Tonio (30 page)

‘So,' he said, once he'd sat down.

On the way there, my thoughts were with my interrupted work schedule. Today, Friday 28 May, was supposed to be ‘Day 5'. It was more than just an indicator — something akin to a particular day's own name. It was more like saying
Tonight, One Twentieth In The Can
. If the first five days of the schedule had yielded twenty-five new pages, the minimum, I wouldn't have been dissatisfied, but perhaps just a bit disappointed.

Sometimes a numbered date got, later on, a nickname as well if it had distinguished itself in one way or another. (The Crash. The Acquittal. The Dirty Blank Line.) The first five days of this schedule would never get a nickname, nor the notation of the number of pages each day yielded, just as the days that followed would not.

6

Much more than older Amsterdam-Zuid, the Olympic Stadium neighbourhood and Buitenveldert seemed to consist of light patches meant to reflect the bountiful sunlight. Turning onto the street where the cemetery was located, I looked over my shoulder to my father-in-law and said: ‘Don't worry, Natan, I'll stick with you.'

He nodded in gratitude. Miriam pulled into the car park. Some of the mourners were already standing against the pink brick wall next to the gate. We got out and approached them, slowing our pace to accommodate Natan. Whether it was the pill, I couldn't rightly say, but even now there were no overwhelming emotions churning around inside me. We had a painful job to do. Just get through it. We hadn't ordered a big convocation. It did not have to last long.
Afterwards
I would think about what this all meant.

The woman from the funeral home came over to us. We went through the details of the sober ceremony. I would say a few words, then invite my brother to deliver his speech. I excused myself: ‘Just have to greet a few people.'

All at once, I stood face to face with my tearful mother-in-law. She was being supported by two nurses from St. Vitus.

‘That sweet Tonio,' she sobbed, ‘he'd never hurt a fly. Why? … Why?'

I kissed her. ‘We'll talk later.'

I spoke briefly with my brother and his wife. With my sister, who wore a wig because of the chemo and radiation. Tonio's two best friends, Jim and Jonas. Jim's younger brother and parents joined him; Jonas had brought his mother. Friends: Josie and Arie, Dick and Nelleke. I told Ronald I'd seen him walk down the Banstraat toward the tram stop. ‘As though you were struggling against the driving sunlight,' I said, but he didn't get my drift, and I felt like a fool.

A light-grey hearse drove, almost noiselessly, up to the gate. Six young men, all dressed in light-grey tailcoats and light-grey top hats, slid the red-brown casket containing Tonio's body out of the hearse and placed it on their shoulders. In perfect unison, they went into motion. I slipped my hand under Natan's arm and led him slowly behind the pallbearers. They were all equally slim, and their youth was undoubtedly meant to tally with the age of the deceased entrusted to them.

I wondered if it had been wise to take that pill. Hardly gave it a second thought when I'd placed it under my tongue to marinate. It would, I figured, take the edge off the situation. What I now experienced was not so much indifference, but rather an emptiness — in myself, and in the coffin. Two congruent voids.

Natan's shuffling must have made us fall behind: suddenly we were overtaken by Miriam, Hinde, and their mother, still supported by the two sturdy nurses. Other members of the group passed us on both sides.

The sun shone over the well-kept cemetery. The modest procession snaked between the meticulously trimmed hedges. My brain, chilled from the medication, had room for thoughts like:
A graveyard like a labyrinth, and make just enough about-turns with the casket in the dead-end passages until, in the heart of the maze, one hits upon the open pit and the evil spirits have been sidetracked
. I wondered how the ghastly pain of the past few days could have quitted me now, of all moments, when the object of my loss was being borne ahead of me, about to vanish into the earth forever.

7

I saw two rabbits sitting on the path. It touched me, how they sat there motionlessly, watching the approaching cortège, and then darted into the hedge. Buitenveldert Cemetery was famous for its rabbits, which nibbled on the plants and flowers on the graves. None of the deceased's relatives protested — it was all part of the package.

I tried to imagine (perhaps to recapture some semblance of feeling) how I would have pointed out that pair of bunnies to a seven-year-old Tonio, and how he would have said ‘awww … cute', but instead I saw him in the child's seat on the handlebars of my bike, age one, his finger pointing at the rolls of hay against the sloping French meadow, and squealing: ‘owww … owww!'

It wasn't far to the grave. The immaculately grey young men placed the coffin on the electric lift above the grave, nodded in respect, and marched, light as feathers, off behind the hedges. They appeared to be executing a thoroughly planned choreography that would have done quite good service as a ballet — only the six dancers would have been wearing grey tights under their tailcoats instead of trousers.

Once everyone had assembled in a semi-circle around the grave, I took a step forward, right up to the coffin. I did not manage to stand upright on both legs. My restless left foot found its way to a wooden beam (an old railroad tie, maybe?) that bordered the edge of the pit.

‘I'll say a few brief words,' I began, ‘and then I'll turn it over to my brother Frans.'

The woman from the funeral home and the cemetery caretaker stood at a polite distance, in the opening between two hedges, keeping a discreet eye on the proceedings.

‘Dear friends … Tonio had many talents, but that did not include a talent for arguing. Differences of opinion, yes, disagreements aplenty, but I never once, in his entire youth, succeeded in getting into an all-out row with him. Worrying. Okay, once. A real quarrel. Well, almost. After two abandoned studies, it didn't look like there was much direction to his life. I summoned Tonio to our house, and took him to task for his lack of ambition. But even then you couldn't call it a proper row. Tonio forestalled escalation by insisting he was veritably
exploding
with ambition, and he'd prove it. For starters, he would get a part-time job while laying the groundwork for a definitive course of study, so he wouldn't have to rely entirely on his parents for financial support. He was so convincing about it, and so damn charming, too, that once again I didn't manage to turn a little squabble into a full-fledged father-son clash.'

On the coffin lay the Biedermeier flower arrangement out of the funeral home's brochure. Every time my eye fell upon it, I felt as though I was addressing Tonio directly, and I did not want that. My gaze drifted up to the blue sky. My foot fidgeted and shifted incessantly over the beam.

‘Tonio kept his promise. He got a job, and last September started in earnest on a Media & Culture major. Last Wednesday he dropped by our place. He gave us a preview of the future he had planned out for himself. After his bachelor's degree, he planned to get a master's in Media Technology, which meant commuting regularly between Amsterdam, The Hague, and Leiden. He had his act together.'

8

He dropped out of the Amsterdam Photo Academy after a year. The Royal Academy in The Hague was his goal. Part of the admission process was to create a photo series with the theme ‘club life' in any chosen context, and to approach it as originally as possible.

The summer of 2007, and with it the admissions deadline for the coming academic year, approached. I had gone to Château St Gerlach to be able to work in peace, but of course Tonio managed to find me. That assignment from the academy … he wasn't really getting anywhere with it, he told me over the phone from Amsterdam.

‘I'm not really the club type,' he said.

‘Well, then let that show through in your project,' I said. ‘It's not like they're making you go play klabberjass every Tuesday night.'

‘Play
what?
'

I told him the story of my father, his Grandpa Piet, who wasn't the club type either, but all the more a pub type, which in turn my mother objected to. In order to get at least a weekly dispensation to go the pub, he joined a klabberjass club. One evening he won, quite by accident, a tin of butter cookies donated by the local baker: one of those large square tins with a net weight of five or six kilos. To celebrate his victory, he drank himself totally and shamelessly blotto, and then had to make his way home with that tin of biscuits. Being the first one up the next morning, I found the tin, battered and beaten, on the kitchen table. It was half empty, and what was still left inside had been pretty much reduced to crumbs. When my mother sent me off the baker to fetch bread before school, I espied, at irregular intervals, small heaps of crumbs along the sidewalk: the exact spots Grandpa Piet had fallen flat, booty in hand. The café where he had celebrated his triumph was right near the bakery where I had to buy the bread.

‘If I had to do a photo essay about a club, Tonio, I'd make it about a klabberjass club. You start with the card game in the pub. There, on a separate table, is the trophy: the tin of butter cookies, say. The winner in his finest hour … and then, on his way home with his trophy under his arm, you photograph his demise, heap by little heap. The winnings, crumbled step by step.'

Poor Tonio, my advice was of little use to him. ‘The fifties, Adri … I can't show up in The Hague with an historical documentary.'

Then he grudgingly mentioned an earlier, rejected idea. ‘Grandpa Natan, doesn't he go out to eat four times a week at a Jewish community centre? It's always the same people … a sort of dinner club?'

We worked this idea out over the phone. In the end, Tonio produced a wonderful, intimate, and melancholy-steeped series of photos focusing on the regular diners in the Beth Shalom canteen. His grandfather was the pivotal figure in the series. He photographed him at home, as he waited for the shuttle bus, and then as he left Beth Shalom when Miriam came to pick him up.

It wasn't really an appropriate subject for an eighteen-year-old budding photographer who was out to mercilessly document the new face of the world. But, oh, what an intimate
Weltschmertz
he captured in those photos. And with such tenderness and compassion … The festive pennants emblazoned with the Star of David, strung across the ceiling like festoons (they hung there year-round). The red plastic water jugs on the tables (the magical red reflection on the tabletop). The solitary woman, a napkin tucked behind her heavy necklace. Grandpa Natan, head uncovered and in his shirtsleeves, at a table full of men in sport jackets and yarmulkes …

Tonio kept in touch with me between sessions. He asked if I thought it would be disrespectful to photograph a spastic man whose food had the tendency to fly every which way. I happened to have volume 6, odds and ends of the author's own choosing, of Gerard Reve's
Collected Works
with me. I read Tonio an excerpt, by way of inspiration, from the story ‘Three Words.'

It is 1940. The still-quite-young author is with fellow writer Jan de Hartog in a soup kitchen on the Spuistraat.

‘Here it comes, Tonio. Do with it what you will.'

Two women dressed in white, uniformish smocks, who apparently ruled the roost here, were busy installing an old, decrepit man at one of the tables, dragging and lifting him into his place. When he was more or less seated, one of the women knotted an enormous, grey-and-blue checked, ragged standard-issue towel around his neck. The other woman brought a small zinc washtub and placed it on the table in front of him. Was he going to be washed and shaved? No: the first woman deposited a dish of food in the tub, and the man, growling softly, began to eat. Much of what he brought to his mouth with the spoon — for a fork would have been utterly futile — fell back into the dish, or next to it, but always within the confines of the tub, from which the man could simply fish it out again.

We were still standing at the door. Jan de Hartog observed the tableau motionlessly, whereby a strange, sculpted serenity came over his face, and his eyes took on a visionary expression, as though he were witnessing more than just this particular scene, and discerning in eternity something imperceptible that had unexpectedly become visible.

‘That is God,' he mumbled.

Tonio thought the excerpt was ‘pretty amusing', but doubted whether he could put it to use in his photo essay. ‘Me and Dutch literature,' he said. ‘We don't click. And whether that spastic man at Beth Shalom is God … I dunno … that's for other people to decide.'

9

I told of the student-parent mix-up two weeks before his death. The unexpected intimacy in a café on the Staalstraat. How naturally he took the lead in the conversation, and in what good form he was. How, in saying goodbye, having nearly got into the taxi, I went back to slip Tonio some extra pocket money. How I, emotional from the evening, hugged him, gave him three kisses, and how he grinned back sheepishly. And how, later, in the taxi, I realised I'd forgotten to give him the cash.

‘In retrospect, we can say — but it remains in retrospect — that that awkward accolade was in fact a farewell … now no longer possible. It was good. Bye, sweet boy.'