Tonio (20 page)

And so on and so forth. When he returns to the table and unscrews the cap of his fountain pen, he sighs: ‘Heh, finally, my first interview.'

‘So, Tonio, schmoozing about me again, eh?'

‘Oh, it was nothing, just Yes and No questions.'

When, three weeks later, I am to repeat the exercise at Athenaeum Booksellers, Tonio passes. ‘Two autograph sessions a year — kind of boring.'

10

The doctor collected the signed forms, refastened them under the clip, and got up. I couldn't just let her go.

‘What happens to my son's body now?' I asked. ‘I've been told … the injury, it's to be documented any time now by a police photographer … a forensic photographer … but after that?'

‘Then he'll be brought by lift to the mortuary.' Something in her tone of voice told me that she had already, maybe a few minutes ago, explained all this. ‘Down in the basement. He'll remain there until whichever undertaker you choose comes to collect the body.'

What stuck with me most of all was that she used
he
and the
body
in the same sentence.

11

Before we got into the lift, Miriam accosted an
ICU
nurse. ‘Have you got any tranquilisers for us? We won't make it through the night otherwise.'

The woman was not aware of our case, so we explained our need for some Valium. She grudgingly pressed a few measly strips into Miriam's hand.

‘Can't I have more than this?' she said. ‘I'm really not planning to go peddle them on a street corner.'

Shortly thereafter I got into the lift with a fistful of Valium. The sharp corners of the foil strips jabbed into my flesh. In my other hand I held Tonio's wallet. Miriam carried the plastic bag with his mobile phone.

Down in the main hall, Hinde requested a taxi at the reception desk. I looked at Miriam. She was pale, but did not cry. She just kept gently shaking her head. Yes, here we were. Recovering from a gruesome experience. Legs trembling. But soon we would leave the horror behind us. The colour would return to our faces, and everything would get back to normal.

That's how it felt.

‘Twenty minutes,' said the concierge. ‘It's busy.'

We went outside to sit in the late-afternoon sun, settling down on a low cart, perhaps for transporting laundry. Hinde went off to smoke a cigarette at a safe distance from the revolving door. I was drained, and did not know what to say. Miriam, too, was silent. Even the sunlight made a tired impression, having shone so fiercely on our misery all day.

Just ten minutes later, the taxi arrived; maybe it wasn't even ours. But since the driver made no moves to enquire at the reception, we quickly got in: Miriam and I in back, Hinde up front. ‘Oud-Zuid, please … Johannes Verhulststraat.'

The last time I had been in a taxi was some two weeks before, after that unexpectedly intimate goodbye with Tonio on the Staalstraat. The fifty-euro note I'd forgotten to slip into his breast pocket. Just like then, I looked back out of the rear window as we drove off, and now there was just as little sign of him as then.

I tried to imagine Tonio as we had left him to his immobile fate in Intensive Care, lying on a temporary bed that in a short timespan had been transformed from a deathbed to a bier. (At least, I always thought a deathbed was the bed a person dies on, not the bed on which a dead body lies. A dead body lies on a bier.) At the request of the forensic photographer, the nurse will have pulled the sheet back to the foot end while he attached his camera to the tripod. First, he documents Tonio's roughly stitched open side, where the car had hit him full on. The man ensures that the bruises and discoloration are properly lit. Then he takes pictures of the other incisions in the torso, and of the drain and saw lines on the skull.

Ecce homo
, or what's left of him. Three days after photographing that pretty girl at our house, Tonio undergoes his final photo session — with himself as the model.

Due to the parallel-tracked bruise stretching from the neck, over the chin, and to the nose, the photographer would take a close-up of Tonio's face. I resented the fact that the last portrait of his good-looking kisser would be so unflattering, with that obscenely swollen tongue sticking out between the lips. As though his last message to the world was an extended tongue, like in the old days when a convict thumbed his nose at his executioner on the scaffold.

The taxi got onto the motorway toward Amsterdam Zuid. The radio (or maybe it was a CD player) blared hip, whining Arabic pop music — electrified bouzoukis, with the vocals alternating with unadulterated rap.

‘Could you please turn down the radio?' Hinde asked.

The driver reacted with less empathy than you'd expect, considering the building where he had just picked us up was a hospital, and his passengers were clearly distressed, if not outright distraught.

‘We've just had some very bad news back at the hospital,' she said in a renewed attempt.

‘Okay, okay,' the man grumbled. He turned down the volume the tiniest fraction. Who were we, after all, to disrupt to his ‘labour vitamins'?* Arabic rap — something new, at least. At that very moment, we heard the ringtone of a mobile phone, but muted, like when a woman's phone goes off in the bottom of her handbag. It wasn't mine. I would have recognised Miriam's. But Hinde did not react, nor did the driver.

[* ‘Arbeidsvitaminen' is a long-running (since 1946) popular-music radio show in the Netherlands.]

Suddenly it hit me that it had to be Tonio's mobile ringing in the plastic bag they had given us. It was lying on Miriam's lap. The bag hadn't been sealed, but was tied shut with one of those plastic zip ties you needed to cut with scissors. Miriam and I stared, paralysed, at the plastic-wrapped mobile phone. (Perhaps she had felt it vibrate on her thigh.) The caller had to be someone who wasn't in the know. So it could be anybody — except for Jim, and even he hadn't heard the latest, definitive news yet.

The phone stopped ringing just as Miriam was about to dig her nails into the plastic bag and tear it open. We waited for the voicemail signal, but there was none: apparently the caller chose not to leave a message.

‘Something just occurred to me,' I whispered to Miriam. ‘They gave us his mobile and his wallet, but not his watch.'

‘The collision …' Her voice sounded flat, exhausted. ‘Maybe it flew off his wrist. The band was getting loose.'

‘Then the police would have found it. They cordon off the whole area after an accident like this. Yellow paint outlines all over the road … you remember what the policeman said this morning. They reconstruct everything, comb the place for clues. Maybe they've kept Tonio's watch as evidence.'

I was reminded of the photos of wristwatches from a museum in Hiroshima. Melted and deformed, their hands immortalising the precise time the atomic bomb exploded. ‘It might have stopped at the moment of impact.'

‘
If
he was wearing it.'

The taxi took the exit ramp, a three-quarter curve, so that Miriam, too listless to resist, got squashed up against me. The warm, soft body that had made Tonio possible and in which he, in turn, had left his mark.

‘Last Sunday,' I said. ‘You two were supposed to go into town … to buy him a new watch. I never heard any more about it.'

‘Tonio emailed that morning to say he was “beat”. Always that word, “beat”. Could mean anything. From a hangover to the flu. Because of his beatness, we put off the watch-shopping until next Sunday.'

‘Not today?'

‘It's a public holiday — we weren't sure if the shops would be open.'

‘Minchen, in the Staalstraat that night, in the pub … do you remember if he was wearing his watch then? He was so keen to get a new one, that maybe …'

Awful, this conversation. As if we were desperately in search of anything of Tonio's that was still ticking. At the mention of the Staalstraat, Miriam began to whimper. She was so proud of him that evening — his wisecracks, his keen remarks. He had become his own person.

‘I wasn't paying attention,' she wept.

‘It was one of those oversized monsters,' I said. ‘He nearly always wore it. I always noticed if he
wasn't
wearing it.'

‘Well, then he
must
have been,' Miriam said, turning her head the other way. I knew it was time to drop the subject.

12

Leidsegracht, 1992. When I got home I saw Miriam, shower cap on her head to keep out the dust, bent over a cardboard moving-box. She clapped two books together, releasing the dust that had managed to gather despite the closed box.

‘Put them back, Minchen. I've found us a house.'

‘In the Veluwe, I hope?'

‘On your native soil. Your old neighbourhood.'

‘May I see it first?'

‘Right now, if you like.'

The manager of the pension fund, who (like the Veluwe landlord Roldanus) had given us a three-year lease, was not in the least bothered (unlike Roldanus) by our request to vacate at the halfway mark, provided we could find a new, creditworthy tenant. But before we could do so, the pension man had found one himself: a concert pianist. The top two floors were perfect for his two grand pianos. I wondered privately if the small spaces had much to offer acoustically, but maybe the pianist only played modern music on a piano packed in a down duvet, tapping the keys through a rubber mat while a tin woodpecker chipped away at the legs. I was far too relieved to have been let out of our lease and able to move ASAP to the new house on the Johannes Verhulststraat to worry any further.

(The ad agency's pension funds did not exactly strike gold with the new tenant. After transferring the two months' deposit, the payments dried up. By the time he was in arrears for an entire year, and the summons-servers had come and gone, the pianist, whose name no one had ever seen on a concert poster, had absconded. One day I received a phone call from Cristofori, the piano-rental company situated on the Prinsengracht, a stone's throw from the house. A woman asked if I could provide her with the forwarding address of my friend, the man who had taken over the flat on the Leidsegracht.

‘You see, he rented two top-of-the-line grands from Cristofori … defaulted on his financial obligations … and now it appears that the pianos have been moved to his new residence. So we thought that perhaps you could …'

I explained to her that the concert pianist was no friend of mine; I had never laid eyes on him, not even on stage. The Cristofori lady also told me, with a sigh of indignation, that the man had the audacity to lower both grand pianos, enlisting the help of some construction workers, who were busy renovating the basement on orders from the agency, out of the house.

‘The guy's got a lot of nerve,' I said.

‘
And
two of our best pianos,' she added.

I told this all to Tonio that evening while tucking him in, on the upper bunk of his new bunk bed. I jazzed up the story with the image of a man who, two wing-shaped grand pianos attached to his shoulders, flew off one night into the wild blue yonder.

‘There's no such thing as a wild blue yonder at night,' he insisted. ‘At night the sky is nearly dark, depending on how far under the horizon the sun has set.'

A man flapping off with two grand pianos as wings, he didn't seem to have much problem with. He made me repeat the story over and over, and had a good belly-laugh at the prank we'd pulled on our landlord by leaving that piano-playing mythical creature behind.)

The formalities surrounding the purchase of the house were completed. We could be summoned to the solicitor's at any moment. At least once a day I would take tram 2 down Leidsestraat to Zuid. In Café Bar-B-Q, at the corner of the Banstraat and the Johannes Verhulst, across from the new house, I'd sit at the window gazing across at the yellow-brick façade. It was the left half of a twin house. Our front exterior had recently been sandblasted, while that of the right-hand house looked as though it had never been cleaned, and had collected all the soot and dirt of the past century. A lung specialist had his practice in the grimy right half of the yellow twins. The owner of the Bar-B-Q told me that the doctor's standard reply to comments by his patients on the filthy state of his façade, was: ‘That is simply to illustrate the point of your visit, to show you what your lungs look like after forty years of smoking.'

There wasn't much more to see of our house. Faded curtains hung in the windows, the sills lined with withered plants, a silent anti-squat brigade. I just sat there and looked, repeating to myself that we were about to start a new life. Tonio, who had just turned four, would grow up there, leave home after graduating high school, and years later, once it had become truly ours, would return with his own family while Miriam and I would downsize. For the next decade-and-a-half we would be secure there, the three of us. I turned to the bartender and asked if there was much burglary in the neighbourhood.

‘Only if they know there's something to be had,' he replied. ‘People with art or a stamp collection.'