Back in Amsterdam, I read a harrowing newspaper article about exactly the kind of child-seat we had used for Tonio in France. Designed for the flat Dutch landscape, it was attached to the handlebars by two U-shaped steel brackets, and was kept in place by its own weight. But on a steep downhill gradient, it had been shown, the seat could easily lurch out of place and hurl its infant passenger into the air. There was a particularly high rate of such accidents that summer in France, a traditional destination for Dutch cycling families.
To cycle from our schoolhouse in Marsalès to the lake, one had to go down quite a steep incline — Miriam, if she had Tonio with her, would always get off and walk, not because of the child’s seat but because she didn’t trust her own braking. That summer day, for our outing to the Château de Biron, I felt confident taking Tonio down that hill in his kiddie seat. I rode Miriam’s bike. It was new, the rubber brake blocks were not yet worn. Still, as we whizzed down the hill, I felt a kind of tugging below that I didn’t quite have under control. Tonio, confidently delivered into my care, was delighted with the speed and cooed ecstatically with outstretched arms.
I was relieved to reach the bottom, where the road levelled off along the lake. Nothing serious had happened, but after reading the article about the child seats I couldn’t shake the image of Tonio being flung through the air. I played and replayed his fall, down to the minutest detaiclass="underline" how his body rolled alongside the bike, his golden locks smeared with blood and guts. The thought could creep up on me in the middle of the day, without any apparent reason, while I was working or telling a completely unrelated anecdote in the café. (‘Well? And then? Now that it’s finally getting interesting, the cat’s got your tongue.’) The obsessive visions had not ebbed in the ensuing twenty years. Since this morning it’s been playing up continually, more intrusively than before, as though my irresponsibility back then ultimately contributed to Tonio’s accident.
10
The blonde nurse returned, this time unhurriedly, greeting her colleagues as she passed them. They were busy collecting the remains of their lunch on the trays.
‘Can I get you something to eat?’ she asked, looking from me to Miriam and Hinde. ‘They’ll be busy with him for some time yet …’
‘Shall we share a cheese sandwich?’ I suggested to Miriam. ‘I don’t think I can stomach much more than that.’
Miriam said nothing, only shook her head, looking down at the ground in front of her feet.
‘I’ll bring a little of everything,’ the nurse said. ‘How about some milk?’
I nodded. The week before I had read somewhere that a glass of milk takes the edge off garlic breath. On her way back to the corridor, the nurse stopped to exchange a word with her colleagues, before walking ahead of them toward the glass doors.
11
The other obsessive thought had to do with the Makelaarsbrug over the Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam. It must have been springtime, perhaps closer to summer, because the ducks in the canal weren’t constantly surrounded by their brood. The remaining ducklings were already partly grown. I had taken Tonio out of his stroller and walked with him onto the pedestrian footbridge. Brilliant sunlight from a sparklingly blue sky.
‘Look, Tonio, the duckies.’
Just then, a mother duck swam with her young from under the bridge into the lacy shadows a tree cast over the water. I sat Tonio on the bridge railing. Under his weight a bit of air hissed from his fresh nappy. I held him tight, leaning him forward a bit to give him a good view of the ducks. He pointed, and babbled, and drooled.
‘Big Italian eyes.’
A man’s voice, suddenly close by. I got a fright, like when the sudden appearance of another person can startle you in the solitary intimacy of a room. It paralysed me just for a moment, but long enough for my knees to wobble and my arm to relax. I almost let Tonio’s little body slip out of my grasp. I wrestled him from the railing and held him weakly against my body. Next to me, the smiling, long-time-no-see face of a colleague. The man touched Tonio’s curls and said: ‘Those eyes. He looks just like …’
He mentioned the name of an actor from the movie Moonstruck, and continued on his way. I remember standing there rigidly for quite some time, with Tonio squirming in my arms. He wanted back on the railing. What could have happened flashed through my mind. You’re startled, the child slips out of your arms. A splash among the ducklings. The father rushing down the stairs of the bridge … jumping into the canal, desperately feeling around the place where the little boy went under …
This obsessive image, too, stuck with me for the next twenty years. It could rear its head at any moment, not only at hazardous moments in Tonio’s life. The vision, ironically enough, sometimes offered salvation in the partly inflated nappy, which, like Donald Duck’s backside, bobbed up to the water’s surface like a life vest.
CHAPTER FIVE. In love against
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1
I was still living in the Duivelseiland neighbourhood, but it appeared that my marriage’s nosedive had come to a halt.
The madness of the annual Book Week was behind us. Now that I increasingly kept to myself in my work flat, still living out of my father’s East Indies suitcase, it was Miriam who more often took the initiative. She would leave a message on my answering machine, only if to express her disgust at the crooning ‘Hello, how are you …?’ of the Electric Light Orchestra, which served as the intro to my own brief spoken instruction: ‘After Mister Beep’. (A pun on a character from A Room with a View, a film Miriam and I had seen in better days — a reference I hoped would not elude her. Once pushed into a corner, one never passes up the chance to drop a hint, however subtle.)
Newsworthy matters aside: she occasionally invited me out for a drink in one of our former hangouts. She’d bring me a small gift, a CD or a bound writing book, and was so sweet to me that the onlookers — well aware of the extent of our crisis — prematurely concluded that we had made up. Once, with our glasses still as good as full, she tugged me away from the table: ‘Come on.’
I could barely keep up with her, such was her tempo, over two bridges, left, right, until reaching Leidsegracht 22, where she seduced me on the living-room sofa (and not in bed). I was simply being forced to fulfil the marital duty from which I thought I’d been honourably discharged some weeks earlier. Afterwards, she was in a hurry to fetch Tonio from the crèche. I wasn’t allowed to join her. Not a chance. I thought I savvied what was going on: now that she had so unexpectedly let herself go, she could at least use Tonio as leverage. I asked Miriam how things stood with us. ‘You know … between you and me.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m still very much in love.’
We said our goodbyes at the edge of the canal.
‘Say something nice to Tonio,’ I said. ‘Something sweet, for me. I don’t want him to forget me.’
Left, right, over two bridges: I hurried back to the café, where in our haste we hadn’t paid for the drinks. They were still there on the table — tepid, but drinkable. As I forced them down, something began to dawn on me. This infatuation of hers … she was using it as a parry. Suddenly, in the costly clarity of post-coitus, I realised she wasn’t so much in love with someone else as in love against me.