Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Strangely enough he yearns not so much for the security of his house as for Tineke, he yearns to curl up against her sleeping body. But he’s not there yet, not by a long shot. In the kitchen he removes the dishcloth-tourniquet, impatient blood immediately fills the salmon-pink gash in his shoulder. He binds it with gauze and adhesive tape. His body is covered with clotted blood, his feet are as brown as goat’s hooves. He switches off the table lamp in the living room window and walks toward the bedroom, his feet now in his running shoes. He creeps into the room, whispers “hello, sweetheart” to make sure she’s asleep and in two steps is standing in the bathroom. He showers, avoiding his shoulder as much as possible; it takes him twenty minutes, his foot stings and throbs.

Tomorrow he’ll have to lie about her daughter, it won’t be easy, an intense anticipatory regret elicits a deep affection for his wife. He turns off the tap. It’s her daughter we’re talking about.

The summer dies down. The months following his descent into hell are uneventful. So uneventful that it makes him nervous, this uneventfulness is a relentless burden. Tineke was not aware of his degradation, he’s relieved for that, but her ignorance only augments his isolation. He never mentioned the wound on his foot, he bluffed about the gash in his shoulder, told her it was the result of an unlucky spill at a glass-strewn frat house, he really should have dropped by a first-aid station. Not a word from Joni. Aaron no longer comes to training sessions, good, correct, he canceled their dan exam by letter to the judo association.

Joni plays it neatly by flying off to California while they’re vacationing on Crete. Tineke is flabbergasted, but he defends her sudden departure, McKinsey does not wait for Mommy and Daddy to come back from holiday, he says, meanwhile biting his nails: every day of their vacation he plans to spill the beans, tell his wife how he really got those strange wounds, to be totally honest, but he holds his tongue. In fact he never really comes close. They’re eating souvlaki when Joni phones Tineke’s cell, he forces a cramped smile as his food goes cold; even when it’s clear that mother and daughter are carrying on a neutral, normal conversation he can’t manage to swallow a single bite.

Back in Enschede he is greeted by relatively good news, confirmation that he did the intelligent thing: just keep your mouth shut, wait and see what happens. And what happens: that website of theirs has frozen, no new photos for several weeks, and then it vanishes from the Web entirely. Apparently they were making the best of a bad situation. He relaxes somewhat. Or is it because Joni is in America?

Meanwhile things are very quiet indeed. Not a peep from California. It is Tineke, of course, who is most surprised. She thinks she understands why Aaron is making himself scarce, although he hasn’t yet dared tell her the judo sessions have stopped. “Siem, honey, Joni’s keeping awfully quiet, don’t you think?” This opportunity to open up, he lets pass by too. What’s more, he does just the opposite. To his own amazement he is prepared to do anything to keep Joni from blowing the whistle on him. He undertakes something extremely gutless and futile. Not to mention risky. He creates a fake e-mail address for his daughter on Yahoo and from that cursed phony out-box he sends brief messages, sometimes longer ones, to his own e-mail address. “Dear Dad and Mom and Janis, it’s terrific here, been over the Golden Gate Bridge, no phone yet but fortunately there’s e-mail. McKinsey is great but intensive, love, Joni”—that sort of drivel, and because Tineke doesn’t use e-mail herself, he prints out these stinking lies of his for her. It fills him with disgust and self-loathing, but he does it all the same.

As though he’s being punished: no word from The Hague. He peruses the newspapers and journals until his fingers are black, reads memoirs of illustrious statesmen at bedtime. Rumor has it he’s in The Hague’s waiting room, there’s been a leak somewhere. On a Radio East talk show someone — a college student, no less — says he’s going to become Minister of Education, and the next day he has to shake off four journalists.

Annoyingly, this vacuum fills up with self-doubt, it just happens. Isn’t he being overly self-righteous? Sometimes he thinks it downright stupid to equate that Internet site with prostitution, it’s just not the same thing; these are the moments he considers himself a narrow-minded old fart, but a minute later the taboo takes his breath away again, he almost wants to scream with misery, and he treats himself and his wife to another phony e-mail. Then, again: am I being too uptight? Am I not the one who’s a moral and ethical stick-in-the mud? A frightened, sexless man?

While he runs the university on auto-pilot he thinks about his children. He can get his head around Wilbert’s downfall, with a mother like that, with a father like that, a father who ditches his family. He’s asked for a son like Wilbert. But Joni is another story, he tells and retells Joni’s story, which is his own story: a girl destined by him for happiness and success, a daughter to whom he offered security, gave all the attention a self-fulfilled man like himself has to offer — partly to ease his guilty conscience about Wilbert, he readily admits, but in the end she did receive all his love, not to mention reaped it, far more than he got in his own youth.

Wednesday, October 11th. As he and Tineke sit watching the evening news, dinner plates on their laps, De Graaf rings. In a two-hour conversation, Sigerius learns that D66 will officially withdraw support for Hildo Kruidenier after the weekend, maybe earlier; the inside story is that this public hazard is dragging the party down in the polls, it’s untenable, he has to go. Kruidenier will resign, there is no other option, and therefore De Graaf wants to present Sigerius the next day as the new minister. Is he ready? More than that, he answers, and yes, he’ll be able to get to the Prime Minister’s office tomorrow morning, Kok wants to see him. Does he mind if the Interior Ministry does a security check — of course he doesn’t mind, bye Thom, for sure, thank you, I’m very pleased too.

The next day, on his way back to Enschede following a relaxed interview with the PM, De Graaf phones again. He hears, in euphemistic terms, that the National Security people came across Wilbert, and they want to conduct a limited security investigation to rule out the possibility of blackmail.

Blackmail — the word triggers him. During a sleepless night he ponders which of them, Wilbert or Joni, is more of a liability; he asks himself the perverse question: which is worse, murder or porn? For the first time since his undoing he gets out of bed and looks at the young women on the websites. He thinks about them. About the mystery of their choices, about Joni’s choice, about the choice of all these girls; he looks them in the eye intending to read desperation, self-destruction, insanity perhaps, regret, deep-seated sluttishness, rotten teeth, traces of abuse and neglect, or else simple, honest-to-goodness stupidity — but the only thing he sees is beauty. They are all, pretty much without exception, beautiful. Not concert pianists or doctoral students, maybe, but above-average attractive women; you could also say: as looks go, successful young women, thoroughbreds in possession of eyes, hair, feet, legs, hands with which they could make it out in the civilized world, could snag themselves potent, healthy marriage partners, land themselves decent jobs. He is no sociologist, nor a biologist, but couldn’t these girls have in fact been born into decent families? To good-looking parents with balanced, sturdy genes, with genetic material that produces daughters that every man wants to have, or touch — or barring that, at least look at ? Behind every nude photo worth paying for are parents who conceived a desirable child. Behind every sex site is a man like him.