Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

He sprang upright and looked at the dark outline of her shoulder blades against the sheets. Was she serious? Did she really doubt what had happened in that bathroom? “Joni,” he said, “don’t be so incredibly naïve. And what about that jizz-hankie? Made up too? Come on, be reasonable.”

“Look who’s talking,” she snarled. “You’re going to tell me what’s reasonable and what’s not?”

“I’m just expressing an opinion, and yes, I think you’re being highly unreasonable. What was the upshot of the case?”

“Highly unreasonable …” She sighed theatrically. “Goddammit, Aaron,” she exploded, “I can’t really take this right now. You’ve been acting like an imbecile all week, just now too, at the table, with your tales of heroism, and you’re calling me unreasonable? Go take another sleeping pill. Good night.” She jerked the sheet farther to her side and buried her head in her pillow. He was glad the light was out, because he could feel himself blushing. “Tales of heroism?” he said as calmly as possible. “What are you talking about?”

She did not answer.

“Well?”

“Aaron. You don’t really think I bought that crap about Manus, do you?”

“Then don’t buy it.”

“I don’t believe a stinking word of it.”

Silence. Five minutes. Ten minutes? He gazed at the gently billowing curtains. He started to believe she was sleeping, and that infuriated him. She knew he couldn’t sleep after an argument. You don’t sleep without an argument either, she’d say tomorrow. In the silence he suddenly sensed that she was keeping something from him. She fobbed him off with a sanitized, Aaron-friendly version of the story. She knew better than to be honest about anyone with a pecker. In the four years of their relationship, jealousy had become such a powerful mechanism that it was impossible to guess what she actually thought of the guy. Even if she’d had twins with that Wilbert she wouldn’t tell him.

“Another one of your crushes, I’ll bet,” he snapped.

“Whatever,” she snapped back.

He swallowed his anger. “And you still haven’t answered my question. Why the tantrum? Why smash a dish of potato croquettes to smithereens?”

She did not answer. For several minutes he looked at her back. Until he could hear from her breathing that she was asleep.

In the days that followed, Sigerius avoided his elder daughter; for Aaron, at least, it was hardly a coincidence that they never once sat down to eat at the same time. Sigerius mostly ate out. Joni seemed to have forgotten their nighttime conversation and avoided him . Her behavior annoyed him; one minute she was like a toddler in happy anticipation of America, the next minute she sat there blubbering about Ennio.

For his part, he was busy at Tubantia Weekly . Thank God. The fireworks disaster had undeniably brought out the best in him, and despite his sleepless nights he had outdone himself these past few weeks. Blaauwbroek was impressed. His boss was the first person they had heard on Joni’s answering machine, far ahead of the platoon of concerned friends and family, and he sounded like an eleven-year-old watching the circus ride into town. “Bever, good afternoon to you, Henk Blaauwbroek here on the machine. I assume you’re alive. Did you also hear a blast? Hibernation’s over, kid. Have you got photos? We’re putting out an extra edition, you get the picture.”

He and his boss had a love-hate relationship. During staff outings and over drinks they were boisterously brotherly, but at the workplace it was a constant battle. Since Aaron had studied at the Art Academy and not at journalism school, Blaauwbroek accused him of having artistic aspirations, a card he never tired of playing. “It ain’t gonna hang in a museum, kid,” or “why not try a shorter shutter speed,” or “there’s our still-life fetishist”—how often had he put up with remarks like that. And he was a lousy news photographer, he was the first one to admit it. Too slow for the real work, too hesitant, not passionate about hard news, but that’s why, he’d reply snidely, he worked for Blaauwbroek and not for Reuters.

But now he strode through media-clogged Enschede as though dispatched by Time magazine itself. For once, he’d come up with ideas all on his own: at a Chinese wholesaler in Liège he took before-during-and-after photos of 1.1-class fireworks, the ammonium chloride kind stored in the Enschede storage bunkers. Together with two ex-residents and the local police chief he crisscrossed the disaster area in a space suit. He shot a series of portraits of now-homeless Roombeekers whom he talked into posing in the torn and blood-stained clothes they were wearing that Saturday, May 13th (his photo of the man wearing one flip-flop and carrying barbecue tongs, who had wandered for hours half naked through the burning streets, made it into a Victim Assistance brochure). From atop the dilapidated roof of the Grolsch brewery he photographed the scorched neighborhood — a shocking war-zone photo a national newspaper bought from him.

The air on his calamity-planetoid was, to put it otherwise, rarefied, and it made him light-headed. He maintained that every Enschede resident who was alive and still had all his limbs had no business grousing, and to suit his actions to his words he returned, as the first and only “victim,” the 1,500 guilders cash the city council had distributed to all those affected by the accident. Joni thought his gesture pompous, even tactless. “It’s time you drop the stunts,” she said.

On their last day at the farmhouse he went to the university library to update their website on a public computer, a shit job that made him wonder why he was the one doing it; this whole website thing was Joni’s idea, but he took the Dreamweaver course; she talked about clean prostitution, but he sat here shitting himself every time a student walked into the room. These were the last photos from the series they had shot at the Golden Tulip, they had to hurry up and post something new.

When he left the library the atmosphere hung like a crystal ball over the campus. Satisfaction with what he had just accomplished temporarily blocked out the visions he’d had while dozing at the library table; he’d dreamt he saw himself lying on the mossy tiles of the central square. The first stars wove through the uppermost blue, elongated wisps of orange hung above the treetops to the west. While he unlocked his bike the Bastille spat out a women’s debating club, garrulous girls who had just gobbled up their weekly cafeteria sausage with fries and limp-boiled vegetables and were now busily searching for their bicycles.

He decided to take the inside route. A leafy cycle path led him to the broad dirt jogging track. Three runners scuffed with a muted crunch over the gravel, two female students sat in the middle oval with a bottle of wine. The sun sank behind the ivy-covered wall that hid the outdoor pool from view. Warm air caressed his scalp. He shut his eyes for a swarm of bugs and was wondering if the pool contained enough water to extinguish that orange ball when, with a whack, his camera bag was knocked off his shoulder. It dangled on his forearm and rattled against the spokes of the front wheel. A girl on an upright bike passed him, muttering a barely audible “sorry.”

“Fucking bimbo!” he shouted, surprised at how readily his contentment turned into rage. Breathing hard, he coasted to a standstill and stood with his legs spread. Jealousy, the fear of losing her, was always the root of everything.

It was snowing when he arrived at the farmhouse. The poplars on the northern edge of the garden blossomed so furiously that the twilight sky was saturated with flakes and the grass was covered with a translucent layer of fluff. Cuddly clumps of white danced around Joni’s bare ankles as she sat on the mossy terrace alongside the former stalls, like a … yes, like a what? Like a melting snowman.