Tonio (17 page)

Meanwhile, a minor drama was taking place at our front door. My mother-in-law had impulsively — in an ‘agitated state of mind', as the police reports called it — absconded from St. Vitus nursing home and taken a taxi to our house. She came to claim Miriam — the reason remained unclear, but this was obviously the last straw. I was aware of the regulations governing the mother-daughter relationship, in place for several months, but I tried to keep out of it as best I could.

Miriam woke me to inform me of the intrusion. Her ferocity was alarming: for the past year, more and more sewage had been seeping up from her youth. I could not quite put my finger on what it was exactly.

‘What did you do with her?'

‘Put her back in the taxi. I was livid. Just then Thomas showed up.' (She was referring to my editor.) ‘What must he have thought! Me standing there screaming at my mother while shoving her into a cab. He brought this envelope for you.' And with a fake pout: ‘And the flowers he had with him weren't even for me.'

She more or less insisted that, before we went off to meet up with Tonio, I have a drink with her to calm her nerves.

‘Otherwise I can't face this evening.'

I shaved quickly, we tossed back a drink, and then it was time to call a taxi. The plan was to eat dinner in the Atrium at the Binnengasthuis, on the university campus. Congregate in the student pub down in the basement before moving next door to the restaurant. The taxi was not held up by the Giro preparations, so we were early (six-thirty) and took our place at the bar. Beer in plastic cups — well, why not.

Quarter to seven and still no Tonio. Miriam called his mobile number. Yeah, his bike was still at Central Station, so he'd taken the tram. He was almost halfway. See you in a bit.
Huuy
. (His goodbye alternated between ‘huuy' and ‘oi'.)

Suddenly there he was standing next to us, having slipped in just as unobtrusively as he always entered the living room. The shyish grin, combined with a nod of the upper body, by way of a greeting. He did not kiss his mother as a matter of course: it had to come from her. For me, a squeeze on the shoulder sufficed.

From the moment I thought that Tonio had reached adolescence I decided to minimise his embarrassment by refraining from embracing him in public. (Once, when I wanted to introduce him to an old friend we bumped into on the street, and brushed his bangs out of his eyes, he jerked himself loose and danced around me with clenched fists, using my belly as a punching bag.) But these things tend to go gradually. Sitting together on the sofa watching a TV game show, we both laughed at a candidate's flub and I playfully and teasingly pulled him close to me. I had expected a punch in return, but he stayed leaning against me just where I had tugged him. He wriggled a hand behind my back and squeezed himself even closer, as though relieved that this was still allowed in the ‘cool' world he was creating for himself.

We hadn't seen Tonio in weeks. ‘You're looking well,' I said, ‘although I'm sure you don't appreciate hearing that.'

He dismissed my comment with a grin. Since his baby fat had dissolved, he'd regained the compact body he'd had at the beginning of high school. My gosh, twenty-two next month. Perhaps because just this once he wasn't wearing his long hair in a ponytail, I was struck by the resemblance to a photo of myself, taken in the summer of 1973, a few months before my own 22nd birthday. I'm standing on a rock in the middle of rushing stream, and, rightly or not, at that age I felt I could walk on water. Now that I had a good look at Tonio, I realised that since his high school graduation, four years ago, I hadn't treated him in line with his personal development. I had postponed getting to know him as an adult, and had bombarded him with the kind of advice you give an insecure adolescent. He in turn was too polite to correct me.

It was simple enough. Brittany 1973 and the subsequent years had not slipped out of my memory. If I wanted to avoid treating the 22-, 23-, 24-year-old Tonio as a child, I only had to think back on myself at that age.

The ease with which he put away one beer after another — there, in any case, he had taken a page out of his father's book, anno 1973. After chatting for half an hour, he started glancing nervously around the bar. ‘I don't see too many of my classmates. And no parents at all.'

Tonio took a spin around the busy pub and had a peak in the adjacent Atrium, where the tables were already set. He returned to us and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Maybe I missed something,' he said, ‘that the date was changed or something.'

‘Let's have another round,' I suggested, ‘and wait it out.'

Another half-hour passed. Not one of his classmates, with or without parents, showed up. I felt bad for him as he did another round of the bar, this time less confident than before, and returned to us with a slightly worried grin. Poor kid. He had dragged his parents all the way here and there was apparently nothing to offer them. He groaned.

‘I must have missed an email somewhere along the way.'

14

‘So we'll go eat somewhere,' Miriam said.

Tonio had an idea. ‘The Staaltraat,' he said. ‘There's a pub there that serves food, where I go with my classmates sometimes. The steaks are pretty good, and they've got those thick-cut fries.'

Off to the Staalstraat. Amsterdam had the chills. Elsewhere in the city, some fifteen couples and their Media & Culture-studying children were assembled in a restaurant, waiting for Tonio and his parents. Meanwhile, we were installed at a small table in Eetcafé ‘t Staaltje, and had one of the nicest evenings in years. Thrilled to really be together. All three of us in good form. Tonio in particular was on a roll. I noticed how well-spoken he'd become recently. (I thought back on the meandering complete sentences he churned out, age seven or eight, in his melodious, high-pitched voice. My disappointment when later, his voice starting to break, he started talking in clipped phrases. As a surly teenager every word seemed be uttered with aversion.) Miriam and I tried to top his witticisms. The waiter who interrupted our laughing with a new round of drinks said: ‘I wish all our customers were like you.'

We reminisced. Some of our memories caused us to fall silent, but not for long. We ironed out a few past misunderstandings. And the steak wasn't bad at all. The fries, too, had the expected Flemish knottiness.

After a longer silence, when melancholy got the upper hand, Miriam told Tonio that what she missed most since he'd left home was their Sunday shopping outings. Her eyes glistened. Tonio looked down at his plate. The upshot was that they agreed to go shopping, on a Sunday of course, for a watch he'd set his sights on, and whose price had already been approved at the time of his graduation.

Miriam: ‘A week from Sunday?'

Tonio: ‘Deal.'

Miriam: ‘And afterwards,
patat
on the Voetboogstraat. Like the old days.'

Tonio: ‘Deal.'

At around midnight we called a taxi. Tonio said he wanted to check back at the Atrium café. Who knows, maybe he would bump into one of his classmates, who could fill him in on what went wrong. The taxi driver came in to let us know he was parked on the corner. Tonio refused to be dropped off at the Binnengasthuis: ‘Ridiculously close by.'

On the way to the taxi, I thought Tonio might need some extra cash for a the rest of the evening: he still had all night ahead of him, and would probably miss the last tram. I'd spring for a taxi. I turned toward him. He needed to go the same way we did, but strangely enough lingered a bit in the doorway of the pub. I let Miriam go on ahead and hurried back to him, a fifty-euro note folded between my fingers. Instead of giving it to him I let it loose in the pocket of my raincoat, and threw my arms around him.

I didn't quite understand this unexpected gesture myself. He and I, we only really hugged on his or my birthday, with Miriam as the sole onlooker. I gave him three big kisses on his stubbly cheeks, and said: ‘I'm glad it worked out this way.'

In order to spare him any more of my emotions, I hurried off. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his shy grin in reaction to my embrace.

I slipped onto the back seat beside Miriam and the taxi headed down the Nieuwe Doelenstraat towards Muntplein. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my raincoat and felt the bill, folded into quarters. ‘Oh, damn, I
still
forgot to slip him something extra.'

I looked back through the rear window, but Tonio was already out of sight.

‘He'll manage,' Miriam said.

CHAPTER SIX

‘Our little boy'

there's a puddle of blood to show the photographer

a typewriter ribbon to change, the house to shuck off

— Gerrit Kouwenaar, ‘there are still'

1

Underneath the clock (five o'clock), the blonde woman appeared — the one who, during the course of the day, we had come to regard as our personal nurse.

‘Your son has been brought from the
OR
to the
ICU
,' she said. ‘I can bring you to him now, if you want to say your goodbyes.'

I pulled Miriam up by the arm. She took a few wobbly steps, as though drunk with sleep.

‘Is it okay if I don't go with you?' Hinde asked. She stood up, too, with panic in her eyes. ‘I can't face it.'

‘All you have to do is wait for us here,' I said.

We followed the nurse into the corridor. Left turn. I held Miriam tight, my arm around her waist, so that we could only take small steps.
Goodbyes
. The day after our dinner at 't Staaltje, she and Tonio exchanged text messages: sure enough, he had missed an email informing them of a change of venue for the student-parent dinner. Miriam texted back that it was a lucky thing, that misunderstanding, because we had had a terrific evening together. That much was ours forever.

At the next junction in the corridor we took a right. It must have been busy in the
ICU
, because in a biggish niche there was a bed in which a woman lay motionless. Her jet-black hair was spread out loosely over the pillow, covering it almost entirely. An Indian (or, in any case, Hindustani: the women wore a dot on the forehead) family sat at the bedside. They sat stoically on stools, elbows on the bedcovers, never taking their eyes off the patient, who appeared to be in a coma.

What kind of impulse was it that made me hug Tonio so emphatically last Friday, right there on a street corner? I could now claim I was saying my goodbyes, then and there, to the
living
Tonio, but that would mean I had had some kind of premonition, like louche stock-exchange traders acted on foreknowledge of imminent market fluctuations.

The nurse walked with a calm tread, so that we, with our fused bodies, had no trouble keeping up with her. She turned to us as we walked, and said: ‘We've had to improvise a bit with the space, but … well, you'll see him shortly. He's still on the ventilator.'

I pulled Miriam against me even harder, suddenly afraid that my common sense might fail me. I was worried that I'd grab the first doctor I saw and yell: ‘You and your fancy machines … Don't stop now! Do whatever it takes! Keep him alive!'

That I'd demand the number of one or another medical ethics committee … call up the chairman of the Society for Intensive Care: ‘He's still alive! Don't let them pull the plug!'

That primitive instincts would get the better of me, like the mother gnu on National Geographic. She kept returning to her dead calf to fend off the pack of hyenas lingering nearby …

The nurse stopped at a light-yellow nylon curtain strung between two pillars on opposite sides of the corridor. She pulled aside one of the flaps. ‘Here we are.'

2

There, somewhere, I must have let go of Miriam — perhaps because the opening was too narrow for both of us. I took a step forward, and another. All at once I was standing in the middle of a sort of peakless tent, draped on three sides with the same nylon fabric, like the kind of shower curtain that always stuck to your body. On the fourth side, a few metres behind the hospital bed, was a large window. The bed was positioned with its head on the left.

It really was him. In that bed lay Tonio. Our son. So it had not been a misunderstanding when they came to tell us they were busy
with him
in the
OR
. Had I secretly hoped, deep down, that it would be a case of an identity mix-up amid the nighttime chaos? Forget it. This was Tonio. Our own, unmistakable Tonio.

I reached to the side, behind me, but my arm mowed through thin air. Miriam — where was Miriam? I looked back in the direction we came from. In the corner of the yellow tent, next to one of the pillars, Miriam sat on a low stool, supported by two nurses, as though they were forcing her down, to keep her from witnessing the terrible scene from close by. A dripping glass of water hung in the free hand of one of the nurses. Miriam, tears and trepidation in her eyes, made a move as if to stand up, to free herself from the grip of the caring hands. They let go.

We shuffled over to the bed. Miriam took my hand, squeezed it.

‘Just look at him, our sweet Tonio,' she whispered, almost without crying. ‘Such a sweet boy … Adri, this can't be happening.'