Tonio (41 page)

24

Buitenveldert under rainy skies: it lends the neighbourhood an acceptable degree of sombreness. Buitenveldert glimmering in brilliant sunlight: a hell of melancholy. We cross Fred. Roeskestraat, where the cemetery with Tonio's grave is. I haven't been back since the funeral. No matter how much I try to avoid the thought, I am forced to imagine his body in the red-brown coffin. Its protracted decomposition in the cool earth, the uppermost clumps of which are hard and dried out from the warm sun of the past days. The rabbits, who by now have gobbled up the Biedermeier bouquet, dart across the bare plot, where, soon, a stone slab will be placed, surrounded by stone borders. His self-portrait as Oscar Wilde, the one I have sent to dozens of people these last few days, is there, in a waterproof frame. We want to have the photo incorporated, one way or another, into the headstone (maybe as an old-fashioned enamel medallion).

‘Oh yeah,' Miriam says, who seems to have read my thoughts, ‘my father wants to chip in fifteen hundred for the headstone.'

‘That reminds me … How would you feel about inscribing it with the name Rotenstreich? I still owe it to Tonio. Ever since June 16, 1988. And to your father. Last chance, you might say. What do you think?'

She does not answer. I glance sideways. The corners of her mouth struggle to hold back a burst of tears. Last week, too, we had to pull off to the side of the road because Miriam's vision went blurry.

25

The Filipino brother and sister who clean our house every Saturday have placed a large stack of condolence post on the cabinet in the hall. I take it out to the veranda, armed with a letter opener. There is a card from Tonio's old teachers at the gymnasium, with a verse by Auden, the same one Ignatius had used in its newspaper condolence announcement. That nice couple, Gert and Marie-Jes from Maastricht, who write me three times a week, have included twenty euros ‘for roses'. (‘… cherish the golden moments with Tonio …' wrote Gert in his last letter. The moment I read that phrase, back here on the terrace, an unexpected gust of wind blew through the spent golden rain. A cloud of faded yellow petals wafted over the neighbour's backyard.) There are touching letters from an old friend from Geldrop, from my former editor, from some of Tonio's ex-schoolmates. Dozens. I will answer each and every one, if need be with a few personal lines at the bottom of the mimeographed letter. They will all get the photo.

Should someone encounter me here on the veranda, he would see a man wielding a slender knife to open one letter after the other, smiling as he reads the contents, and then setting the letter aside. On the face of it, the man sits like a king in the shadow of the golden rain's crown, which scatters yet more sere petals with each puff of wind. The Norwegian forest cats, silent witnesses to the most terrible summons of his life, weave between his calves, their plume tails upright.

Miriam, outwardly calm, comes to announce that she is heading over to the garden centre. ‘Pick out some plants. It'll give me something to do.'

I hand her Marie-Jes and Gert's twenty euros. ‘For roses. Why don't you buy a creeper? That arch where Tonio's model posed … it could use some filling up. Our Maastricht friends would approve.'

Once Miriam is gone, the feeling of extreme tension and anxiety returns. It concentrates around my stomach, robbing it of all appetite. It wrings out my intestines, which still regularly spew a yellow poison: the form my disgust with life has assumed.

If I don't think about it directly, that spastic anxiety almost seems more like a precursor to something than a reaction to the fatal incident. As though a yet greater calamity is on its way. Yes, that's it: everything in and around me is sending me warnings. That Tonio was mowed down on the street like a dog is nothing by comparison. Just wait, the worst is yet to come.

26

When people are showered with attention for an anniversary or a death, it is usually the vast quantity that they call ‘heart-warming'. I have, however, never been able to regard the truckloads of letters that have reached us as having an added-value effect.

There were intensely affectionate letters, in which the writer confessed a powerlessness to express himself or herself, after which even the feeblest of words came across as comforting. Most correspondents appeared to be of one mind that ‘the loss of a child is the worst thing that can happen to you … your worst nightmare come true'. A relatively large number of parents to whom this had happened, many of them complete strangers, wrote to us.

There were pre-printed cards with an appropriately subdued motif, the words ‘
WITH CONDOLENCES
' and only a signature underneath. On one of the cards, the printed word
MOTHER
was crossed out with ballpoint pen and replaced with the handwritten
SON
. Also okay.

I had to admit that pathos, as it pertained to our situation, never sounded insincere. The same went for our own words. When I wrote to someone that Miriam and I had gone ‘through an ice-cold hell of loss and heartache', it simply
was
so.

Of course there was also a small minority of thrill-seekers, snuffling around the anguish. Free melodrama, served up by reality: irresistible. But here, too, the sensation was short-lived, except for those directly involved.

After these past weeks, my fingers still tremble too much from the jolt to be able to pen a handwritten answer. Sometimes I write a few lines by hand, and I barely recognise my own handwriting, it's that shaky. Pouring strong liquor on a practically empty stomach every evening can't help much, of course. I can't manage without my 80-proof painkiller. Bombay Sapphire helps me face night-time. The next morning, the pain is back, mixed with disgust, which for the time being refuses all painkillers.

Among all the notes of affection, the first poison-pen sentiments also reach us, relayed by sympathetic friends in a tone or with a look of ‘oh brother …'

‘Now he knows what it is,' was one firmly worded message. ‘Why doesn't he write a book about
that
. Something real for a change.'

Hard to believe, but true: even an unfathomable loss is capable of eliciting ill will. So now we've crossed that line, too. Chosen ones who gild their lives with the death of their child.

The Netherlands has been a Christian democracy for many years now. The slogan is ‘family as the cornerstone of society'.

When, in 2005, I was invited for lunch at the Trêveszaal, the baroque ministerial conference room, a number of Christian Democrats greeted me the most warmly. The prime minister introduced me to a German guest (the speaker of the German senate) as ‘one of the Netherlands' most respectable … eh … respected authors'. Even if they never actually read a book, at least they know who you are. They needed to drum up a smattering of representatives of Dutch culture to impress the foreign delegation. They always
ask
things of you, and never give you anything in return. I haven't heard a word of sympathy from those cornerstone-preachers now that
my
cornerstone has been yanked out of place.

The hypocrisy of politics does not end with the death of a child. The ‘cornerstone of society' lie is followed by the lie of ‘coming to terms' with the loss. As essential as procreation was once preached to us, the new essence, when that progeny passes away, is the process of ‘coming to terms'. Psychologists, psychiatrists, victim assistance, self-help books, medicine, priests, and psychics are there to help us through it. We are surrounded by well-meaning advisors who promise us that the pain of the loss will recede with time, and in the long run it can be turned into ‘something positive'. We, Miriam and I, still have
each other
, which can only speed up the process. (The well-meant advice does not take into account that an uncontrollable and secret chemistry takes place between our individual senses of loss, which almost doubles the pain.)

Instead of maintaining an embarrassed silence, because the counsel as to the necessity of the family has been proven wrong, people just go on glossing over the rough spots. ‘Come on, you two, chin up, grit your teeth and grieve, chip away at it. Been down that road before. Two, three years, and you'll see, it'll wear off. You'll be able to think back on the good times with a wistful smile.'

My prognosis is different. The pain of the loss will not wear off. Not with Miriam, not with me. As the years go by, until the day we die, the pain will only increase, following a fickle law that now, just a few weeks after Tonio's death, has already made itself known.

27

Many of the condolence letters expressed the hope that Miriam and I would be able to support
one another
in this process; this was occasionally joined by the warning that everyone deals with loss in their own way: ‘It doesn't always tally.'

They were right. Miriam and I gave each other daily briefings on our confused sensations and conflicting feelings. Already at breakfast (how I handled the loss during the night), but especially in the evening, when the aluminium caps to the gin and vodka bottles got unscrewed. And in between as well, while I answer the condolence post and she comes up to my workroom to let the tears flow freely. Miriam could cry. In response, I would feel my eyes prickle and well up, sometimes as far as wetting my lashes, but with me the grief mostly leaked inward, as I constantly, embarrassedly, assured her. With her, the pain got worse as the afternoon wore into evening. Mine surprised me at unexpected moments, in stabs.

If I had a defiant day, then she might be taking a first, cautious step in formulating a kind of resignation. The next day, it would be me who saw an opening, not her.

Indeed, it did not tally. But what we were lucky not to have, right from the start, were the mutual reproaches. We did not accuse each other of having failed, directly or indirectly, of preventing the accident. (She was a lousy bike-riding teacher. Going off into traffic after drinking, he got that from his father. Etcetera. None of it.)

My father had kept contact, even after 1949, with an old army buddy from the police actions in the Dutch East Indies. They had both started a family, so sometimes years went by without them seeing each other. Once, when their eldest children were already adults, the couples bumped into one another on the street. How're things? My father enjoyed bragging about the school or university progress of his brood. After some hesitation, his friend admitted that his eldest son was no longer alive.

‘His own choice,' said the wife. The boy had jumped from a high building. ‘It nearly meant the end of our marriage.'

After their son's suicide, the pair hurled the most awful accusations back and forth. In the one's eyes, the other was entirely at fault, and vice versa. The man (according to the woman) had poisoned their son with his old traumas from the Indies. The divorce proceedings had begun. They saved their marriage by the skin of their teeth. Their lives were ruined for good.

Miriam and I see no reason to blame one another for anything, and while a torrent of accusations to and fro might channel some of the grief, we are not going to give in to it. (The self-reproach is a different story altogether.) We have our hands full on plugging another hole. For years, we were satisfied with our love for each other. The ripening of that love resulted in Tonio. And thus a sworn triumvirate was born. It could take a knock or two, perhaps because we always managed to patch things up in time.

Now that blind fate has evicted Tonio from that rock-solid triumvirate, Miriam and I are fastened only to each other. We stagger around on wobbly knees, groping about, crazed with fear. After a long, marvellous journey through Tonio's developing life (that playfully rocking labyrinth), we are back together: thrown back to our own devices. Where are we to go now? Tonio's absence is a
fremdkörper
in between us.

It appears that, in our desperate attempts every evening to recall everything about him and hold it tight, we are reliving the journey of his life, complete with this requiem as a chronicle. But it is no more than a voyage through time with no foothold, a sentimental journey, a reconstruction, an empty rerun.

28

Miriam arranges the potted plants and flowers from the garden centre on the veranda, and waters them with the hose. ‘Wonder if they'll make it this time,' she says. ‘I don't know what colour my thumb is, but it's sure not green.'

‘Ice-blue,' I say, ‘from mixing long drinks.'

A while later we sit down to a perilous mix of Campari, vodka, and mineral water, with a lemon wedge and lots of ice. ‘We've got to quit drinking,' Miriam says. ‘I don't even like the taste anymore, you know that?

‘Bitter,' I concur. ‘It's medicine. That powdered aspirin we used to dissolve in water tasted just like this.'

Nevertheless, the alcohol finds its way in, glass after glass. I tell Miriam about the intense anxiety that preys on me most of the day. ‘As though a SWAT team might appear at any moment to haul me in.'

We drink. Ice cubes tinkle as they slide to the bottom of the empty glass. The Campari, under the golden rain, makes geishas of us: red-painted lips and a white face.

‘There's another side to it,' I say. ‘The anxiety I was just talking about … it's not unlike being desperately in love.'

‘Gosh,' says Miriam, ‘you've got that feeling pretty much at your fingertips.'