Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  He’s completely at a loss. That evening, as he sits in his furnished apartment, the walls start to close in on him. Rain falls in sheets on the sidewalks in the depths of the Hooikade and he stands with his legs against the warmth of the radiator. He is imprisoned in a glass cell, he has never been so visible before, so vulnerable. All eyes are fixed on him, he is fighting for the confidence of parliament, of the media, of the party, of the voter. His stalker has chosen his moment well, he’s got to hand it to him. He tosses and turns, the wind whistles around his foreign, anonymous bedroom, he thinks of home, of Tineke, of their life before—and suddenly it hits him.

  Wilbert. Who else?

  God, that took him long enough. How could he be so blind? His son gets out of jail, his son calls for Joni. The only man on earth who has a score to settle with him. He switches on the lamp next to the bed and looks into the small bedroom. He can’t say the thought puts his mind at ease. “Dumb bitch,” he hisses. Could Joni have told him? How incredibly, terribly, unbelievably stupid. The room is chilly and yet the sweat is pouring off his shoulders.

  Or did Wilbert first threaten her? If it’s him at all. So there he is, in the dead of night. He stares into space for several minutes. Then he takes his cell phone, locates that 06 number, and dials.

  “Wilbert,” he says after the beep, “I know it’s you, kid. Apparently you’re angry. After ten years you’re still angry. I respect that. I’m angry too sometimes. But realize you’re playing with fire. On top of it, you’re talking crap. You insinuate all sorts of things, but can you prove anything? Of course not. There’s nothing to prove. Get a grip on yourself, kid. Get a life.”

  15

  The dreams were relentless. They picked at him with their sharp beaks, and when he woke up the ravens landed on the lampshades, waiting for him to doze off again. He found himself everywhere: in bed, on the sofa, at the table with his stubbly cheek in a cold slice of pizza, on the stairs with a cramp in one of his feet.

  It felt as though he didn’t sleep for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch, but sometimes it was suddenly pitch-dark, or conversely, an unexpectedly bright ray of light sliced through the gap in the curtains. He made space-time journeys through all the houses that had featured in his life. Often he was at home in Venlo with his parents, in creepy variations on the row house he grew up in, and there was always someone—usually his father—who was pissed off about something; then he lived with a malignantly or terminally ill Sigerius family member in his little room at his great-aunt’s in Overvecht, or he lay on his own deathbed; he often had the same dream, in a room in the otherwise abandoned farmhouse. Sometimes awoke to guinea pigs pissing on him, having placed them on his chest in another epoch. He listened to distorted sirens in the city.

  Twice he had visitors. Somewhere in time he woke with a start to an electric drumroll that repeated itself three times as he lay on the sofa, swallowing and blinking, a container of lukewarm pasta carbonara on his chest. He slid to the floor and crept toward the radiator. In the shadows he could make out a pair of figures, a man and a woman. The man wore a blue suit and tie, the woman an ash-gray ensemble, they both had scarves around their necks but no overcoats. They each gripped a leather portfolio under their arm. Jehovahs. He would keep an eye on them until they pushed a Watchtower through the letter slot and then tried their luck with the neighbors. But they didn’t. The man’s gaze glided up and down the front of the house, the woman rang again, louder, it seemed. Aaron ducked farther down, kept so quiet he could hear them whisper. When they rang for the third time he got up and went to the front door.

  His visitors introduced themselves with names he forgot straightaway. They claimed to be from the Ministry of Justice, they wanted to ask him some questions about “Mr. Sigerius.” For a brief moment he was certain they had come to tell him his ex-father-in-law was dead.

  “Do we look that gloomy?” the man asked kindly. He looked sympathetic too: well-meaning wrinkles folding across his rock-hard head, but his handshake betrayed him: a hydraulic vise-grip. He smelled like a mixture of subtle aftershave and the brown oil he used to grease his firearms.

  “Your friend has been nominated for an important position,” the woman added. She did not smile, but slid the toe of her shoe over the threshold. Something told him he had to make a solid, upright impression on these people. “Come in,” he said.

  In the passage he distinctly heard the woman inhale sharply through her triangular nose. “Horses?” she asked as he led them into his house; strangely, it was as though all three of them were entering his house for the first time. He was dreaming, it seemed, he dreamed the smell of fresh manure, a scent he’d hardly noticed until now. It felt like he was watching himself from the sofa, he saw himself walk into the freezing-cold living room, and immediately noticed that he looked very strange indeed, in Sigerius’s judo jacket, which he wore like a bathrobe that used to be white but was now smeared and stained with bits of old food. He also realized, from his racing heartbeat, that his living room did not exactly radiate stability and solidity; he was busy emptying out his bookshelves, everywhere there were stacks of books he was planning to use to stoke his multiburner the coming winter, it was getting cold and his central heating got tepid at best. On top of it, he needed to buy garbage bags. “Don’t mind the mess,” he said, in fact to himself.

  The man kicked some guinea pig droppings out of the way, producing a high-pitched rolling sound. The woman raised her painted eyebrows and looked around. He hurriedly removed a stack of pizza boxes from the armchair next to the curtain. “Take a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the purple sofa, the only unoccupied place in the room because he himself was not lying on it. He set the boxes on the coffee table, on top of a brickwork of books, and sat down on the freed-up armchair. The container of pasta he’d been eating from was lying on its side next to the woman’s right foot, a congealed tongue of beige-colored sauce oozing out.

  “You’re the boyfriend of Mr. Sigerius’s stepdaughter, is that right?” asked the man. He sat on the sofa like it was a gas station toilet. “According to our information, you and Mr. Sigerius are well acquainted.” He pointed to the badminton racket that stuck out from under a pile of boxes. “You work out together and are close friends.”

  “That’s right.” He saw no reason whatsoever to go into the situation in detail. How would he explain it? That everything was ruined was none of their business.

  “We’re interested in Sigerius’s son,” the fellow said. “His only biological child.”

  Aaron nodded. The division of duties was clear: the woman sat with a notebook on her lap, poised to write down everything he said. He noticed her looking interestedly at the fence post. It was leaning like Gulliver’s toothpick against the emptied bookcase.

  “Not so much in the son himself,” said the man, “but in his relationship with Mr. Sigerius. What can you tell us about that?”

  The man’s tone switched between formality and familiarity like a traffic light. He simmered with aggression. In his own office, deep in the sub-basement of some concrete complex with endless corridors and security portals, a bright, monochromatic lamp dangled above the table.

  “No contact,” Aaron said. “Zero. As you’re perhaps aware, he’s a bit of a, um … how can I put it nicely? A strange guy.”

  The man nodded earnestly, but the woman, reacting to his last words, emitted a brief chuckle, which she tried to disguise with her hand. Seeing that he was on to her, she asked: “What is that pole doing there?”

  “I need it during my expeditions,” he said, too eagerly and too earnestly—he regretted it immediately, and as he did not elucidate further, they all sat staring at the muddy fence post he had unearthed in a park on one of his trips to the supermarket. At the top, where a steel cable had once been threaded through the nails, he had tied a length of rope.

  “Expeditions?” the man asked. He enunciated the word as if it did not have a scientific connotation, but a menacing one, a thr
eat to national security, which he moreover seemed to take personally.

  Aaron nodded. “If we just wait for government agencies,” he answered as truthfully as possible, “we’ll never get to the bottom of the fireworks disaster. That’s why I’m devoting my free time to investigating the underlying explanation of things.”

  The guy locked his gaze onto him, red-hot steel that Aaron had to let loose. “In the eschatological sense,” he explained, looking at the woman. She smiled at him as though he were lying in a crib. “And what does that pole have to do with it?”

  Everything. Was he supposed to tell them that sometimes, when his neighbor’s lights were out, he would drag his fence post to a stretch of painted fencing across from the Rijksmuseum, prop it against the partition, climb up onto it and pull himself onto the top rail? Then he’d hoist the pole up by the rope and jump down into pitch-black ruins. A few times, he wandered around, sneezing from the ashes his feet kicked up, shining his flashlight on chunks of rubble. Agonizing about the meaning of it all, the myriad consequences, all of them causal, he poked around the colossal vehicles that clean-up crews drove around during the day, studied the foundations of demolished houses like a dentist. When he became exhausted, or frightened by the din in his head, he went to the crater where the SE Fireworks bunkers once stood, now a sandpit cordoned off with plastic barrier tape. And then lay down on his back, stared up from his observatory at the stars, allowed himself to be trampled by the stampede in his brain. It was a scary place. Was it wise to tell these cops about it? The fear in the focal point of his sooty enclave. In the distance, a halo from the unwitting city.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Do you recall any conflicts between Sigerius and his son?” the man asked. Eschatology didn’t seem to interest him one iota.

  “Oh yes,” he replied. “They fought about everything. Even about a glass of Coke.”

  “You just said they had no contact.”

  “Did I? They don’t; haven’t for a long time. It’s not something I’d say lightly.”

  The guy fired a barrage of insinuating questions at him, fishing for signs of problems between Wilbert and his father; he was after something. As though what he’d most like to have heard was that Sigerius and Wilbert had had fisticuffs right here in this room and smashed, the two of them, through the sliding door. Meanwhile some details came to mind. I could blab, he thought, I could tell them what I know about the court case against the kid, and the deceitful role Sigerius played. For now he let the man talk, heard himself give evasive answers, and was surprised to notice himself flagging, almost nodding off. Or were those in fact his waking moments? He wondered other things too, like who Sjöwall and Wahlöo reported to, and would Sigerius find the transcript of this interview on his desk in the morning? The he-man had guaranteed him anonymity at first, it was a routine screening, he claimed, but the secret service often kept things from you.

  “Who’s calling themselves the secret service?” he asked.

  “How about if we ask the questions,” said the woman. The secret agent got up with a sigh, squashing pizza boxes with his Italian shoes. Shivering from the cold, he walked alongside the bookshelves. “This is nothing,” Aaron said. “It’s supposed to freeze tonight.”

  “You moving or something?” the guy asked, his chin pointing like a urinal toward the stacks of books piled here and there. No, he wasn’t moving, but he just couldn’t stand it anymore, the thousands of spines staring at him from the shelves.

  “Maybe,” he answered. He used to like to stare back, but these days it only depressed him, even now that his broad-shouldered friend stood at them, rubbing his hands, his back squarely in his jacket, on the verge of instigating one of his forays: crouched down, on the balls of his feet, asking questions, a steady stream of questions. Had he read them all? What did he think of that Vestdijk? Had he read this? What’re they worth, all these books? Why didn’t he lend them out? How did he keep them alphabetized? What was the point of a first edition? And Naipaul, was he worth reading? And bam, there was Sigerius again, holding up one of the thousands of novels he had dragged off to his nest in the years after his Utrecht debacle, a mountain of never-to-be-read books that had exerted such an attraction on Sigerius. Why did he think this or that author was so good? And this one, isn’t he overestimated? So I should read him? What do I have to read before I die?—limitless interest, Aaron at first wondering whether it was genuine, or if Sigerius was just returning the favor for his own boundless curiosity about jazz.

  The fact that Sigerius kept coming back proved he really meant it. He apparently missed their exchanges. And yes, he did have some catching up to do. Literature was his blind spot, he was ignorant about the oddest things. The man who’d stared at his books and now turned to look at him thought Dostoyevsky was a composer. Grew up among sailors and construction workers. Faulkner? No idea. In his speeches at the opening of an academic year, Sigerius never skimped on quotes, Ibsen, Isherwood, Irving, Ishiguro—everything with the I for Important, but decorative and discretionary. Suddenly he felt like commenting on it, a strange virulence washed over him. “You’ve read so little,” he said. “Practically nothing.”

  For his part, all he did in the weeks, months, years following his Utrecht disgrace was read; out of pent-up anger, out of sheer frustration, he read hundreds of novels, in many cases asking himself, even before he’d met Sigerius: why? Are you done trying to prove yourself yet? When will you admit defeat? It was Sigerius who had given his reading frenzy, in retrospect, a clear significance. “Aaron,” he had said, “I’m not an intellectual. Help me catch up.” The intense realization made his eyes brim with tears. He got out of his chair and took a step toward Sigerius, prepared to embrace him—

  “… asked you something,” said the man.

  Aaron’s eyes went wide. He hadn’t heard a thing. Had he fallen asleep? Or was this a dream? He looked at the man. “Sigerius and I have a very close relationship,” he muttered desperately, his voice trembling more than was acceptable, “sometimes it seems like I’m his son.”

  Unfortunately the woman did not write this down. She fastened the top button of her blouse. These two weren’t here to screen Sigerius; he had sent them. They were his agents, he understood perfectly well that Sigerius was already a minister, probably Prime Minister by now.

  “Well, what do you know,” said the guy. He was perched on the edge of the sofa like a dandy. “And what does that say about Sigerius and his real son?”

  The woman glanced at an unusually large white-gold wristwatch. But was it really a watch? An inky cloud of fear shot through his veins, several organs simultaneously kicked into wartime production: panic overruled his sentiments of a moment ago, how suddenly they could change! He clenched the leather armrests of the chair with his clammy fists. That watch, it was probably a device, a webcam tested by NASA, and Sigerius and his wife looked at each other right now, judgmentally, our friend here thinks he’s got us figured out, not knowing he also had that figured out. The great shadowing had begun.

  “Wilbert plays no role in our lives whatsoever,” he said as softly as possible. “Sigerius abandoned him very early on.” Now that he had them figured out he noticed that Sjöwall wore a huge signet ring, his clenched boxer’s fist looked like the head of a cyclops, he stared into the eye, a diaphragm opened. No one played a role in anyone’s life any longer, he realized all over again. He heard clattering, a gust of wind brought the boarded-up back window to life. All three of them looked. Sigerius had abandoned him too, and how. Strangely enough, he couldn’t put his finger on the exact reason, there must have been a motive of some sort, anyway his friend had well and truly left him out in the cold. A wave of irritation washed over him. What possessed Sigerius to make a habit of abandoning his family? He was being spied on here, but you could also turn the tables, why didn’t he take control of the situation? This was his chance, the line was open, this was the moment to get it off his chest. As a real son it was his duty to
tell Sigerius, preferably over Thomson and Thompson’s heads, a thing or two. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but in time his friend would thank him for it. He wanted to say that he loved Sigerius like a father, but that he felt terribly abandoned, and he said so, but what came out of his mouth was so muted and muffled that the guy leaned his granite-head forward.

  “What did you say, son?”

  He started. Suddenly he smelled Sigerius’s unnerving power, a tingling, fresh chewing gum smell. His tears were already mobilized, now they flowed freely, he cried miserably. The man asked him again what he was trying to say, pushed his small, flat ear almost against his mouth. Aaron whispered the words about fatherly affection and being unappreciated.

  The man sank back, looked at him. “I’ll bet it’s not that bad,” he said. The woman slapped her notebook shut. She looked around the room, her nose scrunched upward. “We’ll be off then.”

  • • •

  Time passed according to the laws of nature. The weather became grimmer, wheezing storms blew rainwater and curled-up autumn leaves into the house. His guinea pigs quietly scratched about, he listened attentively to the gnawing and shuffling. The nights got longer.

  On the evening of the second visit—or was it the early hours?—the sound of the electric doorbell plowed through the syrupy silence that enveloped him. Was he awake? Yes, he stood with the bathroom doorknob in his hand. Had he ordered food? He couldn’t remember, and besides he had to go to the toilet. Instead of doing the sensible thing—locking himself in the bathroom—he hurried to the living room, crouched down next to the cold radiator and peered outside from under the curtain. His view of the front path was blocked, so he pushed the left-hand curtain aside a tad and pressed his temple against the ice-cold windowpane: was somebody standing under the wooden overhang? The answer came from a series of loud bangs on the door; he fell backwards onto his butt from fright. He crawled back to the gap underneath the curtain. The shadowy figure—a man, judging from its posture—was definitely impatient, took three steps back and looked up, went back to the door and rattled the letter flap with a deafening clatter. He had something on his back, a small knapsack. His mouth puffed out agitated little clouds.