Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

Love, not woman, was problematic.

43

Here, in the curve now being shown, Tonio was killed. ‘Run over like a dog,’ I once said in one of my worst bouts of anger. Two metres below street level, following the same curve, cruised the boat carrying football hero Robin — on his way to the tribute on Museumplein. My recollection of the two boys at the Marsalès neither added to nor detracted from Tonio’s death or Robin’s triumph. It was what it was.

A camera, set up on the mooring across from the Salt & Pepper shakers,* filmed the players’ wives, some of them with children, as they waited for the boat. One heavily made-up face pulled itself loose from its Modigliani neck, disintegrated into little coloured blocks, and was rebuilt from these same blocks as though they had imploded back together.

[* Notoriously ugly 1970s twin buildings across the Stadhouderskade, on the Weteringschans, so nicknamed because of their boxy ungainliness.]

‘So this is what she got herself all dolled up for,’ Miriam said.

‘Minchen, I think after all this jerky camerawork, we can handle the Holland Casino footage, don’t you?’

Miriam switched off the TV. ‘I don’t know. When the policeman from the accidents unit told me on the phone what that film showed, I was sick to my stomach for days.’

‘Come on, that disc has been lying in your computer for long enough now.’

‘I don’t think I can watch it. Later, maybe. Someday.’

‘Remember when we took Tonio to see The Lion King? When the buffalo went wild and stampeded over the lions, he couldn’t bear to watch it anymore. He got down on his knees in front of his chair, laid his face on the seat, and plugged his ears. You’re free to do exactly the same if it gets too much for you. But at least come sit next to me.’

‘I’m afraid I won’t even dare close my eyes.’

‘Listen, Minchen. Back at the AMC we watched him die, close up. If we can do that, we can do this, too.’

44

Two small figures danced with goofy, wooden leaps across the crosswalk between the Max Euweplein footbridge and the entrance to Vondelpark — apparently to dodge a vehicle approaching jerkily from the west side. I know nothing about cars, but from the documentation for my novel I recognised it as a Suzuki Swift. The car might have slowed down some for the pedestrians and, once past the crosswalk, sped up again, but from the jerky images it was impossible to tell. The Suzuki jolted around the wide curve of the Stadhouderskade, toward the next crosswalk. At the same time, a cyclist approached the same spot from the Hobbemastraat, thus more or less from the south. The traffic lights at the intersection appeared not to be on.

The collision between car and bicycle took place precisely between two consecutive frames — as though someone had snipped out, in an act of censorship or for some other reason, the collision itself. So we had a result but no cause. The CCTV film showed a stopped Suzuki Swift with a bicycle lying in front of it, and a more or less prone, slightly curled up figure behind it. The driver got out of the car, wooden as a marionette.

Miriam stood leaning over me from behind, her bosom tucked into my neck, and I could feel her gasp. Her fingers, lying loosely on my upper arm, now dug into my flesh. The driver jumped to his next position — and then the film went dark. I set the video back to the beginning, and replayed it.

‘No, not again,’ Miriam said, crying. She hid her face in my neck, and I felt the warm wetness of her tears.

‘Oh yes, now I want to know everything.’

That quasi-discreet omission of the moment suprême . The tidy division of oncoming figure into cycle and cyclist, split between front and rear bumper. Head and shoulders of the passenger getting out of the car. Strange: in the rerun, the CCTV film went on for longer. The driver’s leap led to the victim. And with another such leap, he was back at the car door.

I pushed the pause button. The driver had a hand to his ear. Perhaps the Forensic Institute could make a giant blow-up of this frame and see what number the man had dialled. I knew already: 1-1-2.

Again the screen went dark. I scrolled back. It was as though I expected the images of the collision itself would, sooner or later, come into view.

‘Minchen, see those running pedestrians? … they could have distracted Tonio. Coast clear for them? Then for him, too. Ride on through.’

Miriam had stopped watching a while ago. She hung heavily on me. I replayed the film a number of times. More eagerly, it seemed, the more I got used to it. As though I had found a way to erase the images of the accident from my memory by overfeeding them. It’s true, the replays gradually became numbing. The video, with its jittery figures and all, suddenly started to resemble Tonio’s very first video games, which he operated with deft little fingers. Except that this game could not be manipulated. No matter how often I replayed it, the car hit the bike every time.

‘Adri, stop now, will you, please.’

‘Look, there’s more.’

If I let the video play on through the blank, black screen, four rotating lights, jerky and flickering, suddenly came into view: two from police cars, two from ambulances. The jolting images made it look as though the victim was being literally thrown, stretcher and all, into one of the ambulances.

Miriam had lifted her head off my shoulders and watched the last images, sniffling quietly. ‘Our sweet Tonio … why did this have to happen?’ (I’m almost certain she said ‘ does this have to’, using the present imperfect: it happened, after all, at that very moment, in front of her own eyes.)

The ambulance with Tonio in it jerked into motion, leaving behind a flea circus of uninterrupted, hopping mini-figurines. With something in between a sob and a sigh, Miriam nestled her head back onto my neck, murmuring the words she’d used since the first night, when all other expressions of grief seemed to be depleted: ‘Our little boy.’

With my arm stretched back tightly around her neck, I sat there staring at the screen. The running clock at the bottom of the screen said 05:09:14. Was the Holland Casino still open at that hour? I imagined that behind the high front wall, on which the security cameras were mounted, the balls on the roulette wheels just rattled on. A tired croupier raked up a fortune in chips. The mysterious yellow-eyed customer finally dared to loosen his necktie a bit.

1

August is drawing to a close. Tomorrow is the first of September, the beginning of meteorological autumn. This morning, the in-house philosopher at de Volkskrant wrote a piece about hope. I quote: ‘Hope is out, fear is in. Hope and fear are twin brothers, born of the unknowableness of the future. We hope for the best, but we fear the worst.’

Hope may be a form of self-deception, but we can’t live without it, even though it means hoping against all odds. ‘Hope is a reflex.’ But if it’s true that the terminal patient keeps hoping for a cure, and the death-row inmate for a reprieve, what does that — reflex or no — leave Miriam and me to hope for? ‘A person cannot evade his hope any more than he can his fear.’