A Father's Affair (21 page)

‘What kind of man
is
my father, then?’ I asked.

‘Too self-confident. Too successful. Too . . . just too,
too
. In every way.’

‘I love you,’ I said. It was the first time I’d ever said that to her.

H
ere follows the course of a carefree spring day on a Wadden Island:

7.45 Get up. Shower. Wake Bo.

8.03 Go to the bakery. Fry eggs. Set breakfast table with fresh buns, orange juice and strong coffee.

8.28 Eat breakfast.

9.33 Finally finish breakfast. Leave all dirty dishes on the counter.

9.50 Go to the bike-hire place. Pick out a pair of sturdy Dutch two-wheelers.

10.04 Go cycling. Through the fields and along the dyke on the shallows side, to Nes. Gambolling lapwings, hysterical godwits, a flight of wigeons, two Nile geese in a long,
straight, grey ditch. ‘If you could choose between the Nile and this ditch . . .’ ‘If you could choose between Amsterdam and Ameland . . .’ ‘Then I’d still be
glad we live in Amsterdam.’

11.28 A coffee shop in Buren. Just when we’ve found a seat, in come the five young people we saw yesterday on the mudflats. ‘See any more seals this morning?’
the same boy asks. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ says the same girl – the girl with the black baseball cap. ‘Are you staying here in Buren?’ ‘No, in
Hollum.’ ‘Is that nice, Hollum?’ ‘Yeah, quite nice.’ ‘Is there anywhere to go out at night?’ ‘Ummm . . . well, we only got here yesterday.’

12.15 We’re ready to leave. ‘Bye,’ says Bo. ‘Ciao.’ ‘See you,’ says the girl with the cap. ‘She was flirting with you,’ I
say when we get outside. ‘Ar-min,’ Bo sighs.

12.43 Walk across the sand at Het Oerd. Black scoters beyond the breakers. A sick rabbit, waiting for a buzzard or a fox. Waiting for death. Bo finds the skull of a seagull,
clean and completely intact. He puts it in his tin.

13.30 Lunch atop a dune. ‘What do you think, shall we blow up that production platform?’ ‘Good idea.’

14.07 Back to the bikes. We head west, on the lee side of the dune. Late-brooding fieldfares. Hoping for a short-eared owl, but all we see is a buzzard, flapping low over the
grassland in semi-successful mimicry – semi-successful, because I stop anyway and pull out my binoculars. ‘Buzzard,’ I say to Bo. ‘I thought so.’ Show-off, I think.
But I say nothing.

14.50 Close to Ballum, a short side-trip to the beach. Dead jellyfish. Sanderlings. Bo finds a skate’s egg, I find a right shoe. How does it go again? In England, more
left shoes are found on the North Sea Coast; in Holland and Belgium, more right shoes – or was it the other way around? In any case, it had something to do with the current and the specific
streamlining of left and right shoes. We agree that, however it went, it had to be the other way around.

15.34 Back on the bikes. We head ‘home’.

16.09 In the village we buy a bottle of whisky and a couple of beers. Plus a copy of
Voetbal International
and
Bild Zeitung
.

16.16 Home. Reading. A drink close at hand. ‘Feyenoord disappoints loyal fans’. ‘
Schadenfreude in Bonn
’.

18.30 ‘What are we going to eat?’ I awake with a start. ‘Let’s go out.’ ‘Good idea.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Here in the
village.’ ‘Sole Picasso.’ ‘Something like that. Sea wolf?’ ‘Mullet.’ ‘Outstanding.’

19.07 A local restaurant with seascape murals and fishing nets hanging from the ceiling. ‘I’d like the Sole Picasso.’ ‘And I’d like the gurnard in
mild mustard sauce. And a carafe of white wine, please.’

That kind of day. The kind of day that in no way prepares you for what the night will bring.

I
f only I hadn’t got so drunk.

If only I hadn’t got so drunk, I would never have drowned myself in self-pity.

If only I hadn’t got so drunk, I would have realized that he was sleeping with his eyes closed.

If only I hadn’t got so drunk, I . . .

After dinner and coffee we take a walk through the fields, towards the shallows. To the west, the lighthouse flashes. To the east, a vague glow announces moonrise. Every once
in a while the nervous cry of a redshank sounds in the darkness, the suppressed keewee-ee-ee-eet of an alarmed lapwing. We pass a field of sheep that stare at us as we go by, as though we’re
the first humans they’ve ever seen. We don’t say much.

Bo says, ‘It really is quiet.’

I say nothing.

Bo says, ‘What are we going to do?’

I say, ‘Walk a little. Go drink some coffee.’

We follow the darkened asphalt between two ditches that reflect the night sky. The fresh air is not having its desired effect on me. Instead of perking up, I become sadder at every step. Maybe
it’s because, in the dark, I have to do without the reassurance of this unchanging landscape. Maybe it’s because, in the dark, death is more real than life. Maybe it’s because Bo
won’t match my pace – something that has never bothered me before, but now it does.

We walk back to the village, with a slight detour. The houses wait for us with lighted windows that are inviting and excluding, all at the same time. We go into the first café we find and
sit at a table by the window. There aren’t many other customers.

‘Evening.’

‘Good evening.’

A boy with blushing cheeks and an enormous pair of hands takes our order: one coffee, one hot chocolate with whipped cream. I take cognac along with my coffee, Bo takes a glass of water. Just as
the boy is putting our steaming cups in front of us, a group of young people comes into the café. It’s the two boys and three girls we’ve seen twice already. It seems
they’ve decided to see for themselves whether Hollum’s as nice as Bo said this morning. To judge from the expression on the face of one of the girls, the conclusion is already
affirmative – it’s the girl with the black baseball cap. As she shuffles past our table, she grants Bo a pearly smile. Even my gloom is lightened by it. Bo mumbles a barely perceptible
‘Hello’ and begins stirring his hot chocolate vigorously.

I say nothing.

Bo says, ‘You think Ellen misses us, a little bit?’ He’d asked that at dinner, too.

‘She’s pleased to be shot of us for a while. Or at least me.’ That’s what I’d told him at dinner, too.

We drink in silence. The group of five is sitting at the bar behind us. The girl with the cap has positioned herself in such a way that she can talk to her friends while keeping an eye on Bo. I
see her gaze wander regularly to our table.

I don’t say anything. I’m thinking. How long have girls been falling for him? I’ve never noticed it before, and Bo would be the last one to talk about it – if he’s
even noticed. Oh that terrific, terrible uncertainty of puberty, in which even the most unequivocal feminine signal can never be unequivocal enough. In which every temptation is also cause for
alarm, when your self-esteem is as vulnerable as a sandcastle in the surf. Because what one moment seems a probability bordering on certainty may turn out the next to be an absolute impossibility.
Because you know nothing, and understand nothing. Or is that an old man talking? Are today’s adolescents much wiser than that? I look at Bo and think: no, that uncertainty is of all ages. But
I can’t be too certain. After all, what do I know about him – except that he is not my son?

‘I have to go to the toilet.’

He gets up. The eyes of the girl-with-the-cap flash in his direction. Bo looks around hesitantly. By watching her expression, I can see the exact moment their gazes cross. That smile again.
(Chimpanzees also show each other their teeth as a sign of reassurance – unlike many other animals, including dogs. Grinning at a mean dog can have nasty consequences. Not grinning at a mean
dog can, too. Smiling at someone you desire is almost always a good first move.) I can’t see whether Bo is smiling back, but he shuffles right past her on his way to the toilet. I catch
myself envying him. I take a quick swig of my cognac and turn to stare out of the window, even though my view is largely obscured by the reflection in the glass.

Bo is flirting.

Bo isn’t a little boy any more.

Oh, what the hell, I’d lost him anyway.

What a ridiculous, pitiful thought!

It’s nice for him. That’s right, it’s nice for him. And what’s more, she’s a nice girl.

What do you know about it, you old windbag?

Well, a nice girl is a nice girl. That never changes. I still have an eye for that.

But Bo’s taste may be different.

Is taste inherited, or is it learned? The fact that men like big tits is biologically determined, the sociobiologists say. Big tits and broad hips. It’s been studied. I glance over at the
corner of the bar where the girl with the cap is sitting. She’s not there any more. Ridiculous of me to wonder about that. I don’t even like big tits.

Where is she?

Gone to the toilet, obviously. Is the door of the ladies’ in the same alcove as the gents’? Must be. From where I’m sitting, I can’t see either of them. Is she waiting
for him? I wouldn’t have dared to do that, back then. But then, times have changed. Haven’t they? No. Monika probably did things like that, too. She lost her virginity when she was
thirteen. Thirteen! When she told me that, I’d been speechless. It took me six months to work up the courage to tell her that she was the first.

Thirteen . . . I felt like such an ass. But my inexperience, when I finally dared to confess it, had a remarkable effect on Monika.

‘Really?’ she asked.

‘Really,’ I said.

She looked at me questioningly for a while. Then she smiled (that smile, that smile!) and said, ‘Then you’re a natural.’ Whether she really meant it, or whether she was only
saying it to make me feel good, I couldn’t have cared less; after that, we fucked even more.

‘You’ve got some catching up to do,’ Monika said.

‘That you saved all that for me,’ Monika said.

‘How sweet!’ Monika said.

And she taught me everything there was to be taught about sex. And after that I taught her what it meant when sex came forth out of true love, because that, she said, was something she’d
never experienced before.

That’s how we riveted ourselves together.

What God brings together, say the priests and pastors, let no man put asunder. But what man brings together, I say in turn, God cannot put asunder. Not even if he hires a hit-man. Not even if .
. . not even then? No, not even then, I tell myself. And I order another cognac. In the hope that I’ll keep believing it.

Bo still hasn’t come back from the men’s room.

I
have three memories of the last time Monika and I were together on Ameland. The first is linked to the photo on the beach – ‘Armin is
crazy’. The second has to do with the shorteared owl. We’re lying in the spring sun, out of the wind in a pocket of inland dune. Bo is sleeping between us. Monika is chewing on a blade
of grass. She has grass in her hair. She’s leaning on one elbow, her head resting on her hand. She says, ‘What does it mean to you to be the father of my child?’

It was a typical Monika question. ‘What do you mean when you say: I love you?’ ‘What did it feel like the first time you held Bo in your arms?’ ‘What does
“being faithful” mean to you?’ For Monika, nothing was to be taken for granted – at least, nothing that had to do with love. Through her, I found out what’s most
killing for love: the rut.

I think about it. Then I reply, ‘That our lives can’t be separated any more. That you can no longer say: my life ends here and yours begins there.’

‘Do you feel that limits you?’

‘Not at all. That the highest goal in life is individual self-realization is a sales pitch from the psychotherapists and pseudogurus. The highest goal is to put an end, once and for all,
to exclusivist thinking.’

‘Excuse me? What’s that: “exclusivist thinking”?’

‘It’s the kind of thinking that draws distinctions and isolates. The kind of thinking that serves as an excellent tool for verifying fact, but which has unfortunately been elevated
to a goal in itself. The kind of thinking that forms the greatest obstacle to achieving wisdom.’

‘You’re shitting through your teeth again, Armin. Could you put that in terms a mere mortal might understand?’

‘You’re the one who asked,’ I splutter. But I’ve tried that line on her many times before, and she’s never fallen for it yet. Not this time, either.

‘You know how much I hate all those abstractions. All I asked was whether you minded that Bo meant our lives could no longer be separated. That’s a very simple question, isn’t
it?’

During our first two years together, conversations like this had often led to heated arguments. I took her criticism as out-and-out aggression, and didn’t know what I’d done to
deserve it. She, in turn, found my abstractions insulting, as though I was consciously trying to belittle her by inflating the simplest questions into philosophical issues. But that afternoon on
Ameland, in the early spring sun, we recognized the dangers and both added some water to the wine.

She shooed away an insect that was zooming around her head and said, ‘What exactly are you trying to say?’

And I said, ‘In order to understand how the body works, it can be very useful to dissect it and study the parts piece by piece. In order to better understand genius and insanity, it can be
very helpful to draw a distinction between body and mind. And of course our insight into lightning, rainbows and solar eclipses increased when we stopped seeing them as manifestations of divine
emotion. In that sense, it can be quite useful to think in exclusive terms. In terms of either one thing or the other. But the bothersome thing about exclusivist thinking is that, in the long run,
it starts seeing itself as the only correct way of thinking – that, after all, is why it’s exclusive. And that leads to intellectual paralysis, and even to outright
stupidity.’

‘For example?’

‘For example, take the discussions about what determines who we are: our genes or our environment. Full-blown academic battles have been fought over issues like that, even though it should
be clear to everyone from the start that both factors play a part and, what’s more, even influence each other. You run into senseless, all-or-nothing debates like that all the time. About
market versus planned economies. About homeopathy versus allopathy. About masculinity versus femininity. About man as calculating egotist versus man as a social creature. About good versus
evil.’