Authors: Peter Buwalda
Was he dreaming? He felt tears glide down his cheeks. Shatter this window too, he thought. Go on, smash it. And then smash my head. He was numb with fear: his knees, his legs, his whole body, they no longer existed, all his nerves had amassed in the very top of his skull, awaiting the blow. Hit me!
Breaking glass. He fell backward, groaning. He heard the tinkling of the shards, unnervingly far away and at the same time frighteningly close by. But: no pain. No cracking of crushed bone, no gushing of warm blood. He felt nothing! Instead, he heard the front door bolt slide open. Relief made way for new fear:
he’s coming to get me
.
But again, something else happened. Sigerius did not enter the room, but stormed up the stairs. His ass glued to the floor, he listened to the sounds coming from upstairs. After a brief silence he heard the creaking of the folding attic stairs, and then: footsteps. Sigerius was up in the attic! He hadn’t dared go up there since that terrible evening in June. Once or twice he’d stood in the hallway, clutching the bolt cutter in one clammy hand and a staircase tread with the other, staring tentatively up through the hatch, planning, surely, to smash the whole caboodle to smithereens. But he couldn’t.
What was Sigerius doing there? Had they come home before he’d had time to rummage about properly? Had he left something there?
“Siem,” he said softly.
His teeth chattered as though he were in a cold tub, he bit his lower lip as hard as he could. What was he going to say?
After an eternity that seemed to last no more than a second, he heard the steps again, the creaking, a loud thud. Did he jump the last few treads? Heavy shoes came crashing down the stairs. He was furious!
Aaron cleared his throat. “Siem,” he whispered, he could not get any volume into his voice. He raised his hands in defense. He wanted to scream—but instead he shat himself. His boxer shorts streamed full with warm shit. “Siem …,” he whimpered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The shit oozed from the bottom of his shorts, poured between his thighs.
The front door slammed with a massive thud, footsteps retreated down the paving stones of his front path. He exhaled. A car door thumped shut, an engine started, and it drove off.
When he jolted awake it was still pitch-dark. It stank in his dream too, but what he now smelled was unbearable; he gagged. His excrement had cooled off and stuck like caked lava between his bottom and the seat of his jogging pants. He stood up, bile in his mouth, holding the lukewarm pile in place with both hands. Choking with disgust, he crossed the room and went into the passage. He stumbled up the stairs, turned on the shower tap (the water only grudgingly started running; it was days since he had stood under it), and undressed in the shower. He dropped his soiled clothes and stamped on them as though he were treading grapes. The hot water splashed heavily, he kept on treading, squirted endless amounts of shampoo and bath gel between his feet, half an hour, an hour, as long as it took until all the foaming
sewer water had disappeared down the drain and all he smelled was Palmolive.
Only then did he soap himself up, scrubbing his groin, his shoulders, his arms, his belly, his legs, until his skin flushed. He washed the congealed sweat from his armpits, and squirted Zwitsal baby shampoo on the thin strip of hair around the back of his head.
He dried himself off slowly, mechanically. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went out on the landing. Taking a deep breath, he took hold of the folding steps and climbed up to the attic. It was a disaster area. The rack with Joni’s shoes appeared to have been kicked over, the pumps lay scattered around the floor. The white baskets had been wheeled into the middle of the room, panties, tops, and stockings lay strewn about. The drawers of his computer desk were open. He went over to the tussled bed and bit into the waterlogged heel of his hand. What had Sigerius been doing here? Hadn’t he been up here once before? Or had it been like this for months?
His attention shifted to a pile of clothes next to the opening in the floor. Men’s clothes. A light-gray pinstripe suit: jacket, trousers, an entire outfit. Under the trousers a pair of white boxers. The white button-down shirt had soft pink stripes, the cuff links were still in the buttonholes. Those shoes … they were Sigerius’s expensive Greves, unmistakable, one of them had a heel lift. What were his clothes doing here, for God’s sake? Had he brought them over with him?
Why?
He felt the pockets of the trousers and jacket. Keys, a loose house key, a wallet, a dead cell phone.
He walked back to the bed and flopped down on it. And lay there, God knows how long. Maybe he slept. Anyway he was chilled to the bone when he got up and walked over to the heap of clothes. He dropped the towel and, shivering, started to put them on.
The first weekend of December he only gets back to Enschede on Saturday evening. Tineke is disappointed that they’re “not doing Sinterklaas” this year, so he bought a silver bracelet with freshwater pearls for her at a jeweler in The Hague. She takes him to a recently opened vegetarian restaurant on the Hengelosestraat, and after they’ve ordered she tears open the marbled wrapping paper. Her reaction strikes him as more surprised than pleased; her eyebrows raised, she wriggles the bracelet around her fat wrist. “This isn’t like you,” she says, and that’s true—spontaneous gifts are not like him, there’s always something behind it. These are penance pearls, a single pearl is equal to one year less of purgatory. He sits grinning like a freshwater swab.
He fills her in on Cabinet doings. They eat something with pak choi and chickpeas. He nearly chokes when she says: “I spoke to Joni.”
“Oh? Did she phone you?” The restaurant is dark, he hopes she doesn’t notice he has to pull himself together.
“I pho—”
“But we don’t have her number.” Don’t get too agitated, he thinks, nothing to be done about it now.
“I was tired of waiting.” She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “I know time flies with her, but really, I think five months is—”
“Four. You phoned from Crete.”
She’s taken aback, looks at him. “What’s the difference. All
right, four. Anyway, I think four months is long enough. So I called McKinsey. Just on the outside chance. And sure enough.”
He rubs the rough of his chin, hoping to rasp away his nerves. He wishes he could hear exactly what they said to each other, word for word, not from Tineke’s mouth, but rather from a cassette tape he can play at his leisure and rewind when necessary. He needs time to plot his course. It was all going so well. For a few weeks now, he has tried to convince himself that his nighttime offensive paid off. Since bluffing on Wilbert’s voice mail—at least, what he assumes was Wilbert’s voice mail—things have been quiet. But he is not reassured. He has not, for instance, been back to parliamentary question hour.
“And?” he smiles, “what did she have to say?”
“Oh, you know. We kept it short, of course. I caught her off guard. She sounded tired. But it seems like her internship’s going well. She thinks they’re going to offer her a job.”
“She coming to France?”
“Probably not. She’ll be tied up all month with a big client.”
“Then she’ll be doing overtime during the Christmas break,” he says. He tries to hide the relief he feels breezing through his insides. “Where’s she working?”
“Where? At the office.”
“Which company, I mean. At Christmas.”
The nonchalant way his wife considers his question puts him at ease. “IBM?” she says. “Yeah, IBM.”
“Oh well,” he says. “I wonder if Hans and Ria are really her cup of tea anyway.”
“She always likes skiing. I discreetly asked about Aaron.”
“Aha. And?”
“She said it’s better this way.”
• • •
They drive through the drizzle back to the farmhouse. Sometimes, come evening in The Hague, he longs for Enschede, but now the thought of Tineke rambling around this empty, embalmed beast, day in and day out, makes him itch to return to the intoxicating flurry of his department. He parks on the gravel driveway, they use the back door, the utility room smells of warm washing. Tineke opens the drum of the machine and pulls out the wet strand, he walks into the darkened living room, switches on lamps.
“Was there much mail?” he calls, but Tineke does not hear him. He goes to the front hall, smells the familiar scent of slate and soaked wood stain. He turns on the light above the chest of drawers, the stack of envelopes and magazines reaches to the edge of the Marseilles photo, next to it, the newspapers he’s asked her to save for him. Among the envelopes is a packet containing a book he’d ordered a while ago, there’s an envelope from Japan, the new issue of
Pythagoras
, a smattering of belated congratulations on his appointment, two
Football International
s, bills, a letter from the Royal Academy of Sciences and a lumpy, middle-sized padded envelope whose address has been crossed out with red pen, under which Tineke has written “addressee unknown.” There’s something hard inside. He gasps, his vocal cords vibrate, as he reads whom it is addressed to. “Mr. F. Wanker,” written in a childlike scrawl, Langkampweg 16, 7522 CZ Enschede—“Langkamp” instead of “Langenkamp.”
First his hand goes hot, then cold and clammy, his sweat soaks into the paper of the envelope. So his wife does not think Mr. F.(ucking) Wanker lives here. The urge to run to the utility room and embrace her, confess everything, say he’s sorry, and at the same time the fear that she could just walk in on him—he’s paralyzed. He stares at himself in the photo in Marseilles: a hunk cradling a tree trunk.
You won’t get me, pal
.
He presses the envelope against his chest, goes into the bathroom, sinks down onto the toilet. While he lets his bladder go he tears it open at the bottom, because the top is sealed with wide brown tape. His trembling hand pulls out terrible things: black fishnet stockings, red panties, a clump of cotton fabric, a wadded-up handkerchief—
his
handkerchief, he sees through white lightning bolts of shock. The cotton feels crusty in the middle, maybe from snot, but probably from something else, something that infuriates and saddens him at the same time. A hard object slides out of the envelope, falls to the rubber toilet mat with a loud
tock
. It is a lifelike black fake penis.
He exhales deeply, flabbergasted, furious. And afraid. The brazenness shocks him. He gets up, sits back down. “Asshole,” he mumbles. This is taking things pretty far, he thinks, it’s taking things to their limit. Was that jerk up in the attic? He can hardly imagine it. When he says: you have no evidence, then the kid gives
this
as an answer? Was he really at the Vluchtestraat? Or did this packet come from … from
Aaron
? No. No? He just doesn’t fucking know. Did Aaron let Wilbert in? Or did the lunatic break in?
He picks up the veined dildo from the tiled floor and tries in vain to break it in half. Then he wraps it up in toilet paper, in the naïve assumption that he can flush it down the john, and the rest too, all of it, get rid of it—but he reconsiders. Tineke will wonder what happened to the envelope. He’s going to have to watch his step.
Only now does he look
in
the envelope, something is still wedged in the far corner, a letter, he fishes it out, lined notebook paper, he unfolds it. Crude handwriting that corresponds with the jagged letters on the envelope. “Withdraw 100,000 guilders, wanker,” he reads. “Show some ministerial accountability.” He is instructed to go to the beach at Scheveningen—“I’ll make it easy for you, wanker, right near your jerk-off den”—on Thursday,
December 14th, at 8 p.m. and bury a bag containing a hundred 1,000-guilder notes at the edge of the dunes directly across from coastal marker 101. “If the money’s not there then some pictures are going to get sent around.”
Again he breaks out in a sweat, out of anger, but also out of nervousness bordering on panic. Damn it, this isn’t just harassment anymore, it’s blackmail—high-stakes blackmail. He is being shaken down by his own son. Shouldn’t he make a beeline for the police? Yes. And yet …
no
. His calves harden, he clenches his teeth until they almost crack. So
this
is what blackmail feels like.
He has to deal with this shrewdly and methodically. Calm down a bit. He can’t go into the living room like this, carrying this envelope. Upstairs, to his study. He hurriedly shoves the contents back into the bubble wrap. He’ll take all the mail up with him, stash the envelope there. He listens for a sign of Tineke; only once he’s sure the coast is clear does he flush and sneak out of the bathroom. He grabs the stack of letters and magazines and bounds up the stairs.
His study is chilly, he sits down, pushes the regular mail to the corner of the desk. Before he locks the poisoned package in one of the green steel drawers he removes the blackmail note, steers his eyes once more through the brief message. At the words “ministerial accountability,” doubt sneaks up on him again: is this terminology that his son would use? And: does he have such disdain for his son that he doubts whether the kid knows the term that is, after all, his job description? Yes, he does.
He folds the note and shoves it deep into his wallet. With a nominal sigh of relief he turns the key and for a few moments stares out into space. The small windowpane above his desk is pitch-black against its chrome-green frame. He swivels his chair to face into the room, but what should be familiar and trusted, the only square meters in the world that are his exclusive domain, his
cave, his thinking space—this very space reminds him of his tormentor. That snake slept here. The serpent he flung out of the window with a stick. Now, ten years later, here he sits, sweaty, stressed, strung out. Now that bastard is letting
him
feel what power is.
Enough. Basta. He takes a deep breath, slaps his thigh with a flattened hand. He has to tell Tineke
something
at least. Tell her some or other half-truth, this is the moment. This time it’s an envelope full of underwear, next time it’ll be the lunatic in the flesh—and what then? His twisting and scheming has already put Aaron in danger, which in itself ticks him off, his reflex is to protect Aaron: in the insane soap opera his life has become, he has to protect his near-son-in-law from his
son
? It’s time for a confession.