She had invited me upstairs to augment my humiliation. I had to stand by and watch as the diplomat moved in with her, and colonised my bookcases.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Miriam said. ‘Those boxes have been up in the attic for the past year-and-a-half. Since 2 December 1990, to be exact, when we can back from Loenen, remember? You were so sick of all the moving that you decided these could stay put for the time being. Yeah? The rest of the books, they could wait. Well, today I finally got around to unpacking. You sure weren’t going to do it for me.’
8
The locksmith had now installed the bolt to the flat. He tossed his tools into his black leather bag and handed Miriam a stocked key ring. He sat down to draw up the bill.
‘Okay, my job here’s done.’ He handed Miriam the bill. ‘No call-out fee.’
I drank another vodka with my rival. Former rival, it was now clear. Miriam saw the locksmith out. Because I did not know what to say to Our Man, I went over to the window. The sky began to change colour. The locksmith put the black bag in the back of his van, which was emblazoned with the name KRIKKRAK in lightning lettering on the side, with a telephone number.
‘You were going to explain,’ I said to Miriam when she got back upstairs.
Miriam and her correspondent gave me an account, filling in each other’s gaps, of their story. Before going to eat at Tartufo they had an aperitif at Café Zeppos on ’t Gebed Zonder End. At a certain point Miriam discovered, maybe when she set out to light up her last crisis-cigarette, that her purse had been stolen. ‘Just snatched from the back of the chair.’ Not that there was much money in it, but worse than that: her house keys. Panicked that the thief would empty the entire building, they picked up the spare keys at Miriam’s parents’ (where Tonio was asleep in his guest cot) and sat waiting, the deadbolt securely fastened, for the arrival of the key guy. Plenty of 24-hour services in the Yellow Pages, but, when push came to shove, none of them really was open day and night. Finally they had found one: Krikkrak, for all your broken teeth. Miriam had telephoned a few friends to go find me. Of course they looked in the wrong cafés.
So much for the farewell dinner, without a single bite of food. ‘As though it were meant to be.’
9
Miriam showed her Special Reporter out — for the last time, let’s hope. I listened from the top of the stairs. A brief, inaudible exchange down on the front stoop. A burst of her cheerful, mocking laugh.
The door slammed shut. It could mean two things: that she had stepped over the threshold to follow the Borderless Reporter to the edge of the earth, or …
I was back amid the moving boxes, whose dank odour tickled my bronchial tubes, and listened intently. It was quiet, both in the stairwell and out on the street.
‘So what’re you standing there for, goofy?’ Miriam was carrying her pumps. She must have crept upstairs in her stocking feet. ‘Empty ’em, if they’re bothering you.’
‘So what’s the verdict?’
‘The verdict is that we’re through. It was an impossible situation, tonight proved it all over again. I thought we had something, you and me …’
‘That’s news to me.’
‘Well, come here then.’
We stood silently face to face. After a little while she said: ‘I was afraid you’d be mad about the stolen purse … the keys … the locksmith … and all you do is moan about the moving boxes! Typical.’
‘Learn to live with it.’
‘I don’t have much choice.’
10
For Miriam, the moving boxes were half empty. For me, half full. And that was the start of refinding our footing after our first major marital crisis.
Half empty: unload the rest of the books.
Half fulclass="underline" there’s still room to load more in.
Was it the new locks, in combination with the sudden appearance of the moving boxes, that gave me the idea of roomier living quarters? I had to think long and hard about whether looking for a new house was the right way to reunite my family. De Pijp, the Kloov, Obrechtstraat, the Veluwe, the Pauwhof, Leidsegracht … all this moving had in fact only made us drift gradually apart.
In Huize Oldenhoeck, yes, there she was happy, until Tonio’s first birthday. It was the environs of her earliest youth. She was born across the street, in the CIZ, the Centrale Israëlitische Ziekeninrichting — now a Jellinek rehab clinic for addicts. Her native soil. If I wanted to buy a house for her, it had to be here, and nowhere else.
11
‘There come the knights.’
A friend had given me a CD of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11. I played it that afternoon for the first time, while Tonio sat in the corner with his Lego. I had never seen a child so engrossed in play before. Off in his own world, as they say.
Somewhere in one of the inner movements the music falls nearly silent, followed by a forte, dry roll on the snare drum, and then another, even louder. Tonio leapt up, pulled the dummy out of his mouth and yelled, his arm outstretched: ‘There come the knights!’
I have no idea what kind of fairy tale his concentrated Lego-play had criss-crossed, but he stood listening, his face enthralled and spittle hanging off his lower lip, until the snare drum was entirely drowned out by the rest of the orchestra. He planted the dummy back between his lips and dropped to his knees at the pile of Lego. I sat down next to him and asked: ‘What was that, Tonio? What did you hear?’
He was completely engrossed in the plastic building bricks. ‘Those were the knights,’ he said quietly, absently. And as though in a kind of indifferent trance he kept on repeating, ever more softly: ‘Those were the knights … the knights …’
12
Ten to five. The neurosurgeon came in first. She was still wearing her light-blue shower cap: the elastic had crept up to the point where it could, at any moment, lose its grip on her hair and flutter to the floor. The last of her two co-assistants closed the door, which had stood open all day, behind her — and then I knew. Tonio was lost.
The surgeon sat down on the short side of the table and looked at Miriam and me in turn. An almost bitter line around her mouth, undoubtedly due to the recent efforts in the OR. Her serious, unintentionally severe gaze eventually rested on me. She shook her head.
‘It’s not good,’ she said hesitantly, followed immediately by: ‘We couldn’t save him.’
Miriam let out a stream of almost songlike cries. Her head slumped, wobbling, further and further downward, as though she wanted to literally lay it in her lap. With my arm around her shoulders, I pulled her close to me. Her trembling mixed with mine.
‘The brain was badly traumatised,’ the surgeon continued. ‘It continued to swell. First on the right, then the left. Besides, his bodily functions started to fail. The blood pressure plummeted … terrible haemorrhaging … There was no saving him. We had to terminate treatment. He’s being brought over to the ICU, so you can say your last goodbyes. He’s still on life-support, but that will be stopped shortly.’
Terminal, but not yet dead.
‘I want you to know,’ I said with a tight voice, ‘that we’re grateful for all your efforts.’
Even now I was aware, although I didn’t smell it myself, of my penetrating garlic breath. I am given the tidings of the imminent death of my son, they are about to unplug his ventilator, and my thoughts dwell on my own bad breath. Aglio olio.
The doctor stood up, shook our hands. ‘My thoughts are with you.’