Tonio (25 page)

The puny golden rain, too, had reached maturity in the course of nearly two decades, and spread its broad crown out over the little garden. In good weather we spent many fine hours out there, sheltered by the high adjacent walls as the evenings cooled off. Gardener friends, though, started to raise their concern about the density of the growth.

‘D'you have any idea how much weight is hanging on those shoots?' a friend asked. ‘If that all comes crashing down, it could take the whole exterior wall with it. Then you'll be staring straight at your neighbour reading the paper in his armchair.'

That would be the good man Max Nord, who, if all was well, lived behind that side wall, and I did not want that on my conscience. Earlier this year, I resolved to have the ivy trimmed in early summer — and then suddenly it was Black Whitsun, which put paid to that promise. The thick, green wall-hanging and the golden rain, as it passed its prime, were from then on the decor for our daily sessions of despair. Here, on the wooden love seat under the compact arbour, Tonio had sat, three days before his death, with the girl from the photo session. Everything around it had to remain intact as much and for as long as possible.

But since we also had to consider the neighbours, who were now living in fear of their wall, we arranged with our regular handymen to resume maintenance the following February.

2

Last night, when I went to bed just before midnight, it hadn't happened yet. As was my habit, I stepped out onto the bedroom balcony to take in a few lungfuls of air, which otherwise were now permanently deprived of fresh oxygen. I decided to ask Miriam if she'd drive me to far-off woods and beaches this fall, so I could stroll without having to share my story with passing acquaintances.

The ivy leaves glinted in the light of the moon, which would only set after 1.00 a.m. If anything had been amiss then, I would have noticed it. The night was clear and tranquil, insofar as a city can be tranquil at that hour. I could never hear another ambulance or police siren without imagining they were headed for the Stadhouderskade.

This morning, 15 September, it was as though autumn was suddenly upon us. Even before I opened the bedroom curtains, I could hear the rain and the wind. It had something enduringly familiar about it, that bare, blank wall across from my window. It brought me back to the early nineties, when the ivy was still only a thin covering on the lowest few metres of the wall.

I slid my feet into a pair of slippers, opened the balcony doors, and stepped outside. Our little back garden was a disaster area. The thick ivy had, perhaps in a hard gust of wind, pulled itself loose from the wall, and like a huge, heavy curtain it buckled as it sank. Thanks to the restricted space between the wall and our veranda, the wall covering had rolled itself up neatly during its free fall, and now lay like a gigantic coconut mat ready to be beaten by a carpet beater the size of a telephone pole. The green Goblin tapestry, which we had always looked upon with such pleasure, had now shown us its back: a gnarled pattern of climbing stems and aerial roots, beautiful and mysteriously intricate as the underside of a Persian rug.

The avalanche of leaves had simply pushed aside the still-slender oak, with its supple trunk, but the golden rain appeared to have been devoured, crown and all, by the huge roll of ivy, like a body rolled up in a hearth rug. At closer inspection I could see the very top of the tree sticking out above the ivy mat, far from the place where I assumed its roots to be. The golden rain, which had grown and matured side by side with Tonio over the last eighteen years, and which he had seen in full bloom just before his death, was no more.

So the blind wall was back. Off to the left hung a ragged, dense lock of ivy that half-covered the bathroom window. And down below, nearly at the paving stones, there was a bit of growth left, like a kind of fig leaf for the wall.

It was eight in the morning. The ivy must have come loose between midnight and a quarter of an hour ago. How could I not have heard the snapping branches, the noise of the avalanche?

Miriam had left for the fitness centre at half past six. If she had noticed the devastation she would certainly have woken me up. I rang her mobile, and left a message on her voicemail: that she mustn't be alarmed when she got home and opened the living-room curtains. Alarmed and well, she phoned right back.

‘The cats …' Her agitated voice. ‘Have you checked to see that they're inside?' From the unmistakable sound of grating pedals I could hear she was on her bike. ‘For all we know they're buried under the ivy … squashed.'

Tygo, more than Tasha, had a tendency to climb up the golden rain in search of prey, a sort of play-hunting, quacking as cats do at an unreachable nest.

‘Hang on,' I said. Now I was uneasy, too, and went down the stairs, phone in hand, to the pantry, calling the cats' names all the way. They were curled up as usual in their basket. ‘Safe and sound. Both of them inside.'

‘Oh, thank God.' Miriam wept with relief. ‘I was sure we'd lost them. Nothing would surprise me now. I got right on my bike.'

We would never know if the cats were out back when the whole thing came tumbling down, and had managed to reach the safety of the cat flap in the nick of time.

Miriam and Tonio had gone to Lanzarote for New Year's 2002–2003. I stayed at home, because of course something required urgent completion. Miriam had admonished me to bring the cats inside on New Year's Eve before the fireworks started, and lock the cat-flap so that Cypri would not panic and run into the garden, where the noise of the explosions ricocheted even more against the walls.

It was one of those flaps with a variety of settings, and I misjudged the procedure: the cat could get out but not back in again. When I returned early that morning she was nowhere to be found indoors. I rang Miriam in Lanzarote, who was already having breakfast with Tonio at the hotel. In her forgiving voice, she piloted me along all of Cypri's possible hiding places. The cat was fifteen-and-a-half, and had diabetes. I wondered out loud if she hadn't crept under the half-rotting wooden fence to die. Her voice choked, Miriam kept urging me on from the other side of the world, with Tonio occasionally chirping in his encouragement.

‘Just keep calling her name.'

Had we ever told Tonio the role Cypri had played in the run-up to his conception? Maybe not, but he had always regarded her as his personal pet, from the moment that he, still a baby, lunged at the cat, who was curled up next to him on the sofa, in order to pet her. He lost his balance and fell on top of her, and paid dearly for it: a blood-drawing swipe, complete with a throaty hiss. Neither of them took umbrage; it was as though the incident served as mutual hazing, because from then on they were inseparable.

‘Cypri … Cypri …'

Finally an answer, thin and plaintive. The cat had got her head stuck between two bars of the basement grating. Finding her flap locked, she had tried to get into the house this way, ignorant of her diabetic swollenness. I still had the mobile phone on, so Lanzarote could follow every step of my rescue mission. Only once it was successfully completed did I get read the riot act for my irresponsibility and negligence. Tonio also joined in mocking my stupidity, giggling with relief.

‘So Adri, got any New Year's resolutions for 2003?'

3

The sad part about having dogs and cats is that they only last, on average, a decade-and-a-half. Those who cannot live without a house pet are confronted with this fact four or five times in their life. Pets are far more loyal than people. We don't lose them to unfaithfulness, but rather to their life expectancy.

If I look at the lives of my contemporaries, it seems as though their existence more or less corresponds in relationships or marriages to the number of house pets. A human love affair has, on average, about the same longevity as your typical dog or cat — except that now, the relationship with the pet ends with its death, and the end of a marriage with the death of love.

Cypri died a year-and-a-half later, just shy of seventeen, as a result of her illness. I was working in Houthem-St. Gerlach, Limburg that spring, so that this time I was the one to follow, by mobile phone, an event taking place in our backyard: Cypri's burial.

Shortly before that (it was May 2004), Tonio had phoned me excitedly with the news that ‘finally, something actually happened in boring old Amsterdam Zuid'. On the way home from school, he noticed on the Apollolaan a small crowd gathered near red-and-white police cordons, behind which men from the forensic team could be seen combing the area.

‘A liquidation! They've bumped off Willem Endstra. You know, the underworld banker. Just like that, in front of my school!'

And then he informed me, less wound-up, of the death of his cat. They had taken Cypri to the vet, where she'd been put to sleep. Before they took her body back home, Miriam and Tonio went in search of a suitable coffin. At De Gouden Ton, Miriam asked for two bottles of Bordeaux, ‘in a box, it's a present.' Since she could not keep the real aim of the packaging a secret, the salesman took the two bottles back out and gave her the box, complete with wood shavings, for nothing. ‘You can always come back for a good Bordeaux sometime, ma'am.'

Cypri had leaked profusely during her last days, so the vet advised them to line the wine box with a plastic garbage bag.

‘We're going to bury Cypri next to Runner,' Tonio said. Runner, his Russian dwarf hamster, for whom he, years earlier, had composed the brief ‘Requiem for Runner' together with his guitar teacher.

So I witnessed the funeral by telephone from South Limburg. Miriam and Tonio took turns relaying the proceedings.

Tonio: ‘She'd been letting everything go the last few days … and now she's lying on the garbage bag, and now it's all dry.'

They slid the wooden lid onto the box, which, said Miriam, fitted the cat to a T. I listened to the hushed discussion between mother and son. ‘D'you think the hole's deep enough? So the crows can't get at her?'

4

The two Norwegian forest cats, Tygo and Tasha, were Tonio's only heirs … and that was it. They were his choice, as tiny kittens. Tygo and his sister Tasha …

After Cypri died, Miriam was against getting another cat for the time being, but once Tonio had seen pictures of Norwegian forest cats online there was no stopping him. He scoured the internet until finding a cattery in Veghel, North Brabant, that specialised in this particular breed. In the summer of 2005, a year after Cypri's death, he put on his sweetest, most seductive face and managed to convince his mother to drive him to Veghel, where according to the website a litter had just been born. With their second visit, shortly thereafter, a silver-grey cat and a rust-coloured tomcat, brother and sister, caught his eye as they rolled and tussled with each other. Tonio's choice was already made, but they had to stay with their mother awhile longer. He kept in contact with the cattery via internet, monitoring the growth, week by week, of his little Norwegians.

The day he could fetch them approached. Now he only had to con his old man out of 425 euros per cat, and the adoption would be complete.

So on a Sunday in November, Tonio, with an ironic kind of pride, carried a cardboard box full of fluffy joy in from the car. Tygo and Tasha (they'd been named weeks earlier) stretched out on the kitchen table after the journey, only to curl up in a bread basket, where they fitted perfectly. Tonio photographed them from above. They lay there harmoniously, head to tail, melted like a yin and yang sign into the contour of the basket. It is framed and hangs on the wall, alongside a recent portrait of Tonio that Miriam has turned, for the time being, to face the wall.

5

Before Miriam hung up to continue biking home, she exhorted me to lock the cat flap. I left it open. The ivy had rolled itself neatly up as it slumped to the ground, so there was no danger of it slipping any further. Nor was the golden rain a hazard anymore.

Back in June, I had caught Miriam up on the library ladder at six in the morning. She had propped it up against the tree in order to rescue Tygo, who was too scared to climb down, from a fork in the branches. A proper library ladder has a hinged mounting bracket which grasps the upper bookshelves perfectly for no-tip climbing. That bracket was now draped loosely over the rounded branch, and the ladder wiggled with it, ready to fling Miriam, her outstretched arm just about to grab the cat, to the ground. Alarmed by her cooing and calling, I got out of bed and went to the balcony, from where I looked down on her rescue efforts. I didn't dare yell to her to come down this instant, for fear she'd get a fright and crash off anyway.

The ladder made a nearly 180-degree twist, but Miriam managed to scoop the hefty tomcat off the branch and bring the two of them to safety.

‘Minchen,
never
do that again, will you? That's not what a library ladder's for. I really can't handle any more accidents. Let the damn cat sit up there for a couple of days and then call the fire brigade. You let your cat mania go too far sometimes.'

This incident proved once again that such a thing as a domestic quarrel was no longer possible. A petulant remark, the slightest raising of the voice, a sharp look — it all felt like a snub to Tonio.

6

I went back upstairs and out onto the bedroom balcony. On the roll of ivy, and among the undulating pleats of the remaining tapestry, skittered a dozen or more jays. I'm not an avid birdwatcher, but I do recognise a jay when I see one: his beige plumage, his black-and-white tail, the edge of his wings speckled like a Palestinian
kaffiya
. A few more sat on the fence between us and our neighbour Kluun.