Tonio (66 page)

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.