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  TONIO

  Adri van der Heijden (b. 1951) is one of Holland’s greatest and most highly awarded authors. His oeuvre consists mainly of two sagas: The Toothless Time and Homo Duplex. He has also written four other requiems, one of which is about his father’s death, His Father’s Ashes.

  Tonio won three of Holland’s most prestigious literary awards: the Constantijn Huygens Prize, the 2012 Libris Literature Prize, and the 2012 NS Reader’s Award for the Best Book of the Year. It has been a major bestseller in Holland and in Germany, and this edition marks its first appearance in English.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Originally published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2012

  First published in English by Scribe in 2015

  Copyright © Adri van der Heijden 2012

  Translation copyright © Jonathan Reeder 2015

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Heijden, Adri van der, author.

  Tonio: a requiem memoir / Adri van der Heijden

  9781925106732 (AU edition)

  9781925228076 (UK edition)

  9781925113921 (e-book)

  1. Heijden, Tonio van der. 2. Sons–Death–Biography. 3. Traffic accident victims–Netherlands–Biography. 4. Parental grief–Biography.

  306.874092

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak

  Whispers the o’erfraught heart, and bids it break.

  — William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

  My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,

  Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

  Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

  O, could I lose all father, now. For why

  Will man lament the state he should envy?

  To have so soon ’scaped world’s, and flesh’s rage,

  And, if no other misery, yet age!

  Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie

  Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

  For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,

  As what he loves may never like too much.

  — Ben Jonson, ‘On My First Son’

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  No middle name

  BOOK I

  Black Whitsun

  Chapter I 100 days

  Chapter II ‘So who’s the third?’

  Chapter III Wrong hospital

  Chapter IV The schoolhouse

  Chapter V In love against

  Chapter VI ‘Our little boy’

  INTERMEZZO

  15 September 2010

  BOOK II

  The golden rain

  Chapter VII The White Elephant

  Chapter VIII The betrayal

  Chapter IX Chime bars

  Chapter X Scorched earth

  Chapter XI A second brood

  Chapter XII Nourishing hunger

  Chapter XIII Pantonioism

  EPILOGUE

  The solar eclipse

  Translator’s note

  Author’s note

  PROLOGUE

  No middle name

  1

  ‘Tóóóóóóó-niii-óóóóó!’

  Never have I called out his name more often than in the scant four months since Black Whitsun. If I add ‘at the top of my voice’, I am referring to my inner voice, which is infinitely louder and more far-reaching than anything my vocal cords, brought into vibration by a thrust of air, are capable of. There’s no sign of it on the outside.

  Compare it with crying. Sometimes I’m ashamed of myself in front of Miriam, who, unlike me, is able to surrender completely to the natural force of a sudden fit of sobbing.

  ‘Even though you don’t see the tears, Minchen, I am crying with you,’ I once explained to her (with a choked voice, mind you). ‘For me, this damn grief is like internal bleeding. It trickles away, or gushes, on the inside.’

  2

  At the beginning of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, the narrator savours the name of his lover, syllable by syllable: ‘the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.’

  My son’s name begins with a similar tap of the tongue behind the front teeth (‘T …’), upon which the lips separate in order to render the vowel ‘o’ in all its fullness. Via the sinuses, higher up, the remaining breath produces a slightly shrieking nasal sound (‘niii …’) — little more than a brief interruption of the drawn-out ‘ooo’, which then further resounds, unhindered, through the still-open mouth.

  ‘Tóóóóóóó-niii-óóóóó!’

  What a perfect thing to call him, we thought — literally, too, so that later, when he was playing outside, we could call him in to dinner. The swell of the second ‘o’ could easily reach the end of the street, if need be all the way to the Jacob Obrechtplein, where one day the boy would hang around the synagogue with his chums.

  When Miriam was pregnant it never occurred to us to establish the baby’s sex via an ultrasound. Even without scientific confirmation, we were both convinced it would be a girl — I don’t remember why. We wanted to name her Esmée, after the opera Esmée that Theo Loevendie was composing at the time. He regularly kept us up to date on its progress over at Café Welling.

  A few weeks before her due date, Miriam came into the bathroom, where I was in the tub nursing a hangover. The door was ajar; she nudged it further open with her pointy belly, which jutted out even more from the way she planted both hands behind her back.

  ‘What if it’s a boy?’

  My head hurt too much to tackle that one. For months, the house had been littered with sheets of notes for a paper Miriam was writing for her Dutch literature work group: a comparative study of Thomas Mann’s novella Tonio Kröger and Alfred Kossmann’s novel Smell of Sadness. I only had to see a page of her notes from a distance, and the name Tonio Kröger caught my eye. Copies of Tonio Kröger were strewn around the living room, even the kitchen — a variety of editions, in German and Dutch. Miriam read passages to me from her paper. I heard her discussing it on the phone with the docent, with her fellow students. And always the rounded euphony of that name: ‘… like it says in Tonio Kröger …’

  ‘A boy,’ I repeated, extending Miriam a sudsy arm. ‘Then we’ll have no choice but to name him Tonio.’

  A light smack on my hand sent the soapsuds fluttering. ‘Okay.’ Miriam wobbled out of the bathroom. Case closed, apparently. Esmée still had top billing, but now we had a boy’s name on hand, in the unlikely event that.

  3

  A few days after the bathroom scene, our son was born, a good three weeks prematurely. Standing at the incubator, I whispered his name, reading it from the pale-pink bandage stuck to his tiny chest. It was starti
ng to grow on me.

  To. Ni. O.

  It had the ring of a rolling, breaking, rumbling wave to it. Ni. A case of declawed negation.

  All right, it was a gamble, but the name ‘Tonio’ turned out to fit him like a glove. Once the little blindman’s eyes opened wide, they looked at you with the same roundness and directness as the boldface o’s on the birth announcement.

  My nickname for him — Totò — came up more or less by itself. It got a droolier laugh out of him than at his real name, so I guessed he wouldn’t murder me for it later. When the mafia don Totò Riina was arrested in Sicily a few years later, a visitor who overheard me call my little one by his nickname said: ‘That’s pretty bold, naming your kid after a mafioso.’

  ‘Before yesterday I’d never heard of this Riina guy. I was always reminded of Antonio de’ Curtis. The Neapolitan comedian. Stage name: Totò. He was in Pasolini’s Uccellacci e uccellini. Hell of a clown.’

  Years later, whenever Tonio pulled one of his pranks, I called him Totò les Héros, after the movie by Jaco Van Dormael. Then he laughed even harder, but a bit nervously once I’d explained I was calling him a ‘hero’, and he knew you could take that in all sorts of ways.

  Miriam’s nickname for him at first was, I thought, more Vondel-like: Tonijntje, ‘little tuna’. When she spoke it she put so much love in her voice that he knew he had nothing to fear — and, self-satisfied, he was happy to show it.

  ‘Okay, five more minutes, Tonijn, but you have to come sit here with me.’

  ‘I’m sad.’

  ‘About Runner, heh …’ (Runner was his Russian dwarf hamster, found dead in his wood shavings months before. Off and on, when it suited him, Tonio would grieve for him. He and his guitar teacher had composed a brief requiem for Runner.)

  ‘I’m so sad he’s dead.’

  ‘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 full: 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.’

  ‘Brand-new father, then. Whatever you say, ace. I went to see Mama in the maternity ward earlier that day. She must have reminded me twenty times that I had to finagle a way … she didn’t care how … to get the name Rotenstreich on that birth certificate.’

  ‘No hyphen.’

  ‘So there I am, walking down the Leidsestraat and Herengracht reciting “Tonio Rotenstreich van der Heijden” to myself, over and over. I started to like it. Not two first names, but a double surname. There was something aristocratic about it. I had just become father to a son. A full-blood prince, that’s what you were. There: the entrance to the registry office. Me on the front steps. It was child’s play. I would mention it as offhandedly as possible, like I had other things on my mind. “I’ve come to register the birth of my son. Tonio Rotenstreich van der Heijden. Yesterday, yes, the fifteenth of June. Sixteen minutes past ten in the morning.” If the guy at the registry office asked: “Excuse me, is that a name, Rotenstreich?”, then I’d answer: “Yes, in the Ukraine, where my father-in-law comes from, it was a common given name.” Just a question of putting on the right attitude.’