Yes, it had to be Wies. Who else? But … if I was so sure it was her, no more than an annoying incident, why did my already upset stomach tighten in anxiety? I slid out of bed, suppler than my back in reality allowed, and went out to the landing to hear what was going on. I went by way of the bathroom. At first it was as though the quiet had returned to the house. Miriam didn’t open the door, and her mother drove back off in the taxi.
My stomach and my heart did not share the relief being coaxed into my head. This wasn’t the first time I’d stood there, holding my breath, to see if Miriam opened the door. The mailman — wasn’t Miriam home? Should I answer via the intercom?
Something, perhaps the gust of air that blew up through the stairwell, told me the front door was open. I struggled with all my might to recognise my mother-in-law in the voice that rose up indistinctly from down below, but I knew that it was a man’s voice. The sound of Miriam’s brief and heated (but unintelligible) reaction offered the hope that she — as she often did in this kind of situation — was yelling at her mother. My fear spoke another language.
Just above me, Tygo and Tasha stuck their furry heads inquisitively through the balusters of the handrail. Downstairs, the glass doors to the hall rattled. A snippet of an unmistakably male voice, followed by an anguished cry from Miriam. The cats dashed down the stairs, their tails swishing along my bare legs as they crossed the landing and continued their patter down the stairs towards the cry of their mistress.
Through the open bedroom door I could hear my mobile phone ring. It lay on Miriam’s half of the bed. I dove at it from the far side. Too late. Just as I pushed the button her voice, loud and panicky, rose up through the stairwell.
‘Adri! It’s Tonio! He’s in the hospital! In a critical condition!’
I was back on the landing in a few steps. In the bend between the first and second floor stood a young policeman, his arm on the handrail, looking up at me impassively. His spotless, white polo-sleeved uniform shirt lit up in the shadows.
‘Sir, I’m afraid I’ve got unpleasant news for you,’ he said. ‘There’s been a traffic accident. Your son, Tonio, is in the Academic Medical Centre in a critical condition. My colleague and I are here to take you there. Our van’s waiting outside.’
I felt myself sink into the kind of grainy, teeming semi-darkness that usually precedes fainting. My organs contracted, and I almost threw up. It could be that at the same moment Miriam came running up the stairs with an inhuman cry, first squeezing past the policeman and then past me. I do not have a clear recollection of the moment, only a churning sensation, from which a high-pitched wail arose. If it did indeed go like that (Miriam can’t confirm it either, for her it is even more of a black hole) then she ran across the landing to Tonio’s old room. It is there that I found myself. Miriam sat on the edge of the bed, shuddering with teary cramps, putting on her socks. Her overwrought face.
‘Tonio’s in a critical condition,’ she kept repeating, in a sort of gasping trance. ‘He’s going to die. Maybe he’s already dead.’
Those socks. She almost couldn’t manage. They kept getting caught on her toenails, and she had to start over. The stark details which, despite the constriction of one’s awareness, manage to nestle themselves in you … This bitterly surprised me, in retrospect. Or this: a tripod in the corner of the room, without a camera but instead, a silvery lighting umbrella screwed to it. Snow-white styrofoam panels here and there: the photographer’s reflectors.
I stood there in my long work shirt and underwear, as though petrified, perhaps no more than a few seconds, but it felt like much longer.
‘Get dressed,’ Miriam cried, nearly screaming. ‘We’ve got to get to him. He’s dying.’
5
I didn’t dare look over the banister on the landing to see if the policeman was still standing in the bend in the stairs. Maybe I was hoping he was a figment of my imagination, a vision that had shadowed me beyond slumber. Even out of the corner of my eye, I could not see the glow of his white polo shirt.
In a critical condition. For much too long (however briefly it may have been), I stood in the bedroom at the chair where a few articles of clothing lay, holding a single sock. All I could do was stare at the framed photo above the radiator. A Venetian gondola with a baldachin and a small sign on the side reading AMSTEL HOTEL. It was floating in the Amstel River in front of the Hoge Sluis, at the service of hotel guests, a few of whom were being transported to the opposite side. Judging from their dress, the scene must have dated from the twenties or thirties. Tonio had downloaded the photo from the Internet and enlarged it for me as a gift marking the thirtieth anniversary (in late 2008) of my book Een gondel in de Herengracht. He was that kind of kid.
I heard Miriam’s hurried footsteps on the landing and, right away, further up the stairs. The gait added a nasty cadence to her high-pitched wailing. I tugged on the faded sweatpants that I’d laid out for the long session at my desk.
Socks. Shoes. Oh God, let him pull through. Not for me. For Miriam. For Tonio himself. And yes, for me, too, even though I didn’t deserve it.
A knock at the door. I was just tying the laces of my shabby house-shoes, which I normally wouldn’t dare wear in public. The policeman again. ‘Sir, are you about ready? Your wife wants you to hurry.’
His young, academy-trained voice, with just that whiff of compassion.
‘Coming.’ A touch of irritation. I was being forced to get dressed, unshowered, in the rattiest possible clothes, and this kid was hustling me along on top of it. Damn it all, what did they expect? That we’d be standing by the front door, spiffed up and passport in hand, impatiently anticipating this long-awaited bad news? What if we had been out on the town until three or four in the morning, as in past Whitsun weekends, and were still sleeping off our grogginess? Did that ever occur to them?
As I charged toward the door, my eye fell upon a coloured-pencil drawing above the bed. Tonio’s double portrait, from 1994, of his parents. He was five, nearly six, and had drawn it in just a few minutes, lying on the floor of a French restaurant while his pasta went cold. Since the man in the drawing wore a hat, which I never did, I asked Tonio who those people were, just to be sure.
‘You and Mama.’
‘There’s a bunch of red hearts flying around our heads.’
‘Yeah,’ he laughed, ‘you’re in love, aren’t you?’
It had finally happened. I had imagined this a hundred times, ad nauseum. How the police would arrive at the door to bring us the worst news imaginable. Your son … And then we were people capable of regarding our overanxious sacrifice to Fear as a cleansing, forestalling ritual. As though imagining an accident down to the most minute detail would stave it off.
Last summer, for instance, when we had given Tonio money for a trip to Ibiza, I immersed myself in repeated nocturnal fantasies, torturing myself with the most gruesome possible scenarios. The guardia civil had found the lifeless body of a young man in a rock crevice. No passport on him, but the night porter at a hotel in Ibiza City recognised him … could we come identify the body …