Miriam and I picked him up at Schiphol Airport. I had expected to see a sun-tanned Tonio strut into the arrivals hall, but he was paler than when he’d left, thanks to holiday nightlife and daytime sleep. But it was him, and he was alive. You see? It worked: the perils of reality were no match for the even more perilous power of the imagination.
6
Downstairs in the front hall, I found Miriam, trembling and in tears, in the care of the policeman. The cats, recovered from their initial panic, sat side by side in the hallway, restlessly sweeping the floor with their puffed-up tails. They remained anxiously in the neighbourhood of the open door to the pantry, where their baskets and food were kept and through which, in case of emergency, they could escape through the cat flap into the backyard. Sometimes, if the doorbell rang particularly long and loud, Tygo, the more skittish of the two, would flee into the golden-rain tree — so high he couldn’t get himself back down and Miriam had to rescue him with the library ladder.
Under normal circumstances, we would certainly have locked Tygo and Tasha in the kitchen. But now, just clicking the glass door had to suffice, so that they wouldn’t follow us.
Although the front of the house was still in the shade, we were nevertheless ambushed by the low, brilliant sunlight that bathed the junction with the Banstraat, and the white police van parked on the corner, in a flood of light. A young female officer who had been waiting at the vehicle approached us with a concerned, almost distressed look on her face, and introduced herself.
‘My colleague and I are going to take you to the AMC,’ she said. And, pointing: ‘There’s the van.’
Apparently anticipating a warm day, she, too, wore a short-sleeved shirt, a dark-blue scarf tucked in the open neck. Even now I made a mental note of such details, thinking with almost ulterior motives of Kwaadschiks, which featured female police officers. (Note: cleavage covered by scarf. Even when on a mission of mercy, a police officer carries handcuffs on her belt, next to a holstered can of pepper spray.) The van, its sliding door already open, was painted in the familiar red and blue stripes, perhaps intended to suggest speed. As one could read in my manuscript.
‘It’s best if you get in back,’ said the woman.
I turned to her colleague: ‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Sir, as far as we know your son was hit by a car at approximately four-thirty this morning on the Stadhouderskade. Somewhere near Max Euweplein. We’ve been told he’s in the Intensive Care unit at the AMC. They’re operating on him at the moment. That’s all we know. The driver of the car is being questioned at the Koninginneweg bureau. We’ve just come from there.’
‘He must have just left Paradiso,’ I said, mainly to myself. And then to him: ‘Could he have taken that footbridge over the canal, towards the Stadhouderskade?’
‘We don’t have any details, sir. Only that the driver of the car remained at the scene of the accident. He phoned the police immediately.’
‘Adri, just get in, will you,’ Miriam said. She was already sitting on the back seat. ‘Before it’s too late.’
I got in next to her.
‘We’ll get you there as fast as possible,’ the policewoman said before slamming the sliding door shut. ‘It’s still early, the A10 won’t be too busy. Although … with the holiday weekend …’
She got in next to her colleague, who had taken his place at the wheel. I pulled the sobbing Miriam up close to me. She was now crying uncontrollably.
‘Our sweet Tonio … he might be dead already.’
7
H&NE. For more than thirty years, this was my secret code for the woman — even she didn’t know about it — whom I held tight on the back seat of the police van.
‘How’d that rice get into the pasta?’
Miriam’s question, on a warm summer evening in ’79, had set everything in motion. ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down wherever he wants,’ writes Cees Nooteboom. In this case, it cannot have been purely dog-like that there on the back seat, with this shuddering body in my arms, I thought back on the first time I met her. The two police officers up front had more or less dragged us out of bed because Tonio was badly injured — the son that, nine years after that rice in the pasta, we had made together. The child whose life was now in danger. The boy who we were following a terrible, careening path to be with.
The official story that I had foisted on the world began at her birthday party, 23 November 1979, three days after she turned twenty. Not many people know that she had already come into my viewfinder six months earlier.
I wanted to have a short novel finished by the end of the summer, having started it that spring in Perugia. I had hoped to catch up with a young woman, Mara, whom I’d met the previous year in Sicily. I didn’t have her address, but did have a phone number, although I didn’t dare ring her — and so it happened that I just bumped into her on a Perugia street. A hasty and sloppy romance ensued, which was at the very least detrimental to my book. I fled to a tiny island in Lake Trasimeno, with 99 or 102 inhabitants, and set to work. I stayed there until the end of July. On Sundays, Mara came over by ferry. It was a good arrangement, until she started to insist that I join her and a small group of friends on Sardinia for the remainder of the summer holidays. I had nothing against Sardinia, but didn’t much relish six weeks of enforced loafing, especially while the publisher at home was waiting for his text.
So I took the train back to Amsterdam and my stuffy third-floor walk-up in De Pijp. It was a hot summer. In the evening, I’d sit working at my desk in front of the open balcony doors until dusk, not wanting to turn on lights because of the mosquitoes. I was lucky with late-afternoon sunlight: where, according to the architectural logic of the neighbourhood, one would expect a parallel cross-street between the Van Ostadestraat, where I lived, and the houses on Sarphatipark, there was only an expanse of low-rise sheds belonging to an assortment of shops and small businesses. Two doors further along, behind a squatted building, one such shed had been torn down and a sort of wild garden had sprouted up among all the rusty scrap metal and rotting wood. The squatters barbecued there on warm summer evenings. One of them was Hinde, whom I knew because one day she brought me a huge bunch of pink tea-roses as thanks for having let her tap into my water main. I knew she had a younger sister who also hoped to move into the squat, but until then only visited once in a while.
On one of those never-ending summer evenings, Hinde and her housemates organised another barbecue and invited me along. ‘My sister’ll be there, too,’ she said, but I wasn’t sure if it was intended as a fix-up. I politely turned down the invitation. I hadn’t come back from Italy to go to parties: shit, if I wanted to party I could have spent the summer with Mara and Ivana and the rest of them on Sardinia. But my work didn’t amount to much that evening. The barbecue, a rusty three-legged thing, billowed smoke. My balcony, with its open doors, acted like a fireplace flue, so that I spent most of the evening looking at my papers through watering eyes.
‘A rat!’ cried one of the fellows. ‘I just saw a rat. There, by those crates!’
‘Onto the barbecue with him.’ Hinde’s voice, I recognised it already. Laughter from down below.
‘How’d that rice get into the pasta?’ A distant voice that resembled Hinde’s: that had to be the sister.
‘From the salt shaker,’ Hinde called back. ‘The cap came unscrewed.’