The hope that Tonio might one day return to us has been obliterated. The fear that this icy truth will pierce us, deeper and more obscenely than before, only augments. What should we hope for? That sooner or later the sense of loss will fade? That is an idle hope, for the loss will be there, with a lifetime guarantee, forever.
2
It is as though we have landed in a dimension of reality where different laws of nature apply to us than to others. If I can go by all the well-meant predictions, most people see the date of the fatal accident as a point in time from which we move forward, marking various calendric milestones (a month now; three months already, soon four; before you know it, six), while loss and grief undergo an organic process of erosion.
Miriam and I (varying somewhat on each other’s perception) experience the situation much differently. Whenever, having just managed to catch our breath, we glance back, we see the events of 23 May racing toward us at an unpredictable (and incalculable) speed. Instead of standing still, and thus falling further behind us, the date and what it represents keeps nipping at our heels — without actually nabbing us. We are like fugitives on the run, being chased by a hyena or some other predator. With every glance over our shoulder, the pursuer appears to be catching up, but it holds back, bides its time — its shadow, moreover, adding to the illusion.
We will be relentlessly pursued for the rest of our days by a nightmare in the flesh — Tonio’s dead flesh. Nothing doing, the waning of pain and grief. The only thing that wanes is not what is behind us, but that which lies ahead: what’s left of our lives.
3
In a half-hearted attempt to do something about my physical condition, I mounted the exercise bike for the first time since Whit Sunday. I lugged it from a dark corner of the bedroom to a spot near the balcony doors, so that I could read the paper by daylight while pedalling. The machine is set to its maximum resistance. The last time I used it, in May, this setting felt easy. Now the pedals are sluggish and heavy. Now it’s my joints that, after months of sedentary brooding, are threatening to seize up.
I drape the newspaper over the handlebars so as not to have to watch the odometer. I concentrate on my unwilling legs. Each rotation of the pedals is another step in my recovery. Soon we’ll initiate Prohibition. My brain has long since become immune to the pain-killing effect of alcohol. Booze is back to what it always was: simply a way to get blotto. With the difference that it now augments the pain, rather than numbing it. The grief-variant of a bad trip.
As far as the physical boundaries of Prohibition go, there’s not much area to patroclass="underline" the two large seat cushions on the sagging living-room sofa, and the 40x40 centimetres of cocktail table, which, thanks to its special construction, can be slid back to divide the sofa into two parts. If I quit, it is primarily to no longer drag Miriam down with me. She regularly complains of a burning sensation in her throat after drinking her favourite herb vodka. Diluting it with orange juice works for the first two glasses, but after that even the sweetest fruit juice has a bitter edge. Neat, then, either straight up or with an ice cube.
That little table, by the way, as handy as it seemed when we bought it, is beginning to get on my nerves. The veneer, which once gave it the impression of being made of solid wood, has started to peel and chip under the rings of sloshed alcohol; but the worst is that, in its function of sliding in a C-shaped embrace around the sofa seat, it forms an annoying barrier between Miriam’s grief and my comforting, and between my grief and her comforting. Every time we nevertheless reach out with an impotent gesture of support to the other, we risk knocking over a glass or bottle in the process.
So away with that wheelless ServeBoy trolley, that clinking witness of our most intimate death-disgust — and all those bottles along with it.
A muscle pain soon develops in my legs that seems more appropriate to hours of daily jogging than a few minutes on an exercise bike. What’s more, the image of Tonio on this same apparatus keeps forcing its way in, to the point of paralysing me. He has deposited a bag full of dirty laundry downstairs, and wants to take advantage of the opportunity to enjoy a decent shower. (The shower in de Nepveustraat does not produce much more than ‘a weak dribble’.) Looking for his parents, he goes around opening doors. Miriam isn’t home, and he eventually finds me in bed, reading. He is cheerful, full of energy.
‘Hi. Taking the day off? You gonna shower?’
‘In a bit.’
‘Mind if I go first?’
‘Learn once and for all not to toss the wet washcloth over the edge of the tub, okay? I really don’t feel like wringing out your used washrags.’
He chuckles and climbs onto the exercycle. I don’t know how the conversation turns to the Coen brothers, his favourite directorial duo, but as he loosely pedals he gives me a brief lecture on Coen cinema. ‘So tricky.’ He’s just seen their latest, Burn After Reading, and groans as he recalls the roles played by Pitt and Clooney. ‘A pitiful pair, those two.’
Brad Pitt, I understand, plays a babytalking personal trainer at a gym. And Clooney … too pathetic for words: ‘What a sucker.’
‘In the roles they’re playing, d’you mean, or the actors themselves?’
‘Both. That’s exactly the Coen brothers’ mean streak. By giving them those roles, they’re totally typecasting them. Really sneaky.’
‘Forgive me, Tonio, but you kind of remind me of a gullible theatregoer from the old days. Someone who waits at the stage door for the bad guy in the play, to punch him in the nose for the evil stuff he did on stage.’
Tonio quit pedalling and looked at me, shaking his head. As usual, I just didn’t get it. ‘Why do you think the Coen brothers ask superstars like that to act in their movies?’
With an expression that said ‘Just think about it’, he dismounted the exercise bike. He took a towel and washcloth from the linen cupboard and disappeared into the bathroom, where I would later find — not on the edge of the tub, but on the washbasin countertop — the washcloth, unwrung, and saturated with frothy shower gel. I lay in bed pondering whether from now on I should regard every Coen brothers movie as a sort of garbage grinder or paper shredder for disposing of mainstream celebrity reputations.
This morning I had already taken Tonio’s imaginary place on the exercycle when Miriam came into the bedroom. It was clear she’d been crying — not dramatically, not for a long time, but nonetheless noticeably, even though I couldn’t put my finger on what made it so. I’d been with her for more than thirty years, and in those three decades we’d had our share of crying behind closed doors, me less than her, but never more than these past three months. By now I could put together an encyclopedia of the many categories of crying, complete with gradations in intensity, that the death of a child can lead to. My internal weeping, too, could be itemised, at the very least into the trickle and the gush.
‘I just thought of something,’ she said, and her eyes started glistening again. ‘My father is ninety-seven; I’m fifty. I take after him. Say I also live to be ninety-seven, or even older … that means I’ve got another forty-seven years to live without Tonio. A half a century. Isn’t that an unbearable thought?’
My legs had come to a stop, but I stayed sitting on the machine. I laid a hand against the side of her face. ‘Minchen, what did we decide? Not to resist the grief. More than that: we’d keep the nerve open and raw, preferably let the pain get even worse, because that’s our last link to Tonio. If we can keep him alive via that searing pain, then we have to do our best to live to a ripe old age. We can’t let death cut us off from our pain too early — that won’t do Tonio’s survival any good. Dying deadens the pain, you know, for good. Regard that pain as the eternal flame on Tonio’s grave. It’ll go out one day, that’s for sure. Half a century from now, that’s soon enough. Deal?’