11
Amsterdam, 25 May 2010
In the early morning of Sunday 23 May, our son Tonio
(born on 15 June 1988) was hit by a car while riding his bicycle.
The accident occurred on the corner of the Hobbemastraat and the
Stadhouderskade. From four-thirty in the morning until four-thirty
in the afternoon, surgeons at the AMC fought, together with Tonio,
for his life. He did not pull through. Tonio died shortly after leaving
the operating room, with us at his side. He was our only child.
As a student of Media & Culture, he had actively and ambitiously
taken life by the horns. He had recently informed us of his intention
of pursuing a Master’s degree in Media Technology. It was not to be.
His passing leaves us devastated.
We hope you will appreciate that Tonio’s burial
will be kept intimate,
and that for the time being we are not able
to receive visitors at home.
Miriam and Adri
Enclosed: Self-portrait of Tonio as Oscar Wilde (2006), taken
during his studies at the Amsterdam Photo Academy.
12
I feel him sitting next to me. I feel him standing before me. I feel the warmth of his breath in my neck — in short puffs, caused by his chuckling, for he is reading, half out loud, over my shoulder, like that time when I wrote to a publisher who had mistreated me. ‘ “Dear bookmonger” … good one!’
But mostly I feel him in me, as though I were a pregnant woman. I feel a hard kick in my gut, then a few lighter kicks for good measure. It feels like he’s struggling to turn over.
In the spring of ’94, he and Miriam came down to Angoulème, where I had gone a few weeks earlier to work on a story. Tonio was five, nearly six. The doors of the TGV opened, and he hurled himself straight from the top step into my arms. Without so much as grazing the platform tiles with the toe of his shoe, he suddenly dangled from my shoulders, laughing, kissing. I can call to mind, any time of the day or night, the affectionate force of his grip. I shall feel Tonio in my flesh for as long as I have living nerves.
Five years later, in Marsalès, I fetch him from a table-tennis tournament at the campground. I watch for a little while from the sidelines how he wields the paddle as twilight falls. He has taped little plastic tubes filled with yellow luminescent liquid to the back of his hands. Their purpose is to confuse and distract his opponent. A flick of the wrist, and the light stick traces a sort of Chinese character in the air. His ruse does not work. Tonio loses time and again. After the last set, I push him playfully in front as we walk home across the low dike that traverses the swimming hole. I press my fingertips into the sides of his nape, just under the ears. His skin is flushed and moist.
‘Hot neck you’ve got there.’
‘Do-hon’t.’ He makes the automatic defensive gesture with his elbows that goes with his age (eleven), but does not really try to shake loose from my hand. ‘Jeez, I didn’t even win a single set. Those light sticks are worthless.’
My thumb glides upward, caressing the sweaty hairline on the back of his neck. The damp warmth will never evaporate from the heel of my hand.
In all phases of his life, Tonio left imprints of himself in me — from the time he literally fell into my lap, straight from the womb, until that last hug on the Staalstraat, when in my emotional absentmindedness I forgot to give him that last fifty.
13
Miriam came home in an artificial kind of high spirits, and with the almost cheery announcement that she and Josie had found ‘a pleasant, quiet spot for Tonio’. The papers made a note of the plot number: 1-376-B.
‘When you see it, you’ll like it, too.’
‘I believe you. I’ll see it Friday.’
Before I could become irritated with her cheerfulness, I reminded myself that it could, at any moment, make way for bottomless grief.
There was a postage-stamp-sized notice in that afternoon’s Het Parool:
Cyclist killed in collision on Stadhouderskade
Amsterdam Zuid — A 21-year-old cyclist died Sunday afternoon in hospital from injuries sustained in a traffic accident on the Stadhouderskade. Early Sunday morning he collided with an automobile. The 23-year-old driver was given a breathalyser test, but had not been drinking.
‘There you have it,’ I said to Miriam. ‘The story of our wonderful boy in a couple of lines. There are Dutch literary critics who think I might take an example from this kind of brevity.’
In the same column of faits divers was another postage stamp containing more upbeat news: the cost of a new driver’s license in Amsterdam was to be lowered by a tenner, from 46 to 36 euros.
14
Jim sat dejectedly in the curve of the corner sofa, even paler than we’d gotten used to seeing him these last few years. The whiteness of his face, wreathed by hair as dark as Tonio’s. Jim made erratic motions, as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. His mother sat beside him, and continually rubbed her hand over his back — a firmer action than caressing or stroking. He allowed her to do it.
Tonio’s bosom buddy. They had known each other since nursery school, and were like brothers. There was a brief estrangement at the time they each went off to a different school (Jim had a learning disability, possibly dyslexia). Once during that period, I bumped into his mother on the Van Baerlestraat, on the viaduct over the Vondelpark. We exchanged slightly awkward greetings as we passed: our sons, after all, weren’t hanging out together anymore. When we were already several dozen metres apart, Jim’s mother turned abruptly and shouted something along the lines of: ‘It’ll work out between them, you’ll see. They’re made for each other.’
‘I’m sure it will,’ I called back. ‘It’s just a phase.’
And sure enough, not much later they rediscovered each other, the bosom buddies. Thereafter the friendship continued uninterrupted, but not without its hurdles. If Tonio came round on a Sunday evening and we’d inquire into Jim’s chronic insomnia, he would shake his head dispiritedly, eyes cast downward, no matter how cheerful he was when he came in. Tonio didn’t say it in so many words, but you could tell he saw the situation as fairly hopeless. Since we didn’t like seeing Tonio go all glum, that hour or so that we had him all to ourselves, we didn’t press it, and eventually stopped asking altogether. He did hint that once their lease on the Nepveustraat ran out, he would think about living on his own, or in a student flat.
I sat on the sofa next to Jim’s father. As a staff member of a medical team, it seemed, he had been indirectly involved with the case of the murdered policewoman I would have been writing about now, were it not … I listened to him with more than the usual interest: notwithstanding his attempts at discretion, I was picking up plenty of nearly first-hand details, despite it being for a novel I was forced by circumstances to set aside and would probably never return to.
And yet my attention was distracted by Jim, who was talking to Miriam about Tonio. About how Tonio had made such a self-confident and go-getting impression recently, and had consequently seemed so content.
‘… yeah, he’d worked it all out himself,’ I overheard. Jim was referring to the channels through which Tonio had hoped to get his master’s degree in Media Technology — the plan he had filled us in on the previous week. Jim underscored his statements with a lot of silent nodding, and I could see on his taut features that he was fighting back the tears.
Even when I tried to resume the conversation with his father, I still kept more than half an ear attuned to Jim. Perhaps my waning attention became evident, for the father suddenly raised his voice a little to call over to Jim: ‘… then maybe he was taking a detour to pick up some cigarettes.’
I didn’t hear Ji
m’s answer clearly, but I assumed it was all about the mystery of why Tonio was at that intersection in the first place. Someone else in the living room said: ‘Wrong place, wrong time.’
Cigarettes. I purposely did not get involved in the discussion, because it might mean I’d hear that Tonio smoked — not just ‘once in a while with the guys’, to be cool, as he’d once told me himself, but systematically enough to find himself without in the middle of the night and go out of his way to buy a fresh pack.
Of course, Jim might have phoned him to ask if he’d pick up some smokes for him on the way. I didn’t ask, because I did not want to know the truth.
So as to get off the subject one way or another I asked Jim about the Polaroid girl. Yes, he’d heard Tonio mention a photo shoot, but he didn’t know any details. He couldn’t even help us out with a name. He had never seen her.
‘Did you have the impression that Tonio talked about a particular girl … I mean, without mentioning her name?’
‘Well, he was pretty preoccupied with girls recently,’ Jim said evasively. ‘He talked about it a lot — whether he was going about certain things the right way, and so on.’
15
‘… and he cursed his fate.’ As a boy I had read this in countless books. There was something cosy about curling up next to the coal stove and reading about the hero who, defeated by dark and evil powers, clenched his fist and cursed his fate.
Now that I know myself how it feels to curse one’s fate, all that cosiness is gone. I lament Tonio’s fate. I curse mine.
CHAPTER TWO
The betrayal
there’s a grave that needs digging for a butterfly
exchanging the moment for your father’s old watch —
— Gerrit Kouwenaar, ‘there are still’
1
Miriam carried Tonio’s mobile phone with her everywhere. It became something of an obsession. If she happened to leave the phone in the bathroom, for instance, she’d run back in a panic to fetch it.
‘He’s really not going to ring,’ I said, when her fussing over the mobile started to get on my nerves.
‘It’s that girl,’ Miriam said. ‘I’ve got the feeling she’s still in the dark. Nobody in Tonio’s circle of friends knew her.’
‘Maybe we should have run the obituary right away then.’
‘No, oh no.’
When Miriam went off to shower, she left the mobile lying on the bed, and although she had turned up the volume she still missed the call. In any case, she was too late, because the voicemail had already been activated. It was a call from an unidentified number, given on the display as: ‘no caller ID’. I found Miriam sitting on the edge of the bed, listening anxiously to the voicemail message.
‘She didn’t leave her name.’ Miriam handed me the phone. ‘But it’s got to be her. Listen.’
‘… tried Facebook, but your page is quiet. I was wondering how the photos turned out. If they’re no good, I’m sorrier for you than for me. You’re the one who did all the work. It was a nice afternoon anyway. Okay, hope to hear from you soon. Bye.’
I thought I heard a trace of a British or an American accent. I handed Tonio’s mobile back. ‘The voice matches her Polaroid, anyway,’ I said.
2
This kind of loss, it just happens to you. The longing follows of its own accord, just like the heartache.
But the loss does not necessarily make you feeble, nor does it present you with a measure of grief that simply has to be accepted without you being allowed to give it some kind of form. As absurd as it was in the given situation, there were always choices to be made. Should we give in to the pain, or resist it? We incessantly asked each other these kind of questions.
‘Would Tonio have wanted his demise to destroy us?’ (Me to Miriam.)
‘We can’t ask him anymore.’
‘Say we did ask him when he was alive … just to be on the safe side.’
‘Knowing him …’ said Miriam, ‘no, I don’t think he’d want to see us go under. He’d have preferred that by staying alive ourselves, we kept his memory alive.’
‘But how about us … what do we want? To sink into ruination because of his downfall? Make no mistake, there’s something comforting in that. Now that he’s gone, we can just let ourselves go to pot. Him kaput, us kaput. Maybe we owe it to him.’
‘If I really put myself in his shoes, Adri … no, he wouldn’t have wanted it. We have to go on. Because of him. For him.’
‘Let’s first give him a proper burial. Then we’ll see … or not.’
3
If we were to map out Tonio’s last hours and days in detail, we were certain to bump into that girl from the photo shoot sooner or later. Even without a phone number or address, not even a name, there’d have to be a sign of her somewhere. She did exist, after all.
But … did we really want to? If we did track her down, we might discover a budding romance — which could have led to something more.
‘The funeral is Friday,’ Miriam said on Wednesday, ‘and we still haven’t contacted that photo girl. I wish she’d ring again.’
‘Let’s just let it run its course,’ I said. ‘If there was something between them, then she’s bound to make herself known again.’
‘I’m so afraid she still doesn’t know what happened. She could be sitting there waiting for Tonio to call … or for a reply from him on Facebook … she just won’t get it.’
‘We’ve tried calling all the available numbers,’ I said. ‘None of his friends know her. At most, they vaguely know about a photo shoot. No one can come up with a date. Not even a name. Y’know, Tonio and photo sessions … he did so many of them. No, we’re just going to have to wait this one out.’
While I thought: we should make a beeline to the Netherlands Forensic Institute, to have that call — ‘no caller ID’ — investigated.
And then there was that excruciating doubt. Did I have to go looking for her? What was the point of reconstructing Tonio’s final days? He had irretrievably vanished from the existence that offered itself for reconstruction.
No, I could better devote my time to the memorial letters. I had laid the photos I was planning to enclose (Tonio as Oscar Wilde) in a small stack, face down, on my writing table. This way I could slide a photo into the envelope without looking him in the eye, for each and every letter compounded the betrayal I was carrying out.
Despite this precautionary measure, Tonio was inevitably present in my workroom, in varying and ever-changing life phases. ‘Adri, if I pass the photos to you, it’ll go faster.’ ‘You keep writing the same thing, but with different names … why’s that?’ ‘Adri, it would be so much more efficient if you had a computer with an address spreadsheet. One click of the mouse and a string of self-adhesive stickers rolls out of the printer. You really are from the Dark Ages, aren’t you?’
They were fine, early summer days, all of which blindingly reflected Whit Sunday. I sat at the desk closest to the open balcony doors, shaded from the sun by the awning.
Occasionally, Miriam came in to cry at my side. No, we didn’t need to know yet more suffocating details: she was grief-stricken enough already, why add insult to injury. We would bury him on Friday morning, and the obituaries would appear in the evening papers that afternoon. After a day like that, our job was to deal with our grief, together, in the safe haven of our house.
4
The day of his funeral was as divine a summery day as the day he died.
‘Today I must bury my son.’ I formulated that sentence over and over in my head while performing a series of everyday actions: brushing teeth, showering, shaving.
I tried out a number of variations: ‘Today I am going to bury my son.’ As many as necessary, until I had the ideal choice of words in my head. This was ‘terra cognita’: many a morning it went lik
e this, before I ascended the stairs to my work room, to write down the first words of a new chapter.
‘Today, I bury my son.’
It was, for now, still just an observation, hardly more than that. No sickening emotions went with it. I was calm even before taking the pill Miriam offered that was supposed to calm me down. My hands did not shake for even a moment while shaving.
While getting dressed, I silently rehearsed the brief speech I had planned to hold at the grave. All week I had almost obsessively hurled the facts concerning the accident as I knew them onto paper, plus what I recalled from Tonio’s last two visits to our home. I wanted to record everything that might come in handy in reconstructing — I still did not know why — the finale of his life. But I could not bring myself to compose a eulogy. My brother would give a longer speech, which put my mind at ease. I’d been engaged in restless, anxious conversation with Tonio all week, and it had exhausted me.
Since our premature return from Lugano last May, I had hardly been out of the house. I’d spent all those months at home, rarely dressed in anything but grotty jogging pants and a baggy lumberjack shirt. All right, I’d bought a dark velvet sport jacket for the premiere of Het leven uit een dag, which since that event was still on the very same hanger on the very same closet door, the tie that went with it draped over the hook.
Tonio was at the premiere, too, dressed in style. He had invited Marianne, an elegant girl he knew from the Amsterdam Photo Academy, a little older than he. They never (much to my regret) really had an affair, but Tonio always invited her to more official events like the Book Ball, if we were able to get our hands on an extra pair of tickets.
That evening at the film premiere in The Hague, I noticed how much more mature and self-assured he had become. The tux jacket looked great on him. He was outgoing, jovial, witty. After the film, he and Marianne joined the musicians of the pop group Novastar, which had provided some of the film score. They had a bang-up time. Later they rode with us in the taxi-van that took the whole bunch of us back to Amsterdam for the afterparty at De Kring.
Tonio Page 21