CHAPTER SEVEN

Pantonioism

1

His passion for rocks was sparked in Brussels. Miriam and Tonio were there in the mid-1980s, visiting her friend Lot. The boy immersed himself in a book belonging to Lot’s husband on minerals and semi-precious stones. Back home, he begged us for a subscription to a rock collectors’ magazine. In every city we visited, he managed to wheedle a handful of special collectors’ items out of us. Soon, stones had no more secrets from him; he developed an infallible memory for types, colours, names.

Once he heard me mention a forthcoming book-cover design to Miriam. I had decided that midnight blue would make a nice background, but couldn’t find the right colour swatches, either at the paint dealer or elsewhere. Tonio darted off to his room, and reappeared a little while later, opening his fist in front of me. ‘D’you mean this?’

A stone of the most splendid shade of blue glistened at me. Maybe not exactly midnight blue, but more useable than what I was looking for. I took the stone in my hand.

‘What’s this?’

‘Lapis lazuli,’ he exclaimed. ‘Lapis lazuli, of course. The real thing, lapis lazuli.’

He accompanied the announcement with a triumphant little dance. He went with me to the publisher, where he unwrapped the lapis lazuli from its dustcloth. His face radiant, he observed the effect his magic stone had on the publisher and his staff.

‘Lapis lazuli,’ he cried gleefully. ‘For Adri’s book.’

Unfortunately, it was not feasible to use this unique colour for the cover. With every proof I received, Tonio fetched his stone for comparison. It wasn’t even in the ballpark.

‘You know what,’ he said, ‘just take a whole bunch of colour photos of it, and snip out the lapis lazuli from each one … then you paste all those lapis lazulis together on the front of your book. Easy.’

When we had the living room renovated in ’97, we had two glass display-cases built in on either side of the fireplace: one for Miriam’s collection of Venetian masks, the other for Tonio’s rocks. He kept his smaller specimens in foam-rubber powder puffs, which were in turn enclosed in transparent hard-plastic boxes. The larger minerals were placed among them on the glass shelves. Every visitor was brought to come see his cabinet.

‘That blueish stone there, Tonio, what’s it called?’

‘It only looks blue. Because of the light. It’s really grey. A labradorite.’

And then he’d look over at Miriam or me and shake his head. How could people be so ignorant?

In a town in Sicily, Tonio found a small, dusty, forgotten shop (he seemed to have a sort of rock-radar) where a little old lady dressed in black, and as wrinkled as a desiccated apple, had a glass case full of minerals and petrified seahorses. While we drank ice-cold, nearly red rosé in the shade of a nearby café, Tonio nosed around that shop. When he came to show us his purchase, he put on his most pathetic face: ‘They’ve also got an agate. Not even that expensive.’

When I gave him the money, he howled with a sort of mocking triumph. He regarded every gift as a victory over his parents’ didactic restraint. The other café patrons got a kick out the way he instructed us to guard his newly acquired booty, returning post-haste to the shop with a fistful of freshly wheedled money, as though he were afraid that other buyers, who of course didn’t know the first thing about rocks, would snap up his prize.

Ten minutes later, he was back. The old woman had packed up his agate, complete with a blue ribbon, like the Sicilian bakers did a tart. Tonio tore open the paper with nimble fingers. ‘Just look at how nicely the manganese left its mark …’ He spoke like an article out of his collectors’ journal, in a deep voice. ‘That grain … and this here, that’s a dendrite print. Just like a Christmas tree, huh Mum?’ And after a brief pause, looking at me in desperation: ‘The lady also showed me a few pieces of jasper. They’re her last ones. Red and green. I don’t think they’re very cheap.’

‘The money’s run out.’

‘Yeah, I know, but …’

Today, Miriam and I are going shopping for a stone for Tonio. The last of his collection, with an inscription.

2

Two p.m. Continuous alternation between sunlight and wind-driven cloud cover has always made me nervous (it was the same weather the Saturday that my father drove his motorcycle into a ditch and was brought home by ambulance, unrecognisable through the mask of clotted blood), but today it’s worse than ever. We’ve got an appointment at the stonecutter’s at five. I draw the curtains against the intensely raking light, then whip them back open at every interlude of darkness.

Work is out of the question. At three, I decide to go ahead and shave and shower, meticulously and at my leisure, so I’ll be in tip-top shape when Miriam comes to get me. Seeing my bed on the way to the bathroom reminds me how tired I am. To regain my strength, I lie down with the first bit of reading material I find on the headboard: a booklet on Shakespeare. It informs me that the bard’s work contains some sixteen thousand question marks. As I lie there half asleep, my finger between the pages, wondering whether that’s a lot or a little, sixteen thousand spread over forty-some plays, Miriam peeks around the door.

‘I’d like to leave at four-fifteen at the latest, okay?’ she says, slightly harried. ‘Friday-afternoon traffic, you never know.’

Shave, shower, wash hair — the thought of it puts me off entirely. I lie there on my bed until four, not even reading, and without resolving the issue of the sixteen thousand question marks. If I get up now, there’ll be just enough time to get myself more or less dressed. Every day, I still wear what I pulled on the morning of Whit Sunday: jogging pants and a flannel lumberjack shirt. Well, not always the exact same ones, because things do have to go in the wash once in a while. The raking light has definitively made way for a slowly passing cloud cover, for the strong winds have subsided.

Crossing the street to the car, I realise the gout in my left foot has returned. I walk so little, and not at all outside the house, that I hadn’t really noticed the pain until now. The conventional wisdom that foot gout can be caused by eating red meat and drinking red port was recently debunked in the science section of the newspaper. I don’t care for red meat or red port, but do enjoy clear alcohol, which indeed appears to play a role in the formation of painful crystals around one’s joints. I finally dare to leave the house after all these weeks, and the whole neighbourhood gets to see me stagger to the car.

‘You’re limping,’ Miriam says from behind the wheel.

‘I’m forgetting how to walk, that’ll be it.’

Cornelis Schuytstraat. Willemsparkweg. Koninginneweg … the streets are indeed crowded with Friday-afternoon traffic, but it never comes to a standstill. Only at the main intersection with the Amstelveenseweg does traffic move so slowly that we have to let four green lights pass.

The Zeilstraat drawbridge is open. There is such a confusion of gulls flying every which way above our heads that it’s as though they’ve just escaped from a great big box, of which one flap is propped open. It is a long while before the bridge begins to swing shut.

‘I’m curious how far they’ve got,’ Miriam says. ‘I asked them to wait with the lettering. It looked good on the computer, but we have to see it with our own eyes first.’

‘Did you remember about the hyphen?’

‘There wasn’t supposed to be a hyphen …’

‘That’s what I mean, no hyphen. But did you check?’

‘Now that you mention it … My mind is such a chaotic mess. I wonder if it’ll ever get better.’

‘You can go.’

The barrier arm jerks upward. We cross the Schinkel canal, heading toward Hoofddorpplein. When we cross under the motorway, entering Slotervaart, Miriam says: ‘This is the same route we took the day Tonio was born, in the midwife’s little Fiat. Keep an eye out … there, off to the left, Slotervaart Hospital. That’s where he was born.’

I have not been back since 15 June 1988, but I recognise the building at once. Miriam was so caught up in her contractions that morning that she only realised we were at the wrong hospital once we got to reception. Tonio never tired of hearing this story.

‘Sorry, honey, sorry,’ the midwife kept repeating. ‘My fault. Stupid of me. Sorry.’

It was clear, Tonio, that there was no way we were going to turn around and go to the VU, where you were supposed to be born. The midwife pushed the wheelchair with a groaning Miriam down the hall to the lift. Your father wobbled alongside, one hand on your mother’s neck. The wrong hospital. Miriam a wrung-out wreck in a wheelchair. This couldn’t possibly end well.

‘But it did!’ he’d exclaim. ‘Just look at me!’

3

From Plesmanlaan, we turn right into the bland monotony of Osdorp.

‘Jan Rebelstraat,’ Miriam says. ‘Have a look at the map. I was here once with Nelleke, but that was sleepwalking. It’s close to Westgaarde.’

In a north-west corner of Osdorp, I locate the Jan Rebelstraat, indeed not far from the cemetery.

‘Turn left here.’ This autumnal summer sky makes me just as nervous as this afternoon’s uneasy grazing sunlight did. ‘There it is.’

Miriam drives past what looks like a normal shop window. LIEFTINK BROS. STONECUTTERS - SINCE 1913.

‘Just a sec.’ Miriam turns off the engine, closes her eyes. ‘Help me muster up some courage.’

I undo her seatbelt and pull her close. ‘Think of last time, Minchen, when you were here with Nelleke. You pretended it was a garden centre … shopping for a little something for our back terrace. A bargain from the sale section.’

‘That was then,’ she whispers. ‘It’s harder now.’

The door, complete with jangling bell, makes me think of one of those old-fashioned general stores. The left side of the shop has been made into a life-size imitation graveyard, like on a film set. What doesn’t tally is all that marble, flamed pink and striped pearl-grey, so glossy and unweathered. Nowhere is there a patch of moss or a sprig of grass between the stone chips that fill up the plots.

Grass markers. Slants. Uprights. Combinations of these. I wonder if the names inscribed on them, some of them with gilded letters, have been made up. If so, what about the portraits sunk into the marble — or are they computer composites? The novelist’s ideal playroom.

To the right, a display of pink marble hearts, and toy animals (teddy bears, bunny rabbits) carved out of light-grey marble. Behind that, two desks with computer equipment. On the wall, large boards with typeface examples.

A man of around forty gets up from one of the desks. Miriam apologises that we’re early. Handshakes all round, which we don’t normally do at the garden centre. We assume he recognises our names from the gravestone.

‘No problem,’ the man says.

Early. He leads us to the workshop behind the showroom, where a second man is at work in a hazy cloud of dust. Maybe they’re brothers, but not the 1913 ones. Suddenly, before we’ve prepared ourselves for it, we are looking down on a gravestone, lying flat on its back and supported by wooden trestles — with our surnames on it.

‘I’ll just go get the paperwork,’ says the man who received us. He goes back to the front room.

TONIO

ROTENSTREICH –

VAN DER HEIJDEN

I point out the hyphen to Miriam. ‘You see how these things take on a life of their own? It’s as though Tonio, maiden name Van der Heijden, was married to a Mr. Rotenstreich. One little hyphen, and he’s lying in his grave with another identity. With a different gender, even.’

‘Stuff for a thriller,’ Miriam says. ‘Alfred Kossmann coined the term “identity fraud” — that’s where it all started, right? Without my thesis on him, we wouldn’t have come up with the name Tonio.’

‘All right, the thriller opens with an exhumation,’ I say. ‘Reason: an erroneously chiselled hyphen, giving the buried person a mistaken identity. I’ll leave the rest up to you. After all, it’s your last name that …’

‘That what?’

‘That doesn’t belong there.’

‘You can still have them take it off.’

‘Not on your life. Not now that I can finally make good on an old promise.’

The three names, and Tonio’s dates, are printed on a sheet of paper, which is taped to the stone. Everything can still be amended, shifted. The man returns with the paperwork. ‘Check along with me, if you will … The headstone is made of Belgian bluestone … one hundred centimetres high, eighty wide, and eight thick. How do you want the photograph?’

The rectangular plaque with Tonio’s self-portrait as Oscar Wilde etched onto it is, I see only now, is lying loosely on the stone. ‘What are the choices?’ I ask.

‘Anything you like,’ says the man. ‘From medallion to recessed. My personal advice would be: half-sunken into the headstone, so it’s still in mid-relief.’

I look over at Miriam. She nods. The man has understood, and makes a note of it. I bring his attention to the extraneous dash. I needn’t explain; he knows the story. How the hyphen still found its way into the design, he couldn’t say, but he assures us it will not end up on the final product.

‘Otherwise it’s at our cost,’ he says.

Back in the showroom we pick out the definitive typeface. We choose ‘Albertus Bold’. We watch as the man changes the headstone’s lettering on the computer.

I draw his attention to the excess space between the components of the dates. He trims it. Out comes a printout of the definitive text, with the photo in place. I point out the misleading hyphen again. Without a word, he removes it from the computer screen as though it’s a fleck, and I get a new printout.

I am reminded of the young woman at the registry office, to whom, bundle of nerves that I was, I neglected to give Tonio’s middle name. Granting Tonio his complete name has taken more than twenty-two years. I have waited until it had to be etched in stone. The shame I now feel is infinitely greater than back then, on 16 June 1988, when I stood outside the registry office with an incomplete birth certificate. (‘How am I going to explain this to my wife?’)

‘The stone,’ the man says, ‘can go into production this week. We’ll place it in a fortnight. Just as a reminder: Belgian bluestone weathers over time … it’s supposed to. Gives it a nice effect. The gravel will be refreshed every four years.’

He motions us to wait for a moment, and goes back to his colleague in the workshop. After a brief exchange, he returns. ‘We won’t start on it until next Monday at the earliest. So … if you change your mind as to the lettering or the photo, you can always call us first thing Monday morning. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll assume we can go ahead as planned.’

Miriam wants to leave, but I linger in the doorway separating the showroom and the workshop until the man has run off his own printout (without the hyphen) and taped it to the gravestone of Tonio Rotenstreich van der Heijden.

My feet feel uncomfortable on the cement floor. It’s Tonio’s feet that should have been standing here, in shoes that have gained a size, the flesh having got looser and fatter after two, three decades. I would have preferred to see him here at forty-something, in which case I would have been the eighty-something deceased for whom he was ordering a gravestone. ‘Belgian bluestone.’ Maybe he would think to print out one of the photos he’d taken of his father over the years, and incorporate it into the monument.

I imagine him pacing impatiently, with or without his mother, as he attended to this necessary evil. A gravestone for his father. Even if I were that age, it would, if he still loved me, be a defeat for him.

This, me in his shoes — now that’s defeat. For him and for me. God, kid, I wish we could have skipped this, and leap forward to, say, 2034. Me, dead at a respectable age; you, living on toward that age.

4

Since beginning this requiem, I have tried to find solace from other writers who have lost a child.

Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, the male half of twins, died at the age of eleven. If traces of this loss can be found in his work, they are only indirect. The filicide in Macbeth, perhaps. ‘Give sorrow words …’ Maybe, with the portrayal of the young hero in Hamlet, Shakespeare created an idealised version of his own son, and disguised himself as a voyeuristic ghost.

Ben Jonson lost his eldest son at age seven. ‘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.’

Descartes never got over the death of his young daughter, but whether her death played any role in forming his philosophy, I couldn’t say. Klaus Mann, eldest son of Thomas, committed suicide. In his diary entries from the time the lad was twelve, the father wondered if he could fall in love with his sailor-suit-clad son. Klaus’s funeral in Cannes had to make do without the sacred presence of Thomas, who was on a speaking tour of Scandinavia.

Anna Enquist lost her daughter Margit to a traffic accident on the Dam. How she (Margit) sang and played and beamed at the twenty-fifth anniversary party of De Revisor. The infant daughter of P.F. Thomèse became a ‘shadowchild’. Mauringh, the eldest son of Jean-Paul Franssens, jumped in front of a train (his father died a year later). One of Jan Cremer’s sons was murdered. A son of Jeroen Brouwers died of an illness. Not long thereafter, I sat across a restaurant table from the father, and could see, close up, the pain in his tired eyes.

The list is long. Writers are not spared. Perhaps they are asking for tragedies, being so tied up with them professionally. After the publication of George Simenon’s The Disappearance of Odile, his own daughter vanished. She was later found to have committed suicide. Simenon wrote a thousand-plus-page memoir in the form of a letter to her.

I have not been able to take any comfort from my colleagues’ pain. Shared pain lessens nothing. It only augments.

5

On the return trip through the scattered building-blocks of Osdorp toward the land of the living, Miriam again points out the high-rise main block of the Slotervaart Hospital.

‘Want to stop?’ And since I appear to take it as a joke: ‘I’m serious. For your book.’

‘Another time. The stonecutter’s also got to go in the book.’

As we ride past the hospital, I keep my eyes glued to the tower block. Somewhere, on an upper storey, I watched my son being born. Looking out over Amsterdam from that height, and becoming a father at the same time — oh, that gave me the most majestic feeling. The urge to take the still-unwashed babe to the window, to show him (to) the world … I didn’t dare.

I have just seen his gravestone. His photo will come just under the arched upper edge. He’ll be looking out over a patch of gravel about as long as he was tall, from a height of less than a metre.

‘I don’t know quite how to put it,’ Miriam says, ‘but I have the constant feeling that Tonio, well, is living in me. Permanently.’

‘In us both,’ I say. ‘And since Whit Sunday, we, with Tonio in us, live permanently in another world. Hasn’t anybody sent the change-of-address cards yet? It’s a world we never imagined existed. Take the stonecutter, for instance … Just drive over there, walk in and order a gravestone … two months ago, we’d never even considered it. Another world, other doors, other interiors. The curious thing is that we behave as though it’s the most normal thing in the world … stroll around, shopping basket in hand, choosing accessories for Tonio’s grave … like at the corner grocery. The way back to our pre-Whitsun existence is gone, cut off, forever. You see something of the world this way, at least.’

We’ve passed the hospital now. I turn back for a last look at the ugly tower block. A couple of days after Tonio was born: I stand with my mother at the glass window, behind which Miriam has appeared wearing a nightgown, with the baby in her arms, her face fatigued, but all smiles.

‘Yeah … yessir, you sure made a good one there.’ She claps her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh dear, what am I saying?’

6

Last week, Miriam got a phone call from Lieftink Bros.: the gravestone had been put in place. They didn’t have quite enough gravel to fill the plot, but it would be taken care of ASAP.

Miriam made a telephone-round of the family straightaway, to find a suitable date for us all to visit the grave together, for you couldn’t call it an unveiling anymore. Natan thought it was strange that they hadn’t done it in the presence of the family. Surely that was a widely held tradition? But, naturally, he wanted to accompany us to the gravesite, also to see his own, endangered surname chiselled into stone.

My father-in-law, my sister, my brother, with wife and child: they were all free on Monday 12 July, the day after the World Cup finals. My mother-in-law, who had so vociferously refused even to shake her ex-husband’s hand at the funeral, would have to go another time. Even then, we couldn’t discount that she would raise a stink about the name ROTENSTREICH on the gravestone. Dealing with her was a matter of never-ending, and usually fruitless, diplomacy.

7

Before the finals, Miriam served deep-fried calamari with the drinks.

‘The guy at the Albert Cuyp market said it was one of Paul’s tentacles. Y’know, the German octopus that predicts football results. By … how’d he do it again? … picking mussels out of the right box, something like that.’

‘And you just toss a tentacle of the oracle into a deep-fryer? That’s tempting the gods.’

‘Nah. Octopus. Paul predicted that Spain would win. Now he’s been rendered harmless. At the Cuyp, they cut the bad mussel out of him and threw it to the gulls. Spain’s gonna lose.’

‘These rings have an alarming crunch to them.’

‘I sprinkled coarse sea salt on top.’

Every moment that, thanks to a bit of diversion, I don’t have to think My life is ruined for good is a plus. At the same time, right after such a moment of distraction, I am convinced that I cannot let go of the thought of my ruined life for even a second. This would be my permanent tribute to Tonio. His life cut short for good, and his future definitively behind lock and key? Then I must be continually confronted with the ruination of my own existence. My focus must not be allowed to waver.

In that duplicitous frame of mind, I take my place in front of the TV.

8

I could keep telling myself that I couldn’t care less who won, but I was at least conscious of the subdued atmosphere after the anticlimax. I had expected the spectators to leave Museumplein in a jeering protest as they made their way to various flashpoints throughout the city: the Spanish consulate, for instance, and any number of Iberian restaurants. I pricked up my ears, but the streets were quiet — there was no noisy grousing by streams of passersby, no vuvuzelas.

The image arose of a crowd, stunned and silent, remaining behind en masse.

‘I’m just going out.’

Herds of dejected football fans were indeed hurrying home: mute, on whispering and lisping shoe soles. In this anonymous darkness, which had erased our national identity, I dared to walk unguarded outdoors. I ambled against the stream to the end of the street. The interior of Café Welling, where the television had already been switched off, looked so sombre you’d think they’d just come from the funeral of one of their regulars. A small group sat outside, smoking.

Museumplein made me think most of one of those third-world garbage dumps, where paupers send their kids to root around for usable rubbish. But these manure pits are usually not lit up at night by floodlights and giant projection screens (now imageless). The place was nearly entirely deserted. A ragged, glittery carpet of trash (beer cans, water bottles, lots of light-blue plastic, crates, orange bits of clothing) concealed what used to be the grassy commons. You looked up almost automatically to check for buzzards. Only nose-diving gulls.

Two amateur scavengers, about ten years old, were collecting discarded vuvuzelas, perhaps in the hope of creating a last-minute market in the run-up to the team’s homecoming welcome the day after tomorrow. They were clever enough to try them out first, braving the residual spit of strangers, just to make sure they could get a lugubrious honk out of the thing.

The sound of crushed aluminium and splintered plastic underfoot had not entirely dissipated: here and there, groups of hangdog supporters were leaving the area, aware that despite the profound loss, in four years’ time there’d be the opportunity to get even. I was immune to it. What did hit me was the setting of the disgrace: it only reminded me, together with those ten-year-old scavengers, of my own loss. Missing Tonio could be augmented in myriad ways and with myriad attributes.

9

Today, the 12th of July, we would add the newest acquisition to Tonio’s rock collection. Not in the glass display-case in our living room — its dimensions did not allow for that. This monster of Belgian bluestone was to be exhibited in the open air, at Buitenveldert Cemetery. I had wanted to have them incorporate a piece of lapis lazuli, Tonio’s favourite, into it, but this was problematic for the stonecutters, so we dropped it.

The municipal sanitation department had already started clearing the debris from Museumplein that very night. When I took my timid early-morning walk, they were still busy cleaning — anything to provide a spotless foundation for the next day’s homecoming, so that a new carpet of garbage could be laid. Win or lose, the screaming must go on. Even the city government had already decided there would be a canal parade. This way, they hoped, by some alchemistic trick, to convert defeat into victory. Bring a million orange-clad provincials by train to the capital. Have them throng the players’ boat, from bridge to bridge, and from canal wall to canal wall. All that honking and orange smoke will magically transform disgrace into triumph. The new mayor cashed in on it: his inauguration was ratified with two streetfests in a single week. Public misconduct, provided it was cloaked in the national colours, was okay.

10

‘Say you lost your wife or your son. Would you keep on writing?’

If someone asked me this before Whit Sunday 2010, my answer would be: ‘Of course not. They are both my muse. Tonio a male one. I do it first and foremost for them. Aside from the question whether there would still be any point in writing, I wouldn’t even be able to.’

And yet, since the end of May, it’s Tonio who in fact keeps me writing. Every day, from ten-thirty in the morning till five in the afternoon, without a lunch break. It is more an obsessive ritual than voluntary labour. Writing for and about him is the best way to get as close to him as possible, the person he was and the absentee he now is, to talk to him and sit in silence with him. In this way I keep him alive, and when my work is finished, this requiem can, in a dialogue with the reader, keep him alive a while longer.

But after that? Of course, I can say: it’s my job, and seeing as we’ve decided to stay alive … It can never be solely a matter of breadwinning, otherwise I’d have chosen a different profession, with a bit more to show for itself at the end of the workday.

The real question is: what to write after this? My current subject is a kind of pitch-black marvel that has crossed my path. A one-off thing, seeing as there are, thank God, no more children of my flesh and blood to be sacrificed. It seems likely that this will overshadow all subsequent topics.

Maybe I should just wait and see. A fruitless void or …

I have no other answer to this terrible loss than to write about it — only to discover along the way that writing is no answer either, because there was no question. It makes the loss all the more chilling: that no question has been formulated, only an exclamation mark like a razor-sharp icicle.

You could turn things around, and bury the loss, but that does not provide an answer either.

11

At ten o’clock, I went upstairs to work on my notes. It was stuffy. I had the window next to my desk wide open. There wasn’t much point, as it was windless outside — and now the air lay thick and motionless against the houses, not even syrupy, because that would suggest a kind of current. Just when you thought the sky had never been this dark during the day, it got a shade darker. Everything to bring out the effect of the lightning. The muffled thunder reminded me of the drums muted with black cloths in a Neapolitan funeral procession, like the one I saw in Positano in 1980 when I left Miriam behind ‘to observe my happiness from a distance’. We couldn’t have picked a more suitable day to inaugurate Tonio’s gravestone.

Just when I thought there would be no cloudburst, I became aware — rather than actually seeing the rainfall — of a violent drumming on the flat roof above my head. I shut the window to keep the raindrops from spattering from the windowsill onto my papers.

The events of the past seven weeks were (with the exception of a single passively grief-drenched day) meticulously notated in telegram style: material that could be useful as the groundcoat for the requiem. How to actually start it? Should I, owing to the unpredictable turn of real events, impose a rigid structure upon it? Or could I make the most of the chaotic whirlpool of feelings and experiences we’d been dragged into, so that the story of our grief could be flung every which way?

My heart felt like a pincushion — so many short jabs punctured it whenever I thought back on this afternoon’s mission. It was like the pins and needles when your foot goes to sleep, but then in the region of the heart.

Hinde arrived by bike at half past one. She was supposed to go with us in the car, but at the last minute decided she’d rather cycle to the cemetery. Miriam and I drove to the Lomanstraat. Natan’s arm appeared slowly above the half curtains, waving — a sign that he had seen us. We knew it would be quite some time before he opened the front door.

Ninety-seven. He was old and wizened. His friendly face was pale, with pink half-moons under the eyes. I helped him cross the street, shuffling along with him to keep to his tempo. In the past two months, he had aged years. He was over a hundred now.

12

We arrived at the cemetery just as Hinde did. My sister was waiting on a bench inside the gate, with a bunch of flowers on her lap, short of breath just from sitting. She still wore a wig, because her hair had fallen out from the chemo. She had a cut on her chin, which bled. I hugged her.

‘Did you fall? Bang into something?’

‘I was trying to pull out a hair,’ she said, ‘and the tweezers slipped.’

I almost laughed, because this was her all over. The perfect motto to sum up her life: tug a single hair out of your chin, and injure your face with the tweezers. I asked about the therapy.

‘Well, I think they’ve done all they can do.’

I got a fright, but she meant that she was ‘kind of’ finished with chemo. ‘The tumor’s still there, but it’s dormant. Sure, I’d rather be rid of it altogether, but they say that could take another three years. On top of it, I had a chest infection. That’s why I’m wheezing like this. I’ve only got 50 per cent lung capacity.’

‘Isn’t that the emphysema?’ Again, I caught myself being concerned about Tonio’s clandestine smoking — until something like an X-ray of his wrecked lungs popped into my head.

‘Yeah, that, too.’

Then I saw Frans and Mariska walk up with their son, Daniel, now sixteen months old. They had come by tram, or a combination of bus and tram. We all hovered around Daniel’s pram until the poor little guy started bawling from the excess attention. (‘So big!’)

We walked together to the grave, slowly, Natan setting the tempo. And again, the cemetery proved itself to be a modest labyrinth, where you always managed to take a wrong turn somewhere. Everything was still wet from the midday thunderstorm, but the ground had not been turned into a swamp. Nor was it all slowly drying out, for the sun was hiding behind a low cloud cover. The rabbits had resumed their darting through the hedges, which still glistened with raindrops.

Usually we got lost because Miriam insisted on relying on the map. Today, though, we all just trudged alongside one another, more or less following the route we remembered from the funeral.

In the end, we reached the grave from two sides, in two groups: Natan, flanked by the women, had taken an earlier turn than Frans and I, but we all converged on the grave at the same time. Frans was pushing the empty pram (Daniel dangled in his mother’s arms), and parked it next to a neighbouring headstone. The old provisional sign, including the plot number 1-376-B, still marked Tonio’s grave. We stood in a semi-circle around the gravelled plot.

TONIO

ROTENSTREICH

VAN DER HEIJDEN

15 JUNE 1988 23 MAY 2010

What a relief, now that I could confirm with my own eyes that the hyphen was gone. I laid my hand on my father-in-law’s arm. ‘So, Natan, there’s your name. How about that?’

His doleful face wrinkled into an insecure smile. I didn’t think the moisture on the pink half-moons under his eyes had been brought on only by the puffs of wind from between the hedges.

‘Fine,’ he said quietly. ‘Fine.’

His life had been quite a journey. He had already had three nationalities before leaving his home and undertaking the trek through Europe. Born in 1912 under the Habsburg monarchy, he became a Pole after World War I. With the Stalin–Hitler pact of ’39, Natan’s part of the Ukraine (Lemberg) fell under Soviet rule, and he was conscripted into the Red Army. Thus began his long march to the Netherlands, and finally to this graveyard in Buitenveldert. He had served as an interpreter in the Red Army: he knew his languages, including Russian. He helped raze Berlin, and after the German surrender he returned to Poland — only to find that anti-Semitism there had only gotten more rabid after the occupation. He volunteered to assist Jewish war orphans, of which a few hundred were to go to Holland to be adopted by foster families.

Once in the Netherlands, he met Wies, a Jewish nurse who had gone into hiding during the war with a family of market gardeners in Sint-Pancras, where she spent long hours in an underground dirt shelter. They got married, and in the fifties had two daughters.

I never did manage to figure out how an incorrect birth year (1916) got into Natan’s passport. Had there been a mistake when he first arrived in Holland, lowering his age by four years, or did he purposely disregard the oversight in order to be more eligible for a residence permit? Even to his wife and children, he maintained that he was born in 1916.

At her birthday party in 1979, Miriam burst into tears when I enquired as to her father’s age.

‘He’ll turn sixty-three next month. He’s probably not long for this world.’

She, just twenty, seemed slightly ashamed of having ‘such an old father’, but was mainly afraid of losing him to old age. In the mid-’90s (he and his wife were already separated), Natan informed us that his year of birth was not 1916, but 1912, suddenly obliging us to add four years to his recently reached milestone of eighty. His daughters took it badly. All of a sudden, they had a father ‘in his eighties’. As though to prove his staying power, he had now managed to stretch it to ninety-seven. He lived on his own, and cared ably for himself. Four days a week (Monday through Thursday), Miriam drove him to the Beth Shalom cafeteria for his dinner, and picked him up an hour-and-a-half later.

The tragic disadvantage of reaching — and thriving at — such a ripe old age is that, already being the only surviving member of his immediate family (his parents and sisters were murdered by the Nazis), he had also outlived his one and only grandson. Natan was more than three-quarters of a century older than Tonio. When Natan was born, the century was just twelve years old, and at Tonio’s birth that century still had twelve years to go. In between those two births lay three world wars — two hot and one cold — and the remaining filth of the twentieth century. Perhaps it says something about my perseverance that only now, twenty-two years after my visit to the Amsterdam registry office, I managed to bequeath his name to his only grandson — on his gravestone.

Despite his affability, Natan was a closed book. I couldn’t guess what he really thought of seeing his surname in such an awkward position, wedged between ‘Tonio’ and ‘Van der Heijden’. We might even be doing something illegal. Rotenstreich was not registered as his middle name, nor as an appendage to the family name, because that, too, needed to be vetted by the authorities, with a price tag.

13

The sky started to darken again, like earlier in the day, but without the same threat of cloudbursts.

It can happen late at night, after a few drinks, in the semi-sleep of early morning, or at moments of sudden fatigue after a day’s work: if I’m in a foggy frame of mind, Tonio’s role in my life tends to disintegrate. He no longer seems like my full-fledged son, but rather someone who at irregular intervals drifts in and out of my life … who drops in from time to time … a somewhat unpredictable family friend. The more muddled my mood, the more I see Tonio’s presence in my past dissolve.

It’s not that he is becoming less important to me — on the contrary — but he seems suddenly elusive. It’s as though I haven’t spent as much time with him as I had wanted to. Thoughts like these drive me to despair, because this makes his perfectly contiguous life susceptible to erosion.

It is not surprising that such a state is the creation of an exhausted brain. It forms, subconsciously, my answer to Tonio’s demise, to the unfathomable decomposition he is undergoing in his grave. Somewhere in the depths of my soul, I want to see his past, as it intertwined with my own, retrospectively decompose.

Not when my brain is working at full power, though — then I know better. Tonio fills my life again: the present life, and what it once was.

Don’t think about his decomposing body underneath that gravel right now. His living, mobile body was here with me, in me, enlivened and driven by my knowledge of its every aspect. His motor functions were in my muscles.

The thunderstorms might revisit us soon. But, unlike Frankenstein, I did not need lightning to bring my boy back to life. My science was different from Frankenstein’s. My knowledge of Tonio was itself the life-giving lightning bolt.

The potted plants, half-eaten by the rabbits, had been placed at the edge of the patch of gravel. Between them was a can of beer that one of his friends had set there shortly after the funeral, together with a pack of cigarettes, now heavy and rain-sodden. I looked at the bottom of the can: a long way until its use-by date. I put it in the pocket of my raincoat, intending to drink it one evening on Tonio’s behalf.

14

The coarse gravel on Tonio’s grave brought me back to a small Greek gravel beach on the Pelion Peninsula.

In the spring of ’95, Tonio’s grandmother took him to the carnival on Dam Square. He was not yet seven, and the rules were clear: no under-sevens on the bumper cars. But watching them close up, how they bashed and ricocheted, was not forbidden, and that’s what he did, running back and forth along the ledge surrounding the rink. The spot where the cars were most congested, and the crashing the most violent, attracted him the most, and he was determined to get a good look. And eventually he tripped on the ledge, took a bad spill, and broke his wrist.

His dismayed grandmother brought him by taxi to the emergency room, where his arm was encased in plaster, or rather a sort of waffled armour, the kind that was mighty difficult to fill with signatures. It happened at an awkward moment for us, because Tonio’s spring break had just begun, and we were about to leave for two weeks’ holiday in Greece. We were to visit my German translator and her husband in the coastal town of Horto. The hospital gave Tonio a waterproof plastic sleeve for the cast, so he could swim.

‘Yeah, those bumper cars, Tonio …’ I said. ‘Risky business.’

Angry: ‘They wouldn’t even let me ride them.’

Whenever he was really indignant, he would cross his arms, with the back of his hands arched upward — which now, because of the cast, was impossible. By the time we got to Horto, he had come to grips with his handicap. He couldn’t wait to get into the water. It was endearing to see how Tonio braved the blue-green marbled bay. It was shallow, so he could easily gain a foothold on the bottom, kicking up silty little clouds. To give his motions the semblance of swimming, he executed a sort of crawl stroke with his good left arm, while his plaster-cast right arm, engulfed in its oversized and inflated sleeve, stuck upwards like a sail.

Miriam and I stood watching him from among the rocks. The spring breeze rippled the surface of the water like silver foil. From time to time, Tonio interrupted his swim stroke and stood chest-deep in the water to wave at us, then tipped back to his prone swimming position.

If that inflated lump with its illegible lettering was so comical, why did Miriam take my hand and squeeze it? When I glanced over at her, I could see that her eyelashes were wet with sea spray — even though the wind was as mild as could be, and the waves, if you could call them that, did not send up spray. Looking straight ahead again, at Tonio jerkily under sail, the gentle breeze told me my face was not entirely dry either.

Remembering how the beach pebbles crackled under our feet, I almost took a step forward, over the stone edging enclosing Tonio’s grave, so as to feel the freshly laid gravel under my soles.

15

In Horto, we rented a bungalow in a holiday park, but it being low season — the first half of May — we had the place to ourselves. Helga, my translator, and her husband, Wolfgang, an architect, had built a house with a sweeping view of the sea a stone’s throw from our cottage.

Along with her elderly parents, Helga had a niece, Inky, staying with her. Inky and Tonio were about the same age. They did not speak each other’s language, but Tonio tried to impress the girl by clambering up the olive tree in Helga and Wolfgang’s yard. Considering he could only use his left arm, Tonio developed a remarkable agility. Upon reaching the uppermost branch, he would sit and, nonchalantly ignoring Inky, stare out to sea as though he expected a ship to appear on the horizon.

Helga and Wolfgang were in Horto when Tonio died. Still in shock from the news, they planted an olive cutting in his memory near the tree he had climbed all those years ago. We received a colour photo of the sapling by email. If I say we were moved, that is perhaps the best neutral description of the pain, joy, and disquiet we experienced while looking at it. Helga and Wolfgang care for the new offspring, and we hope someday to be travelworthy enough to water it ourselves.

16

During our second week there, we (Helga and Wolfgang, Miriam and me, Inky and Tonio) took a day trip on Wolfgang’s sailing yacht. Dolphins swam along, some distance from the boat, to the children’s delight. The way the animals, five or six at a time, lifted themselves above of the surface of the water in agile curves, sending out entire Milky Way galaxies of silver bubbles out of the dark-blue water as they dove back in … Tonio leaned against the mast, looking excitedly back and forth … port, starboard … he didn’t have enough eyes. A complete, infinite dolphinarium, and we were sailing straight through it.

Wolfgang, assisted by Helga in executing the more complex manoeuvres, moored the boat at a small, uninhabited island, which was dominated by a dilapidated chapel with an exclusively feathered parish. A forgotten set of Hitchcock’s The Birds: they had taken up residence in every niche, every windowsill, and were in a raucous conclave on the altar. As we approached, they shifted restlessly back and forth, shoulder to shoulder, but, as though guarding their colony’s lodgings, did not take flight to join their brethren circling above what used to be the roof. Tonio and Inky were awestruck, but in a slightly fearful way, perhaps because the birds sat there mumbling in chorus, as though they had abandoned themselves to a mussitated vespers.

On the way back, Tonio was allowed to man the rudder. Captain Wolfgang demonstrated how to plant your feet wide apart, to avoid falling over in case of an unexpected lurch. Since Tonio could only steer with one arm, Wolfgang stood behind him, but so unobtrusively that Tonio could maintain the illusion that the yacht was entirely under his control. As we didn’t know beforehand how much spray we would encounter on board, Miriam had fastened Tonio’s waterproof cover onto his arm, and it whipped sinisterly in the wind. For one reason or another, we weren’t able to keep the air out of the sleeve when fastening it, so I began to wonder whether the constant back-and-forth of the balloon was doing Tonio’s wrist any good.

Of course, I was touched to see my little boatsman at the helm, so serious and manly in his role, so secure in his task, one-armed like a Captain Hook … but at the same time …

‘You’re mulling over your new book, aren’t you?’ said Helga, sitting down next to me. ‘I can tell.’

‘Oh, do you miss translating?’

She had me figured out. There, surrounded by white seagulls and silver dolphins breaking through myriad tints of blue, all I had to do was luxuriate in my immediate happiness. Miriam, up on the foredeck with her face turned to the sun … Tonio, with the rudder in his little fist, occasionally enclosed in Wolfgang’s grown-up hand, steering the yacht through Greek waters … and next to me, the imaginative translator of Advocaat van de hanen, about to be published after the summer by Suhrkamp …

And me, instead of counting my blessings, sitting there in my own world, piecing together the fragments of the new manuscript … this here, that there, and in between, for now, a blank page … I was back in my workroom, the ship where I was captain, coxswain, and galley mate all in one.

17

Now I stood at Tonio’s grave, wondering why I hadn’t simply prolonged that Greek idyll. Sell the expensive house in Amsterdam, live modestly in a village like Horto … Tonio at school in a neighbouring town … I really did not need an eighty-square-metre office garden, sumptuously planted with technical vegetation, like I had in Amsterdam, in order to write. An eyebrow pencil and a roll of toilet paper would do the job just as well.

Upon take-off from Thessaloniki, there was no turning back. I had definitively chosen the confines of the writing table and the faux relaxation of the urban café. Since Whit Sunday, there was a new punishment, which would taunt me for the rest of my days: look up from my work and see the nearly seven-year-old Tonio at the rudder of a sailing yacht, cleaving its way through the deep-blue Greek waters … laughing nervously, but he does it … yes, he does it … the ship obeys him.

18

I consider myself to have been a writer since the summer of 1972, no matter what a failure my first novel was. I have published since 1978. Writing has become second nature to me. After Black Whitsun, I was apparently not so devastated that I was unable to make notes on the dirty trick fate had played on us. I now write this requiem. Say that, after fulfilling this duty to Tonio (for this is how I regard this undertaking), I am able, one way or another, to continue practising my profession and to succeed in completing the various pending projects — then, no matter how good they turn out, for the rest of my life I will be, at least in my own eyes, a failure.

Once again, I quote from the poem Ben Jonson wrote upon the death of his seven-year-old son:

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

Likewise, I have the feeling that my best piece of prose is now behind me, and that it is dead and buried, and can never be outdone.

On second thoughts, I’m a little disappointed with the likeness of that etched photo of Tonio as Oscar Wilde. Too blotchy. Maybe it’s because a larger, true-to-life print of the portrait, in a waterproof frame, was still there. (The men who placed the gravestone had anchored the frame firmly in the gravel.) There was some discolouration from the damp — the bottom of the photo had gone violet — but otherwise it reflected Tonio’s clear glance admirably.

So here he lay all that time, without an audience, without anyone. The boy was with me the entire day, in every guise between zero and twenty-one years old. I lived with him, spoke to him, wrote about him — and yet treachery once again slithered into my soul: I had left him here all on his lonesome for weeks on end, in slow decay.

Frans scuffled about, taking photos of the group. He also bent over the plot a few times, twisting himself into contortions in order to get a legible shot of the text.

Natan stood motionless and deep in thought. Maybe he imagined Tonio in all his vigour, like the last time he had dropped by for a visit, the Wednesday before Whit Sunday. Just as with us later that afternoon, he probably told Natan of his future plans. His visit to his grandfather was likely not entirely selfless. There was a holiday weekend ahead, and he wanted to go out with Jenny. In the end, he drank up grandpa’s money with Goscha and Dennis. That night in Trouw, in a sentimentally philosophical confession, he had shared with Goscha (as she told Miriam and me) his guilty conscience regarding his grandparents: that he was slack in keeping in touch with them, and then pocketed a tidy sum once he went around, only to squander it on booze.

I looked over at Natan, and caught a glimpse of him as he was back in 1993, in the Catherina Hospital in Eindhoven, where he and Wies had visited my dying father. Two men from such radically different worlds, one on his deathbed at sixty-seven and the other eighty-plus and still going strong … the one sometimes hard to follow with his Brabant drawl, the other sometimes impossible to follow with his East European brogue. After the (final) goodbyes, my father called out to Miriam’s father, in his failing voice:

‘Natan!’

Natan turned around for the last time.

‘Our grandson, Natan — what a … !’

And with that, my father, worn out and gasping for air, raised a wobbly arm in the air and stuck up his thumb.

‘Ja … ja,’ was the only thing that Natan, moved and embarrassed, managed to utter. He, too, stuck his thumb in the air, although this was not part of his normal repertoire of gestures.

Daniel had made a drawing for Tonio, which Frans had rolled up and tied with a ribbon. The little boy thought it entirely normal that his gift be left on the grave, but the ribbon had to be untied. They unrolled the drawing and weighed it down with a large chunk of gravel. Scrawls of red and blue, and, in Frans’ handwriting, the word ‘meow’.

‘When I asked him what it was,’ Frans explained, ‘Daniel said, without hesitating, “meow”. His word for cat. So I guess it’s a cat.’

19

As I said in my brief speech at his funeral, Tonio would go out of his way not to argue with his parents. Even that one time when my nagging him about his lack of ambition threatened to turn into an argument: this, too, fizzled before becoming a real showdown. He simply asked for the time to prove his mettle; what else could I answer but ‘I can count on you.’

He took a job, and enrolled at the University of Amsterdam. I had no reason to raise the matter again.

In recent days, I have caught myself inventing, in my daydreams, terrible conflicts with Tonio. They always occur in moments of fatigue and mental disorientation, when the truth about his death takes on less-defined contours. A head-to-head clash, followed by deadlock, could have driven father and son apart. But no matter how terrible the conflict, even if it lasted for years, there was always the opportunity for rapprochement.

My pride in our stable relationship was now equalled by my unbridled ingenuity in fantasising conflicts between us. Nothing was too harrowing. The key point of the visions was that the son turned his back on me, lived — at whatever inaccessible distance. And then, one day, we buried the hatchet. The scope of the conflict coloured the reconciliation. It surprised us both that, after years of our gruelling feud, our embrace had remained so strong.

In my most horrific daydream, I envisioned a fight with Tonio about … his death. We hurled the most awful accusations of neglect at each other. Then we exhausted ourselves with self-censure.

‘I take the blame, Tonio.’

‘Cut it out. I screwed up.’

‘If I hadn’t …’

‘Quit it! It was my own stupid fault.’

It ended with us reproaching each other’s self-reproach, and forbidding ourselves from blaming the other. When the mist of the daydream cleared, there was no longer a life-threatening conflict. He was dead. Only a hyena dragging around a carcass makes himself think he is still fighting with his prey.

20

On the way back to the exit, we rambled a bit through the cemetery, in search of the grave of the musician Hub Mathijsen. He had been a violinist in the salon-music ‘Resistentie Orkest’* and often played the violinophone, which had a metal resonator much like a gramophone horn, rather than a wooden sound box. Its melancholy sound would have been quite apt now, here.

[* A play on the name ‘Residentie Orkest’, the resident symphony orchestra of The Hague. Prior to founding the Resistentie Orkest, Mathijsen was 2nd concertmaster of the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra and was active in the Amsterdam ‘provo’ movement of the 1960s.]

If you wander around this small cemetery long enough, you’ll eventually pass every grave. Hub, I had forgotten, was buried next to his brother Joost, the pianist he had performed with all those years. His widow had told me Hub was deaf in one ear: she had him lovingly laid to rest with his good ear facing his brother.

21

The family came back to our place for refreshments. If Mariska held Daniel on her lap, then she, Frans, and Natan would fit perfectly on the back seat of our car. The buggy could fold up and go in the boot.

Halfway home, the car began to fill up with the smell of rot — no, not a dirty diaper or dogshit-packed shoe treads. Rot.

When we got out, Miriam held the earthenware pot in her hand that, filled with moss, slime, and the strands of sodden tobacco from the waterlogged cigarettes, had stood for weeks next to Tonio’s grave. It must have all started decomposing, together with the half-unrolled film spool that someone apparently wanted to give Tonio on his way to eternity.

‘That rotten-egg smell,’ she said. ‘Here’s the culprit.’

She put the stinking pot on the curb, but, remembering that we were forbidden to throw away anything having to do with Tonio, picked it up and put it back on the floor mat of the car. ‘So let it rot.’ I wanted her all to myself at that moment, if only for that expression of hopeless embarrassment.

The party had already gone upstairs when Miriam came out of the library. ‘I’ve just been out back. The veranda’s beautiful at the moment. The sun’s going to come out.’

A little while later, we were all sitting under the spent golden rain, which let loose a flutter of brown shreds at the least bit of breeze. Frans pointed to the huge growth of ivy, which, a good metre thick, was still covering the entire side wall of the houses on the Banstraat. ‘I don’t want to get on your case,’ he said, ‘but you really should think about trimming that thing. Otherwise …’

‘Not now,’ I said.

We ate and drank. As quiet as everyone was at the grave, they were now boisterously chatting. Except Natan. Seeing him sit for a while with his hands covering his eyes, Hinde asked if he was all right.

‘I’m thinking,’ he said, in his customary, somewhat singsong tone. Soon after that, he had Miriam drive him home.

I talked mostly to my brother, who was sitting next to me. He couldn’t remember a thing of the telephone conversation we had had the night before, after the football finals. His explanation was that the unexpected loss had made him twice as drunk as he really was.

Daniel swung like a monkey from chair to chair, never taking a moment’s rest. His blonde hair made me think of Tonio at that age, although there was a difference in energy level. O, horror … this little boy was in all things Tonio’s successor and surrogate. I hoped I could continue to love him as I now did, divorced from all thoughts of my own son.

The sky had gradually gone pitch-black again. I suggested moving the gathering indoors, to the living room, and started rolling up the awnings.

The upstairs television was on: it was nearly six o’clock. The news showed footage of the effect of thunderstorms in the east of the country — uprooted trees and collapsed party tents (there were festivals all over the place). The rest of the news was dominated by The Grief At The Defeat: a dejected Museumplein, which I had seen with my own eyes the previous night, and the arrival of the Boeing with the Dutch team, escorted by a pair of F-16s.

‘A dubious honour,’ Frans said. ‘This is how they usually escort a hijacked aircraft. The enemy of the people brought to the ground. Get down, you. Lie, dog.’

22

‘So. The stone’s there,’ I said after the visitors left. ‘Firmly anchored in the earth. His patch of ground.’

‘And, most importantly,’ Miriam said, ‘his second name is on it. Or, what’s it called … his middle name. Oh, my poor sweet father … he was really broken up.’

How do tears of compassion differ from tears of grief? They both leak out of the same ducts. It must be the facial expression that goes with it. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her simply moved to tears, rather than destroyed by grief.

‘Well, let’s see,’ I said, counting on my fingers. ‘We’ve found the bike, his watch, the photos … Jenny has been traced, and now she’s got her portfolio … the stone’s in place, his name is complete … Now all we need to do is visit the site of the accident.’

‘Do we have to?’

‘Yes, we have to. We owe it to Tonio. At that spot, he had his last thoughts of us. Of you and me. The word “dumb!” probably flashed through his mind, and that says it all. Also that he did something dumb to us. That’s how it must have gone. “Dumb!” To himself, to us. There, at that intersection, before he lost consciousness.’

‘All right, I reckon we can handle anything now. When?’

Today, nearly two months after Whit Sunday, it has finally got through to me that Tonio is dead. Until now they were just suspicions, followed by denials. Signs posing as the truth. Disbelief still held sway.

Everything is different now.

23

Acquaintances of ours, a couple, had repeatedly offered us a jaunt on their motor punt as a diversion, but until now we had not taken them up on it. On the morning of the team’s homecoming, the woman rang us. They were planning to take their boat out that afternoon, to meet the Dutch team’s boats out on the IJ harbour and, if possible, tag along through the Amsterdam canals toward Museumplein. Would we … on account of the historic aspect of the event … be interested …?

Miriam promised to confer with me and ring them back. We had already decided to keep half an eye on the TV broadcast of the whole travesty, not to spare the screen our ridicule and to wash down the taste of national duplicity afterwards with a glass of strong stuff. I suddenly saw the chance to break through the cast-iron bands that grief had forged around our house, and finally brave the city and visit the place where our boy had had his fatal accident.

Under cover of a dubious festivity. Incognito among the sham-jubilant crowds. No one would pay us any notice. Just what the doctor ordered.

‘Tell them we’ll go.’

Miriam arranged with the friends that we would drive to their place later that morning. They lived on KNSM-eiland, a residential development in the IJ, near where their boat was moored. We could watch the team’s reception with the Queen on television, where we’d see for ourselves when the players left The Hague for the Amsterdam canal procession.

I rang a neighbour who I knew wouldn’t miss a minute of the broadcast, and asked if he would record the whole charade for us — Noordeinde Palace, IJ, Herengracht, Museumplein, the lot. He was so surprised at my sudden patriotism that he promised to run off a disc for me.

24

It’s the unguarded moments that have a monopoly on our true feelings. The brain is still under the spell of semi-sleep, or a daydream, or a bout of fatigue. At such moments of doziness or inattention, it appears that I still, or more than ever, consider the possibility that Tonio will return to our midst. The unguarded moment gives a glimpse at a more primitive layer of the soul, where the hope is fed that we will get our son back one day. We need that latent expectation, apparently, in order to survive the loss.

Wide awake, we appear, albeit with self-destructive revulsion, to accept the hard facts confirming the irrevocability of Tonio’s fate, and in doing so we embrace, apparently, our own fate. But deep in our heart we still preserve the animalistic disbelief that he has vanished from our lives forever.

This requiem, too, if it is a requiem, has its own unguarded moments. The reconstruction of Tonio’s last days and hours loses its predetermined futility, and is transformed into a search for the lost and forsaken boy himself.

‘He’s not dead; he’s woken up from the dream that was life.’

What we are reconstructing is nothing other than the closing moments of this dream — from which Tonio, according to the poet, has now escaped. It is the escaped Tonio we are searching for. This requiem serves no other purpose than to track him down and retrieve him.

Before we got in the car, I browsed through de Volkskrant, which, like yesterday’s paper, was all about Dutch football. Patriarch Cruijff had nothing good to say about his great-grandsons’ playing. Disgraceful, is what it was. In Uganda, a bloodbath took place in a bar where godless fans were watching the finals. The severed head of the suicide bomber still rolled around amid the dozens of dismembered bodies — which was at least a change of pace from the Dutch misery of a badly behaved soccer ball on the screen.

Anyway, our boys, who did first have to reach the finals in order to lose, would be soon cheered rather than jeered. It was the will of the people. Triumph had already nestled itself in everyone’s consciousness nationwide: it was the spark that illuminated every empty-head from within, like the candle in the hollowed-out beetroot on Shrove Tuesday.

At eleven o’clock, Miriam came to get me. ‘I’m not even sure we’ll get through the crowds with the car. They’re streaming in from far and wide, I heard, and not all by train.’

She was wearing a new summer dress, brightly coloured and with an African print. Its length and width nicely camouflaged her waistline, enlarged by our evening pain-relief. Unlike with me, drink did not at all leave its mark on her sweet face. The fingerprint of grief in her features: that was another story.

25

The football squad and their bigwigs were still inside Noordeinde Palace having tea with the Queen. Screaming hordes of supporters rattled at the gold-spiked gates. A NOS helicopter filmed the players’ bus waiting for them behind the palace. But first the terrace scene. The palace doors (whose narrowness always makes them look uptight) opened, and the losers spilled out onto the stairs, positioning themselves around their queen. Self-conscious shuffling.

‘The cabinet formation is complete,’ our host said, to kick off the mood. ‘One less worry.’

‘The Queen’s the only one smiling,’ the hostess said.

‘Can’t say I blame her,’ her husband replied. ‘She’s just been treated to the sight of the family colour being supported by twenty-three pairs of muscular, hairy legs.’

The players and their coaches were wan and sickly by comparison. Indeed, not one of them could muster a smile. Maybe they were all hung over. Their loss had been celebrated until the wee hours in Huis ter Duin, Noordwijk, where they were fêted by our other national losers, De Toppers.*

[* The three-man pop music group that represented the Netherlands in the 2009 Eurovision Song Festival. They competed in the second semi-finals, but failed to reach the final round.]

Eventually, here and there, a cagey grin passed over a player’s face. So this is how they faced each other: the Queen with her disgraced football cabinet on one side of the gilded gates, the triumphantly howling herd of cattle on the other.

Then they turned and followed the Queen back inside. Later, we were shown a bird’s-eye view of the players and their entourage stepping into two helicopters on the Waalsdorpervlakte, on the outskirts of The Hague — for a half-hour flight to Amsterdam. Our host switched off the TV and suggested we walk to the mooring.

26

On the IJ we joined a slapdash flotilla of smaller and larger boats, from motor punts to speedboats to seaworthy yachts. The water police, ever vigilant, kept all of us at a safe distance from the players’ and VIP boats. We needed our captain’s binoculars to make out the Museum Boat moored at the marine base, festooned as it was with orange-red flowers and guarded by a fleet of motorised police super-pedal boats.

We kept our eyes peeled for the arrival of the team’s helicopters, but seeing as it had been at least an hour since they left the Waalsdorpervlakte, the guys must have already long arrived at the marine base.

Miriam and I would watch it all again that night on TV. The players had changed clothes, trading their blazers for training gear — blue with orange trim, to distinguish them from the monochrome uniforms of their supporters. They marched, in a barely orderly single file, across the dock to board the Museum Boat, fidgeting and jostling like schoolboys on a class outing.

‘Well, well, look who we have there,’ our host said, passing me his binoculars. ‘Our brand-new mayor himself.’

With difficulty, I could make out the newly appointed burgomaster, Van der Laan, who, sporting his official mayoral collar, somewhat worriedly greeted the entourage. Later, in the rerun, we would get the details. All those overtrained football machines went straight for the beer, provided by sponsor Heineken in green slurp-bottles, regular glasses, and goblets the size of the World Cup itself. This was their way of bracing themselves for the shameful ticker-tape parade.

Once both boats, surrounded by the police water-scooters, were well past the fans’ flotilla, there was no stopping the crush. It was like Sail, when everything that could float came out to welcome a Russian cadet ship as it reached the IJ. Despite the police, our little punt could now get quite close to the players’ boat. The whole chaotic armada set out in the direction of the Westelijke Eilanden.

The goalkeeper appeared at the railing and brought an oversized World Cup tankard of beer to his mouth. Dirk, Robin, Wesley … what a bunch of little boys they were, really, when you saw them horsing around on the deck like that. They became more and more rambunctious. The mayor stood there, a bit out of place in his water-spattered suit. None of the players seemed to want to trade words with him.

I crouched at the bow of the boat. I looked back at Miriam, who, seated alongside our friends on the thwart, was holding on tightly to the gunwale. Her face was wet, but it could just as well have come from the spray sent up by a passing boat. On the other hand … in this open expanse of light, surrounded by bobbing boats all hurrying in the same direction, it was impossible not to think of Tonio. She knew, as I did: we were heading, via an enormous detour, for the spot we haven’t dared visit since Whit Sunday, the day we stood at his deathbed, kissing him goodbye for eternity. But a confrontation with the crossroads where he had lost consciousness for good early that morning, we hadn’t been able to face. We’d still have to wait and see if it would happen today.

We bobbed to the left of the players’ boat. There was a gap in the water police’s cordon, which a floating camera crew from the popular show RTL Boulevard took advantage of by cruising right up alongside, so close they could almost touch. The TV glamour-programme crew did its work until Wesley Snijder recognised the presenter’s mug and dumped the contents of a ten-litre beer stein over him. There: payback for the tendentious reporting on Wesley’s fiancée.

The armada sailed past one of the harbour islands.

27

When I woke up that morning, I realised I was wearing my apnea mask. Usually, if I went to bed tanked up — as was certainly the case after that visit to the cemetery — I’d neglect to put it on, sometimes out of forgetfulness, more often because I fell into a deep sleep the minute I lay down. Last night, even though my mind was a blank, I apparently did think of it.

I dreamt of Tonio. As I lay there half asleep, listening to the quiet murmur of the CPAP device, I tried to recall the dream. Tonio cried at the end — no, he was still crying. You could barely hear it above the sound of the machine, but it was unmistakable. He did not cry like a young adult man, no, but like the two-, three-year-old he once was. He cried, quietly and inconsolably sad, as he occasionally did on Thursday evenings in our Leidsegracht days, when Miriam had her regular night out with a girlfriend. I would babysit Tonio, and if he woke up, perhaps because he knew (or felt) that his mother was not there, he cried. If I went to have a look, he would stand up in his crib, which only just fitted in the nook of the roof. Upon seeing his father, he said, with a sniff and a wobbly voice: ‘I want Mummy.’

I couldn’t offer him Mummy, because she was sitting in a restaurant with Lot, or they were having a last drink at Café Schiller. ‘I want Mummy.’ His singsong weeping made me all the more nervous, because on Thursday nights we usually received a couple of anonymous calls. If I answered, it was silent on the other end of the line. Sometimes I thought I heard vague pub noises in the background. I have to admit that at first I suspected it was Miriam: checking whether I was at really at home with the little one. Our relationship was not at its best in those days (even though Our Man in Africa was not yet in the picture). When I brought it up with her, she hit the roof. Never, never would she do such a thing. Didn’t I remember that back when we lived in De Pijp, ten years before, she had been the victim of anonymous telephone terrorism? Whenever she answered, the caller played a German march, or the Horst Wessel. Later, we discovered that the caller was a neo-Nazi in the neighbourhood, a civics teacher at the high school where my sister taught English. A nostalgic anti-Semite.

We assumed that the Thursday-evening caller was a Schiller regular, who wanted to let me know he’d spotted my wife, or wanted to suggest that he himself was in her company — in short, that he had me in his grip. But this suspicion did nothing to relax me in my duties as babysitter, and Tonio was well aware of it, so that he kept on whimpering, almost apologetically softly — a full-out sob session just wasn’t his style. ‘I want Mu-u-u-ummy.’

Meanwhile, that morning, the thirteenth of July, he went on wailing as a continuation of my long-forgotten dream, as only the very occasionally inconsolable Tonio could. For a moment, I thought it was the neighbour’s youngest child, whose early-morning cries I heard from time to time through the open windows. But no, the neighbours were on holiday. And besides, it was unmistakably the weeping of the three-year-old Tonio — so real, so near, that it frightened me. The sound was dampened by the hum of the CPAP machine. I wanted to hear Tonio cry in all his unadulterated misery, so that I’d know what he needed …

I tore off the apnea mask without undoing the plastic hooks. I yanked the elastic bands over my head and hurled the thing, tube and all, onto the floor. The apparatus lay there for a few seconds, making that slurping and sucking sound, and then … silence. The child’s hushed crying had vanished.

In its drowsy state, my brain must have converted the singsong hum of the CPAP into Tonio’s long-ago disquiet. I wanted it back. I wanted to be able to listen to it for hours on end. I groped in the dark next to the bed, found the tube, and pulled the elastic bands back over my head. The apparatus resumed automatically, softly pumping air into the mask, guarding its wearer against suspended breathing. The puffs of air sounded the same as before, but the weeping was gone. I’d driven it off.

All day I tried to call to mind that real-life crying. I am not a great believer in supernatural incidents, but I could not avoid the notion that Tonio, via my apnea machine, was trying to tell me something. Perhaps the terrible, unutterable truth about his end. The suffering he must have endured after being thrown to the asphalt, or later, in the ambulance or on the operating table. Or, declared brain-dead, on his deathbed, when all he was given was air through a breathing tube. Maybe there he felt his parents’ presence, their kisses and caresses, and heard their choked words of farewell. This morning, Tonio tried to say something back. But not comforting. Only how awful it was. The pain. The farewell. And in doing so, he used his most anguished child’s voice. Its melancholy, wordless melody.

28

Much as the police in their bumper-boats tried to keep the pursuing fans’ fleet at bay, our motorised punt remained in the front ranks. We jounced our way into the labyrinth of the city. The very first bridges were already thronged with hysterically bleating supporter-sheep. Compared to June ’88, when the blandness of everyday duds still dotted the red-white-blue, the fans were now far more exuberantly decked out in the colour of their religion. Many of the supporters wore shapeless, bright orange angel-hair wigs, some of them a good half-metre across. The costume director of the film Amadeus would have been jealous.

Seen from a distance, the frizzy offshoots of the wigs bled seamlessly into a powder-like orange mist produced by spray cans. As it hissed out of the valve, the smoke was still a clear day-glo orange; but as it wafted out across the water, the mist quickly took on a grubby tint. It made me think of the crayon I used as a child to colour in a pencil-outlined rooftop. The crayon always dragged some pencil graphite with it, smudging the orange into a dirty grey-red — quite realistic, you could say, but today it only made me sad.

As we turned onto the Brouwersgracht, I felt Miriam poke me in the back. I was being beckoned by the host, who sat at the stern, manning the rudder. He shouted that he wanted to bypass the Herengracht and try to approach Museumplein via Prinsengracht and Spiegelgracht. That would give us a head start.

I nodded, and wondered if I could get to the Hobbemastraat/Stadhouderskade intersection without running into a barricade. We hadn’t told our friends that, for us, that spot was the actual objective of this trip.

The Melkmeisjesbrug was, in all its slenderness, a living triumphal arch, rising up out of a dense, unearthly orange mist. The red-white-blue mass that swarmed over it had a thousand legs and waving tentacles, and it screamed wordlessly from a thousand throats.

The players’ boat, followed by that of the officials, turned left onto the Herengracht directly after passing under the Milkmaids’ Bridge. Our captain picked up speed. The bow of the punt lifted slightly and cleaved the water of the Brouwersgracht. Straight ahead. I glanced to the left. The Herengracht was, for as far as the eye could see, a tunnel formed by a canopy of trees and a mass of writhing arms, all waving flags, banners, and pennants.

If you didn’t know better, you might mistake the monotonous hollering for a mass lament. The bridges over the Herengracht appeared to be covered in a rusty orange sort of teeming moss, kept in undulating motion by maggots. And then there was that layer of red-brown mist lying low over the water of the canal, like the vapours emitted by heavily polluted wastewater from a chemical factory. The team boat would soon be out of sight.

I thought back on the idyllic Loenen in the Veluwe, where the manure was brought out in thick winter mist. As the morning progressed, the low-lying haze took on a filthy yellow colour, like London smog above an industrial zone. Poor Tonio, who I had brought to the unspoilt countryside to protect him from urban grime. The windows in his room had to be hermetically sealed against the stench of the liquid fertiliser, which, absorbed by the ground mist, could only escape horizontally … across the road … through the yards and into the houses …

We cruised past the West Indies House, situated on the Herenmarkt on the right bank of the Brouwersgracht. That’s where we were married on 24 December 1987, while Tonio was already taking shape inside Miriam’s belly. Here, on that frigid winter morning, my father nearly fell into the water from a sudden attack of dyspnea. After the marriage ceremony, he wobbled, hacking and gasping for air, over to the water’s edge to hoick a gob of bloody saliva into the canal. I saw, in the nick of time, from the way his eyes rolled back into his head, that he was having a dizzy spell, and just managed to prevent him from teetering into the canal. Pulmonary emphysema. He was just sixty-two, but half of those years had been spent chain-smoking. He never did quit. Secret chemical substances in each cigarette insured that his lungs, overgrown with glasslike slime, would open up — until the next cigarette.

We were planning to go to the Sonesta Hotel, next to the Koepelkerk, for champagne, but the upshot of the palaver was that I went to the reception desk to cancel the reservation while the rest of my family helped my half-dead father into a taxi. I did not want to write him off as a bad fairy in drag, but it was clear that the ceremony, intended to legitimise the foetus, had been jinxed.

29

The new gravestone had not provided closure. More than any single day between 23 May and now, today, the 13th of July, was one of pantonioism. This was, of course, also because we hadn’t left the house just for a trip to the goat farm or Buitenveldert Cemetery, and were back in the city proper for the first time since that dinner on the Staalstraat. Tonio was everywhere. Everything exuded Tonio. Even the most insignificant objects, the most unimportant occurrences, revealed a trace of his soul.

30

‘If he keeps on like this,’ Miriam shouted into my ear, ‘I’m going to be sick.’

The punt hardly slowed in the frothing turn that took us onto the Prinsengracht, lurching sideways without interrupting its Japanese bows. Miriam grabbed onto me and said: ‘I’m really gonna throw up.’

When we had passed under the bridge and straightened our course, I turned halfway toward our friend at the rudder and motioned to him to slow down. Maybe he only understood my signal when he saw Miriam retching.

July 1994. The boat trip from our village on the Ibiza coast to Ibiza Town was scheduled to take an hour. En route, said the brochure, we could enjoy views of the rocky coast as we sailed past. A mirror-smooth, deep-blue sea … white lassoos of sea foam around the megaliths jutting out of the calm waves … cold drinks on board included in the price …

The Spanish skipper tore to Ibiza Town in less than half an hour, while the man who was supposed to provide the drinks had already positioned himself with the fire hose, ready to rinse away the gall of passengers who had gotten seasick within the first ten minutes. The bow slammed against the water surface with a force that a whale’s fin couldn’t have matched. Miriam was the first one to throw up, immediately followed by Tonio (out of solidarity with his mother). Grinning, and adopting a fiendish routine, the steward stood there, legs spread, hosing down the deck. The boat lurched so violently that Miriam and Tonio were unable to aim their puke, and consequently sullied themselves.

Later, as we walked along the quay (still sick to our stomachs), we saw the crew lounging on coils of rope, thoroughly enjoying a leisurely lunch thanks to the extra half-hour they had robbed from the tourist riff-raff.

The six-year-old Tonio was so horrified at having to witness his own mother vomit that he went into a panic at the thought of the return voyage.

‘I don’t want Mama to throw up.’

In the end, we took a taxi back to the bungalow — an hour-and-a-half trek, including inexplicable traffic jams, over winding inland roads. At first, the driver only sniffed with distaste, but later he launched into an all-out rant against his sour-smelling passengers.

Once home, the hardships were soon forgotten. Before dinnertime, Tonio and I thought up a new chapter for our book Reis in een boom. The boy had climbed into the chestnut tree behind his house and refused to come down, despite the pleas of his father and mother. Yes, at night, when his parents were asleep, he did climb down — to fetch tools and planks with which to build himself a treehouse. He carried out the construction during the day, doing his best to imitate a woodpecker with his hammer and nails.

‘… to mislead his parents.’

‘What’s a woodpecker?’

‘You know. Woody Woodpecker.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘When the treehouse is finished … a kind of cabin … then he can start his travels.’

‘Yeah, but Adri … a tree … how can you travel in it? A tree doesn’t have wheels. It has roots … way deep in the ground.’

‘And that is the secret of our story. A secret only you and I know. Omigosh, just imagine, if everyone knew the secret … then every Tom, Dick, and Harry could write a story like this. Uh-uh, this is our story. Yours and mine.’

‘Will my name be on the book, too?’

‘Of course — the author’s name is always on the front cover. And the title page. So there’ll be two names. Yours and mine.’

If I were worth my salt as a writer, I would be able to describe Tonio’s expression at the realisation that he might write his own book. With me. His face darkened a bit, perhaps as he realised the hurdles of such an undertaking.

‘Yeah, but Adri … I don’t even know the tree’s secret. Does he turn it into a ship?’

‘No, the tree stays put, with its roots anchored firmly in the ground. And the boy still travels.’

‘So what’s the secret?’

‘When you get onto a train or a boat, and you go travelling on it, what’s the first thing you notice?’

‘That you’re moving … or sailing.’

‘Exactly. You move forward, and that means your surroundings change. First the train chugs past the houses, then fields and meadows. The secret of our tree is that it never leaves its spot, but that it keeps getting new surroundings. So it’s as though that boy in his tree travels all over the world. With a constantly changing view from his treehouse.’

31

What was I doing here, in the middle of all this mass hysteria? Wanting to finish off what I started on 26 June 1988, when I made an about-face because I didn’t dare abandon the newborn any longer?

My intuition had not deceived me. I got home and found Miriam in panic. The maternity-support worker had given Tonio his bath, whereby a plaster on her finger came loose. She showed Miriam the cut, which had opened up again in the warm water and was bleeding profusely. The silly woman had mentioned in passing that she had also been nursing a terminal AIDS patient for several months. After my phone call to the clinic, she was recalled from our employ and fired on the spot. We were told that the nurse was a chronic fantasist, and that she never should have been placed with us, but this only augmented Miriam’s (and my) disquiet. I should never have gone to the football homecoming that afternoon.

32

Grasping the gunwale, I crouch-walked to the stern. I had to step over two cross thwarts along the way. The host-captain made a beckoning gesture at the handle of the rudder, assuming, apparently, that I wanted to take over from him.

‘The Pulitzer’s mooring is just up ahead,’ I said. ‘Could you let us off there? Miriam and I want to go into town on foot.’

He looked disappointed, but nodded, ticking his finger against the brim of his cap. At the Pulitzer Hotel, I helped Miriam out of the boat. We thanked them for the enjoyable cruise, and watched as the punt cut its way, razor-sharp, through the khaki-coloured water.

Via two side streets and the bridge over the Keizersgracht, we approached the Herengracht as quickly as the unflagging stream of thronging supporters allowed. We needn’t have hurried, as the Museum Boat still had a couple of hundred metres to go before reaching the jam-packed bridge, where we tried to find a spot. The place was swarming with silver-white wigs, spray-painted to look like cloudish versions of the Dutch flag. Under the wigs, faces were caked with orange gunk, with mini-flags in red, white, white, and blue on their cheeks and foreheads.

The Revolt of the Clowns. They hung in clusters on lampposts. Something tickled my face: an orange wig, generously adorned with the kind of sticks you get at the herring vendor: a toothpick with a little Dutch flag at the end. The players’ boat appeared under the next bridge. The animalistic braying, which you thought couldn’t get any louder, only increased in volume. Again I noticed the lack of anything triumphant in the sound of the cheering. You only had to shake your head and it sounded like a mass yell for help, a crowd crushing itself to death.

The boat had now emerged from under the low bridge, and the blue training outfits all stood back upright, bottle or glass in their raised hand. The police force’s motorised waterbikes hastened to resecure the cordon. People jumped, or fell, into the canal, reminiscent of old black-and-white cinema newsreels of The Beatles on their canal tour through Amsterdam. Then, too, it seemed to me as though people were screaming in protest, because there was a fake Beatle, complete with signature haircut, cruising along as a stowaway.*

[* Drummer Jimmy Nicol replaced Ringo Starr, who had taken ill with tonsillitis, on the group’s June 1964 tour.]

The trio of young men who jumped into the water right in front of us wore orange life vests, ruling out a joint suicide born of desperate adulation. The boat drew nearer, and the cheering got even more deafening. Orange gorged itself on Orange, but the screaming suggested insatiability.

I held Miriam tightly, with her back pressed against me. We were now looking straight at the boat, insofar as the frizzy orange wigs allowed. Van Bommel’s goofy hat. A black player, whose name I didn’t know, wore a gold-coloured Roman victory helmet, I suppose in order to dispel any residual doubts. Another player was being interviewed on camera.

The spray-can orange mist thickened as the boat approached. Now, showers of orange confetti rained down upon the deck.

‘Heads down!’ cried the MC. The players crouched obligingly, just to be on the safe side — a pity, because after their scandalous performance against Spain, I thought they all, down to the last man, deserved a good head-butt. The boat glided under the bridge. I took Miriam by the hand and pulled her behind me.

‘What are you doing?’ she called out.

‘They’ll be going down Leidsegracht next.’

Despite colliding constantly with other spectators, we managed to keep ahead of the team’s boat. On the Leidsegracht, we found a surprisingly uncrowded spot across from number 22, where we had lived from November 1990 to July 1992. As if I hadn’t stopped here on purpose, Miriam pointed to the house across the canal, her finger singling out the second floor. I looked at her. It was the first time today I’d seen tears in her eyes.

Hysterical cheering along the canal wall broke the relative quiet. Through the arch of the bridge, led by two police boats, sailed our national pride.

33

With every tourist boat that turned the corner from Herengracht into Leidsegracht, we heard the loud honk of a ship’s horn. In time, it drove Miriam and me completely crazy, but Tonio ran excitedly to the window with each new blast.

‘Boat … boat!’

And then he watched contentedly as the flat, glass-topped vessel passed through the canal below, and the passengers’ heads turned from left to right on cue from the tour guide.

One pleasant spring day during our first year at that address, I knelt at the low windowsill and looked out the open windows to see if Miriam and Tonio were yet on their way back from nursery school. There they stood, on the stone steps leading to the front door. A rare sight: Tonio in tears. He kicked the lowest stair angrily while Miriam spoke soothing words.

‘No … I want to go to Bibelebons!’

He wasn’t faking it for effect. His crying seemed heartrendingly sincere in the serernity of that spring afternoon. ‘I want to go back to Bibelebons. Bibelebons! Not home.’

He plonked himself down at the bottom step and refused to go inside. Eventually she sat down next to him, an arm around his shoulder. I couldn’t make out the words, but the snivelling continued, softer now.

Sweet poppet. He was the only one of us who missed the Veluwe. A tour boat tooted its horn. Tonio wasn’t interested. He shook his head vehemently. Bibelebons — his beloved Veluwe nursery school. And we had just yanked him out of there, without asking his permission.

34

Tonio called me by my first name from the moment he could speak. If he wanted to indicate our familial relationship, he’d say: ‘This is my Adri. My Adri.’

And with it, he’d tug at my sleeve.

I sit in the small living room at Leidsegracht 22, with the glass door open to the short hallway and the stairs leading to the dining room. Reading on the sofa, I watch Tonio scuffle past, bearing a large bale of blankies. The entire house is laid with the same soft, thick, grey carpeting, including the stairs — it is Tonio’s greatest pleasure to climb up the stairs on his bare knees. From behind the pacifier comes a combination of humming, mumbling, and gentle groaning as he conquers the stairway. When he reaches the curve and is nearly out of sight, the ruffle of his limbs against the treads stops, as do the noises from his nose and mouth. I turn a page of my book, and observe out of the corner of my eye how he hangs motionlessly on the stairs, the pacifier now in his free hand. He is looking at me. I focus on the page, but have stopped reading. Each of us as stock-still as a grasshopper, we eye one another: he, straight at me; me, indirectly.

I can’t hold my pose any longer, and turn to him, looking straight into his wide-open eyes, which glisten teasingly.

‘Adri, you’re my fa-a-a-a-a-ather, right?’

‘Whether you like it or not, yes, I am your father.’

Before I’ve even finished my sentence, he sticks the pacifier back into his mouth and continues lumbering up the stairs. His panting laugh has something triumphant about it: as though he’s unmasked me, or at least has coerced a confession out of me.

I stare motionlessly at my book awhile, without reading.

35

When the homecoming boat had passed and the players crouched once again for the next arched bridge, we stood looking at the gable of our former home. All the way at the top, at the back, was Tonio’s attic room, which he proudly showed to every first-time visitor. ‘This is my house.’

I pointed at the wide canal-green door, which shone like a mirror. Next to the door was a lantern that would have gone down well at a brothel. ‘You think that lock is still the same?’

Miriam didn’t know what I was getting at.

‘Remember, that time you locked me out … and were hiding inside with Our Man in Africa?’

‘Oh, that. I’d lost my keys. I only wanted to keep thieves out.’

‘Maybe I was the thief.’

Having had enough of the noxious orange fumes, I suggested to Miriam that we take a short cut through Leidsestraat to the Leidsebosje, and wait for the parade there. We took a left onto the Keizersgracht. Leidsestraat and Leidseplein were less packed than otherwise on a warm summer afternoon. As we approached the square, I caught myself peering down side streets in search of the shawarma joint that Tonio might have been heading for that night, in order to put some solid food in his beer-ravaged stomach.

By the time we got to the Korte Leidsedwarsstraat, I could no longer contain myself. I walked over to the door of a Turkish snack bar, and examined the colour photos of the various dishes. Sure enough, they did a döner kebab, Tonio’s favourite late-night snack. Was this the image he had in mind, and for which he allowed himself to be lured into a detour — off the Van Baerle, to Jan Luyken and, finally, Hobbemastraat?

Yes, a person can meet his end as unheroically as this. I recently came across an old postcard, sent in the summer of 1978 by Jolanda, who was vacationing on the island of Terschelling with a girlfriend. ‘I miss you + shawarma sandwich’. I had spent a few intense weeks with her, both of us so in love that we forgot to eat, but not to drink. Late at night — I lived in De Pijp — we would end up at the shawarma joint on the Ferdinand Bolplein. The streets were just as deserted as now in the early morning. I never considered those nocturnal meals life-threatening.

36

We passed the Hotel Americain’s new fountain. From the sudden cheering around the corner, we reckoned the players’ boat had reached the Singel. For those on the bridge, the boat still had to take another curve, so here the howling only started a few moments later. Miriam and I found a spot at the far end of the bridge railing. The sunlight shone on the deck and on the players, a few of whom were being interviewed. The TV helicopter hovered above Leidseplein, taking the bird’s-eye footage we would soon be watching at home.

No sooner had the boat nipped under the wide bridge than the entire herd of supporters rushed across the tram tracks to the other side — in order to see their heroes reappear. The stampede looked just like thirty years before: the giddy panic with which hordes of squatters and their supporters were scattered by riot police. The tear gas was now orange, and the tears were not chemically induced, but brought on by the confused mix of triumph and defeat.

Miriam and I cut straight through to the Leidsebosje. We were approaching The Spot, but were in no hurry to reach it. We preferred to be pushed or washed there by the hordes of clowns that were now heading our way. Hundreds of them swarmed further up along the raked wall of the Singel canal, in order to get as close as possible to the boat, which was just emerging from under the bridge. It cruised down the short stretch of Leidsekade where Harry Mulisch lived. From where I stood, I couldn’t see if he was watching from his workroom: there was too much reflection in the window. He might well have been there. Usually, he’d have retreated to his favourite hotel on the Lido in Venice right now, but it was closed for renovations. The day after the accident he had walked over to The Spot, and was shocked by the bright yellow lines and symbols that illustrated the brute force of the drama, as yet unaware of who it had happened to.

I recognised the player now being interviewed as Robin van Persie. I pointed it out to Miriam, who nodded sadly. Without having to say it out loud, we both pictured the six-year-old Robin leaning up against the wall of our rented schoolhouse in Marsalès, watching sullenly as his sisters taught the one-year-old Tonio to walk. Even the flat-bottomed flagship of Dutch football could not escape from pantonioism today.

The pedestrian bridge linking the Max Euweplein to the Stadhouderskade (the bridge I had once believed had played such a crucial role in Tonio’s unhappy end), too, was chock-a-block with screaming fans who were already wastefully dumping fistfuls of orange confetti into the canal while the boat was still no further than the old Lido. My eyes glided along the front façade of the Holland Casino, trying to locate the security cameras that had registered Tonio’s last deed in this world. I wasn’t able to find them. Of course, being a system designed to foil burglars, they wouldn’t make them overly conspicuous.

On the other corner of the entrance to the Max Euweplein was the grand café where, not even a year ago, Tonio had first met his future classmates. The small delegation that had brought us flowers at the beginning of June explained how it had gone. August 2009: because Tonio was still working at Dixons, he missed the beginning of intro week. When he finally made a date with his ‘group’, he showed up much too late. Trying to kill time while waiting for him, his classmates — who had never met Tonio or even seen a photo of him — tried to picture what he was like, based solely on his name and date of birth. The game got more and more serious. Based on just those two bits of information, they put together a profile, a sort of intuitive composite sketch. Theories on his personal attributes like hairstyle and weight were posited and dismissed. A small majority came to the conclusion that he was 1.75m at most. Another small majority saw him with long, dark hair and thick eyebrows that grew toward each other a bit just above the bridge of his nose. Finally, they all more or less agreed: this, and only this, was how the newcomer looked.

Just then Tonio walked in, certain of his anonymity. He scanned the tables in the full café for what could be his group. How on earth was he to recognise them? All at once there were ten arms waving in the air, and ten voices calling out as one: ‘Yoo-hoo, Tonio! Over here!’

They had democratically conceived just the right picture of him. If I try to imagine his surprise at that moment — his shy grin (that started somewhere between his shoulder blades) — I could just cry. Just nine months later — a stone’s throw from that very same café, on the other side of the canal — he would be dashed to the pavement by a car.

I imagined him walking over to his classmates’ table. ‘Jeez, what the … you guys …’

Laughing, with jerky gestures, he would make a round of handshakes. ‘Shit, how’d you know …?’

37

The team’s boat approached The Spot, where the Singel canal curves to the left toward the Rijksmuseum. Supporters still slid down the sloped, overgrown canal wall, either on their back or in a crouch walk, toward the water’s edge, as though they were prepared to wade out to the boat, up to their neck in brown muck if need be.

‘Come with me.’ I pulled Miriam past the undulating wall of orange backs and wigs. The Hobbemakade/Stadhouderskade junction was deserted. High above, a helicopter hovered, but not to guard The Spot. The crowd faced away from the intersection, cheering hysterically. No more yellow outlines, which the desk officers had warned us about, were to to be seen — worn away by cars that hadn’t suddenly found a cyclist on their front bumper.

I pointed to the place. ‘Right about there.’

Here he had been slammed out of life. Life itself not yet entirely out of him, but what ensued was mostly just a last-ditch attempt to save what, in the end, couldn’t be saved.

The boats, accompanied by whoops and roars, followed the curve. Vuvuzelas bellowed their heavy tones. Entire hordes advanced en masse toward the Rijksmuseum, so as to enjoy, for another few moments, a view of the players, or to be at Museumplein on time for the actual tribute.

Miriam shook her head, crying inaudibly. ‘Just like that …’ I thought I heard her say. ‘In the middle of the road …’

What struck me all the more was the loneliness of what had occurred here. After a bike ride on his own … blind fate grabbing him by the horns … being flung into the air and smacked against the asphalt. How long did he lie there like that? Did he groan, or were his lungs already too wrecked to provide sufficient air to cry out?

I studied the area carefully. The curve in the Stadhouderskade, the mouth of the Hobbemakade, the crosswalk from the Park Hotel to the Singel … indeed, it really did look, as Dick had said, open and orderly. Blindfolded and all, fate had had quite a chore bringing together a cyclist and a car right here. Exacting work in the early-morning darkness.

In my imagination these past weeks, The Spot had gradually shrunk — until it became a narrow, indistinct, one-way tunnel in which a bike and a Suzuki simply had to have a fatal encounter.

38

Tonio, the finest thing you gave me is the sense of self-esteem. Before you made your entrance, I always had to act out a form of confidence, such was the low self-regard I secretly harboured. As I watched you develop, so too grew my sense of pride — in you, of course, but also in myself. I was, for a not-inconsequential part, in you. Whoever could have a hand in producing such a magnificent creature, must certainly be worth something.

Now that I’m forced to release you so abruptly, my self-esteem is in a sorry state, as though it was not only created out of you, but has vanished along with you. I begat you, but was unable to preserve you. I’m not worth crap anymore.

39

It is a night
you normally only see in films

Night was apparently a thing, an object, which could usually only be made visible cinematographically, but also occurred once in a blue moon — in the form, for instance, of the Brabant balladeer Guus Meeuwis. He was on stage at the far end of Museumplein, rounding off his act for the rapturous mob. After this, the national team would be given its official tribute; the players were now just about stepping off the boat at the pier across from the Rijksmuseum, in order to be reunited with their loved ones.

On the floor there’s an empty bottle of wine
and clothes that could be either yours or mine

My Dutch grammar teacher would probably take more umbrage at that ‘empty bottle of wine’ than ‘there’s clothes’. Gerard van der Vleuten is no longer with us in this life, but through the years I often hear his undaunted voice: ‘A bottle of wine, Guus, is a bottle full of wine. If the bottle is empty, Guus, the wine is finished, leaving us with an empty wine bottle. An “empty bottle of wine”, Guus, is like “the corner of a round table”: a contradictio in terminis. Got it? Guus …?’

Meeuwis closed with the stupidest number to ever emerge from the history of Dutch song: ‘Kedeng, kedeng’, the title offering an onomatopoeic depiction of a train chugging along the rails. The audience hollered the refrain in over-the-top ecstasy, enriching it with an improvised arrangement for a thousand vuvuzelas. Here a loser lifted up the hearts of the losers — and necessary it was, too.

The players were now allowed to take the stage. Van Bronckhorst, the captain, announced each of his men one by one, all twenty-two of them. The cheering from below elevated the athletes ever further above their flop. The vox populi had the last word.

40

The neighbour who had recorded the live broadcast for us warned me that the video and sound quality was ‘godawful’, with pixelated block faces and wrung-out heads.

Filmed from the air, the fans looked even more like a herd of cattle at round-up time. If they got squashed hard enough against the bridge railings, their fervour would get squeezed out by itself. This mass display of rapture about absolutely nothing — this can’t be what life, civilisation, Tonio’s death, was all about. It was not so much that people sought out emptiness — they sought out echoing emptiness, so they’d feel less alone. Nothingness had to be an echo chamber. You tossed in a bass, and got back an ass, without having to do any more than scream at the top of your lungs.

The boats disappeared under the Marnixstraat’s wide bridge at the end of the Leidsegracht, and stayed under it for so long that one might think they had just evaporated into the darkness. The helicopter’s camera could only film the fans who desperately raced from one side of the bridge to the other, in disbelief that their heroes might be gone for good.

And yet the team boat re-emerged into the full sunlight, and turned left onto the Singel toward Leidseplein and the Hotel Americain. Before the vessel once again vanished into the darkness of the bridge alongside the hotel, you could see Robin van Persie being manoeuvred into an advantageous position for his turn as interviewee. Again the helicopter filmed as the herd galloped from one side of the bridge to the other. I knew that we, too, had crossed the road — not to the railings on the opposite side, but to the Leidsebosje, but I wasn’t able to make us out: it was filmed from too high up.

The broadcast switched to the camera on board the boat and the interview with Van Persie. His handsome face had become, as the neighbour said, a Picasso cubist image, and his ear bled into a series of coloured squares.

‘So how does this all make you feel?’

‘Yeah, great, fantastic. All these people. This sea of orange. I’m starting to believe we actually won the championship.’

The boat cruised past the Holland Casino, under the footbridge. The helicopter briefly filmed the dome of the casino from above. Armando has written of the ‘guilty landscape’.* Well, this here was a ‘guilty cityscape’. Security cameras, meant to guard the casino’s lucre, had registered the last moments of Tonio’s life. The disc with the film was in the CD-ROM tray in Miriam’s computer. I should try to convince her — and myself — to watch it together: this, too, we owe to Tonio.

[* Armando is a Dutch painter, sculptor, and writer.]

‘So, Robin, does this lessen the loss any?’ the interviewer attempted again.

‘I don’t believe in “loss” anymore,’ Van Persie replied. ‘These people lining the canals, on the bridges, it’s their call. If they want to act like we’ve won, then we’ve won.’

‘In other words,’ I said to Miriam, ‘the national fan-club has unilaterally elected the Dutch football team world champions. If the hoi polloi want a shindig, they’ll twist the facts as long as they need to, until they come up with a reason for one.’

Miriam shrugged. The interviewer mumbled something about second place.

‘When you see this,’ Robin said, ‘coming in second’s not so bad.’

The boat parade approached the scene of the disaster.

‘Second place is just the first-place loser,’ I said. ‘An American sports slogan. The Dutch spin on it is: a first-place loser is still in first place. A water-tight argument, if ever I’ve heard one.’

Miriam shrugged her shoulders again, this time shaking her head, too, but without taking her eyes off the TV. Where the Singel followed the curve of the Stadhouderskade, the team’s boat started manoeuvring to the left.

‘Minchen, don’t you feel like shouting at them: wait here … stop … out of respect … throw some of those flowers up onto the street … do something … have somebody say something … even if just a moment of silence …’

‘With a city full of Dam Screamers?’ Miriam said. ‘Fat chance.’

The interview with Van Persie had come to an end. The camera mocked him once more by deforming his good-looking head and turning a close-up of his torso into a motif of brown-and-pink squares, a sort of Victory Boogie Woogie-ised portrait. I suddenly realised that the images of Tonio’s accident would show the same kind of jerkiness — not due to sloppy camera technique, but to frugality. Like all that surveillance-camera footage in Crimewatch. I didn’t know if the fragmentary images of his last deed on earth would make it easier or more difficult for me to watch them.

Now the broadcast switched to bird’s-eye-view shots from the helicopter we’d seen hovering above us this afternoon, when I’d had the confident certainty that we were being filmed as we stood at the spot where Tonio had been killed seven weeks earlier. That pair of flecks, separated from the crowd, was that us? Miriam and I sat tensely on the edge of the sofa, as though we were expecting Tonio’s resurrection, filmed from the air.

‘Do you see us?’ Miriam asked.

‘Helicopter’s too high.’

The yellow accident-reconstruction lines on the asphalt, the chalked outline of Tonio’s body, would have been the only thing you could make out from that distance, if they hadn’t been washed away by rain, by car tyres, or maybe by one of those high-pressure hoses spraying a chemical cleaning agent, the kind they used to get rid of squashed chewing gum from the cobblestones of the Kalverstraat.

Miriam and I were not visible on the film images. The camera swung back to the Singel, where the team boat, surrounded by motorised police waterbikes, glided around the curve.

‘Think of that schoolhouse in Marsalès, back in ’89,’ I said. ‘Those two little boys in our yard. Tonio, who was learning to walk behind his buggy … and Robin, who glowered through it all. And you see? — their histories graze each other, there in that curve.’ The camera showed us the back of Paradiso. If Tonio had gone there with Jenny that Saturday night, he’d still be alive; but, according to a whole lot of well-meaning and well-disposed people, we ‘mustn’t think like that’. And what if this is the only way I can think? Thinking is like forms of government. In some places, there is a regime of freedom; in others, one of suppression. The subject has no choice but to go along with it.

41

I thought back on that day, in the same summer of ’89, when we lost track of Robin while his sisters were immersed in Tonio’s attempts to walk. Despite Robin’s reputation for recklessness, or maybe because of it, the girls brushed it off, but Miriam and I were uneasy, so they decided to go looking for their brother after all.

I saw Robin again later that afternoon, at the campground happy hour, where the keg contained Heineken to make the Dutch guests feel more at home. I sat at a table with Robin’s mother and a friend of hers, another divorcée from Rotterdam, and the friend’s young daughter. The former Mrs. Van Persie was an extraordinary person, not exactly pretty, but with looks that stuck on you, or rather: they imprinted themselves in your brain like a seal in wax, indelible.

Lily and Kiki played with Tonio on the lawn. His buggy was next to me, empty. In her marvellous Rotterdam accent, Mrs. Van Persie told me about her job, her life, her family. Of the three children, Robin had taken the divorce the worst. Even when treating serious matters, her words alternated regularly with a brief, melodious giggle, or just the beginning of one — a kind of punctuation in the conversation.

Meanwhile, the children had congregated near the washroom block. Lily put Tonio back in his buggy and raced with him over to Kiki. My attention was distracted by the daughter of Mrs. Van Persie’s friend. The girl, maybe ten years old, wanted to sing me a song she’d learned, using a pop bottle upended on a broomstick as a microphone. She put on a guttural voice vaguely reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, but the featherweight variant. Her performance was interrupted by screams from the Van Persie sisters, who had come running from the washrooms in our direction. In tears.

‘Mama! Mama!’ they cried. ‘Robin! It’s Robin! He’s bleeding! He fell into barbed wire!’

‘Well, that’s about it,’ the mother said, rounding off her summary of the Van Persie family. Her daughters leapt around her like frightened puppies. ‘Come on, Mama! Robin’s bleeding like crazy!’

She stood up, slow and dignified. ‘Robin again.’ It was not the first time this had happened. That carpenter’s square in his forehead a while ago was indeed serious business, but pretty much every day there was a wound of some size to be patched or bound.

As though to demonstrate the proper lifesaving tempo, the girls ran ahead, looking back anxiously at their mother — who walked, straight as an arrow and unhurriedly, toward the washrooms. I had to keep an eye on Tonio, so I remained at the table, which in any case was littered with various small items belonging to the Van Persies. I watched the mother. The crowd of children parted for her, and the ruckus died down. A little while later, she led her son, pushing him gently forward, past the tables toward their tent. She greeted me with a gesture signifying: this is just how it is. Robin held his wounded arm outstretched, tilted slightly downward, so that the trickle of blood, having originated in the neighbourhood of his armpit or shoulder, wound its way to his wrist. He frowned as sullenly as that morning in our yard, but he did not cry.

42

Early that same fall, the Van Persie sisters came for a visit with their mother (without Robin, who by now was living with his father). Adults who meet during summer holidays should avoid renewing the acquaintance afterwards, when everyone has re-immersed themselves in day-to-day life. Awkwardness and tongue-tied embarrassment take over. Kiki and Lily, however, were oblivious to all this, and their need to cuddle Tonio had not dwindled.

But something else had changed. Tonio, now two months older, ran around the house as though he had never done otherwise. I don’t remember if we had prepared him for the girls’ visit, and if so, whether he understood which girls. The visitors’ voices drew him out of his room. There he stood, in the doorway between the bedrooms and living area of our apartment, with his blue-cotton elephant under his arm. I don’t hold with the cliché of the beaming bride, beaming faces, or beaming babies, but just this once I’ll admit it was the truth: when he saw Kiki and Lily, he radiated an almost iridescent joy. Out of pure bliss, he gathered up a fine gob of spittle on his drooping lower lip, which soon hung in a quivering strand halfway to the floor. Tonio had not only recognised their faces but their body warmth, their eager and secure arms, their scent.

Squealing with delight, the girls pounced on the little boy. ‘Tonio, can we see your room?’ He waddled proudly ahead, down the hallway leading to his private domain. Miriam brought them snacks every now and then, but otherwise we didn’t see the trio for the rest of the afternoon. When I took a peek around the doorway, I saw Lily with Tonio in his crib, singing to him. He giggled, listened, and giggled again — as though every verse contained a punch line, and he wanted to show he had caught it. Meanwhile Kiki worked on constructing a tower out of Tonio’s colourfast, drool-proof building blocks.

If I think back on these and later situations, I’m surprised how often he, as an only child, was surrounded by girls. Isoude, Femke, Merel, Iris, Alma, Pareltje, Jayo, Lola … Tonio loved women of all ages, and women loved him, ever since he was a tyke. Amazing that a boy like this would later worry about girls.

Love, not woman, was problematic.

43

Here, in the curve now being shown, Tonio was killed. ‘Run over like a dog,’ I once said in one of my worst bouts of anger. Two metres below street level, following the same curve, cruised the boat carrying football hero Robin — on his way to the tribute on Museumplein. My recollection of the two boys at the Marsalès neither added to nor detracted from Tonio’s death or Robin’s triumph. It was what it was.

A camera, set up on the mooring across from the Salt & Pepper shakers,* filmed the players’ wives, some of them with children, as they waited for the boat. One heavily made-up face pulled itself loose from its Modigliani neck, disintegrated into little coloured blocks, and was rebuilt from these same blocks as though they had imploded back together.

[* Notoriously ugly 1970s twin buildings across the Stadhouderskade, on the Weteringschans, so nicknamed because of their boxy ungainliness.]

‘So this is what she got herself all dolled up for,’ Miriam said.

‘Minchen, I think after all this jerky camerawork, we can handle the Holland Casino footage, don’t you?’

Miriam switched off the TV. ‘I don’t know. When the policeman from the accidents unit told me on the phone what that film showed, I was sick to my stomach for days.’

‘Come on, that disc has been lying in your computer for long enough now.’

‘I don’t think I can watch it. Later, maybe. Someday.’

‘Remember when we took Tonio to see The Lion King? When the buffalo went wild and stampeded over the lions, he couldn’t bear to watch it anymore. He got down on his knees in front of his chair, laid his face on the seat, and plugged his ears. You’re free to do exactly the same if it gets too much for you. But at least come sit next to me.’

‘I’m afraid I won’t even dare close my eyes.’

‘Listen, Minchen. Back at the AMC we watched him die, close up. If we can do that, we can do this, too.’

44

Two small figures danced with goofy, wooden leaps across the crosswalk between the Max Euweplein footbridge and the entrance to Vondelpark — apparently to dodge a vehicle approaching jerkily from the west side. I know nothing about cars, but from the documentation for my novel I recognised it as a Suzuki Swift. The car might have slowed down some for the pedestrians and, once past the crosswalk, sped up again, but from the jerky images it was impossible to tell. The Suzuki jolted around the wide curve of the Stadhouderskade, toward the next crosswalk. At the same time, a cyclist approached the same spot from the Hobbemastraat, thus more or less from the south. The traffic lights at the intersection appeared not to be on.

The collision between car and bicycle took place precisely between two consecutive frames — as though someone had snipped out, in an act of censorship or for some other reason, the collision itself. So we had a result but no cause. The CCTV film showed a stopped Suzuki Swift with a bicycle lying in front of it, and a more or less prone, slightly curled up figure behind it. The driver got out of the car, wooden as a marionette.

Miriam stood leaning over me from behind, her bosom tucked into my neck, and I could feel her gasp. Her fingers, lying loosely on my upper arm, now dug into my flesh. The driver jumped to his next position — and then the film went dark. I set the video back to the beginning, and replayed it.

‘No, not again,’ Miriam said, crying. She hid her face in my neck, and I felt the warm wetness of her tears.

‘Oh yes, now I want to know everything.’

That quasi-discreet omission of the moment suprême. The tidy division of oncoming figure into cycle and cyclist, split between front and rear bumper. Head and shoulders of the passenger getting out of the car. Strange: in the rerun, the CCTV film went on for longer. The driver’s leap led to the victim. And with another such leap, he was back at the car door.

I pushed the pause button. The driver had a hand to his ear. Perhaps the Forensic Institute could make a giant blow-up of this frame and see what number the man had dialled. I knew already: 1-1-2.

Again the screen went dark. I scrolled back. It was as though I expected the images of the collision itself would, sooner or later, come into view.

‘Minchen, see those running pedestrians? … they could have distracted Tonio. Coast clear for them? Then for him, too. Ride on through.’

Miriam had stopped watching a while ago. She hung heavily on me. I replayed the film a number of times. More eagerly, it seemed, the more I got used to it. As though I had found a way to erase the images of the accident from my memory by overfeeding them. It’s true, the replays gradually became numbing. The video, with its jittery figures and all, suddenly started to resemble Tonio’s very first video games, which he operated with deft little fingers. Except that this game could not be manipulated. No matter how often I replayed it, the car hit the bike every time.

‘Adri, stop now, will you, please.’

‘Look, there’s more.’

If I let the video play on through the blank, black screen, four rotating lights, jerky and flickering, suddenly came into view: two from police cars, two from ambulances. The jolting images made it look as though the victim was being literally thrown, stretcher and all, into one of the ambulances.

Miriam had lifted her head off my shoulders and watched the last images, sniffling quietly. ‘Our sweet Tonio … why did this have to happen?’ (I’m almost certain she said ‘does this have to’, using the present imperfect: it happened, after all, at that very moment, in front of her own eyes.)

The ambulance with Tonio in it jerked into motion, leaving behind a flea circus of uninterrupted, hopping mini-figurines. With something in between a sob and a sigh, Miriam nestled her head back onto my neck, murmuring the words she’d used since the first night, when all other expressions of grief seemed to be depleted: ‘Our little boy.’

With my arm stretched back tightly around her neck, I sat there staring at the screen. The running clock at the bottom of the screen said 05:09:14. Was the Holland Casino still open at that hour? I imagined that behind the high front wall, on which the security cameras were mounted, the balls on the roulette wheels just rattled on. A tired croupier raked up a fortune in chips. The mysterious yellow-eyed customer finally dared to loosen his necktie a bit.