15
Miriam and Hinde were probably on their way from their father’s house on the Lomanstraat to the St. Vitus retirement home in the Jordaan, where their mother lived. How do you tell your parents that their only grandchild has been killed in a traffic accident — right now I could not imagine it. I just wanted them to get back home as soon as possible. I was scared.
In the course of the day, I had visited the toilet far more often than usual, for ever-shorter spurts of colourless urine, like after you’ve been sitting in rain-drenched clothes in a draughty train station waiting room. Now, too, the urge arose, like a chill on the bladder, despite the warmth of the summery Whitsun that penetrated the house. I sat on the edge of the sofa for a good fifteen minutes, my fists screwed into the seat cushions next to me, ready to hoist myself up and go to the bathroom. When I could finally bring myself to get up and leave the room, I lingered indecisively on the landing. My hands lay on the balustrade connecting the handrail of the staircase leading upstairs and downstairs. There I stood, looking down the stairs to the front hall, my back safely to the wall of photos.
The WC was to my left, next to the spare kitchenette. Opposite its door, Miriam had covered a mangled bit of wall where the fuse box used to be, with portraits of Tonio. They dated from various ages.
Tonio as a toddler, with an obligatory smile that doesn’t quite mask the put-out earnestness.
Tonio with bravado, butch-ish cap on his head, broadly grinning in between the giggly sisters Merel and Iris. (Judging from the bared teeth, still pre-braces.)
Dressed up as the Dutch cabaret artist Dorus, complete with moustache, bowler hat, and dust coat, from when he had to sing (or lip-synch) the song ‘Two Moths’ at a talent show at the Cornelis Vrijschool.
As an eight-year-old, autographing books at Scheltema with his father. (In the photo, taken by Klaas Koppe, he hands a freshly signed book to a customer.)
With his friend Jim in Antwerp for the presentation of the Golden Owl 2004 (not to me), each with a large mug of Jupiler beer in hand, doubled over laughing. Tonio’s mouth wide open with hilarity, showing off the sparkling braces he’s still got at age fifteen.
Tonio’s self-portrait as Oscar Wilde, the result of a group project at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, fall 2006.
There was no avoiding this portrait gallery when you left the WC. I don’t remember exactly how it got started — it had been years earlier — but from a certain, indefinable moment, I could not look at these photos with the usual tenderness. I wondered if it was because of the panda that had hung there between two small portraits of Tonio ever since his graduation in 2006.
16
As I am about to step from the landing onto the top tread, I hear Tonio and Merel’s voices coming from the bathroom. The door is ajar. Involuntarily I stop and listen. The silence is broken by the tinkle of a child’s pee.
‘When I’m done,’ says Tonio, ‘then it’s your turn. I’m not going to flush first, ’cause that’s bad for the environment. We have to think of the environment. Now you, Merel.’
The seat is lowered with a thwap. Again the sound of child’s pee, augmented with that special gurgle which is the sole domain of girls.
‘Two pees without flushing,’ says Tonio, ‘is better for the environment. When you’re finished, you can go ahead and flush. Then it’s still good for the environment. Right, Merel?’
A little embarrassed, I continue downstairs. I have the impression that environmental concern is not the basis for Tonio and Merel being together in the bathroom, although it does certainly benefit from it.
It must be around the same time, early spring, that Tonio presents his mother with a curious maths problem. Merel stands next to him, giggling.
‘Okay, Mum, if I got Merel pregnant, how long exactly would it take for the baby to come?’
Miriam believes her sexual education has fallen short, and starts explaining: ‘Well, you have to consider roughly …’
‘No, we want to know exactly,’ Tonio interrupts impatiently, ‘because we want the baby to be born exactly on New Year’s Eve. Right, Merel?’
Whenever Merel is bashful, and doesn’t dare laugh out loud, her cheeks puff up like a hamster’s. Her lips, already full, jut out even more, and she hooks her pinkies, as though to test their opposing strength. She nods vehemently. ‘Yes,’ she says, almost inaudibly and, for the occasion, with a low, boyish voice, ‘that’s what we’d like to know.’
17
We celebrated Tonio’s eighteenth birthday on 15 June 2006. By late afternoon — it was a sunny day — the guests started trickling in, one by one or in small groups. One of these days, maybe tomorrow, the Ignatius final exam results would be announced, but the party mood forced the butterflies about the test results to the background. Tonio no longer a minor … unbelievable. Each time he left the room, and Miriam called him back to open the next present, I fully expected to see the child I knew so much better than the adult he now was. His late baby fat hadn’t entirely disappeared yet, and although he still had that gawky posture he didn’t attack the gift-wrapping, like an excited puppy, the way he used to. Everything he now carefully unwrapped and held in his hands was greeted with a satisfied grin.
The phone rang for the umpteenth time. Miriam answered.
‘Tonio, for you.’
He put down the latest gift (a light meter, a notch up from his present one) with the rest of the presents on the mantelpiece and took the receiver. The company chatted away, but I kept one ear tuned in to Tonio’s call.
‘Oh, thanks,’ he said. ‘How did you know it was my birthday?’ And a moment later: ‘Oh, that. Of course. I guess that slipped my mind today.’
Something in his voice, a shrill exclamation, maybe, made the room fall silent. ‘Yes, thanks.’ He hung up and turned around. ‘My form teacher,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I thought he called to wish me a happy birthday. But … uh … it looks like I’ve passed my exams.’
For the next half hour, the three of us forgot our guests entirely — no, they simply did not exist. Tonio and I sat on the sofa, arms around each other’s shoulders. Miriam knelt in front, her bosom resting on our knees, and her hands nearly reaching our backs.
‘We’ve done it,’ she kept saying, in tears. ‘We’ve done it, the three of us. How great, how great, oh how great. This, this moment, we have to hang onto it. Forever.’
And I, wanker that I am, let it happen. I just sat there with a throat like a wrung-out dishrag, and let Miriam do all the talking. Tonio wavered, his face taut, between keeping a distance and giving in. Fighting back the tears, as they say. The way he looked at Miriam, awkwardly trying to read our feelings, he reminded me of the five-year-old kid who stood in front of me at the cremation of his grandfather, speechlessly observing the tears and uncontrolled twitches on my face, not sure whether he should try to comfort his father or cry, too.
Forget it, today was his eighteenth birthday. The guests could all look the other way in courteous silence — but they wouldn’t see him snivel, no fucking way.
Just as Tonio was exercising an old Dutch tradition by hanging his schoolbag on the flagpole out on the balcony, adorned with a kite-tail made from used notebooks, his old sweetheart Merel came cycling by. I couldn’t see her from the sofa, but recognised her voice.