Bonita Avenue (43 page)

“Nah, the Romans did,” he answered.

I didn’t even realize he’d made a joke, that’s how nervous I was. I can barely remember what we talked about for the first half hour, or should I say: what
I
talked about, agitated, high-speed, haphazard, like a wound-up toy mouse. Wilbert, cracking his knuckles, asking the occasional question. The whole time I saw myself through his eyes. I regretted my coquettish miniskirt, I detested my droning account of my internship in California, I cursed the
Quote
I’d bought at the train station newsstand and that had slipped out of the bag.

I focused on that crucifix, perhaps out of embarrassment, but also not to have to look at that other scene of suffering: Wilbert’s face. What had
happened
? It was as though it belonged to two different people; the right half of his face, the undamaged side,
showed a grim, ill-shaved man who was beginning to resemble his father: the same broad fleshiness as Siem, the same small nose whose right nostril moved when he talked. The eye was still black as crude oil, but duller and smaller than it used to be, accentuated by the gray bags underneath. I had trouble telling whether the healthy half radiated bitterness, or maybe even cruelty, because the gruesome left side demanded all the attention. It was twisted, almost
melted
. His left cheek and corner of his mouth drooped and puckered as though there were no skull underneath, the pale skin hung like an empty rubber bag. His lower eyelid sagged under its own weight, showing the reddish-white insides. When he blinked only the good side closed, the left side stayed open while the eyeball rotated to all white. Every couple of minutes a globule of drool threatened to escape from the corner of his sagging mouth, and he would slurp it back up. It was the sound I’d heard over the telephone.

“Do you have to be religious to live here?”

“Preferably not.”

“Preferably not. OK.”

As always, he was sizing me up, in so far that was possible with that one watery eye. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said, “what exactly they do want. Why they take in megamorons like us. Nobody getting rich off us, see. They keep pourin’ money in.” He seemed to be mulling it over; I was relieved for him to be the one talking for now. “I guess their thing is to save souls. For them, every convert counts. And as long as they’re at it, may as well be hardcore sinners. You have to be rotten to the core, otherwise you ain’t gettin’ in.”

Although his Dutch had clearly deteriorated, his theory had something to it. And he knew himself well enough to use the term megamoron, a pretty accurate description, albeit an indirect one.

“Do you want to stay?”

“Sure. As long as I can stand it. You can’t do nothing here. No smoking, no drinking. No drugs.”

“Of course, they’re helping you reintegrate, that’s good.”
Genesis: your bridge to society
—I had looked it up on the Internet before getting in the train to Amsterdam—Catholic, locations in ten cities. Applications accepted from prison; ex-convicts were only admitted if they were “motivated” to give their life “new meaning.” Sounded all right to me.

“That’s not the point,” Wilbert barked. “I can fill in my own fucking forms. I can live where I want. I don’t
need
them, see, I’m just
using
them, their, what do they call it … their compassion.”

He yawned, stretched his arms above his head, and pushed his compact chest forward; the overwashed cotton of his T-shirt was yellowed in the armpits. He wore camouflage army pants and generic sneakers. His body was bloatedly muscular, a hard, round belly—a gift from his father—swelled between his thick thighs. On the dusty rattan coffee table in between us lay a copy of
Nieuwe Revu
, some dried-up tangerine peels, and a weird object: two short sticks, handles actually, connected to each other by a two-inch chain. “What’s that?” I asked, nodding at it.

I spent the whole trip from Enschede to Amsterdam wondering what I was going to say to Wilbert. What to talk about with someone you perjured in court? Ten years had passed, I’d had ten years to think it over, and I couldn’t come up with anything better than this?

“Karate sticks. Point is, they’re different here. These religious people are selfless. Take Jacob, he’s completely selfless.”

“Jacob?”

“My mentor. The guy gets up at six every morning.” He looked at me. What was I supposed to do, whistle with admiration?

“Then he bikes out here from Watergraafsmeer and sits in the
kitchen waiting for the deliveries from the bakery and the grocery store. Every morning, see? He puts out the bread, the milk, the apples, and the bananas, drinks coffee. Only then does he have his breakfast. Half a loaf of
peperkoek
with butter.”

I nodded.

“Spends the rest of the day fixing shit. Other people’s shit. This morning two Yugoslavs showed up, they’d come to have a chat with one of our guys. He must’ve smelled them or something, ’cause he climbed out his window and shimmied up the drainpipe to the roof. Lay there flat against the roof tiles.”

Strangely enough, I pictured
him
lying there, Wilbert, clinging to the steep, tea-cozy-shaped roof of the pretentious urban villa where we were sitting, a building that until the 1930s had housed the Free School. High-ceilinged classrooms with ornate woodwork, anthroposophical slogans etched into the tiled walls, once intended for children from the intellectual class. Today the villa was home to a very different sort of resident.

“And so Jacob has to get rid of these chumps. And then get a ladder and haul that dude off the roof. And that’s how it goes, see, six days a week, for twenty years. If you ask him why he does it, he says: because Jesus loves me, and he loves you too. A selfless man. Doesn’t even get paid, y’know.”

That last part was hard to believe, that Jacob didn’t get paid, in fact it all sounded pretty soppy to me, but, I thought, maybe he really was touched. I looked at the crucifix. Did he still believe? Once we all went to Drenthe, he and the four of us, a short vacation early on in his year with us in the farmhouse, we’d rented a National Parks bungalow, I think to get used to one another. So there we were in this forest ranger’s cabin, sitting around a table that wobbled so much my mother flipped it upside down and took a bread knife to one of the legs—to Wilbert’s amazement, because
of course the only thing he ever saw his mother take a bread knife to was a cardboard carton of supermarket wine. And since it did nothing but rain the whole time, we played Risk and Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, which pissed Wilbert off because even Janis knew more than him. His religious outlook, or what passed for it, revealed itself during those gaming hours: there was a question about Hinduism or Buddhism and Wilbert earnestly declared that there had to be something between heaven and earth, he did believe in a God, his mother’s soul had to have gone
somewhere
. At which point Siem made an attempt to gently instruct him—but in fact he jumped down his throat; our live-in atheist was determined to convince Wilbert of the impossibility of an afterlife, tossing around studies done by scientists he “knew personally.” It was a red flag to Wilbert. “Know-it-all,” he said, hard as nails, and nothing else. I seem to remember hiking through the woods the next afternoon, could have been later, to a dolmen. Alongside that enormous pile Wilbert stumbled upon a rock with a cavity that had filled up with rainwater, and in that little pool we saw tadpoles swimming around. He asked if I saw the “fathead,” that was Siem, he said, and the pool he was swimming around in was the universe he supposedly knew everything about. And those two other tadpoles, those were me and him, to whom Siem sat there hollering that nothing existed except our little pool.

“So do you still believe?” I asked.

“You sound just like Jacob,” he said. “You wanna know where I got the hangjaw, don’t you? Facial paralysis, the doctors call it. A busted facial nerve. Permanent.”

“A fight?” I asked, wondering why he suddenly brought it up.

Wilbert laughed—the kind of laugh that doesn’t let you off the hook. “You guys in that dollhouse of yours seem to think I go door to door with a bludgeon. Nah, run-of-the-mill ear infection. What
you get when you sit in the slammer playing doctor with a plastic coffee stirrer.” He leaned forward, brought his finger close to my face—for a moment I thought he was going to touch me. “There’s this little cable, see, just a thread, a kind of nerve that runs from your ear to your cheek, and that thread makes sure you get to keep that smooth Barbie face of yours. Mine festered itself kaput. See that gauze?”

He pointed to a single bunk bed behind me, an IKEA assembly of untreated pine that went only halfway up the unusually high wall; his room was immense, the original classroom must have had two doors so it could be separated with a plasterboard wall. My eyes were drawn to the childlike desk under the bed; above a layer of tax papers and torn-open envelopes lay a wad of gauze and a roll of adhesive tape.

“Every night I have to smear salve onto my eye, see, and then tape it shut. Otherwise it’ll dry out. But it spontaneously starts watering while I’m eating. Jacob, he wants me to look for a job, ‘you’ve got to get back into the groove,’ this and that, see. This here’s one of their drawbacks—they’re dreamers. Who’s gonna hire a face like this, d’you think? Totally fucking
nobody
, that’s who. Even that Jesus of theirs would hire someone else. If that guy there”—he stuck his thumb out like a hitchhiker in the direction of the crucifix—“had
this
face, somebody else’d be hanging there now.”

“An operation?” I suggested. “Plastic surgery, I mean?”

“You paying?”

“Just trying to be helpful.”

“Don’t.”

More spittle dripped out of the corner of his mouth, but instead of slurping it back in he caught the strand of saliva with his wrist and flung the glob of spit against the linoleum. “There,” he said. “There’s God for you.”

There you had it: the loutish aplomb with which he transformed Daddy’s little girl into an unmanageable teenager who considered anything not lethally dangerous extremely funny, and at least worth trying. But now I experienced what my father had to put up with for years: irritation at Wilbert’s behavior, at his way of thinking, at his way of
non
-thinking. On TV I’d seen a Dutch bishop tell about how he was hit by some mysterious muscular disorder. For a while the Holy Joe couldn’t walk, and his miserable time on wheels seriously shook his devotion. That’s their take, the papists. Their whole life long they pray away earthquakes and genocide, but as soon as
they
get sick, weak and nauseous they start to teeter.

Wilbert stood up and walked with stiff steps behind me. “You want anything?” he said. “A drink or something?”

“Thanks,” I said. As I spoke, I heard a dull thud. When I looked over my shoulder I saw him wind up for a second slug at a punching bag that swung, squeaking, back and forth on a long rope attached to a ring in the ceiling. Wasn’t that twisted dribble-gob more
proof
of God than not? An offhand, incidental show of higher justice? God had determined that he should go through life as the cliché murderer. I felt my irritation well up into anger. Wilbert did a few boxing moves, his body seemed to have become smaller and meatier, stronger too. He brought the leather cadaver to a standstill, unzipped it, and stuck his arm in like a vet into a cow. I saw his fingers root around under the dark-blue skin, and the one working corner of his mouth curled upward when he pulled out a small packet wrapped in toilet paper. He said: “Bit of a craving,” and went over to a low cabinet, crouched down and pulled out a shabby washbag. Plopped back in the armchair, he took a shaving mirror and a Gillette razor blade out of the bag; the wad of toilet paper produced a ziplock bag of white powder, and I watched as he shook a small mound of it onto the mirror, cut it with short,
regular motions, and slid it into a single line. He pulled a flattened ten-guilder note from his back pocket, rolled it up, and bent over the table, the tube up against his nostril. As he inhaled the powder in two mighty sniffs, I looked at his thin black hair, pulled back into a greasy ponytail. He flopped back in the chair. “Cooking,” he said, satiated. “They teach you that here too.”

A wave of indignation involuntarily forced its way out. “Why do you use that junk?” I heard myself snarl. “Tell me, Wilbert, why do you always choose the path of least resistance? Why are you sitting here doing lines on the sly? God damn it, why do you do the things you do—
Wilbert
.”

His face hardened, his right eyebrow crept upward in provocative amazement. He hoarded aggression, I could see it. He closed his right eye and turned his head stiffly. He took a couple of seconds to loosen up his jailbird-neck. Then he opened his eye and looked at me in silence.

“
You
tell
me
something,” he said. “Why were you in that courtroom?
You fuckin’ skank
.”

The starting gun. Yep. What my father had warned me about ad nauseam was beginning at last. What he’d dreaded for ten years—and I, strangely enough, only now. I blushed, my mouth went dry. Is this what I crossed the damn country in ankle-breaking heels for? I was such an idiot. Why didn’t I cancel? Why did I even call him in the first place? Questions, questions. But his—that was a good one. What
was
I doing in that courtroom?

“Telling the truth”—so said my father. “Just tell the judge the truth.” We were sitting opposite each other in the Bastille’s otherwise empty bistro. That’s all he asked of me. So what
was
the truth? According to my father, the truth was what Vivianne
had told Maurice, and Maurice subsequently told him. And that’s what he was going to tell me now, so that I could then relate it to a lawyer, months from now, who would then put it in, what did you call it, a brief? All of it without hearing
his
side. Just tell the truth, kid.

It was the Monday afternoon following the not-so-laconic telephone call from Vivianne’s laconic boyfriend; my father and I on campus, seated at a table with red paper placemats on an old-fashioned thick white tablecloth, it felt more like a Chinese restaurant than a French bistro. He had phoned my school and achieved the desired Professor Sigerius effect: the vice-principal stood waiting for me, beaming, outside the chemistry lab. My father was already seated at the window, waiter at fifteen paces, when I showed up at the restaurant, sweaty from the bike ride and the jagged stone steps. He ran his hands through the full black beard he had back then, and only saw me just as I was about to sit down.