Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  ‘I understand that … I do understand. But she’ll have to come see me once, at least. When I die.’

  This she repeats, almost triumphantly, in each telephone conversation. She often says: ‘I don’t want … don’t want to live anymore. I’m going to Tonio.’

  Hinde came by the day before yesterday. Her mother has decided to let herself die, and soon. She has chosen to wither away. No more medicine, only morphine for the pain. She refuses food and liquid.

  Miriam is beside herself. ‘She’s using Tonio’s grave as her final podium … to give one last theatrical performance, to go out with a bang. Doesn’t for a moment think of me … that I’m trying to come to grips with Tonio’s death. She just bashes her way through the whole grieving process. It’s blackmail, that’s what it is. I put our contact on hold temporarily, so now she’s going to force me to visit her. How did she put it? “Miriam will have to come to me once, at least. When I die.” Uh-huh. Now I’ll have to. One last breakdown. Right between Tonio and me. Then she’ll be satisfied.’

  Suddenly, the accents are shifted. Intense discussion between the two sisters. Consultation with my mother-in-law’s psychiatrist.

  ‘She’s done it again,’ Miriam exclaims. ‘Once again, she’s got me spending my whole day thinking about her. Instead of about Tonio and that I miss him so goddamn much.’

  8

  Since Miriam, despite her mother’s languishing, still does not want any contact with her, I ring Wies a little more often, say once a week. If she doesn’t answer, I get her voicemail, on which she announces herself with only the sound of her breath, which is undeniably hers. In this way, I discovered that human breathing, too, also contains a non-exchangeable fingerprint.

  If she does answer, and I say my name, she begins at once to cry and shout.

  ‘Not a minute goes by when I don’t think of him … I get up with it and go to bed with it … I don’t want to live anymore. I want to be with him. I hope I die soon. And you two … will you be all right? Miriam doesn’t want anything to do with me. It upsets me, but I do understand. I only hope …’

  On top of it, she has come down with shingles.

  ‘Shingles is also called St. Anthony’s fire,’ I say, just to say something, and then she really breaks down.

  ‘That darling Tonio … he’s there somewhere. He’s hiding … he gives me all kinds of signs. St. Anthony’s fire. I hope I’ll be joining him soon.’

  9

  I know no one who takes her dreams so seriously, and often so literally, as Miriam. She is quick to dispel daytime misunderstandings, but not nighttime ones. This morning, she reproached me, half in tears, that she had had an ‘awful’ dream about me. When she says it like that, in that tone, what she really means is that I caused her to have a bad dream.

  ‘Now, of all times,’ she snarled. ‘How dare you.’

  ‘Be a little more specific,’ I said, ‘so I can confess to my crime.’

  ‘You’d left me for another woman.’

  She gave me a dirty look. There was no doubt in her mind that I was fully responsible for my behaviour during her REM sleep.

  ‘Well, think about it,’ I said. ‘It’s simply the fear that, now of all times, I could start on a second brood. I hate the word, but that’s what Flip called it when I bumped into him pushing a baby carriage. “Second brood, y’know … ” ’

  ‘Oh, so that’s what you’re thinking about. A second brood. You see? Once again, my dreams speak the truth.’

  I followed Miriam with my eyes as she crisscrossed the bedroom with choppy, agitated steps and a wiggling bosom (no bra on yet). That nightly drinking of ours had led both of us to start puffing up. I’d been having the problem for years now, but now Miriam’s belly was starting to protrude more and more. I had to be the one to set an example, and be the first one to leave the glass untouched.

  ‘Come on, Minchen, wait a sec.’

  ‘I’m going to shower. I have to go over to my mother’s this morning with Hinde, yeah? You go fantasise about your second brood.’

  My mother-in-law had meanwhile been put in hospital with her shingles. They had decided to admit her after finding her stark naked and completely disoriented in the hallway of the retirement home. I knew this was a tall order for Miriam, who since Tonio’s death had come down with a severe case of matrophobia. Too much baggage there. She went mainly to shore up her sister.

  After the chaos of conflicting feelings in the weeks immediately following Whit Sunday, I had decided to be as merciless as possible in my self-reflection — an unsparingness that over time might bring some clarity to my present and future situation. In the context of this introspection, the notion of a second brood, like Flip’s, had not yet come up. Was my desire for an heir, now that this, in the person of Tonio, had fallen by the wayside, so strong that I could attach myself to a young, fertile woman? Apparently I needed my wife’s dreams in order to ponder the question myself.

  I followed Miriam by ear as she went from the shower cell to Tonio’s room, where she got dressed. Ten minutes later, the strident doorbell: Hinde. Women’s voices, cut off by the echo of the front door. I had hoped she might come say goodbye, just to show that for her, too, it was only a game, posturing, put-on indignation. But, no, you didn’t mess with Miriam’s dreams.

  10

  ‘How was your mother?’

  ‘Completely disorientated. At least that’s how it looked. She mainly lay there, staring into space. Once in a while, she spewed out an incongruous word. The doctors think she’s got temporary aphasia. I have my doubts. At a certain point, she snarled something like: “You’ve gotten fatter … are you pregnant or what?” Hard and tactless, but to the point.’

  ‘She’s really something,’ I reply. ‘Her fifty-year-old daughter is grieving the loss of her only child, and then she just asks offhand if you’re pregnant. Way off the mark, but you’re right, it’s got nothing to do with aphasia.’

  I look at my darling Minchen, who stares from the back of her eyes, deep in inscrutable thoughts. What she sees, I wish I could reconstruct via her facial expression, without asking. If she is so far away, there is only one place she can be: with Tonio. I imagine her taking stock of her life’s biological history. All those preparations in the flesh … The changes in a girl’s body. Her first period, and all of those that followed. The ever-ticking clock of ovulation. Sexual blossoming. Unrequited loves. Lovesickness. Requited loves, and, finally, again the lovesickness.

  True Love.

  All the sperm delivered but rebuffed by contraceptives. And then all the sperm that is not sabotaged by contraceptives. The negative tests. That one positive test.

  The various stages of pregnancy, for three-quarters of a year. The worry about miscarriage. Decorating the nursery. The countdown. Labour. The pain. The joy. The fear.

  And all of this just to be able to hold that one in your arms, to later take by the hand and to help grow up. And all of this effort just to lose that one, forever, so that the entire process of nature and spirit only served to create an illusion, and then to destroy it.

  She looks up, meets my speculating gaze. ‘What?’

  ‘What were you thinking of?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  I first got chatting to Miriam at her twentieth birthday party. This fall she’ll turn fifty-one. I have experienced her in all available moods, period or no, just as she has been subjected to all my states of mind, hangover or no. How many times does a man, in the course of three decades, ask his wife, noticing her angry or teary face, what’s wrong?

  ‘You look so sombre.’ How many times in the course of all those years has she said that to him? ‘I’m not going to sit here looking at some sourpuss all night.’

  Since Black Whitsun, I no longer need to ask Miriam this question at every brow-furrow, nor she me if my mouth happens
to droop. This will hold true for the rest of our mutual future: we know exactly what’s wrong with the other. Mind-reading is not that difficult when the mind is fixed on one thought, for forever and a day.

  ‘Minchen, years ago we saw a documentary on TV about that Italian gynaecologist … remember? He ran a kind of posh clinic where he managed to get post-menopausal women pregnant. Sixty, sixty-five years old, they were all welcome for fertility treatments. At first, all hell broke loose among the medical-ethics people, but women came to him from all corners of the earth. Women who, after a busy career, still wanted children … or only met the love of their life at a more advanced age …’

  ‘I get it,’ Miriam says. ‘You feel so sorry for my mother with that blunder of hers about me being pregnant … now you want me to go to that Italian clinic for therapy. I wonder if it still exists, actually. I’ll look it up online.’

  ‘It’s just a daydream, Minchen. I only want you to dream with me … about what it might bring us.’

  ‘A lot of pleasure, and even more misery.’

  ‘I’d get to see a child reach its twenty-first birthday before I turned 80,’ I say. ‘You’d only be in your early seventies. Think about it.’

  ‘I am thinking about it. We would get to go through every stage of Tonio’s development one more time. Great. And then? We’ll never see what Tonio’s future had in store. No graduation, no career, no wedding, no grandchildren, no … nothing. But what about when we’re old folks, how much of Tonio’s successor’s future will we get to see? Not much, maybe. Thanks a lot for the offer, Adri, but I’ll pass.’

  I don’t have an immediate response to this. And she hasn’t yet brought up the inevitable fears that would go along with a new case of dangerous-growing-up. Oh, it would be far more fraught than with Tonio, because after him, our fears would be completely justified by his fateful death. The newcomer would be made to suffer twice over because of the unknown predecessor, the missing brother. The child would have a hell of a life with two bodyguards posing as parents.

  ‘Well, nice of you to consider it anyway, Minchen. Consider the appointment with Dr. Antinori cancelled.’

  ‘Oh, so you’ll go for a second brood in another nest after all.’

  ‘Quit it about that second brood, will you,’ I say. ‘It takes two to tango. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’

  ‘I don’t want that way. I don’t even want that will. Listen, Minchen … the fact that Tonio is gone for good feels like complete emasculation. With his death I’ve lost so terribly much. A great love, my best friend, the heart of my future. A masculine muse. And yes, my progeny, too. The grandchild I might have been able to hold someday. There are, at least as far as I know, no apocryphal Van der Heijdens roaming around anywhere. The single outcome of my manly efforts here on earth was Tonio.’

  ‘Remember what you used to say, when Tonio was little, when people asked if we were planning to have more children? “No,” you’d say, “fatherhood doesn’t suit me, but I had to try it out once. I could never die without ever becoming a father.” That’s what you said.’

  ‘Try it out … if I said that, then with hindsight it does sound kind of sinister. As though it was a one-off experiment that could either succeed or fail. Depending. All right, I did try out fatherhood. And with brilliant results. Now he’s gone. The boy, the man, who was supposed to take it all over from me. He has left me without heirs. Here I am, a retrospectively sterilised father … Don’t think that I often thought of myself as a future grandfather. Seldom, in fact. Through Tonio, the way he acted around me, I could consider myself still young …’

  ‘Second brood,’ Miriam says. ‘You’re dodging the issue.’

  ‘Minchen, once and for all: I don’t have the instinct of a tribal leader that offers up three, four marriages for the sake of producing, at long last, a first-born son … and subsequently only thinks eight generations ahead. Honestly, I am not going to go build a new nest. I could give you a whole slew of reasons why not. For example, that back in ’88, at the age of thirty-six, I was already a belated father. Or that for a new child I’d already be a grandpa … No, the real reason is because I want to stay with you. That I want to live out my life with you. Our names will soon be joined together on Tonio’s gravestone. We have a dead son together. We will both die childless.’

  ‘I’m so frightened,’ says Miriam.

  ‘Childless … and not, either. You can’t erase the fact that for nearly twenty-two years we were Tonio’s parents. Until the day we die, our job is — no, not to keep his memory alive, but to keep him warmly alive. I need you for that. And you need me. We are the heirs of the person he was. The executors of his life, his works, his words … But the most important thing is that we keep him wedged in between us forever. Only that way will he let himself be nourished. With love, with memories. No way, a second brood. Tonio remains our progeny.’

  11

  I ring my mother-in-law in hospital. Today is her eighty-fifth birthday. Contrary to my expectations, she answers the phone, but her voice is nearly inaudible. If I stylise the bits I think I understand, I come up with: ‘I’m old. I don’t need to go on any longer. You all are still young … I hope you’ll pull through … that you’ll be able to write again someday …’

  After the umpteenth repetition of suchlike phrases, she says, suddenly perfectly intelligible: ‘Well, I have to hang up now, I’ve got visitors … and there’s someone waiting in the hall, too. Thanks for the flowers.’

  That visitors are clamouring to get in is not entirely plausible. Perhaps it’s her way of showing her displeasure at our absence on her birthday. And as far as starving herself to death goes: Hinde reported recently that her mother had announced that she ‘rather felt like some bonbons’ again.

  12

  Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary to track Jenny down and press her to tell us her story. Exactly a month after the cancelled visit, and a week after returning from her vacation, Jenny rang Miriam. They made a new appointment.

  ‘I’ll make sure the photos are ready,’ Miriam promised.

  ‘The photos aren’t the main reason I’m coming,’ Jenny said.

  13

  As though the summer had resurged just for the occasion: it was that kind of day, bathed in swirling light, when we finally made Jenny’s acquaintance.

  Despite the heat, almost unbearable under the flat roof, I had spent most of the day upstairs working on this requiem. More and more, it was taking on the form of a detective-like reconstruction, albeit without a private eye or a Commissioner Maigret. You could hardly call it a whodunit. Yes, if you could eventually single out fate as the perpetrator. The desperate parents had thrown themselves into a case reconstruction. The what, the how. In that order.

  I had described the uncertain hours preceding Tonio’s death, the dying itself, the consternation, the funeral, the discussions with friends who had been with him on his last night, the accounts of the police and the trauma surgeon. I had reported on the search for his bicycle, his clothes, his watch, his camera, his photographs. Everything had been checked off, except a chat with the girl from the photo session.

  I turned off the fan, tired of constantly picking up sheets of manuscript paper that had fluttered out of place. I had briefly considered plundering Tonio’s glass display case of volcanic and other stones in order to have enough paperweights, but I was afraid that, at the sight of all those minerals and semi-precious stones Tonio had collected and displayed, I wouldn’t get a single letter set to paper. For the same reason, I did not open the awning on the balcony: too many associations with the last time Tonio and I spoke.

  Today at five o’clock, we would, if all went as planned, finally get to meet Jenny. No wonder writing was such a chore this afternoon. I could blame the heat, but it was Jenny I needed in order to move on. If she was able to answ
er a few questions that were still troubling me, I could perhaps round off my requiem for Tonio, before it crushed me.

  At the same time, I dreaded the meeting with a distaste bordering on revulsion. Who could guarantee that what Jenny had to say wouldn’t cause me to cave in altogether?

  The piano jingle of my mobile phone. Miriam. ‘Not too hot up there?’

  ‘I was just about to come down.’

  ‘I’m taking my father to Beth Shalom a bit earlier today. So I’ll be home in plenty of time to let that girl in.’

  ‘I’m having a hard time of it.’

  ‘Me too.’

  It was a quarter to four. I’d been sitting up here, sweating and stinking, for long enough. Under a tepid shower, I thought of Tonio and girls. Of what Dennis and Jim had revealed about it: that girls had been on Tonio’s mind a lot recently … that he’d come to them for advice … Once again, I was fretting about something that no longer concerned him. Quandaries that could no longer trouble him.

  There had been no lack of sex education. But the attendant difficulties, had I prepared him sufficiently for them? There had never been any prudishness between us, although we never overdid it and turned our house in to a nudist colony. When, as a toddler, he occasionally saw me naked, he would prance through the house, gleefully exclaiming, over and over: ‘Whoa, what a big one … whoa, what a big one.’

  Once, he must have been about eleven, Tonio burst into my workroom, panting from the three flights of stairs. He positioned himself next to my desk, and without preamble dropped his trousers and underpants. Arching his back, he held out his organ between thumb and index finger. Being the son of a Jewish mother made him technically a Jewish boy, but he had never been circumcised.

  ‘It hurts like crazy,’ he said, pointing to the reddened foreskin, which, like mine, was rather elongated, but apparently not very loose, perhaps too tight. ‘Mama said I should show you.’

  ‘It looks a little inflamed,’ I said. ‘You have to wash the spout on the inside, too, not just the outside.’