I have not been back since 15 June 1988, but I recognise the building at once. Miriam was so caught up in her contractions that morning that she only realised we were at the wrong hospital once we got to reception. Tonio never tired of hearing this story.
‘Sorry, honey, sorry,’ the midwife kept repeating. ‘My fault. Stupid of me. Sorry.’
It was clear, Tonio, that there was no way we were going to turn around and go to the VU, where you were supposed to be born. The midwife pushed the wheelchair with a groaning Miriam down the hall to the lift. Your father wobbled alongside, one hand on your mother’s neck. The wrong hospital. Miriam a wrung-out wreck in a wheelchair. This couldn’t possibly end well.
‘But it did!’ he’d exclaim. ‘Just look at me!’
3
From Plesmanlaan, we turn right into the bland monotony of Osdorp.
‘Jan Rebelstraat,’ Miriam says. ‘Have a look at the map. I was here once with Nelleke, but that was sleepwalking. It’s close to Westgaarde.’
In a north-west corner of Osdorp, I locate the Jan Rebelstraat, indeed not far from the cemetery.
‘Turn left here.’ This autumnal summer sky makes me just as nervous as this afternoon’s uneasy grazing sunlight did. ‘There it is.’
Miriam drives past what looks like a normal shop window. LIEFTINK BROS. STONECUTTERS — SINCE 1913.
‘Just a sec.’ Miriam turns off the engine, closes her eyes. ‘Help me muster up some courage.’
I undo her seatbelt and pull her close. ‘Think of last time, Minchen, when you were here with Nelleke. You pretended it was a garden centre … shopping for a little something for our back terrace. A bargain from the sale section.’
‘That was then,’ she whispers. ‘It’s harder now.’
The door, complete with jangling bell, makes me think of one of those old-fashioned general stores. The left side of the shop has been made into a life-size imitation graveyard, like on a film set. What doesn’t tally is all that marble, flamed pink and striped pearl-grey, so glossy and unweathered. Nowhere is there a patch of moss or a sprig of grass between the stone chips that fill up the plots.
Grass markers. Slants. Uprights. Combinations of these. I wonder if the names inscribed on them, some of them with gilded letters, have been made up. If so, what about the portraits sunk into the marble — or are they computer composites? The novelist’s ideal playroom.
To the right, a display of pink marble hearts, and toy animals (teddy bears, bunny rabbits) carved out of light-grey marble. Behind that, two desks with computer equipment. On the wall, large boards with typeface examples.
A man of around forty gets up from one of the desks. Miriam apologises that we’re early. Handshakes all round, which we don’t normally do at the garden centre. We assume he recognises our names from the gravestone.
‘No problem,’ the man says.
Early. He leads us to the workshop behind the showroom, where a second man is at work in a hazy cloud of dust. Maybe they’re brothers, but not the 1913 ones. Suddenly, before we’ve prepared ourselves for it, we are looking down on a gravestone, lying flat on its back and supported by wooden trestles — with our surnames on it.
‘I’ll just go get the paperwork,’ says the man who received us. He goes back to the front room.
TONIO
ROTENSTREICH –
VAN DER HEIJDEN
I point out the hyphen to Miriam. ‘You see how these things take on a life of their own? It’s as though Tonio, maiden name Van der Heijden, was married to a Mr. Rotenstreich. One little hyphen, and he’s lying in his grave with another identity. With a different gender, even.’
‘Stuff for a thriller,’ Miriam says. ‘Alfred Kossmann coined the term “identity fraud” — that’s where it all started, right? Without my thesis on him, we wouldn’t have come up with the name Tonio.’
‘All right, the thriller opens with an exhumation,’ I say. ‘Reason: an erroneously chiselled hyphen, giving the buried person a mistaken identity. I’ll leave the rest up to you. After all, it’s your last name that …’
‘That what?’
‘That doesn’t belong there.’
‘You can still have them take it off.’
‘Not on your life. Not now that I can finally make good on an old promise.’
The three names, and Tonio’s dates, are printed on a sheet of paper, which is taped to the stone. Everything can still be amended, shifted. The man returns with the paperwork. ‘Check along with me, if you will … The headstone is made of Belgian bluestone … one hundred centimetres high, eighty wide, and eight thick. How do you want the photograph?’
The rectangular plaque with Tonio’s self-portrait as Oscar Wilde etched onto it is, I see only now, is lying loosely on the stone. ‘What are the choices?’ I ask.
‘Anything you like,’ says the man. ‘From medallion to recessed. My personal advice would be: half-sunken into the headstone, so it’s still in mid-relief.’
I look over at Miriam. She nods. The man has understood, and makes a note of it. I bring his attention to the extraneous dash. I needn’t explain; he knows the story. How the hyphen still found its way into the design, he couldn’t say, but he assures us it will not end up on the final product.
‘Otherwise it’s at our cost,’ he says.
Back in the showroom we pick out the definitive typeface. We choose ‘Albertus Bold’. We watch as the man changes the headstone’s lettering on the computer.
I draw his attention to the excess space between the components of the dates. He trims it. Out comes a printout of the definitive text, with the photo in place. I point out the misleading hyphen again. Without a word, he removes it from the computer screen as though it’s a fleck, and I get a new printout.
I am reminded of the young woman at the registry office, to whom, bundle of nerves that I was, I neglected to give Tonio’s middle name. Granting Tonio his complete name has taken more than twenty-two years. I have waited until it had to be etched in stone. The shame I now feel is infinitely greater than back then, on 16 June 1988, when I stood outside the registry office with an incomplete birth certificate. (‘How am I going to explain this to my wife?’)
‘The stone,’ the man says, ‘can go into production this week. We’ll place it in a fortnight. Just as a reminder: Belgian bluestone weathers over time … it’s supposed to. Gives it a nice effect. The gravel will be refreshed every four years.’
He motions us to wait for a moment, and goes back to his colleague in the workshop. After a brief exchange, he returns. ‘We won’t start on it until next Monday at the earliest. So … if you change your mind as to the lettering or the photo, you can always call us first thing Monday morning. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll assume we can go ahead as planned.’
Miriam wants to leave, but I linger in the doorway separating the showroom and the workshop until the man has run off his own printout (without the hyphen) and taped it to the gravestone of Tonio Rotenstreich van der Heijden.
My feet feel uncomfortable on the cement floor. It’s Tonio’s feet that should have been standing here, in shoes that have gained a size, the flesh having got looser and fatter after two, three decades. I would have preferred to see him here at forty-something, in which case I would have been the eighty-something deceased for whom he was ordering a gravestone. ‘Belgian bluestone.’ Maybe he would think to print out one of the photos he’d taken of his father over the years, and incorporate it into the monument.