‘So, up to your ten pages a day yet?’ he asked.
After an overconfident glass some time ago, I expressed this as my target for my current novel. He asked it teasingly, but I thought I also heard in it something of the old polite interest.
‘Five’s the minimum,’ I replied. ‘Six, seven is doable. Eight is a banner day. So cut me some slack.’
He had been to visit grandpa Natan, his ninety-seven-year-old grandfather who lived on the Lomanstraat, and since he ‘was in the neighbourhood anyway’ he took a short detour to drop in on his parents. I suspected there was more to it than that.
‘Grandpa Natan’s going to have a cataract operation,’ he said, suddenly serious.
‘Oh?’ Miriam and I knew nothing about it.
‘Yeah, crazy, actually … putting an old man through all that.’
‘I’m about to take him over to Beth Shalom,’ Miriam said, glancing at her watch. ‘I’ll bring it up with him in the car.’
I had the impression that it somehow did Tonio good to show his concern for his fragile grandfather. Since leaving home, he lived life to the hilt, and his youth, not exactly overflowing with close family anyway, was vanishing rapidly in his wake. No, this wasn’t just a casual social call.
‘Tonio, your master’s degree, that’s where we left off.’ Miriam got up; it was her turn to go to the Lomanstraat. ‘Don’t forget to tell Adri.’
After she left, Tonio explained to me that when the time came, he had decided to get his master’s in Media Technology.
‘How about just getting your bachelor’s in Media & Culture first? You’re hardly through your first year.’
He grinned. ‘Can’t hurt to think ahead, now and then.’
Maybe that was his way of erasing the words ‘lack of ambition’, which had been lingering ever since our first and only real clash. Tonio spelled out what Media Technology involved, and told me the course wasn’t offered by the University of Amsterdam. He found out he would have to alternate between Leiden and The Hague.
‘That’ll mean moving,’ I said.
‘That’ll mean the train,’ he said.
There was something different about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He dared to look deeper into his future, and there had to be a reason for it. More self-confidence, yes, but his shyness hadn’t vanished. Perhaps to avoid having to lower his eyes, he looked up at the laburnum, where the green clusters were starting to show yellow buds.
‘Late bloom this year,’ I said.
‘Yeah, what do you expect,’ Tonio replied, ‘with such a cold May.’
It dawned on me that we seldom, if ever, discussed nature. At the Ignatius Gymnasium open house, a number of older students who were showing him around gave him a stick insect in a glass jar from the biology lab to take home. The gift thrilled him so much that Vossius and Barlaeus were directly out of the running; Ignatius was his choice. He installed a small terrarium around the stick bug, but not long thereafter asked our permission to let the ghost grasshopper loose in the Vondelpark. This was the extent of his yen for nature. His passion lay with physics. I remember when, at school, he and a classmate gave a demonstration of the internal combustion engine, complete with computer simulation. It was grand to see him so in his element.
When I’d stoked up the fireplace one Christmas Eve and wondered out loud how the flames got their form and colour, the fourteen-year-old Tonio responded with a complete physics lecture, full of facts that had never occurred to me.
‘It’s all about energy, Adri.’
And now, father and son were earnestly discussing, like a pair of oldies, the late bloom of the laburnum. Fortunately, Tonio soon switched to a topic more in synch with the physical sciences: his photography.
‘Adri, a small favour … Miriam has agreed, but I’m supposed to ask you, too. There’s this girl, and I promised …’
‘Aha.’
‘… I’d do a photo shoot with her. For a portfolio. It’s like this … she wants to make extra money as a model or an extra, and needs a photo portfolio to take around to casting agencies and such. And, well, I thought … this house, your house, it would be just the place for a photo shoot. It’s tomorrow afternoon. Miriam doesn’t mind going out for a couple of hours, but she didn’t know if you …’
‘Oh-ho! You come here to badger me about whether I’m doing my ten pages per day, and then chase me out of my study so you can take pictures of a cute girl. Without an audience.’
If I were to think back now on the slightly uneasy look he gave me, I’d see his clear brown eyes, which radiated more vitality than a person needs for an entire lifetime.
‘Great,’ he said, getting up. ‘I knew you’d say yes.’
5
The motorway was quiet, in both directions. Anyone planning to spend the Whitsun bank holiday elsewhere had already left town on Friday or Saturday. And as for the Amsterdam day-trippers, they would hit traffic snarls only later in the day.
We knew the route to the Academic Medical Centre better than the police officers up in the front seat. Since autumn 2005 Miriam had driven me there for monthly medical examinations in my role as guinea pig for a new wonder drug that could restore and regulate an imbalanced metabolism. In recent months, Miriam had taken the same route a few times to deliver Tonio to the AMC, where they had lecture halls suitable for the Media & Culture written exams.
Whitsun morning was, in a taunting sort of way, glorious. A haze that had not yet completely cleared sifted the sunlight, making it look as if gold dust was suspended in the air. We speeded straight through that glittering mist, and at the same time were radically closed off from it. Critical condition. The police van was moving further and further away from the day I had promised myself. Half an hour ago, I was still lying in bed, seventeen stairs away from my manuscript. At that moment I still had the choice: shower first, or give in to a wholesome impatience and take the bedroom smell upstairs with me.
The doorbell had made choosing superfluous. Work on my novel about the murder of a police officer today? There was a real one standing on the doorstep. A van just like in my manuscript was parked at the corner, but without a police squad poised to spring into action. It was empty and real, and would take us to the AMC, where Tonio, in a critical condition … See, the fact that reality pursues one’s fiction, tries to overtake it, and sometimes even passes it, or, worse yet, makes it redundant, is something that every novelist just has to take into account. No point in moaning: it is one of the hazards of the trade. Beautiful, of course: the complete sovereignty of an invented reality, its closed circuit … but just try to take out an all-risk policy on it.
I never complained. Only today, reality thrust itself with such obscene and devastating directness into my fragilely constructed world that I could only bow my head — or let it hang.
6
Last Thursday, too, it was abundantly spring, almost summery, 19 degrees Celsius and clear skies. When I went downstairs just before one o’clock to drive out to the Amsterdamse Bos with Miriam, I met Tonio in the front hall. He had just brought a folding tripod up from the basement, where he’d been storing some of his things since moving to De Baarsjes. A few white reflectors of framed styrofoam were already leaning against the wall of the passage.
‘Check this out,’ he said, running his hand over one of the styrofoam sheets, which was pocked with an irregular pattern of tiny holes. ‘Totally chewed up by beetles.’