A Father's Affair (25 page)

What a crock of shit! What a heartless crock of shit. As if she had any choice. As if I would have done any different in her situation. Would I have done any different in her situation? Would I
have done any different in Monika’s situation?

How warm Ellen’s bed had been that cold winter night, when Monika was at home being pregnant from a man she – with her bare arse against the wall – had fucked only once.

Just one time.

‘Did you know about it then?’

‘Did I know what when?’

‘When we did it, that one time, did you already know about Monika and my father?’

‘No.’ She’s quiet for a while. Then she says, ‘I rang her the next day. Feeling guilty, I guess. I asked how she was doing. Not too well, she said. I asked whether she
wanted me to come over. She did. Come tomorrow, she said. You were at the publishing house that day. That’s when she told me. I could have told her that she didn’t have to feel so
guilty. That she wasn’t the only one. That sometimes we all do things we’d have been better off not doing, but that we don’t feel sorry about. I could have told her all that. But
I didn’t. I didn’t dare.’

I look at her. She lowers her eyes. I’m not angry any more. I’m not anything any more. Not a father. Not a son. Not a beloved. Not a friend. Nothing. I’ve ceased to exist. I
have to reinvent myself.

Is that what the evangelist meant by the truth making you free?

B
o is sleeping with his eyes closed. I can hardly believe it, but it’s true. I sit on the edge of his bed and listen to his breathing. The
pause between exhale and inhale, that’s the loveliest moment of all. Because then, for a fraction, life stands still.

So is that what I want? To make life stand still? Yes. That’s what I want.

Statistically speaking, Bo and I probably share a quarter of our genes, although that percentage may be higher, or even a lot lower – that’s the rotten thing about average values: as
an individual, you never know how they apply to you. (But try telling that to an insurance agent.) That Bo has the line of my jaw is therefore probably no coincidence. That his feet are different
sizes, just like mine, probably isn’t, either. According to the sociobiologists, now that I know about our blood relationship I will be able to love him more. Although only half as much as
when I thought he was my own child, because father and child share half their genes on the average – in other words, twice as many as half-brothers.

This dramatic insight into the relationship between blood ties and love was given us by a certain William Hamilton, who in 1964 published an article in the
Journal of Theoretical
Biology
with the title ‘The Evolution of Social Behaviour’. Hamilton’s article was seen by many as the most important breakthrough in evolutionary theory since Gregor
Mendel’s discovery of the hereditary characteristics of the pea. Before Hamilton, Darwin’s theory could be used only to explain egocentricity – social behaviour did not fit within
the theory, and was therefore an unpopular field of research for biologists. The only problem was that one could not deny that social behaviour existed, in both animals and humans. Hamilton was the
first to provide an evolutionist’s explanation of such behaviour.

In short, Hamilton’s insight was this: social behaviour can provide an evolutionary advantage when it benefits direct blood relations. The quantity of genes shared by the blood relations
is therefore the determining factor. From a genetic point of view, the closer the kinship, the greater the advantage of social behaviour over selfishness. Egocentric genes can therefore be served
by altruistic individuals.

‘There’s only one problem with Hamilton’s theory.’ It was Dees, of course, who brought this up. ‘It’s a snake biting its own tail. He proves what must be
proven on the basis of the presupposition that evolutionary theory is correct, and from the standpoint that there
is
such a thing as social behaviour.’

But this time I didn’t feel like letting him get away with it so easily. ‘You could,’ I said, ‘develop a hypothesis on the basis of Hamilton’s theory. For example,
that humans or animals will be more egoistical in proportion to the extent that other individuals in an experiment are more distantly related. In general, experiments seem to support that
hypothesis.’

‘All well and good,’ Dees countered, ‘but the only thing that proves is that the parson always christens his own child first – and that, to put it mildly, is not exactly
a scientific breakthrough. If Hamilton is right, there should be a direct relationship between a given gene, or at most a pair of genes, and the social behaviour shown. What’s more,
we’re supposed to believe that our genes contain information somewhere that enables us –
unconsciously!
– to distinguish between close relatives and those three or four
times removed. But then you may as well believe in God, or in little green men from outer space.’

I had to admit that I could bring no reasonable argument to bear against that. But the problem with Dees’s criticism of evolutionary theory is that, although he rejects the
Darwinists’ answers to the questions of life, he has no answers himself.

And so here I sit beside my sleeping half-brother, who looks like me but then again not. The cuckoo’s egg that my own father laid in my nest. Ever since Bo experienced the love of the
girl-with-the-cap, he’s no longer afraid at night. Love makes whole. But can love ever restore what’s been broken between him and me? Will I ever be able to love him again the way I did
all those years? And what about him? The only honest answer to those questions is: I don’t know, by God – and not by Darwin either.

I
t was Bo’s idea. It was profane, shocking and absurd, but I knew as soon as he suggested it that it would have to be carried out.

Four months had gone by since that insane day when he discovered that his father was his brother and his grandpa his father. From everything about him, you could tell that they had been the most
difficult months of his life – nothing could change that, not even the postcards from the girl-with-the-cap. Throughout the summer, he looked as if it was still winter. He had bags under his
eyes all the time, and he was even more taciturn than usual. Sometimes we would sit in the living room for hours without saying a word. Ellen let us go our way, the way only she could. She was
there, even when she wasn’t there. And she never got in our way, not even when she sat between us – in fact, especially not then.

For the first few weeks after that absurd discovery at my parents’ house, I was so incredibly angry that at the end of each day every muscle in my body hurt. I often got up in the middle
of the night and spent an hour under the shower, in the hope that I would then be able to sleep. Sometimes it helped. Usually it didn’t. There was, however, one thing I did differently from
what I had done in all the years before: I stopped drinking. On extremely bad days I pounded my head against the wall for minutes at a time. For days on end, I couldn’t eat a bite.

Every day Ellen said, ‘I love you.’

And sometimes I said, ‘I love you too.’

And slowly the realization grew that although everything had changed, at the same time everything had stayed the same.

One Friday afternoon in August, Bo asked, ‘How about us going fishing tomorrow?’

And of course I said yes.

He had just removed the hook from the first bream of the day and let it slide gently back into the water when he mentioned his idea.

‘I want us to scatter Grandpa’s ashes over Monika’s grave. And then I want us to get on with life.’

The next day we stood at Monika’s grave, Ellen, Bo and I. It was still early. The only other visitor was a song thrush, picking vigorously for worms on a freshly dug grave. Bo brought out
the urn and unscrewed the lid. None of the rage and desperation of those days had gone out of the text on Monika’s tombstone: ‘Monika Paradies. Beautiful. Young. Mother. Dead.’
I’d been ashamed of myself on occasion for not having come up with something more dignified. But now they suddenly seemed again to me to be the perfect words for what I knew about her. Once
the love of my life. Now four words chiselled in granite.

Bo held the urn up as high as he could. Then he turned around and around. The fine dust blew across the graveyard in the summer breeze. A little white mountain formed at the foot of
Monika’s grave.

T
his book contains a number of direct quotations. The excerpts from the Gospel of Philip are based on the translation by the members of the Coptic
Gnostic Library Project (
The Nag Hammadi Library in English
, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1977), and on the Dutch translation by Jakob Slavenburg (
De verborgen leringen van Jezus
,
Ankh-Hermes, Deventer, 1992).
Fulgor the Golden Eagle
was written by Cecilia Knowles. The various excerpts from the literature of biomedicine were taken from
Biochimica et biophysica
acta, Molecular Cell Research
(Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, vol. 763, no. 2, September 1983). The figures on globe-theoretical decline were taken from
Pleidooi voor de platte
aarde
(Plea for a Flat Earth) by Klaas Dijkstra (Boersma Enschede, publication date unknown).

During the writing of this book, I was assisted by the love, patience and professional wisdom of Tiziana Alings. Without her contribution, as critical as it was stimulating,
this would never have become the book it is. These paltry words will never be enough to thank her.

CHANNELLING GREAT

CONTENT FOR YOU

TO
WATCH, LISTEN

TO AND
READ.