Authors: Peter Buwalda
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.”
He sounded unexpectedly bitter, and a damn sight more conservative than usual—this scenario was clearly way too close to home, something that forced him to throw his liberal principles overboard. Aaron was glad Sigerius did not look at him, perhaps out of shame, so he could let his own emotions cool off, that usually worked best; he was overcome by a strange exhilaration that
consisted partly of delight, grateful to be taken into another’s confidence, and partly of discomfort with this sudden intimacy. It felt as though they were dancing across the canteen together.
“They gave him a pair of overalls and a decent salary, so he had somewhere to show up in the morning with his lunchbox. After grief followed by even more grief that we won’t go into right now, he was given the chance to start over again—what more could a person want? At the Hoogovens steelworks, of all places. An excellent company, tens of thousands of Dutch men and women have earned an honest living there for the past 100 years. A sporting chance, you’d say. But the first spat he gets into, the kid picks up a sledgehammer and beats his direct superior, a foreman looking forward to a gold watch from the head office, flat as a pancake. I sat in the public gallery when the prosecutor described what various witnesses had seen. What happens to a person when you bash them with a four-kilo sledgehammer.”
Sigerius wet his mustache by pulling his lower lip over it, pressing it flat with his thumb and index finger. Aaron didn’t know what to say. This was not your average revelation. It was a fucking bombshell. He thought he knew a thing or two about Sigerius, he thought he understood what this man, whom he looked up to despite desperately trying not to, had dealt with his entire life, understood the path to success his life had taken, the essentials of that life, and now he discovered he knew absolutely nothing. (That sensation of ignorance, he realized later, was something he should have just got used to: it was the story of his life in Enschede. He never knew anything.)
“Eight years,” Sigerius said loudly; the bartender, quite a bit closer to them now, was scrubbing the draining racks. “The prosecutors demanded ten plus mandatory psychiatric treatment. But he impressed them at the psychiatric observation clinic … yeah,
there, he did well,” and here he lowered his voice, “entirely compos mentis. My son is not at all stupid.”
As though it were a stiff drink rather than tonic water, he put the glass to his lips and drained it. He set the empty glass down with gentle precision on the broad cherrywood bar.
The train slowed down, the suburbs of Brussels slid into view, the passengers standing in the aisle peered out, craning their necks at the gray, haphazard urban sprawl. Tineke, who had reopened her eyes, brought a small mirror and dark-red lipstick out of a red-leather handbag, painted her wrinkled mouth with a steady hand, repacked the accessories and stared, scowling, at a point just between Aaron and the man next to him.
Wilbert Sigerius. He had never met the fellow, after all these years the fascination had long since faded. Still, it occurred to him that everything he had found out about her stepson over the course of his Enschede years must have been just as awful for Tineke as for Sigerius. She had contributed two healthy daughters, girls to whom they had given a wholeheartedly devoted, not to mention an indulgent and privileged, upbringing; Joni and Janis had both grown into outgoing, stable, at times maddeningly rational adults. Sigerius, on the other hand, had saddled her with that viper.
The train trundled into Brussels Central Station and shuddered to a halt. The crowd in the aisle moved slowly toward the stillshut doors: waiting quietly for salvation, a hundred silent heads in isolated prayer. Tineke didn’t budge. He could just as easily stay in the train until Brussels South, although there was a train to Linkebeek from Central as well. The girl removed her chewing gum from her black-lined mouth and reached across Tineke’s lap toward the metal rubbish bin. Then she stood up, brushed against his left
knee, and joined the current of disembarking passengers. Now Joni’s mother stood up too and, her back to him, removed a tartan roller-suitcase from the luggage rack. Seen from behind, with those slender, pointy hips, he would never have recognized her.
On an impulse, he decided to get off, he wasn’t sure exactly why. Should he let this complete coincidence simply evaporate into nothing? All he had to do was stay put, and the meeting wouldn’t even have taken place. His heart pounding, he left the train, the stony smell of the platform filled his lungs. Almost against his will he pursued Tineke, maintaining a five-step distance, as she trotted up the stairs toward the central hall. Once in the light-brown marble open space, she set the valise down on its back wheels and dragged it into the bustle. Just inside the main entrance she took a cell phone from the pocket of her maroon wool overcoat, punched in a number, and started to talk. He saw her step into Brussels, she was gone, and again he hesitated.
Instead of returning to his platform, instead of
not
living, he ran after her, into the open air. He scanned the shadows cast by the streetlamps. She was not part of the throng at the intersection leading to Brussels’ Grote Markt. He walked to the edge of the sloping sidewalk and looked around. There she was, she had turned right onto the Putterij; quickening his pace, he closed the dark gap of twenty meters, and before he knew what he was doing he placed his hand on the heavy fabric of her coat. She stood still and turned around. She looked surprised, startled. Her meticulously made-up skin covered her jaws and cheekbones like wrinkled paper.
“Tineke,” he mumbled, “I …”
“I beg your pardon?” she asked kindly.
“Tineke,” he said, more forcefully this time, “I don’t know if this is the best …”
This time she really looked at him, he could see she focused. She stuck out a hand that briefly touched his arm, as though that extra tactile assistance might help. “Weren’t you sitting across from me just now in the tr—?” Her face changed again, she raised her droopy eyelids as far up as possible, her mouth became an astonished, scarlet “O.”
“Aaron!” she cried, “of course! Aaron Bever. But my boy, what …” She let go of the handgrip on her suitcase, it toppled over. She took a step toward him, grasped his shoulders, and gave him two kisses. Over her fragile shoulders he saw a car pull up to the curb, a sporty dark-blue BMW that flashed its headlights twice. She turned and waved. When she looked back at him, she said: “We’re in a hurry. I have to be going. But Aaron, I absolutely didn’t recognize you. You’ve … changed. Enschede was so long ago …” She clutched his lower arm, looked straight at him. “Oh dear …” she said, “but how are
you
… things turned out so badly …”
He was too flabbergasted to reply. Any moment the door of the BMW could swing open and Sigerius would come walking their way. He gasped for breath, felt dizzy. Since he could think of nothing else to say, he stammered: “Say, Tineke, how’s Siem? Is that him?” He gestured feebly at the impatient car.
She let go, just as abruptly as she had grasped him. She took a step back, her face slammed shut like a lead door.
“
What?
” she spat. “You must be joking.”
“No,” he said. “Why?” He felt his eyes go watery.
“You rotten kid,” she said. “What do you want from me? What are you doing here? Are you stalking me?”
The car door opened. A small man of about forty-five got out, his wavy black hair and trimmed beard glistening under the street lights. They looked at each other. The man, who in an unnerving,
aggressive way was not Sigerius, smiled politely. Another car swerved around them, honking, and behind the BMW a minibus switched on its flashers.
Tineke reached for the handle of the passenger door.
“You don’t know?” she said. “You really don’t know, do you?” She laughed awkwardly, her face a scrawny grimace of disbelief. “Siem is dead.” She shouted over the traffic. “He’s been dead for eight years. We buried him in early 2001. Or are you just trying to upset me?”
“No,” he said.
Then she got in.
According to his résumé, Sigerius has a pretty good understanding of coincidence. In his Berkeley days, and later in Boston, he taught practical courses in probability theory and stochastic optimization to first-year math and physics students. He was paid to impart the sensation of mathematical order amid chaos to classrooms full of emotionally stunted number nerds. These were chess players, ZX-spectrum scholars, Rubik’s wizards, not one of whom claimed a place on a university athletic team, no basketball, no baseball; they had come to Berkeley to serve quantum physics, to unleash the digital revolution. Before he bombarded the boys and that single stray girl with discrete stochasts, probability space, and Bayes’s theorem, he challenged them to relate the most spectacular piece of coincidence they’d ever experienced. Let’s have it, your most outrageous twist of fate, your spookiest fluke. As a teaser he made a probability analysis on the blackboard of the most remarkable of the students’ anecdotes.
Sigerius was reminded that he was dealing with quick-witted young adults when, once, a pale, severe-looking boy at the back of the lecture hall raised his hand and launched into a story about his grandparents’ honeymoon in the 1930s. They are on a cruise to South America and just off the coast of Chile, his grandmother drops her wedding ring overboard. Sixty years later, celebrating their diamond anniversary, the couple takes the same exact cruise,
and the two of them are there when a fisherman reels in a tuna and flings it onto the deck. Gramps insists that the fish be cut open, and what do you think? (Even though it’s been a good fifteen, nearly twenty years since those classes, he still recalls, at that “what do you think” and the kid’s serious face scanning the classroom, the smell of pulverized blackboard chalk. In his memory, the orange curtains he always drew halfway right after lunch billow in front of the wide-open windows. His stuffy classroom was located on the ninth floor of Evans Hall; summers there lasted six, seven months.)
And? No ring.
When he told that joke to Aaron Bever recently, Aaron nodded, got up, took a novel out of the bookcase and showed him where Nabokov had pulled the same stunt half a century earlier.
Coincidence is at its most striking when it manifests itself as executioner—he and his students agreed on that. When the chuckling subsided, the same translucent young man told a story about an altogether different excursion. About his brother, who was planning to travel through Europe with his girlfriend, from the northernmost point in Scandinavia down to Gibraltar in three months. They flew to Kirkenes, a town at the very tip of Norway, rented a car and made their way toward Sweden along a flat two-lane road. During that tranquil, snow-white leg of the journey they encountered just a single oncoming vehicle, a lurching Danish Scania towing a heavy trailer. Just as they pass the truck—or actually, a few seconds before, or maybe the coincidence had kicked in several minutes earlier, no, it was probably a matter of long-term metal fatigue that had been eating its way through the nuts and bolts—the truck loses its trailer. The shaft comes loose. The deep-frozen shaft that juts perpendicular to the steerable front axle turns, like a jouster’s lance, in the direction of the rental car and bores through the windshield. The trailer flips over, flinging the car into
the snowbank like an empty beer can. The girl is decapitated. The brother, at the wheel, escapes with a bruised wrist.
The boy was restrained and controlled. He sat straight up in his seat. Siem looked at him from the blackboard, he was wearing a button-down shirt with a large, pointy collar and while he talked his hand kept flattening out the same sheet of graph paper, densely scribbled with formulas. “Coincidence, huh?” Siem said. In the weeks that followed the boy never returned to class. Speculation around the coffee machine had it that the brother was himself.
What did Sigerius want to teach them? And what is he trying to tell himself now? That the probability of the improbable is huge? That so-called bizarre coincidences happen all the time. That a mathematician’s job is to judge the bizarre on its quantitative value, that is: to strip the coincidence down to its bare probability instead of assigning it some magical significance. He stares at the rain as it runs down the windows of the restaurant where the task force has convened. The brightly lit space is narrow and feels like a city bus in a car wash. The lobsters and crabs in the unappetizing wall of stacked-up aquariums next to the entrance are secretly hoping for a deluge that will upset the balance of power. Their claws are spotted with rust-colored freckles, sometimes one shifts as though it’s got an itch.