The next moment there were flies—a swarm of metallic flies, a pestilential cloud that lifted off and, as if on command, alighted again. Pinching my nose, I approached the shower. The flies clung to a body that hung from a noose of orange nylon, the rope we used to fasten the boat. It was clothed; the torso was like soaked fruit in a lambswool sweater—it looked set to explode. The shins—swollen, festering, moist—bulged above the thick-laced hiking boots. The inside of the cubicle was smeared with dark wetness; in the corner, a toppled bucket. The head—his head. The rope, tied with a sturdy knot onto the hinge of the open vent, pulled it skew, the neck had an unnatural kink. The face—
I choked back my vomit. Aside from being bluish-green, the face was swollen, the tongue stuck out of the twisted, grimacing mouth. On the chin, a whopper of a scab. The left eye was closed, but not the right one, it bulged out. It was more out than in. It stared as though it had collected all the torment and agony that a person could suffer.
I puked before I reached the toilet. The contents of my stomach sloshed onto the plastic floor tiles between the cubicle and the bowl. I squatted, gagged twice more and stood back up. My head. My heart was up in my skull. I went over to the washbasins and turned on the faucet.
“Don’t cry, God damn it. Don’t.”
Cold water. I rinsed my mouth and my face. I stared into the drain. Paper: a piece of paper stuck out of his breast pocket. Had I seen it right? An envelope, a napkin?
I mustered all my courage and turned around. I took a step toward the shower. Without looking at the face, I reached for the breast pocket, first came up against the dead chest, felt the sluggish weight, and jerked back my hand. Panting, I grabbed hold of the doorpost. “Dad. What—” Then I took the body by the hips and held it tight.
It was an envelope. I brought it with me through the bedroom and upstairs to the deck. I sat down on the bench in the pilothouse and caught my breath. I tried to breathe normally, focusing on a red buoy off in the distance, where the bay met the ocean. Only when I started freezing—half an hour later, an hour?—did I look at my hand that still clasped the envelope. It was a standard size, it looked like it contained a postcard. My belly felt heavy. I tried to tear it open, but my fingers were trembling. And my head was about to explode. I laid the envelope on the table and got up. Suicide? What had happened to the fighter? I tipped a second packet of ibuprofen into my mouth and forced the powder down with spit.
Suddenly there was the barrage of questions, stupid ones and idiotic ones all jumbled up together. How did he get in? Did he have a key? Why did this have to happen? Did he already have the key when we got back from vacation? Did I have a knife? Or scissors. Couldn’t leave him hanging there like that. Why did he do it? Has anyone missed him yet? Mom? His department? Those flies had to go. Is it my fault? I had to lay him on the bed. That rope around his neck. Call the police? Why didn’t you call me? I had to go into Sainte-Maxime to find a police station. I had to call Val-d’Isère.
But I didn’t get up, I stayed put. “If you really had such a problem with it, Dad,” I said, “why didn’t you fucking come take it out on me?”
With barely functioning fingers, I opened the envelope. There was indeed a card inside, a repro of an old Sainte-Maxime poster, I’d bought it that summer and left it lying there, Jugendstil with a palm tree and a beach. Something was written in pen on the back; through my tears I could make out his surprisingly childlike handwriting. Instead of reading it, I tore the card into little pieces and threw the scraps overboard.
21
At Venlo he crosses the Meuse. Large ice floes hug the edge of the graphite water, a long barge carrying mountains of beige sand keeps a middle course. On both meandering banks he sees the provincial clusters where thousands of families will soon be waking up to the gray December light; for yet another consecutive night the snow covering has thickened. Aaron’s parents: didn’t they live in Venlo? He met them once, in their son’s house. Mild people with mild opinions. He should call Val-d’Isère, he had promised to call before leaving home. A message from a mild husband with mild opinions. As long as it keeps freezing. He rolls down the back window a bit farther.
Fumes penetrate the Audi, morning rush hour is under way, the roads become increasingly congested with truck traffic, heavy tires lisping their way through the salty brown slush. Since Duisburg he’s been stuck at a snail’s pace behind an Italian eighteen-wheeler, but he is still early. He hadn’t the energy last night to install the roof pod, so his skis are lying on the flattened passenger seat and the suitcases are in the back, stuffed with unironed pants and shirts; only now does it occur to him that what he’s wearing—a moth-eaten lambswool sweater, a dubious pair of jeans, and hiking boots—is out of character; he is, to put it mildly, quite a sight.
Day breaks off to the east, the ashen morning sky is like a ponderous announcement of the mining region he’s about to drive through. Don’t think about it. The image, it seems, is stored in countless caches in his memory, it comes hurtling at his retina from unexpected corners of his subconscious. Book a hotel in France. He forces himself to imagine a bed in Metz or Nancy where he can actually sleep for a couple of hours. Prepare himself for the normality of Val-d’Isère. A showered guest, duly attentive to his host and hostess. A few curative hours in a hotel room. Near the Belgian border he stops for gas, wipes snow from the windshield. Inside, in line for the cashier, he spreads his limbs in order to absorb as much warmth as possible. He strikes a strange pose there in line, halfway turned toward the car, never once taking his eyes off the Audi. He buys chewing gum, puts three pieces into his mouth.
His breathing is shallow. He crosses the border, nodding to a pair of chatting customs officers as he passes. Shouldn’t have drunk that rum. The moment he’s out of sight he floors it. For the past hour or so he has felt an unprecedented anxiety, his nerves are off-kilter, like somebody is jerking a brush through the tangled dendrites. He grits his teeth, but as soon as he releases the pressure his teeth start chattering. Avoid Liège, his rule of thumb: they always used to get hopelessly lost in this chaotic city. Drive around it. He wants to go to an anonymous place, an illogical place, somewhere that takes some trouble to reach. Belgium is reliably illogical; he has already taken a detour in order to be here.
The snow chains, why didn’t he bring the snow chains? They’re lying on top of the cupboard in Joni’s old room; earlier that night it seemed too risky to go upstairs, and after that it had slipped his mind. And now he’s driving in the Alps without snow chains. Or is it already thawing?
He is on a kind of ring road around Liège. Instead of heading south, to Metz, he decides to go west, he takes the A15 to Namur. It is impossible not to think about it. To block out the image he evokes substitute thoughts—pleasant thoughts, under normal circumstances—visions of off-piste skiing, of the copious meals Hans will prepare for them, of complex mathematical formulas—but they flutter away, they are too flimsy to accomplish much. He racks his brains for something stronger, something potent enough to convince himself that he is doing what he has to do, but he comes up empty-handed. He jams his index finger into his skinned chin.
After Namur he exits the freeway. Taking the country roads, which soon become stony paths, he passes craggy, leafy woods, hardened snow around the gray tree trunks. This is another world, here the earth is bleak, just as it is bleak almost everywhere except in his own country; in the Netherlands nature dives underground like a metro and only resurfaces in Scandinavia. His life is bleak. Sometimes that life races down a village street with houses as gray as stringy rags, and then covers long stretches without seeing a single building, only woods and farmland, every so often a spotted tile roof deep down in a valley.
On the way down a hill he turns onto a snow-covered dirt road that leads to a green-black pine forest. A few minutes later, completely surrounded by the tall fir trees, he parks as far off the path as possible. He sits there for a quarter of an hour, too tired to move. Tineke, he really must ph
one Tineke. He enters the number and listens to the ragged foreign ringtone. After the seventh ring he hangs up. Blood is pounding in his ears. He tries to rehearse the conversation: what, in fact, does he plan to say? Before he’s come up with some platitude, she calls back. “Hello dear,” he says hoarsely. Just let her do the talking. They are having breakfast, his wife tells him, they’re looking out over the slopes, the trails are still being prepared—but he hardly takes it in. She wants to know when to expect him, he says it will be late, he’s just leaving Enschede, count on midnight. She’s taking ski lessons, she says: news meant to counter his own silence, so he mumbles something enthusiastic, but his thoughts slip away—he almost gags. The black pinky, think of that burned-off gangrene finger. “What did you eat yesterday?” she asks. “Did you remember to turn down the heat?” While he inhales and exhales deeply she rattles on, maybe because Hans and Ria are within earshot, maybe because she’s suppressing thoughts about the photos he’s nearly forgotten already. She says he sounds tired, “did you have a cold night?” No. Yes. He mustn’t warm himself on her normality, on the stubborn unchangedness on her end of the line—not yet. Soon. Later.
“Did you get everything in the roof pod?”
“I’ll try now,” he answers, and as soon as they’ve hung up he calculates how long ago it was that he left the utility room with his skis under his arm. Six hours? Could just as well be six years. He lets his cell phone sink into his pocket.
He had already walked around the side of the house to the Audi a few times, his footsteps crunching, first with his travel bag, then his laptop and attaché case, cautiously forging a path in the light that shone out from the sunroom onto the softly ionizing layer of snow. He tried to recall his mood at that moment, the weary restlessness that accompanied him on his last inspection of the farmhouse, looking for blood stains or anything out of place, before he carried his skis into the utility room. Cautiously optimistic relief? He had turned on the outside light—only then?—and in the yellow glow saw the entire terrace light up. The snow was falling harder now; he opened the kitchen door and stepped outside. White powder fluttered from the thatched roof and the crown of the chestnut. As the icy wind cut through his clothes he looked at the trail of his footprints running parallel to the sunroom; only now, though, did he notice a second, much narrower, trail branching off into the backyard. His eyes followed the snow-dusted footprints. They led to a hump at the edge of the terrace, about six meters from where he stood. Something was lying there. An oblong, snow-covered object, right about where the patio stones met the grass. His skis slipped out of his fingers, the slap muted by the snow. Fucking hell, he was lying there. He took a step back and watched closely. Wilbert. On his back, the broken arm bulging up under the bomber jacket. Snow was starting to cling to his clothes, the legs were spread slightly, feet pointing outward, the toes of the shoes were white. His head was facing the farmhouse, bent backward at an odd angle. He could see the battered face, the left eye was open a crack. The nose, he observed with a shock, puffed out little clouds of vapor.
The thought of that face. Pressing the slimy wound on his chin, he looks around. Think of something else, damn it, think of … Joni? He sits panting in a parked car on a forest lane in the Belgian Ardennes, on the verge of fainting. Think of something … good. The game Joni used to play on Bonita Avenue, a game she called “America’s Good-time Girl.” She’d poke her little blond face around their bedroom door, the new day shining on her face like fresh dew, and chirp: “Dad and Mom, OK, Round One. America’s Good-time Girl. Stay in bed.” He lets his head fall back against the headrest, allows his eyelids to droop for a moment, and immediately they suck themselves against the white of his eyes. From their bed they’d hear her downstairs in the wood-paneled kitchen, squeezing oranges, making coffee and toast; there was an evening variant too, when she’d whirl through the cramped living room like in a fast-motion film, a busy little bee lighting candles, closing curtains, the adorable fumbling with a corkscrew and a bottle that wouldn’t—
It backfires. His happiest memories plunge him into a deep gloom. He opens his eyes, rolls down the driver’s window and stares out into the woods for several minutes; the black trunks are close together, he can’t see any farther than thirty meters or so. In the depths: darkness.
He couldn’t move, he could only stare. How long had that bastard been lying there? It looked like he had slipped, he must have lost his footing, maybe he fell on his head, or on his arm. Did he try to get back up? The surrounding snow looked raked about. He’s sleeping it off. Was that it? The rum—he was completely blotto, he fell, thrashed about with his one good arm and when nothing helped he thought: nighty-night. The idiot was sleeping off the rum at 13 below zero.
He debated with himself. How often had he debated with his better self lately? This time they quickly reached an agreement. He stood for a moment longer, his gaze fixed on the sleeping figure in the freezing cold, and then he turned away. He picked his skis up out of the snow, put them on the brushy doormat in the utility room and meticulously locked up. Back in the kitchen, he took the carving knife from the block again. He went into the sunroom, out of habit switched on the light, then turned it off again. His eyes glued to the body, he walked around the long table without banging into anything, turned a chair with exaggerated care toward the glass wall and sat down, knife in his hand, his hand on his lap. His son had an ugly, balding head.
At first he did not know exactly why he was sitting there. Was he guarding his fort? Or did he have other intentions? As the minutes ticked by he was interested in only one thing: condensation—in the furthest reaches of the outdoor light he saw the damp discharge of Wilbert’s breath. Shivering, he zipped his ski jacket up over his Adam’s apple. He watched the breathing obsessively. He noticed his own reflection in the glass, faintly, like a watermark, a contour ten times weaker than the illuminated face out there in the snow, a strange, skewed face that belonged to a blind-drunk, hypothermic body, a body in need of assistance.
Become a monk. How can you stare at the same thing, attentively but devoid of all thought, for an unlimited amount of time? He pressed his left knee up against the icy windowpane. There was nothing but condensation, soft little puffs filled his consciousness. Switch off your thoughts, you’ve thought enough by now. And yes, it worked, his head cleared immeasurably, no more unfinished thoughts, no reflection, only snippets, what fifteen blows of a sledgehammer could do—they slipped out of his brain but he quashed them in the cloudlets outside. Not once did he take his eyes off the volcano that kept smoldering, emitted those puffs of sulfur—they kept on coming, low, tirelessly. Still, it was freezing out there: cold in, warmth out, cold in, warmth out …
… he lifted him up and cuddled him, a dry, ribbed chin against his sweaty forehead, then the man whom he didn’t know carried him to the edge of the spongy mat. He lay on his back, deep in the mat, other boys were standing around him, they were silent, only nodded at him, except for one thin, bawling blond boy. He noticed that his own face no longer had its old shape, he felt it, he was swollen all over, small warm tomatoes, everywhere, it felt hot and gigantic. “Don’t fetch my wife,” he wailed. “Oh yes,” said Mr. Vloet, who, he saw now, was an aged version of a neighbor, their elderly neighbor from the Antonius Matthaeuslaan, who walked across the dojo that changed into his office in Zoetermeer, only larger, emptier—
He woke to a metallic clatter. Where am I? Until he saw his own reflection he swirled aimlessly through a pitch-black universe. He rubbed his hands over his face. The carving knife had fallen to the slate floor. His muscles felt tense from the cold when he retrieved it and grasped it in his fist; skittishly he scanned the terrace. His short leg was asleep. The night was still black, but paler. The face was still there, it seemed to have turned slightly, for a moment he thought the eyes were open, he rubbed his own eyes to clear them.
The breathing had stopped.
He stayed put. For at least a quarter of an hour, he guessed, he
sat in that chair as if frozen himself, staring at the immobile body in the snow. Non-thinking was not out of the question, every incipient thought burst into a garland of triumph and guilt, he allowed the confusion to blossom, as though it were not his own … So you’re a murderer. You’re both murderers, but you’re alive and on the run, the one who got off scot-free … He stood up and opened the sliding glass door, it was sticking, like the lubricant was frozen. No, don’t prettify it, don’t call him a murderer … His feet sinking into the snow, he walked over to the body, stood close to it and looked. Mustn’t kill him, mustn’t slander him either, he wasn’t convicted of murder … Blood had leaked through the jacket, the snow under his left side had become a slushy brown. Manslaughter, fifteen hysterical blows, fifteen death blows within a minute, but it wasn’t murder, you must be precise about it. You’re the murderer in this family, you murdered him … Was he really dead? He inhaled, held the cold air in his lungs, nudged the right shoulder with the rounded toe of his hiking shoes, cautiously at first, then harder. No reaction. He gave the thigh a kick. His knees cracked when he sank to his haunches. He took a deep breath and rammed the point of the knife into the palm of the outstretched hand.
He gets out of the car. The slam of the door thunders through the frozen silence of the surrounding woods. He opens the rear hatch, wavers for a moment between the backpack and the tent bag, in the end lugs the tent bag out of the trunk. He clamps the load under his right arm while he locks the car. The canvas is frozen, and yet he knows it’s thawing outside, and in his head as well: something is changing up there; what he was able to do all morning, in fact all night—cold-blooded reasoning, followed by cold-blooded action—is becoming increasingly difficult. He looks around again and walks into the woods, the bag clamped to his chest. It’s rough going, there is no path, here and there he has to wriggle between drooping branches. The snow on the ground is thin and hard, he continually stumbles over roots, his ungainly coat keeps getting caught on the bristly thicket. There are no birds to be heard. Crackling branches and needles under his hiking shoes, the occasional rustle of unseen forest animals, but most of all: his own heavy breathing. The thirty, maybe forty kilos in his arms want to sag, he’s got a poor grip on the bag—this is bad. And again he thinks of the face, his hands begin to perspire, he has to stop. Replace it with another gruesome thought. The elbow, think of the elbow cracking. The resistance in the wrist; bending, struggling cells; the moment of capitulation, the snap. And keep walking.
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