A Father's Affair (2 page)

‘How long can you stay out in the sun?’ she’d asked as we were ploughing along through the hot sand, looking for a quiet spot.

‘For hours,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

‘Not that long.’

I found her white body enchantingly beautiful, but that day I discovered the price she paid for that beauty. We didn’t stay long, and when we weren’t in the sea (where we splashed
each other, where I took her in my arms in the surf and kissed the salt from her face, where we gave a fervent rendition of the starry-eyed young lovers in a B-movie) – when we weren’t
in the sea itself she stayed under that big beach towel. Even so, that evening she was sunburned. In the years that followed we often went to the beach together, but never again on a sunny day in
July.

There are a few pictures of the two of us. In the most cheerful one, we’re riding a big men’s bike. Monika’s on the saddle, she has to stretch her feet and toes to reach the
pedals. I’m sitting on the baggage carrier, one arm around her waist. With my other arm I’m waving at the photographer. I wonder who took that picture, and exactly when it was taken.
Judging by Monika’s hair, it must have been before Bo was born. After that she let it grow. Just when she’d decided to have it cut short again, she became ill. She was buried with long
hair. Now I remember who took the picture: my father. It’s my father’s bicycle. There are splotches of paint on Monika’s trousers. The picture was taken on the Ceintuurbaan,
across from the Sarphatipark. We’d just found a house, across the road from the park. My father helped us fix it up.

For the first two weeks, the work left to do increased, rather than decreased, with each passing day. When we scraped off the wallpaper, we discovered that the plaster was crumbling. When we
tore out the suspended ceiling, mouldy beams appeared. The chimney had an enormous crack in it. The wooden floor beneath the kitchen cupboards was rotten.

‘You should have seen that right away,’ my father groused, more at himself than at me. ‘What in the world do you look at when you go to see a house?’

‘I look out the window, mostly,’ I said.

Besides the park, we also had a view of a magpies’ nest. The first time I saw the house, the birds were busy repairing their roof. The weather had been wet and blustery, and the large nest
had clearly suffered some damage. The two birds were flying back and forth with twigs. It must have been April or May. The picture with the bike was taken two months later. Behind the parked cars
you can see a hawthorn in final bloom. Painting the house had been the final chore. Shortly after, we moved in – first Monika, the next day me.

That summer the magpies raised three fledglings.

And Monika became pregnant.

I
t was a summer full of firsts. It was the first time I lived with someone. The first time I read the words ‘vasopressin’ and
‘glycogenolysis’. The first time I fucked in a car. The first time I made a woman pregnant (I thought). The first time I ever saw a red-tailed blackbird in Amsterdam (on the Gerard
Doustraat). The first time I thought about the words ‘It would be foolish to laugh at the romanticist: the romanticist, too, is right’ (Ortega y Gasset). The first (and last) time I
ever slept with two women at once. The first time I saw my father as my equal, because my father saw an equal in me. That was a change I hadn’t seen coming, and one that moved me almost as
much as the changes in Monika’s body. (Long before her belly began to grow, there were changes in the shape of her face, the pliancy of her hair, the softness of her breasts. I couldn’t
believe that so many people remained in the dark about it for so long. Did no one really look at her – not even her own mother? No, especially not her own mother.)

My father is a self-made man – those are his own words. He got off to a bad start in life, was weak and sickly as a boy. When he was thirteen, the war broke out. Three months later he lost
his father. Not because of the war, but because of a stupid coincidence. A new house was being built on a street close to where my grandparents lived. The workmen had just installed the highest
beam, and my grandfather stopped across the street to see the men congratulate each other, and to watch as one of them, balancing on the tie beam, threw his cap in the air and caught it again.
‘If my father hadn’t stopped to watch,’ my father said, ‘that tram would never have hit him.’ But, still staring up at the cheering men, my grandfather crossed the
street right in front of a number 4 tram. His legs were so badly crushed beneath the steel wheels that they had to be amputated at the hospital. The wound on his left leg (or the stump of it)
became infected. The infection became internalized. Ten days after the accident, my father no longer had a father.

‘You’ve never learned to fight,’ my father would say whenever he couldn’t understand why I did the things I did. What else could I do but admit he was right, and then add
as nonchalantly as possible, ‘But isn’t that exactly what you wanted – to make sure I’d have a better life than you did?’

After the war the family didn’t have enough money for my father to continue his education, but he soon found work with a contractor; ironically, the same one who’d built the house
that cost my grandfather his life. During the Fifties, when most of Holland was one big building site, my father worked his way up from general dogsbody to foreman. In 1961 he not only married an
Amsterdam nightclub singer three years his senior but also started his own business: within ten years, Cornelis Minderhout Contractors & Construction had made my father a prosperous man (even
though today’s nouveaux riches would laugh at what my father called ‘our family fortune’ – we had enough money for a duplex in Abcoude and a rowing-boat on the River
Gein).

For years I thought of my father as a man who could do anything, an admirable figure who could build a cupola for my attic room as easily as he could whip up a big pan of paella, take apart the
engine of our Volvo Amazone or organize a party for a hundred people (to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Minderhout Contractors), where a magician performed tricks and my father danced the
merengue with a stunning black lady singer. My father is a ladies’ man, and although I don’t know that he ever cheated on my mother, I can hardly imagine he didn’t.

My mother was, as I said, three years older than my father, and when they met she was working nights as a singer (‘chansonnière’, my father would say) in a club. She was a
strikingly beautiful woman, with high cheekbones and a full mouth that was always accentuated in her publicity photos by dark, shiny lipstick. The wedding pictures clearly show how proud my father
was of his conquest. Precisely nine months later, my mother had me. ‘Your father was just in the nick of time,’ she said later. ‘I actually figured I was too old for
children.’ At the moment of my birth, my father was on a construction site in Leeuwarden. When he came home that evening I was lying in the crib, bathed and powdered. He picked me up, turned
to my mother and said smugly, ‘Didn’t I do a good job on this one?’ Years later, when my mother tossed that back in his face, he still had no idea that he’d said anything
wrong. But I was six and sensed unerringly that my father had hurt my mother, and that made me keep an even greater distance between us.

‘Your father,’ my mother said when the time came for me to leave home, ‘has always loved you a great deal.’ But her actually having to say that probably said enough. (As
she lay dying, she said, ‘Your father has always loved me a great deal. But maybe I didn’t love him enough. And later on I couldn’t any more.’ I didn’t dare ask what
she meant.)

But new life changes everything – even, and especially, the relationship between father and son.

We told my parents that Monika was pregnant on a lovely, belated summer day in September, a day that seemed bent on making up for the cold, wet summer we’d had. They had
arrived late in the afternoon, when the sun was casting a golden-yellow haze over the trees. The ideal hour for a glass of good wine. (My father knew everything about wine, too. With great care he
had assembled at the house in Abcoude a wine collection which, to his considerable pride, had received a write-up in the local paper. For this special occasion, therefore, I’d sought the
advice of a wine shop on the Frans Halsstraat, and finally bought a red Bordeaux with a full bouquet, a touch of oak and an aftertaste with a slight whiff of vanilla.) The French doors at the front
of the house were open, and the bustle of the street and the smells from the kitchen, where Monika was fixing a gorgonzola polenta with three varieties of mushrooms and a pomegranate sauce, made my
parents sigh deeply over a town in France they’d visited that summer, where they’d dawdled away the hours at pavement cafés with a carafe of full-bodied
vin de pays
and
a good book. My father was impressed by my choice of wine. We drank to the good life, and, because I’d brought Monika hers in the kitchen, no one noticed that she was having grape juice
rather than Bordeaux.

My father and I took another hard look at the work we’d done that summer (most of it done by Monika and him, because I’d been too busy working – after all, we needed the
money), while my mother kept Monika company in the kitchen. When dinner was ready and we were all seated at the table, I said, ‘Monika and I have something to tell you.’ Then I let a
brief silence fall, the way you’re supposed to, and looked at my mother, at my father, and back at my mother. My mother smiled benevolently, the way I knew so well, and my father stared
pensively at the tablecloth, as if studying a blueprint.

‘We’re pregnant,’ I blurted out, and it sounded clumsy and ridiculous, which it was. You don’t tell your parents something as intimate as that, I realized (it’s
about sex, when you stop to think about it), but by then it was out and, besides, just try stonewalling a pregnancy.

My mother burst into tears. I’d been expecting that. My mother cried readily and plentifully, especially with joy. (She was living proof of how wrong people are when they see crying as a
sign of weakness. ‘That I won’t be around to see how things turn out with you and Bo,’ she told me on her deathbed, ‘that’s what hurts the most.’ And she cried
then, too. But she died in peace.) But that my father started crying too, that touched me to the quick. He stood up, came over and hugged me. I stood there uneasily, trapped between chair and
table, and felt his shoulders shaking. Then he leaned back and looked me straight in the eye. His cheeks were wet, but there was a broad grin on his face. ‘From now on, we’re no longer
father and son,’ he said. ‘We’re both father.’ And he went over to Monika and hugged her too, and I hugged my mother and my mother hugged my father and then Monika, and only
after that did we dish up the food and fill our glasses. (I went to the kitchen and came back with the carton of grape juice, and everyone laughed at our little ruse.) We talked about everything
and nothing, and especially about what it meant to be expecting a child, and I found out that my father had been right: for the first time, we spoke to each other as equals.

When my parents eventually went home, Monika and I waved goodbye from the French doors. Then we sat on the couch, close together, and stared at the candles flickering pleasurably in the belated
summer breeze through the open doors, and for a long time we said nothing.

Three days later Monika went to her parents’ in Roermond. ‘Better if you’re not around when I tell them,’ she said. And when she came home:
‘It’s a good thing you weren’t around.’

F
irst times aren’t something you forget easily, but the rest . . . My memory’s like the filing system of some boozed-up cataloguer:
it’s full of gaps and improvisations, the drawers have fallen on the floor, the cards have been hastily swept together. Sometimes months go by with no filing activity at all, then the work
turns feverish but sloppy. I have a filing cabinet full of memories, but where are the ones that can help me answer the questions that keep me awake these days? Who is the father of my son? With
whom did my late beloved betray me? And when? And above all: why? How can it be that I never noticed a thing, that I never had the slightest suspicion? Or is it that the suspicion actually was
there, but the drunken filing clerk swept those memories under the carpet, tossed them out the window, incinerated them in the stove?

I look at Bo, who I know better than anyone else in the world, and I see a stranger. I look at Ellen, who I love more than anyone else, and I have to avert my gaze.

Ellen says she wants to marry me.

‘Ellen,’ I say, ‘you want a child. You want a child of your own, and I can’t give it to you. Find another man before it’s too late.’

‘I want to have your child,’ Ellen says. ‘I don’t want some other man’s baby. And I especially don’t want another man. I want you.’

‘That’s what you say now, but what will it be like in a year, in two years?’

‘How am I supposed to know, Armin? Do you know what you’ll want in two years’ time? How do you know you won’t be sick of me? Or that you won’t be in a midlife
crisis and run away with a twenty-one-year-old?’

‘Jesus, Ellen.’

‘Yeah, Jesus, Armin.’

‘But marriage. Why for God’s sake do you want to get married?’

Monika and I never got married. Getting married wasn’t something you did back then. At least, we didn’t. We loved each other, and the State had nothing to do with
something as intimate as love. That went without saying. And so we didn’t marry, not even when the baby came – in those days, you didn’t brush aside your principles that
casually.

We gave Bo his mother’s surname (Paradies) – that went without saying, as well. After all, she’d carried him for nine months. And she was the one who breastfed him. That a
child automatically received its father’s name was a symptom of the despicable patriarchy under which we lived. Like Cruise missiles. And capitalism. (The civil servant at the public
registrar’s office didn’t go along with our choice of surname. ‘That’s only possible when the child isn’t officially recognized by the father,’ he said. When I
called him a pen-pusher and a lackey, he refused to deal with our application any more. Finally, one of his female colleagues was called in to settle things – I mutteringly agreed to go along
with what the law prescribed. But the next day we placed an announcement in the paper: ‘Born: Bo Paradies.’ Our parents didn’t read
De Volkskrant.
That saved a lot of
bellyaching.)