She survived it by the skin of her teeth. So when the crisis had passed and she was able to stand on her own uneven legs, she got her new name: Cypri. Considering the result, a scant four months later, it seems she performed her function as reminder admirably indeed.
18
Usually, it’s the woman who knows, in retrospect, precisely which act of coupling resulted in conception. In the case of baby Tonio, however, I am the one who maintains: ‘the fourth of October 1987. A Sunday afternoon, between four and five.’
Miriam has never challenged me on this. We had returned from a walk through the Jordaan. Jacob Obrechtstraat 67. Huize Oldenhoeck, the place was called. We took the lift up to the fourth floor. The enclosed space had its usual cheesy body-odour smell of the unwashed caretaker. I remember this because Miriam commented on it. A deliveryman had complained to us about the smell a few days earlier.
Once inside, we were apparently in a hurry. We didn’t even make it to the bedroom. The two sofas in the living room, with their narrow seats, could not accommodate spread limbs. We kneeled behind one another on the two-seater. The Sunday tranquillity was interrupted only by the pok-pok of the tennis court behind the building.
How did I know for sure that Tonio’s conception took place then and there? I recall aiming high into her, and that the gratification seemed to come from deeper than usual. Perhaps that last detail points to momentarily heightened fertility. Our calculations six weeks later did not refute the theory that Tonio’s foetal existence commenced in the late afternoon of the fourth of October.
19
According to that year’s diary, on the morning of Friday the 13th of November 1987 Miriam came to tell me that the pregnancy test she had just performed came up positive. I did not attach any significance to that ominous date back then, and to do so now, some two decades later, in a police van on the way to the hospital, would be unwise, too.
‘So I guess I’m pregnant,’ Miriam said with a lightness that suggested it was the most normal thing in the world. She had come from the bathroom to the kitchen to deliver me this domestic notice, where (without a hangover, having sworn off alcohol) I was sitting down to a late breakfast.
‘Pregnant,’ I repeated, chewing and nodding. ‘Doesn’t sound good.’
We looked at each other for a moment with feigned dejection — until I couldn’t contain myself any longer, leapt up, and squeezed her close to me.
‘Ow!’
‘Oh, Minchen, this is so wonderful … so wonderful.’
When I relaxed my arms a bit in order to look her in the eye, she put on her customary clown’s pout, with wrinkled chin and puffy hamster-cheeks. ‘That’s just how it is,’ she said, her grimace accompanied by crossed eyes.
‘Come on, get into that outfit you had on recently. Make-up, too. This is something to be celebrated.’
‘Now? It’s not even noon.’
‘We’ll go kit out the nursery first. No time to lose.’
In a furniture boutique on the Rozengracht, I bought her the modern extendable dining table she’d had her eye on. It cost me a fortune, but who cares. The centrepiece of the living room would remind us of this day forever. Fully extended, it could seat ten.
‘The test didn’t say anything about octuplets,’ Miriam said.
‘Never can be too careful.’
I rang my brother from Café De Zwart. He reacted rather cautiously. ‘Don’t you think you should wait a few months,’ he said, ‘before you go telling everybody? Anything can happen.’
‘You’re not everybody. But thanks for the tip. I’ll keep it under my hat for the time being.’
Inside, Miriam was drinking apple juice. ‘I’ll have a glass of wine at dinner. Just this once. So … what’d Frans say?’
‘He says we should keep mum for the next three months. Till we’re sure nothing goes wrong, a miscarriage or something.’
‘The heck with him. I’m going to shout it from the rooftops.’
Now that my share of the job was completed, my blood no longer had to be kept alcohol-free. From now on I could drink what I wanted, and did just that. Later that afternoon, we took a tram to Central Station. Whenever we had something to celebrate, we did it at De Bisschop, a restaurant in Leiden. Of everything we ordered, I only remember the bottle of Margaux, which was — minus half a glass — all for me. While the wine warmed me I gazed, speechless, at the girl across from me, who was still my girl, but since this morning with a blissful asset that belonged indivisibly to both of us.
If the foetus proved viable and grew into a full-fledged child, then it must never escape my vigilance. Write? Only as breadwinner for the little one and his obliging parents, and only then during the time-outs from fatherhood. It was a weighty oath I silently made to myself in De Bisschop. Dread and delight struck home in alternation.
‘I’ve heard Theo mention the title of his opera so often,’ I said to Miriam, ‘that if it’s a girl, we’ll name her Esmée.’
‘Don’t let Frans hear you,’ she said. ‘In three months, we can bring it up again.’
CHAPTER TWO. ‘So who’s the third?’
1
With a child on the way, we thought it best to get married forthwith. The ceremony was scheduled for 24 December 1987. I had read somewhere that in Switzerland they had invented a digital watch whose alarm would go off once a year, showing the telephone number of the local florist in the display, so you knew: today is my anniversary. I figured that putting it on a special date would compensate for my innate forgetfulness — and it was cheaper to boot.
A Christmas Eve wedding: the family was not amused. The 24th of December, damn it, was Christmas-dinner shopping day. We decided to make it an intimate family wedding, giving the hubbub of a reception a pass: my father suffered from emphysema, my sister nearly did, and my brother had burnout. But once confronted with the hostile mood on the day itself, I sorely regretted not having organised a bacchanal for my friends, colleagues, and the pub regulars.
The words that kept cropping up among the guests were haricots verts, which had to be procured from a particular Beethovenstraat vegetable shop for Christmas dinner. There was also, among my siblings and sister-in-law at least, a certain lack of empathy with the wedding itself. Surely no one got married anymore?
The only one who kept the mood up and running was my mother-in-law, who every half-hour asked for a repeat of the Mendelssohn wedding march, which I had put on for the opening of the first bottle of champagne. Once seated, my mother confessed to having spent the whole week agonising over whether to prepare a humorous speech. She had planned to bring up the cowboy chaps I had received from her sister in Australia for my First Communion: they were open at the back, of course, leaving my legs bare and thus inviting jeers from the neighbourhood scallywags: ‘Half of your pants are still caught on the barbed wire.’
The girl who faithfully sped past my parents’ house on her white scooter, without it ever having led to an affair, was another of the barbs she looked forward to. Just like my scraping together my vacation money picking strawberries, and my refusal to be caught using my father’s Honda moped.
The poor woman was not up to delivering this kind of toast. ‘So … that’s that,’ she said with that stock trivialising gesture of hers, which meant: don’t mind me, I’m too stupid for that kind of thing.