‘Did you fall? Bang into something?’
‘I was trying to pull out a hair,’ she said, ‘and the tweezers slipped.’
I almost laughed, because this was her all over. The perfect motto to sum up her life: tug a single hair out of your chin, and injure your face with the tweezers. I asked about the therapy.
‘Well, I think they’ve done all they can do.’
I got a fright, but she meant that she was ‘kind of’ finished with chemo. ‘The tumor’s still there, but it’s dormant. Sure, I’d rather be rid of it altogether, but they say that could take another three years. On top of it, I had a chest infection. That’s why I’m wheezing like this. I’ve only got 50 per cent lung capacity.’
‘Isn’t that the emphysema?’ Again, I caught myself being concerned about Tonio’s clandestine smoking — until something like an X-ray of his wrecked lungs popped into my head.
‘Yeah, that, too.’
Then I saw Frans and Mariska walk up with their son, Daniel, now sixteen months old. They had come by tram, or a combination of bus and tram. We all hovered around Daniel’s pram until the poor little guy started bawling from the excess attention. (‘So big!’)
We walked together to the grave, slowly, Natan setting the tempo. And again, the cemetery proved itself to be a modest labyrinth, where you always managed to take a wrong turn somewhere. Everything was still wet from the midday thunderstorm, but the ground had not been turned into a swamp. Nor was it all slowly drying out, for the sun was hiding behind a low cloud cover. The rabbits had resumed their darting through the hedges, which still glistened with raindrops.
Usually we got lost because Miriam insisted on relying on the map. Today, though, we all just trudged alongside one another, more or less following the route we remembered from the funeral.
In the end, we reached the grave from two sides, in two groups: Natan, flanked by the women, had taken an earlier turn than Frans and I, but we all converged on the grave at the same time. Frans was pushing the empty pram (Daniel dangled in his mother’s arms), and parked it next to a neighbouring headstone. The old provisional sign, including the plot number 1-376-B, still marked Tonio’s grave. We stood in a semi-circle around the gravelled plot.
TONIO
ROTENSTREICH
VAN DER HEIJDEN
15 JUNE 1988 23 MAY 2010
What a relief, now that I could confirm with my own eyes that the hyphen was gone. I laid my hand on my father-in-law’s arm. ‘So, Natan, there’s your name. How about that?’
His doleful face wrinkled into an insecure smile. I didn’t think the moisture on the pink half-moons under his eyes had been brought on only by the puffs of wind from between the hedges.
‘Fine,’ he said quietly. ‘Fine.’
His life had been quite a journey. He had already had three nationalities before leaving his home and undertaking the trek through Europe. Born in 1912 under the Habsburg monarchy, he became a Pole after World War I. With the Stalin — Hitler pact of ’39, Natan’s part of the Ukraine (Lemberg) fell under Soviet rule, and he was conscripted into the Red Army. Thus began his long march to the Netherlands, and finally to this graveyard in Buitenveldert. He had served as an interpreter in the Red Army: he knew his languages, including Russian. He helped raze Berlin, and after the German surrender he returned to Poland — only to find that anti-Semitism there had only gotten more rabid after the occupation. He volunteered to assist Jewish war orphans, of which a few hundred were to go to Holland to be adopted by foster families.
Once in the Netherlands, he met Wies, a Jewish nurse who had gone into hiding during the war with a family of market gardeners in Sint-Pancras, where she spent long hours in an underground dirt shelter. They got married, and in the fifties had two daughters.
I never did manage to figure out how an incorrect birth year (1916) got into Natan’s passport. Had there been a mistake when he first arrived in Holland, lowering his age by four years, or did he purposely disregard the oversight in order to be more eligible for a residence permit? Even to his wife and children, he maintained that he was born in 1916.
At her birthday party in 1979, Miriam burst into tears when I enquired as to her father’s age.
‘He’ll turn sixty-three next month. He’s probably not long for this world.’
She, just twenty, seemed slightly ashamed of having ‘such an old father’, but was mainly afraid of losing him to old age. In the mid-’90s (he and his wife were already separated), Natan informed us that his year of birth was not 1916, but 1912, suddenly obliging us to add four years to his recently reached milestone of eighty. His daughters took it badly. All of a sudden, they had a father ‘in his eighties’. As though to prove his staying power, he had now managed to stretch it to ninety-seven. He lived on his own, and cared ably for himself. Four days a week (Monday through Thursday), Miriam drove him to the Beth Shalom cafeteria for his dinner, and picked him up an hour-and-a-half later.
The tragic disadvantage of reaching — and thriving at — such a ripe old age is that, already being the only surviving member of his immediate family (his parents and sisters were murdered by the Nazis), he had also outlived his one and only grandson. Natan was more than three-quarters of a century older than Tonio. When Natan was born, the century was just twelve years old, and at Tonio’s birth that century still had twelve years to go. In between those two births lay three world wars — two hot and one cold — and the remaining filth of the twentieth century. Perhaps it says something about my perseverance that only now, twenty-two years after my visit to the Amsterdam registry office, I managed to bequeath his name to his only grandson — on his gravestone.
Despite his affability, Natan was a closed book. I couldn’t guess what he really thought of seeing his surname in such an awkward position, wedged between ‘Tonio’ and ‘Van der Heijden’. We might even be doing something illegal. Rotenstreich was not registered as his middle name, nor as an appendage to the family name, because that, too, needed to be vetted by the authorities, with a price tag.
13
The sky started to darken again, like earlier in the day, but without the same threat of cloudbursts.
It can happen late at night, after a few drinks, in the semi-sleep of early morning, or at moments of sudden fatigue after a day’s work: if I’m in a foggy frame of mind, Tonio’s role in my life tends to disintegrate. He no longer seems like my full-fledged son, but rather someone who at irregular intervals drifts in and out of my life … who drops in from time to time … a somewhat unpredictable family friend. The more muddled my mood, the more I see Tonio’s presence in my past dissolve.
It’s not that he is becoming less important to me — on the contrary — but he seems suddenly elusive. It’s as though I haven’t spent as much time with him as I had wanted to. Thoughts like these drive me to despair, because this makes his perfectly contiguous life susceptible to erosion.
It is not surprising that such a state is the creation of an exhausted brain. It forms, subconsciously, my answer to Tonio’s demise, to the unfathomable decomposition he is undergoing in his grave. Somewhere in the depths of my soul, I want to see his past, as it intertwined with my own, retrospectively decompose.
Not when my brain is working at full power, though — then I know better. Tonio fills my life again: the present life, and what it once was.
Don’t think about his decomposing body underneath that gravel right now. His living, mobile body was here with me, in me, enlivened and driven by my knowledge of its every aspect. His motor functions were in my muscles.