Tonio Read Online Free Page A

male voice, followed by an anguished cry from Miriam. The cats dashed down the stairs, their tails swishing along my bare legs as they crossed the landing and continued their patter down the stairs towards the cry of their mistress.
    Through the open bedroom door I could hear my mobile phone ring. It lay on Miriam’s half of the bed. I dove at it from the far side. Too late. Just as I pushed the button her voice, loud and panicky, rose up through the stairwell.
    â€˜Adri! It’s Tonio! He’s in the hospital! In a critical condition!’
    I was back on the landing in a few steps. In the bend between the first and second floor stood a young policeman, his arm on the handrail, looking up at me impassively. His spotless, white polo-sleeved uniform shirt lit up in the shadows.
    â€˜Sir, I’m afraid I’ve got unpleasant news for you,’ he said. ‘There’s been a traffic accident. Your son, Tonio, is in the Academic Medical Centre in a critical condition. My colleague and I are here to take you there. Our van’s waiting outside.’
    I felt myself sink into the kind of grainy, teeming semi-darkness that usually precedes fainting. My organs contracted, and I almost threw up. It could be that at the same moment Miriam came running up the stairs with an inhuman cry, first squeezing past the policeman and then past me. I do not have a clear recollection of the moment, only a churning sensation, from which a high-pitched wail arose. If it did indeed go like that (Miriam can’t confirm it either, for her it is even more of a black hole) then she ran across the landing to Tonio’s old room. It is there that I found myself. Miriam sat on the edge of the bed, shuddering with teary cramps, putting on her socks. Her overwrought face.
    â€˜Tonio’s in a critical condition,’ she kept repeating, in a sort of gasping trance. ‘He’s going to die. Maybe he’s already dead.’
    Those socks. She almost couldn’t manage. They kept getting caught on her toenails, and she had to start over. The stark details which, despite the constriction of one’s awareness, manage to nestle themselves in you … This bitterly surprised me, in retrospect. Or this: a tripod in the corner of the room, without a camera but instead, a silvery lighting umbrella screwed to it. Snow-white styrofoam panels here and there: the photographer’s reflectors.
    I stood there in my long work shirt and underwear, as though petrified, perhaps no more than a few seconds, but it felt like much longer.
    â€˜Get dressed ,’ Miriam cried, nearly screaming. ‘We’ve got to get to him. He’s dying.’
    5
    I didn’t dare look over the banister on the landing to see if the policeman was still standing in the bend in the stairs. Maybe I was hoping he was a figment of my imagination, a vision that had shadowed me beyond slumber. Even out of the corner of my eye, I could not see the glow of his white polo shirt.
    In a critical condition. For much too long (however briefly it may have been), I stood in the bedroom at the chair where a few articles of clothing lay, holding a single sock. All I could do was stare at the framed photo above the radiator. A Venetian gondola with a baldachin and a small sign on the side reading AMSTEL HOTEL . It was floating in the Amstel River in front of the Hoge Sluis, at the service of hotel guests, a few of whom were being transported to the opposite side. Judging from their dress, the scene must have dated from the twenties or thirties. Tonio had downloaded the photo from the Internet and enlarged it for me as a gift marking the thirtieth anniversary (in late 2008) of my book Een gondel in de Herengracht . He was that kind of kid.
    I heard Miriam’s hurried footsteps on the landing and, right away, further up the stairs. The gait added a nasty cadence to her high-pitched wailing. I tugged on the faded sweatpants that I’d laid out for the long