When I first knew Miriam, I used to tease her about her ‘filthy fingers’ — a matter of pigmentation, whereby her fingers got darker as they approached the tips. Only now did I see that Tonio had inherited his mother’s natural colouring, but on closer inspection it was simply that his fingertips were just plain dirty. I pointed it out to Miriam.
‘Look, the dirt under his nails. He obviously skidded across the asphalt.’
‘His nails were always dirty. How many times did I tell him …’
She said it almost straightforwardly, like a belated remark on child-rearing. The nurse was still standing at the foot of the bed, without looking up at us, as though she hadn’t even noticed our presence. She carried out vague procedures on or around the blinking apparatus, but out of the corner of my eye I couldn’t make out exactly what she was doing.
I took Tonio’s hand, which felt limp and heavy. The fingers were swollen, reminding me of his limbs when he was hurled, fresh from his mother’s womb, like a bundle of sausages onto my lap. He was still unwashed. There was not much life yet in the puffy, purply arms and legs. All the available nursing hands were needed to combat the perceived complications with the mother, which turned out to be less urgent than all that, but meanwhile there I sat with that sticky creature glued to my jeans. (I wore them for several weeks longer, without washing out the dried placard of blood and slime, like a proud Indian with bear blood on his vest.) Bawling, that it did, but without the body joining in. To check whether it was alive I poked my finger against the tiny hand. Immediately the minuscule fingers closed around it. Mission accomplished.
I laid Tonio’s hand down and put my thumb underneath it, lightly stroking the palm of his hand. There was no movement; the skin felt lukewarm. Normally you’d say: his hand felt pleasantly dry and cool. Now, I knew this was a temperature between life and death.
I continued rubbing my thumb against his palm in a regular rhythm — until the machine at the foot of the bed suddenly began beeping impatiently, and, startled, I jerked my hand back. The sound, in its electronic chilliness, had something agitated about it, like a mother bird’s alarm calls when her nest is under threat (in our backyard ivy). Miriam got a fright and started trembling. Nothing had visibly changed in Tonio’s inert state. I looked over at the nurse, who kept her eyes glued to the monitor, and did not seem fazed.
‘Does this mean it’s happened?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no,’ she said airily, without taking her eyes off the small monitor screen. ‘It even just seemed to pick up slightly.’
‘Pick up … meaning …?’
‘Well, just that … I’m seeing some improvement.’
I don’t believe her words actually elicited any real hope in me, but they did throw me for a loop. (Later it appeared that Miriam fortunately did not register what she had said.) The alarm beeps had stopped. Did this mean that what the nurse had taken to be an improvement had already fallen by the wayside?
Suddenly I was no longer so sure she had been given the task of turning off the ventilator. Perhaps it was her job only to monitor the machine’s signals, hence her unbiased observation that there was ‘some improvement’.
4
This time, we reached the waiting room without getting lost. The fear in Hinde’s eyes could not have been linked to Tonio’s fate, because she already knew that. It had to do with us: how we were bearing up, how she had to succour us. I understood. I was never so afraid of anything as someone else’s unquenchable heartache.
Before we could sit down, another wave of panic came over me. ‘Minchen, they’re taking him off the ventilator now. We can’t abandon him now.’
We hastened back to the yellow curtain even quicker than the previous time. Tonio in his bed. If the light-blue mouthpiece had lain on the sheet in front of him, there would have been room for the thought that it had been poorly attached and had fallen out of his mouth, or that in his deep slumber he had spat it out — but the thing was just gone. They had removed it, and put it away, so that some desperate family member would not get it into his head to restart the ventilator.
Tonio was no longer breathing. How long ago had they cut off his breath? We hadn’t been gone for more than two minutes. It had probably just happened … no more than 30 seconds ago … We couldn’t ask the nurse, because she was gone.
Had they intentionally wanted to shield us from that obscene moment when his life would be irrevocably brought to a halt by a human hand? Or had we indicated by walking off that we had chosen not to witness it?
‘It’s really happening now, love,’ I said to Miriam. ‘He’s dying. You can see the colour draining from his face.’
Dying. I tried to believe it myself, otherwise I’d never be able to pinpoint the moment. There was the homo duplex again. Alongside all the unfathomable grief into which I sank, there was still room for other emotions. Like pride. I was proud of him, the way he lay there dying, serene and sovereign. He could do it, he did it, he died. It was more than anyone could say for me until that point. I was still childishly consumed by my own mortal fear. As dying went, Tonio was head and shoulders above me.
He was brain-dead, of course, from the moment we first saw him here in the yellow tent. The real dying he did on the operation table. In stages, one failing bodily function after the other. ‘He’s dying,’ I’d said to Miriam. I left it at that.
That the colour drained from his face was accurate insofar that he now became even more ashen than at first. He would have already lost his light olive complexion early that morning, on the Stadhouderskade. Now his face had even lost all hint of a sheen. The slackening skin pulled the pores open.
If in the past I succumbed to fearful daydreams, losing control of my thoughts and visions, I would occasionally arrive at the image of a newly dead Tonio. I’d get so angry at myself that I would jump up from the chaise longue and wring the obscene thoughts out of my head with both hands. Balls of my hands pushing into my eye sockets, rubbing as hard as possible, until nothing was left of the image except the exploding sparks of light on my abetting retina.
Well, here he lay, Tonio. Dead. All along I had been taking a visionary advance on what, unimaginably, still turned out to be possible. Where was my anger now?
5
All of a sudden, she was back, the nurse who had observed a slight improvement in Tonio’s readings the last time we were there. No, it wasn’t her after all — it was another one. She fiddled with a few of the buttons on the machine, which as far as I could see was already switched off. I also noticed that, with the exception of the ventilator, all the tubes and wires were still attached.
‘Only the mouthpiece has been taken away,’ I said. ‘The rest is still there.’
Without looking at me, the young woman replied: ‘Everything has to be left in place as much as possible until the forensic photographer has been here. Pictures of the external injuries are always taken with the equipment attached. I don’t know why, but those are the rules.’
I didn’t want to ask if, for the sake of the photo shoot, she shouldn’t reattach the ventilator, just to complete the picture. It would be no easy task. Since removing the mouthpiece, Tonio’s lips had started to part, and the tongue began, ever so slowly, to stick outward, thick and lazy, like a sleepy Down’s patient. I nearly asked her to stop what she was doing and call her colleagues, a doctor if necessary — anything to stop that obscene swelling of the tongue. But just then she walked away from the bed, the yellow curtain rustled, and she was gone.
We had never known him like this. Tonio was already transforming into unrecognisableness.
Miriam focused on another disturbing detail. With her thumb she tried to push Tonio’s left eyelid, which was creeping open, back into place. Elastic as it apparently still was, it kept shooting halfway open. In the old days, they put coins on the eyes of the deceased to keep them from opening. The homo duplex
reminded me of a book, by Dickens perhaps, that I’d read as a boy, in which some poor bloke tried to steal the coins from the face of a body laid out for viewing. The thief found himself being stared at wide-eyed and accusingly by the deceased.
We had better leave before Tonio, who had at first lain there so peacefully, would take his leave of us with an unfathomable gaze and stupidly extended tongue. We both kissed him once more on the cheek and forehead, Miriam murmuring: ‘My poor darling … my sweet Tonio.’
On the morning of 15 June 1988, I had seen him, aided by the gloved hands of a midwife, emerge from his mother. He tore her open in order to gain entry to the world. She gave him, with a drawn-out scream of surrender, permission to rip her perineum in order to push his way through. Nearly twenty-two years later, I witnessed how he disappeared back into his mother — not in the guise of a dead person, but in the form of a dark cloud of grief that would be indissolubly stored in her.
I took a step backwards. While Miriam bade farewell to our son with a few last whispers and caresses, I looked at him for as long as possible — not only his face, but his entire body, from head to toe and back again.
Because he was so small, they had put him straight into an incubator after his first washing. For observation. While Miriam was being stitched a maternity nurse brought me to the ward where he lay in his glass cradle, with its white rosettes in the side walls, through which ministering arms could be stuck. He wore an oversized nappy and was fastened to all manner of wires and tubes. His cry was thinner and higher-pitched than I’d ever heard before from a newborn. His knees were tucked way up, perhaps because he’d gotten used to the position during all those months. But, damn it, this was my son, no two ways about it.
‘It’s a tradition here on the ward,’ the nurse said, ‘to take a photo of every newborn baby. The first one is on the house, we always say.’
‘With pleasure.’
She aimed the Polaroid at the side of the incubator. Just as she was busy adjusting the camera, Tonio stopped crying. While at first the puggish face had been facing upward, it now turned in our direction. The nurse took the photo. I imagined that the flash penetrated his still-blind eye membrane and set him off crying again. The camera hummed in the woman’s hands and Tonio’s very first portrait glided out, still hidden in a black square.
‘That’s what I call photogenic,’ she said, flapping the shiny card. ‘Stops crying at just the right moment. Half a second, couldn’t have been more than that, but it was enough.’
She blew against the dark surface, as though her breath would bring the image to life. And it did. Her unique method of photo developing succeeded: the contours of the cocooned Tonio gradually came into focus.
We still cherished that now-faded first Polaroid. Soon, almost twenty-two years later, Tonio would once again, tubed and wired, be photographed in a hospital — this time on his deathbed, and very likely for the last time. Human existence didn’t make any sense at all, but the circles were always neatly complete, and that was exactly what was wrong with it.
That my own life-circle could contain Tonio’s would make a jinxed geometric figure of it for the rest of mathematical eternity.
Miriam and I knew that this goodbye was definite and everlasting. I obstinately want to recall that we stepped backwards until we were behind the yellow curtain and in the hallway. More likely is that we kept turning around, in order to imprint, more sharply and deeply, that last image of him.
6
Shock. There was no other word for it. I had seen the phenomenon in others before. Then it was active shock, which did not only manifest itself via the facial muscles, but it seemed as though the entire body desired to participate, without, however, offering any semblance of solace. Hands grasped the chest, fingers clawed in the mouth, breath imitated a wheezing bellows.
‘No … no.’
My shock was a silent, cold shock. Blood, tears, other bodily fluid — it all seemed to be drawn away from the surface and led into my chilled insides, and to freeze there.
7
Another memory of Tonio in his incubator. His willy (the wrinkled little gumdrop I first checked to determine the sex of my child) was taped downward, toward his feet, apparently to prevent the little fellow peeing all over his not-yet-healed navel. You can’t start too early teaching boys to aim.
What had they done with his genitals during that endless operation? In a documentary about John Lennon’s murder they interviewed a doctor from the hospital where the wounded musician had been brought. ‘There lay the hero of my youth, naked, with his penis taped to his thigh.’
Now that I’d recalled that bit of the documentary I couldn’t get the image out of my head: a naked John Lennon with his member taped down to facilitate the autopsy. Ach, Tonio … that fine instrument of yours: you still had so much to accomplish with it. You had only just started.
8
We ran into our blonde nurse in the hallway, who, even after an entire day’s work in this transit station, had not lost any of her freshness. Was she waiting for us, or did our paths just coincidentally cross? She walked with us, a small stack of manila folders pressed against her bosom.
‘Are you doing okay?’ she asked. And right away: ‘Of course you’re not. What am I saying.’ The upbeat expression vanished from her face for the first time all day. ‘Oh, sorry, sorry.’
Her apology sounded sincere, even a bit desperate, which did not suit her. Maybe she was still an intern.
‘Don’t apologise.’ I heard the woodenness in my own voice. ‘You’ve been a terrific help today.’
At the corner near our waiting room she said goodbye, her face plaintive. Her shift was over.
‘I’m terribly sorry for your loss.’
She had one of those slender hands where you could feel the bones glide supplely over one another.
A female doctor sat on the two-seater, with a clipboard of papers that needed signing. Not a single word of her explanation got through to me. While the Rotenstreich sisters tearfully consoled each other, I put my signature next to the ‘X’ the required number of times. I could only think of the joint autograph sessions with Tonio in a variety of bookshops in the mid-nineties. He so wanted to sign his own name under my autograph on the half-title page, but had agreed to the condition that the customer specifically request Tonio’s contribution. Tickled pink, he would give a shy smile when the buyer asked: ‘May I also have your son’s autograph?’
Now I was signing papers on his behalf.
9
Scheltema Books, Koningsplein, Saturday 22 June 1996. For more than two-and-a-half hours, Tonio perseveres in signing his name under mine, after which he claps the book shut and hands it to the customer. He is enjoying himself, but his smile has something ironic to it, as though he knows he’s taking them for a ride, which he enjoys in equal measure.
‘Did Master Tonio also contribute to the book?’ an older man asks.
‘No,’ replies Tonio, his voice cracking into a high-pitched laugh. ‘I don’t even know what it’s about.’
There is a lady from the radio. She holds a microphone in the air to register the ambient noise, and briefly questions a few people in the queue. Suddenly I’ve lost track of Tonio. As I sit there signing, I see him out of the corner of my eye standing next to the radio presenter. If I concentrate, I can hear him cheerfully and uninhibitedly answering her questions, at length and in more or less complete sentences.
‘Of course I’m allowed to autograph, too. He’s my father, and he sat upstairs for sooooo long, and I had to wait sooooo long for him to finish … Here it is —’ (he takes a book from the stack, opens it) ‘look: “For Minchen and Totò and their infinite patience” … that’s mama and me. Because we never complained … only sometimes, just a little.’
And so on and so forth. When he returns to the table and unscrews the cap of his fou
ntain pen, he sighs: ‘Heh, finally, my first interview.’
‘So, Tonio, schmoozing about me again, eh?’
‘Oh, it was nothing, just Yes and No questions.’
When, three weeks later, I am to repeat the exercise at Athenaeum Booksellers, Tonio passes. ‘Two autograph sessions a year — kind of boring.’
10
The doctor collected the signed forms, refastened them under the clip, and got up. I couldn’t just let her go.
‘What happens to my son’s body now?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been told … the injury, it’s to be documented any time now by a police photographer … a forensic photographer … but after that?’
‘Then he’ll be brought by lift to the mortuary.’ Something in her tone of voice told me that she had already, maybe a few minutes ago, explained all this. ‘Down in the basement. He’ll remain there until whichever undertaker you choose comes to collect the body.’
What stuck with me most of all was that she used he and the body in the same sentence.
11
Before we got into the lift, Miriam accosted an ICU nurse. ‘Have you got any tranquilisers for us? We won’t make it through the night otherwise.’
The woman was not aware of our case, so we explained our need for some Valium. She grudgingly pressed a few measly strips into Miriam’s hand.
‘Can’t I have more than this?’ she said. ‘I’m really not planning to go peddle them on a street corner.’
Shortly thereafter I got into the lift with a fistful of Valium. The sharp corners of the foil strips jabbed into my flesh. In my other hand I held Tonio’s wallet. Miriam carried the plastic bag with his mobile phone.
Down in the main hall, Hinde requested a taxi at the reception desk. I looked at Miriam. She was pale, but did not cry. She just kept gently shaking her head. Yes, here we were. Recovering from a gruesome experience. Legs trembling. But soon we would leave the horror behind us. The colour would return to our faces, and everything would get back to normal.
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