Tania was not about to let herself be intimidated by the boy-dominance. As soon as we arrived, they attacked the bedrooms: mattresses were pulled from beds and dragged to the largest room. They were going to sleep together, the four of them — no ifs, ands, or buts.
What followed was a week of delirious fun, during which Miriam and I seemed to have become completely invisible to them. As soon as we appeared, their expressions, in all their exuberance, went all glassy, and we simply dissolved. At the seaside restaurant where we ate dinner, they had their own table, which danced around the place so furiously as a result of their animated discussions that the restaurant staff had to ask them to get up, so it could be brought, pizzas and all, back to its original spot. We did exist, if only for a moment, when it came time to pay the bill, insofar as they were able to point us out as the folks with the cash.
It was almost a privilege to witness, close up, four young people who enjoyed one another’s company so intensely, Tania no less than her three roommates. On New Year’s Eve, Tonio asked if they could drink vodka and Coke to usher in the new year. I said they’d better not dare put away even a millimetre more than half of the bottle.
‘You’re minors. Miriam and I are responsible.’
‘Yoo-hoo, guys,’ Tonio cried, ‘we can have half.’
When I want to fetch some mineral water from the fridge later that evening, Jonas was filling the empty vodka bottle with water.
‘Jonas, did you really think I wouldn’t notice?’
The kid gazed stupidly back. He was completely blotto. The next morning, I saw another empty bottle the four of them had snuck in, bobbing in the swimming pool among the clumps of grass they’d beaten into it with a golf club.
I was never able to ascertain the position and role of Tania in this constellation. When they said goodbye back at Schiphol, where she was met by her mother, Tania gave each of her companions an equally sisterly hug. Only Tonio made a fleeting, tender gesture (running the back of his hand along her jawline, or maybe he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear), and looked at her intently, without suspending his smile. That was all. After that, we never heard another word from or about Tania. Months, perhaps a year later, I raised the question with Tonio.
‘Hey, that Tania … from Lanzarote last Christmas … have you seen her at all?’
‘No,’ he replied, in a tone that said: Why should I?
‘And Jim … and Jonas … do they have any contact with her?’
‘Nope.’
‘Did something happen on Lanzarote … that might have made her angry?’
‘No, how come?’
‘No reason. Just wondering.’
17
I’m never keen to recognise omens. Maybe that’s why I only really see them when the damage is already done and they’ve lost their prophesying function. Omens that no longer contain a forewarning lose their dangerous sheen: they dry up.
I once kept a list of calamities I came across in novels that later, exactly, or nearly so, befell the author. Omens that the writer himself set to paper, cloaked in fiction. If I were to take heed of all the dire portents in my own novels, I would soon have to stop writing altogether.
Since Black Whitsun, the foretokens predating that day keep rearing their head. The air around me swirls with them. Wherever they hid (a nasty habit of omens) prior to 23 May, they have been resounding — now that it’s too late to be alarmed — for weeks on end. They visit me in my sleep, and do not give me a moment’s peace. They’re like annoying insects, and they seem to multiply relentlessly, keeping pace with my increasingly guilty conscience.
At the time, I did not even notice the majority of these omens. Those that were too obviously a warning disguised as a symbol, I cast to the wind. Others, I manufactured myself, choosing not to regard them as forebodings.
I had written a number of ‘requiems’: two for childhood friends, for my father, for my mother, for a colleague, even (the shortest of them all) for a cat who’d been bitten to death. It never occurred to me that one day I’d have to write a requiem for my own son. Now it’s as though the first five were premonitory studies for what, as a matter of survival, I am now forced to execute.
Weerborstels, about the cousin who had smashed into a tree while on the run from the cops, was in fact a requiem, too. It was a novella about a problematic father-son relationship, which ended fatally for the son. My creative thinking did not, apparently, allow me to imagine that Tonio, another vulnerable-boy-in-the-making, could meet the same fate as my cousin; otherwise, I’d have certainly abandoned the project.
At the end of his speech, my brother quoted the last line of Weerborstels: ‘He is not dead.’ Later that day, Frans reminded me that I had dedicated the novella to Tonio. ‘I remember noticing it,’ he said, ‘because in those days you always dedicated your books to Miriam and Tonio.’
I checked it at once. ‘For my son, Tonio.’ He was right.
‘It’s so plainly the story of a father and his son,’ I said. ‘I guess I wanted to make that clear in the dedication.’
It was disgusting. I had related a draft version of Weerborstels, then still entitled Met gedoofde lichten, in a long letter to my brother in the summer of 1989, when Miriam, Tonio, and I were staying at the schoolhouse in Marsalès. Tonio’s first birthday was just behind us. The main character Robby was based on my cousin Willy, who the previous year had met his end (in more or less the same fashion: ‘met gedoofde lichten’ — with his lights off). At the beginning of the novella, I had given the young Robby similar traits to the six-year-old Robin van Persie, who occasionally joined his sisters in our schoolhouse yard. A kind of bashful brazenness … timid audacity.
I had been given a couple of boxes with extra copies of Weerborstels, the annual Book Week freebie. Tonio later sold them at the Vondelpark market on Queen’s Day. I insisted he not ask for more than a guilder per copy. At his request, I autographed the books. He would proudly show his customers that he was the dedicatee. ‘For my son, Tonio.’ He was prepared to add his own signature, for a price.
When he showed me his takings at the end of the day — nearly three hundred guilders! — I asked him how many copies he’d sold. Well, he still had some left over, for next year. This morning, he’d started out at two-and-a-half guilders apiece, but when he saw that they sold like hotcakes he upped it to five guilders, and later yet to seven-fifty. ‘Nobody seemed to mind.’
‘But I do. Damn it, Tonio, I said it had to be for the fun of it. I could die of embarrassment.’
‘Adri, come on, a guilder … you’re selling yourself short.’
‘Selling your winnings short, you mean.’
18
Dick had polished off his bottle of Noilly Prat, and now sat nursing a foul glass of very ordinary vermouth with evident distaste, compensating the sickly-sweetness with the occasional sniff on his hip flask of whisky (not too long, though, because then too much would evaporate, and it had to go a long way).
As the delivery time of the afternoon newspapers neared, I paced with increasing anxiety over to the landing, peering down the stairs to check whether they were already lying on the mat under the letter slot. What did I expect to find? The truth, in the form of an obituary? Did a suspicion need to be confirmed on the ‘family announcements’ page of the evening paper?
‘What with all that modern communication stuff,’ I said, back in the living room, ‘all those mobile phones … email addresses … the internet, God knows what else … Facebook, Hyves, you name it. Twitter … you’d think somebody should be able to trace that girl.’
‘She mentioned Facebook on Tonio’s voicemail,’ Miriam said. ‘They must have chatted with each other there.’
‘You’ve got Polaroids of her,’ Jonas said. ‘Why don’t we put one of them on Facebook, circulate them among Tonio’s friends … Maybe she’ll turn up tha
t way.’
‘Except that Tonio pulled a fast one on us,’ I said. ‘He took those snapshots with him, maybe threw them away, because they were just test shots.’
Jim offered to look through Tonio’s room for the prints. Meanwhile, Jonas would try to track down the girl via a Facebook message: ‘Seeking the roughly 20-year-old girl, name unknown, who Tonio van der Heijden photographed on Thursday, 20 May.’
Miriam reminded me of my initial reservations. ‘You’ve had a drink now,’ she said, ‘but yesterday you wanted to just let it be. We wondered whether we really wanted it, you know, her identity and all. Say we find out they had something together … or could have … Do we want to torture ourselves for the rest of our lives with … yeah, with what? A love affair for Tonio? Maybe our future daughter-in-law? The mother of our grandchildren? … I don’t know if I want to have those kind of thoughts. I never used to have them when I saw Tonio with a girl. It doesn’t get us anywhere. Yeah, where all roads lead. To Tonio’s grave.’
The remaining guests sat motionless, silent.
‘Miriam,’ I said, ‘we also have to think of Tonio. I remember how proud he was when he showed me those snapshots … his grin, when I commented what a good looker she was. He said she’d invited him to Paradiso. That’s not something he’d tell me otherwise, don’t you think? There was obviously something there. Of course he wanted us to meet her. I’ll bet he was disappointed she was already gone when we got back from the Bos. Minchen, we owe it to Tonio to find her. If he can’t introduce us to her anymore, then we have to track her down ourselves.’
‘I think,’ said Miriam, ‘it’s only going to cause us more pain.’
‘And what if I think we shouldn’t steer clear of that pain?’
19
Whenever Miriam enters the room, I’m pleased to see the familiar presence. Still, after all these years, I feel that pleasant, mild shock: there she is. Since Whit Sunday it’s as though I’m seeing double. It is my wife who steps through the doorway, and at the same time, like a not-quite-lined-up superimposed image, it is a mother who has been robbed of her child. The second figure refuses to stay within the outline of the first one, no matter how much I blink.
Saturday morning. More than the queasiness of the hangover, it was the stomach-turning realisation: Yesterday I buried my son. The previous day, I had watched the coffin containing the body of my son being lowered into a hole in the ground, and I did not cry, and after that I drank myself into a common stupor. I couldn’t even remember how the afternoon ended, let alone the evening.
Right after I had pulled open the curtain, swearing at the bright sunlight, the double vision of Miriam entered the room: the mother of my child, and the now-childless mother. Closing one eye to blot out the double vision did not help. Her expression was one of heartache, fear, insecurity. I went over to her, placed my hands on her shoulders. ‘What is it?’
‘You exploded at me last night.’
‘I can’t remember a thing.’ That’s what you get with vodka, a drink that not only prevented a headache, but, just to be on the safe side, also disengaged one’s short-term memory, perhaps to erase recollections that might bring on a headache after all. ‘What was it about?’
‘Everyone was gone, and I wanted to go to bed. You didn’t. You wanted to talk. I didn’t. I was all talked out. And then you started in … angry … that I only thought of myself.’
‘Oh, Minchen.’ I pulled her close to me. ‘I was angry, but not at you. At what happened. At everything this dirty trick has brought us.’
This appeared to reassure her. ‘You were already angry in the afternoon,’ she said, ‘when the papers were delivered. Having to see Tonio’s name in bold letters on the obituary page … you were fuming. You hurled the papers through the living room.’
Miriam made breakfast. She returned to the bedroom with the tray, the newspaper, and a large stack of condolence letters. More bereavement ads, but this time Tonio’s boldface-printed name did not elicit anger; the various messages surrounding it were too implausible for that, too absurd — although there was nothing to laugh about either.
Side by side in bed, propped up against the pillows, reading all those shocked condolence letters together … It was a bad piece of theatre. A cheesy sequel to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with George and Martha in the marital bed, passing messages of sympathy back and forth after the fatal accident of their made-up twenty-year-old son.
I had asked Miriam for toast with jam, but couldn’t even manage that. Weak coffee with lots of milk was all my stomach would tolerate. The only organs where the terrible truth could permeate were my intestines. The diarrhoea that began on Whit Sunday had gone on for a week.
20
What feeds the gut-wrenchingness of Tonio’s death the most is the razor-sharp recollection of all our senseless bickering in his presence. Lead-in, build-up, climax, cool-off, reconciliation — it’s all forgotten, leaked away into the folds of time. At the moment itself, our disagreement and each one’s highly personal sense of rightness were a matter of life or death — for the innocent bystander, Tonio, as well, at age three, five, eight, eleven, thirteen. With the exception of certain recurring arguments and their variants (the ‘classics’), none of it has stuck — and as far as Tonio is concerned, it’s anybody’s guess what effect it all had on him.
The idiotic quarrelling that’s supposedly inherent to every marriage, not even the bad ones. The contorted arguments. Being right just for the sake of being right, like a sort of l’art pour l’art. The raised voices, with or without sprays of spittle. The ‘did-so-did-not’ level of the school playground.
(Diary entry, Tuesday 8 April 1997)
08:00 woken by familiar sounds coming from bathroom. Intimate murmuring between mother and son. Sleep draws me back down, deep into the old, fragile mattress (which really needs replacing), but I decide to regard the time of awakening as a sign: the recently implemented eating regimen requires me to have breakfast between eight and nine.
I open the bathroom door: M. is sitting on the closed toilet-seat lid combing Tonio’s hair. He looks up at me, startled but smiling. (‘You’ve broken your own record,’ he said recently, the last time I got up that early.)
I say: ‘Keep your snappy comments about broken records to yourself today, okay?’
He pulls a puckered lemon-face, as though he feels he’s been put firmly in his place, but his bright, brown eyes sparkle with mockery. Downstairs I pick up the morning paper from the doormat and take it with me back to bed. A work crew, armed with an electric apparatus, has begun sanding the living-room floor. (In May they will attack my office.) The entire house is gradually covered in a thin layer of snot-green powder, a mixture of old paint and the underlying wood.
Before M. takes Tonio to school, I am given a sober breakfast of wholegrain bread and sugar-free jam (no butter), plus the recommended ration of cappuccino. When M. returns, I give her the tips I’d promised for the ‘ur-book’ issue of Maatstaf (Mallarmé, Proust, Genet, Mulisch, Reve, etc.)*
[* Maatstaf was a Dutch literary magazine (1953–1999). The December 1997 issue was devoted to ‘ur-books’ by twelve well-known Dutch authors (including Van Der Heijden): excerpts from early or unpublished manuscripts that would form a first, or ‘ur’, version of later writings. Miriam Rotenstreich was one of the magazine’s five editors at the time.]
Home renovation has its benefits. I spend half my days in espresso bars throughout the city, reading and scribbling to my heart’s content.
[ … ]
15:30 tram 24 back to Zuid. Alight Beethovenstraat, walk home via Apollo, Hilton, Christie’s. At our front door I bump into Ronald Sales, who is delivering the portrait he did of me some years ago. We bring it inside, and decide to celebrate my purchase in the Vondelpark. Tonio asks if he can go with us, and straps on his new roller skates (which he wheedled out of
me with the Golden Owl prize money.* Until now, I have neglected to pen here a report of the award ceremony, which I simply watched on television at home. Tonio went berserk: how was it possible, his father being awarded a prize on TV while he sat there next to him on the couch.? When it came time to answer questions posed by the presenter over the phone, I could barely understand her over Tonio’s whooping and hollering as he bolted jubilantly through the room. ‘This is the best night of our lives … !’)
[* Belgian prize for Dutch-language fiction. Van der Heijden won the fiction category in 1997 for Het Hof van Barmhartigheid and Onder het Plaveisel het Moeras.]
He skates ahead of us, the wheels grating against the asphalt, via Corn. Schuytstraat and Willemsparkweg toward the park, every so often looking over his shoulder to make sure we lag appropriately behind. Forbidden beer at the Film Museum’s outdoor café. Tonio nearly runs over publisher and restaurant tycoon Bas L. [ … ]
18:00 back home. Tonio is pleased that I’m eating in tonight — which, let’s just say because of the renovation chaos, has gone by the board of late. When I confess to M., who is in the kitchen preparing dinner, that I’ve been hitting the beer with R., her mood nosedives. ‘What about your diet? Not to mention that this diet of yours is the reason you didn’t want to go out with me Friday night.’
She’s right, of course, but that doesn’t stop me from going on the defensive. The quarrel, which branches off into endless hair-splitting, makes the delicious chicken dish lose some, if not all, of its taste. I notice that Tonio is put off by our squabbling and wrangling. When M. starts to cry, his lower lip quivers in unison with her sobs.
‘May I please be excused?’ (I still don’t know where he picked up that snippet of etiquette.)
‘To do what?’
‘Ask Camiel if he can come out to play.’
He leaves his chicken untouched, and charges down the stairs to his friend, two houses further on. You always read that an athlete’s brain produces a chemical that enhances their performance and stamina, allowing them to push themselves beyond the normal limits. I’ll bet a similar kind of chemical, of a slightly different compound, is also produced in the brain of bickering people: they wear each other out with fallacious arguments and just keep on going, far beyond the boundaries of dignity.
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