A Father's Affair (15 page)

A couple at a little table in the corner got up to leave, and Ellen and I edged our way through the crowd to grab their seats. For a while we listened to the music without talking. Then Ellen
tugged on my sleeve, and I leaned over to her so she wouldn’t have to shout above the music. With her mouth close to my ear, she said, ‘Had you ever gone to bed with two women at the
same time before?’

I laughed and shook my head. ‘What about you? I mean . . .’

‘No.’

We stopped talking for a while, but when I glanced over at her again I saw a smile on her lips. She turned to me and looked me straight in the eye, and the smile grew broader.

‘That kind of thing only happens when Monika’s around,’ she said.

And I nodded and thought: it’s not over yet.

(There’s always a convenient excuse for adultery. According to the most recent sociobiological insights, the urge to commit adultery is genetically embedded in both men
and women: adultery – so long as it remains undiscovered – increases reproductive success.)

We stayed for the end of the set. Then I suggested we go somewhere else. Outside, Ellen put her arm through mine and led me to a café I’d never been to before. Not
too crowded, but not too quiet, either. When we went in they were playing something by the Velvet Underground, and for the rest of the evening the old hits just kept on coming, by Dr Hook and the
Medicine Show and Credence Clearwater Revival and the Rolling Stones. The clientele seemed to be a carefully selected cross-section of Amsterdam nightlife, which brought with it an extremely
atypical camaraderie (not a single subculture was dominant enough to impose its own code of behaviour on anyone else). We settled down at a table on a dais at the back of the café, and Ellen
ordered a bottle of red wine and two glasses – another of the place’s unique features: you could order wine by the bottle, and for twenty guilders you got a more than reasonable Rioja
instead of the kind of sourish Corbières or a Côtes-du-Rhône that cost four guilders and seventy-five cents in the supermarket.

‘To the new life,’ Ellen said.

‘To the new life.’

‘What are the two most important things you’d like to pass along to your child?’ she asked.

I had to think about that one. I rarely thought about fatherhood in such concrete terms.

‘Love, and a deep suspicion of public opinion,’ I said then.

‘Which spot in Holland are you most looking forward to showing your child?’

‘The Wadden Shallows at low tide, in autumn, when a peregrine is hunting and the sun is literally blocked out by a cloud of stilts.’

‘What piece of music would you like it to hear?’

‘Bach’s
St Matthew Passion.
’

‘That’s so sorrowful!’

‘But also comforting. And everything Dolly Parton ever did, of course.’

‘What’s your earliest memory?’

‘Is this an interrogation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dressing up like a princess. We had a big wicker basket full of old clothes. My mother’s wedding veil was in there, too. I put it on. I can’t remember what else I had on. But
I remember standing in front of the mirror and finding myself beautiful and very charming. My mother says I was three at the time.’

‘Who was your first real love?’

‘Jacqueline van Essen. At junior school. A little girl with glasses and a round face with chubby cheeks, sort of like Queen Beatrix in her early photos. She called me the apple of her eye.
I thought a lot about that expression: apple, eye, apple of my eye. Nice expression. Mysterious. Why would you call someone the apple of your eye? But I was very flattered. And I fell in love right
away. Must have lasted at least six months, which is an eternity at that age.’

We sat and talked like that until the wine was finished. Then I drank a beer and Ellen had a Spa, with bubbles.

When we were back outside, I said: ‘I’ll walk you home.’ (‘She lives on Love Street, lingers long on Love Street,’ Jim Morrison was singing inside.)

‘But it’s out of your way.’

‘Monika would never forgive me if I let her best friend walk home alone in the middle of the night.’

It wasn’t far to Ellen’s house. She lived at the edge of the Jordaan. And of course she asked me to come up and get warm (the temperature by then had dropped well below freezing, an
east wind had come up and cut right through my jacket and, besides, it wasn’t the kind of evening one concludes by saying goodbye on a windy pavement.) Her house was small and soberly
furnished. Wooden floors with here and there a carpet or a throw rug from Asia or Latin America. A single bookcase full of travel guides. A wooden Buddha on the mantelpiece. A poster of a
Guatemalan Indian on the wall. She put the kettle on in the tiny kitchen, then came and sat beside me on the sofa. And before the tea had even drawn, we were lying on the floor and my hands were
gliding over her breasts and she was blowing softly in my ear.

Everything was familiar, and everything was new.

We went to her bedroom. She took the teapot and two cups with her. She lit two candles. We undressed and crawled into her bed, which was cold but soon warmed up. We kissed and caressed and she
said, ‘Just once. No more than that.’

And I said, ‘Yeah, one time.’ And we looked at each other when I went into her and we said again, ‘Just once.’

Afterwards we drank our tea, close together, with the duvet pulled as high as it would go. And I said, ‘It wasn’t over yet.’

And she said, ‘No.’

But suddenly our voices sounded different. Suddenly we weren’t so sure of ourselves any more. When I’d finished my tea, I dressed quickly and kissed her goodbye.

‘Be careful’ was the last thing she said.

(The desire to keep adultery secret is also genetically determined, says the sociobiologist. Discovery increases the chance of violence and abandonment, and therefore reduces
the progeny’s chance of survival. But, according to Dees, sociobiologists suffer from a chronic lack of knowledge of molecular biology, and so their theories are built on shifting sand.)

‘B
ookkeepers is what they are,’ says Dees. ‘And not very creative ones at that.’

We’re on our third glass of cognac. After Dees’s wise words about living with questions and living with answers, the subject of ‘Bo’s biological father’ (meanwhile
narrowed down to ‘Niko Neerinckx’) had never been touched on again. By way of the melting of the polar icecaps and the recruitment policy at Feyenoord Football Club, we’ve arrived
quite naturally at one of Dees’s hobbyhorses. He says, ‘They run the bookkeeping for a bankrupt world-view, the way the accountants of the Third Reich kept careful track of how much
Zyklon-B was being used, while the Allied bombers had already blasted half the country to rubble and the Russians were marching into Berlin.’

Whenever Dees gets wound up, he starts talking about the war. He got that from his father. ‘It’s in my genes,’ he actually admits, even though he, of all people, knows what
nonsense that is. The biggest popular lie of our day is that everything is in our genes – says Dees.

‘These so-called modern biologists have a number of preconceptions about how the world is organized, and anything that supports those preconceptions is broken down and studied until the
cows come home. All they do is bend over backwards to verify their own reductionist-mechanist world-view. Every once in a great while, of course, some smart alec comes along and proposes research
that might undermine that world-view. What am I saying? Every once in a great while some madman actually starts that kind of research and writes an article about it!’

He takes another slug of his cognac.

‘Articles like that do not find a place in our publication. We will tolerate no muttering in the ranks.’

There’s no better remedy for depression, despair, melancholy and that run-down, helpless feeling than an evening out, chewing the fat with Dees about the state of the
world in general and science in particular. For years, Dees has been working on a book that will disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution once and for all.

‘Microbiology will deliver Darwin the
coup de grâce
, just you wait!’ It’s the same thing he’d said back when he banished me from the publishing house,
because he felt I should be dealing with losing Monika, even though he never said that in so many words. For a while we saw each other only in bars, where I was to be found even more often than he
was – and that’s saying something. Sometimes I would leave Bo at my parents’ house. They let him sleep in my old room, in my old bed, the bed where Monika and I had once fucked.
(That was while my parents were on holiday. We were taking care of the post and watering the plants. It made us feel like naughty children. When we were finished, Monika said, ‘What were your
adolescent fantasies?’ When I told her, she laughed so hard that she peed in my bed. But my parents never found out, and fortunately Bo didn’t, either.)

But I usually took Bo along to the bar. He slept well there, although no one noticed; he’d stopped closing his eyes by then. Bo never had nightmares in bars, though. He would drink big
glasses of milk, or apple juice from the bottle. And he thought it smelled nice. ‘It stinks really nice here,’ he said on his first visit. No one ever talked about passive smoking in
those days – PC puritanism hadn’t been invented yet.

‘In Darwin’s day,’ said Dees, ‘they had no idea what the inside of a cell looked like. That’s why he could claim that the eye had evolved from photosensitive cells.
What did he know about what went on inside a photosensitive cell – let alone
how
it went on? He didn’t have the faintest about all the things that have to happen in order to
bring about the simplest functional change in a cell like that, to say nothing of a structural
improvement
. Darwin had no way of knowing that cells are full of irreducibly complex systems
– and systems like that are fatal for evolutionary theory.’

(Irreducibly complex systems, as Dees has explained to me many times since, cannot be created step by step, by means of minor, random genetic mutations. They work as a mousetrap, for example,
does: only when all the parts are in the right place and serve the right function at the right moment. If one single part is absent, or if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, the
whole system fails – and therefore constitutes a useless adaptation, which will disappear under the pressure of natural selection.)

‘These days,’ Dees went on, ‘every molecular biologist knows that the vast majority of systems he studies are irreducibly complex. And therefore that the pillars of all of
modern-day biology are rotten to the core. The only thing is, they’re afraid to tell anyone. Because then the whole neo-Darwinist house of cards will come crashing down!’

Dees was drinking margaritas at the time, which had something to do with a holiday love affair. I was drinking red wine. The intoxication brought on by red wine makes sorrow both greater and
more bearable. I could sit there listening to Dees and, at the same time, my sorrow at Monika’s death could be big enough to fill the whole café. Then it was as though the noise, the
voices, the music, were coming to me through a wall of cotton wool (only Dees’s voice remained the same; every word of his excited argument came across loud and clear, so that years later I
could still play it back almost verbatim – to his astonishment). At the same time, it was as though I was no longer sitting opposite him at the table, my three-year-old son on my lap, but
floating through space, up through the cigarette smoke and the stench of stale beer, sweaty bodies and cheap perfume, and looking down from on high on the roiling mass, like a bird, a dead soul,
like God himself. And all around me my sorrow kept expanding, filling the city, the country, the stratosphere. At moments like that I believed I knew what Bo dreamed of when he fell off the
world.

‘I’m telling you,’ Dees said, ‘Hitler’s ideas about race were based on better arguments than Darwin’s theory of evolution.’

We drank to that, and we ordered another margarita and another carafe of red wine. And I said, ‘You hear that, Bo? Don’t go looking for things that confirm your pet opinions. Look
for things that kick the props out from under them. Thus spoke Uncle Dees.’

But Bo hadn’t heard a thing. Bo was sleeping with his eyes wide open. And now, ten years later, I’m sitting with Dees in the bar again, talking once again about wrong-headed theories
and world-views that are maintained even though everyone knows better, and I think: man is incapable of learning.

S
tudies have shown that visitors coming to congratulate parents after a birth are much more likely to say that the child resembles its father than
its mother. The explanation the researchers give for this is that the visitors are unconsciously trying to put the father’s mind at ease.

There are, of course, cases where the baby is the spitting image of its father. The resemblance between George W. Bush and his father is so strong that one wonders whether Mrs Bush was involved
in the process at all, or whether one can speak here of the first successful human clone. But if Jordi’s last name wasn’t Cruyff, who would think he was the son of the greatest football
player who ever lived? And who, purely on the basis of appearance, would ever pick Claus von Amsberg as the biological father of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of Oranje-Nassau? Alex takes after his
mother. Like Bo, the eldest son of Niko and Anke Neerinckx. While Bo, the only son of the late Monika Paradies, looks just as much (or as little) like his mother as he does like the man he calls
his father, but who isn’t.

But does Bo look like Niko Neerinckx? No. At least, not like the photos I’ve seen of Niko Neerinckx. And not like my memory of him, even if that memory is vague and no doubt unreliable.
But does that mean anything? Can we, on the basis of a lack of resemblance between father and son, draw any conclusions about the love life of Mrs Cruyff or that of the Queen?

For anyone in search of his son’s father, physical appearance is an unreliable indicator. A DNA test would probably provide a definite answer, but I’m not sure I dare push things in
that direction. As usual, Dees is right: no one can guarantee that it will be easier for me to live with the answers than with the questions. So I am not going to confront Niko Neerinckx with what
I’ve found out.