Tonio Read online

  Tonio laughed. ‘I’ll bet I know how it ended.’ He pulled the cloth back round his neck and pressed the cool fabric against his overheated ears, a sign sleep was at hand.

  ‘Hey, no butting in, you. Well, it did go differently than I’d planned. Behind the door where I needed to be was a kind of hallway, only a metre square, with a plastic chair. Not enough room to swing a cat. There was this small counter with a computer on it, and—’

  ‘You had computers back then?’

  ‘Yeah, wouldn’t you know it? Computers, even before you were born. Antique ones, pedal-powered.’

  ‘So how come you still don’t know how—’

  ‘You can teach me one day. So there was this young woman at the birth-registry computer, she was all friendly and welcoming. Entirely truthfully, I said: “My wife gave birth to a son yesterday, and now—” This was in the days when civil servants were still encouraged to put the public at ease, so she cried: “Oh, how gre-e-e-e-at! What’s his name?” I thought the official part was still to come, so I answered — again, nothing but the truth — well, what do you think I answered?’

  Tonio dropped his voice and said, dreamily: ‘Tonio.’

  ‘And the young woman, half singing: “What a great na-a-a-ame!” I should’ve noticed her fingernails dancing over the keys, but I was a nervous young … er … brand-new father, and I wasn’t on the ball. She glanced at the passport I had laid on the counter and went back to her typing. A sheet of paper came rolling out of the printer, and bam, on went the city’s official stamp. She folded it in half, slid it into a plastic cover, beamed at me, and said: “I wish you and your wife, and of course baby Tonio, a happy start.” Before I knew it, I was standing outside by the canal, reeling slightly from the fast-track process. Something wasn’t quite right …’

  ‘Adri, I said I knew how it was going to turn out.’

  ‘Yeah, go ahead and laugh. It was first and foremost about you.’

  ‘But how could you—’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what being a brand-new dad does to you. You lose your mind. I opened the folder. Van der Heijden, Tonio, born 15 June 1988, registered 16 June 1988. A-OK. Dumb bunny! If she’d just asked for a middle name, I’d have pulled it off.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go back? You could have said: something has to go in between. Rotenstreich. No hyphen. Huh, Adri?’

  His voice sounded soft and childlike. The story had taken a turn for the worse. His hands were stuck into the rolled-up cloth, like in a muff.

  ‘I didn’t dare. I was afraid that if she heard that so-called middle name now … that she’d get suspicious.’

  ‘Whoa.’

  ‘I first had to rethink my strategy. Maybe write to the queen after all.’

  ‘Mama was cross, I’ll bet.’

  ‘So back to the hospital. She was just breast-feeding you in the maternity ward. She looked at me with … you know … with those big, brown, expectant eyes, which think they know what’s coming. That her family name has been rescued for at least a whole generation.’

  Tonio slowly shook his head no, and again no. If I detected a whiff of schadenfreude, it was directed at me, not at his mother.

  ‘I told Mama what went wrong. A happy start? No, you couldn’t call it a happy start.’

  ‘Adri, I can’t believe you could be so stupid.’

  6

  It’s time I finally gave him his middle name.

  BOOK I

  Black Whitsun

  CHAPTER ONE

  100 days

  1

  The doorbell, twice: first short and hesitant, then long and emphatic.

  The abrasive shrillness always scared the Norwegian forest cats out of their wits, and sent them scampering for cover — the reason Miriam would disconnect the electric bell on weekday mornings, when the postman might ring with a package. The cats always came first. Today, Sunday, the chance that anyone would ring was negligible, certainly this early in the day, so she left it plugged in.

  The first tinkle sounded as though a finger was unable to get a grip on the button. Loud enough, however, to send the cats charging up the first flight of stairs. Even from where I was, in bed on the second floor, I could hear the drumroll of their heavy paws on the steps. They probably paused in the bend of the stairs, only to dash up even faster after the second, much more insistent, ring. Their claws scrabbled over the parquet floor on the first-storey landing, after which they took the next flight of stairs by leaps and bounds. The stampede and the doorbell’s echo ended simultaneously, so Tygo and Tasha probably came to a halt halfway up the second flight, their ears pricked up and their coarse fur standing on end, alert for further hostilities.

  2

  Whit Sunday, 23 May 2010. The bell of the Obrechtkerk had just chimed nine times. The intrusive peal calling the parishioners to prayer would only come later, at a quarter to eleven. Classic Sunday morning tranquillity in Amsterdam Oud-Zuid.

  I lay on my back in bed. I had raised the head end of the mattress by remote control to reading level. The curtains were open partway, so from my pillow I could see what a fine spring day it was becoming. (The newspaper had predicted a ‘summery’ day.) The sun was still hidden behind the tall houses, their eaves in stark silhouette against the deep blue sky. Just as the structure of falling rain can often portend much of the same all day, today’s sky betrayed its intention of remaining cloudless until evening.

  The breeze that wafted into the bedroom through the balcony doors was still cool, raising goosebumps on my bare shoulders, so I slipped on a yellow-and-brown checked flannel shirt.

  I wasn’t really reading. The book in which I had planned to look up a certain passage lay, skewered on my index finger, on the covers. Flipping through it only made me more aware of the sense of delicious comfort I’d been granted this morning. Lounging here in bed, hunting down that paragraph, counting the church bells … it all served as an extremely agreeable deferment.

  On the long sorting-table in my workroom a floor higher lay a new work schedule for the coming 100 days, starting tomorrow, Whit Monday. According to the outline, today was Day Zero, tomorrow Day One, and 31 August Day 100. September 1: Delivery Day.

  Always those 100-day work blocks … it’s been like this for twenty years now. Superstition? An affectation? Compulsive clinging to decimal urges? A bit of all of them, I suspect, and more of the same.

  I had discovered by coincidence that a schedule of 100 consecutive workdays (a sizeable yet manageable timespan) fitted me like a glove. At the end of 1989 I went off, wife and child in tow, to live for a year in the Veluwe, a wooded region in the middle of the province of Gelderland in the east of the country. I had convinced myself that it would benefit my new novel, which was set in Amsterdam, if I were to remove myself from that setting for a while. In fact (although I didn’t admit it) I wanted to shelter my little family, including the eighteen-month-old Tonio, in the security of the hinterland. When the little tyke was old enough to go to primary school we would return to the city.

  But after only a few months, in the spring of ’90, we became involved in a dispute with the landlord, whose house was connected to ours by a glass-enclosed walkway. The quarrel escalated into the kind of psychological (and occasionally physical) warfare I certainly didn’t need to leave Amsterdam for. In order to finish my book in time for its autumn publication, I was forced to look for suitable lodgings elsewhere.

  I chose De Pauwhof, an old artists’ and scientists’ colony in Wassenaar, where on 23 June I began the definitive version of Advocaat van de Hanen. On 1 October I sat in a taxi with the completed typescript of that cursed book on my lap, heading back to Loenen in the Veluwe, where I would fetch wife and child and take them back to Amsterdam. On the back seat I calculated how long I had worked on the completion of the novel while in Wassenaar. Nulla dies sine linea (‘Not
a day without a line’) — panic and a guilty conscience had guaranteed that. I arrived at a total of exactly 100 days, including weekends. An obsessive ritual was born.

  For the next twenty years, the rule was: if a novel required two or three versions, then I would mark off that many blocks of 100 days on the calendar. Accordingly, the book I had been working on since the autumn of 2009 (Kwaadschiks) had already swallowed up two such time blocks. At the end of April I submitted a draft (but complete) typescript to the publisher. The last eight days of May plus the coming three summer months would be devoted to the definitive version.

  Drawing up a schedule like this meant — with the requisite superstition — naming the days. Counting from a diary, I typed out 100 available days, and named them. Day 18, Day 19, Day 20 … Day 92, Day 93, Day 94 … Some of them got nicknames, depending on their contribution to the endeavour, but only after the fact.

  Claiming and taking control of dates in advance: wasn’t that tempting Fate? Once they were numbered, they were still useful as empty time, but they were definitely no longer neutral. I had annexed them.

  Each new schedule began with a Day Zero. In this case it fell on 23 May, today, Whit Sunday. A marvellous kind of temporal no-man’s-land. So as to soften the blow of Day One, I always saw to it that the production of Day Zero, expressed in pages, already met the target average. But at the same time, Day Zero was nonbinding and by definition could be a partial or even complete flop. Nothing would be lost.

  So there I lay, while half of Amsterdam enjoyed its holiday sleep-in, looking forward to the imminent nonbinding workday, the start of which I could put off for as long as I pleased. Downstairs, in her workroom on the ground floor, Miriam would undoubtedly have already been at her computer for an hour-and-a-half or so. On weekdays, she usually got up at about six to go to the gym, and started working by half past eight, but Sundays she skipped the exercises, which gave her an extra hour in bed as well as an hour’s head start on her work. I wasn’t in such a hurry. Her concentration usually waned by noon, while mine was then at its best and only started flagging by late afternoon.

  I pictured the cats sycophantically weaving figure eights around her legs under the computer table, manoeuvring for her attention, or, if that failed, stretching out ostentatiously across the keyboard. Our deal was that if I felt like coffee I’d phone, and she’d bring breakfast upstairs. I knew how it would go. Side by side, propped up on the pillows, talking over the day’s plans. In midweek the weather had suddenly turned warm. As we’d done the past few days, we would meet out on the back terrace at the end of afternoon, under the golden rain, for a glass of fruit juice. No need to cook: Tonio was coming to eat, and he had already placed an order for a portion of chow mein from the Surinamese takeaway.

  I picked up my mobile phone from the bed but immediately laid it back down. Breakfast could wait. The only hitch in my wellbeing: my stomach — normally staunch, stout, and reliable — was in rather a bad way, and thus hindered my appetite. It couldn’t have anything to do with alcohol: we hadn’t touched a drop for several weeks now. I tried to remember what we had eaten the night before. Veal, because there was a marsala sauce — no, for scaloppine marsala Miriam had turned to organic chicken these days out of environmental concerns. The first course was spaghetti aglio olio, rich in darkly sautéed garlic, and, as a side dish, a salad that had been generously sprinkled with more freshly chopped garlic. Apparently a clove too many, because early that morning, somewhere between four and half past, I’d woken up to a clenching stomach, complete with an unstoppable flood of saliva. I sat upright in bed, continually swallowing, battling the nausea, until it subsided and I was able to lie back down.

  3

  Now, hours later, my stomach was still not entirely back to normal. Of course I could just ask Miriam for some coffee, a dash of espresso diluted with plenty of milk, but I decided to enjoy the comfy situation a bit longer on my own. It was fine like this. As Japi, from Nescio’s The Sponger, said: I was always getting myself worked up. Since cutting short a disastrous work visit to Lugano a year ago, I had asserted ownership of my time. I’d share part of it with Miriam (and with Tonio, if he so desired), but otherwise no one could lay any claim to it. Written enough letters, contributed to enough magazines. I was tired of buffing the regulars’ tables at assorted pubs with my jacket sleeves, not to mention all the language that evaporated out of your mouth, free of charge, and that could just as well have been written down at home.

  And it worked. Every day was a gift. I once remarked to Miriam that ‘most people always came to get something, never to bring it’. It was a burst of pique, no more than that, but once I’d said it I realised it was true. Since then I made certain there was no longer anything to be had. I would continue bringing people things now and again, but all in due course.

  My mind drifted back to the work schedule lying on the long wallpaper table upstairs. It lay next to the copy of the draft typescript I had submitted at the end of April. There was also a plastic folder containing 160 pages of the definitive version. I had written it more or less off the cuff, outside every hundred-day schedule. Thus there was a starting balance, so to speak, to compensate for the less productive days.

  In short, I had my act together. I sank back onto the pillows, almost purring with pleasure. I would ring Miriam in a minute. After the coffee, and perhaps some lazy lovemaking, I would mount the exercise bike for half an hour, then it was just a matter of showering, getting dressed, and going upstairs. There, I would choose exactly the right moment to release the agreeably wound-up spring for the next 100 days.

  4

  And then the bell. One short, one long. Loud and invasive. In the echoing silence that followed, the thumping of the cats as they raced upstairs.

  As always, the strident buzz of the doorbell irritated me (God, Miriam, weren’t we going to have the Brom people install a friendlier bell?), but now it was a sense of unease that made me sit straight up in bed. I turned my head to the right, glanced at my watch on the night table. Ten past nine. It was probably my mother-in-law. Lately she’d taken to showing up on our doorstep, befuddled, delivered by cab. The reason was usually that Miriam didn’t answer the phone or offer any other sign of life.

  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.