A Father's Affair (22 page)

‘And now back to you and me and Bo.’

She smiles when she says it, the chimpanzee code for ‘I mean well’.

I say, ‘According to the proponents of exclusivist thinking, people lose their individuality when they bond with others. But I believe that love actually allows people to become more
themselves by fusing with another person. Through Bo, you and I are inextricably linked for the rest of our lives. But through that link, I feel freer than I ever did before. The opposite of
exclusivist thinking, I believe, lies in the true acceptance of the paradoxical. The key to every bit of wisdom is a paradox.’

And at that very moment a short-eared owl comes in fast and low over the surrounding hedge of buckthorn, swerves and tips its wing when it sees us, and disappears as silently as it came.

‘Pure coincidence,’ I say, ‘but, of course, not without portent.’

And Monika says, ‘Pfffff!’ and laughs stridently. And I crawl across Bo and push her down in the grass and kiss her until she’s quiet.

The third memory has to do with the evening that followed that day. For years I’ve only dared to think back on that when Ellen was very close. Because Ellen understands.
That I had to think about that evening there in that café in Hollum, with Ellen so far away, should have been a warning to me.

T
hey come back together. The girl’s eyes are glistening even more brightly. You can’t see a thing on Bo. The girl goes back to her
barstool. Bo comes over to our table, but doesn’t sit down. He says, ‘I’m going over there.’ And he nods back towards the bar. ‘Those are the people we met this
morning, remember?’

‘Sure I do. Have fun.’

I peer at the reflections in the window and try to think about nothing – which doesn’t work, which
never
works. When I look up a little later, one of the boys is talking
excitedly to Bo. Every once in a while, Bo says something back. The girl-with-the-cap, who’s standing just behind him, never takes her eyes off Bo. I order a glass of red wine from the boy
with the workman’s hands.

‘Red wine for the gentleman.’

‘Thank you very much.’

Two glasses of red wine later, a man is suddenly standing beside my table.

‘Is this chair taken?’

‘No, help yourself.’

He’s enormous. I slide the table towards me a bit to make room for his stomach. He grins at me. Limpid blue eyes in a face that seems to glow permanently from being out of doors. A dark,
not particularly neat beard. Teeth that seem to indicate a heavy nicotine addiction. As soon as he’s seated he pulls a rumpled pack of dark cigarette tobacco out of his pocket and begins to
roll one.

‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Holiday?’

‘Three-day weekend.’

‘Let me guess: Amsterdam?’

‘Good guess.’

‘Accent. Clothes. Self-confidence bordering on indifference. I can pick them out in a crowd, I can, Amsterdammers.’

‘Hollum?’ I ask.

‘Ballum.’ He lights his roll-up. Takes a deep drag. Blows the smoke at the ceiling.

‘That your son?’ He nods his head back towards the bar, precisely the way Bo did half an hour ago.

‘Yeah.’

‘Looks just like you. Same movements. Same self-confidence bordering on indifference.’

I have to laugh at that.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘One of the girls in that group has her eye on him. And I don’t think he feels awfully self-confident about that.’ (All the other things I could say, about resemblances between
people who aren’t related, and what that says about the influence of environment and genes, all those things I don’t say.)

He turns his huge body towards the bar. It makes the table shake. The wine slops over the rim of my glass. Just to be safe, I pick up the glass. He sits there examining the group of young people
for a while. I look along with him.

Bo is still talking to the same boy. That is to say, the boy is talking at Bo, gesturing excitedly, and Bo says something back on occasion. But now when he says something he no longer looks at
the boy, but at the girl-with-the-cap. And she answers him with her eyes, and every once in a while with her mouth. And suddenly it seems to dawn on the boy what is happening right before his eyes.
He takes a little step back. Looks at the girl. Looks at Bo, who’s saying something to her at that very moment. Then he turns demonstratively to the girl, but she doesn’t even glance at
him. She’s still looking at Bo. And Bo keeps talking imperturbably. The boy tries again to take over the conversation, but again it doesn’t work. Then he turns abruptly and orders
something from the barman.

The man across from me at the table turns back. The table shakes again. The wineglass is suspended safely between my fingers.

‘Puppy love,’ he says, so loudly that I’m afraid Bo will hear it. (But Bo doesn’t react.)

‘That’ll be kissing in the dark. And touchy-feely. Ha ha ha!’

I laugh along with him, but not entirely with conviction. You’re turning into a grouchy old shit, I think to myself. But I say, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ And he says I can.

Bas is the name of my table companion and drinking partner. And he’s no fisherman, no farmer, no roughneck, no ship’s pilot, no beachcomber, no publican and no cook. Bas is a
biologist. He’s studying the effects of cockle-fishing on eider ducks in the Wadden Shallows. The effects are disastrous. Tens of thousands of birds have died of starvation in the last few
years; the result of the new, intensive fishing methods, as practised particularly by the fleet from Dutch Zealand that frequents the shallows.

‘For the first time in years,’ Bas says, the foam of a third beer in his beard, ‘my work has gained me a certain popularity on the island. Conservationists aren’t loved
here. The islanders often feel that the birds are considered more important than they are. And that hurts. I can understand that. But now that the Zealanders are to blame, of course, that’s
all changed. A bunch of foreigners ripping up the sea floor, that’s the bloody limit.’ His laugh is infectious, his enthusiasm is too. He talks about the eider ducks as though they were
the crown of creation.

‘A grown male eider in his Sunday best can still bring tears to my eyes,’ he says. ‘Even after all these years. I’m not a poet, unfortunately, but if I were I’d
write an ode to the eider drake. That clownish black and white, alongside those soft pastels. I feel about eider drakes the way I do about pretty women. When I see a really pretty woman, I tend to
think: how can she belong to the same species as a fat, ugly lummox like me? And when I see those dark, stodgy female eiders beside a beautiful drake with that almost tropical plumage, I also
wonder how in the world that can be. If you ask me, God’s a big practical joker.’

And he laughs that robust laugh and turns around so he can see Bo and the girl-with-the-cap, who only have eyes for each other. (They’re both drinking red port – I’ve never
seen Bo drink that before!)

Talking to Bas with the belly and the beard and the beer has dispelled my sombre mood, so I decide to change from red wine to something more cheerful. I order a double whisky on the rocks.

‘Or, on second thoughts, hold the rocks.’

Bas joins me.

‘Don’t mean to pry,’ he says when our drinks arrive, ‘but where’s the missus?’

‘The missus is . . .’ I’m about to say ‘dead’. But I’m afraid to fall back into that mire of melancholy and self-pity. ‘At home, in Amsterdam. It was
time for the men to go off on their own.’

‘Very good,’ Bas says. ‘A boys’ day out. I bet that son of yours . . . what’s his name again? Bo, right, Bo . . . I bet Bo wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable
with that girl over there if he knew his mother was sitting here.’

And suddenly I see Monika across from me at the table. With a glass of red wine in her hand, and her red hair all mussed from cycling into the wind. Didn’t we once sit here, here in this
same café, at this very table? Could be. She was wearing an apple-green jacket. With a purple scarf. She was the liveliest-looking thing on the island. And she knew it. That semi-ironic
smile she turned on the world was her way of saying, ‘That’s right, take a good look, this is what became of that ugly little redhead with freckles, the one you all teased as a child.
Now you’re sorry, now you’d like to get to know me, now you want to touch me, but it’s too late. I don’t need you any more. I’m perfectly happy without you. I have a
man I love who loves me, and me alone. And I have a child I cry with and laugh with. And all of us laugh at you. The three of us against the rest of the world. And we can win with our hands in our
pockets.’

That’s how Monika looked at the world, in the spring of 1987.

Why did God have to put a contract out on that?

I knock back my whisky in one go. Bas looks at me in amazement. But he says nothing. A boys’ day out.

I remember Bo coming over to me at a certain point.

‘I’m going with them. Somewhere else.’

‘Good. Have fun.’

Bas and I laughed and drank and talked. He told me a hilarious story about a drunken cockle fisher, but I’ve forgotten the punchline. Or maybe there wasn’t any punchline. He told me
about his father, who’d worked on ships plying the coast of Scandinavia. About storms on the Kattegat and the Sont. About perfumed letters from Sweden that had driven his mother to despair.
He talked about crates of expensive wine he’d found on the beach as a child. And about a bloated corpse that had suddenly popped up in the surf a few years ago, in the middle of a group of
children at play. He told island stories. And I listened. And finally he asked me about life in Amsterdam. And I returned to my years as a drunk, which were suddenly right there before my eyes (the
way drunken goldfish remember the tricks they learned under the influence).

I said, ‘One rainy October night I was walking through the red-light district. It must have been about four or five in the morning. Things were getting quiet. I was carrying Bo on my back,
and I was looking at the women sitting at their windows and they were looking at me. One of the women tapped on the window and gestured to me, and I thought: out here it’s cold and wet, and
in there I bet it’s nice and warm. I stuck my hand in my pocket and found some banknotes and, even though I didn’t know whether they were tens or hundreds, I still walked over to the
door. The woman opened the door for us and I stepped inside and put Bo on the only chair in the room and she closed the curtains and asked me my name. I thought that was sweet of her, to want me to
have a name. I’d been talking to people all night, in bars and out on the street, and no one had asked me my name. The woman was German; she had a heavy accent. Andrea was her name. At least
that’s what she called herself. She thought Armin and Bo sounded German, and I let her think that. She asked Bo if he wanted to take off his coat, but he was asleep. So I said, “Bo
sleeps with his eyes open.” At first she didn’t believe me. She went over and stood in front of him, in her black negligée, and she waved her carefully manicured fingers in front
of his face. He didn’t react. Then she believed me. “Why does he do that?” she asked. “Because of a nightmare,” I said. “
Arme Jungen
.” We sat down
on the bed, Andrea and I. “Where is his
Mutter
?” she asked. “She’s dead,” I said.’ And then I explained to Bas, ‘Bo’s mother died ten years
ago.’

Bas nodded, as though it were completely normal that the mother who had just been at home in Amsterdam was now suddenly ten years dead. And, in fact, it was. People not telling the truth about
things like that is the most normal thing in the world.

‘That’s why I drank so much back then,’ I said. ‘That’s why I was wandering with my son through the red-light district at five in the morning.’

The barman brought us more beer. Apparently we were no longer drinking whisky.

‘We sat on that bed for a long time,’ I went on. ‘She was a wonderful girl. She told me she had a daughter almost Bo’s age. I asked about the first words she’d
taught her child. “
Mein Vati ist ein Arschloch
,” she said. Her daughter’s name was Maria. She hoped Maria would remain a virgin all her life. I gave her two hundred
guilders. But when we got home and I was undressing Bo for bed, I found the money. She’d tucked it into his clothes. That’s the only time I’ve ever visited a whore.’

When we’d finished our beer, I got up to leave.

‘Be careful,’ Bas said.

And I said, ‘We’ve got a house just around the corner. I’ll be all right.’ But it took me a long time to find it.

Bo wasn’t there.

I
woke up with a splitting headache. My tongue was leather and my stomach felt like a reactor vat that was about to explode. I was sitting in a
chair in the living room of the little house. Outside, it was turning light. On the fence in front of the house was a blackbird.
Chuuk-chuuk-chuuk-chuuk
, said the blackbird. I walked into
the kitchen and filled a tall cocktail glass with water. Three times. Then I went back to my chair, picked the bottle of whisky off the floor and took two hefty swigs.

It didn’t help.

I went to the toilet and pissed and drank more water. Then I went to the room with the double bed, opened the door and . . . Lying in the bed were Bo and the girl-with-the-cap. Without the cap.
The cap was lying on the floor, on top of her other clothes. She was wearing a T-shirt. One of Bo’s. Bo was wearing a T-shirt, too. It wasn’t a shocking sight in any way, more romantic,
innocent even. He was asleep. She was asleep. Her arm was lying across him. I closed the door again and sat down in my chair. I poured another glass of whisky and wondered why my hands were shaking
so badly.

I remember seeing the girl walk through the house that morning in her underpants and that T-shirt of Bo’s. I remember Bo making coffee. Later there was a mug of cold coffee beside my
chair. I remember that I wanted to pour myself another glass of whisky to get rid of the headache. But the whisky was finished. Fortunately, there was still a bottle of beer.

I went back into the room with the double bed. The room was empty. The bed wasn’t made. I fell right onto my back. The beer sloshed out of the bottle. What was left of it I drank at one
go. I felt the cold liquid running down my chin and neck. I closed my eyes. The world spun. I thought about Monika. I thought about Ellen, who I could never give the thing she wanted most of all. I
thought about my son who wasn’t my son, and who dared to do things at fourteen that I’d dared only when I was twenty. And I thought: he gets that from his father. And then I thought
about Niko Neerinckx and about Anke. And I cursed myself for not fucking her. For still being a coward, only half a man. And I tried to imagine how she’d look without clothes, how I’d
tear the clothes off her body, how she’d give herself to me, how she would struggle fruitlessly. I wanted to get an erection. An erection because of
her
. But I was too drunk for
that.