Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  I felt a lump of misplaced pride in my throat. ‘So Tonio was, so to speak, still strong enough that it was worth a try?’

  (He still died, didn’t he? What did I expect?)

  ‘After your son was brought in here,’ continued the doctor, ‘I first attended to his spleen. He had suffered a powerful impact to the left side of his body. As you might recall, I first removed half of it. When the remaining half continued bleeding, I removed that as well. He had coagulopathy, that is, severely impaired blood clotting … Meanwhile the neurosurgeon was tending to his brain. The right side had started to swell. Therefore we detached the skull on that side, so as to drain the fluid and blood.’

  Dr. G. relayed the information with such clarity and detail that only now did I truly experience Tonio’s agonies in the OR. The operation lamps glaring into his insides, altering the natural colour of his blood … The green, fenestrated surgical drape … Did he actually have one of those sheets with the cut-outs draped over him? They were working all over his body at the same time. At most, only his legs would have remained covered.

  My boy, my son, that beautiful product of my loins … wrecked … His mother’s pride, literally the fruit of her womb … already so distant at that point in time, and unable to return of his own accord, nor able to be brought back by the united efforts of the trauma team. He still had a chance, then and there, no matter how negative the prognoses.

  ‘Meanwhile I’d turned my attention to his lungs,’ Dr. G. continued. ‘A great bleeding mass. They had simply stopped working. When they brought him in, his blood pressure was alarmingly low. We gave him one transfusion after the other. That was the situation, more or less, the first time I came to brief you. After that, the left side of his brain had also begun to swell. The neurosurgeon then set about dealing with that. And all the while his other functions were rapidly worsening. So, what with the drop in blood pressure, the lungs, which no longer produced any air, and the problem with the clotting … his condition became more and more hopeless. And yes, at a certain point you have to make a decision. He’s not going to make it. There’s no point in continuing treatment.’

  And after a short pause: ‘I can assure you, as long as there’s any hope of achieving something, we keep trying. Especially with someone his age.’

  Tonio, who, still very young, assembled a vehicle out of technical Lego, his eyes glued to the diagram spread out on the table, and his worm-like fingers independently executing their work.

  Tonio, who, after visiting my parents, demonstrated (oh, tender white lie) how my mother was slightly less hunched from the Parkinson’s than a few weeks previously. ‘First she stood like this …’ (Tonio bent way over.) ‘And now like this …’ (Nearly upright.)

  Tonio, who …

  ‘If I might ask you something,’ Dr. G. said, ‘because, whatever happens, we can learn from it … Is there anything we could have done better?’

  ‘We’re laymen,’ I replied. ‘Who are we to correct or criticise you and your team of experts?’

  And then I made the mistake of bringing up the nurse at Tonio’s deathbed, when the alarm went off and I asked if ‘this was the end’, to which she had blithely replied: ‘Oh no, there’s even a bit of improvement.’

  What possessed me? Did the fact that I still brought it up mean that her careless words really had given me a sliver of hope?

  ‘Of course I knew better,’ I hastened to say, ‘but I can imagine that a family member might take false hope from a remark like this, and then shout: “Don’t turn off the ventilator! He’s recovering!” I don’t want to put her in a bad light. It was just clumsy.’

  Dr. G. concurred. Miriam had wept during most of the conversation, and at a certain point I believe I saw the doctor’s eyes glisten as well. He asked whether his observation — namely, that the accident had occurred at a dangerous intersection — had been confirmed by the traffic police.

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ I said. ‘There was a survey in Het Parool where it was mentioned as particularly hazardous.’

  I pointed to the file the doctor had consulted a few times during our discussion. ‘Might we have access to that sometime? I’m considering writing a kind of prose requiem for Tonio, and perhaps … I wouldn’t be able to read it now, of course … but later …?’

  ‘You can ask me for it when the time comes,’ Dr. G. said. ‘I’ll warn you, though, it’s full of medical terms. The reports are succinct, here and there staccato, because, well, sometimes … in life-threatening situations … you have to be quick.’

  ‘If I do request it,’ I said, ‘I’ll treat it with the utmost discretion.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt that,’ said Dr. G.

  I thanked him for the clarity of his explanation. ‘We might have expressed ourselves awkwardly now and then, but rest assured we have the greatest admiration for the efforts of you and your team.’ Miriam and I got up. ‘We’ll let you get back to work.’

  ‘This is also my work.’

  27

  If I am to take Dennis and Goscha at their word — and why shouldn’t I? — they had put away a good deal of alcohol that night. I don’t know if it was enough for a hangover the next day. Tonio spent ‘the morning after’ on the operating table. If it was true that pain could not be entirely suppressed by anaesthesia, then what about a hangover?

  And: what were the consequences of all that alcohol on the operation? Dr. G. had said that Tonio’s clotting was disastrous. Could that, in this case, have had something to do with drink? I remembered that soon after his birth, before being placed in the incubator, Tonio had been given a shot of vitamin K in order to boost his coagulation, premature newborns being susceptible to poor blood-clotting. Later, I met the man who had discovered provitamin K, Professor Hemker, in Maastricht. He was also an avid collector of oboes. I did not neglect (also on Tonio’s behalf) to thank him for his scientific efforts.

  If I wanted to immerse myself in shame, I could imagine how the operating-room surgeons commented on the patient’s booze-breath.

  That Thomas Mann quote kept haunting me. ‘It was much worse than I thought …’ If it’s true that even under anaesthesia, consciousness continues to experience pain somewhere deep down, then Tonio spent the last half-day of his life in immobile, excruciating suffering — first on the asphalt, then in the ambulance, later in the operating room, and lastly (with his parents finally at his side) in intensive care.

  I have always told myself that the worst part about pain is the further effect of suffering. One remembers the source or cause of the pain, and cringes with shame for allowing it happen or for having brought it on oneself. One feels the pain ebb, and experiences the added fear of a sudden resurgence of the torment. One is afraid that the pain could well be the harbinger of approaching death. And so on.

  I have always reassured myself with the thought that pain quickly eliminated by death, no longer able to be replayed and reconsidered in one’s consciousness, in fact never existed.

  But what if the pain, before being absorbed by death, is allowed to run riot for half a day, as with Tonio? Was that pain also nonexistent? How far back does death’s power retroactively function as a pain remedy?

  A boy of six falls out of an upstairs window and is skewered by the spikes of the garden fence. The child survives by the skin of his teeth. It takes neighbours half an hour to free him. If that boy lives to be eighty, does his eventual death, all those decades later, still, in retrospect, erase the pain of the then-six-year-old? If so, we can just as well posit that death ‘retrospectively’ erases every feeling experienced throughout a human life — indeed, erases that life itself, as though it had never existed.

  It is thus precisely in my most lucid moments that I am convinced that Tonio, like the author of Tonio Kröger, must have undergone, in the depths of his vital being and for hours on end, the ruination brought on by the coll
ision and the scalpels. If that is true, then I owe him, many times over, my own present pain.

  28

  We drove from the AMC, where he died, to Buitenveldert, where he was buried — but at the last moment, just as Miriam was about to turn onto Fred. Roeskestraat, I managed to forestall a visit to the grave.

  ‘Sorry, Minchen, but I can’t face it, not after that medical talk. Damn it, let’s just go to the Bos.’

  ‘I figured you’d say that. The goat farm has always been the perfect refuge … I mean, if the cemetery’s too much for you.’

  ‘Aside from our back porch, there’s no better place to talk about Tonio.’

  Later, during lunch at the outdoor café, Miriam shared with me her latest discovery: on that fatal night, Tonio was not riding his own bike, but Jim’s. ‘Somebody brought it up when Jim and his parents were at our place, two days after the accident. But like so many things, it totally slipped my mind.’

  Nor could I recall it being mentioned. So soon after the incident, countless details ricocheted off our armour-plated denial. The eagerness to learn everything only arose after the funeral, when we tried to sneak him back into our midst.

  ‘Then it’s time we returned Jim’s bike,’ I said. ‘Or … well, what’s left of it. Mangled or not, it’s still his property. Or maybe we should —’

  ‘His parents have already bought him a new one. He said to his mother: “Mum, you don’t think I’m going to ride that thing now.” ’

  ‘The police said they were still busy studying the bike and the Suzuki.’

  ‘The bike’s in storage at the James Watt bureau,’ Miriam said. ‘I checked. There’s even an appointment to go collect his things — bike, clothes, the lot.’

  ‘Hey, all this behind my back, how come …’

  ‘You stay home. Write. I’ll go with Nelleke.’

  ‘Don’t forget to ask about the watch.’

  ‘I’m dreading the shoes even more.’

  We sat for a good, long time in silence at that café table, looking past each other at the chickens and roosters, but even they weren’t all that active this day. A bantam was having a wash in the fine, grey sand under the octagonal bench that encircled a tree.

  ‘What about his own bike?’ I finally asked.

  ‘At Central Station,’ Miriam answered. ‘As usual. They’ve already carted off so many of his bikes from there.’

  29

  ‘Oh, I might take a puff in the bar now and then,’ Tonio had told me months ago, when I asked him if he smoked. ‘You know, just to be cool with the guys. Don’t know why, really.’

  In retrospect, it occurred to me that he’d seen the question coming (which, incidentally, sounded too much like: not you!), and had prepared his answer in all its nonchalance. He wanted to spare us. If he’d just admitted that it was more than just the occasional drag in the pub, then I could in turn have said: ‘Listen, Tonio, I’ve been able to keep you away from smokes until you turned eighteen. I still think it’s dumb, but now it’s up to you. Go ahead and light up, if it’ll make Miriam’s screwdrivers taste better. So we’ll open a window later.’

  From a conversation between Jim and his father, who shortly after Whit Sunday were pondering the riddle of Tonio’s nocturnal detour, I picked up a snippet about ‘stopping at Leidseplein for cigarettes’, which could just as well have meant: picking up a pack for Jim. Photos that surfaced on the Internet showing Tonio theatrically holding up a lit cigarette (or joint) struck me as no more than a pose, but Dennis and Goscha had more or less confirmed that Tonio was a regular smoker. Another friend had placed, as a kind of salute, a film roll, a can of beer, and a pack of cigarettes at Tonio’s grave.

  He wanted to spare his parents, damn it, and in doing so had more than once denied them his company. Now I suspected that his restlessness after a drink or two-and-three-quarters of a portion of chow mein at our house meant he had to have a smoke, and didn’t want to put us out. Courteous to a fault.

  I found myself fretting over that smoking of his. Until he was nearly twenty and moved to De Baarsjes, I’d never once seen him light up. All right, let’s say he did so when he was out of the house, at parties, ‘just to be cool with the guys’. At home, he always backed me up whenever I pronounced on this pet peeve of mine. His beloved Grandpa Piet, a smoker from the age of eleven, was felled at the age of sixty-seven … his Aunt Marianne was now struggling, post-emphysema, with lung cancer … No tobacco user could pretend anymore that he would simply get off scot-free.

  I armed myself with strategies that would help him quit. For starters, I would talk to him, not in a fatherly way, but more like an old friend … Smoking was deadly — that warning wasn’t put on the packet just to deface the product design.

  Suddenly there was the image of the lanky Dr. G., who had given Miriam and me a discreet but frank report of Tonio’s lung trauma. In a fraction of time, his still healthy lungs had been transformed into untreatable blood-sponges — and in that same fraction of time it happened again now, interrupting my train of thought. Here I was, whingeing that Tonio had, despite all my good advice, started smoking. His lungs would never even get the chance to be destroyed by nicotine.

  30

  If Tonio had survived, badly injured, and had remained in a coma for an extended time, he could have one day regained consciousness, wondering in horror: what’s happened? Where am I? What am I doing here?

  A damaged brain, too, can still produce such questions. At the very least, there’s a battered command centre that registers the puzzling and the elusive. At best, it begins to dawn on the person, in fragments, what happened, or what might have happened.

  Immense regret, perhaps. Shame.

  Miriam and I appear at his hospital bed. Whether he recognises us or not, there is at least a consciousness that may or may not be able to recognise us. He is alive.

  In one of his novels, the Dutch writer Alfred Kossmann touches on the great scandal of human existence: that a person cannot experience his own death. Tonio is already on the other side of that scandal.

  Now that he is irretrievably dead, he does not have access to an authority (namely, consciousness) that informs him: ‘Listen here, Tonio, your life has come to an end, you cannot finish what you have started.’

  Tonio knows nothing now. Miriam and I, and a few others, do know. We are well aware of what’s denied him: that the future he envisaged — partly clear, partly cloudy — is now out of reach.

  Events experienced in the past remain in one’s consciousness, thanks to mental rumination.

  You’re walking carelessly down the street, eyes wandering, and bang your head against a beam sticking out of a window. The smack is followed immediately by a brief, blindingly bright flash. Then anger: who in their right mind sticks a beam so far out the window? Embarrassment: how could I be so stupid? You look around: did anybody see? You walk on. Besides pain on the outside, shame burns under the skin of your face. The collision nestles in a variety of guises in your consciousness, which continues to illuminate every aspect it, over and over.

  Of all possible incidents, death is probably the most serious thing that can happen to a person. But … it is life’s only self-terminating event. For the one who experiences this unique event, reflection is impossible. Anger, shame, guilt, cause and effect, consequences … none of these count. Dead is dead.

  31

  I had asked my editor to come by so we could discuss when (and if) I might resume work. I was looking, first and foremost, for a strategy to keep from going mad, to fend off the fear: the fear of a future not only without issue, but also (as either a direct or indirect result of which) without a steady pursuit.

  ‘The bothersome, no, the paralysing part,’ I said, ‘is that in the past few weeks I’ve had to visit a whole list of locations from my new novel. Hospital, police station … Even the car that plays a
crucial role in the book is the same make and colour as the one that hit Tonio. A Suzuki Swift. Red. It’s not very stimulating to have reality literally take over my meticulously made-up world.’

  It was another brilliant summer day. We sat on our back terrace under the expanse of the spent golden rain, and I told her that Tonio had taken a break here with his photo model a few days before his death, in the same resplendent sunlight.

  The editor suggested I first write about Tonio, and then later, when it was out of my system, to pick up where I left off on Kwaadschiks.

  ‘A requiem-like book could go one of two ways,’ I said. ‘I could write it two, three years from now … or five … by which time it will take on a retrospective character. Looking back, some years earlier, on a terrible event. A reassessment of the grief. How the lives of those involved have changed. Or, if I write it now, this summer, it will be an account from within a situation that took place such a short time ago … straight from the mishmash of emotions … Writing then becomes part of the struggle, and vice versa. The distraught parents reconstructing the last days and hours of their son … because everything is imperative … they cling to every detail …’

  Poetical bullshit. I have no choice. I cannot not write about him, for him, now, because at this moment nothing else matters. It’s either write about Tonio, or not write at all — it’s not a matter of choice. Without even having thought about it, without consciously setting out to, I was already doing it. From the minute the doorbell rang on Whit Sunday, and a police officer uttered the words ‘critical condition’, I was composing my requiem — at first as an incantation, in the desperate hope of keeping him alive, and, later that day, with incredulous acceptance, in the desperate hope of conjuring him, in words and images, back to his former life.