Tonio (72 page)

Now the broadcast switched to bird's-eye-view shots from the helicopter we'd seen hovering above us this afternoon, when I'd had the confident certainty that we were being filmed as we stood at the spot where Tonio had been killed seven weeks earlier. That pair of flecks, separated from the crowd, was that us? Miriam and I sat tensely on the edge of the sofa, as though we were expecting Tonio's resurrection, filmed from the air.

‘Do you see us?' Miriam asked.

‘Helicopter's too high.'

The yellow accident-reconstruction lines on the asphalt, the chalked outline of Tonio's body, would have been the only thing you could make out from that distance, if they hadn't been washed away by rain, by car tyres, or maybe by one of those high-pressure hoses spraying a chemical cleaning agent, the kind they used to get rid of squashed chewing gum from the cobblestones of the Kalverstraat.

Miriam and I were not visible on the film images. The camera swung back to the Singel, where the team boat, surrounded by motorised police waterbikes, glided around the curve.

‘Think of that schoolhouse in Marsalès, back in '89,' I said. ‘Those two little boys in our yard. Tonio, who was learning to walk behind his buggy … and Robin, who glowered through it all. And you see? — their histories graze each other, there in that curve.' The camera showed us the back of Paradiso. If Tonio had gone there with Jenny that Saturday night, he'd still be alive; but, according to a whole lot of well-meaning and well-disposed people, we ‘mustn't think like that'. And what if this is the only way I
can
think? Thinking is like forms of government. In some places, there is a regime of freedom; in others, one of suppression. The subject has no choice but to go along with it.

41

I thought back on that day, in the same summer of '89, when we lost track of Robin while his sisters were immersed in Tonio's attempts to walk. Despite Robin's reputation for recklessness, or maybe because of it, the girls brushed it off, but Miriam and I were uneasy, so they decided to go looking for their brother after all.

I saw Robin again later that afternoon, at the campground happy hour, where the keg contained Heineken to make the Dutch guests feel more at home. I sat at a table with Robin's mother and a friend of hers, another divorcée from Rotterdam, and the friend's young daughter. The former Mrs. Van Persie was an extraordinary person, not exactly pretty, but with looks that stuck on you, or rather: they imprinted themselves in your brain like a seal in wax, indelible.

Lily and Kiki played with Tonio on the lawn. His buggy was next to me, empty. In her marvellous Rotterdam accent, Mrs. Van Persie told me about her job, her life, her family. Of the three children, Robin had taken the divorce the worst. Even when treating serious matters, her words alternated regularly with a brief, melodious giggle, or just the beginning of one — a kind of punctuation in the conversation.

Meanwhile, the children had congregated near the washroom block. Lily put Tonio back in his buggy and raced with him over to Kiki. My attention was distracted by the daughter of Mrs. Van Persie's friend. The girl, maybe ten years old, wanted to sing me a song she'd learned, using a pop bottle upended on a broomstick as a microphone. She put on a guttural voice vaguely reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, but the featherweight variant. Her performance was interrupted by screams from the Van Persie sisters, who had come running from the washrooms in our direction. In tears.

‘Mama! Mama!' they cried. ‘Robin! It's Robin! He's bleeding! He fell into barbed wire!'

‘Well, that's about it,' the mother said, rounding off her summary of the Van Persie family. Her daughters leapt around her like frightened puppies. ‘Come
on
, Mama! Robin's bleeding like crazy!'

She stood up, slow and dignified. ‘Robin again.' It was not the first time this had happened. That carpenter's square in his forehead a while ago was indeed serious business, but pretty much every day there was a wound of some size to be patched or bound.

As though to demonstrate the proper lifesaving tempo, the girls ran ahead, looking back anxiously at their mother — who walked, straight as an arrow and unhurriedly, toward the washrooms. I had to keep an eye on Tonio, so I remained at the table, which in any case was littered with various small items belonging to the Van Persies. I watched the mother. The crowd of children parted for her, and the ruckus died down. A little while later, she led her son, pushing him gently forward, past the tables toward their tent. She greeted me with a gesture signifying: this is just how it is. Robin held his wounded arm outstretched, tilted slightly downward, so that the trickle of blood, having originated in the neighbourhood of his armpit or shoulder, wound its way to his wrist. He frowned as sullenly as that morning in our yard, but he did not cry.

42

Early that same fall, the Van Persie sisters came for a visit with their mother (without Robin, who by now was living with his father). Adults who meet during summer holidays should avoid renewing the acquaintance afterwards, when everyone has re-immersed themselves in day-to-day life. Awkwardness and tongue-tied embarrassment take over. Kiki and Lily, however, were oblivious to all this, and their need to cuddle Tonio had not dwindled.

But something else had changed. Tonio, now two months older, ran around the house as though he had never done otherwise. I don't remember if we had prepared him for the girls' visit, and if so, whether he understood
which
girls. The visitors' voices drew him out of his room. There he stood, in the doorway between the bedrooms and living area of our apartment, with his blue-cotton elephant under his arm. I don't hold with the cliché of the beaming bride, beaming faces, or beaming babies, but just this once I'll admit it was the truth: when he saw Kiki and Lily, he radiated an almost iridescent joy. Out of pure bliss, he gathered up a fine gob of spittle on his drooping lower lip, which soon hung in a quivering strand halfway to the floor. Tonio had not only recognised their faces but their body warmth, their eager and secure arms, their scent.

Squealing with delight, the girls pounced on the little boy. ‘Tonio, can we see your room?' He waddled proudly ahead, down the hallway leading to his private domain. Miriam brought them snacks every now and then, but otherwise we didn't see the trio for the rest of the afternoon. When I took a peek around the doorway, I saw Lily with Tonio in his crib, singing to him. He giggled, listened, and giggled again — as though every verse contained a punch line, and he wanted to show he had caught it. Meanwhile Kiki worked on constructing a tower out of Tonio's colourfast, drool-proof building blocks.

If I think back on these and later situations, I'm surprised how often he, as an only child, was surrounded by girls. Isoude, Femke, Merel, Iris, Alma, Pareltje, Jayo, Lola … Tonio loved women of all ages, and women loved him, ever since he was a tyke. Amazing that a boy like this would later worry about girls.

Love, not woman, was problematic.

43

Here, in the curve now being shown, Tonio was killed. ‘Run over like a dog,' I once said in one of my worst bouts of anger. Two metres below street level, following the same curve, cruised the boat carrying football hero Robin — on his way to the tribute on Museumplein. My recollection of the two boys at the Marsalès neither added to nor detracted from Tonio's death or Robin's triumph. It was what it was.

A camera, set up on the mooring across from the Salt & Pepper shakers,* filmed the players' wives, some of them with children, as they waited for the boat. One heavily made-up face pulled itself loose from its Modigliani neck, disintegrated into little coloured blocks, and was rebuilt from these same blocks as though they had imploded back together.

[* Notoriously ugly 1970s twin buildings across the Stadhouderskade, on the Weteringschans, so nicknamed because of their boxy ungainliness.]

‘So this is what she got herself all dolled up for,' Miriam said.

‘Minchen, I think after all this jerky camerawork, we can handle the Holland Casino footage, don't you?'

Miriam switched off the TV. ‘I don't know. When the policeman from the accidents unit told me on the phone what that film showed, I was sick to my stomach for days.'

‘Come on, that disc has been lying in your computer for long enough now.'

‘I don't think I can watch it. Later, maybe. Someday.'

‘Remember when we took Tonio to see
The Lion King?
When the buffalo went wild and stampeded over the lions, he couldn't bear to watch it anymore. He got down on his knees in front of his chair, laid his face on the seat, and plugged his ears. You're free to do exactly the same if it gets too much for you. But at least come sit next to me.'

‘I'm afraid I won't even dare close my eyes.'

‘Listen, Minchen. Back at the
AMC
we watched him die, close up. If we can do that, we can do this, too.'

44

Two small figures danced with goofy, wooden leaps across the crosswalk between the Max Euweplein footbridge and the entrance to Vondelpark — apparently to dodge a vehicle approaching jerkily from the west side. I know nothing about cars, but from the documentation for my novel I recognised it as a Suzuki Swift. The car might have slowed down some for the pedestrians and, once past the crosswalk, sped up again, but from the jerky images it was impossible to tell. The Suzuki jolted around the wide curve of the Stadhouderskade, toward the next crosswalk. At the same time, a cyclist approached the same spot from the Hobbemastraat, thus more or less from the south. The traffic lights at the intersection appeared not to be on.

The collision between car and bicycle took place precisely between two consecutive frames — as though someone had snipped out, in an act of censorship or for some other reason, the collision itself. So we had a result but no cause. The CCTV film showed a stopped Suzuki Swift with a bicycle lying in front of it, and a more or less prone, slightly curled up figure behind it. The driver got out of the car, wooden as a marionette.

Miriam stood leaning over me from behind, her bosom tucked into my neck, and I could feel her gasp. Her fingers, lying loosely on my upper arm, now dug into my flesh. The driver jumped to his next position — and then the film went dark. I set the video back to the beginning, and replayed it.

‘No, not again,' Miriam said, crying. She hid her face in my neck, and I felt the warm wetness of her tears.

‘Oh yes, now I want to know everything.'

That quasi-discreet omission of the
moment suprême
. The tidy division of oncoming figure into cycle and cyclist, split between front and rear bumper. Head and shoulders of the passenger getting out of the car. Strange: in the rerun, the CCTV film went on for longer. The driver's leap led to the victim. And with another such leap, he was back at the car door.

I pushed the pause button. The driver had a hand to his ear. Perhaps the Forensic Institute could make a giant blow-up of this frame and see what number the man had dialled. I knew already: 1-1-2.

Again the screen went dark. I scrolled back. It was as though I expected the images of the collision itself would, sooner or later, come into view.

‘Minchen, see those running pedestrians? … they could have distracted Tonio. Coast clear for them? Then for him, too. Ride on through.'

Miriam had stopped watching a while ago. She hung heavily on me. I replayed the film a number of times. More eagerly, it seemed, the more I got used to it. As though I had found a way to erase the images of the accident from my memory by overfeeding them. It's true, the replays gradually became numbing. The video, with its jittery figures and all, suddenly started to resemble Tonio's very first video games, which he operated with deft little fingers. Except that
this
game could not be manipulated. No matter how often I replayed it, the car hit the bike every time.

‘Adri, stop now, will you, please.'

‘Look, there's more.'

If I let the video play on through the blank, black screen, four rotating lights, jerky and flickering, suddenly came into view: two from police cars, two from ambulances. The jolting images made it look as though the victim was being literally thrown, stretcher and all, into one of the ambulances.

Miriam had lifted her head off my shoulders and watched the last images, sniffling quietly. ‘Our sweet Tonio … why did this have to happen?' (I'm almost certain she said ‘
does
this
have
to', using the present imperfect: it happened, after all, at that very moment, in front of her own eyes.)

The ambulance with Tonio in it jerked into motion, leaving behind a flea circus of uninterrupted, hopping mini-figurines. With something in between a sob and a sigh, Miriam nestled her head back onto my neck, murmuring the words she'd used since the first night, when all other expressions of grief seemed to be depleted: ‘Our little boy.'

With my arm stretched back tightly around her neck, I sat there staring at the screen. The running clock at the bottom of the screen said 05:09:14. Was the Holland Casino still open at that hour? I imagined that behind the high front wall, on which the security cameras were mounted, the balls on the roulette wheels just rattled on. A tired croupier raked up a fortune in chips. The mysterious yellow-eyed customer finally dared to loosen his necktie a bit.