Tonio (8 page)

It was during those two-plus years he lived in De Baarsjes that my life, I imagined, became busier than ever. A new book came out, and I started accepting speaking engagements again. And on top of that: a weekly column, the guest teaching, an essay assignment … not to mention the work already on my plate. After his holiday in Ibiza, summer 2009, we fetched him from Schiphol by car, and dropped him off at his house on the Nepveustraat: the only time I saw it, and then only from the outside. We didn't get asked in. He was clearly in a hurry to share his adventures with Jim — the British girls he'd mentioned in passing on the way back. He'd nearly been thrown out of the hotel for letting them stay overnight in his room without checking in.

He left his bag of dirty laundry in the car. ‘I'll come by on Sunday to pick it up.'

Nor did I ever write to him at his new address. In the past, if I was working at Château St. Gerlach, I did send him the occasional pep note around exam time. If I was so bent on working with ‘old stuff', rather than computers and email, why not write an old-fashioned letter, handwritten and delivered by post?

My publisher asked me a while ago, perhaps not entirely selflessly, how many letters I thought I'd written in the past forty years. I came up with an estimate of ten thousand. Short and long, typed and handwritten, personal and business. During those two years that Tonio lived in De Baarsjes, the copies in my archive numbered a good four hundred — and not a single one of them to him.

It needn't be too late. If Tonio survived his accident and operation, I would write to him every day of his convalescence. At first, if his mind had to recuperate, simple letters that a nurse could read out loud to him. Gradually, more elaborate ones. And once he was back on his feet, I would never stop — even if he didn't write back.

4

‘We've lost him, Adri,' came the high, singsong voice beside me. ‘I just feel it.'

When had I last seen and spoken to Tonio? Last week, twice in short succession — atypical since his move.

On Wednesday, I worked until four. I went downstairs, hoping to catch some sun out on the veranda: after a chilly first half of the month, the weather had turned the previous day. The French doors leading from the library to the terrace were open. I recognised Miriam's voice; she was talking to someone, but since the curtains, billowing in the breeze, were still closed, I couldn't see to whom. I stepped out onto the veranda. There sat Tonio. More relaxed and self-assured than I was used to seeing him. When he noticed me, a mildly mocking grin spread across his face.

‘So, up to your ten pages a day yet?' he asked.

After an overconfident glass some time ago, I expressed this as my target for my current novel. He asked it teasingly, but I thought I also heard in it something of the old polite interest.

‘Five's the minimum,' I replied. ‘Six, seven is doable. Eight is a banner day. So cut me some slack.'

He had been to visit grandpa Natan, his ninety-seven-year-old grandfather who lived on the Lomanstraat, and since he ‘was in the neighbourhood anyway' he took a short detour to drop in on his parents. I suspected there was more to it than that.

‘Grandpa Natan's going to have a cataract operation,' he said, suddenly serious.

‘Oh?' Miriam and I knew nothing about it.

‘Yeah, crazy, actually … putting an old man through all that.'

‘I'm about to take him over to Beth Shalom,' Miriam said, glancing at her watch. ‘I'll bring it up with him in the car.'

I had the impression that it somehow did Tonio good to show his concern for his fragile grandfather. Since leaving home, he lived life to the hilt, and his youth, not exactly overflowing with close family anyway, was vanishing rapidly in his wake. No, this wasn't just a casual social call.

‘Tonio, your master's degree, that's where we left off.' Miriam got up; it was her turn to go to the Lomanstraat. ‘Don't forget to tell Adri.'

After she left, Tonio explained to me that when the time came, he had decided to get his master's in Media Technology.

‘How about just getting your bachelor's in Media & Culture first? You're hardly through your first year.'

He grinned. ‘Can't hurt to think ahead, now and then.'

Maybe that was his way of erasing the words ‘lack of ambition', which had been lingering ever since our first and only real clash. Tonio spelled out what Media Technology involved, and told me the course wasn't offered by the University of Amsterdam. He found out he would have to alternate between Leiden and The Hague.

‘That'll mean moving,' I said.

‘That'll mean the train,' he said.

There was something different about him, but I couldn't put my finger on it. He dared to look deeper into his future, and there had to be a reason for it. More self-confidence, yes, but his shyness hadn't vanished. Perhaps to avoid having to lower his eyes, he looked up at the laburnum, where the green clusters were starting to show yellow buds.

‘Late bloom this year,' I said.

‘Yeah, what do you expect,' Tonio replied, ‘with such a cold May.'

It dawned on me that we seldom, if ever, discussed nature. At the Ignatius Gymnasium open house, a number of older students who were showing him around gave him a stick insect in a glass jar from the biology lab to take home. The gift thrilled him so much that Vossius and Barlaeus were directly out of the running; Ignatius was his choice. He installed a small terrarium around the stick bug, but not long thereafter asked our permission to let the ghost grasshopper loose in the Vondelpark. This was the extent of his yen for nature. His passion lay with physics. I remember when, at school, he and a classmate gave a demonstration of the internal combustion engine, complete with computer simulation. It was grand to see him so in his element.

When I'd stoked up the fireplace one Christmas Eve and wondered out loud how the flames got their form and colour, the fourteen-year-old Tonio responded with a complete physics lecture, full of facts that had never occurred to me.

‘It's all about energy, Adri.'

And now, father and son were earnestly discussing, like a pair of oldies, the late bloom of the laburnum. Fortunately, Tonio soon switched to a topic more in synch with the physical sciences: his photography.

‘Adri, a small favour … Miriam has agreed, but I'm supposed to ask you, too. There's this girl, and I promised …'

‘Aha.'

‘… I'd do a photo shoot with her. For a portfolio. It's like this … she wants to make extra money as a model or an extra, and needs a photo portfolio to take around to casting agencies and such. And, well, I thought … this house, your house, it would be just the place for a photo shoot. It's tomorrow afternoon. Miriam doesn't mind going out for a couple of hours, but she didn't know if you …'

‘Oh-ho! You come here to badger me about whether I'm doing my ten pages per day, and then chase me out of my study so you can take pictures of a cute girl. Without an audience.'

If I were to think back now on the slightly uneasy look he gave me, I'd see his clear brown eyes, which radiated more vitality than a person needs for an entire lifetime.

‘Great,' he said, getting up. ‘I knew you'd say yes.'

5

The motorway was quiet, in both directions. Anyone planning to spend the Whitsun bank holiday elsewhere had already left town on Friday or Saturday. And as for the Amsterdam day-trippers, they would hit traffic snarls only later in the day.

We knew the route to the Academic Medical Centre better than the police officers up in the front seat. Since autumn 2005 Miriam had driven me there for monthly medical examinations in my role as guinea pig for a new wonder drug that could restore and regulate an imbalanced metabolism. In recent months, Miriam had taken the same route a few times to deliver Tonio to the
AMC
, where they had lecture halls suitable for the Media & Culture written exams.

Whitsun morning was, in a taunting sort of way, glorious. A haze that had not yet completely cleared sifted the sunlight, making it look as if gold dust was suspended in the air. We speeded straight through that glittering mist, and at the same time were radically closed off from it.
Critical condition
. The police van was moving further and further away from the day I had promised myself. Half an hour ago, I was still lying in bed, seventeen stairs away from my manuscript. At that moment I still had the choice: shower first, or give in to a wholesome impatience and take the bedroom smell upstairs with me.

The doorbell had made choosing superfluous. Work on my novel about the murder of a police officer today? There was a
real
one standing on the doorstep. A van just like in my manuscript was parked at the corner, but without a police squad poised to spring into action. It was empty and real, and would take us to the
AMC
, where Tonio, in a critical condition … See, the fact that reality pursues one's fiction, tries to overtake it, and sometimes even passes it, or, worse yet, makes it redundant, is something that every novelist just has to take into account. No point in moaning: it is one of the hazards of the trade. Beautiful, of course: the complete sovereignty of an invented reality, its closed circuit … but just try to take out an all-risk policy on it.

I never complained. Only today, reality thrust itself with such obscene and devastating directness into my fragilely constructed world that I could only bow my head — or let it hang.

6

Last Thursday, too, it was abundantly spring, almost summery, 19 degrees Celsius and clear skies. When I went downstairs just before one o'clock to drive out to the Amsterdamse Bos with Miriam, I met Tonio in the front hall. He had just brought a folding tripod up from the basement, where he'd been storing some of his things since moving to De Baarsjes. A few white reflectors of framed styrofoam were already leaning against the wall of the passage.

‘Check this out,' he said, running his hand over one of the styrofoam sheets, which was pocked with an irregular pattern of tiny holes. ‘Totally chewed up by beetles.'

‘Come on, styrofoam-eating beetles?'

‘Polystyrene beetles, yeah. The storeroom at Dixons was swarming with them. Computers just sank through their own packaging …'

‘Cross your fingers for this afternoon then,' I said. ‘Holey reflectors, they'll give a model a moth-eaten face every time.'

‘Very funny, Adri. Good day at the typewriter, I see.'

‘I don't see any model, by the way. You hiding her from us?'

I noticed he had shaved. He was not wearing his hair in a ponytail; it had obviously been washed, and brushed smooth and glossy. We rarely saw him so kempt at home.

‘She just phoned to say she'd be a bit late. Had to stop by the drugstore first. Bladder infection.'

Miriam emerged from her study. She kissed her son and ran the back of her hand across his cheek. ‘Mmm, babyface.' She held him at arm's length and inspected him from head to toe. ‘Hey, your favourite shirt. I thought I'd washed and ironed it for this weekend … for if you went out …'

‘I'll change it soon. So it'll stay clean.'

‘Okay, we're off,' I said. ‘Now Tonio, good luck. Or should I say: good shooting.'

I shouldn't have thrown him such a knowing look, because he cast his eyes down, groaned softly and mumbled: ‘Pl-l-lease.'

7

The trees on our street were now yellow-green, their crowns bursting with seed pods. We drove via sun-drenched Amsterdam-Zuid to Amstelveen.

‘Funny,' Miriam said. ‘When he photographs, he thinks nothing of stretching out on his stomach in the dust. In the mud, if need be. Now he puts on his best shirt.'

‘Sometimes a photo shoot is more than a photo shoot.'

There were considerably more fishermen on the bank of the Bosbaan than the last time we drove here, and they no longer huddled so timorously in their shelters, which resembled something midway between an umbrella resting on its side and a one-man lean-to. Where the Bosbaan's water dead-ended, we could really plunge into the woods — a churning mass of fresh green vegetation, snipped-up sunlight, and lacy shadows.

‘Just look at the spring,' Miriam said.

At the goat farm café, we ordered the house classic for lunch: tuna salad on a nearly black multigrain roll. Goat buttermilk. Manure-scented tranquillity.

‘Strange to think,' Miriam said, ‘that I used to bring Tonio here to see the newborn goats and piglets. Now it's where he shoos us off to so he can have the whole house to himself and that girl. I have to say I rather like it.'

The situation apparently had a rejuvenating effect on us: after lunch we set out on a ramble, each of us holding a cone of goat's milk ice cream. We walked to the blue bridge, under which the rowing lake narrowed, and hung over the railing, dreamily watching the few kayaks and water bikes out this early in the season.

‘Gosh, that Tonio,' Miriam said. ‘Media Technology … and then right away he picks up his photography again. He's doing well. I'm so glad. If I think back to two, three years ago …'