Tonio (54 page)

7

Since Tonio's funeral, Miriam has no desire to see her mother. This is only partly because of the way Wies insulted me during the post-funeral reception.

‘My attention is focussed on Tonio, and no one else,' Miriam says. ‘I'm trying to survive.'

Despite my aversion to the woman, I do feel sorry for Wies, so I occasionally ring her up. If she doesn't answer, there's no point in leaving a message, because she does not know how to retrieve her voicemail. If she does answer, she immediately begins wailing and screeching, so that I can hardly understand her. Her voice squeaks and cracks and grates.

‘Tonio, such a good boy … why? why?' That part I do understand, every time.

I'm torn, I'll admit it. I see before me the brazen face with which she shunned her ex-husband at the funeral, and at the same time I think: Tonio was her only grandchild, she took care of him, Tonio took care of her yard (for a price), Tonio got her mobile phone in working order.

Her endless repetition of everything means I gradually pick up pretty much all of it. ‘And you … you probably can't write anymore, can you?'

I assure her I that I am writing. About Tonio.

‘I hope you'll be able to write again someday. And Miriam, how is she coping? Are you two holding up together? I never hear from her anymore …'

‘Miriam's mind is entirely on Tonio. She needs to focus all her energy on dealing with this terrible event.'

‘I understand that … I do understand. But she'll have to come see me
once
, at least. When I die.'

This she repeats, almost triumphantly, in each telephone conversation. She often says: ‘I don't want … don't want to live anymore. I'm going to Tonio.'

Hinde came by the day before yesterday. Her mother has decided to let herself die, and soon. She has chosen to wither away. No more medicine, only morphine for the pain. She refuses food and liquid.

Miriam is beside herself. ‘She's using Tonio's grave as her final podium … to give one last theatrical performance, to go out with a bang. Doesn't for a moment think of me … that I'm trying to come to grips with Tonio's death. She just bashes her way through the whole grieving process. It's blackmail, that's what it is. I put our contact on hold temporarily, so now she's going to
force
me to visit her. How did she put it? “Miriam will have to come to me
once
, at least. When I die.” Uh-huh. Now I'll have to. One last breakdown. Right between Tonio and me. Then she'll be satisfied.'

Suddenly, the accents are shifted. Intense discussion between the two sisters. Consultation with my mother-in-law's psychiatrist.

‘She's done it again,' Miriam exclaims. ‘Once again, she's got me spending my whole day thinking about
her
. Instead of about Tonio and that I miss him so goddamn much.'

8

Since Miriam, despite her mother's languishing, still does not want any contact with her, I ring Wies a little more often, say once a week. If she doesn't answer, I get her voicemail, on which she announces herself with only the sound of her breath, which is undeniably hers. In this way, I discovered that human breathing, too, also contains a non-exchangeable fingerprint.

If she does answer, and I say my name, she begins at once to cry and shout.

‘Not a minute goes by when I don't think of him … I get up with it and go to bed with it … I don't want to live anymore. I want to be with him. I hope I die soon. And you two … will you be
all right
? Miriam doesn't want anything to do with me. It upsets me, but I do understand. I only hope …'

On top of it, she has come down with shingles.

‘Shingles is also called St. Anthony's fire,' I say, just to say something, and then she really breaks down.

‘That darling Tonio … he's there somewhere. He's hiding … he gives me all kinds of signs. St. Anthony's fire. I hope I'll be joining him soon.'

9

I know no one who takes her dreams so seriously, and often so literally, as Miriam. She is quick to dispel daytime misunderstandings, but not nighttime ones. This morning, she reproached me, half in tears, that she had had an ‘
aw
ful' dream about me. When she says it like that, in that tone, what she really means is that
I
caused her to have a bad dream.

‘Now, of all times,' she snarled. ‘How dare you.'

‘Be a little more specific,' I said, ‘so I can confess to my crime.'

‘You'd left me for another woman.'

She gave me a dirty look. There was no doubt in her mind that I was fully responsible for my behaviour during her REM sleep.

‘Well, think about it,' I said. ‘It's simply the fear that, now of all times, I could start on a second brood. I hate the word, but that's what Flip called it when I bumped into him pushing a baby carriage. “Second brood, y'know … ” '

‘Oh, so that's what you're thinking about. A second brood. You see? Once again, my dreams speak the truth.'

I followed Miriam with my eyes as she crisscrossed the bedroom with choppy, agitated steps and a wiggling bosom (no bra on yet). That nightly drinking of ours had led both of us to start puffing up. I'd been having the problem for years now, but now Miriam's belly was starting to protrude more and more. I had to be the one to set an example, and be the first one to leave the glass untouched.

‘Come on, Minchen, wait a sec.'

‘I'm going to shower. I have to go over to my mother's this morning with Hinde, yeah? You go fantasise about your second brood.'

My mother-in-law had meanwhile been put in hospital with her shingles. They had decided to admit her after finding her stark naked and completely disoriented in the hallway of the retirement home. I knew this was a tall order for Miriam, who since Tonio's death had come down with a severe case of matrophobia. Too much baggage there. She went mainly to shore up her sister.

After the chaos of conflicting feelings in the weeks immediately following Whit Sunday, I had decided to be as merciless as possible in my self-reflection — an unsparingness that over time might bring some clarity to my present and future situation. In the context of this introspection, the notion of a second brood, like Flip's, had not yet come up. Was my desire for an heir, now that this, in the person of Tonio, had fallen by the wayside, so strong that I could attach myself to a young, fertile woman? Apparently I needed my wife's dreams in order to ponder the question myself.

I followed Miriam by ear as she went from the shower cell to Tonio's room, where she got dressed. Ten minutes later, the strident doorbell: Hinde. Women's voices, cut off by the echo of the front door. I had hoped she might come say goodbye, just to show that for her, too, it was only a game, posturing, put-on indignation. But, no, you didn't mess with Miriam's dreams.

10

‘How was your mother?'

‘Completely disorientated. At least that's how it looked. She mainly lay there, staring into space. Once in a while, she spewed out an incongruous word. The doctors think she's got temporary aphasia. I have my doubts. At a certain point, she snarled something like: “You've gotten fatter … are you pregnant or what?” Hard and tactless, but to the point.'

‘She's really something,' I reply. ‘Her fifty-year-old daughter is grieving the loss of her only child, and then she just asks offhand if you're pregnant. Way off the mark, but you're right, it's got nothing to do with aphasia.'

I look at my darling Minchen, who stares from the back of her eyes, deep in inscrutable thoughts. What she sees, I wish I could reconstruct via her facial expression, without asking. If she is so far away, there is only one place she can be: with Tonio. I imagine her taking stock of her life's biological history. All those preparations in the flesh … The changes in a girl's body. Her first period, and all of those that followed. The ever-ticking clock of ovulation. Sexual blossoming. Unrequited loves. Lovesickness. Requited loves, and, finally, again the lovesickness.

True Love.

All the sperm delivered but rebuffed by contraceptives. And then all the sperm that is
not
sabotaged by contraceptives. The negative tests. That one positive test.

The various stages of pregnancy, for three-quarters of a year. The worry about miscarriage. Decorating the nursery. The countdown. Labour. The pain. The joy. The fear.

And all of this just to be able to hold
that one
in your arms, to later take by the hand and to help grow up. And all of this effort just to lose
that one
, forever, so that the entire process of nature and spirit only served to create an illusion, and then to destroy it.

She looks up, meets my speculating gaze. ‘What?'

‘What were you thinking of?'

‘What do you think?'

I first got chatting to Miriam at her twentieth birthday party. This fall she'll turn fifty-one. I have experienced her in all available moods, period or no, just as she has been subjected to all my states of mind, hangover or no. How many times does a man, in the course of three decades, ask his wife, noticing her angry or teary face, what's wrong?

‘You look so sombre.' How many times in the course of all those years has she said that to him? ‘I'm not going to sit here looking at some sourpuss all night.'

Since Black Whitsun, I no longer need to ask Miriam this question at every brow-furrow, nor she me if my mouth happens to droop. This will hold true for the rest of our mutual future: we know exactly what's wrong with the other. Mind-reading is not that difficult when the mind is fixed on one thought, for forever and a day.

‘Minchen, years ago we saw a documentary on TV about that Italian gynaecologist … remember? He ran a kind of posh clinic where he managed to get post-menopausal women pregnant. Sixty, sixty-five years old, they were all welcome for fertility treatments. At first, all hell broke loose among the medical-ethics people, but women came to him from all corners of the earth. Women who, after a busy career, still wanted children … or only met the love of their life at a more advanced age …'

‘I get it,' Miriam says. ‘You feel so sorry for my mother with that blunder of hers about me being pregnant … now you want me to go to that Italian clinic for therapy. I wonder if it still exists, actually. I'll look it up online.'

‘It's just a daydream, Minchen. I only want you to dream with me … about what it might bring us.'

‘A lot of pleasure, and even more misery.'

‘I'd get to see a child reach its twenty-first birthday before I turned 80,' I say. ‘You'd only be in your early seventies. Think about it.'

‘I
am
thinking about it. We would get to go through every stage of Tonio's development one more time. Great. And then? We'll never see what Tonio's future had in store. No graduation, no career, no wedding, no grandchildren, no … nothing. But what about when we're old folks, how much of Tonio's successor's future will we get to see? Not much, maybe. Thanks a lot for the offer, Adri, but I'll pass.'

I don't have an immediate response to this. And she hasn't yet brought up the inevitable fears that would go along with a new case of dangerous-growing-up. Oh, it would be far more fraught than with Tonio, because after him, our fears would be completely justified by his fateful death. The newcomer would be made to suffer twice over because of the unknown predecessor, the missing brother. The child would have a hell of a life with two bodyguards posing as parents.

‘Well, nice of you to consider it anyway, Minchen. Consider the appointment with Dr. Antinori cancelled.'

‘Oh, so you'll go for a second brood in another nest after all.'

‘Quit it about that second brood, will you,' I say. ‘It takes two to tango. Doesn't it?'

‘Where there's a will, there's a way.'

‘I don't want that
way
. I don't even want that
will
. Listen, Minchen … the fact that Tonio is gone for good feels like complete emasculation. With his death I've lost so terribly much. A great love, my best friend, the heart of my future. A masculine muse. And yes, my progeny, too. The grandchild I might have been able to hold someday. There are, at least as far as I know, no apocryphal Van der Heijdens roaming around anywhere. The single outcome of my manly efforts here on earth was Tonio.'

‘Remember what you used to say, when Tonio was little, when people asked if we were planning to have more children? “No,” you'd say, “fatherhood doesn't suit me, but I had to try it out once. I could never die without ever becoming a father.” That's what you said.'

‘Try it out … if I said that, then with hindsight it does sound kind of sinister. As though it was a one-off experiment that could either succeed or fail. Depending. All right, I
did
try out fatherhood. And with brilliant results. Now he's gone. The boy, the man, who was supposed to take it all over from me. He has left me without heirs. Here I am, a retrospectively sterilised father … Don't think that I often thought of myself as a future grandfather. Seldom, in fact. Through Tonio, the way he acted around me, I could consider myself still young …'