Even in my vilest nightmares, I couldn’t have predicted that I would one day have to devote myself to a requiem for my own son.
32
‘If there’s nothing more left of that bike than scrap,’ I said to Miriam, ‘then just take a few pictures of it for our archive. Ask the police to junk it. If we put it here in the hall … I don’t think I could stand the sight of it. And the photos: put them in a sealed envelope until I can face it. Remember to ask about the watch.’
Since Miriam was too nervous to drive, Nelleke took them in her car to the Serious Traffic Accidents Unit near Amstel Station. It was a police domain, so there were lots of broken parking meters. After finally coaxing a ticket (or half of it) out of one of the machines, Miriam rang officer Windig, who had promised to accompany her to the depot. His colleague Hendriks answered the phone and came downstairs in his place.
Later, Miriam and Nelleke described a labyrinthine trek through corridors, stairs, rails, reinforced steel doors, and walls adorned with rolled-up fire hoses and extinguishers. All of a sudden, they found themselves in a lofty space that felt halfway between an aeroplane hangar and a parking garage.
‘I was so nervous,’ Miriam said later, ‘that I only saw that one empty passenger car in the middle of an immense open space.’
She couldn’t say whether it was a red Suzuki Swift. There were racks of damaged bicycles and scooters, and the sweating Miriam made a beeline, as though by radar, for Jim’s bike — not that she recognised it, but she saw Tonio’s shoes dangling from the handlebars in a plastic bag, their toes sticking out of the bag.
‘Nelleke, that bike … it’s still intact,’ Miriam exclaimed. I can almost imagine her misplaced triumph. ‘Surely a bike doesn’t come through a fatal crash looking like this …’
‘That bike is going with us,’ Nelleke said resolutely. ‘Not to the junk heap.’
Shoes absorb part of the soul of their wearer. It’s in the slight distortion of the opening … that walked-in warp … the nuances in the grey tint of the X-ed indentations the laces leave on the tongue. It was this shoe portrait that Miriam suddenly discovered, and that broke her up.
Officer Hendriks led Nelleke and Miriam back through the labyrinth to the exit. So this is where the belongings of those caught off-guard at an intersection at night, of the flung and fallen, end up. Bits and pieces, often smeared with blood or mud, waiting for their rightful owner, sometimes surrogated by his or her next of kin.
Hendriks shook hands with the women, and reminded Miriam that she could always call. They walked to the car: Nelleke with one hand on the handlebars, and the other arm around Miriam’s shoulder. Miriam phoned me before they got in.
‘Those horribly empty shoes, Adri … without his feet … without him in them. Gaping at me with their terrible emptiness …’
‘And the bike?’
‘Not a scratch. You could ride off on it as is.’
Miriam said she wanted to take Nelleke to the garden centre, to get her something as thanks for her support. ‘Retail therapy.’
‘And the watch?’ I asked.
‘It wasn’t there,’ she answered. ‘It could still be somewhere in his flat …’
‘He always wore it,’ I said. ‘Certainly when he went out.’
‘It might have come loose during the accident …’
I was reminded of an incident from my youth, which made its way into my book Vallende Ouders. One day, my mother, riding on a narrow bike path that cut across the meadow, collided with an oncoming cyclist and landed in the ditch alongside the path. Her left wrist was bleeding, just where her metal-link watchband was torn loose by the lip of the bike bell. The watch must have ended up in the murky, rust-brown ditchwater. We rode to my grandparents, who lived nearby. My father and I returned to the scene (me perched on the baggage carrier), armed with a skimmer. He stirred in the sludge with the kitchen tool until the sun, blood-orange red, rested just above the heath. The watch was nowhere to be found. He did fish out a long, narrow screwdriver, though, which would perform many long years of service as an aid in opening and closing defective electrical plugs and sockets.
I tried to recall Tonio’s wristwatch. ‘Did it have an elastic metal band,’ I asked, ‘or a leather strap?’
‘It had a kind of buckle clasp that clicked shut,’ she said. ‘I remember that it wasn’t really a boy’s model, and it was way too loose. So they took out a link at the jeweller’s, and later, when Tonio’s wrists got fuller, I had it put back in.’
‘A buckle like that,’ I said, ‘could easily have sprung open from the collision. It was probably left lying there on the street, and got picked up by an early-morning passerby.’
‘That person didn’t arrive home with a clear conscience, then,’ Miriam said. ‘The intersection was painted with yellow accident-scene stripes. If you find a watch lying there, chances are it belonged to the victim.’
She was already starting to talk in James Wattstraat jargon.
‘And what did the Control Unit have to say about the accident itself? Was the Suzuki driving too fast?’
‘A bit too fast,’ Miriam said, ‘but Tonio shouldn’t have crossed the street right then.’
‘And the blood tests?’
‘Yeah, he’d had quite a lot to drink.’
‘There must be a couple of thousand drunk students cycling through Amsterdam at that time of night. Doesn’t mean you have to get run over.’
The bike did not have a light. In his pockets they found the small lamps that could have been attached to his clothes or wrapped around his arms. They needed recharging — which is maybe why he didn’t have them on.
33
I lie on my sweat-drenched bed reading the paper, with the balcony doors opened to the cool morning air. It is moderately sunny. I read that the actress Patricia Neal has passed away. Yesterday it was announced that they found a notebook of Roald Dahl’s containing his account of the death of his seven-year-old daughter, in the early 1970s. Patricia Neal was the mother of the little girl.
When Miriam brings breakfast, she seems slightly panicked. When I mention it to her, she is very much surprised. ‘I’ve just taken a pill, but I guess it hasn’t kicked in yet.’ (Recently, she takes her pills only in the late afternoon.) ‘Klaas is coming at nine-thirty … to transfer the photos of Jenny. I still have to shower.’
34
At five o’clock, a delegation of Tonio’s college friends: a guy and three girls. They’ve brought a large bouquet with them, on behalf of the whole class, in a vase — there had been a collection — and a big card signed by all of them.
One of the girls tells us how she met Tonio last September, in a grand café on the Max Euweplein. It was at the end of orientation week, which Tonio had missed part of because he still worked full-time at Dixons. They would finally meet their missing classmate. (There, too, our histories overlap. During orientation week in Nijmegen, I was working at Daf in Eindhoven to rake together enough money to furnish my student digs. I only arrived at the university on 1 October 1970, just in time for the first day of classes, and to discover that the rest of the class had meanwhile become great friends. My social life never recovered.)
Because Tonio, true to tradition, was late, his waiting classmates wondered out loud what kind of guy they should keep an eye out for, out of all the people that came into the café. They pooled their expectations of the newcomer, and arrived at a sort of composite profile — which, apparently, was spot on.
Our four visitors, especially the girls, gush enthusiastically about Tonio’s helpfulness, and not only in class-related matters.
‘He was so nice … so friendly.’
They shook their heads dejectedly as they reminisced. I asked about that ‘parents evening’, which we had missed. They groaned with embarrassment. Yeah, something really did go wrong. The organis
ers decided at the last minute to change the dinner venue, and the email with the new information never reached Tonio. ‘Although,’ one of the girls said, ‘I did see him later that evening at the Atrium café.’
Miriam told them how our evening had panned out. ‘It was a pity to have missed you and your parents, but we had a wonderful evening. In retrospect, even more so. It was the last time the three of us had such an intimate dinner together … without knowing, of course …’
Perhaps because of the tears in her eyes, the students all stood up at once, as though on cue. I didn’t want them to leave. The boy, Jörgen, was the only one to have accepted a beer. I tried to coax him to stay for another, but he politely refused.
‘I guess we’ll be going,’ said one of the girls.
‘Just one more question,’ I said. ‘Did any of you hear Tonio mention a girl named Jenny recently?’
‘Jenny …’ The name was repeated a couple of times. They looked inquiringly at one another, hesitantly shaking their heads.
‘Not that I know of,’ Jörgen said. ‘At least, there’s no Jenny in our class.’
‘She was, how should I put it, new in his life,’ I said. ‘No one in Tonio’s circle of friends appears to have met her. We get, well, the impression that in the last week of his life something might have been brewing between Tonio and this Jenny.’
It was irritating that I couldn’t show them a picture.
‘We didn’t see Tonio that week,’ one of the girls said.
I was beginning to look like a fogeyish matchmaker, but one with a very specialised mission: to couple Tonio posthumously with a woman. Tonio’s classmate Claire offered to have a look on Facebook or some other social media to try to find out about Jenny.
‘It’s okay, don’t bother,’ said Miriam. ‘I’ve finally managed to reach her by telephone. She’s willing to come by. We’re just asking around, you know, what kind of girl she is. And especially, well, how serious they were.’
35
Us and our detective work. At times, I watch from a distance as Miriam and I make the rounds, knocking agitatedly on doors. Our mouths move, we gesticulate. I know we are asking about Tonio in his last days, but without the sound it looks more like we’re going door to door demanding our son. ‘Give him back … we know he’s in there.’
After the students left, Miriam and I dove for the bottles, which we did not dare to do in the presence of the cola-drinking girls.
‘I’ll order a couple of pizzas,’ Miriam said.
We talked even more greedily than we drank. Every day, three times a day, theories having to do with Tonio’s disappearance spun around in our heads. They all had to be put to the test.
‘Minchen, have I already told you about my variant on the scorched earth?’
‘Doesn’t sound pretty.’
‘Everyone makes mistakes in their life. It’s all about what you do with them.’
‘Learn from experience,’ Miriam said. ‘That’s what they say, anyway.’
‘For now, I’m thinking about how you look back on them, those mistakes. Even if I’ve long redeemed myself, I can still cringe with embarrassment at the memory. The incredibly stupid things. Even totally on my own, I want the earth to swallow me up, let me tell you. As a kid, I had the tendency to obsessively repeat to myself the hideous blunders I’d let loose in adult company. Just to wallow in the shame. Maybe I was out to punish myself … to better my life.’
‘Gee, makes me almost want to forgive all the stupid things you’ve done to me.’
‘Since Tonio’s death … if I look back on my life, I see nothing but mistakes, gaffes, idiocy. Even things I wasn’t dissatisfied with back then, that other people complimented — now they don’t stand a chance. And why not? Because everything I ever undertook, even long before Tonio came along, could count as the groundwork for his death.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ Miriam said, now without sarcasm. ‘It’s inhuman.’
‘I’ve got no choice. This is the way I see it. The death of my son is proof that my life has been nothing but one big blunder. When I look back on my past I see a vast, charred expanse. My memory has applied the scorched-earth tactic. Every blessing I’ve ever thought I’d counted has been burned. It’s all out of reach.’
Miriam gave up protesting this morbid take on things — perhaps (but I hoped not) because she shared it. Her glance drifted more and more toward the corner sofa, Tonio’s regular spot. I knew the tears wouldn’t be long in coming.
‘Whenever I think of … of how he always sat over there,’ she said, not for the first time. ‘With Tygo on his lap, writhing around under his hands.’ She was already crying. ‘The thought that he’ll never come walking through that door again, ever …’ She stamped her feet on the floor and yelled: ‘Adri, it hurts so much. Help me. Please just help me.’
The pizza menu, where the phone number of the delivery service was printed, was downstairs in the front hall. Miriam left the room to place the order. I sat there, exhausted with grief, more from hers than from mine, staring into my greasy glass, when suddenly the living-room door sprung open. I started, as I used to do when Tonio dropped by unexpectedly. First came the vague, dark reflection of a figure in the white paint of the door, and then Tonio stepped through the opening. He always gave me that childlike grin of his, like when he had hidden himself to tease his parents, and suddenly reappeared.
(‘Say, have you seen Tonio?’
‘Nope, not for a while.’
‘I’m starting to worry.’
‘I’ve looked everywhere. Nothing. Nowhere.’
‘Well, I guess we should make some calls then.’
This was always the moment when he would leap out of the laundry basket, gleefully blurting out: ‘You really thought I was missing, didn’t you?’)
Miriam had once again neglected to close the door properly behind her, so that one of cats only had to jump up against it to shove it open. I sat with bated breath, waiting for the arm that would push the door further open. Fooled again. Our ginger tomcat, Tygo, came zigzagging into the room.
36
Summer 1990. Having fled the war zone in Loenen, I turned in desperation to De Pauwhof, a doomed artists’ colony in Wassenaar (where you were expected to take tea with the widows of the sculptors who had drunk themselves to death) to finish my book. I had left Miriam and Tonio behind in the Veluwe, where they were at the mercy of the fickle landlord/neighbour, who would sometimes just switch off the electricity for an entire weekend. I was so afraid Tonio would forget me that every other day I went to Wassenaar’s only toy shop to buy him a Matchbox car, which I then sent off to Loenen, accompanied by a drawing or postcard.
The shop had a limited range. How many could I send before running out of models? Miriam subtly let me know over the phone that Tonio had received the stretch limo twice already: grey with a black roof.
At De Pauwhof, I made friends with the musicologist Albert Dunning and the elocutionist Maud Cossaar. Miriam and Tonio were planning a day trip to Wassenaar, so Dunning’s wife, Jeanine, bought a small gift for the boy — from the same toy shop. It was beautifully wrapped, but when she presented it, Tonio grudgingly unwrapped the gift and reacted with the vaguely bored comment: ‘Oh … a car.’
Jeanine was slightly miffed, but Albert had a good laugh over His Lordship’s ho-hum reaction. From a balcony somewhere above our heads, Maud Cossaar exclaimed, with the diction of an interbellum diva, her arms outstretched: ‘Don’t you-ou have a charming little family!’
What Jeanine did not know was that Tonio had been sent the very same car, in the very same colour (yellow) by his father, identically gift-wrapped. Sigmund Freud claimed that children had the tendency to throw a toy out of their crib every time their mother left the room — to give themselves the feeling it was them who had showed mama the door. Freu
d does not go into expelling the father in this manner. And yet it seemed that this is precisely what Tonio had in mind when he flung, with a decisive and potent gesture, that yellow car into the rhododendrons that surrounded the Pauwhof terrace.
No matter how thoroughly we combed the dark inner reaches of the bushes, destroying a good number of flowers in the process, we were never able to find that little yellow car. Tonio watched our fruitless efforts with amusement.
37
It is Friday afternoon. Miriam and her friend Josie take Josie’s daughter Lola to a party. Jenny is supposed to come pick up her portfolio photos at four o’clock. Miriam has agreed to give them to her: I don’t want to be there. Just to be on the safe side, I’ve left the door leading from my workroom to the landing ajar so I can hear the doorbell if Miriam’s not back by the time Jenny arrives. In that case, I can buzz the girl in and ask her via the intercom to wait for Miriam downstairs.
Four o’clock, four-fifteen: no doorbell, and no sound at all drifting up the stairwell when I go out to the landing to check. I dial Miriam’s number. Voicemail. She rings back a bit later.
‘I’m just having a drink with Josie at a café. Jenny cancelled. Bladder infection, just like that afternoon with Tonio. Tomorrow she’s going on holiday for three weeks. She’ll come fetch the photos when she gets back. Promised to, anyway.’
The cancellation rankles me. I say: ‘Don’t let it get to you, Minchen. Jenny probably can’t handle it yet. Every photo she sees bears witness to Tonio just out of view. Evidence of that afternoon together in our house.’
‘To be honest, I was dreading it, too,’ Miriam says. ‘I’m relieved she cancelled.’
She says she’ll pick up some sushi from the Japanese takeaway, to nibble with a cold glass of something. I have a sneaking suspicion that as far as dinner goes, that will be it. ‘See you later.’
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