The thunderstorms might revisit us soon. But, unlike Frankenstein, I did not need lightning to bring my boy back to life. My science was different from Frankenstein’s. My knowledge of Tonio was itself the life-giving lightning bolt.
The potted plants, half-eaten by the rabbits, had been placed at the edge of the patch of gravel. Between them was a can of beer that one of his friends had set there shortly after the funeral, together with a pack of cigarettes, now heavy and rain-sodden. I looked at the bottom of the can: a long way until its use-by date. I put it in the pocket of my raincoat, intending to drink it one evening on Tonio’s behalf.
14
The coarse gravel on Tonio’s grave brought me back to a small Greek gravel beach on the Pelion Peninsula.
In the spring of ’95, Tonio’s grandmother took him to the carnival on Dam Square. He was not yet seven, and the rules were clear: no under-sevens on the bumper cars. But watching them close up, how they bashed and ricocheted, was not forbidden, and that’s what he did, running back and forth along the ledge surrounding the rink. The spot where the cars were most congested, and the crashing the most violent, attracted him the most, and he was determined to get a good look. And eventually he tripped on the ledge, took a bad spill, and broke his wrist.
His dismayed grandmother brought him by taxi to the emergency room, where his arm was encased in plaster, or rather a sort of waffled armour, the kind that was mighty difficult to fill with signatures. It happened at an awkward moment for us, because Tonio’s spring break had just begun, and we were about to leave for two weeks’ holiday in Greece. We were to visit my German translator and her husband in the coastal town of Horto. The hospital gave Tonio a waterproof plastic sleeve for the cast, so he could swim.
‘Yeah, those bumper cars, Tonio …’ I said. ‘Risky business.’
Angry: ‘They wouldn’t even let me ride them.’
Whenever he was really indignant, he would cross his arms, with the back of his hands arched upward — which now, because of the cast, was impossible. By the time we got to Horto, he had come to grips with his handicap. He couldn’t wait to get into the water. It was endearing to see how Tonio braved the blue-green marbled bay. It was shallow, so he could easily gain a foothold on the bottom, kicking up silty little clouds. To give his motions the semblance of swimming, he executed a sort of crawl stroke with his good left arm, while his plaster-cast right arm, engulfed in its oversized and inflated sleeve, stuck upwards like a sail.
Miriam and I stood watching him from among the rocks. The spring breeze rippled the surface of the water like silver foil. From time to time, Tonio interrupted his swim stroke and stood chest-deep in the water to wave at us, then tipped back to his prone swimming position.
If that inflated lump with its illegible lettering was so comical, why did Miriam take my hand and squeeze it? When I glanced over at her, I could see that her eyelashes were wet with sea spray — even though the wind was as mild as could be, and the waves, if you could call them that, did not send up spray. Looking straight ahead again, at Tonio jerkily under sail, the gentle breeze told me my face was not entirely dry either.
Remembering how the beach pebbles crackled under our feet, I almost took a step forward, over the stone edging enclosing Tonio’s grave, so as to feel the freshly laid gravel under my soles.
15
In Horto, we rented a bungalow in a holiday park, but it being low season — the first half of May — we had the place to ourselves. Helga, my translator, and her husband, Wolfgang, an architect, had built a house with a sweeping view of the sea a stone’s throw from our cottage.
Along with her elderly parents, Helga had a niece, Inky, staying with her. Inky and Tonio were about the same age. They did not speak each other’s language, but Tonio tried to impress the girl by clambering up the olive tree in Helga and Wolfgang’s yard. Considering he could only use his left arm, Tonio developed a remarkable agility. Upon reaching the uppermost branch, he would sit and, nonchalantly ignoring Inky, stare out to sea as though he expected a ship to appear on the horizon.
Helga and Wolfgang were in Horto when Tonio died. Still in shock from the news, they planted an olive cutting in his memory near the tree he had climbed all those years ago. We received a colour photo of the sapling by email. If I say we were moved, that is perhaps the best neutral description of the pain, joy, and disquiet we experienced while looking at it. Helga and Wolfgang care for the new offspring, and we hope someday to be travelworthy enough to water it ourselves.
16
During our second week there, we (Helga and Wolfgang, Miriam and me, Inky and Tonio) took a day trip on Wolfgang’s sailing yacht. Dolphins swam along, some distance from the boat, to the children’s delight. The way the animals, five or six at a time, lifted themselves above of the surface of the water in agile curves, sending out entire Milky Way galaxies of silver bubbles out of the dark-blue water as they dove back in … Tonio leaned against the mast, looking excitedly back and forth … port, starboard … he didn’t have enough eyes. A complete, infinite dolphinarium, and we were sailing straight through it.
Wolfgang, assisted by Helga in executing the more complex manoeuvres, moored the boat at a small, uninhabited island, which was dominated by a dilapidated chapel with an exclusively feathered parish. A forgotten set of Hitchcock’s The Birds: they had taken up residence in every niche, every windowsill, and were in a raucous conclave on the altar. As we approached, they shifted restlessly back and forth, shoulder to shoulder, but, as though guarding their colony’s lodgings, did not take flight to join their brethren circling above what used to be the roof. Tonio and Inky were awestruck, but in a slightly fearful way, perhaps because the birds sat there mumbling in chorus, as though they had abandoned themselves to a mussitated vespers.
On the way back, Tonio was allowed to man the rudder. Captain Wolfgang demonstrated how to plant your feet wide apart, to avoid falling over in case of an unexpected lurch. Since Tonio could only steer with one arm, Wolfgang stood behind him, but so unobtrusively that Tonio could maintain the illusion that the yacht was entirely under his control. As we didn’t know beforehand how much spray we would encounter on board, Miriam had fastened Tonio’s waterproof cover onto his arm, and it whipped sinisterly in the wind. For one reason or another, we weren’t able to keep the air out of the sleeve when fastening it, so I began to wonder whether the constant back-and-forth of the balloon was doing Tonio’s wrist any good.
Of course, I was touched to see my little boatsman at the helm, so serious and manly in his role, so secure in his task, one-armed like a Captain Hook … but at the same time …
‘You’re mulling over your new book, aren’t you?’ said Helga, sitting down next to me. ‘I can tell.’
‘Oh, do you miss translating?’
She had me figured out. There, surrounded by white seagulls and silver dolphins breaking through myriad tints of blue, all I had to do was luxuriate in my immediate happiness. Miriam, up on the foredeck with her face turned to the sun … Tonio, with the rudder in his little fist, occasionally enclosed in Wolfgang’s grown-up hand, steering the yacht through Greek waters … and next to me, the imaginative translator of Advocaat van de hanen, about to be published after the summer by Suhrkamp …
And me, instead of counting my blessings, sitting there in my own world, piecing together the fragments of the new manuscript … this here, that there, and in between, for now, a blank page … I was back in my workroom, the ship where I was captain, coxswain, and galley mate all in one.