Bonita Avenue (7 page)

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 elevator 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.”

At a neighboring table, a waitress is going around with a teapot with the beak of a tropical bird, a slender, curved spout at least a
meter long, from which the woman refills teacups from a distance. John Tyronne, the young Stanford professor, beckons her with a flourish of his arm. Tyronne, talented but naïve, was brought aboard the task force with a certain amount of fanfare, primarily because of his early and technically well-argued papers on the millennium bug, but he’d gone overboard and had done himself more harm than good with his increasingly apocalyptic Y2K articles that had sprung up in American newspapers the previous year and where he had more or less predicted the end of the world. As Tyronne refused to set foot in an airplane after December 31st, 1999, the first meeting of 2000 had been postponed. “Ah, there’s our doomsday prophet,” smiled task force chairman Gao Jian at their first reunion in the unravaged world. “Still eating canned food?” This afternoon, during the paper Sigerius had presented on haptics, he teased Tyronne that he would never have to fly again. “Soon we’ll plug a rubber hand into your laptop, John, and when you squeeze it at home, your PC will send your pressure profile to a special rubber Johnny Tyronne task-force hand here in Shanghai: the cyberspace handshake! Minor problem with that fraction of a time delay, though”—and here he gave Tyronne, who was sitting up front, a dead-fish handshake. “Not so nice, is it?” A second later he squeezed—too hard.

“Wouldn’t a Japanese name be a better idea?” he says, trying to humor Obayashi. “Something other than Number Place?”

Obayashi mumbles an answer that escapes him entirely. For a moment he hears nothing, it’s that idiotic comment about the Go CD-ROMs that ignites, in delayed action, a phosphorus flame in his brain. Here he is, eating Peking duck, while his laptop is lying on his hotel bed.
Maybe that CD is in the laptop bag. Maybe you’ve got the photos with you
. He has to restrain himself from jumping up from the table, marching straight through the wall of seawater
and lobsters, and making a beeline for the Okura. Instead he smiles at Obayashi, wipes off his greasy fingers on the paper napkin and closes his eyes.
Think. That disc full of photos: is it in your laptop bag?
No idea. He imagines himself in his study, the familiar smell of paper and fallen dust, the tranquillity of his monk’s cell. He pictures his desk in front of him. The disc could also be lying in a locked drawer.

He checks his watch, pulls his cell phone out of his inside pocket. Without looking at Obayashi any further he unlocks the keypad and stares pensively at the illuminated screen for a few seconds. “Excuse me,” he whispers, laying a hand on the pudgy Japanese wrist. Although he has only the contours of his pretext ready, he gets up and buttons his sport jacket. An image flashes through his mind: the police phone him here in China with the news that Wilbert has been decapitated. The shaft of an uncoupled trailer. Dead as a doornail. Without finishing the thought, he clears his throat and says: “Gentlemen … sorry to interrupt … but I’m afraid I have to be going. I’ve just received word that … something is up in Enschede.”

“Anshkieday?” shouts Tyronne, whom he perhaps teased too much this afternoon. “Ansh-kie-day … Sigerius, where is that university of yours, Atlantis?”

Gao Jian stubs out his cigarette and lights another, smoke escapes from the corners of his mouth. He looks inquisitively at Sigerius. “Colleague,” he says earnestly, “what seems to be the matter? Can I be of any assistance?”

“I’m afraid not,” Sigerius hears himself say, and, thinking of the torrent he is about to step into, says: “I’ve just heard that the campus has flooded. Terrible weather in the Netherlands, heavy rain—just like here, but worse.”

“You’ll miss the evening program.”

“Tomorrow’s another day. They’re expecting me to make a statement in Enschede concerning the, er, damage.”

The tepid downpour shades the Shanghai twilight. Gurgling, the rainwater seeks out drains and sewers, sloshing against the Huaihai Zhong Lu sidewalks, over which hundreds of Chinese tread hurriedly with precise steps, shielding their straight hair with umbrellas or briefcases. Occupied taxis spray fans of glistening water; shoppers, their arms ending in clusters of purchases, take cover under awnings or in doorways, staring into space or conversing in their secret language. The usually thriving, vibrant, pulsating avenue with its high-priced shops, malls, hotels, and restaurants almost looks covered, it is so dark.

Jaywalking against a red light, he crosses a flooded intersection, dodging the aggressively advancing taxis and rickshaws. His suit jacket is drenched, lukewarm rainwater soaks the toes of his shoes. He takes large strides, a curious disquiet steers him toward his hotel. On the one hand he believes his suspicions say more about himself than about Joni, that what he has seen is a projection of his own fears; but on the other hand he is just a bit too familiar with adversity to be entirely sure. As different as his daughters are from each other, he has never doubted their respectability, their decency: it is a question a man with a son in the Scheveningen penitentiary never gets around to asking. He would put his life on the line for Tineke’s daughters, Janis and Joni, whom he regards as his own—the elder, who has everything going for her, who will breeze through life: she is quick on the draw, witty, ambitious, above all engaging—“take the plunge with me,” it’s written on her forehead in glittering gold letters—and on top of it those damned
good looks, her extraordinary beauty, so no, the father of a criminal does not worry about a daughter like Joni. If they have any worries about Tineke’s girls they are for Janis, who is altogether another matter. The younger daughter has made it her life’s work
not
to engage, she harbors a programmatic, often intolerable, loathing for everything that in her eyes is not genuine, she fights a one-woman guerrilla war against everything that is insincere, fake, hypocritical. That is why she refuses to diet, that is why she wears boys’ clothes, that is why she so vehemently abhors money, meat-eaters, Hollywood films, saddled horses, universities, vacations. She shreds Christmas cards sent by aunts and uncles. Deodorant: Tineke had to force her to use deodorant, as a teenager Janis insisted it was a lie to mask your own odor, it’s deceitful, deodorant is bourgeois. At least she’s honest, he and Tineke told each other.

The heavens open, downpour turns into hailstorm, the deafening drumroll is so loud that the traffic appears to glide noiselessly forward. Sigerius has no choice but to take refuge under a sodden awning. Packed together with other pedestrians, he picks up a scent that reminds him of the sweaty judo mats of long ago. One of the men points to the bouncing ice balls, maybe he’s never seen hail before, at least not on May 13th.