‘So who’s the third?’

CHAPTER TWO

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.

‘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.

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.

‘Stupid me — again,’ he moaned. I helped by adding my own clumsiness to his. Once the danger had been averted, I returned to my desk rather than help him finish the job. I made a feeble promise to come see his new place once he’d moved.

We had lived under the same roof with Tonio for nearly twenty years, the last sixteen of them in this house. Perfectly normal that now, two years after his final exams, he would leave the parental nest in order to live on his own. So normal that the drama of it all — for a drama it was — more or less escaped me.

It was during those two-plus years he lived in De Baarsjes that my life, I imagined, became busier than ever. A new book came out, and I started accepting speaking engagements again. And on top of that: a weekly column, the guest teaching, an essay assignment … not to mention the work already on my plate. After his holiday in Ibiza, summer 2009, we fetched him from Schiphol by car, and dropped him off at his house on the Nepveustraat: the only time I saw it, and then only from the outside. We didn’t get asked in. He was clearly in a hurry to share his adventures with Jim — the British girls he’d mentioned in passing on the way back. He’d nearly been thrown out of the hotel for letting them stay overnight in his room without checking in.

He left his bag of dirty laundry in the car. ‘I’ll come by on Sunday to pick it up.’

Nor did I ever write to him at his new address. In the past, if I was working at Château St. Gerlach, I did send him the occasional pep note around exam time. If I was so bent on working with ‘old stuff’, rather than computers and email, why not write an old-fashioned letter, handwritten and delivered by post?

My publisher asked me a while ago, perhaps not entirely selflessly, how many letters I thought I’d written in the past forty years. I came up with an estimate of ten thousand. Short and long, typed and handwritten, personal and business. During those two years that Tonio lived in De Baarsjes, the copies in my archive numbered a good four hundred — and not a single one of them to him.

It needn’t be too late. If Tonio survived his accident and operation, I would write to him every day of his convalescence. At first, if his mind had to recuperate, simple letters that a nurse could read out loud to him. Gradually, more elaborate ones. And once he was back on his feet, I would never stop — even if he didn’t write back.

‘We’ve lost him, Adri,’ came the high, singsong voice beside me. ‘I just feel it.’

When had I last seen and spoken to Tonio? Last week, twice in short succession — atypical since his move.

On Wednesday, I worked until four. I went downstairs, hoping to catch some sun out on the veranda: after a chilly first half of the month, the weather had turned the previous day. The French doors leading from the library to the terrace were open. I recognised Miriam’s voice; she was talking to someone, but since the curtains, billowing in the breeze, were still closed, I couldn’t see to whom. I stepped out onto the veranda. There sat Tonio. More relaxed and self-assured than I was used to seeing him. When he noticed me, a mildly mocking grin spread across his face.

‘So, up to your ten pages a day yet?’ he asked.

After an overconfident glass some time ago, I expressed this as my target for my current novel. He asked it teasingly, but I thought I also heard in it something of the old polite interest.

‘Five’s the minimum,’ I replied. ‘Six, seven is doable. Eight is a banner day. So cut me some slack.’

He had been to visit grandpa Natan, his ninety-seven-year-old grandfather who lived on the Lomanstraat, and since he ‘was in the neighbourhood anyway’ he took a short detour to drop in on his parents. I suspected there was more to it than that.

‘Grandpa Natan’s going to have a cataract operation,’ he said, suddenly serious.

‘Oh?’ Miriam and I knew nothing about it.

‘Yeah, crazy, actually … putting an old man through all that.’

‘I’m about to take him over to Beth Shalom,’ Miriam said, glancing at her watch. ‘I’ll bring it up with him in the car.’

I had the impression that it somehow did Tonio good to show his concern for his fragile grandfather. Since leaving home, he lived life to the hilt, and his youth, not exactly overflowing with close family anyway, was vanishing rapidly in his wake. No, this wasn’t just a casual social call.

‘Tonio, your master’s degree, that’s where we left off.’ Miriam got up; it was her turn to go to the Lomanstraat. ‘Don’t forget to tell Adri.’

After she left, Tonio explained to me that when the time came, he had decided to get his master’s in Media Technology.

‘How about just getting your bachelor’s in Media & Culture first? You’re hardly through your first year.’

He grinned. ‘Can’t hurt to think ahead, now and then.’

Maybe that was his way of erasing the words ‘lack of ambition’, which had been lingering ever since our first and only real clash. Tonio spelled out what Media Technology involved, and told me the course wasn’t offered by the University of Amsterdam. He found out he would have to alternate between Leiden and The Hague.

‘That’ll mean moving,’ I said.

‘That’ll mean the train,’ he said.

There was something different about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He dared to look deeper into his future, and there had to be a reason for it. More self-confidence, yes, but his shyness hadn’t vanished. Perhaps to avoid having to lower his eyes, he looked up at the laburnum, where the green clusters were starting to show yellow buds.

‘Late bloom this year,’ I said.

‘Yeah, what do you expect,’ Tonio replied, ‘with such a cold May.’

It dawned on me that we seldom, if ever, discussed nature. At the Ignatius Gymnasium open house, a number of older students who were showing him around gave him a stick insect in a glass jar from the biology lab to take home. The gift thrilled him so much that Vossius and Barlaeus were directly out of the running; Ignatius was his choice. He installed a small terrarium around the stick bug, but not long thereafter asked our permission to let the ghost grasshopper loose in the Vondelpark. This was the extent of his yen for nature. His passion lay with physics. I remember when, at school, he and a classmate gave a demonstration of the internal combustion engine, complete with computer simulation. It was grand to see him so in his element.

When I’d stoked up the fireplace one Christmas Eve and wondered out loud how the flames got their form and colour, the fourteen-year-old Tonio responded with a complete physics lecture, full of facts that had never occurred to me.

‘It’s all about energy, Adri.’

And now, father and son were earnestly discussing, like a pair of oldies, the late bloom of the laburnum. Fortunately, Tonio soon switched to a topic more in synch with the physical sciences: his photography.

‘Adri, a small favour … Miriam has agreed, but I’m supposed to ask you, too. There’s this girl, and I promised …’

‘Aha.’

‘… I’d do a photo shoot with her. For a portfolio. It’s like this … she wants to make extra money as a model or an extra, and needs a photo portfolio to take around to casting agencies and such. And, well, I thought … this house, your house, it would be just the place for a photo shoot. It’s tomorrow afternoon. Miriam doesn’t mind going out for a couple of hours, but she didn’t know if you …’

‘Oh-ho! You come here to badger me about whether I’m doing my ten pages per day, and then chase me out of my study so you can take pictures of a cute girl. Without an audience.’

If I were to think back now on the slightly uneasy look he gave me, I’d see his clear brown eyes, which radiated more vitality than a person needs for an entire lifetime.

‘Great,’ he said, getting up. ‘I knew you’d say yes.’

The motorway was quiet, in both directions. Anyone planning to spend the Whitsun bank holiday elsewhere had already left town on Friday or Saturday. And as for the Amsterdam day-trippers, they would hit traffic snarls only later in the day.

We knew the route to the Academic Medical Centre better than the police officers up in the front seat. Since autumn 2005 Miriam had driven me there for monthly medical examinations in my role as guinea pig for a new wonder drug that could restore and regulate an imbalanced metabolism. In recent months, Miriam had taken the same route a few times to deliver Tonio to the AMC, where they had lecture halls suitable for the Media & Culture written exams.

Whitsun morning was, in a taunting sort of way, glorious. A haze that had not yet completely cleared sifted the sunlight, making it look as if gold dust was suspended in the air. We speeded straight through that glittering mist, and at the same time were radically closed off from it. Critical condition. The police van was moving further and further away from the day I had promised myself. Half an hour ago, I was still lying in bed, seventeen stairs away from my manuscript. At that moment I still had the choice: shower first, or give in to a wholesome impatience and take the bedroom smell upstairs with me.

The doorbell had made choosing superfluous. Work on my novel about the murder of a police officer today? There was a real one standing on the doorstep. A van just like in my manuscript was parked at the corner, but without a police squad poised to spring into action. It was empty and real, and would take us to the AMC, where Tonio, in a critical condition … See, the fact that reality pursues one’s fiction, tries to overtake it, and sometimes even passes it, or, worse yet, makes it redundant, is something that every novelist just has to take into account. No point in moaning: it is one of the hazards of the trade. Beautiful, of course: the complete sovereignty of an invented reality, its closed circuit … but just try to take out an all-risk policy on it.

I never complained. Only today, reality thrust itself with such obscene and devastating directness into my fragilely constructed world that I could only bow my head — or let it hang.

Last Thursday, too, it was abundantly spring, almost summery, 19 degrees Celsius and clear skies. When I went downstairs just before one o’clock to drive out to the Amsterdamse Bos with Miriam, I met Tonio in the front hall. He had just brought a folding tripod up from the basement, where he’d been storing some of his things since moving to De Baarsjes. A few white reflectors of framed styrofoam were already leaning against the wall of the passage.

‘Check this out,’ he said, running his hand over one of the styrofoam sheets, which was pocked with an irregular pattern of tiny holes. ‘Totally chewed up by beetles.’

‘Come on, styrofoam-eating beetles?’

‘Polystyrene beetles, yeah. The storeroom at Dixons was swarming with them. Computers just sank through their own packaging …’

‘Cross your fingers for this afternoon then,’ I said. ‘Holey reflectors, they’ll give a model a moth-eaten face every time.’

‘Very funny, Adri. Good day at the typewriter, I see.’

‘I don’t see any model, by the way. You hiding her from us?’

I noticed he had shaved. He was not wearing his hair in a ponytail; it had obviously been washed, and brushed smooth and glossy. We rarely saw him so kempt at home.

‘She just phoned to say she’d be a bit late. Had to stop by the drugstore first. Bladder infection.’

Miriam emerged from her study. She kissed her son and ran the back of her hand across his cheek. ‘Mmm, babyface.’ She held him at arm’s length and inspected him from head to toe. ‘Hey, your favourite shirt. I thought I’d washed and ironed it for this weekend … for if you went out …’

‘I’ll change it soon. So it’ll stay clean.’

‘Okay, we’re off,’ I said. ‘Now Tonio, good luck. Or should I say: good shooting.’

I shouldn’t have thrown him such a knowing look, because he cast his eyes down, groaned softly and mumbled: ‘Pl-l-lease.’

The trees on our street were now yellow-green, their crowns bursting with seed pods. We drove via sun-drenched Amsterdam-Zuid to Amstelveen.

‘Funny,’ Miriam said. ‘When he photographs, he thinks nothing of stretching out on his stomach in the dust. In the mud, if need be. Now he puts on his best shirt.’

‘Sometimes a photo shoot is more than a photo shoot.’

There were considerably more fishermen on the bank of the Bosbaan than the last time we drove here, and they no longer huddled so timorously in their shelters, which resembled something midway between an umbrella resting on its side and a one-man lean-to. Where the Bosbaan’s water dead-ended, we could really plunge into the woods — a churning mass of fresh green vegetation, snipped-up sunlight, and lacy shadows.

‘Just look at the spring,’ Miriam said.

At the goat farm café, we ordered the house classic for lunch: tuna salad on a nearly black multigrain roll. Goat buttermilk. Manure-scented tranquillity.

‘Strange to think,’ Miriam said, ‘that I used to bring Tonio here to see the newborn goats and piglets. Now it’s where he shoos us off to so he can have the whole house to himself and that girl. I have to say I rather like it.’

The situation apparently had a rejuvenating effect on us: after lunch we set out on a ramble, each of us holding a cone of goat’s milk ice cream. We walked to the blue bridge, under which the rowing lake narrowed, and hung over the railing, dreamily watching the few kayaks and water bikes out this early in the season.

‘Gosh, that Tonio,’ Miriam said. ‘Media Technology … and then right away he picks up his photography again. He’s doing well. I’m so glad. If I think back to two, three years ago …’

‘I was a little hard on him, I guess, chewing him out for his lack of ambition. At his age I was no better.’ First one job after the other for a year, then two aborted studies: psychology and law. And after my philosophy bachelor’s: two half-doctorates, philosophical anthropology and aesthetics — two halves, unfortunately, don’t make a whole. So much for my own goals.

‘I’ve got a hunch Tonio will finish his degree.’

‘Or else he’ll do other amazing things.’

We strolled back towards the parking lot. ‘Half past three,’ said Miriam, as we passed the goat farm. ‘No, we can’t do that to him.’

‘Oh, Tonio’s a pretty efficient photographer. He doesn’t go for the scattergun approach. When he had to snap me for De Groene Amsterdammer he sat me down at an antique Remington, tossed a few rolls of telex paper around. I heard a few clicks, and assumed he was taking some proofs. “Ready when you are,” I said. But he already had what he was after.’

‘You just said a photo session is sometimes more than a photo session. Come on, let’s go have a drink at the goat place. Grant him this one afternoon.’

When we got home at around five, Tonio was packing up his cameras in a large plastic bag. The girl had just left. A whiff of cigarette smoke hung in the house.

‘And … any luck?’ I asked.

‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I can judge the digital shots pretty well on the computer. But I took some analogue ones, too, and for those I’ll have to wait for the prints.’

‘Pop out back before you go,’ I said.

One of the styrofoam reflectors was leaning up against the side of the small arbour that enclosed a wooden loveseat. I settled down on the veranda with the evening papers. A little while later, Tonio placed two square photos on the table in front of me.

‘Remember, they’re just Polaroids,’ he said. ‘I always take a couple to test the light.’

They were in black-and-white. A girl, or young woman, Tonio’s age, with shoulder-length hair and a pleasant face that looked far too sweet-natured for the aloof business of modelling. She had put herself in a somewhat too deliberately winsome pose, framed by the mini-arbour, its bench apparently removed during the session.

‘Pretty girl,’ I said, my expert eye far from withered. ‘Very pretty. But a professional model … I dunno.’

I handed him back the Polaroids. I could see on his face that once again, I just didn’t get it.

‘Professional? Adri, she’s a college student. That modelling and acting, it’s only a side job. Just like me at Dixons.’

‘She’s awfully attractive, that’s for sure.’

Suddenly, his demeanour changed. ‘She asked me go to Paradiso with her on Saturday night,’ he said, with bashful pride. ‘Some kind of Italian blockbuster night, with Italian hits from the ’80s.’

‘Oh, there’ll be lots of Eros Ramazzotti then.’

He pulled a comic face that said: never heard of him. Miriam came out onto the veranda and offered us something to drink. Tonio declined, but sat down anyway, albeit restlessly, on the edge of a chair. Miriam reminded me of two funerals the next day, at more or less the same time. Two close acquaintances, both of whom were equally important to us.

‘We still have to choose,’ she said. ‘And not like: you do one, I’ll do the other. Not this time.’

‘Too many people dying lately,’ I said. ‘Cremations, funerals … The question is: are they all mandatory? People are so quick to make you feel like there’s no getting out of it. There’s something unfair about it, considering my own—’ I turned to Tonio. ‘I’m not sure if you know … well, so now you do … but when the time comes, I insist on being buried in the absolutely smallest possible company. Not cremated, mind you, buried. A hole in the ground with three people standing around it. Three, no more.’

‘Oh,’ said Tonio, ‘and who’s the third one then?’

There was a moment’s silence, and then we all burst out laughing in unison. He was right. The third one would be lying in the coffin.

Tonio had a delightfully unassuming laugh, with lively bursts which made his parted lips looked even fuller and the skin on his nose creep upward toward his forehead. (That laugh, too, was in a critical condition. Oh God, save his laugh.)

He got up and, still chuckling, asked his mother: ‘Do you still get Surinamese takeaway on Sundays?’

‘A tradition since before you were born,’ Miriam replied.

‘Whitsun, too?’

‘We don’t do Whitsun.’

‘Sunday’s on then. Chow mein would be delicious.’

‘All right, just don’t cancel again because you’re so beat. Like last Sunday, when we were supposed to go into town.’

‘Oh yeah, that watch … we’ll have to make another date.’

In his quick, springy way, his shoulders hunched just a tad, he headed to the door, and said goodbye with his variable salutation, which this time sounded something like: ‘Oi.’

‘Have fun Saturday,’ I called after him. I don’t know if he heard it, as he was already passing through the kitchen on the way to the front door. How extraordinary: Tonio was going to drop by for the third time in the space of a week. The previous day he had laid out his future plans, but it was like he had something else to tell us. I hadn’t forgotten how proud of a new girlfriend I used to be. With the ongoing conquest still in full swing, I already wanted to show her off, not only to my friends but to my parents, too — even if only in words for the time being, and if at all possible with a picture as well.

After Tonio had left, Miriam called me to the kitchen. She stood at the open fridge. ‘Check this out.’

The shelves, the vegetable drawer, the door compartments — every nook and cranny was jammed with cartons of ice tea and fruit juice in all possible flavours. There was a litre of Lipton Ice in the freezer, in case the young lady liked hers extra cold. Neither of us knew that Tonio had done all this shopping. It amounted to half a week’s allowance spent on fruit juice and iced tea.

‘Tonio knows how to look after his models,’ I said.

‘It won’t be out of concern for lack of vitamins at his parents,’ Miriam replied. ‘I’ll take them with me next week along with his clean washing.’

In the corner of the living room, next to the glass display case containing Tonio’s rock collection, I saw two more styrofoam reflector sheets. A strong nicotine smell hung in the air. On the floor, a saucer with stubbed-out cigarette butts; I emptied it into the waste bin. So the girl — still nameless — was a smoker.

I came across the grainy white sheets elsewhere in the house. They gazed at me like monochrome paintings, telling me no more about the photo session than that they reflected sunlight or lamplight onto the model.

‘What are we supposed to do with all that styrofoam?’ Miriam asked.

‘Leave it,’ I said, ‘he can clean it up himself on Sunday.’

Before dinner, I went up to my office on the third floor — not to work, but to raise the awning on the back balcony. It had rained a few nights ago, and the irregular tick-tick and drumming of the rain on the open canvas had kept me awake for hours.

The electric button, to the left of the French doors, seemed to falter — until I noticed that the awning was already up, neatly rolled into its aluminium frame.

Wait a sec. I knew for sure I hadn’t raised it before we left for the Amsterdamse Bos — intentionally, to protect the parquet floor from the profuse sunlight that streamed in at that hour. I could have raised the awning and drawn the curtains, of course, but in order to air out the room I left the balcony doors wide open, and experience had taught me that the curtains would billow upwards, and on their way down sweep stuff from the nearby desk. The last time that happened, I had incited Miriam’s ire by accusing her cats of being the cause of the destruction.

All these deliberations were still clear in my mind — even now, three days later, in the back seat of the police van. It was not a matter of forgetfulness. I had left the curtains open, lowered the awning, and fastened the doors by their hooks on the balcony wall. Now, upon returning, I found the curtains still open, but the doors were closed tight and the awning raised.

Tonio? We had a deal: he was free to use the entire house, except for the floor where my office was, because I was busy sorting through material, and there were stacks of handwritten, as-yet unnumbered sheets everywhere. I had a good look around. There was no evidence of them having taken photos here. No styrofoam sheets. No film roll wrappers in the wastebasket. No sign of the unwelcome rearranging to which photographers from newspapers and magazines so enjoyed subjecting one’s home.

Was I hoping for signs of an amorous interlude? The book about Dutch police precincts, a reference aid for my novel that I kept stuck between the two seat cushions of the chaise longue, was still in place.

I opened the balcony doors. The slats and planks that used to be Tonio’s old bunk bed lay precisely as our handyman René had left them, only a bit more grey-green after exposure to the snow and rain. To the right, an aluminium fire-escape ladder led up to the roof.

‘Minchen, when we came back from the park … did you raise the awning in my office?’

‘No, you must’ve done it yourself. I can’t do everything.’

I was none the wiser. I decided to ring Tonio about it — tonight, or else tomorrow. Not to scold him for having invaded my workspace, but … well, maybe I’d find out some details of his love life. My God, what an old busybody I was becoming.

The phone call went by the wayside. Soon … later, while he was recuperating, I’d ask. God knows how many hours we would have to spend at his bedside until he was himself again. There’d be enough time to talk. I would jabber him through it.

A critical condition: what is that, actually? Perhaps they were quick to call someone’s condition ‘critical’ so that if it did turn out badly for the patient after all, they’d be safeguarded against the vengeful indignation of the survivors.

I was reminded of my cousin Willy van der Heijden Jr., who was declared clinically dead after a motorcycle accident. Illusionist-joker that he was, he rose from the dead, and six weeks later returned to business as usual, which in his case meant low- to medium-grade criminality. So it could swing that way, too.

No, bad example. Not even a year later, he was on the run, artificial knee joints and all, from the police, and crashed himself just as dead as before by smashing his car into a tree: no headlights on an unlit road. This time he skipped the ‘clinically’ phase.

I remember my mother calling me up with the news. ‘A bad egg, that boy, but I had to let you know.’

While I was on the phone with her ,I looked at the eighteen-month-old Tonio as he crawled across the rug, drooling from the exertion. No such thing would ever happen to him, I would see to that. With the upbringing I was going to give him, he would never have to flee from the police, let alone with his headlights off.

‘How’s Uncle Willy taking it?

‘He’s a wreck, of course. He’d put all his hopes into that boy. The neighbours said he wandered the streets the whole night with his dog. Talking out loud. Yelling.’

‘He might be dead already,’ Miriam moaned.

‘A critical condition,’ I said, ‘can mean anything. I’m sure they’re doing their best.’

‘He’s being operated on,’ the policeman said. ‘They’ve been busy for hours.’

Goddamn. That did sound critical.