Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  If I look at the lives of my contemporaries, it seems as though their existence more or less corresponds in relationships or marriages to the number of house pets. A human love affair has, on average, about the same longevity as your typical dog or cat — except that now, the relationship with the pet ends with its death, and the end of a marriage with the death of love.

  Cypri died a year-and-a-half later, just shy of seventeen, as a result of her illness. I was working in Houthem-St. Gerlach, Limburg that spring, so that this time I was the one to follow, by mobile phone, an event taking place in our backyard: Cypri’s burial.

  Shortly before that (it was May 2004), Tonio had phoned me excitedly with the news that ‘finally, something actually happened in boring old Amsterdam Zuid’. On the way home from school, he noticed on the Apollolaan a small crowd gathered near red-and-white police cordons, behind which men from the forensic team could be seen combing the area.

  ‘A liquidation! They’ve bumped off Willem Endstra. You know, the underworld banker. Just like that, in front of my school!’

  And then he informed me, less wound-up, of the death of his cat. They had taken Cypri to the vet, where she’d been put to sleep. Before they took her body back home, Miriam and Tonio went in search of a suitable coffin. At De Gouden Ton, Miriam asked for two bottles of Bordeaux, ‘in a box, it’s a present.’ Since she could not keep the real aim of the packaging a secret, the salesman took the two bottles back out and gave her the box, complete with wood shavings, for nothing. ‘You can always come back for a good Bordeaux sometime, ma’am.’

  Cypri had leaked profusely during her last days, so the vet advised them to line the wine box with a plastic garbage bag.

  ‘We’re going to bury Cypri next to Runner,’ Tonio said. Runner, his Russian dwarf hamster, for whom he, years earlier, had composed the brief ‘Requiem for Runner’ together with his guitar teacher.

  So I witnessed the funeral by telephone from South Limburg. Miriam and Tonio took turns relaying the proceedings.

  Tonio: ‘She’d been letting everything go the last few days … and now she’s lying on the garbage bag, and now it’s all dry.’

  They slid the wooden lid onto the box, which, said Miriam, fitted the cat to a T. I listened to the hushed discussion between mother and son. ‘D’you think the hole’s deep enough? So the crows can’t get at her?’

  4

  The two Norwegian forest cats, Tygo and Tasha, were Tonio’s only heirs … and that was it. They were his choice, as tiny kittens. Tygo and his sister Tasha …

  After Cypri died, Miriam was against getting another cat for the time being, but once Tonio had seen pictures of Norwegian forest cats online there was no stopping him. He scoured the internet until finding a cattery in Veghel, North Brabant, that specialised in this particular breed. In the summer of 2005, a year after Cypri’s death, he put on his sweetest, most seductive face and managed to convince his mother to drive him to Veghel, where according to the website a litter had just been born. With their second visit, shortly thereafter, a silver-grey cat and a rust-coloured tomcat, brother and sister, caught his eye as they rolled and tussled with each other. Tonio’s choice was already made, but they had to stay with their mother awhile longer. He kept in contact with the cattery via internet, monitoring the growth, week by week, of his little Norwegians.

  The day he could fetch them approached. Now he only had to con his old man out of 425 euros per cat, and the adoption would be complete.

  So on a Sunday in November, Tonio, with an ironic kind of pride, carried a cardboard box full of fluffy joy in from the car. Tygo and Tasha (they’d been named weeks earlier) stretched out on the kitchen table after the journey, only to curl up in a bread basket, where they fitted perfectly. Tonio photographed them from above. They lay there harmoniously, head to tail, melted like a yin and yang sign into the contour of the basket. It is framed and hangs on the wall, alongside a recent portrait of Tonio that Miriam has turned, for the time being, to face the wall.

  5

  Before Miriam hung up to continue biking home, she exhorted me to lock the cat flap. I left it open. The ivy had rolled itself neatly up as it slumped to the ground, so there was no danger of it slipping any further. Nor was the golden rain a hazard anymore.

  Back in June, I had caught Miriam up on the library ladder at six in the morning. She had propped it up against the tree in order to rescue Tygo, who was too scared to climb down, from a fork in the branches. A proper library ladder has a hinged mounting bracket which grasps the upper bookshelves perfectly for no-tip climbing. That bracket was now draped loosely over the rounded branch, and the ladder wiggled with it, ready to fling Miriam, her outstretched arm just about to grab the cat, to the ground. Alarmed by her cooing and calling, I got out of bed and went to the balcony, from where I looked down on her rescue efforts. I didn’t dare yell to her to come down this instant, for fear she’d get a fright and crash off anyway.

  The ladder made a nearly 180-degree twist, but Miriam managed to scoop the hefty tomcat off the branch and bring the two of them to safety.

  ‘Minchen, never do that again, will you? That’s not what a library ladder’s for. I really can’t handle any more accidents. Let the damn cat sit up there for a couple of days and then call the fire brigade. You let your cat mania go too far sometimes.’

  This incident proved once again that such a thing as a domestic quarrel was no longer possible. A petulant remark, the slightest raising of the voice, a sharp look — it all felt like a snub to Tonio.

  6

  I went back upstairs and out onto the bedroom balcony. On the roll of ivy, and among the undulating pleats of the remaining tapestry, skittered a dozen or more jays. I’m not an avid birdwatcher, but I do recognise a jay when I see one: his beige plumage, his black-and-white tail, the edge of his wings speckled like a Palestinian kaffiya. A few more sat on the fence between us and our neighbour Kluun.

  I had read about it in the paper. Tens of thousands of Eurasian jays emigrated from Eastern Europe, where they had thrived, and settled in the Ardennes, only to spread their wings further to the Netherlands in search of acorns. The onslaught has only just begun: in the coming weeks, they expect a hundred thousand at least. Those few in our tumbledown backyard were perhaps just the reconnaissance team. I saw them yesterday for the first time. They skipped about, as though surprised and disoriented, over the ivy’s aerial roots, possibly wondering what had happened to the previous night’s lodgings. Jays have the reputation of being quite muddled, and are thus apt to forget where they have hidden their stash of beechnuts. This was the impression they gave me now: surely they’re here somewhere … there you go, we’ve covered them too meticulously again …

  Tygo and Tasha emerged from their cat flap, and with their Norwegian gusto put paid to that Eurasian fumbling and fussing. The birds took flight over the backyards, and the cats in turn gazed confusedly into their newly formed wilderness. With cautious pawsteps, Tygo mounted the oversized roll, while Tasha sniffed around the splintered trunk of the golden rain.

  ‘See, Tasha?’ I said quietly, ‘You no longer need that tree to get to the birds.’ At once she turned her silver-white head in my direction and opened her jaw a few times in a soundless meow. Then she joined her brother on top of the hillock of ivy.

  ‘For God’s sake, let’s not get wound up over the ivy, too.’ Miriam’s voice behind me in the bedroom, panting from the stairs. Female heels clattering over the parquet. She stopped next to me and looked down into the abyss. ‘Yeah, I know … it’s a huge mess, but there’s nothing to be done. Worse things have happened.’

  ‘That’s just it, Minchen … we sat for nearly four months on those few square metres grieving over those worse things.’

  I pointed to the wrought-iron skeleton of the small arched alcove, which had been bent completely out of shape by the force of the falling ivy. The w
hite loveseat was half buried.

  ‘Tonio sat there with his model. Three days before he died. He photographed her there … If we hadn’t had that spot to cry our eyes out we’d never have survived the summer.’

  The cats now sat side by side, looking up at us with their white chests puffed out.

  ‘Then that’s the how it was meant to be,’ Miriam said. ‘Summer’s passed …’

  ‘Um-hm. The season is finished. Night after night the same show, and now the sets are being dismantled, rolled up, taken away. For the continuation of the heartache, ladies and gentlemen, we offer you the living room.’

  Miriam persisted in not caving in at the sight of what did, after all, amount to the destruction of her backyard, but in the end we both hung over the balcony railing in tears. That golden rain … when we moved in back in July ’92, Tonio was four, the slightest puff of breeze blew pale flakes off the little tree, but we didn’t realise these were withered blossoms. The following May, the golden rain brought forth small yellow cobs, no bigger than baby corn.

  ‘I’ll have them plant a new golden rain if you want,’ I said. ‘But what matters to me is that Tonio grew up with this one, and that he got to see it in bloom just before he died. That mess down there makes me feel like from now on, everything of ours is going to get dragged down … everything we thought we’d achieved, built up … everything that still bonds us with Tonio.’

  ‘Don’t think like that.’

  ‘I can’t help it. Murphy’s law, with its never-ending chain of discomforts, has something comical to it. I have the sensation that for the past few months we’ve been living under a law that’s only brought a never-ending chain of disasters. The one seems to bring about the next, without a logical connection. And the end is nowhere in sight.’

  The cats now lay on their side atop the roll of ivy, paws intertwined — play-fighting, but only half-heartedly, giving one another the occasional random lick.

  ‘So now you understand,’ Miriam said, ‘why I freaked out this morning about Tygo and Tasha.’

  BOOK II

  The Golden Rain

  CHAPTER ONE

  The White Elephant

  there is shopping to be done before darkness

  asks the way, black candles for the basement

  — Gerrit Kouwenaar, ‘there are still’

  1

  Whit Monday. In a daze, I ascended the stairs to my workroom: the seventeen treads that only yesterday morning separated me from my novel, and which the ringing of the doorbell rendered untakeable. On what I referred to as my sorting table lay the unfinished manuscript, and next to it a new work schedule. Today was to be the first day. Just look, there it was, in black and white: ‘Monday 24 May 2010/Day 1’. I looked around the workroom with something approaching curiosity. The maps spread out on the long table. The desks with three identical electric IBMs. The folders containing newspaper clippings about the murder.

  Here is where it should have happened today.

  Were it not for …

  I went to the back balcony and opened the doors. Whit Monday promised to be just as fine a pre-summer day as the day before. The unperturbed hard blue sky. Early yesterday morning, Tonio might have seen, at most, a hint of colour fade into the sky. This was all the summer he would see this year, this life.

  Once again I was taken aback by the awning above the balcony doors, which I had found retracted last Thursday after the photo shoot, knowing for sure I had left it open. I could no longer question Tonio about it. The girl on the Polaroid snaps, maybe she could clear it up. Where was she now? The capable young photographer who had immortalised her on film had, after this tour de force, set off permanently for a different place.

  The loose slats from what used to be Tonio’s bunk bed were still lying on the wooden floor of the balcony, against the railing. René, the handyman, had stacked them here, maybe two years ago now, presumably planning to bring them back down to the basement. He had used them to strut the scaffolding when the gutters on the street side had to be replaced. Before the scaffolding was taken down, René had carried the narrow planks over the roof to the back of the house and via the fire ladder down to my balcony. Perhaps I was working and he didn’t want to disturb me. When he left them there, they were still bright yellow and shiny with varnish. Over the past two years, the elements had turned the wood a greenish-grey, matching the colours of the balcony itself.

  Suddenly, out of those faded, mossy slats rose the image of the intact bunk bed Tonio was allowed to pick out when we moved into this house. He was so proud of it, especially because it meant the prospect of sleepovers with friends. One evening, when the eight-year-old Tonio had his steady girlfriend Merel over for the night, I went to check on them a couple of times. Merel was on the bottom bunk, Tonio on the top. Across the room, on an improvised bed, slept Merel’s elder sister Iris, who was always present as supervisor of all daytime games and activities.

  The second time I peeked in, I found two little heads lying on the top-bunk pillow. An hour later, the equilibrium had been restored, with Merel back on the bottom bunk.

  ‘It’s fine with me if you and Merel want to sleep together,’ I said the next morning, ‘but why’d you kick her out again so soon?’

  Tonio, indignant: ‘Yeah, well Merel lay there farting the whole time. It was gross.’

  ‘Oh kid, those marital inconveniences … you may as well get used to them.’

  I leant over the balcony railing and looked down into the garden. The domed canopy of the golden rain nearly covered the entire courtyard. Unlike a few days ago, the blossom panicles shone bright yellow through the green of the leaves. To the left, against the terracotta-stuccoed wall, was the two-seat bench under a small alcove (not much more than a wrought-iron arched frame). Here, too, judging from the test snapshots, Tonio had photographed the unknown girl. They were to go to an ‘Italian blockbuster night’ together in Paradiso on Saturday. According to the police, no one was with him at the time of the accident. Had he said goodnight to her just before, back at Paradiso? Was she even aware of his fate?

  We didn’t have her name. Perhaps we could find a number or a message from her on Tonio’s mobile phone, which was still sealed in plastic. We still did not dare listen to it.

  Wandering aimlessly through the house, I kept coming across, in the strangest places, those snow-white sheets of styrofoam that Tonio had used as reflector screens. It still bothered me that he brought them up from the basement without bothering to put them back. Being irritated with him, for as long as it lasted, kept him temporarily alive.

  The tripod was still in his old room — without a camera, but rather with an umbrella-shaped reflector screwed onto it. Tonio was undoubtedly planning to clear everything up the next time he came around. First things first: the photos had to be developed and printed. Everything pointed to his determination to be of service, down to the smallest details, to the nameless girl.

  One of the thicker white sheets was lined with parallel lengths of black tape, giving it the effect of a striped awning. I turned a desk lamp toward it in an attempt to recreate the lighting effect Tonio might have had in mind, but I couldn’t quite work it out.

  2

  Tonio’s birth on 15 June 1988 brought with it certain consequences. I was bound to protect, to warm, to clothe, to feed, and to educate the boy until at least adulthood. As far as my love for him went, my commitment would extend until long after adulthood — until my own death, and then some.

  He did not survive me. The world has been thrown out of balance, but I am still accountable for the consequences of my ‘baby fever’ back in 1987. Now that things have taken this awful turn, I cannot in retrospect renounce the choice, make him, for example, Death’s ‘poor relation’. To regret my decision of July 1987 would be an act of cowardice, and would sully his memory. Unthinkable.

&
nbsp; Even in his deceased state, I am bound to accept him — and care for him — unconditionally. I knew that the child I had set my sights on would be mortal, no matter how able-bodied he came into the world. Back then I accepted, albeit with a knot in my stomach, that mortality as a calculated risk. I had even prepared myself to accept, however slim the chance, the risk of his premature death.

  So grit your teeth, chattering if need be. Bow your head, but then raise it again. By bringing Tonio into the world, an untimely death was one of the unwelcome risks I saddled him with. I had gambled with his life, and lost.

  Miriam is still undiminished H&NE, the only woman I ever wanted a child with. Now that her son is dead, I must care undiminished for her, just as for him.

  3

  Or was there a viler implication behind the disaster that had befallen us? Even though it was thirty years ago that, before Miriam became H&NE, I doubted how suitable I was for fatherhood (or, better put, how suitable fatherhood was for me) — it could be that I was now being punished for my initial presumptuousness, and was forced to return to the original plan: write and do not start a family.

  Yes, perhaps that was the message … that any man who dared a half-hearted attempt at fatherhood might be robbed of it at any moment.

  4

  In aeroplanes I always paid close attention to the rumble and hum of the engines. A steady sound meant everything would be fine. And as far as turbulence went … a little bounce was a good sign: in this way the aeroplane was buying off my composure.

  Today I was not sitting in a Boeing, but was still trying to follow all its noises, vibrations, and movements by proxy. As long as I just thought of Frans and Mariska and their one-year-old son Daniel on their flight from Spain to Amsterdam, it had a calming effect. They would no longer see Tonio alive, but they felt the full impact of this loss. Being a father himself made Frans a more full-fledged brother. But then again, now that I myself no longer had a son to contribute …