Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

The word “shaft” did not sit well with him. He gave her ass a shove, she took a step forward. “Excellent,” he said. “The gloves are off.”

“Asshole!” she cried. She gave the armchair a kick.

“Why? He had to go. Your father was completely in the right.”

To his surprise, she stayed calm. She grabbed the vacuum, turned it on and cleaned the seat of the armchair. When she had finished she mumbled: “The bag’s full.” She dropped the hose wand and looked at him. “Aaron, try to relate. Just this once. I perjured myself. Against my will. I was put under pressure to betray a kid I liked. In a court of law. To his face. I committed perjury in front of him. He heard it, and he knew it.”

“And then?”

“And then?” she barked. “And then? What do you think ‘and then’? They gave him ten months. Thanks to me lying. Thanks to Siem’s manipulation. That’s what ‘and then.’ ”

He nodded. “Did Wilbert phone you?”

She wanted to say something, again something irate, but just at that moment her cell phone rang. While fumbling to retrieve it from her skirt pocket she cooled off and said: “I called him. We met up.”

She answered the phone. After announcing her name she listened attentively, stuck out her hand to him like a traffic cop, and disappeared into the kitchen. She pulled the door shut behind her with a bang. Who did she have on the line? He hurried after her and saw through the window that she’d gone all the way to the end of the overgrown backyard. She was talking indistinctly. With that criminal?

It was strangely quiet in the street; it took him a while to realize he heard no birds. The fauna had abandoned Roombeek. He had fled his house in order to simmer down. He left a note on the table saying that he’d gone to buy more vacuum cleaner bags and get something for them both to eat.

He wanted to cycle up to the Roomweg, to a small housewares shop across from the French fry joint, but once he saw the wooden fence he realized the shop now only existed in his memory. So — she did go to see Wilbert. He rode past the museum and into the neighborhood beyond it. Should he be jealous, or worried? Past the primary school he turned left and arrived at the “flower monument,” a public garden on the Deurningerstraat that overflowed with cellophane-wrapped flowers in memory of the victims. Why was he unable to show any empathy?

With a vaguely uneasy feeling he rode through Blaauwbroek’s street, glanced in the living room window, but no one was home. He crossed the railroad tracks and biked into the city center, following the Langestraat until he reached the Hema. Had his capacity for compassion completely evaporated? Was he overlooking a sort of fundamental jealousy, a blind spot that determined his view of even the most serious matters?

He paid for the vacuum cleaner bags, as well as a hunk of cheese and six muesli rolls, and walked his bike to the lingerie shop in the Havenstraat. Not entirely by coincidence, he passed Ennio’s delicatessen, on whose dark-red door hung a note saying “Closed until further notice”; he stood in front of the busily decorated shop window and examined a small tower of jars: Colman’s Original Mustard, miniature jars of Wilkin & Sons No Peel Orange Marmalade, tall jars of Mrs. Ball’s Peach Chutney, all stacked in the shape of a little man. On top, attached with barely visible nylon thread, was a bowler hat, and alongside it, on two threads, a diagonal walking stick. He imagined Ennio fussing with his wares behind that cramped window display, and concluded that Joni couldn’t possibly have had sex with the sort of person who thought up and constructed this kind of nonsense.

Was he too jealous? Should he back off? Could he be imagining things? Stol, Ennio, Wilbert, fuck, fucking, fucked — three guys who robbed him of a good night’s sleep; did their number say something about Joni, or about him?

He walked farther and went into the lingerie shop. One way or another, today or tomorrow, they had to shoot a new photo series. Maybe he could buy something usable here, something to demonstrate his goodwill. The older saleslady nodded at him. From an overfull rack he chose a brassiere made of black see-through tulle, with red stitching on the half-cups, and in a plastic bin he found some black net stockings that — said the saleslady — would suit madam perfectly. Back to work, call a truce. He cycled back to the crater, pondered his wording of the suggestion to go up to the attic and get changed. For the first time in weeks he felt something that resembled sexual desire.

For the second time that day, again almost as if it was a perfectly normal thing to do, he entered his house, this time conciliatory. “Hello!” he called out as he went into the living room. No reply; maybe she was still on the phone. He walked through the empty room, looked through the kitchen window into the backyard, but she wasn’t there either. He went back into the hallway and knocked, against his better judgment, on the WC door.

He smiled: would she have had the same idea, the eternal peace-making elixir, and be up in the attic already? Who knows, maybe their telepathic signals had survived the storm. He bounded up the stairs and scanned the landing — the folding stairs had not been pulled down, he saw at once — but still looked, his mouth half open, up at the attic hatch. Shut tight. Of course. The copper-colored padlock glowered frostily at him. The house was empty. Through the bathroom window he could see that her bike, which had waited for her alongside the conifers since the wedding in Zaltbommel, was gone.

His arousal long dissipated, he crashed down the stairs. Since the vacuum cleaner bags lay on top, it took him a few minutes to find his note on the dining room table. Her handwriting under his own.

His reaction to what he read was atypical for him, for the situation, for his deeply rooted fear of losing her, but apparently not at all atypical in a pathological sense, because when he recalled his behavior to Haitink some months later, she nodded furiously, a pumpjack on the fields of his psyche. He described to her how his consciousness did not shrink into a small, hard ball of regret, as one might hope and assume, but expanded into a universe of rage and resentment. “ Fuck !” he screamed, “Fucking hell! You bitch ! You sick, snivelling little bitch !” He then spent several minutes tearing the cardboard packaging of the vacuum cleaner bags to shreds, slammed the bags against the corner of his dining room table, and then tore each of the bags individually to shreds. With sweat dripping from his skull, he seized the note from among the scraps of paper, wadded it up, and took it to the toilet. He pissed on it. Before he flushed he fished it back out of his urine (“Aaron,” said Haitink, “try to ascertain for yourself just why you did that”) and reread what she had written.

Aaron, I’ve got good news for you: I’ve just heard that Ennio is dead. Also, I’m glad you can get back in your house, because for the time being I have no intention of seeing you. Don’t call. Joni .

Now that it’s finally a bit calmer on campus — the last exams of the academic year have been wrapped up, most of the staff have gone abroad, either in campers or airplanes; as he cycles to the administrative wing in the morning he finds Tubantia as in his nightmares: ready to be disbanded — Sigerius goes to The Hague to test the waters. He likes traveling first class. Seated at an out-of-the-way table in Café Dudok’s back garden, he lunches with Frederik Olde Kannegieter, who has been at the Finance Department for the better part of the morning. They have managed to squeeze in an hour to discuss which way the wind blows, in Kannegieter’s opinion, in the Cabinet deliberating Sigerius’s appointment. They’ve known each other since Boston, where he had arranged for Kannegieter to teach a course on decision science. Many an afternoon was spent in his MIT office working together on an article on the “traveling salesman problem,” a piece that, for reasons that now escape him, never came to fruition. Later, Kannegieter was rector in Groningen, board member at KPN, and was now in his fifth year as chairman of the Central Planning Office.