That evening, out on the veranda, we wondered what good it had all done — the talks with Tonio’s friends, nosing around, going to all that desperate bother.
Mostly a bit of distraction from the — in reality — insoluble problem. And yes, now we knew that he’d spent his last night in the company of Goscha and Dennis, and not with Jenny. And that he did not come from Paradiso, but from club Trouw, and after that he had cycled off on his own to his flat in De Baarsjes.
Why the date with Jenny didn’t go through: unclear. What had brought Tonio to that intersection of the Hobbemastraat and the Stadhouderskade: no one had the foggiest idea. Nor the precise circumstances of the accident itself: the police investigation was still underway.
All right, after a lot of digging around, we had managed to unearth the results of the photo shoot, but Jenny had still not picked them up. Jim and Dennis were supposed to organise a small exhibition of Tonio’s other photos, but we didn’t hear a peep out of them. Jim’s brazenness to Miriam only drove us deeper into despair.
We had wanted to defend and protect Tonio, in his now-defenceless position as a dead person, but we hadn’t counted on the indifferent, run-of-the-mill betrayal of the living. If this sounds bitter — it is bitter.
The heavy-duty envelopes with Tonio’s photos of Jenny lay there between us. His last earthly task. Neither of us had the courage to look at them, because we knew as well as Jenny that on each and every print, conspicuously invisible, was Tonio’s presence. His keen eye, peering straight through the glossy paper. What was in that envelope was a collection of snapshots etched in Tonio’s memory on Thursday, 20 May 2010 — a memory swirling with Jennys.
‘So. Here we are,’ said Miriam. ‘Photos located, model AWOL.’
‘Just look at us,’ I said. ‘Too shit-scared to open a packet of snapshots. And Jenny? She wouldn’t be able to see a single print without getting Tonio’s squint into the bargain … the top of his head as he bent over his Hasselblad … No, she didn’t dare. Actually, I find it kind of touching that she’s now claiming the same ailment as the day of the photo shoot. Maybe she had the jitters then, too.’
‘Then I’d just as soon she didn’t come by three weeks from now either.’
‘We’ll just wait and see. If it takes too long, we’ll make contact ourselves. We have the right to hear her account of the whole business.’
38
Since Black Whitsun, I have cursed, more than ever before, the vulgarity of what opinion leaders call low culture, and in the expression of which I find nothing that even obliquely reflects or clarifies my present situation.
I was wrong. Miriam’s encouragement, some time ago, to ‘let it all out’, scream out my misery, apparently shook something loose in me. This morning, I heard the old song ‘My son, my son’ by Vera Lynn on the radio. My mother used to sing it now and again, fumbling through the English lyrics. It starts out with a rather ripe male chorus, but then suddenly you have Vera Lynn, with her swelling belt voice.
The song hit me right in the gut, and relieved me of a cramp located somewhere between my head and my heart. Two weeks ago, Miriam had coaxed a dry scream out of me, but now it all came pouring out, complete with heavy sobbing and an unstoppable stream of colourless snot.
It felt liberating, but it did not liberate me. It is a short number. When it was over, the catharsis went no further than a damply whispered: ‘That’s it … that’s it.’
My son, my son
You’re everything to me
My son, my son
You’re all I hoped you’d be
My son, my son
My only pride and joy
God bless and keep you safe
My own, my precious boy
For all the care and heartache
life has brought to me
One precious gift has made it
all worthwhile
For heaven blessed and with
great joy rewarded me
For I can look and see
My own beloved son
My son, my son
Just do the best you can
Then in my heart I’m sure
You’ll face life like a man
My pride and joy
My life, my boy
My son, my son
CHAPTER FIVE
A second brood
1
The fact that he is no more, and will never be again (but remains as indelible as ever), is more evident to us now than in the beginning. After the funeral, well-meaning people suggested that ‘the loss, the grief, would wear off, one way or the other’. The accident is now six weeks behind us. The only thing that has worn off is the surreal feeling that keeps the possibility open that one day, today or tomorrow, the nightmare will end. This unwelcome process of erosion takes place for the sake of reality, which, wielding the hard truth like a battering ram, drives itself ever deeper into us.
Were it a nightmare, it should have been long over by now. Typical of nightmares is that the dreamer wakes from them with a jolt. A nightmare is not a soap opera that can be stretched out infinitely for the sake of ‘to be continued’.
The pain. It has only just started.
‘Sometimes it seems a bit less awful than at first,’ Miriam said this morning. ‘It no longer feels like a bad concussion, but my brain is still a sieve. Especially with names and words, and the order of things … things, you know … dates. Events. And shopping is still a disaster. I drift through the shops, and have no idea what to buy. At home, I first go to make up a … a, what do you call it, a note, a list … and it’s just blank, because … what were we going to eat again? Sometimes I’m scared it’ll never get any better.’
‘Think of all those other functions that have stopped, Minchen. Hoping for. Yearning for. Praying … begging. They still exist, but have been switched off. They’re arrows you have nowhere to aim at. No bulls-eye on the target. You can hope for Tonio’s return as much as you want … believe in the miracle of his survival … pray, beg, threaten. Come back! Here, you! Or else! Pointless. Functions just as redundant as the appendix, the wisdom tooth, the coccyx …’
2
The tiring part is that every morning, awakening from the stale flush, we begin a new life, and that very evening grope the old one back. Every day, the same old ritual of resuming the pain management.
It is a quarter to seven, still early evening. Miriam has fetched her father from Beth Shalom and dropped him off at his house, where she administers his eye drops. Five minutes later, she is home. I sit on the sofa in volatile sombreness. The evening news and feature stories are over. Sometimes Miriam catches me in the living room seething at an instalment of RTL Boulevard, the Dutch celebrity-gossip show, with its vapid blather about weddings, divorces, and babymaking by members of the species who, probably due to their spiritual bastard status, are known as ‘Dutch Notables’. Every once in a while there is a guest crime journalist, who offers commentary on the pictures of Joran van der Sloot in a Peruvian jail. I am always struck by the resemblance of this young murderer to Frankenstein’s monster, but with the scars neatly airbrushed out.
Miriam asks if I want something to drink. I respond petulantly.
‘Weren’t we going to quit? This morning we swore we wouldn’t go tempting each other.’
‘Who’s talking about booze? I’m just having mineral water.’
‘Me too, then.’
A few minutes later, we sit chewing, with utter aversion, a glass of Spa. In silence. Without looking over, I can hear from Miriam’s breathing that she’s going to go to pieces. I ask: ‘Did you take your pill on time?’
‘Just did.’ She’s already crying. ‘Bit too late.’
‘This is no good.’ I set the water glass down on the coffee table with a smack. ‘Pour me a real drink. I won’t make it through tonight otherwise. A gin and tonic, yeah. A generous one.’
; Even before the first swig that makes everything lighter, a load glides off our shoulders. Miriam, crying, goes into the kitchen, but not dragging her feet. I hear the rattle of glasses, bottles, fridge drawers. The crackle of ice-cube trays. The tinkle of the ice cubes. This has to stop — sooner or later, this has to stop. Miriam’s esophagus has been acting up again, because she pours pure vodka down it. It also gives her painful heartburn, which she combats with Rennies. For the time being, relief has the upper hand: we have managed to put off complete abstinence for yet another day.
Miriam returns to the living room carrying a tray with, in addition to the drinks, a plate of pata negra (or slices of mackerel, or toast with paté). ‘This will have to do for tonight.’ She has fixed herself a screwdriver. I get an extra-large glass with a double shot of gin watered down with tonic. My favourite brand: Bombay Sapphire.
Whenever Tonio dropped by unexpectedly he would have either one or the other: a G&T or a screwdriver, and usually left it at just one. Miriam and I clink glasses. She drinks through the lump in her throat, and shakes her head.
‘That he’ll never again sit here holding a tall glass … it’s incomprehensible.’
3
One motif in the novel I was working on up until Whit Sunday involved the double suicide of two lovers (in this case, to put an end to a mortal fear of abandonment).
Have I ever raised the idea of doing ourselves in, together, to put an end to the pain? No. The thought hovers unspoken between us. We did not give in to it. Or did we? There are long-term forms of suicide, such as allowing insidious self-destruction to take its course. It is still too early to conclude whether or not we have caved in irrevocably to this offensive event. It’s entirely possible that what we see as a fight for survival are really the spasms of an inevitable downfall.
Someone wrote: ‘Would Tonio have wanted your lives to go to pot because of his death?’
Although he probably never gave the question much thought, because his joie de vivre did not permit it, I answered the correspondent: ‘No, Tonio would not have wanted that. We are persevering in his spirit.’
On the other hand: what else can you do, as parents, than go to pot over the destruction of a boy like him? We say we’re resisting our downfall, and keep telling ourselves that Tonio didn’t intend to drag us along in his own destruction, but maybe, resistance or no, that is precisely where we’re headed. It would mean that our love for him is stronger than our survival instinct, our craving for self-preservation.
Miriam and I are either in a process of recovery, or we are up to our necks in auto-intoxication. Does it matter? The booze bottles in the hall once contained either medicine or poison — they are, however you look at it, empty.
Keeping our heads above water won’t bring Tonio back, nor will going belly up. In life,Tonio was worth surviving for, with every bit of our strength. Precisely because we experienced the live Tonio in all his vitality, it is tempting to destroy ourselves over the dead one.
4
When a new Bombay Sapphire needs to be opened, Miriam brings me the bottle, because she can’t get it open herself. The only drawback to this superior brand is that the screw cap has no knurling, so the fingers cannot get a grip, especially when they are wet from the ice cubes. Even my dry fingers don’t manage without chafing. I begin to believe that the designers of this bottle (square, the glass light-blue as a spring sky) intentionally opted for a slippery-smooth cap, in order to create in the user an additional moment of reflection. I clench my teeth, twist and wring, while my left hand, clamped around the bottle, goes numb from the cold. I am inclined (if not likely) to think: What’s the point of this mock relaxation if it requires so much exertion?
Follow Tonio’s destruction with my own: it remains, in its desperate irony, an appealing thought. A moment later, I resist it again. This one, irreplaceable life of mine must be lived to the very end, developing all my strengths and skills.
But … if I choose the latter option, I must also live on behalf of Tonio, who no longer can live under his own power. I must apply all my achievements to show how extraordinary his life was, and how extraordinary its significance still is. It means that, in addition to my existing capabilities, I must develop new techniques — not to simply describe him with verve, but to bring him back in all his vitality.
5
You can shut out the world as much as you like, but there will always be cracks, chinks, leaks that cannot be filled. Family bonds, for instance, cannot be ignored. Hinde is available on demand, but she does not interfere. I notice that, once in a while, I am in need of my brother’s willing ear. Since Miriam told him this, he rings regularly. Natan, ever modest, sometimes waits for weeks to hear from me, and then telephones himself — always briefly, afraid to take up too much of my time. And then there’s my mother-in-law.
6
The relationship between Miriam and her mother has been quiescently poor for forty years now. It did not improve with my entrance on the scene, thirty years ago, but thanks to my (then-) conciliatory disposition, the animosity went underground. In retrospect, I would have been better off fanning the smouldering fen-fire: it might at least have brought about — if need be with a great brouhaha — some degree of clarity for all parties.
The arrival of Tonio distracted mother and daughter from much as-yet unmined conflict material (although Miriam claims that her breast-feeding abruptly ceased when she withdrew with the baby to her old room, which was so thin-walled that as a child she could hear her parents coupling and fighting — not necessarily in that order — in the next room). Tonio was often entrusted to the care of his grandparents. Only some fifteen years later, when Miriam began writing about her youth, did the mudslide break loose. In her search for poems dating from her childhood years, she overturned a good deal of poisoned ground. Their relationship worsened rapidly, and not only below the surface. Wies made desperate attempts, in my presence, to explain away her daughter’s angry outbursts as no-nonsense efficacy: ‘Miriam can be harsh sometimes, but she’s quite the organiser.’
One of Miriam’s most vehement reproaches was that her mother had a knack for knowing exactly when to go to pieces: immediately before her husband or daughters had an important event. I remember having booked a hotel for eight weeks in Positano in order to work on a book. My mother-in-law had a breakdown the day of my departure: Natan, pale as ivory, came to tell us, he himself nearly on the verge of collapse. Last year, when she heard that Miriam and I had rented a house in Lugano, she had to be admitted to the Valerius Clinic. I don’t want to suggest that she faked her mental condition, but she certainly could manoeuvre it well enough to achieve the maximum theatrical effect. Her nervous system was the theatre animal in her: a shrill, handwringing tragedienne.
In between earth-shaking breakdowns, she kept her nerves honed by a continual series of mini-collapses. In fact, she typically behaved like someone who could be swept away by the black wave of melancholy at any moment. Year after year, if Miriam and I ate at my in-laws on a Friday evening, Wies would interrogate me as to my labours, and in particular what they achieved in a material sense. My job, after all, was to support her daughter, preferably in a comfortable and cushy manner. Seated on the edge of her armchair, she subjected me to direct questions that were, to put it bluntly, doozies. The tricky part was that as soon as I began to formulate an answer, she flew out of her chair and into the kitchen to turn down the chicken soup or stir the latke batter to keep it from going lumpy.
Her return to the edge of the armchair, too, followed a regular pattern. With her right hand she would make a quick rubbing gesture over her nose, like you see certain adorable rodents do, but usually with both front paws at the same time. This nose-polishing rub was always a preamble to the same utterance: ‘You know …!’
And thereafter followed a half-hysterical harangue about life’s perils and pitfalls. The answer she had required of me
a few moments earlier had apparently become entirely irrelevant. If I ever managed to get a word in edgewise, so as to assure her that my pursuits had indeed led to a certain level of prosperity, she would drown me out with the whine: ‘Oh well, as long as you can keep it up … heaven forbid you should hit a slow patch!’
When, some years later, I tried to impress her with the offhand remark that two-thirds of my income went to the taxman, she began caterwauling that I could never in a million years earn that kind of money. Without allowing me to say a word, she declared me bankrupt then and there.
7
Since Tonio’s funeral, Miriam has no desire to see her mother. This is only partly because of the way Wies insulted me during the post-funeral reception.
‘My attention is focussed on Tonio, and no one else,’ Miriam says. ‘I’m trying to survive.’
Despite my aversion to the woman, I do feel sorry for Wies, so I occasionally ring her up. If she doesn’t answer, there’s no point in leaving a message, because she does not know how to retrieve her voicemail. If she does answer, she immediately begins wailing and screeching, so that I can hardly understand her. Her voice squeaks and cracks and grates.
‘Tonio, such a good boy … why? why?’ That part I do understand, every time.
I’m torn, I’ll admit it. I see before me the brazen face with which she shunned her ex-husband at the funeral, and at the same time I think: Tonio was her only grandchild, she took care of him, Tonio took care of her yard (for a price), Tonio got her mobile phone in working order.
Her endless repetition of everything means I gradually pick up pretty much all of it. ‘And you … you probably can’t write anymore, can you?’
I assure her I that I am writing. About Tonio.
‘I hope you’ll be able to write again someday. And Miriam, how is she coping? Are you two holding up together? I never hear from her anymore …’
‘Miriam’s mind is entirely on Tonio. She needs to focus all her energy on dealing with this terrible event.’
Tonio Page 39