Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

‘So …’ I started all over again.

‘Yes, we’re on.’

‘Really?’

‘We’ll do it. Really.’

‘I was just thinking …’ I said. ‘As soon as it’s born I’m going to keep a diary of his, or her, life. Every day. Everything. As a present for his or her eighteenth birthday.’

‘Then you should start with the pregnancy,’ said Miriam. ‘As a prologue.’

‘No, with today. The decision. And everything from this moment on. I’ll start tomorrow.’

All I can recall from the rest of the evening is that most of our sentences began with: ‘I could …’ or ‘We could …’ And the choice of a home birth versus a hospital came up.

‘At home, at home,’ Miriam said decisively. ‘No hospital birth for me.’

‘Y’know, Minchen, not to get on your case, but … until now, whenever we talked about having a child you were so intractable. I’ve often suspected you were secretly afraid of the pain.’

‘Oh no, no way. The pain? Then you don’t know me.’

16

I had won Miriam over so convincingly that I lost sight of my own doubts and fears about fatherhood. They reared their head now that, even with all her conditions, she had relented. I had created a danger zone for myself, and dragged Miriam and me over the line.

Within two weeks of the decision, we took the express train back to Amsterdam, so impatient were we to cleanse and prepare our bodies for procreation in the intimacy of our own home. Miriam would quit smoking, I would — at least until after a successful conception — stay off the booze. Miriam was such a moderate drinker that she had no trouble forgoing that one glass.

While we felt ourselves becoming more radiant and healthier by the day, my mother-in-law’s birthday approached. Wies had lobbied for a grandchild for so long — demanded it, almost — that we figured she’d be delighted with the news that we were bringing our bodily equilibrium into balance in preparation for a perfect copulation and a pure conception.

A misjudgement. I phoned her up.

‘No, Wies, we’re coming for your birthday, don’t worry. The only difference is that won’t be drinking on account of —’

‘Well, don’t bother coming then. Not even a little nip, what a pair of killjoys. Either we celebrate my birthday or we don’t.’

Not a word of happiness about the imminent addition to the family. It wasn’t, incidentally, her doing that in the ‘dry’ weeks that followed (abstinence from alcohol, but not from sex: Miriam would only go off the pill once our degenerated bodies had been revitalised), doubts started to creep back into my head. Whether I would be up to the responsibility of raising a child. To placate Wies, we broke down and hit the 45 per cent Polish vodka that friends of Natan in Cracow still sent him. At home, too, we occasionally cheated on our self-imposed regime. I still found, to my relief, emptied blister pill strips in the bathroom wastebasket. Maybe it wouldn’t come to parenthood all. Whenever we loosened the reins I’d sneak an extra splash into my glass. Miriam would do the same with each new half-smoked cigarette, and say it would be irresponsible to go off the pill so soon.

17

Shortly before leaving Aix, we received the news that Miriam’s aged cat Baffie had died. Once back in the Netherlands, we stopped off at my parents’ in Eindhoven on the way to Amsterdam. We hadn’t been there even an hour when I asked my father if there was an animal shelter nearby. Yes, he knew of one, not so far away. Without further ado he drove us there. Miriam glanced at me occasionally, her eyebrows raised, but she, too, refrained from asking anything.

A staff member led us past the hysterically barking dogs, their claws haphazardly playing the harp on the cage fronts, to the cat unit.

‘This litter was born in June … they’re less than a month old.’

Miriam promptly fell in love with a tabby with undersized front legs and who allowed herself to be constantly overrun by her siblings. She hadn’t even picked the runt up yet, and its claws were already tangled in her hair. ‘No getting loose now. I’ll have to take her.’

‘She’s not meant just to replace Baffie,’ I said. ‘Her job is to be a constant reminder of the pledge we made in Aix—’

‘What,’ Miriam said, kissing the kitten on the pink heart-shaped spot on its nose. ‘Is the poor little thing supposed to go back to the shelter once the promise has been fulfilled?’

So the adoption was sealed. In anticipation of a definitive name, we provisionally baptised her Brilliant-but-with-Undersized-Legs. Back on the Obrechtstraat we temporarily housed her in the bathroom, which proved to be a bad idea. The stunted front legs did not prevent her from clawing her way up the outside of the laundry basket, and jumping from the lid into the tub. She slid all the way down the slippery porcelain and practically into the drain. That’s how we found her the next morning: totally bruised, swollen with internal fluids, and bleeding.

She survived it by the skin of her teeth. So when the crisis had passed and she was able to stand on her own uneven legs, she got her new name: Cypri. Considering the result, a scant four months later, it seems she performed her function as reminder admirably indeed.

18

Usually, it’s the woman who knows, in retrospect, precisely which act of coupling resulted in conception. In the case of baby Tonio, however, I am the one who maintains: ‘the fourth of October 1987. A Sunday afternoon, between four and five.’

Miriam has never challenged me on this. We had returned from a walk through the Jordaan. Jacob Obrechtstraat 67. Huize Oldenhoeck, the place was called. We took the lift up to the fourth floor. The enclosed space had its usual cheesy body-odour smell of the unwashed caretaker. I remember this because Miriam commented on it. A deliveryman had complained to us about the smell a few days earlier.

Once inside, we were apparently in a hurry. We didn’t even make it to the bedroom. The two sofas in the living room, with their narrow seats, could not accommodate spread limbs. We kneeled behind one another on the two-seater. The Sunday tranquillity was interrupted only by the pok-pok of the tennis court behind the building.

How did I know for sure that Tonio’s conception took place then and there? I recall aiming high into her, and that the gratification seemed to come from deeper than usual. Perhaps that last detail points to momentarily heightened fertility. Our calculations six weeks later did not refute the theory that Tonio’s foetal existence commenced in the late afternoon of the fourth of October.

19

According to that year’s diary, on the morning of Friday the 13th of November 1987 Miriam came to tell me that the pregnancy test she had just performed came up positive. I did not attach any significance to that ominous date back then, and to do so now, some two decades later, in a police van on the way to the hospital, would be unwise, too.

‘So I guess I’m pregnant,’ Miriam said with a lightness that suggested it was the most normal thing in the world. She had come from the bathroom to the kitchen to deliver me this domestic notice, where (without a hangover, having sworn off alcohol) I was sitting down to a late breakfast.

‘Pregnant,’ I repeated, chewing and nodding. ‘Doesn’t sound good.’

We looked at each other for a moment with feigned dejection — until I couldn’t contain myself any longer, leapt up, and squeezed her close to me.

‘Ow!’

‘Oh, Minchen, this is so wonderful … so wonderful.’

When I relaxed my arms a bit in order to look her in the eye, she put on her customary clown’s pout, with wrinkled chin and puffy hamster-cheeks. ‘That’s just how it is,’ she said, her grimace accompanied by crossed eyes.