A Father's Affair (4 page)

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

She leans over, kisses the head of my dick. ‘Oh, oh, wait.’ She climbs on top of me, and with a hard shove she brings me into her. ‘Yes!’

I look at the white of her breasts, I look at the white of her eyes. And suddenly it’s as though her whole body is emitting light, Monika has become an angel.

‘Shit!’ she shrieks. As fast as she climbed on to me, that’s how fast she’s off me now.

‘Shit!’

It feels like something snaps at the base of the stiff organ that has just been generating so much excitement.

‘Ow!’

I turn my head and look at the source of the heavenly light.
POLICE
is written in mirror image between the two round headlights.

‘Shihihit,’ giggles Monika, in the driver’s seat now and raising the backrest. I lie back down and grab the first piece of clothing I can find. I use it to cover my crotch.

‘Jesus!’

I hear a door open. Footsteps. A torch shines into the car. Monika rolls down her window.

‘Everything okay, ma’am?’

Monika laughs nervously. ‘Yes, everything’s okay.’

The light slides slowly over her bare breasts, over my stomach.

‘Well then, have a nice evening.’

‘Yes, officer, you too.’

More footsteps, the slamming of a car door. From the way the headlights swerve I can tell that the van is reversing, away from us, turning and leaving. Monika leans over, grabs the shirt I was
covering myself with, throws it on the floor beside the accelerator and starts kissing my limp cock.

A Renault 5 is awfully small to make love in, but you can. Thirty-eight weeks and three days later, Monika gives birth to a son. We name him ‘Bo’.

I
suffer from Klinefelter’s Syndrome, a defect of the sex chromosomes.

‘Normally speaking, men have an X and a Y chromosome, while women have two X chromosomes,’ the doctor explains patiently when I come back to the hospital for the after-care
counselling. ‘All egg cells have an X chromosome, while sperm cells have either an X or a Y. When the two cells fuse, it depends on the sperm cell, or on fate, whether you get an XX or an XY:
a girl or a boy.’

He uses his silver pen to draw a few neat egg and sperm cells on a piece of paper, and writes the correct letters underneath.

‘But what happens with Klinefelter’s? Something goes wrong with the formation of the egg cells – an XX cell in the ovary doesn’t split neatly into two egg cells with X
chromosomes, but splits into one egg cell with two X chromosomes, and one with nothing at all. If the egg cell with the double X is fertilized, you get either a girl with three X chromosomes, which
usually has no ramifications whatsoever, or a boy with the chromosomes XXY. The latter is what we call Klinefelter’s Syndrome.’

He looks up from his drawing. He’s the same man who gave me the bad news a little over a week ago, but it’s as though I’m actually seeing him for the first time. He’s
unusually small, with the limbs of a child, the torso of an old woman, but with the head and features of the lively forty-year-old he seems in fact to be. Ruddy cheeks, greyish-green eyes behind a
pair of little gold-rimmed spectacles. He’s not unfriendly, but he keeps his distance. I would, too, if I had to explain Klinefelter’s Syndrome to a patient.

‘The syndrome often leads to clear visible defects,’ he lectures on. ‘Patients may have an extremely small penis, or they may display slight breast enlargement at puberty. But
there are also cases, like yours, in which there are no visible effects at all. Then the presence of the syndrome is discovered only during fertility tests – when it turns out that the semen
contains no sperm cells. Unfortunately, that’s what one sees in almost all Klinefelter patients.’

SPERM SAMPLES
was written in blue letters on the sign above the desk at the IVF clinic. But the cubicle behind the desk was empty. So there I stood, in
my hand a brown paper bag containing, ever so discreetly, the little glass jar with my most recent ejaculation. A young couple walked past me down the corridor. I looked at the pharmaceutical
company calendar hanging on the blind wall in the little cubicle. The photo on it showed three men in white coats, staring interestedly at the test tube one of them was holding up to the light. The
pages of the calendar hadn’t been torn off for three months. Maybe someone liked the photo. In one corner of the little office was a doorway opening into a narrow hallway, which led in turn
to another room. In that room I occasionally caught a glimpse of people walking around in hospital uniforms. I tried unsuccessfully to get their attention.

Was there no buzzer? No, there was no buzzer.

Should I shout something? ‘Hello, I’ve got something for you here!’

Behind me I suddenly heard a harsh female voice. ‘Just put it down, okay? They’ll find it.’ I turned around to see who had spoken, but all I saw was the back of a white coat
disappearing around a corner.

‘Fine, thank you very much,’ I mumbled. The sliding window on the desk was half open; it would have been easy just to set my brown paper bag on the counter. But there was something
– how shall I put it? – something almost blasphemous about dealing so offhandedly with my sperm. I mean, I rinse it down the drain in the shower every bit as casually if need be, but
still . . . that’s up to me. When other people start messing around with it, I expect them to show great care, to say nothing of respect – it is, after all, life-giving seed (or so I
thought at the time), and despite all medical science still very much a mystery and a miracle and so on. I should have known better. In a hospital, sperm is like urine or foot fungus: something to
examine in a lab, something you reduce to a row of digits on a form and then toss in the waste-bin.

I laid the bag on the counter, and just at that moment someone came into the little cubicle. It was the woman who had helped me when I came in, the one who had given me the sticker with my name
and outpatient number and date of birth.

When I’d checked in, she’d said, ‘Go down that corridor and it’s, let’s see, the second, no, the third door on your right, Room C. Any questions?’

Room C consisted of two cubbyholes. One of them had a toilet and a sink. In the other was a piece of furniture that looked like a cross between a bed and an examination table, with a steel frame
and black leatherette upholstery. Next to it was a table with a huge number of little glass jars. Beside the jars lay stacks of brown paper bags and, beside those, more stacks of white towelettes.
At the foot of the bed, on a little rollaway table, were a TV set and a video recorder.

So this was where it was supposed to happen. Solo sex by the light of fluorescent tubes and a flickering TV screen.

I read the instructions on the plasticized poster on one of the immaculate white walls, and did as I was told. Urinate until the bladder is empty. Wash well with lukewarm water, but do not use
soap. Then I sat down on the bed and turned on the video. There was an extreme close-up of a sallow-looking penis sliding over a shorn labium. I heard excited groans and that typical smutty-video
music. I quickly turned down the sound, ran the tape back a bit and then cued forward for a long time. The fuck scene I’d landed in the middle of (and during which my predecessor had reached
his climax?) was followed by an outdoor scene. A pale man with a typical Seventies look (hair down over his ears and a flimsy smile on his face) was leading an equally pale woman down into the
cabin of his houseboat. The next moment she was on her knees, giving him a blow job. A second man came on board and did what men in porno films always do. Suddenly the camera was panning after a
young woman on a bicycle. Her blonde pigtails flapped in the wind. She stopped at a farm, dumped her bike against the wall of an outbuilding and, bingo, there she was rolling in the hay with a
lusty hired hand who hadn’t even bothered to take off his gumboots.

It was no mean trick to find a sequence that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be called exciting, but eventually I stopped the video at a badly focused breast in backlight. There was
also, I had to admit, something exciting about masturbating in an almost-public space. Besides that, the porno movie was ridiculous, and humour is the ideal accompaniment to lust. Hence the deadly
earnest of fundamentalist preachers. I took a little jar from the table, stood beside the bed, took another good look at the breast on the screen, closed my eyes and thought the kind of thoughts
that can bring you to a sexual climax. (Contrary to what the books of feminist heavyweights like Nancy Friday and Shere Hite would have us believe, most people – if they fantasize at all
– fantasize not about wild orgies, panting Great Danes, or bondage, but simply about their own partner, or about partners from the past. To that rule I am no exception.)

It was a little hard to keep the jar at the right angle at the right moment, but it all worked out without any mess. As I pasted on the label, I had to laugh out loud. If it hadn’t been
for having to cross the waiting room where two lonely men were emphatically engrossed in an old back-issue of a magazine, while a prim couple – who I judged at a glance to be of the
we-decided-late-because-our-careers-came-first school – were poring over the birth announcements on the giant bulletin board – if I hadn’t had to walk through there, I’m
sure I would have sung or whistled a tune, that’s how cheerful this uncommon ejaculation had made me.

But the wait at the
SPERM SAMPLES
desk soon turned my cheerfulness back into the initial nervous embarrassment. Eye to eye again with the woman who had done my intake, I
wondered how many minutes had passed and whether I hadn’t come much too fast, or actually taken a perturbingly long time. I laughed awkwardly and said, ‘Here you are.’ And she
said, ‘Thank you very much.’ And that was that.

The doctor makes another attempt at helping me put things in perspective.

‘You are not,’ he says, reinserting his pen in the breast pocket of his white lab coat, ‘the only man made sterile by Klinefelter’s Syndrome who has nevertheless raised a
child. A study in England among twelve married patients showed that three of them had a child. One man even had a number of children. Whether those men’s wives were still alive to explain
things, of course, I don’t know.’

That last sentence he mumbles under his breath, as though suddenly realizing that this titbit of information will do little to help me come to terms with the insane truth that my son is not my
son. And that the woman responsible for that fact is no longer around. (Fate had had another cruel twist in store. The fertility test was originally carried out because Ellen, after two years of
trying to get pregnant, was wild with desperation – a desperation I understood, but didn’t share. The first time we went to the hospital, they asked us about any congenital defects in
our families. ‘Two uncles and my grandfather on my mother’s side,’ Ellen said, ‘went mad and spent their lives in an institution. I remember my one uncle sitting in a chair,
drooling like a helpless baby, and asking over and over again: “Where are the jujubes? Has anyone seen my jujubes? Who took the jujubes?”’ ‘There’s a slight
chance,’ the doctor said, ‘that you carry a gene which increases the likelihood of insanity. So, just to be on the safe side, we’ll run a chromosome test.’ The result of
that test was maddeningly comforting: if we’d been able to have a child, that child would have had just as much or just as little chance of going insane as anyone else.)

‘Fate,’ I say to the photograph of the two happy teenagers in powder snow above the doctor’s head, ‘is crueller than the cruellest butcher in a concentration
camp.’

‘There is no sense in ascribing human characteristics to fate,’ he finds. ‘Fate is blind – all natural laws are blind.’

‘What makes you so sure of that?’

‘Well, that’s been my experience. I’ve never been able to discover any justice in the way one person is struck by disaster and illness and the other isn’t. Have
you?’

‘I wasn’t talking about justice, I was talking about cruelty.’

‘Those are,’ he says, ‘two sides of the same coin. Without a sense of justice, there can be no cruelty.’

‘Of course, but the absence of justice you’ve noted says nothing at all about the nature of fate, does it? Does that rule out fate being cruel? When you simply observe the actions of
the butcher in the concentration camp, you have no idea whether he has any sense of justice – and therefore no idea whether he’s acting out of cruelty or out of complete
stupidity.’

‘Well, all right,’ the doctor concedes (there’s probably another patient waiting), ‘we’re all free to think about these matters as we please.’

But I’m in no mood to be put off with platitudes. Not now. Not under these circumstances.

‘No, we’re not all free to do that!’ I shout. ‘First you say that I shouldn’t ascribe human characteristics to fate. Then I show you that you know nothing,
nada
, about the character of fate – human or inhuman, cruel or stupid: you simply don’t know, and then you try to get out of it with some gobbledygook!’

I’ve jumped to my feet and I’m screaming at him like a fishwife – and it feels wonderful.

‘No, that’s not what I . . .’ he mumbles.

‘Precisely! There you go! That’s not what you meant! But what
did
you mean? I know your type, I know exactly what you mean. Day in, day out, I do nothing but read
meaningless studies by all those colleagues of yours, big, impressive-looking stories about calcium-ionophores and endothelial cells and shit like that! Advanced motor mechanics, that’s all
it is. How substance A interacts with substance B, and what that means in turn for the permeability of membrane X. And because you guys happen to be smart enough to unravel a few of those
extraordinarily complicated problems – resulting, by the way, in a whole slew of new and even more complicated problems – out of pure euphoria at that success, you now think you can
explain the whole fucking universe. God is dead! Fate is blind! Everything is random! Everything is senseless, irrational, out of control! But as soon as anyone bothers to ask you to defend those
standpoints by force of argument, you guys pretend there’s no one home. Then suddenly everyone is free to think whatever they want. God, what intellectual cowardice!’