Tonio (67 page)

His dismayed grandmother brought him by taxi to the emergency room, where his arm was encased in plaster, or rather a sort of waffled armour, the kind that was mighty difficult to fill with signatures. It happened at an awkward moment for us, because Tonio's spring break had just begun, and we were about to leave for two weeks' holiday in Greece. We were to visit my German translator and her husband in the coastal town of Horto. The hospital gave Tonio a waterproof plastic sleeve for the cast, so he could swim.

‘Yeah, those bumper cars, Tonio …' I said. ‘Risky business.'

Angry: ‘They wouldn't even
let
me ride them.'

Whenever he was really indignant, he would cross his arms, with the back of his hands arched upward — which now, because of the cast, was impossible. By the time we got to Horto, he had come to grips with his handicap. He couldn't wait to get into the water. It was endearing to see how Tonio braved the blue-green marbled bay. It was shallow, so he could easily gain a foothold on the bottom, kicking up silty little clouds. To give his motions the semblance of swimming, he executed a sort of crawl stroke with his good left arm, while his plaster-cast right arm, engulfed in its oversized and inflated sleeve, stuck upwards like a sail.

Miriam and I stood watching him from among the rocks. The spring breeze rippled the surface of the water like silver foil. From time to time, Tonio interrupted his swim stroke and stood chest-deep in the water to wave at us, then tipped back to his prone swimming position.

If that inflated lump with its illegible lettering was so comical, why did Miriam take my hand and squeeze it? When I glanced over at her, I could see that her eyelashes were wet with sea spray — even though the wind was as mild as could be, and the waves, if you could call them that, did not send up spray. Looking straight ahead again, at Tonio jerkily under sail, the gentle breeze told me my face was not entirely dry either.

Remembering how the beach pebbles crackled under our feet, I almost took a step forward, over the stone edging enclosing Tonio's grave, so as to feel the freshly laid gravel under my soles.

15

In Horto, we rented a bungalow in a holiday park, but it being low season — the first half of May — we had the place to ourselves. Helga, my translator, and her husband, Wolfgang, an architect, had built a house with a sweeping view of the sea a stone's throw from our cottage.

Along with her elderly parents, Helga had a niece, Inky, staying with her. Inky and Tonio were about the same age. They did not speak each other's language, but Tonio tried to impress the girl by clambering up the olive tree in Helga and Wolfgang's yard. Considering he could only use his left arm, Tonio developed a remarkable agility. Upon reaching the uppermost branch, he would sit and, nonchalantly ignoring Inky, stare out to sea as though he expected a ship to appear on the horizon.

Helga and Wolfgang were in Horto when Tonio died. Still in shock from the news, they planted an olive cutting in his memory near the tree he had climbed all those years ago. We received a colour photo of the sapling by email. If I say we were moved, that is perhaps the best neutral description of the pain, joy, and disquiet we experienced while looking at it. Helga and Wolfgang care for the new offspring, and we hope someday to be travelworthy enough to water it ourselves.

16

During our second week there, we (Helga and Wolfgang, Miriam and me, Inky and Tonio) took a day trip on Wolfgang's sailing yacht. Dolphins swam along, some distance from the boat, to the children's delight. The way the animals, five or six at a time, lifted themselves above of the surface of the water in agile curves, sending out entire Milky Way galaxies of silver bubbles out of the dark-blue water as they dove back in … Tonio leaned against the mast, looking excitedly back and forth … port, starboard … he didn't have enough eyes. A complete, infinite dolphinarium, and we were sailing straight through it.

Wolfgang, assisted by Helga in executing the more complex manoeuvres, moored the boat at a small, uninhabited island, which was dominated by a dilapidated chapel with an exclusively feathered parish. A forgotten set of Hitchcock's
The Birds:
they had taken up residence in every niche, every windowsill, and were in a raucous conclave on the altar. As we approached, they shifted restlessly back and forth, shoulder to shoulder, but, as though guarding their colony's lodgings, did not take flight to join their brethren circling above what used to be the roof. Tonio and Inky were awestruck, but in a slightly fearful way, perhaps because the birds sat there mumbling in chorus, as though they had abandoned themselves to a mussitated vespers.

On the way back, Tonio was allowed to man the rudder. Captain Wolfgang demonstrated how to plant your feet wide apart, to avoid falling over in case of an unexpected lurch. Since Tonio could only steer with one arm, Wolfgang stood behind him, but so unobtrusively that Tonio could maintain the illusion that the yacht was entirely under his control. As we didn't know beforehand how much spray we would encounter on board, Miriam had fastened Tonio's waterproof cover onto his arm, and it whipped sinisterly in the wind. For one reason or another, we weren't able to keep the air out of the sleeve when fastening it, so I began to wonder whether the constant back-and-forth of the balloon was doing Tonio's wrist any good.

Of course, I was touched to see my little boatsman at the helm, so serious and manly in his role, so secure in his task, one-armed like a Captain Hook … but at the same time …

‘You're mulling over your new book, aren't you?' said Helga, sitting down next to me. ‘I can tell.'

‘Oh, do you miss translating?'

She had me figured out. There, surrounded by white seagulls and silver dolphins breaking through myriad tints of blue, all I had to do was luxuriate in my immediate happiness. Miriam, up on the foredeck with her face turned to the sun … Tonio, with the rudder in his little fist, occasionally enclosed in Wolfgang's grown-up hand, steering the yacht through Greek waters … and next to me, the imaginative translator of
Advocaat van de hanen
, about to be published after the summer by Suhrkamp …

And me, instead of counting my blessings, sitting there in my own world, piecing together the fragments of the new manuscript … this here, that there, and in between, for now, a blank page … I was back in my workroom, the ship where I was captain, coxswain, and galley mate all in one.

17

Now I stood at Tonio's grave, wondering why I hadn't simply prolonged that Greek idyll. Sell the expensive house in Amsterdam, live modestly in a village like Horto … Tonio at school in a neighbouring town … I really did not need an eighty-square-metre office garden, sumptuously planted with technical vegetation, like I had in Amsterdam, in order to write. An eyebrow pencil and a roll of toilet paper would do the job just as well.

Upon take-off from Thessaloniki, there was no turning back. I had definitively chosen the confines of the writing table and the faux relaxation of the urban café. Since Whit Sunday, there was a new punishment, which would taunt me for the rest of my days: look up from my work and see the nearly seven-year-old Tonio at the rudder of a sailing yacht, cleaving its way through the deep-blue Greek waters … laughing nervously, but he does it … yes, he does it … the ship obeys him.

18

I consider myself to have been a writer since the summer of 1972, no matter what a failure my first novel was. I have published since 1978. Writing has become second nature to me. After Black Whitsun, I was apparently not so devastated that I was unable to make notes on the dirty trick fate had played on us. I now write this requiem. Say that, after fulfilling this duty to Tonio (for this is how I regard this undertaking), I am able, one way or another, to continue practising my profession and to succeed in completing the various pending projects — then, no matter how good they turn out, for the rest of my life I will be, at least in my own eyes, a
failure
.

Once again, I quote from the poem Ben Jonson wrote upon the death of his seven-year-old son:

Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

Likewise, I have the feeling that my best piece of prose is now behind me, and that it is dead and buried, and can never be outdone.

On second thoughts, I'm a little disappointed with the likeness of that etched photo of Tonio as Oscar Wilde. Too blotchy. Maybe it's because a larger, true-to-life print of the portrait, in a waterproof frame, was still there. (The men who placed the gravestone had anchored the frame firmly in the gravel.) There was some discolouration from the damp — the bottom of the photo had gone violet — but otherwise it reflected Tonio's clear glance admirably.

So here he lay all that time, without an audience, without anyone. The boy was with me the entire day, in every guise between zero and twenty-one years old. I lived with him, spoke to him, wrote about him — and yet treachery once again slithered into my soul: I had left him here all on his lonesome for weeks on end, in slow decay.

Frans scuffled about, taking photos of the group. He also bent over the plot a few times, twisting himself into contortions in order to get a legible shot of the text.

Natan stood motionless and deep in thought. Maybe he imagined Tonio in all his vigour, like the last time he had dropped by for a visit, the Wednesday before Whit Sunday. Just as with us later that afternoon, he probably told Natan of his future plans. His visit to his grandfather was likely not entirely selfless. There was a holiday weekend ahead, and he wanted to go out with Jenny. In the end, he drank up grandpa's money with Goscha and Dennis. That night in Trouw, in a sentimentally philosophical confession, he had shared with Goscha (as she told Miriam and me) his guilty conscience regarding his grandparents: that he was slack in keeping in touch with them, and then pocketed a tidy sum once he went around, only to squander it on booze.

I looked over at Natan, and caught a glimpse of him as he was back in 1993, in the Catherina Hospital in Eindhoven, where he and Wies had visited my dying father. Two men from such radically different worlds, one on his deathbed at sixty-seven and the other eighty-plus and still going strong … the one sometimes hard to follow with his Brabant drawl, the other sometimes impossible to follow with his East European brogue. After the (final) goodbyes, my father called out to Miriam's father, in his failing voice:

‘Natan!'

Natan turned around for the last time.

‘Our grandson, Natan —
what
a … !'

And with that, my father, worn out and gasping for air, raised a wobbly arm in the air and stuck up his thumb.

‘
Ja … ja
,' was the only thing that Natan, moved and embarrassed, managed to utter. He, too, stuck his thumb in the air, although this was not part of his normal repertoire of gestures.

Daniel had made a drawing for Tonio, which Frans had rolled up and tied with a ribbon. The little boy thought it entirely normal that his gift be left on the grave, but the ribbon had to be untied. They unrolled the drawing and weighed it down with a large chunk of gravel. Scrawls of red and blue, and, in Frans' handwriting, the word ‘meow'.

‘When I asked him what it was,' Frans explained, ‘Daniel said, without hesitating, “meow”. His word for cat. So I guess it's a cat.'

19

As I said in my brief speech at his funeral, Tonio would go out of his way not to argue with his parents. Even that one time when my nagging him about his lack of ambition threatened to turn into an argument: this, too, fizzled before becoming a real showdown. He simply asked for the time to prove his mettle; what else could I answer but ‘I can count on you.'

He took a job, and enrolled at the University of Amsterdam. I had no reason to raise the matter again.

In recent days, I have caught myself inventing, in my daydreams, terrible conflicts with Tonio. They always occur in moments of fatigue and mental disorientation, when the truth about his death takes on less-defined contours. A head-to-head clash, followed by deadlock, could have driven father and son apart. But no matter how terrible the conflict, even if it lasted for years, there was always the opportunity for rapprochement.

My pride in our stable relationship was now equalled by my unbridled ingenuity in fantasising conflicts between us. Nothing was too harrowing. The key point of the visions was that the son turned his back on me,
lived
— at whatever inaccessible distance. And then, one day, we buried the hatchet. The scope of the conflict coloured the reconciliation. It surprised us both that, after years of our gruelling feud, our embrace had remained so strong.

In my most horrific daydream, I envisioned a fight with Tonio about … his death. We hurled the most awful accusations of neglect at each other. Then we exhausted ourselves with self-censure.

‘I take the blame, Tonio.'

‘Cut it out. I screwed up.'

‘If I hadn't …'

‘Quit it! It was my own stupid fault.'

It ended with us reproaching each other's self-reproach, and forbidding ourselves from blaming the other. When the mist of the daydream cleared, there was no longer a life-threatening conflict. He was dead. Only a hyena dragging around a carcass makes himself think he is still fighting with his prey.