The officers raised a hand as they descended the stairs, heading towards the revolving door and their van, parked in the sun. Miriam and I followed the nurses to the Intensive Care Unit (Intensive Care, which was different than the Emergency Room. Ambulance, ER, ICU, OR: Tonio’s body had made a speedy series of promotions.) On the way, one of them apologised for the fact that we had been informed so late.
‘His wallet was full of cards, but we couldn’t come up with an address right away for … for his parents. At moments like that, a life-threatening situation, we have other priorities. Saving a life always comes first.’
Life-threatening situation. A doctor was waiting for us at the junction of two corridors. We were told that Tonio had been on the operating table for ‘hours’ (it was approaching ten o’clock) and was still in a critical condition.
‘The traumatologist will be out shortly to give you an update.’
I gathered we were now in the ICU. A young nurse, blonde and blue-eyed and as fresh as the morning, led us to a small waiting room and offered us coffee.
‘Just some water,’ said Miriam, who had already sidled against me on the three-seat sofa.
‘Coffee for me, please,’ I said.
The nurse left the room, leaving the door open. Above the doorway was a large kitchen clock: ten past ten.
‘Ugh, no coffee,’ Miriam said. ‘It reminds me of when …’
She reached for her forehead and cried, sputtering slightly. She didn’t need to finish her sentence. I knew she was referring to that June morning in ’88, when we mistakenly ended up at the Slotervaart maternity ward, and Miriam had gone into hysterics over my coffee breath.
I opened Tonio’s wallet. The billfold section contained nothing but a five-euro note. The coins, all told, probably added up to a sizeable amount.
A year earlier, in August, after the premiere of Het leven uit een dag, I had studied his bar behaviour during the reception at De Kring. Tonio and Marianne had retired to a dark corner somewhere alongside the dance floor where the crew were swinging to the house music, and whenever he went to fetch drinks for himself or the girl, he paid with a banknote and jammed the change into the pocket of his wallet (the very one I was now holding in my hands). Those slight tendencies towards disorderliness: I lamented them all the more because I exhibited them myself at his age, and long thereafter, and still had not managed to overcome them all. Continually confronted, in matters both minor and significant, with our similarities, I was forced to imagine myself as a twenty-one-year-old. It worried me. Not for myself, but for him.
‘If Tonio really is so much like me,’ I said to my brother, who sat next to me at the bar in De Kring, ‘then he’s got an uphill battle ahead of him.’
Frans, who knew me in my early twenties and even lived with me for a while, sputtered out a feeble denial just to be polite.
There were plenty of cards and passes, complete with address, in the pockets of Tonio’s wallet, so I suspected that there had indeed been more urgent matters than tracking down his parents.
‘Here’s an ID card from the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis,’ I said to Miriam. ‘What would he have been doing there?’
‘Jaw surgeon,’ she said with a shrug of revulsion. ‘Wisdom teeth.’
The nurse came in with a tray, and arranged the Thermos cans, cups and glasses on the table. ‘The traumatologist will be in to see you shortly,’ she said as she was leaving. ‘If you need anything, just check the corridor, one of us will be there.’
4
Since being roused from bed, I had hardly spoken, except with Miriam, but every time I opened my mouth, first to the police officers and now to the nursing staff, I was painfully aware of the heavy odour of garlic on my breath. I didn’t smell it myself, but seeing as we hadn’t had breakfast yet I knew it rose straight from my gut. (This morning, when I went downstairs, the kitchen door on the first floor was open. Spread out on the bread board were four rolls, sliced and waiting to be buttered. Oranges alongside the juice squeezer. A still-life in the wake of bad tidings.)
What time had the policeman said Tonio’s accident occurred that morning? Around 4:30? The flood of saliva brought about by the garlic overkill had woken me at about a quarter past four. No, don’t go there: I wasn’t about to start seeing premonitions and signs in everything. An upset stomach as a warning of Tonio’s impending disaster? And what was I supposed to do with this cryptic message delivered by peptic Morse code?
Once again I couldn’t help but notice the parallels with the circumstances of Tonio’s birth. Then, too, stomach cramps that turned out to be contractions had taken us by such surprise that we skipped breakfast. The previous evening, we’d eaten Surinamese food from Albina, a takeaway restaurant on the Albert Cuypstraat. I had ordered a portion of their dangerously spicy fashon sausage, which I only ate if I knew I had no social obligations for the next three days, because the dish transformed your mouth into an unwashed arsehole. And so I arrived at the Slotervaart maternity ward on the morning of 15 June 1988 with a contaminated mouth, augmented by an empty stomach. I dared not open my mouth for fear of endangering the delivery with my toxic fumes.
5
I don’t know where the additional information came from, but meanwhile the exact time of the accident was established as 4.40 a.m. Four weeks before the longest day: was it already light by that time, or still dark, or midway? When daylight savings time kicked in, we set the clocks an hour ahead, which meant that for the next seven months the sun would rise an hour later. I seemed to remember that in the old days, before daylight savings time was introduced, it was already broad daylight when the Nijmegen nightclub Diogenes emptied out at four-thirty or five o’clock at this time of year. All right, we’re talking about weekend hours. On weekdays Diogenes closed at 3.45, and in late May it was still pretty much dark.
I couldn’t be totally sure. I decided to set the alarm clock for 4:30 the next day so I could check the sky at twenty to five.
But if it turned out to be still dark at that time, it would automatically raise the next question: did Tonio have lights on his bike, or at least those little clip-on lamps on his clothes?
I wasn’t at my post this morning. No late-night revelry behind me, no hangover to sleep off, but I did just lie in bed, no denying that. Even waking up to a saliva flood and churning stomach presented me with no other thought than: once it’s passed, try to get another hour of sleep … work to do …
I should have been there, on the Stadhouderskade, to restrain my recklessly cycling son, steer him out of harm’s way. There was no one in the room to accuse me of anything, but I hardly needed a pointed finger to feel guilty, to know I was guilty. I sat next to Miriam shuddering and sweating with guilt for what I had carelessly let happen that morning.
My thoughts continued to hover around Tonio’s birth — undoubtedly due to the congruence of the circumstances. The uncertain drive to the hospital … the torturously long wait … If I were guilty of allowing his accident, it’s because I was accountable for his birth in the first place.
If, at that moment, someone had entered the room to tell me that back on 15 June 1988 I had intentionally let the midwife drive the wrong way in order to sabotage Tonio’s birth, then I’d have believed it. From the moment that I wanted a child, I also did not want one. Ergo: my insidious ambivalence made Tonio a sitting duck from the word go. This morning was proof — perhaps irrevocable proof — of it.