Tonio (36 page)

‘And so goddamn unfair,' I add, ‘that while he was alive he had no inkling as to his premature end.'

‘Well … maybe better that way.'

‘I don't know, Minchen. Yes and no. If he'd seen it coming, he wouldn't have been so jolly those last days. On the other hand … Kellendonk, for instance, knew he'd die young.* He took measures. If he'd lived out a full life, I don't think he'd have clenched his entire body of thought into that one book.**

[* Frans Kellendonk (1951–1990) was a Dutch novelist. He died of AIDS just after his 39th birthday.]

[**
Mystiek lichaam
(‘Mystical body', 1986), for which he won the Bordewijk Prize the following year.]

Now there's a goat on each end of the seesaw. The two animals must weigh about the same, because the plank, now free from the ground, balances in mid-air, until one of the goats jumps off, and the other end of the seesaw lands with a slap on the half-buried car tyre.

‘The past week you've talked a lot about shame,' Miriam says. ‘Being ashamed of what happened to Tonio. Well, if Tonio knew he'd die young, like from some illness … I don't think I'd get over my
own
shame. I'd have interpreted every word, every glance of his, as a reproach. Even if he didn't mean it that way.'

32

While Miriam goes to pick up the photos, I proceed with the detailed, telegram-style reconstruction of the days since 23 May. I am shocked, though, by the blow that Tonio's death has dealt Miriam's memory. As far as I know, I remember everything about the accident clearly, in living colour, but I cannot guarantee that it will remain so. One of these days, my own memories might crumble and sink into a black hole behind closed eyes. And then Miriam won't be able to be my recall crutch.

Why this obsessive notation of everyday facts having to do with Tonio's death, funeral, and the aftermath? I don't know. I only know that I cannot let a single detail fall into oblivion.

Outside, the fierce early-summer day rages, while here I sit up on the third floor doing a sort of bookkeeping, recording the events that have killingly trundled on since Tonio's vanishing. Just after noon, Miriam comes upstairs with the hundred reprints of Tonio as Oscar Wilde, and the heavy-duty envelopes.

‘Look, a classmate of his emailed this …'

It was an address list of Tonio's fellow students. I set my diary notes aside to send his Media & Culture classmates a copy of our form letter, with a few handwritten personal lines, and include the portrait. I've laid the photos face down on the table, so as not to have to continually look Tonio in the eye.

And then, while I pick up these pages again and begin to put them in order, I see Tonio all of a sudden, nearly two years old, standing in the springtime sun. My father and mother had been visiting, and left behind a two-piece outfit for him: light-grey, shiny, part silk. The top has a decorative hood.

I freeze, the papers clamped between my fingers. He's wearing his new clothes for the first time. Miriam has just dressed him and, smothering him with kisses, enthuses about how wonderful he looks. ‘A little silk-clad prince.'

Seated motionlessly at my work table, as though the image might evaporate with the least movement, I watch as the little boy takes careful, demure steps across the yard in Loenen, until he stops in the sunny part of the garden. He's not entirely comfortable in his new clothes, but, at the same time, Miriam's compliments make him aware of the specialness of his appearance. Not one to avoid the spectacular, he deliberately chooses the sunlight, which shimmers as it falls upon his curly blond locks.

Just then, Mrs Roldanus appears from the hedge of her garden, on her way to the garage. Tonio takes a few steps toward her, while his hands feel their way over his belly.

‘Look,' he says, with that thin, high-pitched voice. ‘Look.'

He shows the woman something that dangles from a string tied around his waist. It is a little heart made of silver-grey silk, maybe intended as a mini-purse, or maybe just for decoration. ‘Lo-o-ok,' he sings.

‘Ohhh, Tonio, how pretty!' the woman says, crouching next to him.

She looks genuinely touched — how couldn't she be — but then again, that creature would, a few weeks later, prove to be an accessory to the disruption of our Veluwian idyll. A self-proclaimed interior designer, she had, naturally, already been privy to the covert plans for the coach house, on our property. Her attempts at appeasement consisted of self-adhesive birds, which she stuck all over the windows and doors of our quarters, including, of course, the glass windbreak, so that no wayward sparrow would crash into the windowpanes.

It's as though that little silk heart, even more than Tonio's golden curls, attracts all of that moment's sunlight. For years, that image had lain unobserved in the depths of my memory. And to rediscover it anew: I don't know if I should be glad or miserable. It doesn't matter. The pain is just as profound either way.

33

Would that Tonio's death were just a problem that, after his abrupt disappearance, we could tackle, solve, bring to a satisfactory conclusion …

There was no solution, so perhaps his death was not, strictly speaking, a problem at all.

So as not to fall to pieces ourselves after the initial shock, we found a parallel problem that might stand a chance of being solved. It was hardly original: a loved one dies unexpectedly, and the survivors want to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, as though the knowledge can somehow bring them a bit closer to the departed. The more mysterious or violent the circumstances of a loved one's death, the more the thirst for details seems to become.

For us, even without any sign of violence, that need could not have been greater.

34

We sit on the veranda, attempting to defer the first glass of the evening. A pitch-black sombreness puts a clamp on my mouth. I suggest that for God's sake we go inside and turn on the eight o'clock news. Maybe there's some news about Joran van der Sloot in Peru — as if that interests me.* We're too late for the headline news, but we
are
treated to the despair of a prominent Dutch football player over a torn hamstring. A report on the upcoming elections gets filtered out of my consciousness entirely.

[* Van der Sloot, a young Dutchman who lived in Aruba, became notorious for his involvement in the mysterious disappearance of an American tourist there in 2005. In 2010 he confessed to another murder in Peru, where he is presently serving a 28-year sentence. Both cases attracted widespread international media attention.]

Of course, we should have stayed outside, in the shelter of the enclosed terrace. Miriam wants to watch an episode of
Cold Case
.

‘Minchen, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life watching that crappy American TV show with you.'

She begins to whimper. ‘Just to sit half-knocked-out on the couch in front of the tube, so as not to have to think, that's all I ask.'

The TV gets switched off. After a smattering of peevishness from my end, we settle down in the gradually darkening living room, conciliatory and shamelessly grief-stricken. Miriam cries more than on previous evenings.

‘So awful …
so awful
that I'll never see him again.' Her words rustle almost inaudibly along with her breath. ‘That I'll never be able to hold him again. All those normal, everyday things … gone, gone, gone. Pick up his washing, and that he just crawled out of bed, smelling of that delicious boy-sweat … I miss him so much.'

We solemnly promise each other that we'll pick up our lives, and move on: with work, and with trying to stay fit, because Tonio would have wanted it that way. From now on, Tonio would be the bottom line, so that we never forget him.

‘We'll also stop drinking,' Miriam says. ‘You know what? I don't even like the taste anymore.

I don't much either tonight, but it doesn't stop me from going at it full force. With each glass, I feel more clear-headed. After Miriam goes upstairs, I stay on the sofa, brooding, staring into the black hole that was once Tonio.

35

Sometimes I catch myself morosely thinking of a horrible imaginary accident that has overcome someone I know. A good friend. In my thoughts, I comfort them, but the catastrophe is too huge and too irrevocable for me to be of any real help. I give them my tears of impotence; more than that, I can't do.

And then, as I emerge from the daydream, it hits me that it is
us
, Miriam and me, to whom the irreparable has happened.

I tell this to Miriam.

‘Might be an emotional detour,' she says, ‘so that you can allow yourself a little bit of pity.'

CHAPTER THREE

Chime bars

1

After his move to De Baarsjes, I sometimes didn't think about Tonio for days. Not explicitly, at least — subconsciously, of course, he was still always puttering around somewhere. His normal life carried on outside my field of vision.

Since his death, there isn't a moment when he is not in my thoughts. Even when you can barely call it thinking, I feel the presence, the blackness, the gravity of his death.

With a Sophist sleight of hand, I could make a plausible argument that he is more important to me dead than alive.

Nothing doing. But … dead, he leans on me more than alive. As a young man in full swing, he possessed the means to escape my attention for brief or more extended periods of time. But the dead Tonio rests unavoidably heavily and immobile in the groaning hammock of my attention.

If Tonio paid one of his usually unannounced visits, he would silently open the front door with his own key. He'd take the stairs up to the first floor without so much as a creak of a tread, abetted somewhat by the thick runner and his supple gait. He only had to give the living-room door, which did not close properly, the tiniest of shoves with his fingertip.

And all of a sudden there he'd be, in the middle of the room. His broad smile told us it was intended as a surprise. Apparently, it never occurred to him that he might catch his parents in a compromising situation. At that hour, after all, we were usually on the sofa, glass in hand. He was always the mischievous kid playing hide and seek (‘Anyone seen Totò recently?' ‘No, I guess he's run away …') and then, weak from giggling, he'd stagger out from his hiding place.

The Norwegian forest cats, too, knew that the door was warped and didn't stay closed. If they wanted to get in from the landing, they would stretch out full-length and pat it open with their big front paws. It made its own special click. Once I called out, crouched at the newspaper bin: ‘Tygo, shut the door behind you. It's draughty in here.'

That snicker. It was Tonio, followed by Tasha. His half-apologetic smile said:
Fooled you, didn't I?

He would flop onto the sofa, Tasha cradled in his arms. She relished and revelled in the attention her stepdaddy lavished on her; but, unlike her brother, she had to be held down with a firm hand, otherwise out of pure flirtatiousness she would leap from his lap.

‘Fancy a drink?'

‘Yeah, a beer would be great.'

Since Whitsun, I have often heard and seen the living-room door spring open under the light touch of Tonio's fingers. The click does something to my heart. I see no hand appear in the crack, no arm following it. It is, in fact, one of the cats. Or a draught.

‘Minchen, for God's sake … close the door all the way from now on, will you. I have a heart attack every time it swings open, 'cause I think it's … Just push hard until it clicks shut.'

It didn't really help. Whenever she gave the door that extra shove, the tears welled up in (or poured out of) her eyes. It gave her the feeling, she said, that she was being forced to shut out even the memory of Tonio's visits.

2

The new situation is ever-present, palpable even at those brief moments when you are granted a respite from it. This is for good. From now until the end of my days, Tonio's death will never
not
be there. I saw him die in the hospital, and at that moment it nestled itself in me, divided equally between my head and my guts. My brain endlessly replays images from his life. It sits uncomfortably on my heart, squeezes the appetite out of my stomach, and causes burning cramps in my intestines.

His brake shoes engulf my feet. He slows down everything.

3

I am in no position to accuse Tonio of recklessness.

An all-round aptitude test given at Eindhoven high schools in 1964 indicated my suitability for gymnasium studies. It was a foregone conclusion that I would attend Augustinianum. My mother was pleased with the result, not because of the high-level education it would afford me (she had only a vague notion of what it entailed), but because Augustinianum was located on the ‘safe' side of the Eindhovenseweg, so that I, with my morning absent-mindedness, wouldn't have to turn left across a dangerous junction, as did my former schoolmates on their way to St. Joris College on the Elzentlaan. But I was determined to join my old pals, and even a thousand motherly admonitions wouldn't stop me — including the argument that the St. Joris teaching system was about to be abandoned and was about to embark on a five-year rearguard struggle.