Tonio took a spin around the busy pub and had a peak in the adjacent Atrium, where the tables were already set. He returned to us and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Maybe I missed something,’ he said, ‘that the date was changed or something.’
‘Let’s have another round,’ I suggested, ‘and wait it out.’
Another half-hour passed. Not one of his classmates, with or without parents, showed up. I felt bad for him as he did another round of the bar, this time less confident than before, and returned to us with a slightly worried grin. Poor kid. He had dragged his parents all the way here and there was apparently nothing to offer them. He groaned.
‘I must have missed an email somewhere along the way.’
14
‘So we’ll go eat somewhere,’ Miriam said.
Tonio had an idea. ‘The Staaltraat,’ he said. ‘There’s a pub there that serves food, where I go with my classmates sometimes. The steaks are pretty good, and they’ve got those thick-cut fries.’
Off to the Staalstraat. Amsterdam had the chills. Elsewhere in the city, some fifteen couples and their Media & Culture-studying children were assembled in a restaurant, waiting for Tonio and his parents. Meanwhile, we were installed at a small table in Eetcafé ‘t Staaltje, and had one of the nicest evenings in years. Thrilled to really be together. All three of us in good form. Tonio in particular was on a roll. I noticed how well-spoken he’d become recently. (I thought back on the meandering complete sentences he churned out, age seven or eight, in his melodious, high-pitched voice. My disappointment when later, his voice starting to break, he started talking in clipped phrases. As a surly teenager every word seemed be uttered with aversion.) Miriam and I tried to top his witticisms. The waiter who interrupted our laughing with a new round of drinks said: ‘I wish all our customers were like you.’
We reminisced. Some of our memories caused us to fall silent, but not for long. We ironed out a few past misunderstandings. And the steak wasn’t bad at all. The fries, too, had the expected Flemish knottiness.
After a longer silence, when melancholy got the upper hand, Miriam told Tonio that what she missed most since he’d left home was their Sunday shopping outings. Her eyes glistened. Tonio looked down at his plate. The upshot was that they agreed to go shopping, on a Sunday of course, for a watch he’d set his sights on, and whose price had already been approved at the time of his graduation.
Miriam: ‘A week from Sunday?’
Tonio: ‘Deal.’
Miriam: ‘And afterwards, patat on the Voetboogstraat. Like the old days.’
Tonio: ‘Deal.’
At around midnight we called a taxi. Tonio said he wanted to check back at the Atrium café. Who knows, maybe he would bump into one of his classmates, who could fill him in on what went wrong. The taxi driver came in to let us know he was parked on the corner. Tonio refused to be dropped off at the Binnengasthuis: ‘Ridiculously close by.’
On the way to the taxi, I thought Tonio might need some extra cash for a the rest of the evening: he still had all night ahead of him, and would probably miss the last tram. I’d spring for a taxi. I turned toward him. He needed to go the same way we did, but strangely enough lingered a bit in the doorway of the pub. I let Miriam go on ahead and hurried back to him, a fifty-euro note folded between my fingers. Instead of giving it to him I let it loose in the pocket of my raincoat, and threw my arms around him.
I didn’t quite understand this unexpected gesture myself. He and I, we only really hugged on his or my birthday, with Miriam as the sole onlooker. I gave him three big kisses on his stubbly cheeks, and said: ‘I’m glad it worked out this way.’
In order to spare him any more of my emotions, I hurried off. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his shy grin in reaction to my embrace.
I slipped onto the back seat beside Miriam and the taxi headed down the Nieuwe Doelenstraat towards Muntplein. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my raincoat and felt the bill, folded into quarters. ‘Oh, damn, I still forgot to slip him something extra.’
I looked back through the rear window, but Tonio was already out of sight.
‘He’ll manage,’ Miriam said.
CHAPTER SIX. ‘Our little boy’
there’s a puddle of blood to show the photographer
a typewriter ribbon to change, the house to shuck off
1
Underneath the clock (five o’clock), the blonde woman appeared — the one who, during the course of the day, we had come to regard as our personal nurse.
‘Your son has been brought from the OR to the ICU,’ she said. ‘I can bring you to him now, if you want to say your goodbyes.’
I pulled Miriam up by the arm. She took a few wobbly steps, as though drunk with sleep.
‘Is it okay if I don’t go with you?’ Hinde asked. She stood up, too, with panic in her eyes. ‘I can’t face it.’
‘All you have to do is wait for us here,’ I said.
We followed the nurse into the corridor. Left turn. I held Miriam tight, my arm around her waist, so that we could only take small steps. Goodbyes. The day after our dinner at ’t Staaltje, she and Tonio exchanged text messages: sure enough, he had missed an email informing them of a change of venue for the student-parent dinner. Miriam texted back that it was a lucky thing, that misunderstanding, because we had had a terrific evening together. That much was ours forever.
At the next junction in the corridor we took a right. It must have been busy in the ICU, because in a biggish niche there was a bed in which a woman lay motionless. Her jet-black hair was spread out loosely over the pillow, covering it almost entirely. An Indian (or, in any case, Hindustani: the women wore a dot on the forehead) family sat at the bedside. They sat stoically on stools, elbows on the bedcovers, never taking their eyes off the patient, who appeared to be in a coma.
What kind of impulse was it that made me hug Tonio so emphatically last Friday, right there on a street corner? I could now claim I was saying my goodbyes, then and there, to the living Tonio, but that would mean I had had some kind of premonition, like louche stock-exchange traders acted on foreknowledge of imminent market fluctuations.
The nurse walked with a calm tread, so that we, with our fused bodies, had no trouble keeping up with her. She turned to us as we walked, and said: ‘We’ve had to improvise a bit with the space, but … well, you’ll see him shortly. He’s still on the ventilator.’
I pulled Miriam against me even harder, suddenly afraid that my common sense might fail me. I was worried that I’d grab the first doctor I saw and yelclass="underline" ‘You and your fancy machines … Don’t stop now! Do whatever it takes! Keep him alive!’
That I’d demand the number of one or another medical ethics committee … call up the chairman of the Society for Intensive Care: ‘He’s still alive! Don’t let them pull the plug!’
That primitive instincts would get the better of me, like the mother gnu on National Geographic. She kept returning to her dead calf to fend off the pack of hyenas lingering nearby …
The nurse stopped at a light-yellow nylon curtain strung between two pillars on opposite sides of the corridor. She pulled aside one of the flaps. ‘Here we are.’
2
There, somewhere, I must have let go of Miriam — perhaps because the opening was too narrow for both of us. I took a step forward, and another. All at once I was standing in the middle of a sort of peakless tent, draped on three sides with the same nylon fabric, like the kind of shower curtain that always stuck to your body. On the fourth side, a few metres behind the hospital bed, was a large window. The bed was positioned with its head on the left.