Tonio (55 page)

‘Second brood,' Miriam says. ‘You're dodging the issue.'

‘Minchen, once and for all: I don't have the instinct of a tribal leader that offers up three, four marriages for the sake of producing, at long last, a first-born son … and subsequently only thinks eight generations ahead. Honestly, I am not going to go build a new nest. I could give you a whole slew of reasons why not. For example, that back in '88, at the age of thirty-six, I was already a belated father. Or that for a new child I'd already be a grandpa … No, the real reason is because I want to stay with you. That I want to live out my life with you. Our names will soon be joined together on Tonio's gravestone. We have a dead son together. We will both die childless.'

‘I'm so frightened,' says Miriam.

‘Childless … and not, either. You can't erase the fact that for nearly twenty-two years we were Tonio's parents. Until the day we die, our job is — no, not to keep his memory alive, but to keep
him
warmly alive. I need you for that. And you need me. We are the heirs of the person he was. The executors of his life, his works, his words … But the most important thing is that we keep him wedged in between us forever. Only that way will he let himself be nourished. With love, with memories. No way, a second brood. Tonio remains our progeny.'

11

I ring my mother-in-law in hospital. Today is her eighty-fifth birthday. Contrary to my expectations, she answers the phone, but her voice is nearly inaudible. If I stylise the bits I think I understand, I come up with: ‘I'm old. I don't need to go on any longer. You all are still young … I hope you'll pull through … that you'll be able to write again someday …'

After the umpteenth repetition of suchlike phrases, she says, suddenly perfectly intelligible: ‘Well, I have to hang up now, I've got visitors … and there's someone waiting in the hall, too. Thanks for the flowers.'

That visitors are clamouring to get in is not entirely plausible. Perhaps it's her way of showing her displeasure at our absence on her birthday. And as far as starving herself to death goes: Hinde reported recently that her mother had announced that she ‘rather felt like some bonbons' again.

12

Fortunately, it wasn't necessary to track Jenny down and press her to tell us her story. Exactly a month after the cancelled visit, and a week after returning from her vacation, Jenny rang Miriam. They made a new appointment.

‘I'll make sure the photos are ready,' Miriam promised.

‘The photos aren't the main reason I'm coming,' Jenny said.

13

As though the summer had resurged just for the occasion: it was that kind of day, bathed in swirling light, when we finally made Jenny's acquaintance.

Despite the heat, almost unbearable under the flat roof, I had spent most of the day upstairs working on this requiem. More and more, it was taking on the form of a detective-like reconstruction, albeit without a private eye or a Commissioner Maigret. You could hardly call it a whodunit. Yes, if you could eventually single out fate as the perpetrator. The desperate parents had thrown themselves into a case reconstruction. The
what
, the
how
. In that order.

I had described the uncertain hours preceding Tonio's death, the dying itself, the consternation, the funeral, the discussions with friends who had been with him on his last night, the accounts of the police and the trauma surgeon. I had reported on the search for his bicycle, his clothes, his watch, his camera, his photographs. Everything had been checked off, except a chat with the girl from the photo session.

I turned off the fan, tired of constantly picking up sheets of manuscript paper that had fluttered out of place. I had briefly considered plundering Tonio's glass display case of volcanic and other stones in order to have enough paperweights, but I was afraid that, at the sight of all those minerals and semi-precious stones Tonio had collected and displayed, I wouldn't get a single letter set to paper. For the same reason, I did not open the awning on the balcony: too many associations with the last time Tonio and I spoke.

Today at five o'clock, we would, if all went as planned, finally get to meet Jenny. No wonder writing was such a chore this afternoon. I could blame the heat, but it was Jenny I needed in order to move on. If she was able to answer a few questions that were still troubling me, I could perhaps round off my requiem for Tonio, before it crushed me.

At the same time, I dreaded the meeting with a distaste bordering on revulsion. Who could guarantee that what Jenny had to say wouldn't cause me to cave in altogether?

The piano jingle of my mobile phone. Miriam. ‘Not too hot up there?'

‘I was just about to come down.'

‘I'm taking my father to Beth Shalom a bit earlier today. So I'll be home in plenty of time to let that girl in.'

‘I'm having a hard time of it.'

‘Me too.'

It was a quarter to four. I'd been sitting up here, sweating and stinking, for long enough. Under a tepid shower, I thought of Tonio and girls. Of what Dennis and Jim had revealed about it: that girls had been on Tonio's mind a lot recently … that he'd come to them for advice … Once again, I was fretting about something that no longer concerned him. Quandaries that could no longer trouble him.

There had been no lack of sex education. But the attendant difficulties, had I prepared him sufficiently for them? There had never been any prudishness between us, although we never overdid it and turned our house in to a nudist colony. When, as a toddler, he occasionally saw me naked, he would prance through the house, gleefully exclaiming, over and over: ‘Whoa, what a big one … whoa, what a big one.'

Once, he must have been about eleven, Tonio burst into my workroom, panting from the three flights of stairs. He positioned himself next to my desk, and without preamble dropped his trousers and underpants. Arching his back, he held out his organ between thumb and index finger. Being the son of a Jewish mother made him technically a Jewish boy, but he had never been circumcised.

‘It hurts like crazy,' he said, pointing to the reddened foreskin, which, like mine, was rather elongated, but apparently not very loose, perhaps too tight. ‘Mama said I should show you.'

‘It looks a little inflamed,' I said. ‘You have to wash the spout on the inside, too, not just the outside.'

‘That's what makes it
hu-u-u-u-rt.
' He shivered theatrically, imitating a cartoon character getting a prolonged electric shock. ‘It's way too tight.'

‘What you have to do is, every time you wash it, soap up the spout really well. Try to slide it back a bit more each time. Until one day it's gone as far back as it can. Plenty of soap.
Tons
of soap. It takes practice. You'll see that the spout will loosen up over time, and won't hurt anymore.'

‘Yeah, but … yeah, but,' he whined with a put-on small voice, ‘if my hand's full of soap, then I can't hold onto anything.'

‘Goodgawdalmighty … then keep a pail of sawdust handy.'

Wearing the most solemn expression in the world, he pulled up his trousers. Before he turned and left the room, he gave me a tense, and a tad glum, look.

‘So what're you going to do now?'

He could no longer contain himself, and guffawed it out. ‘Soap up my spout, of course. Soap up my spout, what else?'

And off he went. I heard him laughing as he skipped down the stairs. At first I thought: he is going to tell his mother. But he stopped a floor below me, in the bathroom, where a while later you could hear water running. For the first time, I wondered if it might have been better to have had him circumcised at birth. If he indeed had inherited my foreskin, genetically speaking, he could, owing to the wrong kind of sensitivity, encounter lovemaking problems later. If pain won out over lust, then impotence lay in wait.

I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower stall. About six months later, Miriam had told me, a bit embarrassed but also laughingly, about a television evening with Tonio (twelve, by that time) and the sisters Merel (thirteen) and Iris (fourteen). Tonio and Merel had been an item for years, but the hyper-intelligent Iris was indispensable to this constellation: she was the most creative of the triumvirate, and managed, by inventing new games and adventures, to drag the other two out of their lethargy. On the evening in question, they were all watching the 1973 film
Turkish Delight
. They had missed the titles, but were treated to a bruising opening scene with Rutger Hauer, dumped by his wife and feeding his longing with nude photographs of her glued to the wall.

‘Shit, goddamn it,' Rutger exclaimed, trembling, ‘shit for me … then I'll lick the shit from your arsehole.' (Or words to that effect.)

Tonio thought it was hilarious, but the girls were bewildered. ‘What's he doing?' asked Merel.

‘Jerking off, of course,' Tonio answered, laughing. ‘He's jerking off.'

‘What's that?' asked Iris, who was always the one who had to explain things to the other two.

‘Jerking off, Iris,' Tonio exclaimed triumphantly. ‘You mean you don't
know
?'

My shower was just a bit warmer than cold, but no matter how much I dried myself off, the sweat just kept streaming down my body. It couldn't only be the heat of a summer day. I'd have given anything to put on my baggy shirt and jogging pants and sit out on the veranda, the doorbell turned off, so as to slowly drink myself into oblivion. I perspired from things I did not want to know about.

Oh God, please let Jenny have a relapse of the kidney infection … well, not too seriously, please, the poor thing … but bad enough to have to cancel at the last minute … maybe the antibiotics didn't do the trick last time … say we just post her the photos …

Tonio was thirteen. It was a regular school day, but he had showered at an unusual time of day: in mid-afternoon. As I needed to use the bathroom myself, I lay on my bed waiting until his poorly dried feet crossed the landing with a sucking, slurpish sound to the door with the poster
GENIUS AT WORK
. The bathroom was steamy and humid. A generous scent of pine gel, stuff I never used myself, filled the air. I never liked showering right after someone else, but hey, come on, this was Tonio. I pulled aside the nylon shower curtain. A classic still life: on a bed of matted dark hairs, a bird's nest in the making, that clung to the drain, lay a large white glob of Tonio's freshly shed semen.

Good, I thought, intensely satisfied, that's taken care of. God, kid, I hope you enjoyed that with majestic embarrassment.

14

With everything that annoys me about him, in literally unguarded moments, I can immediately point to something corresponding to my own student days. The reckless drinking, the cycling without a light, the bungling perseverance with girls, an unshaved look, neglecting grandparents (except when it came to extra pocket money), late nights, sleeping in, a trashed house, a chronic lack of money, a chronic shortage of study hours and course credits …

In fact, I cannot think of
anything
of which I say: I did that better when I was twenty-one. Maybe I went to bed with more girls, but that was only partly thanks to my seduction tactics, which suffered greatly under my innate shyness. Those were different times. Sexual revolution? Nah, it was just the pill. You didn't ask a girl if she was ‘on the pill': she would warn you if, on the outside chance, she was not. Crabs and the clap were the fifth column of 1970s student life, but being the pre-AIDS era, the turn-on was never turned off by the talcum scent of a freshly unrolled condom.

It was now 2010, and AIDS had still not been licked, and for the remaining venereal diseases they'd thought up a collective name: so much transmittable misery threatens the love life of young people these days. Once again, one has to negotiate, or at least confer, and never since Mr. Condom saw a profit in a tied-up lamb's intestine has there been as much fussing with rubbers as there is today.

This is not going to be an unauthorised biography of Tonio — more like an unauthorised requiem. Am I sufficiently aware that Tonio's take on some events might be different from mine? Would he prefer not to have seen certain facts in print at all?

He was two, or nearly. The three of us were in the train, perhaps en route to my parents' in Eindhoven. Tonio had a sketchbook and coloured pencils with him, but he'd stopped filling the page with scribbles, so I amused him by making simple drawings. Sucking intensely on his pacifier, he watched my doings with sleep-laden eyes. After rendering a cat in a variety of positions, I then drew a portrait of Tonio, with his long locks, the pacifier like a clown's mouth, and the security blanket he kept pressed against his ear. I showed it to him. His face cleared. He laughed.

All right, then, next portrait. The big eyes, the sumptuous curls. I folded the paper in half lengthwise and tore out a small hole where the mouth was. After flattening the paper back out, I took Tonio's pacifier out of his mouth and stuck it through the hole in the paper. I held up the portrait. Almost the same as the last one, which had made him laugh so heartily, but now adorned with a real-life pacifier. Quoting from ‘
Nader tot U
', I exclaimed: ‘Is that true to life, or is that not true to life?'*