Tonio (32 page)

‘Adri, it's not
that
big a deal, but
why
a Catholic cemetery?' As always when she, tendentiously or not, raised an issue that was vexing her, she first rubbed her nose vigorously with thumb and index finger. ‘I don't understand.'

I knew I'd best avoid bringing up my own Catholic background, because I'd renounced it (in her presence, too) more often and more thoroughly than a dribble of holy water, a First Communion, and the grand total of, yes, one (1) confession required. Tonio had a Jewish mother and, through her, two Jewish grandparents, so, yes, a Jewish funeral might have been plausible. The Catholics not only worshipped a false Redeemer, but they also blamed the Jews for nailing that Redeemer to the cross.
Not that big a deal
.

Back at the cemetery, where she yelled to Tonio that she'd be joining him soon, I felt briefly sorry for her. Now she was spoiling it all, by sticking her manually polished nose into it. I had no desire whatsoever to explain to her — again — that our choice of Buitenveldert Cemetery had nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with the happenstance that it was a small, out-of-the-way graveyard, where we could be sure no paparazzi would be perched in the trees.

‘Wies,' I said, laughing, but I meant it, ‘it's been ages since I've heard you stick up for Judaism.'

I could say what I wanted, but
listen
: that was something she seldom, if ever, did. She rubbed her nose again for the next confrontational question. Her chaperones stood with their sandwiches in the dining room, which was bathed in full sunlight. Everyone else had found a spot in the front room. They ate, drank, and talked.

‘What worries me is …' said my mother-in-law, her voice breaking, ‘what about your writing?' Followed by, less as a question than as an observation: ‘How
are
you going to keep on working … !'

God, no, not today, don't let this happen on the day I buried my son: that the woman who, all those years ago, openly doubted my ability to put food on the table, and with every minor success wailed pathetically: ‘As long as he can keep it up', that she was now going to go into convulsions about the progress of my literary labours. One of the nurses came to my rescue with a reminder that it was time to be getting back to St. Vitus. The two chaperones still had work to do there.

‘Wies, maybe you should start saying goodbye to people,' said the woman, who had introduced herself earlier as Brigitte.

‘Well!' she huffed, reaching for her nose but not polishing it as usual, ‘I'm
cer
tainly not saying goodbye to Natan. What do you people take me for?'

Her face took a crude expression unsuited to the occasion.

‘Brigitte meant in a more general way,' I said. ‘You can just skip Natan.'

So there you had it: two people who had lost their family, in part (Wies) or entirely (Natan) in the war, and then, at the funeral of their only grandson, bitterly refused to even shake the other's hand. I was sorely in need of a drink. On the way to the kitchen, I thanked Brigitte and Margreet for their support. I made a mental note to send them each flowers at a later date.

I hung around in the kitchen until I could be sure the St. Vitus delegation had left. Back in the living room, I checked to see that the remaining guests had been seen to. Dick, who I never saw drink (but did see, on occasion, sniff nostalgically at a hip-flask of whisky, as a remembrance of alcoholic days of yore), had allowed Miriam to set him in front of a full bottle of vermouth. I expressed my surprise.

‘I won't get through this sad day otherwise,' Dick said. ‘The only problem is …
if
I drink, I always drink the vilest, nastiest possible … sweet vermouth … which has a built-in limit. But Miriam gave me a whole bottle of Noilly Prat. And, unfortunately, I really like it.'

16

Always a wondrous experience, the animated conversation and drinking during a post-funeral reception. I tried to participate, but as relaxed, almost indifferent, as I was at the funeral, I was now uptight. Perhaps the pill was wearing off. I tried to combat the stiffness with ice-cold vodkas, but my speech remained under lock and key.

Tonio's best friends, Jim and Jonas, chatted, both drinking beer. There was nothing that afternoon which could evoke Tonio's presence more vividly than those two faces. When they were about fifteen or sixteen, we took them to Lanzarote for the Christmas holiday. A girl of about their age, Tania, also went along — I'd not only never met her before, but never even heard of her. It was unclear who she was ‘with' — all three equally, was my impression after the first few days.

Tania was not about to let herself be intimidated by the boy-dominance. As soon as we arrived, they attacked the bedrooms: mattresses were pulled from beds and dragged to the largest room. They were going to sleep together, the four of them — no ifs, ands, or buts.

What followed was a week of delirious fun, during which Miriam and I seemed to have become completely invisible to them. As soon as we appeared, their expressions, in all their exuberance, went all glassy, and we simply dissolved. At the seaside restaurant where we ate dinner, they had their own table, which danced around the place so furiously as a result of their animated discussions that the restaurant staff had to ask them to get up, so it could be brought, pizzas and all, back to its original spot. We did exist, if only for a moment, when it came time to pay the bill, insofar as they were able to point us out as the folks with the cash.

It was almost a privilege to witness, close up, four young people who enjoyed one another's company so intensely, Tania no less than her three roommates. On New Year's Eve, Tonio asked if they could drink vodka and Coke to usher in the new year. I said they'd better not dare put away even a millimetre more than half of the bottle.

‘You're minors. Miriam and I are responsible.'

‘Yoo-hoo, guys,' Tonio cried, ‘we can have half.'

When I want to fetch some mineral water from the fridge later that evening, Jonas was filling the empty vodka bottle with water.

‘Jonas, did you really think I wouldn't notice?'

The kid gazed stupidly back. He was completely blotto. The next morning, I saw
another
empty bottle the four of them had snuck in, bobbing in the swimming pool among the clumps of grass they'd beaten into it with a golf club.

I was never able to ascertain the position and role of Tania in this constellation. When they said goodbye back at Schiphol, where she was met by her mother, Tania gave each of her companions an equally sisterly hug. Only Tonio made a fleeting, tender gesture (running the back of his hand along her jawline, or maybe he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear), and looked at her intently, without suspending his smile. That was all. After that, we never heard another word from or about Tania. Months, perhaps a year later, I raised the question with Tonio.

‘Hey, that Tania … from Lanzarote last Christmas … have you seen her at all?'

‘No,' he replied, in a tone that said:
Why should I?

‘And Jim … and Jonas … do they have any contact with her?'

‘Nope.'

‘Did something happen on Lanzarote … that might have made her angry?'

‘No, how come?'

‘No reason. Just wondering.'

17

I'm never keen to recognise omens. Maybe that's why I only really see them when the damage is already done and they've lost their prophesying function. Omens that no longer contain a forewarning lose their dangerous sheen: they dry up.

I once kept a list of calamities I came across in novels that later, exactly, or nearly so, befell the author. Omens that the writer himself set to paper, cloaked in fiction. If I were to take heed of all the dire portents in my own novels, I would soon have to stop writing altogether.

Since Black Whitsun, the foretokens predating that day keep rearing their head. The air around me swirls with them. Wherever they hid (a nasty habit of omens) prior to 23 May, they have been resounding — now that it's too late to be alarmed — for weeks on end. They visit me in my sleep, and do not give me a moment's peace. They're like annoying insects, and they seem to multiply relentlessly, keeping pace with my increasingly guilty conscience.

At the time, I did not even notice the majority of these omens. Those that were too obviously a warning disguised as a symbol, I cast to the wind. Others, I manufactured myself, choosing not to regard them as forebodings.

I had written a number of ‘requiems': two for childhood friends, for my father, for my mother, for a colleague, even (the shortest of them all) for a cat who'd been bitten to death. It never occurred to me that one day I'd have to write a requiem for my own son. Now it's as though the first five were premonitory studies for what, as a matter of survival, I am now forced to execute.

Weerborstels
, about the cousin who had smashed into a tree while on the run from the cops, was in fact a requiem, too. It was a novella about a problematic father-son relationship, which ended fatally for the son. My creative thinking did not, apparently, allow me to imagine that Tonio, another vulnerable-boy-in-the-making, could meet the same fate as my cousin; otherwise, I'd have certainly abandoned the project.

At the end of his speech, my brother quoted the last line of
Weerborstels
: ‘He is not dead.' Later that day, Frans reminded me that I had dedicated the novella to Tonio. ‘I remember noticing it,' he said, ‘because in those days you always dedicated your books to Miriam
and
Tonio.'

I checked it at once. ‘
For my son, Tonio.
' He was right.

‘It's so plainly the story of a father and his son,' I said. ‘I guess I wanted to make that clear in the dedication.'

It was disgusting. I had related a draft version of
Weerborstels
, then still entitled
Met gedoofde lichten
, in a long letter to my brother in the summer of 1989, when Miriam, Tonio, and I were staying at the schoolhouse in Marsalès. Tonio's first birthday was just behind us. The main character Robby was based on my cousin Willy, who the previous year had met his end (in more or less the same fashion: ‘met gedoofde lichten' — with his lights off). At the beginning of the novella, I had given the young Robby similar traits to the six-year-old Robin van Persie, who occasionally joined his sisters in our schoolhouse yard. A kind of bashful brazenness … timid audacity.

I had been given a couple of boxes with extra copies of
Weerborstels
, the annual Book Week freebie. Tonio later sold them at the Vondelpark market on Queen's Day. I insisted he not ask for more than a guilder per copy. At his request, I autographed the books. He would proudly show his customers that he was the dedicatee. ‘For my son, Tonio.' He was prepared to add his own signature, for a price.

When he showed me his takings at the end of the day — nearly three hundred guilders! — I asked him how many copies he'd sold. Well, he still had some left over, for next year. This morning, he'd started out at two-and-a-half guilders apiece, but when he saw that they sold like hotcakes he upped it to five guilders, and later yet to seven-fifty. ‘Nobody seemed to mind.'

‘But I do. Damn it, Tonio, I said it had to be for the fun of it. I could die of embarrassment.'

‘Adri, come on, a guilder … you're selling yourself short.'

‘Selling your winnings short, you mean.'

18

Dick had polished off his bottle of Noilly Prat, and now sat nursing a foul glass of very ordinary vermouth with evident distaste, compensating the sickly-sweetness with the occasional sniff on his hip flask of whisky (not too long, though, because then too much would evaporate, and it had to go a long way).

As the delivery time of the afternoon newspapers neared, I paced with increasing anxiety over to the landing, peering down the stairs to check whether they were already lying on the mat under the letter slot. What did I expect to find? The truth, in the form of an obituary? Did a
suspicion
need to be confirmed on the ‘family announcements' page of the evening paper?

‘What with all that modern communication stuff,' I said, back in the living room, ‘all those mobile phones … email addresses … the internet, God knows what else … Facebook, Hyves, you name it. Twitter … you'd think
somebody
should be able to trace that girl.'

‘She mentioned Facebook on Tonio's voicemail,' Miriam said. ‘They must have chatted with each other there.'

‘You've got Polaroids of her,' Jonas said. ‘Why don't we put one of them on Facebook, circulate them among Tonio's friends … Maybe she'll turn up that way.'

‘Except that Tonio pulled a fast one on us,' I said. ‘He took those snapshots with him, maybe threw them away, because they were just test shots.'

Jim offered to look through Tonio's room for the prints. Meanwhile, Jonas would try to track down the girl via a Facebook message: ‘Seeking the roughly 20-year-old girl, name unknown, who Tonio van der Heijden photographed on Thursday, 20 May.'