Left onto the Hobbemastraat. The asphalt glistens with embedded bits of glass, as though the road surface is mirroring the starry night above, but you’re too tired to lift your head and cast your eyes upward. You do see, in a flash, the book stalls set up on either side of the street for an Uitmarkt some ten years ago. You and I stood behind the table at my publisher’s stand, signing books together.
You’ve got other things on your mind now: a döner kebab from the Turkish snack bar. It was your favourite lunch when you worked at Dixons — plenty of shawarma joints in the Kinkerstraat neighbourhood. Heading toward your destination, you cycle between the tram rails of lines 2 and 5. You pass the leather-goods store where we bought Mama that red-brown set of bags for her fortieth birthday. You always managed to send costs skyrocketing with your expensive taste. You enjoyed giving presents even more than getting them. ‘She’s sure to want a toilet bag, too … don’t you think, Adri? Look, it’s made of the same leather. And here, this carry-on bag, the same leather, too.’
No, the leather-goods store doesn’t ring any bells with you tonight. Your thoughts have narrowed to Jenny and döner kebab. The traffic lights at the crosswalk at the corner of the Park Hotel blink lazily. Ach, that Jenny. How she turned a quarter-turn, at your request, in order to benefit more from the reflector sheets … and you, bent over the tripod with the reflecting umbrella above your head. More like a parasol … You might still have the presence of mind to cast a glance to your right, past the yellow flashing lights. A taxi is just driving over the crosswalk. On that side, the Stadhouderskade is otherwise empty.
And to the left? If you didn’t first look left, was it because there was no sound coming from that side? Or were your ears still pounding from the beats of techno-animal Carl Craig?
Maybe you were a bit dizzy from doing those dance dips with Dennis.
12
We provided Tonio with plenty of toys. He had a way of charming us out of anything his heart desired. Grandma Wies once said: ‘You always get your way in the end.’ She made a fake-suffering face to go with it. From that moment on, Tonio seemed to see it as his job, refining his charm as he went, to get his way. A teary eye was often more than enough.
The expensive problem was that once Tonio had figured out the mystery of a toy, he got bored with it. He could put together, one-two-three, a technical Lego set intended for age groups far above his own, but the then secret formula had been cracked. At best, the resulting construction could be expanded with accessories and attachments, which kept costs down. But usually his eye fell upon an entirely new challenge, complete with flashing lights, rolling caterpillar tracks, and an electrical transformer.
He constructed a power-driven Ferris wheel out of a K’Nex building set; it was so tall he had to use the kitchen stepstool to reach the top. When I pointed this out, he replied: ‘The Ferris wheel on Dam Square is higher.’
Roller skates. A super-manoeuvrable silver-coloured kick scooter. The radio-controlled jeep with tractor tyres. Warhammer armies, complete with half a paint studio to decorate the miniature soldiers and their arsenal.
Computers and laptops, the toys of the growing adolescent. The games that went with them. The software.
After he turned eighteen, he expanded his playing field to the cafés where you had to be seen. Club Trouw, where he spent his last night: wasn’t that, with all its techno music, his final plaything? The outcome of a lifetime of toys? And there had to be a bicycle, too, on which to ride home, spaced out. From technical Lego via a headful of technopounding on his way to a Media Technology degree — somewhere in the process, at a crucial point, he was scooped up and thrown down. Then came the ambulances, and he was subjected to medical technology, with which they had hoped to piece him back together.
13
Even murder serves a purpose, no matter how perverse. It is, after all, the aim of the murderer to bump off his victim. There is, likewise, apparently, a point to a soldier felled on the battlefield: he does it for his fatherland; he is cannon fodder in service of the triumph over Evil.
And the victims of a terrorist attack? At least in the eyes of the person who gave the order, their death had a purpose. The more casualties, the more successful the operation. Not only suicide terrorists, but their victims, too, die for their country, judging from the memorial services and plaques organised from higher up.
I can see no point, unearth no purpose, whatsoever in Tonio’s death. He was on his way home, and felt like a bite to eat on the way, and encountered an unwanted and unintended force in his way, which killed him. The operator of the deadly projectile did not know, until that very moment, that he was operating a deadly projectile. He had left his job, and was driving home with a friend. Silent night, holy night.
Tonio’s death was the result of the collision of two forces. The devastation they were capable of causing, should they meet, was calculable before the fact with scientific probability. The destruction they eventually caused was able to be established, after the fact, with scientific certainty.
Tonio’s death could thus be reduced, in both point and purpose, to a physics formula. Our dismay was all the greater when we realised that our flood of emotions had run up against an ice-cold formula, hard as rock. There is no guarantee that emotions are able, in the long run, to wear away even the hardest stone.
14
In Asbestemming, I described once seeing a statue of St. Sebastian, who in a sort of death-leap is hit by the shower of arrows. They are thick, cast-iron arrows, and they pierce St. Sebastian’s trunk according to a very precise geometrical pattern: as though a square harrow had been rammed in its entirety straight through the martyr’s chest from behind.
Tonio, your fatal accident will continually pierce me in the same way for the rest of my days. My God, you dear boy, why did this have to happen? Why, goddamn it, did everything have to be ruined — you, us, the future, everything?
Sometimes, to put it bluntly, I’m pretty pissed off at you. A bit earlier homeward, a few less beers, a light on your bike, look before you cross … and it wouldn’t have happened. You little bastard. You told Jenny on Facebook that Saturday you were still ‘beat’ from the previous night. Beat — your favourite term for hung over. Doesn’t that give you the responsibility to get a good night’s sleep for once? You three wanted to ‘paint the town red’, as Goscha put it. Well, you did paint it red — with your own blood, you fool.
Why this? Why this irrevocable death, which nothing can correct? Goddamn it, Tonio, I was prepared to face every problem with you, no matter how terrible. Your worst misery would still have been a formidable adversary for me. I would have fought down to my last drops of sweat and blood to find a solution. Anything for you.
The problem is: your death isn’t a problem, because there is no solution — even one that doesn’t stand a chance.
15
No, I blame myself. I do not reproach you, in your groundwater-deep, breathless sleep. Your stillness is one massive indictment of myself, even without you wanting it so, because you can no longer want. Your death speaks the truth about my failure. Your death is the sum total of my negligence. There is always the possibility that your death was the result of that one act of negligence — which one, I don’t know, and that only makes it worse.