A Father's Affair (5 page)

I suddenly realize that I’m shaking all over. The room has gone liquid, the doctor is swimming, office chair and all, to the window and back.

‘Oh, fuck,’ I moan, falling back in my chair. I crumple into a ball. Bury my face in my hands. I feel the salt of tears stinging my eyes, but I refuse to start crying now.

‘Oh, fuck,’ I say again, and run away as fast as my rubber legs will take me. ‘Mr Minderhout!’ I hear the stunned doctor’s assistant call after me. ‘Mr
Minderhout!’

The hospital is conspiring against me. Corridors blend into other corridors without getting me where I want to be. Signs point me in the wrong direction. Lifts take me to the
wrong floors. I bump into rolling trolleys. Trip over a child, which begins crying loudly. Its mother curses me up and down.

I duck into a stairwell where the stairs all lead upwards. I run, jump, three steps at a time, going up. I climb and climb until I reach the highest floor, completely out of breath.
There’s another corridor. At the end of it, daylight is rushing in. I stumble towards it. There’s a sofa beside a coffee table covered in magazines. I fall onto the sofa. The blood is
pounding at my temples. My back is soaked with sweat.

‘Are you all right?’ a woman’s voice asks.

When I look up again, I’m lying, fully dressed, on a hospital bed beside a window. I have a broad view of a park, fields, a motorway. In the distance I see two steeples. Abcoude. And I
think about my father and suddenly I know for sure that I’ll never tell him what’s wrong with me. It would make me feel as inferior as I did when I was a boy and cringed every time he
said, ‘Isn’t it about time you started going after girls, instead of watching birds?’

‘Sure, Dad.’

A kestrel is hanging in the wind like a kite.

‘A cup of tea will do you some good,’ the woman’s voice says.

I turn my head and look at her.
YASMIN AL
-
MUTAWA
is printed on the little name-tag on her breast.

‘Thank you, Yasmin,’ I say, but my mouth is so dry and my voice so quiet that I can’t even hear myself.

L
ast night I went out drinking with Dees, for the first time in seven months. After the second glass of whisky I told him what had happened.

‘My God,’ Dees said. ‘Waiter, could we have two more? Better make that doubles.’

Dees is a scientific editor. We work for the same publisher. I’ve known him for thirteen years. He’s my best friend. He knew Monika, too.

‘My God, Armin, who would have expected that from Monika?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Jesus! And I always thought Bo looked so much like you.’

We sit and say nothing and drink our double whiskies.

‘Do you have any idea,’ Dees asks, ‘who it could have been?’

‘No. You? For starters.’ We both burst out laughing.

‘No. Someone at that travel agency where she worked?’

‘Could be.’

‘Wasn’t there some ex-boyfriend, a guy she still saw sometimes?’

‘Yeah. Robbert.’

‘Jesus, man!’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you told Bo?’

‘No. Only that I can’t have any more children.’

‘Probably just as well.’

‘I don’t know.’

There’s a television above the bar. A blonde is lying on a bed. Candles are burning. She has the sheet pulled up just over her breasts.

‘You have to go now,’ the subtitle reads.

A man runs his hand through his hair. He stands at the bedroom door, takes a step towards the bed, changes his mind, turns around and leaves. The woman starts weeping. In close-up, you can see
her mascara running.

‘Remember that time the four of us went to the beach?’ Dees asks. ‘When Bo was still a baby?’

I nod.

‘He was on your back, in one of those slings. And you were gabbing away at him as if he was fifteen, instead of eight months old. Picking up shells and pieces of driftwood and showing them
to him. Monika and I stood there and watched you walk along the waterline. What you didn’t know was that Bo had been asleep for a long time.’

He takes a sip of whisky, looks up at the TV screen, stares into his glass. He looks tired. Dees always looks tired. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s led the life of a
dyed-in-the-wool bachelor. Works too much. Eats badly. Drinks a lot. Sleeps too little. Bachelors are more faithful friends than attached men are. I’m living proof of that: since Ellen and I
have been together, Dees has seen a lot less of me. But complaining would be as foreign to Dees as clean living.

He says, ‘Then suddenly I notice that Monika’s crying. I can’t take it when women cry. It makes me nervous as hell. She grabs my hand. I want to put my arm around her, but it
doesn’t work. You’re running down the beach with Bo on your back and you don’t have a clue. And I wait until Monika’s finished crying. She lets go of my hand. Pulls out a
handkerchief and wipes her face. I wanted to ask what she was crying about, but I couldn’t find the words. Women crying. I’ve never been able to handle that.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. We order two more whiskies and two beers.

‘All this talking makes a body thirsty,’ Dees says.

‘Men!’ Monika would have said. ‘They drive me nuts!’

Later that evening, after we’ve said all there is to say about the condition of the playing field at the Amsterdam Arena, long after the weepy blonde has thrown herself
from the roof because the man at the door left her again, and after the barman has switched to Elvis, Dees suddenly says: ‘Of course, it
is
a perfect case example for the old nature
v.
nurture debate.’

‘What, the grass in the Amsterdam Arena, or that woman’s suicide?’

‘No, the business with Bo.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Yeah. I mean, Bo looks so much like you, but he doesn’t have your genes.’

‘Oh. Yes. I guess I never looked at it that way.’

I’d planned to run through a pile of proofs this morning, but I get out the box of photos instead. There’s one of Monika and Robbert. It was taken at a party at our
house on the Ceintuurbaan. They’re holding up their glasses in a toast. Robbert is grinning at the camera. Monika is smiling her Monika smile: restrained, but with that cynical little
something. (There were people who hated her for that smile, but those people couldn’t see the pain behind it.)

Could he be the one? Robbert? No, couldn’t be. Couldn’t it be? Bo doesn’t look like him at all. Well, except for the colour of his hair. Where might Robbert be these days? What
would a law-school dropout be doing for a living? Running a consultancy? Doing a little day-trading? Would he still be living in Amsterdam? I haven’t seen him for years. I pick up the phone
book.
Haakman, Humadi, Huisman, Hueber.

Hubeek, H.J.M., attorney
– impossible.

Hubeek, R.P.F.
– damn, that’s right. ‘The Reformed Political Federation called for you,’ I used to say to Monika whenever I’d had Robbert on the line.
‘Is Monika there?’ were the only words he ever spoke. He never asked how I was doing, or about Bo, but that seemed only logical to me. He didn’t like me, and the feeling was
mutual. On the few occasions Monika went out with him while we were together, she came back with stories about how narrow-minded he was, what an enormous stick-in-the-mud. He came to our house only
once, for that party. We shook hands. He wasn’t at the funeral. I can’t remember whether he received a funeral announcement.

Hubeek, R.P.F. I jot down the address and telephone number in the back of my pocket diary. From the looks of things, he’s gone up-market.

‘Do you think it could have been somebody at Small World?’ I ask Ellen that evening.

‘Of course not.’

‘What do you mean, “Of course not?”’

‘You tell me what kind of men worked there.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You had Chris Verhoeven. He was a fag. Then you had Chris Winters. He wasn’t Monika’s type at all.’

‘Why not?’

‘The kind who wears slip-on trainers and trousers with an elastic waistband. A single family dwelling in Almere with no family.’

‘And who else?’

‘Who else? Well . . . well, there was Niko.’

‘Exactly.’ I remembered Niko. The tour guide. Pale face. Straight, dark hair. Dark eyes. A little tatty. The kind of guy who made other men wonder why so many women fell for him.
Couples who booked a tour with Small World in order to save their relationship were better off not ending up in Niko’s group.

‘Niko’s destroyed a lot of marriages,’ Monika said when she introduced me to him at an office party. (The same party where I first met Ellen. ‘This is Ellen,’
Monika said. ‘If I ever leave you for anyone, it’ll be for her.’)

‘Impossible,’ Ellen says. ‘I would have noticed. I had a crush on him myself back then, remember?’

‘That’s exactly it. It would explain why she didn’t tell you.’

‘Armin, Armin, stop it. You’re driving yourself crazy.’

‘No I’m not. I’m doing everything I can to stop myself going crazy.’

I’ve written Niko’s name in the back of my pocket diary, too. Under Robbert’s. Ellen has no idea where Niko lives these days, or what he does. But I’ll
find out: Neerinckx, written with a ckx at the end. There can’t be too many of those in Holland.

T
he first words a child learns are, I believe, the most important ones in his life.

It’s better for a kid to learn ‘monkey’, ‘nut’, ‘kitten’, ‘fire’ and ‘peanut butter sandwich’ than it is ‘Atari’,
‘Nintendo’, ‘Teletubby’ or ‘My First Sony’. Better yet if he learns ‘sparrow’, ‘titmouse’, ‘blackbird’, ‘magpie’,
‘redwing’. Or ‘love’, ‘is’, ‘as’, ‘wine’, ‘and’, ‘balsam,’ ‘all’, ‘who’,
‘anoint’, ‘themselves’, ‘with’, ‘it’, ‘revel’, ‘therein’.

Bo’s standing at the edge of the pond, throwing bread crusts at the ducks. He’s making a lot of noise while he’s at it. Especially when the seagulls dive into
the ruckus on the water.

‘Seagull!’ he shouts then. ‘Seagull, pretty!’

Bo is wild about gulls. We have a standard Sunday-morning ritual: the gull-feeding ritual. We go out on the balcony together, at the back of the house. All week we’ve been saving heels of
bread. ‘Seagull!’ Bo shouts. ‘Seagull, pretty!’ And as soon as the first black-headed gull comes sailing over the rooftops, he throws a crust into the air as hard as he can.
Following a brief little trajectory, that first crust always lands in the downstairs neighbours’ garden, but seldom does that escape the gull’s eye. Within minutes the air is filled
with shrieks that quickly drown out Bo’s shouting. The high point is always that moment when, with an unerring dive, a gull succeeds in intercepting an earthbound piece of bread. Then the two
of us cheer and clap till our hands hurt. The wild pursuit (by jealous gulls who have just missed three times in a row) that follows such a tour de force receives our undivided attention.

‘Jealousy,’ I tell Bo, ‘is a very healthy emotion. As long as it’s accompanied by intense physical effort.’

Bo can nod so sagely.

Bo likes ducks, too, but he clearly likes them less than gulls. In the pond is a drake with a crippled wing. The wing dangles in the water like an afterthought. Bo thinks the
handicapped drake has more right to a crust of bread than the others. But, no matter how he tries, the poor bird never catches a crust. The healthy members of his own sort, or the gulls, are always
too quick for him. For the first time, Bo is not pleased with the gulls’ aerial skill.

‘Go ’way,’ he shouts. ‘Go ’way!’ But the gulls won’t be put off by a toddler. ‘Stupid gulls,’ he mutters. And, a little later on,
‘Stupid duck.’

It’s a small step from pity to disdain. A step even a child of two years and three months can take with ease.

‘There are two trees growing in Paradise,’ writes the apostle Philip. ‘The one brings forth beasts, the other men. Adam ate of the tree that brought forth beasts. And he became
a beast and brought forth beasts.’

B
o has gone to bed. The TV is off. I’m trying to read a book about the extinction of species, written by an island biogeographer (that seems
like an extremely attractive profession of late: island biogeographer), but I can’t concentrate. Ellen comes out of the kitchen with two glasses of wine. I put down the book.

‘What’s your fondest memory of Monika?’ she asks when we’ve touched glasses and tasted the wine.

‘The first evening the three of us were together,’ I say without hesitation.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Or are you just saying that to make me feel good?’

‘Does it make you feel good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. But that’s not why I said it. No one could share the way Monika did.’

‘How do you remember that evening?’

Like this.

No one started it. Suddenly there were three mouths coming together, three tongues exploring. Ellen’s face was still wet with tears. Monika had breadcrumbs in her hair. A
tram rumbling down the Ceintuurbaan was making the house shake. We kissed each other with all the tenderness we had in us, with all the desire for love and attention and affection of young adults.
We kissed each other out of curiosity.

And like this.

Monika’s hands were covered in breadcrumbs. On the counter, a sea bass on its platter was staring at the blue tiles of the kitchen wall. The fish was surrounded by
bottles and jars of herbs and oil, capers and olives. There was an open bottle of cognac and a bag of macaroons. Next to that a plastic sack full of peaches. There was a dish of exotic-looking
vegetables. On the baking tray were fresh sardines. The baking tray was resting, for lack of a better place, on top of the fridge.

‘Tuscan kitchens are bigger,’ Monika said ruefully.

‘Can I help?’

‘No.’

The table in the front room had already been set, for three. Beside each plate was a card of hand-made paper on which Monika had written the menu in a graceful hand. The hors d’oeuvres
consisted of crostini with mussels and
sarde alla griglia.
After that the menu promised spaghetti with olive oil and garlic, followed by
branzino aromatizzato al forno.
By way of
vegetables we’d be having
finocchio gratinato.
The dessert was a Tuscan surprise,
pesche con amaretti.
(I found one of the menu cards when I was looking through the box of
photos. It had a stain on it. A tear, I thought sentimentally.)