Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

I look over at Miriam. She nods. The man has understood, and makes a note of it. I bring his attention to the extraneous dash. I needn’t explain; he knows the story. How the hyphen still found its way into the design, he couldn’t say, but he assures us it will not end up on the final product.

‘Otherwise it’s at our cost,’ he says.

Back in the showroom we pick out the definitive typeface. We choose ‘Albertus Bold’. We watch as the man changes the headstone’s lettering on the computer.

I draw his attention to the excess space between the components of the dates. He trims it. Out comes a printout of the definitive text, with the photo in place. I point out the misleading hyphen again. Without a word, he removes it from the computer screen as though it’s a fleck, and I get a new printout.

I am reminded of the young woman at the registry office, to whom, bundle of nerves that I was, I neglected to give Tonio’s middle name. Granting Tonio his complete name has taken more than twenty-two years. I have waited until it had to be etched in stone. The shame I now feel is infinitely greater than back then, on 16 June 1988, when I stood outside the registry office with an incomplete birth certificate. (‘How am I going to explain this to my wife?’)

‘The stone,’ the man says, ‘can go into production this week. We’ll place it in a fortnight. Just as a reminder: Belgian bluestone weathers over time … it’s supposed to. Gives it a nice effect. The gravel will be refreshed every four years.’

He motions us to wait for a moment, and goes back to his colleague in the workshop. After a brief exchange, he returns. ‘We won’t start on it until next Monday at the earliest. So … if you change your mind as to the lettering or the photo, you can always call us first thing Monday morning. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll assume we can go ahead as planned.’

Miriam wants to leave, but I linger in the doorway separating the showroom and the workshop until the man has run off his own printout (without the hyphen) and taped it to the gravestone of Tonio Rotenstreich van der Heijden.

My feet feel uncomfortable on the cement floor. It’s Tonio’s feet that should have been standing here, in shoes that have gained a size, the flesh having got looser and fatter after two, three decades. I would have preferred to see him here at forty-something, in which case I would have been the eighty-something deceased for whom he was ordering a gravestone. ‘Belgian bluestone.’ Maybe he would think to print out one of the photos he’d taken of his father over the years, and incorporate it into the monument.

I imagine him pacing impatiently, with or without his mother, as he attended to this necessary evil. A gravestone for his father. Even if I were that age, it would, if he still loved me, be a defeat for him.

This, me in his shoes — now that’s defeat. For him and for me. God, kid, I wish we could have skipped this, and leap forward to, say, 2034. Me, dead at a respectable age; you, living on toward that age.

4

Since beginning this requiem, I have tried to find solace from other writers who have lost a child.

Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, the male half of twins, died at the age of eleven. If traces of this loss can be found in his work, they are only indirect. The filicide in Macbeth , perhaps. ‘ Give sorrow words …’ Maybe, with the portrayal of the young hero in Hamlet , Shakespeare created an idealised version of his own son, and disguised himself as a voyeuristic ghost.

Ben Jonson lost his eldest son at age seven. ‘ 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. ’

Descartes never got over the death of his young daughter, but whether her death played any role in forming his philosophy, I couldn’t say. Klaus Mann, eldest son of Thomas, committed suicide. In his diary entries from the time the lad was twelve, the father wondered if he could fall in love with his sailor-suit-clad son. Klaus’s funeral in Cannes had to make do without the sacred presence of Thomas, who was on a speaking tour of Scandinavia.

Anna Enquist lost her daughter Margit to a traffic accident on the Dam. How she (Margit) sang and played and beamed at the twenty-fifth anniversary party of De Revisor . The infant daughter of P.F. Thomèse became a ‘shadowchild’. Mauringh, the eldest son of Jean-Paul Franssens, jumped in front of a train (his father died a year later). One of Jan Cremer’s sons was murdered. A son of Jeroen Brouwers died of an illness. Not long thereafter, I sat across a restaurant table from the father, and could see, close up, the pain in his tired eyes.

The list is long. Writers are not spared. Perhaps they are asking for tragedies, being so tied up with them professionally. After the publication of George Simenon’s The Disappearance of Odile , his own daughter vanished. She was later found to have committed suicide. Simenon wrote a thousand-plus-page memoir in the form of a letter to her.

I have not been able to take any comfort from my colleagues’ pain. Shared pain lessens nothing. It only augments.

5

On the return trip through the scattered building-blocks of Osdorp toward the land of the living, Miriam again points out the high-rise main block of the Slotervaart Hospital.

‘Want to stop?’ And since I appear to take it as a joke: ‘I’m serious. For your book.’

‘Another time. The stonecutter’s also got to go in the book.’

As we ride past the hospital, I keep my eyes glued to the tower block. Somewhere, on an upper storey, I watched my son being born. Looking out over Amsterdam from that height, and becoming a father at the same time — oh, that gave me the most majestic feeling. The urge to take the still-unwashed babe to the window, to show him (to) the world … I didn’t dare.

I have just seen his gravestone. His photo will come just under the arched upper edge. He’ll be looking out over a patch of gravel about as long as he was tall, from a height of less than a metre.

‘I don’t know quite how to put it,’ Miriam says, ‘but I have the constant feeling that Tonio, well, is living in me. Permanently.’

‘In us both,’ I say. ‘And since Whit Sunday, we, with Tonio in us, live permanently in another world. Hasn’t anybody sent the change-of-address cards yet? It’s a world we never imagined existed. Take the stonecutter, for instance … Just drive over there, walk in and order a gravestone … two months ago, we’d never even considered it. Another world, other doors, other interiors. The curious thing is that we behave as though it’s the most normal thing in the world … stroll around, shopping basket in hand, choosing accessories for Tonio’s grave … like at the corner grocery. The way back to our pre-Whitsun existence is gone, cut off, forever. You see something of the world this way, at least.’

We’ve passed the hospital now. I turn back for a last look at the ugly tower block. A couple of days after Tonio was born: I stand with my mother at the glass window, behind which Miriam has appeared wearing a nightgown, with the baby in her arms, her face fatigued, but all smiles.

‘Yeah … yessir, you sure made a good one there.’ She claps her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh dear, what am I saying?’

6

Last week, Miriam got a phone call from Lieftink Bros.: the gravestone had been put in place. They didn’t have quite enough gravel to fill the plot, but it would be taken care of ASAP.

Miriam made a telephone-round of the family straightaway, to find a suitable date for us all to visit the grave together, for you couldn’t call it an unveiling anymore. Natan thought it was strange that they hadn’t done it in the presence of the family. Surely that was a widely held tradition? But, naturally, he wanted to accompany us to the gravesite, also to see his own, endangered surname chiselled into stone.