I watched the tall man. He held an electric drill. He got up and walked over to the front door of the flat, and drilled several holes around the gap where the old cylinder lock had once been.
The scent of sawdust permeated the living room, but I smelled something else, something that had hit me the moment I walked in. Damp cardboard. I looked around the room. There were moving boxes all over, some with their flaps folded open. On each box, an orange cross in a black circle: the stylised pulley block of the ERKENDE VERHUIZERS logo. As long as I kept my eyes glued to that circled cross, my thoughts would organise themselves automatically. What on earth was going on here?
The bookcase behind the sofa on which the Borderless Correspondent sat seemed fuller than before. I might have had a lot to drink but I wasn’t seeing double, certainly not double book spines anyway. Just to be sure, I squinted at the bookcase with one eye closed. Damn, there were more books, but from this distance I couldn’t make out their titles.
Miriam came in with the vodka bottle.
‘So,’ I said, nodding at the boxes, ‘today, treason smells like damp cardboard.’
She had invited me upstairs to augment my humiliation. I had to stand by and watch as the diplomat moved in with her, and colonised my bookcases.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Miriam said. ‘Those boxes have been up in the attic for the past year-and-a-half. Since 2 December 1990, to be exact, when we can back from Loenen, remember? You were so sick of all the moving that you decided these could stay put for the time being. Yeah? The rest of the books, they could wait. Well, today I finally got around to unpacking. You sure weren’t going to do it for me.’
8
The locksmith had now installed the bolt to the flat. He tossed his tools into his black leather bag and handed Miriam a stocked key ring. He sat down to draw up the bill.
‘Okay, my job here’s done.’ He handed Miriam the bill. ‘No call-out fee.’
I drank another vodka with my rival. Former rival, it was now clear. Miriam saw the locksmith out. Because I did not know what to say to Our Man, I went over to the window. The sky began to change colour. The locksmith put the black bag in the back of his van, which was emblazoned with the name KRIKKRAK in lightning lettering on the side, with a telephone number.
‘You were going to explain,’ I said to Miriam when she got back upstairs.
Miriam and her correspondent gave me an account, filling in each other’s gaps, of their story. Before going to eat at Tartufo they had an aperitif at Café Zeppos on ’t Gebed Zonder End. At a certain point Miriam discovered, maybe when she set out to light up her last crisis-cigarette, that her purse had been stolen. ‘Just snatched from the back of the chair.’ Not that there was much money in it, but worse than that: her house keys. Panicked that the thief would empty the entire building, they picked up the spare keys at Miriam’s parents’ (where Tonio was asleep in his guest cot) and sat waiting, the deadbolt securely fastened, for the arrival of the key guy. Plenty of 24-hour services in the Yellow Pages, but, when push came to shove, none of them really was open day and night. Finally they had found one: Krikkrak, for all your broken teeth. Miriam had telephoned a few friends to go find me. Of course they looked in the wrong cafés.
So much for the farewell dinner, without a single bite of food. ‘As though it were meant to be.’
9
Miriam showed her Special Reporter out — for the last time, let’s hope. I listened from the top of the stairs. A brief, inaudible exchange down on the front stoop. A burst of her cheerful, mocking laugh.
The door slammed shut. It could mean two things: that she had stepped over the threshold to follow the Borderless Reporter to the edge of the earth, or …
I was back amid the moving boxes, whose dank odour tickled my bronchial tubes, and listened intently. It was quiet, both in the stairwell and out on the street.
‘So what’re you standing there for, goofy?’ Miriam was carrying her pumps. She must have crept upstairs in her stocking feet. ‘Empty ’em, if they’re bothering you.’
‘So what’s the verdict?’
‘The verdict is that we’re through. It was an impossible situation, tonight proved it all over again. I thought we had something, you and me …’
‘That’s news to me.’
‘Well, come here then.’
We stood silently face to face. After a little while she said: ‘I was afraid you’d be mad about the stolen purse … the keys … the locksmith … and all you do is moan about the moving boxes! Typical.’
‘Learn to live with it.’
‘I don’t have much choice.’
10
For Miriam, the moving boxes were half empty. For me, half full. And that was the start of refinding our footing after our first major marital crisis.
Half empty: unload the rest of the books.
Half full: there’s still room to load more in.
Was it the new locks, in combination with the sudden appearance of the moving boxes, that gave me the idea of roomier living quarters? I had to think long and hard about whether looking for a new house was the right way to reunite my family. De Pijp, the Kloov, Obrechtstraat, the Veluwe, the Pauwhof, Leidsegracht … all this moving had in fact only made us drift gradually apart.
In Huize Oldenhoeck, yes, there she was happy, until Tonio’s first birthday. It was the environs of her earliest youth. She was born across the street, in the CIZ, the Centrale Israëlitische Ziekeninrichting — now a Jellinek rehab clinic for addicts. Her native soil. If I wanted to buy a house for her, it had to be here, and nowhere else.
11
‘There come the knights.’
A friend had given me a CD of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11. I played it that afternoon for the first time, while Tonio sat in the corner with his Lego. I had never seen a child so engrossed in play before. Off in his own world, as they say.
Somewhere in one of the inner movements the music falls nearly silent, followed by a forte, dry roll on the snare drum, and then another, even louder. Tonio leapt up, pulled the dummy out of his mouth and yelled, his arm outstretched: ‘There come the knights!’
I have no idea what kind of fairy tale his concentrated Lego-play had criss-crossed, but he stood listening, his face enthralled and spittle hanging off his lower lip, until the snare drum was entirely drowned out by the rest of the orchestra. He planted the dummy back between his lips and dropped to his knees at the pile of Lego. I sat down next to him and asked: ‘What was that, Tonio? What did you hear?’
He was completely engrossed in the plastic building bricks. ‘Those were the knights,’ he said quietly, absently. And as though in a kind of indifferent trance he kept on repeating, ever more softly: ‘Those were the knights … the knights …’
12
Ten to five. The neurosurgeon came in first. She was still wearing her light-blue shower cap: the elastic had crept up to the point where it could, at any moment, lose its grip on her hair and flutter to the floor. The last of her two co-assistants closed the door, which had stood open all day, behind her — and then I knew. Tonio was lost.
The surgeon sat down on the short side of the table and looked at Miriam and me in turn. An almost bitter line around her mouth, undoubtedly due to the recent efforts in the OR. Her serious, unintentionally severe gaze eventually rested on me. She shook her head.
‘It’s not good,’ she said hesitantly, followed immediately by: ‘We couldn’t save him.’
Miriam let out a stream of almost songlike cries. Her head slumped, wobbling, further and further downward, as though she wanted to literally lay it in her lap. With my arm around her shoulders, I pulled her close to me. Her trembling mixed with mine.
‘The brain was badly traumatised,’ the surgeon continued. ‘It continued to swell. First on the right, then the left. Besides, his bodily functions sta
rted to fail. The blood pressure plummeted … terrible haemorrhaging … There was no saving him. We had to terminate treatment. He’s being brought over to the ICU, so you can say your last goodbyes. He’s still on life-support, but that will be stopped shortly.’
Terminal, but not yet dead.
‘I want you to know,’ I said with a tight voice, ‘that we’re grateful for all your efforts.’
Even now I was aware, although I didn’t smell it myself, of my penetrating garlic breath. I am given the tidings of the imminent death of my son, they are about to unplug his ventilator, and my thoughts dwell on my own bad breath. Aglio olio.
The doctor stood up, shook our hands. ‘My thoughts are with you.’
I blinked, and felt a cold wetness on my eyelashes and lids, as though old, forgotten tears had lingered there, cooled off long ago. The other women followed the neurosurgeon out of the room. The third doctor leant over to us and said: ‘He might still be in the lift on the way here. A nurse will come get you when you can see him. You might want to say goodbye while he’s still on the ventilator. Try not to be shocked by his upper body, it’s quite swollen. From the internal bleeding.’
I had to play for time. Had to extend his life.
‘You’re terminating treatment,’ I said, repeating the absent surgeon’s words.
The woman nodded. ‘To carry on would be futile … and irresponsible.’
I had to contain myself. I was in no position to resist this medical decision. (A decision that was already irrevocably determined by the force of the collision, by blindfolded Fate.) This was not a matter of euthanasia. I had to take care not to lose control, to demand that the treatment be prolonged. Those stories are well known. Family members, future next-of-kin, their fists clenched in the doctor’s face, the bed in which their loved one lay protected by a human chain from the nurse whose task it was to disconnect the mechanical ventilator.
I nodded back. The doctor smiled sadly and left the room. I had to banish the vain thought of Tonio standing a fighting chance, and concentrate on Miriam, bolster her so she could go say farewell to her unsaveable son. She was still bent over, crying. Not full out — and that was exactly the heart-wrenching part: that there was something hushed and humble about her grief. Even now.
‘Come, Minchen.’ I took her by the upper arm. ‘We have to prepare ourselves for this. To say goodbye. They’ll come get us any time now.’
Miriam shook her head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Think of that evening, two weeks ago, at the café on the Staalstraat,’ I said. ‘We had such a good time together. So intimate, the three of us. Think of that, as intensely as you can, when we go to him now. That evening, that was our farewell, without our knowing.’
13
It was probably not Tonio’s idea, but his college classmates had decided to go out for drinks and dinner with their parents. A date had been set for the outing: 7 May, a Friday evening. Tonio had emailed the invitation to Miriam with the message: ‘I don’t know if you two are into this, but …’
He knew that for the past year we had avoided socialising outside our home. ‘But this is about Tonio,’ Miriam said. ‘We don’t get much chance to show some interest in his studies.’
‘All right, sign us up.’
May 7th was chilly. It was the day they found the man who had strangled Andrea Luten, that the dead pilots of the crashed Turkish Airways plane were found to have been negligent, and that the Dam screamer had apologised for the disturbance he’d caused at the recent Memorial Day ceremony. As though to underscore the week’s incessant tumult, two helicopters hovered overhead the entire afternoon, one from the police and the other from the TV, in connection with the Giro d’Italia, which started here because Amsterdam had to live up to its reputation, cost what it may, as a ‘gruesome party house’, as the writer Gerard Reve put it. Distracted by the pulsating rhythm of the helicopters I decided not to count 7 May as a normal workday. Soon, a drink with Tonio. On the way to my shaving ritual in the bathroom I dove into bed to catch forty winks.
Meanwhile, a minor drama was taking place at our front door. My mother-in-law had impulsively — in an ‘agitated state of mind’, as the police reports called it — absconded from St. Vitus nursing home and taken a taxi to our house. She came to claim Miriam — the reason remained unclear, but this was obviously the last straw. I was aware of the regulations governing the mother-daughter relationship, in place for several months, but I tried to keep out of it as best I could.
Miriam woke me to inform me of the intrusion. Her ferocity was alarming: for the past year, more and more sewage had been seeping up from her youth. I could not quite put my finger on what it was exactly.
‘What did you do with her?’
‘Put her back in the taxi. I was livid. Just then Thomas showed up.’ (She was referring to my editor.) ‘What must he have thought! Me standing there screaming at my mother while shoving her into a cab. He brought this envelope for you.’ And with a fake pout: ‘And the flowers he had with him weren’t even for me.’
She more or less insisted that, before we went off to meet up with Tonio, I have a drink with her to calm her nerves.
‘Otherwise I can’t face this evening.’
I shaved quickly, we tossed back a drink, and then it was time to call a taxi. The plan was to eat dinner in the Atrium at the Binnengasthuis, on the university campus. Congregate in the student pub down in the basement before moving next door to the restaurant. The taxi was not held up by the Giro preparations, so we were early (six-thirty) and took our place at the bar. Beer in plastic cups — well, why not.
Quarter to seven and still no Tonio. Miriam called his mobile number. Yeah, his bike was still at Central Station, so he’d taken the tram. He was almost halfway. See you in a bit. Huuy. (His goodbye alternated between ‘huuy’ and ‘oi’.)
Suddenly there he was standing next to us, having slipped in just as unobtrusively as he always entered the living room. The shyish grin, combined with a nod of the upper body, by way of a greeting. He did not kiss his mother as a matter of course: it had to come from her. For me, a squeeze on the shoulder sufficed.
From the moment I thought that Tonio had reached adolescence I decided to minimise his embarrassment by refraining from embracing him in public. (Once, when I wanted to introduce him to an old friend we bumped into on the street, and brushed his bangs out of his eyes, he jerked himself loose and danced around me with clenched fists, using my belly as a punching bag.) But these things tend to go gradually. Sitting together on the sofa watching a TV game show, we both laughed at a candidate’s flub and I playfully and teasingly pulled him close to me. I had expected a punch in return, but he stayed leaning against me just where I had tugged him. He wriggled a hand behind my back and squeezed himself even closer, as though relieved that this was still allowed in the ‘cool’ world he was creating for himself.
We hadn’t seen Tonio in weeks. ‘You’re looking well,’ I said, ‘although I’m sure you don’t appreciate hearing that.’
He dismissed my comment with a grin. Since his baby fat had dissolved, he’d regained the compact body he’d had at the beginning of high school. My gosh, twenty-two next month. Perhaps because just this once he wasn’t wearing his long hair in a ponytail, I was struck by the resemblance to a photo of myself, taken in the summer of 1973, a few months before my own 22nd birthday. I’m standing on a rock in the middle of rushing stream, and, rightly or not, at that age I felt I could walk on water. Now that I had a good look at Tonio, I realised that since his high school graduation, four years ago, I hadn’t treated him in line with his personal development. I had postponed getting to know him as an adult, and had bombarded him with the kind of advice you give an insecure adolescent. He in turn was too polite to correct me.
It was simple enough. Brittany 1973 and the subsequent years had not slipped out of my memory
. If I wanted to avoid treating the 22-, 23-, 24-year-old Tonio as a child, I only had to think back on myself at that age.
The ease with which he put away one beer after another — there, in any case, he had taken a page out of his father’s book, anno 1973. After chatting for half an hour, he started glancing nervously around the bar. ‘I don’t see too many of my classmates. And no parents at all.’
Tonio took a spin around the busy pub and had a peak in the adjacent Atrium, where the tables were already set. He returned to us and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Maybe I missed something,’ he said, ‘that the date was changed or something.’
‘Let’s have another round,’ I suggested, ‘and wait it out.’
Another half-hour passed. Not one of his classmates, with or without parents, showed up. I felt bad for him as he did another round of the bar, this time less confident than before, and returned to us with a slightly worried grin. Poor kid. He had dragged his parents all the way here and there was apparently nothing to offer them. He groaned.
‘I must have missed an email somewhere along the way.’
14
‘So we’ll go eat somewhere,’ Miriam said.
Tonio had an idea. ‘The Staaltraat,’ he said. ‘There’s a pub there that serves food, where I go with my classmates sometimes. The steaks are pretty good, and they’ve got those thick-cut fries.’
Off to the Staalstraat. Amsterdam had the chills. Elsewhere in the city, some fifteen couples and their Media & Culture-studying children were assembled in a restaurant, waiting for Tonio and his parents. Meanwhile, we were installed at a small table in Eetcafé ‘t Staaltje, and had one of the nicest evenings in years. Thrilled to really be together. All three of us in good form. Tonio in particular was on a roll. I noticed how well-spoken he’d become recently. (I thought back on the meandering complete sentences he churned out, age seven or eight, in his melodious, high-pitched voice. My disappointment when later, his voice starting to break, he started talking in clipped phrases. As a surly teenager every word seemed be uttered with aversion.) Miriam and I tried to top his witticisms. The waiter who interrupted our laughing with a new round of drinks said: ‘I wish all our customers were like you.’
Tonio Page 12
