That’s how it felt.
‘Twenty minutes,’ said the concierge. ‘It’s busy.’
We went outside to sit in the late-afternoon sun, settling down on a low cart, perhaps for transporting laundry. Hinde went off to smoke a cigarette at a safe distance from the revolving door. I was drained, and did not know what to say. Miriam, too, was silent. Even the sunlight made a tired impression, having shone so fiercely on our misery all day.
Just ten minutes later, the taxi arrived; maybe it wasn’t even ours. But since the driver made no moves to enquire at the reception, we quickly got in: Miriam and I in back, Hinde up front. ‘Oud-Zuid, please … Johannes Verhulststraat.’
The last time I had been in a taxi was some two weeks before, after that unexpectedly intimate goodbye with Tonio on the Staalstraat. The fifty-euro note I’d forgotten to slip into his breast pocket. Just like then, I looked back out of the rear window as we drove off, and now there was just as little sign of him as then.
I tried to imagine Tonio as we had left him to his immobile fate in Intensive Care, lying on a temporary bed that in a short timespan had been transformed from a deathbed to a bier. (At least, I always thought a deathbed was the bed a person dies on, not the bed on which a dead body lies. A dead body lies on a bier.) At the request of the forensic photographer, the nurse will have pulled the sheet back to the foot end while he attached his camera to the tripod. First, he documents Tonio’s roughly stitched open side, where the car had hit him full on. The man ensures that the bruises and discoloration are properly lit. Then he takes pictures of the other incisions in the torso, and of the drain and saw lines on the skull.
Ecce homo, or what’s left of him. Three days after photographing that pretty girl at our house, Tonio undergoes his final photo session — with himself as the model.
Due to the parallel-tracked bruise stretching from the neck, over the chin, and to the nose, the photographer would take a close-up of Tonio’s face. I resented the fact that the last portrait of his good-looking kisser would be so unflattering, with that obscenely swollen tongue sticking out between the lips. As though his last message to the world was an extended tongue, like in the old days when a convict thumbed his nose at his executioner on the scaffold.
The taxi got onto the motorway toward Amsterdam Zuid. The radio (or maybe it was a CD player) blared hip, whining Arabic pop music — electrified bouzoukis, with the vocals alternating with unadulterated rap.
‘Could you please turn down the radio?’ Hinde asked.
The driver reacted with less empathy than you’d expect, considering the building where he had just picked us up was a hospital, and his passengers were clearly distressed, if not outright distraught.
‘We’ve just had some very bad news back at the hospital,’ she said in a renewed attempt.
‘Okay, okay,’ the man grumbled. He turned down the volume the tiniest fraction. Who were we, after all, to disrupt to his ‘labour vitamins’?* Arabic rap — something new, at least. At that very moment, we heard the ringtone of a mobile phone, but muted, like when a woman’s phone goes off in the bottom of her handbag. It wasn’t mine. I would have recognised Miriam’s. But Hinde did not react, nor did the driver.
[* ‘Arbeidsvitaminen’ is a long-running (since 1946) popular-music radio show in the Netherlands.]
Suddenly it hit me that it had to be Tonio’s mobile ringing in the plastic bag they had given us. It was lying on Miriam’s lap. The bag hadn’t been sealed, but was tied shut with one of those plastic zip ties you needed to cut with scissors. Miriam and I stared, paralysed, at the plastic-wrapped mobile phone. (Perhaps she had felt it vibrate on her thigh.) The caller had to be someone who wasn’t in the know. So it could be anybody — except for Jim, and even he hadn’t heard the latest, definitive news yet.
The phone stopped ringing just as Miriam was about to dig her nails into the plastic bag and tear it open. We waited for the voicemail signal, but there was none: apparently the caller chose not to leave a message.
‘Something just occurred to me,’ I whispered to Miriam. ‘They gave us his mobile and his wallet, but not his watch.’
‘The collision …’ Her voice sounded flat, exhausted. ‘Maybe it flew off his wrist. The band was getting loose.’
‘Then the police would have found it. They cordon off the whole area after an accident like this. Yellow paint outlines all over the road … you remember what the policeman said this morning. They reconstruct everything, comb the place for clues. Maybe they’ve kept Tonio’s watch as evidence.’
I was reminded of the photos of wristwatches from a museum in Hiroshima. Melted and deformed, their hands immortalising the precise time the atomic bomb exploded. ‘It might have stopped at the moment of impact.’
‘If he was wearing it.’
The taxi took the exit ramp, a three-quarter curve, so that Miriam, too listless to resist, got squashed up against me. The warm, soft body that had made Tonio possible and in which he, in turn, had left his mark.
‘Last Sunday,’ I said. ‘You two were supposed to go into town … to buy him a new watch. I never heard any more about it.’
‘Tonio emailed that morning to say he was “beat”. Always that word, “beat”. Could mean anything. From a hangover to the flu. Because of his beatness, we put off the watch-shopping until next Sunday.’
‘Not today?’
‘It’s a public holiday — we weren’t sure if the shops would be open.’
‘Minchen, in the Staalstraat that night, in the pub … do you remember if he was wearing his watch then? He was so keen to get a new one, that maybe …’
Awful, this conversation. As if we were desperately in search of anything of Tonio’s that was still ticking. At the mention of the Staalstraat, Miriam began to whimper. She was so proud of him that evening — his wisecracks, his keen remarks. He had become his own person.
‘I wasn’t paying attention,’ she wept.
‘It was one of those oversized monsters,’ I said. ‘He nearly always wore it. I always noticed if he wasn’t wearing it.’
‘Well, then he must have been,’ Miriam said, turning her head the other way. I knew it was time to drop the subject.
12
Leidsegracht, 1992. When I got home I saw Miriam, shower cap on her head to keep out the dust, bent over a cardboard moving-box. She clapped two books together, releasing the dust that had managed to gather despite the closed box.
‘Put them back, Minchen. I’ve found us a house.’
‘In the Veluwe, I hope?’
‘On your native soil. Your old neighbourhood.’
‘May I see it first?’
‘Right now, if you like.’
The manager of the pension fund, who (like the Veluwe landlord Roldanus) had given us a three-year lease, was not in the least bothered (unlike Roldanus) by our request to vacate at the halfway mark, provided we could find a new, creditworthy tenant. But before we could do so, the pension man had found one himself: a concert pianist. The top two floors were perfect for his two grand pianos. I wondered privately if the small spaces had much to offer acoustically, but maybe the pianist only played modern music on a piano packed in a down duvet, tapping the keys through a rubber mat while a tin woodpecker chipped away at the legs. I was far too relieved to have been let out of our lease and able to move ASAP to the new house on the Johannes Verhulststraat to worry any further.
(The ad agency’s pension funds did not exactly strike gold with the new tenant. After transferring the two months’ deposit, the payments dried up. By the time he was in arrears for an entire year, and the summons-servers had come and gone, the pianist, whose name no one had ever seen on a concert poster, had absconded. One day I received a phone call from Cristofori, the piano-rental company situated on the Prinsengracht, a stone’s throw from the house. A woman asked if I
could provide her with the forwarding address of my friend, the man who had taken over the flat on the Leidsegracht.
‘You see, he rented two top-of-the-line grands from Cristofori … defaulted on his financial obligations … and now it appears that the pianos have been moved to his new residence. So we thought that perhaps you could …’
I explained to her that the concert pianist was no friend of mine; I had never laid eyes on him, not even on stage. The Cristofori lady also told me, with a sigh of indignation, that the man had the audacity to lower both grand pianos, enlisting the help of some construction workers, who were busy renovating the basement on orders from the agency, out of the house.
‘The guy’s got a lot of nerve,’ I said.
‘And two of our best pianos,’ she added.
I told this all to Tonio that evening while tucking him in, on the upper bunk of his new bunk bed. I jazzed up the story with the image of a man who, two wing-shaped grand pianos attached to his shoulders, flew off one night into the wild blue yonder.
‘There’s no such thing as a wild blue yonder at night,’ he insisted. ‘At night the sky is nearly dark, depending on how far under the horizon the sun has set.’
A man flapping off with two grand pianos as wings, he didn’t seem to have much problem with. He made me repeat the story over and over, and had a good belly-laugh at the prank we’d pulled on our landlord by leaving that piano-playing mythical creature behind.)
The formalities surrounding the purchase of the house were completed. We could be summoned to the solicitor’s at any moment. At least once a day I would take tram 2 down Leidsestraat to Zuid. In Café Bar-B-Q, at the corner of the Banstraat and the Johannes Verhulst, across from the new house, I’d sit at the window gazing across at the yellow-brick façade. It was the left half of a twin house. Our front exterior had recently been sandblasted, while that of the right-hand house looked as though it had never been cleaned, and had collected all the soot and dirt of the past century. A lung specialist had his practice in the grimy right half of the yellow twins. The owner of the Bar-B-Q told me that the doctor’s standard reply to comments by his patients on the filthy state of his façade, was: ‘That is simply to illustrate the point of your visit, to show you what your lungs look like after forty years of smoking.’
There wasn’t much more to see of our house. Faded curtains hung in the windows, the sills lined with withered plants, a silent anti-squat brigade. I just sat there and looked, repeating to myself that we were about to start a new life. Tonio, who had just turned four, would grow up there, leave home after graduating high school, and years later, once it had become truly ours, would return with his own family while Miriam and I would downsize. For the next decade-and-a-half we would be secure there, the three of us. I turned to the bartender and asked if there was much burglary in the neighbourhood.
‘Only if they know there’s something to be had,’ he replied. ‘People with art or a stamp collection.’
I didn’t collect postage stamps, and until now our art collection consisted of a few of Tonio’s framed drawings, like his brilliant portrait of the cat Cypri.
13
The taxi exited the A10 and descended into Buitenveldert.
‘A critical condition,’ I said. ‘I’ve been wrestling with that term all day. With what it means … especially its elasticity. That “critical” had something comforting about it. As though, with a little extra effort, the doctors would be able to fix it … Now I know a critical condition can also turn out, well, critical.’
‘Then for me it has a whole different gist,’ Miriam said. ‘When the police rang the bell this morning, I knew right away something was really wrong. Even before they opened their mouths. When I heard “critical”, I knew he’d die. Or was dead already.’
‘He was still alive.’
‘All day I thought it would turn out badly. Of course, you never know for sure. Tonio could live without his spleen. Like people manage with just one kidney. But when I heard about his brain trauma … both halves starting to swell … I just prayed he wouldn’t come out of it as a vegetable.’
‘By the afternoon,’ I said, ‘my nightmare was a Tonio emerging from a coma. Severely brain-damaged, just enough left to be able to comprehend his condition. Oh, my God, what have I done? Look what my recklessness has caused. I think I’d have died from his regret, his shame … compounded by my own.’
Then it was quiet for a few moments, aside from the Arabic music and Miriam’s sobs. We drove past the old Olympic Stadium, approached the Harlemmermeer roundabout, near where my father-in-law Natan lived. Hinde turned to her sister and said: ‘Papa and Mama … how are you going to tell them?’
‘Not over the phone,’ said Miriam.
They decided to discuss it at our place and then cycle around to their parents’ homes, one at a time — in which order was still up in the air. I was surprised to have been so routinely excluded from such a painful mission, but I did not protest.
14
We got out of the taxi. I looked up, along the yellow-brick façade. Electric light shone through the half-opened curtain of Tonio’s old room — Miriam had probably left the light on when she got dressed there early this morning, trembling with trepidation.
I remembered a time, August ’98, when we returned home from holiday to find a six-member family standing on the front stoop. They were looking up on cue from an old man, who seemed to be the group’s guide. They spoke American English. When one of them saw us head for the front door, our suitcases in tow, the old man approached us. He introduced himself in Dutch and told us that he had lived here until the age of sixteen, shortly before the war broke out. He had been able to flee to America via Switzerland — to New York, where he still lived. Now he had been joined by his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren for the couple’s fiftieth-anniversary trip to his home town, including a visit to the house where he had spent his youth.
We gladly invited them inside. Tonio ran ahead; he saw it as his duty to show the visitors what he considered the highlights of the house: the basement full of Lego, and his own room with its K’Nex Ferris wheel. The old man’s father had been a wine merchant, and the basement had been the storeroom. While Tonio’s laugh echoed throughout the house, the whole family was in tears. The wife and the daughter were particularly hard hit. The father had told them so much about the house of his youth, and now … now here they were, actually walking around in it! Renovations had transformed much of the place over the past sixty years, but once in a while the man got choked up when he recognised certain things from the 1930s. The stained glass in the balcony doors, the ceiling ornaments, the maid’s room up on the third floor.
When we retired to the living room for coffee, he pointed to a cupboard door. ‘There’s a secret hiding place in there. My father had a small safe built in.’
Miriam opened the cupboard door. The bottom was covered with a piece of linoleum, which, sure enough, covered a small hatch. We had never noticed it. The cache was empty (but it set the wheels of Miriam’s imagination spinning, resulting in a thriller-like novel a few years later). It was an emotional moment for the man, and his whole family, to be able to point out something tangible that had been his father’s.
I let my gaze climb the yellow façade, behind which Tonio had grown up — never to return, not today and not in his old age. Thinking of that old man made me feel a wave of sorrow for Natan, Tonio’s 97-year-old grandfather, who would soon hear from his daughters that his grandson was no longer alive.
15
Miriam and Hinde were probably on their way from their father’s house on the Lomanstraat to the St. Vitus retirement home in the Jordaan, where their mother lived. How do you tell your parents that their only grandchild has been killed in a traffic accident — right now I could not imagine it. I just wanted them to get back home as soon as possible. I was scared.
In the course of the day, I had visited the toilet far more often than usual, for ever-shorter spurts of colourless urine, like after you’ve been sitting in rain-drenched clothes in a draughty train station waiting room. Now, too, the urge arose, like a chill on the bladder, despite the warmth of the summery Whitsun that penetrated the house. I sat on the edge of the sofa for a good fifteen minutes, my fists screwed into the seat cushions next to me, ready to hoist myself up and go to the bathroom. When I could finally bring myself to get up and leave the room, I lingered indecisively on the landing. My hands lay on the balustrade connecting the handrail of the staircase leading upstairs and downstairs. There I stood, looking down the stairs to the front hall, my back safely to the wall of photos.
The WC was to my left, next to the spare kitchenette. Opposite its door, Miriam had covered a mangled bit of wall where the fuse box used to be, with portraits of Tonio. They dated from various ages.
Tonio as a toddler, with an obligatory smile that doesn’t quite mask the put-out earnestness.
Tonio with bravado, butch-ish cap on his head, broadly grinning in between the giggly sisters Merel and Iris. (Judging from the bared teeth, still pre-braces.)
Dressed up as the Dutch cabaret artist Dorus, complete with moustache, bowler hat, and dust coat, from when he had to sing (or lip-synch) the song ‘Two Moths’ at a talent show at the Cornelis Vrijschool.
As an eight-year-old, autographing books at Scheltema with his father. (In the photo, taken by Klaas Koppe, he hands a freshly signed book to a customer.)
With his friend Jim in Antwerp for the presentation of the Golden Owl 2004 (not to me), each with a large mug of Jupiler beer in hand, doubled over laughing. Tonio’s mouth wide open with hilarity, showing off the sparkling braces he’s still got at age fifteen.
Tonio’s self-portrait as Oscar Wilde, the result of a group project at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, fall 2006.
Tonio Page 15