Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  And when he and his sister stood awkwardly at the table, he handed them each a glass.

  “I don’t drink, Pa,” he said.

  “Lots of things you claim not to do.” His father raised his glass by its silver stem. When he and Ankie followed suit he said: “To our double-crosser.”

  It was true. He’d been double-crossing them for years. His Judo training was like an underground movement: eventually everyone knew about it, his brothers and sisters, his classmates, the neighbors, in the end every Delft Catholic Daily subscriber—everyone except his father. For years he judoed in secret, first once a week, until the suit hung frayed on his body, then three times a week, and finally four. The whole time he maintained a tightly woven system of lies, backstreet routes, and accomplices in order to do what he loved.

  His pa could get stuffed. He decided as much after a disastrous furniture-moving chore one ice-cold Sunday afternoon. He and his father had dragged a massive oak desk from the Trompetsteeg to the home of his elder sister Loes and her husband on the Kruisstraat. It was a hand-me-down from his father’s office that landed in their living room like a stranded galleon. “I’ll take that beast,” Loes offered. It was hard going; they had to set it down on the vacant street every fifteen meters.

  He was red-faced from the exertion, but maybe also from the route they were suddenly taking together. For some weeks he had followed his father along these same sidewalks every Tuesday evening, cautiously, like Dick Tracy trailing a gangster, via the Beestenmarkt to the Moslaan, a paper supermarket bag under his arm. Before he turned onto the Kruisstraat his father’s duffel bag was a dark-gray oval in the distance as he headed for night business school on the Raamstraat. Siem would ring Loes and Gerrit’s doorbell, and his sister, half in the tiled hallway and half on the stoop, thrust his washed judo suit into the bag. Then he would run, hardly trusting his father’s head start, to the Oude Delft to arrive at Uke-Mi’s dojo on time.

  Six months earlier, after some ten trial lessons with Mr. Vloet, he raised the issue at home. With a vague foreboding that his father might not share his enthusiasm, he had prepared his argument thoroughly; it would be most sensible, he thought, to bring up the philosophy behind his new sport, that judo was much more than just a kind of wrestling. Mr. Vloet, who had sparred with Japanese masters in Paris, devoted an entire lesson to the teachings of Professor Kano, judo’s creator. A portrait of Kano hung in their dojo. What an amazing evening that was. Mr. Vloet could really nail you if he wasn’t satisfied with your shoulder throw, “GARBAGE!” would echo loudly through the room, but when he talked he could be friendly and calm; they sat listening to him for a good hour, and that evening at the dinner table Siem found himself retelling, flushed with excitement, what he could remember of Mr. Vloet’s words.

  His brothers and sister listened as they chewed, and his father too listened in silence, the leather elbow patches of his cardigan resting on the embroidered tablecloth. He eyed him over a steaming pan of Savoy cabbage. His small, furrowed face looked overworked. Maybe because he had a sedentary life, both here and at the office, his bony shoulders hung forward and his neck seemed long and bare.

  “So Pa,” he said, “judo doesn’t have much to do with fighting—nothing, in fact—with judo it’s all about self-control and respect for your opponent. Professor Kano, the founder, didn’t call it judo for nothing, judo means ‘gentle way.’ That the world would be a better place for it, that’s what he hoped.”

  “Better?” his father asked. “Better, how?”

  “From judo, of course,” he answered. “Professor Kano never intended judo as a sport, but as a kind of, well, teaching. Kids learn judo at school, Papa, in Japan everyone learns the ideals and principles, the symbols behind it, at a young age, you see?”

  His father did something out of character: he laughed. His raddled face twisted and creased; it startled Siem as though he were looking at his father’s bare legs. It was not a cheerful laugh. What this thirteen-year-old boy couldn’t put into words hung permanently in his head like an oily vapor: their father was a broken man. He and their mother had run an office supply shop on the Choorstraat, a low-key business that ran entirely on his mother’s enthusiasm and went bankrupt soon after her inexplicable death, almost as though a plug had been pulled out of a bathtub drain. They had to move. Since then his father had lived with five children and sundry creditors in this crappy little house. He did his best, but he’d lost his spirit. He said: “There’s no symbol behind anything, Siem. You can’t say that. But go on, let’s hear about those Japanese ideals.”

  “OK,” he said eagerly, trying to recall Mr. Vloet’s exact words. “Now, for Professor Kano, cooperation was really important. On the mat as well as outside, judokas are supposed to help other people.”

  Ankie stifled a yawn. Fred pretended to paddle. “Canoe,” he said.

  “Cooperation enhances people’s well-beingness—”

  “Well-being,” his father interrupted.

  “People’s well-being. By being sportsmanlike and respectful, you enhance the happiness of others, Pa, and therefore your own happiness too. Unlike boxing. Boxers just bash each other’s heads in. Judokas have respect for each other.”

  “So why do they strangle each other?” asked Fred.

  “That’s part of the game, you dork,” he snarled. “We let go as soon as the referee gives the signal.”

  “Who would win,” rejoined Fred, “Floyd Patterson or what’s-his-name … that Anton Geesink of yours?”

  His father stroked his thin neck with his left hand. “Siem here,” he said to the others, “talks as though he has done this … sport for years now.”

  “No, really,” Siem answered, shocked. He loved his father, because he was his father, because his father had the gumption to go to night school twice a week, because he was a widower, and in a way was their mother too. But he was also apprehensive, maybe because his father had been through so much.

  “Patterson,” said Fred. “He’d knock Geesink’s block off.”

  “No, really,” Siem repeated, “that’s why I’m telling you all this, I want to ask if I can join. I really want to do judo. There’s a good club on the Oude Delft. I’ve already had a few trial lessons.”

  At the words “trial lessons” a shudder surged through his father’s body, as though he were in a train changing tracks. “And what might this teacher’s name be?”

  He often thought back on what his father once said when Fred had bored all the way through Jet Kolf’s foot with a hand drill, the steel bit went right through her leather boot. Blood spurted out. Someone went to get him, he didn’t know who, his father came running to the Beestenmarkt without his coat. “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times,” he growled as he slapped Fred upside the head, “I should’ve put the lot of you into an orphanage.”

  “You mean our sensei, Pa. That’s what the Japanese call him.”

  “I asked you what his name was.”

  “Mr. Vloet.”

  His father shook his head, as though Mr. Vloet wasn’t really named Mr. Vloet. “Boy,” he said, “you shouldn’t believe everything you hear. Wishy-washy nonsense about respect and virtue. That guy has no idea what he’s talking about.”

  “Mr. Vloet is a third dan, Pa. That’s a pretty high rank.” He felt someone kick his shin. Daan glared at him, his mouth pulled into a tight little stripe, he shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “I don’t give a shit which damn Mr. Vloet is or isn’t,” his father said, suddenly raising his voice. “What irks me is that know-it-all rubbish about the Japanese. Don’t tell me about the Jap, Simon. Don’t try it on with me about the virtuous Japanese. Or about another man’s happiness. God help me.”

  And with the word “God” his father slapped his hand against the edge of his plate. It broke in half. First came the loud jangle, then complete and utter silence. Fred and Daan stared wide-eyed at their sausages, Ankie gawked with a full mouth at her father. As though his p
late hadn’t been cleaved in two, their father jabbed a piece of potato from the tablecloth, stuck the fork in his mouth and chewed. After he’d swallowed, he said calmly: “Listen, Siem. You tell that Mr. Vloet your father was a POW in Burma. You tell him: ‘My father did forced labor on the Burma railway.’ You understand? Then he’ll understand why you won’t be coming anymore.”

  • • •

  Well over halfway along the Moslaan, he and his pa stood blowing on their fingers. It was as though there was a body in the desk.

  “Going well, boy.”

  Sweat poured down his back—a mixture of exertion and fear. He trusted his sister all right, she wouldn’t rat on him, but he wasn’t so sure about his brother-in-law. Gerrit with his dirty fingernails from the workshop. He was an odd fish, Gerrit, a downright sneak, buttered up his old man until the stuff dripped off him. Had a story about everybody, things no one else ever mentioned. The exact cause of their mother’s death, for instance—Siem had heard it from Fred, and Fred had heard it from Gerrit. His mother—his softhearted, sweet, pretty mother—had died, according to Gerrit, as a result of a furuncle. A furuncle in her nose. “A f’your uncle?” he asked, shocked, fyorunkel, fyorunkel? It sounded like that monkey the Russians shot into outer space. “But you don’t die from it,” he stammered, horrified. “A sort of boil,” Fred explained, “you do so, if the, you know, the pus squirts into your brain.”

  He didn’t like Gerrit knowing about him doing judo on the sly. That he was hooked. The afternoon he went by Loes and Gerrit’s to ask if she would launder his judo suits from now on, a conniving frown passed over his brother-in-law’s face. Gerrit sat him down to explain in detail why his father did not approve of judo. He did know about the war, yes? About the Dutch East Indies? What the yellow bastards had done to his pa? No? “Kid,” Gerrit said with a grimace, “they brutalized your ol’ man something awful. First he trudged 200 kilometers to Burma, barefoot, seven days and nights. And then spent two years dragging railroad ties, fourteen hours a day, no coffee breaks. Covered in open sores and lice. And the Jap with his billy club. Ever seen your dad’s back?”

  “No.”

  “Keep it that way, kid. When you were still in diapers your sister and me, we lived with your folks. Every night at 3 a.m., kid, it started. Bawled like a baby, your pa did. Slept in the alcove so your ma could get a good night’s rest. Under his bed he had a, watchamacallit, one a them wog-cutlasses, a ‘klewang,’ and if your mother or me …”

  Loes came in with the coffee. “What all are you telling the boy?”

  “… or your sister here, if we went in to calm him down, he’d stand up on his bed waving the damn thing. ‘Out of here, dirty Jap! Ssssss—I’ll slice you to ribbons.’ ” He grinned. “Ain’t that right, Loes?”

  His sister held a tin of butter cookies under his nose.

  “Your pa went AWOL too, once,” Gerrit said. “Escaped from the prison camp. Two weeks in the jungle. Oh yeah. A hero. Your pa’s a hero.” Maybe because he was only fourteen, had never had lice, let alone been beaten with a stick, maybe because Gerrit’s venomous verbosity made him sick to his stomach, Siem had difficulty paying attention. “The Kempeitai, you’ve heard of that, right?” Gerrit asked. “The Yellow Gestapo, you could say. Your father, he walks straight into their arms. Poor guy. Spent the rest of the war in a metal box, a meter square. Home sweet home. Not sitting, not standing, not lying down. They’d let him out couple times a week so they could beat the crap out of ’im … Yeah, yeah.”

  Siem’s head cooled down on his way home, it had iced over with recalcitrance. If everything Gerrit said was true, then it was awful for his father, really and truly, but what did a judo club in Delft have to do with the war in Asia?

  He and his pa picked the desk back up, this time both of them holding it by the tabletop, so that they could take the corner with small steps, his father facing backward. Although his arms were trembling from the exertion, he still had time to ponder the whole judo issue. He couldn’t not think about it. They had another twenty meters or so to go when his brother-in-law’s dark-green Volkswagen came rattling around the corner. Gerrit parked across from No. 23. When his father set down his end and turned around, something in Siem’s cranium started careening and crashing about. He watched as Gerrit climbed like a flightless bird from the dark-green dome. Gerrit had recently given his father a lift to Rotterdam. It was enthusiastic indignation that banged around inside his skull. Loes and her husband had a Volkswagen. A German thing, a car thought up by fucking Adolf Hitler. And his father was quite happy to ride around in it! In Hitler’s car!

  “I’ll take over for you,” Gerrit called from across the street to Siem’s father, who was leaning with his back against the edge of the desk.

  “Pa,” he said, but his father did not turn around. “Pa,” he shouted, “could you please tell me why Loes and Gerrit can drive a Kraut car, but I can’t go to judo?”

  It all happened so fast. In two steps his father was around the side of the desk, he’d never seen him so agile and athletic before. And then: exquisite pain. The palm of his father’s hand landed mercilessly against his left ear, the fragile organ not yet cauliflowered by sixteen years of competitive judo. Tears sprang from his ducts, but he gritted his teeth, squeezing back the fluid with his eyelids until he could once again focus on the knotty wood of the desk. His father raised his arm and pointed down the street they had just come from. “Out of my sight,” he said. “Move.”

  Hans and Ria used to live in a small third-floor walk-up on a side street of the Antonius Matthaeuslaan; now they own a renovated brownstone overlooking Wilhelmina Park that Hans financed with the wholesale import of South African wine. They eat in the shady backyard. After a few glasses of Kranskop red, Sigerius debates the mathematical merits of chess with his host, a club chess player with black-and-white opinions. The obnoxious fanaticism with which he insists on his pet opinion (which he in fact borrowed from G. H. Hardy)—that despite its charm, chess lacks something essential, it is inconsequential as opposed to mathematics: “mathematics is elegant and relevant, Hans, you can’t say that about chess”—makes him realize how much that boat is eating at him. He must find a way to get up into that attic.

  The next morning, as they are saying their farewells, they accept the invitation to celebrate Christmas with Hans and Ria in their chalet in the French Alps. Tineke takes the wheel and drives, as they always do when they’re in Utrecht together, down the Antonius Matthaeuslaan—but he hardly bothers to look. Should he go back to Aaron’s house? He compares himself to his father, wonders whether, until that championship jenever, he really was completely in the dark. Of course he knew. He used to see his father’s obstinate ignorance of his judo as pure weakness, as oversimplification and, as the years went on, as the plain indifference of an old fart. For the first time, he seriously tries to step out of that mindset and into the resentment his deeply humiliated father must have felt. This exercise in empathy makes him realize that his father tacitly tolerated his judo, despite his wartime trauma. When his pa died in 1964, Sigerius was secretly relieved—he dreaded facing the man after his training year in Japan, his relief was purely selfish. But in the hectic days after their weekend in Utrecht, that old feeling takes on a new taste; for the first time, he’s glad his father no longer had to put up with it, for the first time, he’s relieved for his father’s sake. Shouldn’t he do the same, just turn a blind eye himself? Just like his father, pretend everything’s hunky-dory. Know but don’t know. Until the neighbor’s kid comes over one evening to say your son is national champion. But what, he wonders, what will they come over to tell him?

  Wednesday morning the fireworks disaster commission meets, and at the end of the afternoon he grabs his chance. At half-past four he crosses the administration parking lot with his sports jacket draped over his arm. Humming, he gets in his university car and drives down the Hengelosestraat. He parks in front of the McDonald’s on Schuttersveld and walks over to the hardwar
e center.

  A timid, pimply boy in a red polo shirt with the store’s logo leads him to a display of grinding tools and bolt cutters. He buys the next-to-smallest cutting shears, which are still enormous, and drives back to campus. To his satisfaction he finds the farmhouse empty. In their bedroom, he removes his suit and goes into the bathroom. He takes a lukewarm shower. If he inhales deeply, his chest resonates with a pleasant edginess. He dries himself off, walks naked into the dressing room, puts on beige khakis, loafers without socks, and a pale-orange polo shirt. Not too theatrical? He checks himself out in the full-length mirror and decides to put his suit back on after all.

  After a certain amount of searching he finds, in the bedroom cupboard, a large tennis bag; he stows the bolt cutter in it diagonally. He leaves a note for Tineke in the living room: “Hi hon, how was it with your sister? Afraid I can’t get out of eating with the guys from that debating team. After that we’ll watch France-Holland together. See you later, S.”

  Just after six he drives down the Hengelosestraat for the second time. Evening rush hour is thinning out, he’s got both front windows halfway open and he’s playing a Cannonball Adderley CD. It’s a warm, windless evening, a large, languid sun paints over the city like a damaged maquette. There are lots of people about, bicyclists weaving in and out, men with rolled-up pant legs playing soccer in parks. But it is a film. Cannonball’s elastic alto sax goes with this film—not with him. The warm evening breeze blows through his car, but he is entirely detached from Enschede.

  He approaches Roombeek via the Lasondersingel. The fencing looks older than the city itself. He parks the car in the small lot in front of the low-rise apartment block, the bunker that protected Aaron’s street from the shock wave. The athletic bag weighs heavily on his shoulder and grazes the overhanging conifers along the front path. This time the lock opens without resisting.

  He enters the hall like in a recurring dream: the faint animal smell, the rustle of junk mail on the mat. He closes the door and listens with bated breath. A million dust particles exchange places, the whirl of silence. In the living room, a familiar tableau: the wall-to-wall curtains at the back are still drawn, the badminton rackets on the coffee table have not rearranged themselves. His mouth is dry, he drinks with long gulps from the kitchen faucet. He stands for a moment at the kitchen window. Aaron’s bike leans up against the wide hedge of conifers.