Tonio (46 page)

Even now that he's gone, and certainly not from tickle-death, I'm still not able to scream. Inside, yes, with all the stops pulled out. Shame replays Tonio's chat with the taxi driver in my head, over and over. He was so sweet: he was satisfied with an animated description of imaginary roughhousing that wasn't to be. That way he could still enjoy it, if only in words.

6

For six weeks now, we have been living with a strangling loss. It is no idle metaphor. We have experienced, every single day, how a nagging absence can literally wrap its tentacles around your neck in a stranglehold. The scream stays stuck in your throat. Loss is a strangler who grants his victim no more protest than a hint of a gargle.

Miriam says I screamed yesterday evening, about Tonio. That would be the first time since Whit Sunday. When it comes to expressing emotions, I've often been called an internaliser — which sounds like I'm squirreling away my feelings. I'm more inclined to believe that internalising one's emotions hollows a person out. It eats away at you.

‘The grief seems to trickle away somewhere inside,' I've said a few times to a weeping Miriam. ‘Kind of like internal bleeding.'

I scream enough in a day, don't worry. Inner shouts of pain, which just appear out of nowhere. I have no say in the matter, but at the same time I see to it that they don't escape, that they don't pass over my lips. My insides scream.

Sometimes the inner lamentation speaks through the voices of my parents. A childhood friend, who was also the son of my mother's best friend, wrote me that his mother had said: ‘Thank goodness Toos was spared seeing this.'

At once this is translated into the gut-wrenching cry of disbelief that Tonio's grandmother Toos — my mother — would have emitted (at least, before Parkinson's had taken away her ability to speak) upon hearing the dreadful news. Since receiving that letter, my mother's cry cuts sharply, sickeningly, through me. Nobody around me notices.

The way my father, reacting to Tonio's death, raises his voice within me. It's like barking, almost the beginnings of a muffled laugh of despair that ends in a coughing fit peppered with grating sobs. Oh, how happy I was to see him able to bestow on his grandson the love he wasn't able to give me. The undertone of my father's scream of dismay has something belligerent about it: this has to be undone, and be quick about it.

So yesterday evening, if I'm to believe Miriam, I let out a loud scream. I don't recall it directly. We — I, mostly — had drunk rather a lot. Could be that Miriam dared me to let it all out for once, to open my heart at full volume. My memory retains only an abstract after-image: a short-lived black vortex, perhaps of disgust, which the ever-stretching, bright-yellow tongue of a voice tries to pierce.

I only remember Miriam's faraway words — at least, when I ask her about it later.

‘Go on, honey … it's okay. It can't hurt.'

7

‘How?' Miriam asks.

‘By going after it,' I say. ‘Not sitting around at home waiting for someone to come tell us something. Take the bull by the horns. I want to talk to the police … have a look in their dossier … the hospital report. I want to see Tonio's bike. The place where it happened … maybe the yellow stripes haven't completely faded yet. I don't know if you know the feeling. You've got a bad tooth, it's a bit loose. With the least touch, like from your tongue, an awful pain shoots through your jaw. Sooner or later, you get the urge to provoke the pain. You bite down really hard … and you're rewarded. Well, that's how I'm going to tackle my pain. Provoke it … draw it closer.'

‘And what about my pills … d'you think I should quit taking them?'

‘The pain will manage to find you, no matter what. The question is: can you handle it? Do
you
want to get to the bottom of it?'

‘Whatever you do, I'm with you.'

‘Okay, then we're not going to sit here having a pity party behind closed curtains. We'll get on with our own reconstruction. You know, play
CSI
. Now we know where Tonio spent his last hours … where he came from and where the car hit him. Surely the rest can be filled in. I'll make an appointment with the Accident Investigation Unit on the James Wattstraat. If you can manage to get your hands on those photos of Jenny … then we can question her, too.'

‘I'll give Klaas another ring,' Miriam said. ‘Those SD cards, those film rolls … they can't just have vanished from the face of the earth.'

Coping with grief — we scrapped the term from our dictionary. Every form of ‘coping', even considering it, removed us yet further from Tonio, and was thus taboo. We left the nerves exposed, and in doing so urged on the pain that bound us to him. That, too, was a form of grieving, but not one that allowed itself to be smoothed out — rather, one that was constantly renewed and exacerbated.

8

‘If you're going to be at the Nepveustraat anyway,' I said to Miriam, ‘be on the lookout for Tonio's wristwatch.'

She was going to De Baarsjes with Klaas the photographer to try to find the film rolls and storage cards with Jenny's photos. We didn't hold out much hope, because Jim and Dennis had both said that when they cleaned up his desk a week after his death they didn't find anything answering to that description. There was still the outside chance that they'd find something on Tonio's computer.

Miriam returned home morose. No sign of Jenny's pictures. Even the polaroids Tonio had showed me after the session were nowhere to be seen. They had gotten precious little cooperation from Tonio's ‘best mate', Jim.

‘Those polaroids,' I said. ‘Maybe he had them with him. Then they should be with the rest of his things at the James Wattstraat. We have to make an appointment with those guys, not just for information, but to collect Tonio's belongings.'

‘I hope the watch is there,' Miriam said, despondent. ‘I couldn't find it at his old flat.'

‘And their cat? How was it?'

‘I didn't even touch it. It crept away, skittish. Imagine her fur crackling with static electricity … those might have been Tonio's sparks. From the last time he petted her.'

9

He took up photography when he was fifteen — not snapshots, but striking situations and glimpses that struck no one else, combined with a natural talent for composition. I noticed that he had developed a taste for expensive photographic equipment. The lens with which he believed he could delve into the depths of the visible world's mysteries was always the costliest.

In high school, he went on a school trip to Greece to study the ruins of the old civilisation. Tonio smelled his chance to photograph the
other
Greece. The sloppy modern one. They flew from Schiphol, but had to change planes in Brussels. Tonio, far too compliant with authority, had followed too literally the airline's advice to only pack one's absolute necessities as carry-on baggage. His expensive camera got sent in the checked luggage.

Zaventem, the main Brussels airport, was in those days notorious for its corrupt baggage-handlers. Somewhere in the transfer of his bags to the flight to Greece, Tonio's photographic equipment was stolen.

I remember how upset I was when, after a bus trip to Luxembourg, where I was to go camping with a group of friends, my new set of miniature pots and pans (a gift from Grandma) had vanished. My homesickness fitted precisely in the void left by the missing camping gear. I was twelve. In my bag I found only the plastic tub of soap for treating the outside of the pans so that the aluminium didn't go black over the campfire. The adventure was spoilt.

Tonio reported the theft by phone. He held up well. We heard later from the chaperones that he participated fully in all the planned activities. They didn't notice a thing, but I knew better. He carried the humiliating loss of his equipment with him the whole time. Everything he'd have taken a picture of was reduced to the square made by two thumbs and two index fingers.

When, in these days of despondency, I feel myself tied up in knots, I picture the fifteen-year-old Tonio in Greece, around his neck the stone where his proud camera should have hung. Just as a loud alarm bell can have an effect on someone's full bladder, the thought of the stolen camera affected my mood. Tears, at last — two of them, but enough for now.

10

‘All those details … I don't know if I can take it,' Miriam had said a few days earlier.

‘All right, I'll go on my own,' I replied. But now that the day had arrived, I wondered whether
I
could handle it all on my own. I suggested she go with me anyway, and leave the room as soon as it got too much. ‘Then at least there's someone waiting for me out in the hallway.'

An officer from the Traffic Infrastructure Control Service, Serious Traffic Accidents Unit, had offered to go to a police station in our own neighbourhood with a colleague, so as to lessen our burden. So the appointment was made for three o'clock at the Koninginneweg bureau.

‘Let's take the car,' I said.

‘What?' Miriam exclaimed. ‘It's practically around the corner.'

‘Minchen, I can't face the thought that people might stop me on the street to offer their condolences.'

Fortunately, the car was parked right out in front, so that we were only steps away from safety. Miriam went back inside to fetch Tonio's mobile phone, which he'd had on him at the time of the accident and which had been handed to us, sealed in plastic, at the
AMC
. The officer from the Serious Traffic Accidents Unit said he wanted to check whether the victim had been using the phone on his bicycle at the time of the fatal accident. Miriam replaced the phone in the transparent bag and handed it to me.

‘That plastic,' I remarked. ‘Do you want them to think we haven't handled the phone? It's obvious the bag's been opened.'

She shrugged her shoulders and started the car. We had gone through that mobile a good twenty times. Incoming calls, with and without caller ID. The text messages. The voicemail messages, like a few from a timid-sounding girl (who turned out to be the Jenny we were looking for), her voice going higher and thinner with each message, the last one beseeching him to get in contact with her, either by phone or on Facebook. She didn't leave a phone number, and there was no ‘Jenny' under any of Tonio's saved contacts. She hadn't sent any texts. We had made a note of everything, and phoned all the numbers we didn't already know. The identity associated with that girl's voice remained untraceable along those channels.

She was right — it was just around the corner. We parked at the end of the Van Breestraat. On the corner of the Emmastraat is our regular pet store, which provides us with sacks of dry food for the Norwegian forest cats. Although the sky was uniformly grey, the shopkeeper sat with friends on a bench outside his shop, smoking and drinking. He greeted us, amiably and with curiosity, but luckily didn't strike up a conversation. I shoved Miriam across the street, between the parked police cars, toward the late-nineteenth-century former coach house, now a police bureau. This is where they had interviewed the driver of the car, still unknown to us, who had hit a cyclist, then unknown to him, on the morning of Whit Sunday.

The small reception area was shabby and dated, with one of those drop ceilings; one of the pressed-fibre tiles was hanging askew, behind which, judging from the bundle of wires, the electricity had been repaired. Even now I couldn't help letting my eyes wander, in aid of the scenes set in the police bureau in my new novel. In the corner, an officer stood at the coffee dispenser, cursing quietly, and balancing several dripping paper coffee cups in his hands.

The receptionist knew of our visit. The agents from the accidents unit were in another part of the building, and he would personally let them know we were here. ‘One moment.'

From Miriam's pallidness, I could guess how pale I probably looked myself. I had been here twice before. The first time had been in 1995, when I had left my bag in the train on the way back from Berlin, and was directed by the railway police to my local bureau to fill in a report. (Eventually the bag was delivered, without any police intervention, to my home address by a young Romanian man who had been in the same train, and was here in Amsterdam for a summer course in economics. He had taken the bag under his wing ‘to do something in return for the hospitality he encountered here every summer'. I invited him in, and fixed him up with food and drink.)

The second time I came here was the result of an official appeal to do so. A friendly officer informed me that there had been a complaint lodged against me, for assaulting a café patron. I couldn't recall any recent incident in that genre. According to the policeman, the incident had taken place at Café Welling, and the victim was a Canadian tourist. He gave me a few descriptive details of the man. When he got to a height of 2.2m — almost 6'8”! — well, that rang a bell. After opening night at the Uitmarkt 2000, a phony poet managed to rile me no end. As far as I could see, I only had two choices: give him a wallop, or leave the café. I opted for the latter.

I wasn't even out the door when I heard an excited voice next to me: ‘Sir, sir, do you have a moment … are you a writer, sir?'