl up against her sleeping body. But he’s not there yet, not by a long shot. In the kitchen he removes the dishcloth-tourniquet, impatient blood immediately fills the salmon-pink gash in his shoulder. He binds it with gauze and adhesive tape. His body is covered with clotted blood, his feet are as brown as goat’s hooves. He switches off the table lamp in the living room window and walks toward the bedroom, his feet now
in his running shoes. He creeps into the room, whispers “hello, sweetheart” to make sure she’s asleep and in two steps is standing in the bathroom. He showers, avoiding his shoulder as much as possible; it takes him twenty minutes, his foot stings and throbs.
Tomorrow he’ll have to lie about
her
daughter, it won’t be easy, an intense anticipatory regret elicits a deep affection for his wife. He turns off the tap. It’s
her
daughter we’re talking about.
The summer dies down. The months following his descent into hell are uneventful. So uneventful that it makes him nervous, this uneventfulness is a relentless burden. Tineke was not aware of his degradation, he’s relieved for that, but her ignorance only augments his isolation. He never mentioned the wound on his foot, he bluffed about the gash in his shoulder, told her it was the result of an unlucky spill at a glass-strewn frat house, he really should have dropped by a first-aid station. Not a word from Joni. Aaron no longer comes to training sessions, good, correct, he canceled their dan exam by letter to the judo association.
Joni plays it neatly by flying off to California while they’re vacationing on Crete. Tineke is flabbergasted, but he defends her sudden departure, McKinsey does not wait for Mommy and Daddy to come back from holiday, he says, meanwhile biting his nails: every day of their vacation he plans to spill the beans, tell his wife how he really got those strange wounds, to be
totally
honest, but he holds his tongue. In fact he never really comes close. They’re eating souvlaki when Joni phones Tineke’s cell, he forces a cramped smile as his food goes cold; even when it’s clear that mother and daughter are carrying on a neutral, normal conversation he can’t manage to swallow a single bite.
Back in Enschede he is greeted by relatively good news,
confirmation that he did the intelligent thing: just keep your mouth shut, wait and see what happens. And what happens: that website of theirs has frozen, no new photos for several weeks, and then it vanishes from the Web entirely. Apparently they were making the best of a bad situation. He relaxes somewhat. Or is it because Joni is in America?
Meanwhile things are very quiet indeed. Not a peep from California. It is Tineke, of course, who is most surprised. She thinks she understands why Aaron is making himself scarce, although he hasn’t yet dared tell her the judo sessions have stopped. “Siem, honey, Joni’s keeping awfully quiet, don’t you think?” This opportunity to open up, he lets pass by too. What’s more, he does just the opposite. To his own amazement he is prepared to do anything to keep Joni from blowing the whistle on him. He undertakes something extremely gutless and futile. Not to mention risky. He creates a fake e-mail address for his daughter on Yahoo and from that cursed phony out-box he sends brief messages, sometimes longer ones, to his own e-mail address. “Dear Dad and Mom and Janis, it’s terrific here, been over the Golden Gate Bridge, no phone yet but fortunately there’s e-mail. McKinsey is great but intensive, love, Joni”—that sort of drivel, and because Tineke doesn’t use e-mail herself, he prints out these stinking lies of his for her. It fills him with disgust and self-loathing, but he does it all the same.
As though he’s being punished: no word from The Hague. He peruses the newspapers and journals until his fingers are black, reads memoirs of illustrious statesmen at bedtime. Rumor has it he’s in The Hague’s waiting room, there’s been a leak somewhere. On a Radio East talk show someone—a college student,
no less—says he’s going to become Minister of Education, and the next day he has to shake off four journalists.
Annoyingly, this vacuum fills up with self-doubt, it just happens. Isn’t he being overly self-righteous? Sometimes he thinks it downright stupid to equate that Internet site with prostitution, it’s just not the same thing; these are the moments he considers himself a narrow-minded old fart, but a minute later the taboo takes his breath away again, he almost wants to scream with misery, and he treats himself and his wife to another phony e-mail. Then, again: am I being too uptight? Am I not the one who’s a moral and ethical stick-in-the mud? A frightened, sexless man?
While he runs the university on auto-pilot he thinks about his children. He can get his head around Wilbert’s downfall, with a mother like that, with a
father
like that, a father who ditches his family. He’s asked for a son like Wilbert. But Joni is another story, he tells and retells Joni’s story, which is his own story: a girl destined by him for happiness and success, a daughter to whom he offered security, gave all the attention a self-fulfilled man like himself has to offer—partly to ease his guilty conscience about Wilbert, he readily admits, but in the end she
did
receive all his love, not to mention
reaped
it, far more than he got in his own youth.
Wednesday, October 11th. As he and Tineke sit watching the evening news, dinner plates on their laps, De Graaf rings. In a two-hour conversation, Sigerius learns that D66 will officially withdraw support for Hildo Kruidenier after the weekend, maybe earlier; the inside story is that this public hazard is dragging the party down in the polls, it’s untenable, he has to go. Kruidenier will resign, there is no other option, and therefore De Graaf wants
to present Sigerius the next day as the new minister. Is he ready? More than that, he answers, and yes, he’ll be able to get to the Prime Minister’s office tomorrow morning, Kok wants to see him. Does he mind if the Interior Ministry does a security check—of course he doesn’t mind, bye Thom, for sure, thank you, I’m very pleased too.
The next day, on his way back to Enschede following a relaxed interview with the PM, De Graaf phones again. He hears, in euphemistic terms, that the National Security people came across Wilbert, and they want to conduct a limited security investigation to rule out the possibility of blackmail.
Blackmail—the word triggers him. During a sleepless night he ponders which of them, Wilbert or Joni, is more of a liability; he asks himself the perverse question: which is worse, murder or porn? For the first time since his undoing he gets out of bed and looks at the young women on the websites. He thinks about them. About the mystery of their choices, about Joni’s choice, about the choice of all these girls; he looks them in the eye intending to read desperation, self-destruction, insanity perhaps, regret, deep-seated sluttishness, rotten teeth, traces of abuse and neglect, or else simple, honest-to-goodness stupidity—but the only thing he sees is beauty. They are all, pretty much without exception, beautiful. Not concert pianists or doctoral students, maybe, but above-average attractive women; you could also say: as looks go, successful young women, thoroughbreds in possession of eyes, hair, feet, legs, hands with which they could make it out in the civilized world, could snag themselves potent, healthy marriage partners, land themselves decent jobs. He is no sociologist, nor a biologist, but couldn’t these girls have in fact been born into decent families? To good-looking parents with balanced, sturdy genes, with genetic material that produces daughters that every man wants to have, or touch—or barring that, at least
look at
? Behind every nude photo worth paying for are parents who conceived a desirable child. Behind every sex site is a man like him.
A man like Theun Beers—who’d have known? The next day he does something off the wall, something he never thought of before all this mess began. He goes into a record shop, tries to remember the name of Joni’s begetter’s band, and when he does dredge up the name he goes through the bins of LPs in search of Mojo Mama, against his better judgment, but what do you know, he finds one.
Stupid City Blues
, it’s called, a battered copy from 1973; on the cover, a photo of the Utrecht Cathedral tower, with—undoubtedly a scissors-and-paste job—an equally tall electric guitar leaning up against it.
With a fascination you’d sooner expect from Joni, but which she always denied—so with borrowed fascination—he studies the photo of the man whose appearance he’d nearly forgotten, but whom he immediately recognizes as her father, because good God, she does resemble Theun. The same healthy blondness, the same proud, self-confident expression, the broad face, the erect posture. The spitting image of that virile, dark blond fellow who on the back cover of
Stupid City Blues
is shown walking along a river, probably the Vecht, the guitar from the front cover slung over his shoulder like a Viking sword, a rock ’n’ roll guy who named his daughters after Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin.
This
is family. The DNA drips off it.