A Father's Affair Read online

  First published in English in Great Britain in 2002

  by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  First published in The Netherlands in 1999 as

  De Passievrucht by L. J. Veen.

  This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Karel van Loon, 1999

  English translation copyright © Sam Garrett, 2002

  The moral right of Karel van Loon and Sam Garrett to be identified as respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate International series.

  The publishers would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature which helped to make this translation possible.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 0 84195 289 3

  eISBN 978 1 782 11082 8

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  www.canongate.tv

  For Karin

  From the start

  Most every heart

  That’s ever broken

  Was because

  There was always

  A man to blame.

  Dolly Parton, ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honkytonk Angels’

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  1

  We drive to the hospital without a word. Ellen’s at the wheel, I’m counting the dots on the macadam. The road is full of cars on the warpath. Ellen drives too fast, then too slowly. She doesn’t use her indicators. I say nothing.

  Billboards are growing along the side of the road.

  THE FUTURE IS HERE.

  WHAT MAKES A BUSINESSMAN HAPPY?

  ‘Money,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  We park in the concrete belly of the hospital sprawl. Walk down covered streets full of people wearing jogging suits, pushing wheelchairs. On a square, marked by the odour of deep fryers and wilted flowers, a combo is playing gypsy music.

  ‘Left here,’ I say.

  ‘There’s the lift,’ she says.

  I look at her reflection in a rectangle of glass. The tension has drained the colour from her lips.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to take it . . .’ she’d said.

  ‘If they say what I’m afraid they’re going to . . .’

  It’s been a few weeks since she completed a sentence.

  ‘Please, take a seat,’ the doctor says. And once we’re seated: ‘I’m afraid I don’t have very good news for you.’

  I see Ellen stiffen. She tucks her chin to her chest, stares at the floor.

  ‘And especially not for you, sir.’

  Her back straightens, her chin pops up. I see it from the corner of my eye. For a second she turns her head in my direction. I’m suddenly aware that I’ve been sweating heavily; my clothes are sticking to my body, wet and cold.

  ‘You’re sterile. And not only is there nothing we can do about it, but – and I realize this will come as something of a shock to you – you always have been.’

  The first thing I feel, at least the first feeling I’m aware of when he stops talking, is relief. There must be some gruesome mistake. Files have been switched, test results keyed in wrongly, someone with the same name, sitting in another doctor’s office, is being told at this very moment: ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you, sir. Your sperm is perfectly healthy.’

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ I say. ‘I have a child. I have a thirteen-year-old son!’

  For a long time, we sit in silence. Nothing moves. No one moves. The whole hospital sprawl of concrete and steel and glass, the lift shafts, the corridors, the darkened crawlways full of clicking, buzzing, sighing pipes, the rooms full of beds bearing the healing and the dying, the visitors and the physicians, the students and the interns, they all hold their breath. The present holds still, because right behind that present the past is exploding.

  Ellen looks at the doctor. The doctor looks at me. I look at a framed photograph right behind his head: a boy and a girl on skis, a snow-lined ridge in the background, a clear blue sky above.

  I know that after that things resumed their normal course. That we went on to discuss matters as grown-ups. And that after that we drove home, Ellen and I, down the same roads, past the same billboards, through the same belligerent traffic.

  I know, but I don’t remember. All I remember is what she asked when we turned into the street where we live.

  She asked, ‘Do you want to tell Bo?’

  Do I want to tell Bo?

  There’s only one thing I want: that what’s been said hasn’t been said, that what’s happened hasn’t happened. It’s a senseless thing to want, but there you have it, I can’t stop. Stopping would be worse. And so I revise old decisions, go back on what I said before. I reconstruct the recent past in order to preserve an older one. Where I said ‘yes’, I now say ‘no’. Where I had decided to act, I now decide to do nothing. Where I gave in to her desire, because I thought it was my desire, too, there I reject her outright.

  ‘No, I don’t want to have a child with you. I already have a child, and that child’s enough for me. Let it be enough for you, too.’

  I know I’m putting our love on the line, that there will be no future for the two of us if I keep this up, but I do it anyway. Now I do. Because the only thing more difficult than living without a future is living without a past.

  2

  So Bo was not conceived on a cold summer night in the passenger seat of a yellow Renault 5. He did not get his chin, which protrudes slightly, making it look as if it was put on wrong, from me. His eyes are the colour of Monika’s but not the shape of mine, as everyone who knew Monika says. That his left foot is half a size smaller than the right, exactly like mine – pure coincidence.

  There’s a verse in the Gospel of Philip that I think about often these days. ‘The children a woman bears resemble the one she loves. If that is her husband, they resemble her husband. If that is a philanderer, they will resemble that philanderer.’

  Once, it must have been about six years ago now, I read that passage out loud to Bo. We were sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen, with big sheets of drawing paper and sharpened pencils in a pyramid of light. I was drawing the House of Knowledge for Bo. First the floor plan, then a front and side view.

  ‘The front room in the House of Knowledge,’ I said to Bo, ‘is the Room of Factual Knowledge. There you find all the things you know right now. Behind it lies a much bigger room, the Room of the Possible, with all the things you might find out if you live long enough and stay curious.’

  Bo rolled a pencil across the tabletop.

  Beside the front and back rooms was a space whose outside walls I’d left blank.

  ‘That’s God’s Dark Room,’ I said. ‘No one knows how big that room is. Any light you take in there is immediately extinguished. The only way to see anything there is to let your eyes get used to the dark. Then sometimes, just for a moment, you catch a glimpse of things that you would never have thought possible.

  ‘There are people,’ I said, ‘who are so startled by what they see that they slam the door and never go back in. And there are people who become addicted to it and seldom or never come out again. God’s Dark Room is the most wonderful, but also the most dangerous, room in the house.’

  The House of Knowledge had a huge attic: the Junk Room of Knowledge, I called it. ‘There you find the weirdest things. Funny, useless things, like the Theory of the Flat Earth and the Ten Golden Rules for Debutantes. But also wonderful, useful things, like the Divine Geometry and the Gospel of Philip.’

  ‘What’s that about?’ Bo asked. And I went to the bookcase and took down the little booklet full of pencilled comments and exclamation marks. I picked out any old passage, completely at random, to read to Bo. It was the passage about the philanderer.

  ‘What’s a philanderer?’ Bo asked.

  ‘It’s someone who loves someone, but only for fun.’

  ‘Isn’t it usually fun, then?’

  I pretended not to hear. The simplest questions are often the hardest to answer. I drew one final room on the house: a little niche in an empty corner of the floor plan.

  ‘This room doesn’t have any windows,’ I said. ‘It’s lit by one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It’s the room of things you’d h
ave been better off not knowing. I call it the Torture Chamber.’

  Bo leaned over the table to get a better look. ‘Do you go there sometimes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I go there sometimes.’

  Who is the philanderer Bo resembles? The only person who could tell me that is Monika. Monika died ten years ago.

  I could, it occurs to me now, have added another room to the floor plan of the House of Knowledge: the Room of No Hope.

  ‘What do you find in there?’ Bo might have asked. And I could have replied, ‘Nothing, that’s just it. It’s a room from a bad dream, a place where you can search all your life for something you know has to be there, but that something keeps slipping away from you just when you think you’ve found it. It’s the room where all the knowledge is stored that you’d like to get to, but for some reason or other can no longer be found.’

  Do I want to take Bo to that room?

  3

  I have a box of pictures from back when Monika was still alive. We’d been planning to paste them up, in three albums with fake black leather covers that she’d bought on Queen’s Day. We never got to do it. Later, Ellen used the albums for other photos – pictures of her and me and Bo. Monika’s photos are still in that box. For years it lay at the bottom of a cupboard and I never looked at it. But now I’ve taken it out. From the floor of my study, multiple Monikas are looking at me, five years of my life in Kodak colours on the ground.

  Monika in a hotel room on the coast of Brittany. She’s three months pregnant, it’s morning, dull sunlight is coming through the window. She’s wearing a light-blue man’s shirt, crumpled, the buttons loose. Her hands are resting on her bare stomach, as if she wants to protect the child. Her white legs dangle over the edge of the high, wrought-iron bed. All through the pregnancy, mornings were hard on her, even after she’d stopped waking up nauseous. In Brittany we walked down to the beach every afternoon, breathed in the sea air to scour our city lungs, watched the seabirds, hunted for shells and starfish among the weedy rocks that fell dry at ebb. One day we found a dead sheep, eaten by fish and birds. The mutilated animal lay there staring at us with empty sockets, like a medieval curse. We hurried back to the hotel.

  Monika on the beach at Noordwijk. She’s wearing a big red-and-white-striped beach towel, covering her from neck to toes. Her nose is gleaming with suntan oil. Our first summer together. She couldn’t stay out in the sun for long. Her red hair turned yellow. Her white skin turned red. Going to Noordwijk had been my idea, on a warm day in July with clear blue skies. Monika agreed to go along, but only because (as she told me later) we hadn’t known each other very long and she didn’t want to be a killjoy.

  ‘How long can you stay out in the sun?’ she’d asked as we were ploughing along through the hot sand, looking for a quiet spot.

  ‘For hours,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Not that long.’

  I found her white body enchantingly beautiful, but that day I discovered the price she paid for that beauty. We didn’t stay long, and when we weren’t in the sea (where we splashed each other, where I took her in my arms in the surf and kissed the salt from her face, where we gave a fervent rendition of the starry-eyed young lovers in a B-movie) – when we weren’t in the sea itself she stayed under that big beach towel. Even so, that evening she was sunburned. In the years that followed we often went to the beach together, but never again on a sunny day in July.

  There are a few pictures of the two of us. In the most cheerful one, we’re riding a big men’s bike. Monika’s on the saddle, she has to stretch her feet and toes to reach the pedals. I’m sitting on the baggage carrier, one arm around her waist. With my other arm I’m waving at the photographer. I wonder who took that picture, and exactly when it was taken. Judging by Monika’s hair, it must have been before Bo was born. After that she let it grow. Just when she’d decided to have it cut short again, she became ill. She was buried with long hair. Now I remember who took the picture: my father. It’s my father’s bicycle. There are splotches of paint on Monika’s trousers. The picture was taken on the Ceintuurbaan, across from the Sarphatipark. We’d just found a house, across the road from the park. My father helped us fix it up.

  For the first two weeks, the work left to do increased, rather than decreased, with each passing day. When we scraped off the wallpaper, we discovered that the plaster was crumbling. When we tore out the suspended ceiling, mouldy beams appeared. The chimney had an enormous crack in it. The wooden floor beneath the kitchen cupboards was rotten.

  ‘You should have seen that right away,’ my father groused, more at himself than at me. ‘What in the world do you look at when you go to see a house?’

  ‘I look out the window, mostly,’ I said.

  Besides the park, we also had a view of a magpies’ nest. The first time I saw the house, the birds were busy repairing their roof. The weather had been wet and blustery, and the large nest had clearly suffered some damage. The two birds were flying back and forth with twigs. It must have been April or May. The picture with the bike was taken two months later. Behind the parked cars you can see a hawthorn in final bloom. Painting the house had been the final chore. Shortly after, we moved in – first Monika, the next day me.

  That summer the magpies raised three fledglings.

  And Monika became pregnant.

  4

  It was a summer full of firsts. It was the first time I lived with someone. The first time I read the words ‘vasopressin’ and ‘glycogenolysis’. The first time I fucked in a car. The first time I made a woman pregnant (I thought). The first time I ever saw a red-tailed blackbird in Amsterdam (on the Gerard Doustraat). The first time I thought about the words ‘It would be foolish to laugh at the romanticist: the romanticist, too, is right’ (Ortega y Gasset). The first (and last) time I ever slept with two women at once. The first time I saw my father as my equal, because my father saw an equal in me. That was a change I hadn’t seen coming, and one that moved me almost as much as the changes in Monika’s body. (Long before her belly began to grow, there were changes in the shape of her face, the pliancy of her hair, the softness of her breasts. I couldn’t believe that so many people remained in the dark about it for so long. Did no one really look at her – not even her own mother? No, especially not her own mother.)

  My father is a self-made man – those are his own words. He got off to a bad start in life, was weak and sickly as a boy. When he was thirteen, the war broke out. Three months later he lost his father. Not because of the war, but because of a stupid coincidence. A new house was being built on a street close to where my grandparents lived. The workmen had just installed the highest beam, and my grandfather stopped across the street to see the men congratulate each other, and to watch as one of them, balancing on the tie beam, threw his cap in the air and caught it again. ‘If my father hadn’t stopped to watch,’ my father said, ‘that tram would never have hit him.’ But, still staring up at the cheering men, my grandfather crossed the street right in front of a number 4 tram. His legs were so badly crushed beneath the steel wheels that they had to be amputated at the hospital. The wound on his left leg (or the stump of it) became infected. The infection became internalized. Ten days after the accident, my father no longer had a father.

  ‘You’ve never learned to fight,’ my father would say whenever he couldn’t understand why I did the things I did. What else could I do but admit he was right, and then add as nonchalantly as possible, ‘But isn’t that exactly what you wanted – to make sure I’d have a better life than you did?’

  After the war the family didn’t have enough money for my father to continue his education, but he soon found work with a contractor; ironically, the same one who’d built the house that cost my grandfather his life. During the Fifties, when most of Holland was one big building site, my father worked his way up from general dogsbody to foreman. In 1961 he not only married an Amsterdam nightclub singer three years his senior but also started his own business: within ten years, Cornelis Minderhout Contractors & Construction had made my father a prosperous man (even though today’s nouveaux riches would laugh at what my father called ‘our family fortune’ – we had enough money for a duplex in Abcoude and a rowing-boat on the River Gein).

  For years I thought of my father as a man who could do anything, an admirable figure who could build a cupola for my attic room as easily as he could whip up a big pan of paella, take apart the engine of our Volvo Amazone or organize a party for a hundred people (to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Minderhout Contractors), where a magician performed tricks and my father danced the merengue with a stunning black lady singer. My father is a ladies’ man, and although I don’t know that he ever cheated on my mother, I can hardly imagine he didn’t.