Tonio (21 page)

I didn't collect postage stamps, and until now our art collection consisted of a few of Tonio's framed drawings, like his brilliant portrait of the cat Cypri.

13

The taxi exited the A10 and descended into Buitenveldert.

‘A critical condition,' I said. ‘I've been wrestling with that term all day. With what it means … especially its elasticity. That “critical” had something comforting about it. As though, with a little extra effort, the doctors would be able to fix it … Now I know a critical condition can also turn out, well, critical.'

‘Then for me it has a whole different gist,' Miriam said. ‘When the police rang the bell this morning, I knew right away something was really wrong. Even before they opened their mouths. When I heard “critical”, I knew he'd die. Or was dead already.'

‘He was still alive.'

‘All day I thought it would turn out badly. Of course, you never know for sure. Tonio could live without his spleen. Like people manage with just one kidney. But when I heard about his brain trauma … both halves starting to swell … I just prayed he wouldn't come out of it as a vegetable.'

‘By the afternoon,' I said, ‘my nightmare was a Tonio emerging from a coma. Severely brain-damaged, just enough left to be able to comprehend his condition. Oh, my God, what have I done? Look what my recklessness has caused. I think I'd have died from
his
regret,
his
shame … compounded by my own.'

Then it was quiet for a few moments, aside from the Arabic music and Miriam's sobs. We drove past the old Olympic Stadium, approached the Harlemmermeer roundabout, near where my father-in-law Natan lived. Hinde turned to her sister and said: ‘Papa and Mama … how are you going to tell them?'

‘Not over the phone,' said Miriam.

They decided to discuss it at our place and then cycle around to their parents' homes, one at a time — in which order was still up in the air. I was surprised to have been so routinely excluded from such a painful mission, but I did not protest.

14

We got out of the taxi. I looked up, along the yellow-brick façade. Electric light shone through the half-opened curtain of Tonio's old room — Miriam had probably left the light on when she got dressed there early this morning, trembling with trepidation.

I remembered a time, August '98, when we returned home from holiday to find a six-member family standing on the front stoop. They were looking up on cue from an old man, who seemed to be the group's guide. They spoke American English. When one of them saw us head for the front door, our suitcases in tow, the old man approached us. He introduced himself in Dutch and told us that he had lived here until the age of sixteen, shortly before the war broke out. He had been able to flee to America via Switzerland — to New York, where he still lived. Now he had been joined by his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren for the couple's fiftieth-anniversary trip to his home town, including a visit to the house where he had spent his youth.

We gladly invited them inside. Tonio ran ahead; he saw it as his duty to show the visitors what he considered the highlights of the house: the basement full of Lego, and his own room with its K'Nex Ferris wheel. The old man's father had been a wine merchant, and the basement had been the storeroom. While Tonio's laugh echoed throughout the house, the whole family was in tears. The wife and the daughter were particularly hard hit. The father had told them so much about the house of his youth, and now … now here they were, actually walking around in it! Renovations had transformed much of the place over the past sixty years, but once in a while the man got choked up when he recognised certain things from the 1930s. The stained glass in the balcony doors, the ceiling ornaments, the maid's room up on the third floor.

When we retired to the living room for coffee, he pointed to a cupboard door. ‘There's a secret hiding place in there. My father had a small safe built in.'

Miriam opened the cupboard door. The bottom was covered with a piece of linoleum, which, sure enough, covered a small hatch. We had never noticed it. The cache was empty (but it set the wheels of Miriam's imagination spinning, resulting in a thriller-like novel a few years later). It was an emotional moment for the man, and his whole family, to be able to point out something tangible that had been his father's.

I let my gaze climb the yellow façade, behind which Tonio had grown up — never to return, not today and not in his old age. Thinking of that old man made me feel a wave of sorrow for Natan, Tonio's 97-year-old grandfather, who would soon hear from his daughters that his grandson was no longer alive.

15

Miriam and Hinde were probably on their way from their father's house on the Lomanstraat to the St. Vitus retirement home in the Jordaan, where their mother lived. How do you tell your parents that their only grandchild has been killed in a traffic accident — right now I could not imagine it. I just wanted them to get back home as soon as possible. I was scared.

In the course of the day, I had visited the toilet far more often than usual, for ever-shorter spurts of colourless urine, like after you've been sitting in rain-drenched clothes in a draughty train station waiting room. Now, too, the urge arose, like a chill on the bladder, despite the warmth of the summery Whitsun that penetrated the house. I sat on the edge of the sofa for a good fifteen minutes, my fists screwed into the seat cushions next to me, ready to hoist myself up and go to the bathroom. When I could finally bring myself to get up and leave the room, I lingered indecisively on the landing. My hands lay on the balustrade connecting the handrail of the staircase leading upstairs and downstairs. There I stood, looking down the stairs to the front hall, my back safely to the wall of photos.

The WC was to my left, next to the spare kitchenette. Opposite its door, Miriam had covered a mangled bit of wall where the fuse box used to be, with portraits of Tonio. They dated from various ages.

Tonio as a toddler, with an obligatory smile that doesn't quite mask the put-out earnestness.

Tonio with bravado, butch-ish cap on his head, broadly grinning in between the giggly sisters Merel and Iris. (Judging from the bared teeth, still pre-braces.)

Dressed up as the Dutch cabaret artist Dorus, complete with moustache, bowler hat, and dust coat, from when he had to sing (or lip-synch) the song ‘Two Moths' at a talent show at the Cornelis Vrijschool.

As an eight-year-old, autographing books at Scheltema with his father. (In the photo, taken by Klaas Koppe, he hands a freshly signed book to a customer.)

With his friend Jim in Antwerp for the presentation of the Golden Owl 2004 (not to me), each with a large mug of Jupiler beer in hand, doubled over laughing. Tonio's mouth wide open with hilarity, showing off the sparkling braces he's still got at age fifteen.

Tonio's self-portrait as Oscar Wilde, the result of a group project at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, fall 2006.

There was no avoiding this portrait gallery when you left the WC. I don't remember exactly how it got started — it had been years earlier — but from a certain, indefinable moment, I could not look at these photos with the usual tenderness. I wondered if it was because of the panda that had hung there between two small portraits of Tonio ever since his graduation in 2006.

16

As I am about to step from the landing onto the top tread, I hear Tonio and Merel's voices coming from the bathroom. The door is ajar. Involuntarily I stop and listen. The silence is broken by the tinkle of a child's pee.

‘When I'm done,' says Tonio, ‘then it's your turn. I'm not going to flush first, 'cause that's bad for the environment. We have to think of the environment. Now you, Merel.'

The seat is lowered with a thwap. Again the sound of child's pee, augmented with that special gurgle which is the sole domain of girls.

‘Two pees without flushing,' says Tonio, ‘is better for the environment. When you're finished, you can go ahead and flush. Then it's still good for the environment. Right, Merel?'

A little embarrassed, I continue downstairs. I have the impression that environmental concern is not the basis for Tonio and Merel being together in the bathroom, although it does certainly benefit from it.

It must be around the same time, early spring, that Tonio presents his mother with a curious maths problem. Merel stands next to him, giggling.

‘Okay, Mum, if I got Merel pregnant, how long exactly would it take for the baby to come?'

Miriam believes her sexual education has fallen short, and starts explaining: ‘Well, you have to consider roughly …'

‘No, we want to know
exactly
,' Tonio interrupts impatiently, ‘because we want the baby to be born
exactly
on New Year's Eve. Right, Merel?'

Whenever Merel is bashful, and doesn't dare laugh out loud, her cheeks puff up like a hamster's. Her lips, already full, jut out even more, and she hooks her pinkies, as though to test their opposing strength. She nods vehemently. ‘Yes,' she says, almost inaudibly and, for the occasion, with a low, boyish voice, ‘that's what we'd like to know.'

17

We celebrated Tonio's eighteenth birthday on 15 June 2006. By late afternoon — it was a sunny day — the guests started trickling in, one by one or in small groups. One of these days, maybe tomorrow, the Ignatius final exam results would be announced, but the party mood forced the butterflies about the test results to the background. Tonio no longer a minor … unbelievable. Each time he left the room, and Miriam called him back to open the next present, I fully expected to see the child I knew so much better than the adult he now was. His late baby fat hadn't entirely disappeared yet, and although he still had that gawky posture he didn't attack the gift-wrapping, like an excited puppy, the way he used to. Everything he now carefully unwrapped and held in his hands was greeted with a satisfied grin.

The phone rang for the umpteenth time. Miriam answered.

‘Tonio, for you.'

He put down the latest gift (a light meter, a notch up from his present one) with the rest of the presents on the mantelpiece and took the receiver. The company chatted away, but I kept one ear tuned in to Tonio's call.

‘Oh, thanks,' he said. ‘How did you know it was my birthday?' And a moment later: ‘Oh, that. Of course. I guess that slipped my mind today.'

Something in his voice, a shrill exclamation, maybe, made the room fall silent. ‘Yes, thanks.' He hung up and turned around. ‘My form teacher,' he said with a shrug. ‘I thought he called to wish me a happy birthday. But … uh … it looks like I've passed my exams.'

For the next half hour, the three of us forgot our guests entirely — no, they simply did not exist. Tonio and I sat on the sofa, arms around each other's shoulders. Miriam knelt in front, her bosom resting on our knees, and her hands nearly reaching our backs.

‘We've done it,' she kept saying, in tears. ‘We've done it, the three of us. How great, how great, oh how great. This, this moment, we have to hang onto it. Forever.'

And I, wanker that I am, let it happen. I just sat there with a throat like a wrung-out dishrag, and let Miriam do all the talking. Tonio wavered, his face taut, between keeping a distance and giving in. Fighting back the tears, as they say. The way he looked at Miriam, awkwardly trying to read our feelings, he reminded me of the five-year-old kid who stood in front of me at the cremation of his grandfather, speechlessly observing the tears and uncontrolled twitches on my face, not sure whether he should try to comfort his father or cry, too.

Forget it, today was his eighteenth birthday. The guests could all look the other way in courteous silence — but
they
wouldn't see him snivel, no fucking way.

Just as Tonio was exercising an old Dutch tradition by hanging his schoolbag on the flagpole out on the balcony, adorned with a kite-tail made from used notebooks, his old sweetheart Merel came cycling by. I couldn't see her from the sofa, but recognised her voice.

‘Congratulations!' she called out.

‘Yeah, thanks … thanks!' he shouted back.

That was all. He came back inside.

‘Who was that?' asked Miriam.

‘Oh … just Merel.'

‘Couldn't you have asked her in?'

Tonio shrugged his shoulders. Something in his expression, the corners of his eyes and mouth, betrayed a certain insecurity: yes, maybe he should have done. ‘Merel also did her final exams,' he said evasively.

God, Tonio, the love of your life all those years. Cruel children: cruel to each other, cruel to themselves.

18

If he played in my workroom, Tonio would often come stand behind me and peer over my shoulder, reading what I was writing or had just written. He sometimes asked what it all meant, but, as I explained it, his thoughts usually drifted back downstairs to his Warhammer armies and half-built K'Nex towers. Once he recognised his name, and his parents', in a freshly written paragraph.

‘Is it about us?'

I explained that it was a diary entry. (In those days, I kept a typed diary on loose sheets of paper.) He thought it was pretty weird. Later that day, I took him aside. ‘When you turn eighteen, Tonio, I'll give you a book with the notes I made throughout your life. About your birth and all sorts of things you've forgotten, or never knew, or will remember once you've read them … I'll make a really cracking book out of it.'