CHAPTER TWO

The betrayal

there’s a grave that needs digging for a butterfly

exchanging the moment for your father’s old watch —

— Gerrit Kouwenaar, ‘there are still’

1

Miriam carried Tonio’s mobile phone with her everywhere. It became something of an obsession. If she happened to leave the phone in the bathroom, for instance, she’d run back in a panic to fetch it.

‘He’s really not going to ring,’ I said, when her fussing over the mobile started to get on my nerves.

‘It’s that girl,’ Miriam said. ‘I’ve got the feeling she’s still in the dark. Nobody in Tonio’s circle of friends knew her.’

‘Maybe we should have run the obituary right away then.’

‘No, oh no.’

When Miriam went off to shower, she left the mobile lying on the bed, and although she had turned up the volume she still missed the call. In any case, she was too late, because the voicemail had already been activated. It was a call from an unidentified number, given on the display as: ‘no caller ID’. I found Miriam sitting on the edge of the bed, listening anxiously to the voicemail message.

‘She didn’t leave her name.’ Miriam handed me the phone. ‘But it’s got to be her. Listen.’

‘… tried Facebook, but your page is quiet. I was wondering how the photos turned out. If they’re no good, I’m sorrier for you than for me. You’re the one who did all the work. It was a nice afternoon anyway. Okay, hope to hear from you soon. Bye.’

I thought I heard a trace of a British or an American accent. I handed Tonio’s mobile back. ‘The voice matches her Polaroid, anyway,’ I said.

2

This kind of loss, it just happens to you. The longing follows of its own accord, just like the heartache.

But the loss does not necessarily make you feeble, nor does it present you with a measure of grief that simply has to be accepted without you being allowed to give it some kind of form. As absurd as it was in the given situation, there were always choices to be made. Should we give in to the pain, or resist it? We incessantly asked each other these kind of questions.

‘Would Tonio have wanted his demise to destroy us?’ (Me to Miriam.)

‘We can’t ask him anymore.’

‘Say we did ask him when he was alive … just to be on the safe side.’

‘Knowing him …’ said Miriam, ‘no, I don’t think he’d want to see us go under. He’d have preferred that by staying alive ourselves, we kept his memory alive.’

‘But how about us … what do we want? To sink into ruination because of his downfall? Make no mistake, there’s something comforting in that. Now that he’s gone, we can just let ourselves go to pot. Him kaput, us kaput. Maybe we owe it to him.’

‘If I really put myself in his shoes, Adri … no, he wouldn’t have wanted it. We have to go on. Because of him. For him.’

‘Let’s first give him a proper burial. Then we’ll see … or not.’

3

If we were to map out Tonio’s last hours and days in detail, we were certain to bump into that girl from the photo shoot sooner or later. Even without a phone number or address, not even a name, there’d have to be a sign of her somewhere. She did exist, after all.

But … did we really want to? If we did track her down, we might discover a budding romance — which could have led to something more.

‘The funeral is Friday,’ Miriam said on Wednesday, ‘and we still haven’t contacted that photo girl. I wish she’d ring again.’

‘Let’s just let it run its course,’ I said. ‘If there was something between them, then she’s bound to make herself known again.’

‘I’m so afraid she still doesn’t know what happened. She could be sitting there waiting for Tonio to call … or for a reply from him on Facebook … she just won’t get it.’

‘We’ve tried calling all the available numbers,’ I said. ‘None of his friends know her. At most, they vaguely know about a photo shoot. No one can come up with a date. Not even a name. Y’know, Tonio and photo sessions … he did so many of them. No, we’re just going to have to wait this one out.’

While I thought: we should make a beeline to the Netherlands Forensic Institute, to have that call — ‘no caller ID’ — investigated.

And then there was that excruciating doubt. Did I have to go looking for her? What was the point of reconstructing Tonio’s final days? He had irretrievably vanished from the existence that offered itself for reconstruction.

No, I could better devote my time to the memorial letters. I had laid the photos I was planning to enclose (Tonio as Oscar Wilde) in a small stack, face down, on my writing table. This way I could slide a photo into the envelope without looking him in the eye, for each and every letter compounded the betrayal I was carrying out.

Despite this precautionary measure, Tonio was inevitably present in my workroom, in varying and ever-changing life phases. ‘Adri, if I pass the photos to you, it’ll go faster.’ ‘You keep writing the same thing, but with different names … why’s that?’ ‘Adri, it would be so much more efficient if you had a computer with an address spreadsheet. One click of the mouse and a string of self-adhesive stickers rolls out of the printer. You really are from the Dark Ages, aren’t you?’

They were fine, early summer days, all of which blindingly reflected Whit Sunday. I sat at the desk closest to the open balcony doors, shaded from the sun by the awning.

Occasionally, Miriam came in to cry at my side. No, we didn’t need to know yet more suffocating details: she was grief-stricken enough already, why add insult to injury. We would bury him on Friday morning, and the obituaries would appear in the evening papers that afternoon. After a day like that, our job was to deal with our grief, together, in the safe haven of our house.

4

The day of his funeral was as divine a summery day as the day he died.

‘Today I must bury my son.’ I formulated that sentence over and over in my head while performing a series of everyday actions: brushing teeth, showering, shaving.

I tried out a number of variations: ‘Today I am going to bury my son.’ As many as necessary, until I had the ideal choice of words in my head. This was ‘terra cognita’: many a morning it went like this, before I ascended the stairs to my work room, to write down the first words of a new chapter.

‘Today, I bury my son.’

It was, for now, still just an observation, hardly more than that. No sickening emotions went with it. I was calm even before taking the pill Miriam offered that was supposed to calm me down. My hands did not shake for even a moment while shaving.

While getting dressed, I silently rehearsed the brief speech I had planned to hold at the grave. All week I had almost obsessively hurled the facts concerning the accident as I knew them onto paper, plus what I recalled from Tonio’s last two visits to our home. I wanted to record everything that might come in handy in reconstructing — I still did not know why — the finale of his life. But I could not bring myself to compose a eulogy. My brother would give a longer speech, which put my mind at ease. I’d been engaged in restless, anxious conversation with Tonio all week, and it had exhausted me.

Since our premature return from Lugano last May, I had hardly been out of the house. I’d spent all those months at home, rarely dressed in anything but grotty jogging pants and a baggy lumberjack shirt. All right, I’d bought a dark velvet sport jacket for the premiere of Het leven uit een dag, which since that event was still on the very same hanger on the very same closet door, the tie that went with it draped over the hook.

Tonio was at the premiere, too, dressed in style. He had invited Marianne, an elegant girl he knew from the Amsterdam Photo Academy, a little older than he. They never (much to my regret) really had an affair, but Tonio always invited her to more official events like the Book Ball, if we were able to get our hands on an extra pair of tickets.

That evening at the film premiere in The Hague, I noticed how much more mature and self-assured he had become. The tux jacket looked great on him. He was outgoing, jovial, witty. After the film, he and Marianne joined the musicians of the pop group Novastar, which had provided some of the film score. They had a bang-up time. Later they rode with us in the taxi-van that took the whole bunch of us back to Amsterdam for the afterparty at De Kring.

Now that I was to bury him, it had to be in that last jacket he saw his father wear, corresponding necktie and all.

While my brother and I stood at the bar, burning through the generously allotted drink vouchers, Tonio and Marianne sat in their own corner, drinking and chatting. It appeared to be a lively conversation. The film crew took over the dance floor, and the director came by every so often to dole out a new round of vouchers.

Marianne, I knew, lived with her parents in Noordwijk, and would be sleeping over at a girlfriend’s place in Amsterdam. The night wore on. As closing time approached it was decided that she would sleep on Tonio’s sofa. They would take the night bus to his neighbourhood, or else walk, it wasn’t really clear.

When they came to say goodnight, I suddenly felt sorry for Tonio. When he was tipsy he would always sway a bit on the balls of his feet, almost unnoticeably, back and forth. He was looking pallid, the corners of his mouth were turned up in a slightly stupid grin. As supple as he had been all night, he was now rigid and wooden, his shoulders hunched. Marianne was just as casually cheerful as she’d been all afternoon and evening, accommodating to Tonio. How he resembled me. My eloquence all too often also had to come out of a glass. When I was Tonio’s age, I recognised myself in the words of Boudewijn de Groot’s ‘Testament’: ‘out pubbing / I drank too much, hoping to wow her / and got the drubbing I deserved’.

I slipped him some cash so they could take a taxi. And, with that, he vanished out of my life again for weeks.

5

The burial was scheduled for ten o’clock. Laughable mundanity: at quarter past nine I leant with my elbows on the balcony railing on the second floor, clipping my fingernails. Through the opening between the houses, I caught a glimpse of our friend Ronald Sales as he walked down the street. Back in 2001, he had made a portrait of Tonio, then thirteen, for my fiftieth birthday. We hung it in the dining room, which we called the Salon de Sales. The memory of the mischievous smile on Tonio’s face on 15 October when he brought me the framed and wrapped portrait was enough to make me jump from the balcony here and now. Only the psyche-numbing pill kept me from doing it.

Ronald walked bent slightly forward, so it looked like he was fighting his way against the dusty early-morning sunlight, as though into a hard gust of wind. Of course he was one of the few invitees, and was making his way to the line 16 tram stop on De Lairessestraat. There was something so easy-going about the scene that I might well have called his name, waved, and shouted: ‘See you at the cemetery!’

I took my time cutting my overgrown nails, which had been a nuisance all week at the electric typewriter. In my haste to set my notes about Tonio on paper, my two index fingers so often missed their mark that the cuticles had become raw. The image of Tonio’s inert hand on the edge of his deathbed pierced my consciousness for the umpteenth time this week. The grimy fingers. The nails: not too long, but with crescents of dirt under them. No, I am not going to equate his hand with the dark-edged envelope of a death announcement — must put that behind me now.

And yes, plenty of associations. I knew that a dead person’s fingernails and toenails kept on growing, just as one’s hair did. The coffin of the poet Jacques Perk, who had died prematurely, was opened in front of his father before being reburied. The man turned away in anguish: ‘That beard … that beard!’

Some time after the liberation of Eindhoven, my father came upon the body, deep in the Sonse Bergen woods, of a parachutist dangling from a treetop. The first thing that struck him were his non-regulation fingernails — no paratrooper would ever get his chute open with those.

All week, every time the doorbell rang I saw those two young police officers before me. A critical condition. But when it rang now, just before nine-thirty, I didn’t flinch: I knew it was Hinde, who would ride with us to the cemetery. Even that demonic bell was tamed by my inner calm, forced into submission by Miriam’s evil little pill.

First via the Lomanstraat to pick up my father-in-law. The double row of trees darkens the street, all year round. Natan had already turned off the living-room lamp he usually left on. He appeared out of the shadows at the front window. From what I could see of his upper body above the half-curtains, it was clear he had shrunk even more. Ninety-seven. He waved to say he was ready. Hinde got out to go fetch her father.

This was the house where Tonio spent countless weekends in the days when Miriam and I went out a lot. Never a peep of discontent. The Wednesday before Whitsun he had dropped in on his grandfather, as he often did, at irregular intervals. Bit of a chat, and the extra pocket money (accepted under protest) was of course welcome. He never let on how he felt about his grandparents’ divorce, back in ’93.

Natan pulled the front door closed, and paused to check the doorknob. He let his elder daughter lead him across the street, shuffling, looking at the ground. Once they reached the car, he looked up, and, upon seeing Miriam and me, a smile came over his pale, sad face, but his wet eyes did not join in the expression. I got out and helped him onto the back seat.

‘So,’ he said, once he’d sat down.

On the way there, my thoughts were with my interrupted work schedule. Today, Friday 28 May, was supposed to be ‘Day 5’. It was more than just an indicator — something akin to a particular day’s own name. It was more like saying Tonight, One Twentieth In The Can. If the first five days of the schedule had yielded twenty-five new pages, the minimum, I wouldn’t have been dissatisfied, but perhaps just a bit disappointed.

Sometimes a numbered date got, later on, a nickname as well if it had distinguished itself in one way or another. (The Crash. The Acquittal. The Dirty Blank Line.) The first five days of this schedule would never get a nickname, nor the notation of the number of pages each day yielded, just as the days that followed would not.

6

Much more than older Amsterdam-Zuid, the Olympic Stadium neighbourhood and Buitenveldert seemed to consist of light patches meant to reflect the bountiful sunlight. Turning onto the street where the cemetery was located, I looked over my shoulder to my father-in-law and said: ‘Don’t worry, Natan, I’ll stick with you.’

He nodded in gratitude. Miriam pulled into the car park. Some of the mourners were already standing against the pink brick wall next to the gate. We got out and approached them, slowing our pace to accommodate Natan. Whether it was the pill, I couldn’t rightly say, but even now there were no overwhelming emotions churning around inside me. We had a painful job to do. Just get through it. We hadn’t ordered a big convocation. It did not have to last long. Afterwards I would think about what this all meant.

The woman from the funeral home came over to us. We went through the details of the sober ceremony. I would say a few words, then invite my brother to deliver his speech. I excused myself: ‘Just have to greet a few people.’

All at once, I stood face to face with my tearful mother-in-law. She was being supported by two nurses from St. Vitus.

‘That sweet Tonio,’ she sobbed, ‘he’d never hurt a fly. Why? … Why?’

I kissed her. ‘We’ll talk later.’

I spoke briefly with my brother and his wife. With my sister, who wore a wig because of the chemo and radiation. Tonio’s two best friends, Jim and Jonas. Jim’s younger brother and parents joined him; Jonas had brought his mother. Friends: Josie and Arie, Dick and Nelleke. I told Ronald I’d seen him walk down the Banstraat toward the tram stop. ‘As though you were struggling against the driving sunlight,’ I said, but he didn’t get my drift, and I felt like a fool.

A light-grey hearse drove, almost noiselessly, up to the gate. Six young men, all dressed in light-grey tailcoats and light-grey top hats, slid the red-brown casket containing Tonio’s body out of the hearse and placed it on their shoulders. In perfect unison, they went into motion. I slipped my hand under Natan’s arm and led him slowly behind the pallbearers. They were all equally slim, and their youth was undoubtedly meant to tally with the age of the deceased entrusted to them.

I wondered if it had been wise to take that pill. Hardly gave it a second thought when I’d placed it under my tongue to marinate. It would, I figured, take the edge off the situation. What I now experienced was not so much indifference, but rather an emptiness — in myself, and in the coffin. Two congruent voids.

Natan’s shuffling must have made us fall behind: suddenly we were overtaken by Miriam, Hinde, and their mother, still supported by the two sturdy nurses. Other members of the group passed us on both sides.

The sun shone over the well-kept cemetery. The modest procession snaked between the meticulously trimmed hedges. My brain, chilled from the medication, had room for thoughts like: A graveyard like a labyrinth, and make just enough about-turns with the casket in the dead-end passages until, in the heart of the maze, one hits upon the open pit and the evil spirits have been sidetracked. I wondered how the ghastly pain of the past few days could have quitted me now, of all moments, when the object of my loss was being borne ahead of me, about to vanish into the earth forever.

7

I saw two rabbits sitting on the path. It touched me, how they sat there motionlessly, watching the approaching cortège, and then darted into the hedge. Buitenveldert Cemetery was famous for its rabbits, which nibbled on the plants and flowers on the graves. None of the deceased’s relatives protested — it was all part of the package.

I tried to imagine (perhaps to recapture some semblance of feeling) how I would have pointed out that pair of bunnies to a seven-year-old Tonio, and how he would have said ‘awww … cute’, but instead I saw him in the child’s seat on the handlebars of my bike, age one, his finger pointing at the rolls of hay against the sloping French meadow, and squealing: ‘owww … owww!’

It wasn’t far to the grave. The immaculately grey young men placed the coffin on the electric lift above the grave, nodded in respect, and marched, light as feathers, off behind the hedges. They appeared to be executing a thoroughly planned choreography that would have done quite good service as a ballet — only the six dancers would have been wearing grey tights under their tailcoats instead of trousers.

Once everyone had assembled in a semi-circle around the grave, I took a step forward, right up to the coffin. I did not manage to stand upright on both legs. My restless left foot found its way to a wooden beam (an old railroad tie, maybe?) that bordered the edge of the pit.

‘I’ll say a few brief words,’ I began, ‘and then I’ll turn it over to my brother Frans.’

The woman from the funeral home and the cemetery caretaker stood at a polite distance, in the opening between two hedges, keeping a discreet eye on the proceedings.

‘Dear friends … Tonio had many talents, but that did not include a talent for arguing. Differences of opinion, yes, disagreements aplenty, but I never once, in his entire youth, succeeded in getting into an all-out row with him. Worrying. Okay, once. A real quarrel. Well, almost. After two abandoned studies, it didn’t look like there was much direction to his life. I summoned Tonio to our house, and took him to task for his lack of ambition. But even then you couldn’t call it a proper row. Tonio forestalled escalation by insisting he was veritably exploding with ambition, and he’d prove it. For starters, he would get a part-time job while laying the groundwork for a definitive course of study, so he wouldn’t have to rely entirely on his parents for financial support. He was so convincing about it, and so damn charming, too, that once again I didn’t manage to turn a little squabble into a full-fledged father-son clash.’

On the coffin lay the Biedermeier flower arrangement out of the funeral home’s brochure. Every time my eye fell upon it, I felt as though I was addressing Tonio directly, and I did not want that. My gaze drifted up to the blue sky. My foot fidgeted and shifted incessantly over the beam.

‘Tonio kept his promise. He got a job, and last September started in earnest on a Media & Culture major. Last Wednesday he dropped by our place. He gave us a preview of the future he had planned out for himself. After his bachelor’s degree, he planned to get a master’s in Media Technology, which meant commuting regularly between Amsterdam, The Hague, and Leiden. He had his act together.’

8

He dropped out of the Amsterdam Photo Academy after a year. The Royal Academy in The Hague was his goal. Part of the admission process was to create a photo series with the theme ‘club life’ in any chosen context, and to approach it as originally as possible.

The summer of 2007, and with it the admissions deadline for the coming academic year, approached. I had gone to Château St Gerlach to be able to work in peace, but of course Tonio managed to find me. That assignment from the academy … he wasn’t really getting anywhere with it, he told me over the phone from Amsterdam.

‘I’m not really the club type,’ he said.

‘Well, then let that show through in your project,’ I said. ‘It’s not like they’re making you go play klabberjass every Tuesday night.’

‘Play what?’

I told him the story of my father, his Grandpa Piet, who wasn’t the club type either, but all the more a pub type, which in turn my mother objected to. In order to get at least a weekly dispensation to go the pub, he joined a klabberjass club. One evening he won, quite by accident, a tin of butter cookies donated by the local baker: one of those large square tins with a net weight of five or six kilos. To celebrate his victory, he drank himself totally and shamelessly blotto, and then had to make his way home with that tin of biscuits. Being the first one up the next morning, I found the tin, battered and beaten, on the kitchen table. It was half empty, and what was still left inside had been pretty much reduced to crumbs. When my mother sent me off the baker to fetch bread before school, I espied, at irregular intervals, small heaps of crumbs along the sidewalk: the exact spots Grandpa Piet had fallen flat, booty in hand. The café where he had celebrated his triumph was right near the bakery where I had to buy the bread.

‘If I had to do a photo essay about a club, Tonio, I’d make it about a klabberjass club. You start with the card game in the pub. There, on a separate table, is the trophy: the tin of butter cookies, say. The winner in his finest hour … and then, on his way home with his trophy under his arm, you photograph his demise, heap by little heap. The winnings, crumbled step by step.’

Poor Tonio, my advice was of little use to him. ‘The fifties, Adri … I can’t show up in The Hague with an historical documentary.’

Then he grudgingly mentioned an earlier, rejected idea. ‘Grandpa Natan, doesn’t he go out to eat four times a week at a Jewish community centre? It’s always the same people … a sort of dinner club?’

We worked this idea out over the phone. In the end, Tonio produced a wonderful, intimate, and melancholy-steeped series of photos focusing on the regular diners in the Beth Shalom canteen. His grandfather was the pivotal figure in the series. He photographed him at home, as he waited for the shuttle bus, and then as he left Beth Shalom when Miriam came to pick him up.

It wasn’t really an appropriate subject for an eighteen-year-old budding photographer who was out to mercilessly document the new face of the world. But, oh, what an intimate Weltschmertz he captured in those photos. And with such tenderness and compassion … The festive pennants emblazoned with the Star of David, strung across the ceiling like festoons (they hung there year-round). The red plastic water jugs on the tables (the magical red reflection on the tabletop). The solitary woman, a napkin tucked behind her heavy necklace. Grandpa Natan, head uncovered and in his shirtsleeves, at a table full of men in sport jackets and yarmulkes …

Tonio kept in touch with me between sessions. He asked if I thought it would be disrespectful to photograph a spastic man whose food had the tendency to fly every which way. I happened to have volume 6, odds and ends of the author’s own choosing, of Gerard Reve’s Collected Works with me. I read Tonio an excerpt, by way of inspiration, from the story ‘Three Words.’

It is 1940. The still-quite-young author is with fellow writer Jan de Hartog in a soup kitchen on the Spuistraat.

‘Here it comes, Tonio. Do with it what you will.’

Two women dressed in white, uniformish smocks, who apparently ruled the roost here, were busy installing an old, decrepit man at one of the tables, dragging and lifting him into his place. When he was more or less seated, one of the women knotted an enormous, grey-and-blue checked, ragged standard-issue towel around his neck. The other woman brought a small zinc washtub and placed it on the table in front of him. Was he going to be washed and shaved? No: the first woman deposited a dish of food in the tub, and the man, growling softly, began to eat. Much of what he brought to his mouth with the spoon — for a fork would have been utterly futile — fell back into the dish, or next to it, but always within the confines of the tub, from which the man could simply fish it out again.

We were still standing at the door. Jan de Hartog observed the tableau motionlessly, whereby a strange, sculpted serenity came over his face, and his eyes took on a visionary expression, as though he were witnessing more than just this particular scene, and discerning in eternity something imperceptible that had unexpectedly become visible.

‘That is God,’ he mumbled.

Tonio thought the excerpt was ‘pretty amusing’, but doubted whether he could put it to use in his photo essay. ‘Me and Dutch literature,’ he said. ‘We don’t click. And whether that spastic man at Beth Shalom is God … I dunno … that’s for other people to decide.’

9

I told of the student-parent mix-up two weeks before his death. The unexpected intimacy in a café on the Staalstraat. How naturally he took the lead in the conversation, and in what good form he was. How, in saying goodbye, having nearly got into the taxi, I went back to slip Tonio some extra pocket money. How I, emotional from the evening, hugged him, gave him three kisses, and how he grinned back sheepishly. And how, later, in the taxi, I realised I’d forgotten to give him the cash.

‘In retrospect, we can say — but it remains in retrospect — that that awkward accolade was in fact a farewell … now no longer possible. It was good. Bye, sweet boy.’

I nodded to Frans that it was his turn. I sat down next to Miriam, ran my hand briefly over her hair. People might have expected us to fall into each other’s arms, weeping loudly, but we didn’t, and not because we were too well-mannered for that. Later, I found out that Miriam felt the same way. The grief kept itself to itself — but with every fibre tensed, to be sure, ready to burst.

10

‘… It sounds ironic, but only in the past week, since his accident, has an important aspect of Tonio come to life for me. Of course, I knew he’d been taking photographs for some years; we had even asked him to take pictures at our wedding. But in fact I’d never really seen more than that remarkable self-portrait as Oscar Wilde.

‘This week I found my way to a website with a selection of his photos, and they struck me in my head and my heart. The old folks eating at Beth Shalom, the penetrating portrait of Miriam, the young junkie lying on a bed in the shadows, the silent girl at the window, the un-Luganic street scenes from Lugano, candids of partiers at festivals or the Book Ball — he always seemed to want to study and lay bare a situation from the “back” or from the “inside out”. And he succeeds, often with abrasive sharpness.

‘This kid’s got talent.’

‘Hey Tonio: what are you up to now? It wouldn’t surprise me if you’re studying the back side of life. And mumbling out loud: “How’s that work, actually? What makes it tick?”

‘In any case, you’ll always occupy our thoughts, now and for the rest of our lives. Or, to paraphrase a writer very well known to both of us: You are not dead.’

11

With a vehemence that made her ugly, my mother relentlessly hammered the dangers of traffic into us kids. All through primary school, we were only allowed to cycle within a certain area. No crossing busy roads. Don’t bike along the canal.

‘You want me to have to deliver you to the graveyard?’ she would shout with her face right up close to ours, spraying saliva and banging her fist against her forehead.

Ever since she let a friend convince her to slide into the 1.20m end at the local swimming pool, where she ‘felt the water tugging at her’, the pool was off-limits as well. ‘It sucks you under. You’ll drown. I’m not letting you go.’

Of course, we biked along the canal, sometimes so close to the edge that the reeds crackled under our tyres. We crossed the busy Mierloseweg without reporting it back to her. And you could get into the pool with a borrowed season pass.

None of us had to be delivered to the graveyard — well, except my father, almost, after he — drunk as a doornail — drove his scooter into a ditch, and was pronounced dead on the scene by the ambulance personnel.

The outcome of my mother’s nightmares skipped a generation. I had to deliver her grandson to the graveyard. Because I wasn’t hysterical enough in hammering home the hazards of road traffic? Had the worried-to-death bitch finally been proved right, here at Buitenveldert Cemetery?

12

A few lines of Ben Jonson’s poem ‘On My First Son’, which the poet Menno Wigman had sent me the previous day as a gesture of comfort, played through my head:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

Seven years — in Tonio’s case it would be trebled, but otherwise Jonson, four centuries earlier, expressed my loss with exquisite precision:

O, could I lose all father, now …

Dispiriting, mood-deadening pill or no, there was that sudden cramp in my chest. Had Miriam and I opted too blindly for such a no-frills funeral? Had we really acted in Tonio’s spirit? Were we not selling him short?

Even a person of twenty-one has, in the occasional doldrums, visions of his own funeral. Who did Tonio envisage standing at his grave? At least the few friends present here today. Girls? Around me I saw, excluding my aged mother-in-law, only middle-aged women. There had been girls in his life. He knew what it was like to be in love. Thinking back on the Tonio of last week, I can’t rule out that he’d been falling in love again. That girl from the photo shoot — we didn’t know her name, but … shouldn’t we have done more to try to track her down?

‘So who’s the third?’

In our preparations, constricted by panic and grief, we had denied Tonio a weeping beloved at his graveside. We should have stood here, the three of us: me, Miriam, and the model, who would no longer be nameless.

Even if this wrong couldn’t be righted, I had to find her, to question her, find out if she had meant something to him … he to her … If need be, we would come here again and grieve with her, at a grave by that time filled in, grassed over … well, then, what the hell, so be it.

13

And then there were a couple more lines from Ben Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’:

Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

If I wasn’t mistaken, a ray of irony twinkled through the heartrending lines. ‘Here lies my best piece of prose …’ Would I ever be able to say that about Tonio in all seriousness? No, but I could try to keep him alive in prose. Not so that people would say ‘his best prose’ … But that I would, in whatever style, offer them a Tonio of flesh and blood.

I hugged Frans, almost jealous of the sob I felt (or heard) shudder out of him.

A cemetery worker operated the handle of the machine that set the device into motion. Slowly, with the reassuringly sober hum of a household appliance, the coffin containing my son’s body sank into the precisely dug grave. I wanted to force myself to think an appropriate thought, but came up with nothing of use, only self-evident observations, translated into words, such as: ‘Tonio’s remains are being entrusted to the earth.’ Entirely in the style of the captions under the illustrations in my old volumes of Jules Verne: ‘The foundering ship sank vertically.’

I did not hold Miriam tightly, nor did she hold me. We both did think something along the lines of: I’ll find him/her by and by.

‘I would like to say something.’ The weepy voice of my mother-in-law interrupted the metallically humming silence. She took a step toward the grave, which took some doing, as the two burly nurses from St. Vitus were clasping either arm. ‘Darling Tonio, I hope I’ll be joining you soon. I’m done living. I’ll be with you soon.’

The winch with the coffin had reached its lowest point. The humming stopped. Now the only thing we heard was my mother-in-law’s crying, dotted with stammering, by now unintelligible, snippets of text. The woman from the funeral home stepped forward and indicated that, if we so desired, we could scatter sand into the grave with a long-handled shovel.

Instead of heading for the exit, I went along the handful of mourners. I stroked Jim’s younger brother, Kaz, who was crying, along the scruff of his neck. To do the same with Tonio’s friend Jonas I’d have had to reach higher than I was able — he’d grown so tall since their school days. I gave his upper arm a heartening squeeze. Jonas stayed over nearly every Friday night during their last year of high school. They became proficient at smuggling in beer, above the rations we allowed. They thought it was fun, or cool, to get sick from it. They chatted endlessly, watched films together. Sometimes I hovered on the landing to eavesdrop on their excited voices, the exuberant laughter, and tried not to think that one day it would end, that after their exams each would go his own way.

As the shovel was passed from hand to hand, I went over to my mother-in-law, who had stayed put where she was, wedged tightly between her two chaperones. ‘Adri, that dear Tonio …’ She began crying all over again. ‘I don’t need to live anymore. I want to die. I’m going to Tonio.’

One of the nurses reassured me with closed eyes and slightly pursed lips, as though to say: Not anytime soon, she isn’t. I looked around me. After taking their turn with the shovel and sand, the company moved toward the exit in small groups. Again I wondered if I hadn’t let Tonio down by offering him such a brief, modest funeral. If I had any feeling since this morning, despite that wretched pill, it was a vague fear: that I had let him down in life, and now I’d let him down in death.

Thomas Mann had been a god to me. I couldn’t read another word of his after learning, from a biography, that after his son Klaus’s suicide, he did not go to Cannes for the funeral. He chose not to break off a speaking tour of Scandinavia.

I had just buried my son. But was I really there?

A writer, not Thomas Mann, once described the feeling of betrayal that took hold of you after burying a loved one — after you literally turned your back on the open grave, leaving the deceased, in his new solitude, to his fate. (Pff, ‘fate’. Not much more ‘fate’ than what damp and maggots had in store for him.) I asked myself if I felt this kind of betrayal now that, accompanied by my friend Ronald, I removed myself from the grave. Tonio in his new solitude. If I were honest, I’d have to admit to myself that I was not aware of any more betrayal than I tried to feel, under the influence of the idea at hand. Never again would I quash my pain with some vulgar pill.

Chatting with Ronald about a celebrity buried here somewhere, the betrayal issue kept nagging me. I felt I had betrayed the Tonio who cycled on his own through the Whitsun night. That I wasn’t standing on the Stadhouderskade to steer fate the other way — that felt like betrayal. And if I couldn’t have prevented the crash, I could have at least been kneeling at my beloved son’s side as he lay there, blacked out and bleeding on the asphalt.

August 2002. Miriam felt like a poulet de Bresse, preferably pre-cooked, and thus we came to be in Bresse on a warm, rainy summer morning. Bresse: why not have a look at the cathedral, too, while we’re here? The three of us strolled through the city centre — and all of a sudden, sooner than we’d expected, it towered above us at the end of an ancient lane: huge, dark, massive. Looking up in fascination, I walked slowly toward it — and all at once was splayed out on the cobblestones. Tripped over one of those cement barriers that the authorities had snuck among the medieval cobbles to discourage parking in the alley. A loud cry of pain: my shin was grazed by the octagonal cement.

Almost in tears himself, Tonio tugged at me, trying to help me get up. Hearing me let out such a shout, he thought I’d broken something (like, earlier that year, my shoulder and foot). Paleness showing through his suntan, he kept hold of my arm, caring and kindly, for quite some time. In order to justify this to himself, he saw to it that his tenderness turned into bristly annoyance.

‘They’re out of their minds,’ he said, regaining some of his colour. ‘They know people are going to be gawking at the church.’

14

In the course of my life, I developed a problematic attitude to death. I kept it at a distance.

For years it was death itself that kept its distance. My paternal grandparents had died before I was born; my mother’s parents were still young and not yet mortally unhealthy. My parents each survived a severe stomach operation at around age thirty. My siblings did not die in a traffic accident, nor did any of my friends.

Death manifested itself solely at a distance. The Indonesian neighbour. The other neighbour’s young daughter. A friend of a friend.

And when death came closer, I evaded it. My father and my mother both suffered long illnesses, and I was not often at their side. When Tonio, ten years old, said he did not want to see Granny Toos for the last time, and not dead either, I was happy to keep him company while the rest of the family went to look at her in her coffin before it was shut. I sat on a bench outside the viewing room at the crematorium. Tonio stood between my spread knees, and I gathered him close. He pried my chin upward to see if I was crying, and if so, how badly. Not so bad. Watery eyes. He made a point of crying as restrainedly as I did. When I noticed him regulating his tears, employing whatever kind of internal clinch, I clamped him even tighter. ‘Adri, not so ha-a-a-a-rd.’

At funerals and cremations, I always yearned for the reception, preferably in a café, where the taste of death could be openly rinsed away.

15

With the exception of Jim’s little brother (who had to go to school) and Jonas’s mother, everyone came over to our house. Miriam had ordered wine and sandwiches from Pasteuning, the local deli and caterer, that would be delivered on call.

As we’d done on the way there, Miriam and I took Natan and Hinde with us in the car. Our return home after the funeral couldn’t have been less of a happening, and that was exactly our aim.

What at the cemetery appeared to be a modest handful of people now managed to fill an entire living room. Pasteuning brought the order so quickly that it was as though they had been waiting in the delivery van at the curb.

I slid into my regular, sagging corner of the sofa, where I felt safest. All the same, my mother-in-law sat down on the nearby chaise longue, and assumed her special conversation position.

‘Adri, it’s not that big a deal, but why a Catholic cemetery?’ As always when she, tendentiously or not, raised an issue that was vexing her, she first rubbed her nose vigorously with thumb and index finger. ‘I don’t understand.’

I knew I’d best avoid bringing up my own Catholic background, because I’d renounced it (in her presence, too) more often and more thoroughly than a dribble of holy water, a First Communion, and the grand total of, yes, one (1) confession required. Tonio had a Jewish mother and, through her, two Jewish grandparents, so, yes, a Jewish funeral might have been plausible. The Catholics not only worshipped a false Redeemer, but they also blamed the Jews for nailing that Redeemer to the cross. Not that big a deal.

Back at the cemetery, where she yelled to Tonio that she’d be joining him soon, I felt briefly sorry for her. Now she was spoiling it all, by sticking her manually polished nose into it. I had no desire whatsoever to explain to her — again — that our choice of Buitenveldert Cemetery had nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with the happenstance that it was a small, out-of-the-way graveyard, where we could be sure no paparazzi would be perched in the trees.

‘Wies,’ I said, laughing, but I meant it, ‘it’s been ages since I’ve heard you stick up for Judaism.’

I could say what I wanted, but listen: that was something she seldom, if ever, did. She rubbed her nose again for the next confrontational question. Her chaperones stood with their sandwiches in the dining room, which was bathed in full sunlight. Everyone else had found a spot in the front room. They ate, drank, and talked.

‘What worries me is …’ said my mother-in-law, her voice breaking, ‘what about your writing?’ Followed by, less as a question than as an observation: ‘How are you going to keep on working … !’

God, no, not today, don’t let this happen on the day I buried my son: that the woman who, all those years ago, openly doubted my ability to put food on the table, and with every minor success wailed pathetically: ‘As long as he can keep it up’, that she was now going to go into convulsions about the progress of my literary labours. One of the nurses came to my rescue with a reminder that it was time to be getting back to St. Vitus. The two chaperones still had work to do there.

‘Wies, maybe you should start saying goodbye to people,’ said the woman, who had introduced herself earlier as Brigitte.

‘Well!’ she huffed, reaching for her nose but not polishing it as usual, ‘I’m certainly not saying goodbye to Natan. What do you people take me for?’

Her face took a crude expression unsuited to the occasion.

‘Brigitte meant in a more general way,’ I said. ‘You can just skip Natan.’

So there you had it: two people who had lost their family, in part (Wies) or entirely (Natan) in the war, and then, at the funeral of their only grandson, bitterly refused to even shake the other’s hand. I was sorely in need of a drink. On the way to the kitchen, I thanked Brigitte and Margreet for their support. I made a mental note to send them each flowers at a later date.

I hung around in the kitchen until I could be sure the St. Vitus delegation had left. Back in the living room, I checked to see that the remaining guests had been seen to. Dick, who I never saw drink (but did see, on occasion, sniff nostalgically at a hip-flask of whisky, as a remembrance of alcoholic days of yore), had allowed Miriam to set him in front of a full bottle of vermouth. I expressed my surprise.

‘I won’t get through this sad day otherwise,’ Dick said. ‘The only problem is … if I drink, I always drink the vilest, nastiest possible … sweet vermouth … which has a built-in limit. But Miriam gave me a whole bottle of Noilly Prat. And, unfortunately, I really like it.’

16

Always a wondrous experience, the animated conversation and drinking during a post-funeral reception. I tried to participate, but as relaxed, almost indifferent, as I was at the funeral, I was now uptight. Perhaps the pill was wearing off. I tried to combat the stiffness with ice-cold vodkas, but my speech remained under lock and key.

Tonio’s best friends, Jim and Jonas, chatted, both drinking beer. There was nothing that afternoon which could evoke Tonio’s presence more vividly than those two faces. When they were about fifteen or sixteen, we took them to Lanzarote for the Christmas holiday. A girl of about their age, Tania, also went along — I’d not only never met her before, but never even heard of her. It was unclear who she was ‘with’ — all three equally, was my impression after the first few days.

Tania was not about to let herself be intimidated by the boy-dominance. As soon as we arrived, they attacked the bedrooms: mattresses were pulled from beds and dragged to the largest room. They were going to sleep together, the four of them — no ifs, ands, or buts.

What followed was a week of delirious fun, during which Miriam and I seemed to have become completely invisible to them. As soon as we appeared, their expressions, in all their exuberance, went all glassy, and we simply dissolved. At the seaside restaurant where we ate dinner, they had their own table, which danced around the place so furiously as a result of their animated discussions that the restaurant staff had to ask them to get up, so it could be brought, pizzas and all, back to its original spot. We did exist, if only for a moment, when it came time to pay the bill, insofar as they were able to point us out as the folks with the cash.

It was almost a privilege to witness, close up, four young people who enjoyed one another’s company so intensely, Tania no less than her three roommates. On New Year’s Eve, Tonio asked if they could drink vodka and Coke to usher in the new year. I said they’d better not dare put away even a millimetre more than half of the bottle.

‘You’re minors. Miriam and I are responsible.’

‘Yoo-hoo, guys,’ Tonio cried, ‘we can have half.’

When I want to fetch some mineral water from the fridge later that evening, Jonas was filling the empty vodka bottle with water.

‘Jonas, did you really think I wouldn’t notice?’

The kid gazed stupidly back. He was completely blotto. The next morning, I saw another empty bottle the four of them had snuck in, bobbing in the swimming pool among the clumps of grass they’d beaten into it with a golf club.

I was never able to ascertain the position and role of Tania in this constellation. When they said goodbye back at Schiphol, where she was met by her mother, Tania gave each of her companions an equally sisterly hug. Only Tonio made a fleeting, tender gesture (running the back of his hand along her jawline, or maybe he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear), and looked at her intently, without suspending his smile. That was all. After that, we never heard another word from or about Tania. Months, perhaps a year later, I raised the question with Tonio.

‘Hey, that Tania … from Lanzarote last Christmas … have you seen her at all?’

‘No,’ he replied, in a tone that said: Why should I?

‘And Jim … and Jonas … do they have any contact with her?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did something happen on Lanzarote … that might have made her angry?’

‘No, how come?’

‘No reason. Just wondering.’

17

I’m never keen to recognise omens. Maybe that’s why I only really see them when the damage is already done and they’ve lost their prophesying function. Omens that no longer contain a forewarning lose their dangerous sheen: they dry up.

I once kept a list of calamities I came across in novels that later, exactly, or nearly so, befell the author. Omens that the writer himself set to paper, cloaked in fiction. If I were to take heed of all the dire portents in my own novels, I would soon have to stop writing altogether.

Since Black Whitsun, the foretokens predating that day keep rearing their head. The air around me swirls with them. Wherever they hid (a nasty habit of omens) prior to 23 May, they have been resounding — now that it’s too late to be alarmed — for weeks on end. They visit me in my sleep, and do not give me a moment’s peace. They’re like annoying insects, and they seem to multiply relentlessly, keeping pace with my increasingly guilty conscience.

At the time, I did not even notice the majority of these omens. Those that were too obviously a warning disguised as a symbol, I cast to the wind. Others, I manufactured myself, choosing not to regard them as forebodings.

I had written a number of ‘requiems’: two for childhood friends, for my father, for my mother, for a colleague, even (the shortest of them all) for a cat who’d been bitten to death. It never occurred to me that one day I’d have to write a requiem for my own son. Now it’s as though the first five were premonitory studies for what, as a matter of survival, I am now forced to execute.

Weerborstels, about the cousin who had smashed into a tree while on the run from the cops, was in fact a requiem, too. It was a novella about a problematic father-son relationship, which ended fatally for the son. My creative thinking did not, apparently, allow me to imagine that Tonio, another vulnerable-boy-in-the-making, could meet the same fate as my cousin; otherwise, I’d have certainly abandoned the project.

At the end of his speech, my brother quoted the last line of Weerborstels: ‘He is not dead.’ Later that day, Frans reminded me that I had dedicated the novella to Tonio. ‘I remember noticing it,’ he said, ‘because in those days you always dedicated your books to Miriam and Tonio.’

I checked it at once. ‘For my son, Tonio.’ He was right.

‘It’s so plainly the story of a father and his son,’ I said. ‘I guess I wanted to make that clear in the dedication.’

It was disgusting. I had related a draft version of Weerborstels, then still entitled Met gedoofde lichten, in a long letter to my brother in the summer of 1989, when Miriam, Tonio, and I were staying at the schoolhouse in Marsalès. Tonio’s first birthday was just behind us. The main character Robby was based on my cousin Willy, who the previous year had met his end (in more or less the same fashion: ‘met gedoofde lichten’ — with his lights off). At the beginning of the novella, I had given the young Robby similar traits to the six-year-old Robin van Persie, who occasionally joined his sisters in our schoolhouse yard. A kind of bashful brazenness … timid audacity.

I had been given a couple of boxes with extra copies of Weerborstels, the annual Book Week freebie. Tonio later sold them at the Vondelpark market on Queen’s Day. I insisted he not ask for more than a guilder per copy. At his request, I autographed the books. He would proudly show his customers that he was the dedicatee. ‘For my son, Tonio.’ He was prepared to add his own signature, for a price.

When he showed me his takings at the end of the day — nearly three hundred guilders! — I asked him how many copies he’d sold. Well, he still had some left over, for next year. This morning, he’d started out at two-and-a-half guilders apiece, but when he saw that they sold like hotcakes he upped it to five guilders, and later yet to seven-fifty. ‘Nobody seemed to mind.’

‘But I do. Damn it, Tonio, I said it had to be for the fun of it. I could die of embarrassment.’

‘Adri, come on, a guilder … you’re selling yourself short.’

‘Selling your winnings short, you mean.’

18

Dick had polished off his bottle of Noilly Prat, and now sat nursing a foul glass of very ordinary vermouth with evident distaste, compensating the sickly-sweetness with the occasional sniff on his hip flask of whisky (not too long, though, because then too much would evaporate, and it had to go a long way).

As the delivery time of the afternoon newspapers neared, I paced with increasing anxiety over to the landing, peering down the stairs to check whether they were already lying on the mat under the letter slot. What did I expect to find? The truth, in the form of an obituary? Did a suspicion need to be confirmed on the ‘family announcements’ page of the evening paper?

‘What with all that modern communication stuff,’ I said, back in the living room, ‘all those mobile phones … email addresses … the internet, God knows what else … Facebook, Hyves, you name it. Twitter … you’d think somebody should be able to trace that girl.’

‘She mentioned Facebook on Tonio’s voicemail,’ Miriam said. ‘They must have chatted with each other there.’

‘You’ve got Polaroids of her,’ Jonas said. ‘Why don’t we put one of them on Facebook, circulate them among Tonio’s friends … Maybe she’ll turn up that way.’

‘Except that Tonio pulled a fast one on us,’ I said. ‘He took those snapshots with him, maybe threw them away, because they were just test shots.’

Jim offered to look through Tonio’s room for the prints. Meanwhile, Jonas would try to track down the girl via a Facebook message: ‘Seeking the roughly 20-year-old girl, name unknown, who Tonio van der Heijden photographed on Thursday, 20 May.’

Miriam reminded me of my initial reservations. ‘You’ve had a drink now,’ she said, ‘but yesterday you wanted to just let it be. We wondered whether we really wanted it, you know, her identity and all. Say we find out they had something together … or could have … Do we want to torture ourselves for the rest of our lives with … yeah, with what? A love affair for Tonio? Maybe our future daughter-in-law? The mother of our grandchildren? … I don’t know if I want to have those kind of thoughts. I never used to have them when I saw Tonio with a girl. It doesn’t get us anywhere. Yeah, where all roads lead. To Tonio’s grave.’

The remaining guests sat motionless, silent.

‘Miriam,’ I said, ‘we also have to think of Tonio. I remember how proud he was when he showed me those snapshots … his grin, when I commented what a good looker she was. He said she’d invited him to Paradiso. That’s not something he’d tell me otherwise, don’t you think? There was obviously something there. Of course he wanted us to meet her. I’ll bet he was disappointed she was already gone when we got back from the Bos. Minchen, we owe it to Tonio to find her. If he can’t introduce us to her anymore, then we have to track her down ourselves.’

‘I think,’ said Miriam, ‘it’s only going to cause us more pain.’

‘And what if I think we shouldn’t steer clear of that pain?’

19

Whenever Miriam enters the room, I’m pleased to see the familiar presence. Still, after all these years, I feel that pleasant, mild shock: there she is. Since Whit Sunday it’s as though I’m seeing double. It is my wife who steps through the doorway, and at the same time, like a not-quite-lined-up superimposed image, it is a mother who has been robbed of her child. The second figure refuses to stay within the outline of the first one, no matter how much I blink.

Saturday morning. More than the queasiness of the hangover, it was the stomach-turning realisation: Yesterday I buried my son. The previous day, I had watched the coffin containing the body of my son being lowered into a hole in the ground, and I did not cry, and after that I drank myself into a common stupor. I couldn’t even remember how the afternoon ended, let alone the evening.

Right after I had pulled open the curtain, swearing at the bright sunlight, the double vision of Miriam entered the room: the mother of my child, and the now-childless mother. Closing one eye to blot out the double vision did not help. Her expression was one of heartache, fear, insecurity. I went over to her, placed my hands on her shoulders. ‘What is it?’

‘You exploded at me last night.’

‘I can’t remember a thing.’ That’s what you get with vodka, a drink that not only prevented a headache, but, just to be on the safe side, also disengaged one’s short-term memory, perhaps to erase recollections that might bring on a headache after all. ‘What was it about?’

‘Everyone was gone, and I wanted to go to bed. You didn’t. You wanted to talk. I didn’t. I was all talked out. And then you started in … angry … that I only thought of myself.’

‘Oh, Minchen.’ I pulled her close to me. ‘I was angry, but not at you. At what happened. At everything this dirty trick has brought us.’

This appeared to reassure her. ‘You were already angry in the afternoon,’ she said, ‘when the papers were delivered. Having to see Tonio’s name in bold letters on the obituary page … you were fuming. You hurled the papers through the living room.’

Miriam made breakfast. She returned to the bedroom with the tray, the newspaper, and a large stack of condolence letters. More bereavement ads, but this time Tonio’s boldface-printed name did not elicit anger; the various messages surrounding it were too implausible for that, too absurd — although there was nothing to laugh about either.

Side by side in bed, propped up against the pillows, reading all those shocked condolence letters together … It was a bad piece of theatre. A cheesy sequel to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with George and Martha in the marital bed, passing messages of sympathy back and forth after the fatal accident of their made-up twenty-year-old son.

I had asked Miriam for toast with jam, but couldn’t even manage that. Weak coffee with lots of milk was all my stomach would tolerate. The only organs where the terrible truth could permeate were my intestines. The diarrhoea that began on Whit Sunday had gone on for a week.

20

What feeds the gut-wrenchingness of Tonio’s death the most is the razor-sharp recollection of all our senseless bickering in his presence. Lead-in, build-up, climax, cool-off, reconciliation — it’s all forgotten, leaked away into the folds of time. At the moment itself, our disagreement and each one’s highly personal sense of rightness were a matter of life or death — for the innocent bystander, Tonio, as well, at age three, five, eight, eleven, thirteen. With the exception of certain recurring arguments and their variants (the ‘classics’), none of it has stuck — and as far as Tonio is concerned, it’s anybody’s guess what effect it all had on him.

The idiotic quarrelling that’s supposedly inherent to every marriage, not even the bad ones. The contorted arguments. Being right just for the sake of being right, like a sort of l’art pour l’art. The raised voices, with or without sprays of spittle. The ‘did-so-did-not’ level of the school playground.

(Diary entry, Tuesday 8 April 1997)

08:00 woken by familiar sounds coming from bathroom. Intimate murmuring between mother and son. Sleep draws me back down, deep into the old, fragile mattress (which really needs replacing), but I decide to regard the time of awakening as a sign: the recently implemented eating regimen requires me to have breakfast between eight and nine.

I open the bathroom door: M. is sitting on the closed toilet-seat lid combing Tonio’s hair. He looks up at me, startled but smiling. (‘You’ve broken your own record,’ he said recently, the last time I got up that early.)

I say: ‘Keep your snappy comments about broken records to yourself today, okay?’

He pulls a puckered lemon-face, as though he feels he’s been put firmly in his place, but his bright, brown eyes sparkle with mockery. Downstairs I pick up the morning paper from the doormat and take it with me back to bed. A work crew, armed with an electric apparatus, has begun sanding the living-room floor. (In May they will attack my office.) The entire house is gradually covered in a thin layer of snot-green powder, a mixture of old paint and the underlying wood.

Before M. takes Tonio to school, I am given a sober breakfast of wholegrain bread and sugar-free jam (no butter), plus the recommended ration of cappuccino. When M. returns, I give her the tips I’d promised for the ‘ur-book’ issue of Maatstaf (Mallarmé, Proust, Genet, Mulisch, Reve, etc.)*

[* Maatstaf was a Dutch literary magazine (1953–1999). The December 1997 issue was devoted to ‘ur-books’ by twelve well-known Dutch authors (including Van Der Heijden): excerpts from early or unpublished manuscripts that would form a first, or ‘ur’, version of later writings. Miriam Rotenstreich was one of the magazine’s five editors at the time.]

Home renovation has its benefits. I spend half my days in espresso bars throughout the city, reading and scribbling to my heart’s content.

[ … ]

15:30 tram 24 back to Zuid. Alight Beethovenstraat, walk home via Apollo, Hilton, Christie’s. At our front door I bump into Ronald Sales, who is delivering the portrait he did of me some years ago. We bring it inside, and decide to celebrate my purchase in the Vondelpark. Tonio asks if he can go with us, and straps on his new roller skates (which he wheedled out of me with the Golden Owl prize money.* Until now, I have neglected to pen here a report of the award ceremony, which I simply watched on television at home. Tonio went berserk: how was it possible, his father being awarded a prize on TV while he sat there next to him on the couch.? When it came time to answer questions posed by the presenter over the phone, I could barely understand her over Tonio’s whooping and hollering as he bolted jubilantly through the room. ‘This is the best night of our lives … !’)

[* Belgian prize for Dutch-language fiction. Van der Heijden won the fiction category in 1997 for Het Hof van Barmhartigheid and Onder het Plaveisel het Moeras.]

He skates ahead of us, the wheels grating against the asphalt, via Corn. Schuytstraat and Willemsparkweg toward the park, every so often looking over his shoulder to make sure we lag appropriately behind. Forbidden beer at the Film Museum’s outdoor café. Tonio nearly runs over publisher and restaurant tycoon Bas L. [ … ]

18:00 back home. Tonio is pleased that I’m eating in tonight — which, let’s just say because of the renovation chaos, has gone by the board of late. When I confess to M., who is in the kitchen preparing dinner, that I’ve been hitting the beer with R., her mood nosedives. ‘What about your diet? Not to mention that this diet of yours is the reason you didn’t want to go out with me Friday night.’

She’s right, of course, but that doesn’t stop me from going on the defensive. The quarrel, which branches off into endless hair-splitting, makes the delicious chicken dish lose some, if not all, of its taste. I notice that Tonio is put off by our squabbling and wrangling. When M. starts to cry, his lower lip quivers in unison with her sobs.

‘May I please be excused?’ (I still don’t know where he picked up that snippet of etiquette.)

‘To do what?’

‘Ask Camiel if he can come out to play.’

He leaves his chicken untouched, and charges down the stairs to his friend, two houses further on. You always read that an athlete’s brain produces a chemical that enhances their performance and stamina, allowing them to push themselves beyond the normal limits. I’ll bet a similar kind of chemical, of a slightly different compound, is also produced in the brain of bickering people: they wear each other out with fallacious arguments and just keep on going, far beyond the boundaries of dignity.

When Tonio returns, we are having coffee — in the bedroom, where the television is temporarily housed for the duration of the renovations. He looks seriously at his parents’ faces. When he’s got something earnest to say, he drops his voice an octave. Like now.

‘So did you guys call a truce?’

21

When Tonio was still small, two conflicting thoughts sometimes hit me simultaneously: the awareness of my parental negligence, juxtaposed against realising how bravely, and unreproachfully, he faced every situation that spotlighted his father’s shortcomings.

This clash of concepts could leave me completely paralysed. Like a naughty schoolchild, I would drag myself off to a corner of my workroom, where I would intensely whisper the words ‘my brave little boy’ a few times.

That helped — until the next exhibition of my inadequacy, which Tonio once again ungrudgingly withstood.

Now that I had failed to prevent a fatal accident, and for once he didn’t manage to salvage himself, my private profession of love, which was never meant for him to hear, poured forth without end. ‘My darling, brave boy. My little hero.’

‘When I think back on it,’ I said, ‘Tonio never upbraided us. To our face, at least. Maybe he swore at us later, out of earshot. But really read us the riot act, you or me … no. Never.’

‘I was always careful,’ Miriam said, ‘no matter how cross I was, never to bad-mouth you to Tonio. I didn’t want him to ever be able to use it against you. And I know you did the same thing. When I hear from Rietje the kind of vitriol Bram dares to hurl at her … the most unbelievable vulgarity … of course, he picked it up from his father.’

‘It’s not thanks to us,’ I said. ‘It’s all Tonio’s own doing. Whenever I looked at that honest face of his, it never occurred to me to complain to him about you. Even if I had to hold back … I’ll be truthful about that. He stayed neutral until he was actually forced to stick up for one or the other of us. Remember that time the three of us were crammed into that one hotel room in Jarnac? I was there to write a piece. The people who gave me the commission had promised the best hotel in the area. Well, if that wasn’t a wet blanket. I lay there on that too-small bed, bitching about how uncomfortable it was. You had made the arrangements by phone. Tonio listened intently to our discussion. Once he realised the organisers had shafted us from a safe distance, he cried out with all the indignation he had in him: “But Adri, there’s nothing Mama can do about it!” He was five, almost six. It was in a restaurant there … a few days later, I think … where Tonio made that double portrait of us.’ I pointed behind me with my thumb toward the wall above the head of the bed. ‘Little red hearts circling around our heads … Lovey-dovey parents. He so wanted it to be okay between us.’

‘Without being sappy about it,’ said Miriam, ‘it’s pretty safe to say he was more of an example to us than we were to him.’

22

Miriam and Tonio were witnesses to the fact that I’ve always tried to protect them. Of course, I failed now and again, more than I’d have liked,.

What I still bitterly regret, now more than ever, is the reckless hospitality I cultivated in the second half of the 1980s. Everyone was welcome — my open-door policy was indiscriminate. Once, when I was a newcomer in the Dutch literary world (a terrain that, in those days, still seemed rather clearly delineated), I walked into the art-society club Arti with a small group of acquaintances I’d bumped into along the way. I happened upon an older colleague, who nodded condescendingly at my table and asked: ‘Are those your friends?’

He answered his own question with a scrunch of the nose. The fellow knew exactly which illustrious, important, and influential people he should surround himself with. At that age, though, someone like that hasn’t any friends left, only an assortment of ‘big cheeses’ gone mouldy.

Having the right friends — nothing could be further from my goal. I took ’em as they came. As a result, all and sundry wafted in and out, not all of them with good intentions. The one sniffed around my marriage, the other my business affairs, yet another my work in progress. You never knew, of course, what information could come in handy, or when. And indeed, nearly twenty years after I started to keep my distance from people, certain colleagues from back then still find it necessary in interviews to comment on what went on at my parties, or that more than once I had to be helped (heaven forbid), drunk, into a taxi.

I grant everyone his contribution to the petite histoire of Dutch literature, even though it still won’t protect it from extinction, but they do have to keep their mitts off my family. There is a passage in Advocaat van de hanen informing the reader that the main character Quispel is in the habit of giving his wife a wallop — one of his many flaws. Aha! thought one of the sniffers who was posing as a friend. Gotcha!, he’s as much as admitted it himself. The rest was simply a matter of perseverance in spreading it around, complete with authentic-sounding details, because you didn’t hang around at this kind of pig’s house for nothing.

This feat of mine has wafted my way numerous times over the years, sometimes in the form of a question, but usually as a statement of fact. It wasn’t Quispel who hit his wife; no, it was me. The pushiest interviewers even opened with the declaration: ‘People say you beat your wife … tell me about that.’

My first reaction was to throw the bum out. (A colleague who I discussed the matter with later, said the interviewer had missed a golden opportunity. ‘He should have asked: “Do you still beat your wife?” Try getting out of that one.’) But on second thoughts it seemed to me a good chance to set the record straight: how a rumour like this, its origins in literary fiction, can make its way into the world, and the kind of damage it can cause its subjects. The interviewer listened patiently, as did my voice recorder, but in the printed version of the interview I could find no trace of my argument. What did I expect? The public wants drama, scandal. They want to watch a marriage disintegrate, and are hungry for all the gory details.

Friends — the real ones — have often asked why I take this kind of gossip to heart. But only these friends — the rest just go with the flow. I have a wonderful relationship with Miriam, and I want people to know that, and not have them think just the opposite — that is my childishly naïve wish.

The worst thing about the scuttlebutt was that made its rounds while Tonio was still in school, and I was worried he’d get flak about it. He never mentioned it, but he was the kind of child to keep this kind of business to himself in order to spare his parents. He knew enough children from broken homes, but was never afraid that his own parents would get divorced.

Miriam and I have been together for thirty-one years, twenty-three of them as a married couple. We skipped the first ‘seven-year itch’, but thereafter we had our share of crises, like the Leidsegracht one. And yes, we’ve lost our temper plenty of times, and there have been blows, from both sides. (Never in front of Tonio.) Back in the Loenen days, I once had to stay indoors for two weeks after Miriam (that sweet Minchen) had given my face such a thorough makeover with her nails that it resembled a currant bun with those bits of red dried peel. And I deserved it, too.

More importantly, we never just sank into silent lethargy, like those couples you see in the breakfast room in Parisian hotels with nothing to say to each other. Miriam and I have always kept the communication channels open — strongly worded, if necessary. I consider myself lucky that Tonio knew his parents like this: talking, bickering if need be, but seldom in icy silence.

‘So did you guys call a truce?’

It wouldn’t have been terribly surprising if Tonio’s crushing death had put the lid on our communication once and for all. Fortunately, we manage, even in pain, to continue our never-ending conversation, even if we have to freely admit now and again that for certain ancillary horrors, there are no words.

I love you, Minchen.

23

Miriam brought the second round of coffee into the bedroom. Another novelty of the past week: she bangs against everything with the tray, even against cupboard doors that do not stand directly in her path. In addition to her memory, it seems that the nerve centre of her motor skills has taken a knock.

‘If you don’t concentrate on it …’ she said. ‘I mean, if it only simmers at the back of your mind, then it’s as though it’s only temporary. Awful but passing. And then … it just happened to me down there in the kitchen … then it hits you, all of a sudden, just like that … that it’s permanent. He, Tonio, was temporary. And now he’s gone for good.’

Miriam sat down on the edge of the bed. Maybe her hand was feeling for mine, but because she wasn’t really looking, her gaze on the open balcony doors and beyond, her fist landed with a sharp crackle on the newspaper laying across my lap.

‘Yeah, temporary,’ I said. ‘That’s the dirty trick your dozing subconscious plays with you. All of a sudden you bolt awake, pricked by the stinger of … remember those monster wasps in the Dordogne? We were so afraid our little Tonio would get stung. If you chopped one in half, the two halves just kept on going.

‘The stinger of the truth, you mean …’

‘Something like that.’

‘I think the subconscious dozes most of the time,’ Miriam said. ‘Out of self-preservation. More than the occasional jolt of the truth … of this kind of truth, anyway … no one can take that, surely?’

I took her hand from the dent it had made in the newspaper.

‘Sooner or later,’ I said, ‘we’re going to have to put a stone on his grave.’

‘I’d rather not think about it. Not now.’

‘Just this, then I’ll drop the subject. Maybe it’s a good opportunity to … hmm, never mind. Another time.’

24

It’s been a week now. I wade through a murky anguish, from which I’m not sure I’ll ever emerge, but the fact that I managed to endure Tonio’s death last Sunday without dropping dead on the spot myself, and without hurling myself from God knows what floor of the AMC, still amazes me, or, better put: amazes me every day a bit more.

How did I get through that day at all, in fact, with the piling up of ever-more-dreaded news? Me, who tends to leave envelopes unopened that just might contain unpleasant tidings.

The announcement that morning that Tonio was ‘in a critical condition’, and at that very moment was lying on the operating table, resulted in an unprecedented shock, but for the duration of the afternoon there was still room for the ‘no longer life-threatening’ sign. Once we’d been crammed into that sauna next to the ICU, a dialectic unfolded (between hope and fear, life and death, Miriam and me, the surgeon and us) that prepared us, step by step, in a pitching motion not unlike a ship, for what is called The Inevitable. There was a kind of numbing logic to the whole process — a logic that kept one step ahead of lunacy, and made the result only just bearable.

The appearance of the neurosurgeon, straight from the OR and still wearing her blue shower cap, did not immediately signify a pitch-black antithesis for our last hopeful expectations, but a consistent synthesis of the undulation between hope and fear, just as we had experienced it the entire day. She shook her head, making the plastic cap creep higher up on her head. Tonio had not yet died, but had no chance of survival. He drifted, as they say, between life and death.

After the unfathomableness of what had taken place deep in the previous night, by daylight the subsequent steps seemed almost too logical, without the hospital at all striving for such logic. Be that as it may, calm dialectic and unemphatic logic made it possible for us to survive Tonio’s deathbed in that improvised tent in the ICU.

It did not prevent each of us, in our own way, once we left the hospital, from being drawn into a chaotic vortex of conflicting feelings that were not only unassuagable but intolerant of any form of logical collating.

You would think that since last week I’d be able to open every letter without trepidation, and that bad news or overdrafts wouldn’t even make me bat an eye. Surely the worst possible news — Tonio’s death — should have immunised me?

Nothing is further from the truth.

For a good part of the day I undergo internal nervous trembling, as though it wants to tell me: the worst is yet to come. As if Tonio’s death was only a prelude to that ‘worst’. This notion is destined to become the refrain of this requiem.

I do not want to know the Very Worst. That letter, I leave unopened. The nervous quivering goes on unabated. But what in God’s name could be worse than Tonio’s death?

This: the reality of his death. That it, one of these days, will really dawn on us. My nerves are steeling themselves for that moment, for me, but also on Miriam’s behalf.

We had to figure out where the best survival plan was lurking: resisting the pain, or surrendering to it.

We had a bit of leeway in our options, but the most essential freedom of choice had been relinquished: Tonio was irrevocably dead, and now irrevocably buried, too. Whatever we did with those doses of pain, this fact remained incontrovertible. We could neither deny nor avoid it. We were in its grip.

25

With the funeral reception winding up, my brother had gone downstairs to Miriam’s workroom to call a taxi, and in the process had spilled a glass of red wine over her keyboard — the first in a chain of computer incidents in which we believed we saw the hand of Tonio at work. He had always been on call whenever we had a computer problem; now it seemed that he was bent on sabotage.

After ringing for the taxi, Frans left his wallet lying next to the phone, which resulted in him giving the driver his watch as collateral when he ran inside to borrow some cash from his wife, who had gone home earlier to relieve the babysitter. He, Mariska, and the baby came by for an hour on Sunday, giving him the chance to not only pick up his wallet but chip some dried wine from between the keys on Miriam’s computer. (The mouse, too, had been drowned in the accident.)

I had not seen Daniel, the only child to whom I could claim unclehood, since 7 March, his first birthday. He’d grown, of course, his little face taking on the look of an individual. With his wispy, white-blond baby hair, he resembled Tonio at that age, as I remember him from Marsalès, although Tonio had more sumptuous curls. I also recognised Daniel’s attempts at walking, the recalcitrant coordination. While Tonio used his stroller as a support (regularly pulling it over on top of him), Daniel navigated our living room without any ambulatory aids, accepting in return a few more falls to the bum, his nappy letting out a puff of air with each fall.

When I got upstairs, I found him sitting on the rug. Maybe because I had snuck up from behind and suddenly crouched down beside him, he started wailing at full volume. Nothing out of the ordinary, but for me it was just that, once again, I had the feeling that as the father of a newly buried son, I gave off a hearty scent of death, which fresh-faced toddlers would have nothing to do with.

His bout of tears was brief, and once I was seated on the sofa, Daniel made an attempt at rapprochement. He kept sliding his half-full drinking cup toward me over the end table, which I was then expected to take. Later, he repeatedly did his best to get my foot, resting firmly on the rug, to budge. He screeched with drooly delight when the shoe snapped back to its original position, the toes still wiggling themselves to rest.

What would have been more natural than to feel envy? My brother had a son, and I no longer did. No, I wasn’t envious — not even a tad. I had been as pleased with Frans’s belated fatherhood as he himself was. It was just that … in Daniel I was reliving Tonio’s efforts and progress. Growing from your birth to first birthday, then learning to walk and talk — that was hard work, a full-time job, a hundred-hour workweek. And thus had Tonio, growing and learning, completed twenty-one years of his life, without being able to cash in on all that hard work.

In the euphoria surrounding his birth, I had appointed myself Daniel’s mentor. I looked into his blue eyes, so full of self-evident confidence in a bright future. I silently gave him my best wishes. He was back on the rug, irreparably breaking my foot. Danny, I wish you a life five times longer than your unfortunate cousin. For the time being, kiddo, we’ve got statistics on our side.

Frans mentioned that he’d come across an online obituary of Tonio, written by Serge van Duijnhoven, complete with a variety of portraits. The feeling that these past few days were an absurd parody suddenly reared its head again. We’d been friends with Serge since before Tonio was born, as a 16-year-old gymnasium student and doomed poet, who sometimes dropped by with his bosom buddy Joris Abeling (killed in a car accident in ’98). They wanted to hear from me how they could conquer the world from their provincial hometown of Oss. They had already stood at Boudewijn Büch’s Keizersgracht doorstep, but he chased them off. (Büch didn’t even have to open the door; he came up from behind on his way back from the bakery, holding half a loaf of brown bread, sliced: for the two barnstormers, a fatal detail.) Incidentally, Serge wasn’t so doomed after all, for he paid a visit shortly after Tonio was born to bring him an inscribed silver spoon. And now he had written Tonio’s obituary … proof that nothing in the world made sense anymore.

26

Later that evening, long back at home, my brother rang.

‘That website, the one with Tonio’s obit … a woman left a message … wait a sec, I’ve just clicked it off by mistake … a French-sounding surname. Tell Miriam to have a look. She wrote a short message in English, seems Tonio recently photographed her daughter. Let’s see if …’ (I heard the tap of his nails on the keys.) ‘No, she doesn’t mention the daughter’s name. The mother’s called Françoise Boulanger. Doesn’t give her daughter’s surname either. Might be something else, keep that in mind.’

The mother did not leave an email address. Miriam phoned Tonio’s friend Jonas to see if he could find something out. Jonas would get right on to it.

27

Last night I was up at 3.00 a.m., and didn’t get back to sleep. I had a drink of water, which sent my guts into paroxysms. Gurgles, little eruptions, snaps like bursting bubble-gum. It reminded me of what I heard when I laid one ear on Miriam’s pregnant belly (the other ear plugged up with my pinkie) in early 1988. This was Tonio inside me. Gargling, buzzing, snoring. Maybe, in the shadowy depths of his switched-off consciousness, he could hear his own guts going mad while the surgeons worked on him.

At about half past eight I open the bedroom curtains. At the sight of the light-blue sky, my stomach contracts even more violently, from bilious revulsion. My son is dead, and will never return. Once again, I experience the terrible loneliness of his end. Rotating blue lights sweep like splatters of disco lights over his motionless body on the asphalt. (Please tell me he’s not groaning in pain.)

The defeat of having lost him. We’ll see if I survive my all-consuming sympathy for Miriam. The fear of losing control — over her life, and over mine. The fear of the fury that is still fighting to get out, which until now has more or less kept its cool.

And so begins a fine spring day in early June 2010, the month when Tonio would turn 22. It would take some getting used to, exchanging the active ‘birthday’ for the passive ‘birth date’.

Miriam joins me a quarter of an hour later. A pattern is emerging: she’s less miserable in the morning. The truly paralysing dejection sets in around late afternoon. Then she takes (like I did the day of the funeral) a valium-like pill, which isn’t strong enough to hold back the sudden fits of tears. She doesn’t want it to, because ‘when I cry I’m closer to Tonio’.

We eat side-by-side in bed. For me, a crust of bread just to have something in my stomach, and espresso with hot soy milk. My recipe was always: two shots of espresso, watered down slightly. Since Whit Sunday, my stomach will only tolerate a single. Evening liquor does not pose a problem, but maybe it leaches the lining of my stomach to the point that by morning I’m yearning for warm milk.

‘I’ve got to go pick up the reprints,’ Miriam says.

‘How many did you order? Fifty?’

‘A hundred.’

‘Don’t forget envelopes. The cardboard ones.’

Every day, staring in shock into the emptiness anew. This kind of irrevocable loss makes you obdurate. Every time, that same disbelief. Can it really be true, is he really gone, for good?

28

Thursday: I last saw him alive (not counting his artificially life-supported, brain-dead presence in the AMC) two weeks ago. In De Volkskrant a bereavement notice from his old school, the St. Ignatius Gymnasium, where he studied from 2000 to 2006. He was firm in his decision to enrol there, having attended orientation evenings at various Amsterdam high schools. Ignatius and nowhere else. I was so proud of him. Now, four years after his graduation, I read in the newspaper a stanza of Auden that Tonio’s former teachers picked out.

The stars are not wanted now
put out every one,
Pack up the moon and
dismantle the sun

Among the messages of condolence posted to our house are heart-rending letters, which in tone and wording far exceed the requisite courtesy. Apparently, the seriousness of this abides little pretence. And yet, everyone turns inevitably and swiftly to business as usual. ‘Life goes on,’ the adage goes, and so it does. Tonio’s classmates are in the middle of their exams; soon, summer vacation will be upon them.

A few friends remain on call, without being pushy. Others keep a welcome distance. The form letter we sent out on May 25 explicitly stated that ‘for the time being we are not able to receive visitors at home’. So in fact, we were avoiding them, rather than they us. Loss and grief damage a person. It’s as though it’s contagious: you could infect others with it, and you don’t want to be the source of it all. At least Miriam still has her shopping rounds, now and then with a neighbour’s helping hand, but I act like a leper swinging his rattle as he avoids healthy folk.

So I see almost no one, but if someone should happen to ask: ‘What does something like this do to you?’, I waver between ‘My life is ruined’ and ‘My life is over.’

My life is just as ruined as Tonio’s body, as it was wrenched open by the surgeons at the AMC.

My life is over, and serves solely as an enclosure for his amputated existence.

Café or restaurant: I can’t bear the thought of it, with the exception of the café at the Amsterdamse Bos goat farm, where I am inclined to go drink coffee because I’m fairly certain no one I know goes there. We go by car, via Buitenveldert, a route that almost passes the cemetery.

Yesterday, yellow traffic signs indicated that the Bosbaan, the rowing lake, was closed due to sculling competitions. This meant we had to take a significant detour through a nondescript bit of Amstelveen, cutting through the southern end of the park. Being a regular competition venue, we had, through the years, been sent this way often enough; but despite the adequate signposting, Miriam kept taking wrong turns.

‘I’m telling you, my mind’s shot,’ she said, stopping the car. ‘Since May 23, my memory’s like a sieve. Even the simplest names … I just draw a blank.’

During the first week after Tonio’s accident, entire days just vaporised. She often finds herself standing in a shop and not for the life of her able to remember what she is there for. Moreover, she expresses herself badly, at times groping awkwardly for words. If she says anything directly related to the death of her son, she tends to interrupt herself with: ‘There it is again. As if I hear myself reciting a line from a script. As if I’m in a play.’

‘Don’t forget,’ I said, ‘that your brain’s taken quite a drubbing. You’ve been walloped with the worst imaginable news: Tonio in a critical condition, Tonio dead … your mind has never had to tackle something like this. It’s not equipped for it. Remember that driver who had rammed into a tram? He sat there at the wheel, dead as a doornail, but without a scratch, without a drop of blood. Turns out he died from his internal injuries. I imagine the brain going through something like that, being knocked senseless by the whack of bad news. Your noggin’s black and blue, and your brain’s underneath.’

‘Well, what about you?’ We were driving again. ‘I never hear you fumbling for a name.’

‘Somewhere else in me has taken the beating. Think of what we’re doing right now. I only dare to go to the goat farm, because I’m terrified of bumping into someone I know.’

We drove into the park. Splashes of light danced through the car’s interior.

‘Are you embarrassed?’

‘Yes, I’m ashamed of having lost my son. I’m ashamed, in front of you and the whole world, that I couldn’t prevent his death. I’ve failed. I’m ashamed of my defeat.’

Over the past twenty-plus years, my goal of piloting Tonio unharmed through life had taken a few knocks in the form of misgivings and cock-ups. But even those, we eventually got over, conquered.

And yet, each year we were forced to release him more and more into the world. Walking to school on his own, sleepovers with friends, camping with friends’ families … school trips, his first time alone in the tram, with buddies to the squatters’ den ‘Vrankrijk’ … the occasional puff on a joint with the guys on Museumplein … to the Photo Academy after graduating high school … the pop festival in Budapest … his move to De Baarsjes … that nocturnal holiday on Ibiza …

And then, in the middle of the night on Whit Sunday: the Paradiso nightclub.

How much right did I have to my pride at having brought up my boy so diligently, having prepared him so thoroughly and turned him over to the world? Didn’t his accident negate all that, underscore my failure as a father? Not only at the end, but in complete retrospect as well?

Miriam tried to reassure me, but was unable to undo that overwhelming perception of guilt, shame, and defeat.

29

A diminished consciousness: Miriam is not the only one to suffer from it since the accident. If my thoughts start to go all murky, I catch myself harbouring only negative notions about Tonio’s imaginary future. Smoking, drinking, which both get out of hand. Poor grades: in the end, no college diploma. Women trouble. Loneliness. Letting himself go to pot. Aches and pains. Premature ageing. Oblivion. An ugly death.

Only a confused mind can worry about a future that’s never going to happen. But why such black thoughts? If I really want to daydream about an impossible future, then why not wish Tonio a rich, successful and triumphant one?

I try to imagine him the day before Whit Sunday. Saturday 22 May 2010. He’s in love, or on the way. He won’t repeat past mistakes. He stands at the mirror, looks himself in the eye, and lisps the slogan he’s seen so often on T-shirts, posters, and beach towels:

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

His future would begin today. Well, his future, ‘the rest of his life’, got off to a pretty sorry start. The deed was so self-destructive that it even colours my notion of his non-existence black.

So many things whose effect on his life I’ll never know. I’d even be curious what the less attractive aspects of my character eventually did to him. The knowledge of his possible rejection of me, because of events I’d long forgotten, would now be something sacred for me, because then he’d at least have had a future.

30

As we walk along a narrow wooded path from the car park to the goat farm, we bump into the girlfriend of a colleague. She is visibly startled, and passes us with a stammered, embarrassed greeting. Much too late, I realise I should have gone after her — to say I understand completely that we haven’t heard anything from her, because there are no words for it, and that the embarrassment is entirely mine.

‘See? That’s what I mean,’ I say to Miriam.

The early-summer weather, which kicked in a few days before Tonio’s death, pursues us relentlessly with ‘what could have been’. In the shade, it’s still matutinally cool. Shadows, streaks of light … Tonio is everywhere. His absence has nestled itself in all that one sees. Everything is occupied by our loss.

All is still quiet at the goat farm. The children are at school. Miriam orders sandwiches inside. When she returns, I dump the plastic bag of condolence letters onto the table. Using a jam knife, I slit open envelope upon envelope. I read the letter or card, and then pass it to Miriam. It strikes me that she skims the words more and more fleetingly, and then folds the paper shut. Her face retains its impassive, resigned expression, and does not appear to react to the message or the person who wrote it. After God knows how many letters, she shoves the pile away from her.

‘You read them. I can’t take it anymore.’

It really is absurd: a couple sitting in the divine spring sunshine, reading condolences for their recently deceased son. Here, amid the smell of goat manure, where as a child he would dart to and fro with a dripping ice-cream cone. I sweep the letters back into the plastic bag. When I look up, Miriam’s face glistens in the sun — from snot and tears.

I ring my father-in-law. He spends as much time as he can watching tennis on a special sports channel in the semi-darkness of his downstairs flat. ‘I try to let that ballet distract me,’ he says. ‘And otherwise I’ve got all the time in the world to babble to myself, about Tonio.’

31

Miriam points to two couples with children. The one man is demonstrating an iPad-like apparatus to the other.

‘Ugh,’ she says. ‘Those men with their toys. No hint of a conversation with their wives, just this one-upmanship with their latest gadgets. Why don’t they just go and have a peeing contest over at the creek?’

We don’t talk much today either, but that’s because we’re both sitting here thinking of our son, who would not reach his twenty-second birthday. Which is in itself a kind of conversation. A goat stands on one end of the seesaw in the small playground; a boy of about six on the other. The animal is completely unfazed by being lifted up into the air and then being let back down again.

‘You know what’s exhausting?’ Miriam says suddenly ‘That every day the pain takes on a different guise. Yesterday I fretted about our future, yours and mine … how we’re supposed to move on … and today it’s the fact that Tonio wasn’t able to round off his life that eats me up. Tomorrow …’

‘And so goddamn unfair,’ I add, ‘that while he was alive he had no inkling as to his premature end.’

‘Well … maybe better that way.’

‘I don’t know, Minchen. Yes and no. If he’d seen it coming, he wouldn’t have been so jolly those last days. On the other hand … Kellendonk, for instance, knew he’d die young.* He took measures. If he’d lived out a full life, I don’t think he’d have clenched his entire body of thought into that one book.**

[* Frans Kellendonk (1951–1990) was a Dutch novelist. He died of AIDS just after his 39th birthday.]

[** Mystiek lichaam (‘Mystical body’, 1986), for which he won the Bordewijk Prize the following year.]

Now there’s a goat on each end of the seesaw. The two animals must weigh about the same, because the plank, now free from the ground, balances in mid-air, until one of the goats jumps off, and the other end of the seesaw lands with a slap on the half-buried car tyre.

‘The past week you’ve talked a lot about shame,’ Miriam says. ‘Being ashamed of what happened to Tonio. Well, if Tonio knew he’d die young, like from some illness … I don’t think I’d get over my own shame. I’d have interpreted every word, every glance of his, as a reproach. Even if he didn’t mean it that way.’

32

While Miriam goes to pick up the photos, I proceed with the detailed, telegram-style reconstruction of the days since 23 May. I am shocked, though, by the blow that Tonio’s death has dealt Miriam’s memory. As far as I know, I remember everything about the accident clearly, in living colour, but I cannot guarantee that it will remain so. One of these days, my own memories might crumble and sink into a black hole behind closed eyes. And then Miriam won’t be able to be my recall crutch.

Why this obsessive notation of everyday facts having to do with Tonio’s death, funeral, and the aftermath? I don’t know. I only know that I cannot let a single detail fall into oblivion.

Outside, the fierce early-summer day rages, while here I sit up on the third floor doing a sort of bookkeeping, recording the events that have killingly trundled on since Tonio’s vanishing. Just after noon, Miriam comes upstairs with the hundred reprints of Tonio as Oscar Wilde, and the heavy-duty envelopes.

‘Look, a classmate of his emailed this …’

It was an address list of Tonio’s fellow students. I set my diary notes aside to send his Media & Culture classmates a copy of our form letter, with a few handwritten personal lines, and include the portrait. I’ve laid the photos face down on the table, so as not to have to continually look Tonio in the eye.

And then, while I pick up these pages again and begin to put them in order, I see Tonio all of a sudden, nearly two years old, standing in the springtime sun. My father and mother had been visiting, and left behind a two-piece outfit for him: light-grey, shiny, part silk. The top has a decorative hood.

I freeze, the papers clamped between my fingers. He’s wearing his new clothes for the first time. Miriam has just dressed him and, smothering him with kisses, enthuses about how wonderful he looks. ‘A little silk-clad prince.’

Seated motionlessly at my work table, as though the image might evaporate with the least movement, I watch as the little boy takes careful, demure steps across the yard in Loenen, until he stops in the sunny part of the garden. He’s not entirely comfortable in his new clothes, but, at the same time, Miriam’s compliments make him aware of the specialness of his appearance. Not one to avoid the spectacular, he deliberately chooses the sunlight, which shimmers as it falls upon his curly blond locks.

Just then, Mrs Roldanus appears from the hedge of her garden, on her way to the garage. Tonio takes a few steps toward her, while his hands feel their way over his belly.

‘Look,’ he says, with that thin, high-pitched voice. ‘Look.’

He shows the woman something that dangles from a string tied around his waist. It is a little heart made of silver-grey silk, maybe intended as a mini-purse, or maybe just for decoration. ‘Lo-o-ok,’ he sings.

‘Ohhh, Tonio, how pretty!’ the woman says, crouching next to him.

She looks genuinely touched — how couldn’t she be — but then again, that creature would, a few weeks later, prove to be an accessory to the disruption of our Veluwian idyll. A self-proclaimed interior designer, she had, naturally, already been privy to the covert plans for the coach house, on our property. Her attempts at appeasement consisted of self-adhesive birds, which she stuck all over the windows and doors of our quarters, including, of course, the glass windbreak, so that no wayward sparrow would crash into the windowpanes.

It’s as though that little silk heart, even more than Tonio’s golden curls, attracts all of that moment’s sunlight. For years, that image had lain unobserved in the depths of my memory. And to rediscover it anew: I don’t know if I should be glad or miserable. It doesn’t matter. The pain is just as profound either way.

33

Would that Tonio’s death were just a problem that, after his abrupt disappearance, we could tackle, solve, bring to a satisfactory conclusion …

There was no solution, so perhaps his death was not, strictly speaking, a problem at all.

So as not to fall to pieces ourselves after the initial shock, we found a parallel problem that might stand a chance of being solved. It was hardly original: a loved one dies unexpectedly, and the survivors want to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, as though the knowledge can somehow bring them a bit closer to the departed. The more mysterious or violent the circumstances of a loved one’s death, the more the thirst for details seems to become.

For us, even without any sign of violence, that need could not have been greater.

34

We sit on the veranda, attempting to defer the first glass of the evening. A pitch-black sombreness puts a clamp on my mouth. I suggest that for God’s sake we go inside and turn on the eight o’clock news. Maybe there’s some news about Joran van der Sloot in Peru — as if that interests me.* We’re too late for the headline news, but we are treated to the despair of a prominent Dutch football player over a torn hamstring. A report on the upcoming elections gets filtered out of my consciousness entirely.

[* Van der Sloot, a young Dutchman who lived in Aruba, became notorious for his involvement in the mysterious disappearance of an American tourist there in 2005. In 2010 he confessed to another murder in Peru, where he is presently serving a 28-year sentence. Both cases attracted widespread international media attention.]

Of course, we should have stayed outside, in the shelter of the enclosed terrace. Miriam wants to watch an episode of Cold Case.

‘Minchen, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life watching that crappy American TV show with you.’

She begins to whimper. ‘Just to sit half-knocked-out on the couch in front of the tube, so as not to have to think, that’s all I ask.’

The TV gets switched off. After a smattering of peevishness from my end, we settle down in the gradually darkening living room, conciliatory and shamelessly grief-stricken. Miriam cries more than on previous evenings.

‘So awful … so awful that I’ll never see him again.’ Her words rustle almost inaudibly along with her breath. ‘That I’ll never be able to hold him again. All those normal, everyday things … gone, gone, gone. Pick up his washing, and that he just crawled out of bed, smelling of that delicious boy-sweat … I miss him so much.’

We solemnly promise each other that we’ll pick up our lives, and move on: with work, and with trying to stay fit, because Tonio would have wanted it that way. From now on, Tonio would be the bottom line, so that we never forget him.

‘We’ll also stop drinking,’ Miriam says. ‘You know what? I don’t even like the taste anymore.

I don’t much either tonight, but it doesn’t stop me from going at it full force. With each glass, I feel more clear-headed. After Miriam goes upstairs, I stay on the sofa, brooding, staring into the black hole that was once Tonio.

35

Sometimes I catch myself morosely thinking of a horrible imaginary accident that has overcome someone I know. A good friend. In my thoughts, I comfort them, but the catastrophe is too huge and too irrevocable for me to be of any real help. I give them my tears of impotence; more than that, I can’t do.

And then, as I emerge from the daydream, it hits me that it is us, Miriam and me, to whom the irreparable has happened.

I tell this to Miriam.

‘Might be an emotional detour,’ she says, ‘so that you can allow yourself a little bit of pity.’