A Father's Affair (20 page)

When it was all over, my mother said, ‘Come with us.’ And I said, ‘If I don’t go home now, I never will. But maybe Bo can sleep at your place tonight, so I don’t
have to worry about him?’

And so Bo went with my parents. He nodded very understandingly when I said that Grandma and Grandpa Minderhout could take care of him today better than I could. I had someone call me a taxi. And
Ellen, who had come with a colleague from Small World, said, ‘I’ll give you a ring this evening.’ But instead of phoning, a couple of hours later she was standing on my
doorstep.

‘I was going crazy at home. But if you’d rather be alone, just say so.’

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I answered, and I was, because without Bo and without Monika the house suddenly seemed an enemy, a place where memories were being shot at me from
every corner, like poisoned arrows.

We cooked together, ate together, opened a bottle of wine together, stared at the TV together without seeing a thing, thought about Monika together without saying a word.

‘Can I sleep here tonight?’ Ellen asked.

‘Sure, that’s okay.’

And we crawled into bed and Ellen clamped onto me and I rolled her onto her back and lay on top of her and she spread her legs and pressed her pelvis against mine and I closed my eyes and
thought Monika, Monika, Monika, and she dug her nails into my back and bit me on the shoulder and I shuddered from the pain and the pleasure and the rage and the sorrow and my hands slid under her
buttocks and I forced my way into her, and she shivered and groaned and clutched at me as a drowning person clutches a rescuer and when she came all the strength poured out of her body and she
began crying and I straightened up and looked at the teary face, and a desperate, irrational rage overcame me and I pulled out of her and jumped out of bed and she sat up, startled, naked and
shivering and still sobbing, and I shouted and shouted and shouted.

Post-mortem sex is a complicated form of sadomasochism.

‘You mustn’t run away any more when we fight,’ Ellen says when the crying is over.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was so afraid you were going to throw me out of the house.’

‘Me, throw you out? Why would I do that?’

‘To beat me to it. Because you’re afraid I’m going to leave you, because you can’t give me a child.’

I drop back onto my pillow.

‘Am I right?’

I sigh and nod. ‘Maybe you should find someone to make you pregnant.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘I’m very good at it, you know. Raising other people’s children, I mean.’

She laughs, but only halfheartedly. ‘Poor Armin.’

I look at her. She looks tired. Sad, too. She’s thirty-four. She’d make a good mother. She
is
a good mother. For Bo. But Bo isn’t her child. I say, ‘You’re
not too bad at it, either.’

‘At what?’

‘Raising other people’s children.’

‘Strange that never occurred to me before.’

‘What?’

‘That now we’re equals in that way. That we’re raising someone else’s child together.’

‘Her child.’

‘Yeah, her child.’

B
o cooked the supper. Potatoes with broccoli and fish sticks. I made the salad, and poured the white wine. Now we’re sitting at the table by
the window. Outside, night is slowly falling. A farmer comes past on his bicycle and waves. Island life.

We drink a toast. ‘To island life,’ I say.

‘Do you remember,’ Bo says, ‘that time the three of us went fishing? Grandpa, you and me?’

I remember.

‘He wasn’t much good at it.’

‘He was lousy at it.’

‘Yeah. But he caught the biggest bream of the day.’

‘Beginner’s luck.’

‘Yeah, beginner’s luck.’

It must have been about eight years ago. Around the time Ellen moved in with us. Bo and I had become desperately addicted to fishing (which, after all the alcohol, was a real improvement for
me). Hardly a weekend went by without the two of us going out. During the fishing I taught Bo the difference between the song of the reed warbler and that of the great reed warbler, the difference
between the hen harrier and Montague’s harrier. I told him about the cuckoo that lays its eggs in another bird’s nest. And about the inhabitants of Borneo, who believe you can predict
the future by the flight of birds. I told him about the great mysteries of the earliest civilizations.

‘Six thousand years ago,’ I said, ‘members of a Neolithic tribe in south-west England built a huge calculator that’s known today as the monument at Stonehenge. According
to official archaeological accounts, it’s a temple where sacrifices were made to the nature gods of the day. But Stonehenge is much more than that. It’s also a sundial and a moon gate.
It’s a mathematical model of the universe as we perceive it from Earth. Precise measurements have shown that the builders of Stonehenge were familiar with the wondrous properties of
right-angled triangles, and that they knew of the divine number pi. They must have been able to predict lunar eclipses and solstices, as well as solar eclipses and the movements of the tides.
There’s only one little problem: according to the history of Western civilization, there was no way those Stone Age barbarians could have known all that. Which is why all the amazing
discoveries about Stonehenge haven’t made it into the official textbooks.’

‘Are we going to go there some time, to Stonehenge?’ Bo asked.

I said we would, and not long ago I reminded myself to finally keep that promise.

That was the kind of thing I told Bo as we stared at our floats. That, and a lot more. I told him about the madness of the arms race, and about the blasphemy of Christian politicians who used
clever loopholes to keep their millions out of the hands of the tax department, and about the arrogance of the men who ran the multinational oil companies and did business with the apartheid regime
in South Africa just as offhandedly as they justified polluting the environment. And I told him about his mother. About the whiteness of her skin and the red of her hair. About how angry she was
when she read the articles I edited for the publishing house, in which laboratory animals were tortured and killed for scientific purposes. And Bo asked, ‘So why do they do that, torture
animals?’

And I said, ‘To test medicines, for example. Medicines that could save people’s lives.’

And Bo said, ‘But not her life.’

‘No, not her life.’

One day my father said, ‘I’d like to go along some time, when the two of you go fishing. I want to see what’s such fun about it.’

My father had never understood what I saw in fishing. (In fact, my father had never understood much about me. Until the day I came home with Monika.)

‘How do you keep from getting bored to death, sitting there by the water?’ my father had always asked.

‘Don’t you get cold?’

‘Aren’t you embarrassed, walking down the street with one of those rods?’

‘Don’t you realize that you’ll never find some sweet young thing with a crusty old hobby like that?’

‘And then that bird-watching business. God only knows how you came up with that aberration; you didn’t get it from me, anyway.’

That I’d somehow succeeded in latching on to Monika remained a true mystery to my father, but it undeniably boosted my status in his eyes. And when I got her pregnant – but, well,
I’ve already talked about that. Just as I’ve talked about how everything reverted when Monika died. As though Monika had been a pair of spectacles my father needed in order to see his
own son as an adult. That I started fishing again a few years after she died only made things worse. I’d become that strange son of his again who refused to succeed in life. I’d become
my mother’s child again.

It was just like my father to catch the biggest fish of the day. In the same way it was just like my father to impress Bo the whole day with hilarious stories about the construction business and
backroom municipal politics, and about the fraudulent practices of aldermen and bribes and drinking parties.

‘You remember his story about that tax inspector?’ Bo says.

I remembered.

‘Boy, did he make me laugh.’

It was a story my father told many times after that, at birthday parties and during Christmas dinners. It was a story that ended with a drunken tax auditor leaving his dossier in a seedy
nightclub, and then calling my father meekly the next day and asking whether he’d seen it. But my father had feigned ignorance, and nothing ever came of
The People
v.
Minderhout
Construction
.

‘Why didn’t you two get along?’ Bo asks suddenly.

‘We got along.’

‘No you didn’t. Not like we get along.’

‘No, not like that, no. He was . . .’ I try to find the right words. ‘When I was a kid he always made me feel that I was a lot less than he was. That I’d never be able to
do all the things he did. And he was right. He was one of those people who can do anything.’

‘He couldn’t fish.’

‘You’re right, but he still caught the biggest fish. Which was just like him.’

‘He wasn’t very brave.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was always shooting off his mouth, but in fact he was really scared. Scared of things changing.’

I look at him, the way he’s sitting there across from me. Just turned fourteen. Sipping his wine carefully.

‘What makes you think that?’

He shrugs. ‘Everything. After Grandma died, there wasn’t much left of him.’

Well well. The grandson has spoken. (The grandson?) I burst out laughing.

‘What is it?’ he asks.

‘Nothing.’

‘So why are you laughing?’

‘Because you’re right. Because you say things I wouldn’t dare to say in that way.’

‘Because he’s your father,’ Bo says understandingly.

‘
Was
my father.’

‘Yeah, was, of course.’

I
kept Ellen at a distance for a long time. (I also kept drinking for a long time). A few days after she’d knocked on our door in vain, and
after the evening I’d tried to ring her in vain, she finally picked up the phone. I apologized for my antisocial behaviour, she said ‘It’s okay,’ and she invited us over for
dinner. We went and we talked and we laughed and we drank in moderation. And Bo and I went home on time, and when we said goodbye we kissed each other on the cheek.

Weeks went by in which we didn’t see or speak to each other, but then suddenly she would be at the door and I would let her in and we would talk again and laugh again and drink in
moderation, and we always said goodbye in the proper way: as friends. Sometimes she would take Bo to the park, or the zoo. Sometimes Bo slept over at her place. (I’d met someone at the disco.
I wasn’t in love with her, but she was in love with me, and I used that to sleep with her when I felt like it – which in the long run wasn’t often enough to keep her satisfied,
and she left me. Which made me much sadder than I cared to admit.)

Ellen also had a brief relationship, with another man. I told her I was happy for her, and that she deserved all the love in the world. Nevertheless, when he broke up with her and she
didn’t seem to be suffering too much, I was relieved. And the next time that Bo and I went to visit her I took along a bottle of champagne, to celebrate freedom regained.

Time went by and my life resumed its normal course. I started drinking less, and Bo spent more time at school and made friends with whom he went to play or sleep the night. I was back to editing
texts about the effect of oxalate on the gluconeogenesis of isolated chicken hepatocytes, and other exalted themes. Along with Dees I waited with bated breath for the results of research into the
molecular similarities between such diverse species as the fruit fly, the carp, the pig and the human being.

‘What it’s all about,’ Dees explained to me, ‘is the structure of the protein cytochrome C. It’s a protein found in almost all living organisms, so it was expected
that a correlation would be found between the extent to which that protein differs from one species to the next and the geological points at which those species arose. Species relatively close on
the evolutionary ladder should resemble each other more closely in terms of protein structure than species more widely removed. After all, the differences are caused by random mutations. So the
more time between the appearance of two species, the greater the differences should be. At least, that’s what people thought. But it doesn’t work that way. The cytochrome C of the carp,
for example, is sixty-four per cent identical to that of
Rhodospirillum rubrum
bacteria. The same goes for the pig. And the cytochrome C of human beings and fruit flies is actually
sixty-five per cent identical to that of the bacteria. Which means,’ and here Dees’s voice took on a triumphant air, ‘that from the point of view of the
Rhodospirillum
rubrum
bacteria, human beings are as close or as distant kin as the fruit fly. A rather nasty blow for evolutionary theory.’

As a counterweight to work and family life, and to the stimulating but rather demanding conversations with Dees, I plunged headlong into two long, hot, summer months of nightlife. I had several
one-night stands, and for a while there even thought I’d fallen in love. (With a girl with red hair, who was at the police academy and voted European Liberal. ‘It’ll never
last,’ Ellen chortled, and it didn’t.) And just when I thought: there will never be anyone else for me but Monika, and so be it, just then, of course, it happened anyway.

‘You started it,’ Ellen would say later.

‘No one started it,’ I said. ‘As usual.’

Six months later she moved in with us.

‘Is it okay if Ellen comes to live with us?’ I asked Bo.

He thought it was okay.

My mother cried with joy when she heard about it. And my father said he was happy for me, too, but in everything he did I noticed that Ellen didn’t impress him the way Monika had. And
Ellen noticed it, too. In any case, she always maintained a certain reserve towards my father.

‘I just don’t get along too well with that kind of man,’ she once told me apologetically.