Tonio (49 page)

‘It's handy, this tablet … for in the lecture hall. I'm really pleased with it.' And off he went. ‘Back to work, oi.'

What would have been more obvious than to give Jim the laptop, as a memento of his best buddy? Well, now that he'd behaved so boorishly to his best buddy's grieving mother, he could forget it.

When Miriam rang him later that afternoon in an attempt to lay it on the line, he hung up on her in mid-sentence. A while later, he rang back.

‘Come get the computer,' he growled, with a tone that implied it was
his
job to put an end to all this kvetching. ‘I've put everything on a hard drive.'

I was sitting on the veranda with the evening papers when Miriam brought me this message. I didn't have an immediate response, except an expression of sadness: that the whole world, including Tonio's best friends, had calmly glided back into their day-to-day routine — and so thoroughly that promises made in the immediate aftermath of Tonio's death had faded, or were even, apparently, voided.

The sky turned black as ink. ‘They're predicting thunderstorms,' Miriam said. ‘I'll run out to the liquor store before the rain starts. Vodka, gin … we're fresh out. Now, of all times, when medicine's what we need most.'

I cranked up the awning, and brought the newspapers into the living room. It was as dark as a late-December afternoon. I turned on all the lamps and switched on the television. The six o'clock news reported heavy storms in Brabant and Limburg, as far north as Gelderland. ‘Trees snapping like matchsticks.'

A quarter of an hour later, after so many evenings under the clear sky, we sat drinking in semi-darkness. Some herring on rye bread: our meal would not consist of any more than this. I could finally mix my Bombay Sapphire gin with London Club tonic, which had more bite and was less sweet than that spineless, weakly carbonated Schweppes. Somewhere on the edge of town, the flash and rumble of the storm had begun.

‘Y'know, when I think about it …' Miriam shook her head. ‘Those two, Jim and Tonio. The way they spent Friday nights here in their pyjamas in front of the TV. They used to think it was so cool that I let them watch that police show.
Baantjer
. Plate of chips on their lap. You were always off at the pub, Welling or De Zwart, but I loved being around those kids … their laughter, their banter and snappy comments … A while ago, I heard a snippet of the theme song. Toots Thielemans on the harmonica. Then it all comes back, and I can almost touch them. Their warm little flannel-wrapped bodies …

She let out what I'd call a weep-sigh. ‘That hard-headed scorn of his … it's killing me. Of course, I understand he's angry and upset by Tonio's death. But that's just it. I'm Tonio's mother. We used to take him everywhere with us. Spain … Nerja, Lanzarote … the aeroplane trips, the apartments, the restaurants. No expense spared. The Golden Owl awards in Antwerp a couple of times. They had a suite to themselves in the Hilton, remember? The sky was the limit. They were brothers. They belonged together. And now … what a shitty, awful day.'

‘I'm noticing,' I said, ‘how our patience with people is wearing thin. Our relationship with the outside world is changing at full speed. Maybe for good.'

That evening, Miriam had one of her worst crying bouts since Whit Sunday. ‘So …
so
damn cruel that he's gone … that he'll never sit there anymore' (she waved a floppy arm at the corner sofa that we never used) ‘in his usual spot with a bottle of beer … and Tygo on his lap.
So
unfair.'

At a certain point, her face become so bloated from the incessant crying that anyone but me would not have recognised it.

‘If fate is so unfair,' I stammered, ‘what's the point of expecting even a
little
fairness from people … I mean the people having to do with that fate?'

‘That hard drive with Tonio's photos,' Miriam said, suddenly harsh, ‘if needs be, I'll sic a lawyer on them. I don't want those boys fooling around with it anymore. They've had two whole months. Now it's our turn.'

‘Ach, Minchen … don't let it come to that. Tonio chose those two as his best friends. We owe it to him to keep treating them nicely, even if they let us down. If they were out to misuse those photos somehow, then that would be another story.'

She nodded and rubbed her face dry. I guessed that my bitterness was greater than hers. Theirs was not a generation of rich promises — or perhaps they were rich after all, but, like a rich piecrust, promises are made to be broken.

22

Before he entered the gymnasium, Tonio managed to wheedle an 800-euro boulder of a watch out of us. On his skinny wrist it resembled a deep-sea instrument that could withstand depths greater than its wearer's heart could. Tonio was as proud of his cadging-trick as of the watch itself.

He wore it always. But unlike his wallet and mobile phone, the watch was not among the things the
AMC
returned to us. Later, we enquired at the Emergency Room. They hadn't come across it among the rest of his belongings. In the ambulance they had snipped off his clothes, which were then turned over, together with his shoes, to the Accident Investigation Unit. Maybe the watch was there, at the James Wattstraat, with the clothing.

23

Dr. G., the traumatologist who had led the operation team on Whit Sunday, had given us his card, with ‘for follow-up appt., if nec.' jotted on the back. I had sent him Tonio's photo and the death notice, with a handwritten note of thanks for his efforts.

Now, weeks after Tonio's death, we were anxious to learn all the details of his injuries and the operation. Miriam wanted to confirm her intuition that Tonio was already beyond help upon arrival at the
AMC
. I wondered if a query like that was really appropriate for a surgeon who had fought to the bitter end for Tonio's life. Miriam was plagued by the uncertainty as to whether Tonio had suffered despite the artificially induced coma, even if it was in the deepest recesses of his consciousness.

We lay in bed arguing until it was time to get ourselves tidied up for the appointment with Dr. G.: half past one at the
AMC
.

The argument was about that one painful question, and whether or not to pose it to the traumatologist. ‘You're really pulling the strings here, Minchen.'

‘You wouldn't be happy either if I left it entirely up to you.'

Except for the funeral, since our last visit to the
AMC
I hadn't worn anything but my faded jogging pants and shapeless lumberjack shirt. Now it was time I put on normal clothes for a change. My appetite might have fallen by the wayside these past weeks, but not the pain-numbing alcohol consumption, so that my sports jacket had gotten too snug for me.

The sun had been beating down on the car, so, despite the air conditioning, I spent the first half of the trip in a sweat. The same route as Whit Sunday. Then, in strangling uncertainty; now, in stifling certainty. On our way to the same doctor. After thirty-six hours in the saddle, he had been forced to go home to rest while Tonio was still alive. Exhausted, he came to say goodbye to us while there was, theoretically at least, still hope. In just a short while he would receive the now-childless parents. Among all those involved, a huge certainty had descended, as immoveable as a rock. How did that feel for
him
? As a defeat?

The traumatology department is located on the first floor of the same wing as the outpatient clinics. We reported to the reception desk. The receptionist had been made aware of our visit, and showed us to a seat in the waiting area. That anxious feeling reared its head while we waited: the unspeakable worst was still yet to come, and soon Dr. G. would tell us what that dreadfulness entailed.

The tension momentarily rekindled the morning's argument. ‘We said we would get to the bottom of it,' I said. ‘Well, here we are.'

‘And that's why I'm going to ask him.'

‘He'll take it badly, you'll see.'

Dr. G.'s assistant brought us to his consultation room. He was tall, but much less so than I had remembered from Whit Sunday: in my imagination, he must have grown to the fearsome stature reserved for messengers of doom. He was in his early forties, tops.

I said: ‘Thank you for seeing us, doctor.'

‘Don't mention it. Please take a seat.'

He sat down behind a small desk. We took the two chairs opposite him, alongside each other. I had the impression that the doctor, despite all the authority he exuded, was still a tad nervous. We could well be there to unload a heap of reproach upon him. He thanked us for the personal note, together with Tonio's photo, that we'd sent him. ‘How are you both doing, after all that's happened?'

‘Pretty bad,' said Miriam. ‘But we haven't had a complete breakdown. Which is something, I suppose.'

He nodded. I related to him what we had heard thus far from the Serious Traffic Accident Investigation Unit, and what we had managed to find out on our own. I amended the previous facts of the case: Tonio had not come from Paradiso, but from Club Trouw on the Wibautstraat. Dr. G. nodded again.

24

‘If you have any specific questions,' Dr. G. said, during a lull in the conversation, ‘then I can address them.'

‘You and your team,' Miriam began, ‘operated on Tonio the whole day. Didn't you know right from the start he wouldn't make it?'

So she asked anyway, and not really with the wording we had agreed upon.

‘Do you feel we carried on operating for too long?' Dr. G. asked, taken aback. He braced himself.

‘If I might explain,' I said. ‘Miriam's referring to her intuition on the day itself. When the police came to our house that morning, they described his condition as “critical”. Miriam thinks she knew already then — instinctively — that Tonio wouldn't make it. And when you came from the
ER
to brief us during the operation, Miriam was still certain he would die … was dying already. For me, it was different. You know how often you hear that someone is in a critical condition … and still the person pulls through? My thought was: as long as they keep operating, there's a chance he'll survive.'

For a fleeting moment, I was back in the waiting room on the twenty-third of May, a Sunday that could still end well. I even felt, with clenched fists, a resurgence of the dread of Tonio's wounds, the brain damage he would have to continue to live with. I shook off the thought. Tonio has been dead for six, seven weeks now. A certainty that we have been sidestepping, with stubborn disbelief, all those weeks.

‘I suspect,' I continued, ‘that Miriam's question is actually more a medical-ethical one. She wants to know if you're obliged to
continue
operating as long as there's a modicum of life in the patient. Right, Miriam?'

Miriam's question to Dr. G. betrayed an element of her dilemma. If there was no way to save her son, she'd have strongly preferred that Tonio was relieved of his pain and suffering right at the beginning of the operations.

25

A recurring question from visitors is: ‘Did Tonio suffer?'

I hear myself reply: ‘He was unconscious from the moment of the collision. They reanimated him in the ambulance, which he responded to well. But according to the doctors, he never regained consciousness. In the
ER
they kept him anaesthetised, just to be on the safe side. So, no, he was unaware of the situation.'

Am I being truthful? I am reminded of a passage from ‘Anecdotes on Death', in which Harry Mulisch quotes Thomas Mann's reaction upon awakening from anaesthesia after a lung operation: ‘It was much worse than I thought … I suffered
miserably
.'

In
Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus
, Mann wonders: ‘Might there be a certain depth in man's vital existence where he, in a state of completely extinguished consciousness, still continues to suffer? Can one completely separate “suffering” from “to endure suffering” in the deeper layers?'

Mulisch then writes: ‘If the extinguishing of my consciousness does not relieve me of my pain, then there is little hope that my destruction will ever pass. It will not pass. It will never pass, it catches on itself and continues to falter in an endlessly petrifying world — my demise will know no end:
my destruction is everlasting
.'

One's hair stands on end at the thought that this might be true. My poor Tonio, tethered to his destruction for eternity … For sure, his destruction carries on
within us.
Miriam and I will, until our last breath, continually endure the devastation of his life.

And if I assume that Miriam, eight years younger than I, will be the last of us to die, will her death finally do away with Tonio's destruction?

26

Miriam nodded. I could see in her eyes that she was at a loss for words.

‘I'll give you a brief summary of how the operation progressed,' Dr. G. said to Miriam, ‘which I hope will answer your question.'

‘Can I ask you to begin with the ambulance?' Oh, how I tried, desperately, to sound like a hard-nosed interrogator and investigator, especially for myself. ‘I understand that a
second
ambulance was called in.'