Once I became a father myself, I was not relieved of these obsessional fantasies. If I were to lose my child, could I then go on living, or would I forfend the pain by doing myself in as quickly as possible? And then there was Miriam, to whom I also had a responsibility. I could suggest a double suicide as a kind of painkiller.
I made a little moral deal with myself, which in itself was no less obsessive. Thinking back on the Makelaarsbrug and on the risky child’s bike seat, I came to the decision that I would commit suicide if I had in any way caused my child’s death.
Tonight’s dilemma was that I could not feel any less guilty of Tonio’s death. It didn’t take a dodgy bike seat to point to my guilt. I could not prevent his death, which was damning enough. On the other hand, I did not want Miriam to have to deal with two corpses in one day. I could not give the disburdening of my guilt priority over the comforting and care she needed.
The longer I thought about it as I waited for Miriam, the more futile the question of suicide became. Tonio was dead, and my self-destruction would be a joke by comparison.
29
It was to be expected that, now that our marital crisis was resolved, various people would do their best to keep the recent conflict alive for a while longer.
‘Did you hear? They’ve made up.’
No, what kind of pub talk was that. They craved drama, and if that was in short supply they would just be creative about it.
Months after my homecoming and our move to the new house, my mother-in-law, herself about to leave her husband, told me that ‘at the neighbourhood club’ it was a foregone conclusion that we, her daughter and son-in-law, ‘had split up’. She was at our place for a visit; we sat in the living room having tea. Tonio was playing on the floor.
‘What do you think, Mum?’ Miriam asked, with that special incisiveness in her voice that she reserved for her mother.
Wies had the habit of quickly running her thumb and index finger over her nose before she struck. ‘Yes, well, you know … people don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason.’
I looked at Tonio in his play corner … On his immobile little back I could see he’d suspended play. His grandmother’s words had alarmed him. A cluster of Legos clutched in each hand, he sat and listened intently. Tonio had just heard the incomprehensible news that his grandparents (she nearly seventy, he eighty) would soon be separating. Now Grandma Wies dropped in to announce that she had it on good authority ‘at the club’ that the same thing was about to happen to his father and mother.
Split up.
‘No, they don’t, do they,’ said Miriam, even sharper now. ‘People don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason. Gossip doesn’t just materialise from thin air. Right? Always an element of truth to it. Maybe the whole truth. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But tell me, Mum, what’s your conclusion, sitting here on the sofa in our new house? Does it look to you like we’re about to split up?’
‘You know, Miriam … I’m only repeating what I’ve heard at the club. That’s all.’ And, after considering for a moment: ‘People don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason.’
Tonio had not gone back to his Legos. He turned his head, and looked at the tea-drinking company with big, serious eyes.
‘Wies, aside from everything you hear and believe at face value,’ I said, ‘do you really think it’s a good idea to come unload it all in front of your grandson? A child of four has ears, and more importantly, feelings, too. You could have at least asked Miriam or me beforehand if there was anything to your clubhouse cackle.’
She shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the tips of her shoes. ‘I only said that people don’t just say this kind of thing for no reason.’ Her lowered voice was perhaps a concession to Tonio’s feelings.
Maybe it was also to spare his feelings that I did not boot granny out of the house then and there.
30
The Rotenstreich sisters were back — shattered by the news they bore, and the reaction it had elicited from the old folks. They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask.
‘Minchen,’ I said, ‘we haven’t touched a drop the past two weeks, no problem. But I won’t survive tonight without an anaesthetic.’
Miriam and I each took one of the pills we’d been given at the hospital and washed it down with some vodka. Hinde passed. She made a sandwich with one of the rolls Miriam had already sliced when the doorbell rang this morning. They weren’t entirely stale, despite the summery warmth that had carried on all day.
‘Okay, so tell me,’ I said flatly (I still had to get acquainted with my own reaction), ‘how did your parents react?’
‘My father took it pretty quietly,’ Hinde said. ‘Didn’t say much. He’s always been one to bottle it up, but all the more so now. Shocked, of course, but with him you have to read between the lines.’
‘My mother just started screaming,’ Miriam said. ‘She kept repeating how awful it was for me. She was being honest, that I’ll have to give her.’
Pill + vodka: I remember little of what we talked about that evening. Each of us sat trapped under our own bell-jar of bewilderment. Intermittently, Miriam burst into fits of tears.
‘This can’t be … it can’t be.’
Yes, I did speak on the phone with my father-in-law, but I can’t recall who rang who. ‘I turned off the television,’ he said with his still-beautiful Polish accent, ‘and just sat for a while talking to myself. Why, I kept asking myself, why a boy of not even twenty-two? And why do I, an old man of ninety-seven, have to go on living? Why?’
31
‘Are we being punished,’ asked Miriam a while later, ‘for having been so happy, the three of us? For being such an ideal threesome?’
For the first time today, her anguish had an undertone of anger. She eyed me fiercely through her tears.
‘Minchen, as far as we know,’ I answered weakly, ‘this was just a matter of blind fate … and blind fate doesn’t hand out specific punishments.’
‘So why does it feel like that? It feels like retribution. For our arrogance, that we dared to be so happy together.’
32
‘If you two think you’ll be all right on your own,’ Hinde said, ‘I think I’ll go home now. It’s not going to be much of a night, for me either, but … I think I’m better off in my own bed. And there’s Dixie.’
‘If you can’t face it at home,’ Miriam said, ‘just come back here. You’ve got the key.’
Hinde promised. Dixie was her cat.
‘I’ll leave some bed things on that couch.’ Miriam pointed to the chaise longue across from the TV. We hugged Hinde goodbye and thanked her for her help and for sticking with us all day.
‘Don’t mention it,’ she said.
Miriam walked her sister downstairs. They stayed in the front hall, talking and crying, for a while longer. After the door clicked closed, I heard Miriam climb the stairs. She walked past the living room and slowly continued up to the bedroom level. As the most dreadful night of my life was unfolding, she left me alone.
I sat stock-still, listening. Cupboard doors clattered upstairs. Heels on parquet. I didn’t hear her come back down: suddenly she was there in the living room, a pillow under one arm, and folded sheets and blankets under the other. She laid the bedding on the chaise longue and sat down next to me on the sofa.
We did not speak. Too exhausted, too numb to console each other. The valium and the vodka did their work, and we gladly encouraged the torpor with new portions of alcohol. The only point of thinking was if there was the chance of finding a solution. I couldn’t even think: here we are, two people with a problem. There was no problem, because there was no possible solution, ever. Death itself could loosely be considered a problem: how do we deal with that stinking, irrevocable fact? A dead person, however, was too dead to constitute a problem.