Bonita Avenue Read online

  Only during the flight to Shanghai, when he’d driven himself crazy with all his theorizing and brooding, did he take the puzzle books from his carry-on and give them a closer look. Like so many number puzzles, he saw directly, they were derived from Euler’s Latin Squares. They comprised a nine-by-nine matrix of cells, a few cells already filled in with a whole number from 1 to 9. The challenge was to complete the remaining cells so that in each row and each column, the numbers 1 through 9 occurred only once. Additionally, the matrix was subdivided into nine three-by-three blocks which likewise had to contain the digits 1 through 9.

  Perhaps, he thinks now, it was unkind to be so brutally honest with Obayashi. “I’ve still got one book left,” he says, suddenly mild. “I’ll give it to my wife.”

  The truth was, he had finished them within fifteen minutes, after five or six puzzles he could whip through them as fast as he could write. His mind wandered. How did these grids work? Did Number Place become more difficult the fewer numbers you were given at the outset? Often it did, he reasoned, but not necessarily. The beginning digits themselves were more of a determining factor, although he suspected that you needed at least eighteen to start off with. Or seventeen? He set out an indirect demonstration, assuming a puzzle with sixteen starting numbers. After a certain amount of juggling he concluded that you needed to start with at least eight different digits. After that he tried to work out how many correctly completed puzzles were possible, an interesting problem that he sunk his teeth into for some time without realizing it (arriving at a number somewhere between a 6 and a 7 followed by twenty-one zeros, but to what extent were those trillions of puzzles all truly different? the grid contains natural symmetries and mirroring), because when he was startled by a gentle female voice in his ear, it was dark in Business class. Would he like something to drink? Around him, eye-masked businessmen were sound asleep.

  It had been wonderful: for a few hours he’d been aware of nothing apart from the deeper mathematics behind those puzzles. As though he were flying in a small private jet above the Singapore Airlines 747, at the edge of the stratosphere. Mathematics was always good medicine. But even before the stewardess had returned with his whiskey, he had slipped back into restless melancholy.

  “If you can help me find a publisher,” says Obayashi, “we can discuss a cut for you. Just for the Dutch market, of course. But even from that, Siem, you’ll get rich, I guarantee it.”

  After Tineke dropped him off at Enschede Station, the moment when the strain of the anniversary week slid off him, he started fretting about what he had seen. On the way to Schiphol he’d asked himself questions, absurd questions (were they the same size? the same age? the same build?), after which he reprimanded himself (it just can’t be, it’s too much of a coincidence, this is what psychiatrists mean by paranoia), checked in relatively calmly, and, without slipping into outrageous fantasies, browsed through the bestsellers in the bookshop display, only to catch himself asking himself even more absurd questions while boarding (is she capable of this? is this in her? in her genes?)—a steady tidal motion, panic and calm, panic and calm, that has possessed him for the past three days.

  Tubantia’s fortieth anniversary celebration had gone as this kind of public event usually did: it washed over him, it was as though he had dreamed the past few days; and just like in a dream, there was no opportunity to look either forward or back. Pampering four honorary doctorates and their spouses; rewriting, rehearsing, and reciting his anniversary speech on nanotechnology, not the meatiest of subjects; breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with his guests, the endless chit-chat, all that bullshit, he felt like he might drop dead in the middle of his speech.

  It was Thursday afternoon, during the closing reception, when things started coming undone. After he’d draped the Tubantia regalia onto his four honorees at the Jacobuskerk, the whole circus moved to the Enschede Theatre. He, Tineke, and the four honorary doctorates and their spouses mounted the raised black-velvet platform in the foyer, ready to be fêted by the hundreds of schmoozing guests who grabbed glasses of wine and fancy hors d’oeuvres from silver platters, or took their places straightaway in the discouragingly long reception line. He must have stood there for three hours, shaking hands, exchanging witty repartee, the long strand of patience reflected in his patent leather shoes.

  About an hour into the handshaking he spotted Wijn. Menno Wijn, his ex-brother-in-law and former sparring partner, towering head and shoulders above the hundreds of students and almost exclusively robe-clad professors, inconspicuous at first, clearly ill at ease, glancing around awkwardly with a mineral water in his fist, almost, it seemed, on the verge of leaving. When he looked again five minutes later, Wijn was standing in the queue like a golem. “Psst, look, two o’clock,” he whispered to Tineke. Her chubby hands released the arm of a professor’s wife and she turned toward him. “To the left,” he said. Mildly amused, she scanned the queue and froze. “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” She lifted her shoulders and shook her freshly coiffed hair that smelled of cigarettes and pine needles.

  Wijn had the expression of someone sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. Before he had arrived the foyer was the picture of diversity, so many different people, so many nationalities, but since noticing his ex-brother-in-law Sigerius realized that every academic looked like every other academic. Back when he and Wijn were in their twenties, he had a rough but rosy face and a ready laugh, finding the mistakes in others especially funny—until those mistakes started to close in on him. The mistakes belonged to his sister Margriet and nephew Wilbert, but most of all to him, Siem Sigerius, traitor, the root of Margriet’s undoing. According to Wijn. What on earth was he doing here? He hadn’t been invited, he must have read about the reception somewhere. Had he come all the way from Culemborg for this?

  While Sigerius planted kisses on powdered cheeks and endured flattering small talk, he could feel the brother of his late ex-wife gaining ground. Vengeance and venom filled the foyer like fumes. It was twenty-five years ago, damn it. In the first few months after the divorce, his old pal had just ignored him, but once Margriet and Wilbert had moved into the attic of Wijn’s sports school in Culemborg, things turned bitter. Hostile. For years, Margriet let her stable but angry brother do her dirty work for her: sis needed money, sis had to go to the liquor store. And for Wijn—by that time landlord, lawyer, and foster parent all rolled into one—what was one more nasty telephone call? Sigerius was already in America with Tineke and the girls when, right around Wilbert’s birthday, an envelope arrived with a greeting card—“congratulations on your son’s birthday”—accompanied by a typed sheet of expense claims: bills from the glazier, medical fees, sessions with the juvenile psychologist, fines, you name it, and at the bottom the bank account number of Menno Wijn Martial Arts Academy. It was the prelude to a few phone calls per year, collect calls of course, fault-finding tirades in which Wijn, in his crude redneck lingo, filled him in on what that “punk” had got up to now, which school he’d been kicked out of and why, about the pulverized licorice cough drops the “fuckwad” sold as hash, how Menno had to throw out the “scum” that came to the house for payback, about the brawls at the carnival, the shoplifting—so when you coming back to Holland, Pop? Menno was down on that whole America thing. But when Sigerius himself phoned, Wijn shut him out, let the deserter know in no uncertain terms that he had no business with them, and banged on and on about how Wilbert had settled in just fine with his dutiful uncle. “He ain’t a bad kid, you know, all of a sudden he got twenty-four canaries up there in the attic. Loves ’m, y’know. Gerbils too, guinea pigs, it’s a regler zoo up there.”

  He always just let it go. Of course he was worried. You’re here now, Tineke would say. We are in California. Menno only quit haranguing him after Margriet died. After that they had only the occasional telephone conversation, Menno moaning and groaning about his role as Wilbert’s guardian, he as the disillusioned father trying to get out of his alimony obligations. Businesslike exchanges, th
e enmity of the past electrically dormant on the phone line.

  Here he comes. His ex-brother-in-law, backlit by the glare that cut in through the tall front windows of the theatre, stepped onto the dais and stopped in front of him. You’d almost expect to see him holding a UPS clipboard, or wonder whose chauffeur he was, what was this guy doing coming after his boss? Straight as an arrow, arms dangling alongside his bony body, his weight on the balls of his feet, just like he used to take his place on the mat: here I am, just try me. No handshake.

  “Menno,” said Sigerius.

  Wijn pulled in his chin. “Doing all right for yourself, I see,” he said in the same tacky accent they spoke back in Wijk C, forty years ago. “I was passing by. I’ve come to tell you your son’s free.”

  Sigerius cleared his throat. “What?”

  “Reduced sentence. On accounta good behavior. He’s already out.”

  At times, language can have a physical effect on him, ice-cold water being dumped over him from meters above his head. “Aw no,” he muttered. “Now that is news. Bad news.”

  Wijn picked at a penny-sized scab on his cheek, no doubt the remnants of a blister he’d got himself from scraping across a judo mat, a self-conscious gesture that made him look, for a brief moment, like his dead sister. His middle finger was missing its nail. A blind finger.

  “Just thought I’d let you know. And tell you that I wash my hands of ’m.”

  “He was supposed to be locked up until 2002.” Tineke. She stood glowering at Wijn with eyes like pistols, but he ignored her, just like he’d been ignoring her for the past twenty-five years.

  “Where’s he going to live?” Sigerius asked.

  “Dunno. Don’t give a shit.”

  Then they stood there looking at each other in silence, the rector and the gym coach. Two guys in their fifties who used to stand in the shower room together, three times a week, year after year, after having mixed their sweat on dojos all over the west coast of Holland. It hadn’t been of any use. Suddenly, without provocation, Wijn brought his hand to Sigerius’s forehead and gave him a rough little jab with that mole finger of his.

  “Dog,” he snarled.

  Before Sigerius could realize he mustn’t respond, before he realized he was not in the position to pick the man up high and crosswise by his polyester collar, hurl him back down and, growling, yank him back up—strangle him on the spot, as big and nasty as he was—Wijn walked off. Without looking further at anyone, he shambled in his cheap, ill-fitting suit past the row of laureates and stepped off the podium with a hollow thud.

  Later he thought: maybe this is all Wijn’s doing. That claw of his, that dirty stinking finger. That it made him start looking at things differently. A cue of flesh that put a spin on his thoughts.

  The fact was, not a minute later he spotted Joni and Aaron in the receiving line, his daughter beside her bald boyfriend, admiringly and attentively listening to him. What did he notice? Nothing in particular, at first. That she looked gorgeous, she had a stunning profile. That she knew exactly what to wear when her old man was up front. Today she had chosen a white wool turtleneck sweater, snug but classic, white gold sparkled in her ears and around her wrists. He was struck, not for the first time, by how smartly she could dress, more expensively, more well-put-together than other students—never prim, you couldn’t make Joni prim even if you buried her in pearls, but chic, classy. She had tucked her entire head of hair under a cap, a sort of Russian Nikita thing, so only the back of her neck betrayed her blondness.

  The next moment he leaned over so he could hear the soft-spoken, silvery-gray wife of an ex-rector. His eyes wide open and his head alongside her elongated ear, he caught sight of Joni, more or less by coincidence; he smiled and winked but she did not see him. Her beautiful face was concentrating on something else, probably on her mother next to him.

  Then he sees it. The dark-brown Siberian cap above Joni’s face jogs something in his memory. Apparently his mouth produces a sound, a sigh or a groan, or something, because the woman whose ear it enters shrinks back. He straightens himself, nods absently, opens his mouth wide and snaps it back shut. The resemblance penetrates his consciousness as something hot, as a liquid that attempts to smother him. Boiling lead. He is dizzy. The phenomenal ability of the brain to recognize faces, effortlessly, unhesitatingly. It has always fascinated him, but now it is killing him. It is not even recognition, it is far more, on all fronts. What he experiences is … identification. Joni’s attentive expression, five, six meters away, the dark fur hat whose brim lies across her smooth forehead so that he sees her, for the first time, as a brunette. The make-up, heavier than usual, the glossy lips parted in concentration. All her features, the broad purity of her compelling, self-assured face, everything that determines the way his daughter looks, shifts over that other face, a face that he, in a sense, also knows like the back of his hand—until his perspiring brain goes “click.” It’s her.

  “Siem, darling—are you OK?” Tineke’s cool hand grabbed him by the wrist, she made an effort to look at him. He didn’t focus properly, he saw the grainy structure of her purple eyeshadow, heard her say that he looked pale, that he hadn’t been getting enough sleep the last few weeks. She gave his shoulder a squeeze, took a step forward and said something to the woman in front of him. He stared at Tineke’s broad back, wrapped in the purple gown she’d had specially made for this afternoon.

  “Tomorrow you’ll be sitting on a plane to Shanghai,” she whispered, once she was next to him again. “We’re in the home stretch. You’re doing great. You were just thrown off by that news about Wilbert. I can tell.”

  His protectress, the lovingly bowed second violin, it is the role Tineke has been playing ever since he lay like a shipwreck on the Antonius Matthaeuslaan and she came upstairs to join him for coffee. Then, too, she talked him through his depression, consoled the inconsolable with cheerful empathy. And now, once again, that endless understanding, although this time, thank God, she didn’t have an inkling as to what it was about.

  “Yeah,” he mumbled. “It worries me. I hate that man. And I hate my son.”

  “I know you all too well,” she said. “Forget that boy. Forget both of them. That Menno is nothing but 100 kilos of rancor. He came here deliberately, just to rile you. They’ve released Wilbert because he’s ready to return to society.”

  Of course Tubantia University’s anniversary celebration was bigger than himself, a figurehead is attached to the prow, and the prow to the ship; everything else went as planned that Thursday, starting with the ceremonial dinner in Koetshuis Schuttersveld, where he found himself, smiling, once again at the head of the table. Calm down! hissed a pinched voice in his head during the toasts to the academy, during the supper of red bass, during his own speech. He thought: it’s impossible. It’s statistically impossible, it’s morally impossible, it’s logistically impossible. He knocked back goblets of white wine to drown out the heckling in his brain. He and Tineke arrived back at the farmhouse, reeling, at half-past one in the morning, and when he flopped down beside her in bed, his back to her, he sank into a raccoon-like slumber. He hadn’t given his son’s release a moment’s thought the entire evening. All he could think about was Joni.

  There was no opportunity to verify his suspicions. Tineke brought him to the train station early the next morning; the first computers he saw were being hogged by a group of backpackers at the airport Internet café. He waited indecisively for one, but walked off before it was his turn. He didn’t dare. The newly opened Shanghai Pudong Airport, he discovered eleven hours later, did not even have an Internet café.

  After a taxi had jostled him through the driving rain, through rundown concrete suburbs into the heart of the metropolis, more or less catapulting him into the lobby of the Okura Garden Hotel, and even before unpacking his bags, he unplugged the telephone cable in his hotel room and tried to connect his laptop to the Internet. When that didn’t work, he shaved, put on a clean but wrinkly shirt and took the e
levator down to the lobby. He crossed the mausoleum of gold-veined marble, slid his key across the reception desk, and requested a quarter of an hour online. A uniformed girl led him to an area with colorful table lamps and outfitted with three communist Pentiums, the cubicles separated by frosted-glass partitions in walnut frames. He seated himself in front of the farthermost computer. The girl gestured for him to wait, leaned across him (sweat and something sweet), and set a digital egg timer. Next to the keyboard—nerve-rackingly non-QWERTY—was a ballpoint pen on a chain and a cube-shaped memo holder. He found, with some difficulty, a working search engine but subsequently ran into what is gradually gaining worldwide notoriety as the Great Firewall of China. He cursed out loud. The pen stayed put when he gave the table an irritated shove, but the plastic cube tipped over with a smack. He couldn’t even get onto the site, and although the irony wasn’t lost on him (he had been summoned to this backward dictatorship to instruct his repressive yellow friends in how to reinforce their nefarious firewall; they wanted to know about everything—broadband Internet, the future of video graphics—only to nip new technology in the bud, that’s what it came down to), he was vexed by being stymied for the umpteenth time as he scooped up the little square memo sheets from the marble floor.

  “I don’t need money, Hiro,” he says, “I’ve already got money.” Maybe he is taking out his frustration on Obayashi because now, two days after the reception, he has still made no headway. Taking his tone down a notch, with a forced smile: “And, to be honest, I don’t think your puzzles will be much of a success in the Netherlands. Do you remember Go? We don’t. The ever-thrilling board game Go. Now only available at the flea market.” He has no idea if it’s true, but if he doesn’t make himself clear now he’ll be spending this summer as a traveling game salesman. His colleague appears, momentarily, to doubt his understanding of the English language, and then says: “Nippon Fun has a computer version of Go. I can send it to you. Two CD-ROMs.”