‘Isn’t that the emphysema?’ Again, I caught myself being concerned about Tonio’s clandestine smoking — until something like an X-ray of his wrecked lungs popped into my head.
‘Yeah, that, too.’
Then I saw Frans and Mariska walk up with their son, Daniel, now sixteen months old. They had come by tram, or a combination of bus and tram. We all hovered around Daniel’s pram until the poor little guy started bawling from the excess attention. (‘So big!’)
We walked together to the grave, slowly, Natan setting the tempo. And again, the cemetery proved itself to be a modest labyrinth, where you always managed to take a wrong turn somewhere. Everything was still wet from the midday thunderstorm, but the ground had not been turned into a swamp. Nor was it all slowly drying out, for the sun was hiding behind a low cloud cover. The rabbits had resumed their darting through the hedges, which still glistened with raindrops.
Usually we got lost because Miriam insisted on relying on the map. Today, though, we all just trudged alongside one another, more or less following the route we remembered from the funeral.
In the end, we reached the grave from two sides, in two groups: Natan, flanked by the women, had taken an earlier turn than Frans and I, but we all converged on the grave at the same time. Frans was pushing the empty pram (Daniel dangled in his mother’s arms), and parked it next to a neighbouring headstone. The old provisional sign, including the plot number 1-376-B, still marked Tonio’s grave. We stood in a semi-circle around the gravelled plot.
TONIO
ROTENSTREICH
VAN DER HEIJDEN
15 JUNE 1988 23 MAY 2010
What a relief, now that I could confirm with my own eyes that the hyphen was gone. I laid my hand on my father-in-law’s arm. ‘So, Natan, there’s your name. How about that?’
His doleful face wrinkled into an insecure smile. I didn’t think the moisture on the pink half-moons under his eyes had been brought on only by the puffs of wind from between the hedges.
‘Fine,’ he said quietly. ‘Fine.’
His life had been quite a journey. He had already had three nationalities before leaving his home and undertaking the trek through Europe. Born in 1912 under the Habsburg monarchy, he became a Pole after World War I. With the Stalin–Hitler pact of ’39, Natan’s part of the Ukraine (Lemberg) fell under Soviet rule, and he was conscripted into the Red Army. Thus began his long march to the Netherlands, and finally to this graveyard in Buitenveldert. He had served as an interpreter in the Red Army: he knew his languages, including Russian. He helped raze Berlin, and after the German surrender he returned to Poland — only to find that anti-Semitism there had only gotten more rabid after the occupation. He volunteered to assist Jewish war orphans, of which a few hundred were to go to Holland to be adopted by foster families.
Once in the Netherlands, he met Wies, a Jewish nurse who had gone into hiding during the war with a family of market gardeners in Sint-Pancras, where she spent long hours in an underground dirt shelter. They got married, and in the fifties had two daughters.
I never did manage to figure out how an incorrect birth year (1916) got into Natan’s passport. Had there been a mistake when he first arrived in Holland, lowering his age by four years, or did he purposely disregard the oversight in order to be more eligible for a residence permit? Even to his wife and children, he maintained that he was born in 1916.
At her birthday party in 1979, Miriam burst into tears when I enquired as to her father’s age.
‘He’ll turn sixty-three next month. He’s probably not long for this world.’
She, just twenty, seemed slightly ashamed of having ‘such an old father’, but was mainly afraid of losing him to old age. In the mid-’90s (he and his wife were already separated), Natan informed us that his year of birth was not 1916, but 1912, suddenly obliging us to add four years to his recently reached milestone of eighty. His daughters took it badly. All of a sudden, they had a father ‘in his eighties’. As though to prove his staying power, he had now managed to stretch it to ninety-seven. He lived on his own, and cared ably for himself. Four days a week (Monday through Thursday), Miriam drove him to the Beth Shalom cafeteria for his dinner, and picked him up an hour-and-a-half later.
The tragic disadvantage of reaching — and thriving at — such a ripe old age is that, already being the only surviving member of his immediate family (his parents and sisters were murdered by the Nazis), he had also outlived his one and only grandson. Natan was more than three-quarters of a century older than Tonio. When Natan was born, the century was just twelve years old, and at Tonio’s birth that century still had twelve years to go. In between those two births lay three world wars — two hot and one cold — and the remaining filth of the twentieth century. Perhaps it says something about my perseverance that only now, twenty-two years after my visit to the Amsterdam registry office, I managed to bequeath his name to his only grandson — on his gravestone.
Despite his affability, Natan was a closed book. I couldn’t guess what he really thought of seeing his surname in such an awkward position, wedged between ‘Tonio’ and ‘Van der Heijden’. We might even be doing something illegal. Rotenstreich was not registered as his middle name, nor as an appendage to the family name, because that, too, needed to be vetted by the authorities, with a price tag.
13
The sky started to darken again, like earlier in the day, but without the same threat of cloudbursts.
It can happen late at night, after a few drinks, in the semi-sleep of early morning, or at moments of sudden fatigue after a day’s work: if I’m in a foggy frame of mind, Tonio’s role in my life tends to disintegrate. He no longer seems like my full-fledged son, but rather someone who at irregular intervals drifts in and out of my life … who drops in from time to time … a somewhat unpredictable family friend. The more muddled my mood, the more I see Tonio’s presence in my past dissolve.
It’s not that he is becoming less important to me — on the contrary — but he seems suddenly elusive. It’s as though I haven’t spent as much time with him as I had wanted to. Thoughts like these drive me to despair, because this makes his perfectly contiguous life susceptible to erosion.
It is not surprising that such a state is the creation of an exhausted brain. It forms, subconsciously, my answer to Tonio’s demise, to the unfathomable decomposition he is undergoing in his grave. Somewhere in the depths of my soul, I want to see his past, as it intertwined with my own, retrospectively decompose.
Not when my brain is working at full power, though — then I know better. Tonio fills my life again: the present life, and what it once was.
Don’t think about his decomposing body underneath that gravel right now. His living, mobile body was here with me, in me, enlivened and driven by my knowledge of its every aspect. His motor functions were in my muscles.
The thunderstorms might revisit us soon. But, unlike Frankenstein, I did not need lightning to bring my boy back to life. My science was different from Frankenstein’s. My knowledge of Tonio was itself the life-giving lightning bolt.
The potted plants, half-eaten by the rabbits, had been placed at the edge of the patch of gravel. Between them was a can of beer that one of his friends had set there shortly after the funeral, together with a pack of cigarettes, now heavy and rain-sodden. I looked at the bottom of the can: a long way until its use-by date. I put it in the pocket of my raincoat, intending to drink it one evening on Tonio’s behalf.
14
The coarse gravel on Tonio’s grave brought me back to a small Greek gravel beach on the Pelion Peninsula.
In the spring of ’95, Tonio’s grandmother took him to the carnival on Dam Square. He was not yet seven, and the rules were clear: no under-sevens on the bumper cars. But watching them close up, how they bashed and ricocheted, was not forbidden, and that’s what he did, running back and forth along t
he ledge surrounding the rink. The spot where the cars were most congested, and the crashing the most violent, attracted him the most, and he was determined to get a good look. And eventually he tripped on the ledge, took a bad spill, and broke his wrist.
His dismayed grandmother brought him by taxi to the emergency room, where his arm was encased in plaster, or rather a sort of waffled armour, the kind that was mighty difficult to fill with signatures. It happened at an awkward moment for us, because Tonio’s spring break had just begun, and we were about to leave for two weeks’ holiday in Greece. We were to visit my German translator and her husband in the coastal town of Horto. The hospital gave Tonio a waterproof plastic sleeve for the cast, so he could swim.
‘Yeah, those bumper cars, Tonio …’ I said. ‘Risky business.’
Angry: ‘They wouldn’t even let me ride them.’
Whenever he was really indignant, he would cross his arms, with the back of his hands arched upward — which now, because of the cast, was impossible. By the time we got to Horto, he had come to grips with his handicap. He couldn’t wait to get into the water. It was endearing to see how Tonio braved the blue-green marbled bay. It was shallow, so he could easily gain a foothold on the bottom, kicking up silty little clouds. To give his motions the semblance of swimming, he executed a sort of crawl stroke with his good left arm, while his plaster-cast right arm, engulfed in its oversized and inflated sleeve, stuck upwards like a sail.
Miriam and I stood watching him from among the rocks. The spring breeze rippled the surface of the water like silver foil. From time to time, Tonio interrupted his swim stroke and stood chest-deep in the water to wave at us, then tipped back to his prone swimming position.
If that inflated lump with its illegible lettering was so comical, why did Miriam take my hand and squeeze it? When I glanced over at her, I could see that her eyelashes were wet with sea spray — even though the wind was as mild as could be, and the waves, if you could call them that, did not send up spray. Looking straight ahead again, at Tonio jerkily under sail, the gentle breeze told me my face was not entirely dry either.
Remembering how the beach pebbles crackled under our feet, I almost took a step forward, over the stone edging enclosing Tonio’s grave, so as to feel the freshly laid gravel under my soles.
15
In Horto, we rented a bungalow in a holiday park, but it being low season — the first half of May — we had the place to ourselves. Helga, my translator, and her husband, Wolfgang, an architect, had built a house with a sweeping view of the sea a stone’s throw from our cottage.
Along with her elderly parents, Helga had a niece, Inky, staying with her. Inky and Tonio were about the same age. They did not speak each other’s language, but Tonio tried to impress the girl by clambering up the olive tree in Helga and Wolfgang’s yard. Considering he could only use his left arm, Tonio developed a remarkable agility. Upon reaching the uppermost branch, he would sit and, nonchalantly ignoring Inky, stare out to sea as though he expected a ship to appear on the horizon.
Helga and Wolfgang were in Horto when Tonio died. Still in shock from the news, they planted an olive cutting in his memory near the tree he had climbed all those years ago. We received a colour photo of the sapling by email. If I say we were moved, that is perhaps the best neutral description of the pain, joy, and disquiet we experienced while looking at it. Helga and Wolfgang care for the new offspring, and we hope someday to be travelworthy enough to water it ourselves.
16
During our second week there, we (Helga and Wolfgang, Miriam and me, Inky and Tonio) took a day trip on Wolfgang’s sailing yacht. Dolphins swam along, some distance from the boat, to the children’s delight. The way the animals, five or six at a time, lifted themselves above of the surface of the water in agile curves, sending out entire Milky Way galaxies of silver bubbles out of the dark-blue water as they dove back in … Tonio leaned against the mast, looking excitedly back and forth … port, starboard … he didn’t have enough eyes. A complete, infinite dolphinarium, and we were sailing straight through it.
Wolfgang, assisted by Helga in executing the more complex manoeuvres, moored the boat at a small, uninhabited island, which was dominated by a dilapidated chapel with an exclusively feathered parish. A forgotten set of Hitchcock’s The Birds: they had taken up residence in every niche, every windowsill, and were in a raucous conclave on the altar. As we approached, they shifted restlessly back and forth, shoulder to shoulder, but, as though guarding their colony’s lodgings, did not take flight to join their brethren circling above what used to be the roof. Tonio and Inky were awestruck, but in a slightly fearful way, perhaps because the birds sat there mumbling in chorus, as though they had abandoned themselves to a mussitated vespers.
On the way back, Tonio was allowed to man the rudder. Captain Wolfgang demonstrated how to plant your feet wide apart, to avoid falling over in case of an unexpected lurch. Since Tonio could only steer with one arm, Wolfgang stood behind him, but so unobtrusively that Tonio could maintain the illusion that the yacht was entirely under his control. As we didn’t know beforehand how much spray we would encounter on board, Miriam had fastened Tonio’s waterproof cover onto his arm, and it whipped sinisterly in the wind. For one reason or another, we weren’t able to keep the air out of the sleeve when fastening it, so I began to wonder whether the constant back-and-forth of the balloon was doing Tonio’s wrist any good.
Of course, I was touched to see my little boatsman at the helm, so serious and manly in his role, so secure in his task, one-armed like a Captain Hook … but at the same time …
‘You’re mulling over your new book, aren’t you?’ said Helga, sitting down next to me. ‘I can tell.’
‘Oh, do you miss translating?’
She had me figured out. There, surrounded by white seagulls and silver dolphins breaking through myriad tints of blue, all I had to do was luxuriate in my immediate happiness. Miriam, up on the foredeck with her face turned to the sun … Tonio, with the rudder in his little fist, occasionally enclosed in Wolfgang’s grown-up hand, steering the yacht through Greek waters … and next to me, the imaginative translator of Advocaat van de hanen, about to be published after the summer by Suhrkamp …
And me, instead of counting my blessings, sitting there in my own world, piecing together the fragments of the new manuscript … this here, that there, and in between, for now, a blank page … I was back in my workroom, the ship where I was captain, coxswain, and galley mate all in one.
17
Now I stood at Tonio’s grave, wondering why I hadn’t simply prolonged that Greek idyll. Sell the expensive house in Amsterdam, live modestly in a village like Horto … Tonio at school in a neighbouring town … I really did not need an eighty-square-metre office garden, sumptuously planted with technical vegetation, like I had in Amsterdam, in order to write. An eyebrow pencil and a roll of toilet paper would do the job just as well.
Upon take-off from Thessaloniki, there was no turning back. I had definitively chosen the confines of the writing table and the faux relaxation of the urban café. Since Whit Sunday, there was a new punishment, which would taunt me for the rest of my days: look up from my work and see the nearly seven-year-old Tonio at the rudder of a sailing yacht, cleaving its way through the deep-blue Greek waters … laughing nervously, but he does it … yes, he does it … the ship obeys him.
18
I consider myself to have been a writer since the summer of 1972, no matter what a failure my first novel was. I have published since 1978. Writing has become second nature to me. After Black Whitsun, I was apparently not so devastated that I was unable to make notes on the dirty trick fate had played on us. I now write this requiem. Say that, after fulfilling this duty to Tonio (for this is how I regard this undertaking), I am able, one way or another, to continue practising my profession and to succeed in completing the various pending projects — then, no matter
how good they turn out, for the rest of my life I will be, at least in my own eyes, a failure.
Once again, I quote from the poem Ben Jonson wrote upon the death of his seven-year-old son:
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
Likewise, I have the feeling that my best piece of prose is now behind me, and that it is dead and buried, and can never be outdone.
On second thoughts, I’m a little disappointed with the likeness of that etched photo of Tonio as Oscar Wilde. Too blotchy. Maybe it’s because a larger, true-to-life print of the portrait, in a waterproof frame, was still there. (The men who placed the gravestone had anchored the frame firmly in the gravel.) There was some discolouration from the damp — the bottom of the photo had gone violet — but otherwise it reflected Tonio’s clear glance admirably.
So here he lay all that time, without an audience, without anyone. The boy was with me the entire day, in every guise between zero and twenty-one years old. I lived with him, spoke to him, wrote about him — and yet treachery once again slithered into my soul: I had left him here all on his lonesome for weeks on end, in slow decay.
Frans scuffled about, taking photos of the group. He also bent over the plot a few times, twisting himself into contortions in order to get a legible shot of the text.
Natan stood motionless and deep in thought. Maybe he imagined Tonio in all his vigour, like the last time he had dropped by for a visit, the Wednesday before Whit Sunday. Just as with us later that afternoon, he probably told Natan of his future plans. His visit to his grandfather was likely not entirely selfless. There was a holiday weekend ahead, and he wanted to go out with Jenny. In the end, he drank up grandpa’s money with Goscha and Dennis. That night in Trouw, in a sentimentally philosophical confession, he had shared with Goscha (as she told Miriam and me) his guilty conscience regarding his grandparents: that he was slack in keeping in touch with them, and then pocketed a tidy sum once he went around, only to squander it on booze.
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