Late last year, I caught myself opting more and more for the upstairs toilet, in the bathroom, rather than the small downstairs WC. The alternative route was also lined with photos, but less unnerving ones (even though the one of Sailor Vos* in Café Zwart, preparing to fly at a friend of mine from Berlin, was certainly not exactly comforting). The odd time I did use the downstairs WC, I always found an excuse to allow my gaze to glide over the photos without really looking at them.
[* A pet name of a local celebrity.]
Now. As I stood looking over the balustrade, I forced myself to turn with a jerk and face the wall of photographs. What had I expected? Now that Tonio had today shown his most vulnerable side, the spine-chilling defencelessness was still fully visible in his photographed face, no longer as a premonition or potential danger, but as a confirmation — and that changed in one fell swoop the aspect of the entire portrait gallery. He was dead.
21
Tonio was four when we moved. In the fall he’d start school at the Schreuder Institute. Holding back time (or, for me, the contrived attempts at it) was a thing of the past. We had now found the ideal fortress from which we could give Tonio the freedom, little by little, to educate himself for future — a fortress we could drag him back into at any given moment.
The movers had left. Horsehair blankets still covered the furniture, and everywhere low walls had been erected out of moving boxes: almost a familiar sight, considering that some of them had remained unpacked during the two Leidsegracht years.
I was dead beat, as was Miriam. She had managed to improvise a bed for Tonio in the corner of what was to be his room. (It was due for renovation, as the parquet floor had been stomped to splinters by the destructive children of the former owner, H.P. Lolkema, nicknamed Mr Horsepower.) I went in to check on him. He had lain half uncovered, surrounded by his various security blankets arranged in top-secret order, and in the middle of it all swam a rubber ducky. The dummy had tumbled out of his mouth, and lay on the pillowcase, still stuck to his lower lip.
I had done a decent job of steering him through stormy waters to this bastion of security. He was safe, and apparently was not visited by nightmares. Once things were unpacked and more or less in place, we would tackle Tonio’s room. Order a bunk bed next week, for starters, for the slumber parties he was so looking forward to organising.
‘Night, kiddo,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t let the alien walls give you a fright in the morning.’
I went back to the balcony at the rear of the same storey. Miriam was flopped in a folding chair, with Cypri on her lap, who, after an initial reconnaissance of the house, also had to give in to fatigue.
‘He’s asleep,’ I said. ‘So peaceful.’
22
Mr Horsepower hadn’t bequeathed us just any old ‘ding-dong’ doorbell. It was a complete carillon, with tubes of various lengths that sent its message soaring up to the furthest reaches of the house. The violence of the chimes hadn’t been so noticeable before, but now, in the stillness of the move, we jumped out of our skin. Someone must be holding his finger on the button, because it sounded like the Munt Tower on the hour, only without a melody. We both sprang to our feet.
‘We’re getting rid of that doorbell,’ Miriam said. ‘It gives Tonio the “fries of his life”, as he puts it.’
When the chiming subsided, we both pricked up our ears to hear if Tonio had woken up. No, not a peep. To prevent another round of bells, I ran to the intercom. ‘Hello?’ It was Mr Rat, whose crackly voice announced that he’d come ‘to consecrate the new house’.
Trouble already.
My patience with people had already started to wane before we went to live in the Veluwe. In retrospect, I was surprised by how, ten years before, I’d blindly trusted pretty much everyone. If that trust got breached, I’d take it from there. I kept an open house, but I learned the hard way. Time and again, I would allow dubious characters to come nosing about, and then knead their findings into the kind of story they felt worth relaying to others. I was naïve enough to be flabbergasted by the versions that eventually reached my own ears.
I had bought the house on the Johannes Verhulststraat from a retired porn boss. The basement was his warehouse; the shelves left behind by the wine wholesaler Leuchtmann came in handy. The neighbours sighed with relief to see the end of the delivery vans with tinted windows. Once the papers had been signed, I set off for my regular café, where the news had already been making the rounds that ‘Adri had taken over a chic brothel in Zuid’. I kind of liked this sort of grotesque gossip, as opposed to the systematic bad-mouthing that had no other aim than to injure the subject.
The moving boxes weren’t even unpacked yet, but Mr Rat, accompanied by his fiancée, a Miss Piggy lookalike, were of the opinion that any further delay in sniffing out the new premises would be irresponsible. Maybe they had picked up some of that ‘chic brothel’ chitchat.
‘We’ve come to inaugurate the house,’ he said, handing Miriam a bottle of white wine, which had been thoughtfully wrapped in aluminium foil to keep it cold. ‘God, Adri, you look beat.’
Well, yes, I hadn’t got much shuteye the previous night, as so much still needed to be packed. But my hospitality got the better of my sleepiness. We sat out on the balcony, and I opened the bottle.
Whether it was the summer evening chill or the white wine, Mr Rat kept excusing himself to go to the toilet. Every storey had one, but with each absence I heard a different flush. And each interval lasted a little longer. Mr Rat was having a good sniff around the place.
‘Now I know why your face looks so worn out,’ he announced after the umpteenth inspection. ‘You’re medicated up to the gills.’
‘Beg pardon?’ Miriam and I looked at one another.
‘Yeah, the door to your study was open, and there were all these boxes of sleeping tablets. Zero-3. They say it’s heavy-duty stuff. Enough to floor a horse.’
After that remark, I should have floored him, and with a less innocent means than Zero-3.
‘Those are weight-loss tablets, Rat. Three days a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday — you starve yourself. Instead of eating, you swallow a couple of Zero-3 capsules every two hours. They expand in your stomach, so you think you’re full. I can hardly recommend it.’
A shadow of irritation glided over Mr Rat’s face. Considering his own addictive tendencies, to yet a different menu of substances, he was not about to be denied this discovery. He shook his head. ‘It’s a well-known fact that Zero-3 is a potent sleeping pill. My regular doorman on the Reguliersdwarsstraat sells them, too. No need to be secretive about it.’
‘Next time you need to pee,’ I said, ‘open one of the boxes and read the leaflet.’
Mr Rat somehow didn’t need to pee after that. Seen enough, mission accomplished. As I was tied up for the next few weeks with readying the house, it was a full month before I heard, along the grapevine, of my addiction to downers.
‘Well, what do you expect,’ I replied. ‘I live in a brothel. I’d never sleep a wink otherwise.’
So this was how I began the new, sheltered life of my small family: by naïvely letting in a mole from the old, unsheltered life.
23
I took advantage of Miriam and Hinde’s absence to make a couple of telephone calls. Not to my father-in-law, no, not just yet: I had to be certain his daughters had already told him the news. It wasn’t a subject to be conveyed via crossed lines.