Tonio (44 page)

In the first place, there was that (seldom absent) feeling of being
ON EDGE
. It was often accompanied by rapid breathing, ditto motor functions, as though you thought something might still be salvaged (but what?).

A variant on this: extreme
ANXIETY
, comparable to paralysing exam-fear, or the insecurity that comes with being hopelessly in love. A sensation that Tonio's death was just a portent for some greater calamity.

PAIN
, wavering between ice-cold and searingly hot, like a storm raging across the plain of your heart. Sometimes it would abate for a moment, only to surge again all the more acutely. (As Miriam put it recently: ‘Just when you think you're feeling reasonably stable, the pain suddenly hits again. Unfair.')

RECALCITRANCE
. To whom or to what, as long there was no authority where one could register a complaint? At the very least, to the brutal truth that Tonio would never again come sauntering in here with his sheepish grin. Without a worthy opponent, recalcitrance bashed its way inwards, wreaking havoc and destruction on the soul rather than the public domain.

41

And then a
GUILTY CONSCIENCE
, to be divided into
rational
and
irrational
feelings of guilt.

Irrational
: that I was not there, at that very spot, to stop the car, or, in the event that I was too late for that, to be there for Tonio, to at least kneel next to him and lay my folded-up jacket under his head … hold his hand. ‘I'm here. Lie still.'

Rational
: that we hadn't taught him to cycle more responsibly. That I didn't see to it that his bike had a light. I should have had
LED
lights and reflectors sewn onto all his clothes when they were here to be washed. (This last thought might tend toward the ‘irrational' category.)

Irrational
: that I was unable to squeeze a second into the reality of that night, and thus prevent the collision between bicycle and car. Perhaps I should have attributed my early-morning awakening, the result of a flood of saliva, as an alarm signal, which in turn should have resulted in a warning
to him
. My mobile phone lay on the bed, within arm's reach.

‘Hello?' His characteristic slightly harried voice, this time from pedalling. It also sounds a bit drunk.

‘Hi, it's me … Adri. Where are you?'

‘Jeez, what the … Well, let's see, I'm just cycling on the Ceintuurbaan with a couple of friends. Just crossed the bridge over the Amstel. We've been out.'

‘Yeah, so I hear. Where are you headed?'

‘Jeezus, you really have to know every … Okay, home, I think. Jim's waiting up for me. We were going to watch a movie.'

‘At this time of night?'

‘You know Jim. Insomniac.'

‘And the people you're with?'

‘They're going to go chill at Dennis's place, Govert Flinkstraat. I don't think I'll …'

‘Yes, do! Better to bike out to De Baarsjes in daylight.

‘Jesus, Adri, how old do you think …'

‘I've got a bad feeling, that's all. I just woke up with a churning stomach.'

‘Jesus man, take a Rennie. We're just on the Ceintuurbaan now. The others are about to turn off at Sarphatipark. I want to stop and talk to them first. Oi, oi.'

He's already hung up. Say I
did
call him, and in doing so delayed his ride across town by just a few seconds … say he nevertheless got hit by a car … wouldn't my guilt be demonstrably even greater? (‘I wish I
hadn't
called him.')

And so, in the eye of the storm of emotions, I piled guilty conscience upon guilty conscience.

Let's not forget
SHAME
. For myself: you've fucked up, Van der Heijden, you've let him slip through your fingers. For Miriam: I begot a son with you, and he's gone, and I wasn't able to prevent his passing.

For Tonio himself: I let you loose on the world with insufficient warning, otherwise you would still be here (which itself is the proof of my failure).

Shame, lastly, before the entire world: from now on I will be the once-proud father who has lost his son. Shun him, the pariah, he stinks of grief like a wet dog stinks of dishrag. His pain is as contagious as the plague.

42

PRIDE
, don't forget: for Tonio.

When I stood at Tonio's deathbed in the
ICU
, and watched him die, there was still, despite everything I was going through, a place for pride. He died. He did it well, too. He dealt with the task, and showed us how easy, in fact, it was. He demonstrated it to his father. See, Adri, this is how you do it.

In the weeks that followed, that pride branched out. We were proud of him: that he skipped blithely through life, had given so much love, was so helpful and generous, and kept difficulties as much to himself as possible. We were proud of him because he had done his best with a life that could, on the eve of a beautiful summer, abruptly be cut short, just like that. He lived as though it would not come to a premature end. A few days before his death, as though calamity were not on its way, he reassured his parents about his future plans. Media Technology. Master's degree. Leiden. The Hague. Train.

We had the definite sense that he, and he alone, had known all along that his life would be short — and had kept quiet about it. That he had held that terrible information in solitude, so as not to saddle us with it — that thought alone filled us with pride.

ANGER
: at everything and everyone, but not all at once. In the absence of a God, I unleashed my wrath at Fate. In my powerlessness I tried to unmask it by ripping away its blindfold, revealing only blind eyes. Ping-pong balls without an iris.

Other objects of my anger: daylight savings time, the manufacturer of
BMW
autos (because I knew for sure it was a garish
BMW
that had taken him down), my mother-in-law, who made a caricature of Tonio's death by incessantly announcing her own …

RESIGNATION
: at times, briefly, to my own surprise. Resignation suggests something long-term, but in the present situation could not be more fleeting. It is quickly followed by a guilty conscience, because accepting Tonio's death — that just won't do.

43

FEAR
in many forms. ‘I'm so frightened,' Miriam said recently, her face contorting into a tearful cramp. ‘I'm eaten up by fear.'

I no longer had to ask her what of.

‘Before we lost Tonio, we used to discuss the problems and challenges of a novel … the series of attempts at a solution … it started to become old hat. In our day-to-day lives, too, we were always “solution people”. No problem was ever too daunting. And we usually found a solution. Problems weren't safe around us. But now here we sit with an absolutely insoluble problem … Tonio's death … and what can't be solved is scary. It scares me more than my own death. More than anything. No matter how you look at it, there's nothing you can do to make it better. It makes me claustrophobic. Like in
The Vanishing
by Tim Krabbé. Locked in an insoluble problem. And you know that nowhere in the future that lies ahead of us will there ever
be
a solution. The fear of the insoluble problem is also the fear of the future.'

Miriam could undoubtedly have added to the list of fears, just as I could. The fear of going mad from the loss. To want to follow Tonio to the grave. To be unable to write again. To be arrested for manslaughter …

I pointed out to my friend that I could expand the list with a whole bunch more emotions, and combinations of them, but that I wanted to limit myself to one last one. The feeling of utter
DEFEAT
. Your son has been taken from you by an unknown power that you, his father, were unable to fend off.

44

So now we'd had visits from Dennis as well as Goscha: the two friends who Tonio had spent his last hours with — a full circle of the clock, roughly the last half-day of his consciousness. (Another half a day would still come, this one
un
conscious. So that his final conscious half-day was associated with evening and night and darkness, and his final unconscious half-day with daytime and sun and operation-room lamps.) Although the emphasis they laid on certain details differed somewhat, the one version more or less complemented the other.

But we were still in the dark as to who this Jenny was, why Tonio didn't go to Paradiso with her, and what he was doing at twenty to five in the morning at the intersection of the Hobbemastraat/Stadhouderskade, so far astray from his usual route.

In all honesty, we had to admit that we had hoped for a more idyllic account of Tonio's last hours. The role his friends Goscha and Dennis played — all well and good. But where was Jenny in this story?

We were shown a Tonio who, after a high-spirited evening, said goodnight to his disco mates, who then settled down in Dennis's house. A solitary Tonio, with comradely duties to fulfil, and for one reason or another took a wrong turn — only to encounter his better in the form of blind and mute fate. We were even robbed of the illusion that he had perhaps wanted to stop in at Paradiso, either inside or out, to catch up with Jenny.

‘I can't get past the moment of the collision,' I said to Miriam. ‘I'm beating my brains out over it. I simply
have
to find out what happened. Otherwise I won't survive it myself. That last bike ride … the crash, out of nowhere … his battered body on the asphalt … sirens in the distance … flashing lights … It all adds up to such a devastating loneliness, Minchen … if I only knew how I
might have
assuaged his aloneness in those minutes.'

‘Everything else I learn about it,' said Miriam, ‘only causes more pain. But if you're determined to leave no stone unturned … then I'm with you.'

CHAPTER FOUR

Scorched earth

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

— William Shakespeare,
King John

1

How often have I dreamt I had killed someone? I was a murderer, no doubt about it, and would soon be found out. The
ideal
murder, though, wasn't part of my dream. I swung.

There's no greater relief, of course, than to wake up from this kind of nightmare. The murder was usually sufficiently realistic that at a certain point, still deeply asleep, you began to wonder if you weren't indeed the victim of a bad dream. No, not a chance: this was 100 per cent real. I would have to accept that I was the perpetrator of the capital crime. No way out.

Only upon awakening, when the dreamer has returned to the only true reality, does the dream's decor reveal itself as though made of cardboard and styrofoam. The events surrounding the murder carry the mark of cheap, implausible fiction. ‘And I fell for it!'

In another kind of nightmare, a loved one dies. Decor, details, the event itself: everything is
so
realistic. A comic-strip dreamer pinches himself, but for me that is unnecessary, for I know: this is for real. My loved one really is dead. My heart freezes.

Tonio's death, and everything pertaining to it, comes rushing at me like one of those hyperrealistic nightmares that won't be messed with. All manner of special effects are brought into play so that the dream will be indistinguishable from everyday reality. Oh, does the dreamer wish to pinch himself? Even such signs of disbelief are parried. He does not awaken. The secret of the dreamsmith.

And yet, even the most firmly quelled nightmare-sufferer retains an ice-cold place in his mind, which — gradually, and against his better judgement — registers the possibility that the reality surrounding him is the well-constructed decor of a realistic dream.

That is how I fare. My state of mind since Whit Sunday exhibits all the characteristics of a chillingly well-disguised dream. I can locate no cracks in the masquerade, nor can I shake the suspicion that the wool — a very high-quality one — has been pulled over my eyes. Only … this stubborn nightmare takes its sweet time, and lingers. The endless prolongation of the dream could also be a way of enhancing its reality level.

Let me put it this way: this nightmare is so realistic that I almost no longer feel like a dreamer.

2

Sunday morning. When Miriam enters the bedroom, I'm reading the weekend papers in bed, with the curtains and the balcony doors open. Wearing just a long T-shirt over her panties, she curls up next to me. Out of bashfulness, or maybe as a diversionary tactic, she gives me soft little head-butts, the way her cats do. Since Tonio's passing, we have fondled, embraced, caressed, stroked, squeezed — all in the service of consolation, mind you, not in any way a form of arousal or stimulation (although who knows, maybe consolation has an erotic side). For the first time in weeks I stroke, in passing, her breasts through the cotton of the T-shirt. She quickly gets out of bed.