She cut herself off when Joni opened the screen door. Nifty physics problem, he heard himself thinking as Joni approached. Givens: rolling velocity of the man and the height of the chimney. Assignment: calculate the depth of the yard. Joni looked like she was in pain, and she was: with a moan she slammed a steaming plate of tandoori chicken under his nose. She blew on her fingers as she rounded the table. She looked pretty bad.
“I’ve had a hell of a day …,” he said before she even sat down. “I photographed these three Evangelical students. In their emergency shelter. They lived in a dorm right across from the fireworks factory. Blown to kingdom come with biblical ferocity. Photos, term papers, a brand-new practice piano, two rented tuxedos: everything up in smoke. And wouldn’t you know it, they still believe. Well-spoken lads who thank the Lord they weren’t home. Evangelists or not, these guys understood that humor is the best way to deal with adversity.”
“I’ve been to see Ennio,” Joni said.
“Within just two days,” he continued, “they had a whole repertoire of May 13th jokes. They’re stuck in that makeshift apartment all day long. ‘What did the firecracker say to the roman candle?’—that kind of thing, the whole time.” He smiled, popped a piece of tandoori in his mouth and looked at Joni while he chewed. “I heard,” he said with his mouth full. “But now he’s able to have visitors. So he’s on the mend.”
With a strange motion, a kind of spasm, she knocked the roll of paper towels from the table. “On the mend?” She inhaled like a sponge diver and disappeared under the table. “He’s in the ICU, Aaron,” came the voice from underwater. When she resurfaced with the paper towels she banged her shoulder against the edge of the table, hard enough to bring on new tears.
“It’s not easy, honey,” said Tineke. “Have a good cry.”
(Bawl, doctor. Bawl. No, that’s not how he said it; months later he would express himself more euphemistically: he felt that Joni, for his taste, overreacted to what she had seen in that ICU. As though she’d had her tear ducts surgically shortened. Those two little geysers, he observed, made her curiously ugly, in contrast to what tears had done with his earlier, less attractive girlfriends: crying made them prettier, their tears softened them. He compared Joni’s sob-gob with her usual Scandinavian freshness. The broad face with its smooth, taut skin; I really should get some fresh air, you thought when you looked at her. The upper half radiated well-being, at least under normal circumstances, strength, genetic gold. Joni’s shrewdness, the sexiness, her flammable femininity—these were lower, they gathered around her mouth, now a pale, quivering stripe, but usually a deep-red anemone with an ever so slightly forward-jutting lower lip that always looked moist. The tiniest pout and all that wellness became overripe, decadent. Although she was aware of her external weapons, she sometimes pushed down the tip of her modest little nose with her index finger: she felt that it swung upward. It didn’t. Amazing how much snot could come out of it.)
And how was Ennio faring? He must have asked something of the sort, because in barely intelligible stages he learned that the guy had third-degree burns all over his body, five broken ribs, a perforated spleen, and countless open flesh wounds. The doctors had covered Ennio’s legs, chest, and a good bit of his back with donor skin—like a dish of lasagna, he imagined. Every morning the wounds had to be disinfected, smeared with salve, and dressed, a painful affair for which they gave him painkillers and tranquilizers. Meanwhile Ennio lost liters of fluids into the jungle of tubes and apparatus, and all sorts of organs refused to function, the reason why he was permanently hooked to an IV that made him swell up in unexpected places.
Joni paused to catch her breath, nestling her rounded chin on her arms, which lay crossed on the table.
“So he’s still alive,” he summarized, and made a feeble attempt at reaching across and laying a hand on her shoulder. As she felt him she sprang up, furious. “Yeah, he’s still alive,” she screamed. She kicked her chair back and got up.
“Joni …,” Tineke said.
“Alive, but they’ve given him pretty slim odds, you prick. He’s got blood poisoning and pneumonia. He’s at death’s door. And everybody’s distraught—everyone in that family is totally devastated. You always make out like things are just hunky-dory!”
“Aaron doesn’t think that,” Tineke said soothingly. She shook her head. “It’s just awful luck, so soon after his divorce. Kicked out of his house, and then this.” She looked worriedly across the yard, her chin dragging the fat of her neck with it, she stopped only when her gaze met his—questioningly, it seemed.
“Wasn’t Ennio screwing his salesgirls?” he said. A heavy silence. “That’s what they say, anyway.”
Joni blew her nose in a paper towel, threw the wad onto the table, and stared into the yard.
“There are people,” he added, “who, in a case like this, would say: God punishes mercilessly and without delay. But you won’t hear me say that.” His comment hit them like seagull shit, he realized as much, but at the same time he was pleased with it, his lack of sleep cleared his head; wonderful how sleep deprivation made you more alert. That Ennio was nothing but a dirty bugger. Each season new first-year chick between his chutneys.
“If you were my son,” said Tineke, “I’d slap your face right now.”
But I’m not your son, he thought. He scooped together the last bits of rice and sauce, shoveled it all in his mouth and said: “Gotta go. Judo.”
When he and Sigerius returned back home around midnight, dead beat, Joni was already lying in the guest bed. Her sleeping figure radiated anger.
He cautiously slid alongside her, fully prepared for another sleepless night. It was the first time since the dinner table incident that he had been alone with Sigerius, and was quick to notice that his father-in-law was harboring a whopper of a grudge. They were sitting on the edge of the mat, next to the large sketchbook, discussing katas, when Sigerius asked if Joni had said anything about “the fuss.” You mean Ennio, he had answered quasi-nonchalantly, or California? No, no—Sigerius meant that to-do about Wilbert, you know, at the table, the commotion over my son. He replied that they’d spoken about it briefly, Joni told him bits and pieces about when they were young, but that they hadn’t spoken much the past few days. It was a father-daughter thing, Sigerius assured him, nothing to worry himself about, but still there was this nagging question: did Aaron know if Joni had been in contact with Wilbert? Phone calls? Did he pick up anything along those lines?
No, he didn’t know a thing.
OK, good—say no more, water under the bridge, let’s get to work, case closed, it seemed—but for Aaron it was case open, water over the bridge, certainly now he lay there, once again, wide awake alongside Joni. For now at least, no tormenting fantasies about her escapades with the chutney-hawker, for now no agonizing about Stol and McKinsey, but you could hardly call it a solace. What had happened? What was Sigerius so worried about? Why did she keep him in the dark? The night stretched itself out like a torture rack of time. Sigerius’s fear had become his own, now he suddenly had to know if she’d talked to that jailbird, and more to the point: why. What was going on here?
While she lay in a deep slumber next to him, as far away as possible on her side of the bed it seemed, he worked his way through the worst possible scenarios. Wilbert had molested her. No, they had had an affair. Bonnie and Clyde. Year after year she visited Wilbert in his cell for a weekly hour of hanky-panky in a cube of tempered glass. There was a child of theirs out there somewhere, she’d given birth, or at the very least had an abortion—and his morbid fantasies whirled around in this vein, picked up speed, flung themselves about, ever faster, ever wilder, until the electric field was enough to rouse Joni: she woke with a start. She lay there panting and smacking her lips to dreams whose content he could only guess. She flipped on the bedside lamp, groped for her watch. “Damn,” she said. Only then did she look beside her. He was sitting upright, his back against the textured wallpaper. The glance she shot him
was … indescribable. What was in it? Ice. Disdain, disapproval. Contempt? Her anger had fermented, and what he tasted was … loathing.
And yet he managed to produce a complete sentence. “Joni,” he choked, “has Wilbert phoned you?”
She sat up, wrestled with the bedsheet, looked at him mockingly. She let out a contemptuous little chuckle, for a moment he expected an answer, but she turned away, shaking her head, burrowed her blond hair deep into the pillow and said: “G’night, dickhead.”
He was allowed back in his house. “Goin’ home,” he chirped after their last breakfast at the farmhouse, and without another word to each other, but as though it was perfectly normal that Joni should join him, they loaded their bags into the Alfa and drove off, he at the wheel, Joni in the passenger seat with the guinea pig cage on her lap. The sky above the campus was bright blue. They drove in silence down the Langenkampweg and the Hengelosestraat; he was familiar with these arguments and knew exactly how long they would last.
They didn’t go for outright bickering, and both considered drawn-out arguments a royal pain in the ass. Of course they’d had plenty of rows, clashes that shook the doors off their hinges, but these were incidents that diminished in frequency the better they came to assess each other’s weaknesses and flashpoints. Joni hated arguments because she was too efficient, because she was focused on the shortest route to success, which for her was not the same as being right or winning an argument (as it was for him) but about arriving at a situation that offered her an advantage. As far as she was concerned, arguing was, she once screamed at him during, ironically enough, a grueling, entirely out-of-hand dispute, “un-pro-duc-tive!”
As they approached his street their attention drifted along the wooden partitions, the eye-level piss-yellow fencework that ran the length of the Lasondersingel and turned the corner at the Blijdensteinlaan. “Just like Asterix and Obelix’s village,” he said to Joni, “only less invincible.” She did not laugh.
He himself was a coward. He avoided confrontations whenever possible; an argument with Joni was more than anything a risk. For the past four years he’d been telling his friends that Joni would be the mother of his children, and to avoid anything that might jeopardize that, he had, until recently, tiptoed around her.
They toddled uneasily up the path to the front door, the key he’d been given by the town council slipped effortlessly into the brand-new lock. “Leave the animals in the hall for now.”
Glass. He’d heard endless accounts of the shock wave, an invisible Hun that swept relentlessly through the streets of Roombeek without skipping a single address—and still he was awestruck. The entire ground floor, which felt small after two weeks chez Sigerius, was littered with splinters, shards, and rubble. On the table, on the armchair seat cushions, on every uncovered centimeter of his bookshelves, between the buttons on the remote control, on the windowsills of opposing windows, one of which had been blown out, in the kitchen sink, on the cabinets—there was glass everywhere. The city council had boarded up the shattered sliding doors with wood panels.
“Double glazing,” he said, “gotta get double glazing.”
They drifted about the sparkling living room for a quarter of an hour at a loss for what to do; and still Joni was silent. He handed her the only pair of rubber gloves he could find under the sink, and put on his own winter gloves. The thaw would set in within an hour, he estimated. He vacuumed the windowsills with his Nilfisk. They scooped the broken glass into garbage bags, in silence. He picked up the two breakfast plates they had left standing on the coffee table the morning of the wedding, and on the way to the kitchen he held a half-eaten slice of bread now sprinkled with glass under her nose. “Wanna bite?” he asked.
“Cut it out!” she screamed. With a furious swipe she knocked his arm away, the plate arced through the air and broke noisily. He exploded, grabbed her by the chin, squeezed it hard, and hissed through his teeth: “What went on between you and that fucking Wilbert?”
“Let go of me,” she said.
He squeezed harder, spit trickled onto his hand. “Tell me,” he bellowed, but instead of answering him, she growled with rage. He pushed her away. “I’m sick of it!” he screamed. “Sick and tired! Always these half-truths. Just fucking tell me what’s going on!”
Her eyes grew to unnatural dimensions. She was taken aback by his outburst, he could tell, the conceit drained from her face. She slumped into the armchair nearest the demolished sliding door, realized the seat was strewn with shattered glass and jumped back up. She cursed.
“Turn around,” he said. To his surprise, she obeyed. He slapped off bits of glass from her buttocks with the flat of his hand, and had to squat down to pick the splinters out of her skirt. This operation released the tension, apparently for both of them, because before he was finished she said: “All right then. Listen.” She sighed deeply, but remained silent.
“I’m listening,” he said.
Again it was a few moments before she spoke. “This isn’t to get any farther than this room. What I’m about to say is … let’s just say I’m not proud of it.”
“OK,” he said, worried but eager. “Talk. You’d got to the court case.” As she was now glass-free, he placed his hands on her hips, his thumbs resting against the flanks of her buttocks. She allowed it.
“Siem insisted I testify,” she said, suddenly businesslike. “He wanted me to say I heard what had gone on in the bathroom. That I was in the hallway and overheard the whole shebang. The sounds. What was said. You follow me now?”
He did not respond, but pressed his thumbs softly into her buttocks.
“Siem demanded that I blow the whistle on his son, my stepbrother. The kid I’d gone horseback riding with the week before. That I … shaft him. That I lie in court.”
The word “shaft” did not sit well with him. He gave her ass a shove, she took a step forward. “Excellent,” he said. “The gloves are off.”
“Asshole!” she cried. She gave the armchair a kick.
“Why? He had to go. Your father was completely in the right.”
To his surprise, she stayed calm. She grabbed the vacuum, turned it on and cleaned the seat of the armchair. When she had finished she mumbled: “The bag’s full.” She dropped the hose wand and looked at him. “Aaron, try to relate. Just this once. I perjured myself. Against my will. I was put under pressure to betray a kid I liked. In a court of law. To his face. I committed perjury in front of him. He heard it, and he knew it.”
“And then?”
“And then?” she barked. “And then? What do you think ‘and then’? They gave him ten months. Thanks to me lying. Thanks to Siem’s manipulation. That’s what ‘and then.’ ”
He nodded. “Did Wilbert phone you?”
She wanted to say something, again something irate, but just at that moment her cell phone rang. While fumbling to retrieve it from her skirt pocket she cooled off and said: “I called him. We met up.”
She answered the phone. After announcing her name she listened attentively, stuck out her hand to him like a traffic cop, and disappeared into the kitchen. She pulled the door shut behind her with a bang. Who did she have on the line? He hurried after her and saw through the window that she’d gone all the way to the end of the overgrown backyard. She was talking indistinctly. With that criminal?
It was strangely quiet in the street; it took him a while to realize he heard no birds. The fauna had abandoned Roombeek. He had fled his house in order to simmer down. He left a note on the table saying that he’d gone to buy more vacuum cleaner bags and get something for them both to eat.
He wanted to cycle up to the Roomweg, to a small housewares shop across from the French fry joint, but once he saw the wooden fence he realized the shop now only existed in his memory. So—she did go to see Wilbert. He rode past the museum and into the neighborhood beyond it. Should he be jealous, or worried? Past the primary school he turned left and arrived at the “flower monument,” a public garden on the Deurningerstraa
t that overflowed with cellophane-wrapped flowers in memory of the victims. Why was he unable to show any empathy?
With a vaguely uneasy feeling he rode through Blaauwbroek’s street, glanced in the living room window, but no one was home. He crossed the railroad tracks and biked into the city center, following the Langestraat until he reached the Hema. Had his capacity for compassion completely evaporated? Was he overlooking a sort of fundamental jealousy, a blind spot that determined his view of even the most serious matters?
He paid for the vacuum cleaner bags, as well as a hunk of cheese and six muesli rolls, and walked his bike to the lingerie shop in the Havenstraat. Not entirely by coincidence, he passed Ennio’s delicatessen, on whose dark-red door hung a note saying “Closed until further notice”; he stood in front of the busily decorated shop window and examined a small tower of jars: Colman’s Original Mustard, miniature jars of Wilkin & Sons No Peel Orange Marmalade, tall jars of Mrs. Ball’s Peach Chutney, all stacked in the shape of a little man. On top, attached with barely visible nylon thread, was a bowler hat, and alongside it, on two threads, a diagonal walking stick. He imagined Ennio fussing with his wares behind that cramped window display, and concluded that Joni couldn’t possibly have had sex with the sort of person who thought up and constructed this kind of nonsense.
Was he too jealous? Should he back off? Could he be imagining things? Stol, Ennio, Wilbert, fuck, fucking, fucked—three guys who robbed him of a good night’s sleep; did their number say something about Joni, or about him?
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