A Father's Affair
Authors: Karel van Loon
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
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’
1
W
e 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.
S
o 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 have 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?
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.