Authors: Peter Buwalda
The phone is lying in the sink—
in
it, strangely enough—and next to it a liquor bottle. Rum. It was part of last spring’s anniversary gift basket, a liter of “Lust Rum,” bottled especially for Tubantia, it’s cheap rotgut. He picks up the bottle and sees that it is threequarters empty. It was unopened before tonight, he’s certain of it. There is, he notices in a flash, a knife missing from the wooden block next to the microwave. He swerves around, looks around. Relax. That knife is safely stowed in the dishwasher. He’s gone. Still, he pulls a stubby steak knife out of the block. He walks over to the cellar stairs, turns around, goes back to the counter. Everything hurts. He takes a swig of rum, it’s poison, and walks back to the hole in the floor. The stairs creak, he’s hardly been down here these past few months; from the dust on the cement floor he sees that no one else has either. Still he checks behind all the racks.
Finally he stumbles into the utility room, it’s cold as anything in there, little puffs of condensation glide out of his mouth. The door to the terrace is ajar, one of the windowpanes has been smashed. So that’s how he got in. He pulls the door shut, turns the key, and removes it. He fastens the deadbolts.
And now? He is exhausted but sleep is out of the question. He could power his car all the way to France on adrenaline alone. The thought of drawing the curtains, turning down the heat, and crawling into bed is ludicrous. He has read enough insipid thrillers, seen enough Hollywood movies, to know that this house is the last place on earth he can afford to be unconscious. Pajamas on, teeth brushed, and lie there waiting for the plot to unfold. A fire, ignited with gasoline from Tineke’s workshop. An ice-cold gun barrel in
his neck as he starts his car tomorrow morning. An axe—he’ll wake with a start in the middle of the night, a finger tapping his forehead, tick, tick, wake up pal, upon which his skull is cleaved with the same axe Tineke uses to chop wood every autumn.
He must clean the place up. Figuring it out takes some time, but finally the drawers of the buffet roll willingly into place. He stacks the envelopes, sweeps the confetti into a dustpan, scoops the pens and pencils up off the floor. With each movement his ribs swap places. He plucks shards of glass out of the puddle of Baileys, mops the floor with a wet dishtowel. He doesn’t dare vacuum, he has to be able to
hear
. In the utility room he tears off a piece of corrugated cardboard from a wine box and, shivering from the cold, tapes it over the broken windowpane.
He has decided to set off tonight; that is, as soon as possible. As he expunges all traces of that grotesque scuffle—he scrubs away the blood stains in the front hall and living room with all-purpose cleaner, hangs Tineke’s dresses meticulously back in place, arranges the shoes on the rack, wipes the blood from the edges with a wet rag—he becomes calmer, and muses on the plotlessness of this evening. An unfinished tragedy took place, a tragedy without a glimmer of a catharsis, nothing was resolved, the bleakness has only deepened. And now? Now he is expected to join his family at Hans and Ria’s, they will greet one another, and then? Christmas will come, he will either confide in Tineke or not, and then? In the new year he will return to The Hague, and when his staff ask how his holiday was, he will answer: invigorating.
Aaron had taken the early-morning train to Brussels and stepped into a travel agency on the way to his appointment with the psychiatrist. Seated at the round multiplex table, the travel agent stuffed him like a Toulouse goose full of brochures about California: scenic drives down Highway 1, mustsee national parks, Death Valley, and much more. Only after the girl had finished her spiel did he mention his specific interest in Los Angeles.
Nothing had been booked yet, he was still just exploring possibilities. His plan was to spend part of the summer in Santa Monica, perhaps take an apartment on the beach or, if need be, a hotel; he’d enroll in a photography workshop—that was how he tried to sell it to Herreweghe later that morning. But he didn’t buy it. Herreweghe—the psychiatrist he’d been seeing for about eight years, on a referral from Elisabeth Haitink—was not the observant type, but rather the correctional: a doctor-as-curator. The humorless, businesslike Herreweghe
managed
your psyche.
The padded treatment room struck him as typically Belgian, furnished as though Jung or Reich were standing in an adjacent room mixing opiates; heavy, immovable furniture, authoritarian elmwood bookcases, the leather-bound medical journals behind the glass reminding you that you knew nothing about your own piddling ego. “You haven’t set foot outside Belgium for years,” Herreweghe said.
“Venlo,” Aaron replied.
“Venlo. And now Los Angeles.”
He wasn’t quite being straight, which said something about the nature of his plans. He told Herreweghe about a friend who had emigrated to America, how inspired he was by what she wrote about her new home, her enthusiasm rekindled a lifelong desire to visit America, and more such drivel, and it almost looked like he’d get away with it, they were already talking about a medical passport and emergency numbers. It was none of this guy’s business that he wanted to go to Santa Monica to see Joni. He knew that Professor Herreweghe worked for a government stalker-rehab clinic—obsessivos delivered to him by the Ministry of Justice—so he was wary of the s-word, ungrounded of course, but probably hard to avoid.
“What’s her name, your American friend?”
He tried to come up with a fake name. Unfortunately, with this man a single twitch could trigger his snare.
“Is it Joni?”
“I have no plans to look her up.” He felt himself blush. And yet in a sense he was telling the truth: an arranged meeting with Joni was out of the question, she was keeping a polite distance, not even that, she was actively avoiding the issue, and maybe an official visit
was
too much of a good thing, he thought, too emotionally charged. So he would go to Los Angeles on his own, stay there awhile, have a vacation, what was wrong with that? And from that relaxed situation he might try to make contact with her.
“But you do have her address.”
The imperative question, that was Herreweghe’s forte. Pretend there’s a question mark coming, but at the last moment spit out a period. Aaron couldn’t recall ever getting an open question from this guy.
“No. How come?”
14023 Sunset Boulevard, Santa Monica, on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. He’d pulled that one off pretty neatly. The tone of their e-mails was not conducive to asking for her address outright, and anyway it would have spoiled all the spontaneity, the possibility of a surprise visit, for instance, or a chance meeting in front of her house—the idea appealed to him. Since she wasn’t listed in any phone books he had to think of something else, and came up with the clever idea of looking up Stol in San Francisco. Say what you like, but Stol at least had the decency to be listed, phone number and all, on the Internet. He would honestly be able to say he was just ringing about a practical question, but he also relished the subtle undertone of revenge this phone call would have.
Instead of Stol himself he got a boy of about seven on the line, who said his father was out golfing, giving him scant time to get used to the notion that those two had spawned. Is your mother at home then? he asked, theatrically naïve. “She lives in L.A.,” the boy answered. “Is your mother Joni Sigerius, by any chance?” He tried to sound as unfazed as possible, but after the kid’s affirmative reply he started right in about her address, too eagerly, for suspicion crept into the child’s voice, “Who are you?” the boy asked with touching directness. Slightly flustered, he repeated his name.
Herreweghe’s bluntness was like having a spade thrust squarely into your soul. Joni—he wanted to hear how she was, her name set off alarm bells all these years later. The man glanced at his watch. “I take it you’d like to look her up,” he said. “Tell me about the last time you two saw each other.”
He made the mistake of taking the question seriously, of succumbing to Herreweghe’s X-ray vision, of calling up the month of December 2000. This is a man who specializes in restraining orders. It was an episode he never dared to look back on, it was a dateless fog, an abstract mishmash of frightened impressions and
manic low-flying passes over what he once thought of as a life—just give it a try, Herreweghe prodded (swimming instructor on the high-dive might have also suited him), when did you talk to her last, and how was it?
How was it … Did Herreweghe really want to know? Being nearly dead was enervating in a way. But it was Joni who came for him this time, Death took a rain check. How was it … the nosedive of December 2000. Is this really necessary? Now? I’m sitting here with a bag full of travel brochures. She had rescued him, that much was beyond a doubt. First she phoned him, from the States. Yes, that phone call too is lodged somewhere in his memory, it was a miracle she didn’t give up trying to reach him. What would have become of him without Joni? She had dumped him and then she came back.
In the meantime, sheets of ice had buckled over Roombeek. Freezing temperatures and early dusk were the result of fallout, the atmosphere was full of particles that wouldn’t settle, the fallout held in an indefinite suspension by the Coriolis effect. It looked threatening. The sun twinkled like a dying star above the bomb crater, but only sporadically, and ever more fleetingly. Abandoned steam shovels and bulldozers stared lifelessly at the epicenter, rusting away in peace. The cold entrenched itself. Not a soul dared to go outside, but everywhere there was a restless rustling: irritably waving conifers, loosened roof tiles that, moments later, spattered like grenades; the wind drove plastic bags and newspapers along the gutters. For weeks the lukewarm radiators in his house had rattled like mad, until the
hammerklavier
suddenly went silent, dead, cold, and his teeth took over the chattering. He heard doors slam in half-crumbling houses.
The flame in his multiburner was constantly on the verge
of going out, he knelt down in front of the cast-iron mouth, the jointed black doors hung open like black crab claws, condensation escaped from the two copper ornamental knobs on the cover. Every so often he fed the flames with strips of cardboard he tore from the scattered boxes. Meantime he hastily thumbed through the book he had condemned to death, diagonally scanning the pages for anything he deemed worthy of a reprieve. The books printed on flimsy paper, laid open, burned like peat, at least as long as chair legs and cupboard shelves. The vital pages he tore out with a series of short jerks, folded them in half and stuffed them, coughing and gasping for breath, in old bank envelopes.
The gunpowder dust was almost unbearable. His eyes itched, black soot inflamed his windpipe. He had first smelled it months ago, a vague odor that reminded him of his earliest childhood, the smell of spent firecrackers, of cap guns, a smell that little by little became a stench; since winter had set in the fumes often hung visibly in his room, the sulfur molecules wafted in from outside, a chafing, heavy vapor that took over the entire house.
It frightened him. He would suddenly panic that he was choking. Sometimes he woke up with a parched throat, his mouth wide open like a coffee filter brimming with gunpowder. Occasionally it penetrated his lungs, his clothes, his
consciousness
so deeply that he forgot the stench altogether; he smelled only the separate elements—charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, and finally nothing at all … was it gone? At those moments, when his mortal fear subsided, when he smelled nothing, he was calm. Everything was worse in the crater, he dared not go there anymore, it was bad for you, and cold as hell besides, even if he wore three layers of clothes—underwear, pajamas, a sweater, Sigerius’s suit, the judo jacket, a padded Gaastra coat, ski socks, hiking boots, mittens on top of gloves—even then, he froze.
So he stayed at the hearth despite the risks of an open fire; he
knew that if the saltpeter concentration got too high, the whole neighborhood would be blown sky-high. Sometimes he wished it would happen: one single, devastating bang putting an end to everything, and yet he maintained his source of warmth as much as possible, small, compact, and kept his eye on the alarm the authorities had installed. When it did go off—a shrill electronic screech that frightened the bejesus out of him—he leapt up, stumbling and slithering into the kitchen, filled a frying pan with water, and dumped it over the flames.
It was a telephone. A plain old telephone.
His
telephone? Alarmed, he struggled up from the sofa where he had buried himself and waded toward the sound of the siren in the back room. Holding his breath, he peered at the closed curtain. What the—? The piece of plastic behind it was a potential intruder, he only had to lift it up and it would metamorphose. Something from outside would force its way in. That Limburg woman who had tried to interrogate him earlier? He groped behind the curtain and picked it up. Deep in the plastic, electrons teemed.
“Hello?” a voice said. He waited, listening acutely. “Aaron? It’s Joni. I’m calling from America.”
It was a stethoscope, Joni had tricked him into placing the instrument against his skull, for a brief moment he knew exactly how it worked—they had laid a transatlantic cable, miles and miles long, across the ocean floor, across pine forests and into his house, a military operation in order to diagnose him—but the image faded as quickly as it had materialized, maybe because the voice upset his frame of mind, a mental state that had settled like sediment at the bottom of an old wine bottle, one of her father’s bottles? The
voice shook him hard, memories drifted to the surface, blurred his focus on his month-long battle against the elements.
“Are you there?” the voice said.
He hawked soot out of his throat. “Yes,” he said. But where was she? Was she really in America?
“Hey. Phew. Long time no see. How are you? I have to keep it short.”
He nodded. He had not spoken to another human being for so long that he was unable to respond, she had to understand that, he was so used to listening, to the blabbing in the supermarket where he actually never went anymore, to the squeaking and scuffling of the animals under his sofa and chairs, to the recriminations emanating from his bookshelves, maybe it was the quiet in the house, his own silence that provoked the hissing and groaning, he only had to glance at any random spine on the bookshelf and it would explode in a tirade—toxic manipulation it was—and he allowed himself to be slandered, he bore it submissively; at times it went no further than minor accusations (“buy some normal food, you shit, something you have to peel and cook yourself!”) or just ordinary cursing (“deadbeat! you stink of puke!”), but often they were vicious personal attacks (“traitor, Nazi, you should die,
die!
”)—rhetorical choruses he fled from, huddled in bed or cowering in the shower, but the cold always drove him back downstairs, the same cold that gave him the wicked idea to kill his tormentors, a funeral pyre—