A Father's Affair (10 page)

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’

I sit up and look at what he’s doing. He’s pulling apart an owl pellet with his little fingers.

‘Look,’ he says. He holds up a minuscule piece of bone, with two sharp little teeth attached to it.

‘The upper jaw of a mouse,’ I say.

‘Is this poop?’

‘No. It’s a pellet.’

‘What’s that?’

I explain it to him.

‘Was it fun in the owl’s stomach?’ Bo asks the mouse’s jaw. ‘No, it wasn’t, was it? You should have kept your eyes open.’

We pull the rest of the pellet apart and find another fragment of a mouse’s skull, the remains of feathers and tiny bones that could belong to mice or birds.

‘What’s this?’ Bo asks.

He’s holding a black oval object between his fingers. ‘That’s a beetle shell,’ I say. There are more casts lying around the tree where Bo found this one.

‘From the looks of it, I’d say it was a wood owl,’ I say. The pellets are elongated and irregular, with a point at one end, like most owl casts. They seem too big for a
long-eared owl, and there aren’t any short-eared owls around here. ‘Maybe he’s up in this tree.’

We look up. Bo is the first to spot the bird. It’s sitting pressed up against the trunk, its plumage blending in almost completely with the bark. One of its round eyes is open and staring
down at us insistently.

‘He’s awake!’ Bo whispers.

We stand there and watch for a while. The owl closes its eye again.

‘Hee hee,’ Bo giggles. ‘Sleep tight.’

It’s twelve o’clock and I’m hungry. Monika would have known a good place around here to have lunch. She knew the best addresses all over the country – and she always
refused to tell me how she’d acquired that knowledge. But we don’t come across Monika in the woods. We follow a muddy path until we get to a paved road. A white marker says it’s
2.1 kilometres to Ede.

We have Dutch pancakes with apple and treacle. Bo has ice cream for dessert, I order coffee and cognac. Bo’s ice cream has a little paper umbrella sticking out of it.

‘Hey, that’s Mama’s umbrella,’ he says.

Outside the sun has gone back behind the clouds. The waitress, a girl with a fringe and pigtails and pimples on the back of her neck, comes to light the little candle in the middle of the
table.

‘How do you like that ice cream?’ she asks Bo in a childish voice.

‘That’s my mother’s umbrella,’ he replies.

‘I don’t think your mother would fit under that umbrella.’

‘Oh yeah, easily. ’Cos my mother’s dead.’

The girl hurries away.

While Bo eats his ice cream, I silently stare at the yellow flame. When he’s finished, I wipe his face.

‘Where are we going now?’ His fatigue has disappeared completely.

‘Wherever you want.’

He frowns, a wrinkle of deep thought across his forehead. ‘I want to go to Roermond.’ Monika’s parents live in Roermond. ‘Then Grandma Paradies can cook for us
tonight.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

In the vestibule I drop two coins into the phone and call Monika’s parents.

‘Hello, Paradies speaking,’ her father says.

‘Hello, this is Armin. How are you?’

‘Armin’ is all he says.

‘Bo would really like to come over for supper tonight.’

‘Bo wants to come to supper,’ he repeats, apparently speaking to his wife. I hear her say that it’s okay.

‘Okay.’

‘See you this evening, then.’

‘Yeah.’ He hangs up.

I haven’t spoken to them since the funeral, and I realize that I have no idea what to say to them.

‘You do the talking later on,’ I say to Bo.

‘What?’

‘Tonight, at Grandpa and Grandma Paradies’s house, you do the talking.’

O
n my desk is a piece of paper with a list of questions.

Why?

Was it passion?

Was it love?

Was it revenge?

Was it lust?

Was it boredom?

Was she drunk?

Was she angry?

Where was she?

Was she outside?

Was she inside?

What did she have on?

What did she take off?

Was the light on?

Was it dark?

Was there foreplay?

Was there afterplay?

Did she come?

Sometimes I find that I get excited when I think about those questions. Then I hate myself.

‘M
r Minderhout?’

The doctor sticks his head through the waiting-room door. I put down the copy of
Privé
in which I’ve been reading about Mel B’s lovechild. Lovechild, I think. Was Bo
a lovechild?

When I step into his office he’s standing beside the desk, his hand held out in greeting.

‘Mr Minderhout, it’s been a long time.’

He’s wearing tortoiseshell spectacles and his hair has turned grey. He must be well into his fifties by now. When he sits down in his chair I hear something in his knees go crack.

‘Ten years,’ I say.

‘Take a seat, what can I do for you? Or rather, first let me ask, how is the little boy? Bo, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right, Bo. He’s not so little any more.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘Thirteen. A difficult age. But he’s doing well?’

‘Yes, he’s doing well.’

‘And you?’

‘Are you Bo’s father?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I asked whether you’re Bo’s father.’

He looks at me perplexedly. Then, not taking his eyes off me for a moment, he says very slowly: ‘You’re asking me . . . whether I’m . . . Bo’s father?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m asking.’ Is he shocked? No, I don’t think so – or else he’s a master at hiding his emotions. Doctors are probably well versed in
that. But, on the other hand, amazement
is
written all over his face.

‘The answer to that,’ he says, ‘is no. But perhaps you could tell me why you think, or suspect, that I’m your son’s father?’

‘Because
I’m
not. So someone else must be.’

‘You’re not Bo’s father?’

‘No. I have Klinefelter’s Syndrome. I’m sterile. Always have been.’

He purses his lips, ejects air from his lungs. ‘Phhhewww.’

‘For the last few years I’ve had a girlfriend. We wanted quite badly to have children. It turned out we can’t.’

‘My God,’ the doctor says. ‘And now you’re looking for the father. For the man who . . .’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you thought . . .’

‘Yes. Why not?’

‘Yes, indeed, why not? It
does
happen. The doctor–patient relationship can be very close, and we read in the papers all the time about how that that can get out of
hand.’ He picks up a glass paperweight and rolls it between his fingertips.

‘Mr Minderhout,’ he says then, ‘I give you my word of honour that there was never anything untoward between your late girlfriend and myself. She was also decidedly not a person
who tried to steer things in that direction.’

‘Did she ever say anything to you, back then, when she came for her pregnancy check-ups? Confess anything?’

‘No, never. My God. It’s only now dawning on me what this must mean to you. I’m very sorry. I didn’t see all the consequences right away.’

‘Are you sure she never said anything?’

‘Yes, absolutely. I would definitely remember something like that. I have a good memory, insofar as a person’s memory can be good. But you probably know all about that by
now.’

He opens a folder that’s been lying on the table all this time. He looks at the index card with Monika’s medical history, flips through the papers. I see the letterhead of the
hospital where Monika died. He sighs.

‘This must reopen a lot of old wounds for you.’

But I don’t want to talk about that. I’m not looking for pity. ‘If you can’t help me any further,’ I say, ‘then I’m sorry to have bothered you. So I can
take you at your word when you tell me you’re not Bo’s father?’

‘You’ll have to. I could tell you – but, no, I won’t burden you with that . . . what’s happened in my practice through the years. No one’s hands are entirely
clean, Mr Minderhout. Mine aren’t, either, although fortunately it’s never got to the point where . . . But, as far as Monika is concerned, I can look you straight in the eye: never,
ever, did anything along those lines transpire between her and myself. And I am also not your son’s father.’

I get up. ‘Thank you. And should you reconsider . . .’

‘I can’t reconsider. There’s nothing
to
reconsider. But do you mind if I ask you something?’

I already have my hand on the doorknob. He’s standing up now, beside his desk again, holding his hand out to me as if I’d just come in the door.

‘Have you told your son about this?’

‘No. Is that all?’

‘Yes. Yes, please excuse me. Of course, it’s none of my business.’

I leave him standing beside his desk with his hand held out, and close the door behind me.

M
onika’s parents have always blamed me for her death, although I don’t know why. Maybe they couldn’t accept the idea that no one
was to blame for their only child living only to the age of twenty-five. They aren’t the kind of people to blame the doctors. There was no questioning authority, especially not the kind that
wore white coats. (They had wanted Monika to go to medical school, but instead she chose cultural anthropology, and quit that after the first year. Her parents blamed me for that, too.)

In their eyes, the only good thing that I’d ever done, or at least that they thought and I thought and everyone thought I’d done, was to beget Bo. When Bo was born they were both
still in their late forties, but their fondest wish was to be grandparents.

‘They’re pleased that they finally have a boy to ruin,’ Monika said. ‘It’s what they always wanted. A daughter was only second best.’

For Monika’s parents, having only one child wasn’t a matter of free choice, the way it had been with mine. (My mother thought thirty-nine was too old for a second child, and my
father never seemed to want a second one very badly. He’d proved what he was capable of. That was enough for him.)

‘My parents went to every doctor in the country,’ Monika said. ‘But they never found a cause. Back then, of course, doctors couldn’t do what they can today.’

One afternoon, when her parents were visiting us and had finished criticizing our small flat, and the way we took Bo everywhere we went, and our rather piddling employment, and our lack of
material possessions, and our political opinions, and our views on marriage – when at last there was nothing left to criticize and they were just about to leave, her mother suddenly said,
‘If I was still young, I’d have IVF. Then I could have a little boy, too.’

That night Monika lay in my arms and wept. And I said to Bo, ‘Make sure you stay away from those creepy people.’ But of course he didn’t listen to me. Grandpa and Grandma
Paradies became his favourite grandparents.

‘So, little fellow,’ Monika’s mother says to Bo, ‘Did your father finally work up enough courage to face us again?’

But Bo doesn’t hear her. He’s already on his way to the little room off the kitchen, where Grandpa Paradies is working on a model of a Dutch East India Company ship. He leaves a
trail of sand on the newly polished floor. In a minute he’s bound to knock over the model ship or create even greater havoc, but they won’t be angry with him, not his favourite grandma
and grandpa. They’re only angry with me. As a matter of principle. Or out of cowardice. But that’s usually the same thing.

‘Hello,’ I say to the woman at the door, and she kisses me stiffly and with palpable reluctance.

‘Hello,’ I say to the back of the man seated at the table, but he doesn’t hear me, he listens only to his grandson telling him something about a gold coin and pirate treasure
and about the taste of sand. (The street close to the railway station had been dug up. Bo had seen something glittering in the yellow sand. It turned out to be a chocolate coin, and he insisted
that he be allowed to eat it. The sand had crackled between his teeth.)

The visit lasts four hours and thirty-five minutes. We talk a little. We eat a little. We laugh a little. When I ask how they’ve been getting on since the funeral, they don’t answer
me. About me and how I’m getting on they ask nothing at all. Only about Bo do they want to know everything there is to know, and the less I say the more questions they ask, and the more
questions they ask the more I want to go away, away from this horrible house with its walls of brick siding and its false beams on the ceiling and its fake Dutch masters and its framed diplomas
from the retail-trade school and the butchers’ school and the yellowed awards from the trade federation for the meat and poultry branch, and that one photograph, that one photograph I
can’t look at but have to keep looking at – that photo showing Monika as a angelic girl, her red hair neatly combed, the edges of the picture blurred in a romantic soft focus. (‘I
was thirteen and had just lost my virginity. I hate that picture,’ Monika said. But of course not when her parents were around.)

After that last visit they came to Amsterdam a few times. But when I kept refusing to honour those visits with a return one, they finally sent me an outraged letter.

‘We want nothing more to do with you. You’ve taken from us the dearest thing we’ve ever had: our little Bo. We hope that when he’s old enough he will defy his father and
renew contact with us. He will always be welcome, but we’ll never let you darken our door again.’

Only then, only after I had read that letter and reread it, after I had torn it into little pieces and burned it in the sink – only then did the tears come. That they hadn’t said a
word about Monika, that they’d called Bo the dearest thing they’d ever had, that’s what finally broke the shell I’d built around myself.

I cried until there were no more tears. And then I cried a lot more.

N
iko Neerinckx lives in Haarlem, with a wife and three young children, two boys and a girl. He’s still off on trips all the time, but not for
a travel agency; these days he works for idealistic organizations who do good things for humanity in faraway countries, and who want to publicize that fact by means of the most modern media. Niko
Neerinckx has his own video-production firm, called Wandering Eyes. (Detective work is a grind, but also surprisingly easy. I wouldn’t mind making a living at it.)