Tonio (51 page)

I found myself fretting over that smoking of his. Until he was nearly twenty and moved to De Baarsjes, I'd never once seen him light up. All right, let's say he did so when he was out of the house, at parties, ‘just to be cool with the guys'. At home, he always backed me up whenever I pronounced on this pet peeve of mine. His beloved Grandpa Piet, a smoker from the age of eleven, was felled at the age of sixty-seven … his Aunt Marianne was now struggling, post-emphysema, with lung cancer … No tobacco user could pretend anymore that he would simply get off scot-free.

I armed myself with strategies that would help him quit. For starters, I would talk to him, not in a fatherly way, but more like an old friend … Smoking was deadly — that warning wasn't put on the packet just to deface the product design.

Suddenly there was the image of the lanky Dr. G., who had given Miriam and me a discreet but frank report of Tonio's lung trauma. In a fraction of time, his still healthy lungs had been transformed into untreatable blood-sponges — and in that same fraction of time it happened again now, interrupting my train of thought. Here I was, whingeing that Tonio had, despite all my good advice, started smoking. His lungs would never even get the chance to be destroyed by nicotine.

30

If Tonio had survived, badly injured, and had remained in a coma for an extended time, he could have one day regained consciousness, wondering in horror: what's happened? Where am I? What am I doing here?

A damaged brain, too, can still produce such questions. At the very least, there's a battered command centre that registers the puzzling and the elusive. At best, it begins to dawn on the person, in fragments, what happened, or what might have happened.

Immense regret, perhaps. Shame.

Miriam and I appear at his hospital bed. Whether he recognises us or not, there is at least a consciousness that may or may not
be able
to recognise us. He is alive.

In one of his novels, the Dutch writer Alfred Kossmann touches on the great scandal of human existence: that a person cannot experience his own death. Tonio is already on the other side of that scandal.

Now that he is irretrievably dead, he does not have access to an authority (namely, consciousness) that informs him: ‘Listen here, Tonio, your life has come to an end, you cannot finish what you have started.'

Tonio knows
nothing
now. Miriam and I, and a few others, do know. We are well aware of what's denied him: that the future he envisaged — partly clear, partly cloudy — is now out of reach.

Events experienced in the past remain in one's consciousness, thanks to mental rumination.

You're walking carelessly down the street, eyes wandering, and bang your head against a beam sticking out of a window. The smack is followed immediately by a brief, blindingly bright flash. Then anger: who in their right mind sticks a beam so far out the window? Embarrassment: how could I be so stupid? You look around: did anybody see? You walk on. Besides pain on the outside, shame burns under the skin of your face. The collision nestles in a variety of guises in your consciousness, which continues to illuminate every aspect it, over and over.

Of all possible incidents, death is probably the most serious thing that can happen to a person. But … it is life's only self-terminating event. For the one who experiences this unique event, reflection is impossible. Anger, shame, guilt, cause and effect, consequences … none of these count. Dead is dead.

31

I had asked my editor to come by so we could discuss when (and if) I might resume work. I was looking, first and foremost, for a strategy to keep from going mad, to fend off the fear: the fear of a future not only without issue, but also (as either a direct or indirect result of which) without a steady pursuit.

‘The bothersome, no, the paralysing part,' I said, ‘is that in the past few weeks I've had to visit a whole list of locations from my new novel. Hospital, police station … Even the car that plays a crucial role in the book is the same make and colour as the one that hit Tonio. A Suzuki Swift. Red. It's not very stimulating to have reality literally take over my meticulously made-up world.'

It was another brilliant summer day. We sat on our back terrace under the expanse of the spent golden rain, and I told her that Tonio had taken a break here with his photo model a few days before his death, in the same resplendent sunlight.

The editor suggested I first write about Tonio, and then later, when it was out of my system, to pick up where I left off on
Kwaadschiks
.

‘A requiem-like book could go one of two ways,' I said. ‘I could write it two, three years from now … or five … by which time it will take on a retrospective character. Looking back, some years earlier, on a terrible event. A reassessment of the grief. How the lives of those involved have changed. Or, if I write it
now
, this summer, it will be an account from within a situation that took place such a short time ago … straight from the mishmash of emotions … Writing then becomes part of the struggle, and vice versa. The distraught parents reconstructing the last days and hours of their son … because everything is imperative … they cling to every detail …'

Poetical bullshit. I have no choice. I cannot
not
write about him, for him,
now
, because at this moment nothing else matters. It's either write about Tonio, or not write at all — it's not a matter of choice. Without even having thought about it, without consciously setting out to, I was
already
doing it. From the minute the doorbell rang on Whit Sunday, and a police officer uttered the words ‘critical condition', I was composing my requiem — at first as an incantation, in the desperate hope of keeping him alive, and, later that day, with incredulous acceptance, in the desperate hope of conjuring him, in words and images, back to his former life.

Even in my vilest nightmares, I couldn't have predicted that I would one day have to devote myself to a requiem for my own son.

32

‘If there's nothing more left of that bike than scrap,' I said to Miriam, ‘then just take a few pictures of it for our archive. Ask the police to junk it. If we put it here in the hall … I don't think I could stand the sight of it. And the photos: put them in a sealed envelope until I can face it. Remember to ask about the watch.'

Since Miriam was too nervous to drive, Nelleke took them in her car to the Serious Traffic Accidents Unit near Amstel Station. It was a police domain, so there were lots of broken parking meters. After finally coaxing a ticket (or half of it) out of one of the machines, Miriam rang officer Windig, who had promised to accompany her to the depot. His colleague Hendriks answered the phone and came downstairs in his place.

Later, Miriam and Nelleke described a labyrinthine trek through corridors, stairs, rails, reinforced steel doors, and walls adorned with rolled-up fire hoses and extinguishers. All of a sudden, they found themselves in a lofty space that felt halfway between an aeroplane hangar and a parking garage.

‘I was so nervous,' Miriam said later, ‘that I only saw that one empty passenger car in the middle of an immense open space.'

She couldn't say whether it was a red Suzuki Swift. There were racks of damaged bicycles and scooters, and the sweating Miriam made a beeline, as though by radar, for Jim's bike — not that she recognised it, but she saw Tonio's shoes dangling from the handlebars in a plastic bag, their toes sticking out of the bag.

‘Nelleke, that bike … it's still intact,' Miriam exclaimed. I can almost imagine her misplaced triumph. ‘Surely a bike doesn't come through a fatal crash looking like this …'

‘That bike is going with us,' Nelleke said resolutely. ‘Not to the junk heap.'

Shoes absorb part of the soul of their wearer. It's in the slight distortion of the opening … that walked-in warp … the nuances in the grey tint of the X-ed indentations the laces leave on the tongue. It was this shoe portrait that Miriam suddenly discovered, and that broke her up.

Officer Hendriks led Nelleke and Miriam back through the labyrinth to the exit. So this is where the belongings of those caught off-guard at an intersection at night, of the flung and fallen, end up. Bits and pieces, often smeared with blood or mud, waiting for their rightful owner, sometimes surrogated by his or her next of kin.

Hendriks shook hands with the women, and reminded Miriam that she could always call. They walked to the car: Nelleke with one hand on the handlebars, and the other arm around Miriam's shoulder. Miriam phoned me before they got in.

‘Those horribly empty shoes, Adri … without his feet … without
him
in them. Gaping at me with their terrible emptiness …'

‘And the bike?'

‘Not a scratch. You could ride off on it as is.'

Miriam said she wanted to take Nelleke to the garden centre, to get her something as thanks for her support. ‘Retail therapy.'

‘And the watch?' I asked.

‘It wasn't there,' she answered. ‘It
could
still be somewhere in his flat …'

‘He always wore it,' I said. ‘Certainly when he went out.'

‘It might have come loose during the accident …'

I was reminded of an incident from my youth, which made its way into my book
Vallende Ouders.
One day, my mother, riding on a narrow bike path that cut across the meadow, collided with an oncoming cyclist and landed in the ditch alongside the path. Her left wrist was bleeding, just where her metal-link watchband was torn loose by the lip of the bike bell. The watch must have ended up in the murky, rust-brown ditchwater. We rode to my grandparents, who lived nearby. My father and I returned to the scene (me perched on the baggage carrier), armed with a skimmer. He stirred in the sludge with the kitchen tool until the sun, blood-orange red, rested just above the heath. The watch was nowhere to be found. He did fish out a long, narrow screwdriver, though, which would perform many long years of service as an aid in opening and closing defective electrical plugs and sockets.

I tried to recall Tonio's wristwatch. ‘Did it have an elastic metal band,' I asked, ‘or a leather strap?'

‘It had a kind of buckle clasp that clicked shut,' she said. ‘I remember that it wasn't really a boy's model, and it was way too loose. So they took out a link at the jeweller's, and later, when Tonio's wrists got fuller, I had it put back in.'

‘A buckle like that,' I said, ‘could easily have sprung open from the collision. It was probably left lying there on the street, and got picked up by an early-morning passerby.'

‘That person didn't arrive home with a clear conscience, then,' Miriam said. ‘The intersection was painted with yellow accident-scene stripes. If you find a watch lying there, chances are it belonged to the victim.'

She was already starting to talk in James Wattstraat jargon.

‘And what did the Control Unit have to say about the accident itself? Was the Suzuki driving too fast?'

‘A bit too fast,' Miriam said, ‘but Tonio shouldn't have crossed the street right then.'

‘And the blood tests?'

‘Yeah, he'd had quite a lot to drink.'

‘There must be a couple of thousand drunk students cycling through Amsterdam at that time of night. Doesn't mean you have to get run over.'

The bike did not have a light. In his pockets they found the small lamps that could have been attached to his clothes or wrapped around his arms. They needed recharging — which is maybe why he didn't have them on.

33

I lie on my sweat-drenched bed reading the paper, with the balcony doors opened to the cool morning air. It is moderately sunny. I read that the actress Patricia Neal has passed away. Yesterday it was announced that they found a notebook of Roald Dahl's containing his account of the death of his seven-year-old daughter, in the early 1970s. Patricia Neal was the mother of the little girl.

When Miriam brings breakfast, she seems slightly panicked. When I mention it to her, she is very much surprised. ‘I've just taken a pill, but I guess it hasn't kicked in yet.' (Recently, she takes her pills only in the late afternoon.) ‘Klaas is coming at nine-thirty … to transfer the photos of Jenny. I still have to shower.'

34

At five o'clock, a delegation of Tonio's college friends: a guy and three girls. They've brought a large bouquet with them, on behalf of the whole class, in a vase — there had been a collection — and a big card signed by all of them.

One of the girls tells us how she met Tonio last September, in a grand café on the Max Euweplein. It was at the end of orientation week, which Tonio had missed part of because he still worked full-time at Dixons. They would finally meet their missing classmate. (There, too, our histories overlap. During orientation week in Nijmegen, I was working at Daf in Eindhoven to rake together enough money to furnish my student digs. I only arrived at the university on 1 October 1970, just in time for the first day of classes, and to discover that the rest of the class had meanwhile become great friends. My social life never recovered.)

Because Tonio, true to tradition, was late, his waiting classmates wondered out loud what kind of guy they should keep an eye out for, out of all the people that came into the café. They pooled their expectations of the newcomer, and arrived at a sort of composite profile — which, apparently, was spot on.