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more like your father.”
    “But Janis and I are blood sisters. So there goes your theory.”
    “Just tell me then.”
    “So you think it’s Siem?”
    “Yeah. That’s what I think, yeah.”
    “Nope,” she sang, laughing. She kicked some dead branches and rotting remains of fallen leaves, as though the gravity of her disclosure evaporated at once because he’d been wrong. She didn’t say so, but her odd excitement told him she was glad he’d guessed Sigerius; he even suspected she would just as soon have left his illusion intact. And he had to admit feeling a bit disappointed—it was a pity there was no genetic tie—but of course he didn’t let her see that. Maybe Joni felt the same way, because even before they had returned to the clammy cabin her high spirits had dissipated into an inwardness he had not seen in her before.
    While he silently warmed up chocolate milk on the two-burner stove and she sat on the moth-eaten sofa with an old issue of
Panorama
on her lap, leafing through an article on skating, he thought about the natural easiness with which she and her sister called Sigerius “Dad.” They said “Dad” with a teasing or admiring smile, wheedled him with “ple-e-e-e-ease Daddy” in his ear when they wanted something, groaned “Da-haaaad” when he irritated them. When he asked her about it, she said with a certain pride that it had been like that since day one; from the day in 1979 when Siem Sigerius and Tineke Profijt married at city hall in Utrecht—without hoopla, without tuxedo, without Rolls or Bentley, without a reception—they had addressed their stepfather as “Dad.” She was six, Janis was three. From that day on, Joni called herself Joni Sigerius. Her real surname, Beers, a word that she only grudgingly revealed, had been encased in cement and dropped to the bottom of the Vecht River.
    Later, back in her student flat, she showed him ochre-brown Polaroid photos of an implausibly tiny Joni, her head sprouting two intensely blond ponytails, a surprisingly ordinary-looking little girl,an almost homely six-year-old, sticking out her tongue as she hung on the leg of a youthful Sigerius—the leg of her new father, who had let his beard grow wild. Her mother, still trim, not skinny like now, but just trim, in a sober dark-green pants suit, the snot-nosed Janis cradled in her arm, wore large brown sunglasses in all the photos because an ophthalmologist had scraped a cold sore from her left eyeball a week earlier.
    Keen to put the past behind them, mother and daughters accompanied their new chieftain to America, to Berkeley, where Sigerius had been appointed assistant professor in the Mathematics Department. Not there, nor at any subsequent campus, did Joni Sigerius volunteer any information about her biological father. Aaron had to press her just to learn the man’s first name. “Theun.” “Theun,” he repeated. “Theun Beers. OK. And what did he do?” Her real father was a traveling salesman in tobacco articles, the nameplate on their front door said “smoking accessories” and behind two small doors in the tall china cupboard were cartons of cigarettes, arranged by brand, that Beers had acquired surreptitiously and sold duty-free to smoke-logged characters who appeared in their living room at all hours, usually after Joni’s bedtime, to place their gravelly voiced orders. Her father often only got home after nine, he ate his meatballs and schnitzels in salesmen’s cafés and roadside diners. Even at the weekend they seldom saw him, she said, because then he rehearsed or performed with his band, a not entirely unsuccessful blues band where he sang and played guitar.
    “Blues? Did he make any records?”
    “How should I know? I think so, yeah.”
    (
Blues?
—he would have given anything to race off to his house on the Vluchtestraat to pore through his three editions of
Oor’s Pop Encyclopaedia
in search of Theun Beers. A blues band, Jesus,
now
she tells me. And sure enough,