Tonio (68 page)

20

On the way back to the exit, we rambled a bit through the cemetery, in search of the grave of the musician Hub Mathijsen. He had been a violinist in the salon-music ‘Resistentie Orkest'* and often played the violinophone, which had a metal resonator much like a gramophone horn, rather than a wooden sound box. Its melancholy sound would have been quite apt now, here.

[* A play on the name ‘Residentie Orkest', the resident symphony orchestra of The Hague. Prior to founding the Resistentie Orkest, Mathijsen was 2nd concertmaster of the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra and was active in the Amsterdam ‘provo' movement of the 1960s.]

If you wander around this small cemetery long enough, you'll eventually pass every grave. Hub, I had forgotten, was buried next to his brother Joost, the pianist he had performed with all those years. His widow had told me Hub was deaf in one ear: she had him lovingly laid to rest with his good ear facing his brother.

21

The family came back to our place for refreshments. If Mariska held Daniel on her lap, then she, Frans, and Natan would fit perfectly on the back seat of our car. The buggy could fold up and go in the boot.

Halfway home, the car began to fill up with the smell of rot — no, not a dirty diaper or dogshit-packed shoe treads. Rot.

When we got out, Miriam held the earthenware pot in her hand that, filled with moss, slime, and the strands of sodden tobacco from the waterlogged cigarettes, had stood for weeks next to Tonio's grave. It must have all started decomposing, together with the half-unrolled film spool that someone apparently wanted to give Tonio on his way to eternity.

‘That rotten-egg smell,' she said. ‘Here's the culprit.'

She put the stinking pot on the curb, but, remembering that we were forbidden to throw away anything having to do with Tonio, picked it up and put it back on the floor mat of the car. ‘So let it rot.' I wanted her all to myself at that moment, if only for that expression of hopeless embarrassment.

The party had already gone upstairs when Miriam came out of the library. ‘I've just been out back. The veranda's beautiful at the moment. The sun's going to come out.'

A little while later, we were all sitting under the spent golden rain, which let loose a flutter of brown shreds at the least bit of breeze. Frans pointed to the huge growth of ivy, which, a good metre thick, was still covering the entire side wall of the houses on the Banstraat. ‘I don't want to get on your case,' he said, ‘but you really should think about trimming that thing. Otherwise …'

‘Not now,' I said.

We ate and drank. As quiet as everyone was at the grave, they were now boisterously chatting. Except Natan. Seeing him sit for a while with his hands covering his eyes, Hinde asked if he was all right.

‘I'm thinking,' he said, in his customary, somewhat singsong tone. Soon after that, he had Miriam drive him home.

I talked mostly to my brother, who was sitting next to me. He couldn't remember a thing of the telephone conversation we had had the night before, after the football finals. His explanation was that the unexpected loss had made him twice as drunk as he really was.

Daniel swung like a monkey from chair to chair, never taking a moment's rest. His blonde hair made me think of Tonio at that age, although there was a difference in energy level. O, horror … this little boy was in all things Tonio's successor and surrogate. I hoped I could continue to love him as I now did, divorced from all thoughts of my own son.

The sky had gradually gone pitch-black again. I suggested moving the gathering indoors, to the living room, and started rolling up the awnings.

The upstairs television was on: it was nearly six o'clock. The news showed footage of the effect of thunderstorms in the east of the country — uprooted trees and collapsed party tents (there were festivals all over the place). The rest of the news was dominated by The Grief At The Defeat: a dejected Museumplein, which I had seen with my own eyes the previous night, and the arrival of the Boeing with the Dutch team, escorted by a pair of F-16s.

‘A dubious honour,' Frans said. ‘This is how they usually escort a hijacked aircraft. The enemy of the people brought to the ground. Get down, you. Lie, dog.'

22

‘So. The stone's there,' I said after the visitors left. ‘Firmly anchored in the earth.
His
patch of ground.'

‘And, most importantly,' Miriam said, ‘his second name is on it. Or, what's it called … his
middle
name. Oh, my poor sweet father … he was really broken up.'

How do tears of compassion differ from tears of grief? They both leak out of the same ducts. It must be the facial expression that goes with it. It's been a long time since I've seen her simply moved to tears, rather than destroyed by grief.

‘Well, let's see,' I said, counting on my fingers. ‘We've found the bike, his watch, the photos … Jenny has been traced, and now she's got her portfolio … the stone's in place, his name is complete … Now all we need to do is visit the site of the accident.'

‘Do we have to?'

‘Yes, we have to. We owe it to Tonio. At that spot, he had his last thoughts of us. Of you and me. The word “dumb!” probably flashed through his mind, and that says it all. Also that he did something dumb to
us
. That's how it must have gone. “Dumb!” To himself, to us. There, at that intersection, before he lost consciousness.'

‘All right, I reckon we can handle anything now. When?'

Today, nearly two months after Whit Sunday, it has finally got through to me that Tonio is dead. Until now they were just suspicions, followed by denials. Signs posing as the truth. Disbelief still held sway.

Everything is different now.

23

Acquaintances of ours, a couple, had repeatedly offered us a jaunt on their motor punt as a diversion, but until now we had not taken them up on it. On the morning of the team's homecoming, the woman rang us. They were planning to take their boat out that afternoon, to meet the Dutch team's boats out on the IJ harbour and, if possible, tag along through the Amsterdam canals toward Museumplein. Would we … on account of the historic aspect of the event … be interested …?

Miriam promised to confer with me and ring them back. We had already decided to keep half an eye on the TV broadcast of the whole travesty, not to spare the screen our ridicule and to wash down the taste of national duplicity afterwards with a glass of strong stuff. I suddenly saw the chance to break through the cast-iron bands that grief had forged around our house, and finally brave the city and visit the place where our boy had had his fatal accident.

Under cover of a dubious festivity. Incognito among the sham-jubilant crowds. No one would pay us any notice. Just what the doctor ordered.

‘Tell them we'll go.'

Miriam arranged with the friends that we would drive to their place later that morning. They lived on
KNSM
-eiland, a residential development in the IJ, near where their boat was moored. We could watch the team's reception with the Queen on television, where we'd see for ourselves when the players left The Hague for the Amsterdam canal procession.

I rang a neighbour who I knew wouldn't miss a minute of the broadcast, and asked if he would record the whole charade for us — Noordeinde Palace, IJ, Herengracht, Museumplein, the lot. He was so surprised at my sudden patriotism that he promised to run off a disc for me.

24

It's the unguarded moments that have a monopoly on our true feelings. The brain is still under the spell of semi-sleep, or a daydream, or a bout of fatigue. At such moments of doziness or inattention, it appears that I still, or more than ever, consider the possibility that Tonio will return to our midst. The unguarded moment gives a glimpse at a more primitive layer of the soul, where the hope is fed that we will get our son back one day. We need that latent expectation, apparently, in order to survive the loss.

Wide awake, we appear, albeit with self-destructive revulsion, to accept the hard facts confirming the irrevocability of Tonio's fate, and in doing so we embrace, apparently, our own fate. But deep in our heart we still preserve the animalistic disbelief that he has vanished from our lives forever.

This requiem, too, if it is a requiem, has its own unguarded moments. The reconstruction of Tonio's last days and hours loses its predetermined futility, and is transformed into a search for the lost and forsaken boy himself.

‘He's not dead; he's woken up from the dream that was life.'

What we are reconstructing is nothing other than the closing moments of this dream — from which Tonio, according to the poet, has now escaped. It is the escaped Tonio we are searching for. This requiem serves no other purpose than to track him down and retrieve him.

Before we got in the car, I browsed through
de Volkskrant
, which, like yesterday's paper, was all about Dutch football. Patriarch Cruijff had nothing good to say about his great-grandsons' playing. Disgraceful, is what it was. In Uganda, a bloodbath took place in a bar where godless fans were watching the finals. The severed head of the suicide bomber still rolled around amid the dozens of dismembered bodies — which was at least a change of pace from the Dutch misery of a badly behaved soccer ball on the screen.

Anyway, our boys, who did first have to reach the finals in order to lose, would be soon cheered rather than jeered. It was the will of the people. Triumph had already nestled itself in everyone's consciousness nationwide: it was the spark that illuminated every empty-head from within, like the candle in the hollowed-out beetroot on Shrove Tuesday.

At eleven o'clock, Miriam came to get me. ‘I'm not even sure we'll get through the crowds with the car. They're streaming in from far and wide, I heard, and not all by train.'

She was wearing a new summer dress, brightly coloured and with an African print. Its length and width nicely camouflaged her waistline, enlarged by our evening pain-relief. Unlike with me, drink did not at all leave its mark on her sweet face. The fingerprint of grief in her features: that was another story.

25

The football squad and their bigwigs were still inside Noordeinde Palace having tea with the Queen. Screaming hordes of supporters rattled at the gold-spiked gates. A
NOS
helicopter filmed the players' bus waiting for them behind the palace. But first the terrace scene. The palace doors (whose narrowness always makes them look uptight) opened, and the losers spilled out onto the stairs, positioning themselves around their queen. Self-conscious shuffling.

‘The cabinet formation is complete,' our host said, to kick off the mood. ‘One less worry.'

‘The Queen's the only one smiling,' the hostess said.

‘Can't say I blame her,' her husband replied. ‘She's just been treated to the sight of the family colour being supported by twenty-three pairs of muscular, hairy legs.'

The players and their coaches were wan and sickly by comparison. Indeed, not one of them could muster a smile. Maybe they were all hung over. Their loss had been celebrated until the wee hours in Huis ter Duin, Noordwijk, where they were fêted by our other national losers, De Toppers.*

[* The three-man pop music group that represented the Netherlands in the 2009 Eurovision Song Festival. They competed in the second semi-finals, but failed to reach the final round.]

Eventually, here and there, a cagey grin passed over a player's face. So this is how they faced each other: the Queen with her disgraced football cabinet on one side of the gilded gates, the triumphantly howling herd of cattle on the other.

Then they turned and followed the Queen back inside. Later, we were shown a bird's-eye view of the players and their entourage stepping into two helicopters on the Waalsdorpervlakte, on the outskirts of The Hague — for a half-hour flight to Amsterdam. Our host switched off the TV and suggested we walk to the mooring.

26

On the IJ we joined a slapdash flotilla of smaller and larger boats, from motor punts to speedboats to seaworthy yachts. The water police, ever vigilant, kept all of us at a safe distance from the players' and VIP boats. We needed our captain's binoculars to make out the Museum Boat moored at the marine base, festooned as it was with orange-red flowers and guarded by a fleet of motorised police super-pedal boats.

We kept our eyes peeled for the arrival of the team's helicopters, but seeing as it had been at least an hour since they left the Waalsdorpervlakte, the guys must have already long arrived at the marine base.

Miriam and I would watch it all again that night on TV. The players had changed clothes, trading their blazers for training gear — blue with orange trim, to distinguish them from the monochrome uniforms of their supporters. They marched, in a barely orderly single file, across the dock to board the Museum Boat, fidgeting and jostling like schoolboys on a class outing.

‘Well, well, look who we have there,' our host said, passing me his binoculars. ‘Our brand-new mayor himself.'

With difficulty, I could make out the newly appointed burgomaster, Van der Laan, who, sporting his official mayoral collar, somewhat worriedly greeted the entourage. Later, in the rerun, we would get the details. All those overtrained football machines went straight for the beer, provided by sponsor Heineken in green slurp-bottles, regular glasses, and goblets the size of the World Cup itself. This was their way of bracing themselves for the shameful ticker-tape parade.