Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” she shouted, without stopping. “And he’s got a son too.”

“Say what ?”

“He’s got a son.” Without getting off, she did a wobbly 180-degree turn and rode back to him. “A son named Wilbert. Wilbert Sigerius.”

“So you and Janis have a stepbrother?”

“If you want to call it that. We never see him, he leads his own life. Just like us.”

He bombarded her with questions, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him much about this Wilbert, except that in her youngest days she had been his downstairs neighbor. (“Downstairs neighbor?” he cried. “OK, explain.”) She told him a complicated story that took him a while to get straight. In the early ’70s the two families had lived on the Antonius Matthaeuslaan in Utrecht, Sigerius with his first wife, a certain Margriet, and their little boy, that’ll have been Wilbert, at number 59B, the upstairs apartment. Below, at 59A, lived Tineke with this Theun and their two young daughters.

She remembered the fights between Sigerius and Margriet above their heads, altercations they could literally follow word for word as they sat at the kitchen counter, she and Tineke, with Janis in her high chair, eating sweetened yogurt, just as she recalled Wilbert’s menacing tirades, frenzied, thunderous stomping, Margriet’s histrionics. Within a few years, that neighborliness culminated in the classical three-way marital drama: Tineke and Siem, she downstairs and he upstairs, fell in love and were caught in the act by Wilbert’s mother, that Margriet woman, although Joni wasn’t privy to the details.

“Cheating rats,” said Aaron.

Prior to the marital meltdown, the racket-making ruffian from upstairs would often traipse through their house to the paved courtyard out back, trampling strawberry plants and knocking over pots. He smelled of sweet soap. After the divorce, Wilbert came to see them just once, she seemed to recall. When Sigerius took them with him to America, that was the end of that.

In the photo album from that period Aaron spotted an overgrown gnome with jet-black hair, the same widely spaced, inky eyes as his father and unpleasantly full lips, insolent as hell, you could just see it. Only later did Joni tell him that he had been the neighborhood bully, a boy who easily terrorized even the older children. Forced them to eat toads he’d caught. Fabricated small bombs with petrol he had siphoned out of parked cars, peed through old people’s mail slots. Coerced the daughter of people up the road into stealing money from her mother’s wallet. Joni’s only first-hand memory of Wilbert’s antics concerned one warm evening when he showed up with one of his cohorts, having found the downstairs front door open, and suddenly stood there in her bedroom. They each carried an enormous green rubber boot, probably Sigerius’s rain boots (when he was still just the upstairs neighbor), that they’d filled to the brim with sandbox sand. The boys poked a yellow PVC pipe between the bars of her bed, goaded her into crying, and when her three-year-old mouth went wide open, they dumped the sand over her face. The grainy taste, how the sand found its way into her throat like a fist, clammy, cool, and dark in her eyes and nose. She’d nearly choked, she said.

A freight train rumbled along the parallel tracks. Startled, Tineke opened her eyes, and for two deafening seconds she stared at him. In Venlo he had taken his oxazepam, but he could feel that the straitjacket around his heart muscles needed an extra tug. So much was evident in those serrated blue irises: condemnation, contempt, disappointment. Arrogance. With a shudder she folded down the collar of her jacket and closed her eyes again. He collected saliva in his cheeks and wriggled his wallet out of his back pocket. Focusing on Tineke’s closed eyes, he slid out a strip of oxazepam and pushed two tablets through the foil. The girl in the red shop uniform watched him, it was the first time she deigned to look at him, she stopped chewing momentarily. A thin line had been traced around her lips with black make-up pencil, vulgar, dated, “a black-belt blowjob,” Joni used to call it. He put the pills in his mouth and sent them, riding on the gob of spit, off to his stomach.

Not long after Joni’s unbosoming, he and Sigerius were sitting at the corner of the long bar in the athletic center’s canteen, both of them slightly woozy from the hot shower following their usual Thursday evening training, he with a mug of beer and a cigarette, Sigerius on tonic water as he still had work to do. His father-in-law was casually dressed: a pristine baby-blue lambswool sweater over a button-down shirt, calves bulging inside ironed corduroy trousers, his wide, loafered feet resting on the bar stool, against which his corpulent leather gym bag leaned like an indolent beast. Every few minutes Sigerius raised his hand to greet a passerby. Aaron felt the slight awkwardness of being in the company of the rector in public.

The canteen was large and 1980s-bleak and reminded him of the Pac-Man playing surface, half-wall cement block partitions that prevented the potted plants from getting enough light, foosball, and two pool tables. The low-rise flannel-upholstered seating units were empty at this late hour, chlorine fumes from the indoor swimming pool somewhere in the belly of the sports complex mixed with the odor of deep-fried bar snacks and the linoleum floor. They recapped their training session, chatted about the university, about the Student Union, which was a thorn in Sigerius’s side, this is off the record, he kept saying. Aaron had been beating around the bush for a few weeks, but now he said: “By the way, Siem, d’you know, I had absolutely no idea you have a son.”

Sigerius was in the middle of a gulp of tonic water. He set his glass down on the bar, wiped his mouth and after a few seconds’ silence said: “Well, well. So she told you. Couldn’t keep it under wraps forever.”

“I was really surprised. I had no idea.”

“Are you shocked?”

“A bit. A bit. It’s kind of unexpected, of course. You’re all such a happy family. I’d never have guessed.”

“I completely understand. I really do. It’s no joke either.”

Aaron, struck by Sigerius’s grave tone of voice, chose his words carefully. “Of course …,” he replied, “these things happen. Statistically speaking. Every day, in fact.”

Sigerius rasped his hand over his stubbly chin, he took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose. “That’s kind of you,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s true.”

“Divorce isn’t common?” Aaron asked, surprised.

“ Divorce? ” Sigerius grimaced at him, his ears trembled with surprise, but his eyes suddenly grew tired, he aged on the spot. Grinning, he plucked a loose hair from his sleeve and let it flutter to the floor. Then he stared straight ahead, as though he were weighing something up.

“Aaron,” he said, “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but I’m talking about manslaughter. About a brutal murder that the lawmakers oblige us to call manslaughter. The bastard killed a man. He’s been locked up for four years already. You didn’t know that part, did you?”

It was nearly eleven at night. About ten meters away the beanstalk behind the bar stood rinsing glasses, his shirtsleeves rolled up; with the exception of two sweatsuited chinwaggers at the pool table, the canteen was empty. Everything they said reached into the pores of the cement blocks. The brief silence he was forced to drop was a thing, a heavy object. A murderer? Blushing, he said: “Siem, you’re joking. Please tell me you’re making this up.”

“I wish I were.” In a forced attempt to remain offhand about the hard facts of his life, Sigerius told him about his one and only offspring, a guy about Aaron’s age. Nothing to write home about. A life of misdemeanors, drug abuse, relapses. The very same Wilbert whom Joni had so dispassionately described became in Sigerius’s version a criminal who had twisted himself like a corkscrew into a life of wretchedness. One weekday in 1993 Wilbert Sigerius hit rock bottom by beating a fifty-two-year-old man to death. “The Netherlands is a wonderful country,” said Sigerius. “No matter how dysfunctional you are, there’s a great big professional circle of friends ready to help you. Anyone who doesn’t have the balls to just get out and work is given a nice subsidized job, even if they’ve got a criminal record.”