Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

‘She’s getting a taxi now.’

‘And she’ll pick up Frans on the way?’

‘He’s in Spain. With Mariska and the baby. They’ll fly back tomorrow.’

(After Hinde left her house on the Vondelpark, her appearance on the Overtoom, where she planned to hail a cab, caused a minor sensation among friends. Having quit smoking years earlier, she now stood early on Sunday morning with a long filter cigarette in her mouth, gesticulating like a nighthawk at passing taxis. Just then, our friend Nelleke drove by, on her way to deliver our mutual friends Allard and Annelie to Schiphol. There wasn’t time to stop and enquire after Hinde’s secret new life, as they were already late and the flight to Hong Kong was not going to wait.)

14

I was so delighted with Tonio’s arrival that I did my utmost to include him in my good cheer right from the start. Music was part of that. I squatted with the two- or three-week-old infant in front of one of my stereo speakers, which screeched out Bach’s oboe concerto. The volume was turned up high, but the little fellow didn’t seem to mind. He had just been fed, and I shouldered him until a sourish burp erupted on my neck. If Bach’s slow movements helped Chinese women during delivery, then they would also be good for a baby’s digestion. Tonio wore a satisfied expression, a smile appeared to form on his relaxed little face.

The ritual of crouching together next to the speaker while gently rocking the baby accommodated a wide range of music. When my thigh muscles started to quiver, I would straighten up and dance across the room with him in my arms. At times, he almost floated in mid-air, the tiny body supported by and balancing on my fingertips alone. If the music (a menuet, for instance) suggested it, I would swing Tonio from side to side as wide as my arms would reach. And then up above my head … back down, nice and low … make a dip … and then swoop back up …

I danced as though under a spell (and I might have drunk some wine at dinner, too). I assumed the baby was just as content being flung about in my arms as he was resting on my thighs in front of the speaker. Until once, in my ecstasy, I did not close my eyes, and looked straight at Tonio’s face. With every upward scoop, his expression was transformed into a chubby little mask of fear, complete with downward-curling mouth and wide-open eyes. God knows how often he’d worn that expression of terror without my noticing.

I immediately quit swinging and swaying and held the little boy gently against me. ‘Oh, how stupid of me, my sweet Tonio, to fling you around like that … Sorry, sorry.’

He did not cry, and his face had pretty much reverted to its relieved post-feeding look. It would be months before I dared dance with him again, and from then on I held him timorously tight. I would not soon shake the memory of that scrunched-up, agonised little head. I never told Miriam, and nearly brought it up now, in the courtyard of the ICU.

‘Minchen, I just thought of something … a snippet from the past …’

‘As long as it’s not about Tonio,’ she said. ‘Not now, I can’t handle it.’

‘Yeah … never mind. Another time.’

It was difficult to hang onto that memory, because I suddenly saw Tonio’s agonised adult face appear on the shady side of the courtyard. It had the same look as the infant in the summer of ’88: the trembling around the eyes and mouth, the reddening cheeks, the expression of a boy in his death throes. Only this time he did not sail toward the ceiling in my arms, but was flung, together with his bike, over the front end of an unexpected oncoming vehicle and, further on, lurched across the roof of the car.

1

‘Let’s go back to the waiting room,’ I said to Miriam. ‘Hinde will never find us here.’

The walled courtyard was making us more and more claustrophobic, but that cubby-hole, where the air was heavy with old coffee (forever associated with Tonio’s birth) was no better. Hinde had not yet arrived. The clock above the door showed half past twelve.

2

During Tonio’s first year, I did a good job of maintaining a stable day-to-day existence, dedicating life and work to my small family. Alarmingly, however, the managers of Huize Oldenhoeck, the brothers Warners (or, as we called them, The Warner Brothers of the Amsterdam School), contrary to their promise not to unload the apartment building designed by their uncle, had turned it over to a management company. From then on, every vacant flat was drastically renovated, stripped of every ornament that referred back to the original 1924 Amsterdam School interior, and then let to a new resident at three times the original price — preferably a member of the corps diplomatique stationed around Museumplein, because those folks paid no attention to the price and never stayed longer than a year, after which the rent could be hiked up once again for the next consul general or his right-hand man.

The high turnover rate in Huize Oldenhoeck meant there were always a couple of flats being renovated at any given time. In the lift or the stairwell (from which they hadn’t yet ripped out the dark purple marble), I encountered, more often than not, a grey-dusted man dressed in a denim suit and cowboy hat: the project supervisor and, I found out later, one of the new managers.

‘I’d never buy a second-hand car from him’ is often used to describe an untrustworthy person. Well, I wouldn’t take any car from this dungareed cowboy, not even if he paid me. Although younger than me, he had those deep grooves between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth that gave him the expression of a sad wolf; he could look at you as sympathetic and guilt-ridden as you please, his head cocked slightly to one side like a dog trying to figure out what his owner is saying. If I complained about the construction noise, explaining that I worked at home, he cringed with servility. The man had a guilty conscience, and took full advantage of it. He offered me fawning, hand-wringing apologies, promising to keep the inconvenience to a minimum. But, of course, nothing changed, except that the cowboy honed in on my Achilles heel. I imagine, in retrospect, how, as soon as I was out of sight he went from grovelling to gloating: he had figured out how to drive the Van der Heijdens from their flat, probably the most desirable in the entire building. Just step up the construction noise.

Yielding in turn to my own guilty conscience, I rented a room on the Kloveniersburgwal, a few doors down from where Miriam and I had been so happy in ’84 and ’85, so I could work in peace. I convinced myself (and Miriam) that this was a good a way to keep myself on track. Every morning I took tram 16 there, but the only thing I achieved was an overwhelming restlessness. Wielding scissors, glue and sheets of A3-sized construction paper, I fashioned a comprehensive montage of my notes for the new novel as they had accumulated over the last three years — including cardboard beer mats, which from the side gave the metre-and-a-half high document a decidedly wavy form. I kidded myself into believing that I could, on the basis of this rough but strictly ordered material, transfer a definitive version directly to the typewriter.

The higher the beer-mat draft, the more paralysing my ergasiophobia. Beyond that fussing with scissors and tape, my work amounted to nothing. Yes, I wrote erotic letters as a warm-up exercise for the ‘real work’. (Admittedly, passages from those epistles did find their way, much later, into the novel.) I had more or less doubled our living expenses and halved my responsibilities as paterfamilias and breadwinner. At home, Miriam and the baby were at the mercy of the management cowboy. When I left the Kloveniersburgwal in the late afternoon, I did not always follow the ‘responsible’ route to the tram stop in front of the Bijenkorf. More and more often I cut hurriedly through the red-light district in the direction of the Spui and its cafés.