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Go lie down on the living-room sofa. The afghan that Mama was curled up under last night while watching TV must be there somewhere. Pillows galore. You spent sixteen years of your life in this house. After graduation you were in no hurry to leave — you stayed under your mother’s wing for another two years. So what’s another night? Do it for us. You’re bound to move back in this September anyway, when you have to leave the Nepveustraat. The census people say statistics show more and more young people living at home again after a few years on their own. The demographists call them ‘boomerang kids’. There is no generation gap anymore.

C’mon, there’s no shame in it. Sleep in tomorrow morning as long as you want. Mama will make you a fantastic Whitsun breakfast.

10

For a moment, he seems to hesitate, but that’s his unsteady way of biking. He stands, his buttocks off the saddle, nearly motionless on the pedals, and almost falls over. He could still turn left just past the Concertgebouw, along Café Welling, where as a child he put in so many pub-hours with his father.

Tonio goes straight ahead. His is a fixed route. Van Baerle, past the Stedelijk Museum, over the Vondelpark viaduct, Eerste Constantijn Huygens. Left on the Overtoom, continuing on to De Baarjes and the insomniac flatmate.

At the next intersection, too, he can still reconsider. Left on the Willemsparkweg, and he’ll be home in a jiffy. His manoeuvres suggest he’s going to turn right onto the Paulus Potterstraat, but he quickly corrects his course, returning in a gentle curve to the Van Baerle, where he cycles past the old music conservatory, now being renovated into a chic hotel.

If he turns, now focused and resolutely, onto the Jan Luykenstraat, then at once I’ll know what’s possessed him.

You know, Tonio, sometimes I worry about your eating habits. Your friend Jonas, himself a good eater who never gains an ounce, says you’ve shed many kilos these past two years by systematically skipping meals and quashing your appetite with cigarettes. Take today. You nibbled at some snacks at that duff party in the Vondelpark this afternoon, and that’s it. The three of you drank beer at Goscha’s place, and later, in club Trouw, Goscha could hardly keep track of the rounds. Food — no thought of it.

For years, you would make your rounds past the work tables in my study. Once a manuscript lay there entitled Voedzame hunger. You asked: ‘What’s that, Adri, “nourishing hunger”? You can’t eat hunger, can you? How could it be nourishing?’ I explained that the story was about love, and that love resembles hunger, but the kind of hunger you and your lover gorge yourselves with. ‘Look at it this way … being madly in love makes you forget to eat. With lovesickness, it’s even worse. You live on your own reserves, until you don’t feel hunger anymore. That’s what they mean when they say that someone is consumed by love. It guts you.’

Miriam says I completely lack didactic talent, and my wise lesson will not do any good today, either. I don’t know how things stand with your feelings for Jenny, but I do know they haven’t suppressed your appetite to that of a sparrow. You’ve got what, forty years ago, we called ‘the munchies’. The only place in Amsterdam you know where you can satisfy that urge at this time of night is in the neighbourhood around Leidseplein, with its fast-food automats and shawarma joints.

It won’t be a banquet. You’ve only got a fiver in your grey wallet, plus a fistful of coins.

Your hunger might persuade you to make a U-turn after all and plunder our fridge. As I said, you wouldn’t wake me, because my recalcitrant stomach already has. And your mother, she’s such a deep sleeper that you’d have to let a jar of pickles slip through your fingers to rouse her. Go on. The cats will come sniff at you, rub along your calves with their thick, furry tails.

Now I understand why you nearly turned onto the Paulus Potterstraat. So far, all north-east-heading streets here lead in just one direction, to Leidseplein and the snack bars. But for sentimental reasons you took the next street, Jan Luyken, where you went to school. The playground of the Cornelis Free School, completely vacant in the clear night. Aren’t you tempted to stop for a moment, rest your foot on the curb? You used to holler and cavort on this paved patch of courtyard. There are your old teachers … the cheerful Loes, the somewhat mysterious Jeanine … They were crazy about you. In that now dark, impenetrable building, you learned to read, write, and do sums. You built a Viking ship there and, dressed up as Dorus, you performed Er zaten twee motten. Day after day, a Moroccan kid waited for you on this playground in the afternoon, first sweet-talking you and then making off with your first mobile phone.

Jakob lived a ways further up the street. His father still lives there. One afternoon, there was a misunderstanding between Mama and Grandma Wies. Grandma was supposed to pick you up from school on a different day than usual and take you to play at her place on the Eemstraat, because she had already left Grandpa Natan. Someone must have made a mistake, because no one came to fetch you. Jakob’s dad, who came to pick up his son, waited with you for a long while.

‘So where does your granny live, Tonio?’

‘On the Eenstraat, I said so already, jeepers.’ And more vehemently: ‘The Eenstraat, Joost, the Eenstraat!’ Do you remember, Tonio, how the incident turned out? All right in the end, apparently: we didn’t have to put out an Amber Alert, or whatever the missing-child alarm was called in those days.

Oh, so you’re cycling further? I notice I’m still trying to tinker with your timing. A second here, a second there. You’re now passing Joost and Jakob’s house on Jan Luykenstraat. They hosted the reception after the school play that marked the end of primary school. While the parents drank cocktails in the living room, you and Jakob and your classmates retreated to the basement. It was so quiet down there, contrary to all our expectations, that after a while one of the mothers, maybe Afra’s, went to make sure you hadn’t all been asphyxiated in the closeness of the basement. She came back nonplussed.

‘They’re sitting there, crying. All of them.’

From that moment on, a group of mothers periodically descended to the cellar. When the door opened, the bawling could be heard above the adult hubbub upstairs; the sobbing persisted shamelessly. Miriam returned, pale, from the basement.

‘Incredible, what a pity party,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen so much childhood anguish in one place.’

‘Tonio, too?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, what do you think. They’ve just realised they might never see each other again. I don’t know who it started with, but they’ve set each other off.’

Once in a while, a mother herded her big baby into the living room, where he or she, red-eyed, could cool down before being allowed to return downstairs to the orgy of blubbering. When Miriam decided it was time to take you home, you came to say goodnight to me with a face withered by prolonged crying. You couldn’t muster up a smile anymore. It was for real.

11

Are you grinning right now, on your bike, as you think back on that bawl-fest? Or does it make you wistful, because time has so bitterly confirmed your classmates’ cellar-snivelling? That was goodbye. From that basement, you split up and swarmed to high schools across the city. In the course of the past ten years, you bumped into an old classmate from the Cornelis Free now and then, but these were mostly awkward encounters. The old camaraderie had been left behind in the Nijsen family’s basement.

At the end of the Jan Luyken, the massive, dark-red Rijksmuseum looms to your right. You’ve always thought it intriguing that the largest and most valuable of the city’s treasures just hang there in the dark, unseen, their fate in the hands of a soulless security system.