‘Sad, but you don’t feel like crying.’
‘I feel tears you can’t see.’
4
With all my angst on the subject of his vulnerability, it never occurred to me that the lively pair of o’s that smiled at me so eagerly via the name Tonio were typographically identical to those that glowered out from the rigid congruence of the word ‘dood’ — death.
The last time Miriam and I saw him, two surgical drains stuck out of his forehead, a short one and a slightly longer one, like horns. They had been inserted earlier that day to siphon off excess fluid from his swelling brain. Even with everything going through my mind at that moment, my own brain still had room for a scene from the movie Camille Claudel, which Miriam and I had seen many years earlier. I wanted to remind her of it, but no, not there, not then.
The sculptor Rodin examines a small statue of a rhinoceros. ‘He’s called Totò, says one of Claudel’s sisters. ‘If you look straight at him, you’ve got his name.’
Two different horns, two identical eyes. Although one of the eyelids was starting to creep upwards, you could safely say Tonio kept his eyes closed, so that the image only partly hit the mark.
5
‘Antonio’ was taboo, but otherwise he liked his name, with all its nicknames, pet names, and bynames. But when he was required — for registration at school or elsewhere — to supply his other given names, he came home outraged. The irate Tonio crossed his arms over his chest in a sort of incomplete interlock, the wrist joints sticking upwards like angry lumps.
‘Why have I only got one name?’
‘My boy, Tonio is such a beautiful, such a perfect, name on its own … why spoil it with a middle name?’
‘Adri, everybody has a middle name. Some of the kids at school have two. I don’t even have one. You’ve got two.’
‘Yeah, and I can thank my lucky stars they didn’t stick another one on. “Maria” was in back then. Especially for boys.’
One day, when he was a bit older, I explained it to him, that lone first name. ‘It’s my fault, Tonio. My own clumsiness deprived you of more than one name.’
A confession from his father: Tonio wasn’t about to pass that up. He was keen as mustard, and glowed with anticipation. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘God, now I’m sunk … Well, here goes then. What is Mama’s and Aunt Hinde’s last name? And no cheeky answers now.’
‘Rotenstreich.’
‘And you, son of Miriam Rotenstreich and grandson of Natan Rotenstreich, what’s your last name?’
Laughing: ‘Van der Heijden, of course. Just like you.’
Tonio triumphantly flung his security blanket into the air, as always trying to hit the ceiling, which seldom succeeded. It was his favourite teething cloth, white with red polka dots, cut from one of Miriam’s old cotton blouses. He had forsworn the pacifier some time ago, and while he was actually too old for a blankie, he couldn’t go entirely without. It fell back and landed on his head. ‘Oops.’
‘How many sons does Grandpa Natan have?’
Tonio pretended to count on his fingers, and then said: ‘None. Just two daughters. Mama and Aunt Hinde. They’re sisters.’
‘Grandpa Natan is in his eighties. He won’t live forever. And Miriam and Hinde … of course, we hope the Rotenstreich sisters will be with us for a long time yet. But eventually it’ll be over. The name Rotenstreich will die out.’
‘Yeah, ’cause if Aunt Hinde and Uncle Frans have children, they’ll also be called Van der Heijden. You and Uncle Frans are brothers, married to two sisters, right, Adri?’
‘Which is why the family argues twice as much,’ I said. ‘But that’s a whole other story.’
‘Doesn’t Grandpa Natan have any brothers?’
Tonio swung the knotted fabric in circles like a catapult, and launched an imaginary projectile. Squinting, he followed its path. Bull’s eye. He pumped his fist. ‘Yesss!’
‘No brothers, no. He used to have sisters. They were murdered by the Nazis in World War II. Just like his parents and the rest of the family. Now there are just three people on earth with the name Rotenstreich.’
‘Y’know, Adri … at school there’s a boy, and his last name is the same as his mother’s. He hasn’t got a father. So what if Aunt Hinde …’
‘Oh? Dunno if Uncle Frans will like that.’
‘Oops.’
Tonio draped the cloth over his head, covering his face.
‘Oops for me, too, just now,’ I said. ‘I neglected to mention something. See, years ago, Grandpa Natan did a lot of research, in old registers and such, looking into his family name. All he found were dead Rotenstreichs. With one exception — a Professor Rotenstreich in Jerusalem. So Grandpa Natan rang him up. The man swore up and down they weren’t related. He didn’t want any more contact. So that was that — another dead end.’
There was a brief silence. Tonio had slid his cloth back on his head so he looked like a miniature pharaoh. ‘Adri,’ he sang, sweet as pie, ‘you were going to tell me why I don’t have a middle name.’
‘Patience sure isn’t your middle name, is it now? Without this detour along the name Rotenstreich, you wouldn’t get my drift at all. I’m taking a carefully chosen path to my goal.’
‘Okay, sorry.’ Laughing, he fell over backwards, and at the same time tossed the balled-up cloth into the air. It noiselessly grazed the ceiling and fell back down with a dull thud. ‘Yesss!’
‘Listen, Tonio, I’m going to tell you what a numbskull your father is. You’d like to hear that, I’ll bet.’
‘Yeah! Yeah!’
‘From the moment Mama was pregnant, we searched for a way to attach the endangered name … Rotenstreich … to the name of our future child.’
‘Huh?’
‘With all the exotic pedigrees around these days, no one thinks anything of an unusual, long first name anymore. Especially if it’s a middle name. When you were born … I’m not sure if you were allowed to file fantasy-names at the birth registry back then. If you can’t follow me, just say so.’
‘I don’t know what a regis …’
‘Where all our names are written down. Everybody who lives in Amsterdam. Where I went the day after you were born to add your name to the list.’
‘Like at a hotel.’
‘Checking in, yes. Couldn’t hurt to try. A publisher suggested we write to the queen. “Your Majesty, have mercy, it is a rare name, etc. etc …” Well, that was the last thing on our minds. I just wanted to walk into the registry office and announce: “People, listen up. The new arrival is named Van der Heijden, first name Tonio, middle name Rotenstreich. In fulclass="underline" Tonio Rotenstreich van der Heijden. No hyphen.” Just as long as it got written down. If it was a girl, she could have called herself Rotenstreich van der Heijden until she got married, or until she died. A boy could even pass the name Rotenstreich van der Heijden to his children.’
‘No hyphen. Funny.’
‘If they fell for it. On 16 June 1988, the day after you were born, I went to the birth registry office on the Herengracht. You and Mama were still in the hospital.’
‘Slotervaart,’ Tonio said, somewhat absently. ‘I had to stay in the incubator.’
‘We’d been sold faulty merchandise, as usual. We decided to keep you anyway. So the next day … off I went to the Herengracht. Picture me walking there, the proud young father.’
‘Young father?’ The polka-dot cloth went sailing again. This time, the rag, unfolding on its descent, landed on my head. ‘Oops.’