Tonio (26 page)

I had read about it in the paper. Tens of thousands of Eurasian jays emigrated from Eastern Europe, where they had thrived, and settled in the Ardennes, only to spread their wings further to the Netherlands in search of acorns. The onslaught has only just begun: in the coming weeks, they expect a hundred thousand at least. Those few in our tumbledown backyard were perhaps just the reconnaissance team. I saw them yesterday for the first time. They skipped about, as though surprised and disoriented, over the ivy's aerial roots, possibly wondering what had happened to the previous night's lodgings. Jays have the reputation of being quite muddled, and are thus apt to forget where they have hidden their stash of beechnuts. This was the impression they gave me now: surely they're here somewhere … there you go, we've covered them too meticulously again …

Tygo and Tasha emerged from their cat flap, and with their Norwegian gusto put paid to that Eurasian fumbling and fussing. The birds took flight over the backyards, and the cats in turn gazed confusedly into their newly formed wilderness. With cautious pawsteps, Tygo mounted the oversized roll, while Tasha sniffed around the splintered trunk of the golden rain.

‘See, Tasha?' I said quietly, ‘You no longer need that tree to get to the birds.' At once she turned her silver-white head in my direction and opened her jaw a few times in a soundless meow. Then she joined her brother on top of the hillock of ivy.

‘For God's sake, let's not get wound up over the ivy, too.' Miriam's voice behind me in the bedroom, panting from the stairs. Female heels clattering over the parquet. She stopped next to me and looked down into the abyss. ‘Yeah, I know … it's a huge mess, but there's nothing to be done. Worse things have happened.'

‘That's just it, Minchen … we sat for nearly four months on those few square metres grieving over those worse things.'

I pointed to the wrought-iron skeleton of the small arched alcove, which had been bent completely out of shape by the force of the falling ivy. The white loveseat was half buried.

‘Tonio sat there with his model. Three days before he died. He photographed her there … If we hadn't had that spot to cry our eyes out we'd never have survived the summer.'

The cats now sat side by side, looking up at us with their white chests puffed out.

‘Then that's the how it was meant to be,' Miriam said. ‘Summer's passed …'

‘Um-hm. The season is finished. Night after night the same show, and now the sets are being dismantled, rolled up, taken away. For the continuation of the heartache, ladies and gentlemen, we offer you the living room.'

Miriam persisted in not caving in at the sight of what did, after all, amount to the destruction of her backyard, but in the end we both hung over the balcony railing in tears. That golden rain … when we moved in back in July '92, Tonio was four, the slightest puff of breeze blew pale flakes off the little tree, but we didn't realise these were withered blossoms. The following May, the golden rain brought forth small yellow cobs, no bigger than baby corn.

‘I'll have them plant a new golden rain if you want,' I said. ‘But what matters to me is that Tonio grew up with
this
one, and that he got to see it in bloom just before he died. That mess down there makes me feel like from now on,
everything
of ours is going to get dragged down … everything we thought we'd achieved, built up … everything that still bonds us with Tonio.'

‘Don't think like that.'

‘I can't help it. Murphy's law, with its never-ending chain of discomforts, has something comical to it. I have the sensation that for the past few months we've been living under a law that's only brought a never-ending chain of
disasters
. The one seems to bring about the next, without a logical connection. And the end is nowhere in sight.'

The cats now lay on their side atop the roll of ivy, paws intertwined — play-fighting, but only half-heartedly, giving one another the occasional random lick.

‘So now you understand,' Miriam said, ‘why I freaked out this morning about Tygo and Tasha.'

CHAPTER ONE

The White Elephant

there is shopping to be done before darkness

asks the way, black candles for the basement

— Gerrit Kouwenaar, ‘there are still'

1

Whit Monday. In a daze, I ascended the stairs to my workroom: the seventeen treads that only yesterday morning separated me from my novel, and which the ringing of the doorbell rendered untakeable. On what I referred to as my sorting table lay the unfinished manuscript, and next to it a new work schedule. Today was to be the first day. Just look, there it was, in black and white: ‘Monday 24 May 2010/Day 1'. I looked around the workroom with something approaching curiosity. The maps spread out on the long table. The desks with three identical electric IBMs. The folders containing newspaper clippings about the murder.

Here is where it should have happened today.

Were it not for …

I went to the back balcony and opened the doors. Whit Monday promised to be just as fine a pre-summer day as the day before. The unperturbed hard blue sky. Early yesterday morning, Tonio might have seen, at most, a hint of colour fade into the sky. This was all the summer he would see this year, this life.

Once again I was taken aback by the awning above the balcony doors, which I had found retracted last Thursday after the photo shoot, knowing for sure I had left it open. I could no longer question Tonio about it. The girl on the Polaroid snaps, maybe she could clear it up. Where was she now? The capable young photographer who had immortalised her on film had, after this tour de force, set off permanently for a different place.

The loose slats from what used to be Tonio's bunk bed were still lying on the wooden floor of the balcony, against the railing. René, the handyman, had stacked them here, maybe two years ago now, presumably planning to bring them back down to the basement. He had used them to strut the scaffolding when the gutters on the street side had to be replaced. Before the scaffolding was taken down, René had carried the narrow planks over the roof to the back of the house and via the fire ladder down to my balcony. Perhaps I was working and he didn't want to disturb me. When he left them there, they were still bright yellow and shiny with varnish. Over the past two years, the elements had turned the wood a greenish-grey, matching the colours of the balcony itself.

Suddenly, out of those faded, mossy slats rose the image of the intact bunk bed Tonio was allowed to pick out when we moved into this house. He was so proud of it, especially because it meant the prospect of sleepovers with friends. One evening, when the eight-year-old Tonio had his steady girlfriend Merel over for the night, I went to check on them a couple of times. Merel was on the bottom bunk, Tonio on the top. Across the room, on an improvised bed, slept Merel's elder sister Iris, who was always present as supervisor of all daytime games and activities.

The second time I peeked in, I found two little heads lying on the top-bunk pillow. An hour later, the equilibrium had been restored, with Merel back on the bottom bunk.

‘It's fine with me if you and Merel want to sleep together,' I said the next morning, ‘but why'd you kick her out again so soon?'

Tonio, indignant: ‘Yeah, well Merel lay there farting the whole time. It was gross.'

‘Oh kid, those marital inconveniences … you may as well get used to them.'

I leant over the balcony railing and looked down into the garden. The domed canopy of the golden rain nearly covered the entire courtyard. Unlike a few days ago, the blossom panicles shone bright yellow through the green of the leaves. To the left, against the terracotta-stuccoed wall, was the two-seat bench under a small alcove (not much more than a wrought-iron arched frame). Here, too, judging from the test snapshots, Tonio had photographed the unknown girl. They were to go to an ‘Italian blockbuster night' together in Paradiso on Saturday. According to the police, no one was with him at the time of the accident. Had he said goodnight to her just before, back at Paradiso? Was she even aware of his fate?

We didn't have her name. Perhaps we could find a number or a message from her on Tonio's mobile phone, which was still sealed in plastic. We still did not dare listen to it.

Wandering aimlessly through the house, I kept coming across, in the strangest places, those snow-white sheets of styrofoam that Tonio had used as reflector screens. It still bothered me that he brought them up from the basement without bothering to put them back. Being irritated with him, for as long as it lasted, kept him temporarily alive.

The tripod was still in his old room — without a camera, but rather with an umbrella-shaped reflector screwed onto it. Tonio was undoubtedly planning to clear everything up the next time he came around. First things first: the photos had to be developed and printed. Everything pointed to his determination to be of service, down to the smallest details, to the nameless girl.

One of the thicker white sheets was lined with parallel lengths of black tape, giving it the effect of a striped awning. I turned a desk lamp toward it in an attempt to recreate the lighting effect Tonio might have had in mind, but I couldn't quite work it out.

2

Tonio's birth on 15 June 1988 brought with it certain consequences. I was bound to protect, to warm, to clothe, to feed, and to educate the boy until at least adulthood. As far as my love for him went, my commitment would extend until long after adulthood — until my own death, and then some.

He did not survive me. The world has been thrown out of balance, but I am still accountable for the consequences of my ‘baby fever' back in 1987. Now that things have taken this awful turn, I cannot in retrospect renounce the choice, make him, for example, Death's ‘poor relation'. To regret my decision of July 1987 would be an act of cowardice, and would sully his memory. Unthinkable.

Even in his deceased state, I am bound to accept him — and care for him — unconditionally. I
knew
that the child I had set my sights on would be mortal, no matter how able-bodied he came into the world. Back then I accepted, albeit with a knot in my stomach, that mortality as a calculated risk. I had even prepared myself to accept, however slim the chance, the risk of his
premature
death.

So grit your teeth, chattering if need be. Bow your head, but then raise it again. By bringing Tonio into the world, an untimely death was one of the unwelcome risks I saddled him with. I had gambled with his life, and lost.

Miriam is still undiminished
H&NE
, the only woman I ever wanted a child with. Now that her son is dead, I must care undiminished for her, just as for him.

3

Or was there a viler implication behind the disaster that had befallen us? Even though it was thirty years ago that, before Miriam became
H&NE
, I doubted how suitable I was for fatherhood (or, better put, how suitable fatherhood was for me) — it could be that I was now being punished for my initial presumptuousness, and was forced to return to the original plan: write and
do not
start a family.

Yes, perhaps that was the message … that any man who dared a half-hearted attempt at fatherhood might be robbed of it at any moment.

4

In aeroplanes I always paid close attention to the rumble and hum of the engines. A steady sound meant everything would be fine. And as far as turbulence went … a
little
bounce was a good sign: in this way the aeroplane was buying off my composure.

Today I was not sitting in a Boeing, but was still trying to follow all its noises, vibrations, and movements by proxy. As long as I just thought of Frans and Mariska and their one-year-old son Daniel on their flight from Spain to Amsterdam, it had a calming effect. They would no longer see Tonio alive, but they felt the full impact of this loss. Being a father himself made Frans a more full-fledged brother. But then again, now that I myself no longer had a son to contribute …

5

Life is all about economy. Supply and demand. Work and pay. Give and take. Barter. Market forces.

A sharp line separates the world of economy from the realm of fate. There is no point in standing on the economic side of the line, shouting: ‘Tonio is dead! What did I do to deserve this? I invested so much in him … from a warm nest to corn flakes!'

Each side of the line is governed by entirely different laws. Today, on Whit Monday, it is all about economy. What happened on the other side of the line, in fate's wasteland, is for now of no consequence, except that a dead body has been transported from that side to this one. The body must be washed, retouched, clothed, boxed, carried, and buried. There is a price list, complete with colour photos.

The funeral home sent an elegantly dressed woman, in no way your gloomy female mortician. She appeared to be touched by a grief we did not even exhibit openly. We sat down with her in the library, the French windows open, awning unfurled. No, not a cremation — a burial.

‘I need a place where I can go occasionally,' said Miriam. ‘Cremation is so absolute.'