17
Now I stood at Tonio’s grave, wondering why I hadn’t simply prolonged that Greek idyll. Sell the expensive house in Amsterdam, live modestly in a village like Horto … Tonio at school in a neighbouring town … I really did not need an eighty-square-metre office garden, sumptuously planted with technical vegetation, like I had in Amsterdam, in order to write. An eyebrow pencil and a roll of toilet paper would do the job just as well.
Upon take-off from Thessaloniki, there was no turning back. I had definitively chosen the confines of the writing table and the faux relaxation of the urban café. Since Whit Sunday, there was a new punishment, which would taunt me for the rest of my days: look up from my work and see the nearly seven-year-old Tonio at the rudder of a sailing yacht, cleaving its way through the deep-blue Greek waters … laughing nervously, but he does it … yes, he does it … the ship obeys him.
18
I consider myself to have been a writer since the summer of 1972, no matter what a failure my first novel was. I have published since 1978. Writing has become second nature to me. After Black Whitsun, I was apparently not so devastated that I was unable to make notes on the dirty trick fate had played on us. I now write this requiem. Say that, after fulfilling this duty to Tonio (for this is how I regard this undertaking), I am able, one way or another, to continue practising my profession and to succeed in completing the various pending projects — then, no matter how good they turn out, for the rest of my life I will be, at least in my own eyes, a failure.
Once again, I quote from the poem Ben Jonson wrote upon the death of his seven-year-old son:
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
Likewise, I have the feeling that my best piece of prose is now behind me, and that it is dead and buried, and can never be outdone.
On second thoughts, I’m a little disappointed with the likeness of that etched photo of Tonio as Oscar Wilde. Too blotchy. Maybe it’s because a larger, true-to-life print of the portrait, in a waterproof frame, was still there. (The men who placed the gravestone had anchored the frame firmly in the gravel.) There was some discolouration from the damp — the bottom of the photo had gone violet — but otherwise it reflected Tonio’s clear glance admirably.
So here he lay all that time, without an audience, without anyone. The boy was with me the entire day, in every guise between zero and twenty-one years old. I lived with him, spoke to him, wrote about him — and yet treachery once again slithered into my souclass="underline" I had left him here all on his lonesome for weeks on end, in slow decay.
Frans scuffled about, taking photos of the group. He also bent over the plot a few times, twisting himself into contortions in order to get a legible shot of the text.
Natan stood motionless and deep in thought. Maybe he imagined Tonio in all his vigour, like the last time he had dropped by for a visit, the Wednesday before Whit Sunday. Just as with us later that afternoon, he probably told Natan of his future plans. His visit to his grandfather was likely not entirely selfless. There was a holiday weekend ahead, and he wanted to go out with Jenny. In the end, he drank up grandpa’s money with Goscha and Dennis. That night in Trouw, in a sentimentally philosophical confession, he had shared with Goscha (as she told Miriam and me) his guilty conscience regarding his grandparents: that he was slack in keeping in touch with them, and then pocketed a tidy sum once he went around, only to squander it on booze.
I looked over at Natan, and caught a glimpse of him as he was back in 1993, in the Catherina Hospital in Eindhoven, where he and Wies had visited my dying father. Two men from such radically different worlds, one on his deathbed at sixty-seven and the other eighty-plus and still going strong … the one sometimes hard to follow with his Brabant drawl, the other sometimes impossible to follow with his East European brogue. After the (final) goodbyes, my father called out to Miriam’s father, in his failing voice:
‘Natan!’
Natan turned around for the last time.
‘Our grandson, Natan — what a …!’
And with that, my father, worn out and gasping for air, raised a wobbly arm in the air and stuck up his thumb.
‘Ja … ja,’ was the only thing that Natan, moved and embarrassed, managed to utter. He, too, stuck his thumb in the air, although this was not part of his normal repertoire of gestures.
Daniel had made a drawing for Tonio, which Frans had rolled up and tied with a ribbon. The little boy thought it entirely normal that his gift be left on the grave, but the ribbon had to be untied. They unrolled the drawing and weighed it down with a large chunk of gravel. Scrawls of red and blue, and, in Frans’ handwriting, the word ‘meow’.
‘When I asked him what it was,’ Frans explained, ‘Daniel said, without hesitating, “meow”. His word for cat. So I guess it’s a cat.’
19
As I said in my brief speech at his funeral, Tonio would go out of his way not to argue with his parents. Even that one time when my nagging him about his lack of ambition threatened to turn into an argument: this, too, fizzled before becoming a real showdown. He simply asked for the time to prove his mettle; what else could I answer but ‘I can count on you.’
He took a job, and enrolled at the University of Amsterdam. I had no reason to raise the matter again.
In recent days, I have caught myself inventing, in my daydreams, terrible conflicts with Tonio. They always occur in moments of fatigue and mental disorientation, when the truth about his death takes on less-defined contours. A head-to-head clash, followed by deadlock, could have driven father and son apart. But no matter how terrible the conflict, even if it lasted for years, there was always the opportunity for rapprochement.
My pride in our stable relationship was now equalled by my unbridled ingenuity in fantasising conflicts between us. Nothing was too harrowing. The key point of the visions was that the son turned his back on me, lived — at whatever inaccessible distance. And then, one day, we buried the hatchet. The scope of the conflict coloured the reconciliation. It surprised us both that, after years of our gruelling feud, our embrace had remained so strong.
In my most horrific daydream, I envisioned a fight with Tonio about … his death. We hurled the most awful accusations of neglect at each other. Then we exhausted ourselves with self-censure.
‘I take the blame, Tonio.’
‘Cut it out. I screwed up.’
‘If I hadn’t …’
‘Quit it! It was my own stupid fault.’
It ended with us reproaching each other’s self-reproach, and forbidding ourselves from blaming the other. When the mist of the daydream cleared, there was no longer a life-threatening conflict. He was dead. Only a hyena dragging around a carcass makes himself think he is still fighting with his prey.
20
On the way back to the exit, we rambled a bit through the cemetery, in search of the grave of the musician Hub Mathijsen. He had been a violinist in the salon-music ‘Resistentie Orkest’* and often played the violinophone, which had a metal resonator much like a gramophone horn, rather than a wooden sound box. Its melancholy sound would have been quite apt now, here.
[* A play on the name ‘Residentie Orkest’, the resident symphony orchestra of The Hague. Prior to founding the Resistentie Orkest, Mathijsen was 2nd concertmaster of the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra and was active in the Amsterdam ‘provo’ movement of the 1960s.]