Tonio (29 page)

‘He's really not going to ring,' I said, when her fussing over the mobile started to get on my nerves.

‘It's that girl,' Miriam said. ‘I've got the feeling she's still in the dark. Nobody in Tonio's circle of friends knew her.'

‘Maybe we should have run the obituary right away then.'

‘No, oh no.'

When Miriam went off to shower, she left the mobile lying on the bed, and although she had turned up the volume she still missed the call. In any case, she was too late, because the voicemail had already been activated. It was a call from an unidentified number, given on the display as: ‘no caller ID'. I found Miriam sitting on the edge of the bed, listening anxiously to the voicemail message.

‘She didn't leave her name.' Miriam handed me the phone. ‘But it's got to be her. Listen.'

‘
… tried Facebook, but your page is quiet. I was wondering how the photos turned out. If they're no good, I'm sorrier for you than for me. You're the one who did all the work. It was a nice afternoon anyway. Okay, hope to hear from you soon. Bye.
'

I thought I heard a trace of a British or an American accent. I handed Tonio's mobile back. ‘The voice matches her Polaroid, anyway,' I said.

2

This kind of loss, it just happens to you. The longing follows of its own accord, just like the heartache.

But the loss does not necessarily make you feeble, nor does it present you with a measure of grief that simply has to be accepted without you being allowed to give it some kind of form. As absurd as it was in the given situation, there were always choices to be made. Should we give in to the pain, or resist it? We incessantly asked each other these kind of questions.

‘Would Tonio have wanted his demise to destroy us?' (Me to Miriam.)

‘We can't ask him anymore.'

‘Say we did ask him when he was alive … just to be on the safe side.'

‘Knowing him …' said Miriam, ‘no, I don't think he'd want to see us go under. He'd have preferred that by staying alive ourselves, we kept his memory alive.'

‘But how about
us
… what do
we
want? To sink into ruination because of his downfall? Make no mistake, there's something comforting in that. Now that he's gone, we can just let ourselves go to pot. Him kaput, us kaput. Maybe we owe it to him.'

‘If I really put myself in his shoes, Adri … no, he wouldn't have wanted it. We have to go on. Because of him. For him.'

‘Let's first give him a proper burial. Then we'll see … or not.'

3

If we were to map out Tonio's last hours and days in detail, we were certain to bump into that girl from the photo shoot sooner or later. Even without a phone number or address, not even a name, there'd have to be a sign of her somewhere. She did exist, after all.

But … did we really want to? If we did track her down, we might discover a budding romance — which could have led to something more.

‘The funeral is Friday,' Miriam said on Wednesday, ‘and we still haven't contacted that photo girl. I wish she'd ring again.'

‘Let's just let it run its course,' I said. ‘If there was something between them, then she's bound to make herself known again.'

‘I'm so afraid she still doesn't know what happened. She could be sitting there waiting for Tonio to call … or for a reply from him on Facebook … she just won't get it.'

‘We've tried calling all the available numbers,' I said. ‘None of his friends know her. At most, they vaguely know about a photo shoot. No one can come up with a date. Not even a name. Y'know, Tonio and photo sessions … he did so many of them. No, we're just going to have to wait this one out.'

While I thought: we should make a beeline to the Netherlands Forensic Institute, to have that call — ‘no caller ID' — investigated.

And then there was that excruciating doubt. Did
I
have to go looking for her? What was the point of reconstructing Tonio's final days? He had irretrievably vanished from the existence that offered itself for reconstruction.

No, I could better devote my time to the memorial letters. I had laid the photos I was planning to enclose (Tonio as Oscar Wilde) in a small stack, face down, on my writing table. This way I could slide a photo into the envelope without looking him in the eye, for each and every letter compounded the betrayal I was carrying out.

Despite this precautionary measure, Tonio was inevitably present in my workroom, in varying and ever-changing life phases. ‘Adri, if I pass the photos to you, it'll go faster.' ‘You keep writing the same thing, but with different names … why's that?' ‘Adri, it would be so much more efficient if you had a computer with an address spreadsheet. One click of the mouse and a string of self-adhesive stickers rolls out of the printer. You really are from the Dark Ages, aren't you?'

They were fine, early summer days, all of which blindingly reflected Whit Sunday. I sat at the desk closest to the open balcony doors, shaded from the sun by the awning.

Occasionally, Miriam came in to cry at my side. No, we didn't need to know yet more suffocating details: she was grief-stricken enough already, why add insult to injury. We would bury him on Friday morning, and the obituaries would appear in the evening papers that afternoon. After a day like that, our job was to deal with our grief, together, in the safe haven of our house.

4

The day of his funeral was as divine a summery day as the day he died.

‘Today I must bury my son.' I formulated that sentence over and over in my head while performing a series of everyday actions: brushing teeth, showering, shaving.

I tried out a number of variations: ‘Today I am going to bury my son.' As many as necessary, until I had the ideal choice of words in my head. This was ‘terra cognita': many a morning it went like this, before I ascended the stairs to my work room, to write down the first words of a new chapter.

‘Today, I bury my son.'

It was, for now, still just an observation, hardly more than that. No sickening emotions went with it. I was calm even
before
taking the pill Miriam offered that was supposed to calm me down. My hands did not shake for even a moment while shaving.

While getting dressed, I silently rehearsed the brief speech I had planned to hold at the grave. All week I had almost obsessively hurled the facts concerning the accident as I knew them onto paper, plus what I recalled from Tonio's last two visits to our home. I wanted to record everything that might come in handy in reconstructing — I still did not know why — the finale of his life. But I could not bring myself to compose a eulogy. My brother would give a longer speech, which put my mind at ease. I'd been engaged in restless, anxious conversation with Tonio all week, and it had exhausted me.

Since our premature return from Lugano last May, I had hardly been out of the house. I'd spent all those months at home, rarely dressed in anything but grotty jogging pants and a baggy lumberjack shirt. All right, I'd bought a dark velvet sport jacket for the premiere of
Het leven uit een dag
, which since that event was still on the very same hanger on the very same closet door, the tie that went with it draped over the hook.

Tonio was at the premiere, too, dressed in style. He had invited Marianne, an elegant girl he knew from the Amsterdam Photo Academy, a little older than he. They never (much to my regret) really had an affair, but Tonio always invited her to more official events like the Book Ball, if we were able to get our hands on an extra pair of tickets.

That evening at the film premiere in The Hague, I noticed how much more mature and self-assured he had become. The tux jacket looked great on him. He was outgoing, jovial, witty. After the film, he and Marianne joined the musicians of the pop group Novastar, which had provided some of the film score. They had a bang-up time. Later they rode with us in the taxi-van that took the whole bunch of us back to Amsterdam for the afterparty at De Kring.

Now that I was to bury him, it had to be in that last jacket he saw his father wear, corresponding necktie and all.

While my brother and I stood at the bar, burning through the generously allotted drink vouchers, Tonio and Marianne sat in their own corner, drinking and chatting. It appeared to be a lively conversation. The film crew took over the dance floor, and the director came by every so often to dole out a new round of vouchers.

Marianne, I knew, lived with her parents in Noordwijk, and would be sleeping over at a girlfriend's place in Amsterdam. The night wore on. As closing time approached it was decided that she would sleep on Tonio's sofa. They would take the night bus to his neighbourhood, or else walk, it wasn't really clear.

When they came to say goodnight, I suddenly felt sorry for Tonio. When he was tipsy he would always sway a bit on the balls of his feet, almost unnoticeably, back and forth. He was looking pallid, the corners of his mouth were turned up in a slightly stupid grin. As supple as he had been all night, he was now rigid and wooden, his shoulders hunched. Marianne was just as casually cheerful as she'd been all afternoon and evening, accommodating to Tonio. How he resembled me. My eloquence all too often also had to come out of a glass. When I was Tonio's age, I recognised myself in the words of Boudewijn de Groot's ‘Testament': ‘out pubbing / I drank too much, hoping to wow her / and got the drubbing I deserved'.

I slipped him some cash so they could take a taxi. And, with that, he vanished out of my life again for weeks.

5

The burial was scheduled for ten o'clock. Laughable mundanity: at quarter past nine I leant with my elbows on the balcony railing on the second floor, clipping my fingernails. Through the opening between the houses, I caught a glimpse of our friend Ronald Sales as he walked down the street. Back in 2001, he had made a portrait of Tonio, then thirteen, for my fiftieth birthday. We hung it in the dining room, which we called the
Salon de Sales
. The memory of the mischievous smile on Tonio's face on 15 October when he brought me the framed and wrapped portrait was enough to make me jump from the balcony here and now. Only the psyche-numbing pill kept me from doing it.

Ronald walked bent slightly forward, so it looked like he was fighting his way against the dusty early-morning sunlight, as though into a hard gust of wind. Of course he was one of the few invitees, and was making his way to the line 16 tram stop on De Lairessestraat. There was something so easy-going about the scene that I might well have called his name, waved, and shouted: ‘See you at the cemetery!'

I took my time cutting my overgrown nails, which had been a nuisance all week at the electric typewriter. In my haste to set my notes about Tonio on paper, my two index fingers so often missed their mark that the cuticles had become raw. The image of Tonio's inert hand on the edge of his deathbed pierced my consciousness for the umpteenth time this week. The grimy fingers. The nails: not too long, but with crescents of dirt under them. No, I am not going to equate his hand with the dark-edged envelope of a death announcement — must put that behind me now.

And yes, plenty of associations. I knew that a dead person's fingernails and toenails kept on growing, just as one's hair did. The coffin of the poet Jacques Perk, who had died prematurely, was opened in front of his father before being reburied. The man turned away in anguish: ‘That beard … that beard!'

Some time after the liberation of Eindhoven, my father came upon the body, deep in the Sonse Bergen woods, of a parachutist dangling from a treetop. The first thing that struck him were his non-regulation fingernails — no paratrooper would ever get his chute open with those.

All week, every time the doorbell rang I saw those two young police officers before me.
A critical condition
. But when it rang now, just before nine-thirty, I didn't flinch: I knew it was Hinde, who would ride with us to the cemetery. Even that demonic bell was tamed by my inner calm, forced into submission by Miriam's evil little pill.

First via the Lomanstraat to pick up my father-in-law. The double row of trees darkens the street, all year round. Natan had already turned off the living-room lamp he usually left on. He appeared out of the shadows at the front window. From what I could see of his upper body above the half-curtains, it was clear he had shrunk even more. Ninety-seven. He waved to say he was ready. Hinde got out to go fetch her father.

This was the house where Tonio spent countless weekends in the days when Miriam and I went out a lot. Never a peep of discontent. The Wednesday before Whitsun he had dropped in on his grandfather, as he often did, at irregular intervals. Bit of a chat, and the extra pocket money (accepted under protest) was of course welcome. He never let on how he felt about his grandparents' divorce, back in '93.

Natan pulled the front door closed, and paused to check the doorknob. He let his elder daughter lead him across the street, shuffling, looking at the ground. Once they reached the car, he looked up, and, upon seeing Miriam and me, a smile came over his pale, sad face, but his wet eyes did not join in the expression. I got out and helped him onto the back seat.