Miriam, next to me on the sofa, only nodded. After Jenny left, Miriam refilled our glasses, but we didn’t touch the drinks. A few days ago, after Jenny had phoned, I still harboured a secret hope that, contrary to all the dark thoughts, my heart could leap at the news that at least some amorous feelings were at play, mutual ones. I sure missed the mark there: the soft, modest voice of a girl had just formulated our worst nightmare.
The nightmare of what might have been, and what will never be.
‘This is one of those moments,’ Miriam whispered, ‘when it really hits me that he’s gone. We’ve lost him.’
22
The morning after Jenny’s visit, I went up to my workroom, now looking at it though the eyes of Tonio and Jenny, in the spring light of the twenty-first of May.
‘We’ll do one last shoot up on the roof,’ he might have said. ‘You’ll have to climb a ladder to get there, though.’
She was rather excited by the idea. He led the way up the stairs. ‘This is where my father works.’
Jenny had, so she said, nosed around a bit. The long table was full of newspaper clippings and manuscripts-in-progress. She had asked Tonio about the maps of Amsterdam and Amstelveen and Valkenburg, which lay unfolded in a row on the table. ‘What have these got to do with his work?’
I could imagine their voices in complete clarity.
‘All I know,’ Tonio replied, ‘is that he’s working on a novel about the murder of a police officer. True story — it happened a couple of years ago in Amstelveen. I guess he’s plotting out routes on those maps or something … See, here’s the ladder.’
He showed Jenny an aluminium ladder attached to the side wall of the balcony, and leading to the flat roof.
‘I’ll have to raise the awning first.’
After Tonio flipped the electric switch, to the left of the balcony doors, the awning hummed upward. ‘Funny.’ He nodded at a pile of wooden planks against the balcony railing. ‘Pieces of my old bunk bed.’
‘You slept in a moss-covered bunk bed?’ Jenny asked.
‘When I took it apart, because I decided it was time to sleep in a real bed, the slats were still natural wood. And varnished. Just look at ’em now. Gone all green from the rain. Dunno why my father leaves them … Okay, now we can go up. You first?’
‘No, you go ahead. Those rungs are pretty far apart.’
Laden with equipment, Tonio climbed the ladder.
The photos he had taken up on the roof were the only ones he was dissatisfied with. Jenny said the surrounding rooftops, with the occasional terrace, didn’t offer much of a backdrop. Soon enough, they went back down — to Tonio’s old room, where the bunk bed had once stood, at times with Merel in it.
23
I couldn’t stop myself. Just as on Whit Monday (but now better informed), I kept retracing Tonio and Jenny’s route through the house. From the backyard to the living room on the first floor, and from there to his old room on the second — and then another flight up to my workroom.
The styrofoam light reflector, still propped in the corner of the living room, indicated where Tonio had photographed her: right next to the glass display case with his rock collection. No matter how hard I sniffed, the used-ashtray smell had disappeared. The first time I nosed around, that Thursday after we got back from the Amsterdamse Bos, I had concluded to Miriam: ‘She’s a smoker.’
Now I knew it was Tonio. Again I regretted not encouraging him to come clean about his smoking habit. There had been a nicotine smell in his old room that afternoon as well.
For the umpteenth time, I circled my long sorting table, repeating Jenny’s questions and Tonio’s answers.
‘I don’t see a computer.’
‘Don’t get me started … my father’s so stubborn. He’s got, like, three antique electric typewriters. See that empty desk there? Twice there was a beaut of an Apple … all the bells and whistles … never used it. The first one, it was when I was still living at home, I slowly but surely smuggled it to my room. The second one’s now in my mother’s study. You see that thing? An old-fashioned photocopier. If he’s not satisfied with the order of a text on a sheet of paper, he snips it into strips. Then he lays them in another order on the glass plate, and … how inefficient is that? I’ve explained to him, I don’t know how many times, that it’s so much easier on a computer … without scissors and copy machine. I’d offer to teach him. He paid me — twice! — for the computer-lesson fees we’d agreed on. And every time he gave up after a few pointers. “I’m attached to my old stuff,” he’d say. “Just let me tinker.” An impossible man.’
‘And the lesson money?’
‘I kept it, of course,’ Tonio said. ‘I wasn’t the one who dropped out.’
The balcony doors. I turned on the electric motor that lowers the awning, for the sole reason of raising it once again and thus freeing up the aluminium ladder.
The dismantled bunk bed. I assumed its mystery remained in his mind for a few days. (He did not ask about it that afternoon — undoubtedly to cover up the fact that he’d been in my workroom.) A moss-covered child-sized bunk bed. Here he rose, via a fire ladder, above his earliest youth, with a pretty girl following him. He was going to take photos of her on the roof. Through various camera eyes, he could examine her with impunity.
Even though my dodgy back really couldn’t take it, I climbed up the too-widely spaced rungs. I imagined that, while Jenny was on her way up, emitting feigned squeals of trepidation, Tonio was studying the surroundings with the eye of a professional. Near him, the glass-enclosed stairwell belonging to neighbour Kluun, leading to a future roof terrace. No, that had to stay out of view. He wanted the expanse of the urban horizon as a backdrop to Jenny.
Tonio walked to the edge of the roof, as close as he dared. The Obrechtkerk with its twin spires, like a slightly stumpy cathedral, might be an interesting decor. But he couldn’t get her to stand close enough to the edge.
‘I’ve got vertigo.’ For the first time that afternoon, her voice had a slight squeak to it.
Tonio looked out over the jagged stone labyrinth, the grooves filled in, here and there, with cloudlike greenery. He could still see the Rijksmuseum, with its red façade, as simply a backdrop for a photo shoot. For me, the building was now a beacon that announced: Here, in my shadow, at my feet, a few days after that photo session, Tonio perished.
24
I went back down the fire ladder and closed the balcony doors, but instead of going downstairs I stayed in my room, shuffling aimlessly about. The material for the work-in-progress was bundled neatly in Leitz ring-binders on top of the filing cabinets. I pulled one or two out at random and thumbed through them. Everything I read crumbled before my eyes. Even the act of putting the thing back in place was in fact no longer worth the effort.
When we moved into this house, the third floor had been divided into three rooms: two boys’ rooms (one with corner bar) and a cork-padded maid’s room. In ’97, I had everything torn out, leaving behind a large L-shaped room. Once the builders had left, I stood speechless on the gleaming parquet floor, while Tonio, letting out little bursts of cheerful laughter, wove around me, his arms spread into aeroplane wings. I had always dreamt of having a workroom like this, and he knew it.
I inspected the dozens of locks on the filing cabinets and drawers. A key stuck out of each lock, its duplicate dangling from the ring threaded through its eye, swaying gently in the breeze that Tonio had created.
‘How am I going to tell all these keys apart?’ I said more or less to myself.
‘I know,’ Tonio cried. He ran down two flights of stairs, and then all went quiet. I stood out on the landing, listening. From the kitchen came the sudden sound of clinking bottles. Then the fridge door closed. Tonio came charging back up the stairs carrying several sheets of self-adhesive mini-stickers in various colours — the kind
you stick on freezer food items, with the date. Like lightning he began sticking labels on the keys, spares, and locks to the filing cabinets, after notating a numeric code per lock. Yellow, green, red, blue … He carried out his operation laughing, with a vague undertone of scorn, because his father hadn’t come up with the idea.
‘There, Adri. See?’ He was already finished. ‘Easy-peasy.’
Now, thirteen years later, the freezer stickers, numbered in his handwriting, were still attached to those locks and keys. I made good use of them, especially when I was travelling — no one, after all, needed access to those cabinets during my absence. I walked along the cabinets, flicked the dangling spare keys with my index finger, and chided myself grimly that Tonio’s labelling of the locks was the only meaningful work that had been carried out on this floor since its renovation.
25
In Louis van Gasteren’s documentary film Hans, het leven voor de dood, there is a scene with Hans van Sweeden’s mother. When she received the news of her son’s suicide, her first reaction, she said, was: ‘My child is dead … now no flowers will ever bloom again.’
I recognise that expression of heartbreak. But in my case, this deathliness refers to the past as well. Wherever I look on the life that lies behind me, I see only failure and futility. Every attempt to achieve anything, no matter what, can in retrospect count on my disdain and disgust. Everything, every action, was, after all, a direct or indirect rehearsal for my greatest failure ever: the accidental death of my son, which I was unable to prevent.
I look back on my past, and what I perceive is not the necessary passage of time; no, I see only a needless waste of time. A pointless botching of days and months and years.
I suspect that I am doing opponents of my work no greater favour, but I confess that since Black Whitsun, no single book of mine (including this one) will enjoy a whit of mercy in my own eyes. I once defended my work with the ferocity of a lion. Now I throw it all to the lions. Whatever I have produced and undertaken is, in retrospect, besmirched by the loss that gapes at the end of it. Tonio was one of my foremost reasons for writing, even for the many years before his birth, because I already had more than a portent of him. I knew he would come, and what he would mean to me, and I prepared myself thoroughly for his coming.
He came, and then vanished, and now everything with which I aimed to give him a full-fledged life is tarnished and sullied. His untimely death is proof that I have gone about things the wrong way, with too little commitment, and that I overlooked important matters. For Harry Mulisch, if a writer is hit by a meteor as he stands waiting at a tram stop for line 2, that’s proof he has no talent. I have allowed my son to be struck in the dead of night by a similar projectile — precisely what I had been trying, with all my written efforts, to prevent.
Ergo: no talent.
26
Tonio’s father was a writer. As a youngster growing up, Tonio couldn’t grasp the blatant revulsion, even hate, that this could evoke. Once, at a school party — he had proudly put on his best sports jacket for the affair — he was actively shunned. A few of the girls who he had bravely asked to dance said: ‘I’m not dancing with you, sicko.’
It looked as though it had been a deliberate plan. A small-scale conspiracy. When he got home, he put on a brave face: oh yeah, great party. But his friend Alexander spilled the beans: ‘It wasn’t so great for Tonio. No one would dance with him. The girls called him a sicko.’
Then it all came out. I dare to use the cliché that my heart bled for him, at the thought of the smartly dressed Tonio, complete with burgundy bow tie, being rebuffed: ‘No, sicko, not with you.’
Further questioning revealed that it probably had something to do with the recent broadcast of a literary talk show, in which an intellectual lady, a Romanist, had spat out the words ‘intensely disgusting’ to describe my latest work. I hadn’t even followed the broadcast, but the ‘intensely disgusting’ epithet that had adhered to Tonio’s father had somehow made the rounds of the Dutch Notables and their brood at the Cornelis Free School.
A few years later, in late August 2000, Tonio sat next to me at a bookstall at the Uitmarkt, held that year along the Amstel. That fall he would start at the gymnasium, but he still liked the ritual of appending his own name to his father’s signed books. He now wore lightweight glasses and had cut his hair short, so he looked younger and more vulnerable than a few months earlier at his graduation from the Cornelis Free. He appeared timidly aware of the significant leap forward that was expected of him — even with the lump behind his cheek from the lollipops the publisher had fed him at regular intervals.
At her request, I had set up my portion of the booth as though it were a corner of my workroom at home. With Tonio’s help, I had even put together a few fake manuscripts, drawing on my supply of misleadingly yellowed counterfeiters’ paper. We tied the bundles up with string, putting the titles of Homo duplex, a cyclical novel-in-process, on the flyleaves. Tonio enjoyed it more than I did. I completed the decor with old inkpots and other writing implements among the nonchalantly placed ‘manuscripts’. Those afternoon signing sessions at the Uitmarkt always terrified me: author on folding chair in a bookstall, waiting for that one client. Regardless of your demeanour, you always felt that it came across as slightly desperate.
On the sheets of yellowed paper, I wrote out aphorisms from the work-in-progress, and added to them mysterious Chinese stamps — well, you had to do something. Tonio, ever good-natured, smilingly helped me stamp and hand out material.
When, later that afternoon, things quieted down some, I noticed a small group of young men nearby. They had been loitering there for some time, but only now did I sense their hateful glances cast in my direction. There was clearly something that irked them. Finally, one of them approached the stall. He stuck his fingers under the string holding the blank manuscripts together, and started slamming the packs of paper onto the tabletop, without a word, but with a constant, fierce anger in his eyes. Tonio got such a shock that he recoiled, chair and all. It was most of all the loud bang of the ‘manuscripts’ being slammed onto the wooden trestle table that was so intimidating, combined with the boy’s silent rage.
Now I think: a band of aspiring writers wanting to unmask me. But still, Tonio was quaking in his boots.
‘Why’d he do that?’
It was probably the last time I’d seen his lower lip tremble. And the last time he joined me at a book signing — but that also had to do with school and age.
27
Tonio, because of you I’ve lost everything. My life. The thought of having you at my deathbed. Worldly goods were for your benefit. Since there is no longer any reason to strive for them, I shall lose them. (I will try to salvage this house, because your mother is so attached to it. She was, after all, born in this neighbourhood.)
My goals, my work, my attempts at maintaining something resembling a personality … my whole world has drained into your grave. Melted snow, and Tonio is the sun.
As a beginning writer, I pretended to live recklessly beyond my means, grazing the edge of bankruptcy, in order to force myself in to productivity. Het bankroet dat mijn goudmijn is [It broke my goldmine] was the title of a bibliophilic booklet I later published. That bankruptcy has now arrived, with your demise, and now that it’s here, it has proved hardly a goldmine: it is barren and infertile. I was rich. You were the capital of my existence. I hadn’t even taken out life insurance on you, certain as I was it would never have to be cashed in. Or perhaps my superstition couldn’t bear the monthly premiums …
All that I’ve gained from your disappearance is freedom — of a dubious kind, to be sure. I am now free of responsibility. No one has to remind me of old, unfulfilled promises. They were all made null and void on Black Whitsun. Ever since those two angels of disaster from the Amsterdam police appeared on my front stoop that twenty-third of May, I laugh at every summons-serve
r.
I feel free to spend what is left of my life exactly as I please. If I do not succumb entirely to idleness and torpor, it’s because I want to continue caring for your mother. It is the only responsibility I still accept, also on behalf of her son.
28
So, with Tonio’s death, my life has demonstrated its uselessness. By dying, he has carelessly cast off his father like a cloak. The one thing I am still good for, by way of ritualistic and associative writing, is to preserve as much of his life as possible. I am almost obsessive in the composition of my requiem for him, about him. His brief, beautiful life must not simply sink into oblivion, just like his beautiful, broken body has sunk into the earth.
And after this? Tonio was, as I have said, my most compelling reason to write, even before he was born. A muse of the masculine sort. In recent years, I have noticed wanting to show him what I was worth, in the hope that he would want to show me what he was worth.
One of the last things he said to me, a few days before his death, was, with that endearing, slightly mocking smile: ‘So, up to your ten pages a day yet?’
Less recently, he told me, recalling from when he was twelve and was about to begin high school, that I had predicted (or, rather, promised) I’d have Homo duplex finished before he graduated.
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