Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  ‘Here in the south,’ I say, ‘it won’t be more than 80 per cent.’

  ‘Don’t shout so,’ Miriam whispers, so quietly that I almost can’t make out what she said. ‘I want to hear this special calm.’

  I didn’t shout, didn’t even raise my voice, but the atmosphere is now so fragile and intimate and lonely that every human noise sounds too loud. Through the eclipse glasses, one observes a starless night sky, with a waning moon.

  ‘This is what’s great about an eclipse,’ I whisper to Tonio, handing him back the glasses. ‘The sun masquerades as a crescent moon, just for the occasion. Welcome to the masked ball of the heavenly bodies. The carnival of the solar system.’

  Tonio puts on his ‘what a bore’ face and responds with the standard phrase he has plagiarised from his mother: ‘Good day at work, apparently.’

  Except for a few thin cloud banks just above the horizon, the sky is clear, but it nevertheless does not look blue, more like colourless: a grainy light-grey, like ground ice covered with a thin layer of powdery snow. I wonder if the fresh lines of condensation, not far from the largely eclipsed sun, weren’t put there in purpose at that hour by a pair of vain fighter-jet pilots. All of France is looking upward at this moment. While scratching your initials into an Egyptian pyramid stone might last longer, writing with smoke in the sky has more effect. Ever since I could throw back my head and gaze upward toward the sky as a child, I have been trying to decipher the script of vapour lines. Sometimes I convince myself that I’ve got the message. Today, I can’t make heads or tails out of them, dulled by the overshadowed sun.

  The hush is suddenly broken by an unseen car racing along the hardened dirt road that runs past our yard. Bits of gravel are thrown into the hedges, and rustle as they fall through the dry leaves.

  ‘Sheesh,’ Miriam says. ‘Bet he promised to be home before dark.’

  The eclipse approaches its French maximum of 80 per cent. In our yard, it’s definitely dusk now, but without the backlight that makes the tree branches look like they were snipped out of black paper. Contrary to a normal Dordogne twilight, this one is deathly, soulless, devoid of ambience. Tonio hands me the cardboard glasses.

  ‘I think it’s as far as it’s going to get,’ he says.

  I put on the glasses. There is still a thick toenail of sun left. I look at it at length, hoping to see the arc of light get smaller. The process seems to be standing still. Tonio grabs the glasses from my nose and puts them on. He stands on the lawn chair.

  ‘It’s over,’ he says after a few seconds. ‘Here, keep ’em.’ He nonchalantly tosses the glasses at me. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  He runs up the few stone steps to the front door, and disappears into the dark house.

  ‘What’s with him?’ Miriam asks. She is still lying there reading, but with the sunglasses on her forehead and the book close to her eyes.

  ‘He’s had enough.’

  Typical Tonio. Once he’s figured out how something — whether it’s a machine or a natural event — works, he loses interest in it. There is more going on in the world that needs his attention.

  My diary tells what comes next. At the height of the eclipse, the birds go silent. As the light gradually returns, they start up again, one by one, now cautiously cheerful, like at dawn. It is a quarter past one. I haven’t seen Tonio again. Little by little, the sky takes on a blue tint. If I raise my face toward the sun, I do not yet really feel its warmth. Miriam offers to warm up yesterday’s two leftover quails for me.

  If I put the eclipse glasses back on, it’s only to check the progress of the Return of Light, as though, taking after Tonio, I want to it to be over and done with already.

  ‘He’s sitting there reading, half in the dark,’ Miriam says when she comes out of the kitchen with the food. ‘With a clip-on bedside lamp, the goofball.’

  I enjoy my quails, but there is something disconcerting about eating a meal in such deadened light. I feel liberated when, at a quarter to two, the eclipse is over.

  It’s all there in black and white, an account of the rest of the day, too. But since Black Whitsun almost eleven years later, my recollection of the eclipse stalls at the point that Tonio called it quits. ‘I’ve seen enough.’ In moments when the reality of his death truly hits me, and my heart constricts with cold and shock, that soulless image of the eclipse once again blankets the whole world, which, like back then, holds its breath, birdcalls and all. Everything else (the dawn, the burning sun in the cloudless blue sky, the twilight with its many contrasts) is illusion, a memory of how it might once have been. A shadow has fallen over it — not the vibrant shadow, which indicates the motility and vitality of the sun, but the perfidious, poisonous shadow of the eclipse, permeating and tainting everything.

  7

  After finishing the quails, I go back inside. There’s so much bright sunlight outside again that in the semi-darkness of the house, the sun-flecks dance about in front of me. The door to Tonio’s room is wide open. He is sitting cross-legged on the bottom mattress of the bunk bed (he sleeps on top). A magazine lies open across his thighs. The shutters are closed. Tonio is reading by the dim light of a pinecone-shaped lamp affixed to one leg of the bed. His eyes dart over the pages, one after the other. There is a huge stack of Donald Duck comic books on the floor; Miriam had bought out the entire stock of old issues at Lambiek on the Kerkstraat. Judging from the speed with which he turns the pages, you might conclude that he’s only looking at the pictures, but when I once decided to test out my theory and quizzed him on one of the stories, it appeared he had not missed a single text balloon.

  The occasional brief sniff: his way of laughing when he thinks he’s not being watched; with us around, he guffaws with generous hilarity. Just a normal eleven-year-old boy, who devours a comic book as though it were a hamburger or a Mars bar. He has still not noticed my presence, or if he has, he hides it well. I observe him, and melt. When I think back on the scene, I count myself lucky that I did not know then what I do now: that there, eleven years old, he was already halfway through his allotment of years. A bit more than halfway.

  8

  Sometimes I want to hold him really tightly. The thought usually hits me when I’m in bed reading, and just happen to lay my book aside. Come, Tonio, I say soundlessly. Come, Tonio, climb under the blankets. I’ll keep you warm.

  His body is unresisting, limp, but not cold. It is the Tonio who lay on the asphalt after the collision, half a day before his death. The occupants of the red Suzuki Swift are standing outside the car, and do not dare go look at the body that’s been chucked a ways further up. The police and ambulance sirens are not yet audible. The blue flicker of the rotating lights hasn’t arrived yet. It is right then that I pick him up and carry him to my bed, and pull back the blanket.

  Come. Come lie close to me. It’ll keep you warm. They’re coming, they’ll be here soon, to make you better.

  9

  I think Miriam will agree with me if I allow Jenny to have the last word.

  Jenny had asked, before going home, if she could have a look at Tonio’s room. ‘Of course, go ahead.’ I understood. That’s where most of the photo shoot had taken place. Miriam offered to accompany her, but Jenny preferred to go up alone.

  ‘I know the way.’

  We heard her gentle treads as she went up the stairs to the second floor — and then, silence. No creaking footsteps on the parquet floor above overhead, as we were accustomed to until two years ago. No, just a very present silence, nothing more.

  She stayed up there a long time, Jenny. Miriam and I looked at each other a couple of times without saying anything. We were thinking the same thing. For God’s sake, get that girl out of the house so we can unleash our tears. We hadn’t truly appreciated it: a glimpse at a budding romance was the most awful thing that could happen to us, precisely because there would never, for all etern
ity, be the chance of seeing it through.

  Jenny did not come back down, nor did she make any sound upstairs.

  ‘Maybe she just snuck out,’ Miriam said. ‘Did you hear the downstairs hall doors? They haven’t been closing so well recently. When the front door shuts, they rattle.’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything,’ I said. ‘She must still be up there.’

  We whispered.

  ‘Shall I go have a look?’ Miriam asked.

  ‘I’ll go have a listen at the bottom of the stairs.’

  I held my breath as I walked out onto the landing. I listened. Not a peep. The curve in the staircase blocked any view of what was going on up on the next floor. The dim light of the wall lamp on the second floor did not betray any motion, not even a shadow. Afraid to disturb something intimate, I dared not go any further. At the same time, I was anxious.

  I went down to the ground floor, where the cats stopped their horseplay on the marble floor and looked inquisitively up at me. To keep them from escaping, I closed the double inner doors tightly. This was how I used to sneak out to Café Welling, but that was no longer necessary. I twisted the bolt so that the lock wouldn’t click shut, and walked backwards between the parked cars onto the street, far enough to look into Tonio’s room.

  The curtains were open. There were no lights on. From the right, though, where the door led to the landing, a minimally faint light shone into the room. I waited, in case I might see something move. A few times, I had to take a few steps forward, toward the parking spots, in order to let traffic pass. Soon the Concertgebouw would be opening its doors, so the neighbourhood was already crawling with patrons in search of a parking space.

  Nothing happened, so I went back inside. The cats had nestled into the curve of the stairs, as though waiting for me: a moment later, they raced ahead of me into the living room, where Miriam sat on the sofa, fighting the urge to cry.

  ‘There’s no light,’ I said.

  We sat next to each other in silence, waiting resignedly for what was to come. The glasses were empty, but I did not ask for more to drink. It was some time before we heard soft footsteps on the stairs, and only then because I hadn’t shut the living-room door all the way. There was a tentative knock at the door.

  ‘Yes, Jenny?’

  ‘I just wanted to say goodbye.’

  Jenny hugged Miriam, and then me. Her face was not red from crying, but her lower eyelashes were stuck wetly together.

  ‘Could you find the light switch?’ I asked, just to break the silence.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t go in the room.’ She sounded slightly startled, as though she thought I suspected her of desecration. ‘The door was open. I stood at the threshold for a long time. To say goodbye.’ And as she turned to go, she said: ‘You know, I really believe that the dead leave a kind of energy behind for us.’

  Amsterdam, June 2010–March 2011

  Translator’s note

  The translator wishes to thank Ruud van Odenhoven for his invaluable and unstinting assistance in matters pertaining to Dutch culture.

  The English translation published here of Gerrit Kouwenaar’s poem ‘there are still’ (originally published in Dutch as ‘Men moet’ by Querido) is copyright © David Colmer.

  Hans Faverey (1933–1990) wrote his collection of poetry The Missed on his deathbed, after a lengthy illness. It was originally published in Dutch as Het ontbrokene by De Bezige Bij. The English translation published here is copyright © Francis R. Jones.

  All footnotes have been written by the translator, with the exception of one provided by the author and identified as such.

  The following works are cited in Tonio:

  by Adri van der Heijden:

  Advocaat van de Hanen (Lawyer to the Punks)

  Asbestemming (Ash Destination)

  De Tandeloze Tijd (The Toothless Time)

  De Draaideur (The Revolving Door)

  Een gondel in de Herengracht (A Gondola in the Herengracht)

  Het schervengericht (Judgement by Shards)

  De slag om de Blauwbrug (The Battle of the Blue Bridge)

  Vallende Ouders (Falling Parents)

  Homo duplex (Homo duplex)

  Het Hof van Barmhartigheid (The Court of Mercy)

  Onder het plaveisel het moeras (Under the Pavement the Morass)

  De Movo Tapes (The Movo Tapes)

  De gevarendriehoek (The Danger Triangle)

  Reis in een boom (Travels in a Tree)

  Weerborstels (Cowlicks)

  Het bankroet dat mijn goudmijn is (The Bankruptcy That is My Goldmine)

  Kwaadschiks (Unwillingly)

  To date, none of Van der Heijden’s works, aside from Tonio, has been translated into English. The English equivalents given above are provisional working titles that have been assigned by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

  by Alfred Kossmann:

  Geur der droefenis (Smell of Sadness)

  by Jan Wolkers (film by Paul Verhoeven):

  Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight)

  by Louis van Gasteren (film):

  Hans, het leven voor de dood

  Author’s note

  This requiem memoir is based in part on my diary entries, some of which were published earlier in their original form in Engelenplaque (2003) and Hier viel Van Gogh flauw (2004). The incident of the replaced front-door lock appeared, in modified form, in the novella Sabberita (1998) and the collection of short stories Gentse lente (2008).