Three weeks shy of twenty-one years ago, we also embarked on a wild ride to a hospital, but in a much smaller vehicle: a Fiat Panda. Miriam had woken me at 4.00 a.m. with severe abdominal cramps.
‘Are you sure it’s your intestines?’
‘I haven’t been to the toilet all week.’
She held my hand. I could tell from her grip how much pain she was in, and how regularly the cramps came. She was trembling. We lay like this, in silence, for a good while.
That night, we had gone to bed arguing. Anticipating the increased washing needs, we had bought a washing machine a couple of days earlier. After the burly delivery men had left, their far-too-generous drink tip in hand, I noticed that the white casing was damaged. By the time I had got the manager of the appliance store on the line, my reserve of diplomacy was depleted: the jerks had screwed up, period. The same fellows returned later that day, now far less friendly, to exchange it. Only after they left did their revenge reveal itself. During the test run, the thing shuddered and stomped loose from the wall. Standing barefoot on the tile floor, I had no choice but to hop backwards away from the machine, lest its undoubtedly sharp bottom edge amputate my toes. While performing a life-saving jitterbug, I also had to find the off button in order to subdue the automatic monster.
Miriam was convinced that the delivery men had left the safety bolts in the drum on purpose. ‘You always over-tip, that’s why. Then they mess with you.’
It was approaching five-thirty. My hand was gradually becoming disjointed by Miriam’s constant squeezing. Her beautiful, smooth forehead, which seldom perspired, was now beaded with sweat. ‘This can’t be just a stomach ache,’ I said.
‘I’ll ring the midwife just to be on the safe side,’ Miriam said. She wasn’t due for another three-and-a-half weeks. The midwife had her explain in detail what exactly she felt. The call was brief. ‘She’s on her way. I might have to go to the hospital already.’
‘Minchen, your overnight bag … The folder says you have to have a bag packed and ready. We don’t have one.’
‘That’s just like you,’ she moaned, ‘to start whinging about an overnight bag at a time like this. I’ve got other things on my mind, you know.’
The stabs worsened. The midwife arrived, her face still lined with sleep, just after six. She put a rubber glove on her right hand and asked me to wait outside. I suppose I could have packed a small travel bag in the meantime, but just stood there inert in the hallway.
‘Now, honey,’ I overheard, ‘you’re dilating already.’
So they were contractions after all, and they were getting stronger. I helped Miriam into her bathrobe. ‘It’s more painful than I expected,’ she said.
The midwife’s Fiat Panda was double-parked downstairs in front of the house. Heavily pregnant, Miriam looked too big for the compact car, but she just fitted. With the midwife at the wheel and us in back, the Panda was more than full.
‘Help, my claustrophobia’s playing up,’ Miriam panted hotly in my ear.
The midwife turned left onto De Lairessestraat, where morning traffic, even this early, was already nervously picking up. The Fiat proceeded with little jerks — leaps, really — and Miriam whimpered.
‘Just get me to the VU,’ she whispered.
2
The van had a lot less traffic trouble now than the Fiat did back then. Morning rush-hour was usually not yet over at ten to ten, but this was Sunday. We drove past a tidily laid-out business park, out of which rose the terraced buildings of the Academic Medical Centre. Somewhere inside, amid the labyrinth of overlit corridors, masked surgeons were operating on Tonio.
If he was still alive.
Twenty-two years ago, just like now, Miriam sat to my left on the back seat of the Panda. Then, too, I hugged her tight, pressed her close to me, so that I felt every contraction pulse through my own body — well, on the surface, anyway, because I couldn’t really feel the pain. Miriam occasionally gave my sleeve a tug to indicate that I should loosen my grip, which did not absorb the contractions.
Twice earlier, I had experienced similar mortal fear in a tiny Fiat. The first time occurred in the winter of ’77, when Maria-Pia Canaponi, a young Florentine, drove me and a friend from the hilltop town of Fiesole down to Florence, hidden in the misty and shadowy depths of the Arno valley. As I recalled over the years, she didn’t so much as drive as allow the car to simply fall downhill, even though the wheels did touch the ground here and there on a hairpin curve, but more like the soles of a mountaineer’s boots graze the side of a cliff as he rappels down a rock face.
The other death-defying Fiat, also somewhere in the mid-seventies, bored its way through the hellish Parisian morning traffic. At the wheel was a local woman, her hat crumpled by the city’s night life. She was trying to impress me (in back) and her girlfriend up front by ignoring red lights or, at the very least, by blindly changing lanes with her brim pulled down over her eyes. Arriving at her house in a suburb of Paris, sheer terror and heart palpitations made it impossible for me to perform up to snuff.
But now the claustrophobic tin can was jostling an unborn life. The midwife manoeuvred her car down the Cornelis Krusemanstraat towards the Harlemmercircuit — and that is where I must have lost track of where we were, distracted as I was by Miriam’s birthing pains. I wasn’t paying attention, and Miriam even less, so neither of us noticed that the midwife had turned right onto the Amstelveenseweg towards the Zeilstraat instead of taking the roundabout to the other leg of the Amstelveenseweg that led to the VU hospital.
Yes, I do recall my impatience at the open drawbridge over the Schinkel, raised like an unbreachable rampart, but it still did not occur to me that our rolling maternity bed was heading the wrong way. Miriam herself realised the mistake only when we reached the hospital. Once inside, the midwife and I helped her into a wheelchair. As we wheeled her through the foyer towards the lift, Miriam whimpered: ‘This isn’t the VU … I was supposed to deliver at the VU.’
‘Oh, sorry, hon, sorry … sorry,’ cried the midwife. ‘My fault entirely. I must have looked at the wrong form this morning … Oh, how awful. Well, there’s no turning back now.’
She had taken us to Slotervaart Hospital.
3
The two police officers turned us over to a small group of nurses in a reception area at the top of a short set of stairs. I can’t remember which of the four or five of them handed me Tonio’s wallet. The grey billfold with snap fastener lay heavily in my hand: its change pocket was laden with coins. I imagined that it still retained some of his body heat — from his thigh, his buttocks, or his breast, wherever he had it at the moment of …
Stuck to the back of the wallet was a self-adhesive, computer-printed sticker bearing his name, a few series of digits and today’s date (how new and nearby everything was). In our absence, they were already busy transforming him into a series of numbers.
The two officers took their leave with a handshake, and wished us ‘sterkte’ — courage, strength. I took the opportunity to study their uniforms one last time. Once this was all behind us and we knew how long Tonio’s recovery would take, I could — no matter how shaken and depressed — return to my writing table and resume work on the police novel. I had pinned up a photo of a female police chief in standard uniform. Now I had been given extra information regarding how a rank-and-file policewoman looked in warm weather.
The policeman handed me a card from the Serious Traffic Accident Unit on the James Wattstraat, where I could request a more complete report on the collision. I had only to ask for the staff member whose name he’d written in with a ballpoint pen.