Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

No, he didn’t know a thing.

OK, good — say no more, water under the bridge, let’s get to work, case closed, it seemed — but for Aaron it was case open , water over the bridge, certainly now he lay there, once again, wide awake alongside Joni. For now at least, no tormenting fantasies about her escapades with the chutney-hawker, for now no agonizing about Stol and McKinsey, but you could hardly call it a solace. What had happened? What was Sigerius so worried about? Why did she keep him in the dark? The night stretched itself out like a torture rack of time. Sigerius’s fear had become his own, now he suddenly had to know if she’d talked to that jailbird, and more to the point: why . What was going on here?

While she lay in a deep slumber next to him, as far away as possible on her side of the bed it seemed, he worked his way through the worst possible scenarios. Wilbert had molested her. No, they had had an affair. Bonnie and Clyde. Year after year she visited Wilbert in his cell for a weekly hour of hanky-panky in a cube of tempered glass. There was a child of theirs out there somewhere, she’d given birth, or at the very least had an abortion — and his morbid fantasies whirled around in this vein, picked up speed, flung themselves about, ever faster, ever wilder, until the electric field was enough to rouse Joni: she woke with a start. She lay there panting and smacking her lips to dreams whose content he could only guess. She flipped on the bedside lamp, groped for her watch. “Damn,” she said. Only then did she look beside her. He was sitting upright, his back against the textured wallpaper. The glance she shot him was … indescribable. What was in it? Ice. Disdain, disapproval. Contempt? Her anger had fermented, and what he tasted was … loathing .

And yet he managed to produce a complete sentence. “Joni,” he choked, “has Wilbert phoned you?”

She sat up, wrestled with the bedsheet, looked at him mockingly. She let out a contemptuous little chuckle, for a moment he expected an answer, but she turned away, shaking her head, burrowed her blond hair deep into the pillow and said: “G’night, dickhead.”

He was allowed back in his house. “Goin’ home,” he chirped after their last breakfast at the farmhouse, and without another word to each other, but as though it was perfectly normal that Joni should join him, they loaded their bags into the Alfa and drove off, he at the wheel, Joni in the passenger seat with the guinea pig cage on her lap. The sky above the campus was bright blue. They drove in silence down the Langenkampweg and the Hengelosestraat; he was familiar with these arguments and knew exactly how long they would last.

They didn’t go for outright bickering, and both considered drawn-out arguments a royal pain in the ass. Of course they’d had plenty of rows, clashes that shook the doors off their hinges, but these were incidents that diminished in frequency the better they came to assess each other’s weaknesses and flashpoints. Joni hated arguments because she was too efficient, because she was focused on the shortest route to success, which for her was not the same as being right or winning an argument (as it was for him) but about arriving at a situation that offered her an advantage . As far as she was concerned, arguing was, she once screamed at him during, ironically enough, a grueling, entirely out-of-hand dispute, “un-pro-duc-tive!”

As they approached his street their attention drifted along the wooden partitions, the eye-level piss-yellow fencework that ran the length of the Lasondersingel and turned the corner at the Blijdensteinlaan. “Just like Asterix and Obelix’s village,” he said to Joni, “only less invincible.” She did not laugh.

He himself was a coward. He avoided confrontations whenever possible; an argument with Joni was more than anything a risk. For the past four years he’d been telling his friends that Joni would be the mother of his children, and to avoid anything that might jeopardize that, he had, until recently, tiptoed around her.

They toddled uneasily up the path to the front door, the key he’d been given by the town council slipped effortlessly into the brand-new lock. “Leave the animals in the hall for now.”

Glass. He’d heard endless accounts of the shock wave, an invisible Hun that swept relentlessly through the streets of Roombeek without skipping a single address — and still he was awestruck. The entire ground floor, which felt small after two weeks chez Sigerius, was littered with splinters, shards, and rubble. On the table, on the armchair seat cushions, on every uncovered centimeter of his bookshelves, between the buttons on the remote control, on the windowsills of opposing windows, one of which had been blown out, in the kitchen sink, on the cabinets — there was glass everywhere . The city council had boarded up the shattered sliding doors with wood panels.

“Double glazing,” he said, “gotta get double glazing.”

They drifted about the sparkling living room for a quarter of an hour at a loss for what to do; and still Joni was silent. He handed her the only pair of rubber gloves he could find under the sink, and put on his own winter gloves. The thaw would set in within an hour, he estimated. He vacuumed the windowsills with his Nilfisk. They scooped the broken glass into garbage bags, in silence. He picked up the two breakfast plates they had left standing on the coffee table the morning of the wedding, and on the way to the kitchen he held a half-eaten slice of bread now sprinkled with glass under her nose. “Wanna bite?” he asked.

“Cut it out !” she screamed. With a furious swipe she knocked his arm away, the plate arced through the air and broke noisily. He exploded, grabbed her by the chin, squeezed it hard, and hissed through his teeth: “ What went on between you and that fuck ing Wilbert?”

“Let go of me,” she said.

He squeezed harder, spit trickled onto his hand. “Tell me,” he bellowed, but instead of answering him, she growled with rage. He pushed her away. “I’m sick of it!” he screamed. “ Sick and tired! Always these half-truths. Just fucking tell me what’s going on!”

Her eyes grew to unnatural dimensions. She was taken aback by his outburst, he could tell, the conceit drained from her face. She slumped into the armchair nearest the demolished sliding door, realized the seat was strewn with shattered glass and jumped back up. She cursed.

“Turn around,” he said. To his surprise, she obeyed. He slapped off bits of glass from her buttocks with the flat of his hand, and had to squat down to pick the splinters out of her skirt. This operation released the tension, apparently for both of them, because before he was finished she said: “All right then. Listen.” She sighed deeply, but remained silent.

“I’m listening,” he said.

Again it was a few moments before she spoke. “This isn’t to get any farther than this room. What I’m about to say is … let’s just say I’m not proud of it.”

“OK,” he said, worried but eager. “ Talk . You’d got to the court case.” As she was now glass-free, he placed his hands on her hips, his thumbs resting against the flanks of her buttocks. She allowed it.

“Siem insisted I testify,” she said, suddenly businesslike. “He wanted me to say I heard what had gone on in the bathroom. That I was in the hallway and overheard the whole shebang. The sounds. What was said. You follow me now?”

He did not respond, but pressed his thumbs softly into her buttocks.

“Siem demanded that I blow the whistle on his son, my stepbrother. The kid I’d gone horseback riding with the week before. That I … shaft him. That I lie in court.”