Tonio (31 page)

I nodded to Frans that it was his turn. I sat down next to Miriam, ran my hand briefly over her hair. People might have expected us to fall into each other's arms, weeping loudly, but we didn't, and
not
because we were too well-mannered for that. Later, I found out that Miriam felt the same way. The grief kept itself to itself — but with every fibre tensed, to be sure, ready to burst.

10

‘… It sounds ironic, but only in the past week, since his accident, has an important aspect of Tonio come to life for me. Of course, I knew he'd been taking photographs for some years; we had even asked him to take pictures at our wedding. But in fact I'd never really seen more than that remarkable self-portrait as Oscar Wilde.

‘This week I found my way to a website with a selection of his photos, and they struck me in my head and my heart. The old folks eating at Beth Shalom, the penetrating portrait of Miriam, the young junkie lying on a bed in the shadows, the silent girl at the window, the un-Luganic street scenes from Lugano, candids of partiers at festivals or the Book Ball — he always seemed to want to study and lay bare a situation from the “back” or from the “inside out”. And he succeeds, often with abrasive sharpness.

‘This kid's got talent.'

‘Hey Tonio: what are you up to now? It wouldn't surprise me if you're studying the back side of life. And mumbling out loud: “How's that work, actually? What makes it tick?”

‘In any case, you'll always occupy our thoughts, now and for the rest of our lives. Or, to paraphrase a writer very well known to both of us:
You are not dead
.'

11

With a vehemence that made her ugly, my mother relentlessly hammered the dangers of traffic into us kids. All through primary school, we were only allowed to cycle within a certain area. No crossing busy roads. Don't bike along the canal.

‘You want me to have to deliver you to the graveyard?' she would shout with her face right up close to ours, spraying saliva and banging her fist against her forehead.

Ever since she let a friend convince her to slide into the 1.20m end at the local swimming pool, where she ‘felt the water tugging at her', the pool was off-limits as well. ‘It sucks you under. You'll drown. I'm not letting you go.'

Of course, we biked along the canal, sometimes so close to the edge that the reeds crackled under our tyres. We crossed the busy Mierloseweg without reporting it back to her. And you could get into the pool with a borrowed season pass.

None of us had to be delivered to the graveyard — well, except my father, almost, after he — drunk as a doornail — drove his scooter into a ditch, and was pronounced dead on the scene by the ambulance personnel.

The outcome of my mother's nightmares skipped a generation. I had to deliver her
grandson
to the graveyard. Because I wasn't hysterical enough in hammering home the hazards of road traffic? Had the worried-to-death bitch finally been proved right, here at Buitenveldert Cemetery?

12

A few lines of Ben Jonson's poem ‘On My First Son', which the poet Menno Wigman had sent me the previous day as a gesture of comfort, played through my head:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

Seven years — in Tonio's case it would be trebled, but otherwise Jonson, four centuries earlier, expressed my loss with exquisite precision:

O, could I lose all father, now …

Dispiriting, mood-deadening pill or no, there was that sudden cramp in my chest. Had Miriam and I opted too blindly for such a no-frills funeral? Had we really acted in Tonio's spirit? Were we not selling him short?

Even a person of twenty-one has, in the occasional doldrums, visions of his own funeral. Who did Tonio envisage standing at his grave? At least the few friends present here today. Girls? Around me I saw, excluding my aged mother-in-law, only middle-aged women. There had been girls in his life. He knew what it was like to be in love. Thinking back on the Tonio of last week, I can't rule out that he'd been falling in love again. That girl from the photo shoot — we didn't know her name, but … shouldn't we have done more to try to track her down?

‘
So who's the third?
'

In our preparations, constricted by panic and grief, we had denied Tonio a weeping beloved at his graveside. We should have stood here, the three of us: me, Miriam, and the model, who would no longer be nameless.

Even if this wrong couldn't be righted, I had to find her, to question her, find out if she had meant something to him … he to her … If need be, we would come here again and grieve with her, at a grave by that time filled in, grassed over … well, then, what the hell, so be it.

13

And then there were a couple more lines from Ben Jonson's ‘On My First Son':

Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

If I wasn't mistaken, a ray of irony twinkled through the heartrending lines. ‘Here lies my best piece of prose …' Would I ever be able to say that about Tonio in all seriousness? No, but I could try to keep him alive
in
prose. Not so that people would say ‘his best prose' … But that I would, in whatever style, offer them a Tonio of flesh and blood.

I hugged Frans, almost jealous of the sob I felt (or heard) shudder out of him.

A cemetery worker operated the handle of the machine that set the device into motion. Slowly, with the reassuringly sober hum of a household appliance, the coffin containing my son's body sank into the precisely dug grave. I wanted to force myself to think an appropriate thought, but came up with nothing of use, only self-evident observations, translated into words, such as: ‘Tonio's remains are being entrusted to the earth.' Entirely in the style of the captions under the illustrations in my old volumes of Jules Verne: ‘The foundering ship sank vertically.'

I did not hold Miriam tightly, nor did she hold me. We both did think something along the lines of:
I'll find him/her by and by.

‘I would like to say something.' The weepy voice of my mother-in-law interrupted the metallically humming silence. She took a step toward the grave, which took some doing, as the two burly nurses from St. Vitus were clasping either arm. ‘Darling Tonio, I hope I'll be joining you soon. I'm done living. I'll be with you soon.'

The winch with the coffin had reached its lowest point. The humming stopped. Now the only thing we heard was my mother-in-law's crying, dotted with stammering, by now unintelligible, snippets of text. The woman from the funeral home stepped forward and indicated that, if we so desired, we could scatter sand into the grave with a long-handled shovel.

Instead of heading for the exit, I went along the handful of mourners. I stroked Jim's younger brother, Kaz, who was crying, along the scruff of his neck. To do the same with Tonio's friend Jonas I'd have had to reach higher than I was able — he'd grown so tall since their school days. I gave his upper arm a heartening squeeze. Jonas stayed over nearly every Friday night during their last year of high school. They became proficient at smuggling in beer, above the rations we allowed. They thought it was fun, or cool, to get sick from it. They chatted endlessly, watched films together. Sometimes I hovered on the landing to eavesdrop on their excited voices, the exuberant laughter, and tried not to think that one day it would end, that after their exams each would go his own way.

As the shovel was passed from hand to hand, I went over to my mother-in-law, who had stayed put where she was, wedged tightly between her two chaperones. ‘Adri, that dear Tonio …' She began crying all over again. ‘I don't need to live anymore. I want to die. I'm going to Tonio.'

One of the nurses reassured me with closed eyes and slightly pursed lips, as though to say:
Not anytime soon, she isn't
. I looked around me. After taking their turn with the shovel and sand, the company moved toward the exit in small groups. Again I wondered if I hadn't let Tonio down by offering him such a brief, modest funeral. If I had
any
feeling since this morning, despite that wretched pill, it was a vague fear: that I had let him down in life, and now I'd let him down in death.

Thomas Mann had been a god to me. I couldn't read another word of his after learning, from a biography, that after his son Klaus's suicide, he did not go to Cannes for the funeral. He chose not to break off a speaking tour of Scandinavia.

I had just buried my son. But was I really
there
?

A writer, not Thomas Mann, once described the feeling of betrayal that took hold of you after burying a loved one — after you literally turned your back on the open grave, leaving the deceased, in his new solitude, to his fate. (Pff, ‘fate'. Not much more ‘fate' than what damp and maggots had in store for him.) I asked myself if I felt this kind of betrayal now that, accompanied by my friend Ronald, I removed myself from the grave. Tonio in his new solitude. If I were honest, I'd have to admit to myself that I was not aware of any more betrayal than I
tried
to feel, under the influence of the idea at hand. Never again would I quash my pain with some vulgar pill.

Chatting with Ronald about a celebrity buried here somewhere, the betrayal issue kept nagging me. I felt I had betrayed the Tonio who cycled on his own through the Whitsun night. That I wasn't standing on the Stadhouderskade to steer fate the other way —
that
felt like betrayal. And if I couldn't have prevented the crash, I could have at least been kneeling at my beloved son's side as he lay there, blacked out and bleeding on the asphalt.

August 2002
. Miriam felt like a
poulet de Bresse
, preferably pre-cooked, and thus we came to be in Bresse on a warm, rainy summer morning. Bresse: why not have a look at the cathedral, too, while we're here? The three of us strolled through the city centre — and all of a sudden, sooner than we'd expected, it towered above us at the end of an ancient lane: huge, dark, massive. Looking up in fascination, I walked slowly toward it — and all at once was splayed out on the cobblestones. Tripped over one of those cement barriers that the authorities had snuck among the medieval cobbles to discourage parking in the alley. A loud cry of pain: my shin was grazed by the octagonal cement.

Almost in tears himself, Tonio tugged at me, trying to help me get up. Hearing me let out such a shout, he thought I'd broken something (like, earlier that year, my shoulder and foot). Paleness showing through his suntan, he kept hold of my arm, caring and kindly, for quite some time. In order to justify this to himself, he saw to it that his tenderness turned into bristly annoyance.

‘They're out of their minds,' he said, regaining some of his colour. ‘They
know
people are going to be gawking at the church.'

14

In the course of my life, I developed a problematic attitude to death. I kept it at a distance.

For years it was death itself that kept its distance. My paternal grandparents had died before I was born; my mother's parents were still young and not yet mortally unhealthy. My parents each survived a severe stomach operation at around age thirty. My siblings did not die in a traffic accident, nor did any of my friends.

Death manifested itself solely at a distance. The Indonesian neighbour. The other neighbour's young daughter. A friend of a friend.

And when death came closer, I evaded it. My father and my mother both suffered long illnesses, and I was not often at their side. When Tonio, ten years old, said he did not want to see Granny Toos for the last time, and not dead either, I was happy to keep him company while the rest of the family went to look at her in her coffin before it was shut. I sat on a bench outside the viewing room at the crematorium. Tonio stood between my spread knees, and I gathered him close. He pried my chin upward to see if I was crying, and if so, how badly. Not so bad. Watery eyes. He made a point of crying as restrainedly as I did. When I noticed him regulating his tears, employing whatever kind of internal clinch, I clamped him even tighter. ‘Adri, not so
ha-a-a-a-rd
.'

At funerals and cremations, I always yearned for the reception, preferably in a café, where the taste of death could be openly rinsed away.

15

With the exception of Jim's little brother (who had to go to school) and Jonas's mother, everyone came over to our house. Miriam had ordered wine and sandwiches from Pasteuning, the local deli and caterer, that would be delivered on call.

As we'd done on the way there, Miriam and I took Natan and Hinde with us in the car. Our return home after the funeral couldn't have been less of a happening, and that was exactly our aim.

What at the cemetery appeared to be a modest handful of people now managed to fill an entire living room. Pasteuning brought the order so quickly that it was as though they had been waiting in the delivery van at the curb.

I slid into my regular, sagging corner of the sofa, where I felt safest. All the same, my mother-in-law sat down on the nearby chaise longue, and assumed her special conversation position.