A Father's Affair (9 page)

S
he’s walking down the other side of the street. Her face and hands white as snow, her red hair like a warning.

‘Look out!’ she shouts.

I follow her gaze and see a little girl on my side of the street, standing at the kerb. She’s trying to cross, but there’s too much traffic. I walk over to her; she’s about
six, with short blonde hair and blue eyes that remind me of the first nice day in March.

‘Come on,’ I say, taking her hand. She doesn’t seem afraid or surprised. She smiles at me. We cross the street together.

‘Thank you,’ she says when I take the child to her.

‘My pleasure.’

On my way home, I can’t stop thinking about her. Green eyes. Or were they grey? I’ve forgotten already. She had a nice voice. Self-assured, but friendly too. Soft, but not girlishly
soft.

Two weeks go by, during which the memories fade. Then, suddenly, there she is again. The tram stops at the Leidseplein and she gets on. That white skin, that red hair. She moves up the aisle to
a spot near me. Green eyes. Or more like greyish-green.

‘How’s the little blonde girl?’ I ask. ‘Is she more careful about crossing the street these days?’

She looks at me in surprise. Then bursts out laughing. ‘My little neighbour girl, you mean? She’s the kind of child who makes you want to ban all cars from the city, isn’t
she?’

She laughs and the tram shakes, but the one has nothing to do with the other, except in my mind.

‘I’m surprised you recognized me.’

‘Immediately.’

‘My hair.’

‘Your eyes.’

‘Of course.’ She laughs again. She has lovely, straight teeth.

‘Where are you headed?’

‘To the Bijenkorf, to do some shopping.’

‘Can I go with you?’ It’s out before I know it, probably surprising me even more than it does her.

‘You’re a bit like my little neighbour girl,’ she says.

The tram jerks and shakes heavily again. In the curve on the Spui she almost loses her footing. With one hand she grabs my coat and pulls herself back on balance.

‘We could have a cup of coffee on the top floor. With apple pie,’ I say.

‘Oh, all right,’ she sighs teasingly.

As we cross the Dam she walks close to me.

‘I’m afraid of pigeons,’ she says. I’ve never heard anything so preposterous. But I don’t tell her that.

‘What’s your name, anyway?’

‘Monika.’

‘I’m Armin.’

‘Ar-min,’ she says, as if she’s trying to taste the syllables. ‘Armin. That’s different.’

In the restaurant at the Bijenkorf we drink coffee and eat apple pie with whipped cream. She tells me about her little neighbour girl. That they go out and do things together
all the time; go to the park, to the museum when it’s raining, to the zoo.

‘What are her favourite animals?’ I ask.

‘The elephants.’

‘Have you told her that elephants weep?’

‘No. Do elephants weep?’

‘They certainly do. Back in the Fifties there was a circus elephant called Sadie who didn’t learn her tricks quickly enough. The elephant trainer punished her for her stupidity by
beating her on the side of the head with a stick. To his amazement, she began crying, horribly, heartbreakingly. He never hit her again. And she was good and learned all her tricks.’

‘And what if my little neighbour girl had a different favourite animal?’ she asked. ‘Would you have told me something about that one, too?’

‘Sure. What’s your favourite animal?’

She thinks about it. Then, with that mocking smile of hers that’s already won my heart completely, she says, ‘The goldfish.’

‘The goldfish?’

‘Yeah.’

I whistle through my teeth and laugh. ‘In an alcohol solution of 3.1 per cent, a goldfish will lose its ability to swim upright within six to eight minutes.’

‘That’s a lie! You’re making that up.’

‘No, really. For years, goldfish were used to test the effects of alcohol on learning capacity. It seems that when you teach goldfish a trick in water laced with a little alcohol, they
forget the trick when they’re back in normal water, but they can repeat it once they’re intoxicated again. Later on they tried the same experiment on people. And it worked exactly the
same way.’

She looks at me, still dubious. ‘And exactly what kinds of tricks did they teach those goldfish?’

‘To swim simple mazes, for example. You don’t believe me, but it’s true.’

She says, ‘You’d make a good father.’ (I’ve never forgotten that. I’d just turned twenty and I’d never thought of myself as a potential father – being a
father was something for my father, but certainly not for me. Her saying it just like that amazed me and excited me and moved me, all at the same time. And I thought, maybe my father’s right:
maybe it
is
time I started going after girls instead of watching birds.)

After we’d had our coffee, we went to the women’s-wear department. She tried on two blouses, while I waited patiently at the entrance to the changing rooms, as
though we’d known each other for years.

‘How do you like this one?’ she asked twice.

The first blouse didn’t look good on her, and she saw that on my face before I could say anything.

‘Oops,’ she said. ‘I get it.’

The second one looked lovely on her. ‘You’re absolutely gorgeous,’ I said.

‘Bullshitter.’ Again, she laughed when she said it.

When I’d walked her to the tram stop, she asked, ‘Don’t you want my phone number?’

That’s how it started. As unexpectedly as it ended.

D
uring the eight weeks after Monika’s death, I edited two hefty textbooks. One was about
Photosynthetic Mechanisms and the
Environment
, the other was on
Pancreatic Islets.
When I take those books off the shelf now, it’s as if I’ve never read them. Entire chapters deal with concepts I’ve
never heard of. During those first eight weeks, the drunken filing clerk of my memory must have been lying in a coma.

When I go into the publishing house to deliver the final corrections on the book about the pancreas, Dees says, ‘There’s no more work for you for the next six
months.’

‘You’re lying,’ I say.

‘You’re right. But I want you to go home anyway. Call me if you need me, but I don’t want to see your face around here for the next few months. There are all kinds of things
you should be doing, but sitting around with your nose buried in manuscripts isn’t one of them.’

I go home, make dinner, which we eat in front of the TV, put Bo to bed, read to him from Bert and Ernie (which he hates) and tell him to try to go to sleep, even if he isn’t tired yet.
Then I drink four glasses of whisky, lie down on the bed and stare at the ceiling until the pain in my eyes warns me that my corneas are drying out. I blink a few times, then start again.

At four in the morning I turn on the light in the living room. The park is still covered in nocturnal darkness, but on the eastern horizon a new day is dawning. The first blackbird sings the
day. I walk over to the bookcase, close my eyes and run my finger across the spines. I take a book off the shelf without opening my eyes, sit down and open it.

I read, ‘No one will hide a valuable object in something large, but many a time people have tossed countless thousands into a thing worth a penny. Compare the soul. It is a precious thing
and it came to be in a contemptible body.’

I think about that until it’s light outside. Then I put the book (which turns out to be an apocryphal gospel I didn’t know Monika had) back on the shelf and get dressed. I wake Bo,
slice bread and warm some chocolate milk, and put it all in a backpack. I dress him warmly and have him pull on his own gumboots. A little later we’re walking hand in hand, into the
still-silent city.

‘Where are we going?’ Bo asks.

‘We’re going to look for Mama.’

We walk down the Ceintuurbaan to the Amstel. On the bridge we stop to watch the birds. A grebe dives and comes back up with a fish in its beak. Bo claps his hands. The bird
gulps down the fish and disappears under water again. Its body is so streamlined that it leaves barely a ripple. We don’t see it surface again.

‘Maybe it’s got a nest down there,’ Bo says, ‘and now it’s sitting on its eggs.’

Along the Weesperzijde, a frumpy blonde is letting out two Doberman Pinschers. Just to be safe, Bo moves around me and takes my other hand. At the Berlage Bridge we turn left. We wait under the
trestle until a train comes over. Bo tilts his head all the way back and peers up.

‘Maybe,’ he says once the train has roared by, ‘Mama is on the train.’

At Amstelstation I buy a day ticket, so we can travel as much as we want. While we’re waiting on the platform for the first intercity train to Nijmegen, we drink some warm chocolate milk.
A man in a suit and trenchcoat sits down beside us.

‘Taste good?’ he asks Bo.

Bo looks up at him, but says nothing. The man pulls a newspaper out of his briefcase. (‘Moscow trembles,’ the front page says. I’m glad Bo doesn’t consort with people who
read the
Algemeen Dagblad
.) When the train pulls in we wait until the man gets up and walks to the closest doors. Then we enter two doors further up.

‘I saw Mama,’ Bo says once we’ve torn past Holendrecht metro station, where the platform was filled with people on their way to work. He’s sitting on my lap, peering
intently out of the window.

‘What did she look like?’

‘She had on a green coat. And she had an umbrella.’

‘Not like her to carry an umbrella when it’s not raining,’ I say.

‘No,’ Bo giggles, ‘not like her, hee hee.’

At the station in Utrecht we see Monika again. She’s stepped down off the train opposite and is walking towards us across the platform. This time she’s wearing a denim jacket, and
instead of an umbrella she’s carrying a duffel bag made of Indian fabric from Guatemala or Mexico. Pinned to her jacket is a badge with a picture of Che Guevara. Her red hair stands up
straight and short. She’s just come from the hair salon. When she walks past our window I squint and watch her through my lashes – that way the illusion won’t be destroyed.

‘Her hair’s awfully short,’ Bo says.

I want to ask him if he thinks she’s pretty, but no sound comes out.

‘What happened to that pigeon?’ Bo asks.

In the sand at the foot of a broad, low pine lie the remains of a wood pigeon. That is to say, its feathers.

‘It was eaten by a hawk,’ I tell him.

‘What’s a hawk?’

‘It’s a bird of prey. Sort of like Fulgor the Golden Eagle, but smaller.’

‘Why don’t you ever read to me from
Fulgor the Golden Eagle
?’ Bo asks. Then he answers the question himself: ‘Because Mama thinks I’m too
little.’

‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘Because Monika thinks you’re too little for that.’

We’re on the heath at Planken Wambuis, but there’s no sign of Monika here. We’ve had our sandwiches and finished the last of the chocolate milk, and now Bo is starting to get
tired. He says, ‘I want Mama to come back.’

‘Mama isn’t coming back. But she’s not really gone, either.’

‘Mama is dead!’ he says angrily and kicks at the pigeon feathers with his little boot.

‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘Monika is dead. But we’ll still see her a lot.’

‘I don’t want to see her any more.’

I don’t know what to say to that. I pick him up and give him a piggyback. From the way his little body is shaking, I can tell he’s crying. By the time we’ve crossed the heath
and reached the edge of the woods, he’s fallen asleep. I gently lower him to the ground, with his back against the trunk of a birch. I spread my coat out on the moss. Bo is awake.

‘Come and lie down next to me,’ I say.

We fall asleep beside each other, in the sun. The last thing I hear is the plaintive mewing of a buzzard.

In my dream I’m walking down a silent street that seems to have no end. I look into the windows, and in every house I see people sitting at tables. Men, women and
children. Each house is furnished differently, but still all the houses look alike. Everywhere the table is in exactly the same place. Everywhere a man is sitting at the head of the table; the
woman and three children are seated differently – but it’s always two boys and a girl. The people are as different as people are, but in some strange way they all look alike, too: the
parents are all the same age, so are the children. When I walk by they look up from their plates and stare at me as I pass. I’m walking down the even-numbered side of the street. When I first
notice the numbers on the houses, I’m at number 26. By the time I get to number 244, the end of the street is still nowhere in sight. I walk faster all the time. I hardly dare look inside any
more, but at the same time I can’t stop. Always those five faces looking up from their plates: a man, a woman, two sons and a daughter. A man, a daughter, a woman and two sons. Suddenly I
hear someone weeping. I look around, but there’s no one else on the street. I peer into the house where I just stopped. Again, the five faces. But no one’s crying. The weeping grows
louder. Then I wake up with a start. The weeping is coming from Bo.

‘Bo! What’s wrong?’

He’s lying on his stomach, his fists clenched under his face.

‘I . . . I . . . I had such a scary dream.’

‘What did you dream?’

‘That I fell off the world.’

‘You fell off the world?’

‘Yeah. The world was square. And really far away. And I fell. I kept falling further away from the world.’

I help him sit up and hold him close. He’s still sobbing a bit, and he sniffs hard a few times. I give him my handkerchief.

We sit there like that for a while without saying anything. I look at the buzzard still hanging high in the air above the heath. It circles on motionless wings. Whenever I see a buzzard I wish
that I could glide that quietly, looking down on the world.

What a strange dream, I think. That he fell off the world. The oppressive weight of my own dream has vanished.

‘Shall we get going?’ I ask. Bo is sitting on the edge of my coat, bent over something. A tiny little clump of person beneath a high Ruysdael sky.