Tonio (24 page)

27

Tonio sat, in my imagination at least, across from me in his regular spot these past years, and I occupied the sagging sofa that by rights was once his. Even in my vision, I was unable to seduce an answer out of him.

Like he was fond of the morning intimacies with his mother …

Early one morning, shortly after the summer of the move, I awoke to someone tugging at my arm. It was Tonio. I lay on the living-room sofa, where I had passed out after a nighttime glass. Laughing and blurting out indignant yells, he hung on my arm. I could feel in his toddler's body the force with which he tried to drag me to the floor. That sofa was his morning domain and was at this moment being desecrated by my massive dozing presence. I gave in and slid to the carpet, and rolled around a bit for good measure. He shrieked in triumph. But the victory was not yet complete: I was chased out of the room. I saw Miriam come out of the kitchen with a feeding bottle of watered-down chocolate milk. Before he took it from her he checked it, as he did every morning.

‘To the brim, and not too hot?'

‘Full as full can be, and not too warm. Feel for yourself.'

A bit later I peeked around the doorway. Tonio was sprawled on the sofa, leaning against his mother, sucking lazily on the bottle and blinking as he watched a video of his favourite cartoon duck, Alfred Jodocus Quack. He swung a swatch of polka-dotted fabric left and right, as though swatting at flies. Every now and then he removed the nipple from his mouth, held the bottle up to the light to check on his drinking progress, and to judge how much longer this paradisal interlude between sleep and school would last. It was his timepiece, his liquid hourglass.

28

Tonio had been dead for hours now, and I had not committed suicide yet. I had often pondered issues like cowardice, lack of solidarity, frozen feelings. If he had been kidnapped, or otherwise had gone missing, I would be out scouring the most unlikely places, out of breath, in search of him. But for his death, I had no answer.

As a boy, I entertained obsessive, morbid thoughts. Say I had to bring my mother the news that my little brother or sister had been killed in an accident. I placed my parents' grief above my own. What's more, I was dead scared of their grief. Better to kill myself than to be confronted with their despair. Dilemma: even though I didn't have to be there to witness it, my suicide would augment their grief by 100 per cent.

Once I became a father myself, I was not relieved of these obsessional fantasies. If I were to lose my child, could I then go on living, or would I forfend the pain by doing myself in as quickly as possible? And then there was Miriam, to whom I also had a responsibility. I could suggest a double suicide as a kind of painkiller.

I made a little moral deal with myself, which in itself was no less obsessive. Thinking back on the Makelaarsbrug and on the risky child's bike seat, I came to the decision that I would commit suicide if I had in any way
caused
my child's death.

Tonight's dilemma was that I could not feel any
less
guilty of Tonio's death. It didn't take a dodgy bike seat to point to my guilt. I could not prevent his death, which was damning enough. On the other hand, I did not want Miriam to have to deal with two corpses in one day. I could not give the disburdening of my guilt priority over the comforting and care she needed.

The longer I thought about it as I waited for Miriam, the more futile the question of suicide became. Tonio was dead, and my self-destruction would be a joke by comparison.

29

It was to be expected that, now that our marital crisis was resolved, various people would do their best to keep the recent conflict alive for a while longer.

‘Did you hear? They've made up.'

No, what kind of pub talk was that. They craved drama, and if that was in short supply they would just be creative about it.

Months after my homecoming and our move to the new house, my mother-in-law, herself about to leave her husband, told me that ‘at the neighbourhood club' it was a foregone conclusion that we, her daughter and son-in-law, ‘had split up'. She was at our place for a visit; we sat in the living room having tea. Tonio was playing on the floor.

‘What do
you
think, Mum?' Miriam asked, with that special incisiveness in her voice that she reserved for her mother.

Wies had the habit of quickly running her thumb and index finger over her nose before she struck. ‘Yes, well, you
know
… people don't just say this kind of thing for no reason.'

I looked at Tonio in his play corner … On his immobile little back I could see he'd suspended play. His grandmother's words had alarmed him. A cluster of Legos clutched in each hand, he sat and listened intently. Tonio had just heard the incomprehensible news that his grandparents (she nearly seventy, he eighty) would soon be separating. Now Grandma Wies dropped in to announce that she had it on good authority ‘at the club' that the same thing was about to happen to his father and mother.

Split up.

‘No, they don't, do they,' said Miriam, even sharper now. ‘People don't just say this kind of thing for no reason. Gossip doesn't just materialise from thin air. Right? Always an element of truth to it. Maybe the
whole
truth. Where there's smoke, there's fire. But tell me,
Mum
, what's
your
conclusion, sitting here on the sofa in our new house? Does it look to you like we're about to split up?'

‘You
know
, Miriam … I'm only repeating what I've heard at the club. That's all.' And, after considering for a moment: ‘People don't just say this kind of thing for no reason.'

Tonio had not gone back to his Legos. He turned his head, and looked at the tea-drinking company with big, serious eyes.

‘Wies, aside from everything you hear and believe at face value,' I said, ‘do you really think it's a good idea to come unload it all in front of your grandson? A child of four has ears, and more importantly, feelings, too. You could have at least asked Miriam or me beforehand if there was anything to your clubhouse cackle.'

She shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the tips of her shoes. ‘I only said that people don't just say this kind of thing for no reason.' Her lowered voice was perhaps a concession to Tonio's feelings.

Maybe it was also to spare his feelings that I did not boot granny out of the house then and there.

30

The Rotenstreich sisters were back — shattered by the news they bore, and the reaction it had elicited from the old folks. They didn't say anything, and I didn't ask.

‘Minchen,' I said, ‘we haven't touched a drop the past two weeks, no problem. But I won't survive tonight without an anaesthetic.'

Miriam and I each took one of the pills we'd been given at the hospital and washed it down with some vodka. Hinde passed. She made a sandwich with one of the rolls Miriam had already sliced when the doorbell rang this morning. They weren't entirely stale, despite the summery warmth that had carried on all day.

‘Okay, so tell me,' I said flatly (I still had to get acquainted with my own reaction), ‘how did your parents react?'

‘My father took it pretty quietly,' Hinde said. ‘Didn't say much. He's always been one to bottle it up, but all the more so now. Shocked, of course, but with him you have to read between the lines.'

‘My mother just started screaming,' Miriam said. ‘She kept repeating how awful it was for me. She was being honest, that I'll have to give her.'

Pill + vodka: I remember little of what we talked about that evening. Each of us sat trapped under our own bell-jar of bewilderment. Intermittently, Miriam burst into fits of tears.

‘This can't be … it
can't
be.'

Yes, I did speak on the phone with my father-in-law, but I can't recall who rang who. ‘I turned off the television,' he said with his still-beautiful Polish accent, ‘and just sat for a while talking to myself. Why, I kept asking myself, why a boy of not even twenty-two? And why do I, an old man of ninety-seven, have to go on living? Why?'

31

‘Are we being punished,' asked Miriam a while later, ‘for having been so happy, the three of us? For being such an ideal threesome?'

For the first time today, her anguish had an undertone of anger. She eyed me fiercely through her tears.

‘Minchen, as far as we know,' I answered weakly, ‘this was just a matter of blind fate … and blind fate doesn't hand out specific punishments.'

‘So why does it
feel
like that? It feels like retribution. For our arrogance, that we dared to be so happy together.'

32

‘If you two think you'll be all right on your own,' Hinde said, ‘I think I'll go home now. It's not going to be much of a night, for me either, but … I think I'm better off in my own bed. And there's Dixie.'

‘If you can't face it at home,' Miriam said, ‘just come back here. You've got the key.'

Hinde promised. Dixie was her cat.

‘I'll leave some bed things on that couch.' Miriam pointed to the chaise longue across from the TV. We hugged Hinde goodbye and thanked her for her help and for sticking with us all day.

‘Don't mention it,' she said.

Miriam walked her sister downstairs. They stayed in the front hall, talking and crying, for a while longer. After the door clicked closed, I heard Miriam climb the stairs. She walked past the living room and slowly continued up to the bedroom level. As the most dreadful night of my life was unfolding, she left me alone.

I sat stock-still, listening. Cupboard doors clattered upstairs. Heels on parquet. I didn't hear her come back down: suddenly she was there in the living room, a pillow under one arm, and folded sheets and blankets under the other. She laid the bedding on the chaise longue and sat down next to me on the sofa.

We did not speak. Too exhausted, too numb to console each other. The valium and the vodka did their work, and we gladly encouraged the torpor with new portions of alcohol. The only point of thinking was if there was the chance of finding a solution. I couldn't even think: here we are, two people with a problem. There was no problem, because there was no possible solution, ever. Death itself could loosely be considered a problem: how do we deal with that stinking, irrevocable fact? A dead person, however, was too dead to constitute a problem.

Miriam took a sip, set her glass on the end table, and shoved it as far from her as she could. The booze did not agree with her. She laid her head on my shoulder; it slid, as though of its own accord, down to my chest, and then further, onto my lap. She cried almost inaudibly, with a quiet, rustling sound, like water singing in a kettle. The only thing she said fitted into a drawn-out, tremulous sigh.

‘Our little boy.'

INTERMEZZO

15 September 2010

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

—William Shakespeare,
Sonnet 18

1

The blind wall is back.

In fact, the house is ours thanks to the back garden's minimalist dimensions. During the years of its vacancy, from '89 to '92, it attracted numerous couples in duplicate, with the intention of splitting the large brownstone into a duplex. Their enthusiasm, according to the estate agent, invariably plummeted at the sight of the garden: no more than a postage-stamp courtyard enclosed by two high exterior walls, a fence, and the side of a warehouse. The subsided, moss-covered paving stones gave under your feet, turning every step into a cakewalk. The only growth, aside from the slick moss, was the cautious sprout of a golden rain. And two families' worth of children were supposed to play out here?

For me, the restricted space was a blessing — saved me all those gardening Saturdays. Right away, Miriam figured out which corner Tonio's lidded sandbox could fit into, leaving enough space for us to have dinner now and again with friends. An artist/landscape-architect acquaintance promised to transform the little courtyard into a ‘garden room' (whatever that may be) one day, but never got around to it.

I had more trouble with the blind wall onto which our rear windows looked out. It was the side wall of a block of houses on the Banstraat, wedged between Johannes Verhulst and De Lairessestraat. It wasn't, incidentally, totally ‘blind'. In addition to a few ventilation grills, there was, to the left and more toward the front of the house, a small bathroom window, half hidden by a wisp of withered ivy. You hardly ever saw light behind the matte glass.

This made for a rather dreary view, like facing out onto railroad tracks, and in fact almost derailed the purchase altogether. But in the end, nature solved the problem. At the bottom of the wall, fresh shoots had sprouted from the clipped ivy, and had begun a careful climb upward. Over the years the unsightly wall became covered in a glistening green carpet of leaves, where a passing breeze could bring out all the various tints of green, shimmering like a mosaic.

In the eighteen years that we lived here, from the summer of 1992 to the summer of 2010, the ever-thickening blanket of ivy, at some places a metre thick, had never been trimmed. Birds nested in it. In the spring of 2007, while I was working temporarily in South Limburg, Miriam decided to surprise me upon my return by giving the grubby courtyard a makeover. Italian stucco and new tiles. Everything antique-pink and terracotta. She had a veranda installed a metre and-a-half above ground level, with French doors leading to the library, and an awning above it.