Authors: Peter Buwalda
He braces his foot against the curb, but the boy pulls him with the strength of a mule up onto the gray-paved sidewalk. They enter a café with a burned-out beer sign above the door. The boy pulls aside the velvet curtain and what they see is a ruin. The building has no back, blinding sunlight almost knocks over the crumbling cavity walls. His mouth agape, he walks over a wooden floor that gives onto rough grassland. A panorama extends out before them: he sees a sun-drenched railway yard stretching the entire breadth of the horizon, its countless parallel rusted tracks overgrown with nettles, dandelions, poppies. Here and there, dusty coal cars and abandoned passenger carriages glisten in the sunlight. You’d almost think it was spring. Beyond it, in the distance, is a gray canal, or maybe it’s a reservoir. On the horizon, a steaming industrial complex with wide gray towers that spew out thick columns of yellow smoke.
“
Allons,
” the boy says, followed by something in high-speed
French that he does not understand. He is standing on the third tread of a stairway, his body warmer looks like a kind of dress. The eyes roll insistently in their rusted sockets. Only now does he notice a rudimentary upper floor. Above his head is a half-demolished ceiling, loose copper pipes and tattered insulation material stick out of it. Blood is now pouring out of his backpack, it is too warm here, it seeps along the floor planks. “
Bouffer.
” The boy mimes eating and quickly takes hold of the peeling handrail—with a shock he realizes the other arm is missing. Just under the shoulder is a pale, sewn-up stump. He struggles up the staircase after the boy.
Upstairs, a man and a girl are seated at a fully set table, eating a sort of dark-red stew. He smells cooking grease. A stout woman crouches before an open oven. The room has no roof, but is furnished nevertheless. There are floor lamps, a dark oil painting hangs on the wall. The boy has already sat down next to the girl, who helps him remove the motorcycle glove. She is the spitting image of Janis, the same cropped hair, the close-set eyes. She stares past him toward the railway yard.
“I’m Siem,” he says.
The man—a former Tubantia dean, he sees now—looks up and nods. “
Asseyez-vous.
” He suddenly realizes how famished he is. He’d like nothing better than a helping of that mashed food. He could almost cry with gratitude.
He tries to remove the backpack—the bleeding has stopped, maybe there’s no more blood?—to take a place at the table, but he gets the shock of his life. The straps feel different now, they aren’t straps anymore, but arms that resist. Thin fingers clamp themselves to his shoulders. He screams with fright, but the others watch him impassively. No sooner has he wrested the one bony wrist loose than the other hand clings tenaciously to his coat. “It’s me, Simon,”
he hears close to his ear. “Your mother. You don’t want to desert your mother, do you, boy?”
Even before he opens his eyes he realizes where he is: in his car, he is lying on the reclined passenger seat, wedged against his skis. He is in a rest area just outside Lyons. He is shattered. The dashboard clock tells him it is quarter to five in the afternoon. He has slept for forty-five minutes, tops. Dusk is already settling in. His nightmare clings to him for another ten seconds or so, then the previous twenty-four hours jolt through him like an electric shock.
The effect is dramatic. Of course he didn’t book a hotel, which is why he is trying to get some shut-eye here, to put an end to the night of horrors that was bleeding into the morning. Usually things seem less catastrophic by day. But not now. The night has deepened.
He pulls the seat upright, crawls over the gear shift to the driver’s side. He clamps himself to the steering wheel. While he is driving he catches his brain doing more or less the same thing; it clamps itself to practicalities, he’s got his brain’s strategy figured out. It neurotically goes through the whole checklist. Is the workshop entirely clean? No blood on the tree stump? Why did he throw away the chipboard at home? Did he put the garbage bags back in the utility room? Had anyone see him walking through Charleroi?
Why’d you answer your phone in the middle of those woods?
The suspects in the fireworks case were traced by their cell phone calls. For seven years you’re the rector of a technical university and you happily answer your cell phone in those woods?
These are diversionary tactics. The manic rush he experienced between Charleroi and Lyons, pedal to the metal, 160 kpm the
whole way,
Mingus at Antibes
coming full-blast out of the speakers, his wild, lawless, furious, frenzied mood—it’s gone, evaporated. As though it never was. Within a minute of opening his eyes he feels something opening under his soul, a terrifying void, above which his most inner core, the man he is, the man he has to remain, tries to keep afloat. Thermal.
His car eats up the asphalt that separates him from normality. He can be in Val-d’Isère in an hour,
one more hour
, and the sketch that will become the rest of his life can begin. But he’s losing altitude. He tries everything. The elbow, the scraps of flesh—they are spent, they are what they are. What he wants to do in The Hague, that letter to Joni, one more try. Can he call Aaron? Isabelle Orthel, he tries to recall her face—but raw, nocturnal images overrule his haphazard fantasies. That feverish dreaming has exhausted him, in traffic near Lyons he took a shallow curve too wide and nearly hit the guardrail.
It went all wrong. He botched it. He had shoved the gruesome torso backward onto the tree stump; the head still hung back and off to one side, he had cut away the scarf with shears—enough exposed neck to finish the job. But that rum he’d drunk. The rum, coupled with what he asked of himself. The first swing fell wide. There was more than enough room to hit the pale, outstretched neck, but he wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps he faltered; in any case the blade of the axe landed too high, struck squarely into the lower part of the face. It cut a deep gash in the left corner of the mouth, through the upper lip and a bit of nose—everything gaped, he heard teeth, maybe even molars, breaking off. For a moment the axe appeared to be stuck, lodged deep in the upper jaw. He gasped for air. When he had jiggled the blade loose his arms, his hands, his entire body started to tremble.
It’s all going so fast. Got to find thermal. Mathematics. Absolute
clarity, synchronicity of beauty and insight? The ecstasy it could make him feel. Yellowish bone and flesh. The diagonal gash welled up with fluid: blood, but something grayish too. The Erdős problems he used to have at his fingertips. During receptions when he felt completely lost, during bad movies. When they lived on Bonita Avenue and he’d sit in the YMCA canteen during Janis’s and Joni’s swimming lessons. But now, Erdős ran through his fingers like fine sand. Joni was totally wrapped up in those lessons.
What is going on?
Not Janis: she’d keep looking over at him, smiling and waving. The sight of the jawbone, the hacked-off tongue, the mangled face. He tried to raise the axe a second time, but the thing weighed 100 kilos, halfway up he had to let it drop back. For a few moments his head was totally empty, until the clattering sound of breaking teeth returned, the strange overtones in the sloshy blow of the axe. The teeth.
Scattered everywhere
. A pathologist needed only one tiny piece of tooth. Shovel all that crap into the garbage bin, that was his first impulse, he was about to get the spade but was suddenly overcome with panic. Fell to his knees, tore off his gloves and began to grabble wildly in the snow. The pain in his frozen feet.
He was burrowing in the snow like a truffle hog when someone walked into the yard. The Teeuwen girl—he still can’t remember her first name—came into view. Black spots filled his vision.
The ring road is busy, he approaches the exit for Val-d’Isère. He’s got the route down pat, they’ve been coming here for years. He’s known her since she was born, the Teeuwen girl. Was it that time already? She took her bike around the back, her full school bag strapped to the baggage carrier. She snapped out the kickstand, checked to see that the bike stayed put, precious seconds he used to stretch out his legs and lie flat in the snow. There he lay, prepared for utter ignominy. His eyes wide open, he peered past the bloody torso, his face pulsated. Thirty meters away, the
thickly clothed girl walked toward the back door, the utility room. He could see her stop short as she approached. Her gloved hand briefly touched the taped-up windowpane. What was her name again? She looked around, he squeezed his eyes shut. When he looked again she had opened the back door. Her voice was dry in the morning air. “Hello?” she called out. He begged, he
prayed
she would go inside. To get to the cats’ food bowls she would have to cut through the living room to the front hall. Had he cleaned up properly? She disappeared into the farmhouse.
Get off here. Chambéry exit. The will to carry on, the survival instinct that now leaks from him like alkaline from a spent flashlight battery, brought him to his feet. Swiftly he scrambled up and lifted the torso off the stump, dragged it to the workshop without breathing, and went around the back of the large workbench. Drunk with adrenaline, he laid the monstrosity behind the veneer press and lay down next to it. Wait. Don’t move. That girl has to go to school, she’d feed the cats and cycle off to school. What was her name, damn it? Joni looked after her, Joni used to babysit at the Teeuwens’.
It’s another quarter of an hour beyond Chambéry. But what he’s known all along, happens: he keeps driving. The two of them, they were at the Teeuwens’ together.
He misses the exit and keeps on driving
. Joni and Wilbert babysat that girl
together
. His Audi is a droplet gliding toward the Mediterranean Sea.