21
Of course, I’ve thought about it a lot over the years: what it means to be alive, to breathe, to move. About the consciousness that was planted in me, me of all people. About the miracle of inspiration.
But that same incorrigible ruminator as a rule regards life as something to be taken for granted. You can’t mull over every breath you take, for otherwise you will choke.
Since Tonio’s death, I miss taking my life functions for granted. Not continuously, but if I ‘catch’ myself experiencing the kind of wellbeing associated with an hour without grief, I have the tendency to recall the pain as quickly as possible. I give myself a telling-off: I have, after all, forfeited the right to a normally functioning existence.
What else is your child but an external enclave of your own flesh and blood? Through my own recklessness (others might speak of ‘fate’ here), I allowed that enclave to be forsaken. A part of me has been amputated, so how will I ever be able to say I feel at home with my body?
The road to the Bosbaan is closed yet again because of a rowing competition. To get to the goat farm, we have to follow the signposts marked with a ‘1’, weaving through the monotonous offshoots of Amstelveen.
The streets are bathed in brilliant sunlight, which doesn’t give a damn about the boy it will never again be able to warm. Miriam speaks (for those familiar with the undertone) rather excitedly. I am more reticent, resentful of the summer day that the sun-worshipper Tonio has been denied.
‘It’s weird,’ she says, rounding off a monologue I’ve only half followed. ‘Every once in a while, it’s like I almost feel satisfied.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It’s really fragile. Then, all of a sudden, there’s the fear, or a pang of guilt again … anxiety or intense bitterness … What sneaks up on me most of all is that impotent rage. I’m angry on Tonio’s behalf. Because he won’t be able to complete his life. Because his short time here was taken up with school and studies that will never come to fruition. All that top-notch groundwork … cut short.’
‘Do you also dare to just be angry … you know, for yourself?’ Miriam asked. ‘I mean, simply because you don’t have a son anymore?’
‘Very occasionally, I permit myself a tiny bit of self-pity. A pathetic little voice in my head starts whining. Look at me … I’ve been at it for nearly sixty years, not building my own future, but Tonio’s. I took a course, too … in fatherhood. And just to be sure, grandfatherhood. All for nothing. Waste of time and effort. Everything told me Tonio wanted to show me what he was worth. But I also wanted to show him what I was worth. “Up to your ten pages a day yet?” he asked a few days before the accident. Kind of teasingly, of course, he had every right, but there was always something sincere and attentive in his curiosity. I wanted to buy him an apartment, so I could say: “Here you are, Tonio: those ten pages a day.” If a writer can have his own son as a muse, then I’ve simply lost my muse. When I mentioned that to Mensje recently, she remembered that once, in a bar, I said I was in love with Tonio. He was knee-high to a grasshopper.’
22
At the goat farm, we find a table in the sun. Under the round overhang, a sort of miniature bandstand, a children’s party is underway. Miriam goes to fetch coffee and water.
Suddenly, there’s tumult. A young man, a foreigner, is yelling something in more or less unintelligible English at an older man, who, taking refuge under the brim of a too-youthful skipper’s cap, is seated at the next table. He ignores the shouting, even when the young man advances in his ire. When the manager comes to intervene, we realise at once what the problem is. The man with the cap had seen the foreigner’s two-year-old son run after a chicken: the kid was probably trying to nab the animal. I must have been somewhere else with my thoughts, because I didn’t see the older man get up to scold the boy, and in doing so grab the child and (claims the father) poke him in the eye.
Major hubbub.
Meanwhile, the wife of the man in the cap has returned from the toilet. She sits down next to him. Surrounding their table are the manager, the parents of the little boy, who is shrieking and whose one eye is clearly redder than the other, and a few bystanders who have come forth as witnesses to the drama. A guy with a beard calls the older man a ‘trouble-maker’. From under the brim of his cap, which shields his eyes, he defends his behaviour in superlatively arrogant terms. I feel an uncontrollable anger well up in me, and shout at the man that he’s an arsehole. I raise my voice, rubbing his nose in his arseholeness, even though I did not witness the incident directly. Miriam and the manager tell me to calm down, but I am unable to halt my tirade. A seething anger has to get out. The man with the cap, in his made-up dignity, gets up, collects the dogs from under his table, and stalks off the terrace with his wife on his arm. Only then do I manage to pull myself together, albeit with choked-back sniffs of disgruntlement and indignation.
The father of the little boy comes over to thank me — for my solidarity, I guess. He tries to offer me a reconstruction of the incident, but because of his poor English most of his testimony eludes me. I do not tell him that my solidarity was false and that I was only using the unfriendly man in the cap as an excuse to vent an anger that came from an entirely different source.
23
Miriam comes out of the goat shed with a taut face. ‘I can’t go in there anymore without thinking of Tonio, how he used to be … He was so crazy about the animals, could squat there forever next to the piglets. He thought they were so sweet.’
‘There’s something defenceless about them,’ I say. ‘That’ll be it. Now we know what he recognised in them.’
‘Seems like there are fewer goats than there used to be,’ Miriam says, ‘so I asked the attendant. And I was right. They’ve cut back on the goats. They’ve had fewer visitors. Because of Q fever.’
‘People are complete idiots,’ I say, still trembling with residual anger. ‘Always afraid of the wrong things. They just have to see one spray-painted goat on the news, and they’re convinced they’ve seen the devil.’
We head back to the parking lot. Out of habit, we make a left turn toward the Bosbaan. Two racing bikes ride ostentatiously in front of us without making any effort to let us pass. Then Miriam remembers that the Bosbaan is closed, a golden opportunity for cyclists on this bit of road. It is no trouble, a pleasure in fact, to turn around and drive back through the sun-pricked treetops — until the revulsion returns, because this light-green speckled budding of the woods simply goes on without Tonio.
We drive through Amstelveen. I say: ‘I can’t believe I chose this nondescript polder-padding as the scene for a novel.’
‘I was going to drive you around a few key spots, wasn’t I,’ Miriam says. ‘The police station … the neighbourhood where the murder took place … Café 1890.’
‘No need to now. That novel’s been scrapped. I’m writing a book about Tonio, and that’ll be that.’
24
Buitenveldert under rainy skies: it lends the neighbourhood an acceptable degree of sombreness. Buitenveldert glimmering in brilliant sunlight: a hell of melancholy. We cross Fred. Roeskestraat, where the cemetery with Tonio’s grave is. I haven’t been back since the funeral. No matter how much I try to avoid the thought, I am forced to imagine his body in the red-brown coffin. Its protracted decomposition in the cool earth, the uppermost clumps of which are hard and dried out from the warm sun of the past days. The rabbits, who by now have gobbled up the Biedermeier bouquet, dart across the bare plot, where, soon, a stone slab will be placed, surrounded by stone borders. His self-portrait as Oscar Wilde, the one I have sent to dozens of people these last few days, is there, in a waterproof frame. We want to have the photo incorporated, one way or another, into the headstone (maybe as an old-fashioned enamel medallion).
‘Oh yeah,’ Miriam says, who seems to have read my thoughts, ‘my father wants to chip in fifteen hundred for the hea
dstone.’
‘That reminds me … How would you feel about inscribing it with the name Rotenstreich? I still owe it to Tonio. Ever since June 16, 1988. And to your father. Last chance, you might say. What do you think?’
She does not answer. I glance sideways. The corners of her mouth struggle to hold back a burst of tears. Last week, too, we had to pull off to the side of the road because Miriam’s vision went blurry.
25
The Filipino brother and sister who clean our house every Saturday have placed a large stack of condolence post on the cabinet in the hall. I take it out to the veranda, armed with a letter opener. There is a card from Tonio’s old teachers at the gymnasium, with a verse by Auden, the same one Ignatius had used in its newspaper condolence announcement. That nice couple, Gert and Marie-Jes from Maastricht, who write me three times a week, have included twenty euros ‘for roses’. (‘… cherish the golden moments with Tonio …’ wrote Gert in his last letter. The moment I read that phrase, back here on the terrace, an unexpected gust of wind blew through the spent golden rain. A cloud of faded yellow petals wafted over the neighbour’s backyard.) There are touching letters from an old friend from Geldrop, from my former editor, from some of Tonio’s ex-schoolmates. Dozens. I will answer each and every one, if need be with a few personal lines at the bottom of the mimeographed letter. They will all get the photo.
Should someone encounter me here on the veranda, he would see a man wielding a slender knife to open one letter after the other, smiling as he reads the contents, and then setting the letter aside. On the face of it, the man sits like a king in the shadow of the golden rain’s crown, which scatters yet more sere petals with each puff of wind. The Norwegian forest cats, silent witnesses to the most terrible summons of his life, weave between his calves, their plume tails upright.
Miriam, outwardly calm, comes to announce that she is heading over to the garden centre. ‘Pick out some plants. It’ll give me something to do.’
I hand her Marie-Jes and Gert’s twenty euros. ‘For roses. Why don’t you buy a creeper? That arch where Tonio’s model posed … it could use some filling up. Our Maastricht friends would approve.’
Once Miriam is gone, the feeling of extreme tension and anxiety returns. It concentrates around my stomach, robbing it of all appetite. It wrings out my intestines, which still regularly spew a yellow poison: the form my disgust with life has assumed.
If I don’t think about it directly, that spastic anxiety almost seems more like a precursor to something than a reaction to the fatal incident. As though a yet greater calamity is on its way. Yes, that’s it: everything in and around me is sending me warnings. That Tonio was mowed down on the street like a dog is nothing by comparison. Just wait, the worst is yet to come.
26
When people are showered with attention for an anniversary or a death, it is usually the vast quantity that they call ‘heart-warming’. I have, however, never been able to regard the truckloads of letters that have reached us as having an added-value effect.
There were intensely affectionate letters, in which the writer confessed a powerlessness to express himself or herself, after which even the feeblest of words came across as comforting. Most correspondents appeared to be of one mind that ‘the loss of a child is the worst thing that can happen to you … your worst nightmare come true’. A relatively large number of parents to whom this had happened, many of them complete strangers, wrote to us.
There were pre-printed cards with an appropriately subdued motif, the words ‘WITH CONDOLENCES’ and only a signature underneath. On one of the cards, the printed word MOTHER was crossed out with ballpoint pen and replaced with the handwritten SON. Also okay.
I had to admit that pathos, as it pertained to our situation, never sounded insincere. The same went for our own words. When I wrote to someone that Miriam and I had gone ‘through an ice-cold hell of loss and heartache’, it simply was so.
Of course there was also a small minority of thrill-seekers, snuffling around the anguish. Free melodrama, served up by reality: irresistible. But here, too, the sensation was short-lived, except for those directly involved.
After these past weeks, my fingers still tremble too much from the jolt to be able to pen a handwritten answer. Sometimes I write a few lines by hand, and I barely recognise my own handwriting, it’s that shaky. Pouring strong liquor on a practically empty stomach every evening can’t help much, of course. I can’t manage without my 80-proof painkiller. Bombay Sapphire helps me face night-time. The next morning, the pain is back, mixed with disgust, which for the time being refuses all painkillers.
Among all the notes of affection, the first poison-pen sentiments also reach us, relayed by sympathetic friends in a tone or with a look of ‘oh brother …’
‘Now he knows what it is,’ was one firmly worded message. ‘Why doesn’t he write a book about that. Something real for a change.’
Hard to believe, but true: even an unfathomable loss is capable of eliciting ill will. So now we’ve crossed that line, too. Chosen ones who gild their lives with the death of their child.
The Netherlands has been a Christian democracy for many years now. The slogan is ‘family as the cornerstone of society’.
When, in 2005, I was invited for lunch at the Trêveszaal, the baroque ministerial conference room, a number of Christian Democrats greeted me the most warmly. The prime minister introduced me to a German guest (the speaker of the German senate) as ‘one of the Netherlands’ most respectable … eh … respected authors’. Even if they never actually read a book, at least they know who you are. They needed to drum up a smattering of representatives of Dutch culture to impress the foreign delegation. They always ask things of you, and never give you anything in return. I haven’t heard a word of sympathy from those cornerstone-preachers now that my cornerstone has been yanked out of place.
The hypocrisy of politics does not end with the death of a child. The ‘cornerstone of society’ lie is followed by the lie of ‘coming to terms’ with the loss. As essential as procreation was once preached to us, the new essence, when that progeny passes away, is the process of ‘coming to terms’. Psychologists, psychiatrists, victim assistance, self-help books, medicine, priests, and psychics are there to help us through it. We are surrounded by well-meaning advisors who promise us that the pain of the loss will recede with time, and in the long run it can be turned into ‘something positive’. We, Miriam and I, still have each other, which can only speed up the process. (The well-meant advice does not take into account that an uncontrollable and secret chemistry takes place between our individual senses of loss, which almost doubles the pain.)
Instead of maintaining an embarrassed silence, because the counsel as to the necessity of the family has been proven wrong, people just go on glossing over the rough spots. ‘Come on, you two, chin up, grit your teeth and grieve, chip away at it. Been down that road before. Two, three years, and you’ll see, it’ll wear off. You’ll be able to think back on the good times with a wistful smile.’
My prognosis is different. The pain of the loss will not wear off. Not with Miriam, not with me. As the years go by, until the day we die, the pain will only increase, following a fickle law that now, just a few weeks after Tonio’s death, has already made itself known.
27
Many of the condolence letters expressed the hope that Miriam and I would be able to support one another in this process; this was occasionally joined by the warning that everyone deals with loss in their own way: ‘It doesn’t always tally.’
They were right. Miriam and I gave each other daily briefings on our confused sensations and conflicting feelings. Already at breakfast (how I handled the loss during the night), but especially in the evening, when the aluminium caps to the gin and vodka bottles got unscrewed. And in between as well, while I answer the condolence post and she comes up to my workroom to let the tears flow
freely. Miriam could cry. In response, I would feel my eyes prickle and well up, sometimes as far as wetting my lashes, but with me the grief mostly leaked inward, as I constantly, embarrassedly, assured her. With her, the pain got worse as the afternoon wore into evening. Mine surprised me at unexpected moments, in stabs.
If I had a defiant day, then she might be taking a first, cautious step in formulating a kind of resignation. The next day, it would be me who saw an opening, not her.
Indeed, it did not tally. But what we were lucky not to have, right from the start, were the mutual reproaches. We did not accuse each other of having failed, directly or indirectly, of preventing the accident. (She was a lousy bike-riding teacher. Going off into traffic after drinking, he got that from his father. Etcetera. None of it.)
My father had kept contact, even after 1949, with an old army buddy from the police actions in the Dutch East Indies. They had both started a family, so sometimes years went by without them seeing each other. Once, when their eldest children were already adults, the couples bumped into one another on the street. How’re things? My father enjoyed bragging about the school or university progress of his brood. After some hesitation, his friend admitted that his eldest son was no longer alive.
‘His own choice,’ said the wife. The boy had jumped from a high building. ‘It nearly meant the end of our marriage.’
After their son’s suicide, the pair hurled the most awful accusations back and forth. In the one’s eyes, the other was entirely at fault, and vice versa. The man (according to the woman) had poisoned their son with his old traumas from the Indies. The divorce proceedings had begun. They saved their marriage by the skin of their teeth. Their lives were ruined for good.
Miriam and I see no reason to blame one another for anything, and while a torrent of accusations to and fro might channel some of the grief, we are not going to give in to it. (The self-reproach is a different story altogether.) We have our hands full on plugging another hole. For years, we were satisfied with our love for each other. The ripening of that love resulted in Tonio. And thus a sworn triumvirate was born. It could take a knock or two, perhaps because we always managed to patch things up in time.
Tonio Page 30