Tonight’s dilemma was that I could not feel any less guilty of Tonio’s death. It didn’t take a dodgy bike seat to point to my guilt. I could not prevent his death, which was damning enough. On the other hand, I did not want Miriam to have to deal with two corpses in one day. I could not give the disburdening of my guilt priority over the comforting and care she needed.
The longer I thought about it as I waited for Miriam, the more futile the question of suicide became. Tonio was dead, and my self-destruction would be a joke by comparison.
29
It was to be expected that, now that our marital crisis was resolved, various people would do their best to keep the recent conflict alive for a while longer.
‘Did you hear? They’ve made up.’
No, what kind of pub talk was that. They craved drama, and if that was in short supply they would just be creative about it.
Months after my homecoming and our move to the new house, my mother-in-law, herself about to leave her husband, told me that ‘at the neighbourhood club’ it was a foregone conclusion that we, her daughter and son-in-law, ‘had split up’. She was at our place for a visit; we sat in the living room having tea. Tonio was playing on the floor.
‘What do you think, Mum?’ Miriam asked, with that special incisiveness in her voice that she reserved for her mother.
Wies had the habit of quickly running her thumb and index finger over her nose before she struck. ‘Yes, well, you know … people don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason.’
I looked at Tonio in his play corner … On his immobile little back I could see he’d suspended play. His grandmother’s words had alarmed him. A cluster of Legos clutched in each hand, he sat and listened intently. Tonio had just heard the incomprehensible news that his grandparents (she nearly seventy, he eighty) would soon be separating. Now Grandma Wies dropped in to announce that she had it on good authority ‘at the club’ that the same thing was about to happen to his father and mother.
Split up.
‘No, they don’t, do they,’ said Miriam, even sharper now. ‘People don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason. Gossip doesn’t just materialise from thin air. Right? Always an element of truth to it. Maybe the whole truth. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But tell me, Mum, what’s your conclusion, sitting here on the sofa in our new house? Does it look to you like we’re about to split up?’
‘You know, Miriam … I’m only repeating what I’ve heard at the club. That’s all.’ And, after considering for a moment: ‘People don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason.’
Tonio had not gone back to his Legos. He turned his head, and looked at the tea-drinking company with big, serious eyes.
‘Wies, aside from everything you hear and believe at face value,’ I said, ‘do you really think it’s a good idea to come unload it all in front of your grandson? A child of four has ears, and more importantly, feelings, too. You could have at least asked Miriam or me beforehand if there was anything to your clubhouse cackle.’
She shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the tips of her shoes. ‘I only said that people don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason.’ Her lowered voice was perhaps a concession to Tonio’s feelings.
Maybe it was also to spare his feelings that I did not boot granny out of the house then and there.
30
The Rotenstreich sisters were back — shattered by the news they bore, and the reaction it had elicited from the old folks. They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask.
‘Minchen,’ I said, ‘we haven’t touched a drop the past two weeks, no problem. But I won’t survive tonight without an anaesthetic.’
Miriam and I each took one of the pills we’d been given at the hospital and washed it down with some vodka. Hinde passed. She made a sandwich with one of the rolls Miriam had already sliced when the doorbell rang this morning. They weren’t entirely stale, despite the summery warmth that had carried on all day.
‘Okay, so tell me,’ I said flatly (I still had to get acquainted with my own reaction), ‘how did your parents react?’
‘My father took it pretty quietly,’ Hinde said. ‘Didn’t say much. He’s always been one to bottle it up, but all the more so now. Shocked, of course, but with him you have to read between the lines.’
‘My mother just started screaming,’ Miriam said. ‘She kept repeating how awful it was for me. She was being honest, that I’ll have to give her.’
Pill + vodka: I remember little of what we talked about that evening. Each of us sat trapped under our own bell-jar of bewilderment. Intermittently, Miriam burst into fits of tears.
‘This can’t be … it can’t be.’
Yes, I did speak on the phone with my father-in-law, but I can’t recall who rang who. ‘I turned off the television,’ he said with his still-beautiful Polish accent, ‘and just sat for a while talking to myself. Why, I kept asking myself, why a boy of not even twenty-two? And why do I, an old man of ninety-seven, have to go on living? Why?’
31
‘Are we being punished,’ asked Miriam a while later, ‘for having been so happy, the three of us? For being such an ideal threesome?’
For the first time today, her anguish had an undertone of anger. She eyed me fiercely through her tears.
‘Minchen, as far as we know,’ I answered weakly, ‘this was just a matter of blind fate … and blind fate doesn’t hand out specific punishments.’
‘So why does it feel like that? It feels like retribution. For our arrogance, that we dared to be so happy together.’
32
‘If you two think you’ll be all right on your own,’ Hinde said, ‘I think I’ll go home now. It’s not going to be much of a night, for me either, but … I think I’m better off in my own bed. And there’s Dixie.’
‘If you can’t face it at home,’ Miriam said, ‘just come back here. You’ve got the key.’
Hinde promised. Dixie was her cat.
‘I’ll leave some bed things on that couch.’ Miriam pointed to the chaise longue across from the TV. We hugged Hinde goodbye and thanked her for her help and for sticking with us all day.
‘Don’t mention it,’ she said.
Miriam walked her sister downstairs. They stayed in the front hall, talking and crying, for a while longer. After the door clicked closed, I heard Miriam climb the stairs. She walked past the living room and slowly continued up to the bedroom level. As the most dreadful night of my life was unfolding, she left me alone.
I sat stock-still, listening. Cupboard doors clattered upstairs. Heels on parquet. I didn’t hear her come back down: suddenly she was there in the living room, a pillow under one arm, and folded sheets and blankets under the other. She laid the bedding on the chaise longue and sat down next to me on the sofa.
We did not speak. Too exhausted, too numb to console each other. The valium and the vodka did their work, and we gladly encouraged the torpor with new portions of alcohol. The only point of thinking was if there was the chance of finding a solution. I couldn’t even think: here we are, two people with a problem. There was no problem, because there was no possible solution, ever. Death itself could loosely be considered a problem: how do we deal with that stinking, irrevocable fact? A dead person, however, was too dead to constitute a problem.
Miriam took a sip, set her glass on the end table, and shoved it as far from her as she could. The booze did not agree with her. She laid her head on my shoulder; it slid, as though of its own accord, down to my chest, and then further, onto my lap. She cried almost inaudibly, with a quiet, rustling sound, like water singing in a kettle. The only thing she said fitted into a drawn-out, tremulous sigh.
‘Our little boy.’
INTERMEZZO
15 September 2010
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
1
The blind wall is back.
In fact, the house is ours thanks to the back garden’s minimalist dimensions. During the years of its vacancy, from ’89 to ’92, it attracted numerous couples in duplicate, with the intention of splitting the large brownstone into a duplex. Their enthusiasm, according to the estate agent, invariably plummeted at the sight of the garden: no more than a postage-stamp courtyard enclosed by two high exterior walls, a fence, and the side of a warehouse. The subsided, moss-covered paving stones gave under your feet, turning every step into a cakewalk. The only growth, aside from the slick moss, was the cautious sprout of a golden rain. And two families’ worth of children were supposed to play out here?
For me, the restricted space was a blessing — saved me all those gardening Saturdays. Right away, Miriam figured out which corner Tonio’s lidded sandbox could fit into, leaving enough space for us to have dinner now and again with friends. An artist/landscape-architect acquaintance promised to transform the little courtyard into a ‘garden room’ (whatever that may be) one day, but never got around to it.
I had more trouble with the blind wall onto which our rear windows looked out. It was the side wall of a block of houses on the Banstraat, wedged between Johannes Verhulst and De Lairessestraat. It wasn’t, incidentally, totally ‘blind’. In addition to a few ventilation grills, there was, to the left and more toward the front of the house, a small bathroom window, half hidden by a wisp of withered ivy. You hardly ever saw light behind the matte glass.
This made for a rather dreary view, like facing out onto railroad tracks, and in fact almost derailed the purchase altogether. But in the end, nature solved the problem. At the bottom of the wall, fresh shoots had sprouted from the clipped ivy, and had begun a careful climb upward. Over the years the unsightly wall became covered in a glistening green carpet of leaves, where a passing breeze could bring out all the various tints of green, shimmering like a mosaic.
In the eighteen years that we lived here, from the summer of 1992 to the summer of 2010, the ever-thickening blanket of ivy, at some places a metre thick, had never been trimmed. Birds nested in it. In the spring of 2007, while I was working temporarily in South Limburg, Miriam decided to surprise me upon my return by giving the grubby courtyard a makeover. Italian stucco and new tiles. Everything antique-pink and terracotta. She had a veranda installed a metre and-a-half above ground level, with French doors leading to the library, and an awning above it.
The puny golden rain, too, had reached maturity in the course of nearly two decades, and spread its broad crown out over the little garden. In good weather we spent many fine hours out there, sheltered by the high adjacent walls as the evenings cooled off. Gardener friends, though, started to raise their concern about the density of the growth.
‘D’you have any idea how much weight is hanging on those shoots?’ a friend asked. ‘If that all comes crashing down, it could take the whole exterior wall with it. Then you’ll be staring straight at your neighbour reading the paper in his armchair.’
That would be the good man Max Nord, who, if all was well, lived behind that side wall, and I did not want that on my conscience. Earlier this year, I resolved to have the ivy trimmed in early summer — and then suddenly it was Black Whitsun, which put paid to that promise. The thick, green wall-hanging and the golden rain, as it passed its prime, were from then on the decor for our daily sessions of despair. Here, on the wooden love seat under the compact arbour, Tonio had sat, three days before his death, with the girl from the photo session. Everything around it had to remain intact as much and for as long as possible.
But since we also had to consider the neighbours, who were now living in fear of their wall, we arranged with our regular handymen to resume maintenance the following February.
2
Last night, when I went to bed just before midnight, it hadn’t happened yet. As was my habit, I stepped out onto the bedroom balcony to take in a few lungfuls of air, which otherwise were now permanently deprived of fresh oxygen. I decided to ask Miriam if she’d drive me to far-off woods and beaches this fall, so I could stroll without having to share my story with passing acquaintances.
The ivy leaves glinted in the light of the moon, which would only set after 1.00 a.m. If anything had been amiss then, I would have noticed it. The night was clear and tranquil, insofar as a city can be tranquil at that hour. I could never hear another ambulance or police siren without imagining they were headed for the Stadhouderskade.
This morning, 15 September, it was as though autumn was suddenly upon us. Even before I opened the bedroom curtains, I could hear the rain and the wind. It had something enduringly familiar about it, that bare, blank wall across from my window. It brought me back to the early nineties, when the ivy was still only a thin covering on the lowest few metres of the wall.
I slid my feet into a pair of slippers, opened the balcony doors, and stepped outside. Our little back garden was a disaster area. The thick ivy had, perhaps in a hard gust of wind, pulled itself loose from the wall, and like a huge, heavy curtain it buckled as it sank. Thanks to the restricted space between the wall and our veranda, the wall covering had rolled itself up neatly during its free fall, and now lay like a gigantic coconut mat ready to be beaten by a carpet beater the size of a telephone pole. The green Goblin tapestry, which we had always looked upon with such pleasure, had now shown us its back: a gnarled pattern of climbing stems and aerial roots, beautiful and mysteriously intricate as the underside of a Persian rug.
The avalanche of leaves had simply pushed aside the still-slender oak, with its supple trunk, but the golden rain appeared to have been devoured, crown and all, by the huge roll of ivy, like a body rolled up in a hearth rug. At closer inspection I could see the very top of the tree sticking out above the ivy mat, far from the place where I assumed its roots to be. The golden rain, which had grown and matured side by side with Tonio over the last eighteen years, and which he had seen in full bloom just before his death, was no more.
So the blind wall was back. Off to the left hung a ragged, dense lock of ivy that half-covered the bathroom window. And down below, nearly at the paving stones, there was a bit of growth left, like a kind of fig leaf for the wall.
It was eight in the morning. The ivy must have come loose between midnight and a quarter of an hour ago. How could I not have heard the snapping branches, the noise of the avalanche?
Miriam had left for the fitness centre at half past six. If she had noticed the devastation she would certainly have woken me up. I rang her mobile, and left a message on her voicemail: that she mustn’t be alarmed when she got home and opened the living-room curtains. Alarmed and well, she phoned right back.
‘The cats …’ Her agitated voice. ‘Have you checked to see that they’re inside?’ From the unmistakable sound of grating pedals I could hear she was on her bike. ‘For all we know they’re buried under the ivy … squashed.’
Tygo, more than Tasha, had a tendency to climb up the golden rain in search of prey, a sort of play-hunting, quacking as cats do at an unreachable nest.
‘Hang on,’ I said. Now I was uneasy, too, and went down the stairs, phone in hand, to the pantry, calling the cats’ names all the way. They were curled up as usual in their basket. ‘Safe and sound. Both of them inside.’
‘Oh, thank God.’ Miriam wept with relief. ‘I was sure we’d lost them. Nothing would surprise me now. I got right on my bike.’
We would never know if the cats were out back when the whole thing came tumbling down, and had managed to reach the safety of the cat flap in the nick of time.
Miriam and Tonio had gone to Lanzarote for New Year’s 2002–2003. I stayed at home, because of course something required urgent completion. Miriam had admonished me to bring the cats inside on New
Year’s Eve before the fireworks started, and lock the cat-flap so that Cypri would not panic and run into the garden, where the noise of the explosions ricocheted even more against the walls.
It was one of those flaps with a variety of settings, and I misjudged the procedure: the cat could get out but not back in again. When I returned early that morning she was nowhere to be found indoors. I rang Miriam in Lanzarote, who was already having breakfast with Tonio at the hotel. In her forgiving voice, she piloted me along all of Cypri’s possible hiding places. The cat was fifteen-and-a-half, and had diabetes. I wondered out loud if she hadn’t crept under the half-rotting wooden fence to die. Her voice choked, Miriam kept urging me on from the other side of the world, with Tonio occasionally chirping in his encouragement.
‘Just keep calling her name.’
Had we ever told Tonio the role Cypri had played in the run-up to his conception? Maybe not, but he had always regarded her as his personal pet, from the moment that he, still a baby, lunged at the cat, who was curled up next to him on the sofa, in order to pet her. He lost his balance and fell on top of her, and paid dearly for it: a blood-drawing swipe, complete with a throaty hiss. Neither of them took umbrage; it was as though the incident served as mutual hazing, because from then on they were inseparable.
‘Cypri … Cypri …’
Finally an answer, thin and plaintive. The cat had got her head stuck between two bars of the basement grating. Finding her flap locked, she had tried to get into the house this way, ignorant of her diabetic swollenness. I still had the mobile phone on, so Lanzarote could follow every step of my rescue mission. Only once it was successfully completed did I get read the riot act for my irresponsibility and negligence. Tonio also joined in mocking my stupidity, giggling with relief.
‘So Adri, got any New Year’s resolutions for 2003?’
3
The sad part about having dogs and cats is that they only last, on average, a decade-and-a-half. Those who cannot live without a house pet are confronted with this fact four or five times in their life. Pets are far more loyal than people. We don’t lose them to unfaithfulness, but rather to their life expectancy.
Tonio Page 18