‘That does shed new light on the purchase of that new watch,’ she replied. ‘Who knows how bad he felt about it.’
‘Well, we never got around to it.’
‘He was too beat.’
Miriam had the watch meticulously repaired, shortening the wristband to fit her own arm, which is (was) far more slender than her son’s. Since picking it up from the jeweller, she wears that watch — with its extra-masculine look, thanks to the little buttons on either side of the twistable outer dial — constantly, day and night.
CHAPTER SIX. Nourishing hunger
1
Shortly after she cleared out Tonio’s flat in De Baarsjes, Miriam refurnished his old room in our house with all his original things. For days, I dared not enter the room, but when I once unthinkingly went in, I was struck by his good taste — pricey without being lavish.
Even the oversized train-station clock, which he himself had gotten the biggest kick out of, was back.
Two weeks after Whit Sunday, the photographer Klaas Koppe brought round an envelope full of blow-ups in which Tonio happened to feature, such as a few taken at a recent Book Balclass="underline" Tonio with his parents, Tonio with Klaas’s daughter Iris. Miriam framed them at once, and hung them in a much-used curve in the stairwell. Not long thereafter, she came in, teary-eyed, to say she’d packed up the photos and replaced them by less-recent ones. Later, I discovered a paper bag on the landing with the framed photos. I pulled one out (Tonio and Iris) — and took a blow to the gut, which then nearly got wrung out. Tonio had not been so tangibly present since his visit on 20 May. I quickly slid it back into the bag — which is still there, propped in the same corner.
In the midst of Tonio’s completely reconstructed teen bedroom, Miriam still does manage to breathe. She sits there all day long at the computer, with Tonio’s laptop within reach. When I want to talk to her, I tend to stay out on the landing, and conduct the conversation through the half-open door.
2
Miriam gets up at 5.00 a.m. every day to go to work in Tonio’s room. Around nine, as I lie reading the paper in the next room, she brings breakfast. We eat and talk, side by side, propped up against the pillows. Radio 4 is on.
This morning, she came into the bedroom without the breakfast tray. A light slap on my legs told me to scoot over, so she could sit on the edge of the bed. She was not crying, but her face was taut.
‘Able to get anything done?’ I asked.
‘I was suddenly so afraid of losing you, too,’ she said testily. ‘And there I’d be, mourning Tonio all on my own.’
Then the tears came. When there was no other way out, I took refuge in literature.
‘The end of The Trial … remember, Minchen? That Josef K. believes the shame will outlive him? Well, my grief for Tonio will long outlive me. I don’t know how long you think you’ll outlive me, but you’ll always be able to share your grief with me … until your last breath … it’s strong enough for that. Even after I’m dead.’
‘I didn’t mean I think you’ll die soon.’
‘That I’d start on a second brood after all, is that it?’
‘Y’know … just the plain fact that I could end up alone, and be the only one who …’
‘Minchen, there’s no morgue tag hanging from my big toe yet, nor is there a guarantee for longevity. There’s no tag hanging on your big toe either. Let’s take it day by day. Together. Let’s do our best to guard each other against sickness. If that’s asking too much, then let’s at least try not to make each other sick. Or crazy.’
3
When Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) at his parents’ home, after his disastrous sojourn in Paris, his sister listened at the door of his room, behind which she could hear his anguished sobbing. As a seventeen-year-old with writer’s itch, this intrigued me no end: the concept that reliving, in poetry, one’s own experiences could have such a powerful effect on one’s disposition. I should from now on mistrust every word by my own hand that is not well-nigh illegible from grief and melancholia.
Since I have started working on this requiem, Miriam complains (her computer being situated directly below my writing table) of sudden bursts of noise above her head. She says I regularly slam my chair backwards, curse loudly, then stomp to and fro, at times ranting unintelligibly.
I am not, at age fifty-eight, going to hide behind poetic torment, but while I am not always conscious of my blasphemous work interruptions, I have to admit she’s right. When Tonio used to do his homework in the very spot she now occupies, he never complained of falling plaster dust fluttering onto his computer. Except once, when he proudly and amusedly announced during dinner: ‘This afternoon, all of a sudden, I heard you start cursing and throwing things.’
I would give anything to know what possessed me, with my small family still intact, that afternoon. Maybe I realised, in an unbearably lucid moment, how fragile we were, the three of us, and that our bliss could fall to pieces without warning. It could have led to the paroxysm of impotent rage to which Tonio, a floor below, was an acoustic witness.
Ach, of course not — this would be too pat. I probably quaked with anger in search of a word balanced on the tip of my pen, suddenly blown away by the switching on of a leaf-blower out on the street. Some such thing.
4
‘There will always be a before and an after,’ one condoloncer wrote. As the months tick on, I appreciate each day how true those words are. A deep scar has been drawn straight through my life. ‘Before’, my existence was worthwhile; ‘after’, it is worthless — I can’t put it any more simply than that.
I will probably continue to write, and if I do indeed find the strength to do so, I will give it my all, for otherwise there’s no point. But actually believing in the craft, as when I was Tonio’s protector and breadwinner — that is a thing of the past.
In my darkest moments, I am even capable of thinking that a bit more professional effort on my part might have saved Tonio — even though I realise at once that greater concentration on my work during his life would have meant less attention for him. So there you are: the sombre surges of my constricted brooding.
5
The letselschadeadvocaat on the Tesselschadestraat (this phrase is begging for a limerick)* had managed to get his hands on the Serious Traffic Accidents Unit dossier, including the CD-ROM with images of the collision recorded by the Holland Casino’s CCTV camera. The public prosecutor handling the case offered to meet with us.
[* A letselschadeadvocaat is a personal-injury lawyer.]
Forensic measurements, police officers at the accidents unit had told us earlier, confirmed that the driver of the Suzuki had been driving ‘a bit too fast’, and that Tonio had drunk ‘a considerable amount’. According to the files obtained by the personal-injury lawyer, the Suzuki was going between 67 and 69 kilometres per hour in a 50 kph zone. Blood tests showed that Tonio had 0.94 mg/ml of alcohol in his body, corresponding to six or seven beers. (For motorists, the limit is 0.5 mg/ml, the equivalent of three beers.)
‘Six beers,’ said the personal-injury lawyer. ‘Not much, in fact. That’s how an evening usually starts.’