15
‘So we’re on?’ I asked all at once.
‘We’re on,’ Miriam said, smiling.
The elongated flame of the candle, the rising moon, and, in between them, the rugged terrain of Villa Tagora — everything took on the scent, the colour, the sheen of our decision.
‘Let’s drink to it,’ I said. ‘While we still can.’
I fetched a new carton of Var wine, and snipped open the spout. Red drops balled up on the scissor blades. ‘And no wisecracks about snipping the umbilical cord — from now on everything is symbolic.’
Miriam didn’t care for more wine. I knocked back one Duralex tumblerful after the other. Even after the music was finished, we stayed sitting there chatting for so long that our fleeting kisses did not particularly disrupt the conversation.
‘So …’ I started all over again.
‘Yes, we’re on.’
‘Really?’
‘We’ll do it. Really.’
‘I was just thinking …’ I said. ‘As soon as it’s born I’m going to keep a diary of his, or her, life. Every day. Everything. As a present for his or her eighteenth birthday.’
‘Then you should start with the pregnancy,’ said Miriam. ‘As a prologue.’
‘No, with today. The decision. And everything from this moment on. I’ll start tomorrow.’
All I can recall from the rest of the evening is that most of our sentences began with: ‘I could …’ or ‘We could …’ And the choice of a home birth versus a hospital came up.
‘At home, at home,’ Miriam said decisively. ‘No hospital birth for me.’
‘Y’know, Minchen, not to get on your case, but … until now, whenever we talked about having a child you were so intractable. I’ve often suspected you were secretly afraid of the pain.’
‘Oh no, no way. The pain? Then you don’t know me.’
16
I had won Miriam over so convincingly that I lost sight of my own doubts and fears about fatherhood. They reared their head now that, even with all her conditions, she had relented. I had created a danger zone for myself, and dragged Miriam and me over the line.
Within two weeks of the decision, we took the express train back to Amsterdam, so impatient were we to cleanse and prepare our bodies for procreation in the intimacy of our own home. Miriam would quit smoking, I would — at least until after a successful conception — stay off the booze. Miriam was such a moderate drinker that she had no trouble forgoing that one glass.
While we felt ourselves becoming more radiant and healthier by the day, my mother-in-law’s birthday approached. Wies had lobbied for a grandchild for so long — demanded it, almost — that we figured she’d be delighted with the news that we were bringing our bodily equilibrium into balance in preparation for a perfect copulation and a pure conception.
A misjudgement. I phoned her up.
‘No, Wies, we’re coming for your birthday, don’t worry. The only difference is that won’t be drinking on account of —’
‘Well, don’t bother coming then. Not even a little nip, what a pair of killjoys. Either we celebrate my birthday or we don’t.’
Not a word of happiness about the imminent addition to the family. It wasn’t, incidentally, her doing that in the ‘dry’ weeks that followed (abstinence from alcohol, but not from sex: Miriam would only go off the pill once our degenerated bodies had been revitalised), doubts started to creep back into my head. Whether I would be up to the responsibility of raising a child. To placate Wies, we broke down and hit the 45 per cent Polish vodka that friends of Natan in Cracow still sent him. At home, too, we occasionally cheated on our self-imposed regime. I still found, to my relief, emptied blister pill strips in the bathroom wastebasket. Maybe it wouldn’t come to parenthood all. Whenever we loosened the reins I’d sneak an extra splash into my glass. Miriam would do the same with each new half-smoked cigarette, and say it would be irresponsible to go off the pill so soon.
17
Shortly before leaving Aix, we received the news that Miriam’s aged cat Baffie had died. Once back in the Netherlands, we stopped off at my parents’ in Eindhoven on the way to Amsterdam. We hadn’t been there even an hour when I asked my father if there was an animal shelter nearby. Yes, he knew of one, not so far away. Without further ado he drove us there. Miriam glanced at me occasionally, her eyebrows raised, but she, too, refrained from asking anything.
A staff member led us past the hysterically barking dogs, their claws haphazardly playing the harp on the cage fronts, to the cat unit.
‘This litter was born in June … they’re less than a month old.’
Miriam promptly fell in love with a tabby with undersized front legs and who allowed herself to be constantly overrun by her siblings. She hadn’t even picked the runt up yet, and its claws were already tangled in her hair. ‘No getting loose now. I’ll have to take her.’
‘She’s not meant just to replace Baffie,’ I said. ‘Her job is to be a constant reminder of the pledge we made in Aix—’
‘What,’ Miriam said, kissing the kitten on the pink heart-shaped spot on its nose. ‘Is the poor little thing supposed to go back to the shelter once the promise has been fulfilled?’
So the adoption was sealed. In anticipation of a definitive name, we provisionally baptised her Brilliant-but-with-Undersized-Legs. Back on the Obrechtstraat we temporarily housed her in the bathroom, which proved to be a bad idea. The stunted front legs did not prevent her from clawing her way up the outside of the laundry basket, and jumping from the lid into the tub. She slid all the way down the slippery porcelain and practically into the drain. That’s how we found her the next morning: totally bruised, swollen with internal fluids, and bleeding.
She survived it by the skin of her teeth. So when the crisis had passed and she was able to stand on her own uneven legs, she got her new name: Cypri. Considering the result, a scant four months later, it seems she performed her function as reminder admirably indeed.
18
Usually, it’s the woman who knows, in retrospect, precisely which act of coupling resulted in conception. In the case of baby Tonio, however, I am the one who maintains: ‘the fourth of October 1987. A Sunday afternoon, between four and five.’
Miriam has never challenged me on this. We had returned from a walk through the Jordaan. Jacob Obrechtstraat 67. Huize Oldenhoeck, the place was called. We took the lift up to the fourth floor. The enclosed space had its usual cheesy body-odour smell of the unwashed caretaker. I remember this because Miriam commented on it. A deliveryman had complained to us about the smell a few days earlier.
Once inside, we were apparently in a hurry. We didn’t even make it to the bedroom. The two sofas in the living room, with their narrow seats, could not accommodate spread limbs. We kneeled behind one another on the two-seater. The Sunday tranquillity was interrupted only by the pok-pok of the tennis court behind the building.
How did I know for sure that Tonio’s conception took place then and there? I recall aiming high into her, and that the gratification seemed to come from deeper than usual. Perhaps that last detail points to momentarily heightened fertility. Our calculations six weeks later did not refute the theory that Tonio’s foetal existence commenced in the late afternoon of the fourth of October.
19
According to that year’s diary, on the morning of Friday the 13th of November 1987 Miriam came to tell me that the pregnancy test she had just performed came up positive. I did not attach any significance to that ominous date back then, and to do so now, some two decades later, in a police van on the way to the hospital, would be unwise, too.
‘So I guess I’m pregnant,’ Miriam said with a lightness that suggested it was the most normal thing in the world. She had come from the bathroom to the kitchen to deliver me this domestic notice, where (without a hangover, having sworn off a
lcohol) I was sitting down to a late breakfast.
‘Pregnant,’ I repeated, chewing and nodding. ‘Doesn’t sound good.’
We looked at each other for a moment with feigned dejection — until I couldn’t contain myself any longer, leapt up, and squeezed her close to me.
‘Ow!’
‘Oh, Minchen, this is so wonderful … so wonderful.’
When I relaxed my arms a bit in order to look her in the eye, she put on her customary clown’s pout, with wrinkled chin and puffy hamster-cheeks. ‘That’s just how it is,’ she said, her grimace accompanied by crossed eyes.
‘Come on, get into that outfit you had on recently. Make-up, too. This is something to be celebrated.’
‘Now? It’s not even noon.’
‘We’ll go kit out the nursery first. No time to lose.’
In a furniture boutique on the Rozengracht, I bought her the modern extendable dining table she’d had her eye on. It cost me a fortune, but who cares. The centrepiece of the living room would remind us of this day forever. Fully extended, it could seat ten.
‘The test didn’t say anything about octuplets,’ Miriam said.
‘Never can be too careful.’
I rang my brother from Café De Zwart. He reacted rather cautiously. ‘Don’t you think you should wait a few months,’ he said, ‘before you go telling everybody? Anything can happen.’
‘You’re not everybody. But thanks for the tip. I’ll keep it under my hat for the time being.’
Inside, Miriam was drinking apple juice. ‘I’ll have a glass of wine at dinner. Just this once. So … what’d Frans say?’
‘He says we should keep mum for the next three months. Till we’re sure nothing goes wrong, a miscarriage or something.’
‘The heck with him. I’m going to shout it from the rooftops.’
Now that my share of the job was completed, my blood no longer had to be kept alcohol-free. From now on I could drink what I wanted, and did just that. Later that afternoon, we took a tram to Central Station. Whenever we had something to celebrate, we did it at De Bisschop, a restaurant in Leiden. Of everything we ordered, I only remember the bottle of Margaux, which was — minus half a glass — all for me. While the wine warmed me I gazed, speechless, at the girl across from me, who was still my girl, but since this morning with a blissful asset that belonged indivisibly to both of us.
If the foetus proved viable and grew into a full-fledged child, then it must never escape my vigilance. Write? Only as breadwinner for the little one and his obliging parents, and only then during the time-outs from fatherhood. It was a weighty oath I silently made to myself in De Bisschop. Dread and delight struck home in alternation.
‘I’ve heard Theo mention the title of his opera so often,’ I said to Miriam, ‘that if it’s a girl, we’ll name her Esmée.’
‘Don’t let Frans hear you,’ she said. ‘In three months, we can bring it up again.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘So who’s the third?’
1
With a child on the way, we thought it best to get married forthwith. The ceremony was scheduled for 24 December 1987. I had read somewhere that in Switzerland they had invented a digital watch whose alarm would go off once a year, showing the telephone number of the local florist in the display, so you knew: today is my anniversary. I figured that putting it on a special date would compensate for my innate forgetfulness — and it was cheaper to boot.
A Christmas Eve wedding: the family was not amused. The 24th of December, damn it, was Christmas-dinner shopping day. We decided to make it an intimate family wedding, giving the hubbub of a reception a pass: my father suffered from emphysema, my sister nearly did, and my brother had burnout. But once confronted with the hostile mood on the day itself, I sorely regretted not having organised a bacchanal for my friends, colleagues, and the pub regulars.
The words that kept cropping up among the guests were haricots verts, which had to be procured from a particular Beethovenstraat vegetable shop for Christmas dinner. There was also, among my siblings and sister-in-law at least, a certain lack of empathy with the wedding itself. Surely no one got married anymore?
The only one who kept the mood up and running was my mother-in-law, who every half-hour asked for a repeat of the Mendelssohn wedding march, which I had put on for the opening of the first bottle of champagne. Once seated, my mother confessed to having spent the whole week agonising over whether to prepare a humorous speech. She had planned to bring up the cowboy chaps I had received from her sister in Australia for my First Communion: they were open at the back, of course, leaving my legs bare and thus inviting jeers from the neighbourhood scallywags: ‘Half of your pants are still caught on the barbed wire.’
The girl who faithfully sped past my parents’ house on her white scooter, without it ever having led to an affair, was another of the barbs she looked forward to. Just like my scraping together my vacation money picking strawberries, and my refusal to be caught using my father’s Honda moped.
The poor woman was not up to delivering this kind of toast. ‘So … that’s that,’ she said with that stock trivialising gesture of hers, which meant: don’t mind me, I’m too stupid for that kind of thing.
I was sorry she didn’t, all the more so because no one had taken the trouble to prepare even a modest toast. I looked over at my sister. We had grown up together. At Sinterklaas I had produced long, rhymed epic poems for her, even for the most trifling gifts. She would usually read it out in complete non-metre, and then promptly tear it up. Now that her eldest brother was getting married, she had nothing to say except the customary handful of bitchy gossip. She spent the whole afternoon sitting there with a smug smirk on her face, chain-smoking in an attempt to catch up with my father’s emphysema. With each coughing fit, her eyes narrowed into little stripes in her carmine-red face.
It never occurred to me that even our immediate family might be susceptible to outright envy. The 250-square-metre flat, this wedding, a child on the way … Things were going too well for us, and you know what, they were right.
The pregnancy was going fine, and the child’s legitimacy was confirmed. Nothing stood in its way, not even my own fears. I feared that which I loved at the same time: the vulnerability of a child.
The responsibility I so dreaded was already manifesting itself. The child was due the first week of July. My fingers trembling, I counted down the days.
2
‘What is it with young people these days?’, I wondered more and more. ‘Aren’t they angry anymore, or what? Tonio is eighteen, has his high school diploma, studies at university … but is still living with his parents. In his boyhood room. Of course we’re secretly glad to postpone the empty nest syndrome … but for him …’
Parents in the same situation, with more sociological instinct, would reply: ‘What it is, is there’s no generation gap anymore. Well, okay, there is, but it’s not such a chasm. The generational differences don’t lead to insoluble conflicts anymore. Everything can be discussed. Everything can be solved. Why run away from a father who doesn’t want to murder you, nor you him? When’s the last time Tonio and you argued?’
Never, actually. Our only argument, which never really got off the ground either, was still to come. Since he was a child, until he was at least sixteen, he would ask at the end of the day: ‘Work well today?’ (Just like, at the end of a meal, he would ask: ‘May I be excused?’ He would drop his voice an octave, as though wanting to feign the maturity befitting the somewhat affected question. He must have picked up this nicety somewhere and appropriated it, because he didn’t learn it from us.) You couldn’t argue with this kind of kid even if you tried.
Barely two years after graduating high school, he managed to find a sublet apartment in De Baarsjes with his best friend Jim. Standing on his own feet suddenly outweighed the cushy room and board
at home. It was April 2008. I wasn’t even able to help him move, as I was in the midst of a series of guest lectures at TU Delft. I do recall the stab in my heart: he had flown the nest after all. I felt a bit slighted, so that the missing generation gap also took its toll. All right, if he really wanted to trade his space, his comfy, well-appointed room on the Johannes Verhulststraat, for half a stuffy flat over in Amsterdam West: fine. Bye-bye, kid, don’t let me catch you on our doorstep with your tail between your legs.
He had completed his first year at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, but wanted to switch to the photography department at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Around the time he moved to the De Baarsjes, he broke off his second course of study, grumbling about ‘changes’ that had been introduced out of the blue. I read him the riot act for his gross lack of ambition. As I said, this confrontation, too, was a dud. He swore he was brimming with ambition, but that he’d rather, after the summer, tackle a proper university major. Until then he was planning to get a job to make ends meet — well, almost … hopefully we would still take care of his rent …
He found work at Dixons, a computer and photography-accessories shop on the Kinkerstraat. We saw very little of him after that. If he came round for a visit, it was usually on Sunday evening, when we would get Surinamese takeaway. Sometimes he would give us advance notice, but more often he just appeared in the living room.
3
I was up on the third floor preparing my lectures, while one flight below Tonio dismantled his room — the room we’d had renovated and furnished for him only a couple of years earlier, far too late. Suddenly the alarming noise of falling objects rose straight through the ceiling. I raced down the stairs.
The space stripped quite bare by now, Tonio stood desperately propping up a set of connected wall cupboards in an attempt to keep them from crashing down for good: the anchors had come loose.
Tonio Page 5
