The truth is staring him in the face: he has got himself a very strange wife indeed. A sardine who does nothing but sleep and drink. And prevaricates, by which he means a creative form of lying; Margriet Wijn does not spin half-yarns, or concoct ordinary lies—she cultivates new realities.
“And you get a woman like that pregnant.” Janis.
“Yeah.”
He lists all the ways he had back in 1970 of not making a child—nip out for some cigarettes, jump on the first merchant ship leaving town—and adds them up, the most important tally of his life, he realizes, and to his amazement the sum total says: get her pregnant.
His phone rings at six-thirty. Tineke. He takes a few deep breaths before answering.
“Why’re you calling so early?” His voice is hoarse. He has hardly slept a wink, and doesn’t know what to expect.
“Janis is in the shower. We’re about to leave.”
“What about the pictures?”
She laughs, a commiserating chortle that sounds forced to him. Then she says: “You’re kidding yourself. She’s a pretty girl, I’ll give you that, and a cheap little hussy on top of it, and yes, she does look a bit like Joni. But it’s not her.”
He listens, dumbfounded.
“Aside from that it’s just not her,” she says, “this girl has bright blue eyes and totally different hair. It’s someone else.” She laughs again. For a moment he considers playing along, just as one laughs along with a lunatic; pretend he only now understands, finally sees the light. Instead, he sighs.
“Is that all you can say? This girl is American, Siem. Your sex babe. Where did you find these pictures?”
“Don’t be so stupid,” he snarls. “I’ve talked to her. Whether or not it’s her is not up for discussion. Have you lost your mind?”
“Have you lost yours? You misunderstood her, that’s all. I think you panicked. Misinterpreted everything. It’s Wilbert, he’s thrown you off-kilter. It’s a tasteless joke. That’s what I think.”
Although he expects this veneer of self-deception to crumble to pieces at any moment, she holds her ground. She means it. It is not even self-preservation, she is actually convinced. “You said yourself it was a short conversation,” he hears her say, “and of course you were shocked, maybe even furious, whatever. Wound up into a frenzy by that damn son of yours. You’re mistaken, honey. Really. Shall I phone her?”
“Don’t you dare!” he barks. She does not reply—stunned, he assumes.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’ll call her myself, dear. Let me take care of it. You just go and enjoy France.”
Soon he has to leave for Leiden to open a conference of the National Network of Women Professors. He switches on the bedside lamp, sleep is now out of the question. He steps onto the cold floor and takes the speech someone has written for him out of his briefcase. Back in bed, he leaves the bundle of papers lying in front of him on the covers.
Is he really planning to bury 100,000 guilders on Scheveningen beach?
An hour later he directs his chauffeur not directly to Leiden, but first through the city’s rush hour to the MeesPierson branch. He has reluctantly invented a pretext for the money, something about paintings and auction houses in Nice and Marseilles, dealers who insist on cash transactions, which turns out to be sufficiently plausible. While the Volvo idles he goes into the office with a small leather Puma sports bag he bought downtown. The receptionist makes a phone call, a smiling young woman appears, she brings him to a room that smells of new carpeting. There she counts out—her nails are painted with little palm trees—a hundred 1,000-guilder notes, a stack not even an inch thick; he is embarrassed by his stupidly amateurish gym bag.
About an hour and a half later he gives a speech to 300 professorial women with 100 grand stuffed in his breast pocket. He fields questions about the dismal Dutch participation statistics on the world stage, about the transparency of the appointment process, social exclusivity in academia’s upper echelons—and strangely enough, there, up on that stage, during the open questions, he experiences a kind of deliverance. Is it that simple? he asks himself. Now of all times, with a microphone in front of his nose, standing in front of 300 skeptical women, he has a revelation. Joni’s own mother does not recognize her! He says: look here, I’m sorry but this is your daughter, and she replies: get your head examined.
“What we in the Netherlands have to move away from,” he says from behind his lectern, “is professors being appointed by deans and department chairs. In countries like America and Norway you start as an assistant professor, and whether you move on to a full professorship depends on how much you’ve published, not on your boss.”
She does not recognize her own daughter. Are you still someone if no one recognizes you? Maybe not. If Tineke, after a confession like his, after that dildo in the mail, still believes that the girl in those photos is not Joni, then it’s not Joni. He’s the only one who single-handedly recognized her, and then only once he actually stood there in that attic room. It’s her and it’s not her, a case of being and not being, wave and particle. “In Norway and the USA,” he says, his heart nearly exploding with elation, “one person does not hold another person back, and that must be our goal here in the Netherlands as well.”
Of course it’s not her! The applause that washes up over the podium encourages him, legitimizes his grin, drenches him in relief. Drop dead, Wilbert! It’s not her! Don’t you see that? Call your stepmother, you bum. You got shit in your eyes, or what? You can see it’s not her, can’t you? Wilbert Sigerius, now him they’ll believe. Well, if Wilbert Sigerius says so. Glowing with triumph, he accepts the bottle of wine and thinks: if I could only talk to Joni. If he had her number he would call her right now: listen, sweetheart, let’s just forget what happened. I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but it’s not you. Mom and I are sure of it. Please come to France, bring Aaron with you. Tell him it’s not you.
Exactly a week later he takes two last phone calls on the electrically warmed backseat of the Volvo. Outside, the city streets, with their sunken tram rails and stately town houses, gradually glide into suburbs and glossy black office parks. The quiet December evening, already deepening into night; the silent strength of his chauffeur at the wheel, who calmly drives him toward the A12—very soon he will be, for a week, a non-minister. He yearns for what the Kingdom of the Netherlands so promisingly calls the Christmas recess; the government car that drives him from The Hague to Enschede is a lever on a mixing console; with each kilometer he is transformed into a family man, the worse for wear perhaps, but still hankering for the French ski village where he’ll celebrate the holidays.
Although he can’t wait to glide down an alp behind Janis, he first looks forward to an evening alone in his own house, listening to his own music, sleeping in his own bed. For the next seven nights he’ll be free from his satyrs, but even freedom can be tiring. Several ecstatic days followed the female professors’ applause, days of excited confusion, his thoughts were already taking a ski vacation of their own: that same evening he quenched his exultant fury with the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon they had given him at the conference, and then sat down to pen a mea culpa to Aaron and Joni, in duplicate, on a ministry notepad, a letter he had genuinely planned to mail; but upon rereading it on the freezing-cold toilet the next morning, he tore it up and flushed it without hesitation.
It was the day of the beach. He would not be standing at beach marker 101 at eight o’clock sharp, he had decided, and would not bury any bag of money. This was the result of that blissful inspiration Tineke had triggered. He no longer considered himself a blackmail target per se, and in order to bolster this idea he worked stealthily in his office on a serious letter to Joni in which he related Wilbert’s extortion attempt, asking if he could count on her to back him up, form a united front, should Wilbert ever try to put his threats into action. But whether it was just the bustle and constant interruptions, or whether he simply blocked it out, the sliding door incident never made it to the
keyboard.
Perhaps because of this, he felt his mood dampen in the course of the day, the triumphant buzz faded, he became softer, squishy, maybe even sentimental. The direct threat dispensed with, he crept out of his bunker and noticed, for the first time in years, a need to put himself in his son’s shoes; we were talking about a guy of twenty-nine after all, a boy really, about the same age as he was when he dropped Margriet like a hot brick. His tongue ran over the words “ministerial accountability” like a molar that’s lost its filling. Everything was fine back in his office in Zoetermeer, his brain saturated with the day-to-day urgencies, but on his way home he played reruns of the past, with his son in various roles: Wilbert perched in his child’s seat on the front of the bike, him looking down on the boy’s soft hair, testily pedaling through an abandoned Utrecht because he couldn’t bear the sight of their national team’s humiliation in the World Cup final; then the panther-like kid with his fanatic horseplay, who some fifteen years later came to liven up his girl-heavy family, and who playfully grabbed him by the wrists behind the farmhouse: the impressive strength of that adolescent body, he felt himself; the sullen, sagging head in the courtroom less than a year later. What was my part in all this?, he thought. How does the kid live? And for what? For whom? Unwittingly and unwanted, blades of pity started sprouting in him.
The flurries have begun, the Volvo makes its way through swirls of snow. His department secretary phones. As they speak, snowflake-speckled signs—towns, distances, exits—emerge from the darkness, at Deventer he signals his chauffeur to pull into a McDrive. They eat their quarter-pounders and fries in the parking lot, calmly chatting about the impending frost, about skiing regions and the best time of year to go.
Jesus—your own flesh and blood. He even attempts to understand Wilbert’s unbridled rage, an enervating exercise in empathy, it is partly meant to anticipate future troubles, naturally—of course there’s an element of tactical thinking; they both got a life sentence, he realizes now—but also to take stock of himself: what mistakes did he make? He tries to imagine how it must have been for a seventeen-year-old kid like Wilbert to be plopped into their family, from that fucked-up food-stamp life in Wijn’s attic to their majestic farmhouse nestled in a poplar grove, inhabited by stable, well-fed, energetic achievers.
He spent that last week at the department with these kinds of thoughts on his mind, and when his chauffeur dropped him off at his flat on the Hooikade he knew what he had to do. He changed out of his suit into jeans and a fleece sweatshirt, and took the rickety ladies’ bike from the downstairs landing out to the street. Off to the beach after all. With nervous resignation he cycled out to Scheveningen, without the money, but with the steadfast resolve to wait at beach marker 101 for his son. Surely Wilbert would come dig up the loot that same evening. Eye to eye it should be possible to engage him, maybe talk some sense into him. He was prepared to chance it. He would try to assess the danger, see how aggressive the kid looked; before he left he had stood in his expat-kitchenette holding a tomato knife, but thought better of it. Naturally he wanted to convince Wilbert he didn’t have a leg to stand on, that this was not a blackmailing family—but without force, and intending to assure him that he belonged, that he was part of the family, no matter what, in spite of everything, in spite of the past. He conducted that odd tête-à-tête in his mind, a father-and-son conversation that would begin awkwardly and would probably end awkwardly too. And yet he wanted to extend his hand one more time.
So there he stood, on December 14, 2000, at eight in the evening, on the pitch-black Scheveningen beach, shivering from the cold, but in fact mostly from nerves. The wind at his back, he paced around marker 101, giving the briny wooden stake the occasional kick just to release tension, rehearsing what he was going to say, scanning the shadowy dunes until he had differentiated the various shades of black, and finally concluding from the total lack of movement in that teeming darkness that Wilbert was not going to show up. He waited until ten, eleven o’clock, the sea approached him—the sea did, yes—and then he declared himself crazy. A sentimental, naïve dickhead.
That weekend he stayed in The Hague. Not much point in hanging around in Enschede on his own. He worked a bit on the table in a living room that wasn’t his, his sandy shoes on a newspaper, and to his surprise all was quiet: no text messages about not-buried bags of money, no sign of life, nada, and when the last days before the recess steamrolled over him, long workdays laced together with end-of-year cocktail parties and last-minute Cabinet decisions, a vague, almost existential doubt crept over him: maybe he was being paranoid, who’s to say he was dealing with Wilbert after all? Couldn’t he have fallen prey to some anonymous nutcase who one way or another had stumbled across Joni’s online mischief and decided to give him a run for his money? Welcome to the reality of The Hague. He felt strangely provincial on Tuesday when he went to return his untouched 100 grand to that same MeesPierson girl. Maybe he had been living for weeks now in a phantasmagoria of guilt, maybe he had let himself obsess about his insane progeny to the point of narcissistic personality disorder.
He and his chauffeur have worked out a way to play music in the back of the car but not in the front. He listens to Everybody Digs Bill Evans, his favorite trio album, virtuosic up-tempo numbers alternated with skillfully contrasting, Satie-like, um, what are they, nocturnes? Aaron—wonder how he’s doing. On the last stretch of freeway he renews his pledge to e-mail Joni, preferably before he leaves for France tomorrow. It has to be a combination of the serious, fatherly approach and that drunkard’s rant he flushed down the toilet last week, a message in which he’ll sort things out in an intelligent, tactical way; he must make it clear that he’s kept her secret to himself, that he has got past being judgmental, that everybody commits youthful indiscretions.
His driver drops him off at the main entrance to the campus; he wants to walk the rest of the way. His laptop in one hand and his doctor’s bag full of documents in the other, he passes the administration building and looks dispassionately at the picture window of his old office; his successor keeps the blinds shut, a faint light burns inside. The campus is a frosted Christmas cake, the fields resign themselves to the blanket of snow, only the widest stretches of asphalt still resist. In front of one of the dorms, a group of boys are engaged in a rather premature snowball fight; you can see their breath, their raw yells are echoless. He passes the sports complex, through the patch of woods, and reaches his street, the Langenkampweg. Snow swishes around the high streetlamps, all he hears is the crunch of his soles and a muted silence that thanks to thousands of slamming snowflakes can hardly be called silence.
There it is, the farmhouse, his farmhouse, swathed in white, patient, immune to the vicissitudes of life. Pain shoots through his bad leg: the exhaustion of the past few days, the exhaustion of the past six months, it’s excruciating, he is broken, yearns for a glass of wine, for a scalding shower.
When they bought the house back in ’85 there was a glossy wooden plank on the front with the words MON REFUGE burned into it, and after closing the sale he promptly unscrewed that smug piece of kitsch from the wall and—how appropriate—stoked the fireplace with it the whole evening. At first the impressive spaces, the luxurious finishes, took some getting used to—who’d have guessed he could grow old here, in aristocratic style? He, whose father had dropped dead in that hovel on the Trompetsteeg.
Tineke would have asked him to go around to the back with those snowy shoes, but he doesn’t have the energy. Sighing, he pushes open the heavy front door, one of the cats darts outside. He stomps the snow from his shoes but decides to take them off anyway. He feels the underfloor heating through his socks. His skis are propped up against the dresser under the stairs, Janis has brought them down from the attic for him. He scoops up a handful of Christmas cards from the doormat, walks into the living room, sets down his bag full of work papers between the magazine rack and a large floor lamp that gives off a warm, soft light: after Tineke’s workshop was brok
en into three years ago (the booty: an electric drill, some 200 hand-tools, and pretty much anything liftable and with an electrical cord) she insisted on installing a light-timer in the house, an apparatus he prefers not to fiddle with. In a sudden urge for domesticity, he switches on the Christmas tree lights.
He takes an opened bottle of red from the wine rack next to the liquor cabinet, pours himself a full glass, and flops down in the corner of the sofa, his feet on the coffee table. He is hardly ever alone here. Dog-tired, he looks around the wide, sparsely furnished room and feels bad about leaving Tineke to her own devices here during the week. A copy of Nouveau lies open at his feet. On the other hand, maybe she loves it.
He takes his laptop from the bag and turns it on. The letter. Do it now, have to get an early start tomorrow. This afternoon at the office he plotted his route, Metz-Nancy-Lyon-Grenoble, more or less the route to Sainte-Maxime. He is planning to allude to that boat of theirs, but doesn’t yet know how; perhaps in slightly shocked terms? In Val-d’Isère, anyway, he wants to be the bringer of good news; provided he can hit on the right tone, he’s planning to close his e-mail with Tineke’s idea of visiting Joni in Silicon Valley in the new year.
He nods off before he’s even opened Word, how long his catnap lasted, he can’t say; snippets of dreams, they are like memories of memories, shoot through his head, he dreams of a boy with deep-set eyes dressed in a body warmer. When he wakes with a start he is thoroughly zonked, his face is sticky—heavy stubble, he really must shave—and his bad leg is asleep. He’s hungry again, there’s a vague cooking odor in the house, a greasy smell he didn’t notice before. It’s half-past nine, he shoves the laptop aside and decides to shower first. On his way from the living room he ponders how to formulate the rapprochement part, attempt to explain his naked presence, or however you’d put it, in Aaron’s house. Maybe he should be as honest as possible, just write it down the way it happened.
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