I was sorry she didn’t, all the more so because no one had taken the trouble to prepare even a modest toast. I looked over at my sister. We had grown up together. At Sinterklaas I had produced long, rhymed epic poems for her, even for the most trifling gifts. She would usually read it out in complete non-metre, and then promptly tear it up. Now that her eldest brother was getting married, she had nothing to say except the customary handful of bitchy gossip. She spent the whole afternoon sitting there with a smug smirk on her face, chain-smoking in an attempt to catch up with my father’s emphysema. With each coughing fit, her eyes narrowed into little stripes in her carmine-red face.
It never occurred to me that even our immediate family might be susceptible to outright envy. The 250-square-metre flat, this wedding, a child on the way … Things were going too well for us, and you know what, they were right.
The pregnancy was going fine, and the child’s legitimacy was confirmed. Nothing stood in its way, not even my own fears. I feared that which I loved at the same time: the vulnerability of a child.
The responsibility I so dreaded was already manifesting itself. The child was due the first week of July. My fingers trembling, I counted down the days.
2
‘What is it with young people these days?’, I wondered more and more. ‘Aren’t they angry anymore, or what? Tonio is eighteen, has his high school diploma, studies at university … but is still living with his parents. In his boyhood room. Of course we’re secretly glad to postpone the empty nest syndrome … but for him …’
Parents in the same situation, with more sociological instinct, would reply: ‘What it is, is there’s no generation gap anymore. Well, okay, there is, but it’s not such a chasm. The generational differences don’t lead to insoluble conflicts anymore. Everything can be discussed. Everything can be solved. Why run away from a father who doesn’t want to murder you, nor you him? When’s the last time Tonio and you argued?’
Never, actually. Our only argument, which never really got off the ground either, was still to come. Since he was a child, until he was at least sixteen, he would ask at the end of the day: ‘Work well today?’ (Just like, at the end of a meal, he would ask: ‘May I be excused?’ He would drop his voice an octave, as though wanting to feign the maturity befitting the somewhat affected question. He must have picked up this nicety somewhere and appropriated it, because he didn’t learn it from us.) You couldn’t argue with this kind of kid even if you tried.
Barely two years after graduating high school, he managed to find a sublet apartment in De Baarsjes with his best friend Jim. Standing on his own feet suddenly outweighed the cushy room and board at home. It was April 2008. I wasn’t even able to help him move, as I was in the midst of a series of guest lectures at TU Delft. I do recall the stab in my heart: he had flown the nest after all. I felt a bit slighted, so that the missing generation gap also took its toll. All right, if he really wanted to trade his space, his comfy, well-appointed room on the Johannes Verhulststraat, for half a stuffy flat over in Amsterdam West: fine. Bye-bye, kid, don’t let me catch you on our doorstep with your tail between your legs.
He had completed his first year at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, but wanted to switch to the photography department at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Around the time he moved to the De Baarsjes, he broke off his second course of study, grumbling about ‘changes’ that had been introduced out of the blue. I read him the riot act for his gross lack of ambition. As I said, this confrontation, too, was a dud. He swore he was brimming with ambition, but that he’d rather, after the summer, tackle a proper university major. Until then he was planning to get a job to make ends meet — well, almost … hopefully we would still take care of his rent …
He found work at Dixons, a computer and photography-accessories shop on the Kinkerstraat. We saw very little of him after that. If he came round for a visit, it was usually on Sunday evening, when we would get Surinamese takeaway. Sometimes he would give us advance notice, but more often he just appeared in the living room.
3
I was up on the third floor preparing my lectures, while one flight below Tonio dismantled his room — the room we’d had renovated and furnished for him only a couple of years earlier, far too late. Suddenly the alarming noise of falling objects rose straight through the ceiling. I raced down the stairs.
The space stripped quite bare by now, Tonio stood desperately propping up a set of connected wall cupboards in an attempt to keep them from crashing down for good: the anchors had come loose.
‘Stupid me — again,’ he moaned. I helped by adding my own clumsiness to his. Once the danger had been averted, I returned to my desk rather than help him finish the job. I made a feeble promise to come see his new place once he’d moved.
We had lived under the same roof with Tonio for nearly twenty years, the last sixteen of them in this house. Perfectly normal that now, two years after his final exams, he would leave the parental nest in order to live on his own. So normal that the drama of it all — for a drama it was — more or less escaped me.
It was during those two-plus years he lived in De Baarsjes that my life, I imagined, became busier than ever. A new book came out, and I started accepting speaking engagements again. And on top of that: a weekly column, the guest teaching, an essay assignment … not to mention the work already on my plate. After his holiday in Ibiza, summer 2009, we fetched him from Schiphol by car, and dropped him off at his house on the Nepveustraat: the only time I saw it, and then only from the outside. We didn’t get asked in. He was clearly in a hurry to share his adventures with Jim — the British girls he’d mentioned in passing on the way back. He’d nearly been thrown out of the hotel for letting them stay overnight in his room without checking in.
He left his bag of dirty laundry in the car. ‘I’ll come by on Sunday to pick it up.’
Nor did I ever write to him at his new address. In the past, if I was working at Château St. Gerlach, I did send him the occasional pep note around exam time. If I was so bent on working with ‘old stuff’, rather than computers and email, why not write an old-fashioned letter, handwritten and delivered by post?
My publisher asked me a while ago, perhaps not entirely selflessly, how many letters I thought I’d written in the past forty years. I came up with an estimate of ten thousand. Short and long, typed and handwritten, personal and business. During those two years that Tonio lived in De Baarsjes, the copies in my archive numbered a good four hundred — and not a single one of them to him.
It needn’t be too late. If Tonio survived his accident and operation, I would write to him every day of his convalescence. At first, if his mind had to recuperate, simple letters that a nurse could read out loud to him. Gradually, more elaborate ones. And once he was back on his feet, I would never stop — even if he didn’t write back.
4
‘We’ve lost him, Adri,’ came the high, singsong voice beside me. ‘I just feel it.’
When had I last seen and spoken to Tonio? Last week, twice in short succession — atypical since his move.
On Wednesday, I worked until four. I went downstairs, hoping to catch some sun out on the veranda: after a chilly first half of the month, the weather had turned the previous day. The French doors leading from the library to the terrace were open. I recognised Miriam’s voice; she was talking to someone, but since the curtains, billowing in the breeze, were still closed, I couldn’t see to whom. I stepped out onto the veranda. There sat Tonio. More relaxed and self-assured than I was used to seeing him. When he noticed me, a mildly mocking grin spread across his face.