Bonita Avenue (6 page)

He tries to concentrate on his conversation with Hiro Obayashi, seated to his left at the Formica table where the eleven-man group of scholars is eating. Every Saturday evening following their afternoon session at Jiaotong University they meet at this table in this restaurant on Huaihai Zhong Lu, it’s a long-standing tradition. And usually he enjoys it, just as he enjoys these junkets to Shanghai, because that’s what they are, of course, pleasure trips. His
membership in the Asian Internet Society goes back long before he became
rector magnificus
, and one of the conditions of his appointment was that this “valuable Asian connection” would remain intact. Of the utmost importance to the position of Tubantia University, he had argued, and so forth. Why of course, they agreed, absolutely, it goes without saying. As he wished. Complete bullshit is what it was, but even then he knew he’d be needing them, his jaunts to Shanghai. Just to get away from the campus for a bit, away from the glasshouse.

“To be honest,” he says, “I found the puzzles a bit … how shall I put it … a bit boring.”

Obayashi, Professor of Information Technology at the University of Tokyo, opens his eyes wide; his skin stretches like a mayonnaise-yellow mask over his broad skull.

“But maybe I’m not the right person to judge them.” Sigerius wipes his mouth on his napkin and, in an attempt to avoid Obayashi, looks around the room. Like every other decent restaurant in China, this one is ugly as sin. The lighting is merciless, certainly now that someone has thrown a blanket over Shanghai, the decor is haphazard: no two tables have the same shape or height; even the flickering and humming fluorescent lights, which radiate X-rays down on steaming dishes of—it must be said—fantastic food were made in different state-run factories and date from different decades. At the next table, a boisterous group of Chinese men are gorging themselves. Businessmen, undoubtedly: shirtsleeves with sweaty armpits, loosened neckties, lip-smacking, belching, bones tossed aside, loud, throaty shouts.

Obayashi nods. He lays his chopsticks on the table and stares silently into his plastic bowl of rice.

“What I mean,” Sigerius says, more tactfully, “is that other
Dutch people, and therefore Europeans, might think they’re really good puzzles.”

Obayashi raises his close-cropped head, looks across the table where John Tyronne is in conversation with Ping. “But maybe you know of a publisher?” he drawls. “Siem, just put me in touch with a publisher. I’ve got high hopes.”

At the last meeting of the Asian Internet Society, in 1999, this same man took him aside to discuss what he termed a “private matter.” Obayashi’s son-in-law was the commercial director of Nippon Fun, a Japanese enterprise that marketed a successful puzzle book in Japan. One of the games, Number Place, was all the rage in New Zealand, where someone had developed a computer program capable of mass-producing the puzzles, as for a daily newspaper. Unfortunately he hadn’t any with him, but Obayashi wanted Sigerius’s opinion on the Number Place game and promised to send him a few copies. He was convinced, even more than his son-in-law, that the world was ready for Number Place. A little while later, an envelope from Tokyo landed on his Enschede doormat: two Japanese booklets, each with sixty puzzles and an accompanying letter explaining in toy-English that the one with the five chili peppers was called “kamikaze,” he’d see why soon enough.

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, the 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.