Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

What time had the policeman said Tonio’s accident occurred that morning? Around 4:30? The flood of saliva brought about by the garlic overkill had woken me at about a quarter past four. No, don’t go there: I wasn’t about to start seeing premonitions and signs in everything. An upset stomach as a warning of Tonio’s impending disaster? And what was I supposed to do with this cryptic message delivered by peptic Morse code?

Once again I couldn’t help but notice the parallels with the circumstances of Tonio’s birth. Then, too, stomach cramps that turned out to be contractions had taken us by such surprise that we skipped breakfast. The previous evening, we’d eaten Surinamese food from Albina, a takeaway restaurant on the Albert Cuypstraat. I had ordered a portion of their dangerously spicy fashon sausage, which I only ate if I knew I had no social obligations for the next three days, because the dish transformed your mouth into an unwashed arsehole. And so I arrived at the Slotervaart maternity ward on the morning of 15 June 1988 with a contaminated mouth, augmented by an empty stomach. I dared not open my mouth for fear of endangering the delivery with my toxic fumes.

5

I don’t know where the additional information came from, but meanwhile the exact time of the accident was established as 4.40 a.m. Four weeks before the longest day: was it already light by that time, or still dark, or midway? When daylight savings time kicked in, we set the clocks an hour ahead, which meant that for the next seven months the sun would rise an hour later. I seemed to remember that in the old days, before daylight savings time was introduced, it was already broad daylight when the Nijmegen nightclub Diogenes emptied out at four-thirty or five o’clock at this time of year. All right, we’re talking about weekend hours. On weekdays Diogenes closed at 3.45, and in late May it was still pretty much dark.

I couldn’t be totally sure. I decided to set the alarm clock for 4:30 the next day so I could check the sky at twenty to five.

But if it turned out to be still dark at that time, it would automatically raise the next question: did Tonio have lights on his bike, or at least those little clip-on lamps on his clothes?

I wasn’t at my post this morning. No late-night revelry behind me, no hangover to sleep off, but I did just lie in bed, no denying that. Even waking up to a saliva flood and churning stomach presented me with no other thought than: once it’s passed, try to get another hour of sleep … work to do …

I should have been there , on the Stadhouderskade, to restrain my recklessly cycling son, steer him out of harm’s way. There was no one in the room to accuse me of anything, but I hardly needed a pointed finger to feel guilty, to know I was guilty. I sat next to Miriam shuddering and sweating with guilt for what I had carelessly let happen that morning.

My thoughts continued to hover around Tonio’s birth — undoubtedly due to the congruence of the circumstances. The uncertain drive to the hospital … the torturously long wait … If I were guilty of allowing his accident, it’s because I was accountable for his birth in the first place.

If, at that moment, someone had entered the room to tell me that back on 15 June 1988 I had intentionally let the midwife drive the wrong way in order to sabotage Tonio’s birth, then I’d have believed it. From the moment that I wanted a child, I also did not want one. Ergo: my insidious ambivalence made Tonio a sitting duck from the word go. This morning was proof — perhaps irrevocable proof — of it.

6

Of course, there was a large clock in the delivery room, as conspicuous as at a train station: the time of birth had to be established unequivocally and on the spot. It was seven-thirty in the morning. Miriam lay in great pain on a bed, the midwife on her left side and a maternity nurse to her right. Normally not prone to being superstitious, that day I found myself wondering if being at the wrong hospital would bring bad luck.

They each held one of Miriam’s hands while spurring her on. ‘Breathe, honey! Breathe through the contractions!’

‘Hey, don’t bite!’ shouted the delivery nurse when Miriam, reacting to a particularly strong contraction, sank her teeth into the nearest available limb. ‘Pant! Don’t bite!’

I looked on helplessly from a distance. My delicate little Minchen was not cut out for childbirth. I should never have saddled her with this.

When the contractions subsided for a moment, the redheaded maternity nurse who had met us at the lift went to fetch coffee. When she returned, she pressed a paper cup into my hand and whispered: ‘I think your wife could use your help right now.’

So coffee in hand, I sat down on the stool next to Miriam’s bed. I took a sip and bent over to whisper something encouraging, but before I could get a word out she cried: ‘No, please! Not with that coffee breath! Ugh, it stinks … I’m so nauseous … I can’t stand it …’

Never before had she looked at me (or through me) like that. Not only as though I were a complete stranger, but a hostile one at that. I noticed that even now, in the throes of labour, she emphasised the word can’t — as a child she adopted this one quirk of her father’s accent. ‘I can’t stand it.’

Her reaction made me recoil and nearly knock over the stool. So this was how ill giving birth could make you. I fled to the corridor, set the still-full coffee cup on a window sill on the way to the WC, rinsing my mouth a good five or six times, gargling with water until my throat went raw.

When the contractions resumed in full force, the women laid Miriam on the floor.

‘Don’t be alarmed, honey. You can push better this way.’

They put a pillow under her head, and there she lay, on the scuffed linoleum, with three women kneeling around her. The maternity nurse wiped up small amounts of faeces that came out with each push. The midwife put a stethoscope to Miriam’s belly, offering the mother-to-be a listen, but Miriam shook her head vehemently as a sign that the hooks be removed from her ears: by now, everything was an intrusion. The midwife signalled me to come listen. I’d have rather not, but I didn’t want to come across as an indifferent father. I knelt down next to Miriam, and with the stethoscope attached, I tried to hold my breath (it was the combination of Surinamese sausage and coffee on an empty stomach, of course, that had produced such a birthing-unfriendly stench). I listened to my imminent fatherhood. Eyes closed, I saw in my mind’s eye a snippet of a documentary of a coral reef. The panicked gurgle of escaping gas bubbles. Blurp, blurp. An improbably fast, watery heartbeat. Acoustically, already a miscarriage.

I nodded and handed the stethoscope back to the obstetrician. I returned to my stool near the door. The women conferred quietly as to whether it wasn’t time to break the membranes. A few moments later, I heard the metallic sound of fluids dripping, then gushing, then dripping again.

7

‘Look, honey, this is the amniotic fluid.’ The Fiat-midwife held the kidney-shaped bedpan up for Miriam to see. ‘That red’s just a bit of blood.’

It was one of those wards where nothing was done without the patient being informed. The heavily sagging body of my sweetheart rested on hands and knees on the floor like a pregnant animal ready to drag itself off to its den to deliver its cubs. The women crouched behind her continued their cries of encouragement. I thought the birthing process had begun. But no. Their exclamations were for the mother-to-be’s excrement. ‘Go on, girl, there’s still more in there. Breathe through the contractions, give us a little push.’