Bonita Avenue (37 page)

“Sit down, kids,” said Mrs. Karsdorp, a mother with pale flesh and unruly red hair. Here too you could hear a pin drop, and afterward he thought he’d heard them go quiet when he arrived, sudden bashfulness, all eyes glued to
Studio Sport
, it seemed like they were bashful because of
him
, either because he was national champion or because of his military travel gear.

After the football came an item on a swim meet, but after that they really did see shots of the judo tournament in Rotterdam, the voice of commentator Jan Cottaar as he announced the title defender, Joop Gouweleeuw, also from Delft, the camera zooming on Anton Geesink, the world champion “who passed up the national title bout,” and there he was himself, “the nineteen-year-old Simon Sigerius,” at the edge of the mat for his final match against Jan van Ierland. Mr. Karsdorp, with whom he and his sister were squashed into a two-seater, was the first to open his mouth: “Won’t your pa come watch?” he asked, and Siem could see that Ankie was about to answer, probably something apologetic. He beat her to it: “I don’t think so, Mr. Karsdorp.” His voice sounded heavy and loud. “My father thinks judo’s a sport for traitors. He doesn’t even know I’m national champion.”

And that was that. No time for a reply, the action had already begun, “a battle of champions,” according to the commentator, and everyone looked, each with his own uneasy thoughts, at the tiny black-and-white figure on the screen who just now, in real life, had uttered those strange words, but who now tugged at one Jan van Ierland, “and only in the third minute did serviceman Sigerius throw his opponent to the tatami with a lightning-fast tenth hip throw, securing the crown as Netherlands heavyweight champion.”

Whether his father, like an insect trapped in amber in the lamplight, looked up when he and Ankie returned half an hour later, he couldn’t recall, but there was a bottle of jenever on the table. His sister switched on a few lamps in the otherwise darkened room, he loitered a bit in the doorway, both of them waiting for something, for an explosion, for some terrible scene.

His father (who would die of a heart attack two years later) turned, his thinning hair damp from the pomade, and brought out three jenever glasses from the buffet, placed them on the table and filled them deftly until the liquor bulged above the rim. “Come, Ank,” he said, “let’s toast our Siem.”

And when he and his sister stood awkwardly at the table, he handed them each a glass.

“I don’t drink, Pa,” he said.

“Lots of things you claim not to do.” His father raised his glass by its silver stem. When he and Ankie followed suit he said: “To our double-crosser.”

It was true. He’d been double-crossing them for years. His Judo training was like an underground movement: eventually everyone knew about it, his brothers and sisters, his classmates, the neighbors, in the end every
Delft Catholic Daily
subscriber—everyone except his father. For years he judoed in secret, first once a week, until the suit hung frayed on his body, then three times a week, and finally
four
. The whole time he maintained a tightly woven system of lies, backstreet routes, and accomplices in order to do what he loved.

His pa could get stuffed. He decided as much after a disastrous furniture-moving chore one ice-cold Sunday afternoon. He and his father had dragged a massive oak desk from the Trompetsteeg to the home of his elder sister Loes and her husband on the
Kruisstraat. It was a hand-me-down from his father’s office that landed in their living room like a stranded galleon. “I’ll take that beast,” Loes offered. It was hard going; they had to set it down on the vacant street every fifteen meters.

He was red-faced from the exertion, but maybe also from the route they were suddenly taking
together
. For some weeks he had followed his father along these same sidewalks every Tuesday evening, cautiously, like Dick Tracy trailing a gangster, via the Beestenmarkt to the Moslaan, a paper supermarket bag under his arm. Before he turned onto the Kruisstraat his father’s duffel bag was a dark-gray oval in the distance as he headed for night business school on the Raamstraat. Siem would ring Loes and Gerrit’s doorbell, and his sister, half in the tiled hallway and half on the stoop, thrust his washed judo suit into the bag. Then he would run, hardly trusting his father’s head start, to the Oude Delft to arrive at Uke-Mi’s dojo on time.

Six months earlier, after some ten trial lessons with Mr. Vloet, he raised the issue at home. With a vague foreboding that his father might not share his enthusiasm, he had prepared his argument thoroughly; it would be most sensible, he thought, to bring up the philosophy behind his new sport, that judo was much more than just a kind of wrestling. Mr. Vloet, who had sparred with Japanese masters in Paris, devoted an entire lesson to the teachings of Professor Kano, judo’s creator. A portrait of Kano hung in their dojo. What an amazing evening that was. Mr. Vloet could really nail you if he wasn’t satisfied with your shoulder throw, “GARBAGE!” would echo loudly through the room, but when he
talked
he could be friendly and calm; they sat listening to him for a good hour, and that evening at the dinner table Siem found himself retelling, flushed with excitement, what he could remember of Mr. Vloet’s words.

His brothers and sister listened as they chewed, and his father too
listened in silence, the leather elbow patches of his cardigan resting on the embroidered tablecloth. He eyed him over a steaming pan of Savoy cabbage. His small, furrowed face looked overworked. Maybe because he had a sedentary life, both here and at the office, his bony shoulders hung forward and his neck seemed long and bare.

“So Pa,” he said, “judo doesn’t have much to do with fighting—nothing, in fact—with judo it’s all about self-control and respect for your opponent. Professor Kano, the founder, didn’t call it
judo
for nothing, judo means ‘gentle way.’ That the world would be a better place for it, that’s what he hoped.”

“Better?” his father asked. “Better, how?”

“From judo, of course,” he answered. “Professor Kano never intended judo as a sport, but as a kind of, well, teaching. Kids learn judo at school, Papa, in Japan everyone learns the ideals and principles, the symbols behind it, at a young age, you see?”

His father did something out of character: he laughed. His raddled face twisted and creased; it startled Siem as though he were looking at his father’s bare legs. It was not a cheerful laugh. What this thirteen-year-old boy couldn’t put into words hung permanently in his head like an oily vapor: their father was a broken man. He and their mother had run an office supply shop on the Choorstraat, a low-key business that ran entirely on his mother’s enthusiasm and went bankrupt soon after her inexplicable death, almost as though a plug had been pulled out of a bathtub drain. They had to move. Since then his father had lived with five children and sundry creditors in this crappy little house. He did his best, but he’d lost his spirit. He said: “There’s no symbol
behind
anything, Siem. You can’t say that. But go on, let’s hear about those Japanese ideals.”

“OK,” he said eagerly, trying to recall Mr. Vloet’s exact words. “Now, for Professor Kano, cooperation was really important. On the mat as well as outside, judokas are supposed to help other people.”

Ankie stifled a yawn. Fred pretended to paddle. “Canoe,” he said.

“Cooperation enhances people’s well-beingness—”

“Well-
being
,” his father interrupted.

“People’s well-
being
. By being sportsmanlike and respectful, you enhance the happiness of others, Pa, and therefore your own happiness too. Unlike boxing. Boxers just bash each other’s heads in. Judokas have respect for each other.”

“So why do they strangle each other?” asked Fred.

“That’s part of the game, you dork,” he snarled. “We let go as soon as the referee gives the signal.”

“Who would win,” rejoined Fred, “Floyd Patterson or what’s-his-name … that Anton Geesink of yours?”

His father stroked his thin neck with his left hand. “Siem here,” he said to the others, “talks as though he has done this … sport for years now.”

“No, really,” Siem answered, shocked. He loved his father, because he was his father, because his father had the gumption to go to night school twice a week, because he was a widower, and in a way was their mother too. But he was also apprehensive, maybe because his father had been through so much.

“Patterson,” said Fred. “He’d knock Geesink’s block off.”

“No, really,” Siem repeated, “that’s why I’m telling you all this, I want to ask if I can join. I
really
want to do judo. There’s a good club on the Oude Delft. I’ve already had a few trial lessons.”

At the words “trial lessons” a shudder surged through his father’s body, as though he were in a train changing tracks. “And what might this teacher’s name be?”

He often thought back on what his father once said when Fred had bored all the way through Jet Kolf’s foot with a hand drill, the steel bit went right through her leather boot. Blood spurted out.
Someone went to get him, he didn’t know who, his father came running to the Beestenmarkt without his coat. “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times,” he growled as he slapped Fred upside the head, “I should’ve put the lot of you into an orphanage.”

“You mean our
sensei
, Pa. That’s what the Japanese call him.”

“I asked you what his name was.”

“Mr. Vloet.”

His father shook his head, as though Mr. Vloet wasn’t really named Mr. Vloet. “Boy,” he said, “you shouldn’t believe everything you hear. Wishy-washy nonsense about respect and virtue. That guy has no idea what he’s talking about.”

“Mr. Vloet is a third dan, Pa. That’s a pretty high rank.” He felt someone kick his shin. Daan glared at him, his mouth pulled into a tight little stripe, he shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t give a shit which damn Mr. Vloet is or isn’t,” his father said, suddenly raising his voice. “What irks me is that know-it-all rubbish about the Japanese. Don’t tell
me
about the Jap, Simon. Don’t try it on with me about the virtuous Japanese. Or about another man’s happiness.
God
help me.”

And with the word “God” his father slapped his hand against the edge of his plate. It broke in half. First came the loud jangle, then complete and utter silence. Fred and Daan stared wide-eyed at their sausages, Ankie gawked with a full mouth at her father. As though his plate hadn’t been cleaved in two, their father jabbed a piece of potato from the tablecloth, stuck the fork in his mouth and chewed. After he’d swallowed, he said calmly: “Listen, Siem. You tell that Mr. Vloet your father was a POW in Burma. You tell him: ‘My father did forced labor on the Burma railway.’ You understand? Then he’ll understand why you won’t be coming anymore.”

• • •

Well over halfway along the Moslaan, he and his pa stood blowing on their fingers. It was as though there was a body
in
the desk.

“Going well, boy.”

Sweat poured down his back—a mixture of exertion and fear. He trusted his sister all right, she wouldn’t rat on him, but he wasn’t so sure about his brother-in-law. Gerrit with his dirty fingernails from the workshop. He was an odd fish, Gerrit, a downright sneak, buttered up his old man until the stuff dripped off him. Had a story about everybody, things no one else ever mentioned. The exact cause of their mother’s death, for instance—Siem had heard it from Fred, and Fred had heard it from Gerrit. His mother—his softhearted, sweet, pretty mother—had died, according to Gerrit, as a result of a
furuncle
. A furuncle in her nose. “A f’your uncle?” he asked, shocked, fyorunkel, fyorunkel? It sounded like that monkey the Russians shot into outer space. “But you don’t
die
from it,” he stammered, horrified. “A sort of boil,” Fred explained, “you do so, if the, you know, the pus squirts into your brain.”

He didn’t like Gerrit knowing about him doing judo on the sly. That he was hooked. The afternoon he went by Loes and Gerrit’s to ask if she would launder his judo suits from now on, a conniving frown passed over his brother-in-law’s face. Gerrit sat him down to explain in detail why his father did not approve of judo. He did know about the war, yes? About the Dutch East Indies? What the yellow bastards had done to his pa? No? “Kid,” Gerrit said with a grimace, “they brutalized your ol’ man something awful. First he trudged 200 kilometers to Burma, barefoot, seven days and nights. And then spent two years dragging railroad ties, fourteen hours a day, no coffee breaks. Covered in open sores and lice. And the Jap with his billy club. Ever seen your dad’s back?”

“No.”

“Keep it that way, kid. When you were still in diapers your sister and me, we lived with your folks. Every night at 3 a.m., kid, it started. Bawled like a baby, your pa did. Slept in the alcove so your ma could get a good night’s rest. Under his bed he had a, watchamacallit, one a them wog-cutlasses, a ‘klewang,’ and if your mother or me …”

Loes came in with the coffee. “What all are you telling the boy?”

“… or your sister here, if we went in to calm him down, he’d stand up on his bed waving the damn thing. ‘Out of here, dirty Jap! Ssssss—I’ll slice you to ribbons.’ ” He grinned. “Ain’t that right, Loes?”

His sister held a tin of butter cookies under his nose.

“Your pa went AWOL too, once,” Gerrit said. “Escaped from the prison camp. Two weeks in the jungle. Oh yeah. A hero. Your pa’s a hero.” Maybe because he was only fourteen, had never had lice, let alone been beaten with a stick, maybe because Gerrit’s venomous verbosity made him sick to his stomach, Siem had difficulty paying attention. “The Kempeitai, you’ve heard of that, right?” Gerrit asked. “The Yellow Gestapo, you could say. Your father, he walks straight into their arms. Poor guy. Spent the rest of the war in a metal box, a meter square. Home sweet home. Not sitting, not standing, not lying down. They’d let him out couple times a week so they could beat the crap out of ’im … Yeah, yeah.”

Siem’s head cooled down on his way home, it had iced over with recalcitrance. If everything Gerrit said was true, then it was awful for his father, really and truly, but what did a judo club in Delft have to do with the war in Asia?