Miriam took a sip, set her glass on the end table, and shoved it as far from her as she could. The booze did not agree with her. She laid her head on my shoulder; it slid, as though of its own accord, down to my chest, and then further, onto my lap. She cried almost inaudibly, with a quiet, rustling sound, like water singing in a kettle. The only thing she said fitted into a drawn-out, tremulous sigh.
‘Our little boy.’
INTERMEZZO. 15 September 2010
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
1
The blind wall is back.
In fact, the house is ours thanks to the back garden’s minimalist dimensions. During the years of its vacancy, from ’89 to ’92, it attracted numerous couples in duplicate, with the intention of splitting the large brownstone into a duplex. Their enthusiasm, according to the estate agent, invariably plummeted at the sight of the garden: no more than a postage-stamp courtyard enclosed by two high exterior walls, a fence, and the side of a warehouse. The subsided, moss-covered paving stones gave under your feet, turning every step into a cakewalk. The only growth, aside from the slick moss, was the cautious sprout of a golden rain. And two families’ worth of children were supposed to play out here?
For me, the restricted space was a blessing — saved me all those gardening Saturdays. Right away, Miriam figured out which corner Tonio’s lidded sandbox could fit into, leaving enough space for us to have dinner now and again with friends. An artist/landscape-architect acquaintance promised to transform the little courtyard into a ‘garden room’ (whatever that may be) one day, but never got around to it.
I had more trouble with the blind wall onto which our rear windows looked out. It was the side wall of a block of houses on the Banstraat, wedged between Johannes Verhulst and De Lairessestraat. It wasn’t, incidentally, totally ‘blind’. In addition to a few ventilation grills, there was, to the left and more toward the front of the house, a small bathroom window, half hidden by a wisp of withered ivy. You hardly ever saw light behind the matte glass.
This made for a rather dreary view, like facing out onto railroad tracks, and in fact almost derailed the purchase altogether. But in the end, nature solved the problem. At the bottom of the wall, fresh shoots had sprouted from the clipped ivy, and had begun a careful climb upward. Over the years the unsightly wall became covered in a glistening green carpet of leaves, where a passing breeze could bring out all the various tints of green, shimmering like a mosaic.
In the eighteen years that we lived here, from the summer of 1992 to the summer of 2010, the ever-thickening blanket of ivy, at some places a metre thick, had never been trimmed. Birds nested in it. In the spring of 2007, while I was working temporarily in South Limburg, Miriam decided to surprise me upon my return by giving the grubby courtyard a makeover. Italian stucco and new tiles. Everything antique-pink and terracotta. She had a veranda installed a metre and-a-half above ground level, with French doors leading to the library, and an awning above it.
The puny golden rain, too, had reached maturity in the course of nearly two decades, and spread its broad crown out over the little garden. In good weather we spent many fine hours out there, sheltered by the high adjacent walls as the evenings cooled off. Gardener friends, though, started to raise their concern about the density of the growth.
‘D’you have any idea how much weight is hanging on those shoots?’ a friend asked. ‘If that all comes crashing down, it could take the whole exterior wall with it. Then you’ll be staring straight at your neighbour reading the paper in his armchair.’
That would be the good man Max Nord, who, if all was well, lived behind that side wall, and I did not want that on my conscience. Earlier this year, I resolved to have the ivy trimmed in early summer — and then suddenly it was Black Whitsun, which put paid to that promise. The thick, green wall-hanging and the golden rain, as it passed its prime, were from then on the decor for our daily sessions of despair. Here, on the wooden love seat under the compact arbour, Tonio had sat, three days before his death, with the girl from the photo session. Everything around it had to remain intact as much and for as long as possible.
But since we also had to consider the neighbours, who were now living in fear of their wall, we arranged with our regular handymen to resume maintenance the following February.
2
Last night, when I went to bed just before midnight, it hadn’t happened yet. As was my habit, I stepped out onto the bedroom balcony to take in a few lungfuls of air, which otherwise were now permanently deprived of fresh oxygen. I decided to ask Miriam if she’d drive me to far-off woods and beaches this fall, so I could stroll without having to share my story with passing acquaintances.
The ivy leaves glinted in the light of the moon, which would only set after 1.00 a.m. If anything had been amiss then, I would have noticed it. The night was clear and tranquil, insofar as a city can be tranquil at that hour. I could never hear another ambulance or police siren without imagining they were headed for the Stadhouderskade.
This morning, 15 September, it was as though autumn was suddenly upon us. Even before I opened the bedroom curtains, I could hear the rain and the wind. It had something enduringly familiar about it, that bare, blank wall across from my window. It brought me back to the early nineties, when the ivy was still only a thin covering on the lowest few metres of the wall.
I slid my feet into a pair of slippers, opened the balcony doors, and stepped outside. Our little back garden was a disaster area. The thick ivy had, perhaps in a hard gust of wind, pulled itself loose from the wall, and like a huge, heavy curtain it buckled as it sank. Thanks to the restricted space between the wall and our veranda, the wall covering had rolled itself up neatly during its free fall, and now lay like a gigantic coconut mat ready to be beaten by a carpet beater the size of a telephone pole. The green Goblin tapestry, which we had always looked upon with such pleasure, had now shown us its back: a gnarled pattern of climbing stems and aerial roots, beautiful and mysteriously intricate as the underside of a Persian rug.
The avalanche of leaves had simply pushed aside the still-slender oak, with its supple trunk, but the golden rain appeared to have been devoured, crown and all, by the huge roll of ivy, like a body rolled up in a hearth rug. At closer inspection I could see the very top of the tree sticking out above the ivy mat, far from the place where I assumed its roots to be. The golden rain, which had grown and matured side by side with Tonio over the last eighteen years, and which he had seen in full bloom just before his death, was no more.
So the blind wall was back. Off to the left hung a ragged, dense lock of ivy that half-covered the bathroom window. And down below, nearly at the paving stones, there was a bit of growth left, like a kind of fig leaf for the wall.
It was eight in the morning. The ivy must have come loose between midnight and a quarter of an hour ago. How could I not have heard the snapping branches, the noise of the avalanche?