Tonio (60 page)

I drag myself up the stairs. The door to Tonio's old room is ajar. Light falls through the door opening, clearly not from a regular bulb — it's too white and cold for that. Back in 2008, Tonio left his hide-a-bed (once intended for overnight guests) behind, which Miriam has since used to escape from my snoring or the hiss of my CPAP machine.

I stand on the landing, holding my breath, and listen. The cats, curious, emerge from the room. They sit in front of the half-open door. The light behind them seems like the dawn light that pours into the room through the open curtains. But that can't be — it's half past two in the morning.

I push the door open a bit and look around the corner: Tonio's dismantled room, where Miriam plans to move her study, furnished as much as possible with his things once they've been moved here from De Baarsjes. She has already installed her new computer on a writing desk. The wide-screen monitor bathes the room in a cold, numbing light. Miriam lies on the bed, the comforter pulled up to her navel. She lies as she seldom does: on her back, with her sumptuous dark hair fanning out over the pillow.

My eyes returns to the computer monitor, where I see a blue block and some text in white letters. I cannot read it from here. Surrounding the blue block is a pearl-grey area, the source of the deathly light. Words jostle each other in my head, until just one ghoulish term remains:
FAREWELL NOTE
.

The cats have slid noiselessly back into the room, and now stand in a symmetrical pose in front of the bed, glaring at me. I take a few steps back to the landing, where I stand trembling as I stare at the half-open door — until the light in the room goes off by itself. I find my own bed, where for the rest of the night I do not get a single moment of shuteye.

Like every morning, Miriam brings me breakfast at around eight-thirty. I tell her I saw a light in her room at a quarter to three.

‘Oh? Didn't notice. The cats do that. At night they traipse over the keyboard, which can make the screen jump on. I sleep right through it.'

O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the school of night.

Generations of scholars have racked their brains over these lines from Shakespeare's
Love's Labour's Lost
. What could the ‘school of night' be? I'm no Shakespeare analyst, but thanks to all those nights that have passed since Black Whitsun, I think I do have an inkling. From what I have learned in these past months of night school — I wish I could reflect even a fraction of it in this requiem.

31

Yesterday, Hinde checked the voicemail on her new mobile number. There was a message from St. Vitus. A staff member informed her: ‘Eh … well, it's like this … this afternoon your mother tried to … jump in front of a car, to, you know … Some passers-by managed to restrain her. They took her to the police station, and the police brought her back to us. Judging from her condition, we're considering taking her back to the Valerius Clinic. Could you give us a call to discuss the situation?'

Aside from upset, Hinde was, of course, livid. You don't go and plop that kind of message onto someone's voicemail — you ask them to ring you back, adding, if need be, ‘It's urgent.'

Yesterday evening, Miriam came home with the mobile phone at her ear, listening to a voicemail message. ‘That was Hinde … wants me to call her back. She sounded pretty down. I hope it's not about my mother.'

Miriam called her sister. I kept an eye on her face, which was as tense as could be. ‘Oh no!' she cried, after listening for a bit. I could hear Hinde's unamplified voice, but couldn't make out what she was saying. I knew there was indeed something seriously wrong.

The previous evening, Miriam had gone inside with her father after bringing him home from Beth Shalom. He complained that he'd been rung a few times by his ex-wife — something she had never done, except anonymously, in the seventeen years since the divorce. She insisted (‘It's an emergency') he give her Hinde's new mobile-phone number, which had just been changed, along with Miriam's and mine. Natan, taken completely by surprise, did not see through her ruse quickly enough, and gave her the number.

While Miriam was in the living room with her father, the telephone rang again. ‘Let me,' she said. And, sure enough, it was Wies, who was shocked to get her other daughter on the line.

‘So you visit Papa,' was her first reaction, ‘and not me …'

‘Think about it,' Miriam said.

‘And you won't phone me either?'

‘Nope.'

‘Then I'd rather be dead. Do you hear me? I'd rather be dead.'

‘You … you fling death wishes and death threats as though … as though it's Sinterklaas candy. Don't you realise, woman, that you're just crying wolf? Every time you get Adri on the phone, you want to die … the sooner the better … and he's supposed to relay the message to me. It's the middle of August, Tonio hasn't been dead even three months, and you announce you're thinking about passive euthanasia. Pining away, whatever. Do you ever just once think about
me
? My son got ploughed over in the middle of the street, okay? I'm trying not to let it ruin me. And you … you just bulldoze your way through my grief with your disgusting death wish. Leave me in peace. You've never cared about me.'

At that point, the receiver went down on the old-fashioned telephone.

My mother-in-law escaped from St. Vitus yesterday afternoon. She ran to the nearby Nassaukade, where she tried to throw herself under a moving car. Passers-by held her back. Hinde did not know whether she tried to wrestle loose from their grip, or if she went calmly with them to police headquarters, which is nearby. She also did not know if the police had made an official report of the incident. All she knew was that they brought Wies back to the old-age home.

Miriam was dejected after that phone call. She didn't say much. I could tell she was furious. Miriam had relived the terrible accident that had cost Tonio his life thousands of times in the past three months. And now her mother had decided to go the same way: to throw herself under the wheels of a passing car, in order to, God only knows, find the secret passage to Tonio. Hundreds of times she had moaned on the telephone that she had no need to live, that she wanted to die, and that she wanted to join Tonio — and still her suicide attempt felt like a knife in the back.

‘It's like one of those copycat crimes,' I said.

‘She's trying to punish me,' Miriam said quietly. ‘She knows exactly where she can hurt me the most.'

32

I only went downstairs after I heard the moving van drive off. From the second-floor landing, I could see Tonio's furniture spread randomly throughout his old room. Boxes with smaller belongings were stacked in the downstairs hall. Miriam looked woebegone.

‘Less than I'd expected, fortunately,' she said.

‘Any sign of the watch?' I asked.

She shook her head. The thought crossed my mind that maybe he had been negligent with it, or had taken it to a pawn shop. After all, two weeks before the accident we'd promised him a new one (owed to him ever since his final exams, along with the cost of driving lessons). Tonio was chronically short of cash. On the other hand … material objects, especially gifts from a loved one, had a sentimental value — he wouldn't just go and pawn them off.

‘Let's just say, shall we,' I said, ‘that it got lost during the accident.'

I thought back with shame on the LP records my mother had gone to a great deal of trouble to get me for Christmas, and which I unloaded for far under their value because I thought my turntable arm had ground an unpleasant hum into them. If that wasn't negligence, then I don't know what was.

I had recently discovered so many parallels between his student days and my own, thirty-five, forty years ago, that the pawn shop was not entirely out of the question.

33

At long last, before the apartment on the Nepveustraat was turned back over to the diddler who had sublet it to the boys, someone found Tonio's watch on top of the dividing wall between the shower and toilet. The wristband was broken. The watch itself was still set to standard winter time. Daylight saving time started at the end of March. In our ongoing reconstruction fever, we concluded that the band had broken at least two months before Tonio's accident. He had probably noticed the watch hanging loosely on his wrist during a visit to the toilet or shower, and had put it up on the divider to free up his hands. It lay there unused for five months, or longer, passively extending winter time.

‘The idea that half-asleep or in a drunken stupor, who knows, he left it lying there …' I said to Miriam, ‘and forgot where he'd put it …'

‘That does shed new light on the purchase of that new watch,' she replied. ‘Who knows how bad he felt about it.'

‘Well, we never got around to it.'

‘He was too
beat
.'

Miriam had the watch meticulously repaired, shortening the wristband to fit her own arm, which is (was) far more slender than her son's. Since picking it up from the jeweller, she wears that watch — with its extra-masculine look, thanks to the little buttons on either side of the twistable outer dial — constantly, day and night.

CHAPTER SIX

Nourishing hunger

1

Shortly after she cleared out Tonio's flat in De Baarsjes, Miriam refurnished his old room in our house with all his original things. For days, I dared not enter the room, but when I once unthinkingly went in, I was struck by his good taste — pricey without being lavish.

Even the oversized train-station clock, which he himself had gotten the biggest kick out of, was back.

Two weeks after Whit Sunday, the photographer Klaas Koppe brought round an envelope full of blow-ups in which Tonio happened to feature, such as a few taken at a recent Book Ball: Tonio with his parents, Tonio with Klaas's daughter Iris. Miriam framed them at once, and hung them in a much-used curve in the stairwell. Not long thereafter, she came in, teary-eyed, to say she'd packed up the photos and replaced them by less-recent ones. Later, I discovered a paper bag on the landing with the framed photos. I pulled one out (Tonio and Iris) — and took a blow to the gut, which then nearly got wrung out. Tonio had not been so tangibly present since his visit on 20 May. I quickly slid it back into the bag — which is still there, propped in the same corner.

In the midst of Tonio's completely reconstructed teen bedroom, Miriam still
does
manage to breathe. She sits there all day long at the computer, with Tonio's laptop within reach. When I want to talk to her, I tend to stay out on the landing, and conduct the conversation through the half-open door.

2

Miriam gets up at 5.00 a.m. every day to go to work in Tonio's room. Around nine, as I lie reading the paper in the next room, she brings breakfast. We eat and talk, side by side, propped up against the pillows. Radio 4 is on.

This morning, she came into the bedroom without the breakfast tray. A light slap on my legs told me to scoot over, so she could sit on the edge of the bed. She was not crying, but her face was taut.

‘Able to get anything done?' I asked.

‘I was suddenly so afraid of losing you, too,' she said testily. ‘And there I'd be, mourning Tonio all on my own.'

Then the tears came. When there was no other way out, I took refuge in literature.

‘The end of
The Trial
… remember, Minchen? That Josef K. believes the shame will outlive him? Well, my grief for Tonio will long outlive me. I don't know how long
you
think you'll outlive me, but you'll always be able to share your grief with me … until your last breath … it's strong enough for that. Even after I'm dead.'

‘I didn't mean I think you'll die soon.'

‘That I'd start on a second brood after all, is that it?'

‘Y'know … just the plain fact that I could end up alone, and be the only one who …'

‘Minchen, there's no morgue tag hanging from my big toe yet, nor is there a guarantee for longevity. There's no tag hanging on your big toe either. Let's take it day by day. Together. Let's do our best to guard each other against sickness. If that's asking too much, then let's at least try not to
make
each other sick. Or crazy.'

3

When Rimbaud wrote
Une saison en enfer
(
A Season in Hell
) at his parents' home, after his disastrous sojourn in Paris, his sister listened at the door of his room, behind which she could hear his anguished sobbing. As a seventeen-year-old with writer's itch, this intrigued me no end: the concept that reliving, in poetry, one's own experiences could have such a powerful effect on one's disposition. I should from now on mistrust every word by my own hand that is not well-nigh illegible from grief and melancholia.

Since I have started working on this requiem, Miriam complains (her computer being situated directly below my writing table) of sudden bursts of noise above her head. She says I regularly slam my chair backwards, curse loudly, then stomp to and fro, at times ranting unintelligibly.