Authors: Peter Buwalda
The tent bag is lying like a blood blister on the edge of the pit. He clambers back up the incline a bit, grabs the drawstring and pulls at it until the bag rolls over the mossy edge. He catches it and lets it slide the rest of the way down to the bottom. He stands panting for a few seconds. Just as he is pushing and wriggling it into the rooty crevice under the pine tree, his phone rings.
The ringtone is so incongruous in that morning silence that he surprises himself with a grin, his facial muscles are taut and rusty. With a sigh he sinks to the ground, stretching his legs out in front of him in the snow. He just sits there, absently, until the ringing stops. For a moment the woods are noiseless. Then his phone starts ringing again, and this time he takes it out of his breast pocket. It is his advisor, Hendrik, the old hand who had been banished to Education in the wake of the Bijlmer inquiry. Through his infinite exhaustion his mouth once again curls into a sort of a smile. This dedicated soul, who from a parallel universe has reached him in the depths of his misery.
“Morning, Hendrik.”
“Hello Siem, sorry to call you on a Saturday. Am I disturbing you?” The voice fills his consciousness like the smell of freshly baked bread.
“Go ahead.”
“Siem, it’s like this. You’ll remember Karin was supposed to go on that talk show tomorrow on TV, but I’ve just heard she’s got flu. Lost her voice. My question is: can you take her place? Personally I think it’s a golden opportunity to squelch all the grumbling about that school plan. What do you think?”
“I’m standing on a ski slope, Hendrik. To be honest, I’m not doing all that much thinking.” What he does think is: don’t leave me alone. Talk to me.
Hendrik swears. Then he laughs: yes, he thought he’d seen the call was being forwarded out of the country, now he remembers Sigerius mentioning spending the holidays in France. “That’s that, then, Siem, never mind. Have yourself a fine vacation.”
“You too, Hendrik, you too.” Apparently something in his tone keeps the other from hanging up. A hesitant silence fills the air. Hendrik is a boat floating far up above him, he must swim up to the surface, and fast. “What are you going to do?” he asks.
“Me? Oh, this and that, tie up some loose ends. I’ve got a lunch with that new parliamentary reporter, kid from the NRC.”
“Actually, I meant for Christmas, Hendrik.” Between sentences his teeth chatter, he pulls in his lips over his teeth. “And New Year’s Eve.”
“Nothing special, Siem.”
“The children? Doing anything with them?” His teeth chatter.
Hendrik pauses. Then, reluctantly: “My wife’s daughters are coming for Christmas. The youngest one has a new boyfriend.” He coughs, waits for another fraction of a second. “A boy from former Yugoslavia. My wife’s dreading it slightly, I think. So. Siem.”
As soon as they’ve hung up he sinks back into the depths of an abyss, cold and ever darker.
• • •
He scoured himself clean with gritty gel from a small tube. The stuff grated the top layer of skin on his neck, on his face; everything had to come off and get washed down the drain. With every fleshy little snot he cringed in self-loathing and disgust. The hot water ate into the places hit by the nunchuk, there was an enormous bruise under his armpit and another elongated one on his neck. He washed his hair twice with a handful of shampoo, his fingers like a steel brush over his scalp. He squeezed toothpaste onto the brush that lay on the small glass shelf and scrubbed his teeth, spat the froth between his feet, and then scrubbed again until his gums bled. He removed the showerhead from its holder and squatted down. There was a soft pink substance on the drain that he pushed through the holes in the copper plate with the back end of the toothbrush. Why, he didn’t know, but as he was doing this he thought back to the full living room in their house on the Antonius Matthaeuslaan, the week after the birth. All his in-laws were there, smoking, bantering, munching the biscuits with sprinkles that he and his older sister had prepared in the kitchen while Margriet’s father sat on the john, for a good long time, he remembers thinking. He could smell the old Wijn. That lout behind the bathroom door bothered him: a reminder that their little boy up there in his crib carried the genes of the guy on his toilet. He was unhappy.
You sawed him up
. He tried to stand up, his ribs cut into his chest like sabers, he had to grab hold of the aluminum doorframe. The devastating force tearing into him was not localized, not something on the scale of his life—it was immense.
You murdered him and then you sawed him up
.
The unease
and
the happiness when the baby was born. He
was happy, because now he had something over the Wijn clan. His own parents were dead and buried, it was him versus them. The unease was stronger, it arose from mixing his genes with these Utrecht low-lifes—but the child was still a Sigerius. Whenever he fantasized about running off, leaving Margriet, in his daydream he always took his son with him—
His frozen son, Siem Sigerius’s sawed-up son, lay like bait in his shed, a hunk of meat that would soon thaw and stink and betray him. He would be devoured by the scorn of politicos, his disgrace would be broadcast nationwide, his nervous system evoked images of the gray colossus of Justice, in no time it would be established that it was murder. Then visions of something even more merciless: the media, the fucking media, the drooling press, the
international
press, newspaper headlines in thick ink, dripping columns covering his trial: the mathematician and his children, blackmail, nude pictures, a circular saw. He pressed his chafed chin to his chest and let the water splash against the back of his head.
Keep on thinking—please. He turned the hot tap halfway off, the water went lukewarm. Tepid water allows him to think clearly. That’s what he did at MIT when he’d drawn a blank: take a shower. No way is he going to just give up. There was a forgotten, primitive shower at the end of the Mathematics Department corridor, beyond Quillen’s room. When he was stuck, like now, he would take his towel and walk down to that cubicle. That sawing, he just couldn’t go through with it. He wanted to turn the hot water back up, but restrained himself. Hot water was for chickens, he needed to cool himself off. Think cold. His shoes made a high-pitched ticking noise in the corridor, on the walls hung portraits of the greatest mathematicians in history: Euler, Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert, Fermat, Galois. He stands motionless under the tepid stream, goose bumps on his body. And now? Get rid of him.
Make a puzzle
of it
. He’d stand there in the MIT shower, up to his neck in Von Neumann algebras, not to mention physically bricked in, until his brain underwent nuclear fusion. The puzzling-together of those algebras and the knot theory, he had to support himself against the tiled shower, his fingers spread, to keep from falling over. But now there’s no fusion, on the contrary: his nucleus splits. First comes panic, then the urge for survival.
Fission yourself first
. He turned the hot water off entirely.
Freeze yourself
. The coldness, Wilbert Sigerius’s coldness. A son who waits until his father is naked and then attacks him with a lead truncheon. The cold, merciless marrow of that bastard, he drank it up like liquid nitrogen. He ran his hands over his scalp one last time and got out of the shower.
He walked back to the workshop and untaped the corpse from the board, pried the upper leg out of the saw. He thought for a moment, then threw the wooden door all the way open, stuck his arms under the dead weight and dragged the pillar of flesh into the backyard. Picking up speed, he followed the blind wall of the workshop where chopped hardwood was stacked under a low lean-to shingled with barked planks. In the fresh snow he could see the outline of the oak stump where Tineke chopped wood. He hurriedly kicked the snow off the trunk and laid the stiffened body over it, the waist in the middle of the round platform, head and heels draping into the snow. There was enough light from the outdoor lamp above the terrace. He walked back to the workshop, pulled the roll of garbage bags out of the backpack. In the left corner of the shed, propped in a sooty fire basket, was an axe. He took it with him outside.
It was an enormous axe with a red-painted steel blade and an elegantly curved, almost athletic handle. First he kicked the left
hand away from the groin, and then tugged the leather jacket up a bit. He had brought this dangerous piece of garbage into the world. He had to repeat it a few times before he raised the axe—
You brought dangerous rubbish into the world
. The first blow was aimed at the saw wound in the thigh, but the axe bounced off something hard and lodged itself in the chopping block.
And now you’ll clean up the mess
. He crouched next to the leg, wriggled his hand into the greasy trouser pocket. It was his duty. First he pulled out a pack of Sportlife chewing gum, and almost cut himself when he pried out an open jackknife. The kid was three years old, Karin was staying with them, Margriet’s youngest sister. Problems with her father. A lethargic girl in polka-dot frocks who sat there the whole day chewing Bazooka bubblegum. The house was littered with those waxy wrappers with cartoons on them. One Sunday afternoon they heard breathless shrieking on the landing. There he sat, with a gob of bubblegum the size of a golf ball lodged in his throat, Karin had stuck it to the edge of the kitchen table, “a whole pack,” she screamed, while little blue-faced Wilbert lay there choking to death. He should have cleaned up that mess right then and there. He looked at the weapon, the blow must have knocked the blade open, there was a deep groove in the wooden sheath. Should’ve let him choke.
But he rushed over and gave him a few punches to the belly, held his unconscious child by the ankles and eventually managed, with three fingers, to fish the sticky, bright pink glob out of the toddler’s throat.
The axe struck the upper leg. With four or five overhand blows—raising it with hate, chopping with hate
and
gravity—he cleaved the half-sawn-off leg the rest of the way; the flesh was as grainy as sorbet, he heard the bone snap. It became a weird loose thing with a sneaker on it. Dark blood welled up out of the ragged open cut,
which he absolutely did not want to stare at, but did anyway; the vivid red surface agreed with what he imagined the cross-section of a leg would look like: skin around flesh around bone. Numb, he stuffed the object in a garbage bag that he then wound shut with the silver-colored duct tape, and carried it to the workshop.
His gamble paid off: the tent bag was long enough. He carried the backpack back to the chopping block. The darkness seemed less deep. Against his better judgment he gauged the opening of the backpack and then the breadth of the shoulders. The torso was indeed too large, his son had his build, stocky and massive; the good arm simply had to come off too.
And the head?
Keep your shit together. No time to lose, when would that Teeuwen girl be coming by? Always start with the least fun stuff, that’s what he had told his daughters their entire youth, get it out of the way. The dishes first, then TV. Homework first, then horseback riding. First the head, then the limbs. He fought back the sudden urge to grab the axe and fling it against the sunroom—he could hear the tinkling of the glass already.
The awful thought of the head
. Wasn’t there a bigger bag upstairs? A
taller
bag, so that he could leave the head attached?
What he’d most like is to close his eyes, just for a minute, but he is too agitated. The backpack—got to go to the car. Taking short steps, he climbs out of the hole and makes his way back through the tree trunks. Even without the thirty-kilo load he stumbles against roots and branches, his toes are frozen, the sound he makes is unnaturally loud. As soon as he has spotted the Audi, its silver finish sparkling in the winter sun, he picks up his pace; for the last fifty meters his eyes water from the stabbing pain in his ribs. Without looking either way along the path he gets in on the
driver’s side. He locks the doors. In the glove compartment he finds a road map of France. Soon the drive southward, through Reims and Dijon, to his family. But first, the backpack. He turns on the engine and drives, too aggressively for a dirt path like this, toward the country road. He turns off toward Charleroi.
From the viaduct the long, desolate street looked abandoned, but now a boy is walking alongside him. He is scrawny and wiry, like a stray dog. The boy is wearing clothes that do not suit him: a filthy, oversized quilted body warmer that hangs below his knees, white nurses’ clogs with tiny girlish holes in them. On his hand is a large black-and-red-leather motorcycle glove. It is clothing that doesn’t look good on anyone.
The boy walks on the gritty, gravelly asphalt and he up on the raised sidewalk. He can’t be older than twelve, and yet his eyes, barely visible, are sunk deep in their flaking sockets: black drain holes that keep a continual and close watch on the backpack. It has started to drip and weighs heavily on his shoulders. He keeps a close eye on his car, the Audi is parked half off the road, half under the viaduct.
He looks around, pretending he does not notice the boy. Much of the already rundown street has been demolished; around the few derelict houses is an empty lot littered with rubble and plastic bottles. They are about thirty meters from their destination: a small dumping ground for household refuse that he’d spotted from the ring road. Old sofas, TVs, mangled bicycles, garbage bags—especially lots of disgorging garbage bags. Answering the boy’s attentive gaze, he points to the dump. A look of dismay shoots over the old-ish, serious face, the purple lips move like worms. “
Non,
”
the boy commands, “
non.
” He gestures with the huge palm of his leather glove. “
Venez!
”
But he does not want to go with him. He has to dispose of the backpack. It appears that the boy understands this, but still knows what’s best for him. He walks up alongside him, and in a flash the enormous glove grabs him by the wrist. The boy gestures with his small, round chin to the opposite side of the street. To oblige him he nods and steps off the sidewalk, the asphalt crunching under his soles. The boy tugs him diagonally across the road, they are nearly running, the white clogs clack like horses’ hooves on the decrepit blacktop. He is worried about the backpack, the load bounces unrhythmically up and down. The straps dig into his shoulders. The blood drips faster, he is leaving a trail behind.
Soon the head will be rolling down the street
. Why did he put it in the bottom compartment? Is the zipper shut?