I imagine him pacing impatiently, with or without his mother, as he attended to this necessary evil. A gravestone for his father. Even if I were that age, it would, if he still loved me, be a defeat for him.
This, me in his shoes — now that’s defeat. For him and for me. God, kid, I wish we could have skipped this, and leap forward to, say, 2034. Me, dead at a respectable age; you, living on toward that age.
4
Since beginning this requiem, I have tried to find solace from other writers who have lost a child.
Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, the male half of twins, died at the age of eleven. If traces of this loss can be found in his work, they are only indirect. The filicide in Macbeth, perhaps. ‘Give sorrow words …’ Maybe, with the portrayal of the young hero in Hamlet, Shakespeare created an idealised version of his own son, and disguised himself as a voyeuristic ghost.
Ben Jonson lost his eldest son at age seven. ‘My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,/Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,/Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.’
Descartes never got over the death of his young daughter, but whether her death played any role in forming his philosophy, I couldn’t say. Klaus Mann, eldest son of Thomas, committed suicide. In his diary entries from the time the lad was twelve, the father wondered if he could fall in love with his sailor-suit-clad son. Klaus’s funeral in Cannes had to make do without the sacred presence of Thomas, who was on a speaking tour of Scandinavia.
Anna Enquist lost her daughter Margit to a traffic accident on the Dam. How she (Margit) sang and played and beamed at the twenty-fifth anniversary party of De Revisor. The infant daughter of P.F. Thomèse became a ‘shadowchild’. Mauringh, the eldest son of Jean-Paul Franssens, jumped in front of a train (his father died a year later). One of Jan Cremer’s sons was murdered. A son of Jeroen Brouwers died of an illness. Not long thereafter, I sat across a restaurant table from the father, and could see, close up, the pain in his tired eyes.
The list is long. Writers are not spared. Perhaps they are asking for tragedies, being so tied up with them professionally. After the publication of George Simenon’s The Disappearance of Odile, his own daughter vanished. She was later found to have committed suicide. Simenon wrote a thousand-plus-page memoir in the form of a letter to her.
I have not been able to take any comfort from my colleagues’ pain. Shared pain lessens nothing. It only augments.
5
On the return trip through the scattered building-blocks of Osdorp toward the land of the living, Miriam again points out the high-rise main block of the Slotervaart Hospital.
‘Want to stop?’ And since I appear to take it as a joke: ‘I’m serious. For your book.’
‘Another time. The stonecutter’s also got to go in the book.’
As we ride past the hospital, I keep my eyes glued to the tower block. Somewhere, on an upper storey, I watched my son being born. Looking out over Amsterdam from that height, and becoming a father at the same time — oh, that gave me the most majestic feeling. The urge to take the still-unwashed babe to the window, to show him (to) the world … I didn’t dare.
I have just seen his gravestone. His photo will come just under the arched upper edge. He’ll be looking out over a patch of gravel about as long as he was tall, from a height of less than a metre.
‘I don’t know quite how to put it,’ Miriam says, ‘but I have the constant feeling that Tonio, well, is living in me. Permanently.’
‘In us both,’ I say. ‘And since Whit Sunday, we, with Tonio in us, live permanently in another world. Hasn’t anybody sent the change-of-address cards yet? It’s a world we never imagined existed. Take the stonecutter, for instance … Just drive over there, walk in and order a gravestone … two months ago, we’d never even considered it. Another world, other doors, other interiors. The curious thing is that we behave as though it’s the most normal thing in the world … stroll around, shopping basket in hand, choosing accessories for Tonio’s grave … like at the corner grocery. The way back to our pre-Whitsun existence is gone, cut off, forever. You see something of the world this way, at least.’
We’ve passed the hospital now. I turn back for a last look at the ugly tower block. A couple of days after Tonio was born: I stand with my mother at the glass window, behind which Miriam has appeared wearing a nightgown, with the baby in her arms, her face fatigued, but all smiles.
‘Yeah … yessir, you sure made a good one there.’ She claps her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh dear, what am I saying?’
6
Last week, Miriam got a phone call from Lieftink Bros.: the gravestone had been put in place. They didn’t have quite enough gravel to fill the plot, but it would be taken care of ASAP.
Miriam made a telephone-round of the family straightaway, to find a suitable date for us all to visit the grave together, for you couldn’t call it an unveiling anymore. Natan thought it was strange that they hadn’t done it in the presence of the family. Surely that was a widely held tradition? But, naturally, he wanted to accompany us to the gravesite, also to see his own, endangered surname chiselled into stone.
My father-in-law, my sister, my brother, with wife and child: they were all free on Monday 12 July, the day after the World Cup finals. My mother-in-law, who had so vociferously refused even to shake her ex-husband’s hand at the funeral, would have to go another time. Even then, we couldn’t discount that she would raise a stink about the name ROTENSTREICH on the gravestone. Dealing with her was a matter of never-ending, and usually fruitless, diplomacy.
7
Before the finals, Miriam served deep-fried calamari with the drinks.
‘The guy at the Albert Cuyp market said it was one of Paul’s tentacles. Y’know, the German octopus that predicts football results. By … how’d he do it again? … picking mussels out of the right box, something like that.’
‘And you just toss a tentacle of the oracle into a deep-fryer? That’s tempting the gods.’
‘Nah. Octopus. Paul predicted that Spain would win. Now he’s been rendered harmless. At the Cuyp, they cut the bad mussel out of him and threw it to the gulls. Spain’s gonna lose.’
‘These rings have an alarming crunch to them.’
‘I sprinkled coarse sea salt on top.’
Every moment that, thanks to a bit of diversion, I don’t have to think My life is ruined for good is a plus. At the same time, right after such a moment of distraction, I am convinced that I cannot let go of the thought of my ruined life for even a second. This would be my permanent tribute to Tonio. His life cut short for good, and his future definitively behind lock and key? Then I must be continually confronted with the ruination of my own existence. My focus must not be allowed to waver.
In that duplicitous frame of mind, I take my place in front of the TV.
8
I could keep telling myself that I couldn’t care less who won, but I was at least conscious of the subdued atmosphere after the anticlimax. I had expected the spectators to leave Museumplein in a jeering protest as they made their way to various flashpoints throughout the city: the Spanish consulate, for instance, and any number of Iberian restaurants. I pricked up my ears, but the streets were quiet — there was no noisy grousing by streams of passersby, no vuvuzelas.