Tonio (62 page)

Roelof Hartstraat. The traffic lights at the intersection are flashing yellow. Individual responsibility. There is almost no traffic. The occasional taxi. To the right, the College Hotel, whose loutish owners chopped down the trees. To the left, the road becomes the Coenenstraat. On the one corner, the local branch of the public library, where you and Miriam used to go to check out books. And on the opposite corner, Huize Lydia, where as a child you went to see your grandparents, when it was still a neighbourhood community centre (Grandpa Natan was treasurer).

Along Van Baerlestraat, too, trees were sacrificed during the recent ‘restructuring'. But right now, urban-planning atrocities are not on your mind as you pedal further on Jim's bike under the streetlights. Still a ways to go until the Nepveustraat. You're tired after two nights of hard partying. After all the euphoria of the past few days, the Jenny fantasies, visions of the long weekend ahead, you bike home all on your lonesome — a thought that drapes a dull melancholy layer over everything.

You ride past the Van Baerle/Nicolaas Maas junction. There, on the corner, my colleague K. Schippers lives. (I gave you his novel about photography as a present.) Once, I stood chatting with him on the sidewalk in front of his house a little too long for your pleasure. Out of impatience, or attention-seeking, you crawled under the unbuttoned back panel of my raincoat. If you walked backwards a bit, I was transformed into a variant on a circus horse, a kind of baggy-clothed centaur. Your excellent performance, while embarrassing me, pleased Schippers, who was a fan of clowns and patchwork animals.

‘As half-man, half-horse, you're free to piss on the street …'

At least fifteen years ago, this incident. You approach the intersection in front of the Concertgebouw. Behind the buildings at your left, two blocks of houses deeper into the De Lairessestraat, the Jacob Obrechtstraat runs parallel to your route. You spent the first years of your life in the large apartment building called ‘Huize Oldenhoeck' — those precious years of which you have no recollection (me, all the more). It occurs to me that on your final bike ride, you keep frighteningly close to the houses of your youth. You cycle, with a few zigzags here and there, along the images and settings of your earliest years. Look to the right, across Museumplein. You know better than I do where the hangout spot was, where the older boys gave you your first drag on a cigarette. You secretly hope that the Dutch football squad goes far next month — not because you really care all that much about the sport, but because of the festivities on the Museumplein grounds.

9

At the Concertgebouw, I know you're always reminded of your boyhood friend Jakob, who was run over by a truck on the corner of Van Baerle and De Lairesse. The truck did not have a blind-spot mirror. Jakob was cycling to the Vossius: it was his very first day at the gymnasium. He only barely survived. That same week you started at another gymnasium, the Ignatius, so the news of Jakob's accident didn't reach you right away, you heard it on the grapevine. It was one of the few times we really lit into you: you told us the news far too late, and almost in passing: ‘Oh, guess what I heard … y'know, Jakob, right? Well he was …'

Now I think you didn't appreciate the seriousness of the incident, the lethal danger. And anyway, Jakob and primary school, those days were long behind you, a new life was opening up. And yet you kept apologising, with tears in your eyes, for your negligence: you were starting to cotton on.

The traffic light changes to green. Now we have to talk turkey. I advise you — no, I beg you — to turn left here onto De Lairesse. A few blocks further, past the Jacob Obrecht, turn right onto the Banstraat. Then just a tad to the left — to your old house on the Johannes Verhulst. The whole front stoop is free to park your bike.

Kid, you're tired, you've been drinking, you're about to keel over, bike and all, from fatigue. Forget that whole trek out to De Baarsjes. Sure, Jim will be disappointed, but he'll figure it out for himself, and sooner or later he'll go to bed. You'll explain it to him tomorrow.

You
think
you've got your wits about you, because you're brooding about Jenny, but in fact it's just sluggish, lovestruck daydreaming. Granted, there's hardly any traffic at this hour, but … you also have to take that Eerste Constantijn Huygens/Overtoom crossing … a left turn … the taxis drive like maniacs there at night.

You've got a key to the house. (It's hanging, if I remember correctly, on the same ring as the key to your bike lock.) You always manage to slip noiselessly up the stairs. You won't wake us, I guarantee you. Besides, I'm wide awake anyway, thanks to a churning stomach from having eaten way too much garlic last night; I'm sitting upright in bed like a cat retching itself free of a hairball. It's nearly half past four, I see on my watch. There's no light yet coming through the curtains.

Go lie down on the living-room sofa. The afghan that Mama was curled up under last night while watching TV must be there somewhere. Pillows galore. You spent sixteen years of your life in this house. After graduation you were in no hurry to leave — you stayed under your mother's wing for another two years. So what's another night? Do it for us. You're bound to move back in this September anyway, when you have to leave the Nepveustraat. The census people say statistics show more and more young people living at home again after a few years on their own. The demographists call them ‘boomerang kids'. There is no generation gap anymore.

C'mon, there's no shame in it. Sleep in tomorrow morning as long as you want. Mama will make you a fantastic Whitsun breakfast.

10

For a moment, he seems to hesitate, but that's his unsteady way of biking. He stands, his buttocks off the saddle, nearly motionless on the pedals, and almost falls over. He could still turn left just past the Concertgebouw, along Café Welling, where as a child he put in so many pub-hours with his father.

Tonio goes straight ahead. His is a fixed route. Van Baerle, past the Stedelijk Museum, over the Vondelpark viaduct, Eerste Constantijn Huygens. Left on the Overtoom, continuing on to De Baarjes and the insomniac flatmate.

At the next intersection, too, he can still reconsider. Left on the Willemsparkweg, and he'll be home in a jiffy. His manoeuvres suggest he's going to turn right onto the Paulus Potterstraat, but he quickly corrects his course, returning in a gentle curve to the Van Baerle, where he cycles past the old music conservatory, now being renovated into a chic hotel.

If he turns, now focused and resolutely, onto the Jan Luykenstraat, then at once I'll know what's possessed him.

You know, Tonio, sometimes I worry about your eating habits. Your friend Jonas, himself a good eater who never gains an ounce, says you've shed many kilos these past two years by systematically skipping meals and quashing your appetite with cigarettes. Take today. You nibbled at some snacks at that duff party in the Vondelpark this afternoon, and that's it. The three of you drank beer at Goscha's place, and later, in club Trouw, Goscha could hardly keep track of the rounds. Food — no thought of it.

For years, you would make your rounds past the work tables in my study. Once a manuscript lay there entitled
Voedzame hunger
. You asked: ‘What's that, Adri, “nourishing hunger”? You can't eat hunger, can you? How could it be nourishing?' I explained that the story was about love, and that love resembles hunger, but the kind of hunger you and your lover gorge yourselves with. ‘Look at it this way … being madly in love makes you forget to eat. With lovesickness, it's even worse. You live on your own reserves, until you don't feel hunger anymore. That's what they mean when they say that someone is consumed by love. It guts you.'

Miriam says I completely lack didactic talent, and my wise lesson will not do any good today, either. I don't know how things stand with your feelings for Jenny, but I do know they haven't suppressed your appetite to that of a sparrow. You've got what, forty years ago, we called ‘the munchies'. The only place in Amsterdam you know where you can satisfy that urge at this time of night is in the neighbourhood around Leidseplein, with its fast-food automats and shawarma joints.

It won't be a banquet. You've only got a fiver in your grey wallet, plus a fistful of coins.

Your hunger might persuade you to make a U-turn after all and plunder our fridge. As I said, you wouldn't wake me, because my recalcitrant stomach already has. And your mother, she's such a deep sleeper that you'd have to let a jar of pickles slip through your fingers to rouse her. Go on. The cats will come sniff at you, rub along your calves with their thick, furry tails.

Now I understand why you nearly turned onto the Paulus Potterstraat. So far, all north-east-heading streets here lead in just one direction, to Leidseplein and the snack bars. But for sentimental reasons you took the next street, Jan Luyken, where you went to school. The playground of the Cornelis Free School, completely vacant in the clear night. Aren't you tempted to stop for a moment, rest your foot on the curb? You used to holler and cavort on this paved patch of courtyard. There are your old teachers … the cheerful Loes, the somewhat mysterious Jeanine … They were crazy about you. In that now dark, impenetrable building, you learned to read, write, and do sums. You built a Viking ship there and, dressed up as Dorus, you performed
Er zaten twee motten
. Day after day, a Moroccan kid waited for you on this playground in the afternoon, first sweet-talking you and then making off with your first mobile phone.

Jakob lived a ways further up the street. His father still lives there. One afternoon, there was a misunderstanding between Mama and Grandma Wies. Grandma was supposed to pick you up from school on a different day than usual and take you to play at her place on the Eemstraat, because she had already left Grandpa Natan. Someone must have made a mistake, because no one came to fetch you. Jakob's dad, who came to pick up his son, waited with you for a long while.

‘So where does your granny live, Tonio?'

‘On the Eenstraat, I said so already,
jee
pers.' And more vehemently: ‘The Eenstraat, Joost, the
Een
straat!' Do you remember, Tonio, how the incident turned out? All right in the end, apparently: we didn't have to put out an Amber Alert, or whatever the missing-child alarm was called in those days.

Oh, so you're cycling further? I notice I'm still trying to tinker with your timing. A second here, a second there. You're now passing Joost and Jakob's house on Jan Luykenstraat. They hosted the reception after the school play that marked the end of primary school. While the parents drank cocktails in the living room, you and Jakob and your classmates retreated to the basement. It was so quiet down there, contrary to all our expectations, that after a while one of the mothers, maybe Afra's, went to make sure you hadn't all been asphyxiated in the closeness of the basement. She came back nonplussed.

‘They're sitting there, crying. All of them.'

From that moment on, a group of mothers periodically descended to the cellar. When the door opened, the bawling could be heard above the adult hubbub upstairs; the sobbing persisted shamelessly. Miriam returned, pale, from the basement.

‘Incredible, what a pity party,' she said. ‘I've never seen so much childhood anguish in one place.'

‘Tonio, too?' I asked.

‘Yeah, what do you think. They've just realised they might never see each other again. I don't know who it started with, but they've set each other off.'

Once in a while, a mother herded her big baby into the living room, where he or she, red-eyed, could cool down before being allowed to return downstairs to the orgy of blubbering. When Miriam decided it was time to take you home, you came to say goodnight to me with a face withered by prolonged crying. You couldn't muster up a smile anymore. It was for real.

11

Are you grinning right now, on your bike, as you think back on that bawl-fest? Or does it make you wistful, because time has so bitterly confirmed your classmates' cellar-snivelling? That was goodbye. From that basement, you split up and swarmed to high schools across the city. In the course of the past ten years, you bumped into an old classmate from the Cornelis Free now and then, but these were mostly awkward encounters. The old camaraderie had been left behind in the Nijsen family's basement.

At the end of the Jan Luyken, the massive, dark-red Rijksmuseum looms to your right. You've always thought it intriguing that the largest and most valuable of the city's treasures just hang there in the dark, unseen, their fate in the hands of a soulless security system.

Left onto the Hobbemastraat. The asphalt glistens with embedded bits of glass, as though the road surface is mirroring the starry night above, but you're too tired to lift your head and cast your eyes upward. You do see, in a flash, the book stalls set up on either side of the street for an Uitmarkt some ten years ago. You and I stood behind the table at my publisher's stand, signing books together.

You've got other things on your mind now: a döner kebab from the Turkish snack bar. It was your favourite lunch when you worked at Dixons — plenty of shawarma joints in the Kinkerstraat neighbourhood. Heading toward your destination, you cycle between the tram rails of lines 2 and 5. You pass the leather-goods store where we bought Mama that red-brown set of bags for her fortieth birthday. You always managed to send costs skyrocketing with your expensive taste. You enjoyed giving presents even more than getting them. ‘She's sure to want a toilet bag, too … don't you think, Adri? Look, it's made of the same leather. And here, this carry-on bag, the same leather, too.'