‘If Tonio really is so much like me,’ I said to my brother, who sat next to me at the bar in De Kring, ‘then he’s got an uphill battle ahead of him.’
Frans, who knew me in my early twenties and even lived with me for a while, sputtered out a feeble denial just to be polite.
There were plenty of cards and passes, complete with address, in the pockets of Tonio’s wallet, so I suspected that there had indeed been more urgent matters than tracking down his parents.
‘Here’s an ID card from the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis,’ I said to Miriam. ‘What would he have been doing there?’
‘Jaw surgeon,’ she said with a shrug of revulsion. ‘Wisdom teeth.’
The nurse came in with a tray, and arranged the Thermos cans, cups and glasses on the table. ‘The traumatologist will be in to see you shortly,’ she said as she was leaving. ‘If you need anything, just check the corridor, one of us will be there.’
4
Since being roused from bed, I had hardly spoken, except with Miriam, but every time I opened my mouth, first to the police officers and now to the nursing staff, I was painfully aware of the heavy odour of garlic on my breath. I didn’t smell it myself, but seeing as we hadn’t had breakfast yet I knew it rose straight from my gut. (This morning, when I went downstairs, the kitchen door on the first floor was open. Spread out on the bread board were four rolls, sliced and waiting to be buttered. Oranges alongside the juice squeezer. A still-life in the wake of bad tidings.)
What time had the policeman said Tonio’s accident occurred that morning? Around 4:30? The flood of saliva brought about by the garlic overkill had woken me at about a quarter past four. No, don’t go there: I wasn’t about to start seeing premonitions and signs in everything. An upset stomach as a warning of Tonio’s impending disaster? And what was I supposed to do with this cryptic message delivered by peptic Morse code?
Once again I couldn’t help but notice the parallels with the circumstances of Tonio’s birth. Then, too, stomach cramps that turned out to be contractions had taken us by such surprise that we skipped breakfast. The previous evening, we’d eaten Surinamese food from Albina, a takeaway restaurant on the Albert Cuypstraat. I had ordered a portion of their dangerously spicy fashon sausage, which I only ate if I knew I had no social obligations for the next three days, because the dish transformed your mouth into an unwashed arsehole. And so I arrived at the Slotervaart maternity ward on the morning of 15 June 1988 with a contaminated mouth, augmented by an empty stomach. I dared not open my mouth for fear of endangering the delivery with my toxic fumes.
5
I don’t know where the additional information came from, but meanwhile the exact time of the accident was established as 4.40 a.m. Four weeks before the longest day: was it already light by that time, or still dark, or midway? When daylight savings time kicked in, we set the clocks an hour ahead, which meant that for the next seven months the sun would rise an hour later. I seemed to remember that in the old days, before daylight savings time was introduced, it was already broad daylight when the Nijmegen nightclub Diogenes emptied out at four-thirty or five o’clock at this time of year. All right, we’re talking about weekend hours. On weekdays Diogenes closed at 3.45, and in late May it was still pretty much dark.
I couldn’t be totally sure. I decided to set the alarm clock for 4:30 the next day so I could check the sky at twenty to five.
But if it turned out to be still dark at that time, it would automatically raise the next question: did Tonio have lights on his bike, or at least those little clip-on lamps on his clothes?
I wasn’t at my post this morning. No late-night revelry behind me, no hangover to sleep off, but I did just lie in bed, no denying that. Even waking up to a saliva flood and churning stomach presented me with no other thought than: once it’s passed, try to get another hour of sleep … work to do …
I should have been there, on the Stadhouderskade, to restrain my recklessly cycling son, steer him out of harm’s way. There was no one in the room to accuse me of anything, but I hardly needed a pointed finger to feel guilty, to know I was guilty. I sat next to Miriam shuddering and sweating with guilt for what I had carelessly let happen that morning.
My thoughts continued to hover around Tonio’s birth — undoubtedly due to the congruence of the circumstances. The uncertain drive to the hospital … the torturously long wait … If I were guilty of allowing his accident, it’s because I was accountable for his birth in the first place.
If, at that moment, someone had entered the room to tell me that back on 15 June 1988 I had intentionally let the midwife drive the wrong way in order to sabotage Tonio’s birth, then I’d have believed it. From the moment that I wanted a child, I also did not want one. Ergo: my insidious ambivalence made Tonio a sitting duck from the word go. This morning was proof — perhaps irrevocable proof — of it.
6
Of course, there was a large clock in the delivery room, as conspicuous as at a train station: the time of birth had to be established unequivocally and on the spot. It was seven-thirty in the morning. Miriam lay in great pain on a bed, the midwife on her left side and a maternity nurse to her right. Normally not prone to being superstitious, that day I found myself wondering if being at the wrong hospital would bring bad luck.
They each held one of Miriam’s hands while spurring her on. ‘Breathe, honey! Breathe through the contractions!’
‘Hey, don’t bite!’ shouted the delivery nurse when Miriam, reacting to a particularly strong contraction, sank her teeth into the nearest available limb. ‘Pant! Don’t bite!’
I looked on helplessly from a distance. My delicate little Minchen was not cut out for childbirth. I should never have saddled her with this.
When the contractions subsided for a moment, the redheaded maternity nurse who had met us at the lift went to fetch coffee. When she returned, she pressed a paper cup into my hand and whispered: ‘I think your wife could use your help right now.’
So coffee in hand, I sat down on the stool next to Miriam’s bed. I took a sip and bent over to whisper something encouraging, but before I could get a word out she cried: ‘No, please! Not with that coffee breath! Ugh, it stinks … I’m so nauseous … I can’t stand it …’
Never before had she looked at me (or through me) like that. Not only as though I were a complete stranger, but a hostile one at that. I noticed that even now, in the throes of labour, she emphasised the word can’t — as a child she adopted this one quirk of her father’s accent. ‘I can’t stand it.’
Her reaction made me recoil and nearly knock over the stool. So this was how ill giving birth could make you. I fled to the corridor, set the still-full coffee cup on a window sill on the way to the WC, rinsing my mouth a good five or six times, gargling with water until my throat went raw.
When the contractions resumed in full force, the women laid Miriam on the floor.
‘Don’t be alarmed, honey. You can push better this way.’
They put a pillow under her head, and there she lay, on the scuffed linoleum, with three women kneeling around her. The maternity nurse wiped up small amounts of faeces that came out with each push. The midwife put a stethoscope to Miriam’s belly, offering the mother-to-be a listen, but Miriam shook her head vehemently as a sign that the hooks be removed from her ears: by now, everything was an intrusion. The midwife signalled me to come listen. I’d have rather not, but I didn’t want to come across as an indifferent father. I knelt down next to Miriam, and with the stethoscope attached, I tried to hold my breath (it was the combination of Surinamese sausage and coffee on an empty stomach, of course, that had produced such a birthing-unfriendly stench). I listened to my imminent fatherhood. Eyes closed, I saw in my mind’s eye a snippet of a documentary of a coral reef. The panicked gurgle of escaping gas bubbles. Blurp, blurp. An improbably fast, watery heartbeat. Acoustically, already a miscarriage.<
br />
I nodded and handed the stethoscope back to the obstetrician. I returned to my stool near the door. The women conferred quietly as to whether it wasn’t time to break the membranes. A few moments later, I heard the metallic sound of fluids dripping, then gushing, then dripping again.
7
‘Look, honey, this is the amniotic fluid.’ The Fiat-midwife held the kidney-shaped bedpan up for Miriam to see. ‘That red’s just a bit of blood.’
It was one of those wards where nothing was done without the patient being informed. The heavily sagging body of my sweetheart rested on hands and knees on the floor like a pregnant animal ready to drag itself off to its den to deliver its cubs. The women crouched behind her continued their cries of encouragement. I thought the birthing process had begun. But no. Their exclamations were for the mother-to-be’s excrement. ‘Go on, girl, there’s still more in there. Breathe through the contractions, give us a little push.’
Before unleashing a wonder, a woman first has to prove she is capable of abandoning all dignity.
Back when Miriam was still on the bed, the women whispered among themselves about the dilation, which with a crinkling rubber glove was established to be eight centimetres. ‘At ten, we start pushing.’
Now, even more soft-spokenly, they measured eight-and-a-half, which apparently was enough to give the green light for pushing. There must be a reason for their haste. Miriam once again was lying on her back on the floor, her legs spread wide.
‘You’re going great, honey. We can already see a bit of its scalp … and some hair …’
I didn’t like the looks of it. The women, Miriam excepted, carried on a continual consultation in a way that was meant to be inconspicuous but was betrayed by worried glances and hurried whispering. The only words I understood were: ‘the other bed’.
8
‘Don’t be alarmed if a few people come in,’ the obstetrician said to Miriam. ‘Obstetrics interns. We’ll be sure they keep to themselves.’
That took us by surprise. Of course I was too weak-kneed to protest. The room filled up with a few young women dressed in white nylon who couldn’t have kept less to themselves. They crowded around Miriam. The doctor got up and instructed two of the obstetricians-in-training to wheel the bed out into the passage. Then a different, better-equipped one was brought in.
Maybe because the group of trainees had thinned out for the time being, I suddenly caught sight of a young man in a white coat, his back to me, sitting at a shelf unit attached to the wall. Judging from his posture, he was writing furiously. Miriam was lifted onto the new bed by six pairs of arms at once, and was commanded to resume pushing with redoubled pressure. From time to time, the white-coated man twirled around on his swivel stool to observe the birthing arena and continued penning his notes on the clipboard supported on his knee.
Perhaps it was lack of sleep that weakened (or obscured) my attention. The room was in the grip of the kind of panic that did not paralyse those present, but rather drove them to serious and purposeful action.
‘Yea-a-a-ah … !’ emerged from several throats simultaneously. All these years later, I harbour the tenacious recollection of how the unwashed infant was lobbed into my lap by the flick of a blood-covered wrist. I shall never forget the gooey splash with which the baby landed on my thigh. It was more like it had been flung, because the child appeared so lifeless and blue.
Nobody cried out that it was a boy. I had to determine this myself. The consternation continued. There were so many women crowded around the bed that I lost sight of Miriam.
The following observations are taken directly from my diary entry on 15 June 1988, because this is as close as I can come to Tonio’s birth:
‘With all those swollen, passively dangling limbs, the little sprog made me think of a bunch of carrots, or rather a string of pale blue sausages you saw hanging at the butcher’s. For half a second, there was the panic: stillborn. But as she turned around, the midwife jabbed the little nipper in his side — a routine, almost malicious whap that got our son bawling. The piercing cries also brought on my own tears — finally. I prodded an index finger against the miniature fist. The fingers wound themselves viscidly around it. It was the little boy’s very first grip on life.’
The baby was taken from me to be washed. I was finally allowed to give Miriam a kiss and to compliment her on the most beautiful delivery of all time. The interns now at a respectful distance, the doctor offered her apologies for the chaotic scene. Now she dared to confess that the last time she had listened with the stethoscope she could hardly pick up a heartbeat, so despite only partial dilation they had decided to get Miriam to start pushing. Since induced birth could not be ruled out, she had had the special bed brought in.
The way Miriam lay there, utterly exhausted, wan and looking like a wrung-out dishrag, I wondered if she’d ever really recover. Visions of the Kanadreuffe’s mother in the novel Karakter — as a schoolboy I’d read the first few pages — who withered incurably in her childbed from one minute to the next, had forever plagued me: become a new father and see your wife age twenty years during delivery.
The afterbirth still had to be removed, but the umbilical cord came, twisted and gaudy, into view. The doctor handed me a pair of episiotomy scissors. ‘It’s a tradition here that the father cuts the umbilical cord. Things didn’t go that smoothly today. We had to hurry.’ She fastened two clamps next to each other on the cord. ‘Can you do it like this?’ Just clip it between the clamps … yes, that’s right.’
It made a creepy, crunching sound.
‘We’ll give you a piece of the umbilical cord to take with you. Sealed in plastic. As a memento.’
I watched as the baby was washed, dried off (more like patted dry) and weighed. He was three-and-a-half weeks premature, and underweight. The scale’s reading was given to the white-coated man, who was still writing everything down. Weight, length, the various times of the entire process. In the six months between high school and university, I had a job as ‘timekeeper’ at a machine factory in Eindhoven. Maybe that’s what this man’s job was called, too. He entered the time of birth as 10:16.
9
‘Have a name for him yet?’ asked the midwife.
‘Ach, all those pretty girl’s names …’ I answered. ‘Yesterday we were sure it would be a girl. Tonio. That’s his name now. Not Esmée. Tonio. Hello, Tonio.’
His cries, as he was trussed into a nappy, were high-pitched and yet hoarse. Miriam’s weakly beckoning voice nearly got drowned out. I went over to her.
‘I’ve just unveiled the monument,’ I said. ‘Well done, babe … beautiful job.’
I kissed her wet cheek. The women removed the afterbirth. As though identifying a flower, the midwife began picking through it in front our very eyes, offering icily sober commentary about how the foetus lived in the uterus. I had rather preferred to preserve the myth of the afterbirth. An aunt who had worked as a maternity ward nurse once told me how some of her colleagues smuggled placentas home with them to feed to the dog (like they also stirred breast milk into their tea). For a moment, I was afraid the doctor would suggest we all munch down the afterbirth for lunch — which would perhaps have meant a return to the myth.
Miriam bravely endured being stitched up where she’d been torn during delivery. Later, she was taken by wheelchair, in which a sort of blotting paper had been laid, to the shower. The doctor took me aside.
‘The baby’s underweight, so we’d like to keep him for the time being … in an incubator … for observation. You can go have a look in a moment.’
10
The blonde nurse came to ask if we needed anything. No, there was enough water in the carafe, and I avoided the coffee after Miriam reminded me how the stuff could stink at inopportune moments.
‘A tranquiliser, maybe?’
Yes, Miriam thought that was a good idea. A li
ttle while later the nurse returned, keyed up, with a handful of individually wrapped pills. ‘The head of the trauma team will be here any minute.’
11
‘As I understand it,’ said Dr G., the traumatologist, ‘the accident occurred on the Stadhouderskade just as it curves past the Vondelpark. It’s a nasty spot. Notorious, I’m afraid: we see a relatively high proportion of accidents at that intersection.’
Dr G. was a tall, slender professor of surgery. He appeared self-assured by nature, but with us he had an slight air of diffidence. His expression betrayed sympathy for the parents: unlike us, he had seen Tonio’s injuries, both the external and internal ones. He was in a position to assess the boy’s chance of survival.
‘I won’t give you false hope,’ he said without sitting down. ‘He’s still in a critical condition. I had to remove his spleen … it was badly damaged. Half of it at first, and then the rest. The impact caused a serious trauma to the lungs. They’ve taken on a lot of blood. It’s complicated by the fact that there was also substantial brain damage. We opened up his skull on the right side, because the brain has started to swell there. It desperately needs oxygen, which the lungs aren’t producing … The next few hours will be touch and go.’
As he spoke, his voice calm, Miriam sat next to me, shivering. A new and detailed map of the child she had given birth to was being unfolded in front of us.
‘I’m going back to the OR,’ said Dr G. ‘You’ll be kept informed of any developments, naturally. I’ll stop by again before I go home.’
It was absurd that we had been brought here but couldn’t see Tonio. An entire team of masked experts bent over his opened-up insides, and inserted tubes, tampons, scalpels, forceps, clamps. But maybe what he needed most was Miriam and me, simply to hold his hand.
Tonio Page 8
