A Father's Affair (3 page)

The house on the Ceintuurbaan was really too small for the two of us and the baby. There was no nursery – and everyone knows that a baby has a right to a nursery.

‘You two will just have to move,’ said Monika’s mother, in whom I’d never detected any affection for her daughter, but who felt that she – and no one else –
had the right to determine how her daughter’s life should be run.

‘You could always buy a place,’ my father said.

‘But Dad,’ I said, ‘think of all the work we put into this house. And, besides, where else in Amsterdam could you find a house with a view like ours?’

No, Monika and I didn’t want to buy a place (you could just see us signing a mortgage with a bank that invested in South Africa!), and we didn’t want to move. Bo slept between us in
the double bed. We changed his nappies on the couch, on the kitchen table, on the counter, on the floor, on the bed, on the desk between typewriter and telephone. We lugged him around in a
sling.

‘Like hippies,’ said Monika’s mother, for whom the Sixties and Seventies had been one long nightmare.

‘Like Negroes,’ said her father, who thought everyone who hadn’t been born in Limburg province was a foreigner, and every Negro a monkey.

‘I think it’s rather sweet,’ my mother said. And my father said, ‘If it makes the two of you happy, it’ll make the boy happy too. And in the long run, that’s
what counts.’

And I thought to myself: did he ever say that to my mother about me? But I didn’t ask.

The first time Monika breastfed Bo, I sat there crying like a baby.

‘It’s the hormones,’ Monika said.

The next day she asked, ‘Do you want a taste?’

I was appalled. But a little later I tasted it anyway. Very cautiously.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Liar,’ she said.

‘It’s for babies, anyway, not for grown-up men.’

Monika said, ‘It excites me. ‘ And I asked her, ‘Does it excite you when Bo does it?’ And Monika nodded.

The last few years I haven’t thought much about those days. Only when I see a girl with short red hair, or yellow shoes. Or a man carrying a baby in a sling. But the last few days I
haven’t thought about much else.

‘Give it time,’ Ellen said.

‘The pain has to wear off,’ Ellen said.

‘Let’s go somewhere for a week, you and me, just the two of us.’

‘Go somewhere, you and Bo.’

‘Go to Ameland for a week, by yourself, nice long walks along the beach.’

‘I want to know who the father is,’ I said. ‘Who the culprit is. Who’s going to tell me that on Ameland? You think his name’s written in the sand at the foot of the
lighthouse?’

(There’s a picture of Monika on the beach on Ameland. In the sand at her feet is written:
ARMIN IS CRAZY
. She’s looking triumphantly into the lens. Her hair
is ruffled by the breeze. Our last vacation together.)

‘So what do
you
know, Ellen? What do you know that I don’t? What did Monika tell you? She must have told you
something
? Girl-talk, don’t kid me, I know you
talked about those things. Women do that. Who was it, Ellen, come on: who, who, who?’

But Ellen insists that she knows nothing.

‘I was in Ecuador then, remember?’

‘Yeah, but later, after you got back. She must have said something. Sort of skirted around it, maybe. A little hint, something you didn’t pick up on at the time. Jesus, Ellen, the
two of you were
intimate
back then. The two of you shared fucking
everything.
And now you’re trying to tell me she never said a word about that? Don’t lie to me,
Ellen. I can’t stand any more lies! Oh, Jesus Christ, Ellen, don’t start crying. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,
but shit, Ellen, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do with this?’

Later that evening: ‘Will you marry me?’

‘Yes.’

I
told Bo that I couldn’t have any more children. That my sperm was no good any more.

‘Been too long since I used it for what it’s meant for.’

That made him laugh. He doesn’t mind not having a new little brother or sister. He only thinks it’s too bad for Ellen. That’s what he said: ‘What a drag for
Ellen.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

And that was that.

When Bo was a baby, I could spend hours looking at him. How he rubbed the sleep from his eyes with fists that weren’t fists yet. How he took in the world, without
understanding, with those big, hungry eyes. How he burped. How he slobbered. How he discovered the miracle of his own body (those pink things there, right in front of my face, those things belong
to me, that’s me!).

The day that Bo rolled over all by himself, from his stomach to his back, I bought a bottle of champagne, and that evening Monika and I drank it all. When the bottle was empty, we made love on
the floor, against the bathroom door, and finally in bed, doggy style, while Bo lay below Monika, crooning and snatching at her breasts.

‘Love, Bo,’ I said, when Monika was asleep, ‘love, that’s what it’s all about. The rest is just crap.’

‘God is love, Bo,’ I said, ‘and love is God. There are a lot of misunderstandings about that. Because the first part, a lot of people say that, but the second one, not too many
people believe that.’

As long as I kept my eyes open I felt pleasantly drunk, but as soon as I closed them I saw red and yellow spots spinning around like crazy. I burped. Bo laughed. Monika sighed in her sleep. A
shadow passed over Bo’s face. That brought tears to my eyes.

‘Listen carefully, Bo,’ I said, ‘because this is about the “purification of an 86-kDa nuclear DNA-associated protein complex”. And, as you know,
you can never start too early on your hard sciences.’

Bo bit his teething ring and looked at me with big eyes.

‘“Hela cells,”’ I read out loud, ‘“were cultured in Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s medium containing 10 per cent fetal bovine serum.” And what
do you think happened then? “Gels were stained with a 0.3 per cent Coomassie brilliant blue.” It’s pure witchcraft, Bo! Modern-day alchemy!’

Just after Bo was born I found work as proof-reader with a scientific publishing house, a job I’ve held ever since. Every two weeks I picked up a pile of proofs for a professional journal
for biochemists, with a worldwide circulation of less than a thousand. At first I struggled with the scientific jargon, but soon I was able to read the articles as easily as recipes in a cookbook,
even though the meaning of the recipes remained entirely obscure.

‘Who is this mysterious Dr Dulbecco?’ I asked Bo. ‘And how did that fetal bovine serum end up in this Eagle’s medium? What paint shop would you have to go to for
Coomassie’s brilliant blue? And what do you get when it’s diluted to 0.3 per cent – would it turn baby blue?’

Bo threw his teething ring on the floor. I picked it up and gave it back. That was the great thing about correcting proofs: I could do it at home, with Bo around, so I didn’t have to miss
a single day of his first years of life.

‘Go ahead and start working whenever you feel able,’ I said to Monika, purely out of self-interest.

‘I don’t understand how you can collaborate on spreading that kind of research,’ she said after she’d spent an evening poring over the journal for biochemists. ‘For
every article they write, they must kill I don’t know how many test animals.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘but it pays for the nappies.’

‘Oh, sure, hide behind Bo. Burden that poor child with your complicity in the torturing of animals.’

‘How do you think they developed the pill?’ I asked.

Monika had gone back to work. At Small World, a travel agency specializing in environmentally sound tourism. ‘A contradiction in terms,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ Monika said. ‘But if you promise not to go on whining about that, I’ll keep my mouth shut about the blood of all those innocent animals on your
hands.’

And so it went.

Monika started taking the pill again. I divided my attention between Bo’s creeping and crowing and ‘the temperature dependence of creatine kinase fluxes in the rat heart’.

‘“Male Wistar rats,”’ I told Bo, who was busy pulling himself up on the coffee table, ‘“were anaesthetized with diethyl ether and injected intravenously with
50 IU heparin approximately one minute before the hearts were exised.” See? Your mother’s making a big fuss about nothing. First the anaesthetic, then the heart is removed. How much
kinder to animals can you get?’

Bo gave up trying to stand and started crying. With my red pen, I inserted a
c
between the
x
and the
i
in ‘exised’.

This morning I woke up at five. I went into Bo’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, for at least half an hour. I studied his sleeping features. The shape of his
forehead, his hairline, his eyebrows, the colour of his eyes. (Bo sleeps with his eyes open. He didn’t always. It started when he was three – with a nightmare.) I examined the little
spots in his irises, the length of his lashes, the wrinkles in his eyelids, the slant of his cheekbones, the shape of his nose, the size of his nostrils, the line of his jaw, the shape of his
mouth, his lips.

He’s entering puberty. There’s a pimple on his chin.

I was hoping for a hunch, something in his face that would suddenly remind me of . . . That’s what I was hoping for, and it scared me to death.

But nothing happened. Nothing came to me. I crawled back into bed and fell asleep. There was no answer in my dreams either.

I
’d always thought that Bo was conceived by leave of the Amsterdam police.

Monika and I had been to a benefit performance at the Haarlem Municipal Theatre. A group of famous actors and actresses were putting on a play to help combat starvation in
Africa. A few months earlier, the director of the theatre had taken an all-in, four-wheel-drive adventure tour of the Sahara with Small World. Out of gratitude for the care shown, and because
he’d made it back alive, he sent complimentary tickets to the travel agency all the time. The play was a crashing bore, but the cocktail party afterwards made up for everything. We identified
a large flock of Famous and Prominent People, the salmon was fat and tender, and the wine, the whisky, yes, even the orange juice, were a cut above the average. We stuffed an envelope containing a
political statement in the collection box meant for generous contributions (‘Starvation is a direct result of the unequal distribution of power in the world. Cancer cannot be cured with
aspirin, starvation cannot be stamped out by charity. Support the revolutionary movements in the Third World!’). Then we hung around until long after midnight, observing, drinking, making
comments. When we finally left, an exhausted doorman led us to the stage door, the only door that hadn’t already been bolted. Feeling cheerful, we stepped into the chilly June night. Behind
us, a famous talk-show host pulled the door closed.

‘Let’s listen to the nightingales,’ I say.

‘Nightingales?’ Monika asks. ‘Are there still nightingales in Holland?’

So I tell her how to drive to the Amsterdamse Bos, where to park the car (in the car park at the start of the old rowing course), and how to walk from there to the nightingales. In the bushes
along the shores of the Nieuwe Meer, when we hear the first clear warbles, Monika kisses me solemnly on the forehead. ‘Where,’ she says, ‘do you find a man these days who can lead
you straight to a place where the nightingales sing? I’m never going to let you go.’

We sit down on a wet bench that draws the cold right up through the seat of your trousers. I snuggle up close and put my arm around her. My hand lands on her breast.

‘We don’t do it enough lately,’ she says.

‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘But we’re going to work on that.’

‘Hmm, but not here on this bench.’

‘No, not on this bench.’

She kisses me. Her lips are dry, but her mouth is warm and moist. She bites my lower lip. The nightingale sings. She puts her hand on my crotch.

‘Very good,’ she mumbles through the kissing.

My hand slides under her jacket, pulls out her shirt-tails. I kiss her neck, nibble softly on her ear while my hand crawls around her back and slides beneath the edge of her panties. Her
buttocks are cold as ice.

‘Come on,’ I say, helping her to her feet.

‘You’re horny,’ she says. ‘I can tell from the way you’re breathing.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I pull her up close and kiss her. ‘And so are you.’

‘Yes.’

At the car she says: ‘Get in. Turn on the heater. And the lights.’

The motor starts with a cough. Monika is standing in the headlights, her face pale, her eyes black. She takes off her clothes. Jacket, shirt, yellow shoes, trousers, panties (she’s wearing
black underwear; she always wears black underwear when she feels like having sex) – one by one they land on the bonnet. When she’s completely naked, she spreads her legs and closes her
eyes. She has a pee. The golden stream sparkles in the lights.

‘You’re crazy,’ I say to the inside of the windscreen. ‘And glorious. And unbelievably exciting.’

‘Turn off the lights,’ Monika says, and I obey. In the dark I see the rapid movements of her white body. In the wink of an eye she’s beside the car and opening the door.

‘Keep the motor running and turn up the heater. My God, it’s so cold. And it’s almost July! Kiss me, Armin, kiss me!’

She climbs on top of me, pushes her cold breasts in my face. With my left hand, I pull the lever and drop the seat back.

‘Take it off,’ she says, and slides away from me to put down the back of the passenger seat as well. ‘Off, off, off!’

I struggle out of my clothes.

‘Sit here.’ I slide beneath her onto the passenger seat. My dick is standing crooked as an old tree. Monika grabs my hand and folds it around the trunk. ‘Watch,’ she
pants, ‘watch.’

She’s crawled onto the driver’s seat, her hands glide along her legs, to the dark triangle in her crotch. ‘Watch.’

My hand slides frantically up and down.

‘Yes!’ Monika says. ‘That’s good. You like that?’