Whether it was the summer evening chill or the white wine, Mr Rat kept excusing himself to go to the toilet. Every storey had one, but with each absence I heard a different flush. And each interval lasted a little longer. Mr Rat was having a good sniff around the place.
‘Now I know why your face looks so worn out,’ he announced after the umpteenth inspection. ‘You’re medicated up to the gills.’
‘Beg pardon?’ Miriam and I looked at one another.
‘Yeah, the door to your study was open, and there were all these boxes of sleeping tablets. Zero-3. They say it’s heavy-duty stuff. Enough to floor a horse.’
After that remark, I should have floored him, and with a less innocent means than Zero-3.
‘Those are weight-loss tablets, Rat. Three days a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday — you starve yourself. Instead of eating, you swallow a couple of Zero-3 capsules every two hours. They expand in your stomach, so you think you’re full. I can hardly recommend it.’
A shadow of irritation glided over Mr Rat’s face. Considering his own addictive tendencies, to yet a different menu of substances, he was not about to be denied this discovery. He shook his head. ‘It’s a well-known fact that Zero-3 is a potent sleeping pill. My regular doorman on the Reguliersdwarsstraat sells them, too. No need to be secretive about it.’
‘Next time you need to pee,’ I said, ‘open one of the boxes and read the leaflet.’
Mr Rat somehow didn’t need to pee after that. Seen enough, mission accomplished. As I was tied up for the next few weeks with readying the house, it was a full month before I heard, along the grapevine, of my addiction to downers.
‘Well, what do you expect,’ I replied. ‘I live in a brothel. I’d never sleep a wink otherwise.’
So this was how I began the new, sheltered life of my small family: by naïvely letting in a mole from the old, unsheltered life.
23
I took advantage of Miriam and Hinde’s absence to make a couple of telephone calls. Not to my father-in-law, no, not just yet: I had to be certain his daughters had already told him the news. It wasn’t a subject to be conveyed via crossed lines.
For the past twenty-five years, my sister’s landline had been permanently connected to the answering machine, so I was not surprised to get her voicemail when I for once called her new mobile number. To soften the blow somewhat, I began by saying ‘something serious’ had happened to her nephew, and asked her to phone me back.
And then my brother, who was still in Spain. When I had spoken to him that afternoon, eons ago, Tonio was still alive. I had told him bluntly that it was not good, but somewhere in the scintillating silence between Holland and Spain there was still hope. Now I had to tell him the bare truth. I don’t know anymore how I put it, but a week later Frans recalled in his funeral speech that I had said: ‘The poor kid didn’t pull through.’
Two ageing, choked-up brothers on the telephone, falteringly asking questions and giving answers about the most horrible conceivable scenario — no, an inconceivably horrible scenario that had nevertheless occurred. We had been raised by a mother who, whenever her children wanted to go out, hysterically summed up all manner of imaginary dangers, and then insisted her brood stay home, if need be under lock and key. Now that a suchlike imagined hazard had finally become reality, we didn’t know which way to turn. This was not part of our upbringing.
‘It’s so awful,’ Frans kept repeating with a strangled sob. ‘This is so terrible.’
There wasn’t more than that to say. It said it all. He would fly back to Amsterdam the next day with Mariska and the baby, and come to us as soon as possible.
24
I heard tell that Uncle Willy, when he learned of his son’s death, went wandering with his dog through the neighbourhood. He took such big strides that the animal felt compelled to run, tugging so forcefully at the leash that my uncle had to lean backwards to counter it. Neighbours who met him, or saw him pass by yet again, said he talked non-stop, loudly, to no one in particular — not even to the dog.
Not two hours ago I had watched my son die. Did I feel the need, like Uncle Willy, to roam the streets, orating or not, pulled along, if necessary, by an imaginary dog? I just sat there on the sofa, ostensibly calm, waiting for the Rotenstreich sisters to return from their hellish mission.
I thought back to the telephone conversation with my mother, a good twenty years before, about Willy Jr’s fatal accident. She and my father were now both dead, but I still had to imagine how I would break the news to her. No, not over the phone, that was too cruel. I’d take a taxi to Eindhoven. In my mind’s eye she still lived, alone, in that house in the ‘Achtse Barrier’ neighbourhood, where Tonio had spent many an overnight visit in the early ’90s. Her shadow behind the matte-glass door.
‘You here, what a surprise. You should have rung, then —’
‘Mama, it’s Tonio.’
I push her gently inside. She tries, stiffly, to look over her shoulder. ‘Nothing serious?’
We’re in the living room. ‘He’s had an accident.’
She sits down on the edge of the easy chair, hand covering her mouth, yellowy pale. The hand shakes — Parkinson’s — so it’s like she’s giving herself tiny slaps on the cheek. ‘Tell me it’s not true.’
‘I wish I could.’
‘Oh … is it bad?’
‘The worst.’
Sniffing, she begins to cry. The hand flaps, out of control, in front of her face. ‘Dead?’
‘Tonio’s dead, Mama. He’s gone.’
‘Even his back beamed.’
Those words, spoken by my mother, echoed endlessly through my head. At Eastertime 1990, Tonio, then nearly two, spent a week at my parents’ in Eindhoven. When we went to fetch him, getting out of the taxi we decided not to ring the bell, but to surprise them by sneaking through the backyard and kitchen.
The living-room curtains were drawn to keep out the sun, but a narrow window at the side was uncovered and open. My father sat at the table demonstrating something (a tow truck, crane, or fire truck) to Tonio, who stood next to him and paid close attention.
‘There’s a little peg here, you see? If you pull it out …’
My mother leant over the table, entirely taken in by Tonio’s greedy attention. She had so thoroughly brushed his still-blond toddler’s hair that it wafted about his head and shoulders like a cloud. We crowded up to the narrow window, our heads pressed together, and felt it was almost a pity to disrupt this scene of happy domesticity. We stood there and watched in silence.
All at once, aroused by some kind of instinctive blood-call, Tonio turned his gaze over my father’s busy fingers and toward the window. He saw us. Out of his throat, out of his tiny body, came a protracted primeval scream like we’d never heard from him before. There was something frightening about it, like an animal in danger, but the undertone was one of triumph. He ran in circles, completely berserk, too excited to find his way through the kitchen, so instead we hurried inside.
As small as he was, Tonio must have possessed an amazing lung capacity, because he brought forth a steady stream of noise, without appearing to stop for a breath that combined joy, wonder, and indignation. (Indignation, too, of course: his way of wordlessly conveying his consternation at our extended absence.) The stomping of his little legs at least brought some cadence to the monotonous, high-pitched wail. He clamped one arm around Miriam’s leg, the other around mine, apparently determined to hold on forever. I looked from my father to my mother. Their faces, hesitating between surprise and resignation, betrayed their thoughts: we’re out of the picture now.
Later, my mother told me that Tonio, halfway through the week, had regularly expressed his doubts as to whether we would ever come pick him up. She said he tended to do so with a brief show of melancholy. He would heave a deep sigh and then resume his interrupt
ed playtime.
Tonio was so relieved that we hadn’t forgotten him, and that we’d come to take him home, that on the way to the taxi, each of us holding one hand, he did not even look back at his grandparents standing in the doorway. My mother later said to my sister: ‘Boy oh boy, it really was something … so sweet … even his back beamed.’
At home, Tonio demonstrated the tow truck, crane, or fire truck and said to me: ‘There’s a little peg here, you see?’
25
Half past seven. The time Tonio was to come around to eat chow mein. Or should I say, he always promised to be here between six-thirty and seven, and it became seven-thirty. Except when he dropped by unannounced, in which case it was usually earlier, between six and half past. All the above-mentioned times had now been exceeded, including the seven-thirty mark.
Dear Tonio, you should have long been here already. Where are you now? Already on the stainless-steel autopsy table in the basement of the AMC, or still on your deathbed in the yellow nylon tent in Intensive Care? If they haven’t carted you downstairs in the freight lift yet, the forensic photographer, who showed up a bit late, might finally be packing up his equipment. The nurse has laid the sheet back over your naked, wrecked body, and is waiting for a colleague to come and help her wheel away your gurney: she has already kicked the wheel brakes loose with her foot.
Okay, that’s how it stands with your dead body. But how about you? Where are you? We don’t have to talk about your soul, and whether it flapped awkwardly around your bed, this being its first foray outside the nest, or flew off in a straight line. No metaphysical ornithology right now. What I mean is pure mechanics. The always-flexible line in which you moved and lived and breathed. An elusive zigzagging line cannot be erased from the world, just like that.
I only have to close my eyes to see you walk into the living room. On the way to the kitchen to pour myself a drink, I walk past the door just as it gently opens. Even though I’m expecting you, I get a fright, because I didn’t hear you on the stairs.
‘Tonio, dearest … don’t we knock anymore?’
Last Thursday you shaved for that girl … come on, what’s her name … and a five o’clock shadow once again accentuates your grin. I greet you with a hand on your shoulder, it’s warm from cycling, as it should be. You’re panting slightly from running up the stairs, so that I feel your breath on my face from close by.
‘Where’s Mama?’
I can’t very well tell you she’s gone with Hinde to Grandpa Natan and then to Grandma Wies to tell them what happened early this morning to their grandson …
‘Gone to the Suri. You wanted chow-chow, right?’
‘It’s chow mein. A chow-chow is a Chinese dog. Jeez.’
Your staccato laugh, always with a hint of melancholy in its undertones (a matter of intelligence: only fools laugh outright cheerfully). As usual, you stink of cigarettes. Your clothes, which Miriam regularly washes, are saturated with the stench of rotten nicotine. Of course, your roommate has been a hardcore smoker since he was fourteen, and smokes pot besides. You guys are like farmers when it comes to airing out the place: never open the windows, lest the smell of manure get in. Last time I visited, I asked you point-blank: ‘You smoke, too, don’t you?’
‘Ah, sometimes I have one in a bar,’ you replied. ‘You know, to go along with the guys.’
Your answer put my mind at ease. But now I think you were skirting the issue. I’m going to ask you again tonight, and then I want a straight answer. Come on, Tonio, you’re going to be twenty-two in a few weeks. No more hide-and-seek. ‘Something to drink?’
‘I’ll wait for Miriam.’
It’s not just that no one mixes a meaner screwdriver than your mother — you don’t want to give the impression of being a glutton. Although I suspect you can put it away as well as the next guy. I noticed it, by the by, after the premiere of the film Het leven uit een dag. (I hope you didn’t cause that Marianne, your date, too much trouble.)
Tygo has followed you upstairs. He’s at your feet, waiting to be petted. You scoop the big tomcat from the carpet with both hands at once, and flop backwards onto the corner sofa: your regular spot. While you stroke him with great swipes, Tygo twists himself on his back over your thighs. Let me have a good look at you, Tonio. You are unarguably handsome, shaven or not. Too bad about that 1.73m — a few centimetres shorter than I. You’ll have to settle for it, I’m afraid, you’re full-grown now. You’ve got short parents and short grandparents. Miriam and I were never preoccupied with genetic details like height when planning a family. A person only feels small when he’s reminded of his stature by a taller person. It’s usually a dumb hulk, whose tallness only makes him dumber and hulkier, and which emboldens him to profess: ‘The tall always have a head start.’
A recent study even showed that tall men earn on average more than relatively shorter ones. See? — the tall guy’s intimidating appearance is going to be legitimised by job-search committees and accounting offices. Hell with ’em. Remember that nearly all geniuses were short. The brain can communicate quicker with the hand, it’s as simple as that. The argument that it’s some kind of subconscious sublimation of a physical handicap is just plain bullshit.
‘How far apart are we sitting now? A good four metres. I can still smell your smoky clothes. Tonio, there’s something I want to ask you … something that’s been eating me the past few days. Before that, too, but this week it cropped up again. Since the photo shoot with that girl, last Thursday, to be exact. You don’t have to answer me. I’m only asking because it bugged me way back when, too. From the time I was seventeen until I turned twenty. You take after me in so many things, and your life now, as a student, has so many parallels with mine at your age … so … if you’re embarrassed by this, then let’s just forget it. Tonio, are you still a virgin?’
26
At the annual Amsterdam cultural fair ‘Uitmarkt’ in 2003, fifteen and thus already too old to co-sign books with his father, Tonio hung around with me at Querido’s stall. As I chatted with passers-by who enquired about future, as-yet unpublished works, I was amused to listen in while Tonio joshed sheepishly with Isolde, my editor’s daughter. They were just two months apart in age, and had shared a playpen as babies. Later they attended each other’s birthday parties. They had played together at Arti. But instead of taking advantage of the longstanding familiarity, he kept the pretty thing at arm’s length with ribbing and raillery. She in turn, not to be outdone by Tonio’s repartee, gave as good as she got. You could say they dallied in tender derision.
Later, he returned the bag I had given him for safekeeping. ‘She and I are going to a do a round of the Uitmarkt,’ he shrugged, grinning almost apologetically. I watched the two of them as they walked off. He exhibited the same tick I had at his age when I walked alongside a girl: drawing his shoulders up unnecessarily high, giving yourself a sort of hunchback.
27
Tonio sat, in my imagination at least, across from me in his regular spot these past years, and I occupied the sagging sofa that by rights was once his. Even in my vision, I was unable to seduce an answer out of him.
Like he was fond of the morning intimacies with his mother …
Early one morning, shortly after the summer of the move, I awoke to someone tugging at my arm. It was Tonio. I lay on the living-room sofa, where I had passed out after a nighttime glass. Laughing and blurting out indignant yells, he hung on my arm. I could feel in his toddler’s body the force with which he tried to drag me to the floor. That sofa was his morning domain and was at this moment being desecrated by my massive dozing presence. I gave in and slid to the carpet, and rolled around a bit for good measure. He shrieked in triumph. But the victory was not yet complete: I was chased out of the room. I saw Miriam come out of the kitchen with a feeding bottle of watered-down chocolate milk. Before he took it from her he checked it, as he did every morning.
‘To the brim, and not too hot?’
‘Full as full can be, and not too warm. Feel for yourself.’
A bit later I peeked around the doorway. Tonio was sprawled on the sofa, leaning against his mother, sucking lazily on the bottle and blinking as he watched a video of his favourite cartoon duck, Alfred Jodocus Quack. He swung a swatch of polka-dotted fabric left and right, as though swatting at flies. Every now and then he removed the nipple from his mouth, held the bottle up to the light to check on his drinking progress, and to judge how much longer this paradisal interlude between sleep and school would last. It was his timepiece, his liquid hourglass.
28
Tonio had been dead for hours now, and I had not committed suicide yet. I had often pondered issues like cowardice, lack of solidarity, frozen feelings. If he had been kidnapped, or otherwise had gone missing, I would be out scouring the most unlikely places, out of breath, in search of him. But for his death, I had no answer.
As a boy, I entertained obsessive, morbid thoughts. Say I had to bring my mother the news that my little brother or sister had been killed in an accident. I placed my parents’ grief above my own. What’s more, I was dead scared of their grief. Better to kill myself than to be confronted with their despair. Dilemma: even though I didn’t have to be there to witness it, my suicide would augment their grief by 100 per cent.
Once I became a father myself, I was not relieved of these obsessional fantasies. If I were to lose my child, could I then go on living, or would I forfend the pain by doing myself in as quickly as possible? And then there was Miriam, to whom I also had a responsibility. I could suggest a double suicide as a kind of painkiller.
I made a little moral deal with myself, which in itself was no less obsessive. Thinking back on the Makelaarsbrug and on the risky child’s bike seat, I came to the decision that I would commit suicide if I had in any way caused my child’s death.
Tonio Page 17