“So do you still believe?” I asked.
“You sound just like Jacob,” he said. “You wanna know where I got the hangjaw, don’t you? Facial paralysis, the doctors call it. A busted facial nerve. Permanent.”
“A fight?” I asked, wondering why he suddenly brought it up.
Wilbert laughed—the kind of laugh that doesn’t let you off the hook. “You guys in that dollhouse of yours seem to think I go door to door with a bludgeon. Nah, run-of-the-mill ear infection. What you get when you sit in the slammer playing doctor with a plastic coffee stirrer.” He leaned forward, brought his finger close to my face—for a moment I thought he was going to touch me. “There’s this little cable, see, just a thread, a kind of nerve that runs from your ear to your cheek, and that thread makes sure you get to keep that smooth Barbie face of yours. Mine festered itself kaput. See that gauze?”
He pointed to a single bunk bed behind me, an IKEA assembly of untreated pine that went only halfway up the unusually high wall; his room was immense, the original classroom must have had two doors so it could be separated with a plasterboard wall. My eyes were drawn to the childlike desk under the bed; above a layer of tax papers and torn-open envelopes lay a wad of gauze and a roll of adhesive tape.
“Every night I have to smear salve onto my eye, see, and then tape it shut. Otherwise it’ll dry out. But it spontaneously starts watering while I’m eating. Jacob, he wants me to look for a job, ‘you’ve got to get back into the groove,’ this and that, see. This here’s one of their drawbacks—they’re dreamers. Who’s gonna hire a face like this, d’you think? Totally fucking nobody, that’s who. Even that Jesus of theirs would hire someone else. If that guy there”—he stuck his thumb out like a hitchhiker in the direction of the crucifix—“had this face, somebody else’d be hanging there now.”
“An operation?” I suggested. “Plastic surgery, I mean?”
“You paying?”
“Just trying to be helpful.”
“Don’t.”
More spittle dripped out of the corner of his mouth, but instead of slurping it back in he caught the strand of saliva with his wrist and flung the glob of spit against the linoleum. “There,” he said. “There’s God for you.”
There you had it: the loutish aplomb with which he transformed Daddy’s little girl into an unmanageable teenager who considered anything not lethally dangerous extremely funny, and at least worth trying. But now I experienced what my father had to put up with for years: irritation at Wilbert’s behavior, at his way of thinking, at his way of non-thinking. On TV I’d seen a Dutch bishop tell about how he was hit by some mysterious muscular disorder. For a while the Holy Joe couldn’t walk, and his miserable time on wheels seriously shook his devotion. That’s their take, the papists. Their whole life long they pray away earthquakes and genocide, but as soon as they get sick, weak and nauseous they start to teeter.
Wilbert stood up and walked with stiff steps behind me. “You want anything?” he said. “A drink or something?”
“Thanks,” I said. As I spoke, I heard a dull thud. When I looked over my shoulder I saw him wind up for a second slug at a punching bag that swung, squeaking, back and forth on a long rope attached to a ring in the ceiling. Wasn’t that twisted dribble-gob more proof of God than not? An offhand, incidental show of higher justice? God had determined that he should go through life as the cliché murderer. I felt my irritation well up into anger. Wilbert did a few boxing moves, his body seemed to have become smaller and meatier, stronger too. He brought the leather cadaver to a standstill, unzipped it, and stuck his arm in like a vet into a cow. I saw his fingers root around under the dark-blue skin, and the one working corner of his mouth curled upward when he pulled out a small packet wrapped in toilet paper. He said: “Bit of a craving,” and went over to a low cabinet, crouched down and pulled out a shabby washbag. Plopped back in the armchair, he took a shaving mirror and a Gillette razor blade out of the bag; the wad of toilet paper produced a ziplock bag of white powder, and I watched as he shook a small mound of it onto the mirror, cut it with short, regular motions, and slid it into a single line. He pulled a flattened ten-guilder note from his back pocket, rolled it up, and bent over the table, the tube up against his nostril. As he inhaled the powder in two mighty sniffs, I looked at his thin black hair, pulled back into a greasy ponytail. He flopped back in the chair. “Cooking,” he said, satiated. “They teach you that here too.”
A wave of indignation involuntarily forced its way out. “Why do you use that junk?” I heard myself snarl. “Tell me, Wilbert, why do you always choose the path of least resistance? Why are you sitting here doing lines on the sly? God damn it, why do you do the things you do—Wilbert.”
His face hardened, his right eyebrow crept upward in provocative amazement. He hoarded aggression, I could see it. He closed his right eye and turned his head stiffly. He took a couple of seconds to loosen up his jailbird-neck. Then he opened his eye and looked at me in silence.
“You tell me something,” he said. “Why were you in that courtroom? You fuckin’ skank.”
The starting gun. Yep. What my father had warned me about ad nauseam was beginning at last. What he’d dreaded for ten years—and I, strangely enough, only now. I blushed, my mouth went dry. Is this what I crossed the damn country in ankle-breaking heels for? I was such an idiot. Why didn’t I cancel? Why did I even call him in the first place? Questions, questions. But his—that was a good one. What was I doing in that courtroom?
“Telling the truth”—so said my father. “Just tell the judge the truth.” We were sitting opposite each other in the Bastille’s otherwise empty bistro. That’s all he asked of me. So what was the truth? According to my father, the truth was what Vivianne had told Maurice, and Maurice subsequently told him. And that’s what he was going to tell me now, so that I could then relate it to a lawyer, months from now, who would then put it in, what did you call it, a brief? All of it without hearing his side. Just tell the truth, kid.
It was the Monday afternoon following the not-so-laconic telephone call from Vivianne’s laconic boyfriend; my father and I on campus, seated at a table with red paper placemats on an old-fashioned thick white tablecloth, it felt more like a Chinese restaurant than a French bistro. He had phoned my school and achieved the desired Professor Sigerius effect: the vice-principal stood waiting for me, beaming, outside the chemistry lab. My father was already seated at the window, waiter at fifteen paces, when I showed up at the restaurant, sweaty from the bike ride and the jagged stone steps. He ran his hands through the full black beard he had back then, and only saw me just as I was about to sit down.
“Take a seat,” he said, clumsily formal, as though I wasn’t his daughter but one of his doctoral students. There was an empty coffee cup on the tablecloth, next to a saucer emblazoned with the Tubantia logo. He looked tired, and in the bright sunlight his suit looked rumpled.
“What’ll you have, honey?”
“Dad, I’ve got sandwiches.”
“Throw ’em out. I’m having the steak sandwich. It’s delicious here. How’d economics go?”
“Went OK.”
He closed the leather-bound menu, beckoned the waiter, and ordered two steak sandwiches. He said something about our vice-principal, uptight man. And then, more to himself than to me: “All right. Now then.”
Without a segue he related what Maurice had told him last Sunday. He tried to, at least: first he got all tangled up in a woolly introduction, and for a moment it looked like he was just going to drop it, but then he cleared his throat and got down to it. His head like a hornet’s, he told me about the handkerchief, still euphemistic and clumsy, and when he got to the scarf, to the shower curtain, and what Wilbert had been up to behind it, the whole thing just ground to a halt: his message, it seemed, was a round peg and his mouth a square hole. Why is discussing sex with our parents so awkward? We sat there embarrassed, both of us, but me most of all for him, until he picked up a hammer and bashed his way t
hrough the misery that had cost him a good night’s sleep.
I think I said something like “jeez,” in a slightly surprised tone. A mild kiddie-curse resulting from at least two emotions that tugged at me during my father’s tortured account. The worst one was my urge to burst out laughing at what sounded like Wilbert’s constant efforts to exponentially augment his repertoire of tomfoolery, which I was starting, deep down, to consider more and more fascinating and arousing—certainly in this “blue” area, one that involved what girls and boys could get up to together. At the same time, this was exactly what kept me from laughing—I was watching my step. Yes, that second emotion was apprehension. My father was clearly allergic to Wilbert in general, but of all his irritations I think the most deep-rooted and now the least visible was Wilbert’s—how to put it?—lack of inhibition. It was more than just confidence. His aggression, his sloth, his boldness (his stupidity, according to my father): these things you could quite reasonably fight about, I’d seen them do so with great enthusiasm. But the fondling and the filthy language, that non-stop hormonal surge—since his arrival the farmhouse had turned into a particle accelerator. Wilbert and the girls, it made Siem nervous, set him on edge. Before the prodigal son had returned to Daddy’s hearth and home, four-letter words were like electric fencing; within a radius of 200 meters our little throats slammed shut, Janis and I were struck dumb with cuss-aphasia. But from the minute he sets foot in our house, Wilbert calls everything “cocksucker” or “fucked” or “jism” or “ho” or just “shit,” there’s no stopping him. After just three weeks he brings a girl back to the farmhouse one Saturday night; the next morning an unfamiliar red and blue granny-bike is leaning against the chestnut tree next to the terrace. The whole Sunday my parents sit there like some Bible-belt couple waiting to see what comes downstairs, but nothing at all comes down the stairs, until Wilbert and the girl saunter into the living room, half naked, at five in the afternoon: “We’ve come to score a couple of fried eggs.”
But instead of just letting them fry up a couple of eggs, my father, covertly pissed off, hisses that the kitchen is closed—shower and beat it, both of you. So that was the last we saw of his one-night stands, from then on Wilbert did that elsewhere, but what we did see more of was skin mags flung about, and boxes of condoms. One day my father storms into Wilbert’s room with a gigantic phone bill—itemized, of course. “06” numbers. That sort of to-do in a house which, pre-Wilbert, you could raze to the ground without finding even one single unillustrated and footnoted sex-education manual, let alone anything remotely titillating. Not even a Panorama. Weren’t you two from the sixties? God, the prudishness! The complete absence of sex in our house. Yeah, they had a Jan Wolkers novel on the bookshelf. But the wrong one.
“Jeez,” my father repeated with a mouthful of steak and Italian bread. “That idiot, the jerk, the scumbag, molested your French teacher. In our bathroom, in my house.” Now he was angry, indignant, I could see it on his face, but that Vivianne and her Maurice, they were livid, especially Maurice. He talked about lifelong traumas and about a lawsuit. And my father didn’t blame them—on the contrary, he agreed with them entirely. “And if they don’t do it, I will.”
“Wait a second, Dad—you want to sue your own son?”
“Enough’s enough, Joni. That creep is ruining us. All of us. Your mother, me, Janis, you. Your sister can’t sleep. Janis is afraid of everything. And you …”
“Me? What about me?”
But first he finished chewing. Grinding up that hunk of beef, swallowing it, collecting enough saliva to be able to continue talking, appeared to require more effort than fattening and slaughtering the cow itself. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “You, I worry most about,” he said.
“Dad, what. Why do you worry about me? What does that kid have to do with me?”
He did not answer, but looked at his right hand, the one holding his water glass. Was he just thinking? The sight of this tired, bearded, brooding man made me uneasy; I could tell he was struggling with something he found much more taxing than mathematics.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “you know you never have to be ashamed of anything in front of me. Never.” Something unlike him: he laid his hand on mine.
“How should I say this. Mom and I get the feeling that Wilbert is … uh … very fond of you. Do you get my drift? We get the feeling that he’s … more than just fond of you. And that he probably … how can I put it decently … Mom and I get the feeling that he … that you two …”
“Dad! What do you mean? What are you trying to say?” I yanked my hand back out from under his and shoved my chair back. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. You mean … No, of course not! How dare you!” Although I knew I was overdoing it, I got up and slapped my hands on the table.
“Joni!” he whispered. “Sit down. Wait. Sit. Calm. Listen to me. Often, when someone is the victim of this kind of thing, they’re ashamed, maybe they’re so ashamed that—”
“Dad! Shut. Up. Don’t say another word.”
“Just listen to me. And keep your voice down. I hate having to confront you like this, but your mother—”
He got choked up. To regain his composure he used the last bite of bread and meat to sop up some gravy, jabbed it, but it fell off his fork onto his lap. Without cursing, without a laid-back chuckle, he plucked up the wayward morsel and set it on the edge of his plate. “Your mother and I know you two are … together a lot. We know he takes you out with him, and that’s, that was … fine. I can’t tell you how much I … appreciate the attention you’ve given him. You’re my daughter. You’ve done your best to make Wilbert feel … to feel at home.”
To my shock I saw his eyes welling up. Moisture was collecting in a place that was supposed to stay dry. No! Do not start crying.
“Sweetheart, listen.” He appeared to pull himself together. “Of course he likes you, I understand that completely, all the boys like you, so he … so Wilbert certainly does. That’s to be expected. But it’s unacceptable. It’s dangerous; he’s dangerous. That boy doesn’t know the difference between liking and …”
“And?”
“Joni.” His voice was suddenly sharp. “Answer me. Has Wilbert ever … molested you? That’s what I want to know. It’s not such an outrageous question. And that’s what the judge is going to want to know. Be honest now.”
No. No way. I was not going to tell him about the few times we came back from town on a Saturday night and plopped down together on the sofa, tipsy, exchanging stories with muted voices, or just making stupid jokes, channel-surfing while the rest of the farmhouse slept. And that it was me who put the moves on him. At fourteen I was perfectly capable of making a boy of seventeen get all hot under the collar, nothing could be easier—seventeen-year-old boys seldom found themselves on a sofa in the middle of the night alone with a girl who felt this comfortable with herself in their sultry presence. Not even Wilbert Sigerius. And so I would quasi-nonchalantly pull up my knees, or just the opposite, spread my legs far too wide while I laughed at what some guy panted in my ear back in the joint where Wilbert had sat at the bar watching me on the dance floor. Or I’d shake my hair loose with a sigh, twang the rubber band into his crotch, and lay down on the sofa with my legs across his lap. When he’d finally put his hands on my bare legs—too hesitantly, if at all—I’d pull myself up on one of those fantastic arms of his and climb, play-insulted, onto his lap, my knees straddling his thighs, I dug my hands into his firm hips, tickled him—“bitch,” he would hiss, and I’d poke my index finger under his discreetly stubbly chin, “look at me—what’d you just say, boy?” while we both felt my terry-cloth crotch push against the fly of his jeans—sorry Dad, that is all I could think of.
But that was about it. No more than that.
“Dad—you know what you can do?” I said, loud enough so that the waiter looked up. “You go ahead and lie to your lawyer. Tell them Wilbert molested you.”
His full, thick lower lip trembled as he nodded and stood u
p. “Be right back,” he said and shuffled, in a tragic parody of his hobbling gait, to the men’s room at the back of the bistro.
• • •
My legs were covered in goose bumps. Above the enormous windows that looked out onto a schoolyard basketball court were elongated pivot windows. They were open. Soon, after I’d cleared out, Wilbert would close them with the long aluminum pole I saw lying under the radiator. So what was the fuckin’ skank supposed to answer?
To my surprise he started talking himself. He had slouched back into his patchwork chair, his hands clasped behind his neck so I could see his leached-out armpits. With his good eye focused on me, he told me how he’d had ten months’ juvenile detention, which I already knew, of course, and that they’d put him in De Hunnerberg on the outskirts of Nijmegen, this I knew too, and that he was surrounded by retards, and that he hated me. This last piece of information, I had only assumed.
“When they dragged us out of bed at 7 a.m. and kicked us into the shower, then I took either an ice-cold or a scalding-hot one. That was the only way to spend five minutes not thinking of revenge, see. As soon as I turned off the water, I thought: I hate her.”
He stopped and sniffed loudly. I crossed my legs. I didn’t know what to say.
“I imagined you all having breakfast in the farmhouse. Your mom in her bathrobe, your dad counting scoops of coffee, you and Janis—fuck, I hated you all. I was dangerous.” He slurped saliva, and shook his head, grinning.
“But among all those retards I had one friend, see. Big ol’ blond dude I sat next to in those classes they made us take. Manners, something with emotions, whatever. Ronnie. Ronnie Raamsdonk. Seventeen, armed robbery. Says he’s a nephew of Pedro van Raamsdonk, this and that, but what happened to the ‘van,’ I ask. He looks at me like I’ve said something really comical. ‘Where’s the “van” then, pal? Your name’s Raamsdonk, right?’ Well, he didn’t know, that’s just how it was. Anyway, I told him how you fucked me around. You have to talk, you—”
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