Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

The heavens open, downpour turns into hailstorm, the deafening drumroll is so loud that the traffic appears to glide noiselessly forward. Sigerius has no choice but to take refuge under a sodden awning. Packed together with other pedestrians, he picks up a scent that reminds him of the sweaty judo mats of long ago. One of the men points to the bouncing ice balls, maybe he’s never seen hail before, at least not on May 13th.

For a couple of years he was the jogging coach for Joni’s gymnastics class; after returning from America she joined a club in Enschede called Sportlust, and one day she asked if he felt like coaching them. Sounds good, he said, and it did sound good: a weekly run with thirteen thirteen-year-olds through the Drienerlo woods. Shortly before his summer holidays, the chairwoman and the head coach sat in his living room discussing the details; soon thereafter, every Wednesday evening the farmhouse overflowed with beanpoles with braces and tracksuits, an arrangement that Joni soon regretted because all the girls canceled now and again — homework, illness, being under the weather — something she could never get away with. He laid out a not-too-girlish route of about four kilometers. They ran southward down the Langenkampweg, cut across the campus, including the motorcycle club’s dune (“Oh, noooo , sir, not the loose sand!”), after which they continued through the woods until coming out at the farmhouse, where Tineke served them glasses of elderberry cordial.

Joni was still young enough to be proud of her athletic father, and he too would have looked back with pleasure on the training if it hadn’t been for that incident. Sportlust participated, as it did each year, in a door-to-door fund-raising drive for cancer research, and Joni and Miriam, a small but pert girl who jogged with her blond curls flattened under a headband, spent two long afternoons canvassing the houses and apartments in Boddenkamp for donations. “A neighborhood where you can expect them to be generous, just like in previous years,” remarked the chairwoman the evening he phoned her because Joni had come home from try-outs and — first stammering, then crying — told him she’d been accused of stealing money out of the collection can.

While counting the takings, the woman told him, the Sportlust treasurer noticed that Miriam’s and Joni’s cans didn’t contain a single banknote, and that their proceeds were not only less than a quarter of the previous years’ but also the lowest of all the other cans, even the ones from what she called the grotty neighborhoods. Miriam was in the Tuesday evening gymnastics group; they took her aside and within ten seconds she had confessed. According to her, she and Joni managed to fish out all the paper money with a geometry triangle and then divided the loot — a little over 150 guilders — between them.

Joni was furious. What a bunch of lies. She had nothing to do with it! How could somebody be so mean. She hated that Miriam, she always knew she had a mean streak, she should never have trusted her. When they had finished their rounds, she told him through her tears, it was already dark and dinner time and Miriam had offered to turn both cans in to the treasurer at the central collection point, near where she lived.

Sigerius was livid. “My daughter is standing here in the living room bawling,” he said to the chairwoman. “I know Joni inside out, your accusations are premature and totally out of line. I guarantee you my daughter is not going around plundering charity collection cans.” They agreed that he and Joni would go together so she could tell her side of the story, a suggestion she accepted with a pout, but she backed out just as he was about to leave for the gym. She was afraid she’d burst into tears. Or explode in anger. So he went alone. It was an onerous meeting; the woman insisted that it was Miriam’s word against Joni’s, and he was adamant that Joni’s name be cleared. When he returned home at ten-thirty that night, he told Joni he’d given them the choice: either take her word for it, or that was the end of the training, and then we’d have to see whether she stayed in the club.

He can still remember exactly where they were standing: in the front hall, he with his coat still on, right foot on the open spiral stairs; Joni halfway, holding her toothbrush with toothpaste already on it. He’ll never forget the moment she broke. After he’d finished his report she went quiet. Then she slumped down onto a step, dropped the toothbrush, tick, tack, tock, onto the slate floor. She hid her face in her nightie and said with a drawn-out sigh: “Dad?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Listen, Dad, don’t freak out or anything. I, um, what I mean is … well, actually, Miriam’s telling the truth.”

• • •

He walks under the dribbling plane trees toward the Okura. He deliberately bangs against the shoulder of a phoning businessman, steers clear of the vegetable stalls on the sagging sidewalk and the garbage bags ripped open by stray dogs. A little group of Chinese, maybe five of them, dart out of a side street and spread a large purple tarp on the sopping wet pavement. In a wink they’ve laid out their wares: leather bags, Ray-Ban sunglasses, Gucci pullovers, Adidas T-shirts, CDs, DVDs, video games. Fake. He pauses for a moment, his shorter leg — the scooter one — hurts, he massages his hamstring. One of the hawkers accosts him in snarly Mandarin.

“Fuck off,” he says with a smile.

What’s worse: selling imitation Gucci or robbing a collection can? What about the gray area? Is it logical or worthwhile to worry about Joni, about a hypothetical problem — as long as he doesn’t know for sure, it doesn’t exist — while he also knows that Wilbert is free? Navigating his way between cars, he crosses the four-lane Huaihai Zhong Lu, turns left forty yards farther on and passes in front of the ramshackle Art Deco façade of the Cathay Theatre, where a horde of Chinese cinema-goers is waiting to see Mission: Impossible 2 . What will happen now that the kid is free? What does six years in the slammer do to a man like Wilbert Sigerius?

“Hitler knew the answer to that,” answered Rufus Koperslager back when he asked that question incessantly, though usually guardedly, to anyone he thought might offer him an educated answer. “Hitler saw prisons as a university for criminals. Didn’t you know that? An indoor gutter, where the rookies learn the trade from the pros.” He is reminded of his first private conversation with that eccentric Rufus, a meeting he would rather forget. “Do you know Hitler’s Table Talk?” No, he hadn’t got round to Hitler’s Table Talk yet. God, yes, Koperslager — a law enforcement chief with a knighthood and the petulant candor of a policeman — was made dean at Tubantia in late ’95. The appointment went against the grain, a cop on campus, a man perhaps a bit too straight-from-the-shoulder, impatient, used to giving orders and to a braidedsteel chain of command. But a realist. Sigerius pricked up his ears when Koperslager told them during the selection procedure he had been director of not one, but two prisons in the early ’80s, an achievement that intrigued him enough to take advantage of the sandwich reception to confide in his new colleague about his criminal son. He was like that back then. Heart on his sleeve. Wilbert had been in for just over a year and in that time Sigerius had developed a not-so-subtle obsession with everything that took place behind bars: he devoured every newspaper clipping, every book, every television documentary, anything that could tell him about correctional regimes and jailhouse norms. “I understand you have a prison background? My son, he’s doing time.”

“Where?” Koperslager also had a considerable affinity with the subject; a dark shroud fell over his policeman’s face, he touched his clean-shaven chin ever so slightly, Sigerius saw him descend into an underworld that excited him more than he would care to admit. Without twitching a muscle, Sigerius named the three penitentiary facilities where they had been stowing Wilbert thus far. “Transfers?” asked Koperslager.