Bonita Avenue Read Online Free PDF Page A

out to Boekelo, on the other side of town. He rang the bell at a seniors’ apartment that corresponded to the address on the tattered card. A Turkish man answered the door.
    So he plundered the record library and, when Joni wasn’t with him, studied jazz history as if he had to program the North Sea Festival that summer. He perused the artist entries, concentrating first on the big shots who got the most pages—the Parkers, the Ellingtons, the Monks, the Coltranes, the Davises—and after that,the rest of the ’50s jazz greats: Fitzgerald, Evans, Rollins, Jazz Messengers, Powell, Gillespie, Getz. He listened to all their records, jotted down biographical particulars in a notebook, etched it all in his memory, Blue Note, Riverside, Impulse!, Verve, Prestige. It was like his former studies, only that fucking
Kapellekensbaan
had taken him three weeks and
Giant Steps
just thirty-seven minutes and three seconds. Books had dominated the first half of his 1990s, he read like a maniac, entire evenings, at bus stops and in waiting rooms, when he lay awake at night: tallying titles, keelhauling oeuvres, five years of forced labor to recoup his humiliating comedown in Utrecht—now it was “mission accomplished” in just five
weeks
. Then he knew it was safe to go back in the water. Another five weeks later, he stood next to Sigerius in De Tor listening to the Piet Noordijk Quartet, sipping whiskey and putting his faith in a silicone-implant jazz knack.
    Deceitful? Of course it was. But everyone in that farmhouse lied. They were a family of prevaricators. Although he knew this was a lame excuse, he told himself that all of them had secrets—Sigerius, Tineke, Joni, him, they all had something to hide. How long had he not known that Janis and Joni weren’t Sigerius’s real daughters? Long. And they’d have been quite happy not to tell him at all. Not a word about the real genetic set-up. Sometimes he had the impression that they’d forgotten it themselves.
    It was at least a year before Joni told him, during a weekend in the woods in Drenthe, that her “procreators” divorced when she was five. More than the news itself, he was surprised that she waited so long to bring up something as relatively ordinary as divorced parents, but she was so dead serious about it, uncharacteristicallyearnest, that he didn’t let on. They were staying in a secluded clapboard cabin about twenty kilometers south of Assen, and the cloying romanticism of isolation and a wood-burning stove apparently gave her that little extra incentive to share. During a crisp winter walk in the woods she challenged him to guess which of her parents was the “real” one: Come on, Siem or Tineke? Good question, he said, but in fact it was a piece of cake. Sigerius, of course.
    “Why d’you think that?”
    “Just because. It’s a wild guess. You don’t look much like him, but not like your mother either. You’re both athletic. Athletically built too.”
    In truth, they didn’t look at all alike. Sigerius was dark and swarthy, had eyes like cold coffee, he looked like a gypsy, almost sinister. His beard growth would make an evolutionary biologist’s mouth water. Joni, on the other hand, was fair and blond, butterflyish, had a face so smooth and symmetrical that Sigerius couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. And yet he detected a common denominator: their drive. Father and daughter possessed the same compulsive energy, wouldn’t tolerate dallying or doubt, hated the thought of giving up, and couldn’t understand it when other people—he, for instance—did so. Joni, like Sigerius, was smart and tough and decisive. Maybe it was genetic.
    “So you think Siem is my real father because I’m not fat.”
    He’d never really given it any thought, he realized, there had been no reason to. “Yeah,” he said. “No … Also the way you interact. You and Siem are in cahoots, you can see that within ten minutes. Janis is a mama’s girl. You’re