I blinked, and felt a cold wetness on my eyelashes and lids, as though old, forgotten tears had lingered there, cooled off long ago. The other women followed the neurosurgeon out of the room. The third doctor leant over to us and said: ‘He might still be in the lift on the way here. A nurse will come get you when you can see him. You might want to say goodbye while he’s still on the ventilator. Try not to be shocked by his upper body, it’s quite swollen. From the internal bleeding.’
I had to play for time. Had to extend his life.
‘You’re terminating treatment,’ I said, repeating the absent surgeon’s words.
The woman nodded. ‘To carry on would be futile … and irresponsible.’
I had to contain myself. I was in no position to resist this medical decision. (A decision that was already irrevocably determined by the force of the collision, by blindfolded Fate.) This was not a matter of euthanasia. I had to take care not to lose control, to demand that the treatment be prolonged. Those stories are well known. Family members, future next-of-kin, their fists clenched in the doctor’s face, the bed in which their loved one lay protected by a human chain from the nurse whose task it was to disconnect the mechanical ventilator.
I nodded back. The doctor smiled sadly and left the room. I had to banish the vain thought of Tonio standing a fighting chance, and concentrate on Miriam, bolster her so she could go say farewell to her unsaveable son. She was still bent over, crying. Not full out — and that was exactly the heart-wrenching part: that there was something hushed and humble about her grief. Even now.
‘Come, Minchen.’ I took her by the upper arm. ‘We have to prepare ourselves for this. To say goodbye. They’ll come get us any time now.’
Miriam shook her head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Think of that evening, two weeks ago, at the café on the Staalstraat,’ I said. ‘We had such a good time together. So intimate, the three of us. Think of that, as intensely as you can, when we go to him now. That evening, that was our farewell, without our knowing.’
13
It was probably not Tonio’s idea, but his college classmates had decided to go out for drinks and dinner with their parents. A date had been set for the outing: 7 May, a Friday evening. Tonio had emailed the invitation to Miriam with the message: ‘I don’t know if you two are into this, but …’
He knew that for the past year we had avoided socialising outside our home. ‘But this is about Tonio,’ Miriam said. ‘We don’t get much chance to show some interest in his studies.’
‘All right, sign us up.’
May 7th was chilly. It was the day they found the man who had strangled Andrea Luten, that the dead pilots of the crashed Turkish Airways plane were found to have been negligent, and that the Dam screamer had apologised for the disturbance he’d caused at the recent Memorial Day ceremony. As though to underscore the week’s incessant tumult, two helicopters hovered overhead the entire afternoon, one from the police and the other from the TV, in connection with the Giro d’Italia, which started here because Amsterdam had to live up to its reputation, cost what it may, as a ‘gruesome party house’, as the writer Gerard Reve put it. Distracted by the pulsating rhythm of the helicopters I decided not to count 7 May as a normal workday. Soon, a drink with Tonio. On the way to my shaving ritual in the bathroom I dove into bed to catch forty winks.
Meanwhile, a minor drama was taking place at our front door. My mother-in-law had impulsively — in an ‘agitated state of mind’, as the police reports called it — absconded from St. Vitus nursing home and taken a taxi to our house. She came to claim Miriam — the reason remained unclear, but this was obviously the last straw. I was aware of the regulations governing the mother-daughter relationship, in place for several months, but I tried to keep out of it as best I could.
Miriam woke me to inform me of the intrusion. Her ferocity was alarming: for the past year, more and more sewage had been seeping up from her youth. I could not quite put my finger on what it was exactly.
‘What did you do with her?’
‘Put her back in the taxi. I was livid. Just then Thomas showed up.’ (She was referring to my editor.) ‘What must he have thought! Me standing there screaming at my mother while shoving her into a cab. He brought this envelope for you.’ And with a fake pout: ‘And the flowers he had with him weren’t even for me.’
She more or less insisted that, before we went off to meet up with Tonio, I have a drink with her to calm her nerves.
‘Otherwise I can’t face this evening.’
I shaved quickly, we tossed back a drink, and then it was time to call a taxi. The plan was to eat dinner in the Atrium at the Binnengasthuis, on the university campus. Congregate in the student pub down in the basement before moving next door to the restaurant. The taxi was not held up by the Giro preparations, so we were early (six-thirty) and took our place at the bar. Beer in plastic cups — well, why not.
Quarter to seven and still no Tonio. Miriam called his mobile number. Yeah, his bike was still at Central Station, so he’d taken the tram. He was almost halfway. See you in a bit. Huuy. (His goodbye alternated between ‘huuy’ and ‘oi’.)
Suddenly there he was standing next to us, having slipped in just as unobtrusively as he always entered the living room. The shyish grin, combined with a nod of the upper body, by way of a greeting. He did not kiss his mother as a matter of course: it had to come from her. For me, a squeeze on the shoulder sufficed.
From the moment I thought that Tonio had reached adolescence I decided to minimise his embarrassment by refraining from embracing him in public. (Once, when I wanted to introduce him to an old friend we bumped into on the street, and brushed his bangs out of his eyes, he jerked himself loose and danced around me with clenched fists, using my belly as a punching bag.) But these things tend to go gradually. Sitting together on the sofa watching a TV game show, we both laughed at a candidate’s flub and I playfully and teasingly pulled him close to me. I had expected a punch in return, but he stayed leaning against me just where I had tugged him. He wriggled a hand behind my back and squeezed himself even closer, as though relieved that this was still allowed in the ‘cool’ world he was creating for himself.
We hadn’t seen Tonio in weeks. ‘You’re looking well,’ I said, ‘although I’m sure you don’t appreciate hearing that.’
He dismissed my comment with a grin. Since his baby fat had dissolved, he’d regained the compact body he’d had at the beginning of high school. My gosh, twenty-two next month. Perhaps because just this once he wasn’t wearing his long hair in a ponytail, I was struck by the resemblance to a photo of myself, taken in the summer of 1973, a few months before my own 22nd birthday. I’m standing on a rock in the middle of rushing stream, and, rightly or not, at that age I felt I could walk on water. Now that I had a good look at Tonio, I realised that since his high school graduation, four years ago, I hadn’t treated him in line with his personal development. I had postponed getting to know him as an adult, and had bombarded him with the kind of advice you give an insecure adolescent. He in turn was too polite to correct me.
It was simple enough. Brittany 1973 and the subsequent years had not slipped out of my memory. If I wanted to avoid treating the 22-, 23-, 24-year-old Tonio as a child, I only had to think back on myself at that age.
The ease with which he put away one beer after another — there, in any case, he had taken a page out of his father’s book, anno 1973. After chatting for half an hour, he started glancing nervously around the bar. ‘I don’t see too many of my classmates. And no parents at all.’