A Father's Affair (13 page)

But how could Bo not be their grandchild?

Maybe that’s the biggest difference between motherly love and fatherly love: a mother is always a hundred per cent certain that her child is truly her child. A mother,
therefore, never has to prove herself.

‘Where was that crack between the rafters, exactly?’

Her voice makes me jump, as though she’s submitting me to an interrogation. But when I look at her she’s wearing that friendly smile again, the smile that makes her so attractive.
She’s a ‘pleaser’, I think to myself. As are so many beautiful women – her kind of beautiful women.

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t remember,’ I say. ‘I mean, I can still see the crack, but not exactly where it was in the attic. Where it was in relation to the steps,
for example.’

I have no idea what kind of steps I’m talking about. Do they have a trapdoor with a pull-down ladder, or a real set of stairs? Is there a skylight? No, at least not on the side facing the
street.

‘There’s a trapdoor, with one of those ladders, on the left side of the attic. Against that wall, as it were.’ She points to one corner of the living room.

‘Well, at least that hasn’t changed.’

We sip our wine in silence. And just when I’m thinking that it’s time to go (after all, I’ll be coming back, and I must pick my way carefully now, I want to see Bo – the
other Bo!), she pushes herself up off the couch and says, ‘We took pictures before we renovated the place. Maybe you’ll recognize it then.’

She goes over to another antique colonial cabinet and comes back with a photo album. She opens the album in front of me on the glass coffee table (the mahogany base undoubtedly came from that
same container on the quay at Rotterdam) and kneels down beside it. When I lean forward to look at the pictures, I can smell her perfume. Cacharel. Monika hated it. ‘Sickly sweet’, she
called it. But I always thought it smelled good. I still do.

Anke Neerinckx turns the pages of the photo album with her neatly manicured hands. I see a man wearing paint-splotched overalls. Niko? I wouldn’t have recognized him. A child playing among
piles of planks in a muddy garden. Bo?

‘Here,’ she says, and slides the book over a bit so that I can get a better look. ‘I bet you’ll recognize this. We found it when we steamed off the old paper.’ I
see a wall with grey-and-green-striped wallpaper. Never have I seen anything so ugly.

‘I’ll be damned,’ I say. ‘How about that?’ And I laugh a little sheepishly. ‘My father had terrible taste. My mother did, too, come to think of it. God rest
her soul.’

‘It was a lot of work,’ Anke says. A lock of her dark hair, which she has fastened up with an exotic hairpin (Sri Lanka?), has fallen loose. The tips of it brush against her cheek. She tries to push the lock away, but it falls back again. It’s a
beautiful gesture, precisely because it’s so futile.

She shows me two more photos of rooms I’ve never seen before, but I nod in confirmation.

‘That’s right, that’s how it was. I’d forgotten, but now I’d recognize it anywhere. That’s how our house looked.’

And then it happens.

She turns a page. A photo slips out. The photo falls to the floor, face down. She picks it up. Turns back the page. There’s a white, empty square where the photo had
been. She puts the picture back in place, slides the corners into the little paper triangles and closes the book. It all takes no more than a few seconds.

When we’ve said goodbye at the door (she holds out her hand, and I’m so dazed I almost forget to shake it: ‘Ring tomorrow, and we’ll arrange a time.’), when
I’m down the street and around the corner, when I know for sure that I’m out of earshot, then I scream, ‘
Monikaaa!
’

I start running. I run straight through puddles, straight through traffic, straight through a crowd hanging around in front of the door of a disco or a mosque or a theatre, I have no idea, I run
until I’m completely out of breath, and then I run some more.

It’s true.

Niko Neerinckx is the father of my son.

Why else would he keep a picture of Monika in the family album?

F
acts. Figures. Titbits of information. There are people who know everything there is to know about expensive cars. In which year did what model
appear on the market? How big was the engine? How many cylinders did it have? And how much did one pay for the optional gazelle-skin upholstery? For years Bo and I didn’t own a car; we only
bought one again after Ellen moved in with us. In the meantime, however, we collected a wealth of useless information about old and exclusive cars. We still can’t tell a Hyundai from a
Toyota, but ask Bo or me about the models of Morris Minor that appeared over the years and you’ll receive a detailed reply. That which one doesn’t have, but would like to, is what one
wishes to know all about. These days I, for example, know everything there is to know about sperm. And about virility and masculine (and feminine) fertility. Facts. Figures. Titbits of
information.

If the statisticians of modern sexological research are right, the spermatic army of Bo’s biological father (the army of Niko Neerinckx!) achieved the easiest victory in the history of
warfare. Even the Gulf War, in which the ground offensive was decided within thirty-six hours, was a hard-fought victory compared with the walk-over of Neerinckx’s troops. Monika’s
battlefield had the feel of enemy presence; there were even trucks that should have brought in the troops, but there were no soldiers. Not one.

D
ees is aghast.

‘So what now?’

‘Yeah, that’s what I’ve been wondering the whole time. What now?’

‘When’s he coming back?’

‘Ten days.’

‘Who would ever have thought, a little detective work and bingo, there’s the culprit. Niko . . . what’s his name again?’

‘Neerinckx. With c-k-x.’

‘Well, isn’t that frightfully la-di-da! Niko Neerinckx.
Bo
Neerinckx. My God, what a mess. Whisky?’

The next day, as agreed, I’d called her – the woman with the pinned-up hair and the sweatpants, the woman who needed company in order to have a drink, the wife of
the man who is the father of Bo, of two Bos, in fact. Anke Neerinckx.

‘Would this afternoon be convenient?’ she asked.

It would.

This time she was wearing black jeans and a man’s white shirt that looked good on her, the way almost anything would have looked good on her. She showed me to the attic. On the way up the
stairs I looked at her arse (it was dancing right in front of my face – nice, tight buttocks). She pulled the trapdoor, and the ladder slid down with dry little clicks.

‘After you,’ she said.

The attic was full of the kind of things attics are supposed to be full of. Suitcases and boxes and skis and an old-fashioned armchair. I looked at the rafters. There weren’t many cracks.
She came up the ladder after me.

‘Is it all coming back to you now?’

‘No,’ I said, speaking truthfully. ‘There was a lot more junk then. It was a kind of maze. That’s why I liked coming up here. I could pretend I was in a completely
different world.’ I’d lost none of my capacity for inundating her with lies. I walked around, inspecting the roof, and finally found a crack at a place where two rafters crossed,
exactly the way I’d imagined it.

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘Here it is.’

She came and stood close to me. Again I smelled her perfume. I stood on tiptoe and peered into the crack.

‘I don’t see anything.’

I took a step back, so she could look as well. Her arm brushed mine.

‘Nope,’ she said. ‘But wait a minute.’

She went over to a big steamer trunk close to the trapdoor, opened it and took out a torch. ‘Here, try this.’

I took the torch and tried to turn it on. It didn’t work.

‘Oh yeah, I forgot,’ she said, and laughed. I handed her the torch and she unscrewed it, took out the top battery and turned it around. ‘One of Niko’s things,’ she
said. ‘He always turns a battery around so they won’t run down by accident.’

‘Handy,’ I say.

‘No it’s not.’ She laughed, as if she was saying something naughty. She’s flirting, I thought. That’s the kind of woman she is, a tease and a flirt. But woe betide
the man who draws the wrong conclusions. She handed me the torch and I shone it into the crack. There was nothing there. She came up beside me for another look too. She brought her face up close to
mine. I felt that lock of hair, which had fallen free again today, brush my cheek. A shiver ran down my spine.

‘What a pity!’ she said, and the way she looked at me seemed to express real disappointment. ‘Oh, what a pity!’ she said again. I was ashamed at making her feel
disappointed while I, of course, was feeling nothing – nothing but heady excitement at her being so close. I walked around the attic a bit more, as if in doubt about the exact location. Maybe
I’d hidden the letter somewhere else? But there were no other cracks.

‘I used to be afraid of attics,’ she said suddenly.

‘Why?’

‘I was afraid strange men were hiding in them. And now look at me . . . up in my own attic with a strange man.’

‘I’m completely harmless.’

‘One can never be sure.’

We went down the ladder again, first me, then her, so I looked at her buttocks again, dancing down this time.

‘Would you like to see the kids’ rooms?’ she asked after I had pushed the ladder back up for her and closed the trapdoor. ‘Where did you use to sleep?’

‘At the back.’

‘That’s Bo’s room now.’

As if I hadn’t guessed. She showed me the room. It didn’t look at all like the one where my own Bo (my
own
Bo?!) slept. Bo didn’t get a room of his own until he turned
four. Shortly after Monika’s death I was offered another house, through one of my father’s real-estate contacts. ‘It isn’t good for you to stay here,’ my father had
said. I think my parents knew I was drowning my sorrows in bars. But they never said a thing about it. They kept asking me how I was getting on, though, and they invited me over for dinner all the
time, or ‘for a decent glass of wine’, as my father put it. I didn’t take them up on it much. I still don’t know why, but I think it had something to do with shame. I felt
like a failure. My father and mother had been together so long, and even though they may not have made each other really happy any more, at least they didn’t make each other
un
happy.
And what about me? What had I accomplished? Monika and I had been together for barely five years. Her death wasn’t my fault, of course, not as her parents wanted me to believe, but still . .
. If I’d called the doctor a little sooner, would she still be alive? I’ve buried that thought, but I can’t dispose of it completely. The feeling of being my father’s equal,
the feeling I’d had when Monika became pregnant, had died along with her. I’d been demoted. I was a son again. It hurt me to disappoint my mother, but I couldn’t find the right
words to explain to her what was going on inside me.

Bo’s room in our new house wasn’t very big, not much bigger than the room of this other Bo, the one I was standing in now. But two rooms could hardly have been more different. Here
there was fire-engine-red linoleum on the floor, while my Bo (
my
Bo?) had sisal mat. Here was a bed with an Ajax bedspread, and the canary-yellow wall opposite the window bore a big poster
of Bert and Ernie. Bo had a mattress on the floor, at his own insistence. (‘The world is nicest closer to the ground,’ he’d said.) The bedspread was a patchwork quilt my mother
had made for him. On the walls of Bo’s room were dozens of pictures of exotic animals, clipped from the pages of
National Geographic
. Gruesome spiders with hairy legs, a manatee with
her calf, a kangaroo rat, a flying fox, a lot of lizards. His room hasn’t changed much since then. The quilt has been replaced by a South American blanket Ellen brought home from one of her
trips. (Bo’s mice had pissed on the quilt, and the guinea pig had gnawed holes in it.) Once Bo had outgrown the mice and guinea-pig phase, the lizards on the wall were finally joined by real
lizards in a terrarium. When he was ten he’d replaced the pictures on the walls with a series of dinosaur posters. Those posters are still there. And beside the terrarium there’s now a
collection of glass jars and plastic containers in which he raises insects, as lizard feed and objects of study. Of all the toys I saw in the room of
this
Bo, the Bo of Niko and Anke
Neerinckx, there was nothing my Bo had ever played with.