Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Dad,” she said, “I don’t want to butt in. I’m just here to warn you.”

“Oh? And what about?”

She leaned over and pulled a folded-up newspaper page out of her bag. She opened it, flattened it out, and slid it toward him. He recognized the photo in the middle all too well: him naked on the riverbank. He’d never shake it.

“You know Aaron took this picture, right?” he asked, just to ask something.

“I took it off the toilet door at our house. Look a little closer.”

He’d seen it already. But to buy time to pull himself together he made a point of scrutinizing the handwritten comments her housemates had scribbled next to his naked body over the past few years. Someone had drawn an enormous balloon in felt-tip pen from his gaping mouth with the text: “Ladies, is Joni behaving herself?” And lower down, under his bare feet in the grass, in large block letters: ERECTOR MAGNIFICUS. “Good one,” he mumbled, “except I don’t get this one.” He tapped the red circle around his shivery penis. “Property of Isabelle Orthel,” read the caption.

“It’s all over campus, Dad. If they write something like this about my father in my house, in my WC, then you can assume everyone knows you’re doing it with a freshman.”

“And what if it’s true? What then?” It occurred to him that she was four years older than Isabelle.

“I don’t begrudge you anything, Dad. But—”

“But what? What’re you here for, Joni, to chew me out?”

“No. I’m here for Mom—”

“She’s not here.”

“I don’t want Mom reading about your escapades on my bathroom door.”

Aaron has tied the belt around his waist, a tidy, flat knot, and examines the inside of the jacket. “I’ve heard that here and there in the Vluchtestraat interior walls have caved in,” he says. “They want to inspect the houses one by one to assess the danger of collapse. It’ll take another week or two. That’s what they say at the information post.”

Sigerius swallows and tries to think of something that sounds friendly. Before he can come up with an obligatory assurance that Aaron is welcome for as long as necessary, they hear the ringtone of a cell phone.

“That’s me,” Sigerius said. He pulled out his Nokia from the pocket of his khakis and checked the number on the display. He frowned. “Sigerius,” he said, allowing his eyes to wander around the dressing room. “Hello, Thom. No, no bother. (…) Terrible, never seen anything like it. But Enschede is resilient. (…) Yes, yes, we’re OK, Thom, we’re all fine. And you? Yes. (…) Go ahead, I’m listening.”

But Aaron wasn’t, at first. He looked around the narrow space. On either side, meters of aluminum racks were stuffed with clothing: to the left, suits and sport jackets arranged by color; to the right, twice as long, Tineke’s dresses and caftans. He was used to this — it was nearly impossible to talk to Sigerius for more than ten minutes at a stretch. What did take some getting used to was what he called the everyday Sigerius: they’d never been at such close quarters before. He noticed that Sigerius preferred to keep to himself, more often than not retreating to the living room while the rest of them were out on the terrace. During meals he could be downright grumpy. Maybe the fireworks disaster brought on extra stress at Tubantia, maybe he sensed the tension between him and Joni, although Aaron could hardly imagine that something so banal would affect his mood. Just to have something to do, he sniffed at the sleeves of the judo suit, the white cotton smelled fresh, old-fashionedly fresh, as though it had come straight from the prehistoric ’60s. Ruska and maybe even Geesink had clutched it, or pulled the collar over Sigerius’s head during a sparring match.

“… sounds very interesting,” he heard Sigerius say. He stood a quarter of a turn from him, with his free hand he gently nudged the toes of a pair of running shoes in the rack. “You folks are really on the ball (…) Yes. (…) I understand, yes. (…) Of course I’ll consider it.” Sigerius wheeled around, his dark, hard gaze locking into Aaron’s eyes. He smiled sheepishly, but Sigerius did not see it. Aaron’s head was reeling. They had been staying at the farmhouse for a week now, and still he hadn’t got a decent night’s sleep. He and Joni were condemned to each other in a narrow guest bed that creaked as though it were slowly contracting; every night he lay there, a nervous wreck, until five in the morning, lest he make it creak or crack, it creaked every time he swallowed, and by dawn he himself was a stiff, groaning plank.

At first he thought it a nifty idea, a few weeks at his in-laws. He was curious about the day-to-day routine on the Langenkampweg — but now he realized how uncomfortable it was. Even more wearing, if possible, than his insomnia was this strife with Joni — it was terrible timing, now that they were living with her parents they were at each other’s throats, they had never bickered so easily before, about everything and nothing. She still seemed pissed off about that wedding. And he in turn was being driven crazy by all her speculating about Boudewijn Stol and his wonderful internships.

And then there was that Ennio. Like hundreds of other Enschede residents, the poor guy lay crumpled in the hospital, bruised, beaten, and burned, not a pretty sight, and he could well imagine that for Joni the accident had “hit close to home,” but what he couldn’t take — Jesus, there wasn’t much he could take, that endless sniveling and blubbering was the least of it — was that he felt excluded; wherever he went, whether into the living room or out onto the terrace for a smoke, there she was, usually in the company of her mother, red-eyed, weeping, in an apparent heart-to-heart that was cut short the minute he appeared. If he asked whether she was all right, the answer was invariably “yeah, fine.” Apparently he was not the one to come crying to about other men. Sigerius had told him yesterday, not to his displeasure, that Ennio had moved to the Kievitstraat after his wife had kicked him out of the house. Apparently on account of messing around with a young female employee.

“When do you want to know?” Sigerius asked. “Fine. (…) Strictly confidential. Understood. I’ll get back to you within two weeks. It’s a deal. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye, Thom.” Sigerius held his telephone at eye level, stared briefly at the display, and then slowly dropped his hand. He looked at Aaron and said: “Well, just look at you.”

“Like it’s tailor-made,” he replied.

“Two weeks,” Sigerius said.

“Two weeks?”

“If he hasn’t fallen before then.” Sigerius eyed him thoughtfully. “Aaron, listen, can you keep a secret? Yes, of course you can. You’ve already heard half of it anyway.”

Without waiting for an answer Sigerius confided in him (his deep, calm voice sounded charged) that it was D66 chief Thom de Graaf who called to say that Kruidenier, the current Minister of Education, was expected to be sacked within a month, or would resign, which in itself wasn’t earthshaking news: it had been the talk of the town in The Hague for the past few weeks. “And would I make myself available.” Normally his father-in-law spoke deliberately, placing a full stop after just about every word, but now the sentences gurgled forth like a brook, his small nostrils flared with triumph. “Could be as early as next week. Or six months from now.”

Sigerius looked at him expectantly. Aaron racked his brains for something appropriate to say, but drew a blank. He was overwhelmed by the news, more forcefully than Sigerius could have been, it had a physical effect on him, as though he’d been given a kick in the backside. Sigerius a Cabinet minister — somewhere in his exhausted body a sprinkler started spouting adrenaline. He had to say something about Kruidenier and his squabbling with parliament, he’d read about it, the guy had misinformed the MPs regarding alleged fraud in public colleges. But his mouth was too dry to get a word out. He stared at the shoe racks alongside Sigerius’s face, a dark blotch on which no doubt surprise or even disbelief was starting to take form. He focused on a pair of waltzed-out, matt-black pumps.