Tonio (50 page)

‘In keeping with noise restrictions, we're not allowed to employ a trauma helicopter at night,' said Dr. G. ‘Therefore we equip an extra ambulance with a surgical team and additional supplies.'

Perfectly plausible, isn't it, that in our out-of-control hedonistic society, human lives are sacrificed for the benefit of a good night's sleep? We're forced to endure the screams of boat bacchanals as they putt-putt through the canals at night, but a trauma helicopter: No. It wasn't safety that was sacred, but boozing.

‘Was Tonio reanimated at the scene?'

‘Let me put it this way,' said Dr. G. ‘Reanimation activities were carried out. For instance, he was put on a ventilator. His lungs, after all, had stopped functioning. And there was an immediate blood transfusion. He had lost a significant amount of blood at the scene of the accident … But comprehensive reanimation, no. Even with exhaustive reanimation efforts in the ambulance itself, the victim is often dead on arrival.'

I felt a lump of misplaced pride in my throat. ‘So Tonio was, so to speak, still strong enough that it was worth a try?'

(He still died, didn't he? What did I expect?)

‘After your son was brought in here,' continued the doctor, ‘I first attended to his spleen. He had suffered a powerful impact to the left side of his body. As you might recall, I first removed half of it. When the remaining half continued bleeding, I removed that as well. He had coagulopathy, that is, severely impaired blood clotting … Meanwhile the neurosurgeon was tending to his brain. The right side had started to swell. Therefore we detached the skull on that side, so as to drain the fluid and blood.'

Dr. G. relayed the information with such clarity and detail that only now did I truly experience Tonio's agonies in the
OR
. The operation lamps glaring into his insides, altering the natural colour of his blood … The green, fenestrated surgical drape …
Did
he actually have one of those sheets with the cut-outs draped over him? They were working all over his body at the same time. At most, only his legs would have remained covered.

My boy, my son, that beautiful product of my loins … wrecked … His mother's pride, literally the fruit of her womb … already so distant at that point in time, and unable to return of his own accord, nor able to be brought back by the united efforts of the trauma team. He still had a chance, then and there, no matter how negative the prognoses.

‘Meanwhile I'd turned my attention to his lungs,' Dr. G. continued. ‘A great bleeding mass. They had simply stopped working. When they brought him in, his blood pressure was alarmingly low. We gave him one transfusion after the other. That was the situation, more or less, the first time I came to brief you. After that, the left side of his brain had also begun to swell. The neurosurgeon then set about dealing with that. And all the while his other functions were rapidly worsening. So, what with the drop in blood pressure, the lungs, which no longer produced any air, and the problem with the clotting … his condition became more and more hopeless. And yes, at a certain point you have to make a decision. He's not going to make it. There's no point in continuing treatment.'

And after a short pause: ‘I can assure you, as long as there's any hope of achieving something, we keep trying. Especially with someone his age.'

Tonio, who, still very young, assembled a vehicle out of technical Lego, his eyes glued to the diagram spread out on the table, and his worm-like fingers independently executing their work.

Tonio, who, after visiting my parents, demonstrated (oh, tender white lie) how my mother was slightly less hunched from the Parkinson's than a few weeks previously. ‘First she stood like this …' (Tonio bent way over.) ‘And now like this …' (Nearly upright.)

Tonio, who …

‘If I might ask
you
something,' Dr. G. said, ‘because, whatever happens, we can learn from it … Is there anything we could have done better?'

‘We're laymen,' I replied. ‘Who are we to correct or criticise you and your team of experts?'

And then I made the mistake of bringing up the nurse at Tonio's deathbed, when the alarm went off and I asked if ‘this was the end', to which she had blithely replied: ‘Oh no, there's even a bit of improvement.'

What possessed me? Did the fact that I still brought it up mean that her careless words really had given me a sliver of hope?

‘Of course I knew better,' I hastened to say, ‘but I
can
imagine that a family member might take false hope from a remark like this, and then shout: “Don't turn off the ventilator! He's recovering!” I don't want to put her in a bad light. It was just clumsy.'

Dr. G. concurred. Miriam had wept during most of the conversation, and at a certain point I believe I saw the doctor's eyes glisten as well. He asked whether his observation — namely, that the accident had occurred at a dangerous intersection — had been confirmed by the traffic police.

‘Well, not exactly,' I said. ‘There was a survey in
Het Parool
where it was mentioned as particularly hazardous.'

I pointed to the file the doctor had consulted a few times during our discussion. ‘Might we have access to that sometime? I'm considering writing a kind of prose requiem for Tonio, and perhaps … I wouldn't be able to read it now, of course … but later …?'

‘You can ask me for it when the time comes,' Dr. G. said. ‘I'll warn you, though, it's full of medical terms. The reports are succinct, here and there staccato, because, well, sometimes … in life-threatening situations … you have to be quick.'

‘If I do request it,' I said, ‘I'll treat it with the utmost discretion.'

‘Oh, I don't doubt that,' said Dr. G.

I thanked him for the clarity of his explanation. ‘We might have expressed ourselves awkwardly now and then, but rest assured we have the greatest admiration for the efforts of you and your team.' Miriam and I got up. ‘We'll let you get back to work.'

‘This is also my work.'

27

If I am to take Dennis and Goscha at their word — and why shouldn't I? — they had put away a good deal of alcohol that night. I don't know if it was enough for a hangover the next day. Tonio spent ‘the morning after' on the operating table. If it was true that pain could not be entirely suppressed by anaesthesia, then what about a hangover?

And: what were the consequences of all that alcohol on the operation? Dr. G. had said that Tonio's clotting was disastrous. Could that, in this case, have had something to do with drink? I remembered that soon after his birth, before being placed in the incubator, Tonio had been given a shot of vitamin K in order to boost his coagulation, premature newborns being susceptible to poor blood-clotting. Later, I met the man who had discovered provitamin K, Professor Hemker, in Maastricht. He was also an avid collector of oboes. I did not neglect (also on Tonio's behalf) to thank him for his scientific efforts.

If I wanted to immerse myself in shame, I could imagine how the operating-room surgeons commented on the patient's booze-breath.

That Thomas Mann quote kept haunting me. ‘It was much worse than I thought …' If it's true that even under anaesthesia, consciousness continues to experience pain somewhere
deep down
, then Tonio spent the last half-day of his life in immobile, excruciating suffering — first on the asphalt, then in the ambulance, later in the operating room, and lastly (with his parents finally at his side) in intensive care.

I have always told myself that the worst part about pain is the
further effect
of suffering. One remembers the source or cause of the pain, and cringes with shame for allowing it happen or for having brought it on oneself. One feels the pain ebb, and experiences the added fear of a sudden resurgence of the torment. One is afraid that the pain could well be the harbinger of approaching death. And so on.

I have always reassured myself with the thought that pain quickly eliminated by death, no longer able to be replayed and reconsidered in one's consciousness, in fact never existed.

But
what if
the pain, before being absorbed by death, is allowed to run riot for half a day, as with Tonio? Was that pain also nonexistent? How far back does death's power retroactively function as a pain remedy?

A boy of six falls out of an upstairs window and is skewered by the spikes of the garden fence. The child survives by the skin of his teeth. It takes neighbours half an hour to free him. If that boy lives to be eighty, does his eventual death, all those decades later, still, in retrospect, erase the pain of the then-six-year-old? If so, we can just as well posit that death ‘retrospectively' erases
every
feeling experienced throughout a human life — indeed, erases that life itself, as though it had never existed.

It is thus precisely in my most lucid moments that I am convinced that Tonio, like the author of
Tonio Kröger
, must have undergone, in the depths of his vital being and for hours on end, the ruination brought on by the collision and the scalpels. If that is true, then I owe him, many times over, my own present pain.

28

We drove from the
AMC
, where he died, to Buitenveldert, where he was buried — but at the last moment, just as Miriam was about to turn onto Fred. Roeskestraat, I managed to forestall a visit to the grave.

‘Sorry, Minchen, but I can't face it, not after that medical talk. Damn it, let's just go to the Bos.'

‘I figured you'd say that. The goat farm has always been the perfect refuge … I mean, if the cemetery's too much for you.'

‘Aside from our back porch, there's no better place to talk about Tonio.'

Later, during lunch at the outdoor café, Miriam shared with me her latest discovery: on that fatal night, Tonio was not riding his own bike, but Jim's. ‘Somebody brought it up when Jim and his parents were at our place, two days after the accident. But like so many things, it totally slipped my mind.'

Nor could I recall it being mentioned. So soon after the incident, countless details ricocheted off our armour-plated denial. The eagerness to learn
everything
only arose after the funeral, when we tried to sneak him back into our midst.

‘Then it's time we returned Jim's bike,' I said. ‘Or … well, what's left of it. Mangled or not, it's still his property. Or maybe we should —'

‘His parents have already bought him a new one. He said to his mother: “Mum, you don't think I'm going to ride that thing now.” '

‘The police said they were still busy studying the bike and the Suzuki.'

‘The bike's in storage at the James Watt bureau,' Miriam said. ‘I checked. There's even an appointment to go collect his things — bike, clothes, the lot.'

‘Hey, all this behind my back, how come …'

‘You stay home. Write. I'll go with Nelleke.'

‘Don't forget to ask about the watch.'

‘I'm dreading the shoes even more.'

We sat for a good, long time in silence at that café table, looking past each other at the chickens and roosters, but even they weren't all that active this day. A bantam was having a wash in the fine, grey sand under the octagonal bench that encircled a tree.

‘What about his own bike?' I finally asked.

‘At Central Station,' Miriam answered. ‘As usual. They've already carted off so many of his bikes from there.'

29

‘Oh, I might take a puff in the bar now and then,' Tonio had told me months ago, when I asked him if he smoked. ‘You know, just to be cool with the guys. Don't know why, really.'

In retrospect, it occurred to me that he'd seen the question coming (which, incidentally, sounded too much like: not
you!
), and had prepared his answer in all its nonchalance. He wanted to spare us. If he'd just admitted that it was
more
than just the occasional drag in the pub, then I could in turn have said: ‘Listen, Tonio, I've been able to keep you away from smokes until you turned eighteen. I still think it's dumb, but now it's up to you. Go ahead and light up, if it'll make Miriam's screwdrivers taste better. So we'll open a window later.'

From a conversation between Jim and his father, who shortly after Whit Sunday were pondering the riddle of Tonio's nocturnal detour, I picked up a snippet about ‘stopping at Leidseplein for cigarettes', which could just as well have meant: picking up a pack for Jim. Photos that surfaced on the Internet showing Tonio theatrically holding up a lit cigarette (or joint) struck me as no more than a pose, but Dennis and Goscha had more or less confirmed that Tonio was a regular smoker. Another friend had placed, as a kind of salute, a film roll, a can of beer, and a pack of cigarettes at Tonio's grave.

He wanted to spare his parents, damn it, and in doing so had more than once denied them his company. Now I suspected that his restlessness after a drink or two-and-three-quarters of a portion of chow mein at our house meant he had to have a smoke, and didn't want to put us out. Courteous to a fault.