Nourishing hunger

CHAPTER SIX

Nourishing hunger

Shortly after she cleared out Tonio’s flat in De Baarsjes, Miriam refurnished his old room in our house with all his original things. For days, I dared not enter the room, but when I once unthinkingly went in, I was struck by his good taste — pricey without being lavish.

Even the oversized train-station clock, which he himself had gotten the biggest kick out of, was back.

Two weeks after Whit Sunday, the photographer Klaas Koppe brought round an envelope full of blow-ups in which Tonio happened to feature, such as a few taken at a recent Book Ball: Tonio with his parents, Tonio with Klaas’s daughter Iris. Miriam framed them at once, and hung them in a much-used curve in the stairwell. Not long thereafter, she came in, teary-eyed, to say she’d packed up the photos and replaced them by less-recent ones. Later, I discovered a paper bag on the landing with the framed photos. I pulled one out (Tonio and Iris) — and took a blow to the gut, which then nearly got wrung out. Tonio had not been so tangibly present since his visit on 20 May. I quickly slid it back into the bag — which is still there, propped in the same corner.

In the midst of Tonio’s completely reconstructed teen bedroom, Miriam still does manage to breathe. She sits there all day long at the computer, with Tonio’s laptop within reach. When I want to talk to her, I tend to stay out on the landing, and conduct the conversation through the half-open door.

Miriam gets up at 5.00 a.m. every day to go to work in Tonio’s room. Around nine, as I lie reading the paper in the next room, she brings breakfast. We eat and talk, side by side, propped up against the pillows. Radio 4 is on.

This morning, she came into the bedroom without the breakfast tray. A light slap on my legs told me to scoot over, so she could sit on the edge of the bed. She was not crying, but her face was taut.

‘Able to get anything done?’ I asked.

‘I was suddenly so afraid of losing you, too,’ she said testily. ‘And there I’d be, mourning Tonio all on my own.’

Then the tears came. When there was no other way out, I took refuge in literature.

‘The end of The Trial … remember, Minchen? That Josef K. believes the shame will outlive him? Well, my grief for Tonio will long outlive me. I don’t know how long you think you’ll outlive me, but you’ll always be able to share your grief with me … until your last breath … it’s strong enough for that. Even after I’m dead.’

‘I didn’t mean I think you’ll die soon.’

‘That I’d start on a second brood after all, is that it?’

‘Y’know … just the plain fact that I could end up alone, and be the only one who …’

‘Minchen, there’s no morgue tag hanging from my big toe yet, nor is there a guarantee for longevity. There’s no tag hanging on your big toe either. Let’s take it day by day. Together. Let’s do our best to guard each other against sickness. If that’s asking too much, then let’s at least try not to make each other sick. Or crazy.’

When Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) at his parents’ home, after his disastrous sojourn in Paris, his sister listened at the door of his room, behind which she could hear his anguished sobbing. As a seventeen-year-old with writer’s itch, this intrigued me no end: the concept that reliving, in poetry, one’s own experiences could have such a powerful effect on one’s disposition. I should from now on mistrust every word by my own hand that is not well-nigh illegible from grief and melancholia.

Since I have started working on this requiem, Miriam complains (her computer being situated directly below my writing table) of sudden bursts of noise above her head. She says I regularly slam my chair backwards, curse loudly, then stomp to and fro, at times ranting unintelligibly.

I am not, at age fifty-eight, going to hide behind poetic torment, but while I am not always conscious of my blasphemous work interruptions, I have to admit she’s right. When Tonio used to do his homework in the very spot she now occupies, he never complained of falling plaster dust fluttering onto his computer. Except once, when he proudly and amusedly announced during dinner: ‘This afternoon, all of a sudden, I heard you start cursing and throwing things.’

I would give anything to know what possessed me, with my small family still intact, that afternoon. Maybe I realised, in an unbearably lucid moment, how fragile we were, the three of us, and that our bliss could fall to pieces without warning. It could have led to the paroxysm of impotent rage to which Tonio, a floor below, was an acoustic witness.

Ach, of course not — this would be too pat. I probably quaked with anger in search of a word balanced on the tip of my pen, suddenly blown away by the switching on of a leaf-blower out on the street. Some such thing.

‘There will always be a before and an after,’ one condoloncer wrote. As the months tick on, I appreciate each day how true those words are. A deep scar has been drawn straight through my life. ‘Before’, my existence was worthwhile; ‘after’, it is worthless — I can’t put it any more simply than that.

I will probably continue to write, and if I do indeed find the strength to do so, I will give it my all, for otherwise there’s no point. But actually believing in the craft, as when I was Tonio’s protector and breadwinner — that is a thing of the past.

In my darkest moments, I am even capable of thinking that a bit more professional effort on my part might have saved Tonio — even though I realise at once that greater concentration on my work during his life would have meant less attention for him. So there you are: the sombre surges of my constricted brooding.

The letselschadeadvocaat on the Tesselschadestraat (this phrase is begging for a limerick)* had managed to get his hands on the Serious Traffic Accidents Unit dossier, including the CD-ROM with images of the collision recorded by the Holland Casino’s CCTV camera. The public prosecutor handling the case offered to meet with us.

[* A letselschadeadvocaat is a personal-injury lawyer.]

Forensic measurements, police officers at the accidents unit had told us earlier, confirmed that the driver of the Suzuki had been driving ‘a bit too fast’, and that Tonio had drunk ‘a considerable amount’. According to the files obtained by the personal-injury lawyer, the Suzuki was going between 67 and 69 kilometres per hour in a 50 kph zone. Blood tests showed that Tonio had 0.94 mg/ml of alcohol in his body, corresponding to six or seven beers. (For motorists, the limit is 0.5 mg/ml, the equivalent of three beers.)

‘Six beers,’ said the personal-injury lawyer. ‘Not much, in fact. That’s how an evening usually starts.’

I was surprised by the results. All this time I’d told myself, grudgingly, that Tonio must have been pretty drunk. After all, he and Dennis had been at a party in the Vondelpark that afternoon, and after that they’d had a few beers at Goscha’s place. At about midnight they rode off to Trouw, where, Goscha had said, the rounds ‘kept coming’. In recounting the evening, she regretted that Tonio was always a step ahead of her, picking up the entire tab. Dennis said that Tonio had had a shot of tequila between beers. So how could all that drinking result in a blood-alcohol content equivalent to just six beers?

‘Don’t forget,’ the lawyer reminded us, ‘that the accident occurred at 4.40 a.m. The alcohol from that afternoon and evening was long out of his system by then. And don’t overestimate the rounds at a club like Trouw. At that hour, the place is jam-packed — the bar, too — so buying rounds wouldn’t have been a speedy affair. If there had been six of them, and Tonio got them all, he’d have been awfully busy. Six times three is eighteen … work that out at nightclub prices. I do understand that Goscha felt guilty, and that at the end of the evening Tonio only had five euros on him. Let’s say that he’d long burned off the beer from that afternoon and evening, that he biked off into the night with five, six beers and a tequila in him. Then he’d have been a little tipsy at most, but certainly not drunk.’

Miriam went with the lawyer to the public prosecutor’s office on the Parnassusweg. They were told that it was up to us whether to sue the driver for involuntary manslaughter as a result of reckless driving. The man would certainly be fined for speeding — nearly twenty km above the speed limit. Miriam, speaking for both of us, did not want to prosecute. She did want to know, however, whether the police had dissuaded the driver from seeking contact with us, or whether he himself had taken the initiative (to do so or not).

As far as the cause of the accident was concerned, the prosecutor’s view was that both parties were guilty. Neither bicyclist nor driver was paying attention at the moment it happened. Tonio should have yielded to the car. The driver could have been chatting to his passenger and had perhaps glanced the other way. He was on his way home from a job at a café, but had not been drinking.

In the past weeks, I have often told myself that Tonio was a clumsy cyclist; that, when he was a youngster, I should have taught him better. This was my daily routine, day in day out: fattening up my guilty conscience. That notion of careless cycling was contradicted by the memory of Tonio on his bike, about two years ago (he had just gone to live in De Baarsjes). I was sitting outside at Café De Joffers, right near the intersection of Willemsparkweg and Cornelis Schuytstraat. Suddenly, I saw his orange granny bike swerve onto the Cornelis Schuyt from the Willemsparkweg. Leaning languidly back, pinkies on the handlebars, he meandered entirely at ease between the backed-up, honking cars — quite elegant, actually, as though city traffic were his natural habitat.

He cut up onto the sidewalk across the street from Joffers, raising his backside to take the curb. I’m sure I saw Tonio park his bike in front of Van Dam’s bistro and go inside. I paid hastily and rushed across the street to ‘catch’ him red-handed. In the bistro: no Tonio. In the bike rack: no orange bicycle.

Maybe there were no tables at Van Dam, and he had continued on to our house. Against our front wall: no orange bike, nor had Miriam seen him inside.

Had I imagined it all? No, when I spoke to him some time later, it seemed I had not. A reckless ride through the Cornelis Schuyt and among the idling cars? This and that day? Could be, but he hadn’t been inside Van Dam. ‘What on earth would I be doing at Van Dam?’ Oh yes, of course, he had nipped into Mulder’s bookshop, a couple of doors down from Van Dam, to buy a photography magazine, and in order to avoid the traffic jam he continued on his way via the sidewalk. His destination was not his parents’ house, but somewhere else — he couldn’t remember where or for what.

I drummed it into my head that whenever I thought of Tonio as a clumsy cyclist, I should try to see him as I did that day on the Cornelis Schuytstraat, with his elegantly reckless cycling style. And this is how he, in the wee hours, had shot out of the Hobbemastraat, heading for — yes, heading for what? For something that justified, at such a late hour, his purposefulness.

I do not believe in a soul that is released from a body after death, and subsequently lives on in some rarefied way. There are those who, after a significant loss, see the light, and convert to one religion or another. As much as I would like to believe in the presence, somewhere, of Tonio’s soul, it is not enough: I want evidence that his soul exists, so that my words do not fall on deaf ears. I would so very much like to inform him of my anger: that he has not been allowed to go on with his life.

‘To tell you the truth, Tonio, I’m pissed off at the whole world. For me, it’s been one huge conspiracy against your future. My anger is all-pervasive. Your mother’s rage is purer. She does not blame anybody in particular. She is just livid on your behalf, because you no longer have the means to express your indignation at the brazen theft of the years you still had ahead of you.’

Show me that his soul is still there somewhere, and I will lay bare my still-living heart to him: my shame for his death, my complicity therein, my shortcomings during his life.

His soul need not respond to my unburdenings, as long as I know it’s there, as a listening or otherwise registering substance, if need be as a cosmic black hole from which not even a faint echo of my confessions will ever return.

‘The few times anyone has had the nerve to ask me these past few weeks if I was working on something, I have answered: “A requiem about Tonio.” Should have been: “for Tonio.” I write it first and foremost for you. No, not for the serenity of your soul. I hope in fact to attract your soul’s attention. I want to rile it. Via your soul, I want to you to know that we have adopted the pain you endured for half a day. “Rest in peace”: nothing doing. We are united in that pain. You, Miriam, and me. And should souls exist — ours, too — then, when we die, we’ll be united for eternity.’

Come on, Tonio, be honest: didn’t it bother you that instead of cycling back the De Baarsjes with you, Goscha chose to stay behind and keep Dennis company? You didn’t have to leave alone. You were also invited to hang out at Dennis’s. You usually didn’t turn down an invitation to extend the festivities.

Or did you have the feeling that Dennis and Goscha would have preferred to be alone together, and insisted you stay only out of politeness? Maybe there had been signs earlier that night that something was brewing between them … Did you feel like a fifth wheel? Did you want to be discreet, and let Dennis and Goscha have the rest of the night to themselves?

Jim, who wasn’t in bed yet, said you had promised to be home by about four o’clock to keep him company. Dennis and Goscha told us something about you guys watching a movie, even at that late hour. Goscha, who was the most tipsy of the three of you, wasn’t sure: ‘Maybe he was just too tired, and wanted to go to bed. We did put away a lot that night.’

She told us that she’d fallen asleep ‘pretty much right away’ once inside Dennis’s house. She thought that Dennis, perhaps because of that, was angry with her afterward.

The three of you stood there for a bit, bikes between your legs, on the corner of Sarphatipark, just near the intersection of the Ceintuurbaan and Van der Helststraat. In the seven years that I lived on the Van Ostadestraat, I walked past this corner nearly every day, in total many hundreds of times. I imagine you standing at the spot where, before I had my own line, my regular phone-booth stood, where I took care of business and appointments. Here, one Saturday in the spring of ’78, I had desperately called every medical emergency service in the city, reaping only answering machines, while the first droplets of bright-red blood dripped out of my pant leg onto the granite floor of the phone booth: a case of an unstaunchably torn foreskin.

What did you all talk about, with the beat of the Trouw DJ still banging in your ears? I hear your laugh waft across the quiet intersection, but cannot make out what you’re saying, except for a quasi-indignant: ‘But Dennis, jeez man …’, followed by more laughter.

From where you stand, you can see the church tower on the corner of the Tweede Van der Helst and Van Ostade as it juts into the night sky. If you had taken a left there, within a few turns of the pedals you’d be at the small row of houses (now a modern block of flats) where your history — not yet in the flesh — began. There, in front of the school next to number 205, your mother and I first met. She was on her bike, and kick-scooted along the sidewalk, greeting me as she passed. She was wearing a hand-me-down raincoat from your future grandpa Natan — such a filthy piece of clothing, totally black with grime on the lapel and between the buttons, that I subconsciously forbade her on the spot to ever wear it again. Of course, I had already seen what a dark beauty lay concealed behind that ratty, formless skin.

More than thirty years ago, and there, in that run-down, pre-gentrification street, is where the Tonio design had taken root.

All right, so Goscha does not bike back with you, and you don’t go to chill at Dennis’s. According to Goscha — and I specifically questioned her about this — you did not ride off swerving like a drunkard. You rode normally, straight ahead, onto the Ceintuurbaan. I imagine you glancing back one last time, waving: ‘Oi!’ (Unless you shouted at something or someone along the way, this would have been your last word — more a sound than a word, your signature goodbye: ‘Oi.’)

I follow you on your last bike ride. A few things are still unclear to me. Maybe, if I keep a close eye on you, I can solve them as we go.

The Ceintuurbaan, the main artery of my years in De Pijp. The intersection with the Ferdinand Bol. The metro station construction site. In case you have a change of heart: you can’t turn right again to rejoin Dennis and Goscha on the Govert Flinck.

The bridge across the Boerenwetering, with the Hobbemakade on either side and the mini red-light district to the right. The night is high and clear. Daytime is not far off: it promises to be a splendid Whit Sunday. I suspect we share a distaste for whores. Can’t count on a lifesaving stopover on that front.

Roelof Hartstraat. The traffic lights at the intersection are flashing yellow. Individual responsibility. There is almost no traffic. The occasional taxi. To the right, the College Hotel, whose loutish owners chopped down the trees. To the left, the road becomes the Coenenstraat. On the one corner, the local branch of the public library, where you and Miriam used to go to check out books. And on the opposite corner, Huize Lydia, where as a child you went to see your grandparents, when it was still a neighbourhood community centre (Grandpa Natan was treasurer).

Along Van Baerlestraat, too, trees were sacrificed during the recent ‘restructuring’. But right now, urban-planning atrocities are not on your mind as you pedal further on Jim’s bike under the streetlights. Still a ways to go until the Nepveustraat. You’re tired after two nights of hard partying. After all the euphoria of the past few days, the Jenny fantasies, visions of the long weekend ahead, you bike home all on your lonesome — a thought that drapes a dull melancholy layer over everything.

You ride past the Van Baerle/Nicolaas Maas junction. There, on the corner, my colleague K. Schippers lives. (I gave you his novel about photography as a present.) Once, I stood chatting with him on the sidewalk in front of his house a little too long for your pleasure. Out of impatience, or attention-seeking, you crawled under the unbuttoned back panel of my raincoat. If you walked backwards a bit, I was transformed into a variant on a circus horse, a kind of baggy-clothed centaur. Your excellent performance, while embarrassing me, pleased Schippers, who was a fan of clowns and patchwork animals.

‘As half-man, half-horse, you’re free to piss on the street …’

At least fifteen years ago, this incident. You approach the intersection in front of the Concertgebouw. Behind the buildings at your left, two blocks of houses deeper into the De Lairessestraat, the Jacob Obrechtstraat runs parallel to your route. You spent the first years of your life in the large apartment building called ‘Huize Oldenhoeck’ — those precious years of which you have no recollection (me, all the more). It occurs to me that on your final bike ride, you keep frighteningly close to the houses of your youth. You cycle, with a few zigzags here and there, along the images and settings of your earliest years. Look to the right, across Museumplein. You know better than I do where the hangout spot was, where the older boys gave you your first drag on a cigarette. You secretly hope that the Dutch football squad goes far next month — not because you really care all that much about the sport, but because of the festivities on the Museumplein grounds.

At the Concertgebouw, I know you’re always reminded of your boyhood friend Jakob, who was run over by a truck on the corner of Van Baerle and De Lairesse. The truck did not have a blind-spot mirror. Jakob was cycling to the Vossius: it was his very first day at the gymnasium. He only barely survived. That same week you started at another gymnasium, the Ignatius, so the news of Jakob’s accident didn’t reach you right away, you heard it on the grapevine. It was one of the few times we really lit into you: you told us the news far too late, and almost in passing: ‘Oh, guess what I heard … y’know, Jakob, right? Well he was …’

Now I think you didn’t appreciate the seriousness of the incident, the lethal danger. And anyway, Jakob and primary school, those days were long behind you, a new life was opening up. And yet you kept apologising, with tears in your eyes, for your negligence: you were starting to cotton on.

The traffic light changes to green. Now we have to talk turkey. I advise you — no, I beg you — to turn left here onto De Lairesse. A few blocks further, past the Jacob Obrecht, turn right onto the Banstraat. Then just a tad to the left — to your old house on the Johannes Verhulst. The whole front stoop is free to park your bike.

Kid, you’re tired, you’ve been drinking, you’re about to keel over, bike and all, from fatigue. Forget that whole trek out to De Baarsjes. Sure, Jim will be disappointed, but he’ll figure it out for himself, and sooner or later he’ll go to bed. You’ll explain it to him tomorrow.

You think you’ve got your wits about you, because you’re brooding about Jenny, but in fact it’s just sluggish, lovestruck daydreaming. Granted, there’s hardly any traffic at this hour, but … you also have to take that Eerste Constantijn Huygens/Overtoom crossing … a left turn … the taxis drive like maniacs there at night.

You’ve got a key to the house. (It’s hanging, if I remember correctly, on the same ring as the key to your bike lock.) You always manage to slip noiselessly up the stairs. You won’t wake us, I guarantee you. Besides, I’m wide awake anyway, thanks to a churning stomach from having eaten way too much garlic last night; I’m sitting upright in bed like a cat retching itself free of a hairball. It’s nearly half past four, I see on my watch. There’s no light yet coming through the curtains.

Go lie down on the living-room sofa. The afghan that Mama was curled up under last night while watching TV must be there somewhere. Pillows galore. You spent sixteen years of your life in this house. After graduation you were in no hurry to leave — you stayed under your mother’s wing for another two years. So what’s another night? Do it for us. You’re bound to move back in this September anyway, when you have to leave the Nepveustraat. The census people say statistics show more and more young people living at home again after a few years on their own. The demographists call them ‘boomerang kids’. There is no generation gap anymore.

C’mon, there’s no shame in it. Sleep in tomorrow morning as long as you want. Mama will make you a fantastic Whitsun breakfast.

For a moment, he seems to hesitate, but that’s his unsteady way of biking. He stands, his buttocks off the saddle, nearly motionless on the pedals, and almost falls over. He could still turn left just past the Concertgebouw, along Café Welling, where as a child he put in so many pub-hours with his father.

Tonio goes straight ahead. His is a fixed route. Van Baerle, past the Stedelijk Museum, over the Vondelpark viaduct, Eerste Constantijn Huygens. Left on the Overtoom, continuing on to De Baarjes and the insomniac flatmate.

At the next intersection, too, he can still reconsider. Left on the Willemsparkweg, and he’ll be home in a jiffy. His manoeuvres suggest he’s going to turn right onto the Paulus Potterstraat, but he quickly corrects his course, returning in a gentle curve to the Van Baerle, where he cycles past the old music conservatory, now being renovated into a chic hotel.

If he turns, now focused and resolutely, onto the Jan Luykenstraat, then at once I’ll know what’s possessed him.

You know, Tonio, sometimes I worry about your eating habits. Your friend Jonas, himself a good eater who never gains an ounce, says you’ve shed many kilos these past two years by systematically skipping meals and quashing your appetite with cigarettes. Take today. You nibbled at some snacks at that duff party in the Vondelpark this afternoon, and that’s it. The three of you drank beer at Goscha’s place, and later, in club Trouw, Goscha could hardly keep track of the rounds. Food — no thought of it.

For years, you would make your rounds past the work tables in my study. Once a manuscript lay there entitled Voedzame hunger. You asked: ‘What’s that, Adri, “nourishing hunger”? You can’t eat hunger, can you? How could it be nourishing?’ I explained that the story was about love, and that love resembles hunger, but the kind of hunger you and your lover gorge yourselves with. ‘Look at it this way … being madly in love makes you forget to eat. With lovesickness, it’s even worse. You live on your own reserves, until you don’t feel hunger anymore. That’s what they mean when they say that someone is consumed by love. It guts you.’

Miriam says I completely lack didactic talent, and my wise lesson will not do any good today, either. I don’t know how things stand with your feelings for Jenny, but I do know they haven’t suppressed your appetite to that of a sparrow. You’ve got what, forty years ago, we called ‘the munchies’. The only place in Amsterdam you know where you can satisfy that urge at this time of night is in the neighbourhood around Leidseplein, with its fast-food automats and shawarma joints.

It won’t be a banquet. You’ve only got a fiver in your grey wallet, plus a fistful of coins.

Your hunger might persuade you to make a U-turn after all and plunder our fridge. As I said, you wouldn’t wake me, because my recalcitrant stomach already has. And your mother, she’s such a deep sleeper that you’d have to let a jar of pickles slip through your fingers to rouse her. Go on. The cats will come sniff at you, rub along your calves with their thick, furry tails.

Now I understand why you nearly turned onto the Paulus Potterstraat. So far, all north-east-heading streets here lead in just one direction, to Leidseplein and the snack bars. But for sentimental reasons you took the next street, Jan Luyken, where you went to school. The playground of the Cornelis Free School, completely vacant in the clear night. Aren’t you tempted to stop for a moment, rest your foot on the curb? You used to holler and cavort on this paved patch of courtyard. There are your old teachers … the cheerful Loes, the somewhat mysterious Jeanine … They were crazy about you. In that now dark, impenetrable building, you learned to read, write, and do sums. You built a Viking ship there and, dressed up as Dorus, you performed Er zaten twee motten. Day after day, a Moroccan kid waited for you on this playground in the afternoon, first sweet-talking you and then making off with your first mobile phone.

Jakob lived a ways further up the street. His father still lives there. One afternoon, there was a misunderstanding between Mama and Grandma Wies. Grandma was supposed to pick you up from school on a different day than usual and take you to play at her place on the Eemstraat, because she had already left Grandpa Natan. Someone must have made a mistake, because no one came to fetch you. Jakob’s dad, who came to pick up his son, waited with you for a long while.

‘So where does your granny live, Tonio?’

‘On the Eenstraat, I said so already, jeepers.’ And more vehemently: ‘The Eenstraat, Joost, the Eenstraat!’ Do you remember, Tonio, how the incident turned out? All right in the end, apparently: we didn’t have to put out an Amber Alert, or whatever the missing-child alarm was called in those days.

Oh, so you’re cycling further? I notice I’m still trying to tinker with your timing. A second here, a second there. You’re now passing Joost and Jakob’s house on Jan Luykenstraat. They hosted the reception after the school play that marked the end of primary school. While the parents drank cocktails in the living room, you and Jakob and your classmates retreated to the basement. It was so quiet down there, contrary to all our expectations, that after a while one of the mothers, maybe Afra’s, went to make sure you hadn’t all been asphyxiated in the closeness of the basement. She came back nonplussed.

‘They’re sitting there, crying. All of them.’

From that moment on, a group of mothers periodically descended to the cellar. When the door opened, the bawling could be heard above the adult hubbub upstairs; the sobbing persisted shamelessly. Miriam returned, pale, from the basement.

‘Incredible, what a pity party,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen so much childhood anguish in one place.’

‘Tonio, too?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, what do you think. They’ve just realised they might never see each other again. I don’t know who it started with, but they’ve set each other off.’

Once in a while, a mother herded her big baby into the living room, where he or she, red-eyed, could cool down before being allowed to return downstairs to the orgy of blubbering. When Miriam decided it was time to take you home, you came to say goodnight to me with a face withered by prolonged crying. You couldn’t muster up a smile anymore. It was for real.

Are you grinning right now, on your bike, as you think back on that bawl-fest? Or does it make you wistful, because time has so bitterly confirmed your classmates’ cellar-snivelling? That was goodbye. From that basement, you split up and swarmed to high schools across the city. In the course of the past ten years, you bumped into an old classmate from the Cornelis Free now and then, but these were mostly awkward encounters. The old camaraderie had been left behind in the Nijsen family’s basement.

At the end of the Jan Luyken, the massive, dark-red Rijksmuseum looms to your right. You’ve always thought it intriguing that the largest and most valuable of the city’s treasures just hang there in the dark, unseen, their fate in the hands of a soulless security system.

Left onto the Hobbemastraat. The asphalt glistens with embedded bits of glass, as though the road surface is mirroring the starry night above, but you’re too tired to lift your head and cast your eyes upward. You do see, in a flash, the book stalls set up on either side of the street for an Uitmarkt some ten years ago. You and I stood behind the table at my publisher’s stand, signing books together.

You’ve got other things on your mind now: a döner kebab from the Turkish snack bar. It was your favourite lunch when you worked at Dixons — plenty of shawarma joints in the Kinkerstraat neighbourhood. Heading toward your destination, you cycle between the tram rails of lines 2 and 5. You pass the leather-goods store where we bought Mama that red-brown set of bags for her fortieth birthday. You always managed to send costs skyrocketing with your expensive taste. You enjoyed giving presents even more than getting them. ‘She’s sure to want a toilet bag, too … don’t you think, Adri? Look, it’s made of the same leather. And here, this carry-on bag, the same leather, too.’

No, the leather-goods store doesn’t ring any bells with you tonight. Your thoughts have narrowed to Jenny and döner kebab. The traffic lights at the crosswalk at the corner of the Park Hotel blink lazily. Ach, that Jenny. How she turned a quarter-turn, at your request, in order to benefit more from the reflector sheets … and you, bent over the tripod with the reflecting umbrella above your head. More like a parasol … You might still have the presence of mind to cast a glance to your right, past the yellow flashing lights. A taxi is just driving over the crosswalk. On that side, the Stadhouderskade is otherwise empty.

And to the left? If you didn’t first look left, was it because there was no sound coming from that side? Or were your ears still pounding from the beats of techno-animal Carl Craig?

Maybe you were a bit dizzy from doing those dance dips with Dennis.

We provided Tonio with plenty of toys. He had a way of charming us out of anything his heart desired. Grandma Wies once said: ‘You always get your way in the end.’ She made a fake-suffering face to go with it. From that moment on, Tonio seemed to see it as his job, refining his charm as he went, to get his way. A teary eye was often more than enough.

The expensive problem was that once Tonio had figured out the mystery of a toy, he got bored with it. He could put together, one-two-three, a technical Lego set intended for age groups far above his own, but the then secret formula had been cracked. At best, the resulting construction could be expanded with accessories and attachments, which kept costs down. But usually his eye fell upon an entirely new challenge, complete with flashing lights, rolling caterpillar tracks, and an electrical transformer.

He constructed a power-driven Ferris wheel out of a K’Nex building set; it was so tall he had to use the kitchen stepstool to reach the top. When I pointed this out, he replied: ‘The Ferris wheel on Dam Square is higher.’

Roller skates. A super-manoeuvrable silver-coloured kick scooter. The radio-controlled jeep with tractor tyres. Warhammer armies, complete with half a paint studio to decorate the miniature soldiers and their arsenal.

Computers and laptops, the toys of the growing adolescent. The games that went with them. The software.

After he turned eighteen, he expanded his playing field to the cafés where you had to be seen. Club Trouw, where he spent his last night: wasn’t that, with all its techno music, his final plaything? The outcome of a lifetime of toys? And there had to be a bicycle, too, on which to ride home, spaced out. From technical Lego via a headful of technopounding on his way to a Media Technology degree — somewhere in the process, at a crucial point, he was scooped up and thrown down. Then came the ambulances, and he was subjected to medical technology, with which they had hoped to piece him back together.

Even murder serves a purpose, no matter how perverse. It is, after all, the aim of the murderer to bump off his victim. There is, likewise, apparently, a point to a soldier felled on the battlefield: he does it for his fatherland; he is cannon fodder in service of the triumph over Evil.

And the victims of a terrorist attack? At least in the eyes of the person who gave the order, their death had a purpose. The more casualties, the more successful the operation. Not only suicide terrorists, but their victims, too, die for their country, judging from the memorial services and plaques organised from higher up.

I can see no point, unearth no purpose, whatsoever in Tonio’s death. He was on his way home, and felt like a bite to eat on the way, and encountered an unwanted and unintended force in his way, which killed him. The operator of the deadly projectile did not know, until that very moment, that he was operating a deadly projectile. He had left his job, and was driving home with a friend. Silent night, holy night.

Tonio’s death was the result of the collision of two forces. The devastation they were capable of causing, should they meet, was calculable before the fact with scientific probability. The destruction they eventually caused was able to be established, after the fact, with scientific certainty.

Tonio’s death could thus be reduced, in both point and purpose, to a physics formula. Our dismay was all the greater when we realised that our flood of emotions had run up against an ice-cold formula, hard as rock. There is no guarantee that emotions are able, in the long run, to wear away even the hardest stone.

In Asbestemming, I described once seeing a statue of St. Sebastian, who in a sort of death-leap is hit by the shower of arrows. They are thick, cast-iron arrows, and they pierce St. Sebastian’s trunk according to a very precise geometrical pattern: as though a square harrow had been rammed in its entirety straight through the martyr’s chest from behind.

Tonio, your fatal accident will continually pierce me in the same way for the rest of my days. My God, you dear boy, why did this have to happen? Why, goddamn it, did everything have to be ruined — you, us, the future, everything?

Sometimes, to put it bluntly, I’m pretty pissed off at you. A bit earlier homeward, a few less beers, a light on your bike, look before you cross … and it wouldn’t have happened. You little bastard. You told Jenny on Facebook that Saturday you were still ‘beat’ from the previous night. Beat — your favourite term for hung over. Doesn’t that give you the responsibility to get a good night’s sleep for once? You three wanted to ‘paint the town red’, as Goscha put it. Well, you did paint it red — with your own blood, you fool.

Why this? Why this irrevocable death, which nothing can correct? Goddamn it, Tonio, I was prepared to face every problem with you, no matter how terrible. Your worst misery would still have been a formidable adversary for me. I would have fought down to my last drops of sweat and blood to find a solution. Anything for you.

The problem is: your death isn’t a problem, because there is no solution — even one that doesn’t stand a chance.

No, I blame myself. I do not reproach you, in your groundwater-deep, breathless sleep. Your stillness is one massive indictment of myself, even without you wanting it so, because you can no longer want. Your death speaks the truth about my failure. Your death is the sum total of my negligence. There is always the possibility that your death was the result of that one act of negligence — which one, I don’t know, and that only makes it worse.

Your whole childhood long, I regaled you with signs of attention, large and small; caring gestures; soothing words. These, however, do not hold up against the all-pervasive sensation, in retrospect, of guilt and negligence. If I wasn’t able to create for you a situation allowing for a safe nighttime cycle route from De Pijp to De Baarsjes, then I should at least have been there, halfway, to throw myself in front of the enemy vehicle and force it to stop. A persistently gurgling stomach on its own does not offer much resistance.

I acknowledge my defeat, which cannot be parried, not even into eternity.

Sundays are Miriam’s darkest days. The pain is at its worst — partly because the huge loss happened on Whit Sunday, of course, but also because if Tonio dropped by, he usually did so on that day. This afternoon, some three months after the accident, she rang me in a panic.

‘There’s a trauma helicopter above the Hobbemastraat.’

This morning, she got up at five and worked until nine-thirty, after which she fell into a deep sleep in bed with a book in her hand, until noon. Just now, she woke up from a pitch-black dream to the pulse of the rotors.

The telephone pressed to my ear, I opened the streetside window of my workroom. If I bent far enough outside, I could indeed see a yellow helicopter with red-blue stripes off to the north-east, hovering approximately above the Rijksmuseum, whose position was marked by the asymmetrical cross of a building crane. It did not rise or descend, did not circle; it just hovered motionlessly like a bird of prey. against the steely-blue sky — at most, swaying gently.

‘If you need some company …’ I said. A few seconds later, she was upstairs. I was still leaning out of the window. The helicopter swung in our direction now, slower than a police chopper, banked steeply to the west, and then returned to its initial position above the Rijksmuseum, staying there for a time, again like a bird of prey.

‘A stand-by, I reckon. He’s waiting for instructions. There’ll be an ambulance down at the scene.’

I comforted Miriam with the thought that even if it had been allowed to fly at night, a trauma helicopter wouldn’t have saved Tonio. ‘He was in good hands. An extra ambulance with a trauma team replaced the helicopter. The kid just didn’t stand a chance.’

No, that wasn’t it. The sound of the propellers had roused her, and then she saw the chopper hovering above The Spot, as though someone was trying to rub it in that the nightmare was for real, even after she’d woken up. ‘I’m okay now.’

Later, when I went downstairs, Miriam was sitting uncomfortably on the sofa, with one leg tucked up and her head leaning back. Red-rimmed eyes staring into nothingness. ‘I miss him so much,’ she kept repeating in a whisper. Her head rolled slowly back and forth over the back of the sofa, in a sort of resigned denial. ‘I miss him so terribly … it’s just inconceivable …’

At moments like these, I had no answer other than to hold her cold hand until it warmed up and she pulled it away because I squeezed it too tightly.

My self-recrimination is not limited to Tonio’s gruesome end. I have also brought this on Miriam. I robbed her of her youth on her twentieth birthday, a bottle of whisky under my arm. Later, I saddled her with a child, which put paid to her childhood once and for all.

I not only saddled her with a child, I also saddled her with death. I had sworn to her I would protect that child with my life, if need be with my dead body. I was not able to honour my promise. The boy slipped through my fingers.

Her life as a girl is finished, and her life as a mother is finished. It is a miracle that she wants to continue her life with me as my wife.

A Sinterklaas celebration at Arti. Finally — you were almost the last one — Santa called you up to the stage. You’d hardly made it there before launching into a little dance on the red carpeting, turning your back on the good saint as you skipped in a circle. Your dance was loony and stiff, hands flapping and rotating like miniature propellers. Your eyes sought me out. I was sitting at the bar.

‘Gotta poop,’ you called out to me. To salvage the situation as best you could, you made an idiotic face. Sinterklaas looked on, flabbergasted. I have seldom loved you as much as at that moment.

I asked Ria the bartender for the wooden stick with the key, and yanked you from the stage.

There is no doubt that I loved him, from the first to the last day. As often as I said it to my mother (‘I love that boy’), or silently to myself, it was mostly an unspoken, matter-of-fact love. No proof necessary. (I sometimes dreamt of a God who would command me to sacrifice my son to Him. I was prepared to believe in such a God, but only in order to make a fool of Him by sparing Tonio.)

The binding and convincing evidence of my love for Tonio was presented, unasked-for, by his death. The ice-cold black hole into which my life plunged, from the one moment to the next, proved how much I loved him.

Since Whit Sunday, Miriam and I talk about Tonio, surprisingly consistently, in the past-perfect and imperfect tense. Only, ‘I loved him’ is something I can’t get out of my mouth. Even my pen baulks. Of course, I can replace the wretched past tense with ‘… how much I love him’, but I am still tempted to add: ‘as he was’.

My love for him is still there, and more intensely than it used to be. Grammatically, it makes no sense at all. If, under duress, I say, ‘I love him’, then what him am I talking about? Tonio no longer exists as him. He existed (and how!) in what now is past tense. And yet I love him, like I used to love him.

My love is genuine and sincere, but it has to make do without an object. It is love desperately in search of an untraceable lover. A talk-show editor once warned his colleagues against inviting me as a guest: ‘Right away, he’ll open up a can of old Greeks.’ Well, now that the can is open anyway: the old Greeks at least had the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to hold on to. An exceptional miracle — by the grace of the gods. I have to make do with a love meandering in the present imperfect tense, forever cut off from the beloved in past imperfect.

Seeing that language is so uncooperative, how can we expect to keep Tonio alive in words?

To be abandoned by a lover, by the woman in your life — even that I’d braced myself for. ‘You never come out of it unscarred,’ a colleague once said. I was prepared for the shame of being dumped. All the love still left over for someone who just slammed the door behind them … the wastefulness of so much longing … well, all right, that passes. Time would do its work.

At most, I had braced myself for the death of my son by allowing my fear to make a pact with my imagination. That I might actually lose him never really entered my mind. I let my imagination, fed by fear, do the work — the work of warding it off.

Someone had abandoned me, my own son, without my love for him being able to pass. Time would show me what longing was. A lover who abandons you can transform your pain into hate. With the loss of a child, this was impossible. I moped around like an utterly betrayed lover whose love only grew and grew.