A Father's Affair (24 page)

Dees didn’t react. Dees was still mad at me. Or deeply disappointed in me, at the very least. I thought: if you only knew what I’ve just found out. But I said nothing. We drove up
onto the A2 and it took all the energy I had not to yank the wheel at a hundred and twenty and throw the car into the guardrail.

After I’ve dropped Dees at his house (‘Let me know how it goes,’ he says, ‘and hang in there.’), I drive on to the Amsterdamse Bos. I don’t
want to go home yet, can’t go home yet.

I’m pregnant. M.

What else could it mean but . . . but
that
! The words still don’t want to come. I can’t even tell myself what I’m thinking. What I know.

I park the car on the lot at the start of the old rowing course, where years ago two Amsterdam patrolmen encountered a suspicious canary-yellow Renault 5. I walk into the woods. From far away I
hear the plaintive mewing of the peacocks at the farm that marks the border between the woods and the old pastureland. Just past the farm I turn left, cross a little wooden bridge and enter the
swampy territory of the nightingales. It’s a cold day, late April, and except for the monotone call of a chiffchaff, no birds are singing. Maybe the nightingales haven’t arrived yet.
They’re one of the last migratory birds to return from the south. When the nightingales sing, it’s not spring that’s returning, it’s the summer.

The water of the Ringvaart is black and restless. Gusts of wind blow the waves in every direction. Peeping loudly, its head held low above the water, a coot swims towards a foolish, brightly
coloured duck. When it arrives within a few metres of the city slicker, it goes into a sprint. Its webbed feet spatter across the surface and it flaps its wings hard, making the water splash all
around. The duck flies away, protesting loudly. The coot swims around the spot it just conquered from the intruder, as if to make sure the duck really has left, the danger really is over. (What
danger? Why do coots see all other birds as a threat? They’re completely paranoid. But maybe that’s why they do so well in the city.)

I decide to walk along the shore of the Nieuwe Meer, and then straight across the fields, back to the woods and the rowing course. Actually, I decide nothing at all. It’s what happens to
me. I’m walked to the shore of the lake and then directed to the right, along the narrow path through the fields. I see the farm rising up amid the fresh green grass. I see it go past. I come
back to the car and am put behind the wheel and the engine is started and the car begins to drive and someone steers me safely through traffic, along the ring road, back home. I’m
parallel-parked without a hitch.

When I’m standing at the front door with the key in my hand, it flashes through my mind for a moment: now what? But I don’t wait for an answer to that question. There is no answer.
The door opens. The stairs take me up. Another door opens, and another. I stand in the living room of my own house – the safest place on earth. Here the sacks of coffee once lay piled to the
ceiling. Now there are bookcases and a table, chairs and a sofa. Sitting on the sofa are Ellen and Bo. Sitting on the sofa is the son of my father.

Y
ou can get used to anything, even to what you don’t see coming.

Ellen and Bo have both been crying. Red eyes. Streaks down their faces. Hair mussed. But now they’re laughing. Bo says, ‘It’s so insane!’ I stand in the doorway and look
at them. It takes a moment before he realizes I’m there. He stops laughing right away.

‘Hello,’ I say awkwardly.

Bo says nothing.

Ellen gets up, comes over to me, throws her arms around me and hugs me. ‘How did it go at your father’s?’

‘It was difficult.’

‘You’d better sit down, Armin.’

I plop down in a chair, with the feeling I’ll never get up again.

‘You want some coffee?’

I want some coffee.

Bo stares at the table. On the table is an envelope. On the envelope is written, ‘For Bo.’ I recognize the handwriting immediately. It’s the same handwriting that was on the
little envelope in the box of letters.

Oh God!

Ellen comes in with the coffee. She puts a cup on the table in front of me. Right next to the envelope. That neat, even handwriting, where did she ever get that, anyway? It seems so contrary to
who she was – who she turns out to have been.

I wait.

It’s quiet in the room. Ellen stirs her coffee. Bo sighs.

‘Bo told me what happened,’ Ellen says.

I say nothing and stare at the envelope.

‘That letter,’ Ellen says, ‘was once given to me by Monika. If Bo ever needed to know what happened. He needed to know.’

Bo leans forward and picks up the envelope, hands it to me. I look him in the eye for a moment. I look at Ellen, but Ellen is looking at the coffee cup in her hand. I take the letter out of the
envelope and read. I don’t get any further than the fifth line. Then the letter falls out of my hand. I close my eyes and wait. Nothing comes.

The first lines of the letter read:

I look really long, really hard at the tip of my left shoe. There’s a bit of mud on it, and sticking to that mud is a little feather. I try to tell from looking at it what
kind of bird it came from, but it’s a rather nondescript thing. Grey. Or dirty-white. When I’ve stared at the feather long enough, I look at Bo. But Bo has his own feather to stare at.
I say, ‘So now you know, too.’

He looks up at me. Puzzlement in his eyes. His eyes move to Ellen for support.

‘Too?’ Ellen asks.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘At my father’s. I found another letter from Monika.’

I take a sip of coffee.

‘So you’ve known about it all these years?’ I ask her. But it doesn’t sound like a question. It sounds more like an acceptance.

‘Yeah.’

I fold the letter, put it back in the envelope and hand it to Bo. I get up. All my muscles hurt.

‘Where are you going?’ Ellen asks.

‘Out. For a walk.’

‘Then I’m going with you.’

I feel like protesting, but I don’t have the energy.

T
his was written by Philip the Evangelist: ‘When the pearl is cast down into the mud, it does not become greatly despised, nor if it is
anointed with balsam oil will it become more precious. But it always has value in the eyes of its owner.’

My mother underlined those words. Just as she underlined the verse about the philanderer which I, in my ignorance, once read aloud to my father’s son (my brother!) from the book that
belonged to his father’s one-time beloved, my beloved Monika. My mother must have known about it all those years. ‘Maybe I didn’t love him enough. And later on I couldn’t
any more.’ What is that? Why do so many women blame themselves when their husband is unfaithful? I’m prepared to take anything into consideration if it helps me understand what
happened, but not that it could be my fault. Did my mother find the note Monika wrote to my father? And did she know right away – the way I knew? Did my father know that my mother knew, or
did he only find out when he read the Gospel of Philip and saw the verses that had been underlined. (‘The children a woman bears resemble the one she loves. If that is her husband, they
resemble her husband. If that is a philanderer, they will resemble that philanderer.’ The words that were too much for my father’s heart. I should have them carved on a plaque.)

I think about what Bas, the big-bellied, bearded biologist said to me in that café on Ameland: ‘God is a big practical joker.’ But I don’t laugh.

Hundreds of questions have been answered, but thousands of new ones have taken their place. The more I know, the more I realize that I know nothing.

What I know now is how it went, more or less. According to Ellen.

It started with a flash of lightning. (‘That’s worse than Hollywood,’ I said to Ellen. ‘Life
is
worse than Hollywood,’ she replied.)

My father and Monika had been working in the house on the Ceintuurbaan. My father had plastered a wall, while Monika painted the bedroom ceiling. When she was finished she’d taken a
shower, to get the whitewash out of her hair. After that my father took a shower while Monika made tea and sandwiches. It was already late in the afternoon, but they hadn’t eaten lunch yet,
that’s how hard they’d been working. While they were sitting at the improvised kitchen table (a door on sawhorses, with three Ikea folding chairs around it), it had suddenly grown dark
outside. Within a few moments, thick summer torrents of rain were washing down from the sky. Monika went and stood in front of the open window. How often had I seen her do that? She had this
childlike fascination with heavy rain and thunderstorms. She’d stand there, looking out with big eyes, a smile on her pale face that the strange light of electrical storms made even paler.
What I used to do, and what my father must have done as well, was stand behind her, close behind her. And then she’d sort of fall back slowly. Then she’d lean against my chest. Then her
red hair would prickle my face. And if the clouds were torn apart by a stroke of lightning, and if the thunder made the windows rattle in their frames, she would lay her head against my shoulder
and look up at me. And I always thought: she has the most beautiful, sensual eyes I’ve ever seen. Did my father think that, too?

‘According to Monika,’ Ellen said, ‘lightning suddenly struck close by. She was startled by the explosion and automatically took a step back. She bumped up against your father,
and your father put his arms around her to keep her from falling.’ There Ellen had stopped.

‘And then?’ I asked.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes, I really want to know.’ Although of course I would rather have known nothing at all.

‘Monika said there had been this tension between your father and her for days. That she’d felt this desire that she didn’t want to feel, wouldn’t allow herself to feel,
but it had kept growing stronger. The moment he put his arms around her, it was as though a hole was knocked in the dyke she’d been hiding her feelings behind. That’s how she described
it.’

Again, Ellen stopped talking. And again I asked her to go on. To tell me everything that she knew and that I didn’t want to know, but had to know.

‘Monika turned around and kissed your father. He said she shouldn’t do that. But he kissed her back . . . And . . . well, yeah. Then they did it.’

‘Straight from kissing to fucking?’

‘Well, not straight away. But . . . quickly.’

‘But . . . but, where? There wasn’t . . . there was nothing in that house to make it . . . well, I mean, comfortable.’

‘No.’

‘On the floor?’

‘No.’

‘Standing up?’

‘. . .’

‘Christ, no! My father?’ I think I laughed then. For a second. We were walking along the IJ, not far from our house. A cormorant flew by and I remember how its black silhouette
slowly dissolved in the tears welling up in my eyes. I sat down on the ground, on the cold, wet asphalt. And I thought: I’m never getting up again. This is it. It’s finished. But Ellen
hunched down beside me and hugged me and caressed me and pulled me against her. We sat there together like that, while evening fell and the blackbirds started singing and the chill slowly drew up
into my bones. And if Ellen hadn’t helped me to my feet, if Ellen hadn’t said that we had to get home, to Bo, to the present, I’d be sitting there still. I would have died there
of a broken heart, like the tragic hero in some nineteenth-century novel.

That’s what I would have wanted, but Ellen didn’t want that.

This, too, Philip the Evangelist wrote: ‘Ignorance is a slave. Knowledge is freedom. If we know the truth, we shall find the fruits of the truth within us.’
It’s a verse my mother didn’t underline. Monika didn’t either.

‘Did she have an orgasm?’

‘Armin!’

‘I have to know.
You
know, I know that for sure. And I can’t stand thinking that you know more than I do.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Was she sorry?’

‘Yes. No. She was when it turned out she was pregnant. And she felt guilty towards the child, even before it was born.’

‘Why did she tell you?’

‘Because she had to talk to someone. Because she felt like she was going crazy.’

‘Why didn’t she leave a letter for me?’

‘She left me behind for you, didn’t she?’

‘Was she in love with my father?’

‘No.’

‘Was he in love with her?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Did she like it?’

‘Armin!’

‘. . .’

‘I think so.’

‘You
think
so?’

‘Yes. Yes, she liked it.’

‘Christ almighty.’

‘Please stop this, Armin.’

‘Did she only feel guilty towards Bo? Not towards me?’

‘No. Yes, also towards you.’

‘Did she say that, or are you saying that to make me feel good?’

‘No, of course not. Of course she felt guilty. What do you think?’

‘What do I think? You don’t want to know what I think. I don’t even want to know that.’

‘She felt terribly guilty.’

‘But you just said she wasn’t sorry about it.’

‘No. Being sorry is something else. Being sorry you feel on your own. Guilt you get from other people.’

‘Oh, that’s easy, isn’t it? So she got her guilt from me!’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t understand.’

‘I understand that.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot.’

I’m taking my rage out on Ellen. My grief. My sorrow. My frustration.

As if she asked for this. Wait, she did ask for this! She lied to me! I knew she knew about it. I knew, but she kept denying it. Now she has to pay for those lies.