Tonio (52 page)

Our four visitors, especially the girls, gush enthusiastically about Tonio's helpfulness, and not only in class-related matters.

‘He was
so
nice …
so
friendly.'

They shook their heads dejectedly as they reminisced. I asked about that ‘parents evening', which we had missed. They groaned with embarrassment. Yeah, something really did go wrong. The organisers decided at the last minute to change the dinner venue, and the email with the new information never reached Tonio. ‘Although,' one of the girls said, ‘I did see him later that evening at the Atrium café.'

Miriam told them how our evening had panned out. ‘It was a pity to have missed you and your parents, but we had a wonderful evening. In retrospect, even more so. It was the last time the three of us had such an intimate dinner together … without knowing, of course …'

Perhaps because of the tears in her eyes, the students all stood up at once, as though on cue. I didn't want them to leave. The boy, Jörgen, was the only one to have accepted a beer. I tried to coax him to stay for another, but he politely refused.

‘I guess we'll be going,' said one of the girls.

‘Just one more question,' I said. ‘Did any of you hear Tonio mention a girl named Jenny recently?'

‘Jenny …' The name was repeated a couple of times. They looked inquiringly at one another, hesitantly shaking their heads.

‘Not that I know of,' Jörgen said. ‘At least, there's no Jenny in our class.'

‘She was, how should I put it,
new
in his life,' I said. ‘No one in Tonio's circle of friends appears to have met her. We get, well, the impression that in the last week of his life something might have been brewing between Tonio and this Jenny.'

It was irritating that I couldn't show them a picture.

‘We didn't see Tonio that week,' one of the girls said.

I was beginning to look like a fogeyish matchmaker, but one with a very specialised mission: to couple Tonio posthumously with a woman. Tonio's classmate Claire offered to have a look on Facebook or some other social media to try to find out about Jenny.

‘It's okay, don't bother,' said Miriam. ‘I've finally managed to reach her by telephone. She's willing to come by. We're just asking around, you know, what kind of girl she is. And especially, well, how serious they were.'

35

Us and our detective work. At times, I watch from a distance as Miriam and I make the rounds, knocking agitatedly on doors. Our mouths move, we gesticulate. I know we are asking about Tonio in his last days, but without the sound it looks more like we're going door to door demanding our son. ‘Give him back … we know he's in there.'

After the students left, Miriam and I dove for the bottles, which we did not dare to do in the presence of the cola-drinking girls.

‘I'll order a couple of pizzas,' Miriam said.

We talked even more greedily than we drank. Every day, three times a day, theories having to do with Tonio's disappearance spun around in our heads. They all had to be put to the test.

‘Minchen, have I already told you about my variant on the scorched earth?'

‘Doesn't sound pretty.'

‘Everyone makes mistakes in their life. It's all about what you do with them.'

‘Learn from experience,' Miriam said. ‘That's what they say, anyway.'

‘For now, I'm thinking about how you look back on them, those mistakes. Even if I've long redeemed myself, I can still cringe with embarrassment at the memory. The incredibly stupid things. Even totally on my own, I want the earth to swallow me up, let me tell you. As a kid, I had the tendency to obsessively repeat to myself the hideous blunders I'd let loose in adult company. Just to wallow in the shame. Maybe I was out to punish myself … to better my life.'

‘Gee, makes me almost want to forgive all the stupid things you've done to me.'

‘Since Tonio's death … if I look back on my life, I see nothing
but
mistakes, gaffes, idiocy. Even things I wasn't dissatisfied with back then, that other people complimented — now they don't stand a chance. And why not? Because everything I ever undertook, even long before Tonio came along, could count as the groundwork for his death.'

‘Don't be so hard on yourself,' Miriam said, now without sarcasm. ‘It's inhuman.'

‘I've got no choice. This is the way I see it. The death of my son is
proof
that my life has been nothing but one big blunder. When I look back on my past I see a vast, charred expanse. My memory has applied the scorched-earth tactic. Every blessing I've ever thought I'd counted has been burned. It's all out of reach.'

Miriam gave up protesting this morbid take on things — perhaps (but I hoped not) because she shared it. Her glance drifted more and more toward the corner sofa, Tonio's regular spot. I knew the tears wouldn't be long in coming.

‘Whenever I think of … of how he always sat over there,' she said, not for the first time. ‘With Tygo on his lap, writhing around under his hands.' She was already crying. ‘The thought that he'll never come walking through that door again, ever …' She stamped her feet on the floor and yelled: ‘Adri, it hurts so much. Help me. Please just help me.'

The pizza menu, where the phone number of the delivery service was printed, was downstairs in the front hall. Miriam left the room to place the order. I sat there, exhausted with grief, more from hers than from mine, staring into my greasy glass, when suddenly the living-room door sprung open. I started, as I used to do when Tonio dropped by unexpectedly. First came the vague, dark reflection of a figure in the white paint of the door, and then Tonio stepped through the opening. He always gave me that childlike grin of his, like when he had hidden himself to tease his parents, and suddenly reappeared.

(‘Say, have you seen Tonio?'

‘Nope, not for a while.'

‘I'm starting to worry.'

‘I've looked everywhere. Nothing. Nowhere.'

‘Well, I guess we should make some calls then.'

This was always the moment when he would leap out of the laundry basket, gleefully blurting out: ‘You
really
thought I was missing, didn't you?')

Miriam had once again neglected to close the door properly behind her, so that one of cats only had to jump up against it to shove it open. I sat with bated breath, waiting for the arm that would push the door further open. Fooled again. Our ginger tomcat, Tygo, came zigzagging into the room.

36

Summer 1990. Having fled the war zone in Loenen, I turned in desperation to De Pauwhof, a doomed artists' colony in Wassenaar (where you were expected to take tea with the widows of the sculptors who had drunk themselves to death) to finish my book. I had left Miriam and Tonio behind in the Veluwe, where they were at the mercy of the fickle landlord/neighbour, who would sometimes just switch off the electricity for an entire weekend. I was so afraid Tonio would forget me that every other day I went to Wassenaar's only toy shop to buy him a Matchbox car, which I then sent off to Loenen, accompanied by a drawing or postcard.

The shop had a limited range. How many could I send before running out of models? Miriam subtly let me know over the phone that Tonio had received the stretch limo twice already: grey with a black roof.

At De Pauwhof, I made friends with the musicologist Albert Dunning and the elocutionist Maud Cossaar. Miriam and Tonio were planning a day trip to Wassenaar, so Dunning's wife, Jeanine, bought a small gift for the boy — from the same toy shop. It was beautifully wrapped, but when she presented it, Tonio grudgingly unwrapped the gift and reacted with the vaguely bored comment: ‘Oh … a car.'

Jeanine was slightly miffed, but Albert had a good laugh over His Lordship's ho-hum reaction. From a balcony somewhere above our heads, Maud Cossaar exclaimed, with the diction of an interbellum diva, her arms outstretched: ‘Don't
you-ou
have a charming little family!'

What Jeanine did not know was that Tonio had been sent the very same car, in the very same colour (yellow) by his father, identically gift-wrapped. Sigmund Freud claimed that children had the tendency to throw a toy out of their crib every time their mother left the room — to give themselves the feeling it was
them
who had showed mama the door. Freud does not go into expelling the father in this manner. And yet it seemed that this is precisely what Tonio had in mind when he flung, with a decisive and potent gesture, that yellow car into the rhododendrons that surrounded the Pauwhof terrace.

No matter how thoroughly we combed the dark inner reaches of the bushes, destroying a good number of flowers in the process, we were never able to find that little yellow car. Tonio watched our fruitless efforts with amusement.

37

It is Friday afternoon. Miriam and her friend Josie take Josie's daughter Lola to a party. Jenny is supposed to come pick up her portfolio photos at four o'clock. Miriam has agreed to give them to her: I don't want to be there. Just to be on the safe side, I've left the door leading from my workroom to the landing ajar so I can hear the doorbell if Miriam's not back by the time Jenny arrives. In that case, I can buzz the girl in and ask her via the intercom to wait for Miriam downstairs.

Four o'clock, four-fifteen: no doorbell, and no sound at all drifting up the stairwell when I go out to the landing to check. I dial Miriam's number. Voicemail. She rings back a bit later.

‘I'm just having a drink with Josie at a café. Jenny cancelled. Bladder infection, just like that afternoon with Tonio. Tomorrow she's going on holiday for three weeks. She'll come fetch the photos when she gets back. Promised to, anyway.'

The cancellation rankles me. I say: ‘Don't let it get to you, Minchen. Jenny probably can't handle it yet. Every photo she sees bears witness to Tonio just out of view. Evidence of that afternoon together in our house.'

‘To be honest, I was dreading it, too,' Miriam says. ‘I'm relieved she cancelled.'

She says she'll pick up some sushi from the Japanese takeaway, to nibble with a cold glass of something. I have a sneaking suspicion that as far as dinner goes, that will be it. ‘See you later.'

That evening, out on the veranda, we wondered what good it had all done — the talks with Tonio's friends, nosing around, going to all that desperate bother.

Mostly a bit of distraction from the — in reality — insoluble problem. And yes, now we knew that he'd spent his last night in the company of Goscha and Dennis, and not with Jenny. And that he did not come from Paradiso, but from club Trouw, and after that he had cycled off on his own to his flat in De Baarsjes.

Why
the date with Jenny didn't go through: unclear.
What
had brought Tonio to that intersection of the Hobbemastraat and the Stadhouderskade: no one had the foggiest idea. Nor the precise circumstances of the accident itself: the police investigation was still underway.

All right, after a lot of digging around, we had managed to unearth the results of the photo shoot, but Jenny had still not picked them up. Jim and Dennis were supposed to organise a small exhibition of Tonio's other photos, but we didn't hear a peep out of them. Jim's brazenness to Miriam only drove us deeper into despair.

We had wanted to defend and protect Tonio, in his now-defenceless position as a dead person, but we hadn't counted on the indifferent, run-of-the-mill betrayal of the living. If this sounds bitter — it
is
bitter.

The heavy-duty envelopes with Tonio's photos of Jenny lay there between us. His last earthly task. Neither of us had the courage to look at them, because we knew as well as Jenny that on each and every print, conspicuously invisible, was Tonio's presence. His keen eye, peering straight through the glossy paper. What was in that envelope was a collection of snapshots etched in Tonio's memory on Thursday, 20 May 2010 — a memory swirling with Jennys.

‘So. Here we are,' said Miriam. ‘Photos located, model AWOL.'

‘Just look at us,' I said. ‘Too shit-scared to open a packet of snapshots. And Jenny? She wouldn't be able to see a single print without getting Tonio's squint into the bargain … the top of his head as he bent over his Hasselblad … No, she didn't dare. Actually, I find it kind of touching that she's now claiming the same ailment as the day of the photo shoot. Maybe she had the jitters then, too.'

‘Then I'd just as soon she didn't come by three weeks from now either.'

‘We'll just wait and see. If it takes too long, we'll make contact ourselves. We have the right to hear her account of the whole business.'

38

Since Black Whitsun, I have cursed, more than ever before, the vulgarity of what opinion leaders call
low culture
, and in the expression of which I find nothing that even obliquely reflects or clarifies my present situation.

I was wrong. Miriam's encouragement, some time ago, to ‘let it all out', scream out my misery, apparently shook something loose in me. This morning, I heard the old song ‘My son, my son' by Vera Lynn on the radio. My mother used to sing it now and again, fumbling through the English lyrics. It starts out with a rather ripe male chorus, but then suddenly you have Vera Lynn, with her swelling belt voice.