Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

You think you’ve got your wits about you, because you’re brooding about Jenny, but in fact it’s just sluggish, lovestruck daydreaming. Granted, there’s hardly any traffic at this hour, but … you also have to take that Eerste Constantijn Huygens/Overtoom crossing … a left turn … the taxis drive like maniacs there at night.

  You’ve got a key to the house. (It’s hanging, if I remember correctly, on the same ring as the key to your bike lock.) You always manage to slip noiselessly up the stairs. You won’t wake us, I guarantee you. Besides, I’m wide awake anyway, thanks to a churning stomach from having eaten way too much garlic last night; I’m sitting upright in bed like a cat retching itself free of a hairball. It’s nearly half past four, I see on my watch. There’s no light yet coming through the curtains.

  Go lie down on the living-room sofa. The afghan that Mama was curled up under last night while watching TV must be there somewhere. Pillows galore. You spent sixteen years of your life in this house. After graduation you were in no hurry to leave — you stayed under your mother’s wing for another two years. So what’s another night? Do it for us. You’re bound to move back in this September anyway, when you have to leave the Nepveustraat. The census people say statistics show more and more young people living at home again after a few years on their own. The demographists call them ‘boomerang kids’. There is no generation gap anymore.

  C’mon, there’s no shame in it. Sleep in tomorrow morning as long as you want. Mama will make you a fantastic Whitsun breakfast.

  10

  For a moment, he seems to hesitate, but that’s his unsteady way of biking. He stands, his buttocks off the saddle, nearly motionless on the pedals, and almost falls over. He could still turn left just past the Concertgebouw, along Café Welling, where as a child he put in so many pub-hours with his father.

  Tonio goes straight ahead. His is a fixed route. Van Baerle, past the Stedelijk Museum, over the Vondelpark viaduct, Eerste Constantijn Huygens. Left on the Overtoom, continuing on to De Baarjes and the insomniac flatmate.

  At the next intersection, too, he can still reconsider. Left on the Willemsparkweg, and he’ll be home in a jiffy. His manoeuvres suggest he’s going to turn right onto the Paulus Potterstraat, but he quickly corrects his course, returning in a gentle curve to the Van Baerle, where he cycles past the old music conservatory, now being renovated into a chic hotel.

  If he turns, now focused and resolutely, onto the Jan Luykenstraat, then at once I’ll know what’s possessed him.

  You know, Tonio, sometimes I worry about your eating habits. Your friend Jonas, himself a good eater who never gains an ounce, says you’ve shed many kilos these past two years by systematically skipping meals and quashing your appetite with cigarettes. Take today. You nibbled at some snacks at that duff party in the Vondelpark this afternoon, and that’s it. The three of you drank beer at Goscha’s place, and later, in club Trouw, Goscha could hardly keep track of the rounds. Food — no thought of it.

  For years, you would make your rounds past the work tables in my study. Once a manuscript lay there entitled Voedzame hunger. You asked: ‘What’s that, Adri, “nourishing hunger”? You can’t eat hunger, can you? How could it be nourishing?’ I explained that the story was about love, and that love resembles hunger, but the kind of hunger you and your lover gorge yourselves with. ‘Look at it this way … being madly in love makes you forget to eat. With lovesickness, it’s even worse. You live on your own reserves, until you don’t feel hunger anymore. That’s what they mean when they say that someone is consumed by love. It guts you.’

  Miriam says I completely lack didactic talent, and my wise lesson will not do any good today, either. I don’t know how things stand with your feelings for Jenny, but I do know they haven’t suppressed your appetite to that of a sparrow. You’ve got what, forty years ago, we called ‘the munchies’. The only place in Amsterdam you know where you can satisfy that urge at this time of night is in the neighbourhood around Leidseplein, with its fast-food automats and shawarma joints.

  It won’t be a banquet. You’ve only got a fiver in your grey wallet, plus a fistful of coins.

  Your hunger might persuade you to make a U-turn after all and plunder our fridge. As I said, you wouldn’t wake me, because my recalcitrant stomach already has. And your mother, she’s such a deep sleeper that you’d have to let a jar of pickles slip through your fingers to rouse her. Go on. The cats will come sniff at you, rub along your calves with their thick, furry tails.

  Now I understand why you nearly turned onto the Paulus Potterstraat. So far, all north-east-heading streets here lead in just one direction, to Leidseplein and the snack bars. But for sentimental reasons you took the next street, Jan Luyken, where you went to school. The playground of the Cornelis Free School, completely vacant in the clear night. Aren’t you tempted to stop for a moment, rest your foot on the curb? You used to holler and cavort on this paved patch of courtyard. There are your old teachers … the cheerful Loes, the somewhat mysterious Jeanine … They were crazy about you. In that now dark, impenetrable building, you learned to read, write, and do sums. You built a Viking ship there and, dressed up as Dorus, you performed Er zaten twee motten. Day after day, a Moroccan kid waited for you on this playground in the afternoon, first sweet-talking you and then making off with your first mobile phone.

  Jakob lived a ways further up the street. His father still lives there. One afternoon, there was a misunderstanding between Mama and Grandma Wies. Grandma was supposed to pick you up from school on a different day than usual and take you to play at her place on the Eemstraat, because she had already left Grandpa Natan. Someone must have made a mistake, because no one came to fetch you. Jakob’s dad, who came to pick up his son, waited with you for a long while.

  ‘So where does your granny live, Tonio?’

  ‘On the Eenstraat, I said so already, jeepers.’ And more vehemently: ‘The Eenstraat, Joost, the Eenstraat!’ Do you remember, Tonio, how the incident turned out? All right in the end, apparently: we didn’t have to put out an Amber Alert, or whatever the missing-child alarm was called in those days.

  Oh, so you’re cycling further? I notice I’m still trying to tinker with your timing. A second here, a second there. You’re now passing Joost and Jakob’s house on Jan Luykenstraat. They hosted the reception after the school play that marked the end of primary school. While the parents drank cocktails in the living room, you and Jakob and your classmates retreated to the basement. It was so quiet down there, contrary to all our expectations, that after a while one of the mothers, maybe Afra’s, went to make sure you hadn’t all been asphyxiated in the closeness of the basement. She came back nonplussed.

  ‘They’re sitting there, crying. All of them.’

  From that moment on, a group of mothers periodically descended to the cellar. When the door opened, the bawling could be heard above the adult hubbub upstairs; the sobbing persisted shamelessly. Miriam returned, pale, from the basement.

  ‘Incredible, what a pity party,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen so much childhood anguish in one place.’

  ‘Tonio, too?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, what do you think. They’ve just realised they might never see each other again. I don’t know who it started with, but they’ve set each other off.’

  Once in a while, a mother herded her big baby into the living room, where he or she, red-eyed, could cool down before being allowed to return downstairs to the orgy of blubbering. When Miriam decided it was time to take you home, you came to say goodnight to me with a face withered by prolonged crying. You couldn’t muster up a smile anymore. It was for real.

  11

  Are you grinning right now, on your bike, as you think back on that bawl-fest? Or does it make you wistful, because time has so bitterly confirmed your classmates’ cellar-snivelling? That was goodbye. From that basement, you split up and swarmed to high schools across the city. In the course
of the past ten years, you bumped into an old classmate from the Cornelis Free now and then, but these were mostly awkward encounters. The old camaraderie had been left behind in the Nijsen family’s basement.

  At the end of the Jan Luyken, the massive, dark-red Rijksmuseum looms to your right. You’ve always thought it intriguing that the largest and most valuable of the city’s treasures just hang there in the dark, unseen, their fate in the hands of a soulless security system.

  Left onto the Hobbemastraat. The asphalt glistens with embedded bits of glass, as though the road surface is mirroring the starry night above, but you’re too tired to lift your head and cast your eyes upward. You do see, in a flash, the book stalls set up on either side of the street for an Uitmarkt some ten years ago. You and I stood behind the table at my publisher’s stand, signing books together.

  You’ve got other things on your mind now: a döner kebab from the Turkish snack bar. It was your favourite lunch when you worked at Dixons — plenty of shawarma joints in the Kinkerstraat neighbourhood. Heading toward your destination, you cycle between the tram rails of lines 2 and 5. You pass the leather-goods store where we bought Mama that red-brown set of bags for her fortieth birthday. You always managed to send costs skyrocketing with your expensive taste. You enjoyed giving presents even more than getting them. ‘She’s sure to want a toilet bag, too … don’t you think, Adri? Look, it’s made of the same leather. And here, this carry-on bag, the same leather, too.’

  No, the leather-goods store doesn’t ring any bells with you tonight. Your thoughts have narrowed to Jenny and döner kebab. The traffic lights at the crosswalk at the corner of the Park Hotel blink lazily. Ach, that Jenny. How she turned a quarter-turn, at your request, in order to benefit more from the reflector sheets … and you, bent over the tripod with the reflecting umbrella above your head. More like a parasol … You might still have the presence of mind to cast a glance to your right, past the yellow flashing lights. A taxi is just driving over the crosswalk. On that side, the Stadhouderskade is otherwise empty.

  And to the left? If you didn’t first look left, was it because there was no sound coming from that side? Or were your ears still pounding from the beats of techno-animal Carl Craig?

  Maybe you were a bit dizzy from doing those dance dips with Dennis.

  12

  We provided Tonio with plenty of toys. He had a way of charming us out of anything his heart desired. Grandma Wies once said: ‘You always get your way in the end.’ She made a fake-suffering face to go with it. From that moment on, Tonio seemed to see it as his job, refining his charm as he went, to get his way. A teary eye was often more than enough.

  The expensive problem was that once Tonio had figured out the mystery of a toy, he got bored with it. He could put together, one-two-three, a technical Lego set intended for age groups far above his own, but the then secret formula had been cracked. At best, the resulting construction could be expanded with accessories and attachments, which kept costs down. But usually his eye fell upon an entirely new challenge, complete with flashing lights, rolling caterpillar tracks, and an electrical transformer.

  He constructed a power-driven Ferris wheel out of a K’Nex building set; it was so tall he had to use the kitchen stepstool to reach the top. When I pointed this out, he replied: ‘The Ferris wheel on Dam Square is higher.’

  Roller skates. A super-manoeuvrable silver-coloured kick scooter. The radio-controlled jeep with tractor tyres. Warhammer armies, complete with half a paint studio to decorate the miniature soldiers and their arsenal.

  Computers and laptops, the toys of the growing adolescent. The games that went with them. The software.

  After he turned eighteen, he expanded his playing field to the cafés where you had to be seen. Club Trouw, where he spent his last night: wasn’t that, with all its techno music, his final plaything? The outcome of a lifetime of toys? And there had to be a bicycle, too, on which to ride home, spaced out. From technical Lego via a headful of technopounding on his way to a Media Technology degree — somewhere in the process, at a crucial point, he was scooped up and thrown down. Then came the ambulances, and he was subjected to medical technology, with which they had hoped to piece him back together.

  13

  Even murder serves a purpose, no matter how perverse. It is, after all, the aim of the murderer to bump off his victim. There is, likewise, apparently, a point to a soldier felled on the battlefield: he does it for his fatherland; he is cannon fodder in service of the triumph over Evil.

  And the victims of a terrorist attack? At least in the eyes of the person who gave the order, their death had a purpose. The more casualties, the more successful the operation. Not only suicide terrorists, but their victims, too, die for their country, judging from the memorial services and plaques organised from higher up.

  I can see no point, unearth no purpose, whatsoever in Tonio’s death. He was on his way home, and felt like a bite to eat on the way, and encountered an unwanted and unintended force in his way, which killed him. The operator of the deadly projectile did not know, until that very moment, that he was operating a deadly projectile. He had left his job, and was driving home with a friend. Silent night, holy night.

  Tonio’s death was the result of the collision of two forces. The devastation they were capable of causing, should they meet, was calculable before the fact with scientific probability. The destruction they eventually caused was able to be established, after the fact, with scientific certainty.

  Tonio’s death could thus be reduced, in both point and purpose, to a physics formula. Our dismay was all the greater when we realised that our flood of emotions had run up against an ice-cold formula, hard as rock. There is no guarantee that emotions are able, in the long run, to wear away even the hardest stone.

  14

  In Asbestemming, I described once seeing a statue of St. Sebastian, who in a sort of death-leap is hit by the shower of arrows. They are thick, cast-iron arrows, and they pierce St. Sebastian’s trunk according to a very precise geometrical pattern: as though a square harrow had been rammed in its entirety straight through the martyr’s chest from behind.

  Tonio, your fatal accident will continually pierce me in the same way for the rest of my days. My God, you dear boy, why did this have to happen? Why, goddamn it, did everything have to be ruined — you, us, the future, everything?

  Sometimes, to put it bluntly, I’m pretty pissed off at you. A bit earlier homeward, a few less beers, a light on your bike, look before you cross … and it wouldn’t have happened. You little bastard. You told Jenny on Facebook that Saturday you were still ‘beat’ from the previous night. Beat — your favourite term for hung over. Doesn’t that give you the responsibility to get a good night’s sleep for once? You three wanted to ‘paint the town red’, as Goscha put it. Well, you did paint it red — with your own blood, you fool.

  Why this? Why this irrevocable death, which nothing can correct? Goddamn it, Tonio, I was prepared to face every problem with you, no matter how terrible. Your worst misery would still have been a formidable adversary for me. I would have fought down to my last drops of sweat and blood to find a solution. Anything for you.

  The problem is: your death isn’t a problem, because there is no solution — even one that doesn’t stand a chance.

  15

  No, I blame myself. I do not reproach you, in your groundwater-deep, breathless sleep. Your stillness is one massive indictment of myself, even without you wanting it so, because you can no longer want. Your death speaks the truth about my failure. Your death is the sum total of my negligence. There is always the possibility that your death was the result of that one act of negligence — which one, I don’t know, and that only makes it worse.

  Your whole childhood long, I regaled you with signs of attention, large and small; caring gestures; soothing words. These, however, do not hold up against the all-pervasive sensation, i
n retrospect, of guilt and negligence. If I wasn’t able to create for you a situation allowing for a safe nighttime cycle route from De Pijp to De Baarsjes, then I should at least have been there, halfway, to throw myself in front of the enemy vehicle and force it to stop. A persistently gurgling stomach on its own does not offer much resistance.

  I acknowledge my defeat, which cannot be parried, not even into eternity.

  16

  Sundays are Miriam’s darkest days. The pain is at its worst — partly because the huge loss happened on Whit Sunday, of course, but also because if Tonio dropped by, he usually did so on that day. This afternoon, some three months after the accident, she rang me in a panic.

  ‘There’s a trauma helicopter above the Hobbemastraat.’

  This morning, she got up at five and worked until nine-thirty, after which she fell into a deep sleep in bed with a book in her hand, until noon. Just now, she woke up from a pitch-black dream to the pulse of the rotors.

  The telephone pressed to my ear, I opened the streetside window of my workroom. If I bent far enough outside, I could indeed see a yellow helicopter with red-blue stripes off to the north-east, hovering approximately above the Rijksmuseum, whose position was marked by the asymmetrical cross of a building crane. It did not rise or descend, did not circle; it just hovered motionlessly like a bird of prey. against the steely-blue sky — at most, swaying gently.

  ‘If you need some company …’ I said. A few seconds later, she was upstairs. I was still leaning out of the window. The helicopter swung in our direction now, slower than a police chopper, banked steeply to the west, and then returned to its initial position above the Rijksmuseum, staying there for a time, again like a bird of prey.

  ‘A stand-by, I reckon. He’s waiting for instructions. There’ll be an ambulance down at the scene.’

  I comforted Miriam with the thought that even if it had been allowed to fly at night, a trauma helicopter wouldn’t have saved Tonio. ‘He was in good hands. An extra ambulance with a trauma team replaced the helicopter. The kid just didn’t stand a chance.’