Authors: Peter Buwalda
On Saturday evenings she more or less shoves him out of the door—“go on, Delft is full of cafés, do you want a girlfriend or don’t you?,” followed by that incessant “right, Fred?”—so to get them off his back he admits he knows a nice girl, Menno Wijn’s
sister, from Utrecht, where he still goes for judo four times a week. One Friday afternoon he gets home from the athletic training school where he teaches and gets the shock of his life:
there she is
, Maggie Wijn, sitting straight up in his late father’s easy chair, shooting the breeze with Mieke like it’s the most natural thing in the world. She looks different, he explains to Janis, less blue-collar; she’s ladylike, she’s used hairspray, there’s eyeshadow on her limp lids, she’s holding a white leather purse on her lap. Mieke’s been meddling again, but for once he’s grateful; until now it’s never got any further than awkward stammering at the back door when he stopped by to fetch Menno. Now they sit here chatting for a couple of hours, it’s even fun, they talk about beat groups she likes, about the liquor store on the Oude Gracht where she works as a cashier; she has a low, melancholy voice, but when he cracks a joke she laughs out loud, more than at Fred’s sarcastic remarks. At nine-thirty Mieke gives a little clap. “Siem, walk Margriet to the station, won’t you?” She’d have preferred to have Fred hand over the wedding rings there and then.
He does not remember much of what must have been an engagement period. Meeting Margriet’s parents, a nerve-racking gathering in a smoke-filled living room, where, he hears later, he gobbled up all four slices of buttered cake; Sunday strolls in Amelisweerd Park where they did their best to chat casually until their well-earned necking behind the dike.
They were married three months later. It took him somewhat longer to understand who it was he was now bound to, a bit like when Margriet only discovered his tattoo on their wedding night: the two blue-green Japanese characters he had had emblazoned on his chest following a tournament in Marseilles, and which Menno said meant “judo.” (“Egg foo young, you mean,” she says, one of
her flimsy jokes that he has to laugh at.) What do they know about each other, really? He ejaculates before he knows it.
She turns out to be insufferably lazy. On the days he teaches self-defense in Amsterdam in the morning, arriving back at Utrecht Central at one-ish and cycling home to grab a sandwich before his afternoon training session, he notices as he approaches the house that the bedroom curtains are still drawn. Like practically every other weekday morning, Margriet is still lolling in the bed they inherited from his father, on the bedside table a soup bowl with dried remains of the spiked eggnog from her former employer. When he criticizes her slothfulness—he’s spent time at a Japanese drill camp where they slept briefly and deeply on mats as thin as carbon paper, got up with the rest of the jungle animals, and ran six kilometers before breakfast—her reaction is one of impassive penitence.
He subjected her to what is nowadays called a vocational aptitude test, and subsequently enrolled her at a local sewing atelier: make your own dresses, pin up jackets, stitch a suit out of a bolt of fabric she could, he found out, pick up for a song at the Saturday textiles market. He bought her a Singer with his sport-school salary and installed it on the kitchen table next to the electrical outlet. It’s a hit, she loves it, she says, the teacher’s great, he’s treated to news items concerning the other women, mostly intrigues, intricate tales of love and betrayal, Margriet has apparently become the confidante of the atelier. Every now and then she comes back with a self-made skirt, or a jacket, sometimes something for him—she’s got talent, it’s as good as store-bought, and it is difficult to describe what goes through his mind when, a year later, he finds out they
were
all store-bought, purchased with her household allowance, from her
lesson
money, because Margriet admits without blinking that she’d only been to that atelier twice.
The truth is staring him in the face: he has got himself a very strange wife indeed. A sardine who does nothing but sleep and drink. And prevaricates, by which he means a creative form of lying; Margriet Wijn does not spin half-yarns, or concoct ordinary lies—she cultivates new realities.
“And you get a woman like that pregnant.” Janis.
“Yeah.”
He lists all the ways he had back in 1970 of not making a child—nip out for some cigarettes, jump on the first merchant ship leaving town—and adds them up, the most important tally of his life, he realizes, and to his amazement the sum total says:
get her pregnant
.
His phone rings at six-thirty. Tineke. He takes a few deep breaths before answering.
“Why’re you calling so early?” His voice is hoarse. He has hardly slept a wink, and doesn’t know what to expect.
“Janis is in the shower. We’re about to leave.”
“What about the pictures?”
She laughs, a commiserating chortle that sounds forced to him. Then she says: “You’re kidding yourself. She’s a pretty girl, I’ll give you that, and a cheap little hussy on top of it, and yes, she does look a bit like Joni. But it’s not her.”
He listens, dumbfounded.
“Aside from that it’s just not her,” she says, “this girl has bright blue eyes and totally different hair. It’s someone else.” She laughs again. For a moment he considers playing along, just as one laughs along with a lunatic; pretend he only now understands, finally sees the light. Instead, he sighs.
“Is that all you can say? This girl is American, Siem. Your sex babe. Where
did
you find these pictures?”
“Don’t be so stupid,” he snarls. “I’ve talked to her. Whether or not it’s her is not up for discussion. Have you lost your mind?”
“Have you lost
yours
? You misunderstood her, that’s all. I think you panicked. Misinterpreted everything. It’s Wilbert, he’s thrown you off-kilter. It’s a tasteless joke.
That’s
what
I
think.”
Although he expects this veneer of self-deception to crumble to pieces at any moment, she holds her ground. She
means
it. It is not even self-preservation, she is actually
convinced
. “You said yourself it was a short conversation,” he hears her say, “and of course you were shocked, maybe even furious, whatever. Wound up into a frenzy by that damn son of yours. You’re mistaken, honey. Really. Shall I phone her?”
“Don’t you dare!” he barks. She does not reply—stunned, he assumes.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’ll call her myself, dear. Let me take care of it. You just go and enjoy France.”
Soon he has to leave for Leiden to open a conference of the National Network of Women Professors. He switches on the bedside lamp, sleep is now out of the question. He steps onto the cold floor and takes the speech someone has written for him out of his briefcase. Back in bed, he leaves the bundle of papers lying in front of him on the covers.
Is he really planning to bury 100,000 guilders on Scheveningen beach?
An hour later he directs his chauffeur not directly to Leiden, but first through the city’s rush hour to the MeesPierson branch.
He has reluctantly invented a pretext for the money, something about paintings and auction houses in Nice and Marseilles, dealers who insist on cash transactions, which turns out to be sufficiently plausible. While the Volvo idles he goes into the office with a small leather Puma sports bag he bought downtown. The receptionist makes a phone call, a smiling young woman appears, she brings him to a room that smells of new carpeting. There she counts out—her nails are painted with little palm trees—a hundred 1,000-guilder notes, a stack not even an inch thick; he is embarrassed by his stupidly amateurish gym bag.
About an hour and a half later he gives a speech to 300 professorial women with 100 grand stuffed in his breast pocket. He fields questions about the dismal Dutch participation statistics on the world stage, about the transparency of the appointment process, social exclusivity in academia’s upper echelons—and strangely enough, there, up on that stage, during the open questions, he experiences a kind of deliverance. Is it that simple? he asks himself. Now of all times, with a microphone in front of his nose, standing in front of 300 skeptical women, he has a revelation. Joni’s own mother does not recognize her! He says: look here, I’m sorry but this is your daughter, and she replies: get your head examined.
“What we in the Netherlands have to move away from,” he says from behind his lectern, “is professors being appointed by deans and department chairs. In countries like America and Norway you start as an assistant professor, and whether you move on to a full professorship depends on how much you’ve published, not on your boss.”
She does not recognize her own daughter
. Are you still someone if no one recognizes you? Maybe not. If Tineke, after a confession like his, after that dildo in the mail, still believes that the girl in those photos is not Joni, then it’s
not
Joni. He’s the only one who
single-handedly recognized her, and then only once he actually stood there in that attic room. It’s her and it’s not her, a case of being
and
not being, wave
and
particle. “In Norway and the USA,” he says, his heart nearly exploding with elation, “one person does not hold another person back, and that must be our goal here in the Netherlands as well.”
Of course it’s not her! The applause that washes up over the podium encourages him, legitimizes his grin, drenches him in relief. Drop dead, Wilbert!
It’s not her!
Don’t you see that? Call your stepmother, you bum. You got shit in your eyes, or what? You can
see
it’s not her, can’t you? Wilbert Sigerius, now
him
they’ll believe. Well, if Wilbert Sigerius says so. Glowing with triumph, he accepts the bottle of wine and thinks: if I could only talk to Joni. If he had her number he would call her right now: listen, sweetheart, let’s just forget what happened. I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but it’s
not you
. Mom and I are sure of it. Please come to France, bring Aaron with you. Tell him it’s
not you
.
Exactly a week later he takes two last phone calls on the electrically warmed backseat of the Volvo. Outside, the city streets, with their sunken tram rails and stately town houses, gradually glide into suburbs and glossy black office parks. The quiet December evening, already deepening into night; the silent strength of his chauffeur at the wheel, who calmly drives him toward the A12—very soon he will be, for a week, a non-minister. He yearns for what the Kingdom of the Netherlands so promisingly calls the Christmas recess; the government car that drives him from The Hague to Enschede is a lever on a mixing console; with each kilometer he is transformed into a family man, the worse for wear perhaps, but still hankering for the French ski village where he’ll celebrate the holidays.
Although he can’t wait to glide down an alp behind Janis, he first looks forward to an evening alone in his own house, listening to his own music, sleeping in his own bed. For the next seven nights he’ll be free from his satyrs, but even freedom can be tiring. Several ecstatic days followed the female professors’ applause, days of excited confusion, his thoughts were already taking a ski vacation of their own: that same evening he quenched his exultant fury with the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon they had given him at the conference, and then sat down to pen a
mea culpa
to Aaron and Joni, in duplicate, on a ministry notepad, a letter he had genuinely planned to mail; but upon rereading it on the freezing-cold toilet the next morning, he tore it up and flushed it without hesitation.
It was the day of the beach. He would
not
be standing at beach marker 101 at eight o’clock sharp, he had decided, and would
not
bury any bag of money. This was the result of that blissful inspiration Tineke had triggered. He no longer considered himself a blackmail target per se, and in order to bolster this idea he worked stealthily in his office on a serious letter to Joni in which he related Wilbert’s extortion attempt, asking if he could count on her to back him up, form a united front, should Wilbert ever try to put his threats into action. But whether it was just the bustle and constant interruptions, or whether he simply blocked it out, the sliding door incident never made it to the keyboard.
Perhaps because of this, he felt his mood dampen in the course of the day, the triumphant buzz faded, he became softer, squishy, maybe even sentimental. The direct threat dispensed with, he crept out of his bunker and noticed, for the first time in years, a need to put himself in his son’s shoes; we were talking about a guy of twenty-nine after all, a boy really, about the same age as he was when he dropped Margriet like a hot brick. His tongue ran over the words “ministerial accountability” like a molar that’s lost
its filling. Everything was fine back in his office in Zoetermeer, his brain saturated with the day-to-day urgencies, but on his way home he played reruns of the past, with his son in various roles: Wilbert perched in his child’s seat on the front of the bike, him looking down on the boy’s soft hair, testily pedaling through an abandoned Utrecht because he couldn’t bear the sight of their national team’s humiliation in the World Cup final; then the panther-like kid with his fanatic horseplay, who some fifteen years later came to liven up his girl-heavy family, and who playfully grabbed him by the wrists behind the farmhouse: the impressive strength of that adolescent body, he felt
himself
; the sullen, sagging head in the courtroom less than a year later. What was my part in all this?, he thought. How does the kid live? And for what? For whom? Unwittingly and unwanted, blades of pity started sprouting in him.
The flurries have begun, the Volvo makes its way through swirls of snow. His department secretary phones. As they speak, snowflake-speckled signs—towns, distances, exits—emerge from the darkness, at Deventer he signals his chauffeur to pull into a McDrive. They eat their quarter-pounders and fries in the parking lot, calmly chatting about the impending frost, about skiing regions and the best time of year to go.