We went outside to sit in the late-afternoon sun, settling down on a low cart, perhaps for transporting laundry. Hinde went off to smoke a cigarette at a safe distance from the revolving door. I was drained, and did not know what to say. Miriam, too, was silent. Even the sunlight made a tired impression, having shone so fiercely on our misery all day.
Just ten minutes later, the taxi arrived; maybe it wasn’t even ours. But since the driver made no moves to enquire at the reception, we quickly got in: Miriam and I in back, Hinde up front. ‘Oud-Zuid, please … Johannes Verhulststraat.’
The last time I had been in a taxi was some two weeks before, after that unexpectedly intimate goodbye with Tonio on the Staalstraat. The fifty-euro note I’d forgotten to slip into his breast pocket. Just like then, I looked back out of the rear window as we drove off, and now there was just as little sign of him as then.
I tried to imagine Tonio as we had left him to his immobile fate in Intensive Care, lying on a temporary bed that in a short timespan had been transformed from a deathbed to a bier. (At least, I always thought a deathbed was the bed a person dies on, not the bed on which a dead body lies. A dead body lies on a bier.) At the request of the forensic photographer, the nurse will have pulled the sheet back to the foot end while he attached his camera to the tripod. First, he documents Tonio’s roughly stitched open side, where the car had hit him full on. The man ensures that the bruises and discoloration are properly lit. Then he takes pictures of the other incisions in the torso, and of the drain and saw lines on the skull.
Ecce homo, or what’s left of him. Three days after photographing that pretty girl at our house, Tonio undergoes his final photo session — with himself as the model.
Due to the parallel-tracked bruise stretching from the neck, over the chin, and to the nose, the photographer would take a close-up of Tonio’s face. I resented the fact that the last portrait of his good-looking kisser would be so unflattering, with that obscenely swollen tongue sticking out between the lips. As though his last message to the world was an extended tongue, like in the old days when a convict thumbed his nose at his executioner on the scaffold.
The taxi got onto the motorway toward Amsterdam Zuid. The radio (or maybe it was a CD player) blared hip, whining Arabic pop music — electrified bouzoukis, with the vocals alternating with unadulterated rap.
‘Could you please turn down the radio?’ Hinde asked.
The driver reacted with less empathy than you’d expect, considering the building where he had just picked us up was a hospital, and his passengers were clearly distressed, if not outright distraught.
‘We’ve just had some very bad news back at the hospital,’ she said in a renewed attempt.
‘Okay, okay,’ the man grumbled. He turned down the volume the tiniest fraction. Who were we, after all, to disrupt to his ‘labour vitamins’?* Arabic rap — something new, at least. At that very moment, we heard the ringtone of a mobile phone, but muted, like when a woman’s phone goes off in the bottom of her handbag. It wasn’t mine. I would have recognised Miriam’s. But Hinde did not react, nor did the driver.
[* ‘Arbeidsvitaminen’ is a long-running (since 1946) popular-music radio show in the Netherlands.]
Suddenly it hit me that it had to be Tonio’s mobile ringing in the plastic bag they had given us. It was lying on Miriam’s lap. The bag hadn’t been sealed, but was tied shut with one of those plastic zip ties you needed to cut with scissors. Miriam and I stared, paralysed, at the plastic-wrapped mobile phone. (Perhaps she had felt it vibrate on her thigh.) The caller had to be someone who wasn’t in the know. So it could be anybody — except for Jim, and even he hadn’t heard the latest, definitive news yet.
The phone stopped ringing just as Miriam was about to dig her nails into the plastic bag and tear it open. We waited for the voicemail signal, but there was none: apparently the caller chose not to leave a message.
‘Something just occurred to me,’ I whispered to Miriam. ‘They gave us his mobile and his wallet, but not his watch.’
‘The collision …’ Her voice sounded flat, exhausted. ‘Maybe it flew off his wrist. The band was getting loose.’
‘Then the police would have found it. They cordon off the whole area after an accident like this. Yellow paint outlines all over the road … you remember what the policeman said this morning. They reconstruct everything, comb the place for clues. Maybe they’ve kept Tonio’s watch as evidence.’
I was reminded of the photos of wristwatches from a museum in Hiroshima. Melted and deformed, their hands immortalising the precise time the atomic bomb exploded. ‘It might have stopped at the moment of impact.’
‘If he was wearing it.’
The taxi took the exit ramp, a three-quarter curve, so that Miriam, too listless to resist, got squashed up against me. The warm, soft body that had made Tonio possible and in which he, in turn, had left his mark.
‘Last Sunday,’ I said. ‘You two were supposed to go into town … to buy him a new watch. I never heard any more about it.’
‘Tonio emailed that morning to say he was “beat”. Always that word, “beat”. Could mean anything. From a hangover to the flu. Because of his beatness, we put off the watch-shopping until next Sunday.’
‘Not today?’
‘It’s a public holiday — we weren’t sure if the shops would be open.’
‘Minchen, in the Staalstraat that night, in the pub … do you remember if he was wearing his watch then? He was so keen to get a new one, that maybe …’
Awful, this conversation. As if we were desperately in search of anything of Tonio’s that was still ticking. At the mention of the Staalstraat, Miriam began to whimper. She was so proud of him that evening — his wisecracks, his keen remarks. He had become his own person.
‘I wasn’t paying attention,’ she wept.
‘It was one of those oversized monsters,’ I said. ‘He nearly always wore it. I always noticed if he wasn’t wearing it.’
‘Well, then he must have been,’ Miriam said, turning her head the other way. I knew it was time to drop the subject.
12
Leidsegracht, 1992. When I got home I saw Miriam, shower cap on her head to keep out the dust, bent over a cardboard moving-box. She clapped two books together, releasing the dust that had managed to gather despite the closed box.
‘Put them back, Minchen. I’ve found us a house.’
‘In the Veluwe, I hope?’
‘On your native soil. Your old neighbourhood.’
‘May I see it first?’
‘Right now, if you like.’
The manager of the pension fund, who (like the Veluwe landlord Roldanus) had given us a three-year lease, was not in the least bothered (unlike Roldanus) by our request to vacate at the halfway mark, provided we could find a new, creditworthy tenant. But before we could do so, the pension man had found one himself: a concert pianist. The top two floors were perfect for his two grand pianos. I wondered privately if the small spaces had much to offer acoustically, but maybe the pianist only played modern music on a piano packed in a down duvet, tapping the keys through a rubber mat while a tin woodpecker chipped away at the legs. I was far too relieved to have been let out of our lease and able to move ASAP to the new house on the Johannes Verhulststraat to worry any further.
(The ad agency’s pension funds did not exactly strike gold with the new tenant. After transferring the two months’ deposit, the payments dried up. By the time he was in arrears for an entire year, and the summons-servers had come and gone, the pianist, whose name no one had ever seen on a concert poster, had absconded. One day I received a phone call from Cristofori, the piano-rental company situated on the Prinsengracht, a stone’s throw from the house. A woman asked if I could provide her with the forwarding address of my friend, the man who had taken over the flat on the Leidsegracht.