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Couldn’t keep it under wraps forever.”
    “I was really surprised. I had no idea.”
    “Are you shocked?”
    “A bit. A bit. It’s kind of unexpected, of course. You’re all such a happy family. I’d never have guessed.”
    “I completely understand. I really do. It’s no joke either.”
    Aaron, struck by Sigerius’s grave tone of voice, chose his words carefully. “Of course …,” he replied, “these things happen. Statistically speaking. Every day, in fact.”
    Sigerius rasped his hand over his stubbly chin, he took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose. “That’s kind of you,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s true.”
    “Divorce isn’t common?” Aaron asked, surprised.
    “
Divorce?
” Sigerius grimaced at him, his ears trembled with surprise, but his eyes suddenly grew tired, he aged on the spot. Grinning, he plucked a loose hair from his sleeve and let it flutter to the floor. Then he stared straight ahead, as though he were weighing something up.
    “Aaron,” he said, “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but I’mtalking about manslaughter. About a brutal murder that the lawmakers oblige us to call manslaughter. The bastard killed a man. He’s been locked up for four years already. You didn’t know that part, did you?”
    It was nearly eleven at night. About ten meters away the beanstalk behind the bar stood rinsing glasses, his shirtsleeves rolled up; with the exception of two sweatsuited chinwaggers at the pool table, the canteen was empty. Everything they said reached into the pores of the cement blocks. The brief silence he was forced to drop was a thing, a heavy object. A murderer? Blushing, he said: “Siem, you’re joking. Please tell me you’re making this up.”
    “I wish I were.” In a forced attempt to remain offhand about the hard facts of his life, Sigerius told him about his one and only offspring, a guy about Aaron’s age. Nothing to write home about. A life of misdemeanors, drug abuse, relapses. The very same Wilbert whom Joni had so dispassionately described became in Sigerius’s version a criminal who had twisted himself like a corkscrew into a life of wretchedness. One weekday in 1993 Wilbert Sigerius hit rock bottom by beating a fifty-two-year-old man to death. “The Netherlands is a wonderful country,” said Sigerius. “No matter how dysfunctional you are, there’s a great big professional circle of friends ready to help you. Anyone who doesn’t have the balls to just get out and work is given a nice subsidized job, even if they’ve got a criminal record.”
    He sounded unexpectedly bitter, and a damn sight more conservative than usual—this scenario was clearly way too close to home, something that forced him to throw his liberal principles overboard. Aaron was glad Sigerius did not look at him, perhaps out of shame, so he could let his own emotions cool off, that usually worked best; he was overcome by a strange exhilaration thatconsisted partly of delight, grateful to be taken into another’s confidence, and partly of discomfort with this sudden intimacy. It felt as though they were dancing across the canteen together.
    “They gave him a pair of overalls and a decent salary, so he had somewhere to show up in the morning with his lunchbox. After grief followed by even more grief that we won’t go into right now, he was given the chance to start over again—what more could a person want? At the Hoogovens steelworks, of all places. An excellent company, tens of thousands of Dutch men and women have earned an honest living there for the past 100 years. A sporting chance, you’d say. But the first spat he gets into, the kid picks up a sledgehammer and beats his direct superior, a foreman looking forward to a gold watch from the head office, flat as a pancake. I sat in the public gallery when the prosecutor described what various witnesses had seen. What happens to a person when you bash them with a four-kilo sledgehammer.”
    Sigerius