Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

The interview with Van Persie had come to an end. The camera mocked him once more by deforming his good-looking head and turning a close-up of his torso into a motif of brown-and-pink squares, a sort of Victory Boogie Woogie -ised portrait. I suddenly realised that the images of Tonio’s accident would show the same kind of jerkiness — not due to sloppy camera technique, but to frugality. Like all that surveillance-camera footage in Crimewatch . I didn’t know if the fragmentary images of his last deed on earth would make it easier or more difficult for me to watch them.

Now the broadcast switched to bird’s-eye-view shots from the helicopter we’d seen hovering above us this afternoon, when I’d had the confident certainty that we were being filmed as we stood at the spot where Tonio had been killed seven weeks earlier. That pair of flecks, separated from the crowd, was that us? Miriam and I sat tensely on the edge of the sofa, as though we were expecting Tonio’s resurrection, filmed from the air.

‘Do you see us?’ Miriam asked.

‘Helicopter’s too high.’

The yellow accident-reconstruction lines on the asphalt, the chalked outline of Tonio’s body, would have been the only thing you could make out from that distance, if they hadn’t been washed away by rain, by car tyres, or maybe by one of those high-pressure hoses spraying a chemical cleaning agent, the kind they used to get rid of squashed chewing gum from the cobblestones of the Kalverstraat.

Miriam and I were not visible on the film images. The camera swung back to the Singel, where the team boat, surrounded by motorised police waterbikes, glided around the curve.

‘Think of that schoolhouse in Marsalès, back in ’89,’ I said. ‘Those two little boys in our yard. Tonio, who was learning to walk behind his buggy … and Robin, who glowered through it all. And you see? — their histories graze each other, there in that curve.’ The camera showed us the back of Paradiso. If Tonio had gone there with Jenny that Saturday night, he’d still be alive; but, according to a whole lot of well-meaning and well-disposed people, we ‘mustn’t think like that’. And what if this is the only way I can think? Thinking is like forms of government. In some places, there is a regime of freedom; in others, one of suppression. The subject has no choice but to go along with it.

41

I thought back on that day, in the same summer of ’89, when we lost track of Robin while his sisters were immersed in Tonio’s attempts to walk. Despite Robin’s reputation for recklessness, or maybe because of it, the girls brushed it off, but Miriam and I were uneasy, so they decided to go looking for their brother after all.

I saw Robin again later that afternoon, at the campground happy hour, where the keg contained Heineken to make the Dutch guests feel more at home. I sat at a table with Robin’s mother and a friend of hers, another divorcée from Rotterdam, and the friend’s young daughter. The former Mrs. Van Persie was an extraordinary person, not exactly pretty, but with looks that stuck on you, or rather: they imprinted themselves in your brain like a seal in wax, indelible.

Lily and Kiki played with Tonio on the lawn. His buggy was next to me, empty. In her marvellous Rotterdam accent, Mrs. Van Persie told me about her job, her life, her family. Of the three children, Robin had taken the divorce the worst. Even when treating serious matters, her words alternated regularly with a brief, melodious giggle, or just the beginning of one — a kind of punctuation in the conversation.

Meanwhile, the children had congregated near the washroom block. Lily put Tonio back in his buggy and raced with him over to Kiki. My attention was distracted by the daughter of Mrs. Van Persie’s friend. The girl, maybe ten years old, wanted to sing me a song she’d learned, using a pop bottle upended on a broomstick as a microphone. She put on a guttural voice vaguely reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, but the featherweight variant. Her performance was interrupted by screams from the Van Persie sisters, who had come running from the washrooms in our direction. In tears.

‘Mama! Mama!’ they cried. ‘Robin! It’s Robin! He’s bleeding! He fell into barbed wire!’

‘Well, that’s about it,’ the mother said, rounding off her summary of the Van Persie family. Her daughters leapt around her like frightened puppies. ‘Come on , Mama! Robin’s bleeding like crazy!’

She stood up, slow and dignified. ‘Robin again.’ It was not the first time this had happened. That carpenter’s square in his forehead a while ago was indeed serious business, but pretty much every day there was a wound of some size to be patched or bound.

As though to demonstrate the proper lifesaving tempo, the girls ran ahead, looking back anxiously at their mother — who walked, straight as an arrow and unhurriedly, toward the washrooms. I had to keep an eye on Tonio, so I remained at the table, which in any case was littered with various small items belonging to the Van Persies. I watched the mother. The crowd of children parted for her, and the ruckus died down. A little while later, she led her son, pushing him gently forward, past the tables toward their tent. She greeted me with a gesture signifying: this is just how it is. Robin held his wounded arm outstretched, tilted slightly downward, so that the trickle of blood, having originated in the neighbourhood of his armpit or shoulder, wound its way to his wrist. He frowned as sullenly as that morning in our yard, but he did not cry.

42

Early that same fall, the Van Persie sisters came for a visit with their mother (without Robin, who by now was living with his father). Adults who meet during summer holidays should avoid renewing the acquaintance afterwards, when everyone has re-immersed themselves in day-to-day life. Awkwardness and tongue-tied embarrassment take over. Kiki and Lily, however, were oblivious to all this, and their need to cuddle Tonio had not dwindled.

But something else had changed. Tonio, now two months older, ran around the house as though he had never done otherwise. I don’t remember if we had prepared him for the girls’ visit, and if so, whether he understood which girls. The visitors’ voices drew him out of his room. There he stood, in the doorway between the bedrooms and living area of our apartment, with his blue-cotton elephant under his arm. I don’t hold with the cliché of the beaming bride, beaming faces, or beaming babies, but just this once I’ll admit it was the truth: when he saw Kiki and Lily, he radiated an almost iridescent joy. Out of pure bliss, he gathered up a fine gob of spittle on his drooping lower lip, which soon hung in a quivering strand halfway to the floor. Tonio had not only recognised their faces but their body warmth, their eager and secure arms, their scent.

Squealing with delight, the girls pounced on the little boy. ‘Tonio, can we see your room?’ He waddled proudly ahead, down the hallway leading to his private domain. Miriam brought them snacks every now and then, but otherwise we didn’t see the trio for the rest of the afternoon. When I took a peek around the doorway, I saw Lily with Tonio in his crib, singing to him. He giggled, listened, and giggled again — as though every verse contained a punch line, and he wanted to show he had caught it. Meanwhile Kiki worked on constructing a tower out of Tonio’s colourfast, drool-proof building blocks.

If I think back on these and later situations, I’m surprised how often he, as an only child, was surrounded by girls. Isoude, Femke, Merel, Iris, Alma, Pareltje, Jayo, Lola … Tonio loved women of all ages, and women loved him, ever since he was a tyke. Amazing that a boy like this would later worry about girls.