A Father's Affair (14 page)

‘He must be a cheerful kid,’ I said, just to have something to say.

‘He gets that from me,’ she said, ‘not from his father.’

The other bedroom was a copy of Bo’s, except the fire-engine red and canary yellow had made way for cobalt blue and apple green. And instead of one bed, there were two. Each with an Ajax
bedspread.

‘I didn’t want Sam to have a girl’s room,’ she said. ‘And Pim likes sleeping in the same room as his sister. Better than with Bo, because he’s still the
littlest. This way he can still play big brother.’ Her babbling about the children like that gave our being there together something almost improperly intimate. But the bedroom she shared
with Niko remained closed to me. And I couldn’t come up with a ready excuse for wanting to see it.

‘Do you have children of your own?’ she asked, once we were back downstairs.

‘No,’ I said. And I thought: you’re lying the truth.

‘I’m going to tell you something you might not like to hear.’

Dees has been quiet for a while, during which time he’s polished off two glasses of whisky. I’d been sitting there thinking about Anke Neerinckx and the pictures she’d shown me
(giving her yet another excuse to have a glass of wine; at two in the afternoon, no less).

‘I think,’ Dees says, ‘you’d be better off not confronting him with this. Wait, wait, wait a minute! I said you might not like what I have to say, but I’m your best
friend. At least give me a chance to finish.’

I lean back in my chair and fold my arms across my chest.

‘The Unwilling Ear,’ says Dees. ‘That’s what they should call that pose of yours. But try to imagine, Armin, what will happen when you tell him what you’ve found
out.’ (When Dees calls me Armin, things have become serious.)

‘To start with, he could claim paternity.’

‘Why would he do that, after all these years?’

‘Because his own marriage hits the rocks, for example. How do you think this Anke is going to react when she finds out he named their oldest son after a child he had by another woman? I
don’t think she’ll take that lightly. So he’ll think you’ve ruined his marriage. And the only way he can still get something out of having sired that kid is to claim
paternity.’

‘It would never hold up in court.’

‘Well, first of all, I’m not so sure. But even more important: do you
want
to go to court? Do you want to do that to yourself? And to Bo? And to Ellen?’

I take a sip of whisky. There’s a lot of truth in what he’s saying. It
would
be much smarter just to let things lie.

‘But I need answers, Dees,’ I say. ‘I want to know how and why and when and where and a lot more.’

‘Is that what you really want? Is it going to help you to know how Monika undressed for him? Do you really want to know if she had an orgasm? Or whether it happened at your place or at
his, or on a table covered with colourful holiday brochures from that drippy travel agency? Is it going to do you any good to know whether he got excited by that scar on her stomach? All I’m
trying to say, Armin, is that if you talk to him, if you interrogate him, you have no control over what you’re going to find out – or not find out. Remember those stories Robbert tried
to put over on you? The answers you get could very well be harder to live with than the questions. That’s all I wanted to say. Could we have two more of the same?’

Honesty is the basis of all friendship, but it can also destroy a friendship. Or a love.

Anke Neerinckx had shown me a picture of her oldest son.

‘How old would he be in this picture?’

‘Five.’

The five-year-old Bo is sitting on a plastic tractor. The tractor is next to a garden fence. The little boy is staring across the fence, into the wide world. There’s a great longing in his
eyes.

‘Small as he is,’ the proud mother says, ‘he’s already a real man. Dreaming of great adventures.’

‘Don’t women dream of adventure?’

‘Sure. But they’re not like men; they look for it closer to home.’

‘“Living on the edge at home”.’

‘That’s right.’

And her eyes meet mine. And our bodies touch, albeit ever so slightly. On the couch, with the photo album between us, on her lap and a little bit on mine.

Ellen once called me a ‘non-threatening male’. ‘That’s why women confide in you so easily,’ she said. I never could decide whether I was pleased by that, but for
the first time in years I’m overtaken by the lust to violate that confidence in a terrible way. But I don’t do it. I don’t even move. I look at the picture of the boy on his
tractor. And the moment passes and she turns the page and together we look at a picture of her and Niko, laughing as they paint a wall.

Life is an endless string of remodellings.

O
n the morning of Bo’s eighth birthday, I got out of bed at five. I turned on the light in the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil, took a
shower. Hair still wet, I fried eggs and bacon, filled a big thermos flask with coffee and a smaller one with tea. I stared at my reflection in the window while the butter spattered in the pan.
‘You’re turning into an old prune face,’ I said to myself. Then I went in and woke Bo.

‘Bo! Bo! Happy birthday!’

We ate our breakfast of crunchy oatmeal and fruit without a word, and while Bo was getting dressed I made bacon and egg sandwiches, with mayonnaise instead of butter, and with plenty of salt,
exactly the way he likes it.

Bo didn’t really wake up until we were in the car.

‘Where’s my present? Don’t I get a present?’

‘We’re going fishing. Isn’t that a present?’

In my five years with Monika, I never went fishing. It was the only real sacrifice I had to make for her. She would never have forgiven me otherwise. ‘Driving a hook through the mouth of a
living animal, just for the fun of it,’ Monika said when she discovered my rods in a corner of my room. ‘I think that’s about as low as a human being can get.’

‘Is it cause enough to reconsider?’ I asked. She’d just confessed to Robbert that there was another man in her life. (Her words, not mine – when it came to love, Monika
adored high-flown texts. Monika never said ‘fucking’: she said ‘making love’ or ‘sleeping with someone’. While in my view, what she did, what
we
did,
was what you really call fucking.)

‘It
should
give me cause to reconsider,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid that this time the spirit is once again weaker than the flesh.’

‘Would it help if I promised never to fish again as long as you’re in my life?’

‘That would be a great help,’ Monika said. That’s how it happened. I only went fishing again when Bo turned five, and then only because he wanted to so badly. My own feeling
about it was that it wouldn’t be fair to Monika to start torturing innocent fish again, simply because she’d had the misfortune to die young. That death had caused enough suffering,
without adding to it the suffering of fish. (Fishing is, of course, a form of cruelty to animals – but it’s such a
beautiful
form, almost as beautiful as bullfighting, for
which I have a secret soft spot.)

When I’d told him that going fishing was a present, too, Bo had looked at me doubtingly. But I simply kept my eyes on the road, which was misty and still largely shrouded in darkness, and
said nothing. By the time we got to the boat-hire place, the eastern sky was dark violet. Hesitantly, the land took on its first colour.

‘Your rod!’ I shouted when I opened the trunk. ‘We forgot your fishing rod!’

Bo didn’t say a thing.

‘I guess we’ll just have to take turns with mine.’

Bo stared at the ground.

‘Come on.’

He dragged his feet, but not for long.

‘Hey,’ I said after the man from the hirer’s had taken us to our boat. ‘What’s that?’ Lying on the bottom of the boat there was a long dark-green object with
a yellow ribbon around it.

‘My present!’ Bo shouted in amazement.

And so we rowed out onto the lake. The shores were deserted and we fished in silence, and only a moorhen saw us and was startled and withdrew into the reeds. Bo’s little hand clenched his
new fishing rod. His knuckles were white. Occasionally our floats dipped out of sight. Occasionally the water churned and splashed.

At nine o’clock I rowed the boat over to the shore, where a coffee house had just opened its doors for business. There I phoned Bo’s school.

‘My son is sick.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

‘No, nothing serious.’

‘That’s a relief. Be sure to wish him a happy birthday, would you?’

By the end of the day we had caught eleven roach, four white bream, six bream and a mirror carp. Bo caught the mirror carp. It was his first, and a miracle his line held. When the fish was lying
on the bottom of the boat, gasping for air with its big rubbery mouth, I leaned over and sniffed.

‘What do you smell?’ Bo asked.

‘Try it.’

He leaned over the fish and sniffed.

‘I smell fish.’

‘And the wondrous odour of the underwater world,’ I said.

He sniffed again, then nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The wondrous odour of the underwater world.’

Next week Bo is going to turn fourteen. For the first time, I have no idea what to give him.

‘L
ight and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another,’ the apostle Philip wrote. ‘They are
inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death.’

Monika cheated on Robbert P. F. Hubeek with me. Monika cheated on me with Niko Neerinckx. I cheated on Monika with Ellen. Ellen cheated on Monika with me.

But only once.

It happened six months after the night Monika told us she was pregnant. One cold Saturday evening in January I went into town alone. During the last few days Monika had been tired and irritable.
She was lying on the couch with a blanket over her, watching TV, her stomach bulging up beneath the tartan rug.

‘Bye,’ I said, and kissed her on the forehead.

‘Have fun.’

The sky was clear and the trees in the park stood motionless in the quiet winter evening. The first layers of ice were forming along the edges of the pond. A duck quacked. I decided not to take
my bike, but to walk into town. The city can be my greatest enemy (when the streets clog up with cars and couriers on scooters, with testy pedestrians and cyclists concerned only with their own
survival), but also my best friend. That evening the city helped me shake off the uneasiness that I’d been dragging along behind me for a few days and that hung in the house on the
Ceintuurbaan like stale cigarette smoke.

At Café de Kerk I drank two beers and listened to a muddled conversation between an old actor and a tatty woman with a tiny little Yorkshire terrier in her handbag that began peeping
nervously every time the actor raised his voice.

‘We spin the threads of our own lives, but God weaves the carpet.’

De Kerk was the ideal spot to start off a night of cheerful drinking. Or to end one.

At Muntplein I saw a boy throw a milkshake at a passing tram. The pink shake splattered and left a freakish spot on the window. A passenger stuck up his middle finger.

I followed the narrow pavement that separates the street from the waters of the Rokin. Another duck quacked. Without birds the city would be absolutely uninhabitable. As always, Queen Wilhelmina
was sitting frozen on her horse. She looked as though she could have done with the heavy overcoat she wore in another statue, on the other side of town, in the square that bears her name.

At Zeppo’s, in an alleyway called Prayer With No End, I had two more beers and looked at the students and congratulated myself for the umpteenth time on the fact that Monika and I had
turned our backs on the university for good. All that bourgeois chichi was painful to behold. I had the urge to get right up the noses of a couple of those gold-spectacled, pin-striped kids. (Not
long before that, I’d told Monika’s father that there were very few things I considered unforgivable, but that being intelligent and still a right-winger was definitely one of them. A
statement, her father said, which merely demonstrated my own shocking lack of intelligence, and their own daughter’s lack of sound judgement.) But I held myself in check this time, paid up
and went on my way. The night was still young. Why should I waste my time on boys who got excited about stock-market reports, or girls who thought a sweater was meant for tying around your neck,
rather than putting on (or taking off)?

I decided to go to De String, on the Nes, to catch some live music until it was late enough to go to the disco. Monika and I may have been on the verge of becoming parents, but we’d
promised each other we’d never turn into buttoned-down homebodies. And that evening I meant to make good on our promise. To drink a little, dance a little, flirt a little, and finally, tired
and drunk but content, to stagger home and crawl in beside that warm, pregnant body. That’s what I would do – and that’s what I would have done had I not run into Ellen at De
String.

She blushed when she saw me. (‘You blushed when you saw me,’ Ellen would say later.) We’d seen each other only once since that wonderful night, and that had
been in Monika’s company, in which company we both felt at home and in which what we felt for each other (whatever that was) was as plain and natural as what we felt for her. Like that very
first time, Ellen was tanned, a beacon of health in a sea of Dutch drabness.

A quartet was playing Irish drunkards’ tunes and ballads full of maritime romance and emigrant suffering. I ordered a Jameson’s, with one ice cube. Ellen was drinking red wine.

‘So how are you doing?’

‘Good.’

‘Are you here by yourself?’

‘Yeah. You too, by the looks of it.’

‘Monika’s too pregnant to roam around on Saturday night. Have you just got back from somewhere?’

‘Ecuador.’

‘Don’t tell me, not with that . . . What’s his name again?’

‘Niko. No, I was there with a group. Exhausting. But fun. And less frustrating than with someone you’re in love with but who doesn’t even know you exist.’